Image Ethics in Shakespeare and Spenser

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Author: James A. Knapp

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Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-02

Image Ethics in Shakespeare and Spenser

10.1057/9780230117136 - Image Ethics in Shakespeare and Spenser, James A. Knapp

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image ethics in shakespeare and spenser Copyright © James A. Knapp, 2011.

First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States – a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–10809–7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Knapp, James A., 1968– Image ethics in Shakespeare and Spenser / James A. Knapp. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978–0–230–10809–7 (alk. paper) 1. English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism. 2. Visual perception in literature. 3. Ethics in literature. 4. Image (Philosophy) 5. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Criticism and interpretation. 6. Spenser, Edmund, 1552?–1599—Criticism and interpretation. 7. Ethics—England—History—16th century. 8. Ethics—England—History—17th century. 9. Aesthetics, British—16th century. 10. Aesthetics, British—17th century. I. Title. PR428.E85K63 2011 820.9’353—dc22 2010024787 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by MPS Limited, A Macmillan Company First edition: February 2011 10

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Printed in the United States of America.


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Illustrating the Past in Early Modern England: The Representation of History in Printed Books (2003).


Previous Publications


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James A. Knapp




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For my parents


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Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-02 10.1057/9780230117136 - Image Ethics in Shakespeare and Spenser, James A. Knapp

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List of Figures

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction: Image Ethics 1 Harnessing the Visual: From Illustration to Ekphrasis 2 From Visible to Invisible: Spenser’s “Aprill” and Messianic Ethics 3 Looking for Ethics in Spenser’s Faerie Queene 4 “To Look, but with Another’s Eyes”: Translating Vision in A Midsummer Night’s Dream 5 The Ethics of Temporality in Measure for Measure 6 “Ocular Proof ” and the Dangers of the Perceptual Faith 7 “Disliken the Truth of Your Own Seeming”: Visual and Ethical Truth in The Winter’s Tale

1 31

161

Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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47 67 99 121 143


Contents


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1.1 The death of King John, woodcut illustration, John Foxe, Acts and Monuments. London, 1563 1.2 Reforms of the church under Edward VI, woodcut illustration, John Foxe, Acts and Monuments. London, 1570 2.1 An emperor’s monument destroyed by a tempest, woodcut illustration, Jan van der Noot, A Theater for Voluptuous Worldlings. London, 1569 3.1 St. George slaying the dragon, woodcut illustration, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene. London, 1590

36 39

51 74


List of Figures


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This book has benefited from the many conversations I have had with colleagues and friends over the years during which it took shape. The initial idea for the project emerged from a spirited conversation with Jeffrey Pence that culminated in our organizing two sessions for the Third International Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference held at the University of Birmingham in 2000. I would like to express my gratitude to Jeff and the participants in those sessions who listened and thoughtfully responded to an early version of what would become Chapter 6. Since then, a continuous stream of discussion and debate has pushed my thinking in new directions. I am grateful to Wendy Hyman, for encouraging me to explore the conceptual power of “nothing”; Richard Wendorf, for giving me the opportunity to participate in an NEH seminar on “Literature and the Visual Arts,” which helped generate the material in Chapters 2 and 3; Arthur Marotti, whose invitation to participate in a panel on “Shakespeare and Religion” sparked the writing of what would become Chapter 5; and the participants in the 2007 SAA seminar, “Shakespeare between Philosophy and Religion,” that I organized with Ken Jackson. I would also like to thank Michael Bristol for offering his SAA seminar on “Shakespeare and Moral Agency” at just the right moment. My colleagues at Eastern Michigan University read and commented on several of the chapters in their early stages. In particular, I want to thank Abby Coykendall, Joe Csicsila, Craig Dionne, Andrea Kaston Tange, Laura George, Marty Shichtman, and Annette Wannamaker for their generous support and guidance. Throughout my work on this project, I have also gained much from my students. I am especially grateful to the students in the graduate seminar I offered at Wayne State University in 2006 devoted to the topic of Ethics and Vision in early modern literature. One of those students, Renuka Gusain, has continued to press me on the issues I raised that semester, and for this I thank her. In addition, discussions in undergraduate honors courses at Eastern Michigan, Wayne State, and the University


Acknowledgments


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Acknowledgments

of Michigan helped me refine the material and clarify my thinking. I am grateful to the students in those classes for their patience and intellectual curiosity. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Gary Kuchar, who read practically the entire manuscript and offered extremely useful criticism at every stage. Michael Witmore provided both enthusiastic support and insightful criticism as the project took shape, and Ken Jackson pointed me toward questions of religion and offered valuable commentary and support on several chapters. I learned a great deal from conversations with Sarah Beckwith about both the impact of the Reformation on penitential thought and our shared interest in Wittgenstein’s theory of language. I am most grateful to my parents James F. Knapp and Peggy A. Knapp, who managed to read the manuscript with critical distance. Katherine Cox unexpectedly appeared at the end of this long journey, offering both the critical eye of a professional writer and immeasurable personal support during the final stages. Earlier versions of some of the material included here have already appeared in print. A portion of Chapter 6 appeared in an earlier essay under the title “‘Ocular Proof ’: Archival Revelations and Aesthetic Response” (Poetics Today 24.4 [Winter, 2003]: 695–727. Copyright 2003, Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, Tel Aviv University. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Duke University Press.) Chapter 7 is a revised version of the article “Visual and Ethical Truth in The Winter’s Tale” (Shakespeare Quarterly 55.3 [Fall, 2004]: 253–78). I am grateful to the Johns Hopkins University Press for permission to include that material here. A small portion of the Introduction appears in the article “A Shakespearean Phenomenology of Moral Conviction,” in Shakespeare and Moral Agency, ed. Michael Bristol (Continuum, 2010), 29–41. And a version of Chapter 5 will be reprinted as “Penitential Ethics in Measure for Measure,” in Shakespeare and Religion, ed. Ken Jackson and Arthur Marotti (South Bend: The University of Notre Dame Press, forthcoming 2011). Finally, I would like to thank my editor at Palgrave Macmillan, Brigitte Shull, for her enthusiasm in bringing the project to print and Lee Norton, also at Palgrave, for his patient stewardship of the book through its final stages of production.


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Image Ethics

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verwhelmed by a miniature portrait of his beloved Portia, the hero of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice is prompted to ask: “What demi God / Hath come so near creation?” (3.2.122–23).1 Facing Portia’s likeness, Bassanio marvels in Petrarchan fashion at the liveliness of the eyes, lips, and hair portrayed before him. The spell only lasts a moment, however, for almost as soon as he falls under the image’s power, he turns and repudiates it: “Yet looke how farre / the substance of my praise doth wrong this shadow / in underpinning it, so far this shadow / doth limp behind the substance” (3.2.133–37). Bassanio’s sudden shift provides a window onto the anxiety of an era in which visual images evoked both admiration and scorn. His praise of the miniature’s appearance comes only a few lines after a fairly doctrinaire speech in which he had summed up the perils of visual appearance with the memorable aphorism: “So may the outward shows be least themselves / the world is still deceived with ornament” (3.2.79–80). By following Bassanio’s speech on the proper attitude toward “outward shows” with a scene in which the hero is called upon to respond to a particular visual image thrust before his eyes, Shakespeare stages an important and unresolved struggle over the ethical response to images in early modern England. That struggle is the subject of this book. The concern over the power of images to deceive is not unique to Shakespeare, or the early modern English stage more generally. Studies of English visual art and Reformation iconoclasm in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries support the assertion that early modern English culture was predominantly antivisual.2 Evidence suggests that Reformation hostility toward religious images and a paucity of native English visual artists created an atmosphere in which the word was not only privileged over the image, but the visual sense was denigrated in its favor. England’s Renaissance was, after all, literary rather than visual. Yet even in the absence of a significant tradition in the visual arts, concerns about the moral danger of visual images


INTRODUCTION


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led to a preoccupation with visual experience in early modern English culture.3 In particular, the period’s literature reveals an obsession with visual experience—particularly, the power of visual images to move observers to act, the fallibility of the sense of sight, and the relationship between visual perception and knowledge. The argument of this book is that early modern English literature—exemplified in the works of Shakespeare and Spenser— offered a space in which to explore the relationship between visual experience and ethical action at the critical moment when English culture was undergoing epistemological, theological, and aesthetic transformations that would mark the transition from the medieval to the early modern era. The Reformation challenge to the value of visual images in spiritual matters coincided with an increasing faith in visual observation on the part of natural philosophers. As Stuart Clark has demonstrated, developments in theological and protoscientific discourse during this period “worked to undermine . . . [the] inherited confidence [in Medieval, particularly Aristotelian accounts of vision] and disrupted the relationship between human beings and what they observed.”4 This in turn necessitated a reconfiguration of the relationship between vision and knowledge. One result of the shifting epistemological ground was that spiritual truth claims were increasingly at odds with knowledge gained from empirical observation, making the evaluation of visual experience a matter of ethics. Prior to the Reformation challenge to the value of images, the proper ethical response to visual experience was fairly clear. Writing in the context of medieval European Christianity, St. Bonaventure could assert that “the invisible things of God are clearly seen, from the creation of the world, being understood by the things that are made.”5 But by the mid-sixteenth century in England, the relationship between seeing and understanding had become a site of ethical struggle. While advocates of visual art and the value of visual observation shared with fervent iconoclasts a belief that the visual possessed a peculiar power to move human subjects to act, the question of how people ought to be moved by visual experience sparked intense debate. The title of this book—Image Ethics—indicates the proximity between ethical concerns and visual images. A central claim of the book is that this proximity led to the preoccupation with visuality found in the various examples of early modern English literature here considered. Despite the fact that some of the vitriolic antivisual rhetoric in the period appears to be directed at visual perception itself, most early modern commentators linked the most pressing ethical problems with visual experience to the unpredictability of the human response to images. Examples of the power of visual experience leading to both positive and negative actions abound in the period, and debates about the ethics of vision are found in a broad range of religious writing—from the moderate Peter Martyr to


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Neither doe our eies onely serue as false reporters to the minde, in natural and artificiall things, but as secret intelligencers, in morall matters, for discovering her weakenesse to the world. Thus by a fierce sparkling eie, we discover anger; by an open staring eie, vnstaidnes: by a rowling vnsetled eie wantonnesse; by a hollow wan eie, envy· and iealousie; by a hautie skornfull eie pride; by a narrow deiected eie, basenesse; by a dull fixed eie, heavines of spirit.7

His insistence that dangerous images be best kept from the view of pious Christians confirms that his fear was less that the images were corrupt than that the observers would respond unethically to the images’ demand. Writing in 1620, Richard Brathwaite called attention to the power of visual experience to incite “passions of the minde”: There is nothing so litle, that hath such diuersitie of operations attending it; being moued by the obiect that it lookes vpon, to loue or hate. Passions of the minde receiue their greatest impression by the eye of the bodie; and soonest are they allayed, when the eye is most temperate.8

The difficulty detractors of visual experience faced is that the dangerous passion produced by visual experience was also seen as the most potent catalyst for spiritual and philosophical reflection. Baldassarre Castiglione’s influential account of the power of the human face to initiate the ascent up the ladder of love is perhaps the period’s most celebrated affirmation of the passion generated by the visual sense.9 But the emphasis on the role of a visual catalyst in the process of spiritual reflection recurs throughout the writing of the period. It is especially prominent in Neo-Platonic and Pauline discourse. Marsilio Ficino’s account of the essence of the rational soul relies on an analogy to visual discernment: “One of the senses, for instance sight, cannot perceive colors unless it assumes the form of those colors …. In the same way, the intellect does not know things themselves unless it is clothed with the form of the things to be known.”10 And though English Protestants could turn to Paul for perhaps the most powerful affirmation of the imperceptible nature of truth, his conversion on the road to Damascus begins with a vision: “Suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven” (Acts 9:3).11 The persistent fear over the ethical ambiguity and power of visual experience is aptly demonstrated by the recent controversies surrounding the release of American military photos from Iraq and the publication of satirical religious cartoons in Denmark. An important element of my argument in


the puritan William Perkins.6 George Hakewill, an iconophobic Protestant who published an entire volume detailing the dangers of vision, stressed vision’s power to move the observer:


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this book is that the early modern debates over ethics and images resonate in our own debates about the intertwining of vision, ethics, and religion, thus making the literary texts considered here as relevant today as they were when they were first published. Literature provides a particularly interesting perspective on the relation of ethics to vision because poets have the luxury of placing images before the eyes of their characters in the safe space of the fictive. The literary artists who are the subject of this book recognized the same power in images as did Protestant iconophobes and Catholic iconophiles, but they were a great deal less certain about the ethical valence of the responses this power would elicit. In the course of this study, we will find that the way literary characters respond to an experience with the visual has less to do with the image in question and more to do with the situation in which it is encountered. Spenser’s good and bad images are often indistinguishable without the poetic narrative indicating that what the hero sees is, for example, the duplicitous Duessa in the guise of the pure Una rather than Una herself.12 What these writers highlight is the peculiar fact that the very same image is capable of eliciting diametrically opposed moral responses based on the details of the ethical situation at hand. This had significant implications for the most basic tenet of Christian moral comportment inherited from the medieval tradition: the principle, in Thomas Blundeville’s words, that one ought “to be stirred by example of the good to followe the good, and by the example of the euill to flee the euill.”13 Of course, Blundeville’s “examples” are the carefully crafted narratives produced by historians, rather than the unpredictable visual images encountered in everyday life. The ambiguity of the experience with the visual is epitomized by Lodovico at the end of Othello, when he first calls on Iago to “look on the tragic loading of [the] bed” on which lie the bodies of Desdemona and Othello, only to immediately reverse his call: “The object poisons sight; / let it be hid” (5.2.374–76). Lodovico is confused over the value of images here: is it better to look and learn the lesson that the image embodies or hide it from sight in order to protect the viewer from the risk of the visual? The kind of moral confusion over how to respond to the image that can be found on the early modern stage and page is rarely a matter of moral truth; the real issue was ethical comportment. In other words, the question was not whether murder or greed are right or wrong, for example, but how to avoid such moral failures (or achieve the alternative moral successes) when responding to the visual. Without the support of a unified theological doctrine undergirded by Aristotelian thought, visual experience offered little ethical guidance for the early modern subject. The characters that populate the works of Shakespeare and Spenser are confronted with the uncertain value of


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visual experience as the playwright and poet explore the implications of ethics in postmedieval, Reformation England. Image

Richard Brathwaite’s description of the power of visual experience to activate the “passions of the minde” epitomizes a commonplace belief in Renaissance England. The ability of the eye to enflame passion and the concomitant desire to reign in intemperate vision saturates the literature of the period. Poets drew on theories of vision that emphasized the active character of the visual sense to accentuate their explorations of the ethical character of visual experience. A popular compendium of received philosophical and anatomical knowledge published as the Problems of Aristotle in 1595 offers a typical account of visually induced passion. We learn, for example, that painters faine Loue to haue a firebrand, and wings, because that the mindes of louers are in suspense, and hang doubtfully and are vnconstant like birds: and then their heate burneth their heart with an vncessant, and vehement care of that which they loue. He holdeth a sword in his right hand, and in his left a quiuer with many arrowes, because that in the beginning loue doth rise from one beame and glance of the eye: for he doth see and desire at the selfe same time. And as soone as he doth desire, the louer sendeth continuall beames of the eie towards that which he loueth. And those beames are like vnto arrowes, because the louer doth dart them into the bodie. There are arrowes in the quiuer, because that those which loue, send forth secret beames and glances of the eies.14

Despite the waning influence of extramission (the effusion of beams of light or fire from the eye) in early modern visual theory, the dynamic relation of vision and passion described in the Problems is a familiar convention in Renaissance love poetry. A particularly good example can be found in the sixth sonnet of John Davies of Hereford’s’ sequence Wittes Pilgrimage (1605): EV’n as the Persians aunciently were v’sd With reu’rence to salute the rising Sunne, And as his Beames were more in’t them infus’d The more Deuotion did their Soules orerunne: So, when Thou risest in Loues Hemispheare Desire saluts Thee with a mild aspect: But, to His Zenuth, when Thou drawest neere, Thou Him enragest with Beames more direct! I do desire Thou should’st looke right on me,


I.


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Marlowe employs the convention at the opening of Dido, as Ganymede and Jupiter engage in idle banter: GANYMEDE: Sweet Iupiter, if ere I pleasde thine eye, Or seemed faire walde in with Egles wings, Grace my immortall beautie with this boone, And I will spend my time in thy bright armes. JUPITER: What ist sweet wagge I should deny thy youth? Whose face reflects such pleasure to mine eyes, As I exhal’d with thy fire darting beames, Haue oft driuen backe the horses of the night, When as they would haue hal’d thee from my sight. (I.i.19–26)16

And perhaps the most celebrated lines in this vein appear in John Donne’s “The Ecstasy.” Donne reveals his familiarity with both the outgoing theory of active vision (extramission) and the passive model that would ultimately succeed it: Our hands were firmly cemented By a fast balm, which thence did spring; Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread Our eyes upon one double string.17

While the ostensible motive of Donne’s speaker is to step up the physical union with his lover, passionate vision serves as a starting point for figuring the human connection on which the poem’s logic relies. The poem begins with the material version of purified love—holding hands and staring into one another’s eyes—and ends with a defense of a less innocent physical union, marked by “affections” and “faculties which sense may reach and apprehend” (ln 66–67). Hovering in the middle of these extremes—and mediating the immaterial interanimation of souls that is love—are Donne’s lovers’ eyes threaded on a string. The image is actually grotesque if not taken as a metaphor: the coalescence of eye beams—a theory dating to the ancients—compared to the union of souls in love. But the characterization of the beams as “string” also suggests the influence of Kepler’s optical theory, developed by literally mapping out the sight lines with thread.18 Donne’s figure


Although those Lookes doo but enrage Desire: Yet if that rage may rest it selfe in Thee, Let all thy Beames sett all myne All on fire: Where, if I burne to Sinders, yet I shall Burne in thy loue, more deere then all that All.15


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of human connection draws on the blending of the physical and metaphysical in discursive constructions of sight. Anxiety over the power of vision— produced by both a desire to harness the power of the visual sense and a fear of its unpredictability—marks human connection, the experience of the other. This anxiety over the power of visual experience appears early on in The Faerie Queene when the Redcross Knight is faced with false images of his beloved Una. Drawn to the image of the lascivious Duessa disguised as Una, Redcross is filled with desire that turns almost immediately to rage, and the impulse to destroy what he sees: All in amaze he suddenly vp start With sword in hand, and with the old man went; Who soone him brought into a secret part, Where that false couple were full closely ment In wanton lust and lewd embracement: Which when he saw, he burnt with gealous fire, The eye of reason was with rage yblent, And would haue slaine them in his furious ire, But hardly was restreined of that aged sire. (I.ii.5)19

Spenser was acutely aware of the dual nature of the power of images. The image he had previously offered of Una was intended to have the opposite effect to Archimago’s false creation: A louely Ladie rode him faire beside, Vpon a lowly Asse more white then snow, Yet she much whiter, but the same did hide Vnder a vele, that wimpled was full low, And ouer all a blacke stole she did throw, As one that inly mournd: so was she sad, And heauie sat vpon her palfrey slow: Seemed in heart some hidden care she had, And by her in a line a milke white lambe she lad. (I.i.4)

The image of the pure Una contrasts with the specters conjured by Archimago only by virtue of the narrative context offered in the poem’s description:


Image Ethics

So pure and innocent, as that same lambe, She was in life and euery vertuous lore,


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Image Ethics in Shakespeare and Spenser And by descent from Royall lynage came Of ancient Kings and Queenes, that had of yore Their scepters stretcht from East to Westerne shore, And all the world in their subiection held; Till that infernall feend with foule vprore Forwasted all their land, and them expeld: Whom to auenge, she had this Knight from far compeld. (I.i.5)

Disguised as Una, Archimago’s “faire-forged Spright” bears the true lady’s appearance: So liuely, and so like in all mens sight, That weaker sence it could haue rauisht quight: The maker selfe for all his wondrous witt, Was nigh beguiled with so goodly sight: Her all in white he clad, and ouer it Cast a blacke stole, most like to seeme for Vna fit. (I.i.45)

As his response indicates, the Redcross Knight cannot discern truth from falsehood based on the image alone: Lo there before his face his Lady is, Vnder blake stole hyding her bayted hooke, And as halfe blushing offred him to kis, With gentle blandishment and louely looke, Most like that virgin true, which for her knight him took. (I.i.49)

Although divine guidance will eventually shield Redcross from the deceptive illusions of visual experience, Spenser’s decision to open his epic with the problem of discerning the proper path of action in response to visual experience confirms the urgency of the issue in early modern England. In Chapter 3, I explore Spenser’s most direct engagement with the issue in Book II of The Faerie Queene. The challenge for Guyon, the knight of temperance, is to control his desire to act on the passion incited by sensual experience, which is, for Spenser, almost always associated with vision. Despite the ready availability of moral precepts to guide ethical action, Spenser saw every encounter in the visual field as a challenge to proper ethical comportment. The problem is equally important for Shakespeare. The intertwining of vision, passion, and ethics is on display in a particularly well-known scene


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from King Lear: the blinding of Gloucester by Cornwall. Much has been written about this scene and its relevance to a Shakespearean principle of ethical resistance. Richard Strier argues convincingly that the scene demonstrates Shakespeare’s affirmation of a “general principle of resistance to immoral authority.”20 Stephen Greenblatt takes issue with this position, claiming that the scene is illustrative of Shakespeare’s “deep skepticism about any attempt to formulate and obey an abstract moral law, independent of actual social, political, and psychological circumstances.”21 Despite arriving at different conclusions, both agree that the scene includes one of the greatest acts of moral conviction in Shakespeare: the Servant’s intervention in Gloucester’s blinding. Judging from the dialogue, the Servant’s decision appears to be a result of moral reasoning, carefully articulated: Hold your hand, my lord! I have served you ever since I was a child; But better service have I never done you Than now to bid you hold. (3.7.73–76)

The Servant weighs the consequences of his course of action against his record of prior service and concludes that the situation demands action not despite but because of his sworn loyalty. In a play that foregrounds the value of unconditional service (exemplified by Kent’s service to Lear and Edgar’s to his father), the episode mirrors the play’s larger theme while it confirms the servant’s moral propriety. These are essentially the grounds on which Strier makes his case, and though he disagrees on the question of motivation, Greenblatt also argues that the Servant acts in defense of a moral code: the protection of “human decency.” While it is clear that the servant’s action is thematically linked to the play’s larger meditation on proper service, for the present study I am interested in the role of embodied visuality in Shakespeare’s staging of this morally motivated act. It is particularly important that the Servant’s apparent display of moral reasoning—of clear thinking reflection on both the situation unfolding before him and his past service to the Duke—comes at the midpoint of a scene of unthinkable torture. Importantly, the Servant’s interruption of Cornwall, and the exchange they have occupies the time between Cornwall’s plucking of Gloucester’s first and second eye. The horror of the scene is heightened by its layering of the language of physical, intellectual, and spiritual blinding leading up to and surrounding the intense visual spectacle. Shakespeare prepares us for the impending spectacle at the opening of the scene when Goneril calls on Cornwall to “pluck out his eyes” (6) and


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again when Gloucester prefigures his own fate by declaring that he sent Lear to Dover “because I would not see thy cruel nails / Pluck out his poor old eyes” (3.7.6, 57–58). But in the world of the play, the linguistic threat of violent blinding alone is not enough to move anyone to intervene. In choosing to stage Gloucester’s blinding, Shakespeare foregrounds the role of the spectacular image in inciting moral outrage, and, consequently, moral action.22 Particularly important are the connections that Shakespeare establishes between the physical eye, emotional passion, and ethical action while constructing the scene’s visual and ethical logic. A closer look at these connections suggests that for Shakespeare’s moral agents, the phenomenal experience with the visual guides ethical action that can only later be explained through moral reasoning. Characteristically, Shakespeare slows the temporal aspect of this progression from experience to moral conviction and ultimately moral action, revealing something of an anatomy of morally motivated behavior. Presenting moral thought and action in what amounts to slow motion effectively foregrounds moral reasoning while simultaneously revealing it to be a necessarily retrospective activity. The retrospective assessment of action taken in ethically charged situations helps place the action taken, but it does not reliably predict characters’ reactions to phenomenal experience when faced with an ethical choice. In King Lear, the emphasis on the power of spectacle over reason is sharpened through the scene’s concentration on the physical eye. References to the physical eye abound in the scene—beginning with the fleshy resonance of the term “pluck” through Cornwall’s promise that he will “set his foot” on Gloucester’s eyes, and reaching a visceral zenith in his memorable exclamation: “Out vile jelly” (3.7.6, 68, 84). Importantly, all of these references to physical eyes are connected directly to the strong emotions that also saturate the scene. After the sisters blurt out possible tortures for Gloucester, Cornwall asks them to leave Gloucester to his “displeasure”; he then dismisses Edmund on the grounds that “the revenges we are bound to take upon your father are not fit for your beholding” (3.7.7–10). Gloucester’s motive for sending Lear away is to avoid the sight of the King’s physical torture at the hands of his daughters, a sight that he seeks to substitute with another: “But I shall see / The winged vengeance overtake such children” (66–67). This is the very claim that throws Cornwall over the edge, as he exclaims: “See’t shalt thou never . . . upon these eyes of thine I’ll set my foot,” and a few lines later, just before attempting to pluck out the second eye, “If you see vengeance—” (67–73). Of course, it is here that the Servant intervenes with what appears to be the reason-based moral response quoted earlier.


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Though we may not pass upon his life Without the form of justice, yet our power Shall do a court’sy to our wrath, which men May blame, but not control. (3.7.25–28)

Cornwall’s rationalization of the violence he is about to do acknowledges the impotence of moral reasoning in the face of strong emotion: here “wrath.” Importantly, the Servant’s seeming invocation of moral reasoning (he intervenes in the name of right over injustice) is followed by his exhortation that Cornwall “take the chance of anger” (80). Despite the Servant’s clear position on the side of right (confirmed by his reference to the ideal of loyal service) and Cornwall’s admission that “men may blame” him for what he is about to do, both men invoke passionate emotion (wrath and anger) rather than reasoned judgment as the source of their action.23 Paradoxically, both are also able to lay out the process of their impassioned action in reasonable discourse. If Cornwall’s wrath is so uncontrollable as to force his (just) power to “do a court’sy to” it, would he really take the time to articulate this? Similarly, would a servant so overcome by a scene of injustice that he is willing to risk his life to stop it articulate his motivation at the moment of crisis? Nevertheless, both men do take the time to provide their reasoned explanation and the scene does not fail to retain its power. The power of this scene comes not from an affirmation of moral propriety, in the name of either political resistance or human decency—both ideals that can be gleaned from the action in retrospect—but from an intertwining of visual, emotional, and ethical discourse that marks English representations of ethical comportment at the turn of the seventeenth century. This figurally powerful intertwining reflects certain currents of thought in early modern England, a period in which theories of vision, the theological basis of moral and ethical behavior, and the understanding of human emotion were in a state of transition. In particular, developments in the science of optics and human vision facilitated a literary refiguration of the relationship between moral reasoning and ethical action, as well as between action and emotion. To draw out these connections, it is worth paying special attention to Cornwall’s characterization of Gloucester’s eye as “vile jelly.” There is no doubt that Gloucester’s exclamation foregrounds the physical violence on display in the scene. But further, his characterization of the flesh of the eye takes


By this point in the scene the contrast between reason and emotion has already been established by Cornwall prior to his interrogation of Gloucester:


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on a visceral power by drawing on the early modern fascination with anatomical description, and the emergent understanding of the physical eye—as a clear and viscous substance of flesh—while retaining the associations of the “evil eye” as an active, penetrating, and dangerous force. Consider Helkiah Crooke’s description of the anatomy of the eye in his Mikrocosmographia (1615). Although Crooke’s anatomical encyclopedia appeared at virtually the same time that Kepler was developing his theory of the retinal image, his account of the eye and of sight retains traces of virtually all the major theories of vision to appear since Plato. Based on the analogy of the eye to a camera obscura, Kepler’s theory would eventually redefine the understanding of vision, replacing the active eye and its participatory form of sight with a passive screen on which the world was projected to the observer’s consciousness. Spurred on further by Descartes’ dualist separation of sensation and cognition, early modern accounts of vision would increasingly separate the mechanical processes of the physical eye from the immaterial vision of the conscious observer.24 But before this transition was complete, accounts of the visual sense in early modern England combined the insights of various anatomical, philosophical, and theological traditions. Crooke begins his account of vision by restating the terms of the ancient debate: “Sight must bee made either by an emission of spirites, or a reception of beames, or else by emission and reception both together.”25 The first theory finds its earliest full articulation in Plato. Crooke notes that “plato indeed (who thought that sight was made extramittendo, or by an emission of light out of the eye) thought that the nature of the eie was fiery, yet not such a fire as would burne but onely illustrate.”26 The theory is articulated in the Timaeus: And of the organs they first contrived the eyes to give light. . . . When the light of day surrounds the stream of vision, then like falls upon like, and they coalesce, and one body is formed by natural affinity in the line of vision, wherever the light that falls from within meets with an external object. And the whole stream of vision, being similarly affected in virtue of similarity, diffuses the motions of what it touches or what touches it over the whole body, until they reach the soul, causing that perception which we call sight.27

This “extramission” theory of vision had advocates into the Renaissance despite its early dismissal by Aristotle in his De Sensu.28 Based largely on Galen but augmented by the discoveries of continental Renaissance anatomists, Crooke’s account registers Aristotle’s rejection of extramission, including the following:


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can absolue and perfect the action of sight, and the iudgement should be made without the eye. Againe, neither is there any corporeall thing transported from the body which is sent vnto our eyes; for then the obiects by continuall diffusion would be diminished. Neither is Vision made the third way, so that a spirite or a beame or a light should yssue out of the Eie vnto the obiect and againe something of the obiect should be moued vnto the spirite, that so the contaction might be made in the middle; for then the nerue alone would haue sufficed for the action, and the iudgement should haue beene made without the eie. Wherefore we thinke with the Philosopher that this contaction is made by a medium, so that a certaine quality with some colour affecting and changing the ayre that is cleare and lucid betwixt the eie and the obiect, doeth transferre from the things themselues the visible species by one right line from the obiect to the eyes, yea to the center of the chrystaline humour. . . . Vision therefore or sight is made by the Reception of visible forms, when the light affected with those formes entreth into the eies through their translucid bodies.29

Following Galen, Crooke locates the primary function of the eye (and thus of sight) in the “translucid bodies” of the organ acted on by light. Due to the historical layering of Crooke’s account (compiling Presocratic and Platonic visual theory with Aristotelian and Galenic revisions), the early modern understanding of vision retains echoes of the active eye, modified by the rejection of the idea that the eye emits effluvia (either spirit or fire) but replacing extramission with a kind of participatory reception of the visible by virtue of a medium that makes its impression on the “crystalline humor.” On the issue of the medium facilitating sight, Plato and Aristotle agreed, the latter stressing the medium over any emission from either object or the eye.30 The addition of lessons learned from anatomists emphasizes the role of the affective flesh in the experience of sight. According to Crooke, “there is in the cristalline not onely a watery moysture, but also a glutinous or slymy, which with his lentor and tenacity retaineth the images or formes of the colours.” He adds that “if you cut this cristalline humour in sunder, you shall finde that it is made of a glutinous and slymy moysture.”31 To return to Lear, Cornwall’s animosity toward Gloucester’s eyes takes on an added layer of significance. The term “jelly” conjures the “glutinous and slymy moysture” of Crooke’s description, but it is his characterization of the eye as “vile” that seems to speak to the active ability of the eye to retain the image Cornwall despises: the vengeance promised by Gloucester earlier in the scene. Crooke notes that the crystalline humor has been called the “idol of sight,” and indeed the eye here is something of an idol: its living presence threatens Cornwall as it generates a kind of adoration from the Servant. With his final words, the Servant implores Gloucester to use the power of


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vision as an agent of vengeance: “My Lord you have one eye left / To see some mischief on him.” This call further incites Cornwall to return to his gruesome act: “Lest it see more, prevent it” (80–83). It, the eye that is, seems to be doing the seeing here, a shift in perspective emphasized by the fact that Cornwall’s final indignity is addressed not to Gloucester, but to his second eye: “where is thy luster now?” The question is rhetorical, of course, a final insult from the lips of one of the play’s second-tier villains. Although perhaps unwittingly, Cornwall raises the question that had been at the center of debates over theories of vision since the ancients. It is the same question that Crooke repeats (via Plato, Aristotle, Galen, Alhazen, and early modern anatomists) in the opening of his account of the physical eye: where is the light from the luminous eye (which can sparkle or burn like fire) located? If the play ultimately seeks to locate the light of life in the nonmaterial realm of truth or understanding (Lear’s question to the blind Gloucester, “What art mad? A man may see how this world goes without eyes” [4.4.52–53]), physiological sight—and the organ of the eye—serves as the focal point through which this moral insight is refracted. Cornwall’s mockery associates the loss of luster in Gloucester’s eye with the defeat of his luminous cause; his hope that he will “see vengeance” implies that some (presumably divine) light will reveal evil for what it is, allowing for the restoration of good to its proper place. Gloucester’s melancholy response to Cornwall’s question continues the scene’s dependence on the figural power of the eye. Deprived of his physical sight, Gloucester’s condition is “all dark and comfortless,” a description resembling the interior of a camera obscura deprived of its aperture. The association of physical darkness with a lack of comfort points to a theological error (one should take comfort in faith rather than what is available to physical sight), and it is especially ironic in the context of a play that offers little comfort to the eye. Almost everything we see in the play is horrible, and the scene we have just witnessed may be the most horrible spectacle of all. But prior to Descartes’ establishment of an autonomous interiority, the loss of the eye as mediator between soul and world leaves Gloucester to ponder his blindness through an unfamiliar body. As a result, he rejects the comfort recommended by commonplace wisdom such as that offered by the puritan Hakewill in his treatise on The Vanitie of the Eie, that “the eye of the sence failing, that of the understanding and spirit wax more cleare.”32 It is possible to reach Hakewill’s conclusion in a retrospective assessment of the play, and such a reading might compensate for the play’s utter desolation of hope and lack of physical comfort. But the play never accepts physical blindness as a fair trade for moral vision. Gloucester’s later claim that he “sees” the world “feelingly” confirms that he never abandons sight as the


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sense governing judgment, and there are many more such references in the play that retain an emphasis on the necessary interconnectedness of physical and moral vision.33 It is actually Gloucester’s first question after becoming blind that completes the visual logic of the scene. He asks for his son Edmund, calling on him to “enkindle the sparks of nature / to quit this horrid act” (3.7.86–88). And though, as Regan is quick to point out, Edmund was responsible for revealing Gloucester’s complicity in the mounting rebellion—and thus his subsequent torture—Cornwall’s prescient decision to deny Edmund the sight of his father’s blinding suggests that even the torturer was not certain that the sight would not have “enkindle[d] the sparks” of filial love. The physical violence against the eyes here, enriched by echoes of philosophical and anatomical visual theory, marks a severing of the ethical connection between the players on the stage. To “set [ones] foot” on the “vile jelly” of the eye is not only to destroy the body’s mechanism of sight, but also to sever the potential for human connection: Donne’s threaded eyeballs, the interanimation of souls. II.

Ethics

The intensity of Cornwall’s animosity toward the vision of another places the demand of visual experience at the thematic center of Shakespeare’s play. The destruction of Gloucester’s eyes is coterminous with the destruction of Gloucester’s threat to Cornwall. A similar intensity appears throughout The Faerie Queene in Redcross’s response to Archimago’s lascivious images of a false Una, for example, or in Guyon’s response to the material pleasures of the world in the Bower of Bliss. But Shakespeare and Spenser approach the ethics of visual experience from opposite directions. For Shakespeare the key to ethical comportment lies in the faculty of vision and its relation to knowledge, especially insofar as this relation lies at the heart of both the desire for and the impossibility of experiencing or controlling the vision of another. Throughout Shakespeare’s work characters strive to see as others see, often as in the case of Leontes or Othello to the point that their own visual imagination borders on madness. The ethical valence of the visual is a matter of how one sees rather than what one sees. There is often no object visible to the eye when Shakespeare’s characters choose to act, though the moral outcomes of their decisions are displayed to the eye of characters and audience alike. As I will argue in Chapter 7, for example, what Othello calls “ocular proof ” only becomes proof after the fact; what Othello sees with his own eyes is open to interpretation. Presented with ambiguous visual images, Shakespeare’s characters make decisions of ethical consequence, but


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only retrospectively are these decisions judged as moral successes or failures. The openness of ethical possibility rises from the singularity of the situations within which Shakespeare’s characters are called to act. On the other hand, for Spenser ethical comportment is measured against an abstract ideal that is obscured by the visual images with which his characters are confronted. As Carol Kaske has argued, Redcross, Guyon, Britomoart, and Spenser’s other hero-knights are continually challenged to discern good images from bad. Spenser’s narrator clarifies what it is that the heroes actually see, and the poet introduces interlocutors such as Una and the Palmer to provide guidance on how they should respond. Nevertheless, the visual images Spenser’s knights confront suggest that the poet increasingly viewed the ethical challenge presented by visual experience to be intractable. Good and bad images are often identical but for the narrative context in which they appear or the intercession of another with better moral training, suggesting that the danger of visual experience is extreme indeed. While Spenser’s poem suggests that there is solace in the Word (and the word), his anxiety about the danger of straying from the word / Word in the presence of the visual image constantly threatens to undermine the comfort offered by linguistic moral reason and divine law alike. In both cases the poets were grappling with ethical questions that continue to haunt human experience and our quest to understand morality. Renewed interest in the nature of morality, spurred on by an intensified global debate over universal human rights and the religious and cultural basis for moral judgment, has produced a new body of work on morality and ethics in philosophy, literary theory, and cognitive psychology that is germane to the present study. Although the subjects of ethics and morality have always been addressed in these fields, in the past two decades interest in ethics has intensified. The critique of Deconstruction on primarily ethical grounds—that it amounts to a form of nihilism, and is thus ethically bankrupt—sparked renewed interest in ethics on the part of literary scholars for whom the subject had acquired the taint of Arnoldian elitism.34 Simultaneously, developments in cognitive psychology have reanimated the field of moral psychology and its mission to examine human moral behavior through the scientific method. On January 13, 2008, the cover of The New York Times Magazine announced its feature article with the question: “What makes us want to be good?”35 The cover included a promise in small print that reflects the excitement brewing in the field of moral psychology: “How evolutionary psychology and neurobiology are changing our understanding of what morality is.” In the article entitled “The Moral Instinct,” Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker extols the promise of new research in cognitive psychology


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and neuroscience to settle long debates over moral universalism and cultural relativism. Recent advances in psychological and cognitive research into the genetic proclivity for moral judgment provide the ostensible context for Pinker’s discussion. While touting new research that suggests the brain is hardwired for a “moral sense” (one in which an appeal to a moral belief-instinct— rather than a reasoned argument—governs action), the article’s primary contribution to the discussion of morality is ultimately more modest: to provide “a theory of how the moral sense is both universal and variable at the same time.”36 Rather than take a side—backed by science—on the age-old question of whether morality is universal (innate, natural, etc.) or local (culturally learned and thus malleable), the scientific approach yields a theory of human morality in which broad categories of universal morality allow for adaptation to particular cultural and historical circumstances. Pinker draws on psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s argument that hardwired moral impulses fall roughly into the categories of harm, fairness, community, authority, and purity.37 Haidt accounts for cultural variability in moral judgment by looking at which category is invoked or prioritized in a given cultural setting. In other words, though the moral categories invoked to judge a particular action are different in different cultural settings, the concept of a universal moral sense remains intact: an honor killing is a moral act for the brother who is moved by the category of purity while it is immoral for the outside observer moved by an appeal to harm. The use of categories is helpful in explaining how both judgments can be justified on moral grounds—the moral sense, in this account, is the impulse that governs actions when they involve one of the identified universal moral categories. But the science gets us no closer to understanding a fundamental difficulty with moral judgments: that while every appeal to morality feels like an appeal to a universal precept, such precepts are difficult to define outside of the particular situations in which they are invoked. Cognitive psychology’s explanation that the brother prioritizes purity while the Western observer prioritizes the prohibition against causing harm will convince neither person that his or her judgment is a matter of anything but universal moral truth. Nevertheless, Haidt suggests that contradictions about morality “are dissolving,” including the paradoxical beliefs that “people are selfish, yet morally motivated” and that “morality is universal, yet culturally variable.”38 I include these recent developments in cognitive psychology because they emphasize just how persistent the ethical questions raised by Spenser and Shakespeare are, for the debate at the heart of what Haidt calls the “new synthesis in moral psychology” is the same debate that has driven discussions of morality at least since Plato posed the question at the beginning of the Meno: “Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue is acquired by teaching


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or by practice; or if neither by teaching nor practice, then whether it comes to man by nature, or in what other way?”39 The same question seems to guide Shakespeare’s meditation on moral agency, as we watch such evil characters as Don John, Iago, and Edmund confirm their iniquitous nature and moral heroes such as Hal / Henry and Cordelia embody moral virtue according to their natural disposition. Of course, Shakespeare’s characters also display moral growth, as they seem to learn (often too late) moral truths that could have enabled them to avert tragedy. For centuries, critical commentary on Shakespeare and morality has been fueled by such seeming contradictions in the playwright’s representation of morally relevant human actions. And it is appealing to argue that the reason for Shakespeare’s transhistorical and transcultural popularity is a result of his genius in representing universal human values.40 Samuel Johnson’s characterization of this aspect of the drama remains quite compelling: “His persons act and speak by the influence of those general passions and principles by which all minds are agitated, and the whole system of life is continued in motion. . . . It is this which fills the plays of Shakespeare with practical axioms and domestick wisdom.”41 Of course, Johnson goes on to stress that Shakespeare’s “real power is not shewn in the splendour of particular passages but by the progress of his fable, and the tenour of his dialogue.”42 Johnson’s point is that moral precepts encapsulated in “the splendour of particular passages” are hard to find in Shakespeare, an observation that begs the question: how are we to conclude that Shakespeare offers “practical axioms and domestick wisdom” (e.g., “moral instruction”) in the absence of any solid examples from the plays? If Shakespeare frequently represents moral situations and his plays somehow embody universal human values, it would follow that the attentive critic could identify the moral precepts contained therein. But the treatment of moral situations in Shakespeare does not necessarily equate to an interest in moral prescription. I will argue below that in order to learn from an attention to ethical action in Shakespeare’s plays, we must abandon the traditional questions that drive discussions of morality and human action. While the question on the cover of The New York Times Magazine, for example, sets up the expectation that science may be close to unlocking the enduring human puzzle of moral judgment, it also forecloses on the examination of moral agency by virtue of its initial assumptions: that we do in fact want to be good and that there is something that makes us this way. Before any answer can be given, the question assumes both a static cause for moral behavior and a universal moral disposition. A more appropriate question would be: “Why do people think some actions are wrong?” The Times’ question is optimistic and future directed—what drives us to be good in


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our future actions?—while the latter question is a matter of retrospective judgment. There is less at stake in deeming an action good than in condemning it as morally wrong, but there is also more to gain from cultivating a preference for virtue over iniquity. It is not surprising that like the moral philosophers, theologians, and psychologists to come before them, Pinker, Haidt, and other cognitive psychologists are just as interested in the way people arrive at negative moral judgments as they are in determining why some strive to be virtuous. There is nothing inherently inappropriate about asking either question; both are central to the concepts of morality and ethical action. But in most discussions the initial questions are shorthand for Meno’s question to Socrates, which could be modernized into something like this: “Do people think some actions are wrong because they are naturally inclined to follow a moral law or because they have learned a set of moral rules that are culturally constructed?” At the opening of Book II of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle provides an answer to Meno’s question: “the virtues are implanted in us neither by nature nor contrary to nature: we are by nature equipped with the ability to receive them, and habit brings this ability to completion and fulfillment.”43 To the casual reader of Spenser, Aristotle’s compromise may look like a blueprint for The Faerie Queene. His effort to “fashion a gentleman in virtuous discipline” is structured, after all, around “the twelve private moral virtues, as Aristotle hath devised.”44 If we take Spenser at his word, his characters are straightforward (if allegorical) embodiments of the virtues explored in each book; their failings represent the imperfection of their fallen state, and their adventures detail the process of habituation that is essential to Aristotelian ethical development. But as most Spenserians have observed, Spenser’s poetic sensibility is more complicated than this account would suggest, especially after we leave the highly structured first book of The Faerie Queene.45 Even if Spenser did subscribe to the Aristotelian account of ethical habituation, his poetry is more focused on the difficulties of cultivating ethical habits (“virtuous discipline”) than confirming our innate capacity for virtue. In the following pages, I will suggest that the debate summed up in Meno’s question has distracted critics from other, I believe, more pressing philosophical questions about ethical subjectivity raised in early modern literature and exemplified in the work of Shakespeare and Spenser. Just as efforts to identify Shakespeare’s religious affiliation rely on passages with apparent confessional biases to make the case for his support of one tradition or another, attempts to identify the moral relevance of Shakespeare’s plays often identify moral imperatives in the plays to put forward conclusions about Shakespeare’s guiding moral principles.46 To do so is to suggest that


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situations in Shakespeare’s plays invite characters and audiences alike to draw on certain principles that govern appropriate moral judgment. Thus, we learn from Shakespeare that tyranny (The Winter’s Tale), overwrought ambition (Macbeth, Coriolanus), inaction (Hamlet), etc., are wrong, and that mercifulness (The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure), forgiveness (The Tempest), loyalty to just authority (King Lear, 1 Henry IV), etc., are right. Arguments that derive these principles from the plays can be convincing, and they have the added appeal of providing a rationale for Shakespeare’s ongoing popularity because his plays demonstrate universal human values.47 In addition, these principles would seem to fit relatively well into the moral categories identified by Haidt: harm, fairness, community, authority, and purity. At the same time, such readings invariably move away from the particularity of the situations found in the poetry and plays in order to highlight literature’s value for moral instruction. Of course, for those of us that study Shakespeare and Spenser, it is impossible to accept the suggestion that the value of the literature corresponds to its ability to convey uncomplicated moral precepts. In fact, just the opposite is true. Certainly a case can be made that Measure for Measure champions mercy over retribution, but the playwright’s reflection on ethical problems in the play far exceeds any didactic moral concerning the value of mercifulness. Guyon’s ability to resist Mammon’s temptations surely contains the moral lesson that greed is wrong and worldly goods are to be eschewed in favor of higher things, but the ability to convey this lesson is not the source of the poem’s power. Hal’s ultimate rejection of Falstaff in favor of his responsibility to the state may support the idea that community must come before the individual, but do we return to 1 & 2 Henry IV to reconfirm our understanding of this moral precept or to witness the manner in which Falstaff complicates any straightforward attempt at moralizing? Shakespeare’s masterful use of dramatic irony routinely ensures that the audience is a party to a consensus moral judgment that has been made explicit almost as soon as the actors take the stage. Clearly the power of Shakespearean drama lies less in its ability to confirm moral truths and more in what Johnson called “the progress of the fable.” As I will argue, the outcome of this progress has everything to do with the way his characters respond to the visual. Likewise, Spenser routinely alerts us to the moral dangers that his characters face on their adventures; there is no moral ambiguity about how one ought to respond to Error or Faithlessness, for example. If Spenser’s poetry still has something to say about ethics, it too is in the poet’s ability to represent the complexity of our experience with ethically charged situations that he brings before his characters’ eyes.


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Literature constitutes a (limited) middle way . . . by allowing readers to follow the details of the process in others. Do we thereby “learn” the value of parental love? This could seem too crude, no doubt because learning is associated with managing some skill, digesting some piece of knowledge, or grasping some pedantic message, rather than being an experience in which values and voices [are] interlaced with responses that are not limited to analysis.48

Such a reading redirects critical attention to our experience with literature’s moral agents, while downplaying the notion that we can clearly identify the moral lessons that experience might yield. Nevertheless, the focus of this kind of moral criticism still concentrates on our ability to make reasoned judgments about the actions of the moral agents we experience in literature. Although Zamir takes great care to honor the fictive experiences of Shakespeare’s moral agents as analogs for our own experiences, the approach still rests on the conventional debate over the adjudication of right and wrong and the quest to determine if these judgments are learned or innate. The focus of this approach, in other words, is on Shakespeare’s dramatization of moral reasoning as well as the purported invitation that his plays offer his audiences to partake in the same. We watch as Lear or Leontes use reason to make decisions that will have moral consequences, and as their reason falters ours is exercised and strengthened. The approach produces original and important insight into the plays, and (from the perspective of moral philosophy) a strong argument for the power of the literary text to contribute to philosophical discussions of morality. More specifically, the approach suggests that there is a human universal at stake in the literary staging of moral situations, and that it is our capacity—however flawed and malleable—for moral reasoning. It is not surprising that moral reasoning has been the focus of moral philosophy and moral psychology for so long. Only in reflecting on moral situations with the aid of reasoned argument can the more complex moral questions be considered. With that in mind, it is worth returning to what Haidt describes as “the new synthesis in moral psychology,” for one of the more interesting insights of the cognitive revolution in moral psychology is the claim that moral reasoning plays a fairly minor role in guiding human action and judgment concerning moral issues and situations:


More nuanced accounts of ethics and literature begin from the assumption that literature’s moral relevance resides less in its representation of moral precepts and more in its representation of ethical situations and the experience that creates for its audience. For example, Tzachi Zamir argues that:


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When we think about sticking a pin into a child’s hand, or we hear a story about a person slapping her father, most of us have an automatic intuitive reaction that includes a flash of negative affect. We often engage in conscious verbal reasoning too, but this controlled process can occur only after the first automatic process has run, and it is often influenced by the initial moral intuition. Moral reasoning, when it occurs, is usually a post-hoc process in which we search for evidence to support our initial intuitive reaction.49

The point is not that moral reasoning has no place in our actual experience with moral situations, but that we do not as a rule employ moral reasoning prior to acting in situations where the nature of the situation has aroused a value-laden emotional response. Haidt is clear that we have the ability to override the initial intuition, and that one way to do so is to use moral reasoning to consider the situation. Literary characters are notorious for their moral reasoning prior to action, and Shakespeare’s characters would seem to be no exception, a fact that would seem to suggest that Shakespeare’s interest was with his characters’ facility with moral reasoning. Spenser would seem to go even further by externalizing the process of moral reasoning prior to action in the form of the spiritual and moral guides that accompany his heroes. It is all the more surprising, then, to watch as Spenser’s heroes struggle to come to terms with what they see. Obvious signs of danger and direct warnings do not dissuade Spenser’s knights from acting in ways that place them in moral danger. Late in Book II, Guyon almost gives in to the siren mermaids on the way to the Bower of Bliss, his “senses softly tickeled, / That he the boateman bad row easily / And let him heare some part of their rare melody” (II.xii.33.7–9). Only with the help of the Palmer, who “with temperate advice discounselled,” does Guyon avoid the temptation of sensual pleasure. The repeated use of reason (here “temperate advice”) to guide the heroes’ behavior suggests that Spenser sought to affirm the value of moral reasoning in the cultivation of virtue. But I want to suggest the opposite—that both Shakespeare and Spenser represent the process by which moral conviction is produced phenomenologically, welling up in their characters despite their awareness of established moral principles and in tension with the calm domain of moral reasoning. This is not to suggest that either writer sides with those in favor of an innate as opposed to cultivated moral nature, but that their literature gains power from an emphasis on the phenomenal experience of moral conviction. Sidestepping the nature / culture debate in this way, I hope to turn attention to the process by which Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s characters arrive at their moral convictions, a process that involves moral reasoning as well as moral intuition but ultimately highlights the experience of the phenomenal world in time.


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I agree with Zamir that the value of examining Shakespeare and moral agency lies less in the evaluations we can make about the actions of his characters and more in the particularity of the ethical situations with which Shakespeare presents both characters and audience alike. As Zamir demonstrates, Shakespeare represents ethical situations with such vividness that it is possible to contemplate the weight of his characters’ experiences as we reflect on the moral dilemmas we face in our own lives. But beyond this, the moral failures of Shakespeare’s characters are particularly catastrophic because they are often supported by misguided moral conviction—Othello feels that it is not simply morally justified that he kill Desdemona, but that it is morally imperative. The power of this conviction has led critics to look for the cultural underpinnings of such judgments and view the tragic heroes as victims of ideology or of cultural mechanisms of social control. As a result, Leontes’s tragic judgment, for example, is attributed to the misogyny of the early modern culture in which his paranoia has been cultivated. This returns me to what I see as a curious moment in Pinker’s explication of the scientific theory of categorical moral universals. He turns to an important thought experiment from neuroethics, known as the Trolley Problem: You see a trolley car hurtling down the track, the conductor slumped over the controls. In the path of the trolley are five men working on the track, oblivious to the danger. You are standing at a fork in the track and can pull a lever that will divert the trolley onto a spur, saving the five men. Unfortunately, the trolley would then run over a single worker who is laboring on the spur. Is it permissible to throw the switch, killing one man to save five?50

It turns out that almost everyone says yes, because the action benefits the greater number of people. A variation, developed by Judith Jarvis Thompson, goes like this: You are on a bridge overlooking the tracks and have spotted the runaway trolley bearing down on the five workers. Now the only way to stop the trolley is to throw a heavy object in its path. And the only heavy object within reach is a fat man standing next to you. Should you throw the man off the bridge?51


Image Ethics

Here, most people would not push the man. The respondents cannot articulate why they would not and the psychologists have speculated, without consensus, about what the relevant difference might be. Pinker sides with those who suggest that it is the active role in killing the man that makes the difference. In other words, the thought experiment allows us to glimpse


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a universal category of moral instinct (do not kill people with your bare hands). For the present discussion, however, I would suggest that it is exactly the opposite: the man’s particularity alters the ethical situation (thus blocking an appeal to universal moral law). He is not simply a man, but a “fat man.” Unlike the abstract man who will die in the first example—an example that welcomes the kind of calculus that allows action to favor the benefit of the many over the one—the second example is more particular than abstract. I can now return to one of the examples discussed earlier: Hal’s sacrifice of Falstaff for the good of England. In one way, Hal’s rejection of Falstaff is a straightforward example of placing the commonwealth above individual interests. But this particular fat man is much more compelling than that moral lesson could ever be. Put in slightly different terms, the things that we might say about the build-up to the moment of rejection are much more interesting than any debate over what impact Hal’s rejection of Falstaff might have on his own moral character. Is Shakespeare creating a delightful vehicle through which to deliver a message about virtue? After all, Hal does reject Falstaff, and harshly so.52 In a sense the answer is yes: in representing the gestation of England’s hero king, Shakespeare is dramatizing the virtues with which Henry was associated. At the same time, though, I would argue that the plays raise a more interesting question for a discussion of Shakespearean ethics and morality: why is it that we are unwilling to throw Falstaff off the bridge? Rather than nod in agreement with the newly prudent King Henry, we yearn for more of the jovial knight. The power of the scene is heightened by the spectacle of Henry’s moral conviction, underscored by his pronouncement: “Presume not that I am the thing I was” (5.5.57). This brings me to one of this book’s central claims: ethical situations in Shakespeare and Spenser regularly hinge on visual images that cannot be distilled into moral precepts. To make the point clear, I need to put some pressure on the conventional distinction between morals and ethics: throughout this book, I use the term morals (moral, morality) to refer to the precepts that can be considered in isolation, apart from the accidents of a particular situation. For example, “murder is wrong” is a moral precept; it is true regardless of the particulars, and for this reason those who invoke it do so with alarming confidence (even when they look the other way when certain circumstances arise—e.g., in wartime). On the other hand, for my purposes, ethics applies to particular human situations in which moral judgments might be invoked: for example, in situations where it makes sense to evaluate human action in terms of right and wrong. Ethics cannot be thought apart from the singular situations in which human subjects are challenged to make ethical decisions, making ethics infinitely variable.


