Renaissance Papers 2010

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Renaissance Papers 2010

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Renaissance Papers 2010 Editors

Andrew Shifflett and Edward Gieskes

❧

Published for

THE SOUTHEASTERN RENAISSANCE CONFERENCE by

Camden House Rochester, New York

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THE SOUTHEASTERN RENAISSANCE CONFERENCE

2010 Officers President: Thomas Berger, Saint Lawrence University Vice President: Robert L. Reid, Emory & Henry College Secretary-Treasurer: Susan C. Staub, Appalachian State University

Renaissance Papers, 2010 Copyright © 2011 The Southeastern Renaissance Conference

All rights reserved Library of Congress Catalog Number A 55-3551 ISSN: 0584-4207 ISBN-13: 978-1-57113-505-6 ISBN-10: 1-57113-505-7

Published by:

Camden House An imprint of Boydell & Brewer, Inc. 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620-2731, USA www.camden-house.com and of Boydell & Brewer Ltd. P.O. Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydellandbrewer.com

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CONTENTS Aretino’s Life and His Afterlife in England Jackson C. Boswell

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Mixing Genres in George Peele’s David and Bethsabe Robert Kilgore

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Royal Prerogative versus the Common Law in A View of the Present State of Ireland and The Faerie Queene, Book 5 James Schiavoni

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The Limits of Clowning in the Age of Marprelate: The Anti-Martinist Tracts and 2 Henry VI Kirk Melnikoff

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Shakespeare’s Iago George L. Geckle

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Francesco Patrizi da Cherso, Caravaggio, and the Metaphysics of Light Delane Karalow

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Being John Donne in 1602 M. Thomas Hester

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The Problem of the Human in Sir Francis Bacon Jason E. Cohen

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The Glamorous Echoes of Godly Print Thomas W. Dabbs

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“More cullors than the Rainbowe caries”: Catholics, Cosmetics, and the Aesthetic Economy of Protestant England Andrew Tumminia

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Renaissance Papers A Selection of Papers Submitted to the Sixty-Seventh Annual Meeting October 15–16, 2010 Davidson College Davidson, North Carolina

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Aretino’s Life and His Afterlife in England Jackson C. Boswell

P

ietro Aretino lived from 1492 to 1556. In English-speaking lands, he is far better known for his tarnished reputation as a pornographer than he is by actual readers. This fame (or rather infamy) is based mainly on a few lascivious sonnets he wrote as a youth (about which, more later). He was also rather well known for three slim volumes of raw satire known collectively as Il ragionamenti. This work purportedly records the conversations of a couple of middle-aged women who talk frankly about the career opportunities open to females. A talented trollop tells her bosom buddy that society has but three roles for a woman: she must be either a nun, a wife, or a whore; and she proceeds to describe her own experiences in all three roles in graphic detail. Her life in a convent was a never-ending orgy of food, drink, and sex (indeed, the hypocrisy of life in the nunnery left her so disillusioned that she left after a few days). She regales us with stories of wives who easily deceive the most vigilant husbands and she concludes her narrative with explicit accounts of the pleasant life enjoyed by courtesans. These dialogues were not only a great commercial success but they also garnered considerable critical acclaim at home and abroad. In Italy in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, however, Aretino’s fame was more firmly based on his unfinished epic Marfisa, which takes up where Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso leaves off, and on his devotional works, which include The Seven Psalms of David (on which Sir Thomas Wyatt based his Lutheran-leaning Penitential Psalms),1 The Three Books of the Humanity of Christ, The 1

Raymond B. Waddington, “Pietro Aretino, Religious Writer,” Renaissance Studies 20 (2006): 277–92.

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Story of Genesis, The Life of St. Catherine of Alexandria, and The Life of the Virgin Mary (and for these he was called “the divine Aretino”). He was also admired for four witty comedies and a tragedy, Orazia, that is perhaps the best Italian tragedy of the sixteenth century; and for his carefully edited collections of over 3,000 letters to rich and powerful friends, enemies, and acquaintances. An eyewitness recounts what happened when a new volume of Aretino’s letters first went on sale in Rome: I never saw such a press of . . . men striving to be the first to purchase your new book. A sign, ‘Letters of the Divine Pietro Aretino,’ was hung up. Suddenly there was a great crowd of people, followed by as much noise and jostling as there is in certain cities when, on Holy Thursday, they give alms to the poor. And so great was the sale that I can assure you that there were plenty who went off with empty hands.2

Although this son of a shoemaker from Arezzo began his own career as a mere servant in the household of a rich Roman merchant, Pietro gained overnight fame in Rome by publishing the “last will and testament” of Hanno, Pope Leo X’s recently deceased elephant, in which the beast bequeathed assorted portions of his anatomy to various princes of the Church with the proviso that they cease and desist the practice of their notorious vices, which he then proceeded to recount in detail. In this will, incidentally, England's Cardinal Woolsey was pointedly left nothing at all; inasmuch as he was not resident at the papal court, Aretino said he could hardly be counted among the living. Naturally the publication was anonymous, but Pietro was not one to hide his light under a bushel, so the secret slipped out. The pleasure-loving Pope Leo X was diverted from his genuine grief over the death of his pet pachyderm, and he took Aretino into his service in order that he might write pleasant things about him and needle his enemies. In his new position, Aretino cultivated sources high and low for gossip and perfected the art of the pasquinade, in which witty verses 2 Bernardo Theodolo, qtd. in Thomas Caldecot Chubb, Aretino, Scourge of Princes (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1940), 343. See also Brian Richardson, Printing, Writers, and Readers in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), 92–95.


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BOSWELL ❧ ARETINO’S LIFE AND HIS AFTERLIFE

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detailing the latest scurrilous gossip were posted on a statue in a busy marketplace and therefore seen and read by many, collected by an enterprising printer, and thence spread throughout the city and beyond. He gained further notoriety by writing a series of sonnets that were published, along with sexually explicit engravings by Marcantonio Raimondi, of sixteen exceedingly lewd, anatomically correct drawings by Giulio Romano. Raimondi was condemned to death for gross indecency, but Aretino begged the pope to spare the life of a prodigiously talented artist and thereby created enemies that put his own life in danger. When his papal protector died and his successor, the painfully pure and devout Adrian VI, was elected by a political fluke, Aretino found it expedient to depart Rome, for he had written extensively in favor of the election of Cardinal Giulio de’Medici, the late Leo’s nephew. An arch-enemy in the papal court ordered his assassination, but he survived five stab wounds and eventually found a refuge in the Serene Republic of Venice, and there he continued to reside for most of the rest of his life. His sources of information throughout Italy continued to provide him with ample grist for his mill, and he ground out scorching satiric verses about the vices of the high and mighty from his haven in tolerant Venice. Soon, instead of being a suppliant courtier whose fate depended on the whim of a rich patron, Aretino found himself courted. Many a prince had the foresight to send him costly gifts not to publish, not least of whom was Henry VIII. Thomas Nash tells us in The Unfortunate Traveller that the English envoy to Venice paid Aretino a pension of 400 crowns a year (over $100,000 in today’s currency) in order that his “cause should be favorably heard.” The records show that Thomas Cromwell wrote himself an aide memoire to send Peter Aretino a reward for services rendered;3 shortly thereafter, Edmund Harvel, England’s ambassador to Venice, sent the king a note. He wrote that Pietro Aretino, “much famous for his wit and liberty of writing in th’ Italian tongue,” had asked him to send this book of his letters “lately printed and dedicate[d] to your Majesty, whom he venerates both for the 300 cr[own]s you before gave him and for your virtues. He has long been persecuted 3

Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, in the Reign of Henry VII, ed. James Gairdner and R. H. Brodie, 37 vols. (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1862–1932), 15:71 (no. 195).


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by the Roman prelates, whose detestable vices he has scourged with his vehement and sharp style. The man is poor, and depends only on the liberality of princes. He expects some small reward from [Your Grace] whom, in return, he will glorify with his pen in spite of the Roman prelates.”4 If the price was right, Aretino would indeed glorify his benefactors. For which, he is sometimes called the first public-relations man. He was quite up-front about it: pay-up or he would publish the unvarnished truth; for which he was called a blackmailer (and worse). If, however, he saw that a prince was transgressing, he would publish a frank open letter calling on him to reform his ways; for this, Ariosto admiringly called him “the scourge of princes” in Orlando Furioso (46.105), and the apt epithet has stuck. He vociferously defended the rights of working men (and women) and was famously liberal in charitable giving to those who had suffered reversals of fortune. Moreover, instead of straining for a high literary style, his works were written in the language really spoken by men. He was easy to read and easy to understand, so naturally he was adored and defended by mobs of the unwashed. When he was chided by the learned lady Vittoria Colonna for wasting his talent, Aretino responded: “I have to consider the tastes of our contemporaries; amusement and scandal are the only things that pay; people burn with concupiscence as you burn with an inextinguishable angelic flame.” He noted that he had sent a serious book to François Ier five years before and was still awaiting an acknowledgment; however, the year before he sent the king a copy of Cortigiana: or, The Way of Courtiers (a satire on Castiglione’s work) and by return post received another gold chain. So he asked: “Why write serious books at all? After all I write for my bread.”5 Aretino’s works were printed in several Italian city-states and translated in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Hungary, Turkey, and Spain. More often than not, engraved portraits graced the title pages of his works, and his became one of the best-known faces in Europe. The English, however, were reluctant to publish him openly. In 1584 and 1589, the London bookseller John Wolfe 4

Ibid., 17:462 (no. 841). Qtd. in the anonymous review of Women of the Renaissance in The Literary World (23 November 1906), 404. 5


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commissioned John Windet to print several parts of Il ragionamenti in Italian, but although printed in London the title pages claim they were printed in Melagrano and Bengodi (the first would be Pomegranate and the latter a fictitious place invented by Boccaccio). Quattro comedie del divino Pietro Aretino was published in 1588 without credit to printer or bookseller and with no place of publication noted. Even John Hawkins’s translation of A Paraphrase upon the Seaven Penitentiall Psalmes was published abroad in 1635, again in deep anonymity. Nevertheless it is clear Aretino’s works were not unknown to many English readers. The very first reference to Aretino in an English-printed book is found in George Gylpen’s 1579 translation of Philips van Marnix van St. Aldegonde’s Bee Hive of the Romishe Church, in which the Dutchman cites Aretino’s authority as a writer about sodomy: [In the court of Rome] they write bookes of Sodomitrie, and all maner of incontinencie, and esteeme them for a godlie matter: like as have done, the Bishoppe Monsenr de la Casa, and Petro Aretino. There do they keepe common schooles, and dispute, whether Matrimonie is better than Sodomitrie. [In a shoulder note, he adds] Johannes de la Casa, Archbishop of Beneventa, hath written a booke in commendation of Sodomitrie, calling it, A godlie worke, & saying, That he tooke great delight in the same, and used no other bedfellow! . . . Petrus Aretinus hath bin likewise a great friend to Popes, and hath published many bookes, wherein he treates of many matters such as bawdrie, and caused manie filthie and unseemelie pictures to be made at Venice, and sundrie sortes of bysseeping to be printed, and made a booke and exposition upon the same.6

Just what “sundrie sortes of bysseeping” might be is a mystery, for bysseeping is not to be found in OED and the editors of OED3 speculate that it may be a misprint for bysleeping, meaning heretical or unnatural behavior. In 1579 Aretino is again linked with sodomy in the gloss to Spenser’s Shephearedes Calender. In “January,” Spenser writes that Hobbinol seeks to obtain Colin’s love with daily suit and gifts of kids, cracklings, and early fruit, but Colin disdains them and re-

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The Bee Hive of the Romishe Churche (London, 1579), fol. 323v.

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gifts them to Rosalind. Lest the reader mistake Hobbinol’s motives, the passage is glossed: “In thys place seemeth to be some savour of disorderly love, which the learned call paederastice. . . . But let no man thinke, that herein I stand with Lucian or his develish disciple Unico Aretino, in defence of execrable and horrible sinnes of forbidden and unlawful fleshlinesse.”7 Unico Aretino may be translated as the one and only, the unique Aretino, and in his defense, it may be said that he did not advocate “forbidden and unlawful fleshlinesse” but simply reported that it took place in venues high and low. Gabriel Harvey, Spenser’s good friend, to whom he had dedicated The Shepheardes Calender, links the “Divine Aretino” with “worthy Ariosto, excellent Tasso, sweet Petrarch . . . four famous heroic poets as valorously brave as delicately fine.”8 In another place he writes that until “unico Aretino” wrote, “Arte was a Dunse.”9 Harvey was, however, ambivalent about Aretino: he coined the expression “to Aretinize” in order to express his loathing of Nash’s Choice of Valentines, but Nashe (called by Thomas Lodge the “English Aretine”)10 shows a greater appreciation for Aretino’s genius than most of his contemporaries when he writes: [T]his Aretine . . . was one of the wittiest knaves that ever God made. If out of so base a thing as inke there may be extracted a spirite, he writ with nought but the spirite of inke, and his stile was the spiritualtie of artes, and nothing else. . . . His penne was sharpe pointed like [a] ponyard. No leafe he wrote on, but was like a burning glasse to sette on fire all his readers. With more then musket shot did he charge his quill, where he meant to inveigh. . . . He was no timorous servile flatterer of the commonwealth wherein he lived. . . . Princes he spared not that in the least point transgrest. . . . If lascivious he were, he may answere with Ovid . . . My lyfe is chast though wanton be my verse. Tell me . . . what good Poet is or ever was there, who had not had a little spice 7

The Shepheardes Calender (London, 1579), 2. Gabriel Harvey’s Marginalia, ed. G. C. More Smith (Stratford-uponAvon: Shakespeare Head Press, 1913). 9 Pierces Supererogation: or, A New Prayse of the Old Asse (London, 1593), 10. Spenser and Harvey seem to have picked up the epithet “unico Aretino” from Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier. 10 Wits Miserie, and the Worlds Madnesse Discovering the Devils Incarnat of This Age (London, 1596), 57. 8


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of wantonnes in dayes? . . . Aretine as long as the worlde lives shalt thou live. Tully, Virgil, Ovid, Seneca, were never such ornaments to Italy as thou hast beene. I never thought of Italy more religiously than England til I heard of thee. Peace to thy Ghost, and yet methinkes so indefinite a spirit should have no peace or intermission of paines, but be penning Ditties to the Archangels in another world.11

After this brief flash of appreciation, writers returned to portraying Aretino as a purveyor of smut. Ben Jonson repeatedly mentions Aretino in Volpone. There Sir Epicure Mamon exclaims rapturously about the “oval room” he plans to construct with the wealth of his alchemical gold and says he will fill it with such erotic artworks that will make those associated with Aretino to appear quite dull (2.2). The city husband justifies prostituting his wife to the decrepit Volpone by contrasting him to some young lecher who “had read Aretine, conn’d all his printes, / Knew every quirke within lusts laborinth” (3.7). Lady Politick Would-Be includes Aretino in a list of poets that the English love to imitate—including Petrarch, Tasso, Dante, Guarrini, and Ariosto—and says she has read all of them; then she adds, “But for a desperate wit, there’s Aretine; only, his pictures are a little obscene” (3.4). This afterthought is, of course, a coy allusion to Raimondi’s engravings, but these casual references in a popular play clearly indicate that the English groundlings were expected to recognize the name Aretino and get the point. John Donne took up the cry of condemnation in Ignatius His Conclave, in which he satirizes Ignatius Loyola and the Jesuits and speculates about matters of protocol in Hell. Who will have primacy: will it be such “innovators” as Copernicus, Columbus, or Machiavelli, or will it be Ignatius himself ? In the process, Donne condemns “blasphemous” Aretino as one “who by a long custome of libellous & contumelious speaking against Princes, had got such a habit, that at last he came to diminish and disestemme God himselfe.”12 This last bit is an allusion to an epitaph allegedly penned by an irate bishop that Aretino had satirized mercilessly. The bishop wrote “Here lies 11 The Unfortunate Traveller: or, The Life of Jacke Wilton (London, 1594), H1r–v. 12 Ignatius his Conclave; or, His Inthronisation of Loyola in Hell (London, 1611), 96–97.


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the Tuscan poet, Aretino. / He slandered all but God, Whom he left out / because he pleaded, ‘Well I never knew Him.’”13 In Areopagitica Milton declined to name Aretino outright but described him as “that notorious ribald of Arezzo, dreaded, and dear to the Italian courtiers. I name him not for posterity’s sake, whom Harry the 8, nam’d in merriment his Vicar of Hell.” Even so, Milton added, “[Y]et those books must be permitted untoucht by the licencer.”14 When the Italian expatriate Giovanni Torriano wrote a series of dialogues for English travelers, he likewise declined to refer to Aretino by name, but simply calls him “A.” In a conversation featuring a foreigner and a Roman bookseller, one can easily imagine the tourist creeping up to the vendor and murmuring: “I am seeking the works of A.” “You may seek them from one end of the Row to the other, and not find them,” replies the bookseller. “And why?” “Because they are forbidden, both the Postures and Discourses, that embracing of men and women together in unusual manners, begets a scandal, and the Inquisition permits no such matters, it condemns all such sordid things.”15 The Discourses to which the bookseller refers is, of course, Aretino’s Ragionamenti, and the Postures alludes to I modi, Raimondi’s engravings with Aretino’s verses. So we see that by the mid-seventeenth century, Raimondi and Romano were ignored and the pictures as well as the verses were attributed to Aretino. In 1660–61 a newspaper called The Wandering Whore was being hawked on the streets of London. The title page promised that it would report the activities of London’s “crafty bawds, common whores, wanderers, pick-pockets, night-walkers, decoys, hectors, pimps and trappaners.”16 Despite all this promising material, the paper died after half a dozen issues, of which only a handful survive. Although early catalogers assigned authorship to Aretino, it appears that an English “translator” took the title from a work erroneously 13 Qtd. in Beverly Ballardo, “Aretino,” The Feminist Encyclopedia of Italian Literature, ed. Rinalda Russell (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1997), 18. 14 Areopagitica (London, 1644), 13–14. 15 Piazza Universale. With a Supplement of Italian Dialogues (London, 1666), 80. 16 Thomason Tracts E.1053 (3) and E.1053 (8).


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attributed to Aretino and shifted the scene to London. The original La puttana errante was actually by Lorenzo Veniero, who had been a secretary to Aretino and sought to gain the renown of his master by trying his hand at soft porn. Numerous editions of Veniero’s trifling work were published under Aretino’s name, so there is little wonder that catalogers were misled. In spite of Aretino’s popular reception and critical acclaim, three years after his death he was condemned to a damnatio memoriae, and all of his works (including the sacred works) were placed on the first general Roman Index of Prohibited Books published by Pope Paul IV. Thus ended the literary career of a man who only a few years previously had been elected first to membership in the Academy of Siena and shortly thereafter to the Infammati of Padua and finally to the Florentine Academy. In England Aretino’s reputation was nearly always smeared with smut, his very name became a byword for all things bawdy and naughty, and his religious works were generally dismissed as opportunistic ploys to obtain a sinecure (cynics spread the rumor that he hoped these pious works would earn him a cardinal’s hat). Although his works open a unique window on everyday life in the sixteenth century, unfortunately his vivid descriptions of vice coupled with his exuberant use of colloquial Italian comes across in English as crass pornography. With the exception of his Penitential Psalms, none of his works were translated into English until the nineteenth century, and even today only a few are available to those who do not read Italian. One might think that Aretino’s prose and poetry, having done so much to elevate vernacular Italian as a literary language, would cause him to be ranked as a literary genius along with Ariosto, Boccaccio, Dante, and Petrarch. Such is not the case; Arentino still gets scant respect among Anglophone readers. Folger Shakespeare Library


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Mixing Genres in George Peele’s David and Bethsabe Robert Kilgore Rather than asking, What kind of thing is this text? we should be asking something like, What kind of world is brought into being here—what thematic topoi, with what modal inflection, from what situation of address, and structured by what formal categories? Who represents this world to whom, under what circumstances and to what ends? —John Frow Genres are not to be mixed. I will not mix genres. I repeat: genres are not to be mixed. I will not mix them. —Jacques Derrida1

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want to advance three interconnected claims: 1) George Peele’s play about David is intentional about mixing genres, despite its reputation for disregarding conventional genres altogether; 2) most writers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries make David an example that can be used for various personal and political ends; 3) by mixing genres, Peele’s play on David complicates the process of making David an example. All of this matters because Peele’s play has been undervalued and the period’s use of David too simply understood. The implications are dramatic, poetic, religious, and political.

1 John Frow, “‘Reproducibles, Rubrics, and Everything You Need’: Genre Theory Today,” PMLA 122, no. 5 (2007): 1633; Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” tr. Avital Ronell, Critical Inquiry 7 (1980): 55. See also John Frow, Genre (New York: Routledge, 2006).

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Peele’s David and Bethsabe—the full title is The Love of David and Faire Bethsabe, with the Tragedie of Absolon—stages events from David’s adultery with Bethsabe (Bathsheba) through the death of his rebellious son Absalom.2 The play was entered into the Stationers Register in 1594, and a quarto of the play was printed in London in 1599.3 The plot of the play fairly faithfully follows the Hebrew Bible’s second book of Samuel, chapters 11 through 19, but critics have often found the play confusing and incoherent. The main cause of confusion seems to be what kind of play to call it. It has been called a “history play” (Weil), a “biblical drama” (Connolly), a “divine play” (Campbell), a “biblical chronicle history” (Brawley, Ashley), a “biblical tragedy” (Roston), and a “divine comedy” (Ewbank).4 Granted, it’s not unusual for Elizabethan plays to work in more than one genre at once. Philip Sidney in his Defense of Poesy complains of “mongrell Tragicomedie[s]”—plays that are “neither right tragedies, nor right comedies, mingling kings and clowns.”5 And Polonius in Hamlet promotes the players as “the 2 George Peele, The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe. With the Tragedie of Absolon. As It Hath Ben Divers Times Plaied on the Stage (London, 1599). 3 Elmer M. Blisten, ed., David and Bethsabe, in The Dramatic Works of George Peele, gen. ed. Charles Tyler Prouty, vol. 3 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1970), 139–40. 4 Judith Weil, “George Peele’s Singing School: David and Bethsabe and the Elizabethan History Play,” in Themes in Drama 8, ed. James Redmond (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), 51; Annaliese Connolly, “Peele’s David and Bethsabe: Reconsidering Biblical Drama of the Long 1590s,” Early Modern Literary Studies Special Issue 16 (2007): 9.1–20; Lily Campbell, Divine Poetry and Drama in Sixteenth-Century England (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1959), 260; Benjamin Griffith Brawley, A Short History of the English Drama (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1921), 46; Leonard R. N. Ashley, George Peele (New York: Twayne, 1970), 151; Murray Roston, Biblical Drama in England (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1968), 103; Inga-Stina Ewbank, “The House of David in Renaissance Drama: A Comparative Study,” Renaissance Drama 8 (1965): 15. A discussion of the generic labels that may apply to Peele’s play is present in almost every piece of criticism on the play. 5 Sir Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesy, in Sir Philip Sidney: The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002), 244.

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best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical-historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragicalcomical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited.”6 It may be usual for an Elizabethan play to mix genres, but Peele’s play has bothered modern scholars. Madeline Doran lamented the play’s “shapeless unselectivity of incidents,” and Inga-Stina Ewbank noted the play’s “happy disregard of genres.”7 When Douglas Bruster and Robert Weimann write about this play in Prologues to Shakespeare’s Theatre, they explain the play’s generic incoherence by way of Peele’s attempt to reconcile his “middle-class background, an Oxford education, and [the] exigencies of an emerging market for cultural goods.”8 Bruster and Weimann are convincing with their material point about Peele’s varied life and career—Peele himself may have been, in Polonius’s words, “tragical-comical-historicalpastoral,” but they read too simply the story of David that is the basis of Peele’s play, and that matters. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, writers were fascinated with David precisely because he was creatively useful and applicable as a commonplace, an example. David was a king and a poet, a courtier and a musician, an adulterer and a murderer, a military hero and “a man after God’s own heart” (1 Samuel 13:14; Acts 13:22). Both Machiavelli and Erasmus praise him. For the annotators of the Geneva Bible, David is “the true figure of Messiah.”9 King James VI/I commends David as an example for his son to follow in Basilikon Doron, and he translates thirty of David’s Psalms into original Scots verse.10 Through Psalm translation and commentary, many writers 6 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd Series (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson, 2007), 2.2.333–36. 7 Madeleine Doran, Endeavors of Art (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1954), 102; Ewbank, “House of David,” 5. 8 Douglas Bruster and Robert Weimann, Prologues to Shakespeare’s Theatre: Performance and Liminality in Early Modern Drama (New York: Routledge, 2004), 103. 9 I quote from the Argument to 1 Samuel in the 1560 Geneva Bible. 10 James VI /I, Basilikon Doron, ed. Charles Howard McIlwain, The Political Works of James I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1918; rpt., New York: Russell & Russell, 1965), 15. For more discussion of David with James and Calvin, see my essay, “Fit for a King: The Manuscript Psalms

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(and their readers) were able to read themselves into some part of David’s story, applying the example of David to their own diverse situations and their own poetic ambitions. John Calvin boldly argues that he can interpret the Psalms because of the tribulations that he and David have shared.11 The list of imitators of David through Psalm translation is too long to list here, but they include Thomas Wyatt, Philip Sidney, Mary Herbert Sidney (the Countess of Pembroke), John Harington, Francis Bacon, George Herbert, Anne Locke, John Milton, and Queen Elizabeth herself.12 But it is not just lyric—there are also heroic treatments of David’s life by Michael Drayton, Abraham Cowley, John Dryden, Nahum Tate, and Thomas Ellwood (Milton’s Quaker friend). The possibilities for using David as an example for poetry seemed limitless. Though David, generally, was a useful example, writers rarely scrutinized the whole man, the whole story. They turned instead to particular episodes of David’s life and to particular psalms to support arguments, provide counsel, glean inspiration, gain poetic authority, and deal with sin. (Drayton treats the David and Goliath episode, for example; Thomas Wyatt translates the seven penitential psalms.) Of great interest is how writers dealt with David’s most publicized fault: his forcing of Bethsabe and murder of her husband Uriah, the soldier. Sir John Harington, Queen Elizabeth’s godson, provides a conventional explanation in an epigram, “Of King David. Written to the Queene.” Harington writes that from David’s fault of King James VI/I,” in Renaissance Papers 2007, ed. Christopher Cobb and M. Thomas Hester (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008), 97–110. For my discussion of David and Philip Sidney, see “Poets, Critics, and the Redemption of Poesy: Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy and Metrical Psalms,” in The Sacred and Profane in English Renaissance Literature, ed. Mary A. Papazian (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 2008), 108–31. 11 John Calvin, The Psalmes of David and Others. With M. John Calvins Commentaries, trans. Arthur Golding (London, 1571), **2v. I have modernized the spelling of i/j and u/v in all early modern texts in this essay. 12 See generally, Rivkah Zim, English Metrical Psalms: Poetry as Praise and Prayer, 1535–1601 (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987) and Hannibal Hamlin, Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004).

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. . . we learne a document most ample, That faln by fraillty we may rise by fayth, And that the sinne forgiven, the penance staieth; Of Grace and Justice both a sweet example. (lines 17–20)13

The point of David’s sin, according to this conventional interpretation, is that we are to learn by example and not do the same. David is not an excuse to sin, but a warning. If then we do sin, we can receive “grace,” but we live with the “penance,” the consequences. Commentators such as William Tyndale, John Fisher, and John Donne apply this example of David’s life in similar ways.14 But Harington, it turns out, is not that conventional. His epigram concludes, “Sith we, for ours, no just excuse can bring, / Thou hadst one great excuse, thou wert a King” (25–26). Harington ends the poem by taking us from the devotional to the political; the conventional to the subversive. “We” have “no just excuse” for our frailty; the King always has an excuse, as does perhaps the Queen.15 My point here is to demonstrate that David reliably serves as an example for early modern writers, but can serve as an example of many different things. For John Fisher, David is an example of a penitent man, and he used David to deliver a priestly warning. For John Harington, David is an example of a king who makes excuses, and he uses David to deliver the critique of a courtier, or of a presumptuous godson.

13 Sir John Harington, “92. of King David. Written to the Queene,” in The Letters and Epigrams of Sir John Harington, Together with The Prayse of Private Life, ed. Norman Egbert McClure (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1930), 223–24. 14 See William Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christen Man (Antwerp, 1528), R7v–8; John Fisher, Treatise Concernynge the Seven Penytencyall Psalmes (1509), in The English Works of John Fisher, ed. John E. B. Mayor (London: Early English Text Society, 1876), 1–8; John Donne, Sermons, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, 10 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1953–62), 5:318. 15 See John Scott-Warren, Sir John Harington and the Book as Gift (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001), 135–40, for speculation about this epigram’s occasion. He dates this epigram to the 1590s.

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Peele knows how to play this example game, too. His 1591 pageant device, Descensus Astraeae, compares Elizabeth to the goddess of justice: Long may she live, long may she governe us In peace triumphant, fortunate in warres Our faire Astraea, our Pandora faire, Our faire Eliza, or Zabeta faire. Sweet Cynthias darling, beauteous Cyprias peere As deere to England and true English heartes, As Pompey to the Citizens of Rome: As mercifull as Caesar in his might. As mightie as the Macedonian king, Or Trojan Hector, terror to the Greekes.16

He further makes Elizabeth/Astraea a shepherd queen, causes her to appear “with hir sheephook on the top of the pageant,” and to address the gathering: Feed on my flocke among the gladsome greene Where heavenly nectar flowes above the banckes. Such pastures are not common to be seene, Pay to immortall Jove immortall thankes: For what is good from heavens hie throne doth fall. And heavens great Architect be praised for all.17

We are justified in looking for coherent examples in Peele’s play on David both because of his training and intellect and because such examples are so common in early modern texts.18 Nevertheless, Peele complicates the process of making and reading examples by writing a play that mixes genres. He begins this task of de-exemplification by re-arranging the events of 2 Samuel, chapters 11 through 13 during his play’s first 400 lines. He does this to show his audience a series of episodes that embody key Elizabethan poetic and dramatic genres: George Peele, Descensus Astraeae (London, 1591), A2 v. Ibid., A2v–3. 18 See John M. Wallace, “‘Examples Are Best Precepts’: Readers and Meanings in Seventeenth-Century Poetry,” Critical Inquiry 1 (1974): 273–90; and Timothy Hampton, Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1990). 16 17

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epic, comedy, love elegy, history play, revenge tragedy, pastoral. This is intended to make audiences think about the figurative process by which they conventionally view the David story as a whole. Now I would like to provide some samples from the first 400 lines of the play in order to show how Peele alludes to one genre after another. Then I will turn to its final lines, in which we can see those genres as representing alternative ways of reading the play’s conclusion. First, there is a Prologue. The Prologue (the actor saying the words) announces the play’s epic aspirations, beginning, Of Israels sweetest singer now I sing, His holy stile and happie victories, Whose Muse was dipt in that inspiring dew, Arch-angles stilled from the breath of Jove. (1–4)19

The Prologue goes on to tell us that David conquered heaven with his “yvorie Lute” (7) and “his ravishing harpe” (10), and closes by asking for divine help in singing about this conquering singer. The Prologue then, according to the stage direction, “draws a curtaine, and discovers Bethsabe with her maid bathing over a spring: she sings, and David sits above vewing her.” This can be called the beginning of the love, or comic plot. Bethsabe sings, Let not my beauties fire, Enflame unstaied desire, Nor pierce any bright eye, That wandereth lightly. (30–33)

David sees all too well: What tunes, what words, what looks, what wonders pierce My soule, incensed with a suddain fire? What tree, what shade, what spring, what paradise Enjoyes the beautie of so faire a dame? (49–52)

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Citations from Peele’s play come from Elmer M. Blisten’s edition. The play is not divided into to acts or scenes, so I use Blisten’s line numbers.

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David summons her to him, and she—with some resistance—obeys. Then, the scene shifts to Israel’s siege of Rabbah, led by David’s general Joab, and the conquest of a high tower.20 This is history-play battle rhetoric: Courage ye mightie men of Israel, And charge your fatall instruments of war Upon the bosomes of prowd Ammons sonnes, That have disguisd your Kings Embassadors, Cut halfe their beards, and halfe their garments off, In spight of Israel, and his daughters sonnes. (157–62)

This scene is then followed by Amnon’s rape of Tamar (his half-sister), and Absalom’s vow of revenge on her behalf, on David’s behalf, and on the behalf of God himself: Hath Amnon forced thee? by Davids hand, And by the covenant God hath made with him, Amnon shall beare his violence to hell, Traitor to Heaven, traitor to David’s throne, Traitor to Absolon and Israel. (346–50) My selfe as swift as thunder, or his spouse, Will hunt occasion with a secret hate, To work false Amnon an ungracious end. (359–61)21

20 Connolly, “Reconsidering Biblical Drama of the Long 1590s,” par. 9, focuses on a later episode when David finally visits this battle scene (lines 768–837). Connolly links David’s acquisition of the crown of Hanon, the king of Rabbah, with Tamburlaine’s conquering of Mycetes in Marlowe’s play, and draws upon texts of two clergymen to suggest resonances with Peele’s play and the world at-large. See Edmund Bunny, The Coronation of David (London, 1588), and John Prime, The Consolations of David, Breefly Applied to Queene Elizabeth (Oxford, 1588). 21 The spelling of Absalom’s name is inconsistent throughout the 1599 edition and Blisten’s edition. Here I have emended the spelling of Amnon, the name of the son of David, from what appears in the 1599 printing as Ammon. Blisten notes that “perhaps the compositor was confused by the

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My point in all these samplings is to illustrate how Peele’s play signals at least four different genres, or kinds, of poetry and drama in its first 400 lines. There is the epic invocation, the comic love plot, followed by martial history play plot, followed by the rape and revenge tragedy plot. Soon follows the revenge killing of Amnon by Absalom, but it happens in the pastoral countryside, at a feast for a sheepshearing festival (lines 740–59). Peele does all this to cause audiences to think about the figurative process by which they conventionally view the David story as a whole. In other words, by stringing together the atomized episodes of David’s story as found in the 2 Samuel text, Peele is able to present his critique of the fragmented, examplemaking ways people think about the David story. He animates the emblems in real time. He de-exemplifies David’s example. In the latter half of the play, Peele seems to relent, and the play really does begin to read like a history play—there is Absalom’s rebellion, David’s flight from Jerusalem, a battle, a political crisis as David no longer seems fit to rule. But the move to history play does not undo Peele’s genre shifting at the beginning of the play; in fact, the earlier presentation of multiple genres gives audiences various ways to read the play’s endgame. The battle between David’s rebellious son Absalom and David’s general Joab has concluded, and Joab has (against David’s instructions) had Absalom killed. But David and the royal party, safely hidden away, does not yet know that. We see Bethsabe with David, trying to secure her son Solomon’s place as heir, a scene that occurs only at David’s deathbed in 1 Kings, chapter 1, but Peele puts it here, during what they think is still a raging battle. David only wants to speak of how much he loves Absalom, yet Bethsabe, the prophet Nathan, and finally Solomon himself persist until David names Solomon the heir. When the news comes that Absalom has been killed, David wails: . . . let them tosse my broken Lute to heaven, Even to his hands that beats me with the strings, To shew how sadly his poore sheepeheard sings. (1824–26)

similarity between Ammon, the people and the country (see l. 159), and Amnon, David’s son” (262).

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O Absalon, Absalon, O my sonne, my sonne, Would God that I had died for Absalon: But he is dead, ah dead, Absalon is dead, And David lives to die for Absalon. (1839–42)

It is at this moment, with David about to die with grief, his song broken, that Joab the victorious general returns, wondering why this looks like a tragedy: Why is this companie so Tragicke hew’d? Why is the King now absent from his men? And marcheth not in triumph through the gates? (1844–46)

David lashes out in anger and grief, but Joab begins a 32-line speech, where he throws David’s words back in his face: Hast thou not said, the wicked are as thornes, That cannot be preserved with the hand, And that the man shall touch them, must be armd With coats of yron, and garments made of steele, Or with a shaft of a defenced speare? (1870–74)

The words that Joab speaks here are the sense of the words that David does speak, but they are not words he has already spoken. They are the words that David speaks in 2 Samuel, chapter 23, reported as the last words of David. In the 2 Samuel narrative, David lives on after this battle, and he does not die in this play. By using David’s last words near the very end of this play, and by already conferring the succession upon Solomon, Peele is signaling that David is already as good as dead. And the political threat becomes real. Joab continues: Advance thee from thy melancholy denne, And decke thy bodie with thy blisfull robes, Or by the Lord that swaies the heaven, I swere, Ile lead thine armies to another King. (1878–81)

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Joab makes this threat also in 2 Samuel 19:7, but it’s the timing of it here, near the very end of the play, that seems to spark a political crisis worthy of a history play. And Bethsabe, not here at all in 2 Samuel 19, shows herself politically astute. David is sitting still when Bethsabe speaks: “O stay my lords, stay, David mournes no more, / But riseth to give honour to your acts” (1895–56). And David rises and speaks, but speaks not to the political situation, but of Absalom: “Then happie art thou Davids fairest sonne, / That freed from the yoke of earthly toiles” (1898–99). His speech soars beyond this earth to the eternal: Thy day of rest, thy holy Sabboth day Shall be eternall, and the curtaine drawne, Thou shalt behold thy soveraigne face to face, With wonder knit in triple unitie, Unitie infinite and innumerable. (1912–16)

This is the kind of transcendent thinking that has led critics to see this play as a divine comedy and Judith Weil to claim that “Peele’s play may be more of a splendid singing school than a tragic history.”22 David’s words echo St. Paul’s, and we glimpse the holy Trinity, but if there is to be reconciliation between father and son, between David and Absalom, between God and people, it will occur only as a matter of faith. David concludes, briefly: “Courage brave captaines, Joabs tale hath stird, / And made the suit of Israel preferd” (1917–18). David has spoken to the political crisis at last, and Joab gets the last words of the play: “Bravely resolvd and spoken like a King, / Now may old Israel, and his daughters sing” (1919–20). That we have a choice of genres to read this ending I hope is evident. Considered as divine comedy, the end shows us David reclaiming power as a type of Christ, foretelling Christian redemption. As a revenge tragedy, God is the scourge of David, causing David to suffer because of his sin with Bethsabe and murder of Uriah. As a history play, the general speaks last, putting a brave face on what is an old, tottering reign. As pastoral, there is both life and death in Arcadia, and this may 22

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all have something to do with England, after all. To say that this play is one genre or another limits the power of Peele’s play, and misses Peele’s careful reading of the David narrative in 2 Samuel and Peele’s critique of how that story was mined for stock examples. Perhaps I have overstated my case about Peele’s David and Bethsabe in the previous pages. Nowadays we do tend to be more accepting that texts deal in different genres all at once, and that my narrow point here about the criticism on Peele’s play is simply a reminder of what we know already—of what Derrida and the recent scholar of genre John Frow already have reminded us. It is also good to be reminded of Carol Kaske’s observation that “The Renaissance Bible as a whole would have provided a poet with an authoritative model of a self-contestatory, agonistic text,”23 which I will gloss here by saying that the Bible, and the David narrative itself, is a tale of many genres, pulling and pushing readers—not only to determine “What kind of thing is this text?” (as Frow asks)—but also, what claims the text makes upon its readers and for what ends. As ever, ends are hard to determine, whether in the Biblical narrative or in John Harington’s witty epigram, “Of King David, Written to the Queene,” or even in something seemingly as straightforward as John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, which John King reminds us is more than a martyrology, but also “functions as an encyclopedia of literary genres including many kinds of verse, martyrologies, fables, ballads, beast fables, fanciful tales, romanticized adventure narratives, and many other writings.”24 For Peele’s part, the use of stock examples of David has been replaced by an extended narrative of many genres with an inconclusive ending: “may old Israel, and his daughters sing,” truly? Staging the narrative of David’s story, especially the increasingly flawed part of David’s reign as told in 2 Samuel, is Peele’s way of reminding audiences of the shaky examples on which authority (both his own authority and royal authority) rests, and that is illustrated by Peele’s intense attention to, not disregard of, genre. University of South Carolina–Beaufort 23 Carol V. Kaske, Spenser and Biblical Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1999), 110. 24 John King, “Literary Aspects of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments,” Foxe’s Book of Martyrs Variorum Edition Online, 2nd ed., Humanities Research Institute (2006), http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/johnfoxe/apparatus/kingessay.html.

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Royal Prerogative versus the Common Law in A View of the Present State of Ireland and The Faerie Queene, Book 5 James Schiavoni

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his essay argues that Spenser’s representations of law are influenced by a bitter struggle between common law and prerogative courts in the sixteenth century. Spenser’s concern with legal cases springs not just from his own interests but from the contested status of law in sixteenth-century England. The English Reformation had disrupted the conceptual and practical relationships between different courts. Henry VIII’s abolition of Roman Catholic canon law created a vacuum that he attempted to fill with royal power over the church and the legislature.1 But the English nation gradually rejected absolutism in favor of the native tradition, which favored civil rights, limited monarchy, and the supremacy of Parliament. In a sense, the Reformation clarified innate tendencies in English law to move away from civil and canon law toward common law. This movement did not occur without protracted struggle, especially since the monarchs had a vested interest in civil law, which favored royal prerogative. Common law lawyers especially resented the growth, during the sixteenth century, 1 F. W. Maitland, Selected Historical Essays, ed. Helen M. Cam (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1957), 138. See also J. W. Tubbs, The Common Law Mind: Medieval and Early Modern Conceptions (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2000), 134. This hesitant movement toward civil law does not mean that King Henry attempted to abolish the common law; he actually protected the jurisdiction of common lawyers; see David Little, Religion, Order, and Law: A Study in Pre-Revolutionary England (New York: Harper, & Row, 1969), 133–34.

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of the royal prerogative courts, which usurped traditional common law jurisdiction.2 These prerogative courts included Chancery, Star Chamber, and High Commission. Besides the fact that these courts were taking business and litigants’ fees away from them, common law lawyers had specific legal objections to the each of these courts. Chancellors, who were not necessarily educated in law, often reversed the decisions of judges in Common Pleas and King’s Bench on the basis of “common sense” or “equity.” Star Chamber consisted of the Lord Chancellor, the chief justices of King’s Bench and Common Pleas, and members of the privy council. It sat especially in cases of public order: breach of the peace, unlawful assembly, rout and riot, government corruption, and sedition—precisely the kind of offenses Sir Artegall encounters so often in Book 5 of The Faerie Queene. This greatly feared court did not feel itself bound by the safeguards the common law provided for the accused. It could arrest and try defendants on its own initiative, without any grand jury indictment, and the usual method of proceedings was to force a defendant to answer all questions and thereby incriminate himself. Defendants refusing to take the notorious ex officio oath to answer all interrogatories were imprisoned until they cooperated.3 While the court observed the constitutional rule that no man could be tried for his life except by a jury of his peers, it imposed other grim penalties just short of execution, such as maiming and mutilation. In one famous instance, the aptly named John Stubbs lost his right hand for publishing a pamphlet hostile to the queen’s proposed marriage to a French Catholic duke. High Commission, a church court enforcing religious conformity, similarly did not observe the procedures of the common law, and denied Puritans and Catholics the due process that many Englishmen regarded as their constitutional right. 2 W. S. Holdsworth, A History of English Law, vol. 4 (Boston: Little Brown, 1924), 284. 3 Part of the issue was that defendants had to take the oath before they knew the charges against them or the questions to be asked. Thus, the process could degenerate into a “fishing expedition” or even an inquiry into private thoughts and beliefs. See Charles M Gray, “Prohibitions and the Privilege against Self-Incrimination,” in Tudor Rule and Revolution: Essays for G. R. Elton from His American Friends, ed. Delloyd J. Guth and John W. McKenna (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982), 355–56.

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SCHIAVONI ❧ ROYAL PREROGATIVE

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Royal prerogative was the subject of bitter political struggle when the royal courts ran roughshod over the common law. Separatists and Puritans typically refused to take the ex officio oath.4 The contest came to a head in a seemingly minor case in 1591 when a Puritan minister named Cawdrey was prosecuted by High Commission for misusing the Book of Common Prayer. When he refused to take the ex officio oath, he was deprived of his parsonage for contempt of court. Since High Commission was not a common law court, there was no allowable appeal. But Cawdrey’s intrepid lawyer James Morice found an ingenious way to continue the case. He sued Cawdrey’s successor in the common law courts for trespass, arguing that, under the Act of Uniformity of 1559, one could be dismissed from a benefice only after conviction by a common-law jury. This appeal eventually put the Queen’s Bench in the position of having to rule on whether the monarch could empower High Commission to ignore common and statutory law. In the event, the court upheld the deprivation and the monarch’s right to overrule the laws,5 but the popular outcry bore some fruit. For the rest of Elizabeth’s reign, the prerogative courts tended to use the ex officio oath more sparingly.6 In this struggle, Spenser, in his role as spokesman for Elizabeth, clearly favors royal prerogative.7 Spenser’s hostility to common law comes out most clearly in his View of the Present State of Ireland, where he remarks on the impotence of the common law, which the Irish turn to their own purposes by seizing upon ambiguities and nuances of interpretation: Thoughe they will not seme manifestlye to doe it yeat will some one or other subtill headed fellow amongest them picke some quirke, or devise some evacion . . . for in the moste apparante 4 Claire Cross, The Royal Supremacy in the Elizabethan Church (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969), 84. 5 John Guy, Politics, Law and Counsel in Tudor and Early Stuart England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 131–33. 6 Ibid., 136. 7 See Frank Kermode, “The Faerie Queene, I and V,” in Essential Articles for the Study of Edmund Spenser, ed. A. C. Hamilton (Hamden: Archon, 1972), 284, and Diane Parkin-Speer, “Allegorical Legal Trials in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene” in Sixteenth Century Journal 23.3 (1992): 494–505.

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matter that maie be the leaste question or doubte that cane be moved will make a stoppe vnto them and put them quite out of the waie. Besides that of themselues they are for the moste parte so cautelous and wily headed speciallye beinge men of so small experience and practize in lawe matters that youe woulde wonder whence they borrowe suche subtilties and slye shiftes.8

They probably took the hint from the common law system itself and borrowed the subtleties from English lawyers. Spenser’s spokesman, Irenius, has run up against the interminable ambiguity of language and the recalcitrant will of an oppressed people—a potent combination. Flexibility was the glory and lifeblood of the English common law, but in the hands of the Irish it turned into a means of rejecting the imperialist will to mastery and public order. Irenius lodges two complaints against the common law. First, the common law right to jury trial works against the English, since Irish juries almost always rule in favor of an Irishman against an Englishman, no matter what the evidence (66–67). Irenius therefore proposes that the right to trial by jury be abolished or a new method of jury selection be instituted. But when Eudoxus suggests that the judges appoint only Englishman or “suche Irishemen as weare of the soundest disposician” (67), Irenius rightly points out that the Irish would complain of jury rigging. Moreover, the common law allows the defendant thirty-six preemptory challenges and unlimited exceptions for cause in jury selection (69). Secondly, Irenius laments the difficulty of confiscating the lands of rebels (the procedure that landed Spenser his own Irish estate at Kilcolman). Irish juries consistently rule against the crown in all “inquiries for excheates, landes attainted, wardeshipps, concelmentes and all suche like” (67). The queen thus loses a great deal of potential income. Irish lords contemplating rebellion have learned the trick of quietly conveying their lands to friends and relatives in trust, reserving only a life interest for themselves, so as to avoid attainder of their lands should they die as traitors. An act of Parliament, which can be passed only with great difficulty, is then required to 8 Edmund Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland, in The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition: The Prose Works, ed. Edwin Greenlaw, et al. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1949), 67. Hereafter cited parenthetically.

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accomplish the seizure of their lands (72). Eudoxus comments that the fault lies with evil men, not the system, but Irenius responds that “the Common law hath left them this benefit, whereof they make advantage, and wrest it to their bad purposes” (28). He definitely faults the common law for its loopholes. Because of these deficiencies of the common law in Ireland, Irenius proposes that it be bypassed completely. His solution is an Early Modern version of executive privilege. The answer lies in “the superiour power of her maiestes prerogative againste which her owne grauntes are not to be pleaded nor enforced” (75). This assertion that the queen can revoke her own grants subverts the logic of Spenser’s argument, since earlier in View of Ireland he had damned the Irish for their repudiation of their ancestors’ submission to Henry VIII: “Howe cane they soe doe iustlie? Dothe not the Acte of the parent in anye lawfull graunte or Conveyaunce binde his heires for euer” (49), Eudoxus rhetorically asks. Apparently it does not, in the case of Elizabeth, since, according to Eudoxus, she can renounce her own grants whenever she so desires. The Irish, in other words, are damnable villains when they renounce their distant ancestors’ promises, but the English can justifiably break their own contracts at will. The episodes of Book 5 of The Faerie Queene also show the strains of the struggle between common law and royal prerogative. But like Irenius’s arguments, the logic of Book 5 begins to subvert itself when the rhetoric of prerogative justice strains against the principles of equity that Spenser lauds so highly. The confused and contested status of English law made depictions of it problematic, and betrayed Spenser into the contradictions of a rhetoric of mastery that fracture the narrative of justice in Book 5. In Book 5, as you remember, Sir Artegall and his robot companion Talus seek to deliver Irena (a portmanteau of Erin and Ireland) from the tyrant Grantorto (probably Spain or the Pope). Several incidents in Book 5 illustrate Spenser’s problematical presentation of Elizabethan justice. Probably the numerous images of land erosion in The Faerie Queene reflect Spenser’s nouveau-aristocratic fixation on the ownership and retention of land: a continual concern for Spenser, who made a career of fighting bitter lawsuits with his Anglo-Irish neighbors over land ownership. For example, an Irishman named Nicholas Shynan won a 1592 lawsuit against Spenser

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for property that he claimed by inheritance but Spenser claimed by right of escheat.9 Lord Roche, Spenser’s neighbor, also won several lawsuits against the poet over farmland that lay on the border of their two estates.10 The drowning of the giant with the scales probably encodes a bourgeois anxiety about land and the aristocracy. The communist giant wants to redistribute property so as to abolish social class and hierarchy, “And Lordings curbe, that Commons over-aw; / And all the wealth of rich men to the poore will draw.”11 Artegall and Talus come upon the giant standing on a rock by the sea, haranguing a rustic crowd. The giant holds a huge pair of scales in his hand, boasting that he will redistribute wealth and power, democratically leveling all distinctions. The peasants enthusiastically agree to his proposals, but Artegall, representing the justice of natural order, takes issue with him and defends the concept of hierarchy, the great chain of being. Growing frustrated by the giant’s obstinate defense of communism, Artegall eventually allows Talus to cast the demagogue into the sea. When the crowd reacts with anger, Talus disperses them by force. The giant’s rhetoric, centering as it does on the four elements, suggests that it is real property he is most concerned with. He pitches his appeal to categories of people who, in sixteenth-century England, notably lacked real property: rustics, women, children (5.2.30.9).12 Their lack of basic economic power entailed a corollary lack of legal rights. Growing population after the disasters of the Late Middle Ages, land shortage in England, a new class of gentleman aristocrats, and Spenser’s personal interests in confiscated Irish 9

Pauline Henley, Spenser in Ireland (Cork: Cork Univ. Press, 1928), 62. Ibid., 65–67. 11 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton, 2nd ed. (Harlow: Longman, 2001), 5.2.38.8–9. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 12 Elizabeth Fowler, “The Failure of Moral Philosophy in the Work of Edmund Spenser,” in Representations 51 (1995): 60, makes a similar observation when she notes that women, children, and peasants lacked the rights of full citizenship. She also points out the illegality of Artegall’s actions. I am indebted to Dr. Fowler for some of the basic ideas behind this article, although she traces the tensions in Spenser’s allegory of justice to a growing historical disparity between ethics and political philosophy, rather than between common law and royal prerogative. 10

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lands all emerge in images of land erosion. When the giant speaks of encroachments, erosions, and inequalities that cause havoc and dissension in realms and nations, Artegall, rather obtusely, interprets him literally as criticizing geologic changes, and challenges him to weigh truth against falsehood and right against wrong. But the giant’s language can easily be read as metaphorical reference to class struggle and the plight of the poor, since the giant also puns on the word “estate,” meaning social class (5.2.37.3). At least the common folk gathered to hear the giant seem to know what his tropes mean, and recognize that redistribution of property would result in freedom for them (5.2.33.4–5), since they would no longer be economic slaves. “Were it not good that wrong were then surceast,” asks the giant, “And from the most, that some were given to the least?” (5.2.37.8–9). In executing the giant, Artegall and Talus act as a sort of special tribunal or prerogative court, disregarding legal procedure. The success of Artegall’s actions suggests the superiority of these royal and ecclesiastical courts. They had vastly greater discretionary powers than the common law courts, which were bound by precedent in their sentences of punishment. Talus’s execution without trial of the giant resembles the sort of arbitrary punishments meted out by Star Chamber. Consider the following defense of religious persecution by Alexander Nowell at the opening of the 1563 Parliament: “But now some will say, Oh bloody man! that calleth this the house of right, and now would have it made a house of blood. But the Scripture teacheth us that divers faults ought to be punished by death: and therefore following God’s precepts it cannot be accounted cruel. . . . For by the scriptures, murderers, breakers of the holy day, and maintainers of false religion ought to die by the sword.”13 The Elizabethan defense of judicial execution rests on Old Testament books such as Leviticus rather than on the New Testament. It also relies heavily on St. Augustine’s analysis of politics, the first Christian justification of the use of the sword to enforce religious conformity. 13

William P. Haugaard, Elizabeth and the English Reformation: The Struggle for a Stable Settlement of Religion (London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1968), 330.