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On the other hand, morality can produce stable precepts that are often useless or unmanageable in actual situations. The heart of my argument about Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s engagement with ethics and morality is that both authors demonstrate a keen understanding of the tension between ethics and morals (so defined). What appears to be an indifference to moral precepts at times in the plays can be seen as a result of the playwright’s interest in the way his characters are continually forced to confront this tension. Similarly, the clarity of Protestant virtue is continually muddied by the complexity of visual experience, the need to discern true images from false. As Paul Cefalu has argued, Guyon’s embodiment of the virtue of temperance relies on the continual intervention of the Palmer to point out the proper ethical course of action.53 The knight’s own experience of his adventure is marked by a series of visual images that exceed his understanding and confound his moral training. Although Cefalu may be right that Guyon’s ethical education culminates in his ability to internalize the moral law repeatedly validated by the Palmer’s exhortations, readers of Book II are less likely to be moved by the authority of the moral law to eradicate the temptations of the sensual world than they are by how difficult it is for Guyon to resist the temptations of what he sees. An important irony of the culmination of Guyon’s moral education in the destruction of the bower is that the spectacle of his destructive rampage rivals (and likely exceeds) the other spectacles he has been learning to resist. The irony points to a tension between the clarity of moral judgment and the ambiguity of visual experience. Here Stephen Greenblatt is right that “Acrasia must be rejected with brutal decisiveness”—if we take “must” as a moral imperative.54 But how any individual—even one trained in “virtuous discipline”—can distinguish between righteous violence and its opposite further accentuates the tension between moral law and situational ethics emblazoned in the spectacle of Guyon’s “rigour pittilesse” (II.xii.83.2). Hal’s confrontation with this tension is made manifest in two highly charged images Shakespeare provides prior to the ultimate rejection of Falstaff. First at the height of the role playing in 1 Henry IV, we are presented with the image of the Prince as King forced to do what his place demands, that which he does, and will do (2.4.457). And again in Part 2 when Hal recognizes the significance of the impending succession, Shakespeare provides a vivid image:


Image Ethics

My gracious lord! my father! This sleep is sound indeed, this is a sleep That from this golden rigol hath divorced


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Image Ethics in Shakespeare and Spenser So many English kings. Thy due from me Is tears and heavy sorrows of the blood, Which nature, love, and filial tenderness, Shall, O dear father, pay thee plenteously: My due from thee is this imperial crown, Which, as immediate as thy place and blood, Derives itself to me. [puts on the crown] Lo, here it sits, Which God shall guard: and put the world’s whole strength Into one giant arm, it shall not force This lineal honour from me: this from thee Will I to mine leave, as ’tis left to me. (4.4.33–46)

Hal is faced with the dual image of his dead father and his future majesty, frozen for a moment when neither reality has come to pass. Like his earlier willingness to banish Falstaff (while at play), the scene encapsulates the way lived experience impacts the development of moral conviction in Shakespeare’s characters. Here, the outcome is positive (for Hal), but the power of the scene is not dependent on the moral outcome. Focusing on the phenomenology of the ethical demand, rather than the process of moral reasoning, helps explain how Spenser and Shakespeare continue to offer insight into our understanding of ethics and vision, as well as the special role literature can play in providing that insight. To elucidate the value of phenomenology in an examination of the Image Ethics at play in Shakespeare and Spenser, in the following chapters I draw on the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jean-Luc Marion, Emmanuel Levinas, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Although these twentieth-century philosophers approach phenomenology differently, they all emphasize the singularity of ethical experience over the inadequacy of the moral precept. Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty focus on the contrast between embodied experience and linguistic abstraction, formulating creative methods to explore the ongoing interaction between thought and understanding. For Wittgenstein the focus is language and the way in which language accommodates itself to the lifeworld in everyday use. For Merleau-Ponty perceptual experience is accommodated to linguistic understanding by virtue of an operation of intertwining he compares to the rhetorical trope of chiasmus. Levinas and Marion both approach the issue of ethics and vision through the lens of religion, Judaism and Roman Catholicism, respectively. While Levinas draws on phenomenology to provide a nuanced account of the power of the visual image to elide the alterity of the (unknowable) other person, Marion seeks to recuperate a theory of the icon that sheds the negative associations of idolatry at the same time that it maintains the power of the visual to incite human action.


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Reading Shakespeare alongside phenomenology helps demonstrate why he presents his characters with images that congeal around ethical situations, providing visualized thought emblems through which characters and audience alike may contemplate the moment of the ethical decision. For it is the moment of decision that constitutes moral agents in Shakespeare. We as readers and viewers make judgments after the fact, as do other characters in the plays, but Shakespeare’s ethical agents pause at the moment of the decision, and thus engage directly with the problematic heart of ethical action. Spenser, on the other hand, provides every possible directive to identify how individual ethical action might accord with the moral law by which his characters will ultimately be judged. The ethical failures that his heroes exhibit confirm the imperfection of their fallen state, while their successes point to the progress of their moral development. But their actual encounters with ethical situations made manifest in the image are just as fraught with moral danger as those found in Shakespeare. The inability of his heroes to simply apply the moral precepts that pertain to the situations they see before their eyes (to flee the evil and follow the good) attests to Spenser’s recognition that the cultivation of “virtuous discipline”—ethical comportment—requires sustained attention to visual experience, that a crucial test of one’s virtue lies in how one responds to images. The chapters that follow explore the variety of responses to the visual that constitute a meditation on ethics in Spenser and Shakespeare. Before turning to my primary poetic and dramatic examples, I first examine how the anxiety over visual experience manifested itself in two particular facets of sixteenthcentury English representational practice. As I have hoped to show in this introduction, the concern over visual experience, and the ethical stakes of responding to images, ran throughout early modern English cultural life. Taking examples from John Foxe’s highly influential “Book of Martyrs” and Thomas Deloney’s proto-novel Jack of Newberry, I offer two examples of how visual images (both material and literary) were deployed in the service of ideology at the same time that they were treated with suspicion. The impulse to draw on the power of the visual image suggests that early modern writers recognized the power of the visual at the same time that they worried about their inability to control the reactions it elicited. It is precisely this cultural ambivalence toward visuality that lent itself to both the Spenserian iconoclasm and the Shakespearean enargia that I discuss in the rest of this study. After examining important examples of anxious image making in Foxe and Deloney, I turn to Spenser’s early poetic publications, focusing on his translations for Jan van der Noot’s Theatre of Voluptuous Worldlings (1569) and his authorial debut in The Shepheardes Calendar (1579). I read Spenser’s


Image Ethics


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engagement with images in the context of the modern phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion. Marion’s interest in recuperating the icon as a medium for an ethical (rather than dogmatic) experience with divinity accords with Spenser’s attempt to retain the image for the purposes of Reformation. In the following chapter, I argue that Spenser’s confidence in his ability to contain the image faltered when he turned to The Faerie Queene, giving way to a recognition of the complex challenge that visual situatedness posed to Protestant ethics. Drawing on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s critique of logical positivism and especially his insistence that ethics and religion cannot be represented in language, the chapter explores Spenser’s use of indirection to cultivate ethical comportment. In the remaining chapters I address Shakespeare’s emphasis on the ethical response to images in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Measure for Measure, Othello, and The Winter’s Tale. In each play the power of visuality—doubled by the visual nature of theater—is seen to challenge the moral principles on which ethical action is presumably based, forcing characters and audience alike to reflect on the value of moral reasoning for the ethical subject at the moment of the decision. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s account of the intertwining of the visible and invisible in phenomenal experience provides a backdrop for my examination of ethics and love (both marital and divine) in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the ethics of temporality in Measure for Measure. The phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and Marion serves to reorient the scriptural influences in the plays (particularly St. Paul’s epistles and the Sermon on the Mount) in a philosophical direction that helps to explain the proximity of vision and ethics in the period. The last two chapters examine Shakespeare’s representation of ethical failure rising from moral conviction in Othello and The Winter’s Tale. Pairing Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics with my earlier discussion of the phenomenology of ethical experience in Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein, I examine how Othello trusts the language of visual experience—rather than the evidence of his eyes—to deliver the “ocular proof ” on which he bases his tragic moral conviction. When Shakespeare returns to the same material in The Winter’s Tale—staging in Leontes the same self-righteous moral outrage first exhibited by Othello—he suggests an ethical alternative to evidence-based, moral judgment. Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical theory, based on the figure of the “face-to-face” relation, illuminates my reading of Shakespeare’s late play as an affirmation of the experience of the other in time as both the greatest obstacle to and opportunity for ethical action. Image Ethics concludes that Shakespeare and Spenser each developed a poetics that emphasized the necessity of the singularity of ethical decision


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making against a fixed moral code. What has been seen as Protestant didacticism in Spenser might be better understood as a pious insistence on vigilant ethical attention to the situation at hand—where the comfort of falling back on doctrinal or dogmatic moral imperatives inevitably leads to ethically questionable behavior. For Shakespeare, the proscriptive serves as the foil against which the truly ethical—that is, ethics as embodied in the singular act—is made visible. Both writers, then, engage with ethics against the grain of the very systems of thought that provided them their poetic language. Their attention to the centrality of an ethics without doctrine, an ethics mediated by—but not derived from—the visible world experienced in time, is a product of the transitional character of an era indebted to both the waning power of Medieval devotion and the emerging allure of the Age of Reason.


Image Ethics


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Harnessing the Visual: From Illustration to Ekphrasis

I

f vision was the noblest of the senses from Plato to Descartes, as Martin Jay has suggested, the last century of its reign was troubled by a succession crisis.1 In sixteenth-century England, debates over the value of visual experience produced an anxiety over the use of images that extended beyond religious prohibitions against idolatry to a broad range of representational practices. While of all the senses the eyes were routinely credited with offering the most direct access to the world, they were also considered most susceptible to misrecognition or illusion.2 This paradox is important for the present study, as it offered a particularly rich reserve for literary artists to represent the vexed relationship between ethical action and perception. If the world observed with the eyes provides a trustworthy guide for the ethical subject, the quality of one’s moral reasoning is the basis on which one’s ethical character is best judged. On the other hand, if the world revealed to visual experience is less stable, the challenge to the ethical subject becomes much greater. It is not surprising, then, that we witness an attempt to separate the reasoned, stable, and implicitly verbal world of morality from the unstable, emotional realm of visual experience in sixteenth-century England. This effort to compartmentalize vision and cognition—associated with images and words, respectively—provides an important context for the literary interest in the ethics of responding to the visual. A central aim of this book is to explore the manner in which literary artists dramatized the impossibility of this separation in phenomenal experience, insisting that the ethical resides in the intertwining rather than the isolation of word and image. But before making that argument, it is instructive to see how this anxiety over the power of images manifested itself in English representational practice.


CHAPTER 1


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The epistemological crisis that sparked the desire to separate visual and verbal representation in early modern England shares a great deal with crises in epistemology and representation that dominated twentieth-century art and philosophy. At the same time that philosophers beginning with Nietzsche assailed what Martin Jay has termed the “ocularcentrism” of modern thought, modernist visual artists struggled to free the visual field from the domination of language. In Stuart Clark’s account, over the course of the previous century, “the traditional hegemony of vision has been dismantled.” This hegemony relied, according to Clark (and Jay), on “a particular model of cognition designed to secure for vision a commanding place in science, in the field of political power, and in the construction of communal solidarity and personal identity in bourgeois societies.”3 But vision, in this sense, is a figure, a point made most forcefully by Richard Rorty who argues that it was the power of the figure rather than any attention to actual visual perception that allowed modern philosophy to claim a ground in the veracity of vision.4 The philosophical objection to the “commanding place of vision” in so much modern thought—based on the argument that visual experience is mediated by language— resembles the objection on the part of modernist visual artists to the intrusion of language in visual art. The effort to emancipate the visual field from linguistic domination would reach its height in the work of abstract expressionist and minimalist artists, hoping to free the visual arts from a long association with iconographic and other literary content, where such content was seen to prefigure the visual field. Clement Greenberg, for instance, bemoaned the tyranny of literature over visual art, en route to his championing of an avant guard rooted in the concept of visual purity. For Greenberg, an abstract artist is a “purist [who] insists upon excluding ‘literature’ and subject matter from plastic art.”5 Greenberg’s desire for a pure visual art was a reaction against conceptual subject matter’s long cohabitation with ideology—witnessed in the uses of images for religious, political, and cultural propaganda. To emancipate the visual from any literary pretext would be to free the visual arts to become a radical alternative to Western ideological stagnation. As W. J. T. Mitchell and others have pointed out, however, the success of abstraction in purifying the visual arts of verbal contamination was limited from the start. For as Mitchell notes, even the most “pure” abstraction begins with a concept, even if that concept is the denial of the conceptual itself; if stories provided the subject matter for earlier art, modern art too has stories: “[t]he only difference is that the stories are represented in a different way,


I. Word versus Image


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and are known only to an elite audience of connoisseurs, critics and historians; for them the expressive improvisations of Kandinsky and the pure geometry of Malevich are eloquent hieroglyphics, memorials of great moments in the epic of abstract painting.”6 Mitchell and other critics of the notion that abstract art’s pure visuality imbued it with an emancipatory character would point to its inability to address issues of political and ethical import without recourse to language.7 In an attempt to respect the differences between visual and verbal representation without idealizing either a purified visual field or an ideal language, Mitchell argues that “the best terms for describing representations, artistic or otherwise, are to be found in the immanent vernaculars of representational practices themselves.”8 Mitchell’s nuanced approach— even-handedly drawing on the visually inflected term “immanence” while using the verbal metaphor of “vernaculars”—demonstrates that the intertwining of language and vision is more persistent and ethically challenging than Greenberg and his avant guard could have anticipated. The effort of twentieth-century visual artists and critics to disentangle the visual from the verbal arts provides a good starting point for the present exploration of ethics and vision in early modern England, a period marked by an obsession with the containment of visuality sparked by the dream of a purified word—sola scriptura. The relatively modest body of English visual art in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries provides copious examples of the intrusion of literary, verbal, and other linguistic matter into the visual field, limiting the experience of the visual to a particular set of interpretive possibilities. In the context of an iconoclastic atmosphere generated by the English Reformation, the visual image was rarely left to speak for itself. Michael Camille attributes the increasing effort to bring the visual image under the control of the word to the breakdown of established truths in the Renaissance, fueled in part by Reformation thought: “A great rift opens up between words and images [during the Reformation]. Language is now in a separate realm, written in discrete boxes or in fields hanging in the picture space.”9 The mid-sixteenth-century painting of Edward the VI and the Pope provides a good example of the shift Camille identifies here.10 Although the painting provides a fairly clear visual allegory of the suppression of Catholic idolatry in the Edwardian Reformation, the proper interpretation of the painting is ensured by the addition of text boxes identifying the Pope with “idolatry and superstition” and the monks with “feigned holiness.” The Pope himself is labeled with the tag “ALL FLESHE IS GRASSE,” a message that complements the Bible verse visible on the open book that crushes him from above: “THE WORD OF THE LORD ENDURETH FOREVER.” This reliance on language to contain the visual representation highlights the mistrust of the visual that emerged in the sixteenth century


Harnessing the Visual


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in England. Camille attributes the “rift” between words and images to a breakdown of the established order available in the middle ages. His assessment comes after his detailed account of how the proliferation of visual material outside the control of verbal systems of meaning operated prior to this shift, when the visual image provided an alternative space for expression in part because the official (verbal) message was uncontested. Because the medieval message is unchallenged—because, as the majority of medieval Christian theology attests, all experience of the world is an experience of God—word and image could coexist on the medieval page. The visual images appearing at the margins of medieval manuscripts and architecture approximate Greenberg’s dream of pure visuality, art addressed to the experience of perception outside of the semiotic tyranny of the word, but only because they posed no threat to the epistemological assumptions of medieval Christianity. Camille’s account of the decline of the free space of visual excess identified in the Gothic margin helps to place the representational shift seen in England in the mid-sixteenth century, beginning with the effort to establish the primacy of word over image during the Edwardian Reformation. This effort initiated a period of widespread anxiety over the visual in early modern England. A primary goal of this book is to show how this anxiety would later become manifest in the complex response to vision and the visual image that marks the literature of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The literary preoccupation with visual experience in the English Renaissance reflects a slow process of cultural change encompassing shifts in thinking on a broad level, from the medieval dream vision to Baconian protoscience, from Ptolemaic to Copernican astronomy, and from, in Patrick Collinson’s terms, “a culture of orality and image to one of print culture: from one mental and imaginative ‘set’ to another.”11 Of course, such transformations did not occur overnight. As Tessa Watt points out in Cheap Print and Popular Piety, a vibrant visual culture continued to thrive on single-sheet prints (mostly ballads and broadsides) well into the seventeenth century, a revelation which demonstrates that large-scale cultural changes do not necessarily amount to changes in popular cultural practice. But, as Joseph Monteyne has suggested in his study of seventeenth-century prints, the visual was no longer a space for expressive transgression as it was in the Gothic margin. Rather, by the Restoration the image would become a primary tool for containment, transgressive space having migrated to the coffee shops, a discursive space marked by unchecked opinion.12 Unlike the images at the margins of Gothic manuscripts—the defecating monkeys and harp-playing asses brought to light by Camille—the images studied by Watt and Monteyne often contain textual markers or obvious iconographic subtexts to guide the viewer’s judgment, leaving little to the vagaries of visual experience.


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Similarly, the rise of the popular stage at precisely the moment following the decline of medieval image culture suggests that the power of the visual spectacle was not simply removed from English cultural life; instead it was channeled to other outlets. The fact that attacks on the theater in this period are almost always driven by an animosity toward spectacle and illusion suggests that the verbal play text failed to anchor dramatic representation to a linguistic message. Despite objections from playwrights including Ben Jonson, the playbook was incapable of concealing the undeniably visual character of the stage.13 Although the debate over the proper characterization of English antivisual sentiment remains unsettled, one thing is clear: visual images and the experience of the visible world become increasingly central to the most important ethical debates of the day. II.

Containing the Visual Image

As I have suggested, the subordination of the visual by the verbal so reviled by Greenberg can be traced to the early modern effort to contain visual excess that emerged from the Reformation. In the beginning, this effort is perhaps most evident in the interjection of words into visual images, and particularly book illustrations. In one of the most celebrated examples of sixteenth-century English book illustration, John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (popularly known as the “Book of Martyrs”), a series of remarkable woodcuts represents important scenes from the history of Protestantism in England. Many of the illustrated scenes include what I will call “text tags,” usually in the form of xylographically produced lettering—words engraved directly on the woodblock from which the image was printed. The inserted text often serves as a guide to understanding the image, helping potential viewers identify the persons depicted, for example. But just as often the text tags strive to assert an even more overt verbal control over the potential ambiguities of the visual representation. Take, for example, the well-known illustration of the death of King John, first included as a tipped-in, folding illustration in the 1563 edition of Foxe’s great book (fig. 1.1). Although the ostensible subject of this cut is straightforward—that a corrupt monk poisoned a martyr king—the series of images included on the block presents a complex narrative that would be difficult to follow if not for the text included as a guide to the action. The organization of the panels in the whole composition recalls the visual organization found in the Biblia Pauperum, a model that the producers of the Book of Martyrs would have known well.14 Viewed in this way, it is possible to see the two central panels—depicting the moment of poisoning and the dead king—in relation to the side panels that offer images of the monk before and after the murder.




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John Foxe, Acts and Monuments. London, 1563, following sig. I4. HEW 6.11.1, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Figure 1.1 The death of King John, woodcut illustration

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It is safe to assume that those aware of the functioning of the tripartite schema of medieval typology would have been able to understand the mode of the illustration as an adaptation of the earlier method of analogical explication; in this case the central action of the lower middle panel is illuminated by references to the satire of Roman ritual depicted in the side panels. But this explanation assumes that viewers were expected to employ a specific hermeneutic method, and without linguistic guidance the image alone cannot preclude other possible ways of engaging with the illustration. The inclusion of the text tags suggests that the producers of Foxe’s book believed that some viewers would be unfamiliar with the organizational tradition in question, or that they would be drawn to other aspects of the image’s visual field, especially as the subject of the woodcut is not a familiar scriptural scene, but a historical event. As a historical event, the illustration takes on a very different narrative function. Rather than simply presenting a typological account of misguided religion, the illustration also participates in Foxe’s revisionist history of the Reformation in England, by visualizing the wrongful usurpation of monarchical power by a papal agent. For this historical revision to come across, the illustration must function narratologically as well as analogically. For the complicity of the Roman religion in the monk’s actions is central to the revisionist narrative with which Foxe’s book is concerned on the larger scale. The emphasis of the illustration bears this out, as three of the four panels devoted to the monk’s actions implicate the larger religious establishment. This is not at all surprising in the context of Foxe’s book. What is important for the present discussion, however, is that the emphasis of the illustration is on its narrative rather than its visual qualities. Although important visual tactics are employed to drive the point home, these are irrelevant without the underlying narrative. Specifically, as John King has pointed out, the central panel representing the poisoning can be seen as a satire of the administration of the cup in the Roman rite of mass.15 The satire would have been immediately recognizable to many observers, but the significance of the association for the larger story of Protestantism would be lost without the narrative underlying the story of the poisoned king. And it is here that text tags become crucial. Because the visual organization is relational rather than chronological—in that we are to understand that the side panels inform the action of the center panels—it is difficult to discern the narrative from the images alone. The addition of the xylographic text in each of the panels allows the story to become clear while preserving the visual satire presented in the layout of the block. With the aid of the text insertions it is possible to see that the narrative begins in the lower right panel, moves to the upper right panel, continues down to the middle panel, and then simultaneously to the upper middle and upper left, finally ending in the




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lower left, where the monks sing a perpetual mass for the murderer. But only in the context of the narrative do the lower left and upper right panels figure into an illustration of “the description and manner of the poisoning of King John.” It is true that some aspects of the illustration certainly enhance the telling of the story by visualization, as in the image captioned “here the monk tempereth his poyson,” which includes the creative detail of the monk dissecting a poisonous toad. For the most part, however, the visualization is conceptual, linking the monk’s activity to Rome, and the fall of the king to the powers of an overreaching religious establishment effectively unchecked by the king. Without this verbal narrative undergirding the image, the woodcut offers visual material that could easily be misinterpreted. Unlike the depiction of the mass on the title page of Foxe’s book in which the damned, represented as tonsured clergy blowing their trumpets downward, literally encroach upon the scene of the misguided roman rite, the satire in the King John mass is hardly recognizable without the text indicating that it is sung perpetually for the murderer rather than the king. The inclusion of text is ultimately aimed at producing a codified moral response to the image on the part of the observer. An example from the 1570 edition of the Book of Martyrs is perhaps even more striking. While the King John illustration draws attention to its narrative focus by dividing the story into six distinct panels, a strategy that encourages viewing the scenes in succession, the illustration introducing the reign of Edward VI relies more directly on the use of the inserted text tags (fig. 1.2). Although the import of the scene is again narrative, this time a narrative of cleansing the English church, the division of the visual field is accomplished architecturally rather than through the expedient of panels. The result is an even more overt use of text to guide the viewing experience. At first glance, the image might seem to offer a single moment contrasting papal corruption and the institutional calm of Edward’s religious reign, in the form of a memorial portrait (on the left) and a Protestant worship service (on the right). On the visual evidence alone, the activity in the background could easily be taken to represent the tumult of the reformation, during which important reformers were burned as heretics, and others fled persecution through self-exile on the continent. In particular, the stylized flames of the fire in the top center of the image recall the flames of the stake of martyrdom that readers of Foxe’s book would have seen only a few pages earlier. The textual guides carefully head off this kind of visual association. Through textual insertion, the top panel is shown to depict a phase in the development of the Anglican church, as images rather than martyrs are consumed by the flames, and those fleeing the country are identified (through


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Figure 1.2 Reforms of the church under Edward VI, woodcut illustration John Foxe, Acts and Monuments. London, 1570, sig. 4A1r, TYP 505.70.404 F, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

both text tags and symbols such as the papal keys on the bags) as papists “packing away their paltry.” Directed that the top portion indicates the Edwardian efforts to purge the temple of corruption, the viewer can recognize the image in the foreground as an Anglican service limited to the sacraments of baptism and communion. The Edwardian establishment is thus set up as a prototype for the longer term Elizabethan version of the Protestant nation. In order for the contrast to be effective, however, the horror of the Marian persecutions cannot intrude upon the Edwardian section of the book, but rather must exist as a distinct period of warning, in which the full evil of the corrupt church was revealed to the English as a test of their true faith. The book’s producers ensured that this point would be clear, not only by carefully guiding the viewing experience in this illustration (which prefaces




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the account of Edward’s reign), but also by relegating the book’s visual component to its other sections; Edward’s reign includes only a single illustration (compared to the copiously illustrated Marian section).16 The conceptual containment of visual excess was crucial to the effectiveness of the volume’s images. As Catholic martyrologies included almost identical images of burning martyrs, the image of a martyr at the stake had no inherent connection to either side of the theological schism. In the process of guiding the viewing/reading of the book, the potential of visualization is confined by the symbolic and narrative, that is, by the word. III.

Containing the Verbal Image

For the purposes of the present study, the decision to include visual images, despite the perceived need to contain their meaning, indicates that Foxe and the others involved in producing his book clearly recognized the power of the visual image. At this transitional point in the development of the English Reformation aesthetic, the carefully controlled visual image was understood to be a powerful tool in the struggle to affirm a variety of religious and political causes ranging from anti-Catholic satire to monarchical power. The impulse to draw on the power of the image coupled with an anxiety over the danger of letting the image speak for itself can be found in the secular context as well. An interesting example comes in the middle of Thomas Deloney’s Jack of Newbury. Chapter 5 of Deloney’s protonovel begins with the following description: In a faire large Parlour which was wainscoted round about, Jacke of Newbery had fifteene faire Pictures hanging, which were covered with Curtaines of green silke, fringed with Gold, which he would often shew to his friends and servants.17

The rest of the chapter is devoted to a catalogue of the clothier hero’s picture gallery, which serves as a kind of mercantile academy for its owner. Through the pictures that Jack describes to his friends and servants (primarily the cloth workers in his employ), Deloney’s readers are treated to various tales of lowborn men who achieved greatness. In addition to the obvious ideological coercion at play in the gallery, there is a curious interplay between the visual catalyst—the pictures—and the narratives that are apparently required for proper understanding. Deloney’s text evokes an archaic mode of visualization at the same time that it reveals the emergence of a new narrative and nonvisual form of memorial. The descriptions of the pictures conjure memories that are organized after the style of medieval paintings, where the proximity


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of subjects and the presence of attributes constitute the semiotic mode of the visual space. However, the anecdotes that Jack attributes to the static scenes depicted in the gallery displace the visual with narrative as the basis for an ethics of remembering. Read in this way, the scene confirms Deloney’s liminal position in a representational shift from medieval to early modern that is often associated with his novels, but such a reading also helps to explain the scene’s seemingly contradictory social politics—the juxtaposition of humility and thrift to the lavish material surroundings of the room and its pictures. The literary genre governing Deloney’s fifth chapter complicates the relation of visual to linguistic modes of representation that is the key to understanding the cultural implications of this episode of the novel. The gallery scene provides clear examples of what John Hollander has described as “notional ekphrasis,” the “representation of an imaginary work of art.”18 Although it is perfectly plausible, in theory, that the 15 paintings could have existed, without any record of even one such painting, or any similar subject in sixteenth-century English visual art, we have to assume that they are as fictive as the tapestries in Spenser’s House of Busirane. The presence of 15 such paintings all depicting the same historical ethic directs our attention to the thematic—and conceptual—import of the paintings within the context of Deloney’s “Pleasant History.” The genre of notional ekphrasis is particularly well suited to the kind of redirection that occurs in the chapter. As James Heffernan has commented of Homer’s description of the Shield of Achilles in book 18 of the Iliad, “All we can see—all that really exists in this passage—is Homer’s language, which not only rivals but actually displaces the work of art it ostensibly describes and salutes.”19 The narrative scenes depicted on the shield parallel the larger story, but without the specificity of the longer narrative. This parallel serves to emphasize the relationship of representation to life, as the shield represents the events that are unfolding at the moment of its making. The suggestion, of course, is that art offers council to the living, despite its resistance to time and the controlled nature of artistic form. The wonder inspired by the visual description of the shield at this pivotal moment in the poem’s narrative mirrors the wonder invoked by the poem at the moment of its recitation. I suggest that the same set of relationships can be found in Deloney’s descriptions of the paintings, which, though heroic in a different register, nevertheless serve to bolster the notion of the tradesman-hero through a similar displacement of image by word. When Jack is not there to explain the story behind the pictures, they are covered with green silk curtains, hidden from view. When the stories are told, it becomes clear that the visual images could never serve the




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purpose for which Jack intends them without his intervention. Their semiotic organization is heavily iconographic, but as the proper interpretation of each of the paintings is explicitly counterintuitive, they fail to speak without Jack’s voice. The first two (and perhaps three) paintings deliver their message through an explicitly narrative visual technique, as we learn of “the picture of a shepheard, before whom kneeled a great King” (47). The gesture of kneeling is clarified by Jack: “See here (quoth Jacke) the father a shepheard, the sonne a Soveraigne” (47). While it is possible that these paintings of kings kneeling before their low-born fathers could produce a proper interpretation without narrative intervention, the meaning granted to the later paintings depends on the narrative overtly. We learn that the “fourth [painting] was the similitude of Aelius Pertinax, sometime Emperour of Rome, yet was his father but a Weaver: and afterward, to give example to others of low condition to beare mindes of worthy men, he caused the shop to be beautified with Marble curiously cut, wherein his father before him was wont to get his living” (47). Here Deloney abandons the description of the painting—only mentioning that it is a “similitude” of the emperor—in favor of an anecdote that aligns the visual composition with the ethical lesson Jack hopes to emphasize in each of the paintings. The anecdote helps to codify a key feature of the whole didactic enterprise: the importance that the low-born heroes remember their beginnings and pass on the means by which they came to their good fortune. In one instance, Jack informs us that Agathocles, King of Sicilia and the son of a potter, always served banquets with earthenware as well as gold vessels “to the intent that he might alwayes beare in minde the place of his beginning” (47). The true purpose of the parade of what appear to be success stories of the upwardly mobile is thus revealed through the suggestion that the success depicted ought not be confused with class transformation, as each figure is shown to simply live out the logical rewards of an already determined class position. Jack’s own resistance to social mobility is offered two chapters earlier when he refuses to be knighted by Henry VIII: “his majesty would have made him a knight, but he refused it, saying, I beseech your Grace let mee live a poore Clothier among my people, in whose maintenance I take more felicity, than in all the vaine titles of Gentility . . . honor and worship may bee compared to the lake of Loeth, which makes men forget themselves, that taste thereof ” (43). It would seem that the entire episode in Jack’s gallery simply provides Deloney with the lead-in for Jack’s moralistic conclusion:


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Seeing then my good servants, that these men have been advanced to high estate and Princely dignities, by wisedome, learning and diligence, I would


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wish you to imitate the like virtues, that you might attaine the like honours: for which of you doth know what good fortune God hath in store for you? There is none of you so poorely borne, but that men of baser birth have come to great honours. The idle hand shall ever goe in a ragged garment, and the sloathfull live in reproach: but such as doe lead a virtuous life, and governe themselves discreetly, shall of the best be esteemed, and spend their daies in credit. (49)20

The commonplace wisdom that ends the chapter does not contradict Jack’s narrative explanations of the paintings in the gallery. However, what we learn of the paintings through the brief descriptions that precede the narrative explanations confirms the dependence of the moral on the chapter’s privileging of word over image. Aside from the straightforward, if potentially cryptic, method of iconography by attribute—as in the case of a king whose father was a gardener, depicted holding a spade—the chapter includes descriptions of paintings that one would be hard pressed to read as parables praising thrift. The descriptions of the thirteenth and fourteenth pictures highlight the tension between the conceptual logic that governs the anecdotes (the moral) and the logic of the visual space (with its attendant conservative social politics). The thirteenth picture depicts “Lamusius King of Lombardie, who was no better than the son of a common Strumpet: being painted like a naked childe walking in the water, and taking hold of the point of a Launce, by the which he held fast, and saved himself ” (48). Such is the account of the visual image offered to Jack’s gallery visitors. The story, as Jack proceeds to elaborate, is that after his lewde mother was delivered of him, shee unnaturally threw him into a deepe stinking Ditch, wherein was some water. By hap king Aglimond passed that way, and found this childe almost drowned; who moving him softly with the point of his Launce, the better to perceive what hee was, the childe (though then newely borne) took hold thereof with one of his pretty hands, not suffereing it to slide or slip awaye againe. (48)

The king, amazed at the strength of the infant, “caused it to be taken up, and carefully to be fostered . . . who afterward grew to be so brave a man, and so much favoured of Fortune, that in the end hee was crowned King of the Lombards, who lived there in honour, and in his succession after him, even until the time of the unfortunate King Albovia, when all came to ruine, subversion and destruction” (48).




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Unlike the previous examples of hardworking cloth weavers, rope makers, shepherds, and shoemakers, whose noble professions Jack extends to their noble ends, this story would seem to undercut precisely the moral Jack hopes to convey through his explanations. The image of the naked babe grasping the tip of the launce evokes the traditional iconographic technique of representing the emblematic moment in a figure’s development. However, the moment depicted and the attendant description work against the chapter’s moral of reward for hard work and thrift. Rather than through hard work, or noble service on the part of the parents, this child is saved by “Fortune,” as the king passed that way “by hap” and only determined to save the boy after seeing him grasp the launce with “a strange force,” the more strange because he was “then only new born” (48). Moreover, it is hard to ignore the implication that the boy’s rise to greatness had something to do in this case with the king’s order that he be “carefully . . . fostered” (48). The tension arises from the dissonance between his identity at birth—“no better than the son of a common strumpet”—and his apparent predestination to kingship implied in his unnatural ability to grasp the launce as a newborn babe. Although the story supports Jack’s later contention that “there is none of you so poorely borne, but that men of baser birth have come to great honours,” it seems to offer little evidence that idleness breeds poverty while virtue and good government ensure that one will “spend [his or her] daies in credit.” If Fortune oversteps her bounds in Jack’s description of the thirteenth picture, the clothier attempts to make amends in the description of the fourteenth: Primislas King of Bohemia was most artificially drawn; before whom there stood an Horse without Bridle or Saddle, in a field where Husband-men were at plough. The cause why this King was thus painted (quoth Jacke) was this. At that time the King of the Bohemians died without issue, and a great strife being amongst the Nobility for a new king, at length they all consented that a horse should bee let into the field, without bridle or saddle, having all determined with most assured purpose to make him their king, before whom this horse rested. At what time it came to passe, that the horse first stayed himself before this Primislas, being a simple creature, who was then busie driving the plough, they presently made him their Sovereign, who ordered himself and his kingdome very wisely. (49)


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Here we return to the motif of labor, as Primislas is found “busie driving the plough,” and yet the good fortune by which he becomes king of Bohemia is left to the superstition of a nobility willing to leave its kingdom


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to a horse’s judgment. Clearly we are offered a providential model—the horse as the hand of God—and yet as the chapter progresses, the tension between the providential, moral, and protocapitalist models becomes more and more strained. The reproduction of this tension in the form of notional ekphrasis seems particularly revealing of the intersections of cultural form and socialeconomic politics from which Deloney’s novels gain their power. In notional ekphrasis, where the artwork does not exist, the author has a much greater range of possibility than in strict ekphrasis (in which the poet engages with a known work of art—Auden on Breughel, for example).21 If, in strict ekphrasis, the author effects the transformation of an idea from one medium to another, the materiality of the two representational practices is very much at stake (how does one choose a word to match a brush stroke, for example?).22 If the original medium is itself idea—or ideological—as in notional ekphrasis, the question of materiality is still at play, only with a difference. The process by which the materiality of the artwork is transformed in strict ekphrasis constitutes a large measure of the interest of ekphrasis as a genre. In its notional form, this process is redoubled as a result of the fact that both the target object and its ekphrastic supplement must be materialized—made manifest—simultaneously by the literary artist. We can learn a great deal about the cultural value attributed to word and image as they are represented in the process. The gallery episode points up the difficulty of Deloney’s balancing act throughout Jack of Newbury. Specifically, the blend of conservative social politics with a progressive labor agenda is tenuously supported through a protoentrepreneurial ideology—suggestive of a modern capitalist work ethic—at the same time that the hero of the book succeeds through a series of fortunate accidents. The consistent references to Jack’s thrift, present from the opening anecdote of the novel, appear to provide the moral of the story as well as its narrative logic.23 At the same time, however, Jack’s good fortune of essentially being in the right place at the right time must be recognized as the actual force behind the narrative progression. In reading the dissonance between the description of the pictures and the stories Jack tells of their supposed meanings, we can see the importance of the visual as a category associated with inspiring action at the same time that the narrative reveals a wariness of the image’s ability to promote the particular action desired. The examples of Foxe and Deloney highlight the early modern English desire to harness the power of the visual at the same time that they reveal an anxiety that the visual ought not be allowed to speak for itself. As both Deloney and the Foxe illustrators worked to contain the semiotic excess of




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the visual images they conjured through verbal description and woodcut illustrations, respectively, they highlight a central problem of visual experience: while the visual demands a response from the perceiver, its demand is also its risk. The power of the visual to condense events in emblematic fashion— the king kneeling before the cobbler father—and subsequently move viewers to action is what makes the experience with the visual a matter of ethics. In the late sixteenth century the risk of placing material images before viewers was increasingly deemed too high, and eventually the spectacle of the theater would succumb to the anxiety over the danger of the visual. But as the iconoclastic impulse spread, literary interest in the unpredictable power of the visual continued to increase. Literary artists recognized that visual experience often produced the most intense emotional responses, and that ethical failure often resulted from the unchecked emotion elicited by visual images. In the next two chapters, I will examine how Spenser moved from an iconoclastic engagement with images focused on their materiality, emphasizing the fleeting nature of corporeal existence, for example, to a more figurative iconoclasm in which the difficulty of predicting the response to visual experience was recognized as the greatest threat to proper Protestant ethical comportment.


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From Visible to Invisible: Spenser’s “Aprill” and Messianic Ethics

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penser’s first appearance in print came in a publication that exemplifies the early modern struggle over the use of visual images discussed in the previous chapter. Jan van der Noot’s Theater for Voluptuous Worldlings (1569) is concerned explicitly with the dangers of visual experience at the same time that it draws on the aesthetic power of its many visual illustrations.1 Iconoclastic to its core, the book is also a primer for those seeking to navigate the difficult Reformation condition of embodied experience. Like Foxe’s “Book of Martyrs,” the book’s heavy emphasis on visual illustration is counterbalanced by a thematic denigration of the value of visual experience.2 Van der Noot shared with other early Reformers the sense that visual illustration offered a potential means of spreading the word-centered Protestant message. As a key part of the message was that too much attention to the material world leads to spiritual failure, his book relied on a mode of illustration in which the medium of expression deployed was simultaneously the object of critique. At the heart of the book, and making up the “theater” of the title, are Spenser’s translations of epigrams and sonnets by Petrarch and Joachim du Bellay indicting the vanity of the world, followed by van der Noot’s own sonnets depicting scenes from the Book of Revelation.3 The illustrated poems are followed by a long, antipapal prose commentary by van der Noot drawn from John Bale and Heinrich Bullinger. That the illustrations were the work of an influential visual artist, the Flemish painter Lucas de Heere (possibly adapted for woodcut by Marcus Gheeraerts), only heightens the tension that exists between the book’s visual and verbal components.4 As Carl Rasmussen has pointed out, van der Noot’s goal in the book was to move the reader from the “vanity of worldly things” to the “knowledge of Heavenly and eternal things.”5 This familiar Christian motif is focused on the transformative process by which the prudent Christian overcomes


CHAPTER 2


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the spiritual dangers of the material world through an attention to the word, and more specifically the Word of God. Central throughout the history of Christianity, the transformation of physical into spiritual experience was complicated by the Reformation recommitment to the word and its attendant denigration of vision. Although Spenser’s verse translations appeared without attribution in the Theater, there is no reason to doubt that he supported both its Protestant message and its formal method. Indeed, as Ernest Gilman has shown, Spenser’s peculiarly visual form of iconoclasm can be traced directly to the Theater. “Depending on the passage of his work that falls open,” Gilman notes, “one can find in Spenser a militant reformer on the question of images or a lover of decoration and display willing to employ more traditional discriminations between their use and abuse.”6 To be sure the conflicted approach to visual images that Gilman identifies is constant throughout Spenser’s career. Significantly, however, Spenser does not continue to illustrate his poetry. The disappearance of visual illustrations from his published poetry mirrors a shift in the poet’s attitude toward visual experience as he turned from an attention to images perceived by the eye to images contemplated by reason with the mind’s eye. In the following pages I explore the implications of this shift for Spenser’s poetic development from the Shepheardes Calendar to The Faerie Queene. I.

Material World

Spenser’s control over the form of his publications is well established. In addition to the deliberate modeling of his poetic career on Virgil’s, scholars such as Ruth Luborsky and S. K. Heninger, Jr., have demonstrated how careful he was in the material presentation of his early illustrated poetry.7 In the Shepheardes Calendar, for example, Spenser included illustrations that positioned the poem as a hinge between the classical and English literary traditions, signaled by the decision to juxtapose the Virgilian Eclogue and the illustrative form of the widely popular illustrated almanacs that had been produced in many editions throughout the sixteenth century in England. These early illustrated publications suggest not only that Spenser intended to control the public dissemination of his poetic project, but also that the relationship between word and image preoccupied his aesthetic from the outset. The argument of this chapter is that Spenser’s early poetic development traces the transition from the epistemological stability of established (medieval) patterns of engagement with the visual to an uncertainty over the role of visual experience in ethical life that troubled early modern thought. This uncertainty would provide fertile subject matter for English Renaissance poetry.


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Spenser’s involvement with van der Noot’s project at the beginning of his poetic career introduced him to an early reformation aesthetic that valued visual images for their ability to unmask the vanity of the world. In Gilman’s account, for van der Noot “images are admissible because they envision their own collapse.”8 Van der Noot himself justified the inclusion of the illustrations as follows: And to sette the vanitie and inconstancie of worldly and transitorie thyngs, liuelier before your eyes, I haue broughte in here twentie sightes or vysions, & caused them to be grauen, to the ende al men may see that with their eyes, whiche I go aboute to expresse by writing, to the delight and lesure of the eye and eares.9

Spenser would soon come to see that the power of visual images and the uncertainty of visual experience were not so easily contained and that the problems raised by vision were more pressing than any simple rejection of images could resolve. But for a time the material visual image served as an apt foil to the spiritual message of a word-centered Protestantism. In the portion of van der Noot’s Theater featuring Spenser’s translations, word and image are given equal space, though the message is clearly that one ought to turn away from the visible, transitory world in order to reach enduring, but invisible spiritual truth. Tellingly, all of the epigrams and sonnets translated from Petrarch (via Clément Marot) and du Bellay are “vision poems,” and the final four apocalyptic sonnets rely on the heavily visual language of the Book of Revelation. The interplay between the woodcut illustrations and the poetic text draws attention to the movement from material image to immaterial truth. Gilman notes that the Theater is “arguably the first English emblem book,” as the relationship between word and image is integral to its method.10 The first of Petrarch’s “visions” introduces the book’s conventional formal method. The speaker’s visual experience leads to the conclusion that the visible world is destined to decay: Being one day at my window all alone, So many strange things hapned me to see, As much it grieueth me to thinke thereon. At my right hande, a Hinde appearde to me, So faire as mought the greatest God delite: Two egre Dogs dyd hir pursue in chace, Of whiche the one was black, the other white. With deadly force so in their cruell race They pinchte the haunches of this gentle beast,


From Visible to Invisible


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Image Ethics in Shakespeare and Spenser That at the last, and in shorte time, I spied, Vnder a rocke, where she (alas) opprest, Fell to the grounde, and there vntimely dide. Cruell death vanquishing so noble beautie, Oft makes me waile so harde a destinie. (464)

The other six epigrams offer similar “visions of the world’s vanity”—a ship wrecked at sea, a tree destroyed by lightening, a fair lady killed by a serpent’s venom—leading to the conclusion that “in earth so nothing doth endure / But bitter griefe that dothe our hearts anoy” (Epigram 6, ln 11–12). In the following series of sonnets translated from du Bellay, images of material wonders are related and then destroyed in prolog to the destruction of the temporal world at the apocalypse—the moment yet to come at which temporal materiality will itself be overcome. The transcendence of materiality at the apocalypse is the gift of spiritual revelation: the unveiling, or making visible of God’s truth. The third sonnet of the second series and its accompanying illustration (fig. 2.1) are representative: Then did a sharped spyre of Diamond bright, Ten feete each way in square, appeare to mee, Iustly proportion’d vp vnto his hight, So far as Archer might his leuel see: The top thereof a pot did seeme to beare, Made of the mettall, which we most do honour, And in this golden vessell couched weare The ashes of a mightie Emperour: Vpon foure corners of the base were pight To beare the frame, foure great Lyons of gold; A worthy tombe for such a worthy wight. Alas this world doth nought but grieuance hold. I saw a tempest from the heauen descend, Which this braue monument with flash did rend. Sonnet 3

The extravagance of the earthly effort to create an eternal monument is mocked by the reality of temporal existence. The “worldling” emperor responsible for the creation of the ill-fated monument is more focused on making his “worthy tombe” visible for all to see than on eternal, but invisible Christian truth. The only sonnet without its own illustration introduces the sequence of sonnets taken from du Bellay and Revelation. In this unillustrated poem all


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Figure 2.1 An emperor’s monument destroyed by a tempest, woodcut illustration Jan van der Noot, A Theater for Voluptuous Worldlings. London, 1569, sig. C2r. Houghton STC 18602, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

material existence is to be eschewed to make way for the faith in God that intuitively comes to the thoughtful narrator upon reflection in a dream:



It was the time, when rest soft sliding downe From heauens hight into mens heauy eyes, In the forgetfulnes of sleepe doth drowne


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Image Ethics in Shakespeare and Spenser The carefull thoughts of mortall miseries: Then did a Ghost before mine eyes appeare, On that great riuers banck, that runnes by Rome, Which calling me by name bad me to reare My lookes to heauen whence all good gifts do come, And crying lowd, loe now beholde (quoth hee) What vnder this great temple placed is: Lo all is nought but flying vanitee. So I that know this worlds inconstancies, Sith onely God surmounts all times decay, In God alone my confidence do stay. (Sonnet 1)

The commonplace that “all is nought but flying vanitee” offers the narrator a path to confidence in God, the essential thing notably absent from the inconstant world. It is when the narrator is not looking with his physical eyes that the truth can appear “before [his] eyes” in slumber. The temple here is not the materially visible temple of the following sonnet, but God’s temple of Revelation: “And the temple of God was opened in heaven, and there was seen in his temple the ark of his testament: and there were lightnings, and voices, and thunderings, and an earthquake, and great hail” (Rev. 11:19). Following the conventions of the medieval dream vision, the sonnet establishes the speaker’s spiritual illumination through a process that brackets physiological sight while simultaneously relying on the structure of vision for its narrative logic: the ghost “appears” before the speaker’s (closed, sleeping) “eyes” to impart the message that all that is seen with the eye is inconstant. The rhetorical oscillation between physiological sight and spiritual revelation accords with the analogical epistemology that governed medieval thought. Knowledge of the world is to visual observation in this world as knowledge of the Truth of God is to spiritual revelation in heaven. For the medieval observer of the world the deferral of revelation is not particularly troubling because the knowledge of the world gleaned through visual observation was considered to be continuous with the process of spiritual revelation that would culminate in the revelation of eternal Truth in heaven. But for the postreformation subject the analogy was strained, prompting a greater effort to articulate how vision in the fallen world could be both corrupt and analogous to spiritual vision. The paradox preoccupied Spenser from this point forward as he strove to develop a poetics that emphasized the salvific power of the word while recognizing that its power was mediated by his and his readers’ experiences of the fallen world. The dream vision would become a crucial form for Spenser, as its immaterial quality provided


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an alternative to the dichotomy between physiological sight and mental judgment as well as physiological sight and spiritual revelation. Like his other appropriations of medievalism (his use of antiquated language, folk forms, and Arthurian legend), the outdated genre of the dream vision allowed Spenser to channel the power of established forms to his own ends. Although the poems translated for van der Noot’s book were not of his own design, it is clear that he was actively assaying the potential of these different forms as he honed his craft.11 The substitution of the dream vision for the material vision of the woodcut illustrations here foreshadows the coming shift in Spenser’s engagement with the various modalities of vision that I am concerned with in the present chapter. Specifically, it signals a movement away from reflection on images perceptible to physiological sight and toward the contemplation of immaterial images conjured through linguistic description. This movement sets up the final four sonnets of the book representing images from the apocalypse to come rather than the material world at hand. Consider, for example, sonnet 13: I saw a Woman sitting on a beast Before mine eyes, of Orenge colour hew: Horrour and dreadfull name of blasphemie Filde hir with pride. And seven heads I saw, Ten hornes also the stately beast did beare. She seemed with glorie of the scarlet faire, And with fine perle and golde puft up in heart. The wine of hooredome in a cup she bare. The name of Mysterie writ in hir face. The bloud of Martyrs dere were hir delite. Most fierce and fell this woman seemed to me. An angel then descending downe from Heaven, With thondring voice cride out aloude, and sayd, Now for a truth great Babylon is fallen. (482)

A paraphrase of Revelation 17–18, the sonnet moves from (1) an actual vision of the woman “before mine eyes” to (2) the apparent vision “she seemed” and ultimately to (3) the truth of the word: she delights in the blood of martyrs, and she signals (according to the angel’s utterance) “a truth” that Babylon is fallen. This conventional movement from visual image to linguistic truth is emphasized in the sonnet through the introduction of the angel in the twelfth line, clarifying the word/image hierarchy.12 This is distinct from the Revelation text, which includes one of the seven angels throughout




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And after these things, I saw another Angel come downe from heauen, hauing great power, so that the earth was lightened with his glorie, And hee cried out mightily with a lowde voice, saying It is fallen, it is fallen, Babylon that great citie, and become the habitation of deuils. (18:1–2)

By beginning with the vision rather than the first angel’s introduction, van der Noot’s sonnet emphasizes the distinction between pure word and corrupt vision, an emphasis well suited to the book’s message. Spenser’s introduction to the world of print thus came in a publication that was absolutely clear about its attitude toward the realm of the visible. As Jan van Dorsten has pointed out, however, despite the book’s antipapal message, the overarching concern of the Theater is doctrinally neutral. Protestants and Catholics alike believed that God’s invisible truth lay beyond the visible world and that the task for the pious Christian was to overcome the world’s vanity.13 Critics including Gilman, Thomas Hyde, and Kenneth Gross have demonstrated how completely this belief structured Spenser’s poetics at the very same time that it generated an anxiety about the implications of a renunciation of material visuality.14 The reformation assault on images helped generate this anxiety by drawing attention to a central paradox of Christian epistemology: that the only path to the invisible truth leads through the visible world. The shift in emphasis from a culture of visuality to one centered on the word (however incomplete) renewed debates over how the faithful ought to respond to the images that came to them from the fallen world.15 As I discussed in the introduction to this book, prohibitions against images as well as defenses of their spiritual value were most often the product of debates over their use and abuse. Calvin defended himself against the charge of radicalism on the question of images early on in the Institutes:


the account: “And there came one of the seven angels which had the seven vials, and talked with me, saying unto me, Come hither; I will shew unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters” (Rev. 17:1). The visions described in the sonnet follow until the second angel descends:

And yet I am not gripped by the superstition of thinking absolutely no images permissible. But because sculpture and painting are gifts of God, I seek a pure and legitimate use of each, lest those things which the Lord has conferred upon us for his glory and our good be not only polluted by perverse misuse but also turned to our destruction.16


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It remains that only those things that are to be sculptured or painted which the eyes are capable of seeing: let not God’s majesty, which is far above the perception of the eyes, be debased through unseemly representations. Within this class are histories and events, some are images and forms of bodies without any depicting of past events. The former have some use in teaching or admonition; as for the latter, I do not see what they can afford other than pleasure.17

Images of the kind that can only afford pleasure, Calvin concludes, “have no value in teaching.”18 The care with which Calvin sought to distinguish between the proper use and abuse of images is not surprising considering the importance of the image in his rhetoric of salvation: For by a kind of mutual bond the Lord has joined together the certainty of his Word and of his Spirit so that the perfect religion of the Word may abide in our minds when the Spirit, who causes us to contemplate God’s face, shines; and that we in turn may embrace the Spirit with no fear of being deceived when we recognize him in his own image, namely, in the Word.19

The certainty of Christian knowledge in this remarkable passage is a function of the complex interplay of image and word, and its insistence on the recognition of what cannot be seen. The chiasmic interplay of image and word, Word and divine image reflects Calvin’s strict position on Christology.20 Calvin saw the attempt to separate the worshiped God from the mediate idol as dangerous in part because it invited further spiritual error, specifically the more conceptually comfortable understanding of Christ as an image of God rather than Christ as both mortal man and immortal God simultaneously. To reach the paradox that lies at the heart of Christianity’s most important mystery, Calvin developed the complicated chiastic approach to word and image quoted above. The rhetorical trope of chiasmus mirrors the epistemological and ontotheological subject that Calvin treats in the passage. Although van der Noot’s book provided Spenser an opportunity to develop his imagistic poetic, it would be this more mysterious interplay of word and image that would structure Spenser’s visual poetics. Even as he attended to the visual presentation of his first original published poetry in The Shepheardes Calender, he would begin to turn his attention from the


Despite his insistence that the visual arts were, like everything else in this world, the “gifts of God,” Calvin only identifies two acceptable uses of images:


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didactic power of the contrast between the ephemeral nature of material images and the stasis of eternal truths to the difficulties of navigating the word-image difference in Christology and the Imago Dei traditions. Turning his attention from material to spiritual images, Spenser came up against a perennial philosophical question: what is the relationship between the experience of material particulars and knowledge of eternal truths? At least since Plato answers to this question have been structured on the model of the word-image difference. The power of the image as a mechanism of cognition, so crucial to Aristotelian metaphysics, met resistance in an era that valued the word above all and that exhibited a renewed interest in Platonic metaphysics (largely through the influence of Christian Neo-Platonism). Throughout the history of metaphysics the priority given to vision and language has continually shifted. Although the ocularcentrism of Medieval European Christianity was challenged by the Reformation suspicion of vision, the reformed word would soon give way to vision’s reign in the Enlightenment, only to return (with a difference) in twentieth-century philosophy, particularly phenomenology. Stanley Cavell, Richard Rorty, Martin Jay, and David Michael Levin have all pointed to the problematic relationship between vision and language as the story of twentieth-century philosophical thought.21 The twentieth-century crisis of vision prompted by the collapse of faith in Enlightenment rationality shares with the Reformation a central epistemological unease. The Enlightenment confidence in the power of observation that would settle early modern debates over the instability of visual experience would ultimately collapse under the weight of modernity’s ethical failures. Writing at the beginning of this long history, Spenser offers a unique perspective on the problem. Although an advocate of the word (and the Word), Spenser was acutely aware of the need to engage with the visible world rather than hide from it. For Spenser the relationship between seeing and knowing was complicated in part because of the unique reliance of the one upon the other. In this we find perhaps the most convincing evidence of a residual Catholic aesthetic in Spenser’s poetics, one that he would continue to integrate with his more obvious Protestant beliefs. Spenser’s fascination with the problem is less a matter of doctrine and more a product of his struggle to represent the religious life. His failure to abandon key experiential elements of Catholic sensuality while railing against the corruption of Catholic devotion can be reconciled by viewing his approach as fundamentally philosophical and religious rather than political or doctrinal.22 In his overt attempt to offer a model for reformed Christian ethical comportment Spenser considers theological and philosophical problems on their face rather than programmatically detailing their solutions according to dogma or doctrine. This is, of course,


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II.

Spenser’s Knowing Shepherds

Ten years after the appearance of his translations for the Theatre, Spenser inaugurated his own poetic career with another illustrated book. Unlike the Theatre with its overt iconoclasm and obvious hierarchy of word over image, the poetry and illustrations to The Shepheardes Calendar display a characteristically Spenserian allusiveness. At points the images directly illustrate an eclogue’s subject while at others they serve to draw out formal or atmospheric elements of the poetry. And though antipapal themes resurface in the Calendar, notably in the May, July, and September eclogues, the relationship between the poems and the illustrations does not reflect an attempt to establish a hierarchy of word over image as in the Theatre.23 It would appear that given relative autonomy over his first performance in print, Spenser chose to take advantage of the affective power of the woodcut illustrations in establishing the Calendar’s tone while signaling the generic affinity of pastoral with traditional English agrarian folkways. The connection, in short, is more aesthetic here than didactic. This is not to say that Spenser abandoned his interest in the relationship between words and images introduced in the Theatre, but rather that he moved on to focus more directly on the immaterial image and its relation to eternal truth. At the end of his celebrated “Aprill” eclogue, Spenser offers two emblems from Virgil, one for each of the poem’s two speakers. The emblem given to Hobbinoll “O quam te memorem virgo?” is answered by Thenot’s emblem: “O dea certe.” The emblems come from the well-known episode in Book I of the Aeneid in which Aeneas encounters his mother Venus disguised as a huntress in the forest outside Carthage.24 The editors of the Variorum Spenser suggest that the poet’s interest in the episode derives from its appropriateness for the praise of a virgin queen, as the first emblem might be translated “By what name should I call you virgin?” and the second “A goddess certainly.” The conclusion is reasonable, as “Aprill” is a fairly straightforward, if complex, praise poem for Queen Elizabeth I, and the emblems clearly serve to associate Spenser-Elizabeth with Virgil-Augustus. In the argument provided by the anonymous “E. K.,” the aim of the poem is presented unequivocally: “This aeglogue is purposely intended to the honor and prayse of our most gracious sovereigne, Queene Elizabeth” (70). Indeed, Colin’s lay, which makes up the majority of the eclogue’s verse, is an encomium to “fayre Elisa queene of shepheards all” (l. 34).


typical of the Reformation, as a return to the primitive church brought with it a return to the theological and philosophical questions contemplated by the early Church Fathers, most notably St. Augustine.