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“Augustine’s view of the Fall of mankind determined his attitude to society,” writes Peter Brown.14 Likewise, Spenser’s Augustinianism, far from being an abstract theological context for his poem, had quite concrete political implications. Sin, the existential split in man’s will, necessitates moral and political discipline, even if tyrannical. While state power cannot always effect the change of heart that is necessary for true repentance and conversion, it can ensure a modicum of desirable civil order and public morality. Both Augustine and Spenser knew the shortcomings of governments, yet endorsed violent suppression of rebels and heretics. Herbert Deane traces Augustine’s developing position on the use of force against the Donatist heretics, beginning with his firm opposition to such expediencies in the years 391 to 398, to his change of heart in the Contra Epistulam Parmeniani about 400.15 Augustine’s Letter 93 and his Answer to Petilian demonstrate the change in his position: “For originally my opinion was, that no one should be coerced into the unity of Christ. . . . But this opinion of mine was overcome not by the words of those who controverted it, but by the conclusive instances to which they could point. For, in the first place, there was set over against my opinion my own town, which, though it was once wholly on the side of Donatus, was brought over to the Catholic unity by fear of the imperial edicts.”16 On Augustine’s own testimony, then, the strongest argument for the use of coercion to enforce orthodoxy is that it works. Augustine likewise anticipates the Tudor-Stuart doctrine of passive obedience, which insists that the people must tolerate even a tyrannical ruler, when he quotes Romans 13:1–3 to explain the divine nature of the earthly authority: “For there is no power but of God: whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God.”17 Thus, when Petilian asks what is the legal 14 Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1967), 239. 15 Herbert A. Deane, The Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1963), 185–211. 16 St. Augustine, The Letters of St. Augustin, trans. J. G. Cunningham, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, first series, vol. 1, ed. Philip Schaff (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1995), 388. 17 Ibid., 389.

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justification for persecution of the Donatists, Augustine replies: “Seek therefore the reason or the measure of the persecution, and do not display your gross ignorance by finding fault in general terms with those who persecute the unrighteous.”18 The magisterial Reformers agreed with Augustine on this matter, as on so many others. Calvin, for example, appeals to “natural equity” to justify judicial punishments (4.20.11) and claims that magistrates can inflict violence yet do so with piety: “The magistrate in administering punishments does nothing by himself, but carries out the very judgments of God.”19 Talus’s execution of the giant implicitly stands on this traditional argument that civil power may be used against heretics and schismatics. Yet however much Spenser relies on St. Augustine and the magisterial Reformers to justify the execution of the giant, it offends the English legal principles of his own time, both in terms of common law and equity. After all, the giant is making a philosophical argument, not inciting riot, when he is killed. Conservative Elizabethans argued that the common law was entirely subservient to the royal prerogative,20 but even the prerogative courts observed the constitutional guarantee that no one could be tried for his life except by a jury of his peers. But Talus, without explicit orders from Artegall, summarily executes an orator. In other words, he does not operate under even the color of law. Nor is this objection anachronistic. Edward Coke and his Parliamentary allies raised exactly the same objections to unconstitutional courts and punishments, and the English Civil War was fought over precisely that issue of the limits of royal prerogative. Some common law lawyers in Elizabeth’s time tried to finesse the situation by arguing that the monarch’s prerogatory rights were actually given to the monarch by the common

18 St. Augustine, Answer to Letters of Petilian, Bishop of Cirta, trans. J. R. King, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, first series, vol. 4, ed. Philip Schaff (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1995), 571. 19 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, vol. 2, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), 1497. 20 J. W. Tubbs, The Common Law Mind: Medieval and Early Modern Conceptions (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2000), 133–39.

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law21 and by parliament,22 but such an argument made no sense when the royal courts violated, for instance, article 39 of Magna Carta, which had been forced upon the king to limit the king’s power: “No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised or exiled or in anyway destroyed, nor will we go upon him nor send upon him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.” Despite the fact that his actions are clearly representations of violations of English law, most critics have sided with Artegall. The giant “misunderstands the basis for a just distribution of wealth” and “rebels against a constitution [sic] authority which is already coherent, logical, and legitimate.”23 T. K. Dunseath does not take seriously the giant’s proposals for social reform.24 “Those scholars who say the giant has the better of the argument have certainly not drawn their conclusions from the poetry, relying instead perhaps upon their own sympathies for democratizing reform.”25 Other critics are less sanguine about Spenser’s portrayal of summary justice. The most incisive analysis is by Elizabeth Fowler, who points out that Artegall exercises “equity” not as a discretionary adjustment of the results of common law but as an excuse for his arbitrary exercise of power.26 Michael O’Connell admits that “The giant’s violation of law in conducting an illegal assembly scarcely necessitated his summary execution.”27 He places this summary justice in light of the very real dangers to Elizabeth’s life and government, but blames Spenser for taking the path of least resistance: “The threat to society was felt to be too real and pressing to require 21 G. R. Elton, “The Rule of Law in Sixteenth-Century England,” in Tudor Men and Institutions: Studies in English Law and Government, ed. Arthur J. Slavin (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1972), 272. 22 Guy, Politics, Law and Counsel, viii. 23 Angus Fletcher, The Prophetic Moment: An Essay on Spenser (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1971), 244. 24 T. K. Dunseath, Spenser’s Allegory of Justice in Book Five of “The Faerie Queene” (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1968), 96. 25 Ibid., 97. 26 Fowler, “Failure,” 64. 27 Michael O’Connell, Mirror and Veil: The Historical Dimensions of Spenser’s Faerie Queene (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1977), 138.

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full consideration of all the philosophic or juridical questions. The legal primitivism of the social bandit’s methods provides an easier way out than further development of Artegall’s judicial role.”28 Andrew Hadfield has even suggested that Spenser may have had egalitarian sympathies: “The Giant’s desire to weigh the winds, waters and the earth is indeed impossible . . . but it does not follow from this that the social vision of the Giant is necessarily so absurd.”29 Modern readers are not the first to find the giant’s republicanism more sympathetic than Artegall’s imperialism. As Fowler notes, “It is not anachronistic to read the giant’s arguments as carrying considerable positive weight.”30 Anabaptists and lower-class English citizens in Spenser’s own time vigorously fought against arbitrary and extra-legal exercises of government power. If they did not succeed, they laid the foundation for later struggles that did finally impose constitutional limits on the executive power. John Keats wrote a Spenserian stanza in which the giant, resurrected and reeducated, confronts again his erstwhile executioners: “When, meeting Artegall and Talus grim, / The one he struck stone-blind, the other’s eyes wox dim.”31 When Thomas Love Peacock told Percy Shelley that Spenser did not intend to convey any approval of the giant’s democratic ideas, Shelley replied, “Perhaps not . . . That is the lesson which he conveys to me. I am of the giant’s faction.”32 Even C. S. Lewis, hardly a political liberal, finds Spenser’s portrayal of summary justice disturbing: “Spenser,” he writes, “was the instrument of a detestable policy in Ireland, and in his fifth book the wickedness he had shared begins to corrupt his imagination.”33

28 29

Ibid., 138–39. Andrew Hadfield, “Was Spenser a Republican?” English 47 (1998):

178. 30

Fowler, “Failure,” 60. John Keats, The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1978), 535. 32 Thomas Love Peacock, Peacock’s Memoirs of Shelley with Shelley’s Letters to Peacock, ed. H. F. B. Brett-Smith (London: Henry Frowde, 1909), 162. 33 C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1958), 349. 31

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Since the first writing of this essay, recent events have put the issue of law and violence in a new light. Today’s military tribunals are not bound by the ordinary rules of evidence or procedure. Such courts bear more than a passing resemblance to the prerogative courts of Spenser’s time. Spenser’s Early Modern discourse on law and violence continues to make itself surprisingly relevant to a twenty-first-century world he could never have foreseen, and Artegall and Talus continue to step outside the common and criminal law in their pursuit of justice. Tennessee Wesleyan College

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The Limits of Clowning in the Age of Marprelate: The Anti-Martinist Tracts and 2 Henry VI Kirk Melnikoff “Be Braue then, for your Captaine is Braue and vows Reformation” —Shakespeare, 2 Henry VI

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he discursive complexity of Jack Cade’s theatrical debut in 2 Henry VI is well underscored by his early vow of “Reformation.” By the close of the sixteenth century, the word had become ubiquitous in London’s social and cultural sphere. Understood in the context of his political rebellion, Cade’s fourthact declaration most immediately conjured contemporary Elizabethan political discourse.1 “All rebels pretend reformation,” wrote Raphael Holinshed in his Chronicles (1587), “but indeed purpose destruction both of king and countrie.”2 Of course, Cade’s “Reformation” also evoked rapidly changing theological connotations. Embraced in the 1560s to describe the break of European churches from Rome, the term was quickly adopted by dissenting Protestants 1 In recent editions of the play the term is routinely connected to contemporary political discourse, almost to the exclusion of all else. Ronald Knowles and Michael Hattaway, for example, have preferred the Quarto’s lower-case “reformation” (F4v) to the Folio’s capitalized “Reformation.” For a selection of Elizabethan political works that make use of the term “reformation,” see Christopher Hampton, ed., A Radical Reader (New York: Penguin, 1984), 114–33. 2 Qtd. in Ronald Knowles, ed., King Henry VI Part 2, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd Series (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson, 1999), 302n.

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halfway into Elizabeth’s reign to name their own project of further transforming the Anglican Church. For these men, the “Reformation” begun by Luther had yet to be achieved in England. What had been a definitive term for the English Church against Rome became a tool of attack for its new enemies. Thus, in response to critics of the English episcopacy confidently referring to Anglican priests as “intolerable withstanders of Reformation,” Richard Bancroft was forced to differentiate between the contemptible “newe reformation” and the old.3 “Reformation,” however, was more than a pervasive term in the political and religious discourse of late sixteenth-century England; it also had significant cultural connotations. Invoked, for example, by William Webbe in the title of his A Discourse of English Poetrie. Together, with the Author’s Iudgement, Touching the Reformation of our English Verse (1586), the word was at times during the 1570s and 1580s directed at contemporary poetics. By the 1590s, “reformation” seems to have taken on theatrical implications as well, particularly with regard to performance practices on the stage. Conjured by Hamlet in his own entreaty to the players to stop “imitat[ing] humanitie so abhominably,”4 calls for theatrical reform were increasingly aimed at the stage antics of the clown. Hamlet, after calling for a restrained mode of representational acting, quickly directs his rant at the traveling company’s “clownes.” To the Player’s defense that “I hope we haue reform’d that indifferently with vs,” Hamlet responds, “O reforme it altogether, and let those that play your clownes speake no more then is set downe for them” (G4). Likewise, at the end of Love’s Labour’s Lost, Rosaline’s use of “reformation” in her final exchange with Berowne invokes stage connotations, coupling the religious with the theatrical. Responding generally to Berowne’s discomfort with her lover’s trial and specifically to his complaint that “Mirth cannot move a soul in agony,” Rosaline replies, 3 For such criticism of the episcopacy, see The Epistle, in The Marprelate Tracts, 1588, 1589, ed. William Pierce (London: James Clarke, 1911), 24. For Bancroft’s response, see A Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse the 9. Of Februarie (London, 1588), 13. See also Kristin Poole, Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), 1–15. 4 William Shakespeare, The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet (London, 1604), G4.

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Why, that’s the way to choke a gibing spirit, Whose influence is begot of that loose grace Which shallow laughing hearers give to fools. A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear Of him that hears it, never in the tongue Of him that makes it. . . . [T]hrow away that spirit, And I shall find you empty of that fault, Right joyful of your reformation.5

Rosaline’s reference to the “loose grace / Which shallow laughing hearers give to fools” mockingly refers to the theology of Luther, which, in contradistinction to the Calvinistic belief in predestination, saw grace as available to anyone who asked for it. At the same time, her sense of a “jest’s prosperity” summons a non-theatrical model of comedy, one in which words can be separated from their vehicle, jokes made independent of the “fools” that deliver them. Imagined as active performers on hand to receive their auditors’ “laughing,” Rosaline’s “fools” are little different from the stage clowns of the early 1590s professional theater. In indirectly asking for their “reformation,” Rosaline predicts Hamlet’s own anti-theatrical penchants. That Shakespeare’s characters respond so vigorously to clowning should not come as a surprise. As Robert Weimann, David Wiles, and others have shown, Richard Tarlton and his heirs had loomed large in London’s cultural imagination since the mid-1580s.6 And yet, while the Elizabethan stage clown’s genealogy, popularity, and theatricality have been well explored, the vibrant discourse sur5 William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. H. R. Woudhuysen, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd Series (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson, 1998), 5.2.846–54. 6 On the clown’s genealogy, social reputation, and practices, see David Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clowns: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), and Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978). On clowning and constructions of authorship, see Nora Johnson, The Actor as Playwright in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003), esp. its first chapter on Robert Armin.

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rounding this cultural phenomenon remains virtually ignored. This essay offers a partial correction to this oversight. It traces the way in which an extended religious quarrel between a puritan pamphleteer and a group of university-trained professional writers functioned implicitly as a professional debate over clowning as a rhetorical mode. Just as Martin Marprelate modeled his own voice upon the Elizabethan clown’s stage persona, Nashe, Lyly, and others doubly modeled their own narrative accents. Inspired by Marprelate’s unprecedented textual appropriation of clowning and inflected by the diverse cultural and socioeconomic positions of their producers, these “anti-Martinist” pamphlets helped both to distinguish and to consolidate an emerging field of professional writers. They particularly had a strong influence upon Shakespeare’s production of the Cade sequence in 2 Henry VI. As I will show, Shakespeare’s construction of a rebel who was also a clown positioned his play within an energizing discourse that intermingled questions of politics, theology, rhetoric, and performance practice. Few episodes in the Elizabethan period intertwined political, religious, and cultural discourses more than what is now known as “the Marprelate controversy.”7 The seven satiric anti-episcopacy pamphlets penned and printed by Martin Marprelate in 1589 and 1590 publicly scandalized the Anglican Church by accusing Archbishop Whitgift and other bishops of immoral behavior. They also inspired numerous high-profile arrests and executions. The scandal was only stopped when the illegal Martinist printing press was finally discovered, but only after much embarrassment to Elizabeth and her top church ministers. “[T]hough his activity only lasted two years,” says J. Dover Wilson, “he succeeded, during that short time, 7 For general overviews of the Marprelate controversy, see Joseph L. Black, ed., The Martin Marprelate Tracts: A Modernized and Annotated Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008), i–cxvi; Donald J. McGinn, John Penry and the Marprelate Controversy (New Bruswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1966), 89–113; Leland H. Carlson, Martin Marprelate, Gentleman: Master Job Throkmorton Laid Open in his Colors (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1981), 1–31; Kristin Poole, “Facing Puritanism: Falstaff, Martin Marprelate and the Grotesque Puritan,” Shakespeare and Carnival, After Bakhtin, ed. Ronald Knowles (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 97–122; and Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003), 27–46.

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in thoroughly frightening the whole episcopal bench, in doing much to undermine its authority and prestige with the common people.”8 The first Marprelate tract The Epistle appeared in October, 1588. A sarcastic response to John Bridges’s epic apology for the episcopacy A Defence of the Government Established in the Church of England for Ecclesiastical Matters, The Epistle quickly made “Martin Marprelate” a public figure and elicited a surprisingly quick response from Elizabethan authorities. Marprelate’s widespread impact was a function of a novel style, one that merged the rhetorical schema of humanism with the satiric idiom of popular print pamphlet.9 Marprelate also borrowed liberally from the professional stage, modeling his own style upon the kind of foolery that defined the Elizabethan stage clown.10 8 J. Dover Wilson, “The Marprelate Controversy,” Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1909), 425. 9 For varying descriptions of Marprelate’s prose style, see Christopher Hill, “Radical Prose in Seventeenth-Century England: From Marprelate to the Levellers,” Essays in Criticism 32 (1982): 98; Ritchie D. Kendall, The Drama of Dissent: The Radical Poetics of Nonconformity (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1986), 173–212; Peter Lake with Michael Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2002), 509–20; and Marcy L. North, The Anonymous Renaissance: Cultures of Discretion in Tudor-Stuart England (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2003), 139–51. 10 Many critics have noticed the similarities between Marprelate’s style of writing and the acting style of the 1580s professional stage clown. See Wilson, “Marprelate Controversy,” 436; John S. Coolidge, “Martin Marprelate, Marvell, and Decorum Personae as Satirical Theme,” PMLA 74 (1959): 526–32; and Patrick Collinson, “Ecclestiastical Vitriol: Religious Satire in the 1590s and the Invention of Puritanism,” The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade, ed. John Guy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), 150–70, esp. 158–70. The connection was made in a sixteenth-century Cambridge disputation: “They’re notorious, those books of yours, inappropriate censures of public morals, those products of a theatre man: seek your own upon a stage” (qtd. in Matthew Steggle, “A New Marprelate Allusion,” Notes & Queries 44 [1997]: 34–36). Other critics, however, have qualified the connection between Marprelate and the professional stage. Kendall, for example, has traced Marprelate’s dramatic strategies back to a long and established English tradition of literary dissent, while Raymond Anselment, “Rhetoric and the Dramatic Satire of Martin Marprelate,” Studies in English Literature 10 (1970): 103–19, contends that

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Such a debt is hinted at early in The Epistle: “Again, ‘May it please you’ to give me leave to play the dunce for the nonce, as well as he; otherwise dealing with Master Doctor’s book, I cannot keep decorum personae.”11 Marprelate’s earlier promise to “ride to Sarum, and thank his Deanship” for his absurdity evokes images of famed horseplay like Derick’s at the beginning of The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth. Yet more than this, in promising to “play the dunce for the nonce” (my emphasis), Marprelate also associates his literary style with comic theatricality. This declaration becomes the manifesto of Marprelate’s style, establishing early on that his literary persona in The Epistle and in the other works to come will be modeled upon the various practices of the Elizabethan stage clown. In his seven works, Marprelate frequently reproduces the performance routines of the 1580s stage clown, a character born of the minstrel, the Vice, the Lord of Misrule and the rustic. Along with frequently breaking into rustic dialects like that of the west country, he revels in the clown’s Lord-of-Misrule derived license, borrows the clown’s signature Vice-like dialogism, playfully engages in extemporal versifying, and frequently shows off in many moments of quotation and rebuttal. The initial response to the Marprelate tracts came in November, 1588, when Lord Chancellor Hatton wrote Whitgift telling him to use the Court of High Commission to arrest those behind the pamphlets. Two months later, the first published response to the Marprelate tracts appeared, Thomas Cooper’s An Admonition to the People of England. This was swiftly followed by an anti-Martinist sermon by Bancroft and a royal proclamation.12 It did not take long, however, to see that these serious responses to Marprelate would not much of Marprelate’s style can be traced to the major Elizabethan rhetorical authorities like Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintillian (104). 11 Marprelate Tracts, ed. Pierce, 27. 12 Bancroft first delivered the sermon from Paul’s Cross on 9 February 1589. It was printed quickly thereafter. Elizabeth’s proclamation, “A Proclamation against Certaine Seditious and Schismatical Bookes and Libels” was published on 13 February 1589. For helpful overviews of the contemporary responses to Marprelate, see Collinson; Joseph Black, “The Rhetoric of Reaction: The Martin Marprelate Tracts (1588–89), AntiMartinism, and the Uses of Print in Early Modern England,” Sixteenth Century Journal 28 (1997): 707–25; and North, Anonymous Renaissance, 151–58.

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stem the tide of his publications or popularity. Following Bancroft’s advice, professional pamphleteers and playwrights were recruited by Whitgift to meet Marprelate “after [his] own vein.”13 Marprelate’s “vein,” however, was anything but a settled quality for these professional antagonists. While most of the anti-Martinist tracts that were published in 1589 and 1590 complain about Marprelate’s indecorous style, not all of them explicitly connect it to the theatrical repertoire of the clown. Moreover, those anti-Martinist tracts that do understand Marprelate in terms of the stage clown do not do so in entirely the same way. Some simply define Marprelate’s clowning as either harmlessly knavish or foolish. Others, however, fully experiment with the rhetorical potential of Marprelate’s clownish language. Of these, some question its efficacy as a style of sociopolitical rhetoric even as others assume it. Most, though, recognize it as an important stake in the early 1590s literary marketplace. Such nuances in the anti-Martinist tracts’ engagement with Marprelate’s clowning have been for the most part overlooked.14 The earliest anti-Martinist work to connect Marprelate’s rhetorical strategies with the theatrical style of the Elizabethan clown displays a varied, albeit limited, interest in the stylistic particularities of Marprelate’s style. Although presenting lines somewhat akin to the infamous extemporary doggerel of Tarlton, A Whip for an Ape: or Martin displaied (1589) does not pursue the detailed parody that will define many of the later anti-Martinist pamphlets; instead, it baldly states that a connection between Marprelate and Tarlton exists to underscore what it sees as the knavish intent behind Marprelate’s foolish persona. Mar-Martine (1589), on the other hand, offers in its third-to-last poem a close, yet limited, investigation of the various characteristics of Marprelate’s foolery. It, like A Whip for an Ape, clearly associates Marprelate with Tarlton’s knavery: “These tinkers termes, and barbers iestes first Tarlton on the stage, / Then Mar13 Later, Whitgift explains, “that Course was taken wch did principally stop Martin & his Fellow’s mouths, viz: to have them answered after their own vein in writing” (qtd. in Charles Nicholl, A Cup of News: The Life of Nashe [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984], 67). 14 On shared style in the anti-Marprelate tracts, see Wilson, “Marprelate Controversy,” 451; Coolidge, “Martin Marprelate,” 528; and Poole, “Facing,” 102.

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tin in his bookes of lies, hath put in every page” (A4v). Yet unlike A Whip for an Ape, Mar-Martine parodies Tarlton’s clowning while worrying about Marprelate’s popular reception (A4v). Published in October, 1589, John Lyly’s Pappe with an Hatchet goes beyond Mar-Martine’s cursory exploration of Marprelate’s clowning. In it, Lyly constructs a complicated image of Marprelate and his clownish style. Likely one of the first writers to be engaged by Whitgift, Lyly was specifically called upon to respond to the recently published Theses Martinianae and The Just Censure and Reproofe of Martin Junior; in it, he pens one of the first anti-Martinist pamphlets to meet Marprelate fully with his own stylistic terms. “[W]hatsoever seem lavish in [it],” writes Lyly under the pen-name veil of “Double V, “let it be thought borrowed of Martins language” (A4). Omnipresent in Pappe with an Hatchet is Marprelate’s signature clown-derived dialogism. Lyly constructs a highly unstable controlling voice that is often in dialogue with itself and self-conscious about its own rhetorical guises. Double V begins this early on the pamphlet, after he has decided that, as responses to Marprelate, “rime and reason bee both forestalde” (B2). Gauging, however, that Marprelate, “hath taken vp all the words for his obscenitie,” Double V stops and exclaims, “obscenitie? Nay, now I am too nice; squirrilitie were a better word: well, let me alone to squirrel them” (B2). Besides transforming “scurrility” into the comically grotesque version “squirrilitie,” this rhetorical motif creates the illusion of immediate production. Framing Double V’s energetic and immediate voice is much rhetorical self-consciousness, which often surrounds, even disrupts, the pamphlet’s verbal kinesis. Concluding, for example, that Marprelate and his cohorts “studie to pull downe Bishopps,” Double V interrupts himself with the exclamation, “A fine period,” and adds, “but I cannot continue this stile, let me fall into my olde vaine” (C2). Modeling Double V’s prose style upon Marprelate’s own foolery, Lyly writes with the assurance that Double V’s voice is not so destabilized that it undermines Lyly’s identity as a serious defender of the Anglican Church. He instead sees Double V’s unstable dialogism as threatening Marprelate and his heirs with a satiric agility. “Scratch not thy head Martin,” Double V entreats, “for be thou Martin the bird, or Martin the beast; a bird with the longest bill, or a beast with the longest eares, theres a net spread for your necke”

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(B4v). Undergirding this experimentation with Marprelate’s Tarltonizing is also a dismissal of the political importance of popular culture. Double V mockingly advises Marprelate to take his “pleasaunt” and “nimble” vein to the popular theatrical and pamphlet markets: “If thy vaine bee so pleasaunt, and thy witt so nimble, that all consists in glicks and girds; performe some play for the Theater, write some ballads for blinde David and his boy, divise some iests, & become another Scogen” (E2v). Lyly’s concentrated yet dismissive engagement with Marprelate’s clowning style reflects his amateur understanding of literary production. Both the comic opening epistle “To the Father and two Sonnes, Huffe, Ruffe, and Snuffe,”15 and the more serious epistle “To the indifferent Reader” register a consciousness of an elite readership that values literary decorum. Suggesting that he has only matched his style with his content, Double V writes in the first epistle, “I was loath so to write as I have done, but that I learnde, that he that drinkes with cutters, must not be without his ale dagger, nor he that buckles with Martin, without his lavish termes” (A2v–A3). Similar rationalizations are more extensive in the second epistle (A4). Assurances of his own respect for the values of the elite and his own erudition are twin necessities for Lyly. Lyly’s amateur bent can be traced as well in Double V’s presumption that Marprelate either works with (A4v) or seeks the financial support of a patron. It also translates into a concern not with a widespread but with an elite reception of Marprelate’s tracts. Lyly makes all of this clear later in his pamphlet when summarizing his tale of a duke’s dissatisfaction with the failed promises of a “lubber” and his Philosopher’s Stone. Here Double V concludes, “Martin, if thou to cousen haue crept into the bosome of some great men . . . it may be, thou shalt bee hearkened too, stroakt on the head, greasd in the hand, fed daintelie, kept secretlie, and countenaunct mightelie” (C1). Lyly’s consistent concern with the patron-driven world of amateur production also produces one of the more obvious moments of unambiguous compliment within any of the antiMartinist tracts. In concluding that Marprelate is not simply a critic of the English Church but a traitor to England as well, Double V 15

Contained within the heading of this epistle is also a derisive allusion to the three ruffians “Huf, Ruf and Snuf ” of Thomas Preston’s Cambises.

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bursts into a paragraph-long rumination upon the undeniable perfection of Elizabeth’s reign: “Her sacred Maiestie hath this thirtie yeares, with a setled and princelie temper swayed the Scepter of this Realme, with no lesse content of her subiects, than wonder of the world” (D3r–v). Lyly’s inclinations in Pappe with an Hatchet, however, are not entirely determined by his imagined elite readership; his intended audience includes other pamphlet writers as well. This explains what Black and others have described as the “literary one-upmanship” (714) that pervades the pamphlet.16 It also helps explain the extensive degree to which Pappe with an Hatchet engages with Marprelate’s cutting-edge clownish style. Lyly’s foolery is as much showmanship as it is satire. This double agenda becomes clear when at the beginning of his pamphlet, he unexpectedly directs the brunt of his jests away from Marprelate and towards Gabriel Harvey. In threatening Marprelate with a variety of forthcoming anti-Martinist tracts, Double V suggests (in a section pregnant with irony) that the anti-Martinist’s secret weapon is in fact the pen of Harvey: [O]ne we will coniure vp, that writing a familar Epistle about the natural causes of an Earthquake, fell into the bowells of libeling, which made his eares quake for feare of clipping, he shall tickle you with taunts: all his works bound close, are at least sixe sheetes in quarto, & he calls them the first tome of his familiar Epistle: hee is full of latin ends, and worth tenne of those that crie in London, haie ye anie gold ends to sell. If he give you a bob, though he drawe no bloud, yet are you sure of a rap with a bable. . . . (B3r–v)

Referring to Harvey’s Three Proper and Wittie Familiar Letters Lately Passed between Two Universitie Men: Touching the Earthquake in Aprill Last (1580), Double V sarcastically praises Harvey for the extensiveness of his work (“six sheetes in quarto”), for his stock of “Latin ends,” and for his willingness to write “without wit.”17 In directing his wit at another foe, Lyly subtly invites Marprelate to laugh with him at Harvey. What is here an unexpected moment of implicit confederacy 16 See Jonathan V. Crewe, Unredeemed Rhetoric: Thomas Nashe and the Scandal of Authorship (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1982), 35. 17 For a lively account of the quarrel between the Harveys, Nashe, and the others, see Nicholl, A Cup of News, 80–135.

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predicts what will be in other anti-Martinist pamphlets a pervasive admiration of and identification with Marprelate. Also published in October, 1589, Martins Months Minde contends with Pappe with an Hatchet to be the first anti-Martinist tract self-consciously to parody the clownish prose style of Martin Marprelate and his heirs.18 The pamphlet is dedicated to “Pasquine of England,” the self-titled pamphleteer who two months earlier had published A Countercuffe giuen to Martin Iunior, and pretends to be written by “Mar-phoreus,” Pasquill’s interlocutor in A Countercuffe. Beginning with the epistle to “Pasquill” and an extended epistle to its “discreet and indifferent Reader,” Martins Months Minde is a fictional “report of the death and buriall of Martin Mar-prelate” (E1).19 In his opening epistle, Mar-phoreus commends Pasquine for the recent “Cuffe” that he gave to Marprelate and then justifies the parodic nature of his own lines, admitting that he made “them but a little merie . . . and bobde [Marprelate et al.] with their owne bable” (A2–A2v). Alluding to the “bauble” of the fool in promising to “bob them with their owne bable,” Mar-phoreus also promises that his own performance will be a reflection of the comic performer. Marphoreus makes it clear that his own foolishness and satiric edge are directly a function of Marprelate’s own clowning, that he had “here at this time onlie plaied with [Martin’s sons] foolish coxcombe” (D2v–D3). Only in his next work will Mar-phoreus “decipher their knavish head, also: and when they shall put off their fooles coate, and leave snapping of their wooden dagger, and betake themselves to a soberer kinde of reasoning” (D2v–D3). Clowning, he says, is incompatible either with religio-political action or serious intellectual debate. As Martin is made to tell his sons later in the pamphlet, “These gambols (my sonnes) are implements for the Stage, and beseeme Iesters, and Plaiers” (F1v–F2).

18 Martin Marprelate’s heirs are “Martin Junior” (the speaker in Theses Martinianae [1589]) and “Martin Senior” (the speaker in The Just Censure [1589]). 19 Martins Months Minde’s title refers to the practice of holding a commemoration service four weeks after a funeral (Wilson, “Marprelate Controversy,” 448).

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Martins Months Minde’s parody of Marprelate’s style does not attempt to capture the radical instability of either Marprelate’s language or his persona. While it reproduces certain elements of Marprelate’s clowning, like quotation-and-rebuttal (E3), these elements essentially only deck the pamphlet’s satiric purpose. Akin to the clown actor’s penchant for distancing himself from his stage role while on stage, Mar-phoreus’s frequent parenthetical asides create the impression that he has two voices, an expository voice and a voice of qualification. In constant dialogue with the former, Marphoreus’s parenthetical latter voice equates to immediacy, suggesting that he is qualifying himself for the benefit of his particular readers. His parenthetical voice, however, is not a self-critical one. The continual commentary of “I Know,” “I doubt not,” “and probablie too” only qualifies; it does not—as both the dialogism of the clown and Marprelate do—undermine the primary polemical voice. Martins Months Minde understands the potential effect of Marprelate’s clowning from the perspective of both an amateur and a professional literary producer. On the one hand, suggesting that the Marprelate tracts are only dangerous if they are embraced by the elite, Mar-phoreus worries that “Mad Martin, & his mates marrings, and his sonnes shiftings, might by such as are mighty, (which the GOD of all might forefend) bee made account of” (D3v). On the other, Marphoreus also seriously ruminates upon the possible impact of Marprelate’s popular reception. This twofold approach to Marprelate’s clowning emerges most clearly when Mar-phoreus comically reconstructs Marprelate’s final words to his two sons Martin Junior and Martin Senior. Responding to Martin’s suggestion that his clownish style would appeal to men of any social standing, Mar-phoreus has Martin advise his sons that “foolerie” only has a limited appeal: “But sure I was deceiued: the one, are wise, and like of no such fooleries: & the other, now wearie of our stale mirth, that for a penie, may have farre better by oddes at the Theater and the Curtaine” (F1). From the perspective of an amateur literary producer, Mar-phoreus has Martin admit a cultural divide between men of “greater States” and the common people. At the same time, from the perspective of a professional literary producer burdened with the task of ever producing new material for the literary market, Mar-phoreus has Martin admit that his clowning was too “stale” to appeal to “the common people.”

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Mar-phoreus’s professional inclinations are further borne out in his association of Marprelate with the clowning of Laneham. Like Singer, Wilson, and Tarlton, Laneham was apparently a well-known clown actor in the 1580s and 1590s. He was a member of Leicester’s Men until 1583 when he was one of twelve star actors selected by Walsingham to be sharers in the Queen’s Men. Mar-phoreus purposely underscores his familiarity with the professional stage (he knows “the Theater and the Curtaine”), and he has Martin admit that his style is not simply clownish but was “learned in Alehouses, and at the Theater of Lanam” (F2). Martin again admits this connection at the end of the pamphlet in Mar-phoreus’s reconstruction of Martin’s will: “Item, all my foolerie I bequeath to my good friend Lanam; and his consort, of whom I first had it; which though it bee now outworne and stale, and farre inferiour to his, yet to him it belongeth of right, and may serue (perhappes) for yong beginners, if it be newe varnisht” (G1v). This admission is doubly determined. It further reveals Mar-phoreus’s professional obsession with fresh material for a ravenous and ever-changing market. It also suggests his need to display familiarity with a theatrical scene consisting not simply of the jigs of Kemp and the “rhymes” of Laneham but also of fresh (as opposed to “outworne and stale”) theatrical fare. Mar-phoreus would not be the last anti-Martinist recruit. Thomas Nashe was also “a paid government propagandist” in the Marprelate conflict, enlisted to write An Almond for a Parrat specifically in response to what would be the last Marprelate tract The Prostestyon of Martin Marprelate (published in October, 1589).20 Written at the height of the Marprelate pamphlet war, An Almond for a Parrat was the seventh anti-Martinist pamphlet to appear on the stalls in St. Paul’s churchyard between October, 1589 and February, 1590. Nashe, in the persona of “Cutbert Curry-knave,” is quick to cite his familiarity with the recently published anti-Martinist pamphlets by “Marphoreus,” “Pasquin,” and “Double V.” “But how euer his crazed cause goes on crutches,” Nashe writes, “that was earst so brauely encountered by Pasquin and Marphoreus, and not many moneths since most wittily scofte at by the extemporall endevour of the pleasant author of Pap with a hatchet: yet is not the good olde creeple utterly discouraged, or driuen cleane from hius 20

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dounghill” (B3). Pointing out that Marprelate has yet to be adequately “discouraged” and able to categorize accurately Lyly’s contribution as “an extemporall endevour,” Nashe reveals himself to be both a competitive and engaged contributor to the fray. Like Martins Months Minde and Pappe with an Hatchet, An Almond for a Parrat explicitly advertises its own clownish style. Nashe makes his own particular debt to the clown overtly clear at its beginning. Prefacing the work with an epistle “To that most Comicall and Conceited Cavaleire Monsieur du Kempe, Iestmonger and Vice-gerent generall to the ghost of Dicke Tarlton,” Cutbert explains that a frustration with the system of literary patronage has led him to dedicate the pamphlet to such a “pleasant patron.” “To avoid . . . the worthlesse attendance . . . and the usual scorne,” Cutbert writes, “I haue made choice of thy amorous selfe to be the pleasant patron of my papers. If thou wilt not accept of it . . . Ile preferre it to the soule of Dick Tarlton” (A2v). Nashe’s invocation of Kemp and Tarlton is a lighthearted yet dispirited response to the failings of a system that has caused many writers to live “discontented.” It also signals Nashe’s intent to borrow Kemp and Tarlton’s particular theatrical style in his construction of Cutbert.21 Nashe’s Kemp-inspired parody of Marprelate’s “jesters penne” (C2v), however, manifests neither the instability of Lyly’s parody nor the apolitical temper of Martins Months Minde. Instead, An Almond for a Parrat deploys a limited number of Marprelate’s clownish devices while taking advantage of the fool’s license to assail his motives and associates. Akin to the stagy entrances of clowns like Derick, Strumbo, and Bullithrumble, Cutbert’s sentences often begin with expressions like “Holla, holla, brother Martin” (C4), “Gibe on, gibe on” (C4), “Saist thou me so good heart, then have at you” (D1) and “How now father Martin” (C3). Expressions such as these create the impression of immediate parley between Cutbert 21 Nashe’s parody of Martin’s clowning did not go unnoticed by his contemporaries. Richard Harvey, in an epistle to his A Theologicall Discourse of the Lamb of God and his Enemies (London, 1590), notes such a connection. Suggesting that Nashe “will needes be playing the douty Martin in his kinde,” Harvey writes, “Yet let not Martin, or Nash, or any such famous obscure man, or any other piperly makeplay or makebate, presume ouermuch of my patience as of simplicitie, but of choice” (A2v–A3).

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and Marprelate and underscore the playful exclamatory nature of Cutbert’s voice. It is Kemp’s clownish “countenance,” with its ability “to shadow,” to make enigmatic, that which it presents, that most attracts Nashe to the clown. Kemp’s “countenance,” Nashe suggests, will be the “curtaine” that protects his pamphlet from criticism. Cutbert’s voice is as polemical as it is clownish. His energetic prose contains unfeigned attacks upon the beliefs, practices, and seditious tendencies of the dissenting Protestant movement. At the same time, An Almond for a Parrat is the first anti-Martinist pamphlet to name names. Not only does it openly attack the dissenters Thomas Cartwright, John Udall, and Philip Stubbes, but it also identifies John Penry as the leading figure behind the Marprelate pamphlet (E1v). Though couched in a playful, rhyming, and allusive (even blasphemous) language, this identification of Penry as Marprelate is serious business and may have been part of the reason that the tract’s publication was delayed by the Elizabethan authorities.22 Written less than two years after Nashe left Cambridge, An Almond for a Parrat well reflects his incomplete break with Cambridge’s amateur ideals. The playful dedication to Kemp and Tarlton at the beginning of the pamphlet reveals his frustrated dedication to the amateur system of literary production. Yet at the same time, An Almond for a Parrat also betrays professional inclinations. Unlike the author of Martins Months Minde or Lyly, Nashe expends no energy worrying about the elite reception of Marprelate’s tracts. Instead, he sees Marprelate as “the serpentine seducer of simplicitie” (C2v). Nashe’s professional bent can also be discerned in his particular construction of Kemp in his opening dedication. Cutbert’s playful identification with Kemp and Tarlton in An Almond for a Parrat is qualified at the end of the epistle. To support what had become by 1590 the tired argument that “[Martin] doth but apply himselfe to that hope which his holinesse the Pope and other confederate foriners, haue conceiued of his towardnesse” (A3), Cutbert tells of witnessing celebrations in “Bergamo” of “one Martin newe sprung vp in England, who by his bookes, libels, and writings, had brought that to passe, which neither the Pope . . . Philip . . . nor all the holy League . . . could at any time effect” (A4). While in Bergamo, Cutbert met a mainstay of the commedia dell’arte stage, “that 22

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famous Francattip Harlicken,” and like Nashe, the “Francattip Harlequin” turned out to be an enthusiastic admirer of Kemp (A3v).23 This brief commedia dell’arte anecdote essentially connects Cutbert and the “Francattip Harlequin” as followers of Kemp. Nashe’s fond imaginings that Kemp had found much favor with commedia dell’arte performers suggest both his sense of Kemp as an itinerant and improvisational performer and his professional concern with popular culture.24 An interest in creative freedom underscores Nashe’s identification with the independent Kemp and improvisational Harlequin. It also inspires Nashe’s ambivalent attitude towards Marprelate. As both Nicholl and Crewe have pointed out, even as he vigorously attacks Marprelate, Nashe cannot help but identify with him. Nashe sees Marprelate as a victim of the same oppressive culture of censorship that threatens his new career. Just as Martin cannot print what he likes without worry of prosecution, Nashe cannot write without worry of offending someone in a position of authority. As a result, Nashe suggests, both writers have been forced into “back lanes” in order to express themselves. “[N]ow a dayes,” Cutbert writes in the opening epistle to Kemp and Tarlton, “a man can not haue about with a Balletter, or write Midas habet aures asininas in great Romaine letters, but he shall bee in daunger of a further displeasure. Well, 23 Nashe’s first-recorded reference to the commedia dell`arte Harlequin has been the subject of some critical controversy and confusion. At issue is Nashe’s combination of two separate commedia dell`arte masks— Francatrippa (a descendent of the Bergamo zany) and Harlequin—in one term. Most critics believe that Nashe simply made a mistake and conflated two characters. See Nicholl, A Cup of News, 84, and K. M. Lea, Italian Popular Comedy, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), 1:81. Some critics, however, have read “Francattip” to mean “French.” See Kenneth Richards, “Elizabethan Perceptions of the Commedia dell’arte,” in Cultural Exchange Between European Nations during the Renaissance, ed. Sadlik Zalewski and Nicholas Antoni (Uppsala, Sweden: Uppsala Univ. Press, 1994), 217. 24 As early as the 1570s Italian troupes employing commedia dell’arte’s style of extemporal performance had been touring England and appearing in noble houses (Lea, Italian Popular Comedy, 352–58), and by time of the Marprelate controversy, they had come to be associated with “the popular itinerant theatre” (Richards, “Elizabethan Perceptions,” 221).

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come of it what will, Martin and I will allow of no such doinges, we can cracke half a score blades in a back lane though a Constable come not to part vs” (A2v–A3). In the course of his pamphlet, Cutbert more than once fantasizes about having the opportunity to “cracke half a score blades.” Nashe’s ambivalence seems to have had a specific source. Sometime late in 1589, at Lord Burghley’s bidding, the Mayor of London had ordered the players to desist from taking up matters of religion or state on stage. Faced with such a powerful and recent censoring response, Nashe registers ambiguity about the identity of his true foe that is hardly surprising. In the end, Whitgift and the anti-Martinists succeeded at quelling publication of the Marprelate pamphlets; The Protestatyon proved the final Marprelate tract. Though it would ultimately take five decades for “20 Martins [to] spring in [his] place,” the antiMartinist tracts did help fan the fire of what would become a sustained pamphlet war between Nashe, Greene, and Lyly on one side and the Harveys on the other. The motivating context for works like Nashe’s Pierce Penilesse and Gabriel Harvey’s Foure Letters, this war of words did much to articulate the outlines of an emergent culture of professional writers.25 Satire would quickly become this culture’s mode of choice, and as Patrick Collinson, Neil Rhodes, Lorna Hutson, and Jesse M. Lander have pointed out, the Marprelate tracts likely had much to do with this. Marprelate’s clowning and the response to it in the anti-Martinist tracts also had a significant influence upon writing for the professional stage. While this influence has been identified in Shakespeare’s later plays like 1 Henry IV and Twelfth Night, some of the earliest evidence of impact can be found in the Cade episode in 2 Henry VI.26 25 For further discussions of the Marprelate Controversy’s wider cultural impact, see Patrick Collinson, “Ecclestiastical Vitriol”; and Jesse M. Lander, Inventing Polemic: Religion, Print and Literary Culture in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006), 80–109. 26 See Neil Rhodes, Elizabethan Grotesque (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 101; Poole, “Facing,” 108–16; and L. Caitlin Jorgensen, “‘A Madman’s epistles are no gospels’: Alienation in Twelfth Night and Anti-Martinist Discourse,” Renaissance Papers (1999): 67–78. The authorship of the 2 Henry VI plays has been a contentious issue. Hart in his 1909 Arden edition and J. Dover Wilson in his 1952 Cambridge edition both argue that the play was the collaborative effort of Greene, Peele,

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Much of the ample criticism dedicated to the Cade sequence in 2 Henry VI has focused upon what these scenes reveal of Shakespeare’s social politics. A majority of critics have argued that the Cade sequence lays bare Shakespeare’s derisive attitude towards popular revolt and commoners in general.27 These arguments, though, have been countered by interpretations that see Shakespeare as more sympathetic with Cade’s rebellion.28 In a different vein, Richard Helgerson has correlated what he sees as the play’s denigration of Cade and his followers with Shakespeare’s literary ambitions as a professional playwright. “Popular revolt,” he writes, “and perhaps popular egalitarian culture generally was the theatre’s dark other, the vestigial egalitarian self that had to be exorcised before a more gentrified, artful, and discriminating identity could emerge. In The Contention, Shakespeare sets to the work of exorcism with savage zeal.”29 Helgerson’s insight here is important, but it too narrows the wide landscape of late Elizabethan professional writing. Marprelate’s swift precipitation of a countering alliance between page and stage not only documents but assumes cultural interchange among London’s professional writers. At the same time, his ideological and stylistic appeal to men like Lyly and Nashe Nashe, Marlowe, Kyd, and Shakespeare. Wilson in particular suggests that the Cade sequence was the work of Nashe. Both Andrew Cairncross and Hattaway, on the other hand, argue that Shakespeare was the sole author of the play. Given the cooperative nature of professional theatrical production before the seventeenth century, it is likely that some kind of collaborative work went into the composition of the play. Nevertheless, I follow Knowles in his convincing conclusion that the play is “substantially Shakespeare’s work” (119). 27 For readings that see Shakespeare as hostile to Cade and the common people, see Richard Wilson, “‘A Mingled Yarn,’ Shakespeare and the Cloth Workers,” Literature and History 12 (1986): 164–80; and Paola Pugliatti, Shakespeare the Historian (London: MacMillan, 1996). 28 See Michael Hattaway, ed., The Second Part of King Henry VI (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), 27; and Michael Bristol, Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Renaissance Authority (New York: Methuen, 1985), 89. For a slightly different recuperation of the Cade sequence, see Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 47–51. 29 Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 212.