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This Poesye is taken out of Virgile, and there of him vsed in the person of Æneas to his mother Venus, appearing to him in likenesse of one of Dianaes damosells: being there most divinely set forth. To which similitude of diuinitie Hobbinoll comparing the excelency of Elisa, and being through the worthynes of Colins song, as it were ouercome with the hugenesse of his imagination, brusteth out in great admiration, (O quam te memore virgo?) being otherwise vnhable, then by soddein silence, to expresse the worthinesse of his conceipt. Whom Thenot answereth with another part of the like verse, as confirming by his graunt and approuaunce, that Elisa is nowhit inferiour to the Maiestie of her, of whome that Poete so boldly pronounced, O dea certe. (84)

The comparison of Elizabeth to the composite figure of Venus/Diana (in Venus disguised as “one of Dianaes damosells”) clearly participates in the mythologizing of Elizabeth as the Virgin queen: as Astrea, both bountiful and chaste. But E. K. also brings out two other important aspects of the correlation between the source of the emblems and Spenser’s strategic placement of them in his encomium to Elizabeth. First, in the context of the Aeneid, the early encounter with Venus serves to move the action of the epic forward—to initiate Aeneas’s quest to fulfill his destiny as the founder of Roman civilization: Venus’s last words to Aeneas are: “Only go forward and, where the path leads thee, turn thy steps!”25 As Judith Kennedy notes of this advice, “the path leads to Dido and a distracting love that must be renounced in favor of heroic fulfillment.”26 That this passage interested Spenser should come as no surprise, knowing as we do that his own poetic fulfillment would come in the form of a quest poem, written in the explicitly indirect form of allegory, or, as Spenser would describe it, “cloudily enwrapped in allegorical devices.”27 If the episode suggests that the path to fulfillment will be indirect, it also serves a second function, in establishing a messianic structure for the quest: Aeneas/Augustus is both he for whom Rome waits and the one destined to come. The particular episode that Spenser cites in “Aprill” situates this messianic structure in terms of the seen and unseen, the visible and the invisible, as Aeneas is able to both see and not see his mother (the divine key to his destiny). Although Aeneas is certain that Venus is a goddess upon first seeing her in the wood, it is only as she departs that he recognizes her as Venus:


E. K. goes on to explain the relationship of the emblems to the overall conception of the poem in his gloss:

She spoke, and as she turned away, her roseate neck flashed bright. From her head her ambrosial tresses breathed celestial fragrance; down to her feet fell


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Spenser draws on the dynamic of seen and unseen offered in the Virgilian reference, in order to represent an experience of messianic recognition as an embodied experience conditioned by the historical exigencies of an early modern England in the midst of religious reformation, cultural renaissance, and emerging nationhood.29 The messianic works on multiple levels for Spenser, namely: enabling the recognition of Elizabeth as Astrea, England as the new Empire, and Spenser as the “new poet.” In each case the messianism arises from the fact that each of these truths is both present to hand and to be fulfilled in an undetermined future. The meditation on recurrence (both seasonal and spiritual) in the Calendar shares the prophetic character of the visions in the Theatre, but without the programmatic assurance of the outcome. The result is a form of melancholy that Hyde associates with Spenser’s “recognition that, lacking the prophet’s calling, he cannot escape the tangle of experience and authority.”30 Hyde sees this melancholy reach a zenith in the cantos of mutability, with origins in the vision poems, though I would argue that it is equally crucial in The Shepeardes Calendar. In that poem, and without the overt apocalyptic rhetoric of the Theatre, Complaints, or The Faerie Queene, it is possible to see the philosophical and theological contours of Spenser’s meditation on image and word, sight and insight. In the “Aprill” eclogue, Spenser considers the structure of the messianic and its formal relation to the prophetic in a pastoral mode that sheds much of the polemic that otherwise makes his poetry appear doctrinally dogmatic. Jean-Luc Marion’s recent effort to effect a “theological turn” in contemporary phenomenology offers some guidance for exploring the way Spenser’s poem seeks to represent the lived experience of messianism, of living through or in a particular instance of messianic recognition. Marion concentrates on “givenness,” on what gives itself to phenomenal experience, as a corrective to the various attempts of metaphysicians since Plato to position the world of experience in one or another relationship to ontological truth, or what is in reality.31 For the present purpose, I am particularly interested in Marion’s argument that the invisible (truth) is only available in what he calls “the crossing of the visible,” and especially his insistence that the visible must be taken seriously by those whose purported interest is in the invisible realm of truth, ethics, religion, etc.32 For this was Spenser’s special interest, and a gift that he, following Sidney’s logic in the Apology, granted the poet: specifically, the ability to show (with the tools available in this


her raiment, and in her step she was revealed a very goddess. He knew her for his mother, and as she fled pursued her with these words: “Why, cruel like others, do you so often mock your son with vain phantoms? Why am I not allowed to clasp hand in hand and hear and utter words unfeigned?”28


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world) what cannot be seen with the eye or told in the form of a precept. It is a gift that is closely intertwined with the divine (Sidney’s poet becomes “like another God”). According to Heidegger, Platonic metaphysics denies temporal phenomenality by figuring truth as unhiddenness: the revelation of truth relies on the idea that the truth has been concealed, hidden. The inherent structure of the truth as unhiddenness produces a kind of epistemological violence in the forceful removal of the veil concealing truth from the view. The revealing always involves a masking or concealing of the original veil—the material image, the particular experienced with the eye—that is the product of the same mode of thought seeking revelation. Marion recognizes in this what he calls “metaphysical iconoclasm.” In his view the phenomenological method is key to overcoming the iconoclasm inherent in a metaphysical tradition that artificially regulates the value assigned to the poles of the visible and the invisible: fallible perception and ideal truth. Platonic metaphysics presents the greatest hurdle to overcome in attending ethically to our experience of the world, because it posits a nonvisible “prototype” as the truth from which we are separated in the experience of the image. Referring to Plato’s discussion of the painting of a couch or bed in the tenth book of the Republic, Marion notes that: According to the example chosen by Plato, there are three couches: the [essential] couch, the only real one, imperceptible [insensible] but nevertheless obvious [evident]; next, the actual, individual couch; and finally the imitation of the imitation, the image painted by the artist. Here the logic of imitation increases visibility in direct proportion to sensibility, thus in inverse proportion to truth and reality. Access to the original and essential being [l’etant] requires canceling out the visible and sensible intermediaries as so many distorting filters . . . thus the invisible reality will reappear only when the brilliant luminosity of the things and images fades.33

Plato’s lucid philosophical articulation of the metaphysical relation of the visible to the invisible erects an iconoclastic logic that was easily integrated with Christian theology. Christian Neo-Platonism offers an almost identical account of the path to spiritual revelation as Marion describes in Plato’s metaphysical ontology. But in accepting this “metaphysical iconoclasm,” one sacrifices the ethical orientation to the world. An important consequence of this metaphysical outlook is that eternal truth (including moral judgment) is not accessible in the world of phenomenal experience except as a shadow. Against metaphysical iconoclasm Marion suggests an alternative that is particularly germane to Spenser’s Virgilian messianism. Rather than eschew or transcend the sensible world when seeking truth, Marion suggests that


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we pay greater attention to phenomenal lived experience, and he puts particular pressure on a special case of the paradoxical phenomenological experience of the invisible (the category which is by definition not available to visual experience). This paradoxical experience arises when the subject is faced with what Marion calls “saturated phenomena”: “They are saturated phenomena in that [the] constitution encounters there an intuitive givenness that cannot be granted a univocal sense in return. It must be allowed, then, to overflow with many meanings, or an infinity of meanings, each equally legitimate and rigorous, without managing either to unify them or to organize them.”34 These phenomena exceed reduction to a single interpretation “because they do not give themselves in a univocal display, available and mastered, according to a doxa. . . . [B]efore the event, I cannot assign a single meaning to the immensity of lived experiences that happen to me. I can only pursue them by unceasingly multiplied and modified significations, in a hermeneutic without end.”35 In saturated phenomena, and especially the case of the icon—an object of worship, actually worshiped as opposed to an “idol” that can be reduced to a self-interested visible spectacle—Marion identifies an exception to the iconoclasm of metaphysics.36 The icon eludes the opposition between image and prototype—an opposition forever doomed to reinvent the metaphysical iconoclasm that obfuscates one’s ethical experience with the world, and especially the other—by virtue of intentionality. In the icon, “the visible image is no longer a screen; on the contrary, it permits itself to be transpierced; but two gazes cross there. Thus the visible surface must, paradoxically, efface itself, or at least efface within it every opacity that would obfuscate the crossing of the gazes.”37 Here the notion of the visible as that which can be the target of one’s vision is placed in contrast to the invisible as that which is unavailable to vision. In this way, phenomenology distinguishes between l’invu (the unseen), the nonvisible (what is not present to the sight), and the invisible as that which by its very nature cannot be brought before one’s sight.38 Marion points out that this latter category of the invisible is only reached paradoxically through the visible—its coherence as a conceptual realm is dependent on the visible. For this reason it is essential to avoid the trap of metaphysical iconoclasm that will foreclose on the opportunity to experience the invisible in the only way possible, specifically, in “the crossing of the visible.” Although Marion seeks to recuperate the icon for Catholic ends, his analysis bears striking resemblance to Calvin’s approach to visual experience. In his commentary on Corinthians, Calvin writes:



There is no doubt but that the ministerie of the word, and those Instruments which are required to exercise the same, are compared here by the Apostle to


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The appearance of the messiah is the example par excellence of the encounter with the invisible made possible in the crossing of the visible: “If Christ constitutes as . . . [icon of the visible], the paradigm of the aesthetic icon, this is in no way because he dispels the ambiguous commerce between the visible and the invisible; it is, on the contrary, because he fulfills its most extreme danger. In his person, human nature becomes, entirely, the type whose prototype consists of nothing less than divine nature.”40 Aeneas’s experience with Venus strikes me as an exemplary case of Marion’s saturated phenomenon, as the hero is first overcome with the vision, and then prompted to intuit the presence of the divine, and finally able to begin his potentially endless quest to make meaning of the experience. The longing that messianism holds in suspension for an absolute or ideal other is introduced in “Aprill” by the melancholic Hobbinoll, whose sadness is brought on by the absence of his friend Colin, who has turned from “Shepheardes delights” to the love of Rosalind. The poem opens with Thenot’s rustic question: “Tell me good Hobbinoll, what garres thee greete?” (l. 1), explained by E. K. in his gloss as “what causeth thee to weep and complain” (77). The poem thus begins with an examination of the experience of sadness, in which Thenot explores the conventional problems that might be the source of Hobbinoll’s pain: What? hath some Wolfe thy tender Lambes ytorne? Or is thy Bagpype broke, that soundes so sweete? Or art thou of thy loued lasse forlorne? (1.2–4)

Thenot’s first suspicion is that the sadness has its source in the cares of the world: that Hobbinoll weeps for the loss of his goods (lambes), his skill, or his beloved. But in the next line he adds the possibility that Hobbinoll’s tears may reflect the season:


a glasse. For God which is otherwise invisible, hath ordained these meanes, to make hym selfe knowen unto us: howbeit this also may be extended to the workmanship of the whole world, wherein the glory of God doth shine unto us: as we may read in other places: Where the Apostle nameth the creatures glasses, in whom the invisible majestie of God appereth.39

Or bene thine eyes attempred to the yeare, Quenching the gasping furrowes thirst with rayne? Like April shoure, so stremes the trickling teares Adowne thy cheeke, to quenche thye thirstye payne. (l. 2–8)41


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Nor thys, nor that, so muche doeth make me mourne, But for the ladde, whom long I lovd so deare, Nowe loues a lasse, that all his loue doth scorne: He plonged in payne, his tressed locks dooth teare. (l. 9–12)

But the poem’s structure confirms rather than denies Thenot’s suggestion that April is a season for sadness, a suggestion that is further supported by the source of Colin’s absence: he has entered the precarious process of his own rebirth, in courting Rosalind (who at this point refuses to requite his love). While Hobbinoll can deny that he is sad for loss of lambs, piping skill, or the love of a lady, his sadness introduces a poem dedicated to the transitional month, framing Spenser’s celebration of both the expected queen (e.g., the queen of the Golden Age) and the related expectation that the poet will come into his future fame as the prophetic seer of this destiny fulfilled. Here the form of Spenser’s model, Virgil’s fourth eclogue, offers the poet an example of temporal complexity through which Spenser might create a present vision of what is to come. Virgil writes: The last great age the Sybil told has come; The new order of centuries is born; The Virgin now returns, and the reign of Saturn; The new generation now comes down from heaven. ... Our crimes are going to be erased at last. This child will share in the life of the gods and he Will see and be seen in the company of heroes, And he will be the ruler of a world Made peaceful by the merits of his father.42

The shift in tense from present to future articulates the messianic character of the eclogue, a feature that no doubt enabled the common medieval Christian reading of the poem as a prophecy of the birth of Christ. As is often noted, Virgil may have drawn on his knowledge of the prophetic writings of Isaiah in crafting the future Age presumptively ushered in by his patron Augustus. The layers of Old Testament prophecy, ancient poetry, and medieval Christian exegesis all clearly inform Spenser’s project in the


The poem is for April, the month of rebirth, but also of promise not yet fulfilled, Elliot’s “cruelest month.” This last possibility—that melancholy is the emotional state proper to the season and its concomitant dependence on expectation—is set aside by Hobbinoll in the next line, with the response:


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Calender. But the melancholy with which Spenser begins his own poem is only present in Virgil implicitly—as when the poet writes of the Golden Age as a future in which “the years have brought your strength to manhood, / No longer then will merchant ship set forth / laden with things to trade in foreign places” (31). The tense again signals the possibility for a present cause for care, as the present does not yet constitute the fulfillment of the prophecy announced as having just arrived. What, then, has just arrived? I am suggesting that this was the question that Spenser takes up in his messianic eclogue. The arrival of the messiah is, like April, a moment of undecidability. We can (and Spenser no doubt did) recall Christ’s own question to the apostles, “who do the people think I am?” which yielded a variety of possibilities, only one of which was (from Peter), “the messiah.” It is not the prophecy that “arrives,” as the bounty that will follow upon the coming of the savior only becomes present after the coming of the messiah; it is, rather, the messiah who comes, and thus there always remains the time of fulfillment.43 Virgil ends his own self-congratulatory eclogue with a hypothetical future that stands for the fulfillment of the prophetic arrival announced at the beginning of the poem: Oh, if I have long life and at the end Have breath enough and spirit enough to be The teller of the story of your deeds, Then neither Linus nor Thracian Orpheus could Defeat me in the singing contest. (33)

After presenting this hypothetical future of poetic greatness fulfilled, Virgil turns to the future-represented-in-the-present, addressing the child: Begin to greet thy mother with a smile, O baby-boy! ten months of weariness For thee she bore: O baby-boy, begin! For him, on whom his parents have not smiled, Gods deem not worthy of their board or bed.

It might be said that both Virgil’s and Spenser’s eclogues simply celebrate the natural cycle of rebirth, that Virgil’s hopeful homage to the coming growing season is particularized by Spenser in an homage to the month of rebirth. In the pastoral mode, this celebration of nature is allegorically extended to the praise of the monarchs responsible for overseeing the peace that enables the enjoyment of natural bounty. This is true. But like all truths, its simplicity gives rise to the uncertainties of temporal, embodied


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existence. Like the confident exclamation of recognition that Thenot and Hobbinoll offer in their dialogic emblem, the immediate recognition of the newly arrived child/virgin/spring—the event at hand—as the prophesied arrival (“O baby boy, begin!”) hovers between a certainty of what is seen and an acknowledgment that what lies before them is in fact unknown. According to E. K., it is only when Hobbinoll is “overcome with the hugeness of his imagination” that he bursts out with the quotation from Virgil, itself an unfinished, searching verse that is only completed by another. In Spenser’s poem, the certainty is a compensation for the deeper melancholy with which the poem began. But “Aprill,” like the Shepheards Calender as a whole, does not end in resolution, but in an urging forward, upon the structure of the messianic as felt in the song of poetry.




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Looking for Ethics in Spenser’s Faerie Queene The commitment to metaphor thus implies, with respect to general theme, a principle of indirection. Cleanth Brooks, “Irony as a Principle of Structure” Personal life, expression, understanding, and history advance obliquely and not straight towards ends or concepts. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence”

A

s we have seen, Spenser’s celebration of Elizabeth in “Aprill” relies on a messianic logic that is marked by a dynamic interplay between the visible and the invisible. The apocalyptic visions of van der Noot’s Theatre and the Christian tradition of revelation inform the poet’s early exploration of the relationship between what is and is not available to the eye. As Spenser continued to develop as a poet, he would focus even more intently on the relationship between visual experience and invisible truth. His thoroughgoing emphasis on vision led Northrop Frye to the celebrated conclusion “that Spenser, unlike Milton, is a good poet of very limited conceptual powers, and is helpless without some kind of visualization to start him thinking.”1 Although Frye’s assessment of Spenser’s dependence on visualization is undeniable, I will argue here that it does not account for the philosophical import of Spenser’s poetic method. His reliance on visualization— what Frye takes for poor powers of conceptualization—reflects his debt to Aristotle’s theory of cognition in De Anima, especially the assertion: “it is necessary that, whenever one is contemplating, it is some image that one is contemplating.”2 In the present chapter, I argue that Spenser’s visual poetics emerged from a lifelong engagement with this theory and its implications for ethical instruction in the context of the Reformation. As the didactic verse


CHAPTER 3


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of van der Noot’s Theatre makes explicit, reformers seized on the fleeting nature of the visible world in order to provide an occasion for spiritual reflection, emphasizing that true knowledge is ultimately unverifiable by physiological sight. Rather than simply accepting this attitude toward visual experience, Spenser explored the difficult paradox contained within its logic. Specifically, Spenser recognized that the denigration of vision marshaled in the service of reforming a materially corrupt religion required visualization for its expressive texture. Revelation is, after all, a metaphor taken directly from visual experience. Thus, while Frye is right to suggest that visualization is something of a crutch for Spenser, the visual image is also paradoxically both a primary path and a significant obstacle to revelation. In turning more directly to the messianic character of the quest in The Faerie Queene, Spenser interrogates this paradox, revealing it to be a major challenge to the development of a Protestant ethics. Although Spenser is often characterized as a Protestant moralist, The Faerie Queene’s moral lessons rarely proceed clearly from precept to action.3 In his letter to Raleigh, Spenser follows Sidney in choosing an approach to moral instruction based on the example rather than the precept: “So much more profitable and gratious is doctrine by ensample, then by rule.”4 Sidney elaborated on the point in his Apology: The Philosopher therefore, and the Historian, are they which would win the goale, the one by precept, the other by example: but both, not having both, doo both halt. For the Philosopher setting downe with thornie arguments, the bare rule, is so hard of utterance, and so mistie to be conceived, that one that hath no other guide but him, shall wade in him till he be old, before he shall finde suffiecient cause to be honest. For his knowledge standeth so upon the abstract and generall, that happie is that man who may understand him, and more happie, that can apply what he doth understand. On the other side, the Historian wanting the precept, is so tied, not to what should be, but to what is, to the particular truth of things, that his example draweth no necessary consequence, and therefore a lesse fruitfull doctrine. Now doth the peerlesse Poet performe both, for whatsoever the Philosopher saith should be done, he gives a perfect picture of it by some one, by whom he presupposeth it was done, so as he coupleth the generall notion with the particuler example. A perfect picture I say, for hee yeeldeth to the powers of the minde an image of that whereof the Philosopher bestoweth but a wordish description, which doth neither strike, pearce, nor possesse, the sight of the soule so much, as that other doth.5


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Spenser scholars have long recognized that relying on Sidney’s definition of poetic production leads Spenser to create a series of pictures, though these


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are not always “perfect pictures” in Sidney’s sense.6 Considering Spenser’s medievalism it would be natural to associate the method with the medieval exemplum tradition. But rather than affirm the power of the “perfect picture” for moral instruction, Spenser interrogates the method’s logic. Spenser’s blend of iconoclasm and poetic visualization in The Faerie Queene highlights a perennial difficulty of moral philosophy: that a truly ethical act is confirmed only in the singular event of which it is a part. In other words, without the phenomenal particularity of a given ethical situation, the validity of an ethical proposition is meaningless. Spenser’s interest in the ethical problem of time—of the order of events as they relate to the process of moral habituation (achieving moral understanding through experiences with ethical situations)—indicates that he questioned the Sidnean model in which the fore-conceit always precedes the perfect picture. The following discussion places Spenser’s treatment of the visual at the heart of what I argue is a poetic project primarily concerned with the implications of emphasizing the situational singularity of ethical experience over any form of prescriptive (Christian) morality.7 Understanding Spenser’s ethics as situational rather than prescriptive helps explain the poet’s insistence that the danger of visual illusion is best avoided through engagement with the visual image. His book will “fashion a gentleman” in “virtuous discipline”; it will not tell one how to act. The concept of “virtuous discipline” relies on a sense of virtue as a matter of one’s comportment toward the ethical situation. Rather than teaching the moral precepts that can be gleaned from an examination of past actions, Spenser opts to visualize the particularity of situations that challenge the stability of an abstract code.8 By focusing on Spenser’s interest in the situational aspect of ethical decision making that is made manifest through the poetic image, this chapter highlights what The Faerie Queene has to say about ethics now, beyond what it might tell us about the thought and theology of sixteenth-century England.9 Critical attempts to align Spenser’s approach to ethics with established traditions in Renaissance moral philosophy have illuminated our understanding of the poet’s interest in a wide range of philosophical and theological thought. Shifting the focus of the interpretation of Spenser’s ethics to include later developments in philosophy draws out the elements of Spenser’s thought that go beyond his influences.10 As I argued in the last chapter in relation to the work of Jean-Luc Marion, and despite the historical distance separating Spenserian poetics and twentieth-century philosophy, in Spenser’s approach to the visual image we are presented with an attempt to overcome the same epistemological and ontological problems that resurface with a familiar urgency in twentiethcentury phenomenology. Spenser’s meditation on ethics emerged out of an


Looking for Ethics in Spenser’s Faerie Queene


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epistemological crisis of rare proportions: the Reformation unsettled the basis of a great many assumptions about the relation of the experiential world to its spiritual counterpart. In order to explore the relevance of Spenser’s poetic ethics to current debates over ethics, I will consider his literary development and technique in relation to the trajectory of twentieth-century philosophy, especially in relation to the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein, a thinker for whom the visual is of paramount concern for ethics. Specifically, I will argue that though historically distant, Spenser and Wittgenstein shared a lifelong interest in ethics that began with an examination of the systematic thought available in the formal philosophical and theological tradition (with the intention of reforming the system) and ended up turning to the singularity of phenomenal experience as the starting point for a sustained and reflective ethical practice.11 Spenser’s approach to the visual mirrors Wittgenstein’s movement from a “picture theory of language” to a theory of “language games.” An intense interest in understanding the relationship between experience and truth led both writers to conclude that any effort to understand this relationship that relied on systematic philosophical thought is doomed to failure. That each writer turns to a situational model for assessing the visual—one that explicitly emphasizes time, the singularity of the situated event—testifies to the usefulness of initiating a dialogue between a twentieth-century philosopher and a sixteenth-century poet that might otherwise be considered flagrantly anachronistic. My contention is not that Spenser anticipates twentiethcentury philosophy, or that twentieth-century philosophy “solves” theologicophilosophical dilemmas raised by Spenser’s poetry. Rather, by reading Spenser alongside this philosophical tradition we can better see how the philosophical questions underlying epistemology and ethics inform a poetics that might otherwise appear contradictory—a poetics that simultaneously emphasizes the power of visual images and the moral necessity of iconoclasm. The relationship between ethics and epistemology constitutes a point of convergence in Spenser’s poetics and Wittgenstein’s philosophical method. Of Wittgenstein’s commentators, Stanley Cavell stands out for his insistence on the importance of Wittgenstein’s philosophical (or antiphilosophical) method for an understanding of the philosopher’s position. According to Cavell, Wittgenstein’s contribution to the epistemological tradition is at once revolutionary and commonsensical. The perennial problem for epistemology lies in reconciling the particularity of phenomenal experience with the compelling intelligibility of conceptual universals. How, for example, if we know each individual cat to be absolutely unique can the general concept of “cat” have any meaning? The unsatisfying answer provided by Platonic


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metaphysics (in the theory of the forms) led Aristotle to place the problem at the heart of his philosophical program, which would guide thought on the problem until the Reformation. As I discussed in the Introduction, the breakdown of Aristotelian authority in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries renewed interest in the problem, generating an enormous volume of philosophical debate from Descartes to Kant. A similar unsettling of the debate would come again in the wake of the nineteenth-century origins of phenomenology beginning with Hegel and Husserl and culminating in the linguistic turn ushered in by Heidegger and Wittgenstein. As Richard Rorty and others argue the culmination of the modern philosophical debate over epistemology in the work of Heidegger and Wittgenstein refocused philosophical attention on the nature of language itself. As Cavell puts it, once language is taken into account, the pressing epistemological question is in understanding “how much a matter [of ] knowing what something is is a matter of knowing what something is called.”12 In exploring this question, it becomes immediately clear that we come to know what something is called through a very complicated process of language acquisition that appears to involve something like Aristotelian habituation, but which goes beyond learning by repetition and habit—by familiarization—to what Cavell calls “initiation.” The distinction is important because initiates become agents in the “forms of life” into which they have been initiated in a much more active way than habituated moral agents come to fulfill the ethical life to which they have been habituated. Cavell writes that: In “learning language” you learn not merely what the names of things are, but what a name is; not merely what the form of expression is for expressing a wish, but what expressing a wish is; not merely what the word for “father” is, but what a father is; not merely what the word for “love” is, but what love is. In learning language, you do not merely learn the pronunciation of sounds, and their grammatical orders, but the “forms of life” which make those sounds the words they are, do what they do.13

Thus, it is inaccurate to imagine that we can teach someone language, if our sense is that we “tell beginners what words mean, or that we teach them what objects are.” Instead, according to Cavell: “We initiate them, into the relevant forms of life held in language and gathered around the objects and persons of our world.”14 It is not difficult to see in Cavell’s rendering of Wittgenstein’s “vision of language” how this particular philosophical approach relates to literature. In creating worlds for readers to inhabit, realistic literary form mimics precisely the kind of process Cavell describes with his notion of learning language as




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an initiation into “forms of life.” This initiation is “natural,” for Cavell, in that it does not require self-conscious reflection on the fact that language is fundamentally precarious (we are entering into a pact in which we will agree to abide by certain rules about the way words mean and the ways in which we can alter or extend those meanings). But Cavell also sees in Wittgenstein an important distinction between the conclusion that “all language is metaphorical” (we agree that this word or linguistic chain stands for that phenomenal reality) and the deliberate use (and experience) of metaphor: Perhaps one could say: the possibility of metaphor is the same as the possibility of language generally, but what is essential to the projection of a word is that it proceeds, or can be made to proceed, naturally; what is essential to a functioning metaphor is that its “transfer” is unnatural—it breaks up the established normal directions of projection.15

Among the very first things that any reader of The Faerie Queen will notice is the poet’s acknowledgment that his deliberate choice of allegory, announced in the letter to Raleigh, is disruptive, that it is something other than “good discipline delivered plainly in way of precepts.”16 As an extended species of metaphor, allegory relies on the disruption of what Cavell calls “the established normal directions of projection.” In his use of archaic language, Spenser is explicitly alluding to the medieval exegetical tradition of allegorical interpretation, but he is also modifying that tradition— reforming it—and the result is a text that requires initiation as much as it does instruction. In what follows I hope to show how Spenser opens up the possibilities of allegory beyond the proscriptive—as an interpretive exercise in determining how this stands for that—to the preparatory in Wittgenstein’s sense described in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: the work as a ladder to be thrown away once the top has been reached. Once Spenser’s initiate has been fashioned in virtuous discipline, he will not have gained a knowledge of moral correctness, but he will have become licensed to project virtue in the face of the ethically singular event. I.

Images Real and Imagined

Both Spenser’s heroes and his readers are repeatedly confronted with indeterminate visual images in The Faerie Queene, a strategy that highlights both a distrust of the image as illusory and an acknowledgment of the centrality of image making in human experience. It is important to examine Spenser’s dynamic attitude toward the visual in the context of the poet’s development from his early translations of the didactic vision poems through The Shepheardes


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Calender and culminating in his crowning achievement in the epic. Although this progression reflects the poet’s commitment to Protestantism and his engagement with the project of Reformation detailed in recent Spenser scholarship, in what follows I will examine the conflict between word and image in The Faerie Queene primarily as a philosophical (as opposed to a theological) problem. I begin with an extremely interesting moment in Spenser’s epic, though not a moment articulated in the poem’s narrative. I refer to the moment that one turns the page at the end of Book I to the opening of Book II, in either of the two sixteenth-century editions of the poem. On the facing page at this point in the text, we find the only illustration included in the volume, depicting St. George slaying the dragon (figure 3.1). I call this a moment in The Faerie Queene because I think it highlights some key elements in the poem’s articulation of the word and image distinction and Spenser’s own uneasy relationship to vision as a complex concept as well as a physiological process. As Paul Voss has commented, the woodcut of St. George is usually taken for a visual epitome of the “conspicuous relationship between Saint George and Red Cross Knight in Book I.”17 Despite the fact that the image actually faces the opening page of Book II, it is not surprising that scholars consistently associate the image with Book I. The association with Book I is natural, if not necessary: Book I draws heavily on the legend of St. George, and the book ends with the heroic battle of the Redcross Knight and the dragon. Nevertheless, the placement of the image and its relation to the subsequent text of the poem suggests another interpretation. The text of the poem that faces the woodcut image marks a transition in the poem from the programmatic explication of holiness and its relatively comfortable resolution in Book I—with Redcross’s victory over the dragon and the promise of Una’s hand in marriage—to the uncertainty of living in the world, and the pragmatic challenges to temperance, which is the topic of Book II. The shift in tone and topic from the first to the second book has been the subject of a long and unsettled scholarly debate, described by Paul Cefalu as a shift from “holiness and Christian grace” to “secular morality, particularly Aristotelian ethics.”18 As subsequent critics have noted, the continuity between the two books is greater than it might first appear. The first stanzas of Book II canto 1 emphasize the kink in the otherwise tidy resolution of the first book: the fact that the ideality represented by the union of Redcross and Una is deferred to allow Redcross to fulfill his vow to serve the Faerie Queene for six years, a deferral of paradise that mirrors the fate of all Christians on Earth. In the context of the first book this deferral is straightforward and conceptually coherent. Echoing the scriptural call for patience on earth in




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Figure 3.1 St. George slaying the dragon, woodcut illustration Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene. London, 1590, sig. M5v. HEW 6.9.32, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

anticipation of the reward of heaven, the first book maintains a balance between the inadequacy of the perceptible world and the fullness of the world yet to come. Rather than realizing the unity of eternal salvation at the end of Book I, the requirement that Redcross complete his service to Gloriana has the consequence of releasing illusion back into the temporal realm of worldlings.


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In turning from the comfort of eternal salvation through true faith (offered in the resolution of Book I) to a meditation on more temporal matters, Spenser thus focuses his attention on the problematic relation between the poem and its moral message. His defense of the allegory doubles as a philosophical response to what we might now call “empiricist” epistemology. In the proem, he worries: That all this famous antique history, Of some th’aboundance of an idle braine Will iudged be, and painted forgery, Rather then matter of iust memory, Sith none, that breatheth liuing aire, does know, Where is that happy land of Faery, Which I so much do vaunt, yet no where show, But vouch antiquities, which no body can know. (II.proem.1.2–1.9)

By associating the “antique history” presented in his epic with the antivisual notion of the “painted forgery,” Spenser locates the poem’s central problematic of reference in the terms of the word-image difference. He goes on to defend his method with a conventional Protestant critique of a world-directed obsession with visual confirmation. Debunking such a simple equation of the sensible with the true through reference to the then recent discoveries of the new world, he is able to reach the obvious (but unempirical) conclusion that in “later times things more unknown shall show” (II.proem.3). If this is a reasonable conclusion, Spenser asks, “Why then should witlesse man so much misweene / That nothing is, but that which he hath seene?” (II.proem.3). John N. King cites this stanza in support of his argument that Spenser is making a distinction between false semblance and “matter of just memory” where the latter describes his poem.19 The stanza is no doubt a response to the Protestant dilemma of how to validate an invisible church over the substantial materiality that had accrued to the medieval Christian tradition. King is right to note that the issue of “just memory” is important to this project, as the reformation account of the origins of the church had to be marshaled against the “false semblance” of tradition on offer in Rome. The distinction provides an especially helpful explanation for the first book, in which the virtue of holiness is shown to win out only after all of the illusions of artifice have been overcome. A primary concern for the virtue of the first book (holiness) is precisely the cleansing of memory—of purifying the image of the true church of the corruption by false artifice that had tainted the church of Rome over time. The conceptual purity of Una’s singular truth is set against the duplicitous image of




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Duessa, whose appearance is multiple and therefore conceptually impure. As a result, though the stakes are high, Redcross’s task in Book I is fairly straightforward. Throughout the book, the allegory is ordered by the logic of the singular and the multiple, where the one is always elevated above the many. Redcross’s dream of Una’s seduction illustrates the logic quite clearly. Although the danger for the knight is the temptation of sensual desire, the allegorical logic of the episode rules out Una’s participation, as her single nature attests: “So pure an innocent . . . she was in life and euery virtuous lore” (I.I.4). Truth cannot be both innocent and not innocent simultaneously. Such duplicity is the domain of falsehood, and the allegorical basis for characters such as Sansfoy, Sansjoy, and Sansloy attests to the linguistic and conceptual logic of the double and thus corrupt: there is no absence of law without true law, no absence of faith without true faith, etc. Duessa, as dual essence, is the prime example of this contrast between the multiple and the singular. The first book deploys the apocalyptic logic of van der Noot’s Theatre to make the point that all worldly experience is incomplete, corrupt, and unworthy of spiritual attention. This message is at the heart of every challenge faced by the Redcross Knight in Book I, from the outward illusions of Archimago and Error to the inward spiritual threat of Despayre: attention to this world must be eschewed in favor of a belief in the world to come. Whether the threat is inward or outward, however, the allegorical method Spenser employs renders it as an image. The abstraction “error” thus becomes not only a character but a vivid visual experience for our hero: But forth vnto the darksome hole he went, And looked in: his glistring armor made A litle glooming light, much like a shade, By which he saw the vgly monster plaine, Halfe like a serpent horribly displaide, But th’other halfe did womans shape retaine, Most lothsom, filthie, foule, and full of vile disdaine. And as she lay vpon the durtie ground, Her huge long taile her den all ouerspred, Yet was in knots and many boughtes vpwound, Pointed with mortall sting. Of her there bred A thousand yong ones, which she dayly fed, Sucking vpon her poisonous dugs, each one Of sundry shapes, yet all ill fauored: Soone as that vncouth light vpon them shone, Into her mouth they crept, and suddain all were gone. (I.i.14–15)


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The disgusting image, already introduced as “foule Erroure,” does not present any difficulty for the hero, but it does provide a preview of the method Spenser will deploy throughout the poem. John King argues that “the distinction between the right use and the abuse of images in Peter Martyr’s Common Places, pt. 2, 2L5 (fol. 341), is central to the proper understanding of Spenserian iconoclasm.”20 Drawing on the tradition of biblical hermeneutics, Carol Kaske argues that Spenser deliberately produced contradictions in order to foster a critical sensibility in his readers modeled on historical traditions of scriptural exegesis. As a result, readers would be able to discern good images from bad.21 Thus, it is not a contradiction that Spenser presents us with sensuous visual images as well as violent scenes of iconoclasm; for King and Kaske the juxtaposition of these scenes is part of the poet’s Protestant didacticism, which is designed to lead readers through a maze of error and correction. The iconoclasm does not constitute a rejection of all images, nor even all images that might relate to religious materials, but rather serves as a tool for discerning true and false images. Sixteenth-century reformation theology provides, for King and Kaske, something like an explanatory key to Spenser’s visually inflected poetics. But even in the world of Book I, with its binary allegory, the paradox of the visual complicates the poem’s ethical logic. Reformers were not always in agreement on the use of images or even internally consistent in their own positions. This can be seen in the example called upon by Kaske and King: Peter Martyr’s Common Places, which King admits is the work of a moderate.22 It is true that Martyr’s commentary would seem to leave the wide range of image making open to the reformed Protestant. But, a close examination of Martyr’s discussion reveals a strangely equivocal position: The use of images may be good, for the keeping of things in memorie, for the garnishing of houses, especiallie of kings and noble personsages, and so to serve for some honest pleasure, wherewith men sometime may both delite and recreate themselues. Howbeit, in such light commodities, there are oftentimes manie faultes; for false images are sundrie times thrust in, in stead of true . . . We must therefore take heed, least men be perniciouslie seduced by false images.23

Martyr vacillates between a moderate prohibition of images based on their potential for abuse and a notion of false images, which would seem to be less a matter of use (or abuse) than of the essence of the image itself (as false instead of true). Even more problematic is that such false images are “sundrie times thrust in,” suggesting that it is not simply the responsibility of the observer to discern between the true and false image, but that the




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way others use and abuse images complicates the process by which such assessments can be made. Indeed learning to navigate the world of image making and viewing is much like learning the “forms of life” Cavell describes as central to Wittgenstein’s vision of language. One must be an initiate to understand properly the meaning of an image, and, by extension, to respond appropriately to its ethical demand. While Martyr’s approach to the image fails to clarify whether or not images can be corrupt in themselves, he is quite clear about what he means when he refers to an “image.” To ensure that there be no confusion, he offers the following definition: “An image is a certeine similitude, whereby some thing is represented unto us, which may be discerned with the eies.”24 This definition complicates any direct application of Martyr’s council on the proper use of images to Spenser’s poetry. For the poet can distinguish between things seen (“discerned with the eies”) and things imagined, but only to an extent, as his medium is language. When does an image qualify as being “discerned with the eies” in the context of poetry? All poetic images are, after all, conjured by the poet through language that activates the imagination of the reader (or listener). At the same time, of course, such images refer however indirectly to an experience with the visual sense. As Spenser issued his poetry with illustrations early in his career, I have to think that he recognized a distinction between the visual image “discerned with the eie” and the poetic image, which (at an early point in his career) seemed to counterbalance the potential allure of the worldly through an appeal to the disembodied word.25 We have seen that as early as The Shepheardes Calender, Spenser was acutely aware of the problem that haunted the word image difference: images brought things to life, though they were themselves dead, while the word was life, though words appear dead without the ineffable spirit that brings them to life. My point is that the opening of Book II reintroduces this philosophical problem, complicating the theological opposition between world and Word that had provided hermeneutic stability in Book I. The deferral of the Truth—figured as the face-to-face experience with God that awaits the faithful in heaven—leaves the Christian subject in the fallen world, and, more importantly, it is this world and our experience of it that provides the representational tools for conceiving the world to come (we cannot experience the face of God, but we know the difference between the faceto-face encounter and the one that is mediated). The quest must go on with the tools at hand, even if the tools are the primary obstacles to achieving the goal. Returning to the Book II proem, we find that Spenser explicitly highlights the problem of vision at this point: “Why then should witlesse man so


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much misweene / That nothing is, but that which he hath seene?” The complex syntax in the poet’s formulation—”that nothing is, but that which”—foregrounds the category of the visual at the same time that it undermines it. Witless man’s misunderstanding is a result of his reliance on the visibly manifest when thinking of matters of existence: whether something or nothing “is.” Although “witless man” is the target of the poet’s criticism in the proem, Spenser suggests that it is only through the example of misplaced attention to a variety of somethings that his reader might begin to see the invisible no things he hopes to make manifest in his poetry. In the process the poet mobilizes the category of nothing as a relative rather than absolute symbolic void that enables insight into the nature of things both material and immaterial. Spenser’s poetic deployment of the category of the visible reveals his interest in the invisible in Marion’s sense, that which cannot be brought before the eyes, including the eye of the mind. It is thus a negative path to an experience with the conceptual or nonmaterial that undergirds his conception of ethics. As discussed in the introduction to this book, the relationship of physical sight to spiritual illumination or understanding—seeing in the sense of comprehending rather than sensually perceiving—is woven through the history of epistemology and ontology; the duality of vision, represented by physical and mental (or spiritual) sight, operates as a dyad informing ancient meditations on existence and nonexistence, and related concepts including life and death, truth and falsehood, something and nothing. The unveiling or revealing of the truth at the apocalypse—the revelation of hidden things—is an archetype for the everyday process of hiding and revealing that structures temporal existence. The tension between hiddenness and revelation saturates discourse concerning the human condition in Christian theology, especially in the context of a Reformation aimed at curbing the excessive interest in the materially visible in favor of a doctrinal emphasis on the invisible truth of the Word. As we have already seen, the intertwining of theological and philosophical thought on the nature of the two modalities of sight (physiological and spiritual/cognitive) marks Spenser’s representation of the visual. As Spenser wrote, Reformation theology and natural philosophy increasingly drew on the complex duality of vision to articulate sharply divergent epistemologies. While the reformers emphasized the mentalcognitive-spiritual modality of vision (its validity bolstered through continual comparison to the untrustworthiness of the visual sense), the emergence of interest in empirical verification in natural philosophy elevated the visual sense as an arbiter of truth. The antivisual ethos of Reformation iconoclasm together with the rise of empirical observation in natural philosophy initiated what would be a gradual segregation of thought concerning the material




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and immaterial realms of human existence. This gradual segregation mitigated the tension between seemingly incompatible modalities of vision by erecting a framework according to which questions of faith and empirical science could be disentangled and ordered into separate domains of knowledge. Only when the assumptions undergirding these domains of knowledge began to collapse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would philosophy and theology return to the problematic intertwining of the two modalities of vision with the same urgency seen in the Reformation. II.

Renaissance Vision and Modern Phenomenology

Nowhere else is the strand of vision’s dual nature picked up and elaborated on more directly than in twentieth-century phenomenology. As a critique of enlightenment thought and systematic philosophy (ultimately all Western metaphysics) began to emerge out of the sometimes strikingly different modes of thought inspired by phenomenology—from Husserl and Heidegger to Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein, Levinas, and now Jean-Luc Marion—the impossibility of disentangling theological and philosophical concerns prompted a return to pre-enlightenment (pre-Cartesian) conceptions of the two-fold visual.26 Husserl’s phenomenology was guided by a desire to account for phenomenal experience in a systematic way, leading to his development of the problematic phenomenological epoché or “bracketing” as a systematic (scientific) method for examining phenomena free from judgment.27 The modification of Husserl’s systematic approach by Heidegger and others would stress the impossibility of removing judgment in the process of phenomenological investigation. In lectures on Plato given at Freiburg in 1932, Heidegger seeks instead to establish the nature of truth as a matter of “the unhiddenness of beings” over the dominant conception of truth as “the correctness of propositions.” To do so he returns to Plato’s cave allegory—arguably the most direct attempt in classical philosophy to grapple with the intertwining of the two modalities of vision. Heidegger notes that Plato makes the distinction early on: “In order to clarify this highest knowledge [of the Good] in its essence, Plato in Book VI already distinguishes two basic types of knowledge: i.e. seeing in the usual sense (sensory perception), and . . . comprehending perceiving (non-sensory seeing). To these two types of seeing there correspond two regions of the visible: . . . what is accessible to the eyes, the senses, and . . ., what is graspable in pure understanding.”28 The telos in both cases is what Heidegger describes as “unhiddenness,” so described to emphasize the prerequisite of “hiddenness” in every instance of revealing. Heidegger’s exploration of the relation of unhiddenness to hiddenness and concealing to unconcealing is concerned with the same questions that


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Spenser sought to address in his poetic engagement with the visible and invisible. The two modalities of seeing saturate Spenser’s poetic production, from the earliest overt apocalyptic visions translated for Van der Noot’s Theatre through the “darke conceit” of his epic Faerie Queene. The poet not only chose allegory for his poetic meditation on the relation of phenomenal experience to moral enlightenment, but also introduced his method with a visual metaphor (darkness). From the darkness Spenser promised light— the fashioning of a gentleman—fashioning literally shaping or giving perceptible form to virtuous being. The movement from dark conceit (imperceptible idea)—Heidegger’s hiddenness—to virtuous discipline (the moral life expressed through human action) allegorizes the larger philosophical and theological problem: that revelation (unhiddenness, truth, the condition of full-sightedness) depends on its opposite: darkness, hiddenness, untruth, blindness. Spenser’s challenge in taking up this thorny, but crucial philosophical problem was to show his readers how they might get nothing from something—how the antivisual Protestant message could be learned through visual experience. Here we must return to Spenser’s explanation of his method, and especially his distinction between “good discipline delivered plainly in way of precepts” and “doctrine by ensample [rather] than by rule.”29 As an example of the power of his method Spenser offers Arthur’s dream, the starting point for the entire epic, which is depicted in Book I, canto ix. The dream is germane to my topic, as it highlights the play of nothing and something that I suggest structures Spenser’s representation of the visual. Just before Arthur relates his dream to Una and Redcross, he speaks of his vain attempt to avoid earthly temptation. But, unlike the early examples in which Spenser clearly juxtaposed bad materiality (vain monuments) to good (but ineffable) truth, Arthur’s dream complicates rather than clarifies the relationship of perception and truth. Arthur’s account of the commonplace struggle to remain virtuous against the odds of human nature is familiar, as is his repetition of the vanity of the world: But all in vaine: no fort can be so strong, Ne fleshly brest can armed be so sound, But will at last be wonne with battrie long, Or vnawares at disauantage found; Nothing is sure, that growes on earthly ground: And who most trustes in arme of fleshly might, And boasts, in beauties chaine not to be bound, Doth soonest fall in disauentrous fight, And yeeldes his caytiue neck to victours most despight. (I.ix.11)




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However, as Arthur continues his tale, moving from an account of conventional wisdom to that of his own experience, the terms of the struggle begin to collapse. One awaits the predictable fall of the hero’s materiality, his fort, and “fleshly brest.” For as he tells us, “nothing is sure, that growes on earthly ground.” But rather than actually seeing the object of his affection and source of his “secret wound” (I.ix.7.8), Arthur’s reason is overcome by a vision in a dream. What he sees is not visible—”So faire a creature yet saw never sunny day” (13, ln10)—nor can Arthur relate her intercourse with him—her “goodly glee and louely blandishments”—in any concrete manner: “ne liuing man like words did euer heare / as she to me deliuered all that night” (I.ix.14.1, 6–8). Her discourse comes to him as antidiscourse (a form of apophatic speech), conveyed only as an echo of Paul’s encouragement to the Corinthians to believe in that which cannot be heard by human ear.30 But even if the encounter is unrepresentable, it is nonetheless presented as an image. We might ask: what kind of image it is that has the power to move Arthur to the kind of disciplined action that will serve as Spenser’s example of Christian magnificence? I suggest that the answer is an image like Marion’s Icon (rather than Idol), an image that is not an image, or, in this case, an image of nothing. For when Arthur awakens from his dream—the experiential modality that allows Spenser to convey the image that is not an image, that which will structure the epic—he contemplates nothing: When I awoke, and found her place deuoyd, And nought but pressed gras, where she had lyen, I sorrowed all so much, as earst I ioyd, And washed all her place with watry eyen. From that day forth I lou’d that face diuine; From that day forth I cast in carefull mind, To seeke her out with labour, and long tyne, And neuer vow to rest, till her I find, Nine monethes I seeke in vaine yet ni’ll that vow vnbind. (I.ix.15)

The stanza is strikingly reminiscent of the introductory sonnet Spenser translated some 20 years earlier for van der Noot’s Theatre.31 Van der Noot’s speaker, moved by a ghost while dreaming, resolves to place his confidence in God, while the void Arthur encounters upon waking becomes the source of his commitment to something that he has not seen with his waking eye: “Whether dreams delude or true it were / was never hart so ravished with delight” (I.ix.14).32 Gloriana’s negative presence here would seem to place her in opposition to the material world, as its antidote, like the God of the earlier poem that will eventually transcend the material world.


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But the role of thing and nothing in The Faerie Queene is not a matter of simple oppositions such as those found in van der Noot’s polemic, where fleeting materiality is always inevitably overcome by eternal spirit. Rather, spiritual and sensory visions cross over in the episode, enabling the dyadic object of vision—the thing seen and the thing apprehended—to coexist in the poem. Although Arthur fails to present an image of Gloriana (the image that supposedly produced his profound commitment to the quest), he does present another image: that of “her place deuoyd, / And nought but pressed gras, where she had lyen.” This image of nothing produces profound emotion: Arthur is moved to tears at the sight of her absence. But the image of nothing is not quite nothing, as the most enigmatic feature of the passage is its reference to “pressed gras,” not only a thing, but something ostensibly material.33 The syntax “nought but” recalls the Book II proem’s “nothing is, but” discussed above. Spenser deploys this syntactical tactic repeatedly in The Faerie Queene. The result is to establish a logic of exception where the object of representation becomes the exception to the void—the nothingness that would be if not for the exception. In this case, the exception of the “pressed gras” serves to emphasize the nought for Arthur: what is nought is most pressing, while the materially present is only a reminder of that absence. Yet the material trace is equally important, as it is the only link between the immaterial dream vision and the hero’s physical existence. Although Spenser chides witless man for believing only what he sees, this material kernel located at the gestational heart of The Faerie Queene enables Spenser to denigrate the visible at the same time that he profits from its affective power. At the generative moment of Spenser’s epic, Arthur does well to attend to what he sees in the absent space left behind by the Faerie Queene. In observing her “place devoyd,” Arthur is able to visualize the ineffable, experience the crossing of seen and the unseen, and open a window onto the nothing that Spenser’s poem makes “visible.” Like Wallace Stevens’ snowman, Arthur “beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” III. Vision, Ethics, Truth Thus, while the allegory of Book I clearly relies on the binary logic of the unified one (truth, wholeness, etc., exemplified in images in bono) versus the corrupt multiple (represented by images in malo), the poem simultaneously introduces a kernel of doubt—an unsettling trace of the paradox that underwrites vision’s dual nature. The clarity of the distinction between truth discerned with the eye of the mind and falsehood fed by the “eie of the bodie” is cast in doubt at the very start of Book II. Here, Spenser turns to




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the problematic issue of living in the world: of matching the ideal of holiness to an ideal of prudent action, moderation, of the virtue of temperance. As Sean Kane puts it, Book II demonstrates “the paradoxes that result when thinking closes itself off to contexts of real action by positing elegant symmetries.”34 The proem’s plea to Queen Elizabeth to ignore the charge that the poet deals in “painted forgeries,” and rather “behold thy face” in “this faire mirrhour,” is followed immediately by the news that Archimago, the evil master of illusion, has escaped: “That cunning Architect of cancred guile, / Himselfe he frees by secret meanes vnseene” (II.i.1). Any comfort Spenser has given his readers in the proem, comfort based on the suggestion that we should not be so simple as to accept only what we can confirm by sight, is shaken once the book opens and the first “unseene” event is the escape of illusion into the world. Considering the placement of the woodcut illustration of St. George in light of the concerns of the second book rather than the first illuminates Spenser’s approach to the visual. Paul Voss cites Alexander Judson’s typical response to the illustration as an image inadequate to the task of visualizing Spenser’s epic poem: “This creature, no larger than a mastiff, feebly struggling under the hoofs of St. George’s charger is no kin to the fire-breathing colossus of Spenser’s imagination.”35 Judson is right of course, but I would suggest that this is precisely the point. For can we really believe that a poet who obsessively controlled the development (and reception) of his Virgilian career simply let the printer carelessly include an image that compromised the integrity of his poetic project? I would argue the opposite, that the image sets the poetic turn marked by the movement from Book I to Book II in sharp relief, as the poet will submit even the most heroic and sacred images to scrutiny. The “painted forgery” of the proem is there for anyone to see on the facing page, and the fact that it stands as an emblem of the history on which the poet based the first book only emphasizes the development of Spenser’s poetic sensibility. In other words, we are asked to seek beyond the formal level of the poem to something ineffable to which it refers as only a shadow. I am suggesting that what consumed Spenser in his continual return to the visual was an essentially philosophical rather than theological problem. To flesh out the philosophical issue at hand, it is instructive to turn to Wittgenstein’s unique form of phenomenology, one of modern philosophy’s most direct attempts to take on the problem Spenser’s poem raises so acutely. Wittgenstein’s early interest in pictures as a model for correlating the experience of the world with the truth of the world constitutes a meditation on the modern impulse to valorize the purity of the word (of thought, reason, etc.) over the accidents of perceptual experience. This is the same impulse that led early modern reformers to privilege the Word over the


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idolatrous image. The desire for a language of truth—uncontaminated by the inconsistent sensual experience of the world—prefigured reformation thought as well as that of the later modern era. The impulse is most evident in the emphasis on the Word over the world (as a corrective to the incomplete knowledge available to experience) during the Reformation and the breakdown of confidence in empirical and positivist epistemologies in the twentieth century highlighted by the rise of phenomenology. While these two moments may seem to approach the question of observation and truth from opposite directions, my point is that they are concerned at their heart with the same issue: how is what we see related to what is true? And more importantly: if we cannot tell how they are related, how are we supposed to respond to what we see? Wittgenstein abandoned his search for a language that might contain the world (or incontrovertible truth)—his “picture theory”—in favor of the more speculative account of the importance of “language games.” Wittgenstein’s “language games” emphasize the impossibility of systematic philosophical thought to capture the complexity (and thus the reality or truth) of human experience. By connecting the concept of a primitive language (contained and solely referential: X word equals Y object) to the broad notion of an entire system of language, Wittgenstein is able to make the point that the flexibility and unboundedness of language is the proper object of philosophical investigation, despite the fact that most philosophy tries to formulate a systematic language that will solve philosophical problems and fix meaning: But how many kinds of sentence are there? Say assertion, question, and command?—There are “countless” kinds: countless different kinds of use of what we call “symbols”, “words”, “sentence”. And this multiplicity is not something fixed, given once for all; but new types of language, new language games, as we may say, come into existence and others become obsolete and get forgotten.36

Wittgenstein’s point is that language cannot be precise in the way philosophy often demands. The flexible concept of the language game allows for a nonsystematic, but nonetheless thoughtful approach to the epistemological questions philosophy has always failed to answer. He explains: “the term ‘language game’ is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life” (PI, §23). It is of particular interest for the present study that despite turning away from the “picture theory” of his early philosophy, Wittgenstein’s meditations on language and human action are brought to life through highly imagistic examples




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from experience. In one sense, this recalls the method Spenser defends in the letter to Raleigh discussed above: “So much more profitable and gratious is doctrine by ensample, then by rule.”37 Of course, Spenser begins with “doctrine,” whereas Wittgenstein begins with experience. Spenser’s initial interest is in the best method by which to deliver the doctrine, rather than in determining what that doctrine is or how it ought to be interpreted. Wittgenstein increasingly focused on the inability of language to reach anything like a functional doctrine, and while Spenser would never question the scriptural basis underlying his understanding of “virtuous discipline,” his poem highlights the chasm that exists between examples of ethical behavior and the rules by which such behavior is supposed to be governed. Wittgenstein’s recognition that the idea of a pure language is not of this world led him to concentrate on the complexity of particular situations in the Philosophical Investigations. A similar recognition moved Maurice Merleau-Ponty to reject conventional philosophical language aimed at absolute clarity in favor of a contradictory, meditative, living form of thought. In his essay “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” Merleau-Ponty writes that “the signification without any sign, the thing itself—that height of clarity—would be the disappearance of all clarity.”38 For Spenser and Wittgenstein, the image serves as the conduit back to experience, and the impulse to pass through it is an ethical impulse—a recognition that the life of the pure word (as if there could be such a life) is ethically bankrupt. What both recognize is the process by which singular experience is transformed into dogma. Like Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, Spenser recognized that the ethical required something other than system; and, as importantly, he insisted that the whole field of ethics is of this world.39 Importantly, for each writer, the test of ethical action is figured as a response to a variety of images. The story of this quest for philosophical truth, beginning with the systematic purification of language (in some sense the project of all philosophy up to the twentieth century), and leading to the problem of the image, is an important one for understanding Spenser’s poetic development. As I have mentioned, Wittgenstein’s early philosophy is often associated with the notion of a “picture theory of language.” Specifically the theory figures the ideality of logical thought as a series of pictures (in which the picture is a frozen and static object or fact). Put simply, Wittgenstein developed the concept of a picture theory to reduce logical facts to their simplest units—“There must be something identical in a picture and what it depicts, to enable one to be a picture of the other at all.”40 Wittgenstein conceived of the picture theory as a remedy for philosophical problems, all of which


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stemmed—in his estimation—from a variety of misunderstandings about the logic of language. Initially, this emphasis on the clarifying power of logic made him a hero to logical positivist philosophers seeking to purge systematic philosophy of the specter of metaphysics. For at the turn of the twentieth century, and in the wake of the great accomplishments of the age of reason, metaphysics remained a fundamental stumbling block to the completion of philosophy; even Hegel, among the most systematic of nineteenth-century philosophers, could not avoid the central metaphysical problem: the discontinuity between the experience of the world and any absolute knowledge of the world.41 Logical positivism, however, seemed to offer an answer, espousing mathematical rather than spiritual universals as the guarantor of a theory of knowledge (untroubled by the traditional problems of metaphysics). Wittgenstein’s early interest in theoretical mathematics and logical philosophy (through Bertrand Russell) led him to take on the nagging problem of metaphysics in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. This book, hailed by logical positivists as the end of metaphysical confusion, seems to argue that anything that cannot be a fact of language—such as the existence of God—also cannot be a fact of the world; such nonfacts are essentially non-sense (as far as philosophy is concerned). This enabled Wittgenstein to state famously, “There can be no ethical propositions” (TLP, 6.42).42 This statement is true because propositions in the positivist sense refer to “what is the case,” and ethical matters cannot be contained to the realm of fact because they involve human action in time. As W. J. T. Mitchell points out, most accounts have it that Wittgenstein spent the rest of his life (after the publication of the Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus) trying to dismantle the early positivism associated with the book and its so-called “picture theory” of language. But a close reading of the Tractatus reveals that Wittgenstein’s philosophy was incompatible with positivism from the outset. The later work can be seen as an extension rather than a recantation of the picture theory. The philosopher’s later interest in language games was already prefigured in the early work, and its conclusion that “what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence” (TLP, 7). What is often left unsaid about this aphorism is that the “we” for the early Wittgenstein refers only to logicians. As logic ought to include only verifiable facts, logicians err if they do not limit their inquiry accordingly. Wittgenstein set out to show that what logic offers is not a path to truth but a very restrictive language game. David Rozema points out the real consequences for anyone willing to live according to the language game Wittgenstein describes in the Tractatus:



If we read the Tractatus as a description of just such a person [a logical positivist], living in just such a narrow world, then some of the later


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“propositions” take on a new, sinister tone. E.g., propositions 5.62–5.63: “That the world is my world shows itself in the fact that the limits of language (the language which I understand) mean the limits of my world.”; “The world and life are one.” “I am my world. (The microcosm.)” . . . the point is to see that the whole work is an “if ”—a series of descriptions that picture a certain kind of life conditioned by a certain, very limited view of the purpose and meaning of language, and in fact a view that allows for no judgments of value at all.43

Rather than a celebration of positivism, then, the Tractatus is a brutal condemnation of the ethical bankruptcy of a philosophy restricted to a positivist theory of language. Taking a logical approach to truth, in other words, has the disastrous result of denying ethics any place in truth.44 Wittgenstein’s later philosophy essentially extends the critique of linguistic imprecision to the entire world of human thought, including, but not limited to, logic. Wittgenstein makes this clear in the Philosophical Investigations: “My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense” (PI, §464). Philosophers can continue to clarify, but such clarification will only lead to a further need to clarify, and worse, this process of clarification will result in abandoning what Wittgenstein felt were the most important matters: “practical questions concerning the good, the true, or the beautiful way(s) of living human life.”45 Mitchell notes that the later Wittgenstein is less concerned with repudiating his early theory than with correcting the misinterpretation that characterized the Tractatus as advocating a picture theory of “the empiricist account of perceptual images, or the positivist notion of an ideal language.”46 His contribution to logic was, in his estimation, to put an end to the search for an ideal language, as the only way it could be achieved was in the form of a picture that was explicitly not in the world. The positivist search for an ideal language would always result in the production of more (rather than less) emphasis on the symbolic, while the truth of the world resides outside of the realm of the utterable. According to Rozema, Paul Engelmann was the only person who really understood Wittgenstein’s point in the Tractatus: “Positivism holds—and this is its essence—that what we can speak about is all that matters in life. Whereas Wittgenstein passionately believes that all that really matters in human life is precisely what, in his view, we must be silent about.”47 Wittgenstein recognized that nearly everyone who read the Tractatus misunderstood it, and when he finally returned to the project, he felt the need to be more direct. Writing in the Philosophical Investigations, he cautions against any interpretation of the work that would associate it


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Our clear and simple language-games are not preparatory studies for a future regularization of language—as it were first approximations, ignoring friction and air-resistance. The language-games are rather set up as “objects of comparison” which are meant to throw light on the facts of our language by way not only of similarities, but also of dissimilarities. (PI, §130)

For the present study, I am interested in the way that Wittgenstein’s language draws on visual experience as a strategy for resisting the philosophical tendency to withdraw from the world into the density of linguistic abstraction. While there is no logical picture theory in the Philosophical Investigations, there is an abundance of pictures. The difference is that the static pictures of the early work (pictures that culminated in the absurdly – – – abstract formula—[ p , ␰ , N (␰ )]—and which the philosopher hoped to reveal as devoid of life—are replaced here with the dynamic images of everyday life; such everyday images resist stasis as they become the objects of philosophical investigation: “The picture is there; and I do not dispute its correctness. But what is its application? Think of the picture of blindness as a darkness in the soul or in the head of the blind man” (PI, §424). The primary difference in the early and late Wittgenstein, it would seem, is that his initial project of revealing the imprecision of language as the fatal flaw of conventional philosophy becomes, in the later writing, a meditation on the glorious capacity of linguistic fluidity to negotiate the relationship between perceptual experience and thought. And, in the process of investigating this relation, Wittgenstein develops a highly visual rhetoric in which ethical questions of practical rather than theoretical import come into focus. Whereas the early Wittgenstein demonstrated that philosophical clarity could only be achieved if imprecise language could be deemed unspeakable—an impossible task—the later Wittgenstein made the unspeakable the subject of philosophical investigation through indirection. Ostensibly searching for the same end (the ever-elusive realm of the true or valuable), the early and late works approach that realm from opposite ends. In taking the ethical proposition as his subject, Wittgenstein’s aim was to move beyond language:


with the usual project of a philosophy directed toward systematic clarification:

For all I wanted to do with them [ethical propositions] was just to go beyond the world and that is to say beyond significant language. My whole tendency and I believe the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk of Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language.48


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IV.