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suggests that some writers had come to recognize that they had more to gain from “cracke[ing] half a score blades in a back lane” with one another than they did from selling a manuscript to a publisher or ingratiating themselves with a patron. In effect, the Marprelate controversy underscored what was an emerging gap between late sixteenth-century social and cultural spheres, with Marprelate’s clownish style coming to constitute cultural capital within the field of professional writing.30 While Shakespeare’s construction of Cade as clown, then, might have struck some as a clear denunciation of Cade’s rebellious political pretensions, to contemporary writers it would have also been seen as an attempt to make a mark in an artistic debate that was about style. There are reasons to believe that the Cade sequence in 2 Henry VI may have been directly influenced by the Marprelate tracts. To begin with, the play was likely composed at the Marprelate controversy’s height.31 Editors of the play have essentially agreed that the play was written sometime between 1587 and 1592, after the publication of the second edition of Holinshed and before Greene’s parody of 3 Henry VI in 1592.32 The Marprelate tracts may not have 30 For explanations of “cultural capital,” see Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984); and John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993). 31 I am not the first to have suggested a connection between Shakespeare’s history plays and the Marprelate controversy. Poole has linked Shakespeare’s representation of Falstaff in 1 Henry IV with images of Puritans disseminated in the Marprelate controversy (“Facing,” esp. 99–104); and Jeffrey Knapp, “Preachers and Players in Shakespeare’s England,” Representations 44 (1993): 29–59, has broadly identified Marprelate-controversy resonances in both of Shakespeare’s tetrologies. Few critics, however, have connected the Cade sequence in 2 Henry VI with the Marprelate controversy. Rhodes has suggested that besides a shared spirit of “deflation,” these scenes invoke Nashe and the Marprelate tracts in their grotesque treatment of violence (95). 32 Cairncross’s 1957 Arden edition concludes that the play was written in 1590. Hattaway’s 1991 Cambridge edition is less certain: “[t] he conclusion must be that the whole sequence was written some time before March, 1592” (68). Knowles, the 1999 Arden editor, is also wary

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caused an uprising, but the brutal punishments of those connected with their production suggest that the Elizabethan establishment was greatly concerned that such a rebellion was a real possibility. The antiMartinist tracts give voice to this concern. Most associate Marprelate with political rebellion. Some argue that Marprelate is not just a theological revolutionary but a political one as well. Seeing Marprelate’s attack upon the Bishops as simply a prelude to an attack upon Kings, A Whip for an Ape warns, “Thinke you not he will pull downe at length / Aswell the top from tower, as Cocke from steeple . . .? / Yes, he that now saith, Why should Bishops bee: / Will next crie out, Why Kings: The Saincts are free” (A3). In Pappe with an Hatchet, Lyly connects Marprelate with two of England’s most renowned sowers of revolution: “I thinke thou art possest with the spirites of Jack Straw & the Black-smith, who, so they might rent in peeces the gouernment, they would draw cuts for religion” (D4). Other tracts claim that Marprelate’s writings increase the likelihood of rebellion by the common people. Suggesting the everyday likelihood of rebellion in Elizabethan England, Pasquil, in The Returne of the Renowned Caualiero Pasquill of England (1589), writes, “The Chronicles of Englande, and the daylie enclosures of Commons in the Land, teach vs sufficiently, howe inclinable the simpler sort of the people are to rowtes, ryots, commotions, insurrections, and plaine rebellions when they grow brainsicke, or any new toy taketh them in the head: they need no . . . Martin to increase their giddiness” (B3). 2 Henry VI’s Cade sequence is often inflected by the language and ideas of the Marprelate controversy.33 Words and expressions in of the early limit, suggesting that “composition and performance of [T]he Contention took place by 1592, or earlier, depending upon how far conjecture is allowed to influence judgment” (111). 33 Two textual versions of 2 Henry VI exist: (1) the Folio text, which was published in 1623 by Heminge and Condell; and (2) the first Quarto, which was published in 1594 by Millington and entitled The First Part of the Contention betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster. The textual transmissions underlying the Quarto and Folio texts have been the subject of much critical debate. Starting from the unanimous presumption that F was copied from some version of Shakespeare’s foul papers, there have been basically three conjectures about Q and F: (A) that the Folio text was set up from an authorial manuscript with some reference to the Quarto text; (B) that both Q and the F are different copies of a now-lost

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the anti-Martinist tracts, some of which occur for the first time in printed English, can also be found in the fourth act of 2 Henry VI. In the garden scene near the end of the act, Cade uses the expression “burly bon’d” in a comic oath to his sword before he faces Iden: “Steele, if thou turne the edge, or cut not out the burly bon’d Clowne in chines of Beefe, ere thou sleepe in thy Sheath, I beseech Iove on my knees thou mayst be turn’d to Hobnailes.”34 “Burly-boned” is a word that Nashe had recently coined in An Almond for a Parrat.35 It does not appear in any of Shakespeare’s subsequent plays. Pappe with an Hatchet’s language also finds its way into act 4 of 2 Henry VI. Lyly’s figure that Marprelate “twill digest a Cathedrall Church as easilie, as an Estritch a two penie naile” (B2v) appears in the Iden scene when Cade tells Iden that he will “make thee eate Iron like an Ostridge, and swallow my Sword like a great pin ere thou and I part” (O2).36 The Cade sequence might also be specifically echoing Lyly’s urbane slur on Marprelate “What care I to be found by a stile, when so many Martins haue been taken vnder an hedge?” (Pappe, B4). To Cade’s opening claim that he is “of an honourable house,” the Butcher replies, “I by my faith, the field is honourable, and there was he born under a hedge: for his Father had neuer a house but a manuscript; (C) that Q is a pirated copy, either of F or of some now-lost manuscript. A version of the third conjecture, the most convincing account of Q and F, has recently been forwarded by Roger Warren, who, in “The Quarto and Folio Texts of 2 Henry VI: A Reconsideration,” Review of English Studies 51 (2000): 193–207, argues that Q is a reported version of some performed fair copy of the play; F represents a later revision of this fair copy. Because both Q and F appear to bear some relation to Shakespeare’s original draft, I have used both versions in the arguments that follow. 34 William Shakespeare, The Second Part of King Hen. the Sixt., in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories & Tragedies (London, 1623), O2. All quotations come from this version of the play unless otherwise noted. The analogous line in [T]he Contention reads, “Now sword, if thou doest not hew this burly-bond churle into chines of beefe, I beseech God thou maist fal into some smiths hand, and be turned to hobnailes” (G4). 35 Nashe writes, “These are nothing in comparison of his auncient burliboned adjunctes” (B3). 36 The analogous line in [T]he Contention reads, “[I]le make thee eate yron like an Astridge, and swallow my sword like a great pinne” (G4).

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cage” (N3v).37 There is also the possibility that Lyly’s title is even echoed in act 4. When Cade and the rebels capture Lord Say, Cade promises Say “the help of hatchet”: Cade. Give him a box o’ th’ eare, and that wil make ’em red againe. Say. Long sitting to determine poore mens causes, Hath made me full of sicknesse and diseases. Cade. Ye shall haue a hempen Candle then, & the help of hatchet. (O1)

Cairncross has convincingly suggested that the Folio’s “the help of hatchet” was in fact a compositor’s error for “pappe of hatchet.”38 This claim is strengthened by Cairncross’s observation that “box o’ th’ ear” also occurs on the title page of Lyly’s pamphlet as the third subtitle, “A Countrie cuffe, that is, a sound boxe of the eare, for the idiot Martin to hold his peace, seeing the patch will take no warning.” Along with its language, the Cade sequence in 2 Henry VI also shares some of the ideas expressed by the anti-Martinists. One of these ideas was that the town of Ashford in Kent was a seedbed for Protestant extremists.39 In The Returne of . . . Pasquill, Pasquill writes, “for [in the May-game that I promised you] you shall have a number of strange Notes upon the Text, some of them gathered from William Dike at S. Albanes, in his clarklie Paraphrases vppon S. Luke and S. John, some have been brought me from other places, & some I gathered my selfe, in an assemblie of the brotherhood at Ashford in Kent” (C2). This anti-Martinist association of radical Protestantism with Ashford helps to explain the curious identification of Cade with the town in the Contention. Before Cade makes his first entrance, George calls Cade “the Diar of Ashford” and playfully claims that “He meanes to turne this land, and set a

37 The analogous line in [T]he Contention reads, “I for the field is honourable, for he was borne / Vnder a hedge, for his father had no house but a cage” (F3). 38 Cairncross, in his edition of The Second Part of King Henry VI (London: Methuen, 1957), writes, “[pap with a hatchet] is proverbial for rough treatment (of children)” (127n). 39 For a further discussion of Ashford’s association with dissenting Protestantism, see Michael Zell, ed., Early Modern Kent, 1540–1640 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2000), 299–301.

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new nap on it” (Contention F3). This geographical reference is not the only association of Cade and his followers with the language of dissenting Protestantism. As Cade enters the stage for the first time, John Holland says of Cade’s companion Dicke the Butcher that “[t] hen is sin strucke downe like an Oxe, and iniquities throate cut like a Calfe.” When Cade first speaks, he talks of being “inspired” by a “spirit”: “For our enemies shall faile before vs, inspired with the spirit of putting down Kings and Princes, Command silence” (N3v). A moment later, he adds, “Be braue then, for your Captaine is Braue, and Vowes Reformation” (N3v).40 As we have seen, “reformation” had a variety of usages at the end of the sixteenth century, functioning as a signature term for the radical political and theological movements of the late 1580s and early 1590s. Marprelate himself often uses the term to characterize his project.41 Shakespeare’s representation of Cade’s monstrous egotism also echoes anti-Martinist claims about Marprelate. Cade’s desire that his “mouth shall be the Parliament of England” (N4v) is akin to Pasquill’s argument in The Returne of the Renowned Caualiero Pasquill of England that “Martins opinion must be received; euery Goose or mast Martin must goe for a Swan, and whatsoeuer he speakes, must be Canonicall” (C1).42 Finally, the Cade sequence in 2 Henry VI reproduces one of the favorite rhetorical tropes of the anti-Martinists, that the civil unrest caused by Marprelate’s activity would only make it easier for Catholics in Spain and France to invade England. In a speech that finally convinces the rebels to put down their arms and turn against Cade, Old Clifford proclaims, “Wer’t not a shame, that whilst you live at

40 The analogous line in [T]he Contention reads, “Therefore be braue, for your Captain is braue, and vowes reformation” (F3v). 41 See Marprelate Tracts, ed. Pierce, 80, 85, 102, 152, 398. 42 The conventionality of the presumption that Marprelate desired to have his ideas made law is also given support by the aforementioned university disputation from the time of the controversy. In it, one poet asks, “And from a mouth so foul will [Marprelate] lay down regulations for the behaviour of good men?” (Steggle, “New Marprelate Allusion,” 36). This image of a “mouth so foul” may have been borrowed by Shakespeare in the Smith’s response to Cade’s desire that “the Lawes of England may come out of [his] mouth”: “Nay Iohn, it will be stinking Law, for his breath stinkes with eating toasted cheese” (Contention, N4v).

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iarre, / The fearfull French, whom you late vanquished / Should make a start ore-seas, and vanquish you?” (O1v). 2 Henry VI’s connection to the Marprelate controversy is suggested as well by the singularity of Shakespeare’s staging of Cade. No other extant play from the late 1580s and early 1590s represents a rebel leader as a stage clown. Those few plays that go so far as to intermingle clowning and rebellion only underscore the uniqueness of Shakespeare’s choice. In the The Life and Death of Iacke Strawe, for example, the clown Tom Miller is identified as one of “fowre Captaines” (B2v), but he shows neither the leadership nor the political motivation of his rebel cohorts Jack Straw and Wat Tyler.43 Unlike Cade’s, Miller’s disruptive actions are firmly located within the world of the play, and they never directly impinge upon the rebels’ noble adversaries. The political marginality of Miller is underscored at the start of the play, when the clown asserts that “for a little Captaine I haue the vantage of you all, / For while you are a fighting, I can creepe into a quart pot I am so small” (B3). Sir Thomas More also mingles clowning with rebellion.44 At the beginning of act 2, the rebel John Lincoln enters the stage with the clown Ralph Betts.45 Betts is the first to speak: “Come come, we’ll tickle their turnips, we’ll butter their boxes. Shall strangers rule the roost? Yes, but we’ll baste the roast. Come, come, a-flaunt, a-flaunt” (2.1.1–3). Speaking with the typical energy and punning wit of the clown performer, Betts provides an injection of festive energy for the opening of the scene. Unlike Cade, however, Betts quickly steps aside and lets Lincoln speak for the rebels. Like Miller, Betts speaks from the margins.

43 The Life and Death of Iacke Strawe’s original date of composition is unknown, though Harbage guesses in The Annals of English Drama that it is between 1590 and 1593. 44 McMillin has dated the original version of the play between 1592 and 1593. The date of the revisions remains an open question. 45 This scene was apparently rewritten by hand B. The clown’s lines were a product of this revision. Vittorio Gabrieli and Giorgio Melchiori, in their edition Sir Thomas More, A Play by Anthony Munday and Others (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1990), argue that Heywood was this reviser and that he “was put in charge of ‘lightening’ the riot scenes by the introduction of the new role of the Clown” (24).

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In the dramatic fare of his London, then, Shakespeare could very well have seen rebellion staged alongside clowning, but it was only in the Marprelate tracts that he would have found rebellion’s voice coming from a clown. As a subsequent political appropriation of clowning, Shakespeare’s construction of Cade should be weighed against similar efforts by Lyly, Nashe, and the author of Martins Months Minde. Cade’s on-stage reception, his character, and his failure suggest Shakespeare’s position in a cultural debate about Marprelate’s style; they also suggest his relationship with his professional contemporaries and his profession in general. Routinely maligned by city authorities and subject to censorship by the Master of Revels, Elizabethan theater professionals had in political rebellion a compelling topic for the stage. Not surprisingly, like Pappe with an Hatchet and An Almond for a Parrat, the Cade sequence in 2 Henry VI is marked by identification. Just as both Lyly and Nashe ironically identify with Marprelate, the opening scene of the Cade sequence implies solidarity between actors and rebels. This is accomplished through a suggestive discussion between two of Cade’s followers before Cade makes his first entrance. Immediately after “Bevis” and “John Holland” enter the stage, the former turns to the latter and entreats, “Come and get thee a sword, though made of a Lath, they haue bene vp these two dayes” (N3v). Constructed out of a thin band of wood, a “Lath” was a well-known conventional stage property of the Vice figure. Bevis’s words to Holland suggest not simply that they are men looking to join a rebellion, but also that they are actors joining a rebellion. This metatheatrical dimension of the scene is further suggested by the fact that “Bevis” and “John Holland” were both names of known Elizabethan actors.46 Though Bevis and Holland never refer to each other by name, their nominations reflect Shakespeare’s thinking about them as actors. 46 As Knowles has pointed out, George Bevis and John Holland were both known actors in the 1590s (296n.). Holland is listed as playing various parts in the plot of 2 Seven Deadly Sins, a play performed around 1590. His name also appears in 3 Henry VI. Though the appearance of actors’ names in play texts is usually taken to be a mistake made either by the compositor or the author (see Cairncross [109n.]), the consistency of the speech tags “Beuis” and “Hol.” suggest that this instance in the Folio of 2 Henry VI may not have been a misstep.

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In 2 Henry VI, actors join artisans and peasants as the followers of Cade. Because Cade’s threat is not his attractiveness to the elite, Shakespeare’s representation of the threat of Cade is reminiscent of Nashe’s representation of Marprelate. Just as the professionally motivated Nashe imagines Marprelate’s danger to arise from his widespread popularity, Shakespeare represents Cade’s clownish figure as having the power to draw “multitude[s]” to him. “His army,” says a messenger to Henry at the beginning of the rebellion, “is a ragged multitude / of Hindes and Pezants, rude and mercilesse” (N4v). Another messenger tells of a similar mass exodus to Cade: “The Rascall people, thirsting after prey / Ioyne with the Traitor, and they ioyntly sweare / To spoyle the City, and your Royall court” (N4v). This representation of Cade’s following as exclusively drawn from the lower orders was of Shakespeare’s invention. Neither Hall nor Holinshed limit Cade’s threat to his mass appeal. Both chroniclers see Cade as having had noble virtues. Not only do they first describe him as being of “goodely stature, and pregnaunt wit,” but they also report that Henry VI’s noble followers, upon first meeting with Cade, found him to be “sober in communicacion, wyse in disputying, arrogant in hart, and styfe in his opinion.”47 Both Hall and Holinshed also describe Cade’s followers as “tall personages,” brave men of rank: “The capitayn not onely suborned by techers, but also enforced by pryuye scholemasters, assembled together a great company of talle personages: assuring them, that their attempt was both honorable to God and the king, and also profitable to the common wealth.”48 Cade’s popularity with the lower social order, as has been pointed out, is a function of festive ritual, of Cade’s acting as essentially a Lord of Misrule in a “bloody carnival where subversion is

47 Edward Hall, The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York (London, 1548), 221. 48 Hall, Union, 220. Holinshed in The First and Second Volumes of Chronicles (London, 1587), writes, “The capteine assembling a great companie of tall personages, assured them, that the enterprise which he tooke in hand, was both honourable to God and the king, and profitable to the whole realm” (2.632). According to the OED, “tall” in the 1590s could translate to “Good at arms; stout or strong in combat; doughty, brave, bold, valiant”; “personage” was used in the sixteenth century to refer to “a person of high rank, distinction, consideration, or importance.”

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also celebration and where violence is framed and ritualized by popular traditions and festive custom.”49 The rebellion’s kinship with carnival is immediately established at Cade’s first entrance: Drumme. Enter Cade, Dicke Butcher, Smith the Weaver, and a Sawyer, with infinite numbers. Cade. Wee John Cade, so tearm’d of our supposed Fathers. But. Or rather of stealing a Cade of Herrings. Cade. For our enemies shall faile before vs, inspired with the spirit of putting down Kings and Princes. Command silence. But. Silence. Cade. My father was a Mortimer. But. He was an honest man, and a good Bricklayer. (N3v)

In the world of the rebels, all authority—even Cade’s own—is subjected to what Bakhtin has described as the leveling power of carnivalesque laughter. Here, as Cade promises to end the authority of “Kings and Princes,” Cade’s follower Dicke the Butcher subjects his claims of inherited authority to comic laughter. This, however, is not necessarily laughter at Cade’s expense. Dicke the Butcher’s comments can be read as being open and loud, suggesting that Cade participates in this festive jocularity.50 Cade himself understands that his popularity is a product of his clownish irrepressibility, his “ability to endure much” (N3v). Instability then is the only stable element of this scene. Even Dicke the Butcher’s comments, for example, are not predictable. At one moment he is laughing with or at Cade; at another, he is acting as Cade’s loyal follower in commanding “Silence.” This instability permeates almost every scene involving Cade, suggestively underscoring Cade’s call to arms that “then are we in order, when we are most out of order” (N4). 49 François Laroque, Shakespeare’s Festive World: Elizabethan Seasonal Entertainment and the Professional Stage, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), 76. 50 See Stephen Longstaffe, “‘A Short Report and not Otherwise’: Jack Cade in 2 HenryVI,” Shakespeare and Carnival: After Bakhtin, ed. Ronald Knowles (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 21–24. Longstaffe makes the point that in neither the Folio nor the Quarto are these comments by Cade’s followers marked as asides. Modern editions of 2 Henry VI, however, routinely mark the comic comments directed at Cade by his followers as asides and thus prejudice the nature of the scene’s laughter.

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Carnival, however, is not a consistent element in the gatherings of Cade and his followers. While it is the definitive mode of almost every scene of rebellion in act 4 of 2 Henry VI and even pervades the scene of Cade’s combat with Iden, carnival barely enters the scene of Cade’s abandonment.51 The language in the scene is earnest rather than unstable. The episode begins with old Clifford offering Cade’s followers a pardon from Henry VI, and they immediately agree to the offer, crying, “God saue the King, God saue the King.” Festive mockery is directed neither at the pardon nor its bearer. Instead, Cade seriously responds to his abandonment, questioning the sincerity of Clifford’s offer: And you base Pezants, do ye beleeue him, will you needs be hang’d with your pardons about your neckes? Hath my sword therefore broke through London gates, that you should leave me at the White-heart in Southwarke. I thought ye would neuer haue giuen out these Armes til you had recouered your ancient Freedome. But you are all Recreants and Dastards, and delight to liue in slauerie to the Nobility. (O1v)

Ironically, Cade’s witty hostility—not simply his invocation of their “ancient Freedome”—immediately inspires his followers to cry out, “Wee’l follow Cade, Wee’l follow Cade” (O1v).52 This, however, is a predictable result. Cade’s witty allusion to “the White-heart in Southwarke” in order to suggest his followers’ collective cowardice (“White-heart”) and his vow to “make shift for one” access the comic and resourceful grounds of his popularity. From the beginning, it was 51 Cade’s persona in the Iden scene is as unstable as it is in his earlier scenes. Even while he may begin the scene with seemingly sincere language about his own failed ambition—“Fye on Ambitions; fie on my selfe, that haue a sword, and yet am ready to famish” (O2)—Cade’s tendency is still to mock. Cade’s vow to Iden, for example, that “if I doe not leaue you all as dead as a doore naile, I pray God I may neuer eate grasse more” (O2) comically invokes his humorous complaint at the beginning of the scene that a “Sallet was borne to do me good” (O2). 52 This is very different than what Cade says to his followers in [T]he Contention. There Cade’s words are much more of an entreaty: “Why how now, will you forsake your generall, / And ancient freedome which you haue possest? / To bend your neckes vnder their servile yokes, / Who if you stir, will straightwaies hang you vp, / But follow me, and you shall pull them downe, / And make them yeeld their liuings to your hands” (G3).

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Cade’s clownish acumen and indominability, his “ability to endure much” that had garnered his widespread support. Shakespeare knew from Hall and Holinshed that Cade’s popularity had a historical limit. In both chronicles, a general pardon from Henry leads to Cade’s abandonment by his followers. Hall writes, “Lorde how glad the poor people were of this Pardone . . . and how thei accepted the same, in so muche that the whole multitude, without biddyng farewel to their capitain retired the same night, euery man to his awne home, as men amased, and strike with feare” (222). Shakespeare expands upon this source material. In 2 Henry VI, Cade is abandoned by his followers only after losing an exchange of oratory with old Clifford. Significantly, Clifford’s words are not undermined by festive laughter, and they go unanswered by Cade: Is Cade the sonne of Henry the fift, That thus you do exclaim you’l go with him. Will he conduct you through the heart of France, And make the meanest of you Earles and Dukes? Alas he hath no home, no place to flye too: Nor Knowes he how to liue, but by the spoile, Unless by robbing of your Friends, and us. (O1v)

Shakespeare enlarges Hall and Holinshed to create a situation that registers the rhetorical limits of Cade’s clowning. Clifford’s ultimate success comes from more than just offering a pardon; his closing speech successfully invokes nationalist prejudices, desires for social mobility, and fears of vagrancy. In the end, Cade’s audience appears prevailed upon by their own class interests and prejudices, leaving Cade to “betake [himself ] to his heeles” (O1v). Shakespeare’s representation of Cade’s failure suggests the social and political limitations of a plebeian cultural ritual; it also outlines the rhetorical limits of clowning as a language of dissent. This circumscription is reminiscent of the amateur focus of A Pappe with an Hatchet and Martins Months Minde. Just as Cade is banished to the country in 2 Henry VI, both of these works reject clowning as a language of dissent because in speaking of “majesticall matters” it violates, a la Sidney, notions of artistic decorum. Yet Shakespeare is not so dismissive of the rhetorical potential of clowning as this. Cade’s momentary transformation in the scene of his abandonment from a festive clown to a steadfast advocate for the lower orders indicates the elasticity of

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the clown persona. For Shakespeare, carnivalesque leveling does not occlude sociopolitical conviction and a potential for authority. In this, Shakespeare is similar to Nashe. Not only are both willing to imagine the clown as having a political voice but both are also willing to ascribe the possibility of political discrimination to the masses. Nashe would continue to refine his satiric “Mad Martin” voice in works like Pierce Penilesse (1592) and Strange newes of the intercepting certaine letters (1593). Shakespeare, at the same time, would persist in his professional reckoning with both Nashe and Marprelate. Long recognized as the possible inspiration behind Moth in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Nashe and his work might have motivated Shakespeare’s development of the bourgeois comedy in 1 Henry IV as well. Indeed, it is in his second tetralogy that Shakespeare seems also to have most fully revisited Marprelate and his clowning, rendering Falstaff as a parody of Marprelate’s grotesque Puritan persona. This time, however, he is less ambivalent about this stylistic posture. “Prince [Hal], like the London magistrates before him,” concludes Poole, “discovers that the boundary between authority and subversion is too fragile to be long toyed with . . .: Falstaff has to be banished just as Martin’s press has to be crushed and the anti-Martinists have to be suspended.”53 Whether explained by his own recently achieved authority as sharer in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men or as an ascribed author in printed editions of Richard II or Richard III, Shakespeare’s banishment of Falstaff in 2 Henry IV well predicts Hamlet’s own calls for the stage reformation of the clown at the end of the sixteenth century.54 Of course, Hamlet’s worry about a menacing clown has more to do with testing Claudius’s guilt than it does with any possible “pittifull ambition” within the staged Mouse-trap. But in Hamlet, unlike in 2 Henry VI, no clown ever materializes. Either as theater or style, clowning had ceased to matter. University of North Carolina-Charlotte 53

Poole, Radical Religion, 41. Shakespeare became a sharer in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1594. Two of the first quarto editions to advertise Shakespeare unambiguously as their author are the second quarto of Richard III (1598) and the second and third quartos of Richard II (1598). For Shakespeare’s growing investment in his own literary authority as a 1590s professional dramatist, see Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003). 54

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Shakespeare’s Iago George L. Geckle

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n the introduction to his Arden Shakespeare Othello, E. A. J. Honigmann tries to make a case that it is the greatest of Shakespeare’s tragedies: “We may fairly call it the most exciting of the tragedies—even the most unbearably exciting—so why not the greatest?”1 I leave that judgment to others (I still opt for Hamlet), but Othello is certainly a great work of art. So what is it about, and what makes it so exciting? David Bevington in his introduction to the play in The Complete Works of Shakespeare says that in this tragedy the “action concerns sexual jealousy.”2 As Iago tells Othello in the temptation scene, act 3, scene 3: “O beware, my lord, of jealousy! / It is the green-eyed monster, which doth mock / The meat it feeds on” (3.3.178–80). “Jealousy” in Shakespeare’s vocabulary means “suspicion” or “mistrust.”3 I recall Madeleine Doran at the University of Wisconsin arguing in a lecture that “the tragic experience in Othello is concerned with the loss of faith.” That is, Iago causes Othello to lose his faith in Desdemona, to suspect her of infidelity. From either perspective it is Iago who is at the root of the tragedy. In the first act of the play, Othello and Desdemona mutually express their deep love for one another (see 1.3.78–96, 130–72, 1 E. A. J. Honigmann, ed., Othello, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd series (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson, 1997), 1. 2 David Bevington, ed., The Complete Works of Shakespeare, updated 4th ed. (New York: Longman, 1997), 1117. All act, scene, line numbers from Shakespeare will be to this edition, indicated parenthetically in the body of the essay. 3 See C. T. Onions, A Shakespeare Glossary, enlarged and revised by Robert D. Eagleson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 146.