Ethics and the Image, Or Spenserian Indirection

Keeping in mind Wittgenstein’s notion of engagement with the ethical proposition as a method for moving beyond the proposition to the proper subject of ethics (beyond language as a way of engaging with the unspeakable), I return now to Spenser, a poet whose carefully orchestrated career led in the end to a poem “clowdidly enwrapped in allegoricall devises.”49 In defending his use of the “darke conceit,” Spenser admits that “to some . . . this methode will seeme displeasaunt, which had rather have good discipline delivered plainly in way of precepts, or sermoned at large” (15–16). As the discussion in the previous chapter demonstrated, it would not be an exaggeration to describe the message of The Theater for Voluptuous Worldlings as “sermoned at large.” In turning to allegory Spenser seems to have recognized that, as a singular event, the confrontation with the poetic image is unpredictable; only in retrospect can its ethical import be ascertained. At first glance, it might appear that the virtue associated with Guyon (Temperance) is among the most inwardly directed virtues—compared to the social virtues of Friendship or Courtesy, for example. Yet, as Guyon navigates the treacherous world of temptation, he is continually presented with ethical questions generated by his experience with images that challenge his preconceived moral imperatives. Spenser articulates Guyon’s experience as a series of encounters with the preconceptual—a crucial region in both Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and Wittgenstein’s language games. It is here that phenomenology’s primary lesson is continually staged. In Emmanuel Levinas’s account, “The most productive thing that phenomenology has contributed is the insistence on the fact that the look absorbed by the datum has already forgotten to relate it to the entirety of the mental procedure that conditions the upsurge of the datum, and thus to its concrete meaning.”50 What is lost as the viewer accommodates the visual field to his or her conceptual understanding is the absolute newness of the experience itself. By the time this reflection can occur the experience is no longer on offer, and when a similar experience presents itself in the future, it is never identical to the last occurrence. The dynamic nature of phenomenal experience places a special demand on the individual to respond with only partial knowledge of the potential outcomes. Consider Guyon’s encounter with Mammon. Next to the Bower of Bliss, the cave of Mammon is the episode best suited to the task of exemplifying


As I have been suggesting throughout this and the previous chapter, Spenser’s challenge was to go beyond language to reach the more important nonthings that lay obscured by the illusions of the materially visible world.


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An uncouth, salvage, and uncivile wight, Of grisly hew, and fowle ill favour’d sight; His face with smoke was tand, and eyes were bleard, His head and beard with sout were ill bedight, His cole-blacke hands did seeme to have been seard In Smithes fire-spitting forge, and nayles like clawes appeard. (II.vii.3)

Guyon, “at the sight dismayd,” first asks of the creature “What art thou man, (if man at all thou art)?” (II.vii.7). The ethical challenge that Spenser stages for Guyon here stems from the situational problem faced by all Christians, who, bound by the flesh of the world, must seek beyond perception to find truth. But Guyon is captivated by the world, as his reaction to the situation reveals. Mammon, “thereat with staring eyes, fixed askaunce, / In great disdaine,” informs the knight that he is the “God of the world and worldlings,” able to offer unimaginable riches if Guyon agrees to serve him (II.vii.7–8). Although Guyon rejects the offer, suggesting that Mammon ought to “proffer [his] giftes” “to men, that couet such eye-glutting gaine,” he goes on to say that in “honours suit my vowed dayes do spend”: Regard of worldly mucke doth fowly blend, And low abase the high heroicke spright, That ioyes for crownes and kingdoms to contend; Faire shields, gay steeds, bright arms be my delight: Those be the riches fit for an aduent’rous knight. (II.vii.10)

Guyon’s response reveals that his ethical development is nascent here, as he is unable to see that his understanding of honor relies on a similar attention to the visible world as that which he attributes to men that “couet eye-glutting gaine.” Guyon’s honor is made manifest in worldly things—”fair shields, gay steeds, bright arms.” If the reader has missed it, Mammon removes any doubt in the next stanza “dost thou not weet, / That money can thy wantes at will supply? / Shields, steeds, and armes, & all things for thee meet / It can puruay in twinkling of an eye” (II.vii.11). Like Falstaff ’s “mere scutcheon,”52 Guyon’s honor is little more than a collage of the images and material trappings of pageantry. The honor he ought to seek, of course, is immaterial, only realized in the interpersonal relation: Guyon’s honor recognized by another,


the value of temperance in the face of earthly temptation.51 Guyon finds Mammon in a “goomy glade,”


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and ultimately, God. Unlike the speaker of the vision poems Spenser translated at the beginning of his poetic career, Guyon struggles with the imperative to cast off his interest in the things he sees in favor of faith in an invisible God deferred to an unknown future. Guyon’s problems issue from the aporia Jacques Derrida identifies with true ethical responsibility: “for responsibility . . . demands on the one hand an accounting, a general answering-for-oneself with respect to the general and before the generality . . . and on the other hand, uniqueness, absolute singularity, hence nonsubstitution, nonrepetition, silence, and secrecy.”53 Derrida’s account of responsibility draws out the ethical problem I have been discussing throughout this chapter: how is it possible to relate the general rule (universals, precepts, laws, etc.) to the situations in which ethical actions are carried out? It is impossible to act according to a generalizable rule and a singular experience simultaneously. This is Wittgenstein’s precise point when he says that there can be no ethical propositions. The moment that the proposition is fixed—frozen in time—it is no longer capable of accounting for the particularity of the situation in which it was conceived. Guyon follows a general rule in rejecting Mammon’s offer, but he also attempts to respond to the uniqueness of the situation at hand. In clarifying his objection to the goods offered by Mammon, Guyon seeks even more particular information about the offer; he worries that they might be stolen, and unless he knows the provenance he must decline: Me list not (said the Elfin knight) receaue Thing offred, till I know it well be got, Ne wote I, but thou didst these goods bereaue From rightfull owner by vnrighteous lot, Or that bloud guiltinesse or guile them blot. (II.vii.19)

The response suggests that Guyon would be willing to accept Mammon’s wealth under the right circumstances, a suggestion that begins to draw out the tension between the general rule and the situational act that troubles Derrida. Mammon’s response is interesting here, as he suggests that none of the material possessions that comprise his wealth have circulated in the world’s economy, precisely the problem with worldly wealth identified by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount (more on this later in the chapter). The form of Mammon’s reply is a further reference to the scriptural emphasis on the immaterial:


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The passage is a burlesque of 1 Corinthians 2:9: “But as it is written: The eye hath not seen, and the ear hath not heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.”54 The goods Mammon offers are hardly the ineffable “things” that God has prepared for the faithful, but the rhetorical echo of the biblical passage suggests Spenser’s wariness about the ability of language to convey the higher truth he identifies with moral edification. Guyon’s response is not that of a biblical scholar, but of a pragmatic empiricist: What secret place (quoth he) can safely hold So huge a masse, and hide from heauens eye? Or where hast thou thy wonne, that so much gold Thou canst preserue from wrong and robbery?

Mammon responds to Guyon’s incredulity (a stance based, no doubt, on experience), by inviting him to “see for himself ”: Come thou (quoth he) and see. So by and by Through that thicke couert he him led, and found A darkesome way, which no man could descry, That deepe descended through the hollow ground, And was with dread and horrour compassed around. (II.vii.19–20)

The path to illumination here—Mammon’s offer that Guyon “come . . . and see”—leads through a series of visual obstacles, beginning with a “thicke couert” and a “darksome way,” so dark that “no man could descry” where it leads. Mammon continues to offer the knight unfamiliar visions, as he leads him into a room in which a “hundred furnaces all burning bright”: By every furnace many feends did bide, Deformed creatures, horrible in sight, And every feend his busie paines applied, To melt the golden metal, ready to be tride (II.vii.35)


But safe I haue them kept in secret mew, From heauens sight, and powre of all which them pursew. (II.vii.19)

The scene that Mammon presents to Guyon represents the entirely new: Behold, thou Faeries sonne, with mortall eye, That liuing eye before did neuer see:


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Image Ethics in Shakespeare and Spenser The thing, that thou didst craue so earnestly, To weet, whence all the wealth late shewd by mee, Proceeded, lo now is reueald to thee. Here is the fountaine of the worldes good: Now therefore, if thou wilt enriched bee, Auise thee well, and chaunge thy wilfull mood, Least thou perhaps hereafter wish, and be withstood. (II.vii.38)

In essence the money god claims to offer Guyon all possible sights—everything that might be seen is revealed. But the fountain of the “worldes good”—of all that is of material value—is easy for the knight to turn down: Suffise it then, thou Money God (quoth hee) That all thine idle offers I refuse. All that I need I haue; what needeth mee To couet more, then I haue cause to vse? With such vaine shewes thy worldlings vile abuse: But giue me leaue to follow mine emprise. (II.vii.39)55

It is here that Guyon takes on the voice of the speaker of the vision poems, eschewing all the material world in favor of his “emprise,” his quest and its temporal logic. In his categorical refusal, Guyon chooses the general rule over the singularity of the situation at hand. As readers of The Faerie Queen will recall, this is, in fact, his crucial error. Able to resist all of Mammon’s worldly temptations, Guyon’s failure comes in his refusal of nourishment—the episode ends with Guyon fainting from lack of sustenance. His categorical refusal ultimately lacks virtue as his lack of nourishment opens him to much greater danger. It is important to consider what precisely it is that Guyon has overcome in the cave, for the faint occurs after an episode in which the knight successfully marshals a concept of temperance to his defense against the material temptations proffered by the God of worldly goods. Alluding to Christ’s temptation in the wilderness, the challenge for the knight is again to heed the words of St. Paul urging patience for the “things to come,” and even more pointedly Jesus’ own advice in the Sermon on the Mount: “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon the earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break and steal. But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through and steal. For where treasure is, there will be your heart also”


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(Matt. 6:19–21). Armed with such scriptural guides, the temptation for Guyon here should be almost nonexistent; it seems highly doubtful that the trial of the cave taxed him more than the other dangers he faces in the book. But while apparently straightforward, Jesus’ advice contains a complicated logic of exchange that is extremely difficult to follow in actual practice. Derrida comments on this passage at length, identifying it at the heart of the economic logic that governs human responsibility: On the one hand, we have a photology in terms of which the source of light comes from the heart, from inside; from the spirit and not from the world . . . On the other hand, if this spiritualization of the “interior” light institutes a new economy (an economy of sacrifice: you will receive good wages if you rise above earthly gain . . .), then it is by breaking with, dissociating from or rendering dissymmetrical whatever is paired with the sensible body, in the same way that it means breaking with exchange as a simple form of reciprocity.56

Derrida’s account of the dual demand of responsibility (to the general and the particular) as a “photology” associates the ethical with the visual. This intertwining of vision and ethics helps to explain Guyon’s inability to separate true virtue from some image of it (in a “bright shield”) and his later ability to submit to a categorical law (“Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon the earth”). Alone, separated from the Palmer, Guyon is wholly unprepared to break with the exchange economy that will identify him as an honorable knight. Although he can refuse the economy of the material world with ease, he is unable to embrace a renunciation of a sacred economy that promises him rewards in heaven. It is here that Guyon comes up against the aporia of responsibility that Derrida identifies with the ethical call to honor singularity and generality simultaneously, or more precisely to honor the general only by renouncing it in the name of singularity. Falling back on a categorical rule in his refusal of material things, Guyon becomes irresponsible—insensible to the physical world through which all of his spiritual understanding is filtered. Following this rule—the categorical refusal of all offers proffered and to come—places him in grave danger, from lack of sustenance, causing him to faint in a condition close to death. On the one hand, the faint confirms the parallel between Christ’s temptations and Guyon’s experience with Mammon: able to resist all of Mammon’s worldly temptations, Guyon, like Christ, faints from lack of nourishment. On the other hand, it also follows that the categorical refusal of the world marks his acquiescence to the temptation of an ethics of the general (of the general rule),




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which effectively removes him from the life world, the phenomenal world of experience which is the subject of the second book. The timing of his faint emphasizes the point: at the end of the three days his “vitall powers gan wexe both weak and wan” leading him to ask Mammon to return him to the surface. But it is only when he is “brought to living light,” that he faints: But all so soon as his enfeebled spright Gan sucke this vitall aire into his brest, as overcome with too exceeding might, The life did flit away out of her nest, and all his senses were with deadly fit opprest. (II.vii.66)

He has answered responsibility’s demand for a “general answering-foroneself with respect to the general” but he has done so at the expense of his own singularity, of the singularity of his experience alone at the moment of decision. His acquiescence to the generalized ethics that enables his categorical refusal of the things of the world ultimately lacks virtue, forcing the issue into the hands of another willing to die for him. Arthur’s willingness in the following canto to submit himself to the risk of death (identifying him as a Christ figure) is the gift of death that redeems Guyon’s quest. It is also here that Spenser’s radical exploration of faith is regrounded in the economy of Christian belief, that which closes his ethics off from the kind of openness associated with Derrida’s “religion without religion.” Through his sacrifice of the singularity of ethical response, Guyon becomes the Christian crusader, who at the end of the book can give the last word to the Palmer. Speaking of the world-centered ingrate, Grill, who curses Guyon for saving him from his condition as a pig in the bower of bliss, the Palmer concludes: “The donghill kind / Delights in filth and foule incontinence: / Let grill be Grill, and have his hoggish mind, / But let us thence depart, whilest weather serves and wind” (II.xii.87). Harry Berger comments that this represents Guyon’s spiritual growth over the course of the book, leading to the recognition that “another man’s soul is not in our keeping. We must attend to ourselves.”57 Guyon’s earlier failure to conceive of his own virtue properly has been read as a symptom of overconfidence: the desire to be recognized for his virtuousness leads him toward the vice of pride. But his struggle appears to result from an inability to overcome the paradox of vision: the “bright shields” and “faire steeds” are metonymies for the true virtue he seeks, but like the (empty) visual images of the ephemeral world that all worldlings are to overcome, the


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materiality of Guyon’s image of virtue remains an important obstacle to his achieving true immaterial virtue. Richard Helgerson makes the point that a major hurdle for early modern English reformers was the challenge of making the invisible church visible.58 Spenser’s poetic project in The Faerie Queene forced him to face the challenge head on. The task required that he use the language of the visible but with the aim of undermining visuality in favor of the invisible. A most fascinating (and perhaps frustrating) feature of the rhetorical method shared by Spenser and modern phenomenology is the continual repetition of the immaterial and ineffable expressed in a language saturated by the visual. The tendency is found in Marion’s emphasis on the “crossing of the visible” as the threshold to spiritual enlightenment and Heidegger’s development of the relationship between hiddenness and unhiddenness. And even as Wittgenstein turns to language games in the Philosophical Investigations, his method leads him to conjure tableau after tableau en route to his conclusion that the truly ethical is beyond reach. Rather than focus on the contradiction, by juxtaposing Spenser to modern philosophy, we might do well to consider the implications of this peculiar combination of resistance and attraction to vision that continues to surface in art and thought; Spenser’s iconoclastic pictorialism is less of a disavowal of the visual world and more of a call to reorient ourselves to it, less a call to avoid the visible and more of a challenge to look anew. Finally, what have we gained from bringing Spenser’s meditation on ethics and vision into dialogue with the trajectory of twentieth-century phenomenology and Wittgenstein’s thought in particular? I hope at least one striking similarity has suggested itself: the peculiar way in which an intense meditation on vision and epistemology leads to a literary and philosophical engagement with indirection. Wittgenstein’s search for a perfect language, which he imagined as a static image, led him to the contemplation of actual images that turned out to be neither static nor perfect. Similarly, Spenser’s Protestant poetics reflect the reformation desire to avoid “external idols” by concentrating on what Puritan reformer William Perkins called “internall images rightly conceived.”59 But as the poet honed his skill, he concentrated more concertedly on the experience of the world that complicates any notion of a purely internal image. Even if the entire project of The Faerie Queene can be seen as a meditation on the proper creation of internal images, the poem does anything but turn its back on the world. Indeed, once the first book sets up a model for the heroic Protestant quest, the poem devolves into a series of investigations into the impossibility of static models. The absent presence of the Faerie Queene responsible for initiating Arthur’s quest (and by extension all of the poem’s quests) remains an unsettling force throughout the poem.




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The fantastic destruction of the bower of bliss that ends Book II ought to offer no comfort to the zealous reformer, whose dream of a world in which the scripture is taken literally is bodied forth in the spectacle of Guyon’s violent rampage. It serves rather as an incentive to move forward, to see if Britomart can do any better at living in the world. The proper ethical response is not to judge but to move on to the next episode, the next image and its demands, “whilst weather serves, and wind.”


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“To Look, but with Another’s Eyes”: Translating Vision in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

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onsidering the complexity of the debates over the place of visual experience in the ethical development of the early modern subject, it is not surprising that we find a significant meditation on the ethical power of the visual at an early point in Shakespeare’s dramatic development. Unlike the poet Spenser, who abandoned material images as his art developed, as a dramatist Shakespeare had to confront the embodied character of visual experience directly. Embodied action is the medium in which his dramatic art took form. Although I will argue in subsequent chapters that Shakespeare’s meditation on the ethics of vision becomes more urgent in later plays, the playwright’s treatment of vision in A Midsummer Night’s Dream establishes epistemological conditions on which his staging of ethics would depend in later plays such as Measure for Measure, Othello, and The Winter’s Tale. In this chapter I argue that A Midsummer Night’s Dream provides an introduction to Shakespeare’s phenomenology of early modern ethical experience, one that takes St. Paul’s epistles as a starting point for translating inaccessible truths into the language of the world. The phenomenology of ethical experience offered in the play is one that emphasizes the texture of the visible world at the very same time that it has as its first principle an insistence on an equally important invisible world beyond human apprehension. The conflict that begins A Midsummer Night’s Dream also organizes the play’s visual logic. After we learn of the impending marriage of Theseus and Hyppolyta, Egeus enters “full of vexation” bearing the accusation that Lysander, in winning Hermia, has “stol’n the impression of her fantasy” (1.1.32). The impression is no doubt an image, as is made clear by the following dialogue in which Theseus insists that Hermia follow the will of her father “to whom [she is] but as a form in wax, / By him imprinted, and within


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his power / To leave the figure, or disfigure it” (1.1.49–51). Hermia’s response to the duke’s command places the ensuing action squarely in the realm of the ethics of vision with which I am concerned in the present study. For in Hermia’s wish that “my father looked but with my eyes” (l. 56) and Theseus’s counter—“Rather your eyes with his judgment must look” (l. 57)—the play establishes as central a visual aporia at the heart of ethical judgment: that it is never possible to see with another’s eyes.1 It is worth pausing over Egeus’s initial accusation against Lysander, as his characterization of the theft of Hermia’s affections is described as the theft of an image of fantasy that could only be carried off with magic: Lysander has “bewitched the bosom” of his daughter “with cunning” (ll. 27, 36). Likewise Demetrius, in his plea to Lysander to give up his claim to Hermia’s hand, refers to Lysander’s claim as his “crazed title” (l. 92). In his effort to win Hermia on the basis of his own character, Lysander accuses Demetrius of essentially the same crime with which he is accused: Demetrius has made love to Helena, winning her soul to the effect that she “dotes in idolatry on this spotted and inconstant man” (109–10). His effort in wooing Helena resulted in idolatry—the production of an image possessing an unnatural power. The references to magic and madness support the conventional reading of the play as a celebration of the madness of love, summed up in Theseus’s famous declaration that the “lunatic, the lover, and the poet, / Are of imagination all compact” (5.1.7–8). At the same time, the first scene foregrounds the complex role of vision in the epistemological questions that will define the play’s meditation on ethics: essentially a meditation on the question “what constitutes right seeing?”—where “right” carries the primary meaning of “ethical.” Further, while meditations on ethical vision tend to rely on the figure of sight as a metaphor for the kind of abstraction associated with moral reasoning, I will argue in this chapter that Shakespeare’s play insists on the necessity of both insight (gleaned from the mind’s eye) and perceptual vision (resulting from the physical sense of sight) in its meditation on “right seeing.” In the course of the confusion in the forest, almost all the characters are put in the literal position of seeing as another: Lysander sees Helena as Demetrius does, Hermia sees Lysander as Helena had seen Demetrius, and so on. The confusion that results from the play’s various perspectival translations reaches its climax in the episode known as “Bottom’s dream,” a scene in which sense and understanding are interminably intertwined. Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the chiasm—the intertwining of sense and thought in phenomenal experience—the following discussion explores Shakespeare’s emphasis on the intertwining of vision and cognition in an effort to represent before the eyes of his audience the experience of romantic love and its spiritual counterpart, divine Love.


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“To Look, but with Another’s Eyes”

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The Vision of Others

Critics including Frank Kermode and David Marshall have noted that the play is saturated with references to the visual: eyes, images, pictures, imprints, looks, gazes, etc.2 Indeed just after Theseus’s pronouncement of his judgment in favor of Egeus, and once they are alone, Lysander notes a change in Hermia’s appearance: “Why is your cheek so pale? / How chance the roses there do fade so fast?” (1.1.128–29). Having just heard the Duke’s judgment, Lysander’s question seems a bit dim, but it allows for a further development of the play’s already complicated visual epistemology, leading up to a remarkable meditation on the ethical demand encountered in the experience of the other person. Hermia responds that her appearance has paled—her roses wilted—due to lack of rain, which she will supply “from the tempests of her eyes” (l. 131). In his effort to console her with stories detailing their affinity with others who had suffered crossed love, Lysander cites only that which he has “read” and “heard” of love, rather than what he has seen. His oft-quoted commonplace conclusion that “the course of true love never did run smooth” leads to the first of the play’s several uses of stichomythia—that most interpersonal of rhetorical tropes—in which Hermia and Lysander describe the plight of legendary star-crossed lovers. In the course of the exchange, the cruel crossing of the historical lovers’ wills is transformed into a cross to bear, beginning with Hermia’s “O cross! too high to be enthralled to low” (l. 136). At the height of the exchange comes a summary of their sad situation: “O Hell! to choose love by another’s eyes” (l. 140). Lysander’s response is remarkable here: Or, if there were a sympathy in choice, War, death, or sickness did lay siege to it, Making it momentany as a sound, Swift as a shadow, short as any dream; Brief as the lightning in the collied night, That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth, And ere a man hath power to say “Behold!” The jaws of darkness do devour it up: So quick bright things come to confusion. (ll. 141–49)


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The concept of “a sympathy in choice,” only given voice here as something inevitably eclipsed by the realities of the world—“war, death, or sickness”—is profoundly ethical. Ethics is invariably tied to choice, to the decision, and the concept of the ethical decision is one that necessarily involves the “sympathy” of others.3 Locating the meeting point at which


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such sympathy might be found can be understood as the challenge facing any attempt to articulate an ethics that adequately accounts for the alterity of the other person.4 In Lysander’s account the meeting point is figured as a flash of insight: the ability to see in another’s place is compared to the “shadow” or “dream” so fleeting that it is always consumed by darkness before it can be shared with another. The passage resonates with a Neo-Platonic account of truth, in which the materials of this world cloud the higher truth, the “bright things” that quickly “come to confusion.”5 Compare Lysander’s contemplation of the true understanding found in “a sympathy in choice” (love allowed to prosper in its pure form) to Pietro Bembo’s in Castiglione’s Courtier: “as if awakened from the deepest sleep it opens the eyes which all men possess but few use and perceived in itself a ray of that light which is the true image of the angelic beauty that had been transmitted to it, and of which it transmits a faint impression to the body.”6 Similarly, describing the essence of the rational soul, Marsilio Ficino asserts that “it recognizes its own essence as spiritual and free from material limits. . . . In ourselves we see perfectly that knowledge is nothing else than a spiritual union with some spiritual form.”7 Lysander’s flash of sympathy is figured in opposition to the material pressures that obscure the truth of love from view (“war, death, or sickness”). Corporeality—here the limitations of the mortal body—works against any sustained contemplation of truth, for as Ficino explains, “Vision, being joined through its own spiritus to the spiritual images of colors, sees them. Yet when it is joined to matter it sees nothing, as is shown when we place a solid body directly upon the eye.”8 Lysander’s reflections on the apprehension of true love are only allowed to stand for a fleeting moment, however, as Hermia completes the transformation of the cross of fate into the cross to bear in patience: If then true lovers have been ever cross’d, It stands as an edict in destiny: Then let us teach our trial patience, Because it is a customary cross, As due to love as thoughts and dreams and sighs, Wishes and tears, poor fancy’s followers. (ll. 150–55)


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The echoes of Christian patience are overt rather than implied here, of course, as the “customary cross” is bound together with divine Love. This is, in fact, the critical synthesizing gesture of Platonism and Christianity, the “theology” of Ficino’s Platonic Theology. Here Hermia’s defense of


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Love suffreth long: it is bountiful: love envieth not: love doth not boast itself: it is not puffed up: It disdaineth not: it seeketh not her owne things: it is not provoked to anger: it thinketh not evil: It rejoyseth not in iniquite: but rejoyseth in the truth: It suffreth all things: it beleveth all things: it endureth all things. Love doth never fall away, though that prophecyings be abolished, or the tongues cease, or knowledge vanish away: For we knowe in parte, and we prophecie in parte. (1 Corinthians 13:4–9)9

Conventional Neo-Platonic theology reconciles the metaphysical and the empathic accounts of Love through a neat synthesis, here articulated by Bembo in The Courtier: O most sacred Love, what tongue is there that can praise you worthily? Full of beauty, goodness and wisdom, you flow from the union of beauty, goodness and divine wisdom, there you dwell, and through it you return to it perpetually. Graciously binding the universe together, midway between celestial and earthly things, by your benign disposition you direct the heavenly powers in their government of the lower, and turning the minds of men to their source, you unite them with it. . . . You join together the things that are separate, give perfection to the imperfect, likeness to the unlike, friendship to the hostile, fruit to the earth, tranquility to the sea, its life-giving light to the sky.10

But Shakespeare’s play does not rush to this conclusion. The synthesis of the ineffable spirit with the imperfect world, leading to spiritual illumination, is left incomplete in the play, as the playwright lingers in contemplation on the inaccessibility of this spiritual truth. Throughout the play Shakespeare insists on the relevance of the philosophical questions raised, rather than overcome, by the merging of Platonism and Christian theology. The acceptance of the cross as a trial of patience redirects Lysander’s attention to the paradox of love and ethical action figured a moment earlier as a flash of truth always consumed by the confusion of darkness. Paul’s love exceeds prophecy, Hermia’s “edict in destiny,” and her willingness to bear the cross is an expression of faith in love against cynicism (certainty about outcomes based on experience), which is compelling enough to bring Lysander back to action, back to the world. Noting Hermia’s “good


love echoes Paul’s account of divine Love in his first letter to the Corinthians:


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persuasion” (l. 156), Lysander formulates the plan of elopement that will set the play’s central action in motion. Rather than synthesizing the Platonic and Pauline as in Neo-Platonic theology, Shakespeare’s scene holds them in suspension, oscillating between Lysander’s espousal of a Platonic metaphysics of ideality dependent on a language of worldly imperfection and Hermia’s Pauline acceptance of love, in which Love supersedes distinctions between embodied experience and eternal truth, between the visible and the invisible. The final exchange of the opening scene, in which Helena details her plight, repeats the visual epistemology established earlier, but with a difference. In her imperfect view of things, she emphasizes physical sight, and thus returns the play’s attention to the lovers’ material rather than ideal situation. We are reminded that it is the material impediments to love that constitute the play’s opening conflict: Call you me fair? that fair again unsay. Demetrius loves your fair: O happy fair! Your eyes are lode-stars; and your tongue’s sweet air More tuneable than lark to shepherd’s ear, When wheat is green, when hawthorn buds appear. Sickness is catching: O, were favour so, Yours would I catch, fair Hermia, ere I go; My ear should catch your voice, my eye your eye, My tongue should catch your tongue’s sweet melody. Were the world mine, Demetrius being bated, The rest I’d give to be to you translated. O, teach me how you look, and with what art You sway the motion of Demetrius’ heart. (1.1.181–93)

On the one hand, Helena’s plea represents a straightforward desire to “have” whatever it is that Hermia has to attract Demetrius, a sort of early modern way of saying “what’s she got that I don’t have?” But, on the other hand, the language in which she couches her desire points to the ethical/ visual dynamic that is the focus of this study: her wish to be “translated” “eye for eye” into Hermia is presented erroneously as something that can be learned: “teach me how you look.” The plea to Hermia to reveal the secrets of her appearance in turn betrays the real lesson Helena wishes to learn: she wants to know what Demetrius sees when he looks on Hermia— “teach me how you look” to Demetrius. Despite Helena’s misguided approach to the situation at hand, her desire “to be to you translated” signals that she recognizes the difficulty that the


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When in love, I solicit a look, what is profoundly unsatisfying and always missing is that—You never look at me from the place from which I see you. Conversely, what I look at is never what I wish to see.11

This, of course, has profound implications for ethics. To see as another, to see the other, and to see oneself as another sees you are all at the heart of the ethical aporia haunting the history of metaphysics, and this aporia is clearly present in the two traditions of thought that inform Shakespeare’s language in this play: Platonic metaphysics via Renaissance Neo-Platonism and Pauline universalism, especially as articulated in first Corinthians. At this early point, the play seems to suggest that to evaluate the human decision, it is critical first to contemplate the central problem identified in Helena’s desire for translation. As the play will stage a remarkable “translation” at its center, Helena’s imperfect articulation of the wish for translation in this early speech offers something of what is to come. Helena’s final speech of the first scene further confirms the metaphysical subtext of the play, signaling the complex manner in which Renaissance Neo-Platonism incorporated a Pauline emphasis on the ineffable while celebrating the value of sensual contemplation: How happy some o’er other some can be! Through Athens I am thought as fair as she. But what of that? Demetrius thinks not so; He will not know what all but he do know. And as he errs, doting on Hermia’s eyes, So I, admiring of his qualities. Things base and vile, holding no quantity, Love can transpose to form and dignity. (1.1.226–33)

Interesting here is the way that Helena’s infatuation with Demetrius suggests the far-reaching and transformative power of love associated with Christ at the same time that she is firmly fixated on her particular situation and the apparent capriciousness of physical attraction. Thus, she can refer to her own error in valuing Demetrius’s qualities with a language that could just as easily be taken as a description of grace: “Things base and vile, holding no quantity / Love can transpose to form and dignity.” Her words echo Paul in 1 Corinthians: “But God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing, things that are” (1 Cor. 1:28).12


alterity of the other poses for intimacy, the impossibility of the knowledge of an other person, described by Jacques Lacan in overtly visual terms:


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Indeed, the play will raise the low to high in the subplot with the rude mechanicals, especially in the figure of Bottom, whose name is another form for low. In this passage love is both the temporal love of the world in all of its imperfection and the perfect whole that is Christian love.13 Helena’s recourse to the language of Christian love in an otherwise selfpitying reflection on her own experience of unfulfillment leads her to a critique of love as mystery, which must be overcome if the resolution of the play is to come off: Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, And therefore is wing’d Cupid painted blind. Nor hath Love’s mind of any judgment taste; Wings and no eyes figure unheedy haste. And therefore is Love said to be a child, Because in choice he is so oft beguiled. As waggish boys in game themselves forswear, So the boy Love is perjured every where. For ere Demetrius look’d on Hermia’s eyne, He hail’d down oaths that he was only mine; And when this hail some heat from Hermia felt, So he dissolved, and showers of oaths did melt. (1.1.226–45)

This speech foreshadows the more famous one that Theseus will offer at the opening of Act Five, decrying the folly of the lovers’ adventure in the woods (though there the logic will be extended to include poets and madmen as well as lovers). The important difference, though, is that Theseus will speak as a detached observer of the lovers’ folly, while Helena is an active participant. In fact, her version of Theseus’s claim that a lover can see “Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt” (5.1.11)—“Love can transpose to form and dignity / Things base and vile, holding no quantity”—is aimed at her own experience: it is her love for Demetrius that has allowed her to make something of nothing (to “give to airy nothing a local habitation and a name” [5.1.16–17]). In this sense, her participation in the process of love’s generation aligns her less with the world of reason that will produce Theseus’s excurses on the fine frenzy of metaphysical reflection and more with the tradition that allows Paul to urge a turning away from both law and philosophy toward the impossible future promised in what Alain Badiou calls the “Christ event.”14 Consider Paul’s comparison of earthly and spiritual understanding to the ages of man: “when I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I imagined as a child. But as soon as I was a man, I put away childishness.


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Now we see in a glass even in a dark speaking: but then shall we see face to face. Now I know imperfectly: but then shall I know even as I am known” (1 Cor. 13). His characterization of this world as that which we see as through a glass dimly refers primarily to the imperfection of earthly insight rather than visual perception, but the metaphor is important as it relies on the sensual to reach the spiritual conclusion. The childishness that we put away in maturity is, for Paul, the condition of embodied experience, as opposed to representing the unenlightened spiritual soul. Although one might misread Paul’s analogy as an offer of enlightened vision—the movement from darkness to light as the fruit awaiting the Christian upon conversion— instead the analogy is intended to clarify the inadequacy of earthly vision, the condition of our as yet imperfect postlapsarian existence. We might understand Helena’s claim that “love looks not with the eyes but with the mind” as an attempt to substitute the solidity of reason for the inadequacy of perception and thus validate true contemplative love over visual fancy. If we did so, we would find ourselves on the conventional ladder of love: the idea that love “looks . . . with the mind” suggests that true love overcomes the sensual and untrustworthy realm of physiological sight through the assertion of reason. Helena strives to exchange the sensual stimulus (the visible face, and particularly the eyes) that produced physical passion in her body for an invisible and ideal love that would validate her connection to Demetrius as, to borrow Hermia’s phrase, “an edict in destiny.” But the distinction does not hold in this play or even in Helena’s own logic. Indeed the line is ludicrous in the present context, as she has just gone to great lengths to emphasize that it is her looks that she hopes to change: HERMIA HELENA

His folly, Helena, is no fault of mine. None, but your beauty: would that fault were mine! (1.1.200–201)

Hermia’s response, “Take comfort: he no more shall see my face,” importantly recenters the action on the physical face as the catalyst for fervent love. The play’s extended meditation on looking, love, and the face hovers in the space between Paul’s promised “face to face” with God that is always deferred and the Neo-Platonic account of the face as the imperfect catalyst for an incorporeal (reasoned) reflection on truth.15 Certainly Paul’s figural rendering of the impossibility of any knowledge of God lends itself to the Neo-Platonic theology in which such knowledge is mediated by the sensorium that must be overcome through reason. But Paul’s version is arguably much more radical than the Neo-Platonic account, as the top of the ladder always remains out of sight.




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I will go tell him of fair Hermia’s flight. Then to the wood will he to-morrow night Pursue her; and for this intelligence If I have thanks, it is a dear expense. But herein mean I to enrich my pain, To have his sight thither and back again. (1.1.246–51)

By her own logic, Helena comes to exactly the wrong conclusion about how she should act in this situation. If love looks not with the eyes but with the mind, why offer Demetrius’s visual sight as the means of bringing his love back to her? The language of exchange is somewhat startling in this context, as if sight could be exchanged like common currency. But rather than confirm this sense of exchangeable vision, the play reveals Helena to be in error. It is the untranslatability of each individual’s phenomenal experience that serves as the primary obstacle to Helena’s efforts to win Demetrius back. The singularity of an individual’s phenomenal experience by its very nature precludes translation. In contrast to the ethical questions raised in the opening dialogue, the play’s subsequent meditations on the ethics of vision depend increasingly on a negotiation between embodied experience and the ideal or conceptual realm of moral prescription. As spectators to the action, we have no trouble adjudicating the proper ethical course of action raised by the initial conflict: Egeus is a tyrant for seeking to overrule Hermia’s true love (his suit should be rejected); Hermia and Lysander are in the right (their marriage ought to be condoned); and Demetrius has a clear ethical course of action open before him if he is willing to abandon his interest in Hermia (his former love, Helena, awaits him). In each case the ease with which we can come to the appropriate judgment suggests that it is possible to exchange visions (to borrow Marshall’s term). But this sense is an illusion as our judgment can only be reached retrospectively: for example, “if I was in his position I would have . . . .” It is worth recalling that on hearing Lysander’s accusation that Demetrius had wooed Helena before turning to Hermia, Theseus admits that he has “heard so much, / And with Demetrius thought to have spoke thereof; / But, being over-full of self-affairs, / My mind did lose it”


What makes all this a matter of ethics is the fact that the real object of Helena’s desire is not Hermia’s physical beauty, but Demetrius’s predisposition to it. Her decision to inform him of the lover’s plot seems to fly in the face of the logic of love she has just articulated (e.g., that her delusion had made Demetrius’s otherwise insufficient appearance a thing of “dignity”):


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(1.1.111–114). The emphasis on language (hearing rather than seeing) and speaking helps to place Theseus on the side of reason in this early scene; by the fifth act he will more fully represent a kind of wooden abstraction, blind to the play’s proper subject of human connection. Moreover, it is of some importance that his emphasis on “self-affairs” has distracted him from the proper action regarding Demetrius here. While Theseus’s distraction does not prevent the audience from recognizing the ethical lay of the land in the opening scene, it establishes that each character’s particular situation will impact their ethical decision making in the play.16 Recognizing that the play does not open with an ethical dilemma, per se, I am suggesting rather that it is by centering the epistemological crisis in the visual that the play leads into the heart of ethics. II.

“Let the Audience Look to Their Eyes”

As the play develops, the ethics of vision established in the first scene is put into action through a variety of hypothetical scenarios in which the characters see from the position of another: the elixir with which Puck anoints the eyes effects the translation of vision—eye for eye—described by Helena in the opening scene, and the rude mechanicals imagine how their appearance will affect the audience, as if they were seeing the actual tragedy unfold before their eyes. Most importantly, though, Bottom’s “translation” will allow him to see what cannot be seen in this world, and though it is the silliest of the play’s meditations on seeing as another, it is also the most ethically profound. We meet Bottom not as a weaver, but as a lead actor, whose self-proclaimed “chief humor is for a tyrant” (1.2.24), despite his insistence that he can play every role. The selection of roles serves as a kind of metacommentary on the social stratification introduced into the play by the presence of the craftsmen while it emphasizes the challenges of seeing from the point of view of another.17 As the action shifts from the fairy to the human world, from the court to the forest, and from the mechanicals’ rehearsals to their performance at court, the importance of perspective becomes apparent. The power and authority of Theseus’s Athenian court of reason, on display in the opening scene, succumb to the burlesque of the mechanicals as they transform tragedy into a “very tragical mirth” (5.1.57). Bottom’s warning to those who would watch his performance—to “let the audience look to their eyes”—implicitly serves notice to Shakespeare’s audience as well, for the ensuing action will involve a confusing flurry of perspectival transformations.18 The middle of the play offers an extended exercise in sympathetic roleplaying. Characters change places, and as they do so they each appear to




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see the world from the point of view of another. We know that they see differently because they tell us: after the enchantment, Lysander’s praise for Helena mirrors his earlier words to Hermia and in his harsh rebuff of Hermia he appears a figure for Demetrius (who had spurned Helena in similar terms only moments earlier); Demetrius expresses his new-found love for Helena in language that would be impossible to distinguish from Lysander’s earlier praise of Hermia. Simultaneously, Titania treats Bottom as a king despite his beastly appearance. Each of the enchanted characters seems to be successfully “translated” eye for eye, each seems to see as another. Their ability to articulate this experience as another is disturbing for those unaffected by the magic. Helena’s response to the sudden affection of the two suitors is disbelief, assuming that they are having a bit of fun at her expense. For Helena, the change is not reasonable, and thus she accepts the more reasonable conclusion that they are involved in a cruel joke. Hermia’s reaction draws out the theme of perception and understanding even more directly. The experience is so far beyond her understanding that she abandons the attempt to explain it, “I am amaz’d, and know not what to say” (3.2.344). Far from bringing about interpersonal understanding, the playful translations of perspective confuse all involved. Hermia articulates the problem as one that extends the chasm between self and other: “You speak not as you think; It cannot be” (3.2.191). Of course Lysander’s thoughts have only been available to Hermia through his words; her dismay at his altered speech emphasizes just how inadequate her previous knowledge of his love had been. Concomitantly, the fulfillment of Helena’s desire to be “to you translated” with Hermia yields not the hoped-for satisfaction but the derision of her former friend and the untenable conflict between two lovers vying for one woman’s hand. The most figural exploration of the relationship between seeing and knowing, however, comes in the translation of Titania’s affections from Oberon to Bottom, the latter translated into an ass. Where Hermia and Helena refuse to accept the change in perception in Lysander and Demetrius (“it cannot be”), opting for silence or an alternative explanation, Bottom reacts with wonder. Throughout his time with Titania he seems to see himself as she sees him—beautiful despite his beastly appearance—and when he is returned to the world he resists the temptation to explain his experience through reason. While the lovers must reject the experiences they had in the forest (e.g., how it felt for Hermia to hear Lysander proclaim his hatred for her), Bottom embraces the experience and incorporates it into his thinking about how he will act. The oscillation between embodied experience and cognitive reflection that dominates the middle of the play coincides with phenomenology’s goal of reconciling conceptual understanding to


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perceptual experience. Before turning to Shakespeare’s staging of this effort at reconciliation in Bottom’s dream, it will be useful to get a fuller understanding of the phenomenological approach to the problem, especially as it is developed by Merleau-Ponty. Specifically, I want to draw on Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to grab hold of the cross-implicated modes of human experience and perception—the visual and verbal, the sensible and the intelligible—through the deep metaphor of the chiasm. On the one hand, the term is borrowed from anatomy—usually associated with the point at which the left and right optic nerves cross at the base of the brain, the so-called “optic chiasma.” It can also refer to the “fusion and exchange” of genetic material in the biological process of meiosis. On the other hand, derived from the Greek letter “␹” (chi ), and indicating a crossing or reversal, the term gestures toward the rhetorical device of chiasmus, in which a syntactical reversal of parallel phrases results in a meaningful paradox, as when Macbeth’s witches warn that “fair is foul, and foul is fair” (1.1.11). Merleau-Ponty’s description of the process he hopes to capture with the term is worth quoting at length: As the visible takes hold of the look which has unveiled it and which forms a part of it, the signification rebounds upon its own means, it annexes to itself the speech that becomes an object of science, it antedates itself by a retrograde movement which is never completely belied—because already, in opening the horizon of the nameable and of the sayable, the speech acknowledged that it has its place in that horizon. . . . When the silent vision falls into speech, and when the speech in turn, opening up a field of the nameable and the sayable, inscribes itself in that field, in its place, according to its truth—in short, when it metamorphoses the structures of the visible world and makes itself a gaze of the mind . . .—this is always in virtue of the same fundamental phenomenon of reversibility which sustains both the mute perception and the speech and which manifests itself by an almost carnal existence of the idea, as well as by a sublimation of the flesh.19

The oscillation between vision and idea, “mute perception and the speech,” in this passage is deliberate, constituting one of the few sustained philosophical attempts to hold the visual and the verbal in suspension, rather than letting one collapse into the other. As his editor, Claude Lefort, points out, “The Visible and the Invisible is an endeavor to keep the questioning open,”20 and his means of doing so is through what he refers to elsewhere as “indirect philosophical language.”21 The value of the chiasm for MerleauPonty’s understanding of the relation of the visible and the invisible is due in part to its indirect treatment of that relation, as a borrowed term. On the one hand, the chiasm refers rather simply to the concept of “reversibility,”




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as the linguistic reversal of rhetorical chiasmus and the anatomical reversal of the optic chiasma help illustrate the notion of a continuous reversibility or intertwining of the visible and the invisible. Yet, on the other hand, the semiotic doubling occasioned by the term’s relevance to both rhetoric and anatomy offers it the depth of both a literal objective descriptor (the scientific term for the place where the world of things crosses over into the world of ideas) and a conceptual, speculative marker for the arbitrary nature of signification (where representation crosses over into understanding). Unlike Descartes’ location of the mind-body nexus in the pineal gland, a physical point, the chiasm is not a site, but an operation. The density of the term reflects Merleau-Ponty’s feeling that philosophy must search for a language fitting its project: “the words most charged with philosophy are not necessarily those that contain what they say, but rather those that most energetically open upon being, because they more closely convey the life of the whole and make our habitual evidences vibrate until they disjoin” (VI, 102).22 What strikes me as useful for a reading of Shakespeare’s phenomenology of the ethics of love (both human and divine) is Merleau-Ponty’s sense that by assuming a stance of questioning refusal toward closure, toward synthesis— what Françoise Dastur calls “a dialectic without synthesis”23—expressive ontological inquiry can shake the foundations of traditional epistemology to the point that those foundations crumble. Shakespeare’s mediation on love (both earthly and divine) suggests that an experience of epistemological turbulence akin to that described by Merleau-Ponty necessarily attends the connection with another on which the experience of love depends. It is important to distinguish Merleau-Ponty’s stance from that of the Cartesian skeptic, hoping, as Lefort puts it in his preface, to detach “himself from all things [in order to] prepare the reinstatement of a thought sure of its rights.”24 When the “habitual evidences” disjoin, the questioning is not over, it only just begins. In this sense, Merleau-Ponty’s thought shares something with the pre-Cartesian attitude toward the visual that I have been exploring in this study. As such, it is consonant with Wittgenstein’s insistence that epistemology ought to focus on the continual acclimation of the subject to ever-changing “forms of life” rather than an effort to evaluate the truth value of statements about the world experienced through the senses. In an important sense the perspectival translations I have been discussing in this chapter have the effect of breaking down the characters’ epistemological assumptions, thus changing the way they respond to what they see. Prior to the ascendancy of Cartesian skepticism and its overt goal of rebuilding “a thought sure of its rights,” the visual occupied a middle space between the realm of eternal (but inaccessible) truth and the material (but ephemeral) world of embodied experience. In returning the visual to this status in an


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effort to dismantle the Cartesian system, Merleau-Ponty offers an approach to ethics and vision that sheds light on Shakespeare’s exploration of motivated human action. Before moving on to the more direct implications of Merleau-Ponty’s thinking for a reading of Shakespeare’s play, it is worth considering one influential objection to his approach. As Martin Jay has noted, Jacques Lacan accused Merleau-Ponty of failing to take his critique of Cartesian occularcentrism far enough. Lacan saw in Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the “flesh of the world” an attempt to identify “the original point of vision,” effectively prioritizing an idealized visual sense as constitutive of consciousness over a cognitive or psychological operation that imbues in the subject a fictional identity.25 For Lacan, the subject emerges in consciousness through a fantasy of visual wholeness that compensates for the absence of unmediated access to the real. But Merleau-Ponty is unwilling to come down on the side of either conceptual reason or “wild perception” in The Visible and Invisible: [T]he philosopher knows better than anyone that what is lived is livedspoken, that, born at this depth, language is not a mask over Being, but . . . the most valuable witness to Being, that it does not interrupt an immediation that would be perfect without it, that the vision itself, the thought itself are, as has been said, “structured as a language.” (VI, 126)

Although this has been characterized as an approving reference to Lacan,26 Merleau-Ponty continues the passage with a markedly un-Lacanian line of thought: If . . . we consider the speaking word, the assuming of the conventions of his native language as something natural by him who lives within that language, the folding over within him of the visible and the lived experience upon language, and of language upon the visible and the lived experience, the exchanges between the articulation of his mute language and those of his speech, finally that operative language which has no need to be translated into significations and thoughts, that language-thing which counts as an arm, as action, as offense and as seduction because it brings to the surface all the deeprooted relations of the lived experience wherein it takes form, and which is the language of life and of action but also that of literature and of poetry—then this logos is an absolutely universal theme, it is the theme of philosophy. (VI, 126)27



Any doubt that Merleau-Ponty disagreed with Lacan on this point is allayed in the working notes, published as an appendix to The Visible and the


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Invisible. In formulating the concept of the chiasm, Merleau-Ponty notes that “the cleavage, in what regards the essential, is not for Itself for the Other, (subject-ob-ject) it is more exactly that between someone who goes unto the world and who, from the exterior, seems to remain in his own ‘dream.’ . . . One cannot account for this double ‘chiasm’ by the cut of the For Itself and the cut of the In Itself. A relation to Being is needed that would form itself within Being” (VI, pp. 214–15). As Merleau-Ponty’s disagreement with Lacan would suggest, the phenomenologist sought to identify the features of language that most clearly resonate with his notion of the chiasm. And here Merleau-Ponty is very close to Wittgenstein. Far from a fantasy of originary consciousness, to seek a relation to Being “formed within Being”— that is the ethical relation to Being—is to insist, as Wittgenstein did, that ethics can only be reached indirectly, in the recognition that language depends on the fluidity of “forms of life” in a constant state of flux. Despite Lacan’s misreading of Merleau-Ponty’s “logos,” his critique initiated a fashion for dismissing phenomenology as ocularcentric. Luce Irigaray, for whom the visual is irredeemably contaminated by the phallocentric gaze, specifically targets Merleau-Ponty for what she perceives to be a totalizing gesture in his thought, resulting from his emphasis on visual perception.28 Irigaray writes: Vision is effectively a sense that can totalize, enclose, in its own way. More than the other senses, it is likely to construct a landscape, a horizon. Up to a certain point. It happens that movement is a more adequate way of building myself an aesthesiological body. And that, moving through the world, across the universe, or dancing, I construct more of a dwelling for myself than through vision. Merleau-Ponty would want it to be vision which closes. . . . It is simply a question of signifying that this privilege accorded to vision indeed gives it some dimensions that metaphysics neglects, but there still remains the privilege of this sense over the others.29

The distinction between the limited “landscape” of the visible and the fluid movement “through the world” that Irigaray associates with the tactile (with aesthesia) is nonetheless a distinction based on a conventional understanding of word and image that associates the temporality of sequential language with dynamic possibility and the static spatial character of vision with reification. It seems likely that Irigaray’s animosity toward the visual derives less from a tendency in Merleau-Ponty’s thought than a general distaste for the visual as permeated by colonial and Enlightenment discourse. In Fredric Jameson’s description, this colonial contamination marked the first phase of modern visuality: its capacity “to make other people over into things by way of the Look thus becomes the primal source


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of a domination and a subjection . . . of the colonizing gaze, of visibility as colonization.”30 Shakespeare begins A Midsummer Night’s Dream by staging a rather striking example of the totalizing patriarchal gaze Irigaray seeks to deconstruct. As I noted at the beginning of this chapter, when Egeus asserts his patriarchal privilege over Hermia, he does so in the language of vision, and he is immediately backed up by Theseus, the representative of patriarchal law who demands that her “eyes must with [her father’s] judgment look” (1.1.57). The destructive power of the oppressive gaze is undeniable, and its repudiation is at the root of the antiocularcentrism of twentieth-century thought, identified by Jay in Downcast Eyes. However, it is a mistake to identify the patriarchal, colonial, or otherwise reifying gaze with vision as such. Even at the height of its rhetorical power, the Enlightenment vision of mastery over nature figured in the discourse of scientific omniscience— the all-encompassing Western gaze—failed to contain the visual field.31 And as I have argued above, in the pre-Enlightenment context of sixteenth-century England, vision was associated with excess rather than containment. Fluid and articulate rather than static and mute, vision for Merleau-Ponty is considerably more dynamic than his critics suggest. Linda Martín Alcoff describes the “absence of mastery” in Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the visible as follows: “the capacity of the body to see, which has been centered in Western epistemology as the basis for mastery through a detached, objectifying gaze, is for Merleau-Ponty grounded in the body’s own visibility. . . . Thus, in one sense, it is our own objectification, our own embodiment in the world, and thus the very opposite of mastery that grounds the possibility of our seeing.”32 Merleau-Ponty’s interest is in sustaining the incongruity of language and perception in order to argue that perception is irreducible to systematic philosophical language. Despite his emphasis on vision, the phenomenologist never suggests that the tactile can be contained or enclosed by the visible in the operation of reversibility (of the chiasm). Merleau-Ponty’s late work offers a language of productive contradiction that is well suited to my reading of A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s oscillation between the poles of earthly and divine vision, of static law and ethical action. Although the law seems insurmountable at the opening of Shakespeare’s play, the action that ensues suggests otherwise.33 Shakespeare’s emphasis on perspectival translation in the form of the crossing of his various characters’ visions highlights the question of where one might locate the “sympathy in choice” that the lovers seek and which governs the ethical response. Shakespeare’s refusal to identify either the abstract immaterial ideal of love or the passionate attraction generated by the senses as the origin of a properly loving stance toward the other person leads to a suspended




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interrelation of sense and understanding like that described by Merleau-Ponty in the intertwining of the visible and the invisible. Both maintain the balance by going back to the singularity of embodied experience and emphasizing how perception and thought are coactive for the thinking subject. Merleau-Ponty remains intriguing precisely because his final work on perception advocates for a refusal of the synthesis that marks more systematic philosophical attempts to account for perception. Even a critic like Jay, actively looking for the continuity between Merleau-Ponty’s thinking and that of other markedly antivisual thinkers like Sartre, Foucault, and Bataille, sees in his thought an attention to the relation of the visual and verbal that does not end in a clear synthesis: “What consciousness misses in Being is the invisible inextricably intertwined with the visible in a chiasmic exchange that never achieves dialectical sublation.”34 III.