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182–91, 251–62). “She loved me for the dangers I had passed, / And I loved her that she did pity them,” he tells the Duke and Senators in act 1, scene 3 (169–70), and later in that same scene she tells them and her father, Brabantio: “That I did love the Moor to live with him, / My downright violence and storm of fortunes / May trumpet to the world” (251–53). As Othello himself later says in the third act in the temptation scene: “Excellent wretch! Perdition catch my soul / But I do love thee! And when I love thee not, / Chaos is come again”4 (3.3.98–100). During the final scene of the play, when Othello comes to the realization that the woman he has just murdered is gone forever, he says: “Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse / Of sun and moon, and that th’ affrighted globe / Should yawn at alteration” (5.2.102–4). Chaos, or utter confusion, has indeed come, and Othello awaits a sign of the Apocalypse: “. . . and lo, there was a great earthquake, & the sunne was as blacke as sackecloth of heere, and the moone was like blood.”5 What happens between act 3, scene 3 and act 5, scene 2 is that Iago, the meanest villain in all of Shakespeare’s plays, manages to convince Othello that Desdemona has been unfaithful to him. Iago alienates or estranges Othello from Desdemona to the extent that Othello kills her. Why does Iago do this? Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) in a now famous statement once said that Iago exhibited a “motiveless malignity” (from Coleridge’s Lectures, published in Literary Remains, 1836–39). Few critics place Coleridge’s phrase in its context. It comes after some comments on Iago’s speech in act 1, scene 3, the end of the trial scene, where he several times urges Roderigo to “put money in your purse,” and as Roderigo is about to exit, Iago concludes: “Go to, farewell. Put money enough in your purse,” and Roderigo responds, “I’ll sell all my land” (1.3.381–83). Coleridge comments as follows: The remainder,—Iago’s soliloquy—the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity—how awful it is! Yea, whilst he is still allowed to bear the divine image, it is too fiendish for his own steady view,—for the lonely gaze of a being next to devil, and 4 For the theological implications, see OED, s.v. “Chaos 2.” and “Perdition 2.” 5 Revelation 6:12 in The Geneva Bible: A facsimile of the 1560 edition, intro. by Lloyd E. Berry (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1969).

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only not quite devil,—and yet a character which Shakspeare has attempted and executed, without disgust and without scandal.6

Note the reference to Iago as “next to devil,” Coleridge perhaps alluding to Othello’s comment in the last scene: “I look down towards his feet; but that’s a fable. / If that thou be’st a devil, I cannot kill thee” (5.2.294–95). A few lines later Othello refers to Iago as a “demi-devil” (5.2.309). But what do we learn in that soliloquy at the end of 1.3.384–405? Iago tells us, “I hate the Moor” (387), that he suspects that “twixt my sheets / He’s done my office” (388–89), that perhaps he can frame Cassio in a plot to prove that he is having an affair with Desdemona in order to “get his place and to plume up my will” (394), and that Othello is “of a free and open nature, / That thinks men honest that but seem to be so” (400–401). Iago has motives—A. C. Bradley, in fact, thought that the character “assigns motives enough; the difficulty is that he assigns so many.”7 I do not think that that is the case either because his motives fall into easily identifiable categories. Iago has already indicated in act 1, scene 1 that he has had his pride injured because he has been passed over for promotion—“I know my price, I am worth no worse a place” (1.1.12)—hence, “I hate the Moor,” he says in the soliloquy in 1.3. He is angry about it and envious of Cassio, who got the job that Iago wanted. Back in act 1, scene 1, he referred to Othello’s “pride” (line 13) and to Cassio as a “Florentine” (21)—remember that Iago and Roderigo are Venetians. Cassio is also supposedly someone with little practical military experience, at least according to Iago (23–28), but clearly Othello must have thought otherwise, and so does the noble Venetian Lodovico, a kinsman of Brabantio, who appoints Cassio as governor of Cyprus in the last scene of the play. Cassio has just been made Othello’s lieutenant, and Iago remains his ancient or ensign, that is, his standard-bearer (32–34). Iago is angry that his ambition, which derives from pride, has been frustrated: again, Cassio got the job that the proud Iago wanted, and Iago is envious and angry.

6 Qtd. from His Infinite Variety: Major Shakespearean Criticism Since Johnson, ed. Paul N. Siegel (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1964), 307. 7 A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1905), 225.

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So we have motives, and they appear as Pride, Envy, and Anger, all sins traditionally associated with the Devil, in fact, in the medieval and Renaissance periods. Many critics have noted Iago’s associations with the Devil, as well as with the morality-play Vice, and also the stage Machiavel; the latter two were figures that Shakespeare would have seen on stage not all that long before the production of Othello in about 1604—Machiavel in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (ca. 1590) and Lucifer and Mephistopheles, as well as the pageant of the Seven Deadly Sins, in Doctor Faustus (ca. 1588). Chaucer’s The Parson’s Tale from The Canterbury Tales (ca. 1387– 1400), tedious and homiletic though it may be, could have provided Shakespeare with all the information about the Seven Deadly Sins that he needed. There Shakespeare would have read that Pride is “the general roote of alle harmes” and that its “twigges” include such things as “Ypocrisie, Despit, Arrogance, Inpudence, Swellynge of Hertte, Insolence,” and “Strif.”8 Iago has touches of all of these, but hypocrisy and despite (that is, contempt or scorn) certainly stand out as essential aspects of his character. Chaucer’s Parson places Envy right after Pride and tells the reader that its species include “sorwe of oother mannes goodnesse and of his prosperitie” and “joye of oother mannes harm” and that out of these two species come “this synne of bakbityng or detraccion” (243). Recall Iago’s extraordinary admission in his eighth and final soliloquy in act five, scene 1 as he sends Roderigo off to attack and hopefully kill Cassio in the dark: “If Cassio do remain, / He hath a daily beauty in his life / That makes me ugly” (18–20). The object here is “homycide, that is manslaughtre,” (245), which derives from the sin of Ire or anger. Iago himself soon kills Roderigo and then Emilia and has already incited Othello to kill Desdemona, a terrifying homicide effected at the beginning of act 5, scene 2. But let us go back to Iago’s first soliloquy at the end of 1.3 and look at that peculiar comment “And it is thought abroad that ’twixt my sheets / He’s done my office” (388–89). Iago mentions this again in his second soliloquy at the end of 2.1: “I do suspect the lusty Moor / Hath leaped into my seat” (296–97). Iago has 8

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), 239. Subsequent citations from Chaucer are indicated parenthetically.

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eight soliloquies in all, by the way—1.3.384–405, 2.1.287–313, 2.3.45–60, 2.3.330–56, 2.3.376–82, 3.3.337–45, 4.1.95–105, and 5.1.11–22—whereas Othello gets but two. This interesting motive, his own jealousy and need for revenge for his having been possibly cuckolded by Othello (and maybe even Cassio in the future?) and his own lust for Desdemona, is not emphasized in the text in the immediately ensuing scenes, although it is brought up by Emilia in act 4, scene 2, the “brothel” scene, when she asserts to Desdemona in front of Iago that Othello’s been “abused by some most villainous knave, / Some base notorious knave, some scurvy fellow” (146–47) and adds, much to Iago’s nervous dismay: “Some such squire he was / That turned your wit the seamy side without / And made you to suspect me with the Moor” (152–54). This motive, Iago’s own jealousy—which is a form of envy in that you have something and do not want anyone else to have it—was acted out brilliantly by Ian McKellen in Trevor Nunn’s 1990 Royal Shakespeare Company production. A DVD of that production is available, and McKellen is perhaps the creepiest Iago I have ever seen. He was described by theater critic Benedict Nightingale, who attended a performance in Stratford-upon-Avon, as follows: Coleridge famously commented on the character’s “motiveless malignity”; but deftly, at times almost invisibly, Mr. McKellen suggests that he has a reason for his vindictiveness. The sight of love, indeed the very thought of it, troubles him, fascinates him, obsesses him, and at some fathomless level enrages him, because he cannot feel or understand it. That’s not an original interpretation, but Mr. McKellen approaches it from a new angle. For one, Iago’s relationship with his wife Emilia, usually just the butt of his disdain, becomes central to the play. Several times he kisses her fulsomely, only to push her away in puzzled disappointment, like a man who has found cherry soda in a glass he hoped was brimming with claret. Why can’t he so much as taste what others seem able to enjoy? The idea that’s several times expressed in the text, and is commonly regarded as one of the feebler ways Iago rationalizes evil, begins to eat into his mind or, as he himself says, “gnaw my in[n]ards” [2.1.298]. Othello can love and he loved: maybe he’s loved and been loved by Emilia. Mr. McKellen’s mouth twists, his hands tighten, his voice gulps and darkens, as the fantasy possesses him and refuses to let go.

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In other words, Iago is more the victim of jealousy than Othello himself, and the emotion becomes irresistible, boundless.9

Iago is a peculiar mixture of evil qualities, and that complexity was seen in the 1981 BBC production starring Anthony Hopkins as Othello. In that video version Bob Hoskins personated Iago as a joker—the morality-play Vice figure, if you will10—and a virulent racist, making him also quite creepy as he plots the downfall of Othello and Desdemona by duping Cassio into beseeching Desdemona to intercede for his reinstatement as Othello’s lieutenant after the fateful brawl in act 2, scene 3. And what’s he then that says I play the villain, When this advice is free I give, and honest, Probal to thinking, and indeed the course To win the Moor again? . . . . . . For whiles this honest fool Plies Desdemona to repair his fortune, And she for him pleads strongly for the Moor, I’ll pour this pestilence into his ear, That she repeals him for her body’s lust; And by how much she strives to do him good, She shall undo her credit with the Moor. (2.3.330–33, 347–53)

Harold Bloom loved that portrayal and has written about it in his inimitable fashion: “The only first-rate Iago I have ever seen was Bob Hoskins, who surmounted his director’s flaws in Jonathan Miller’s BBC television Othello of 1981, where Anthony Hopkins as the Moor sank without a trace by being faithful to Miller’s Leavisite . . . instructions. Hoskins, always best as a gangster, caught many of the accents of Iago’s underworld pride in his own preternatural wiliness . . . in the pleasure of undoing one’s superior at organized violence.”11 How Bloomstaffian are those remarks, with the clever 9 Benedict Nightingale, “Othello Is Othello, But Whatever Got Into Iago?,” New York Times, 24 September 1989, Stage View, 5. 10 See Bevington, ed., Complete Works of Shakespeare, 1118. 11 Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), 462. Subsequent citations given parenthetically.

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cut at F. R. Leavis, whose own notorious remarks on Othello in an essay titled “Diabolic Intellect and the Noble Hero: or The Sentimentalist’s Othello” influenced Laurence Olivier’s portrayal of the protagonist in a 1964 production at the Old Vic Theatre in London, a performance also available on DVD. As Kenneth Tynan wrote, “the concealed mainspring of the production,” derived from Leavis, was “the idea of Othello as a man essentially narcissistic and selfdramatising.”12 Or, as Leavis himself put it: “. . . it is plain that what we should see in Iago’s prompt success is not so much Iago’s diabolic intellect as Othello’s readiness to respond. Iago’s power, in fact, in the temptation scene is that he represents something that is in Othello—in Othello the husband of Desdemona: the essential traitor is within the gates.”13 Leavis finds that “a habit of self-approving self-dramatization is an essential element in Othello’s make-up, and remains so at the very end” (142). In other words, Othello got what he deserved because, as Leavis goes on to say, he “acquiesces in considering [Desdemona] as a type—a type outside his experience— the Venetian wife. It is plain, then, that his love is composed largely of ignorance of self as well as ignorance of her. . . . It may be love, but it can be only in an oddly qualified sense love of her: it must be much more a matter of self-centred and self-regarding satisfactions—pride, sensual possessiveness, appetite, love of loving—than he suspects” (145). This sort of cheap psychologizing informs a number of postmodern interpretations of Othello the character, for example, Stephen Greenblatt’s conclusion in Renaissance Self-Fashioning that Othello has within himself a “deep current of sexual anxiety . . ., anxiety that with Iago’s help expresses itself in orthodox fashion as the perception of adultery.”14 Bloom himself seems to fall into the same mode of thought when he argues that Othello “literally does not know whether his wife is a virgin, and is afraid to find out, one 12 Kenneth Tynan, “Olivier: The Actor and the Moor,” Plays and Players 13 (August 1966): 49. 13 F. R. Leavis, “Diabolic Intellect and the Noble Hero: or The Sentimentalist’s Othello,” The Common Pursuit (London: Chatto & Windus, 1952), 140–41. Subsequent citations given parenthetically. 14 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980), 250.

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way or the other” (457). Surely Othello’s remarks to Desdemona at the beginning of act 2, scene 3 tell us otherwise: “Come, my dear love, / The purchase made, the fruits are to ensue; / That profit’s yet to come ’tween me and you” (8–10). That their wedding night is rudely interrupted by the brawl that Iago orchestrates between Cassio, Roderigo, and Montano also explains Othello’s anger later on in the scene as he cashiers Cassio for dereliction of duty: “Look if my love be not raised up. / I’ll make thee an example” (244–45). I have never thought that Othello gets what he deserves, and I think that anyone who has read Shakespeare’s main source for this play, Giraldi Cinthio’s novella, or short story, in his Gli Hecatommithi (Decade 3, Story 7), first edition in 1565, will probably agree with that view. Cinthio’s Moorish Captain is much less noble in character than Shakespeare’s Othello the General, and Cinthio’s Ensign, himself in love with but ignored by Disdemona, as she is called, is described as “scoundrelly” and “wicked.”15 He accuses Disdemona of adultery with a Corporal, the Cassio figure. The Ensign himself steals Disdemona’s handkerchief and also actually kills Disdemona himself by battering her to death with a sand-filled stocking. He later goes with the Corporal to the Signoria, and they accuse the Moor, who has turned on the Ensign and stripped him of his rank, of Disdemona’s murder. The Moor, who had agreed to and had participated in the murder, is captured and tortured, but he endures and denies everything, and is later killed by Disdemona’s kinsmen. The Ensign is later arrested on a charge of bearing false witness, is tortured, and subsequently dies from his injuries. As Maynard Mack has argued in a brilliant essay titled “‘Speak of Me as I Am’: Othello”: What should be noticed in particular is that, essentially, Shakespeare invented Iago; set him down in his dramatis personae with the single epithet “a villain”; and devoted most of the play’s lines and scenes to showing in detail the cunning, malignancy, and cruelty of his nature, including the cowardice of his murder of his wife. It seems to me therefore impossible to believe, as 15 Giovanni Battista Giraldi Cinthio, Gli Hecatommithi (1566), trans. Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 7:243. Subsequent citations given parenthetically.

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some critics would have us do, that the root causes of Othello’s ruin are to be sought in some profound moral or psychological deficiency peculiar to him. He shows, to be sure, the degree of inexperience that follows naturally from his being a new husband, a soldier who has spent his entire previous life in the field, an outsider unacquainted with Venetian ways, and a man whose straightforward nature assumes the like in others. These are failings that a skilled manipulator can exploit, and their exploitation is precisely what we watch with sinking hearts. But once we go beyond this to postulate a deep and deadly fault in Othello’s inmost being we come up against the implausible conclusion that one of the most experienced of dramatists has badly bungled his play. For what he has created in Iago, in that case, is a master intriguer and corrupter with no function proportionate to his stature, if what he exists to do has already been done for him by a self-doomed victim.16

As I have always told my students, Othello’s tragic flaw, if you must have one, is articulated for us by Iago in his first two soliloquies. First, Iago tells us in act 1, scene 3 that “The Moor is of a free and open nature, / That thinks men honest that but seem to be so” (1.3.400–401). Iago then essentially runs a variation upon that judgment in act 2, scene 1: “The Moor, howbeit that I endure him not, / Is of a constant, loving, noble nature, / And I dare think he’ll prove to Desdemona / A most dear husband” (2.1.289–92). These are, I suppose, character flaws if you are dealing with an Iago. But to return for a moment to Shakespeare’s main source. Cinthio’s Ensign has a wife, Shakespeare’s Emilia figure, who is described as follows: “The Ensign’s wife, who knew everything (for her husband had wished to use her as an instrument in causing the Lady’s death, but she had never been willing to consent), did not dare, for fear of her husband, to tell her anything. She said only: ‘Take care not to give your husband any reason for suspicion, and try your hardest to make him realize your love and loyalty’” (7:248–49). After the deaths have been narrated, Cinthio brings the Ensign’s wife back into the story as part of the moral of the tale: “Thus did God avenge the innocence

16

Maynard Mack, Everybody’s Shakespeare: Reflections Chiefly on the Tragedies (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1993), 137. Subsequent citations given parenthetically.

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of Disdemona. And all these events were told after his death by the Ensign’s wife, who knew the facts, as I have told them to you” (7:252). Shakespeare, clearly, has greatly expanded the role of Emilia in his dramatic version of the story. And if we pay close attention to Emilia we can more readily understand Shakespeare’s intentions in regards to our interpretation of the characters of Othello and Iago. Emilia and Iago have been married we know not how long, but we do know that he is quite contemptuous of her and treats her badly in public in act 2, scene 1 when he, Emilia, and Desdemona all arrive together in Cyprus, Cassio kisses Emilia in greeting, and Iago refers to “her tongue,” which “she oft bestows on me” (103), and then after Desdemona defends Emilia, Iago adds: “I grant, / She puts her tongue a little in her heart / And chides with thinking” (108–10). Poor Emilia weakly defends herself with, “You have little cause to say so” (110), which sets Iago off on his seemingly light-hearted satire on women. Later in the temptation scene, Emilia picks up the fatal handkerchief after Desdemona drops it and tells us that she will “have the work ta’en out / And give’t Iago” (3.3.312–13) “to please his fantasy” (315). When Iago arrives as she completes her soliloquy, he brusquely asks why she is there alone, and she revealingly responds: “Do not you chide. I have a thing for you” (317). After he makes a snide sexual innuendo and then insults her, she tells him that she has the handkerchief, shows it to him, and he grabs it. She had said that she was going to “have the work ta’en out” and then give the copy to Iago. Why the change? That is, why show it to him? I would argue that she is both trying to be an obedient wife and is also afraid of him, as is the Ensign’s wife in the story by Cinthio, and is trying to curry favor. This scene is coolly played by Zoë Wanamaker as Emilia opposite Ian McKellen as Iago in the 1990 Trevor Nunn RSC production. The body language and stage business provide us with a wealth of information about this marriage—McKellen takes the handkerchief from her, kisses her brutally on the mouth while groping her, and then pushes her away and lights a pipe. She acts shocked, as though she has been brutalized, and she has been. It was after watching this scene that I concluded that perhaps contemporary audiences can understand Emilia’s behavior in terms of what we now know about abused and battered wives. If so, we must remember that Emilia does not want to know too much about what Iago is up to. She wants to believe what everybody in the play believes, that

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her husband is “honest Iago.” It is not until the long and painful final scene of discovery or recognition, in act 5, scene 2, that Emilia, as well as Othello, comes to understand the true nature of “honest, honest Iago” (5.2.161). As Maynard Mack has argued in the essay I quoted above: “If tragedy, as Aristotle thought, has to do with terror, Othello’s being brought to kill the thing he loves is terror, for it can happen to us, and does, as many a newspaper headline will remind us. And if pity too is part of the tragic experience, here is pity in its intensest form, for we know it to be a law of life that what is beautiful is always vulnerable and what is precious can cause the greatest pain” (139–40). How can someone so young as Iago be so evil? We know how old Iago is, for he tells Roderigo: “I have looked upon the world for four times seven years” (1.3.314–15). Although one can seldom be sure if Iago is telling the truth when he is talking to someone else, I see no reason to doubt this particular piece of information. What does it mean? Is Shakespeare telling us that we should not necessarily trust anybody under thirty? I do not have a definitive answer, nor does any editor or critic that I have come across. We are not given the ages of anyone else in this play, but I have always conjectured that Othello is somewhat over thirty-five because of his remarks about the reasons Desdemona has supposedly betrayed him during his first soliloquy, which occurs in the temptation scene: Haply, for I am black And have not those soft parts of conversation That chamberers have, or for I am declined Into the vale of years—yet that’s not much— She’s gone. I am abused, and my relief Must be to loathe her. (3.3.279–84)

If we refer to the traditional Biblical span of years for a full life in Psalm 90:10—“The time of our life is threscore yeres & ten” (Geneva Bible)—then Othello, “past the meridian of life,” as George Lyman Kittredge once glossed 3.3.281–82,17 is at least thirty-five. He is not old by today’s standards, but old enough in Shakespeare’s day to 17

George Lyman Kittredge, ed., The Tragedy of Othello (New York: Blaisdell Publishing Company, 1965), 190.

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be worried about his age and his attractiveness to his young wife.18 We know that she is young because Iago uses that fact as one more item to use against her in this very temptation scene: “She that, so young, could give out such a seeming, / To seel [sew up or blind] her father’s eyes up close as oak, / He thought ’twas witchcraft” (3.3.223–25). By the end of this play, as at the end of Hamlet— where we are given specific information in the graveyard scene that Hamlet is thirty years old—the important young people, the hope of the future, if you will, are pretty much all dead. It was a theme that Shakespeare seems to have been brooding over in some way at this point in his career. The playwright himself was approaching forty when he wrote Othello, which is usually dated ca. 1603–4. The tragic loss of potential, the idea that chaos can come again, was a theme that Shakespeare was to come back to not long after he wrote Othello in his next great tragedy, King Lear (ca. 1605–6), but that is another story. Here, in Othello, we may not have Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy, but we can agree with E. A. J. Honigmann that we have his “most unbearably exciting” tragedy. University of South Carolina

18 According to Sir Thomas Elyot’s divisions of “the ages of man” in his Castel of Helth (fifteen editions from 1539 to 1618), the period of adolescence ends at twenty-five years of age, followed by one’s prime of life: “Iuuentute vnto .xl. yeres, hotte and drye, wherin the body is in perfyte growthe”; followed by old age: “Senectute, vnto .lx. yeres, cold and drie, wherin the bodye beginneth to decreace” (qtd. in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy and Evelyn Simpson [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950], 9:392). In the introduction to his Arden edition, E. A. J. Honigmann “tentatively place[s]” Othello “between 40 and 50” (17). In light of Psalm 90 and Elyot’s divisions, 35–40 would be a better guess.

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Francesco Patrizi da Cherso, Caravaggio, and the Metaphysics of Light Delane Karalow Just as Aristotle discovered the prime mover by way of motion, so in Panaugia I find it by way of lumen and lux and then, in Pancosmia, by way of a Platonic method I descend to the products of light. —Francesco Patrizi da Cherso, November 1587, Ferrara1

I

n the history of art, the paintings of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610) are placed chronologically at the end of the Late Mannerist period and, therefore, at the inception of what came to be called the Baroque. Unquestionably, his works signal a major transition. The years in Rome between 1592 and 1606 when he executed his revolutionary works were a time in which principal philosophical, theological, and scientific ideas were being reconsidered. In the wake of the Protestant Reformation and the Council of Trent (1543–65) there was a complex tension between the prevailing Aristotelian philosophy, Neoplatonism, and the rise of a new kind of Platonism that first appeared in Ferrara. In Rome, where these ideas coalesced into a single spiritual, cultural, and philosophical milieu, it seems in hindsight that the visual arts would, to at least some degree, be affected. Caravaggio arrived in Rome in 1592, the same year as Francesco Patrizi da Cherso (1529–97). The former came to better his

1 “[S]iccome Aristotile per via del moto trovo il primo motore, cosi nella Panaugia io lo trovo per via del lume e della luce, e poi nel Pancosmo con metodo platonico descendo alla produzione della luce.” Cited in Danilo Aguzzi Barbagli, Francesco Patrizi da Cherso: Lettere ed opuscoli inediti (Firenze: Istituto Nazionale de Studi sul Rinascimento, 1975), 70.

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artistic fortunes, the latter by invitation of the newly elected Pope Clement VIII (Aldobrandini) to lecture at the Sapienza, where the Pope had created a chair in Platonic philosophy. From 1592 until 1597 many important scholars, intellectuals, and literati attended his lectures there. Patrizi and Caravaggio were both working within the same immediate geographical area adjacent to the Sapienza between 1594 and 1597. Two blocks from the Sapienza was the church of San Luigi dei Francesi, the site of Caravaggio’s St. Matthew cycle (1599–1602). Across from San Luigi was the palace of Vincenzo Giustiniani, one of Caravaggio’s most discriminating patrons and a collector of antique sculpture.2 It was Giustiniani’s brother, Benedetto, who, in 1592, was appointed by the Jesuits to evaluate the philosophy of Patrizi for the Inquisition.3 In the same immediate area was the Palazzo Madama, the home of another important patron of Caravaggio, Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, who gave quarters to the artist in 1594. The Palazzo Madama was the meeting place for the Accademia degli Insensati, a group of learned men devoted to the study of literature, art, philosophy, and the “new science.” They were dissatisfied with traditional scientific methodologies and, like Galileo, sought new approaches that would enable them to understand nature more fully. Cavaliere Giuseppe D’Arpino, the artist to whom Caravaggio was apprenticed when he first arrived in Rome, introduced his protégé to this cultivated circle. In addition to Cardinal del Monte and D’Arpino, members of the Insensati included Prospero Orsi (Caravaggio’s friend and painter of grotteschi), Aurelio Orsi (poet and brother of Prospero Orsi), Federico Zuccaro (founder of the Academy of St. Luke), 2 The sculpture collection of Vincenzo Giustiniani was of interest to many artists working in Rome. For the connections between Vincenzo, his brother Benedetto, and Caravaggio and the collections and patronage of the Giustiniani, see Luigi Salerno, “The Picture Gallery of Vincenzo Giustiniani,” Burlington Magazine 102 (1960): 21–27. For the influence of Giustiniani and Platonism on Caravaggio see Robert Enggass, “‘La virtu di un vero nobile’: L’amore Giustiniani del Caravaggio,” Palatino 2 (1967): 13–20. 3 Although the investigation of Patrizi’s work began in 1592, he continued to teach Platonic philosophy at the Sapienza until his death in 1597.