Ethics and the Song of Poetry

As in the rhetorical device of chiasmus, neither of the seemingly opposed terms in Merleau-Ponty’s chiasm—the visible and the invisible—contains the truth of meaning and the truth of Being. Just as “fair is foul,” and “foul is fair” for Shakespeare’s witches in Macbeth, in Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of perception, the visible is the invisible and the invisible is the visible. In each case, the paradox presents the occasion for an experience with truth, but not by overcoming the visible to reach the invisible as one might learn from Renaissance Neo-Platonism or Reformation iconoclasm. The experience of the chiasm is profound—even spiritual—but it is as dependent on the embodied experience of the world as it is on the invisible that lies beyond. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare’s meditation on the ethics of vision reaches its climax—and becomes most chiasmatic—in the episode known as “Bottom’s Dream.”35 Importantly Shakespeare gives the scene to a weaver whose name emphasizes his occupation, as “bottom” was current for “bobbin” in medieval and early modern usage. Just as the bobbin serves the weaver as the “clew or nucleus on which to wind thread,” Bottom is at the center of the chiasm or intertwining of ethics of vision in the play.36 The entire passage is as follows: I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about t’expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had—but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of


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Bottom’s report is a parody of 1 Corinthians 2:9: But as it is written: The eye hath noth seen, and the ear hath not heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him. But God hath opened them unto us by his spirit. For the Spirit searcheth all things, yea the bottom of God’s secrets.37

The scriptural passage relies on the kind of reversal that Merleau-Ponty describes with the term chiasm. To have God’s truth opened up by spirit— to “see” the truth—one must refuse the logic of perception itself; Paul evokes the word (“for as it is written”) in order to refute the world, what the eye has seen. But Paul’s celebration of the ineffable also contains within it an inevitable reference to the material: the written record. Although it is not certain which verse Paul quotes when he indicates that “it is written,” a likely candidate is the Old Testament book of Isaiah 64:4: “For since the beginning of the worlde it hath not ben hearde or perceaued, neither hath any eye seene another God beside thee, whiche doest so muche for them that put their trust in thee.”38 The contrast between the two verses is striking, as Paul’s version denies the possibility of any material experience with the truth of God’s love, while the verse from Isaiah justifies the greatness of God on the basis of the superiority of what has been seen of His work “since the beginning of the world.” Paul’s emphasis on the ineffable in the Corinthians passage highlights the difficulty of articulating the truth of the Christian God, of representing what St. Anselm abstractly defined as that “than which no greater can be conceived.” Without recourse to such an intellectualized definition of God—and charged with the task (only available in retrospect) of universalizing Christianity—Paul’s ineffable is strikingly rooted in the material world. Although playfully reworking the Corinthians passage, Bottom’s confused rendition sustains the tension between the imperfect senses and the perfect knowledge that can only be described through a negation of that imperfection (“the eye hath not seen,” “ear hath not heard,” and so on). In retaining the form but mixing up the senses and their stimuli, Bottom not only retains the metaphysical complexity of Paul’s message, but also draws attention to it. For rather than rejecting the sensual world in favor of a deferred paradise, Bottom revels in the physicality of his recent experience, choosing a


this dream. It shall be called “Bottom’s Dream”, because it hath no bottom, and I will sing it in the latter end of a play, before the Duke. Peradventure, to make it more gracious, I shall sing it at her death. (4.2.199–211)


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scriptural commonplace that would be meaningless without recourse to the sensual experiences on which Paul’s comparison depends. The scriptural passage had considerable purchase in the word-centered reformation context of Elizabethan England, ensuring that the underlying theme would have been readily apparent to the audience.39 To underscore the message, and add a further irony, Shakespeare locates this speech immediately after a theatrical spectacle of earthly reveling, the scenes in which Bottom, reduced to a beast, is offered the full range of physical pleasures. Having witnessed what no eye could hear (or see for that matter), the audience can then laugh at Bottom’s attempt to come to terms with his bottomless vision. He imagines that he has awakened from a dream “past the wit of man to say what dream it was.” His attempt to bring the unrepresentable experience under the power of discourse is foregrounded by his inability to reconcile his waking understanding (reason) and the vivid spectacle of the fantasy enacted only moments before on the same stage. More than a parody of the passage from Corinthians, the episode as a whole constitutes a general parody, which might be described as semiserious, of early modern Protestant epistemology. Bottom experiences an exaggerated instance of the gap between perception and understanding (the sensible and the intelligible), which Merleau-Ponty describes as “that between someone who goes unto the world and who, from the exterior, seems to remain in his own ‘dream’” (VI, 214). And the weaver (mark the occupation) would indeed be a “patched fool” if it were not for the manner in which he resolves the paradox that he has seen what “is past the wit of man to say”: he turns to art.40 In a scene filled with silliness and contradiction, this is a profoundly humane move on Bottom’s part. By moving the attempt to contain his rare vision from the realm of reason (“wit”) to the realm of art, Bottom diffuses the charge of contradiction. The impulse to art as a response to the unrepresentable (confirmed by his promise to “sing it” at Thisby’s death) transforms Bottom from the simple clown (the rude mechanical) into Shakespeare’s other form of fool, who, like Lear’s fool, is able to speak truth through indirection. It is fitting that Jan Kott describes Bottom’s double role in the play with a chiasmus: “Seriousness is mockery and mockery is seriousness.”41 What Bottom practices here is a disruptive intertwining of sense and reason in which disparate experiential phenomena are made to mean not by subjecting them to a discursive order, but by shaking the foundations of the traditional epistemology that can no longer accommodate them. Bottom’s response to the unrepresentable is to face the operation of the chiasm head on—to act on the latent awareness that the senses and the understanding mutually inform the representational impulses through which all knowledge is made manifest. Put another way, the only way for him to hear what he has


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seen is to hear it as “a gaze of the mind,” that is, to reimagine cognitively what he has just experienced sensually. Although he has mangled the scripture, he learned its lesson, which is more than can be said for his epistemological alter ego, Duke Theseus, for whom “the lunatic, the lover and the poet are of imagination all compact.” As Louis Montrose has argued, Bottom’s account of his dream becomes suggestively serious when paired with Theseus’s unforgiving account of imagination: “Theseus’s deprecation of lunatics, lovers and poets is his unwitting exposition of the scope and limits of his own wisdom.”42 For Montrose the issue is power, and it is Theseus’s failure to recognize the limitations of his own power of perception that allows the play within the play, and by extension, Shakespeare’s play to embody and enable the counterhegemonic concerns of players and workers in Elizabethan England. In denying the lunatic, lover, and poet the seriousness of the state, in other words, Theseus in fact opens those roles up to the representation of sociocultural dissention. The play pushes all involved to consider how they see themselves and others as well as how others might see them. What Bottom has seen (but cannot say) is the world through the eyes of his social superiors. Bottom observes the world from what amounts to Oberon’s position, which in turn mirrors Theseus’s position. Most importantly, throughout the fantasy he is served by the underclass, the undifferentiated others (who can tell Peaseblossom and Mustardseed apart?), who comprise the fairy equivalent of the rude mechanicals, that is, of himself. Naturally he cannot say what he has seen. Moreover, Bottom’s response is striking for its precision in confusion. Despite having announced that he will have a ballad made of the dream, Bottom’s final speech of the act amounts to an equivocal disavowal of the epistemological domain of language: “I am to discourse wonders; but ask me not what. For if I tell you, I am no true Athenian. I will tell you everything right as it fell out” (4.2.25–27). When asked to tell, however, he refuses: “Not a word of me” (4.2.29). For Bottom, to “discourse wonders” is not to explain, but it is to tell the truth, “everything right as it fell out.” This definition of truth does not conflict with the scriptural notion of the truth opened up to the believer through Spirit, but it grants the world more play in the process of revealing. It clearly indicates a realm of thought beyond reason, offering, as Theseus puts it, “more than cool reason ever comprehends.” Relying instead on an imaginative engagement with the world not unlike that attributed pejoratively by Theseus to “the poet’s eye,” Bottom’s response is poetic in the broadest sense:



The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,


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Theseus’s satirical rendering of the poetic Idea described by Sidney in The Apology is not only an accurate account of what Sidney was after, but it also strikes me as a fairly clear articulation of the role of word and image in the interrelated processes of perception and understanding that guide ethical action. As disruptive as the “fine frenzy” is to the practical truths and abstract moral laws that govern Theseus’s world of reason, the movement between understanding and experience that defines the frenzy also defines the ethical human subject. For as Theseus remarks, it is in this state that one can glance from Earth to Heaven and Heaven to Earth—that is from visible to invisible and invisible to visible—without privileging either. That the resultant forms flow from the poet’s pen, suggesting the priority of language, need not be an indication of a necessary synthesis, if one accepts Merleau-Ponty’s claim that while “philosophy itself is language, rests on language . . . this does not disqualify it from speaking of language, nor from speaking of the pre-language and of the mute world which doubles them: on the contrary, philosophy is an operative language, that language that can be known only from within, through its exercise.” (VI, 126). What Bottom sees in a very real sense is the truth of his own existence. The inexpressibility of that truth is not a simple feature of his social oppression, his marginality as part of an underclass, or a result of his lack of civility (signaled by malapropism, naiveté, etc.). Rather, this truth can only be glimpsed in the moment of waking from a dream; it exists in the liminal space between the familiar and the fantastic—the point of crossing over, of the chiasm, of the Wild Being, of imagination. Such rare visions as Bottom’s dream disrupt those accepted commonplaces, agitating and unsettling them, challenging their epistemological assumptions. At the same time, however, it is crucial to remember that such experiences would not be rare if they did not disrupt something equally necessary, for without “habitual evidences” there is nothing to disjoin. In maintaining both poles of the visible and the invisible, the play establishes its ethical imperative to never stop, never opt for either the comfort of reason and law (as do Egeus or Theseus) or the fullness of the sensuous experience (Bottom’s experience with Titania). The ethical demand of the visual inheres in the ability to move between both realms, remaining attuned to what has been in order to ethically respond to what is to come.


And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. (5.1.2–22)


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The Ethics of Temporality in Measure for Measure All difficulties are but easy when they are known. Measure for Measure, 4.2.205–6

E

ven before the play had begun, the very title of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure would have given its first audiences a reference point for the subsequent action: Jesus’ words of caution in the Sermon on the Mount, “judge not that ye be not judged, for with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged, and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again” (Matt. 7:1–2).1 As the scriptural reference would suggest, the play’s ostensible theme is “proper judgment,” and its extension, justice, especially insofar as the notion of justice pertains to the relation of the individual to the state. Moreover, this theme is placed squarely in the context of religious debate—specifically politico-theological debate—highlighted by the reference to the Sermon. The play’s commentary on the state/subject dyad has been given serious consideration in important recent work on Shakespeare and political theology, notably that of Debora Shuger and Julia Reinhard Lupton.2 Such work extends a long line of commentary about the play’s position on religion’s role in the sovereign’s delivery of good rule and the application of law.3 Specifically, recent work addresses how Measure for Measure might help clarify what early moderns saw as the proper balance between the application of earthly justice (the law of the world) and the distribution of mercy with its deferral of judgment to eternal justice (the eternal judgment of souls that is always to come). I seek to build on such critical discussions of political theology centered on historical debates by turning explicitly to the philosophical and spiritual (religious) questions that underlie early modern debates over political theology—questions that emerge from Shakespeare’s engagement with ethics


CHAPTER 5


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and vision in Measure for Measure from the point of view of a literary dramaturge rather than a churchman or moral philosopher. My aim here is not to adjudicate the debate over Shakespeare’s confession—judging the relative compatibility of his dramatic representation with Calvinist, Lutheran, or Roman Catholic theology—but rather to examine his treatment of ethics in the context of the swirl of theological and philosophical debate resulting from a century of renaissance and reformation. To isolate the religious and philosophical issues raised by Shakespeare’s play, I will focus rather narrowly on the temporal dimension of ethics as just action: the fact that action always precedes judgment, or to put it in slightly different terms, that judgment is always retrospective, while action is always future directed, always involved in the process of becoming. This temporal problem at the heart of ethics is also at the center of the scriptural source from which Shakespeare takes his title: for Jesus’ cautionary advice to “judge not that ye be not judged” places judgment (of another’s past action) in the context of one’s own future judgment at the hands of another (ultimately the absolutely Other, God). In what follows, I specifically focus on the ways in which Measure for Measure addresses the issue of ethical temporality by contrasting the visible and the invisible, through the play’s emphasis on form and figurality. As Lisa Freinkel notes, “Judgment is only possible on the basis of comparison— what is alien is not familiar, what is new is not old.”4 In the context of the debate over the place of ethics in earthly and eternal justice, the basis of comparison is complicated by the paradox of Christian mystery: if we know the new by comparing it to what it is not (the old), then how can we accept Christ’s claim in the Sermon on the Mount: “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy them, but to fulfill them” (Matt. 5.17). The answer, variously expressed by Christian authorities from St. Paul to Luther, is that what is being compared is not comparable in fact but only in figure. Take, for example, Paul’s comparison in 1 Corinthians, discussed in the previous chapter: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass darkly; but then shall we see face-to-face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as I am known” (1 Cor. 13:11–12). Calvin emphasized the figural character of the passage in his commentary on the epistle: “[Paul] maketh that which he hath spoken before, manifest by a similitude.”5 The comparison of “seeing then” to “seeing now” is incomprehensible without temporality. The difference between the two forms of vision is generated by their separation in time; unlike comparing two paintings side by side, the comparison of then and now is not simply


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a matter of the differences and similarities between two visual fields, but is also contingent upon the intervention of time in the process of perception. Moreover, while the comparison of childhood and adulthood offers an accessible illustration of the relational difference between developing and mature human understanding, the point of the passage is to inspire belief in that which cannot be known: what it will be like to be face-to-face with God. In fact, the concept of “being face-to-face with God” is a wholly material and intensely visual conceptualization of salvation, a future state that is unavailable to visual experience.6 The incongruous comparison here is none other than allegory: human coming of age as an allegory of spiritual salvation. And in this way the problem of bridging the gap between Old Testament Law and New Testament Love melts away into the contours of figurality. But it does so in a formally specific manner that is important to the current consideration of ethics in Measure for Measure. As Freinkel points out, Paul’s allegorical treatment of the relation of the old and new relies on a figure of chiasmus, which is further developed by Augustine in his articulation of Paul’s revelation: “In the Old Testament there is a concealment of the New, in the New Testament there is a revelation of the Old.”7 Augustine’s employment of chiasmus, what would become one of Shakespeare’s favorite figures, appears to be no solution at all, as it “turns temporal difference back upon itself. Repetition becomes inversion and inversion takes us back to where we started.”8 But as Freinkel observes: This suspension is, ultimately, an illusion—if only because of language’s temporal dimension: AB comes before BA. Indeed, chiasmus relies upon the fact of this temporality, for it is only insofar as chiasmus enforces a revision . . . that the trope avoids tautology, yielding instead a sense of development: we feel we have gotten somewhere. In this way chiasmus, we might argue, is the trope built out of that recursive movement essential to construing linear syntax: its repetitions enforce rereadings—we double back and thus move forward.9

The temporal dimension of ethics that I hope to describe below relies on precisely this kind of opportunity to “double back and thus move forward” in the course of one’s experience of the world. While Freinkel is referring specifically to the rhetorical trope of chiasmus, and specifically to the character of linguistic temporality, I will continue to draw on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological exploration of the figure in order to extend the chiastic movement Freinkel describes to a reading of the theatrical representation of embodied experience in Measure for Measure.


The Ethics of Temporality in Measure for Measure


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I.

Phenomenology, Religion, Ethics

As I hoped to show in the previous chapter, embodied experience is for Merleau-Ponty always a matter of doubling back and moving forward, in the process that he describes as “intertwining” or the chiasm. Merleau-Ponty attempts to move beyond the conventional mind-body problem by proposing an alternate mode for embodied experience, one inspired by the “uncontested evidence that one must see or feel in order to think, that every thought known to us occurs to a flesh.”10 What separates Merleau-Ponty from more straightforward materialist or behaviorist thinkers is his notion of “flesh.” While a complete account of Merleau-Ponty’s “flesh” is beyond the limits of this study, as a point of reference, consider this relevant passage: The flesh we are speaking of is not matter. It is the coiling over of the visible upon the seeing body, of the tangible upon the touching body, which is attested in particular when the body sees itself, touches itself seeing and touching the things, such that, simultaneously, as tangible it descends among them, as touching it dominates them all and draws this relationship and even this double relationship from itself, by dehiscence or fission of its own mass.11

In this passage Merleau-Ponty articulates a central insight of phenomenological thought: that an understanding of embodied experience is contingent upon the double reflection that occurs when one is aware of the interaction between the conscious and the sensual aspects of a particular phenomenal moment, when it makes sense to describe the experience as one of “seeing oneself seeing.” Despite the level of abstraction required to delineate the conceptual relationships Merleau-Ponty seeks to explain here, his analysis remains grounded in the particularity of human experience. His attention never strays from the singularity of an individual’s embodied interaction with the world in time. Nevertheless, his account has overt religious—specifically Christian—rhetorical echoes. The experience in which the “tangible descends among them” recalls Christ’s descent to earth in human form, and the resulting “dehiscence or fission” of the mass (seemingly whole) prior to the exchange is not unlike the process of kenosis that resolves the paradox of Christ’s relationship to both God and man. Kenosis derives from Philippians 2.7, where Paul describes Christ’s descent as an emptying [␬␧´␯␻␴␫ς] of his divinity: “But he made himself of no reputation, and took on him the form of a servant, and was made like unto men, and was found in shape as a man.”12 It is not surprising, then, that the most important heir to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological enterprise, Jean-Luc Marion, has taken the method in an explicitly Christian direction. Where Merleau-Ponty places emphasis on the excess of perceptual experience—that which allows for conceptual


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revision—Marion identifies the trace of the divine. Merleau-Ponty notes that perception “asserts more things than it grasps,” by which he means that no perceptual experience captures the full range of possible interrelations between phenomenon and apprehension.13 The implication is that one must return to the experience on reflection and that a subsequent similar experience could result in radically different conceptual understanding. The stakes are overtly ethical, for as Jorella Andrews argues, “perception as he defines it . . . is . . . ethically productive. . . . [T]he ethics in question challenges traditional positions in that it is not the discovery and application of ‘universally valid’ rules, principles, or rights that are presented as foundational, but involvement in perceptual acts experienced as ongoing and unstable.”14 For Merleau-Ponty such an ethics of perceptual instability is a condition of human embodied experience and its temporal embeddedness. Only when one seeks to extract systematic principles or laws from experience does one escape temporality, and then the price is far too high, for to escape temporality is to “withdraw into the core of our thinking” or, as Andrews puts it, to “relinquish our primordial embeddedness in perception.”15 From a Christian perspective, of course, the emancipation from temporality is the desired end, albeit always deferred. Thus, for Marion the method of phenomenological reduction that serves Merleau-Ponty’s goal of eschewing dogmatic philosophical proscription becomes the method by which to avoid the pitfalls of traditional ontotheology. Specifically, as I discussed in Chapter 2, Marion seeks to recuperate the icon by taking it out of the metaphysical and mimetic tradition and distinguishing it from the idol. As long as the image is predicated on a known prototype, it is in danger of becoming an idol. When looking at an idol, the visual act is constrained by the prototype and the desire to judge how nearly the idol approximates the original. Like all dogmatic ontotheology according to Marion, this is to approach the divine from the wrong direction. Alternately, Marion suggests, “the icon is given not to be seen but to be venerated”: The “respectful veneration” is not to be confused with adoration: the one, in effect, is concerned with a (real) nature, the other a (irreal [sic] intentional) gaze; before the icon, one should not adore, since the visible and real support (the image in its materiality) does not merit what a divine nature alone demands.16



The process by which “respectful veneration” occurs is what Marion calls the “kenosis of the image.” Emptied of its purported representational characteristics, the icon is able to suggest the trace of the invisible: A dulled, dressed-down image . . . the icon allows another gaze, which it gives to be seen, to suddenly appear through it. . . . The self renunciation of


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the image itself—a condition of its transformation into an icon—is thus accomplished in the obedience of the one who shed his face, renouncing his visibility in order to do the will of God. By this paradoxical glory, Christ displays the logic of the iconic image. . . . In fact it is precisely at the moment that he loses his human appearance [figure] that Christ becomes the figure of the divine will: in him, it is no longer his human appearance [figure] that is imagined [se figure]; and shedding appearance, he gives shape [donne figure] to a holiness that would have remained invisible without the shrine [écrin] (not screen [écran]) of his body.17

What becomes visible for Marion is the invisible truth of the Christian God, made visible at precisely the moment that the visible is effaced. As I argued in Chapter 2, Marion’s formulation is particularly well suited to a discussion of Spenserian visuality (especially in the Theatre and Shepheardes Calendar). It seems clear that Marion, like Spenser, begins with his belief in the immaterial God and then seeks to reconcile the experience of the phenomenal world to his belief in a truth that cannot be reached through such experience. On the other hand, for Merleau-Ponty, the invisible (immaterial truth) remains temporally bound to the figure of the unknowability of the future, and it is this feature that makes MerleauPonty’s phenomenology particularly germane to the present discussion of Shakespeare’s dramatic technique. II.

Dramatic Embodiment

Measure for Measure raises the issue of embodied experience in its opening scenes. The topic of judgment as temporal comparison (old and new) is expressed explicitly in terms of figural embodiment: Duke Vincentio requests that Escalus render a judgment of his future substitute, Angelo, with the question, “What figure of us think you he will bear?” (1.1.16). Interestingly, the Duke has already made up his mind to deputize Angelo, having “with special soul / Elected him our absence to supply, / Lent him our terror, dressed him with our love, / And given his deputation all the organs / Of our own pow’r” (1.1.17–21).18 The Duke’s awareness of a dissonance between the outward features of his power and something like Angelo’s inner nature signals a central tension in the play’s epistemology.19 The Duke explains that his choice of Angelo is a result of what he has seen: “There is a kind of character in thy life, / That to th’ observer doth thy history/Fully unfold” (1.1.27–29).20 And Angelo’s response is similarly expressed in terms of figure: “Let there be some more test made of my mettle/Before so noble and so great a figure/Be stamp’d upon it” (1.1.47–50). This brief dialogue


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introduces one of the play’s most important themes: the relation of invisible character to outward appearance. The comparison to the impression of the monarch’s figure on the coin—common in Shakespeare—takes on additional force here in the context of the previous dialogue, raising the question: which is more important, the mettle (or metal) to be stamped or the figure that results from the impression?21 It would seem that the Duke’s test, if that is what it is, rests on the assumption that even the most well defined of public personas are no guarantee of true character.22 In a subsequent scene, the Duke describes Angelo to Friar Thomas as “precise”; he “Stands at a guard with envy; scarce confesses / That his blood flows; or that his appetite / Is more to bread than stone” (1.3.51–53). But rather than the expected conclusion—Bassanio’s lament in The Merchant of Venice that “the outward shows be least themselves” (3.2.73)—in Measure for Measure the dynamic between inner character and outward appearance is not so clear. The Duke’s suggestion that Angelo’s inner character is available to all who look on him would seem to prove false as the action proceeds, and yet, epistemologically, it is the same suggestion that he makes (apparently accurately) to Isabella later in the play.23 Rather than a simple dichotomy (external/internal), the play offers instead a more subtle articulation of the relationship between appearance and truth, figure and its invisible referent. When Angelo succumbs to the material world—recognizing for the first time that he too has bodily desires—his soliloquy turns on the rhetoric of visible form: O place, O form, How often dost thou with thy case, thy habit, Wrench awe from fools, and tie the wiser souls To thy false seeming! Blood, thou art blood. Let’s write ‘good Angel’ on the devil’s horn, ’Tis not the devil’s crest. (2.4.12–17)

Later as his plan begins to consume him, he turns again to form with the recognition: “This deed unshapes me quite” (4.4.20). And yet in his emerging self-awareness, Angelo recognizes that his constitutional transformation is not mirrored in his outward appearance. In the same soliloquy he muses that his “authority bears of a credent bulk, / That no particular scandal once can touch” (4.4.26–27). What is “unshaped,” we learn, is his spirit— “when once our grace we have forgot, / Nothing goes right” (4.4.33–34). The static image of the severe judge remains despite his actions, but the state of his soul now “unshaped” mars the outcome of his experience in time: “nothing goes right.”




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Isabella is introduced with a similar emphasis on form, but rather than outward appearance, it is the lack of emphasis on her figure that is striking (especially considering the action to follow): “in her youth / There is a prone and speechless dialect, / such as move men; beside, she hath prosperous art / When she will play with reason and discourse, / And well she can persuade” (1.2.182–86). The use of “prone” here has been something of a puzzle. Shakespeare consistently uses the word in the sense “apt” or “inclined to,” and it has been glossed thus by many editors.24 But it is not clear how the word so defined modifies “dialect,” unless the syntax is manipulated: “her dialect is prone to move men.” Arden editor J. W. Lever claims that Claudio uses the word to indicate “the abject posture of submission or helplessness.” While this is linguistically plausible, the Isabella we soon meet is hardly submissive or helpless, even when faced with a lecherous and powerful adversary. More to the point, neither reading of prone explains the paradoxical “speechless dialect,” which it seems can only refer to visual appearance, for as we find out when Isabella appears, her dialect (her language) is not inclined to moving men (except Angelo, of course).25 The natural conclusion is that Claudio is describing her looks: men are moved without words— youthful beauty is a universal language. Lucio’s words upon first seeing Isabella further complicate the play’s epistemological stance on the relation of visible appearance to ontological status: “Hail, virgin, if you be, as those cheek-roses / Proclaim you are no less” (1.4.16–17). In another play, perhaps, the assumption that all young women are virgins could be taken on its face, but spoken by Lucio and in the Vienna of Measure for Measure, the comment points to significant epistemological questions. It is true that the play’s central conflict is generated in part by the visual proof of Juliet and Claudio’s indiscretion—“The stealth of our most mutual entertainment / With character too gross is writ on Juliet” (1.2.154–55). But proof of virginity is not available visually.26 Lucio’s slightly hesitant “if you be” signals that he is aware of the epistemological problem, despite the likelihood that he is correct (he is, after all, at the gate of a nunnery). As Lucio’s qualified observation suggests, the belief that knowledge of a person’s invisible character can be derived from outward form is complicated in Measure for Measure at the same time that a rhetorical emphasis on the body, visible form, and perceptual intuition suggests that invisible character is intertwined with outward appearance. Isabella confirms as much in her description of Angelo:


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Where is the essence and where the appearance here? The question is complicated further by Isabella’s explanation: “O, ‘tis the cunning livery of hell, / The damned’st body to invest and cover / In prenzie guards” (3.1.94–96).27 Here it is the “damnedest body” rather than the inner character that is concealed, “cover[d]” by the clothing of authority, or the appearance of virtue. While it is not clear what it would take to “cast” his “filth within,” Isabel suggests that if it were done, his evil would “appear”: we would be able to see his true essence. Importantly, this revelation is deferred to an undetermined future. Isabel’s understanding of the relationship between Angelo’s appearance and his inner character relies not on a dualist conception of mind and body, but on an understanding of body and soul as existing in a chiastic relationship. Similarly, in the Duke’s first overture to Isabella he offers the same account of the soul-body relationship, but in positive terms: “The hand that hath made thee fair hath made you good; the goodness that is cheap in beauty makes beauty brief in goodness; but grace, being the soul of your complexion, shall keep the body of it ever fair” (3.1.180–84). The Duke’s speech is a complex chiasmus, signaling the intertwining of world and mind, body and soul, appearance and essence. But as with Isabel’s description of Angelo, the key to the relational model’s explanatory power is missing. Angelo appears virtuous to all who look on him, despite his inequity. Isabel is desperate to protect her virtue despite that her beautiful appearance is proof enough for Vincentio that grace is the soul of her complexion; she confirms to Claudio that chastity is all: “were it but my life, / I’d throw it down for your deliverance / As frankly as a pin” (3.1.102–04).28 The intertwining here of visible beauty and invisible grace relies on the Duke’s use of chiasmus, that most temporal of tropes: the hand made you good and that which produced your beauty serves as proof that the hand made you good. The sense of doubling back to move forward is most clear in the outcome, which is to exempt Isabel from the instability of temporal existence: her state of grace “shall keep the body of it ever fair” (my emphasis). The deployment of a temporal figure to shore up faith in the possibility of an atemporal state highlights the difficulty of representing the ethical, a difficulty that Shakespeare’s play brings into sharp relief. Temporality is also at the heart of Angelo’s insistence on a precise demarcation of the line between abstraction and lived experience (ideas and


Nips youth i’ th’ head, and follies doth enew As falcon doth the fowl, is yet a devil: His filth within being cast, he would appear A pond as deep as hell. (3.1.88–93)


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actions): “tis one thing to be tempted, another to fall” (2.1.17–18). Angelo would not have to look far to find a counterargument from the highest authority. In the Sermon on the Mount Christ dissolves the distinction on which Angelo’s argument relies: “I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart” (Matt. 5:28). Nevertheless, in the context of earthly, rather than spiritual, law, there is no recourse to the internal thoughts of others. Angelo, like any legal authority, is bound to what can be seen; he explains his empirical justice to Escalus: ’Tis one thing to be tempted, Escalus, Another thing to fall. I 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. What knows the laws That thieves do pass on thieves? ’Tis very pregnant, The jewel that we find, we stoop and take’t Because we see it; but what we do not see We tread upon, and never think of it. You may not so extenuate his offense For I have had such faults; but rather tell me, When I, that censure him, do so offend, Let mine own judgment pattern out my death, And nothing come in partial. (2.1.17–31)

Angelo’s pragmatic approach to the law clearly defines the visible as the purview of earthly justice. Although by his own report Angelo had never been tempted before meeting Isabella—“Ever till now / When men were fond, I smil’d, and wond’red how” (2.2.185–86)—he makes no effort to answer Escalus’s question: if you had the desire and opportunity, is it possible that you would make the same mistake as Claudio? Escalus is clearly in tune with Christ’s message in the Sermon, which is not concerned with material offenses but spiritual comportment: do not feel better about not having committed adultery if you yearn internally to commit it. Of course, the prohibition against judgment in the Sermon on the Mount is a prohibition against the judgment of individuals rather than actions. Elsewhere in the Sermon, Jesus is quite clear about actions deserving of negative judgment. For example, correcting the notion that He has come to reject the law, Jesus extends the law to heaven: “Whosoever


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therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall observe and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 5:19). But the judgment of individuals is a matter of judging another’s soul, and this must be left to God. Put in slightly different terms, this logic in no way contradicts the law that defines some actions as morally wrong, but it reserves judgment on the status of the individual guilty of committing the act: “hate the sin, not the sinner.” While this axiom makes sense in the context of Christian theology, Shakespeare reminds his audience that the difficulty comes in the application of earthly justice, as the presumed restraint of hatred for the sinner runs counter to the retributive violence of judicial punishment. It is not possible to punish the sin, as Angelo rightly points out in his juridical debate with Isabella: 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 stand in record, and let go by the actor. (2.2.37–40)

Isabella’s response, “O just but severe law!” acknowledges the clarity of Angelo’s logic here, but without addressing the larger temporal problem left out of Angelo’s account. His claim that “the faults” fine stands “in record” is based on the assumption that right and wrong are always known rather than elicited through reflection on the situation at hand.29 The play’s later rejection of strict retributive justice provides the critique of Angelo’s conclusion without actually denying its logic. The faults are still wrong, but the role of the judge in punishing those faults is not simply to insist on the principle of “measure for measure” or “an eye for an eye.” Shakespeare briefly offers the satisfaction that retributive justice delivers in the Duke’s performative declaration of Angelo’s sentence: The very mercy of the law cries out Most audible, even from his proper tongue, ‘An Angelo for Claudio; death for death!’ Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure; Like doth quite like, and Measure still for Measure. Then, Angelo, thy fault’s thus manifested; Which though thou wouldst deny, denies thee vantage. (5.1.407–413)




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O my dread lord, I should be guiltier than my guiltiness, To think I can be undiscernible, When I perceive your Grace, like pow’r divine, Hath look’d upon my passes. Then, good Prince, No longer session hold upon my shame, But let my trial be mine own confession. Immediate sentence, then, and sequent death Is all the grace I beg. (5.1.366–74)

Angelo makes good on his earlier claim to Escalus that if he were to be discovered committing a crime, he would accept the punishment. But the crime for which the Duke sentences him to death is not the same as that on which he judged Claudio. According to the Duke, the “fault” for which he is condemned is his treatment of Claudio: his “double violation / Of sacred chastity and of promise-breach” (5.1.404–05). Having just pardoned Angelo for wronging Isabella’s “well defended honor,” the Duke’s reference to the violation of “scared chastity” suggests that Angelo violated his own chastity by harboring lecherous intentions. The second charge also turns the judgment away from the tangible effects of Angelo’s actions to his spiritual condition. He is indeed guilty of “promise-breach,” but by this point in the play the audience already knows that Claudio has been spared. It is here that the play returns to the Sermon as its guiding scriptural reference. And clearly, the Sermon fails to support the application of the law in this manner: “Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, Resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” (Matt. 5:38–39).30 Thus, at the very moment that the play offers satisfaction in the form of retributive justice, it recalls Jesus’s plea to eschew this urge and internalize the retribution for sin—to turn from the judgment of the other to the judgment of the self. In redirecting the urge for external justice to the internal self, the Sermon might be seen to undercut the law. What function does the law serve if not to adjudicate human action and meet out punishment? Seeking an answer to this question was a concern for medieval and reformation political theology alike, and as the previous discussion suggests, Shakespeare’s play engages with the question directly.


The sequence of events here is particularly interesting for the present discussion of the temporal dimension of ethics. The Duke’s claim that Angelo “woulds’t deny” anything is peculiar considering that some forty lines earlier Angelo was the one to witness the manifestation of his fault:


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Huston Diehl suggests that Shakespeare’s representation of the law in Measure for Measure owes its logic to Calvin: “For Calvin, the law . . . serves a vital function: by revealing our inherent sinfulness, it produces dissatisfaction with the self, a dissatisfaction that, because it initiates the process of repentance, is essential for salvation.”31 Central to Calvin’s account is the penitent’s renunciation of the earthly self in favor of an eternal judge. Submission to an absolute other is contingent upon a process of selfeffacement. And it is ultimately this process of self-effacement that will have the natural consequence of cultivating a Christian society in which mercy governs judgment. Clearly Shakespeare’s meditations on questions of ethics and judgment reflect his understanding of this system of political theology, but they also suggest his skepticism of this seamless wedding of earthly and spiritual judgment. Pace Portia in The Merchant of Venice, the quality of mercy is indeed strained in that play. And in Measure for Measure Shakespeare risks a representation of Christian mercy that is strained beyond the breaking point. The Duke’s sensible declaration that “the very mercy of the law cries out” for Angelo to be punished is followed by the implausible scene of Isabel’s plea for the life of the man responsible (she thinks) for her brother’s death and the attempt to deflower a would-be nun.32 Rather than parrot Christian views on repentance, ethics, justice, and mercy, Shakespeare reserves judgment on every system that would proscribe, or prescribe, a particular course of action. By staging the dilemmas inherent in the opposition between old and new, law and mercy, earthly and spiritual justice, Shakespeare makes visible an array of coherent images that will be shattered in the course of time. Emphasizing the critical role of time, the temporal resolutions to these dilemmas are simultaneously inevitable and withheld. III.

Penitential Ethics

What then, if anything, can Measure for Measure say about temporality and ethics? Rather than a helpless lament for the world’s irredeemable corruption, Measure for Measure represents an extended reflection on human action in time, one with important insights into the place of ethics in our experience of the world. In this final section, I will argue specifically that Measure for Measure presents a “penitential ethics” in which the penitent is concerned not with his or her responsibility to the law or a concept of justice, but with the situation at hand, acknowledging that judgment of any course of action must be deferred to an inaccessible future. Viewed in this manner, ethics might look entirely secular and material. Such is the view put forward by Alain Badiou in Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil.33 For Badiou,




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true ethics calls for radical fidelity to a truth event. The truth event is only recognizable in retrospect for its alteration of the course of human history (Einstein’s theory, for example, but also the moment one falls in love). What Badiou ejects from ethics is any form of absolute other, even a supposedly desacralized version of the absolute other, as in Levinas’s account of radical alterity.34 In the case of Shakespeare, it would be going too far to suggest that the playwright evacuated ethics of its religious content. Shakespeare, like Levinas, retains a form of radical alterity in his emphasis on time. And, if one accepts Badiou’s argument that “every effort to turn ethics into the principle of thought and action is essentially religious,” it is in the continual reference to time as the ultimate judge that Shakespeare’s play becomes a play about religion (as opposed to being a play about doctrinal or theological disputes). Rather than presenting a play that seeks to represent a compromise between Puritanism and Catholicism, Calvin and Luther, or the Old and New Testament articulations of law and mercy, I suggest that Shakespeare engaged with the foundations of ethical thought in a way that requires the spectator to set aside conclusions about proper judgment (always to come) and focus on one’s experience of the world in time. Now this might sound patently absurd, given the contours of a Christian penitential theology in which retribution, satisfaction, and restitution loom large. In each case the act of penance is intended to amend the past: accepting punishment in the case of retribution, offering to make up for an injury against another in the case of satisfaction and restitution. But if we bracket the material acts of penance developed in medieval penitential theology and consider the penitent in terms of orientation, as a state of existence, the aneconomic kernel of penitential comportment comes into focus. Mercy is offered to the penitent not as absolution but as a figure for salvation, a figural expression that the penitent is indeed saved. Only the repentant are open to salvation. Considered in this way, it is easier to make more sense of the mercy granted to the seemingly irredeemable characters that populate Shakespeare’s play. The question, of course, is how to determine penitential comportment if not for some outward show of contrition. William Tyndall addressed precisely this question in The Obedience of a Christian Man: Penance is a word of their own forging, to deceive us withal, as many others are. In the Scripture we find poenitentia, ‘repentance:’ agite poenitentia, ‘do repent;’ poeniteatuos, ‘let it repent you:’ metanoite, in Greek, ‘forthink ye,’ or ‘let it forthink you.’ Of repentance they have made penance, to blind the people, and to make them think they must take pains, and do some holy deeds, to make satisfaction for their sins; namely such as they enjoin them.35


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Penance as the penitential act is the institutional solution to the problem of spiritual penitential comportment, but it is a solution, according to Tyndale that relies on a misunderstanding of the nature of sacrament: “Repentance is no sacrament: as faith, hope, love, and knowledge of a man’s sins, are not to be called sacraments. For they are spiritual and invisible. Now must a sacrament be an outward sign that may be seen, to signify, to represent and to put a man in remembrance of some spiritual promise, which cannot be seen but by faith only.”36 As reformers like Tyndale argued, the reliance of medieval penitential theology on the material, visible acts of penance drew attention away from the scriptural emphasis on the orientation of the individual toward God. The solution of prescribed acts quickly became the problem. But the rejection of outward acts of penance, while mitigating the threat of a preoccupation with the material sign, failed to offer an alternative for determining the penitent’s spiritual condition. Contrition— whether or not the penitent is truly repentant—is a matter between the individual and God; Tyndale explains that contrition and repentance are both one, and nothing else but a sorrowful and a mourning heart. And because that God hath promised mercy unto a contrite heart, that is, to a sorrowful and repenting heart, they, to beguile God’s Word and to stablish their wicked tradition, have feigned that new word attrition, saying ‘Thou canst not know whether thy sorrow or repentance be contrition or attrition, except thou be shriven. When thou art shriven, then it is true contrition.’ O foxy Pharisee!37

The reformation insistence on repentance as a state rather than an act (or series of actions) returns me to the temporal dilemma with which I began. Tyndale’s attempt to rescue repentance from medieval penitential theology rests on a temporal distinction: “Repentance goeth before faith, and prepareth the way to Christ, and to the promises. . . . Repentance, that is to say, this mourning and sorrow of the heart, lasteth all our lives long.”38 The argument might be reframed in more recent theoretical language as “the true Christian always already repents.” Thus, Christian virtue is predicated on a penitential orientation toward the world. Importantly, the relation of God’s atemporal truth to the temporally bound individual is conceived in spatial terms: the true (penitent) Christian has turned toward God, the heathen has turned away, and thus the penitential plea is always a call to “turn” and face the penitent sinner. The call to turn brings me to a pivotal moment in Measure for Measure. The scene comes at the end of the first interview between Angelo and Isabella, after Angelo begins to fall, but prior to expressing his foul proposition.




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At just the moment when the “precise” substitute Angelo begins to recognize his devolution into sexual obsession, his interlocutor pleads for him to “turn back.” Isabella’s plea, “Gentle my lord, turn back,” at once refers to the visual scene presented to the audience at the point of Angelo’s aside—he has turned his back on the conversation—and signals a “turning point” in the play, as well as in the ethical life of the character in question. Angelo does turn back—to invite Isabel for another interview—but in turning back, he has turned his back on the word (or the letter) of the law that was his world up to this moment in the play. In granting Isabel another interview, he has given over to something other than the word (the law) allowing himself to embrace an anticipation of the unknown. But what is it that spurs the change? Once moved—just after Isabel’s plea to turn back—Angelo asks this very question “is this her fault or mine?” He is able to recognize after some reflection that she has said nothing to tempt him, but by this time, it is too late. Having turned back, Angelo has set his course; he has refused to turn back from his chosen path, that which leads to his sexual coercion of Isabel. The ethical dilemma that Shakespeare stages in this scene is not whether Angelo should or should not proposition Isabella (or even whether he should or should not pardon Claudio). Rather, the moment for ethics is the moment when the visible crosses over into the realm of language; ethical recognition comes in the reconciliation of visible image and invisible word. Reasoned discourse on the application of the law crosses over into the living flesh, emphasizing that the law never exists outside individuals— singular embodied experiences; in other words, Jesus’ claim in the Sermon that he has come to fulfill rather than destroy the law (that he is the word become flesh). “Gentle my lord, turn back.” In this moment we witness a call to turn, and thus witness a turning point. The dramatic import of this plea is to emphasize the decision with which Angelo is faced: he is at a turning point, and the path he takes will determine his ethical fate. But Isabella’s plea also closely follows the rhetorical pattern of the penitent, a pattern found repeatedly in the Psalms: consider from Psalm 90 “Turne agayne O God (what, for euer wylt thou be angry?) and be gratious vnto thy seruauntes” or Psalm 6 “Turn thee, O Lord, and deliver my soul” or from Psalm 26 as rendered in the Psalter of St. Jerome: “Hear, O Lord, my voice, with which I have cried to Thee. Have mercy on me and hear me. Turn not away Thy face from me; nor in Thy wrath turn from Thy servant. Be Thou my helper. Forsake me not, nor despise me, O God my Savior. Set before me, O Lord, the law in Thy way, and guide me in the right path, because of my adversaries. Deliver me not to those that persecute me.”39 The echoes of this very old tradition


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frame the plea for Angelo to turn back as a matter of a future yet to come: “I wait for you to turn back to me.” The echo lends to the play’s messianic atmosphere; even as the action darkens, one senses that there is a justice to come. But further, this call for justice is a call for the face-to-face encounter; “turn back [to face me]” “turn not thy face away from me.” And it should thus be no surprise that the Sermon on the Mount is the play’s central scriptural reference: Christ returned, confirming the prophecies to come face-to-face. As I mentioned at the outset, once Angelo has yielded to Isabel’s “prone and speechless dialect,” his course is set; although he turns back in response to Isabel’s plea, he does not turn from his present course. The scenes that surround this turning—the first interview in which Angelo is moved to transformation and the subsequent interview in which he makes his intentions known to Isabel—constitute the meditative center of the play, and its reflection on the Sermon on the Mount. While the direct reference to the passage from Matthew is given to the Duke in the final act, the heart of the Sermon’s lesson is more directly addressed here. Jesus’ message on the mount is to attend to experience on Earth with patience, avoiding the trap of dogma that is the product of looking back only or failing to look in the present: Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgement ye judge, ye shal be judged: And with what measure ye mette, it shal be measured to you againe. And why seest thou the mote that is in thy brothers eye, but perceiuest not the beame that is in thyne owne eye? Or, how saist thou to thy brother, Suffer me to cast the mote out of thyne eye, and beholde a beame is in thyne owne eye? Hypocrite, first cast out the beame out of thine owne eye, and then shalt thou see clearely to cast out the mote out of thy brothers eye. (Matt. 7:1–5)

The passage that drew Shakespeare’s attention couches the problem of ethics bound to the exigencies of time in a language of the visual (the eye for an eye has become the eye blinded by splinter or beam). Isabella’s repetition of her plea a line later emphasizes the need to see in order to judge. After Angelo has agreed to return to the topic (“I will bethink me; come again tomorrow”), Isabel repeats the plea, this time, unwittingly inviting Angelo to delve deeper into his fantasy: “Hark how I’ll bribe you; good my lord, turn back.” Isabel’s bribe is the promise of heaven should he show the mercy she imagines he will, but it highlights her own blindness to the situation at hand. She has apparently failed to notice Angelo’s visible agitation, noted




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repeatedly by Lucio in his asides (such as “he will relent. He’s coming; I perceive’t” [2.2.124–25]). As they fail to see each other, they also speak different languages. What she offers to the now changed Angelo, by this point entirely focused on his desire, is the image of “fasting maids, whose minds are dedicate / To nothing temporal” (2.2.154–55). It is not until the second interview that Isabel comes to recognize Angelo’s transformation, at which point she echoes her earlier call to turn back, but now with an understanding lacking earlier: “Let me entreat you speak the former language” (2.4.140). Interestingly, as far as Isabel is concerned, the only language Angelo has spoken to this point has been the language of the law, the letter of the law that was the source of her pain, the condemnation of her brother Claudio. But with the revelation of Angelo’s desire, the question of ethics rises to the surface, as there is no possibility of a return to the law, “the former language.” This epistemological Gordian knot at the heart of the play defines the pivotal scenes in which Angelo succumbs to the “temptation” presented by Isabella. At this moment Shakespeare employs another chiasmus: When I would pray and think, I think and pray To several subjects. Heaven hath my empty words, Whilst my invention, hearing not my tongue, Anchors on Isabel; heaven in my mouth, As if I did but only chew his name, And in my heart the strong and swelling evil Of my conception. (2.4.1–7)40

Disembodied thought and prayer are set against the bodily chewing mouth and lecherous intention, which are in turn associated not with evil thoughts but the fleshy metaphor of “swelling . . . conception.” Presented in the form of a chiastic reversal, invisible faith (heaven) is corporealized in the mouth, while the seat of faith (the heart) is occupied by Angelo’s flesh: the “swelling evil of my conception.” It is the heart that is preoccupied with the flesh rather than the flesh corrupting the heart; in the flesh Angelo still represents the law. And this revelation begins Angelo’s conversion to the penitent, aware that outward actions cannot be the sole basis for judging the state of the soul. It is also here that Shakespeare’s play reveals something of the depth of the epistemological problem nagging theological debates over the relation of world and Word. However immaterial the God of Christian desire, even the most pure spiritual desire remains mired in the material trappings of human existence. Thus, as Luther observed, both the iconoclast and the iconophile pay inordinate attention to the flesh.41 Negotiating the


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intertwining of “heart and tongue” is a far more difficult task than trying to maintain their separation. This difficulty becomes clear to Angelo only as his personal crisis forces him to abandon his absolute position on the side of the precise law. Despite the play’s emphasis on the visual throughout the various subplots, the text suggests that Angelo’s “corruption” and fall are not brought on by his sensual experience upon seeing Isabella.42 As the two trade arguments, and Angelo’s desire grows, the pleasure of rhetorical debate—and Isabella’s unwillingness to “put on the destined livery” of woman—are the ostensible cause (2.4.138). It is only after his transformation (his acceptance of bodily desire) that Angelo shifts the dialogue from language to vision with the command: “I do arrest your words”: Be that you are That is a woman; if you be more, you’re none; If you be one (as you are well expressed By all external warrants) show it now, By putting on the destin’d livery. (2.4.133–38)

Again there is an oscillation between vision and language, “external” appearance and internal identity (“that you are”). The intertwining is evident in the problematic tension between what is seen and what is thought to be: for example, I see that you are a woman, so show me what I see. Isabella’s response turns back to language: “I have no tongue but one,” but her metonymy sustains the emphasis on the body. As Isabella continues to deny any value to bodily pleasure, her language becomes increasingly saturated with both visual and bodily references. The most striking of these is the oft-mentioned image she provides of herself under “threat of death”: “Th’ impression of keen whips I’ld wear as rubies, / And strip myself to death as to a bed” (2.4.101–102). Perhaps more telling, though, is her later response to the Duke’s proposition of the bed trick: “The image of it gives me content already, and I trust it will grow to a most prosperous perfection” (3.1.59–60). Surely Isabel’s “content” (pleasure) derives from the appealing form of a well-conceived plan, and yet that well-conceived form leads her to find pleasure in the sexual deception of Angelo, in turn suggesting the generative rhetoric of success: what more prosperous perfection of conception can there be than procreation? Compare the obverse, coming at the height of the action brought about by the Duke’s plan, when Angelo worries that his deed “makes [him] unpregnant” (4.4.20). While Angelo loses form— becomes unrecognizable to those expecting to see the precise ruler—Isabel gains a worldly body.43 This process is akin to Marion’s “kenosis of the




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image”: the images created for the precise Angleo and the ascetic Isabella dissolve over the course of the play, leaving uncertainty and fallibility in their place. Both images borrowed divinity in material forms (the law as underwritten by visible proof and the trappings of saintly asceticism represented by the choice of a spiritual vocation) only to have that materially manifested divinity dissolve as a result of their actions over time. At the personal level of individual penitential comportment, the dissolution and reconstitution of Angelo and Isabella recalls the conversion of St. Augustine as he recounts his sexual failings in the opening of the Confessions: I will call to mind the impurity of my life past, and the vncleane corruptions of my Soule; not for any loue that I beare to them, but for that which I owe to thee, O my God. For loue of thy loue, O Lord, I do it; recording my most wicked wayes, in the very bitternes of my soule, that thou mayst grow sweet to me; Thou who art no counterfait, but a happy and secure sweetnes; recouering me from that diuishon of my selfe whereby I was all torne in peeces, whilest being auerted [te aversus] from thee alone, I vanished away, upon the variety of thy creatures. For in my youth I did sometyms burne with a kind of hellish desire to be satisfied, and I presumed euen to grow wilde, with an appetite of strange and conceited pleasures; but in the meane tyme the beauty of my Soule was wholy blasted; and in thyne eyes, O Lord, I was putrifyed, whilest yet I took contentment in my selfe, and procured to please the eyes of men.44

Augustine describes his preconversion state as one in which he was “averted from thee [God]” (te aversus). The primary meaning of avert in the OED is “to turn away,” either literally or figuratively, with early modern uses commonly describing the relationship with God. Augustine describes the result of being turned away from God as the “division of the self,” a “vanishing away,” that resembles Angelo’s lament that his deed “unshapes” him (4.4.18). Augustine’s language is saturated with bodily figures at the very moment he seeks to turn away from the material to embrace the spiritual. The emphasis on the physical turning as simultaneously a spiritual turning is echoed in Measure for Measure as Shakespeare stages the difficulties of sustaining either Angelo’s strict adherence to earthly justice or Isabel’s equally strict adherence to eternal justice. What are we as readers and audience members to make of the fact that the two characters most governed by strict restraint (either legal or spiritual) fall equally for (erotic) visions born of the very antivisual rhetoric that allowed them to eschew the world of sense? Must we accept, as some critics have argued, that the play’s movement away from order toward instability demonstrates that Measure for Measure is unsuited to any coherent ethical


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or theological position?45 It is true that the play rejects the most obvious correctives to Vienna’s morally depraved state—the Puritan Angelo’s law, the ascetic Isabel’s withdrawal, and Ducal responsibility (Friar Thomas’s suggestion that the law “rested in your Grace / To unloose this tied-up justice when you pleas’d” [1.3.31–32]). Does the debunking of every possible moral position confirm Diehl’s position that the play offers a Calvinist worldview, in which the only personal growth comes in recognizing one’s own imperfection? Both readings are compelling. But to understand the play as a renunciation of the possibility of positive action or the need to give over to an absolute authority fails to account for the play’s other guiding principle. As the action unfolds, the Duke’s commonplace “all difficulties are but easy when they are known” is perhaps the only axiom left standing. All speculation about Isabella’s response to the Duke’s proposal of marriage, of the happiness or despair of Angelo and Mariana in marriage, and of the fate of Lucio, Claudio, and Juliet, everyone is meaningless without the movement of time. The space between word and image, judgment and action, is open in this play. This space and the instant it takes to traverse it sustain the hope for an ethics that resists settling for the limitations of image or word considered in isolation. For Shakespeare in this play, reversal opens the possibility for the penitential orientation we find in St. Paul, in the Psalms, in Jesus’s words on the mount. Angelo’s precise law, like Isabel’s immaterial image of purity, cannot be sustained in ethical action. But penitential ethics are unlike the forms of penitential theology that prescribe specific actions as recompense for sin or wrong done to another. The ethics of Measure for Measure lie ahead paradoxically in what’s behind—the play ends with the Duke’s promise: “So bring us to our palace, where we’ll show / What’s yet behind that’s meet you all should know” (5.1.538–39).46 Returned to the world and to time, Shakespeare’s characters and his audience alike await their fate in the unpredictable figure of the future.




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“Ocular Proof” and the Dangers of the Perceptual Faith Trifles light as air Are to the jealous confirmations strong As proofs of holy writ. Shakespeare, Othello, 3.3.322–24

M

erleau-Ponty begins The Visible and the Invisible, naturally enough, by interrogating the notion that “we see the things themselves, the world is what we see.” Of such commonsense statements, Merleau-Ponty asserts that “if we ask ourselves what is this we, what seeing is, and what thing or world is, we enter into a labyrinth of difficulties and contradictions.”1 Rather than confront these difficult questions, the natural temptation is to retreat into the safety of what Merleau-Ponty termed “the perceptual faith,” a belief in the existence of the material world ostensibly confirmed through the senses.2 In Othello, Shakespeare dramatizes how something like Merleau-Ponty’s “labyrinth of difficulties and contradictions” complicates the relationship of ethics and vision. The play specifically foregrounds the early modern struggle over the contradictory nature of vision as both the most direct conduit to the world as it is and the sense most susceptible to illusion and misinterpretation. In the following pages, I examine how Othello’s ethical failure stems in large part from his inability to understand the problematic relationship between vision and truth, and ultimately vision and ethics. If, as I argued in the last chapter, Measure for Measure represents one of Shakespeare’s most significant meditations on the conflict between codified morality and individual ethical decision making, in Othello the playwright turns his attention to the question of what constitutes an acceptable ground for moral judgment. While Measure for Measure demonstrates the inadequacy of moral law to account for the singularity of


CHAPTER 6


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ethical experience, Othello examines the difficult epistemological problems raised by the ethical demand. Concentrating on how what we see (and have seen) impacts how we act when confronted with the ethical decision, the play suggests that the process of reasonable deliberation by which Othello arrives at his moral conviction is as problematic as any moral law on which he might have based his judgment. While the clarity of abstract moral law fails to accommodate the particularity of human experience in Measure for Measure, Othello demonstrates that moral reasoning has significant limitations in the face of epistemological uncertainty. The “ocular proof ” of my title refers, of course, to Othello’s demand that Iago supply hard evidence to prove Desdemona’s guilt. The demand comes at the height of his transformation from loyal husband to jealous victim. The centrality of vision in the process of this transformation makes the play particularly instructive for the present attempt to examine the relationship between ethics and vision in early modern England. Martin Jay has playfully reminded us that “if we actively focus our attention [on the ubiquity of visual metaphors], vigilantly keeping an eye out for those deeply embedded as well as those on the surface, we can gain an illuminating insight into the complex mirroring of perception and language.”3 Othello highlights this mirroring to the point that linguistic visual figurality is taken for visual experience. Specifically, the stories Shakespeare’s characters tell in hopes of establishing the truth betray a special reliance on the visible as the category most closely allied with the language of objectivity, grounded in a material, empiricist epistemology. At the same time, however, the play reveals the visual to be a category discursively constructed to suit the narrative logic of the particular situations in which the characters find themselves. The appeal to the language of vision as the language of proof relies on what might be more properly termed rhetorical or aesthetic characteristics for its power—the certainty of the “eye witness” compared to the untrustworthiness of “hearsay,” for example. What is crucial to the present discussion is the continuous rhetorical invocation of the visible as the ground for a collectively witnessed reality in the play. The language of the visual serves to underwrite the authority of the account even when there is an overt appeal to something immaterial beyond visual perception, such as Desdemona’s “honesty.” In conversation with Othello, Iago raises the issue of visual perception in confirming a lady’s honor: “Her honour is an essence that’s not seen; / They have it very oft that have it not” (4.1.16–17).4 David Michael Levin highlights the problem as it persists in philosophy; he argues that


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the ‘nature’ of the visual perception (vision, sight, seeing) about which philosophers talk, and which they claim to be ‘describing’ and critically


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“Ocular Proof” and Dangers of Perceptual Faith

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By introducing (linguistic or discursive) distortion or mediation before the point of translation from visual perception to understanding (or cognitive processing), Levin extends the established critique of the transparency of visual representation to the entire realm of visual experience (we must interpret not only artificial signs, but natural signs as well). That Levin has to make the argument at the end of the twentieth century is testimony to the persistent tendency to naturalize vision as transparent. The epistemological upheaval I have been tracing in early modern Reformation attitudes toward vision opened the visual to doubt at the same time that it put additional pressure on the visual to provide the comfort of perceptual veracity. The early modern debates that ushered in a post-Aristotelian discourse of vision were concerned with the same questions Levin identifies for philosophers writing in the wake of twentieth-century phenomenology. Specifically, Levin cautions against the production of a false ground based on the visual by showing how language is replete with visual metaphors that serve to anchor the arbitrary world of signs to the world of things. The point is that the language of abstraction and the language of objectivity are equally penetrated by the language of vision. Consider, for example, the Latin, claro, “to make bright,” claritas, “clearness, brightness,” clareo, “to be bright, to shine,” clarus, “bright, clear, distinct”; the French clairvoyant “seer,” and so on. The example of Othello provides a parable of how such irresponsible interpretation can follow from a failure to recognize the naturalization of visual experience in language leading directly to tragic ethical failure. Prior to his transformation from devoted husband to jealous murderer, Othello’s confidence rests in his knowledge that Desdemona has seen him, and until he sees something to make him doubt her honesty, he will remain unshaken: Nor from mine own weak merits will I draw The smallest fear or doubt of her revolt, For she had eyes, and chose me. No, Iago, I’ll see before I doubt; when I doubt, prove; And on the proof, there is no more but this— Away at once with love or jealousy! (3.3.187–92)


examining, primarily in the context of an epistemology, is, and must explicitly be recognized as, a discursive construction, and indeed a historical construction in the force field of philosophical discourse. The ‘visual perception’ is never just a simple immediate, straightforward, unproblematic presentation of the phenomenon and experience of vision.5


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While Othello’s response is an object lesson in reason, that most abstract of human inventions, he insists that it will not be his own internal powers of reason (his “weak merits”) that will produce a conclusion, but rather, he will rely on external proof. Moreover, this external proof—his empirical evidence—is explicitly provided by the sense of sight. Iago admits that as long as Othello is of this mind, the only thing that could convince him would be for the Moor to become the “supervisor,”6 to “grossly gape on”— “behold her topp’d”: It were a tedious difficulty, I think, To bring them to that prospect; damn them then, If ever mortal eyes do see them bolster More than their own. What then? How then? What shall I say? Where’s satisfaction? It is impossible you should see this, Were they as prime as goats, as hot as monkeys, As salt as wolves in pride, and fools as gross As ignorance made drunk. But yet, I say, If imputation and strong circumstances Which lead directly to the door of truth Will give you satisfaction, you might have’t. (3.3.395–408)

Othello’s response—“Give me a living reason she’s disloyal”—and the implicit rejection of “imputation and strong circumstances” lead directly to an object: the fateful handkerchief, which ultimately constitutes Othello’s “ocular proof.”7 Patricia Parker notes that the handkerchief is “a ‘thing’ that can be ‘scanned’ and ‘seen,’ it makes the invisible visible.”8 But in fact, Iago had already given away the game when he admitted that the thing was “impossible to see.” The process by which the handkerchief “makes the invisible visible” is indirect, as Parker’s account suggests: it does so by “standing . . . for a female ‘particular’ otherwise out of the field of vision”; it is the “visible counterpart to the rhetorical uncovering” of Desdemona’s adultery; “it is associated with the exposure of secrets, standing in for ‘an essence that’s not seen’” (4.1.16).9 Not only would it be emotionally unbearable, but it would also be truly impossible to see, for Othello asks to see what cannot be seen: a moment past; he seeks, in other words, historical knowledge.10 The “tedious difficulty,” which Othello is initially unwilling to abandon, is a central concern of historical inquiry. How does one, in fact, interpret that which is not immediately available? And, moreover, if immediacy is the precondition of knowledge, how can any interpretation of the past


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Even though historical knowledge receives its justification from the forestructure of Dasein, this is no reason for anyone to interfere with the immanent criteria of what is called knowledge. For Heidegger too historical knowledge is not a projection in the sense of a plan, the extrapolation of aims of the will, an ordering of things according to the wishes, prejudices, or promptings of the powerful; rather it remains something adapted to the object, a mensuratio ad rem [from the act of measuring to the thing]. Yet this thing is not a factum brutum, not something merely at hand, something that can simply be established and measured, but it itself has the same mode of being as Dasein.11

Following Heidegger, Gadamer’s solution is to assert that while historical knowledge cannot come into being without the confirmation of an individual’s preconceptions (it “receives its justification in the fore-structure of Dasein”), this does not mean that historical knowledge is radically relative, “the extrapolation of aims of the will,” or simply instrumental, “a projection in the sense of a plan,” predisposed, that is, in a dogmatic, pejorative sense. Elsewhere Gadamer emphasizes the need to recuperate the positive valence of the concept of prejudice: “Prejudices are not necessarily unjustified and erroneous, so that they inevitably distort the truth. In fact, the historicity of our existence entails that prejudices, in the literal sense of the word, constitute the initial directedness of our whole ability to experience. . . . They are simply conditions whereby we experience something—whereby what we encounter says something to us.”12 All knowledge, not simply knowledge of the past, is here shown to hinge on the operation by which conscious observers bring their experience with the world into line with what is conceivably recognizable in light of their own historically conditioned preconceptions. In his recuperation of prejudice as a positive term, Gadamer thus seeks to redefine the relationship between the conscious observer and the world, which had been falsely rendered through the illusion of a sharp distinction between subjects and objects. He continues the passage from Truth and Method with the following:


be considered knowledge? In an attempt to reconcile hermeneutics and historicism, Hans-Georg Gadamer offers the following solution in Truth and Method:

[H]owever . . . [i]t does not mean simply that there is a “homogeneity” between the knower and the known. . . . In fact . . . the coordination of all knowing activity with what is known is not based on the fact that they have the same mode of being but draws its significance from the particular nature


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of the mode of being that is common to them. It consists in the fact that neither the knower nor the known is “present at hand” in an “ontic” way, but in a “historical” one—i.e., they both have the mode of being of historicity. . . . Thus there is no understanding or interpretation in which the totality of this existential structure does not function, even if the intention of the knower is simply to read “what is there” and to discover from his sources “how it really was.”13

Shakespeare’s play dramatizes the mode of being of historicity to which Gadamer refers. In Othello the historical knowledge sought is linked explicitly to an object—the handkerchief—which appears to be present to hand in an “ontic” sense, the traditional hermeneutic sense (as neutral evidence), but which in fact exists for the characters of the play only through the mode of being of historicity: its meaning (and the knowledge suggested by it) inheres in the overlap between the historicity of the observing character and the history of the object. For, in addition to being a thing, the handkerchief is specifically identified as a thing-seen. And as I will argue, the interplay between these two modalities constitutes the ground on which the third term—the object as evidence—is constructed. Although Gadamer explicitly identifies language as “the fundamental mode of operation of our ‘beingin-the-world,’” I do not think it is a coincidence that his own metaphor for the place of overlap between the past life-world and the present world of the historical observer is visual: the “fusion of horizons.”14 The penetration of the visual in Gadamer is of course a result of the profound influence of phenomenology (Husserl in particular) on his philosophy. It must be noted, however, that Gadamer was following Heidegger’s lead in specifically setting out to break with the philosophical paradigm of ocularcentric metaphysics, which had dominated from Plato, and had been codified by Descartes’ insistence on “clarity and distinctness.”15 Derrida’s subsequent critique of the “metaphysics of presence” is largely an attempt to follow through on the break initiated by Heidegger (and, importantly, Nietzsche). Stanley Cavell makes a direct connection between “the problem of knowledge” and the play’s structure by considering tragedy, and Othello in particular, “as a kind of epistemological problem.”16 Vision is crucial for Cavell’s reading because it is the denial of sight (presumable the sight of Desdemona’s adulterous passion) that culminates for Cavell in the tragic ending in which a parallel scene of murder is revealed to the sight. Like Parker, who sees the tension in the play to result from the hiddenness of “the secret place of woman,” Cavell associates the denial of the sight of sexual death with the ultimate unveiling of actual death displayed on the tragic marriage bed in Act 5: “the thing denied our sight throughout the


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opening scene; the thing, the scene, that Iago takes Othello back to again and again, retouching it for Othello’s enchafed imagination; is what we are shown in the final scene, the scene of murder.”17 Cavell’s reflection on the problem of knowledge leads to the conclusion that only the inanimate can be known: “A statue, a stone, is something whose existence is fundamentally open to the ocular proof. A human being is not.”18 Parker explicitly links the dread that attends this conclusion to the gender dynamics at play in early modern England; she identifies the conflict attending the preoccupation with “bringing a secret place [woman’s ‘privity’] before the eye” and the “sense of this secret female place as something too ‘obscene’ for ‘show.’”19 Both Cavell and Parker emphasize the ways in which a desire for knowledge contributes to a impulse toward annihilation. The violence that results from an overwrought desire to know absolutely that which cannot be known is one important ethical danger associated with the power of visual experience in the period. In the rest of this chapter I hope to build on this critique of the desire for ocular proof, by exploring how such a desire necessarily informs all ethical action, despite leading in Othello’s case, to tragic error. Part of the logic behind returning to Merleau-Ponty here is my sense that a preoccupation with the critique of Cartesian metaphysics has obscured the possibilities suggested by the other side of the phenomenological coin—the interrogation of perception—which marks another important branch of literary theory’s family tree. Before his untimely death while composing The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty took the philosophical examination of perception further than any other thinker. The result was a willingness (never fully spelled out) to grant to the visible world an ontology that defied linguistic containment.20 As will become clear below, I believe that the force of the visual metaphor is crucial for the project of historical reconstruction, a project in which even Gadamer’s limited, historicized hermeneutics is invested. The handkerchief ’s imputed status as a thing—divorced from human motivation—suggests precisely that it is present to hand in an ontic way, while its status as a thing-seen suggests that it possesses the mode of being of historicity. As a stand-in for Desdemona’s sexuality, the handkerchief is knowable in a way that Desdemona herself is not.21 But the play does not allow the handkerchief to operate as a stable material thing. Rather, it modulates between representations of the handkerchief as thing (autonomous, neutral, material) and thing-seen (the object apprehended as Desdemona’s handkerchief, Othello’s gift, and so on). This modulation explicitly unveils the necessity of the ontically present (neutral) thing for the production of the category of material evidence at the same time that it demonstrates the




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impossibility of neutral materiality. Iago asks Othello: “tell me but this/Have you not sometimes seen a handkerchief/Spotted with strawberries in your wive’s hand?” (3.3.433–35). And although the specificity of the handkerchief is confirmed in Othello’s response, “I gave her such a one; t’was my first gift,” his reference is to the object’s history rather than its appearance. Aware that the history of the handkerchief is the source of its power over Othello, but sensitive to the fact that such a history cannot be seen, Iago lies that he “knows not that”—that the evidence he is about to present is unrelated to the object’s history; instead he returns to the realm of the visible: “but such a handkerchief / (I am sure it was your wive’s) did I to-day / See Cassio wipe his beard with” (3.3.437–39). Of course, Iago has not seen any such thing, and it would not have mattered if he had. The force of his declaration is a reference to the act of seeing as an ahistorical— or preconscious—mode of perception. The implication, in other words, is that Iago’s suspicions were produced by his perceptual experience. It is worth drawing attention to this fact in the context of a play ostensibly concerned with the disastrous effect of a man’s preconceptions on his perception of “reality.” If Iago’s rhetorical virtuosity obtains in his ability to convince Othello of the priority of the visual experience, his success is confirmed when Othello accepts the verbal account as the ocular proof he demanded. Robert Heilman explains the process well: “when Othello is being conspicuously deceived by the seeming, he is under the illusion that he is seeing particularly well, for Iago has tutored his vision.”22 It is no accident that Iago’s rhetorical strategy relies on the language of vision for its authority. Although Othello has seen nothing of the “ocular proof ” he earlier demanded, he nonetheless proclaims that his “bloody thoughts, with violent pace, / Shall nev’r look back, nev’r ebb to humble love, / Till that a capable and wide revenge / Swallow them up” (3.3.457–460). In the subsequent scenes of the play, he continues to seek visual confirmation of the affair, but from this point on his search proceeds from the belief that Desdemona is guilty. It is at this point that things get interesting. For rather than allow his plan to rest on a second-hand account of Cassio’s possession of the handkerchief, Iago is fully prepared to provide Othello with the satisfaction he originally demanded. In staging the scene between himself and Cassio, Iago again reveals the process by which the category of the visual gains evidentiary status through linguistic figurality. Looking on from the wings as Iago speaks to Cassio of his flirtations with Bianca, Othello “sees for himself ” the two men discussing Cassio’s affair with Desdemona. In a wonderful dramatic moment—borrowed from farce and so familiar in Shakespeare—the playwright is able to map two coherent narratives onto a single visual field.


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Now I will question Cassio of Bianca, A huswife that by selling her desires Buys herself bread and clothes. It is a creature That dotes on Cassio (as ‘tis the strumpet’s plague To beguile many and be beguil’d by one); He when he hears of her, cannot restrain From the excess of laughter . . . ... As he shall smile, Othello shall go mad; And his unbookish jealousy must conster Poor Cassio’s smiles, gestures, and light behaviors Quite in the wrong. (4.1.93–103)

What Iago recognizes here is precisely the power of the visual: the sight of a smiling Cassio can confirm Othello’s suspicions in a way that a linguistic account could not. Only the unexpected entrance of Bianca with the handkerchief falls outside the manipulative domain of Iago’s plan. But rather than reveal the staged quality of the encounter between Cassio and Iago, Bianca’s entrance, and especially her possession of the handkerchief, lends the scene further authenticity in Othello’s eyes. It is at this point that one is reminded of the playwright’s ultimate power over the dramatic action, as even the accidental is made to fit neatly into the villain’s scheme.23 Although there is much to say about the way fiction and fact are construed by all involved in this scene, for the present purpose, I am particularly interested in the way that the handkerchief functions in the process of validating the various histories that accrue to it over the course of the play. For Othello, Bianca’s mere possession of the handkerchief is enough to confirm the worst about Desdemona. But why? Bianca’s possession of the handkerchief itself is not proof of anything without the narrative history Iago has provided. While a good deal of attention has been given to the question of whether or not Othello succumbs too quickly to Iago’s suggestions, I would submit that an examination of the handkerchief ’s various histories complicates any simple account of Othello as dupe to Iago’s boundless, manipulative power.24 For in addition to being his “first gift” to Desdemona, Othello relates that the handkerchief has “magic in the web of it,” a revelation that contrasts sharply with his own earlier account of their courtship. Significantly, Othello had denied any knowledge of magic when defending himself before the Duke in the opening scenes


The scene is not finessed in any way, as Iago tells us exactly what he plans to do and exactly what will happen:


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of the play. In response to Brabantio’s assertion that he could never have honestly won Desdemona’s hand—“For nature so prepost’rously to err / (Being not deficient, blind, or lame of sense) / Sans witchcraft [it] could not” (1.3.62– 64)—Othello offers only a “round unvarnished tale.” Of course, the tale he tells belies his own claim that he is “rude . . . in . . . speech, / and little bless’d with the soft phrase of peace” (1.3.81–82). The power of Othello’s language is revealed in both the eloquence of his account of their courtship and the basis of his defense: the only witchcraft Othello claims to have used was the art of storytelling, “[she] bade me, if I had a friend that lov’d her, / I should but teach him how to tell my story, / And that would woo her” (1.3.164–66). As in the confusion of the material handkerchief and the stories that make it available to the understanding (what Heidegger would call its “coming into presence”), Desdemona is wooed as much by Othello’s account of his acts as she is by the acts “themselves.”25 The history that Othello later tells of the handkerchief, which would have confirmed the worst of Brabantio’s fears, calls Othello’s account of the relationship into question: That handkerchief Did an Egyptian to my mother give; She was a charmer, and could almost read The thoughts of people. She told her, while she kept it, ’Twould make her amiable, and subdue my father Entirely to her love; but if she lost it, Or made gift of it, my father’s eye Should hold her loathed and his spirits should hunt After new fancies. She, dying, gave it me, And bid me, when my fate would have me wiv’d, To give it her. I did so; and take heed on’t, Make it a darling like your precious eye. To lose’t or give’t away were such perdition As nothing else could match. (3.4.55–68)

Othello’s fantastic history further complicates the multiple histories that are attributed to the handkerchief by Iago and Bianca—the former with the intent to deceive and the latter with the intent to unveil the truth. Ignoring Othello’s romantic history of the handkerchief as “his first gift,” Iago offers an image of Cassio using the handkerchief to wipe his beard. Similarly, Bianca rejects Cassio’s story on the grounds of its implausibility: “A likely piece of work, that you should find it in your chamber, and know not who left it there! This is some minx’s token” (4.1.151–53). Iago immediately picks up on the suggestion, taunting Othello that Desdemona has


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given the handkerchief to Cassio who cared so little “he hath giv’n it his whore” (4.1.177). While neither Iago nor Bianca offers the “true” history of the handkerchief (whatever that may be), the histories they tell have power by virtue of their ability to elicit recognition from both Othello and the audience. Such recognition relies in part on what Roland Barthes famously termed the “reality effect,” as the details of each story produce a sense of mundane authenticity. The details can be seen (are seen by Othello) as, to use Barthes’ words, “notations whose very insignificance authenticates, signs, signifies ‘reality.’”26 Vivid histories provided for the handkerchief override the truth of the events as they have been presented to the viewers of the play. One can picture a guilty Cassio wiping his beard with the sacred object—as Oliver Parker demonstrated in the 1995 film version of the play—and the image is powerful despite the knowledge that Cassio is innocent. If it were not for our being in on the game, we might believe—as Othello does—that Iago’s account of Cassio wiping his beard is too vivid to be invented.27 Iago’s earlier account of the dreaming Cassio relies on similarly powerful imagistic details. The claim that Cassio cried out “cursed fate that gave thee to the Moor!” would have the status of hearsay if not for Iago’s visualization of the scene in which Cassio “laid his leg / Over my thigh, and sigh’d, and kiss’d” (3.3.424–25). Othello’s jealousy is enflamed by the story of the dream. He is convinced that it “denoted a foregone conclusion” but he accepts Iago’s suggestion that it constitutes only a “shrewd doubt” (3.3.428–29).28 It is only after Iago’s visualization of Cassio with the handkerchief that Othello is actually satisfied: “Now do I see ‘tis true” (3.3.444). What Iago’s rhetorical strategy touches on here is something deeper than the real or true as these terms function conceptually; he somehow evokes a truth about the world that could never be represented—except approximately—truth that is felt in the experience of the description. He seems to hint at something Merleau-Ponty imagined to be present in our very experience with the world: “What I want to do,” noted the philosopher, “is restore the world as a meaning of Being absolutely different from the ‘represented,’ that is, as the vertical Being which none of our ‘representations’ exhaust and which all ‘reach,’ the wild Being.”29 If the histories attributed to the handkerchief by Iago and Bianca position it as proof of an affair between Cassio and Desdemona that never occurred, Othello’s own history of the handkerchief further undermines its status as veridical. Ultimately Shakespeare presents us with an object (the handkerchief ) so unstable that it becomes emblematic of the flaws endemic to empiricist (materialist) epistemologies, flaws that become even more pronounced when such epistemologies guide human ethical action. Paul Ricoeur’s caveat concerning




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History begins when we no longer have immediate understanding, and when we undertake to reconstruct the sequence of antecedents along lines other than that of the motives and reasons alleged by the actors in the history. The difficulty for epistemology is precisely to show how explanation is added to, or superimposed on, or even substituted for, the immediate understanding of the course of the past history.30

Continuously breaking down the authority of the visual (through which we experience the material world and thus achieve Ricoeur’s “immediate understanding”), the play seems to condemn any overzealous acceptance of the truth of things that is grounded in perception. As events unfold, the condemnation extends even to the declarations of love between Othello and Desdemona, uttered before the jealousy set in. When Desdemona claims that she “saw Othello’s visage in his mind,” she is essentially saying that what you see is not what you get (1.3.252). Without the ground of visual confirmation, the understanding of the past is left to the ways in which the various explanations—the stories offered for the handkerchief—are able to convincingly add to, superimpose themselves on, or substitute for the immediate understanding (the truth, the historical fact) that is out of reach. And as I have been suggesting, rather than separate aesthetic qualities from such explanation in the hope of determining the latter’s power to persuade, we ought to focus on the way that aesthetic power translates into evidentiary power, thus naturalizing rhetorically constructed fictions as historical facts confirmed by firsthand (eyewitness) experience. Considered in this way, the history of the handkerchief seems utterly determined for each of the characters by the particular (albeit fictional) consciousness that brings it into language at any given moment in the play. And yet, the final scene adds an important twist to the play’s visual epistemology. For the final history attributed to the handkerchief is the one that fulfills the tragedy. Although overcome with emotion after having committed the violent act, Othello can seek refuge in the fact that he has executed a guilty woman. Like Angelo in Measure for Measure, Othello believes that the proper application of the law supported by the facts constitutes the basis for ethical action despite how unpleasant it is to mete out the punishment. And for Othello the fact on which he based his action is guaranteed by the handkerchief, which he saw in Cassio’s hand with his own eyes: “she did gratify his amorous works / With that recognizance and pledge of love / Which I first gave her. I saw it in his hand” (5.2.213–15). But rather than


historical understanding captures the difficulties presented to both the characters and the audience of Othello:


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allow the handkerchief to remain a material witness to Desdemona’s infidelity, Othello revises the object’s history, further complicating its status as material evidence: “It was a handkerchief, an antique token / My father gave my mother” (5.2.216–17). Contradicting his own account that the handkerchief was given to his mother by an Egyptian, Othello adapts the story to accommodate the larger structure of the tragedy—gift from father to mother, not to be lost, is given by Othello to Desdemona, whose loss becomes indeed “such perdition / as nothing else could match” (3.4.67–68). Prior to the final scene, Othello is a play much like Measure for Measure, concerned with the relationship between outward appearance and inward truth of character. Othello’s blackness does not convey his character to Desdemona, who sees his true character in his mind, Iago’s “honesty” is belied by his evil intentions offered in a series of asides, Cassio’s loyalty persists despite what appears to be a transgression of Othello’s will when he is set up by Iago and Roderigo, and so on. In the final scene, the truth of each character’s ethical state is apparently unveiled in a spectacular series of actions, beginning with Othello’s murder of Desdemona. The events seem to suggest that Othello reveals his true nature as an uncivilized moor, incapable of the ethical life, of living up to the reason-governed Venetian persona he has taken on as a public image. Likewise, Iago’s evil nature is revealed in his murder of Emilia before our eyes, and Cassio’s loyalty is restored when it is revealed that Iago planted the handkerchief in his chamber. All of the tidy resolution is put into motion by the handkerchief and its imputed neutrality as a thing. When the handkerchief ’s neutrality is shattered, so is Othello’s resolve. Katherine Eisaman Maus points out that “Othello lives out the epistemological dilemma of the English juryman to whom everything is supposed to be manifest, but who is nonetheless forced to depend upon clues and surmises, who must treat as clearly visible that which is inevitably beyond sight.”31 The revelation of this compromise comes naturally at the height of the tragedy. Othello’s epiphany is brought on by Emilia’s revelation that she gave the handkerchief to Iago, and Iago kills Emilia for precisely this declaration. What appears to be a proper unmasking of the truth, however, relies on the concealment of the play’s seemingly deeper revelation: as the previous discussion was intended to demonstrate, Othello can be shown to provide a parable about the disaster of confusing things with their stories, conflating what Gadamer has called the “nature of things” and the “language of things.”32 Although the play resolves a multitude of misconceptions in this final scene, it does so by reinstating the category of the object as evidence. As comforting as the normative final scene can be, considering the course of events in the play, the late return to the perceptual faith would seem at best romantic and at worst deeply pessimistic.




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When you shall these unlucky deeds relate, Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate, Nor set down aught in malice. Then must you speak Of one that loved not wisely but too well; Of one not easily jealious, but being wrought, Perplexed in the extreme; of one whose hand (Like the base [Indian]) threw a pearl away Richer than all his tribe; one whose subdu’d eyes, Albeit unused to the melting mood, Drops tears as fast as the Arabian trees Their medicinable gum. Set you down this. (5.2.341–51)

Othello places himself and his future history within the narrative genre of the fantastic and of the moral fable; his story is to assume its place among those he told Desdemona during their courtship (i.e., “of the Cannibals that each other eat, / The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders” [1.3.143–45]). Only stories of this kind, he suggests, will be able to convey him as he is. The tenuous link that such stories have to the material realities they describe seems unimportant; it is their ability to evoke wonder in the listener that lends them validity. Finally, the indictment of Iago comes in the form of a pronouncement in which the neutral “thing” is acknowledged to be an object imbedded in the language of perception: Lodovico commands that Iago “Look on the tragic loading of this bed; / This is thy work.” And though the sight of the bodies constitutes a self-evident confirmation of Iago’s deeds, and thus his “true” self, the moment is too terrible to endure. The light of truth is immediately extinguished as the order is given to conceal the visual proof: “The object poisons sight, / Let it be hid” (5.2.363–365). Reading Othello as I have points to some of the play’s more provocative suggestions concerning the difficulty of drawing on our experience of the world in determining the ethical course of our actions. The final act of concealment, in particular, points to one of the play’s central epistemological stumbling blocks. Parker is certainly right to stress that the ambivalence about opening secret places to “show” points to cultural anxieties peculiar to the early modern era. Likewise, Cavell’s suggestion that the search for knowledge is itself tragic is an important reminder about the dangers of the search for certainty and the fundamental humanity that attends skepticism, the acceptance


Othello’s final speech is about how he wants his history told, in which he moves from the objective to the narrative, the material to the aesthetic:


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that some things cannot be known. Importantly, the final scene of Othello marks the end of a long series of thoughts on seeming, on the peculiar truth that things are not always as they seem. Despite the tragic consequences of misrecognition that have resulted in the death of the central characters, the revelations of the final scene reinstate the priority of the sensible—and especially the visible—world over the discursive and aesthetic representational textures that generated the tragedy over the course of the play. And yet, in Othello’s final words, Iago’s silence, and Lodovico’s order to conceal the poisoned object, the return of the sensible is qualified by the implication that the truth is not simply available for all to see. Rather, despite the characters’ investments in the visual world (sights such as the handkerchief in Cassio’s hand, Lodovico’s “loaded bed,” Othello’s blackness), ethical understanding in the play demands something more than the evidence of things seen. By the end of the play, Othello’s blueprint for reasoned action (“I’ll see before I doubt; when I doubt, prove; / And on the proof [act]”) is shown to lack the ability to accommodate the singularity of the ethical demand. If Othello’s failure can be read as a rejection of empirically grounded reason as the basis for ethical subjectivity, what can Othello tell us about Shakespeare’s contribution to an early modern phenomenology of ethical action? It strikes me that at least two important things can be said. First, we ought not to forget that compelling critical positions invariably find purchase in an appeal—either explicit or implicit—to a ground. Beginning in the early modern period, that ground has often been coterminous with the visible, though the authority of the visible has been paradoxically constructed through linguistic, rhetorical, and aesthetic strategies (i.e., not on some self-evident characteristic of visuality). As confidence in Aristotelian models of vision waned, early modern anxieties over the veracity of vision opened the door for literary artists to explore the intertwining of embodied experience and cognition that structures ethical action. Although Shakespeare’s play calls the veracity of visual experience into question, it also suggests the ethical danger of overconfidence in the stability of any ground (visual, rhetorical, logical, and so on). Second, Shakespeare reminds us to ask why the tendency to favor either the material or the ideal (as grounds for critical inquiry) repeatedly manifests itself in terms of the sensible (especially the visible), regardless of the sometimes overt disdain for the instability of sensuous (and especially visual) experience. Shakespeare resists the temptation to prioritize either the visible or the invisible, opting instead for something like Merleau-Ponty’s middle space of philosophical inquiry:



Being is the “place” where the “modes of consciousness” are inscribed as structurations of Being (a way of thinking oneself within a society is implied


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Merleau-Ponty suggests a way of ethically engaging with the world in which the movement between the poles of visible and invisible is unceasing. The faintly paradoxical oscillation in his thought—in which “modes of being” are “structurations of consciousness” and “structurations of consciousness” are “modes of being”—reflects the responsibility of his ongoing attempt to understand the relationship of the sensible and the intelligible (of perception and knowledge). Most importantly, though, Merleau-Ponty does not allow for the isolation of moments of ideality and materiality: the synthesis of experience and understanding “the in itself for itself integration” is not something that occurs in the quiet reflection of conscious detachment, but in a constantly agitated state of physicality (the “Being in promiscuity”). Merleau-Ponty’s characterization accounts for the slippage between the appeal to materiality (to the thing, the handkerchief ) and the desire for ideality (the “fact,” the “actual,” the “truth”). We can never look at the truth, because we cannot isolate the truth from the continually unfolding experience of perception. In his final published work, the essay “Eye and Mind,” Merleau-Ponty demonstrates this unwillingness to ground philosophical thought in either the ideal or the material through an interrogation of art (painting in particular). “Suppose . . . that no thought ever detaches itself completely from a sustaining support; that the only privilege of speaking-thought is to have rendered its own support manageable; that the figurations of literature and philosophy are no more settled than those of painting and are no more capable of being accumulated into a stable treasure . . . that in the end we are never in a position to take stock of everything objectively or to think of progress in itself.”34 Considering his own insight, he imagines the disappointment of the subject, like Othello, who is forced to ask, “Is this the highest point of reason, to realize that the soil beneath our feet is shifting?”35 Not unlike Gadamer, who would rather revel in the positive contamination of language by prejudice, Merleau-Ponty responds to the distraught empiricist by embracing the continual unfolding of experience in the crossing of eye and mind. The disappointment of the empiricist “issues from that spurious fantasy which claims for itself a positivity capable of making up for its own emptiness. It is the regret of not being everything, and a rather groundless regret at that.”36 In an attempt to describe an alternative way to search for the depth of experience that is at the heart of ethics, Merleau-Ponty


in its social structure), and where the structurations of Being are modes of consciousness. The in itself for itself integration takes place not in the absolute consciousness, but in the Being in promiscuity. The perception of the world is formed in the world, the test for truth takes place in Being.33


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writes, “It cannot be merely a question of an unmysterious interval, as seen from an airplane, between these trees and those farther away. Nor it is a matter of the way things are conjured away, by one another, as we see so vividly in a perspective drawing. These two views are very explicit and raise no problems. The enigma, though, lies in their bond, in what is between them.”37 While “Eye and Mind” represents Merleau-Ponty’s most direct engagement with artistic production—he treats the painting of Cézanne throughout the essay—had he lived longer, he might have turned even more concertedly to the relation of ethics and aesthetics. For the most profound journeys into the heart of epistemology and ontology seem to lead to the nature of the inexpressible that is exposed in that relation: Bottom’s attempt to account for his wondrous experience leads him to song, just as Emilia sings the truth of Desdemona’s character on her deathbed and Othello waxes poetic in an attempt to articulate his experience. In his late phase, Merleau-Ponty abandoned the hope for a scientific phenomenology in favor of a deliberately futile method of approaching perception through indirect philosophical language. The method is perhaps best understood as a series of profoundly responsible attempts at approximation—essays (in Montaigne’s sense) certain to fall short, but crucial for their defense of aesthetic aporias against lifedenying certainties. In our own search for ethical understanding, we might heed Heidegger’s warning (and insufficient apology for his own ethical failure) that “the more questioningly we ponder the essence of technology, the more mysterious the essence of art becomes.”38 Heidegger turned to art too late, after recognizing his own ethical failure, his late work an insufficient attempt to make amends for the blind spots of his early thought.39 And it is something like Heidegger’s technology that fails Othello: the reasoned deliberation over evidence, which blinded him to the humanity—both good and evil—that surrounded him. Even when he was “perplexed in the extreme,” Othello seemed to be aware of the limitations of his own method—torn between the law he had accepted upon becoming Venetian and the aesthetic power of the other person: OTHELLO IAGO OTHELLO

I would have him nine years a-killing. A fine woman! a fair woman! a sweet woman! Nay, you must forget that. Ay, let her rot, and perish, and be damn’d to-night; for she shall not live. No, my heart is turn’d to stone; I strike it, and it hurts my hand. O, the world hath not a sweeter creature! she might lie by an emperor’s side and command him tasks.




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IAGO OTHELLO

IAGO OTHELLO

Nay, that’s not your way. Hang her! I do but say what she is. So delicate with her needle! an admirable musician! O, she will sing the savageness out of a bear. Of so high and plenteous wit and invention! She’s the worse for all this. O, a thousand, a thousand times. And then, of so gentle a condition! (4.1.178–193)

Despite being convinced of Desdemona’s guilt by the power of reason and the witness of material fact, Othello cannot shake the power of her bodily presence. Resolved to murder her, Othello exclaims, “I’ll not expostulate with her, lest her body and beauty unprovide my mind again” (4.1.204–206). One can sense here that Othello has his own doubts about what ought to “provide” his mind with the basis for proper ethical action. The situation before him at the scene of what will be his loyal wife’s death offers ample persuasions against his determined course of action. The oscillation between what the evidence has “provided” he should do (“tear her to pieces”) and that provided by his interpersonal experience of her offers two possible courses of action. Following reason and the “facts” provided by Iago to his very eyes, Othello can come to no other conclusion than that she is guilty. And still the image of the sleeping Desdemona before him on the bed —the most compelling “living reason” in the play—suggests otherwise: “O balmy breath, that dost almost persuade / Justice to break her sword!” (5.2.16–17). Unlike Angelo’s cold willingness to execute the law (regardless of his personal failings), Othello’s hesitation suggests that his effort to act ethically is authentic throughout. Of course, this authenticity is of little solace, considering that his intuition only “almost” persuades him to change his mind. But it does indicate something about Shakespeare’s sense of ethical subjectivity. For Shakespeare, the fraught relationship between what we see (how we experience seeing) and what we do is a condition of ethical agency. Recourse to moral law or reason does not ease the difficulties that arise at the moment of the ethical decision. This truth structures Othello’s undoing at the hands of the manipulative Iago. In the companion piece to Othello, The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare tells a similar story, but with a different conclusion. That play is the subject of the following chapter.


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“Disliken the Truth of Your Own Seeming”: Visual and Ethical Truth in The Winter’s Tale Nothing is more free than the imagination of man.1

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t the end of The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare offers a scene so improbable that in order to perceive it, Paulina informs Leontes, “It is requir’d / You do awake your faith” (5.3.94–95). What we are about to see, of course, is the living statue of Hermione—art become life, imagination turned into reality. This theatrical spectacle is paradigmatic of a Shakespearean aesthetic in which characters and audience alike are confronted with an impossibility that somehow gestures toward a deeper truth. The invitation to accept the living Hermione is powerful, leading to the conclusion that the playwright’s gift is an invitation to accept the openness or, in more recent critical terms, the indeterminacy of both art and life. Yet the final scene is prefigured by another, less-positive encounter with an impossible image, the product of Leontes’s frantic response to Hermione and Polixenes in the opening scenes of the play. In this chapter I will argue that the two scenes are more alike than is generally acknowledged, that Leontes’s dilemma in facing each image involves not a choice between certitude and openness—between understanding and faith—but an ethical judgment: a response to a demand from another. And while there is no doubt that his first response is wrong, the fact that he makes a choice constitutes the ethical nature of his character contra indeterminacy, against endless deferral. It is in this choice that he asserts his responsibility and enables his future redemption. To place Leontes’s response to Polixenes and Hermione in Act 1 in the same category as his later response to the statue in Act 5 is to read against


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the grain of the theme of redemption that many critics argue structures the play. In such a reading we can identify Leontes’s irrational jealousy as an example of moral depravity, which can be redeemed only by divine intervention. The final offer of redemption, recognized as the good, provides a counterexample to the evil experienced earlier and is readily visible to all. As comforting as this reading is, it relies on a knowledge of the proper response to each scene, which can become clear only after the fact. That the final scene requires a leap of faith—demanded by Paulina—and an acceptance of magic underscores the lack of a prescriptive notion of responsible action here. The action’s emphasis rests on the moment of decision, when any knowledge of the correctness of the choice is utterly unknowable. Thus, while there is no doubt that the Leontes of the first acts is a jealous tyrant, his tyranny is a result of his flawed response to the demands of an image beyond his understanding, an image of alterity, in the sense given to that term by French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas—the unknown and unknowable other person.2 Leontes is not, however, the essence of tyranny, or ontologically tyrannical. Rather, his actions in the moments leading up to his horrific response to an imagined infidelity produce for us (and for the characters in the drama) the concept of tyrant. If Leontes were a tyrant in an ontological sense, his redemption would be impossible. When the final scene reenacts the ethical situation of the opening scene, offering the same character another impossible image and a second chance to respond, only then does Leontes allow his response to proceed from the other. His redemption is not an evasion: in answer to Paulina’s offer to “forbear” and “depart” (5.3.85, 5.3.97), admitting that some might deem her work “unlawful business” (l. 96), Leontes is unequivocal, issuing the command for her to “proceed” and adding that“[n]o foot shall stir” (ll. 97–98). His willingness to affirm the unknown constitutes a risk that is the guarantor of an ethics freed from the restrictions of prescriptive thought (prescriptions, for example, of conventional epistemology or institutional religion). To proceed is to risk choosing in favor of what cannot be known in the present but will have full consequences in the future. To accept the unknown is not to remain at the moment of undecidability; it is to act in the face of the indeterminate in order to make meaning, and thus to ensure the truth of Paulina’s pronouncement that her “spell is lawful” (l. 105).


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I. Howard Felperin has taken an important first step toward the interpretation that I advocate here. Felperin stresses Leontes’s need to accept the play’s linguistic indeterminacy, to abandon certitude in favor of a “sophisticated,


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a condition of the play’s “realism,” that the linguistic problems foregrounded in the opening act of The Winter’s Tale are never, because they cannot be, solved . . . the language of art employed by Paulina [in the final scene] is every bit as incommensurate and incompatible with the “nature” it attempts to define. . . . The problem of language has been resolved only in the sense of having been accepted and transcended, resolved, that is, by fiat or on faith.4

Thus, Felperin concludes, in The Winter’s Tale the “world of reference . . . finally has no objective reality or ontological stability, but recedes into an infinite play of signs and deferral of affirmed or authoritative meaning.”5 Rather than reject this conclusion, and the usefulness of deconstruction as a mode of critical analysis, I hope to examine the ethical implications of this stance for our understanding of the aesthetic experience offered by Shakespeare’s play. By reading The Winter’s Tale as a play about the relationship between ethics and aesthetics, we may move beyond Felperin’s critical insight and advance the debate over the political and ethical import of deconstruction. While it is tempting to celebrate the aesthetic object as the site where language can be accepted on its own terms, reflection on the eternal suspension of determinacy has the appearance of evasion. Worried that deconstruction is essentially valueless, advocating a form of solipsistic nihilism, many literary critics turned away from such theory to approaches that emphasize real consequences—to history and the politics of cultural and social struggles, which promised to reconnect literary study with lived experience.6 Despite this adverse response, Jacques Derrida has insisted all along that deconstruction is politically engaged.7 Overlooked until recently by scholars of early modern culture, who are more familiar with Derrida’s celebration of the linguistic deferral (or différance) on which Felperin’s argument rests, is Derrida’s late work focusing on ethics and religion as the sites where theoretical concerns over language confront actual political and social matters of consequence. With this turn to religion and ethics, insistence on the priority of the other, which is at the heart of Levinas’s notion of alterity, has become central to the project of deconstruction. The product of the Levinas-Derrida exchange has been described as “religion without religion,” a philosophical


as distinct from a naive, realism” in the play.3 Felperin’s elegant deconstructive reading argues for a radical openness in which indeterminacy is found at the height of Shakespeare’s reflection on art in The Winter’s Tale. The improbability of the final scene highlights for Felperin the incomplete nature of knowledge mediated by language:


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ethics grounded in a critique of Heideggerian ontology (and implicitly a critique of traditional ethics) aimed at redirecting reflection from one’s own being to the impossible knowledge of the other person.8 Levinas’s insistence on the philosophical centrality of the other (a paradoxical proposition: the other as the absent presence of human experience) serves as the starting point for my discussion of ethics and aesthetics in The Winter’s Tale. Levinas predicates our cognitive experience with being on a prior relation to the other through a critique of ontology aimed at prioritizing ethics “as first philosophy.”9 His intention is to respond to Heidegger’s attempt to think the meaning of being in its situatedness (a project epitomized in the Heideggerian term for human being: Dasein, literally “there being”). Levinas champions the other as the only escape from the homogenizing effects of thought directed toward a knowledge of being which is paradoxically occasioned by the fact of being: [The] primacy of the same was Socrates’s teaching: to receive nothing of the Other but what is in me, as though from all eternity I was in possession of what comes to me from the outside—to receive nothing, or to be free . . . Cognition is the deployment of this identity; it is freedom. That reason in the last analysis would be the manifestation of a freedom, neutralizing the other and encompassing him, can come as no surprise once it was laid down that sovereign reason knows only itself, that nothing other limits it.10

Rejecting this “freedom” as a form of cognitive imperialism, Levinas argues that a “calling into question of the same—which cannot occur within the egoist spontaneity of the same—is brought about by the other.”11 He then goes on to “name this calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the Other ethics.”12 For Levinas the disruption of self-awareness by the other suggests the necessity of something exterior to being; he regards this “beyond”—what he eventually calls “otherwise than being”—as both prior to and the future of the human subject.13 Gaston Bachelard describes this disruptive aspect of poetry as the “transsubjectivity of the image,” which cannot be reduced to the poet’s past but which nevertheless amounts to a matter of human connection: “The poet does not confer the past of his image upon me, and yet his image immediately takes root in me.”14 In his most direct commentary on aesthetics, Levinas, like Bachelard, relates aesthetic experience to an encounter with an image: “[t]he most elementary procedure of art consists in substituting for the object its image. Its image, and not its concept. A concept is the object grasped, the intelligible object. Already by action we maintain a living relationship with a real object; we grasp it, we conceive it. The image neutralizes this real relationship, this primary conceiving through action.”15 Our ethical


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responsibility to the image in aesthetic experience arises from our inability to contain the experience through a cognitive response; the ethical response to the aesthetic image is not to accept the impossible stasis of the manifest image but to create another image from the experience. It is important to stress that Levinasian alterity includes both the other person, designated “other,” and the utterly other, designated “Other”—the other as other, conceptually equivalent to God.16 Derek Attridge glosses “the other as other” as “the experience . . . [of ] an encounter with the limits of one’s powers to think and to judge, a challenge to one’s capacities as a rational agent.”17 For Levinas this encounter is always fleeting: “Knowing conceals re-presentation and reduces the other to presence and co-presence. Time, on the contrary, in its dia-chrony, would signify a relationship that does not compromise the other’s alterity, while still assuring its non-indifference to ‘thought.’”18 I hope that this digression into Levinasian ethics clarifies this chapter’s central claim: that Shakespeare’s recognition of the importance of something like Levinasian alterity marks many of the more reflective moments in the plays, when we watch a moment of seemingly simple perception become a crisis of responsibility. This aspect of Shakespeare’s aesthetic contrasts sharply with Jonson’s, for example, as the latter continually sought to control the issue of his pen, allowing little time to pause in the presence of the unknown. Shakespeare shares with Spenser a recognition that the visual possesses the power to disrupt the course of action prescribed by moral reasoning. By isolating this problematic notion of the image-as-other, the action of The Winter’s Tale suggests that the aesthetic demand issued by the image is explicitly a matter of ethics in the philosophical sense: that which concerns human action in the context of a singular event. Attridge suggests that Levinasian ethics might recuperate the aesthetic as an important site for intersubjective exchange by figuring it as a kind of Levinasian other. The key to such an approach to aesthetic production and response—one sensitive to the diversity of experience brought to the aesthetic encounter by the viewer— is in its emphasis on time as the guarantor of art’s consequence. Following Levinas, we might opt for a more studied reflection on what we do when confronted with the unknown (exemplified in the “face of the other,” and the “face-to-face” relation): we determine, judge, conclude.19 Whatever path we choose, the choice is a matter of ethics.



II. Levinas’s notion of an ethics grounded in the “face-to-face” relation with the other provides a striking introduction to the world of Shakespeare’s late


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play. When The Winter’s Tale opens, we find two court servants, Archidamus and Camillo, discussing the relative merits of their native lands. Although on one level the exchange is simply an exercise in civility, on another it introduces what will be the play’s central epistemological dilemma—the relationship of the seen to the true. Archidamus tells Camillo that if he ever visits Bohemia, he “shall see . . . great difference betwixt our Bohemia and your Sicilia” (1.1.3–4). Of course, the audience is about to be treated to just such a visual spectacle, as the play alternates between Bohemia and Sicilia, drawing great power from the contrast—exemplified by the Sicilian Leontes’s insane jealousy and Bohemian Polixenes’s evenhanded response. The importance of this initial exchange lies in its emphasis on seeming, which, it turns out, opens the interpretive space of possibility throughout the play. Archidamus’s belief in Bohemia’s poverty of spectacle leads him to invent a remedy; as he tells Camillo, “we will give you sleepy drinks, that your senses, unintelligent of our insufficience, may, though they cannot praise us, as little accuse us” (ll. 13–16). We are offered here a capsule of the tensions soon to be revealed, as the Sicilian king accuses his wife on the basis of what he believes to be the evidence of his own eyes. The play’s insistent meditation on truth continues immediately after the two servants’ opening exchange, when Hermione is called on to persuade Polixenes to extend his stay in Bohemia. When Hermione asks for a second time if he will stay, Polixenes responds: “I may not, verily” (1.2.45). Hermione seizes on Polixenes’s assertion that he cannot stay in truth by questioning the power of his “limber vows” and particularly his “dread ‘verily’” (ll. 47, 55). It is apparently through this argument that Hermione is able to convince Polixenes to remain in Leontes’s court, for her comment that “a lady’s ‘verily’ is / As potent as a lord’s”(ll. 50–51) allows her to shift the stakes of the discussion from the inevitable truth of his immediate departure to the possibility of a change of heart. Hermione’s quip is ironic in that it simultaneously calls on the universality and the relativity of truth statements. More importantly, Hermione catches Polixenes in Hume’s gap, for of course there can be no truth to future events, only expectations and the potential consequences of one’s actions.20 He cannot be leaving tomorrow in truth but only in word, and a word can be changed. This innocent exchange between Hermione and Polixenes lays the epistemological groundwork for Leontes’s much more serious struggle with what he sees as truth in the first half of the play. In the lines that follow Polixenes’s agreement to remain in Sicilia, the calm of the court visit gives way notoriously to Leontes’s irrational jealousy, which revolves around the paternity of the boy Mamillius and that of the unborn child Hermione carries at the opening of the play. This scene,


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like 3.3 of Othello, has often been cited as an example of Shakespeare’s carelessness with time, for Leontes is apparently transformed from a loyal friend and husband into a jealous monster in a few moments. To explain the jarring effect, critics have argued that Shakespeare sacrifices character development to the larger theme of redemption, identified by J. Dover Wilson as the goal of the romances. According to Wilson, The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline are “loosely constructed and at times carelessly written” because they are “experiments” in a new form leading up to Shakespeare’s crowning achievement in The Tempest.21 The loose construction of The Winter’s Tale is often associated explicitly with the treatment of time—not only in the figure of Time, who serves as the link between the play’s two parts, but also in the sense that time speeds up in the opening scenes. As the downward spiral of Leontes’s jealousy occurs in what might be called unrealistic time, the audience is forced to watch his catastrophic errors accumulate—errors easily avoided, it would seem, had the king but paused for a moment of calm reflection. The result, according to this reading, is a compact preparation for the more leisurely second part, in which the scene shifts to the pastoral setting of Bohemia and its sheep-shearing festival, the generative celebration leading up to Leontes’s redemption and the restoration of order. I want to suggest an alternative interpretation, which argues that, rather than abandoning character in the opening scenes, Shakespeare focused more intently on his subject’s ethical struggle. Rather than accelerating time in the service of an allegorical portrayal of the dynamics of redemption, the play can be seen to do the opposite—to slow time down, drawing out the precise moment at which Leontes comes face to face with an ethical decision. The king’s experience in that moment offers a glimpse into the peculiar modality of art, in which ethical reflection is suspended or, in Levinas’s terms, in which art effects its “eternal duration [in] the meanwhile.”22 The suspension of time prefigures the action to come, culminating with the scene in which the statue becomes perhaps the exemplary instance of art’s ability to stop time. That Leontes makes the wrong choice only highlights the pressure that the play brings to bear on our own engagement with ethical responsibility. Immediately after Leontes has entreated his wife to convince Polixenes to stay, the Sicilian king becomes obsessed with images both manifest and of his own making. While Hermione and Polixenes walk apart, Leontes worries that their affection is “too hot” (1.2.108); he reasons that:



To mingle friendship far is mingling bloods. I have tremor cordis on me; my heart dances, But not for joy; not joy. This entertainment


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Image Ethics in Shakespeare and Spenser May a free face put on, derive a liberty From heartiness, from bounty, fertile bosom, And well become the agent; ’t may—I grant. But to be paddling palms and pinching fingers, As now they are, and making practic’d smiles, As in a looking-glass; and then to sigh, as ’twere The mort o’ th’ deer—O, that is entertainment My bosom likes not, nor my brows! (ll. 109–19)

Leontes begins to imagine alternative realities here; he recognizes that the interaction between Hermione and Polixenes is as easily the result of “heartiness,” “bounty,” and a “fertile bosom,” which “well become the agent,” as it is an example of “practic’d smiles,” aimed at the end of “mingling bloods.” He thus foreshadows his argument in the trial scene, when he implores the attendant lords to “[l]ook on” Hermione: Mark her well; be but about To say she is a goodly lady, and The justice of your hearts will thereto add ’Tis pity she’s not honest—honorable. Praise her but for this her without-door form (Which on my faith deserves high speech). . . . When you have said she’s goodly, come between Ere you can say she’s honest: but be’t known (From him that has most cause to grieve it should be) She’s an adult’ress. (2.1.65–78)

The argument is familiar to Shakespeareans, as it appears almost verbatim in Much Ado About Nothing, when Claudio, at the altar with Hero, accuses her of infidelity: She’s but the sign and semblance of her honor. Behold how like a maid she blushes here! O, what authority and show of truth Can cunning sin cover itself withal! Comes not that blood as modest evidence To witness simple virtue? Would you not swear, All you that see her, that she were a maid, By these exterior shows? But she is none: She knows the heat of a luxurious bed; Her blush is guiltiness, not modesty. (4.1.33–42)


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In the earlier play Shakespeare is also musing on the relation of perception to reality but in a comic space less concerned with the implications of Claudio’s public actions than with the playwright’s ability to manipulate events toward a positive ending.23 For Leontes, watching the “entertainment” provided by Hermione and Polixenes leads to a proliferation of images, all of which suddenly become the subject of his more urgent attempts at understanding. As Felperin notes, “Leontes’ jealous and destructive passion is not quite so flimsy and fanciful . . . as is often casually assumed.”24 Indeed, though his interpretation of what he sees may be questioned, the play’s initial scenes clearly indicate that “Leontes is presumably looking at something.”25 In performance this “something” could be made more or less relevant to Leontes’s suspicions. Yet the text here does not leave much room for speculation about how to stage the interaction between Hermione and Polixenes. Unlike the final scene of Measure for Measure, for example, in which a director’s interpretation of Isabella’s response to the Duke’s proposal can result in an array of performance options, The Winter’s Tale establishes in the early scenes the error of Leontes’s interpretation.26 Nevertheless, because the text does not reveal what precisely it is that Leontes sees—but only that he sees differently from the other characters—we are forced to contemplate the consequences of Leontes’s possible reactions to what is apparently visible. The effect is to shift the attention from the spectacle onstage to the spectacle of Leontes’s mind. Initially unable to adjudicate between the conflicting images (both real and imagined) of his wife as faithful hostess and lustful adulteress, Leontes turns to his son to ask first, “Art thou my boy?” and then, “Art thou my calf?” (1.2.120, 1.2.127). Because Mamillius is both the king’s son and his subject, his response actually fuels the fury behind Leontes’s image-making. To the second question the boy replies, “Yes, if you will, my lord” (l. 127). Seeing the potential of his own imaginative power—that he can will (order) the world according to his will (desire)—Leontes becomes frozen in a moment of ethical reflection. The long speech that follows is worth examining in detail. In the Folio text it begins: Thou want’st a rough pash, & the shoots that I have To be full, like me: yet they say we are Almost as like as Egges; women say so, (That will say any thing). But were they false As o’re-dy’d Blacks, as Wind, as Waters; false As Dice are to be wish’d, by one that fixes No borne ’twixt his and mine; yet were it true




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The cuckoldry hinted at earlier—“that is entertainment / My bosom likes not, nor my brows”—is developed here in the image Leontes now has of himself adorned with “shoots.” His transformation into the statue-like cuckold is not yet complete, however, as the passage is still animated with ambiguous references to generation in the words “Egges,” “Welkin,” and “Collop.”28 Not yet reified in the image of the cuckold, Leontes can imagine a world in which eggs hatch and flesh grows and decays. But the passage is also a turning point in his thought, as he rehearses the age’s paternal anxiety. Many critics have commented on the dire consequences of the assumptions entailed in his misogyny here. As Valerie Traub points out, “[t]he anxieties of Leontes are the anxieties of a masculinist culture in which women’s bodies possess enormous powers of signification. Hermione’s pregnant body, as much as it is a signifier of maternal fecundity and hereditary lineage, is a palpable reminder of erotic activity.”29 Playing devil’s advocate, Felperin argues that the viewer/reader’s inability to judge the merit of Leontes’s jealousy is a result of the incomplete knowledge offered by the play: “We see enough to know it has some basis, but not enough to say how much. We are from the outset in a world of interpretation—the producer’s and our own—where nothing can be either wholly dismissed or wholly believed, and nothing can be known for certain.”30 As the confused king continues, however, the particularity of the issue of paternity gives way to a meditation on a larger epistemological problem—that of necessary connections, or causality.31 Leontes begins this deeper exploration of doubt with an appeal to the boy’s appearance, an appeal he hopes to satisfy with the truth of their intersubjective gaze (his request for Mamillius to look on him). Although momentarily comforted by their similarity—his “dear’st . . . Collop”32—the confirmation of Hermione’s faithfulness provided by the boy’s appearance is not enough to stop the flood of thought that follows: Can thy Dam, may’t be Affection? thy Intention stabs the Center. Thou do’st make possible things not so held, Communicat’st with Dreames (how can this be?) With what’s unreall: thou coactive art, And fellow’st nothing. Then ’tis very credent, Thou may’st co-joyne with something, and thou do’st, (And that beyond Commission) and I find it,