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Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, Maffeo Barbarini (who became Pope Urban VIII in 1623), Cardinal Emanuele Pio, and the famous poets Torquato Tasso, Gaspare Murtola, and Giambattista Marino. The Insensati were committed to the contemplation of the divine through denial of the senses, therefore, lending a distinctly (Neo)Platonic emphasis to their activities. Scholars have already linked the Insensati to allegorical and symbolic themes in Caravaggio’s paintings.4 In addition, Caravaggio painted a fresco for the vault of a casino that Cardinal del Monte owned on the Pinciana.5 In the casino Cardinal del Monte performed experiments in alchemy and medicine, and he decorated its walls with portraits of “natural philosophers” such as Ramon Lull, Roger Bacon, Hermes Trismegistus, Paracelsus, and Ibn Hajan, the very authors who shaped the new “philosophy of nature” espoused by Patrizi.6 This new “philosophy of nature” had arisen out of the intellectual ferment of the late Quattrocento and peaked in the last decade of the Cinquecento. Its rise coincided with the shift in both artistic theory and practice. These “philosophers of nature” embraced a new cosmology as well as the belief that nature might be usefully transformed in the interests of mankind. They attempted to return to a universal cosmology that was both infinite and unified. This philosophical enterprise, which sought to improve upon nature, had consequences for artists and artistic theory. The extant rational, Albertian Renaissance aesthetic was reconfigured into a new aesthetic that attempted to reconcile the irresoluble conflict between the Albertian aesthetic and the rise of science and the “philosophy of nature.” Patrizi, a “philosopher of nature,” Platonist, aesthetician, humanist, and historian, was a major protagonist in this development. His contributions to late

4 Luigi Salerno, The Age of Caravaggio, Exhibition Catalogue (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1985), 18. 5 Giuliana Zandri, “Un probabile dipinto murale del Caravaggio per il Cardinale del Monte,” Storia dell’arte 3 (1969): 339. 6 See Paul Oskar Kristeller, Eight Philosophers of the Italian Renaissance (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1964), 93–96, and Charles Lohr, “The Sixteenth-century Transformation of the Aristotelian Natural Philosophy,” in Aristotelismus und Renaissance: In Memorium Charles B. Schmitt, ed. Eckhard Kessler, Charles H. Lohr, and Walter Sparn (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1988), 88–89.

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Cinquecento aesthetics can be divided into two main categories. The first, which includes works such as the Della poetica, falls within the broad extant tradition of literary criticism and poetics that treat literary and visual theory together. The second, including the Nova de universis philosophia, 1591, encompasses work in the fields of natural philosophy and metaphysics. Proceeding from the premise that Caravaggio’s dynamic use of light has never been adequately explained, this paper introduces and explores the question of whether or not Patrizi’s metaphysics of light and space could have been of decisive influence on the artist. Whether or not Patrizi and Caravaggio met in Rome remains conjectural, albeit extremely probable given the mutual patronage and associations the two maintained as well as their close geographical proximity. For Caravaggio, the conception and depiction of light and space is an overriding concern in his work. More importantly, his use of light has metaphysical overtones and ontological significance for his own work and for its effects upon the many artists who came under his influence. For Patrizi, the importance of light is paramount in his work, which comes out of a tradition that begins with the light symbolism of St. Augustine. In the sixteenth century, attitudes toward light and dark and the concept of space, as understood by both artists and scientists, changed dramatically. At mid-century, aesthetic theory had eschewed things that are dark as being unknowable. On the other hand, as a result of the de-emphasis on Humanism and the reassessment of Aristotle’s works, the new “philosophers of nature” attempted to establish a new cosmological system that provided a means for the subject to become one with the object.7 Prior to this time, Renaissance Humanism had emphasized the study and emulation of the ancients, which had relegated the study of nature to a secondary status. Patrizi, among others, sought to overturn the subordinate status of nature by discrediting the works of Aristotle. He focused on Aristotle’s theory of imitation and on 7 In 1550 Girolamo Cardano had published De Subtilitate, in which he stated that “dark and imperfect things are not knowable, for they are infinite, confused, indeterminate.” Cited in Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz, History of Aesthetics, vol. 3, trans. Chester A. Kisiel and John F. Besemeres (Warsaw: Polish Scientific Publishers, 1974), 160.

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his concepts of light and space. By so doing, he sought to re-establish a unity between Platonic/Christian metaphysics and nature. In his belief that nature was rational and knowable he insisted upon an investigation of nature based on new methods, focusing on space, light, mathematics, and the primeval elements of which the world is made. According to Patrizi’s new system, everything in this world is rationally ordered, thus everything is accorded its own place and purpose. All of nature is touched by divinity. All lower things participate with higher ones and in them God is present, secondarily, through a unity that contains the immaterial prototypes of all things. Nature is, therefore, orderly, rational, external, and beautiful because it has God’s blessing.8 To a great extent, Patrizi was reacting to the increasing separation of art and nature. For him, humanity’s mission is to know nature, which contains the clearest evidence of God. He favored mathematics, as did Leonardo, coupled with observation based on reason, authority, and experience. For Patrizi, then, the search for certain knowledge necessitated a new relationship between subject and object.9 This desire to fuse the subject and the object by the new “philosophers of nature” was part of an attempt to subject nature to the will of the individual, and required that the subject and the object be “of one nature.” This change in the subject/object relationship occurred in the visual arts as well. One important way in which this was accomplished was through the formulation of new methods to depict light and space. Foremost among those artists to succeed in this endeavor was Caravaggio. For Patrizi the perception of light and space belonged to the realm of metaphysics. The concepts of both light and space could easily be understood as metaphysical when scientific discoveries began to disclose properties of light and space that defied empirical optical observation. Additionally, the concepts of light and space 8 Benjamin Brickman, An Introduction to Francesco Patrizi’s Nova de Universis Philosophia (PhD diss., Columbia Univ., 1941), 56–68. 9 Ernst Cassirer has explored this phenomenon in greater depth and discusses Patrizi’s importance in this development in The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. Mario Domandi (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1963), 169.

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were integral components of a system that encompassed theology, Platonic philosophy, and science, and were, therefore, categorically predisposed to metaphysical speculation. Although Patrizi privileged space, he treated light first, because he believed it to be the first corporeal form, and the most important. In order to embrace this new Platonic concept of light and space in the late sixteenth century, one had to reject the late Medieval concept of inner-worldly space that accords with the Aristotelian cosmos.10 Working within the new expanded view, Patrizi set out to discredit the Aristotelian corpus that had dominated philosophical discourse since the middle of the thirteenth century. He was one of the few “philosophers of nature” who attempted to set forth a new universal philosophical system to replace the extant Aristotelian one, a system in which light is privileged, as it had been for Marsilio Ficino, as the “dynamic medium connecting all in the spatial world.”11 The Nova de universis philosophia (1591), is Patrizi’s most substantive and influential work and the source for understanding his metaphysics of light and space. The circumstances of his earlier life brought him into contact with unique sources and acquaintances. Patrizi, who was born on the island of Cres (Cherso), which in the sixteenth century was part of the Venetian Republic, soon left for studies in Ingolstadt, Padua, Cyprus, and Modena. In 1577 he was appointed to a chair in Platonic philosophy at the Studio at Ferrara.12 Here, he met important philosophers who were dedicated to 10 For the transition from the late medieval understanding of the cosmos to the early modern one see Alexander Koyre, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1957), R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1945). See also Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1936), 99–143. 11 Paul Oskar Kristeller, The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, trans. Virginia Conant (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1964), 116. 12 Most of the details of Patrizi’s life are to be found in the autobiographical letter he wrote to Baccio Valori in 1587, during the time he was traveling between Cyprus, Spain, and Italy. See Danilo Aguzzi Barbagli, Francesco Patrizi da Cherso: Lettere ed opusculi inediti (Firenze: Istituto Nazionale de Studi sul Rinascimento, 1975), 45–51.

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the study of light and astronomy. A Platonism distinctly different from that of Ficino and the Medici in Florence developed. Patrizi remained in this position until summoned to Rome by Pope Clement VIII (Ippolito Aldobrandini) in 1592, in the very same month that Caravaggio arrived there. All of Patrizi’s works were published between 1553 and 1594; however, most of them date from the Ferrara period. He wrote on a vast number of topics including poetry, philosophy of history, rhetoric, literary criticism, military history and science, mathematics, moral philosophy, metaphysics, and natural science. In addition he translated into Latin works by Aristotle, Philoponus, Proclus, and books and fragments of the Corpus Hermeticum.13 In 1581 he published one of his most substantive works, the Discussiones Peripateticae, which was a thorough critique and commentary on Aristotelian science. This was followed, after other works on science and mathematics, by his Nova de universes philosophia, which he dedicated to Pope Gregory XIV.14 After his summons to Rome by Clement VIII, Patrizi lived in the apartments of the Pope’s nephew Cinzio Aldobrandini and was welcomed by the Papal family. Patrizi wrote that in Rome he was greeted by many new and old and extremely learned friends.15 A chair created for him by the Pope at the Sapienza enabled him to begin teaching Platonic philosophy. Lecturing primarily on the Timaeus, he continued to enjoy the Pope’s favor and additionally that of patrons associated with the Papal court, despite concerns by some who questioned “unorthodox” views of Patrizi, which resulted 13 For a succinct review of Patrizi’s publications and unpublished manuscripts see Brickman, Introduction, 12–14, 79–81. 14 A second edition of the Nova de universis philosophia was published in Venice in 1593 with slight variations. 15 Luigi Firpo, “Filosofia e controriforma,” Rivista di filosofia 41 (1950): 164. In October of 1591, Cardinal Ippolito Aldobrandini sent Patrizi a letter in praise of the Nova de Universis Philosophia. He was subsequently invited to Rome. By May, he had completed complimentary visits around the city of Rome and found himself “most honorably ascribed in the household of the Papal family,” Luigi Firpo, “The Flowering and Withering of Speculative Philosophy—Italian Philosophy and the Counter-Reformation: The Condemnation of Francesco Patrizi da Cherso,” in Eric Cochrane, ed., The Late Italian Renaissance 1525–1630 (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 275–77.

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in the Nova de universis being placed on the Index of the Inquisition. Patrizi was asked to denounce, among other things, his assertion that “shade is a positive rather than a privative contrary to light.”16 Patrizi, therefore, posited one of the revolutionary new understandings of the nature of light and dark that parallels the dramatic new use of tenebrism in the paintings of Caravaggio. The Nova de universis philosophia is divided into four major parts.17 Each section bears a Greek title and is arranged according to its meaning, order, and subject matter: Panaugia (10 books on the physical and metaphysical properties of light), Panarchia (22 books on the Neoplatonic hierarchy of being), Pampsychia (5 books on the soul as the intermediary between the spiritual and corporeal world), Pancosmia (on the physical world and the four principles that unite it). The Panaugia is most relevant to the change in artistic theory and practice following its publication. In this work, Patrizi draws from many sources within the Platonic and Neoplatonic tradition.18 This he combines with scripture, from which he derives the term pater luminum, from James 1:17: “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above and cometh down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variableness neither shadow of turning.” At this point, for the sake of brevity, it is helpful to consider a summary of the main points of Patrizi’s metaphysics that could be relevant to artistic theory and practice in the medium of painting, and that could have influenced the work of Caravaggio. The following list combines the distilled concepts of his metaphysics of light and space, which are, by virtue of their nature, inseparable: 1) Light is the most important principle of all corporeal things. Space is first but light is more important. Light is the first cause and the basis for the existence and behavior of all things. Light is a self-subsisting entity. It is not a quality of matter. It is, instead, a type of mat-

16 Paul Oskar Kristeller, “Francesco Patrizi da Cherso: Emendatio on Libros suos Novae Philosophiae,” Rinascimento 10 (1970): 215–18. 17 Paola Zambelli, “Aneddoti Patriziani,” Rinascimento 7 (1967): 309–18. 18 On Patrizi’s synthesis of Aristotelian, Philonic, Plotinian, and Platonic metaphysics of light see Eugenie Elizabeth Maechling, Light Metaphysics in the Natural Philosophy of Francesco Patrizi da Cherso (MA Thesis, Univ. of London, 1977).

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2)

3)

4)

5)

6)

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ter which exists in the sensible world. Therefore, light is the object of sense perception, rather than the agent for the visual process. Grades of light, not color, constitute the class of primary visible things. Light, not color, is the object of vision. Form, therefore, is to be understood visually through the representation of light, not color. Light is the vehicle by which space is visually understood. Optics, therefore, are subordinate to the study of light. Light, then, is privileged over optics and over logically ordered constructs of perspective in order to visually understand and represent space. Darkness is not privative. Metaphysically, darkness is a real substance, not the absence of something. Therefore, darkness and light are positive opposites, not privative opposites. Divine things are the source of light, lux, which is both corporeal and incorporeal in its radiation. Light mediates between God and the corporeal world and, therefore, bridges the earthly and divine world. In this capacity, light serves as a cosmogonical agent.19 There are two types of light, lux and lumen. Lux is the most important source. It is the corporeal and incorporeal source of light. It is direct and unifying in its manifestation. Lumen is derived from lux. Lumen is empirical, luminous, and does not allow for extreme darks or lights. It is experienced as reflected light and is multiplicitous in its manifestation.

Caravaggio and Patrizi shared common goals. Both sought to recapture a lost unity between art and nature, to reduce the perceived distance between the subject and the object, and to re-present the world as a transcendent, unified cosmos in which divine presence is made known, both metaphysically and corporeally. For both Caravaggio, the artist, and Patrizi, the philosopher, light was the vehicle or agent by which this objective could be accomplished. Arriving in Rome simultaneously, sharing the same patrons and friends in close geographical proximity, this study suggests that it is quite likely that the philosopher influenced the artist. Lynchburg College 19 It may be helpful here to distinguish between “cosmology” and “cosmogony.” Cosmology is a branch of systematic philosophy that deals with the character of the universe as a cosmos. It combines speculative metaphysics and scientific knowledge. Cosmogony is a theory or account of the creation or origination of the universe.

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Being John Donne in 1602 M. Thomas Hester ohn Donne’s 1601 marriage to the daughter of Sir George More, laments Izaak Walton in his Protestant hagiography, was “the remarkable error of his life.” Only the “mutuall affection, [which] made their bread of sorrow taste more pleasant than the banquet of fooles, might be urged,” he says, “to moderate a severe censure” of Donne’s error. In fact, asserts Walton, Donne himself “never seemed to [have] justifie[d] the flattering mischief [of this] passion”—even though he had “a wit apt enough, and [was] very able to make paradoxes.”1 I wish to “moderate” Walton’s “severe censure” of the clandestine 1601 marriage by considering (not entirely facetiously) that Donne’s “remarkable error” was not his marriage but his 2 February 1602 letter to Anne’s father—in which he employed his “apt wit” and “paradoxes” not so much to “justifie” as to assert “bold[ly]” his (and Anne’s, but mostly his own) conduct. The following reading of Donne’s letter to Sir George aims to supplement recent biographical discoveries and “reasonable conjectures”2 in order to suggest how this “remarkable” epistle reveals more about Donne than has been limned.3

J

1 Izaak Walton, Lives (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1833), 39. 2 See Dennis Flynn, John Donne and the Ancient Catholic Nobility (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1991); and Margaret Maurer, “The Poetical Familiarity of John Donne’s Letters,” in Forms of Power in the English Renaissance, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Pilgrim Books, 1992). 3 The letter is available in Donne’s Marriage Letters in the Folger Shakespeare Library, ed. M. Thomas Hester, Robert Sorlien, and Dennis Flynn (Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library, 2005), 35–37, 67–69.

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The letter begins with that most familiar favorite of Donne’s love poems—“If ”—initiating the false syllogism of the opening exordium, in which Donne amidst his “humble” plea insinuates that it is actually Sir George’s fault that has kept him from “waiting upon you myself to have given you truth and clearness of this Matter between your daughter and me.”4 A “very respective fear of your displeasure, [and] anger,” he submits, and Egerton’s “lov[ing] compassion” for your passion (ours goes unmentioned, of course) has so severely “increase[d] my sickness as that I cannot stir.” The faults not of John and Anne but of her father, that is, have forced this letter to assume “the boldness” that the absent author claims he would have assumed himself if he were not rendered so sick, doubtful, and apparently procrastinating because of his fear of explaining “plainly” to Sir George “the limits of our fault” and of attempting to convince Anne’s “wise” father to “proportion the punishment” that the exordium and the remainder of the letter itself attempt to mitigate (and eventually to dismiss as antithetical to “th[ose] persuasions of Nature, Reason, Wisdom, and Christianity” that would incline Donne “to show [his] humble obedience” to Sir George). Much virtue indeed in this first of five Ifs in the letter. If this were a poem by Donne and not a letter on which the future of his family depended, one might associate it (rhetorically) with those earlier “shame[ful]” Elegies in which the poet’s invented stand-ins ironically disclose the “boldness,” sickness, and illogicalities of their subtle equivocations. But in the letter—which readers have aptly termed “blunt,”5 “curious,”6 “nervous[ly] jaunt[y],”7 and “coolly insolent,”8 Donne (unintentionally but not ironically) supplies the best description for it when he says the “office” of the letter is “boldness.” Its bold 4 See M. Thomas Hester, “‘Let me love’: Reading the Sacred ‘currant’ of Donne’s Profane Lyrics,” in Sacred and Profane: Secular and Devotional Interplay in Early Modern British Literature, ed. Helen Wilcox, Richard Todd, and Alasdair MacDonald (Amsterdam: VU Univ. Press, 1996), 130. 5 Edward LeComte, Grace to a Witty Sinner (New York: Walker and Company, 1965), 80. 6 Edmund Gosse, The Life and Letters of John Donne, 2 vols. (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1899), 1:100. 7 R. C. Bald, John Donne: A Life (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), 134. 8 Dennis Flynn, “Donne’s Catholicism: I,” Recusant History (1976): 10.

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“casuistries,” in fact, shadow forth that very feature of its author that would have most “incense[d]” Sir George—preventing any “pardon”—but which at the same time intimate a “reasonable conjecture” about why Donne composed a letter so “scarcely calculated to assuage the anger that he had every reason to anticipate.”9 As Flynn phrases it, “Donne seems to have driven More to extremes almost deliberately, as if confident of his own immunity” (17); besides “punning on ‘donne’ and then going so far as to request the dowry,” he chose as his emissary for the letter Henry Percy, ninth Earl of Northumberland, who was “associated with Raleigh, suspected of intriguing, atheism, magic, and Catholicism—the “Wizard Earl” was hardly the sort of person to mollify Sir George More.”10 Indeed, the contradictory terms of the melancholic plea of melancholy in the syllogistic “thesis” of the exordium are maintained in the casuistical “antithesis” and “synthesis” of the narratio, in which the implicit (and reiterated) contrasts between Sir George’s crippling, “displeas[ing] anger” and the devout and devoted couple’s “conscien[tious]” covenants strive to establish the “reason[able]” (and therefore “pardon[able]”) prescience of the groom’s deceptive behavior and the couple’s “honest purposes” and behavior. “So,” Donne avers, without stooping to the father’s passionate “anger”—“without violence to conscience,” that is—from the time that Sir George returned Anne to York House, the couple actually engaged in a sort of “fore”-trothplight “of promise and contract”—a legal and moral “obligation” that led quite naturally and reasonably to the secret marriage “about three weeks before Christmas.”11 Donne’s own conduct was fully moral and legal; unlike the violation of Donne’s health by Sir George’s unhealthy and irrational anger, it did not “violate any trust or duty towards” the intemperate, ill-tempered, “sick” father by the conscientious couple, the priest and the witnesses who violated civil and canon law. All this sophistry is then offset by the epigrammatic closure and bravado of the wonderfully touching and boldly 9

Bald, Donne, 135. Flynn, “Donne’s Catholicism: I,” 10. 11 On “trothplight” as a legal marriage, see Anne Jenalie Cooke, Courtship in Shakespeare and His Society (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1991), and Ilona Bell, Elizabethan Women and the Poetry of Courtship (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998). 10

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heroic “we adventur’d equally.” This sentence—in which the couple is described for the first time in the letter as “we”—in fact, conveys crisply the cadences of the marriage vow itself by which “we” two become one “equally.”12 (Never has the illegal elopement of a 29-year-old man with a 17-year-old girl been so fully [and equivocally] canonized by the rational “wit” of the groom.) Of course “the clearness of this Matter between your daughter and me” promised by the groom remains opaque in the narratio: it is “long since” its “foundation” was laid at York House; Donne “found means to see her” during the Queen’s last Parliament “twice or thrice”; and the marriage took place “about three weeks before Christmas”—performed and witnessed by “five [unidentified] persons” whose anonymity is protected by his vow (“by my salvation”) that in turn faithfully fulfills his initial vow that he did “forbear to use any such person, who by furtherance of it might violate any trust or duty towards” Anne’s father. The narratio’s equivocal retrospective defense of the couple’s clandestine behavior—which “should be pardoned,” Donne suggests—is carried to its hyper-determined conclusion through more of the casuistical rhetoric with which it began by implicitly contrasting the (purportedly unfathomable) “opinion” of Sir George to the “honest purposes in [the lovers’] hearts and [the] fetters in [their] consciences.” Anything but the “plainness [Donne incredibly claims he has] used,” the narratio’s closing sentences partake of that “art of Equivocation”13 of which he later spoke in describing his “cases of conscience,” in which “the cause of the auditor’s misunderstanding [is] attributed to his own, not the speaker’s, insufficiency as a moral agent.”14 Sir George’s “opinion,” that is— that relativistic threat to “measure” and “judge[ment]” that Donne attributed to Sir George’s courtly superiors in his August 1601 Metempsychosis—that opinion in which “innocent” Donne “stood not right” is made to seem weak indeed when juxtaposed to moral agency of the couple’s “hearts [and] consciences.” In fact, as in his 12 There are other instances of this in the poems, such as Nocturnall’s placement of “we” at the center of the poem. 13 Ignatius His Conclave (London, 1611), 33. 14 Olga L. Valbuena, Subjects to the King’s Divorce: Equivocation, Infidelity, and Resistance in Early Modern England (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 2003), 75.

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verse satires, the beleaguered writer is forced to rely on neologisms to denote “plain[ly]” the “fault” of which “we” are accused: he did not “fore-acquaint” and they did not “fore-reveal” because it would have “impossibilitate[d]” their mutual adventure. Donne’s “imperious wit . . . bends . . . Our stubborn language” to invent “fresh”15 terms apt to the couple’s predicament. In the propositio the speaker “acknowledge[s the] fault to be so great” which he has just asserted should be pardoned and now asks Sir George “to believe . . . neither had dishonest end nor means,” and then “humbly beg[s]” that Anne not “feel the terror of your sudden anger”; however repentant this seems it yet insinuates the same moral distinctions central to the letter’s mode of mental reservation. For while the poor speaker “dare[s]” only to “offer [no] other prayer” than that Sir George be willing “to believe this truth,” Donne’s conduct (then and now) is certainly portrayed as more “honest” and “tender” than the “terror of . . . sudden anger” that he “begs” (and rhetorically dares) Sir George to avoid. And just in case this appeal from pathos does not work, then the confirmatio that follows does “dare” to assert the irrationality, lack of wisdom, and inevitable futility of Sir George’s allowing his “full . . . passion” to reign. Here, from one perspective, in fact, Donne verifies his willingness to “tender” (in the sense of to offer, to give willingly as well as to love, to hold dear) both his “fortunes” or his “life” when he warns (or dares to inform) Sir George of a “particular” detail—that in this case he is helpless—for “it is irremediably donne.” This radical departure of Lipsius’s principle that “strict brevity” in a letter written to “someone important . . . does not avoid contemptuousness”16 is carried to the level of scorn by Donne’s pun on his own name. Succinctly arrogant in its confident assertiveness, carrying the brunt of the casuistical argument to its epigrammatic conclusion, this thrust is as surprising in such a letter and (in Flynn’s apt term) as “coolly insolent” as the last line of any of Donne’s Martial epigrams. For the pun essentially serves to displace and to flaunt Sir George’s patriarchal 15 Thomas Carew, “An Elegie upon the death of the Deane of Pauls, Dr. Iohn Donne,” Poems (London, 1633), 28, 49–50. 16 Principles of Letter-Writing: A Bilingual Text of “Justi Lipsi Epistolica Institutio,” ed. and trans. R. V. Young and M. Thomas Hester (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1996), 27.