To say this Boy were like me. Come (Sir Page) Looke on me with your Welkin eye: sweet Villaine, Most dear’st; my Collop. (ll. 128–37)27


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This second half of Leontes’s monologue has been the subject of a great deal of critical confusion. Stephen Orgel notes that the passage has since Rowe “defied any consensus” and argues that it is in fact incomprehensible, an example of a kind of “linguistic opacity” that can be identified as “a feature of the play.”34 The difficulty of the passage is confirmed in the play’s very next line, in which Polixenes asks, “What means Sicilia?” (l. 146, emphasis added), and it is no doubt tempting to imagine that the onset of madness has rendered Leontes’s speech unintelligible. But while the passage is difficult, it is not nonsense. David Ward, for example, drawing on philological research into the early modern uses of the term affection, argues that the passage’s difficulty is more a matter of linguistic drift than any overt opacity: “It is a piece of psychological self-diagnosis which uses the technical vocabulary correctly and would be clearly understood by a substantial proportion of Shakespeare’s audience.”35 I hope to suggest that this debate over the monologue’s intelligibility proceeds from the wrong direction, as both the proponents of incomprehensibility (or indeterminacy) and those arguing for clarity (obscured by linguistic change) locate the passage’s difficulty in the text rather than in the dramatic situation. But if we can consider the difficulty here as Leontes’s dilemma when faced with uncertainty, the play can be seen to double the process of reflection by demanding a response to the obscure—for Leontes, to the inconceivable; for the audience to the work of art itself—and thus shifting attention away from the aesthetic object and toward the affective response it elicits. Levinas’s meditation on aesthetics provides an illuminating characterization of the debt to literary obscurity that I am interested in here. The philosopher asks, “Does not the function of art lie in not understanding? Does not obscurity provide it with its very element and a completion sui generis, foreign to dialectics and the life of ideas? Will we then say that the artist knows and expresses the very obscurity of the real?”36 Levinas invokes the experience of not understanding to suggest that it is the spectator’s ethical responsibility to act—to make meaning—when faced with the image presented in art. Moreover, for Levinas the image is the operative feature of art, regardless of medium, as he rejects the conventional distinction between the plastic and the literary arts as defined by a concern with space and time, respectively:


(And that to the infection of my Braines, And hardning of my Browes). (ll. 137–46)33

We can then understand that time, apparently introduced into images by the non-plastic arts such as music, literature, theatre and cinema, does not


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shatter the fixity of images. That the characters in a book are committed to the infinite repetition of the same acts and the same thoughts is not simply due to the contingent fact of the narrative, which is exterior to those characters. They can be narrated because their being resembles itself, doubles itself and immobilizes. Such a fixity is wholly different from that of concepts, which initiates life, offers reality to our powers, to truth, opens a dialectic. By its reflection in a narrative, being has a non-dialectical fixity, stops dialectics and time.37

Levinas’s point here is that we cannot find the other’s essence in representation because this can reproduce only what we already know of ourselves. In William E. Engel’s description, “Dramatic artifice, especially where death is involved, brings with it a glimpse of its double nature—and of our own. . . . We are left wondering whether the encounter we have with things in the world ever can be anything more than a confirmation, or refutation, of what we expected to find there.”38 For Levinas, the questions raised by aesthetic obscurity—questions centered on precisely the kind of ontological doubleness that can be posed only as a question (“Can thy Dam?” can both be true?)—cannot simply be left open, for to leave open such questions is to abdicate one’s ethical responsibility to the other. It is only in the aesthetic image that these questions are unresolved. According to Levinas, art touches on the “non-truth of being . . . always to be defined by comparison with truth, as what is left over after understanding,” leading to a further question: “Does not the commerce with the obscure, as a totally independent ontological event, describe categories irreducible to those of cognition?”39 Considered in this way, the uniqueness of aesthetic experience is a result of both the denial of understanding produced by aesthetic objects and the demand for cognition as a response to this denial.40 In this sense, aesthetic experience simply isolates a feature common to understanding in general. Michael Witmore notes that “early modern philosophers and theologians inherited a long-standing tradition of thinking about wonder as a response to some novel situation or object, the result of a lack of understanding that invited further engagement. The idea that the affective state of wonder could itself be explained as an effect of ignorance was a classical one.”41 Art possesses the ability to stage the encounter with obscurity; and drama in particular emphasizes the double nature of that encounter: always (and forever) allowing both the moment of confusion (or wonder) and the interpretive resolution to coexist in an impossible recurrence.42 Shakespeare offers several well-known examples of encounters with obscurity leading to productive action. Hamlet’s response upon his first


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encounter with the Ghost—“Let me not burst in ignorance. . . . What may this mean, / That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel/Revisits thus the glimpses of the moon” (1.4.46, 1.4.51–53)—leads Horatio to exclaim: “He waxes desperate with imagination” (l. 87). And, as discussed in Chapter 4, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Bottom, stricken with wonder at the memory of his experience, vows to have Peter Quince “write a ballet of this dream” and to “sing it in the latter end of a play, before the Duke” (4.1.214–15, 4.1.217). If we accept that all art places us in an encounter with obscurity, then I would argue that such experience also tacitly includes guidance in the form of demands placed on us by the image of art as other. Shakespeare, in particular, offers a great deal of guidance on the matter of obscurity in The Winter’s Tale, because he makes it “a feature of the play.” To return to Leontes’s difficult monologue, we can now suggest that all of Leontes’s speculation follows from the seed of doubt signaled in the compound question, “Can thy Dam, may’t be / Affection?” This question condenses the principal dilemma of the play, as Leontes collapses both particular and general causal explanations: he doubts Hermione’s capacity for adultery and also the power of affection to turn fantasy into reality. Faced with the image of his wife as adulteress—an image manifested in his mind’s eye through the fantasy of himself as cuckold—Leontes is forced beyond the cognitive and into the obscure. “Perplexed in the extreme,” like his tragic counterpart Othello (5.2.346), Leontes has a dilemma like our own in reading the play. His tortured reasoning in the passage quoted above reproduces his own interpretive predicament; if the passage is “difficult,” it is because the decision he is about to make is difficult. As Felperin notes, Leontes “stakes nothing less than everything . . . on his interpretation.”43 This choice mirrors the intensity of his “affection,” that he is “moved”:44 the image of himself as a cuckold is strong enough to override any visual proof of paternity Leontes might find in Mamillius’s appearance. He is aware of the contradiction between his image of Hermione as an adulteress and the accepted truth: the image makes possible “things not so held.” This awareness leads him to the conclusion that, in the image, reality and imagination merge as if the real “communicat’st with Dreames . . . With what’s unreall.” Ward notes that the sense of “communicat’st” here is likely that associated with the Eucharist, as in the act of “communicating” with the body of Christ.45 Taken in this way, Leontes’s affection goes beyond the power of persuasion to something like transformation: his imagination engenders his reality.46 John Joughin attributes Leontes’s behavior here to his “habitual tendency to foreclose on his interpretive options.”47 Indeed, the vexed king rejects dialogue and




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dialectic but only insofar as he aims to reach certitude through a kind of hermetic interpretation. That is, rather than fail to see the interpretive possibilities open to him, he sees them and is paralyzed as a result. Levinas similarly muses that it is in the image, “[i]n the instant of a statue, in its eternally suspended future, the tragic, simultaneity of necessity and liberty, can come to pass.”48 In Levinas’s terms,“[a]n image is both a term of the exposition, a figure that shows itself, the immediate, the sensible, and a term in which truth is not at its term, since in it the whole of being does not show itself in itself, but is only reflected in it.”49 This conception of the image leads Levinas to conclude that “we should compare art with dreams: the instant of a statue is a nightmare.”50 What the play offers us here is the eternal moment in which Leontes is caught apprehending two eternally suspended futures. His mental state is marked by his own recognition that he is experiencing necessity and liberty simultaneously, and it is nightmarish in every conceivable way.51 Faced with cognition’s inability to comprehend communication with dreams—faced with the obscurity of the situation in which he finds himself eternally suspended—Leontes is compelled to accept the proposition that affection is “coactive,” that it “fellow’st nothing.” Thus, in the final lines of the passage, Leontes rejects the frozen instant, opting instead for action: just as the reasoning mind will come to a judgment, affection will find its object.52 Ward argues that affection in its seventeenth-century sense was involuntary, distinguishing it from reason. His argument is convincing in that references to the will’s need to resist the appetitive abound in early modern tracts concerning the housekeeping of the soul.53 Without reason as his guide, Leontes is bound to follow affection to its object—the “something” with which it “may’st co-joyne.” As a result, affection conjoins with its object in the visible proof that Leontes conjures to defend his accusation of Hermione. Although Ward argues that the “something” is Leontes’s own body, it seems more likely that it is the evidence of his eyes offered in the scene in which Hermione persuaded Polixenes to stay. The rest of the passage would then read as follows: it is possible that affection may join with something, and it does (“I find it”); to my great dismay, I see myself in the image of the cuckold (“the infection of my Braines, / And the hardning of my Browes”). Leontes has decided that the image of his affection (the unfaithful Hermione produced by the conjunction of the actual Hermione with the imagined infidelity) is plausible (“very credent”), thus explaining his mental distress and his furrowed brow (or cuckold’s horns). It is significant that his brow hardens as he comes to his conclusion, for this is the point at which he leaves reflection—and its multiple possibilities—for certainty, the vulnerability of flesh for stony resolve. The paradox of the play’s presentation,


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as Leontes’s flawed argument reveals, is that both the moment of eternal possibility—the frozen statue of aesthetic reflection—and the consequences of human action (once performed) are static; only in the process of deciding and acting on one’s decisions is true ethical responsibility possible. Viewed in this way, Leontes’s words are not the ravings of insanity but a careful meditation on the relation of experience to certitude.54 Although Leontes recognizes the tenuousness of his reasoning in this passage, he overcomes uncertainty by naturalizing the connection between what is seen and what is known by custom.55 The key to Leontes’s conversion from conjecture to certainty resides in his ability to transfer the impression of Hermione’s guilt—the perception that holding hands with Polixenes amounts to “paddling palms”—to something he can feel in the mind: something that might lead to the “infection of [his] Braines.” The progression from doubt to belief, and finally moral conviction, parallels that examined in the previous chapter’s discussion of Othello, though in the absence of an Iago figure, the process has become completely interior. Convinced of the reality of his own conjecture, Leontes accuses Camillo of deception: “we have been / Deceiv’d in thy integrity, deceiv’d / In that which seems so” (1.2.239–41). Camillo’s response is to ask that Leontes “Be plainer with [him]”: “let me know my trespass / By its own visage” (ll. 265–66). But rather than reveal his own experience with doubt—the basis of his extremity of feeling—Leontes tries to shift the discussion to the observable facts of his experience: Ha’ not you seen, Camillo (But that’s past doubt; you have, or your eye-glass Is thicker than a cuckold’s horn), or heard (For to a vision so apparent rumor Cannot be mute), or thought (for cogitation Resides not in that man that does not think) My wife is slippery? (1.2.267–73)56

Leontes’s reasoning here rests on the assertion that his accusation is based on ocular proof. The adultery is visible—“a vision so apparent” that the facts of the situation are “past doubt.” But in fact Leontes links apparent vision to “rumor,” which “cannot be mute.” We are left to ask, as Camillo does, what Leontes has actually seen. The term apparent is especially telling here, considering that we have just been presented with the process by which Leontes was confirmed in his belief; we will recall that an image of the guilty Hermione appeared to Leontes in his mind rather than in the visible world. Both meanings for the word apparent were current in the




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Is whispering nothing? Is leaning cheek to cheek? is meeting noses? Kissing with inside lip? stopping the career Of laughter with a sigh? (a note infallible Of breaking honesty)? horsing foot on foot? Skulking in corners? wishing clocks more swift? Hours, minutes? noon, midnight? and all eyes Blind with the pin and web but theirs, theirs only, That would unseen be wicked? Is this nothing? Why then the world and all that’s in’t is nothing, The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia nothing, My wife is nothing, nor nothing have these nothings, If this be nothing. (ll. 284–96)

Although he begins with things apparently seen, Leontes’s account of the lovers’ flirtation betrays its conjunction with his imagination when the passage shifts from “skulking in corners” to “wishing clocks more swift.” Regardless of the staging of the early scenes, Leontes cannot possibly be so far privy to the thoughts of the supposed lovers that he can know their wishes. Rather, in place of the evidence of his eyes, Leontes offers an account of the affair in conventional terms, reminiscent of John Donne’s observation that “love, all alike, no season knows nor clime / Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.”58 His frenzied repetition of “nothings” at the end of the passage cannot help but recall his realization that “affection” “fellow’st nothing.” When the argument fails to convince Camillo, Leontes makes a most curious accusation: Camillo is either a liar “[o]r else . . . a hovering temporizer, that / Canst with thine eyes at once see good and evil, / Inclining to them both” (ll. 302–4). A “hovering temporizer” like Levinas’s “statue, in its eternally suspended future,” fails to make ethical decisions. Leontes’s “hovering temporizer,” then, corresponds closely with what Levinas sees in the “eternal duration of the interval . . . the meanwhile, never finished, still enduring,” specifically “something inhuman and monstrous.”59 It is at this point that my analysis departs from the celebration of linguistic play and editorial openness so elegantly championed by Orgel and Felperin. For to acquiesce to the “endless process of deferral” that, according to Felperin, Leontes must accept is to concede the indeterminacy of art, a response that Levinas identifies as art’s “dimension of evasion” when faced with difficult


seventeenth century.57 The empirical evidence Leontes marshals to head off Camillo’s horror confirms that the vision is Leontes’s own:


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ethical questions.60 Rather than accept indeterminacy, we can (and do) decide what we think such passages mean. That we do decide (in contrast to art’s suspension of judgment), I will argue, is what the play foregrounds; our ability to make an interpretive choice constitutes our ethical responsibility to respond to the otherness of the image, with the full understanding that our response may be flawed. Once the king has decided, time begins to move again. Unlike the opening passages of 1.2, in which all the development occurs in Leontes’s mind, the subsequent passages offer a rapid series of events. We learn that Camillo is no “hovering temporizer,” for he immediately warns Polixenes rather than poisoning him. His is clearly an ethical decision, one that rests on his sense of justice and not experience: “To do this deed, / Promotion follows. If I could find example / Of thousands that had struck anointed kings / And flourish’d after, I’ld not do’t” (ll. 356–59). Just as quickly as Camillo turns, Leontes publishes his accusation in the public forum, calling for a trial and sending for a judgment from the oracle. All of the action follows from Leontes’s dialogue with Camillo about Hermione’s infidelity, that is, from the moment Leontes decides to act on his imagination by making his thoughts known to an other. All of the doubt that the king expresses in the monologues of 1.2 is swallowed up in the flurry of action leading up to the oracle’s pronouncement and the death of Mamillius. As these events unfold, the process of Leontes’s reasoning is revealed to the other characters as he interprets what appears to him an accumulation of evidence. Learning of Camillo and Polixenes’s flight, Leontes articulates his acceptance of his affected state; he knows that his belief is tainted by his own knowledge, a knowledge admittedly produced by the power of involuntary affection to make dreams reality: How blest am I In my just censure! in my true opinion! Alack, for lesser knowledge! how accurs’d In being so blest! There may be in the cup A spider steep’d, and one may drink; depart, And yet partake no venom (for his knowledge Is not infected), but if one present Th’ abhorr’d ingredient to his eye, make known How he hath drunk, he cracks his gorge, his sides, With violent hefts. I have drunk, and seen the spider. (2.1.36–45)



But rather than recognize that his “infected” knowledge impels him to conclusions rejected by everyone present, Leontes relies on his reason to


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justify the outrageous claim that Camillo, Polixenes, and Hermione were plotting his own death. As the second act increases the dramatic irony by which we witness Leontes’s error, the indeterminacy of the text gives way to clarity. Few readers or audience members would have difficulty in reaching a consensus about Apollo’s oracle: “Hermione is chaste, Polixenes blameless, Camillo a true subject, Leontes a jealous tyrant, his innocent babe truly begotten, and the King shall live without an heir, if that which is lost be not found” (3.2.132–36).61 Rather than argue for an indeterminacy of meaning here, we ought to consider why Shakespeare departs from the convention of a riddling oracle. For, despite the relative openness of its final phrase, the oracle is the epitome of clarity; that Leontes can reject its truth (“There is no truth at all i’ th’ oracle” [l. 140]) is a commentary on truth rather than a commentary on language. When Leontes asks the officer charged with reading the oracle, “Hast thou read truth?” the answer might appear evasive in the context of the play: “Ay, my lord, even so / As it is here set down” (ll. 138–39). The exchange highlights the relation of what is seen to what is true; the officer has read the words on the page, but this proves to Leontes only that those are the words on the page. And by this point in the play, the Sicilian king has made clear that his concern with truth is based not on the kind of appearance that can be perceived visually but on that which is seen with the mind’s eye. Earlier in the same scene, when a dismayed Hermione complains to Leontes, “You speak a language that I understand not. / My life stands in the level of your dreams” (ll. 80–81), Leontes utters the notorious response: “Your actions are my dreams. / You had a bastard by Polixenes, / And I but dream’d it” (ll. 82–83). What Leontes reveals here is that he is no longer concerned with the visible world. Only the death of Mamillius is enough to shake Leontes’s conviction, and his immediate conversion upon his son’s death shatters the stasis produced by the images that had transfixed him to this point. It is commonplace to note that if the play were a tragedy, it would end with the death of Hermione a few lines later: Leontes’s fate fixed as an image, a nightmarish statue of a tyrant frozen in his eternal error. Paulina’s speech of condemnation provides a lasting sense of this frozen moment: “A thousand knees, / Ten thousand years together, naked, fasting,/ Upon a barren mountain, and still winter / In storm perpetual, could not move the gods / To look that way thou wert” (ll. 210–14).


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III. But The Winter’s Tale is not a tragedy. In place of the nightmarish statue of an eternally misguided Leontes, the play substitutes another statue, that of


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Hermione preserved. Initially, as a piece of art, the statue of Hermione seems to serve as an emblem of the tragic events detailed in the play’s first three acts. In this sense the statue can be read as an epic tribute to the power of patriarchal and discursive violence to silence female speech and turn the female subject into an object for the male gaze. But we learn immediately that the statue of Hermione is not static. Paulina’s explanation that the “carver’s excellence, / Which lets go by some sixteen years, and makes her / As she liv’d now,” leads Leontes to correct her: As now she might have done, So much to my good comfort as it is Now piercing to my soul. O, thus she stood, Even with such life of majesty (warm life, As now it coldly stands), when first I woo’d her! I am asham’d; does not the stone rebuke me For being more stone than it? O royal piece, There’s magic in thy majesty, which has My evils conjur’d to remembrance, and From thy admiring daughter took the spirits, Standing like stone with thee. (5.3.30–42)

The portrait in Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” a monument to the duchess as she was at the moment of perceived betrayal, is painted with the “spot of joy” in her cheek that so enraged the duke, and which revealed his need for control ultimately satisfied in the stasis of the painted image. In contrast, Shakespeare’s statue is of a seemingly impossible Hermione, a Hermione that never was. In its incomprehensibility, inanimate but wrinkled with age, the statue offers Leontes only the memory of his former fault. The statue’s tantalizing presentation of an inaccessible present prompts Leontes to declare that “we are mock’d with art” (l. 68). Recognizing the pain that the image recalls, Paulina offers to draw the curtain, but Leontes commands that it remain open “these twenty years,” at which Perdita exclaims, “So long could I / Stand by, a looker-on” (ll. 84–85). Leontes’s awkward command to leave the curtain open “these” 20 years highlights the statue’s ambiguous relationship to time. (It is an image of Hermione both as she stood when Leontes “first . . . woo’d her” and one more “wrinkled” than when she died [l. 28].) As a statue, Hermione is the eternal duration of the meanwhile, a composite of her story’s entirety bound to perpetual repetition. The play’s final gesture is to break this image, as Hermione’s statue miraculously comes to life. There has been a great deal of speculation about how this transformation actually occurs, most of which hinges on Paulina’s




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declaration, “It is requir’d / You do awake your faith” (ll. 94–95), with which I began this chapter. Walter S. H. Lim suggests that the entire play is concerned with “anxieties traceable to Shakespeare’s and early modern England’s encounter with the boundaries of the (un)knowable.”62 Faith, for Lim, is the issue at hand, and the acceptance of the unknowable becomes in the statue scene a corrective for Leontes’s earlier rejection of faith, manifested most explicitly in his refusal to believe Apollo’s oracle. Michael O’Connell offers an even more nuanced version of this argument, suggesting that the scene is a “response to iconoclasm,” in which the “effect on the spectators would appear quite precisely analogous to religious experience in that an act of faith is required for the enactment of the seeming miracle. . . . [I]ts quasi-religious enactment . . . presses an audience into idolatry as it assents with Leontes to whatever reality the apparent statue may mysteriously possess.”63 I agree that the play offers just such a commentary on faith, but I would like to suggest that the play’s concern with faith extends to what is understood as truth, here defined through a prioritizing of the ethical over the visual. O’Connell sees the scene as an example of Shakespeare’s willingness to affirm the power of the visual spectacle over “humanist claims for an exclusive, or near exclusive, truth in language.”64 I want to suggest instead that the statue scene emphasizes the overcoming of both language and vision in favor of an “otherwise”—something beyond both the stasis of the visual image and the self-affirming word. I read the scene not only as an example of iconoclasm toward the image in the physical sense of the statue as idol, but also as a more radical iconoclasm directed toward the image in the Levinasian sense: a reference to conceptual stasis.65 Faced with the fantastic offer of a living Hermione, Leontes leaves his former control and acquiesces to the will of another: “What you can make her do, / I am content to look on; what to speak, / I am content to hear” (ll. 91–93).66 If we recall Leontes’s response to Hermione’s earlier plea for justice—“Your actions are my dreams”—we see already that we are in a very different space. I am suggesting that the play offers a meditation on Leontes’s ethical experience, a meditation that can help to elucidate Levinas’s definition of ethics as a matter of relating to the other. In facing the image of Hermione presented in the statue, Leontes enacts Levinas’s “face-to-face” relation, the dynamic relation in which the same is transformed by the encounter with the other: “The same and the other can not enter into a cognition that would encompass them. . . . The conjuncture of the same and the other, in which even their verbal proximity is maintained, is the direct and full face welcome of the other by me. This conjuncture is irreducible to totality; the ‘face to face’ position is not a modification of the ‘along side of. . . .’”67


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As in the first act, Leontes is again presented with an image he cannot comprehend; and here again he will be forced to choose. Paulina is careful to remind him of the importance of his choice when she warns, “Do not shun her / Until you see her die again, for then / You kill her double” (ll. 105–7). Joughin argues that Leontes “undergoes an abrupt and remarkable transformation. Suddenly his capacity for ‘judgment’ confirms itself as a newly dynamic and creative process, which involves an open-ended awareness of participating in the sensuous particularity of the ‘truths’ that are unfolding before him.”68 But I hesitate to attribute Leontes’s transformation to the simple—or even not-so-simple—acceptance of the “open-ended” as the remedy for his previous, destructive penchant for certainty. The king seems just as willing to judge as he was before, and all that has changed is his orientation to the truth. As the old Shepherd observes to his son at the end of Act 3, just before the interruption of Time, “thou met’st with things dying, I with things new-born” (3.3.113–14); Leontes has learned that it is less important to determine the facts of the past—facts that will always be irretrievable to some degree—than it is to imagine the future that may result from his actions. Both past and future are indeterminate before consciousness; to act is the only assurance of determination. The openness attributed to the Shakespearean text may well be a defining feature of the aesthetic object, but I would suggest that it is not a feature of aesthetic response. Just as Leontes will choose, first wrongly and then justly, forever within the confines of the play, so we as spectators are faced with the interpretive dilemmas posed by the play’s reflection on the consequences of human judgment. At this particular moment in the play, we are faced with an incomprehensible image—a living statue—for which our only recourse to understanding would seem to be through innovative engagement. Like Leontes, we proceed, and we do so on faith.69 But it is not the kind of religious faith that promises a conceptual return, such as salvation. Innovative engagement, when it allows us to comprehend the incomprehensible, is entirely unlike the suspensive meanwhile that Levinas associates with the aesthetic; it is rather the everyday, the condition of living in a world that we can never fully understand. This feature of existence, as a continual struggle to make the new intelligible, is what led Heidegger to champion Hölderlin’s paradoxical claim that “poetically man dwells.”70 For Levinas— and I am suggesting for Shakespeare too—this poetical dwelling emerges as philosophical exegesis, or criticism. In his first encounter with Hermione’s image, Leontes sought to control what he could not comprehend by imposing meaning despite his recognition of the unlikelihood of his interpretation, and the result was her death, her image frozen as a statue. But in committing to one version of truth—by




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making a choice—he also enabled his future redemption. The second time around, it is we (audience/readers) who are given the task of making meaning. We can accept the story of the redeemed king as a tale just as the rustics accept the truth of Autolycus’s doubtful ballads;71 we can question or revel in the play’s emphasis on magic or faith; we can refuse to offer a reading, opting instead for linguistic play (though even in this, we make a choice). In each case, however, the play calls on interpretation; and its ethical demand is an invitation to animate the aesthetic’s potential through interpretation: “the artwork can and must be treated as a myth: the immobile statue has to be put in movement and made to speak.”72 Interpretation does not constitute mastery of the aesthetic object, nor should it seek such. The provisional nature of all interpretation is the cost at which we purchase consequence, and it is a bargain. For it is through our engagement with— our judgment of—aesthetic experience that we reintroduce the political, the social, the ethical, as Levinas argues: “Philosophical exegesis will measure the distance that separates myth from real being, and will become conscious of the creative event itself, an event which eludes cognition. . . . Criticism, in interpreting, will choose and will limit.”73


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Introduction 1. Unless otherwise indicated, quotations of Shakespeare follow The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 2nd ed. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997); Evans’s editorial square brackets have here been silently elided. 2. Patrick Collinson describes the ethos in England after 1580 as “iconophobic” (The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries [New York: St. Martins Press, 1988], 99). On iconoclastic and antivisual sentiment in early modern England, see John Philips, The Reformation of Images: The Destruction of Art in England, 1535–1660 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973); Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts: Vol. I Laws against Images (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); Michael O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2000); Huston Diehl, Staging Reform Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). 3. On the question “Is England a visual nation?” Nikolaus Pevsner concludes that “though the cases of Dürer and Rembrandt (and many others) show sufficiently that individual genius can flourish in reformed, as vigorously as in unreformed, countries . . . in England it did not” (The Englishness of English Art [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964], 206). Pevsner begins his survey of English art with Hogarth, though he adds that “if one includes architecture, design, and planning, and if one includes the Middle Ages, the significance of the English contribution to European art grows considerably” (205). The flourishing of—as well as the prejudice against—the early modern English theater, the art form closest to visual experience itself, is evidence of an abiding cultural interest in visuality. On the reaction to the theater, see Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981); Marguerite A. Tassi, The Scandal of Images: Iconoclasm, Eroticism, and Painting in Early Modern English Drama (Cranbury, NJ: Susquehanna University Press, 2005); Jennifer Waldron, “Gaping upon Plays: Shakespeare, Gosson, and the Reformation of Vision,” Critical Matrix 12 (2001): 48–77; O’Connell, Idolatrous Eye; and Diehl, Staging Reform. On the importance of the visual elements of print, see Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Joseph Monteyne, The Printed


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4. 5. 6.

7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

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Image in Early Modern London: Urban Space, Visual Representation, and Social Exchange (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); and James A. Knapp, Illustrating the Past in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). On the visual arts and their relationship to literature in early modern England, see Clark Hulse, The Rule of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Ernest Gilman, The Curious Perspective: Literary and Pictorial Wit in the 17th Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978); and David Evett, Literature and the Visual Arts in Tudor England (Athens: Georgia University Press, 1900). Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 2. St. Bonaventura, The Mind’s Road to God, trans. George Boas (New York: Library of the Liberal Arts, 1953), sec. II, par. 13. See, for example, Peter Martyr Vermigli, The Common Places of the most famous and renowmed Diuine Doctor Peter Martyr, diuided into foure principall parts . . . (London, 1583); and William Perkins, A commentarie or exposition, vpon the fiue first chapters of the Epistle to the Galatians (London, 1604). George Hakewill, The vanitie of the eye first begun for the comfort of a gentlewoman bereaved of her sight, upon occasion enlarged and published for the common good (Oxford, 1615), chapter 18. Hakewill is among those who seemed intent to reject all visual experience as corrupt. His treatise was written for a blind woman, and in the second half he lauds the benefits of a lack of sight. See Clark, Vanities of the Eye. Clark structures his account of the intellectual history surrounding early modern vision on Hakewill’s treatise. Richard Brathwaite, Essaies upon the five senses (London, 1620), 3–4. Baldassarre Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, 1528, trans. Sir Thomas Hoby (1561; Rpt. New York: National Alumni, 1907), 344. Marsilio Ficino, “Platonic Theology,” trans. Josephine Burroughs Journal of the History of Ideas 5 (1944), 227–242, esp. 236. Unless otherwise specified, scriptural references are to The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition, ed. Lloyd E. Berry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). I have expanded abbreviations and modernized spelling. On Spenser’s images “in bono et in malo,” see Carol Kaske, Spenser’s Biblical Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), esp. chapter 2. Thomas Blundeville, The true order and method of Writing and reading Histories, 1574, ed. Hugh G. Dick, Huntington Library Quarterly 2 (1940): 149–170, esp. 165. Aristotle, The problemes of Aristotle with other philosophers and phisitions. Wherein are contayned diuers questions, with their answers, touching the estate of mans bodie. (Edinburgh, 1595), sig. L7r–L7v. This curious compendium of answers to popular questions was published from the late medieval period through the seventeenth century. See Ann Blair, “Authorship in the Popular Problemata Aristotelis,” Early Science and Medicine 4, No. 3 (1999): 189–227. John Davies, Wittes pilgrimage, (by poeticall essaies) through a vvorld of amorous sonnets, soule-passions, and other passages, diuine, philosophicall, morall, poeticall, and politicall. (London, 1605), sig. B3r.


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16. Christopher Marlowe, The Works of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Tucker Brooke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910). 17. John Donne, John Donne’s Poetry, ed. A. L. Clements (New York: Norton, 1966), ln 5–8. 18. Donne’s familiarity with Kepler has been established. See William Empson, Essays on Renaissance Literature, Volume I, Donne and the New Philosophy, ed. John Haffenden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). See also, Wilbur Applebaum, “Donne’s Meeting with Kepler: A Previously Unknown Episode,” Philological Quarterly 50.1 (January 1971), 132–34. According to John Cartwright and Brian Baker: “It is clear that Donne had read both Kepler’s and Galieo’s works” (Literature and Science: Social Impact and Interaction [Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2005], 64). 19. Unless otherwise noted, references to The Faerie Queene are to The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche (New York: Penguin, 1979). 20. Richard Strier, “An Exchange on Shakespeare and Power,” The New York Review of Books 54.9 (May 31, 2007). For Strier’s elaboration of this argument, see his Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), chapter 7. 21. Stephen Greenblatt, “Shakespeare and the Uses of Power,” The New York Review of Books 54.6 (April 12, 2007). 22. See Beatrice Groves, “‘Now wole I a newe game begynne’: Staging Suffering in King Lear, the Mystery Plays and Grotius’s Christus Patiens,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 20 (2007), 136–50. 23. The servant could be suggesting that Cornwall’s refusal to stand down submits him to the dangerous course that action taken in anger always risks. 24. See, for example, Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1995); and Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). 25. Helkiah Crooke, Mikrocosmographia (London, 1615), 561. 26. Ibid. 27. Plato, Timaeus, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Charleston, SC: BiblioBazaar, 2007), 139–40. 28. See David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 5–7. 29. Crooke, Mikrocosmographia, 561. 30. See Lindberg, Theories of Vision, 7. 31. Crooke, Mikrocosmographia, 562. 32. Hakewill, Vanitie, Chapter 27. 33. See, for example, Marcus Nordlund, The Dark Lantern: A Historical Study of Sight in Shakespeare, Webster, and Middleton (Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 1999), especially chapter 4.3 (on Lear). 34. Although Derrida’s turn to ethics is often identified with the publication of Specters of Marx in 1993 (English translation in 1994), his interest is present throughout his career, as is clear from his serious engagement with the work of Emmanuel Levinas in the essay “Violence and Metaphysics” included in the


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35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

47.

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1978 collection Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass [Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978]). And the intense meditation on ethical questions in Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money (trans. Peggy Kamuf [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992]) and The Gift of Death (trans. David Willis [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995]), published in 1992 in French, are only now receiving the attention they deserve. Of course, a significant group of Derrida’s commentators saw this interest in the ethical all along; Mark Taylor, John D. Caputo, Simon Critchley, and Derek Attridge are only the most well-known champions of an understanding of Derridian philosophy as a philosophy of ethical engagement. See, for example, Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999). Steven Pinker, “The Moral Instinct,” New York Times Magazine, January 13, 2008, sec. 6, pp. 32–37, 52, 55–56, 58. Ibid., 37. Jonathan Haidt, “The New Synthesis in Moral Psychology,” Science 316.5827 (May 18, 2007): 998–1002. Ibid., 998. Plato, The Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett, vol. III (New York: Bigelow, Brown, and Co., n.d.), 11. For a recent effort to reaffirm this argument, see Paul A. Cantor, “Playwright of the Globe,” Claremont Review of Books 7.1 (Winter, 2006). Samuel Johnson, “Shakespeare’s Truth to Life,” from the Preface to Johnson’s edition (1765), in His Infinite Variety: Major Shakespeare Criticism since Johnson, ed. Paul N. Siegel (Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1964), 10. Ibid. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, 1103a22–26, trans. Martin Ostwald (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962). Spenser, “Letter to Raleigh,” in The Faerie Queene, 15. For a discussion of the shift from Book I to Book II in The Faerie Queene, see Paul Cefalu, Moral Identity in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), chapter 2), and chapter 3 of the present study. For an example of the effort to clarify Shakespeare’s religious affiliation see Richard Wilson, Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theater, Religion, and Resistance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). An approach to religion in Shakespeare that resists this temptation can be found in Ewan Fernie’s collection Spiritual Shakespeares (London and New York: Routledge, 2005); and Beatrice Groves, Texts and Traditions: Religion in Shakespeare, 1591–1604 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007). Examples of this approach can be found in a wide range of Shakespearean commentary, from William Bennett’s reductive arguments—such as that Macbeth is a straightforward warning against overwrought ambition (The Book of Virtues [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996], 85)—to the highly sophisticated arguments of critics like Richard Strier who argues that Shakespeare’s staging of ethical conflict affirms “a general principle of resistance to immoral authority.” See Strier, “An Exchange on Shakespeare and Power,” quoted above.


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48. Tzachi Zamir, Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. 203–204. See also Cefalu, Moral Identity. 49. Haidt, “The New Synthesis in Moral Psychology,” 998. 50. Pinker, “The Moral Instinct,” 35. 51. Ibid. 52. See 2 Henry IV (5.5.48–73). 53. Cefalu, Moral Identity, Chapter 2. 54. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 175.

Chapter 1 1. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 21–82. Jay’s first chapter is entitled “The Noblest of the Senses: Vision from Plato to Descartes.” 2. Stuart Clark provides an extensive overview of the early modern European debates over vision in Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). As an intellectual historian, Clark is interested in how changes in attitudes toward the value of vision shaped early modern intellectual and cultural life. My concern in the present study is to examine how these changes foreground the value of literature in negotiating philosophical and theological shifts having significant implications for social, political, and religious life. 3. Ibid., 8. 4. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), passim. 5. See Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 1:23. He associates the domination of the visual arts by literary concerns with the entire Western tradition. 6. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Ut Pictura Theoria: Abstract Painting and the Repression of Language,” Critical Inquiry 15 (Winter 1989): 348–71, esp. 366. 7. Those seeking to examine visual art’s power soon associated visuality with something like its own language, a “language of vision,” that could be interpreted through the use semiotics. See Meike Bal and Norman Bryson. “Semiotics and Art History,” The Art Bulletin 73.2 (1991): 174–208. 8. W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 14–15n10. 9. Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 158. 10. The painting has been reproduced often. It can be found on the cover of Margaret Aston’s study, The King’s Bedpost: Reformation and Iconography in a Tudor Group Portrait (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), in which


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11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

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Aston offers an extended reading of its iconography. The painting was once thought to be contemporary to Edward’s reign, but Aston challenges that assumption, arguing instead that it was produced early in Elizabeth’s reign. Jennifer Loach has reasserted the argument for the earlier date. See her Edward VI (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York: St. Martins Press, 1988), 99. Collinson based his argument largely on the fact that there was a striking decrease in visual material included in Bibles and books by major reformers after 1580. His position has been challenged most directly by Tessa Watt in Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). For a discussion of this debate, see my earlier study, Illustrating the Past in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). Joseph Monteyne. The Printed Image in Early Modern London: Urban Space, Visual Representation, and Social Exchange (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), passim. See, for example, the classic studies by Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981); D. J. Gordon, “The Intellectual Context for the Quarrel between Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones,” in The Renaissance Imagination, ed. Stephen Orgel (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), 77—101; and, more recently, Huston Diehl, Staging Reform Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); and Michael O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2000). See The Bible of the Poor [Biblia Pauperum]: A Facsimile and Edition of the British Library Blockbook C.9 d.2, trans. and commentary by Albert C. Labriola and John W. Smeltz (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1990). For a discussion of this image, see John N. King, Tudor Royal Iconography: Literature and Art in an Age of Religious Crisis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). Beyond the headpiece illustration detailing Edward’s reign (fig. 1.2), only one illustration adorns the text of Foxe’s Edwardian section. This is telling considering that the book includes nearly 150 illustrations. Thomas Deloney, The Pleasant History of John Winchcomb, In his younger years called Jack of Newbury in Shorter Novels: Elizabethan, intro. George Saintsbury and notes by Philip Henderson (New York: Everyman, 1929), 47. All further references will be to this edition and given in the text. John Hollander quoted in James A. W. Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 7, 14. Heffernan, Museum of Words, 14. On the ideological workings of the text, see Rosemary Kegl, The Rhetoric of Concealment: Figuring Gender and Class in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 127–66. Compare Deloney’s conservative ideology—work hard and reap the rewards—to King Lear’s parody of justice in


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the mock trial: “plate sin with gold, / and the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks; / Arm it in rags, a pigmy’s straw does pierce it” (4.4.165–67). 21. See Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Artes.” 22. See James Elkins, On Pictures and the Words that Fail Them (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 23. The novel opens with an anecdote about Jack’s reputation for thrift around his home town, in which he balances generosity and thrift through “good government.” This ability is in part responsible for his ultimate success in winning the widow of his master.

Chapter 2 1. Jan van der Noot, A theatre wherein be represented as wel the miseries & calamities that follow the voluptuous worldlings (London, 1569). The English edition is a translation of the French edition published the year before by John Day. Day also printed the first edition of the work in Dutch, Het theatre oft Toon-neel . . . (London, 1568). References to Spenser’s translations will be given in the text and taken from The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram, et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). The Theatre has attracted considerable attention from scholars interested in tracing the contours of Spenser’s poetic development. Josephine Walters Bennett was among the first to argue that the apocalyptic form of the Theatre gave Spenser the structure for Book I of The Faerie Queene (The Evolution of the “Faerie Queene.” [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942]). Carl J. Rasmussen identified a Calvinist poetics in van der Noot’s commentary (“‘Quietnesse of Minde’: A Theatre for Worldlings as a Protestant Poetics,” in Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual 1 [Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980], 3–27). On Spenser’s relation to the prophetic tradition of vision poetry, see Thomas Hyde, “Vision, Poetry, and Authority in Spenser,” English Literary Renaissance 13.2 (1983): 127–45. The argument of the present chapter is indebted to the work of Ernest B. Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation: Down Went Dagon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), esp. chapter 3. Gilman argues that the Theatre contains the origins of “Spenser’s iconoclastic imagination.” In what follows I build on Gilman’s argument to look at how Spenser’s peculiar combination of iconoclasm and love of imagery can speak to philosophical questions about the relationship of vision to ethical action. Although my understanding of Spenser’s attitude toward images shares something with the position put forward by John N. King (Spenser’s Poetry and the Reformation Tradition [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990]), I am less interested in establishing whether or not Spenser’s poetry is iconoclastic than I am in exploring the way Spenser’s poetry envisions an ethical response to visual experience. 2. Van der Noot’s book is a good example of the tendency described by Patrick Collinson of early Reformers to draw on the power of the waning medieval aesthetic to convey its new message. See Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant


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3.

4.

5. 6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

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England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York: St. Martins Press), 1988; and King, Reformation Tradition, chapter 2. Spenser likely followed Clément Marot for his translations from Petrarch. He would collect the Petrarch and du Bellay sonnets in his Complaints (1591), though not the apocalyptic poems. Some critics have questioned whether they are his. See The Yale Edition, 61–63. On the illustrations, see Louis S. Friedland, “The Illustrations in The Theatre for Worldlings,” Huntington Library Quarterly 2 (1956): 107–20. Friedland questions the attribution of the woodcuts to Gheeraerts. For the attribution to Gheeraerts see Edward Hodnett, Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder, of Bruges, London, and Antwerp (Utrecht: Haentjens Dekker & Gumbert, 1971). Rasmussen, “Quietnesse of Minde,” 5–6. Ernest Gilman, “Worldlings (1569) and the Origins of Spenser’s Iconoclastic Imagination” in Imagination on a Long Rein, ed. Joachim Moller (Marburg: Jonas Verlag, 1988), 45–55, esp. p. 52. See Ruth Luborsky, “The Illustrations to the Shepheardes Calender.” Spenser Studies 2 (1981): 3–53; and “The Illustrations to the Shepheardes Calender: II.” Spenser Studies 9 (1988): 249–53; S. K. Heninger, Jr., “The Typographical Layout of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender,” in Word and Visual Imagination: Studies in the Interaction of English Literature and the Visual Arts, ed. Karl Joseph Holtgen, Peter M. Daly, and Wolfgang Lottes (Erlangen: University-Bibliothek ErlangenNurnberg, 1988), 33–71. Gilman, “Worldlings,” 49. Van der Noot, Theatre, F2v–F3r. Gilman, “Wordlings,” 46. Friedland also refers to the Theatre as “the first emblem book issued in England” (107). Jan Van Dorsten takes issue with the characterization of the book as an emblem book, though his reason seems to be van der Noot’s claim that he added illustrations to “make the poems more memorable” (A.C. Hamilton, ed., Spenser Encyclopedia [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990], 685). This position seems to overlook the possibility that van der Noot saw the interrelation of word and image as the best method for crafting a memorable book. This interrelation as an aid to memory is a central feature of the emblem book tradition, as Gilman has shown elsewhere. See his “Word and Image in Quarles’ Emblemes,” in The Language of Images, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 59–84. See also Michael Bath, Speaking Pictures: English Emblem Books and Renaissance Culture (London: Longman, 1994). See Gilman, “Worldlings,” and Hyde, “Vision.” The body of criticism on sixteenth-century apocalyptic literature is significant. A good introduction is Katharine R. Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain: 1530–1645 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); also see Richard Bauckam, Tudor Apocalypse: Sixteenth Century Apocalypticism, Millennarianism and the English Reformation: From John Bale to John Foxe and Thomas Brightman (Appleford: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1978); John N. King, English Reformation Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982); Leslie P. Fairfield,


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13.

14.

15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24.

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John Bale: Mythmaker for the English Reformation (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1976); Paul Christianson, Reformers and Babylon: English Apocalyptic Visions from the Reformation to the Eve of the Civil War (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1978); and C. A. Patrides and Joseph Anthony Wittreich, eds., The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). The consistency across confessions on this point helps to explain how van der Noot could write his virulent antipapal commentary only three years before returning to the Catholic church. See Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation and Kenneth Gross, Spenserian Poetics: Iconoclasm, Idolatry, and Magic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986). Hyde writes in “Vision, Poetry and Authority”: “Spenser inaugurates the visionary line, not by complacent or even confident exertion of his own powers of vision, but by cautious and most unprophetic respect for their limitations” (129). The debate over this shift is ongoing, but there is consensus that the early modern attitude toward vision differed from its medieval predecessor. For the most thorough recent account, see Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles [1960] (Louisville and London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), vol. 1, 112. Ibid. Ibid. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1.95. See Stephen Edmondson, Calvin’s Christology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). See Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-century French Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993); David Michael Levin, The Philosopher’s Gaze: Modernity in the Shadows of Enlightenment (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1993). On the difference between treating religion on its own terms and considering it a political or ideological formation, see Ken Jackson and Arthur Marotti, “The Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Studies,” Criticism 46.1 (2004): 167–190. On the reshaping of antipapal satire in the Calendar see King, English Reformation Literature, 446. Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I–VI (Loeb Classical Library, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, revised ed. G. P. Goold, 1935 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999]), I.327–28. Virgil’s passage reads as follows:


Notes

Sic Venus; et Veneris contra sic filius orsus: “Nulla tuarum audita mihi neque visa sororum—


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Notes O quam te memorem, virgo? Namque haud tibi voltus mortalis, nec vox hominem sonat: O, dea certe— an Phoebi soror? an nympharum sanguinis una?— sis felix, nostrumque leves, quaecumque, laborem, et, quo sub caelo tandem, quibus orbis in oris iactemur, doceas. Ignari hominumque locorumque erramus, vento huc vastis et fluctibus acti: multa tibi ante aras nostra cadet hostia dextra.”

25. Virgil, Aeneid, I.401. 26. Judith Kennedy, entry for “The Shepheardes Calender, mottos in,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, 652. 27. Spenser, “Letter to Raleigh,” The Faerie Queene, 16. 28. Virgil, Aeneid, I.402–409. Virgil’s Latin is as follows: Dixit et avertens rosea cervice refulsit, ambrosiaeque comae divinum vertice odorem spiravere, pedes vestis defluxit ad imos, et vera incessu patuit dea. Ille ubi matrem adgnovit, tali fugientem est voce secutus: “Quid natum totiens, crudelis tu quoque, falsis ludis imaginibus? Cur dextrae iungere dextram non datur, ac veras audire et reddere voces?” 29. Theresa M. Krier approaches Spenser’s portrayal of visual response as a matter of recognition rather than perception, for to “recognize iconographic signs in Spenser’s work is to recognize its generic sweep as well” (Gazing on Secret Sights: Spenser, Classical Imitation, and the Decorums of Vision [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990], 9). Krier’s analysis is rich and rewarding for an understanding of Spenser’s generic range as well as for exploring the poet’s linguistic allusiveness. As I have hoped to make clear, my interest in the present study is to look at Spenser’s representation of visual response from the other direction, as a meditation on the philosophical issues related to perception in the context of religious reform. 30. Hyde, “Vision,” 145. 31. Marion makes the case for the centrality of givenness in Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). 32. Marion’s emphasis on “crossing” as a way of understanding the relation of the “visible and the invisible” owes a debt to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the “chiasm” or “intertwining” of the visible and the invisible, as a way of avoiding the pitfalls of a traditional metaphysics that always downgrades perceptual experience in an effort to establish a stable realm of truth. I discuss Merleau-Ponty’s radical conception of the chiasm in subsequent chapters. 33. Jean-Luc Marion, The Crossing of the Visible, trans. James K. A. Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 79.


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34. Jean-Luc Marion, In Excess: Studies in Saturated Phenomena, trans. Vincent Berraud and Robyn Horner (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 112. 35. Ibid., 112–13. 36. This iconoclasm is always bolstered by what he calls a “mimetic logic” in which “what ‘is’ is neither seen nor perceived nor given; what is seen, perceived, and given ‘is’ not” (83). 37. Marion, The Crossing of the Visible, 60–61. 38. For a discussion of the differences between the invisible as visible things hidden and the in-visible as that which “has no structure of visibility” (89), as in the case of music, see Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Willis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 88–92. 39. Jean Calvin, A commentarie upon S. Paules epistles to the Corinthians. Translated out of Latine by T. Tymme (London, 1577), sig. U4r. 40. Marion, The Crossing of the Visible, 84. 41. Compare to Lysander’s suggestion that Hermia’s “cheek roses” fade due to lack of rain in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. See Chapter 4 in the present study. 42. Virgil, The Eclogues of Virgil: Bilingual Edition, trans. David Ferry (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1999), 29. 43. See Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).

Chapter 3 1. Northrop Frye, “The Structure of Imagery in The Faerie Queene,” UTQ 30 (1961): 109–27, esp. 111. 2. Aristotle, De Anima (On the Soul), trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred (New York: Penguin Classics, 1987), iii 8, 432a8–a9, 431a16–a17. 3. Elizabeth Fowler’s characterization is typical, as she declares that Spenser’s “ambition in The Faerie Queene is to declare and express the precepts of moral philosophy” (“The Failure of Moral Philosophy in the Work of Edmund Spenser,” Representations 51 [1995], 47–76), esp. 47. 4. Spenser, “Letter to Raleigh,” The Faerie Queene, 15. 5. Sir Philip Sidney, “An Apology for Poetry,” in Elizabethan Critical Essays, vol. I, ed. G. Gregory Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1904), 164. 6. See John Bender, Spenser and Literary Pictorialism, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972); and Adam McKeown, “Looking at Britomart Looking at Pictures,” SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 45.1 (2005): 44–63. 7. In the General Introduction to his edition of The Faerie Queen (revised second edition [Harlow: Pearson, 2007], 1–20), A. C. Hamilton affirms the absence of moral didacticism in the poem (pp. 6–7). Milton makes a similar point in Aereopagigtica. 8. The connections between the structure of The Faerie Queene and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics have been the subject of a great deal of Spenser scholarship. See, for example, Ernest Sirluck, “The ‘Faerie Queene,’ Book II, and the


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9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

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‘Nicomachean Ethics’,” Modern Philology 49.2 (1951): 73–100. The bulk of this work has focused primarily on the question of how closely Spenser followed Aristotle as his guide. In the present chapter, I am more interested in Spenser’s approach to the ethical questions raised in his poem, and how his particular poetics can be seen as an intervention in the philosophical tradition in broad terms. Of the current usages of “discipline” listed in OED, the closest to Spenser’s intention is: “Instruction having for its aim to form the pupil to proper conduct and action; the training of scholars or subordinates to proper and orderly action by instructing and exercising them in the same; mental and moral training” (3. a.). My approach shares something with “presentism,” the critical formation in Shakespeare studies developed by Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes. See Hugh Grady, The Modernist Shakespeare: Critical Texts in a Material World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf: Studies in Early Modern Reification (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); Terence Hawkes, Shakespeare in the Present (London and New York: Routledge, 2003); Terence Hawkes, and Grady Hugh, eds., Presentist Shakespeare (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2007). The emphasis is on how the questions raised by Shakespeare’s texts continue to animate our responses in the present. I hope to do something similar with Spenser, taking careful note that Spenserians have been even more beholden to historicist approaches than have Shakespeareans. My approach is not unique. See, for example, Paul Cefalu, English Literature and Contemporary Theory: Sublime Objects of Theology (New York: Palgrave, 2007); and Donald R. Wehrs, “Touching Words: Embodying Ethics in Erasmus, Shakespearean Comedy, and Contemporary Theory,” Modern Philology 104.1 (2006): 1–33. See Paul Englemann, Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein, with a Memoir (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967); and Ludwig Wittgenstein, “I: A Lecture on Ethics.” The Philosophical Review 74 (1965): 3–12. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 170, emphasis original. Ibid., 177–78. Ibid., 178. Ibid., 190. Spenser, “Letter to Raleigh,” 16. Paul J. Voss, “The Faerie Queene 1590–1596: The Case of Saint George,” Ben Jonson Journal 3 (1996): 59–73, esp. 59. Voss makes a compelling case for reevaluating the reference to St. George in light of the connection made between Henri of Navarre and St. George, connections initially prompted by Navarre’s Huguenot leanings. Voss points out that Navarre (now Henry IV of France) lost his status as a Protestant freedom fighter (the mode that prompted the associations with St. George) when he converted to Catholicism in 1594. Voss’s argument is that the associations generated in printed pamphlets between Navarre and St. George would have been quite different before and after Henri’s conversion to Catholicism, thus altering significantly the role of the illustration


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18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

27.

28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

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in the conceptual frame of Spenser’s poem. Voss suggests that the inclusion of the image in the second edition may have even been a result of carelessness on the part of the printer, who should have been aware of the tainted associations of the image in 1596. Cefalu, Moral Identity, 49. John N. King, Spenser’s Poetry and the Reformation Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 70. Ibid., 68. See Carol Kaske, Spenser and Biblical Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), esp. chapter 2. See King, Reformation Tradition, 78. Peter Martyr Vermigli, The Common Places of the most famous and renowmed Diuine Doctor Peter Martyr, diuided into foure principall parts . . . (London,1583), bk. 1, pt. 2, pg. 341. Martyr, bk. 1, pt. 2, pg. 333. For a detailed discussion of the nature of the image, see W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), esp. 5–46. The original alignment of Wittgenstein with analytical philosophy and logical positivism, in particular, has been widely criticized. There is now significant support for the view that Wittgenstein shares more with the phenomenological tradition than any other in twentieth-century philosophy. See Nicholas F. Gier, Wittgenstein and Phenomenology: A Comparative Study of the Later Wittgenstein, Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981). Gier argues that “Wittgenstein’s own phenomenology follows the development of 20th Century phenomenology in general: from a more Husserlian stage to a full life-world phenomenology” (p. 5). Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. Fred Kersten (Dordrecht, Boston, and London: Kluwer, 1983), 57–66. Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Truth: On Plato’s Cave Allegory and Theaetetus, trans. Ted Sadler (New York: Continuum, 2002), 73. Spenser, “Letter to Raleigh,” 16. 1 Corinthians 2:9. Shakespeare’s representation of an experience with a Faerie Queene also produced in the 1590s would make the same reference to Paul, albeit in the form of a burlesque. See my chapter on A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Chapter 4 of this volume). See Chapter 2 of this volume. The episode has been read through a Lacanian lens as a masculine fantasy of the unified body, in which Gloriana functions for Arthur as the absent presence gathering together masculine and feminine, maternal and patriarchal in a utopic vision. In his exemplary Lacanian reading, David Lee Miller goes on to point out that in order to serve this function, “Gloriana has no positive essence: her ‘essence’ if we can call it that, is the essentially negative fact that she never returns to the body.” See David Lee Miller, The Poem’s Two Bodies: The Poetics of the Faerie Queene (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 141. For Miller


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33.

34. 35. 36.

37. 38.

39.

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the episode represents Arthur’s experience as the fundamental experience of subject formation as described by Lacan in his essay on “The Mirror Stage.” Carol Schreier Rupprecht identifies the pressed grass as “the token left behind by a dream figure to prove the ‘reality’ of the remembered dream (and in ancient theory authenticate its visionary status)” (A. C. Hamilton, ed., Spenser Encyclopedia [Toronto: University of Toronto Press], 227). Sean Kane, “The Paradoxes of Idealism: Book Two of The Faerie Queene,” John Donne Journal 2(1983): 81–109, esp. 106. Judson quoted in Voss, 59. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953), §23. Further references will be to this edition, indicated by the abbreviation PI, followed by paragraph number. Spenser, “Letter to Raleigh,” 15. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. and intro. Galen E. Johnson, trans. editor Michael B. Smith (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 76–120, esp. 119. This emphasis on the experiential nature of ethics has its roots in Aristotle. While it does seem clear that Spenser begins with the Aristotelian idea that ethical comportment is instilled through habituation, his emphasis on the ethical difficulties posed by the particularity of visual experience suggests an affinity with Wittgenstein’s conclusions about the inability of language to address ethics in a meaningful way. In the Areopagitica, Milton describes Spenser’s experiential ethics: I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary but slinks out of the race. . . . Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary. . . . Which was the reason why our sage and serious poet Spenser, whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas, describing true temperance under the person of Guion, brings him in with his palmer through the cave of Mammon, and the bower of earthly bliss, that he might see and know, and yet abstain. Milton, John, Complete English Poems, Of Education, Areopagitica, ed. Gordon Campbell, 4th edition (London: Everyman, 1990), 590.

40. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness, intro. Bertrand Russell (London and New York: Routledge, 1974), 2.161. Further references will be to this edition, indicated by the abbreviation TLP, followed by the proposition number. 41. For all the power of his system, we arrive nonetheless at the concept of spirit. 42. See Marjorie Perloff, Wittgenstein’s Ladder (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), esp. 30. 43. David Rozema, “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: A ‘Poem’ by Ludwig Wittgenstein,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62.2 (2002): 345–63, esp. 358–59. 44. See ibid., 352–53.


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45. Ibid., 354. 46. Mitchell, Iconology, 15n14. See also Mitchell’s “Wittgenstein’s Imagery and What It Tells Us,” New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation 19 (1988): 361–70. 47. Englemann, Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein, 97, quoted in Rozema, “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,” 348. Wittgenstein offers a similar sentiment in a letter to Ludwig Ficker: “My work consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one” (letter to Ludwig Ficker of circa September–October 1919, trans. McGuinness and Furtmüller). 48. Wittgenstein, “Lecture on Ethics,” 11–12. 49. Spenser, “Letter to Raleigh,” 16. 50. Emmanuel Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, trans. Michael B. Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 174. 51. See Geoffrey A. Moore, “The Cave of Mammon: Ethics and Metaphysics in Secular and Christian Perspective,” ELH 42.2 (1975): 157–70. 52. 1 Henry IV, 5.1.137. 53. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Willis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 61. John Caputo glosses this line of thought as follows: “Derrida subscribes to the notion of an unconditional obligation—but without ethics, or beyond ethics—which is what he calls a ‘hyper-ethical sacrifice.’ This means a responsibility to singularity which at one and the same time, ‘in the same instant,’ forces me to transcend or sacrifice my generalizable obligations to the community” (The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion, [Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997], 206). 54. I quote David Daniel’s edition of William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). 55. Gross makes the observation that Guyon leaves Mammon’s cave intact, concluding that his domain represents “an elusive and permanent institution in the world, or at least not one reformable by iconoclastic violence” (183). 56. Derrida, Gift of Death, 100–101. 57. Harry Berger, Jr., The Allegorical Temper: Vision and Reality in Book II of Spenser’s Faerie Queene (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 240. 58. See Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 266. 59. Perkins quoted in King, Reformation Tradition, 79.

Chapter 4


Notes

1. For a reading of the themes of sight and blindness in the play, see Frank Kermode, “The Mature Comedies,” in Stratford-upon-Avon Studies: 3, Early Shakespeare, ed. John Russel Brown and Bernard Harris (London: Edwards Arnold, 1961), 211–27; David Marshall addresses play’s exploration of vision as a “dramatization of the conditions of theater” (“Exchanging Visions: Reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” ELH 49.3 [1982]: 543–75, esp. 544).


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2. In addition to Kermode, “Mature Comedies,” and Marshall, “Exchanging Visions,” see Géza Kállay, “‘The eye of man hath not heard . . .’: Fundamental Measurements and Perception from St. Paul to Shakespeare’s Bottom,” The AnaChronisT 4 (1998): 1–30. 3. OED for sympathy indicates the first meaning as a (real or supposed) affinity between certain things, by virtue of which they are similarly or correspondingly affected by the same influence, affect or influence one another (esp. in some occult way), or attract or tend toward each other. Obs. exc. Hist. or as merged in other senses. Shakespeare always uses the term in this sense: “accord” (Arden). 4. Alain Badiou’s sense of the “event” comes close to Lysander’s description here: “the event, which brings to pass ‘something other’ than the situation, opinions, instituted knowledges; the event is a hazardous, unpredictable supplement, which vanishes as soon as it appears” (Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward [London and New York: Verso, 2001], 67). 5. Brooks points to the comparable passage in Romeo and Juliet (2.2.117–20): “Too like the lightning, which does cease to be / Ere one can say ‘It lightens’” (Arden). But consider as well the moments when Shakespeare extends the mediation to the wonders of thought, as in The Winter’s Tale 1.2.120–37 (see Chapter 7), Macbeth, 2.1.34–37, and The Tempest, 3.3.24–25. 6. Baldassarre Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier [1528], trans. Sir Thomas Hoby [1561] (Rpt. New York: National Alumni, 1907), 339. 7. Marsilio Ficino, “Platonic Theology,” trans. Josephine Burroughs, Journal of the History of Ideas 5 (1944): 232. 8. Ibid. 9. Geneva version (1560). 10. Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, 341–42. 11. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. JacquesAlain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1981), 103 (emphasis original). 12. Stanley Wells glosses the line “Love is prompted not by the objective senses but by the fancies of the mind,” to which Harold Brooks adds that “it is usually that love is ‘engendered in the eyes’, which if it lacks further insight, is judged unreliable” (Arden). 13. See 1 Corinthians 13. 14. See Alain Badiou, St. Paul and the Foundations of Universalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). 15. See Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, 344. 16. This helps to explain why Theseus can claim that he is unable to overrule the law at the beginning of the play only to do just that at the end of act 4. 17. See Louis Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 18. See Lina Perkins Wilder, “Changeling Bottom: Speech Prefixes, Acting, and Character in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Shakespeare 4.1 (2008): 41–58. 19. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, Followed by Working Notes, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University


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20. 21.

22.

23.

24. 25.

26. 27.

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Press, 1968), 154–55. Further references to this work will appear in the text with the abbreviation VI. The posthumously published Visible and Invisible was Merleau-Ponty’s unfinished attempt to build on the line of thought begun in “Eye and Mind” (originally “L’Oeil et l’esprit” Art de France 1 [January 1961], trans. Carleton Dallery and printed in The Primacy of Perception, and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History, and Politics, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 159–90. Interest in Merleau-Ponty has been revived in the last two decades. See, for example, M. C. Dillon, ed. Merleau-Ponty Vivant (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991) and Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor, eds., Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000). As Evans and Lawler point out in the introduction to Chiasms, MerleauPonty’s late phase was marked by his attempt to overcome the limitations of his earlier attempts at a phenomenology of perception (see Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith [1945; New York: Routledge, 1962]). A large portion of “Eye and Mind” is concerned with moving beyond Cartesian metaphysics, especially Descartes’ account of seeing and its relation to thinking. Merleau-Ponty foreshadows the project of The Visible and the Invisible in his critique of Descartes’ Dioptric, which, he points out, fails to face “the enigma of vision”: “Here is the Cartesian secret of equilibrium: a metaphysics which gives us decisive reasons to be no longer involved with metaphysics, which validates our evidences while limiting them, which opens up our thinking without rending it” (“Eye and Mind,” 177). Claude Lefort, Editor’s Foreword to The Visible and the Invisible, xxxii. See Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. and intro. Galen E. Johnson, trans. ed. Michael B. Smith (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993) pp. 76–120. Consider also W. J. T. Mitchell’s contention, in Picture Theory, noted above, that “the best terms for describing representations, artistic or otherwise, are to be found in the immanent vernaculars of representational practices themselves” (14–15n10). Françoise Dastur, “World, Flesh, Vision,” in Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh, ed. Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 45. Lefort, Editor’s Foreword, xxxii. Lacan dismisses Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology by accusing him of “reconstituting the way by which, not from the body, but from something that he calls the flesh of the world, the original point of vision was able to emerge” (Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 81, quoted in Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-century French Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 360. Ibid., 322. These comments are obviously caught up in Merleau-Ponty’s disagreement with Sartre over the nature of Sartre’s distinction between the for-itself and the


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28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

34. 35.

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in-itself. For the present discussion, though, I am primarily concerned with the character of the Lacanian influence suggested by Merleau-Ponty’s language. For a discussion of the disagreement between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, see Margaret Whitford, Merleau-Ponty’s Critique of Sartre’s Philosophy (Lexington, Kentucky: French Forum Publishers, 1982), especially Chapter 2. If, as Jay notes in Downcast Eyes (323n189), Sartre believed that the two agreed that the unconscious was structured as a language, the agreement itself expressed a misunderstanding. See Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). For a sympathetic restatement of Irigaray’s reading see Tina Chanter, “Wild Meaning: Luce Irigaray’s Reading of Merleau-Ponty,” in Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh, ed. Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 219–36. Judith Butler offers a similar critique focusing on the Phenomenology of Perception in “Sexual Ideology and Phenomenological Description,” in The Thinking Muse: Feminism and Modern French Philosophy, ed. Jeffner Allen and Iris Marion Young (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989), 85–100. For a defense of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of reversibility, which emphasizes the dynamic nature of his notions of visibility and invisibility against Irigaray’s critique, see Gail Weiss, “Écart: The Space of Corporeal Difference,” in Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh, 203–216. Irigaray, Ethics, 175. Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn (New York: Verso, 1998), 105. See Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750. (New York: Zone, 1998), 361 and passim. Linda Martín Alcoff , “Merleau-Ponty and Feminist Theory on Experience,” in Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh, 263. As one of Irigaray’s defenders, Tina Chanter, admits, “We may wish to question the audacity of Irigaray’s reading at certain points . . .. Does Merleau-Ponty really effect a reduction of the tactile to the visible, and is it fair to represent the reversibility of the flesh, the chiasm, as reciprocal?” (Chanter, “Wild Meaning,” 234). At the outset the fixed law is that “which by no means we may extenuate” (1.1.120), but by the end it is a matter of human interconnection: “Egeus, I will overbear your will” (4.1.78). Jay, Downcast Eyes, 319. The volume of commentary on this passage is far too large to note here. For the concerns of the present argument, see especially, Jan Kott, “The Bottom Translation.” Assays 1 (1981): 126–49; Ronald F. Miller, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The Fairies, Bottom, and the Mystery of Things,” Shakespeare Quarterly 26.3 (1975): 254–68; J. Dennis Huston, “Bottom Waking: Shakespeare’s ‘Most Rare Vision’,” SEL 13.2 (1973): 208–22; R. W. Dent, “Imagination in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Shakespeare Quarterly 15.2 (1964): 115–29; Joseph Rosenblum, “Why an Ass?: Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia as a Source for Bottom’s Translation,” Shakespeare Quarterly 32.3 (1981): 357–59; Thomas Stroup, “Bottom’s Name and His Epiphany,” Shakespeare Quarterly 29.1 (1978): 79–82;


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36.

37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42.

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O’Connell, Idolatrous Eye, 130–32; David Evett, Literature and the Visual Arts in Tudor England (Athens: Georgia University Press, 1900), 224–41. OED, s.v. “bottom,” 15.a. The identification of the weaver’s bottom as a “clew” further associates Bottom with the “clew” of the legendary Theseus, for whom the ball of thread served as a guide through the Cretan Labyrinth. The opposition between Bottom as the physical nucleus and Theseus as the figural guide underscores the play’s contrast of the worlds of sense and reason. See OED, s.v. “clew, n1,” 3. Tyndale’s New Testament, trans. David Daniel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). Bishop’s version (1568). Other possible sources include the apocryphal Ascension of Esaiah and Apocalypse of Elias. See Frank Kermode, “The Mature Comedies.” As I do, Kermode sees Bottom’s awakening through his “dream” vision as the play’s most profound exploration of its visual themes, though he reads the “great import” of the dream as an allegory of the experience of divine love. See Evett, Literature and the Visual Arts, 241. Kott, “The Bottom Translation,” 126. Montrose, The Purpose of Playing, 192.

Chapter 5 1. Unless otherwise specified, references are to The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition, ed. Lloyd E. Berry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). I have expanded abbreviations and modernized spelling. On the significance of the title and the relation of the play to the Sermon on the Mount, see Paul N. Siegel, “Measure for Measure: The Significance of the Title,” Shakespeare Quarterly 4.3 (1953): 317–20; Stacy Magedanz, “Public Justice and Private Mercy in Measure for Measure,” SEL 32.2 (2004): 317–32; and Andrew Barnaby and Joan Wry, “Authorized Versions: Measure for Measure and the Politics of Biblical Translation,” Renaissance Quarterly 51.4 (1998): 1225–54. 2. See Debora Shuger, Political Theologies in Shakespeare’s England: The Sacred and the State in Measure for Measure (New York: Palgrave, 2001); and Julia Reinhard Lupton, Citizen-Saints Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); see also the influential though problematic work of Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1985), and its elaboration in Gorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998) and Jacob Taubes The Political Theology of St. Paul (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). 3. The play has been treated as a mirror for princes designed specifically for James I at the outset of his reign. Arden editor J. W. Lever identifies Edward Chalmers as the first to make the argument in 1799, followed by others including Louis Albrecht, David L. Stevenson, and Ernest Schanzer (see Lever, xlvii). For elaborations on this argument, some more recent examples are Josephine


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Walters Bennett, Measure for Measure as Royal Entertainment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966); Alexander Leggatt, “Substitution in Measure for Measure.” Shakespeare Quarterly 39.3 (1988): 342–59; and Shuger, Political Theologies. 4. Lisa Freinkel, Reading Shakespeare’s Will: The Theology of Figure from Augustine to the Sonnets (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 7. 5. Calvin, A commentarie upon S. Paules epistles to the Corinthians. Translated out of Latine by T. Tymme (London, 1577), sig. U3v. 6. The (1599) Geneva gloss on this passage reveals the difficulty of the comparison: The applying of the similitude of our childhood to this present life, wherein we darkly behold heavenly things, according to the small measure of light which is given to us, through the understanding of tongues, and hearing the teachers and ministers of the Church; of our man’s age and strength, to that heavenly and eternal life, wherein when we behold God himself present, and are lightened with his full and perfect light, to what purpose should we desire the voice of man, and those worldly things which are most imperfect? But yet then, shall all the Saints be knit both with God, and between themselves with most fervent love, and therefore charity shall not be abolished, but perfected, although it shall not be shewen forth and entertained by such manner of duties as peculiarly and only and belong to the infirmity of this life. 7. Augustine, De Catechizandis Rudibus 4.8, as cited by Jill Robbins, Prodigal Son/Elder Brother, 1, quoted in Freinkel, Reading Shakespeare’s Will, 22. 8. Freinkel, Reading Shakespeare’s Will, 23. 9. Ibid., 217. 10. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, Followed by Working Notes, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 146. 11. Ibid., emphasis original. On Merleau-Ponty’s “flesh,” see Fred Evans and Leonard Lawler, eds., Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000). 12. The Douay-Rheims translation of the passage is: “But he emptied himself, taking the form of a servant.” Christ’s emptying of divinity is reversed for the Christian seeking God; where Christ emptied himself for man, man must empty himself for God. 13. Merleau-Ponty writes, for example, that “the chiasm is not only a me other exchange (the messages he receives reach me, the messages I receive reach him), it is also an exchange between me and the world, between the phenomenal body and the ‘objective’ body, between the perceiving and the perceived: what begins as a thing ends as consciousness of the thing, what begins as a ‘state of consciousness’ ends as a thing” (Visible and the Invisible, 215). 14. Jorella Andrews, “Vision, Violence, and the Other: A Merleau-Pontean Ethics,” in Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty, ed. Dorothea Olkowski and Gail Weiss (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 167–82, esp. 167–68.


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15. Ibid., 169. 16. Jean-Luc Marion, The Crossing of the Visible, trans. James K. A. Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 60. See also, Brian Robinette, “A Gift to Theology? Jean-Luc Marion’s ‘Saturated Phenomenon’ in Christological Perspective,” HeyJ 48 (2007): 86–108. 17. Marion, Crossing of the Visible, 61. Also see Jean-Luc Marion, “‘They Recognized Him; and He Became Invisible to Them,’” Modern Theology 18 (2002): 145–52. 18. The use of “elected” here is consonant with the theme of Angelo as a figure of the Elizabethan Puritan. The description of Angelo as precise has provided support for this position. For a recent discussion, see Maurice Hunt, “Being Precise in Measure for Measure,” Renascence 58.4 (Summer, 2006): 243–67. While the association seems clear, there is less agreement about what conclusions ought to be drawn from the characterization. The use of elected also emphasizes the theme of sovereignty. Consider another of Shakespeare’s uses of elected, in Richard II, when Richard says, “The breath of worldly men cannot depose/The deputy elected by the Lord” (3.2.52–53). 19. A positive reading of the Duke’s decision to conceal his appearance relies on a distinction between what he is and how he is viewed. Katherine Eisaman Maus develops her reading of the play and its connection to a Renaissance notion of “inwardness”—an unavailable but important emerging element of human subjectivity—by stressing similar moments in the play. See Katherine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995): 157–81. 20. See also the Duke’s comment to Friar Thomas concerning what he knows of Angelo (1.3.50–53). The Duke’s preconception of Angelo is only complicated by the question of when he comes into the knowledge that Angelo has forsaken Mariana. 21. Of course, this portends the eventual undoing of Angelo’s identity—his “settled visage” (3.1.90) so fixed in the minds of all who know him. 22. In offering the commission, the Duke further invokes visible form in his admission: “I love the people, / But do not like to stage me to their eyes” (1.1.67–68). 23. The Duke’s comment is that “the hand that made thee fair hath made thee good. The goodness that is cheap in beauty makes beauty brief in goodness; but grace, being the soul of your complexion, shall keep the body of it ever fair” (3.1.180–84). I discuss the passage in more detail below. 24. The OED identifies the following meanings for the adjectival form of “prone” as current around the beginning of the seventeenth century: “Having the front or ventral part downwards; bending forward and downward; situated or lying face downwards, or on the belly”; “Of a part of the body: So situated as to be directed downwards; under, nether, ventral”; “fig. Said of action compared to following a downward sloping path: Easy to adopt or pursue; involving no difficulty or effort”; “Having a natural inclination or tendency to something; inclined, disposed, apt, liable”; “Ready in mind (for some action expressed or implied); eager” (OED, s.v. “prone,” 1., 1.a, 1.b, 5, 6, 7). The word appears in Shakespeare five other times, always with the meaning “apt” or “eager,” and in


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25.

26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40.

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three cases with the additional connotation of sexual depravity. See Henry VIII (1.1.160), The Winter’s Tale (2.1.108), Cymbeline (5.4.203), The Rape of Lucrece (98.5), and Sonnet 141 (ln 6). Eric Rasmussen and Jonathan Bate explicitly gloss “speechless dialect” as “silent communication (body language)”; see their RSC Shakespeare: Complete Works, ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (New York: Modern Library, 2007), 164. Similarly, Othello’s demand for “ocular proof ” is by default a demand for proof of infidelity rather than marital chastity. See Chapter 6 for more on this point. The adjective “prenzie” is a mystery, the only use of the word in English. It could be an Italianate form of “prince’s” as some editors suggest, or “proxy,” but neither is entirely convincing, and the latter makes little sense in the passage quoted. I wonder if “apprentice” might not make more sense in the context of a theologically oriented reading of the play—a play seemingly focused on the question of how one might best practice/learn/model Christian virtue. In the Arden edition Lever amends the line by substituting “precise” for “prenzie.” Lupton’s argument centers on Isabella’s decision to choose chastity over her brother’s life. See Lupton, Citizen-Saints, 140. The “record” to which Angelo refers is the eternal record imputed to God but unavailable on Earth. This passage extends Jesus’ earlier reference to the eye: “Wherefore if thy right eye cause thee to offend, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for better it is for thee, that one of thy members perish, then that the whole body should be cast into hell” (Matt. 5:29). Huston Diehl, “‘Infinite Space’: Representation and Reformation in Measure for Measure.” Shakespeare Quarterly 49 (1998): 393–410, esp. 404. It is important to remember that Angelo believed he had followed through on his intention. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London and New York: Verso, 2001). See ibid., 18–29. William Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christian Man (Antwerp, 1528; London, 1537), rpt. Christian Classics Series (London: Religious Tract Society, n.d.), 203. Ibid., 204. Ibid., 210. Ibid., 204. The first two quotes are from the Bishop’s version (1568), the Psalter quote is to the translation of Psalm 26:7–12, which is translated thus in the Vulgate: “Ne avertas faciem tuam a me, et ne declines in ira a servo tuo.” Also consider Psalm 102: “Hear, O Lord, my prayer: and let my cry come to thee. Turn not away thy face from me: in the day when I am in trouble, incline thy ear to me.” The Bishop’s renders “turn not thy face” as “hide not thy face.” For a detailed reading of the linguistic conventions in this passage, see John L. Harrison, “The Convention of ‘Heart and Tongue’ and the Meaning of Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare Quarterly 5 (1954): 1–10; also see G. K. Hunter, “Six Notes on Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare Quarterly 15 (1964): 169–71.


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41. See Freinkel, Reading Shakespeare’s Will, 146. 42. In performance it is possible to put the emphasis on Angelo’s reaction to Isabella’s beauty, but the dialogue casts doubt on the interpretation (especially in the first encounter). Shakespeare was quite capable of staging the experience of visually inspired love: compare, for example, Claudio’s first encounter with Hero in Much Ado or Bassanio’s description of Portia in Merchant. 43. In Lupton’s account, “ruled by the counterfeit Angelo, the city has been in effect headless, or governed by a counterfeit head; in returning to power, in making his royal entry, the Duke must remarry the city, becoming its symbolic head and restoring order to the civil monster” (152). 44. St. Augustine, The confessions of the incomparable doctour S. Augustine. Trans. Sir Tobie Matthew (St. Omer: English College Press, 1620), Bk. II, Ch.1, Sig. D3–D3v. 45. See, for example, Ronald R. Macdonald, “Measure for Measure: The Flesh Made Word,” SEL 30.2 (1990): 265–82. 46. In addition, his last words to Escalus are, “There’s more behind that is more gradulate” (5.1.529).

Chapter 6 1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, Followed by Working Notes, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 3. 2. The first section of the first chapter of The Visible and the Invisible is entitled “The Perceptual Faith and its Obscurity” (p. 3). For a discussion of the emphasis on the material, see James A. Knapp and Jeffrey Pence, “Between Thing and Theory,” introduction to a special issue of Poetics Today 24.4 (2003): 641–71. 3. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-century French Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 1. 4. In the very next line he turns to something that can bee seen: “But, for the handkerchief ” (4.1.18). 5. David Michael Levin, “Introduction,” in Sites of Vision: The Discursive Construction of Sight in the History of Philosophy, ed. David Michael Levin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 7. 6. F1 has “super-vision” for Q1’s “supervisor”; the modern notes clarify the latter as “spectator.” 7. Katherine Eisaman Maus asserts that Othello eventually accepts Iago’s offer of “imputation and strong circumstances,” as he amends his demand for ocular proof with what appears to be an acceptance of circumstantial evidence: “Make me to see’t; or (at the least) so prove it / That the probation bear no hinge nor loop / To hang a doubt upon” (3.3.364–66; see Maus, Inwardness and Theater, 105, 118). As I argue below, however, Othello’s conversion depends less upon the circumstantial evidence than on Iago’s ability to convince him that he has in fact been given ocular proof—the form of evidence that Maus informs us was considered strongest in the legal terms of the time (Maus, 118).


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8. Patricia Parker, “Othello and Hamlet: Dilation, Spying, and the ‘Secret Place’ of Woman,” Representations 44 (Autumn, 1993): 60–95, esp. 65. 9. Ibid. 10. In the introduction to the Riverside edition of the play, Frank Kermode follows J. C. Maxwell in arguing that “Othello’s demand for ocular proof to settle the matter of Desdemona’s fidelity is logically absurd, since there can be no proof of fidelity; evidence can only be on the other side” (p. 1249). However, I think that at this point in the process of Othello’s conversion the important question is on what grounds Iago will succeed, and the emphasis on ocular proof, which turns out to translate into material evidence, suggests an epistemological bias that runs throughout the play. 11. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum 1995 [1960]), 261. 12. Ibid., 9. 13. Ibid., 261–62. 14. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. and ed. David E. Linge (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), 3. 15. For Gadamer’s place in this philosophical history, see Martin Jay’s “The Rise of Hermeneutics and the Crisis of Ocularcentrism” in Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 99–113. 16. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 482. 17. Ibid., 488. 18. Ibid., 496. 19. Parker, “Secret Place,” 66. 20. For a discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s ambivalent attitude toward the visual, see Chapter 5 of Jay’s Downcast Eyes. 21. Parker, “Secret Place,” 39; Cavell, Claim of Reason, 490. 22. Robert B. Heilman, Magic in the Web: Action and Language in Othello (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1956), 58. 23. A. C. Bradley notes that while “the skill of Iago was extraordinary . . . so was his good fortune” (Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth [London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1960 {1904}], 182). Bradley points out that Bianca’s entrance and behavior are among the lucky breaks that go to Iago. 24. Maynard Mack offers a reading that is sympathetic to Shakespeare, arguing that “we are asked here to let clock time fade into emotional time” to benefit from Shakespeare’s magisterial rendering of an individual’s movement from “confidence to perplexity to doubt to surrender to breakdown” (Everybody’s Shakespeare: Reflections Chiefly on the Tragedies [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993], 144). 25. Heidegger locates the “coming into presence” of being in the visually inflected dynamic of concealing and revealing. One of his translators, William Lovitt, points out that this dynamic penetrated the philosopher’s reading, as in Heidegger’s


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26. 27.

28.

29. 30.

31.

32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

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appropriation of Heraclitus’s proverbial “nature loves to hide” as “concealedness is the very heart of coming into appearance” (Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. and intro. William Lovitt [New York: Harper and Row, 1969], 36n2). Again I want to emphasize that the visual is central to explanations of this epistemological difficulty. Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang 1974 [1970]), 81. My argument shares something with Stephen Greenblatt’s assertion that the process at work in Othello is “a submission to narrative self-fashioning” (Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980], 234). I think it is important to add to Greenblatt’s reading, however, that the narratives that successfully produce the effect of submission are visually inflected. The Folio gives the line “’tis a shrewed doubt, though it be but a dream” to Othello. Most editors follow the Quarto reading in giving it to Iago. For the present reading, it makes little difference. Either Othello qualifies his own assertion that Desdemona’s guilt is “a foregone conclusion” or he accepts Iago’s correction. Either way, Othello waits for the handkerchief to make any final truth claims. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and Invisible, 253. Paul Ricoeur, “Explanation and Understanding: On Some Remarkable Connections among the Theory of the Text, Theory of Action, and Theory of History,” trans. Charles E. Regan and David Stewart, in The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: An Anthology of His Work, ed. Charles E. Regan and David Stewart (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), 149–66. Katherine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 120. See Maus’s chapter on Othello for an extensive (and deeply learned) discussion of English jurisprudence. Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, 69–94. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 253. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind” trans. Carleton Dallery, in The Primacy of Perception, and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History, and Politics, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964 [1960]), 189–90. Ibid., 190. Ibid. Ibid., 180. Heidegger, Technology, 35. Heidegger’s turn to art has been attributed to his effort to atone for his participation in the promotion of National Socialism. On Heidegger’s role in promoting Nazi ideology, see Victor Farias, Heidegger and Nazism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989); Richard Wolin, ed., The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998); and Emmanuel Faye, The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933–1935, trans. Michael B. Smith, foreword by Tom Rockmore (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).


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1. David Hume, “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1777),” in Essential Works of David Hume, ed. Ralph Cohen (New York, Toronto, and London: Bantam Books, 1965), 44–167, esp. 47. 2. Levinas developed his philosophy of alterity over a long career: see especially Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969); Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978); and Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague, Boston, and London: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981). 3. Howard Felperin, “‘Tongue-tied Our Queen?’: The Deconstruction of Presence in The Winter’s Tale,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (London and New York: Methuen, 1985), 3–18, esp. 16. 4. Ibid., 16. 5. Ibid., 14. 6. See, for example, J. Hillis Miller, “Presidential Address 1986. The Triumph of Theory, the Resistance to Reading, and the Question of the Material Base,” PMLA 102 (1987): 281–91. Miller notes that the rise of historicism is a response to the charge that deconstruction amounts to “language playing with itself ” (284). 7. See especially Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York and London: Routledge, 1992); Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995); and Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). Simon Critchley makes the case for an ethical deconstructive practice in The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999). 8. See John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida; and John Caputo, Against Ethics: Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993). For the interest this discussion is beginning to hold for early modernists, see Jackson and Marotti, “The Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Studies.” 9. See Emmanuel Levinas, “Ethics as First Philosophy” in The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 75–87. 10. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 43. See also Derek Attridge, “Innovation, Literature, Ethics: Relating to the Other,” PMLA 114 (1999): 20–31. M. M. Bakhtin makes a similar argument in Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, trans. Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990): “The entire world, insofar as it is already actual, already present-on-hand, fails to stand up to a meaning-directed criticism immanent to the very same world. . . . The word that has been pronounced sounds hopeless in its already-pronouncedness; the uttered word is an embodiment of


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11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

20.

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meaning in mortal flesh. All being that is already present-on-hand in the past and the present is only a mortal incarnation of the yet-to-be meaning of the event of being, the meaning of the absolute future; such being is without hope (outside the sphere of future accomplishment). . . . The other human being, however, is wholly in this world; he is the hero of this world, and his life is accomplished totally in this world” (133). Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 43. Ibid., emphasis added. Levinas develops his notion of transcendence most fully in Otherwise than Being (fully cited above). Cf. Bakhtin, who says: “Everything that enters into an artistic whole represents a value, . . . a value that possesses actual validity for a given human being in his particular fate. . . . A given human being is the condition of aesthetic vision” (230). Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1958), trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), xix, xvii. Emmanuel Levinas, “Reality and Its Shadow,” in The Levinas Reader, 129–43, esp. 132. For a discussion of the connections between Levinas and aesthetics, see Peter Schmiedgen, “Art and Idolatry: Aesthetics and Alterity in Levinas,” Contretemps 3 (2002): 148–60; and Jill Robbins, Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999), passim. On some of the strands of criticism concerned with ethics, see Lawrence Buell, “In Pursuit of Ethics,” PMLA 114 (1999): 7–19; Attridge’s essay in the same special issue of PMLA (20–31) directly addresses the importance of Levinas’s thought to literary study. Although Levinas insisted that his philosophical interest in alterity was distinct from his discussions of his Judaism, the strands of thought are difficult to disentangle. According to Alain Badiou, Levinas’s “principle [of ] the ‘Altogether-Other’ . . . is quite obviously the ethical name for God” (Ethics, 22). While this assertion is hard to deny, the distinction between Levinas’s ethical God and the God of institutionalized religion is significant. To reject any sense of the ineffable in response to the crimes of the world religions is too great a loss for Levinas to bear. Attridge, “Innovation, Literature, Ethics.” 24. See also John J. Joughin, “Shakespeare, Modernity, and the Aesthetic: Art, Truth, and Judgment in The Winter’s Tale,” in Shakespeare and Modernity: Early Modern to Millennium, ed. Hugh Grady (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 61–84, esp. 61–62. See also Joughin’s introduction to his own edited collection Philosophical Shakespeares (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 1–17. Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other and Additional Essays, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 31. Levinas discusses the “face-to-face” relation throughout his work, but see especially Totality and Infinity, 79–81, 303–4; Otherwise than Being, 89–97; and “Violence of the Face” in Alterity and Transcendence, 169–82. Cf. Hume, who says: “Matters of fact, which are the second objects of human reason, are not ascertained in the same manner [as relations of ideas: e.g.,


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21.

22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

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mathematical formulas]; nor is our evidence of their truth, however great, of a like nature with the foregoing. The contrary of every matter of fact is still possible; because it can never imply a contradiction, and is conceived by the mind with the same facility and distinctness, as if ever so conformable to reality. That the sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction, than the affirmation, that it will rise” (62). See J. Dover Wilson, “The Meaning of The Tempest,” in His Infinite Variety: Major Shakespearean Criticism since Johnson, ed. Paul N. Siegel (Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1964), 396–412, esp. 401. Levinas, “Reality and Its Shadow,” 141. This is still a matter of a reflection on aesthetics, of course, but the reflection is here directed toward the work, while the reflection that I am suggesting is a component of The Winter’s Tale is directed outward to the world. Felperin, “Tongue-tied Our Queen?” 7. Ibid. Felperin asks that we “consider, for example, the tortured monologues in which Leontes discloses his jealousy to us. Since these are cast as commentaries on behavior taking place before his eyes, and in the first instance before our eyes too, there must be some empirical ground, as it were, for his suspicions, however slight” (7). Felperin’s essay is an extremely clever attempt to present the opposing view, but the mountain of evidence, from the unambiguous oracle to Leontes’s own reticence about his fault and the fulfillment of the prophecy, makes a reading of Hermione as unfaithful extremely dubious. Although I cite the line numbers from the Riverside edition, I am here quoting the text of the 1623 Folio. While the Folio is the sole authority for the play, nearly every edition that I consulted amended this speech, often making it more, rather than less, difficult and always, in my opinion, removing its most important qualities. I am in agreement with David Ward on this point. For his definitive argument in favor of the Folio text, see David Ward, “Affection, Intention, and Dreams in The Winter’s Tale,” Modern Language Review 82 (1987): 545–54. Leontes’s speech links him to Mamillius through the figurative play on “collop,” which refers back to the “egges” of the second line, as collop is both a “piece of flesh” (used to describe offspring) and a dish comprised of a piece of meat with an egg fried on it (OED, s.v. “collop1,” 1., 3.[a.], 3.b.). The OED glosses “Welkin eye” as “Heavenly or blue eye,” s.v. “welkin,” 5; this draws on the sense of welkin as “heaven” 2., b. The other Shakespearean use cited by the OED is in Twelfth Night, 3.1: “Who you are, and what you would are out of my welkin, I might say Element, but the word is ouer-worne.” Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 44. See also Janet Adelman’s argument that Hermione’s pregnant body is the catalyst for Leontes’s “psychosis [which] illustrates in its purest form the trauma of tragic masculinity, the trauma of contamination at the site of origin” (Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest [New York: Routledge,


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30. 31.

32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39.

40.

41. 42.

43. 44.

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1992], 226). Although I am not concerned directly with gender here, these arguments do not contradict my own. Felperin, “Tongue-tied Our Queen?” 8. In the middle of the following century, as part of the attempt to make the human an object of scientific inquiry, this problem would become the basis of Hume’s philosophy; see Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 62 (quoted in note 20 above) and 99. Adelman points out that the reference to Mamillius as a “collop” can be read as a fantasy of male generation, freed from the maternal body (226). It is certainly an attempt on Leontes’s part to establish his direct paternity of the boy against his doubts about Hermione’s fidelity. Again, I here follow the Folio text. Stephen Orgel, “The Poetics of Incomprehensibility,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991): 431–37, esp. 433–34. Ward, “Affection, Intention, and Dreams,” 552. Levinas, “Reality and Its Shadow,” 131. Levinas, “Reality and Its Shadow,” 139. In Time and the Other, Levinas writes that “the condition of time lies in the relationship between humans, or in history” (79). In other words, it cannot “lie” in a manifest object of perception such as a text. William E. Engel, Death and Drama in Renaissance England: Shades of Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 167. Levinas, “Reality and Its Shadow,” 132. Elsewhere Levinas elaborates on this idea, suggesting that the paradigmatic category that is irreducible to cognitive experience is the face of the other: “Being then would not be the construction of a cognitive subject, contrary to what idealism claims. The subject opening to the thought and truth of being, as it incontestably does, opens upon a way quite different from that which lets the subject be seen as an ontology or an understanding of being. Being would not derive from cognition” (Otherwise than Being, 26). See Alan Singer, “Beautiful Errors: Aesthetics and the Art of Contextualization,” boundary 2 25 (1998): 7–34, esp. 7–8. Singer argues that the privileging of perfection in art (assumed in conceptions of the autonomy of aesthetic objects) denies the aesthetic its role in the realm of human action, which is always provisional. See Michael Witmore, Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 134. See Engel, Death and Drama, 165–68; and John Sallis, Stone (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994). As Sallis observes: “That which is presented—doubled on stage—is not itself present, not present as itself, on stage” (124). Felperin, “Tongue-tied Our Queen?” 4. According to Ward, it is “absolutely certain that ‘thy’ and ‘thou’ refer to ‘Affection’” (546–47). Ward interprets Leontes’s state as a medical/psychological condition—based on the medical language that saturates the play. I would add


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45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52.

53. 54.

55.

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that the language used to describe the psychological turbulence associated with madness was often applied to the state of poetic inspiration and response. The poet’s “fine frenzy” noted by Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (5.1.12) and Sidney’s argument in his 1595 Apologie for Poetrie that poetry must “delight”—must “move” the reader or listener—in order to be productive of virtue are two obvious examples. Ward, “Affection, Intention, and Dreams,” 551. Shakespeare’s other uses of the word imagination often suggest a similar kind of power. Note, for example, Bardolph’s description of Hotspur’s failing in 2 Henry IV: “Eating the air, and promise of supply, / Flatt’ring himself in project of a power / Much smaller than the smallest of his thoughts, / And so with great imagination, / Proper to madmen, led his powers to death, / And winking, leapt into destruction” (1.3.28–33). Bardolph’s association of imagination with a state “[p]roper to madmen” recalls Theseus’s well-known account of poetic image-making as the result of a “fine frenzy” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream “as imagination bodies forth / The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen / Turns them to shapes, and gives to aery nothing / A local habitation and a name” (5.1.12, 5.1.14–17). For a full discussion of Theseus’s speech in relation to the visual themes I am interested in here, see Chapter 4. Joughin, “Shakespeare, Modernity, and the Aesthetic,” 71. Levinas, “Reality and Its Shadow,” 138–39. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 29. Levinas, “Reality and Its Shadow,” 139. Felperin argues that Leontes is not aware of the contradictions of his reason and experience. Citing Sidney’s Apologie for Poetrie as a more reflective alternative, Felperin suggests that Leontes cannot see where he goes wrong (12–13). I disagree, and I will address Leontes’s self-awareness explicitly below. Orgel (p. 433) suggests that the passage does not make clear what it is that Leontes finds, but on this interpretive front the passage actually seems fairly clear: he seeks understanding in uncertainty, and what he finds is the image of himself as cuckold, or “proof ” of Hermione’s adultery. Leontes is wrong, but he is not incomprehensible. See Ward, “Affection, Intention, and Dreams,” 549. Leontes recognizes essentially the same point that Hume would make in this regard—that human experience and what Hume calls “sentiment” lead us to turn contingent into necessary connections, as a way of overcoming the incompleteness of our understanding (99). Where Hume (and Leontes) are willing to accept the inevitability of this situation, Levinas identifies it as an important epistemological obstacle facing ethical thought: “To know [in this traditional Western epistemological sense] amounts to grasping being out of nothing or reducing it to nothing, removing from it its alterity” (Totality and Infinity, 44). Adelman’s sense that Leontes’s jealousy is a product of the male anxiety about maternal origin is exactly right in this context. Also see Lynn Enterline, “‘You speak a language that I understand not’: The Rhetoric of Animation in The Winter’s Tale,” Shakespeare Quarterly 48 (1997): 17–44.


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56. See Chapter 4 for a discussion of the reasoning Othello uses before his fall: “Nor from mine own weak merits will I draw / The smallest fear or doubt of her revolt, / For she had eyes, and chose me. No, Iago, / I’ll see before I doubt; when I doubt, prove; / And on the proof, there is no more but this— / Away at once with love or jealousy!” (3.3.187–92). 57. The OED lists both “meeting the eyes” and “manifest to the understanding,” s.v. “apparent1,” 1., 3. 58. John Donne, “The Sun Rising,” in The Complete English Poems of John Donne, ed. A. J. Smith (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1971), ll. 9–10. For a discussion of the ways in which Ovidian and Petrarchan poetic traditions figure the possibilities of Leontes’s responses, see Enterline, “You speak a language that I understand not,” 17–44. 59. Levinas, “Reality and Its Shadow,” 141. 60. Felperin, 15; Levinas, “Reality and Its Shadow,” 141. 61. Felperin argues that Leontes’s ability to reject the truth of the oracle constitutes its lack of authority (15). While this argument is interesting, the rest of the play confirms the authority of the oracle. More to the point, perhaps, I do not agree that lack of authority amounts to semiotic indeterminacy. 62. Walter S. H. Lim, “Knowledge and Belief in The Winter’s Tale,” SEL 41 (2001): 317–34, esp. 327. Ruth Vanita in “Mariological Memory in The Winter’s Tale and Henry VIII” (SEL 40 [2000]: 311–37), also associates the “visionary resolutions” of the play with questions of faith. In particular, she sees the play as a celebration of “female fictive lineage” that suggests a nostalgia for the medieval past and the comfort of the cult of the Virgin Mary (311–12). 63. O’Connell, Idolatrous Eye, 144, 141. 64. Ibid., 144. 65. According to Levinas, “[t]he proscription of images is truly the supreme command of monotheism” (“Reality and Its Shadow,” 141). See Diehl’s Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: “Shakespeare’s remarkable achievement redeems art, rescuing theater (at least temporarily) from antitheatrical threats by transforming (before our very eyes in The Winter’s Tale) the bewitching image—painted and stony, dead and man-made—into a living person, wrinkled by time” (86–87). 66. Enterline observes of this scene that “when Shakespeare listens once more to Ovid’s female voices, he shifts the emphasis away from the otherness within the self (Petrarch’s ‘exile’ of blindness, obsession, and forgetting) to pose, instead, a question: the question of the other’s desire” (“You speak a language that I understand not,” 42). 67. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 80. See also Alterity and Transcendence, where Levinas observes: “I think that responsibility for the other man, or, if you like, the epiphany of the human face, constitutes a penetration of the crust, so to speak, of ‘being persevering in its being’ and preoccupied with itself ” (171). 68. Joughin, “Shakespeare, Modernity, and the Aesthetic,” 71. 69. I am convinced by O’Connell’s argument that the theatrical effect is dependent on the faith of characters and audience alike: “if anyone indeed made a move to leave, one senses, the scene itself could not proceed” (141).


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70. Heidegger’s discussion of Hölderlin’s aphorism appears in the essay “. . . Poetically Man Dwells . . .,” in Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 213–29. 71. Mopsa’s motivation for buying ballads is linked to her belief that they are true: “I love a ballet in print, a-life, for then we are sure they are true” (4.4.260–61). When Dorcas asks Autolycus whether the story of one of the ballads (about a woman turned fish) is true, he responds: “Five justices’ hands at it, and witnesses more than my pack will hold” (ll. 283–84). 72. Levinas, “Reality and Its Shadow,” 142. 73. Ibid.


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Adelman, Janet, 210n.25, 211n.32, 212n.55 aesthetics, 2, 47–49, 56–57, 144, 154, 157, 159, 161–65, 171–72, 181–82 Alcoff, Linda Martín, 115 Andrews, Jorella, 125 Aristotle, 2, 4–5, 12–14, 19, 67, 71, 73, 157, 193n.8, 196n.39 De Anima, 67 De Sensu, 12 Nicomachean Ethics, 19, 193–94n.8 Problems of Aristotle (anon.), 5 Aston, Margaret, 187–88n.10 Attridge, Derek, 165, 209n.15 Augustus Caesar, 57–58, 63 Bachelard, Gaston, 164 Badiou, Alain, 106, 133–34, 198n.4, 209n.16 Bale, John, 47 Barthes, Roland, 153 Bennett, Josephine Walters, 189n.1 Bennett, William, 186n.47 Berger, Harry, 96 Bible books of Acts, 3 1 Corinthians, 61, 93, 103, 105, 117–18, 122 Isaiah, 63, 117 Matthew, 94–95, 121–22, 130–32, 137, 204n.30

Psalms, 136, 141, 204n.39 Revelation, 47, 49–50, 52–53 versions of Biblia Pauperum (“Bible of the Poor”), 35 Bishop’s Bible, 201n.38, 204n.39 Geneva Bible, 202n.6 Tyndale New Testament, 93, 117 Blundeville, Thomas, 4 Brathwaite, Richard, 3, 5 Brooks, Cleanth, 67 Bullinger, Heinrich, 47 Calvin, Jean, 133–34, 141 A commentarie upon S. Paules epistles to the Corinthians, 61–62, 122 Institutes of the Christian Religion, 54–55 Camille, Michael, 33–34 Caputo, John D., 197n.53 Castiglione, Baldassarre, 3, 102 Cavell, Stanley, 56, 70–72, 78, 148–49, 156 Cefalu, Paul, 25, 73 Chanter, Tina, 200n.32 chiasmus, 26, 55, 111–12, 116, 118, 123, 129, 138 Clark, Stuart, 2, 32, 187n.2 cognitive psychology, 16–18, 23–24 Collinson, Patrick, 34, 183n.2, 188n.11, 189n.2 contrition, 134–35 Crooke, Helkiah, 12–14


Index


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Index

Dastur, Françoise, 112 Davies, John, 5 Wittes Pilgrimage, 5–6 de Heere, Lucas, 47 Deloney, Thomas Jack of Newberry, 27, 40–46 Derrida, Jacques, 92, 95–96, 148, 163 Descartes, René, 12, 14, 31, 71, 112–13, 148–49, 199n.19 Diehl, Huston, 133, 141, 213n.65 Donne, John, 6, 15, 185n.18 “The Ecstasy,” 6 “The Sun Rising,” 176 du Bellay, Joachim, 47, 49, 50 Edward VI, King of England, 33–34, 38–40 ekphrasis, 41, 45 Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 57–59, 67, 87, 118–19 Engel, William E., 172 Engelmann, Paul, 88 Enterline, Lynn, 213n.66 Felperin, Howard, 162–63, 169–70, 173, 176, 210n.25–26, 212n.51, 213n.61 Ficino, Marsilio, 3, 102 Foxe, John, 27, 35–40, 45, 47 “Book of Martyrs,” 27, 35–39, 47 Freinkel, Lisa, 122–23 Frye, Northrop, 67–68 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 28, 147–49, 155, 158 Truth and Method, 147–48 Galen, 12–14 Gheeraerts, Marcus, 47 Gilman, Ernest, 48–49, 54, 189n.1 Greenberg, Clement, 32–35 Greenblatt, Stephen, 9, 25, 207n.27 Gross, Kenneth, 54, 197n.55 Haidt, Jonathan, 17, 19–22 Hakewill, George, 3, 14

Heffernan, James, 41 Heidegger, Martin, 60, 71, 80–81, 97, 147–48, 152, 159, 164, 181 Heilman, Robert, 150 Helgerson, Richard, 97 Heninger, S. K., 48 Homer, 41 Hume, David, 166, 212, 209n.20 Husserl, Edmund, 71, 80, 148 Hyde, Thomas, 54, 59, 191n.14 iconoclasm metaphysics and, 60–61 Reformation and, 3, 33, 46, 79, 116 Shakespeare and, 180 Spenser and, 27, 46–48, 57, 69–70, 77, 97, 189n.1 idolatry, 26, 33, 180 Irigaray, Luce, 114–15 Jameson, Fredric, 114 Jay, Martin, 31, 32, 56, 113, 115–16, 144 John, King of England, 35–38 Johnson, Samuel, 18, 20 Jonson, Ben, 35, 165 Joughin, John, 173, 181 Judson, Alexander, 84 Kane, Sean, 84 Kaske, Carol, 16, 77 Kennedy, Judith, 58 kenosis, 124–25, 139 Kepler, Johannes, 6, 12 Kermode, Frank, 101, 201n.39 King, John N., 75, 77 Kott, Jan, 118 Krier, Theresa M., 192n.29


228

Lacan, Jacques, 105, 113–14, 195n.32, 199n.25 Lever, J. W., 128, 201n.3 Levin, David Michael, 56, 144–45


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Index

Mack, Maynard, 206n.24 Marion, Jean-Luc, 26, 28, 59–62, 69, 79–80, 82, 97, 124–26, 139 respectful veneration, 126–27 saturated phenomena, 61–62 Marlowe, Christopher, 6 Dido, 6, 58 Marot, Clément, 49 Marshall, David, 101, 108, 197n.1 Maus, Katherine Eisaman, 155, 203n.19, 205n.7 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 26, 28, 67, 80, 86, 90, 123, 126, 143, 149, 153, 157–59 chiasm, 100, 111–18, 120, 124–25, 202n.13 concept of flesh, 113, 124 “Eye and Mind,” 158–59 Phenomenology of Perception, 199n.19 The Visible and the Invisible, 111–13, 116, 143, 149, 198–99n.19, 202n.13 messianism, 58–65, 67–68, 137 metaphysics, 56, 59–61, 70–71, 80, 87, 103–06, 125, 148–49, 192n.32, 199n.29 Milton, John, 67, 196n.39 Mitchell, W. J. T., 32–33, 87–88, 199n.22 Monteyne, Joseph, 34 Montrose, Louis, 119

morality, relationship to ethics, 16–19, 21, 24–25, 69, 143 Neo-Platonism, 3, 56, 60, 102–5, 107, 116 See also Plato Nietzsche, Friedrich, 32, 148 O’Connell, Michael, 180 Orgel, Stephen, 171, 176, 212n.52 Parker, Patricia, 146, 148–49, 153, 156 particularity. See singularity penance, 134–35 perception, 2, 12, 26, 80–81, 111, 113–25, 154, 165, 169, 192n.29 ethical action and, 31, 60 Merleau-Ponty and, 110–11, 124–25, 143 visual, 55, 60, 107, 114, 144–45, 149–50, 158–59 Wittgenstein and, 84, 88–89 See also vision Perkins, William, 3, 97 Petrarch, 1, 47, 49 phenomenology, 26–28, 56, 59, 61, 69–71, 80, 84–85, 90, 97, 110–14, 124–26, 145, 159, 195n.26, 199n.19 Pinker, Steven, 16–17, 19, 23 Plato, 12–14, 17–18, 31, 56, 59–60, 70, 80, 104, 148 Meno, 17–18 Republic, 60 Timaeus, 12 See also Neo-Platonism


Levinas, Emmanuel, 26, 28, 80, 90, 134, 162–65, 167, 171–72, 174, 176, 180–82 aesthetic obscurity, 170–72 face-to-face relation, 29, 165, 180 Lim, Walter S. H., 180 logical positivism, 28, 85, 87–88 Luborsky, Ruth, 48 Lupton, Julia Reinhard, 121, 204n.28, 205n.43 Luther, Martin, 122, 134, 138

229

●

Rasmussen, Carl, 47, 189n.1 Ricoeur, Paul, 153–54 Roman Catholicism, 4, 26, 33, 37–38, 40, 54, 56, 61, 122, 134, 194n.17


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Index

Rorty, Richard, 32, 56, 71 Rozema, David, 87–88 St. Augustine, 57, 123, 140 Confessions, 140 St. Bonaventura, 2 St. Paul, 3, 28, 82, 94, 99, 103–7, 117–18, 122–24, 141, 153 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 116, 199–200n.29 Sermon on the Mount, 28, 92 See also Bible Shakespeare, William Hamlet, 20, 172–73 1 Henry IV, 20, 24–26, 91, 212 King Lear, 9–15, 20, 21 Macbeth, 20, 111, 116, 186n.47, 198n.5 Measure for Measure, 20, 28, 99, 121–44, 154–55, 160, 168–69 Biblical reference of title, 121 embodied experience and, 124–33, 136 penitential theology and, 133–41 temporality in, 28, 122–23, 125, 130–31, 133 The Merchant of Venice, 1, 20, 27, 127, 133, 205n.42 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 28, 99–120, 173 “Bottom’s dream,” 100, 111, 116–17, 120 Much Ado About Nothing, 168, 205n.42 Othello, 4, 15, 23, 28, 143–60, 167, 173, 175 handkerchief in, 150–55 knowledge in, 148–49 The Tempest, 20, 167 The Winter’s Tale, 20, 28, 161–82 aesthetic obscurity in, 170–73 deconstruction and, 162–64 intelligibility of, 170–72 interpretation of vision in, 178–82 truth in, 166–67

Shuger, Debora, 121 Sidney, Philip, 59–60, 68–69, 120 An Apology for Poetry, 59, 68, 120 singularity, 108, 116, 124 ethics and, 16, 26, 28, 69–70, 92, 94–96, 143–44, 157, 197n.53 situatedness and ethical responsibility, 4, 9–10, 16, 18–29, 69–70, 86, 91–92, 94, 104–9, 131, 133, 160, 162, 174–74, Spenser, Edmund The Faerie Queene, 4, 7–8, 15–16, 20, 22, 25, 68–70, 72–84, 90–98 Archimago, 7–8, 15, 76, 84 Duessa, 4, 7, 76 Guyon, 8, 15–16, 20, 22, 25, 90–98 iconoclasm in, 77, 79, 97 images real and imagined in, 73–80 internal images and, 97 language and, 70–72 Mammon, 20, 90–96 nothing in, 81–83 Redcross Knight, 7–8, 15–16, 73–74, 76, 81 Una, 4, 7–8, 15–16, 73, 75–76, 81 woodcut of St. George, 73–74 “Letter to Raleigh,” 68, 72, 86 The Shepheardes Calendar, 48, 55, 57–65, 67, 78 Theater for Voluptuous Worldlings (Jan van der Noot), 27, 47–55, 90, 189n.1 See also van der Noot, Jan Strier, Richard, 9


230

temporality, 10, 28, 50, 60, 63–64, 74–75, 79, 94, 114, 121–26, 129–41, 176–77 Thompson, Judith Jarvis, 23 Traub, Valerie, 170, 210n.29


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Trolley Problem, 23–24 Tyndale, William, 134–35 Obedience of a Christian Man, The, 134 van der Noot, Jan, 67–68, 76, 81–83 Theatre of Voluptuous Worldlings, 27, 47–55, 90, 189n.1 van Dorsten, Jan, 54, 190n.10 Vermigli, Peter Martyr, 2, 77–78 Common Places, 77 Virgil, 48, 57–60, 63–65, 84 Aeneid, 57–58, 191–92n.24, 192n.28 Eclogues, 63–65 vision, 2–8, 11–15, 31–38, 49–56, 59–62, 67, 73, 78–79, 97, 111–18, 122–23, 139–45, 148–50, 175–77, 187n.2 Calvin and, 61 epistemology and, 2, 32–33, 48, 52, 60, 69–71, 75, 79, 97, 99–101, 109, 112, 115–16, 126–28, 144–48, 154–55, 166 invisible and, 28, 58–63, 79–81, 97, 99, 104, 111–16, 120, 122, 125–29, 143–49, 157–58, 193n.38 language and, 28, 31–35, 46, 49, 56, 70–72, 78, 85–90, 97, 109, 113–15, 120, 136–40, 144–45, 148, 150, 156, 180

●

231

reliability of, 3, 7–8, 25, 31–33, 48–49, 56, 75–77, 79, 83, 107, 144, 157 spiritual, 49, 54, 60–62, 79–80, 97, 104, 125–26, 135–36, 138 theories of, 5–6, 11–14, Voss, Paul, 73, 84, 194–95n.17 Ward, David, 171, 173–74 Watt, Tessa, 34 Wilson, J. Dover, 167 Witmore, Michael, 172 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 26, 28, 70–72, 84–92, 186n.39 epistemology and, 112 ethics and, 70–72, 92, 197n.47 language and, 26, 78, 196 “language games,” 70, 85–86, 87, 89–90, 97 logical positivism and, 28, 195n.26 Merleau-Ponty and, 114 phenomenology and, 80, 84 Philosophical Investigations, 86, 88–89, 97 “picture theory of language,” 70, 85, 86–89 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 72, 87–88 Zamir, Tzachi, 21, 23


Index


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Image Ethics in Shakespeare and Spenser

Poets and Playwrights: Shakespeare, Jonson, Spenser, Milton

Shakespeare and Philosophy (Routledge Studies in Shakespeare)

Spenser Keine Schonzeit für Spenser

Spenser Spenser und der Kandidat

Spenser Spenser auf der Flucht

Poetry and Paternity in Renaissance England: Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne and Jonson

Poetry and Paternity in Renaissance England: Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne and Jonson

Spenser Spenser und das gestohlene Manuskript

Imagining Death in Spenser and Milton

The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser and Jonson (Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature)

Pastime (Spenser)

Shakespeare in Theory and Practice

Shakespeare, Spenser and the Matter of Britain (Early Modern Literature in History)

Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis (Accents on Shakespeare)

Shakespeare in the Present (Accents on Shakespeare)

Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing

Shakespeare

Shakespeare

Shakespeare and Literary Theory (Oxford Shakespeare Topics)

Fancy's Image: Contexts, Settings, and Perspectives in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries

Extramural Shakespeare (Reproducing Shakespeare)

Shakespeare and Women (Oxford Shakespeare Topics)

Shakespeare and Moral Agency (Continuum Shakespeare Studies)

Shakespeare

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Shakespeare and Text (Oxford Shakespeare Topics)

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Shakespeare In Japan

Shakespeare in China

Image Ethics in Shakespeare and Spenser

Poets and Playwrights: Shakespeare, Jonson, Spenser, Milton

Shakespeare and Philosophy (Routledge Studies in Shakespeare)

Spenser Keine Schonzeit für Spenser

Spenser Spenser und der Kandidat

Spenser Spenser auf der Flucht

Poetry and Paternity in Renaissance England: Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne and Jonson

Poetry and Paternity in Renaissance England: Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne and Jonson

Spenser Spenser und das gestohlene Manuskript

Imagining Death in Spenser and Milton

The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser and Jonson (Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature)

Pastime (Spenser)

Shakespeare in Theory and Practice

Shakespeare, Spenser and the Matter of Britain (Early Modern Literature in History)

Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis (Accents on Shakespeare)

Shakespeare in the Present (Accents on Shakespeare)

Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing

Shakespeare

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Shakespeare and Literary Theory (Oxford Shakespeare Topics)

Fancy's Image: Contexts, Settings, and Perspectives in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries

Extramural Shakespeare (Reproducing Shakespeare)

Shakespeare and Women (Oxford Shakespeare Topics)

Shakespeare and Moral Agency (Continuum Shakespeare Studies)

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Shakespeare and Text (Oxford Shakespeare Topics)

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