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authority through the play on Anne’s new name as the wife of John Donne. Indeed, when it becomes clear just how far the letter-writer is willing to go in what has now become not his supplication but his counsel to Sir George, then one might be tempted to wonder if that was a pun on “tender much more” in the proposition—especially when Donne follows the incredible pun on his own name by advising Sir George that his best future course lies in granting him the dowry that would “give us happiness,” “prosper my endeavours and industry,” and offset any worries her father might have about Donne’s “present estate” (therein offsetting, in part, that poor “opinion” of him). Should we now re-read, that is, Donne’s earlier claim to “tender much more” as a play on Anne’s maiden name—or to infer that he now has left open the possibility that Donne is willing to give up his own “fortunes or life” for that of More’s daughter? After the outrages of the confirmatio, Donne adds only an advisory digressio that, with its impertinent tone of familiarity and stoic stance of aloof superiority, announces his refusal even to acknowledge any future opposition to his marriage. Since it is all fore-known by him, he will “say nothing.” Instead, the peroratio concludes the letter with a plea for his choleric father-in-law to conform to the type of “persuasions” with which he has identified Anne and himself throughout the letter; and (possibly) further undercuts his claim of “humble[ness]” by an equivocation on “vows”—as a reference both to Anne’s and John’s recent marriage vows and to his own “particular” vow that his “love is directed unchangeably upon her.” Donne does finally conform to the trope of humility at the close of the letter when he leaves a 13-line gap between the valediction and his signature; but it comes too late, providing only a (paradoxically) polite social gesture to superior authority that is out of character with the style and method of the letter itself. Donne’s attempt to “anticipate Sir George’s response”17 and his fond hope that the “airy [and] blunt” casuistry of this letter would “fore”-stall “the “terror of [his father-in-law’s] sudden anger” was, of course, a “remarkable” error.18 However firm his confidence in 17

Maurer, “Poetical Familiarity,” 191. “There is . . . little in the letter [concerning Sir George] but correct prophecy,” says LeComte (Grace, 82); he was, it seems, one of those “Readers” Donne could not “teach.” 18

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the certainty and authority of Egerton’s sympathetic support—as intimated by the conspicuous reference to his “lord” in the second clause of the letter—Sir George’s “opinion”19 proved to be the “onely measure and judge” that mattered; and he persuaded Lord Egerton to dismiss Donne from his service and within the week had Donne committed to the Fleet “for conspiracy to violate the common and the civil law”—the first step towards an attempt to annul the marriage. Letters, after all, as Donne himself omce wrote, are “conveyers and deliverers of [one’s] self,” and this epistle is certainly no exception to the classical adage that underpins Donne’s definition—Stylus virum arguit. We should not, that is, “impossibilitate” that Sir George read his “unelected” new son-inlaw as conveyed by this letter quite accurately. When framed by the 1591 Marshall engraving and the 1595–98 Lothian portrait of Donne, in fact, the “self-conscious icon[ic]” design of Donne’s letter and the vehement tenor of Sir George’s response to its author become clearer. The Marshall engraving of Donne at 18, for example, visually and symbolically glosses, as Flynn points out, the “unwaveringly stoic asseveration”20 of its motto (or “war cry”21), Antes muerto que mudado: “Better dead than changed.” “[T]he portrait makes purposeful reference to Donne’s Catholic and Welsh ancestry” through its “generally martial impression,” its use of the family coat-of-arms to affirm “Donne’s descent from [a] noble family,” and “the earring in the form of a cross [which] denotes the outstanding quality of Donne’s [descent] from the Catholic Heywoods.” Exemplary of “the gentleman volunteer, or captain” who fought against the Dutch Protestants, the design of the portrait miniature, that is, especially the young man’s firm grasp of his sword, recalls “Donne’s [identification and] association with the Catholic nobility that began with his birth into the [aristocratic] family of Sir Thomas More and took shape in the formative years of his adolescence.”22 The tone, the defi19 To recall Donne’s August 1601 attack in Metempsychosis on the triumphant “Progress” of Sir George’s governmental colleagues and superiors. 20 Flynn, Donne and the Ancient Catholic Nobility, 2. 21 Valbuena, Subjects, 75. 22 Flynn, Donne and the Ancient Catholic Nobility, 2–6.

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ance, and the sheer impudence of the marriage letter are a vestige of the Heywood Donne—that friend of the Catholic-sympathizing Earl of Northumberland who delivered the letter to Sir George, the “aristocratically” bold Donne who “dares” inform Sir George that “it is irremediably donne.” As he himself suggests in a subsequent letter that specifies Sir George’s “opinion” of him and the calumny of others’ “ill thoughts of me” as the “fault . . . of loving a corrupt religion,” more than a small part of Sir George’s rage was undoubtedly provoked by Donne’s heritage and the lingering residue of Catholicism surrounding him. The Lothian portrait is also instructive. As an intriguing variation on the popular portrait of the melancholic, it could well unsettle any young daughter’s patriarch. Donne’s coolly confident, handsome face gazing past the viewer—his arms folded in bold self-possession, his “elegantly pale and smooth” hand23 hanging as casually as the elaborately laced collar over his dark doublet—here certainly is the pose of the conventional melancholic, his large hat ready at any moment to cover from us that gaze which may intimate impertinence, a face that (Frost points out) the “artist has attempted to darken with a kind of grayish-umber overpainting on forehead, cheeks, and chin”—unlike the (much brighter) “color employed on juxtaposed hand” (9) that conspicuously foregrounds the picture, its inactivity traced vertically by the touch of the chain at the center of the painting up to the shadowy face that could be transfixed by contemplation of his donna angelicata who is addressed in the blasphemous motto overhead as she who can “Lighten [his] darkness” [Illumina Tenebr(as) Nostras Domina]. Yet, the design of the Lothian intimates at the same time an inventive flaunting or even an equivocal critique of the melancholic stance as a pose being overcome, maybe even wittily mocked for its conventionality by the specifics of the portrait. The handsome face with the melancholic’s hat pushed back so as to expose, not conceal, a face strikingly handsome, intelligent, and self-confident of its intelligence that is framed by the elaborately ornate (and expensive) lace, a complexly patterned lace seemingly chosen for an effective display that yet draws attention away from 23

Kate Gartner Frost, “The Lothian Portrait: A New Description,” John Donne Journal 13 (1994): 9.

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its richness to that of the rich textures of the sitter’s face, any sense of ostentatious aristocratic display offset by the casual (pose of ) sprezzatura of the open collar and the carelessly dangled neckchain (noteworthy for its lack of any emblematic jewelry). Here the firmly held sword foregrounded in the Marshall engraving remains in the shadows to the sitter’s left—its aggressive threat muted by (again) the casual repose of the prominent hand, the sword’s (merely ornamental) need offset by the intelligence of the face that is emerging from the shadows—all directed towards the prominence of that (uncalloused, smooth, aristocratic) hand, the hand of a gentleman, perhaps a poet, or even a “chief Secretary.” Yet the most striking (and unconventional) feature of the portrait (as Donne noted in his will) is that it is a “Picture . . . taken in Shaddowes”—or, more provocatively (and equivocally) a picture of Donne having moved out of (or into) the light, the well-lit hand fully visible, the confident face not yet totally clear.24 Read in this way, the Lothian offers an “apt” gloss on Donne’s (nearly contemporaneous) letter to Sir George.25 Both artifacts sustain an opaque “plainness” by which the carefully designed male supplicant, an irresolvable and enigmatic mixture of melancholic postures freshly conceived, resolutely looks past the judgment of his audience as he seems either to emerge from or into the “Shaddowes.” His conspicuously exposed hand lies boldly calm—perhaps projecting even the “cool insolence” capable of an illegal “handfast” of trothplight. His face—posed in an assurance deriving from a bold intelligence, an aristocratically strong will, a resolute faith in love/Love, or even the striking handsomeness of a “great visitor of ladies”—is not yet plain except for its confidence (or over-confidence)—the signal of an intelligence capable of “violence” (or of “yoking images violently together”) but not to his “conscience.” And his present circumstances are epitomized by a motto (“an irreverent

24 Bald, Donne, 567, who observes, recalling Bryson’s comments in 1939, that the figure “has only recently emerged into the light” (523). 25 Again, in the sense in which Maurer has taught us to read Donne’s letters as “idiosyncratic utterances” that construct “well-contrived interludes in circumstances that are themselves illuminated by the shape of his retreats from them” (“Poetical Familiarity,” 191, 185).

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parody of the third Collect for Evening Prayer”26) that announces that his “love is unchangeably” directed towards his beloved. . . .27 The confidence in Egerton’s support that contributed to Donne’s “remarkable error,” that is, is an extension and psychic prop for the manner, the casuistical boldness, and the verbal inventiveness of Donne’s 1602 letter. John and Anne were “undone” by the same adamant, provocative, “coolly insolent,” and “unwavering” defiance endemic to the Marshall engraving’s “bold[ly]” daring stance, and by the same sublimely confident, self-possessed, intellectually superior equivocation of the Lothian painting in which Donne is either moving into or just out of the shadows of its (or his) background. It is not surprising, that is, that the austere Sir George More read his new son-in-law (quite correctly, I would add) as he did. Nor is it surprising that Donne wrote as he did, for he could only be “irremediably Donne.” Donne’s “remarkable error” lay not only in his letter’s being bold, too bold, but in his failure to recognize fully the extent of the effects the Reformation would have on his generation. Although its equivocal casuistry hardly fulfills its opening promise of “clearness,” the letter yet “conveys and delivers” a revealing portrait of its absent author—and grounds for “reasonable conjecture” about why the wrathful patriarch of the staunchly Protestant Mores of Loseley responded to it with such a “severe censure.” North Carolina State University

26 Geoffrey Keynes, A Bibliography of Dr. John Donne, 4th edition (Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), 373. 27 Such, in fact, is the central conceit of Donne’s subsequent letter to Sir George from the Fleet on 11 February, which was broached in the 2 February letter’s submission that Sir George alone can “Destroy her and me,” which is mentioned in that first letter only as an “[un]reason[able]” and “[un]wise” response to a marital fait accompli that is “irremediably donne.”

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The Problem of the Human in Sir Francis Bacon Jason E. Cohen

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hat is humanity for Francis Bacon, and how do his texts work out its conception? His works rely on implied articulations of humanity, and his pliant deployment of the term complicates its many uses. The “Preface” to Bacon’s Instauratio Magna faults men for failing to pursue the sciences fully, “And so they [i.e., men] are like fatal pillars of Hercules to the sciences; for they are not stirred by the desire or hope of going further.”1 Despite his forward assertion of his doubts about men’s past or present intentions,2 Bacon nevertheless relies on a conception of humanity that can and should move beyond those pillars to find a plus ultra for science at large, in addition to extending his own philosophical and experimental projects in particular.3 My insistence on the importance of Bacon’s focus on humanity stands in contrast to a longstanding view of Bacon that has portrayed him as a coldly driven and meticulously

1 Francis Bacon, The New Organon, ed. and trans. Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), 6. Further references are cited parenthetically as NO followed by book and aphorisim. References to the Preface or Plan of this work are followed by page numbers.. 2 See John Guillory, “The Bachelor State: Philosophy and Sovereignty in Bacon’s New Atlantis,” in Politics and the Passions, 1500–1850, ed. Victoria Kahn, et al. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2006), 49–74. 3 The motto plus ultra is inscribed underneath the pillars of Hercules in Bacon’s frontispiece to the Instauratio Magna. See Charles Whitney, Francis Bacon and Modernity (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1986), 33–35; and Julian Martin, Francis Bacon, the State, and the Reform of Natural Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), 163–64.

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professional operator in scientific and political arenas, a view perpetuated for instance by his recent biographers, Lisa Jardine and Alan Stewart.4 Bacon situates the importance of “humanity” in each area of his writings, including his few religious statements, many political and jurisprudential tracts, works in natural philosophy included in the Instauratio, and those titles like the New Atlantis, “Confession of Faith,” and Advancement of Learning, which are in the words of Bacon’s editor, James Spedding, “related to the Instauratio Magna, but not to be included in it” or which have been “superceded by it.”5 In this essay, I set out the social and ethical terms of human “virtue,” a term that conveys its meaning differently in the areas of private and public communication. The discreet meanings that Bacon attributes to “virtue” signal his shifting conception of the “man of science,” as Moody Prior once fashioned the Baconian subject.6 As I show, an ambivalent conception of the virtuous subject guides Bacon’s inquiries into natural and political law; and as a result of the irreconcilable conclusions Bacon draws from these areas of inquiry, the challenge of describing an essential set of characteristics for the virtuous subject forms a crucial symptom of Bacon’s failure to construct a unified system of inquiry into the natural and political worlds. By framing virtuous action across the natural, political, and historical modes of Bacon’s writings, I aim to suggest that his work is not meant to be reconciled to a unified project of single-headed progress, but more subtly, that his work shares a methodological concern with equity in his several pursuits of truth. Let me open with a brief episode that occurs in Bacon’s late utopian fragment, the New Atlantis, and which reveals the intriguing position he assigns to humanity. The New Atlantis condenses Bacon’s understanding of humanity neatly because it calls on the two explicit traditions that shape 4 Lisa Jardine and Alan Stewart, Hostage to Fortune: The Troubled Life of Francis Bacon (London: Victor Gollancz, 2000). 5 Francis Bacon, The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Ellis, and Douglas Heath (1868; rpt. New York, NY: Garrett Press, 1968), vol. 3, table of contents. Further references to this text are cited parenthetically as Works, followed by volume and page number. 6 Moody E. Prior, “Bacon’s Man of Science” in Essential Articles for the Study of Francis Bacon, ed. Brian Vickers (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1968), 140–66.

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the term. In the first place, the sailors’ initial encounter with another people in the New Atlantis points toward an association between those who are “full of humanity” and the revival of languages in humanist learning: “to find that the people had languages . . . did not comfort us a little,” particularly since those named are the revered classics—Greek, Hebrew, “good Latin of the School”—in addition to the vernacular inclusion of Spanish.7 During the same episode, the Bensalemite messengers read out and then hand over a scroll inviting the treatment of the ship’s sick, which is emblematically inscribed at its foot with “a stamp of cherubins’ wings, not spread but hanging downwards, and by them a cross” (MW, 458). In the second place, this combination of message and image announces the messenger’s Christian filiations and signals the second valence of those people called “full of humanity” by its inscribed gesture. The scroll contributes to a reading that tropes textual and figural contents for a general ethos of compassion and faith. The exchange of the scroll requires the ship’s crew to participate in this substitution of knowledge and being for affection, and this in turn establishes a substitutive method according to which Bensalemite society portrays itself.8 The condensed double-use Bacon finds for humanity indicates his own foundation in the two traditions associated with the term. In its utopian vein, Bacon’s work imagines a society full of humanity in an attempt to claim hope for human kind. “Full of humanity” thus further expresses an ideal potential that reaches beyond Bensalem’s fictive shores—it holds out the vatic possibility that others may attain to living so fully, or that well-intentioned hopes do not only seem, like the narrator’s initial sighting of land

7 Francis Bacon, The Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001), 458. Further references to this book are cited parenthetically as MW. On humanist learning and Bensalem, see Denise Albanese, New Science, New World (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1996), 29–32, 112. 8 On reason and faith in Bacon, see Jerry Weinberger, “Francis Bacon and the Unity of Knowledge: Reason and Revelation,” in Francis Bacon and the Refiguring of Early Modern Thought: Essays to Commemorate the Advancement of Learning (1605–2005), ed. Julie Solomon and Catherine Martin (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 109–28.

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in Bensalem, “full of boscage, which made it show the more dark,” fuller, that is, with the obstructions and doubts of skeptical realism (MW, 457). The thickets and underbrush, Bacon’s “boscage,” open up to reveal a safe harbor in Bensalem; and the crew’s safety is assured from the outset by its people’s humanity. Humanity is the social condition that enables a positive encounter between strangers in Bacon’s utopian fiction. But the fiction soon shifts away from a narrative of the encounter and moves toward the narrative of conversion. The humanity that attends to the first encounter is pushed outside the narrative, in a sense, because the enumeration and description of proto-scientific investigations does not open a new (social or narrative) space for its re-introduction. Bacon’s later description of Solomon’s House, the centrally “scientific” component in his utopia, enables him to dismiss the problems raised by his narrative of conversion: science, in the Baconian imagination, crosses all cultural lines. The displacement and conversion of humanity into a group unified by natural philosophy across its cultural and religious divides reveals how the Baconian force of science overshadows a politically or socially sensitive account of natural knowledge. Nevertheless, the narrator never questions his hosts’ hospitality or humanity, even when the reiteration of humanity later on in the text heightens the ambivalences associated with Bensalem’s coercive hospitality. What particular attributes does “humanity” possess in Bacon’s work, and how does its conception enable the text to trade doubt for certainty in the movement between darkness and the “God’s first creature, which was light” (MW, 472)? Already, the terms of humanity in Bacon reveal a singular problem in the use of the word at large. Humanity has two distinct registers of meaning: first, it works as a collective noun to indicate an assembly of people; second, it designates a set of characteristics. It is generally the case in English usage that an attributed meaning derives its signification from the unattributed form of the word, which is the root. In this case, we could expect that the group of people called “humanity” would give rise to the cultural or personal characteristics that “humanity” locates. But this is clearly not so: no single group of people carry a set of attributes that would correspond to those of every other group. The split definition of “humanity” presents the same problem to Bacon that it presents at large, its use fractured by the insoluble question of which meaning takes precedence over the other.

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At stake in the meaning of humanity is not just a question of deciding between a collective noun or an individual descriptor. Following Burkhardt, this crux locates a question of precedence for renaissance humanist literature, which remains pertinent today in the scholarly negotiation between a civic thread of humanism and its renaissance individualist strand.9 “Civic humanism” has long been associated with the masterful work of the historian and philologist Hans Baron, who characterizes this thread of humanism exactly in his discussion of the evolution of renaissance thought in Florence after 1400: “Florentine citizens . . . began to speculate about the psychological forces propelling historical development of the Florentine people and about the development of Florentine culture on the changing vitality of the body politic. . . . A conviction that human nature must not be repressed lay behind all these theories.”10 In Baron’s account of humanism, individual actions or achievements refer to higher social and historical artifacts. The civic cords of humanity are stronger than its individual threads. By contrast, the second conception of humanism is established in the work of Ernst Cassirer, whose views of renaissance individualism are shaped by a philosophical view of humanism. Cassirer thus locates the problem of the human in a different constellation of psychological forces: “Before that [transition from medieval to renaissance thought] can happen, it is necessary to create, so to speak, a new state of tension in thought . . . Just as the visual arts seek plastic formulas of balance, so philosophy seeks intellectual formulas of balance between medieval faith in God and the self-confidence of Renaissance man.”11 Cassirer’s argument holds that humanity is guided by the individualist forces of freedom and necessity. These internal motives shape his view that faith and civic duty remain subordinate to humanity’s Protean drive to reinvent itself and thus 9 See Jacob Burckhardt, Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy: An Essay (London: Phaidon Press, 1951), 70–88, 264–68. 10 Hans Baron, In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism: Essays on the Transition from Medieval to Modern Thought, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1988), 31–32. 11 Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. Mario Domandi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963), 75–76; italics in original.

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to strive toward perfectibility and moral duty. The problem of the human in Cassirer’s conception of renaissance individualism is immanent and perpetual. The English context for the use of the term is no less fraught. As it is first glossed in the OED, “humanity” refers to a civil disposition, but this understanding of the term is highly at odds with the meaning Bacon imputes to the human. For Bacon, “humanity” reveals a set of essential inadequacies that we do not see in its emergent uses. In its earliest English usage, however, humanity draws its meaning from the humanist influence of conduct manuals. In Henrician prose, humanity names the characteristics that an individual ought to show other humans, and it shows how to achieve concord between oneself and another.12 One of the principle proponents of this type of behavioral organization, Sir Thomas Elyot’s Boke Named the Governor (1531) supports the well-established resonance between humanity and what is humane. The chapter entitled “The Principall Partes of Humanitee” defines its object thus: the “condicion of man . . . is called Humanitee, whiche is a generall name to those vertues, in whom semeth to be a mutuall concorde and loue, in the nature of man.”13 For Elyot, humanity is a singular disposition that reflects an image of the “concorde” between an individual example of virtuous behavior and the “generall name” exhibited by our best natural conditions. The “nature of man” here refers to a type of nature that stands in excess of an organic or biological understanding of life; the category of the human is indicated by a nature that operates within a social context, which he essentializes. The context Elyot offers for humanity presents an understanding of nature to his audience by means of its human enactment, and it makes humanity an example of natural law. Humanity is in effect the highest example of nature for Elyot. Moreover, humanity reflects the structure of nature’s sovereign authority because nature supplies particulars that are made in accord with its general forms. The relationship between a particular instance and a general name is held together through “mutuall concorde,” which creates a relationship through the structure of an example. 12

Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “humanity.” Sir Thomas Elyot, Boke Named the Governor (London, 1531), bk. 2, ch. 8, fols. 108–9. 13

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Humanity is thus for Elyot a lived condition of being, whose particular example corresponds to the general category called “the nature of man.” Elyot further locates humanity as the vehicle and nature as the means to drive the relationship he identifies between a general name and its illustration. When it is held against the criteria for an example, Elyot’s definition of humanity may seem tautological: humanity, it would seem, is defined as those conditions that correspond to the nature of man. But there is more to the definition than that. Elyot’s implication is that humanity supplies a collective term whose characteristics enable a correspondence between human and natural laws. In this moment of condensation, we can see that Elyot’s example plays on both sides of the definitional ambivalence in “humanity,” which is a slippage Bacon will attempt to reform. Elyot’s conditions for humanity place a priority on the concord between the nature of man and human virtues, which finally offers a contrast between his understanding of humanity and the reformation of its meaning in Bacon. Virtues place Elyot’s humanity in excess of its natural, organic indicators. Virtues are, in effect, representative of an essential quality in humanity that must be socially constructed for Elyot. But, at his later moment in the development of the state and the early modern conception of the subject, Bacon’s understanding of human virtues is bigger than Elyot’s socially limited term because Bacon relies on his method to correct human understanding in all possible matters. If Elyot works out his conception of humanity through a socially equitable understanding of virtues, the virtues Bacon attributes to humanity are vastly expanded through his inquiries into the epistemic possibilities for rational understanding. Machiavelli’s influence on English political and social thought crystallizes around a tension that Elyot and Bacon’s entries into the problem of the human hold in common. The Machiavellian civic arena of virtù and necessità bridges Elyot’s social understanding with Bacon’s larger concerns for epistemic reformation.14 Elyot’s defi14 On Machiavelli and Bacon, see G. N. G. Orsini, Bacone e Machiavelli (Genoa: Orfino, 1936); Robert K. Faulkner “The Empire of Progress: Bacon’s Improvement upon Machiavelli,” Interpretation 20 (1992): 37–62; F. J. Levy, “Francis Bacon and the Style of Politics,” ELR 16 (1986): 101– 22; Lisa Jardine, Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse (London:

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nition of humanity sounds politically oriented from its inception, but Bacon’s sounds more closely attuned to natural philosophical possibilities. Consequently, while Elyot’s notion of humanity relies on civic virtues that were essentialized by their concord in nature, Bacon’s conception of virtue provokes an open inquiry into the characteristics that define the human rather than understanding them as essentially or implicitly given. Bacon’s humanity depends on the scientific method to determine its characteristics, that is, whereas Elyot’s depends on a homogenous conception of equity that carries his virtues across the difference between individual subjects. In order to tease out this distinction further, I turn to J. G. A. Pocock’s classic study of Machiavelli, which follows the operation of virtù to trace the shift in the Florentine intellectual and moral transition from a mythic understanding of its republican history to a political and civic one. He writes: The politicization of virtue introduced a dramatic change. The operations of fortune were no longer external to one’s virtue, but intrinsically part of it; if, that is to say, one’s virtue depended on cooperation with others and could be lost by others’ failure to cooperate with one, it depended on the maintenance of the polis in a perfection which was perpetually prey to human failure and circumstantial variations. The citizen’s virtue was in a special sense hostage to fortune, and it became of urgent moral importance to examine the polis as a structure of particulars seeking to maintain its stability—and its universality—in time.15

Indebted to the Florentine understanding of virtue that Pocock describes, Elyot’s humanity must express the “urgent moral importance” that its civic and universal location signals. Its virtues must be made to stand forward and uphold civic responsibilities. But the fallibility and uncertain fortune of men place this moral obligation into a rather fragile setting. It is perhaps for this reason that Elyot shapes humanity into the highest form of an example, and Pocock’s

Cambridge Univ. Press, 1974), 163–68; and Vincent Luciani, “Bacon and Machiavelli,” Italica 24 (1947): 26–40. 15 J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975), 76.

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formulation also invokes a political logic according to which Bacon’s conception of humanity uncoupled the tenets of natural knowledge from a direct correlation to social strictures. I noted above that there is a certain tautology to Elyot’s phrase, wherein the repetition of meaning in the definition secures its strength on the force of its iterability. Humanity, revisiting Elyot’s logic, is the example of essentialized human conditions, and furthermore, those conditions are the example of virtues. Elyot overcomes the potential failures of humanity by insisting on the possibility to attain to worldly perfection by means of the concord between the highest virtues—their categorical condition, or “generall name”— and human nature. The turn to natural law is already laid underneath Elyot’s definition: natural law locates those laws common to all men, which is precisely what Elyot attempts to convey with his definition of humanity. Humanity, then, follows the form of natural law in its particular and individual examples. According to the claim made by the “generall name” for this exemplary status, there resides the possibility in humanity—at every particular moment—to aspire to individual perfectability. In this decisive model of the “concorde” humanity engenders, Elyot’s conduct manual attempts to catalog humanity’s conspicuous manifestation by naturalizing social interaction, and to thus regulate the social by describing its conceptual shape within essential limits. By contrast, Bacon’s conception of humanity leads him to refer the term to the search for natural knowledge. This correlation between the methodical inquiry into nature and the characteristics he defines as human leads Bacon to posit a set of qualities that are compatible with his revolutionary view of human potential to know the world completely. In the first instance, the characteristics that lead the inquiry into natural knowledge are also politically charged, but we shall see that in the last instance, they are focused systematically on shaping new knowledge into a new form of virtue. According to Bacon’s early modern literary sensibility, human conditions cannot be investigated without inquiring into what “humanity” should be, or at least what it should know.16 One of Bacon’s most prominent contributions to the history of philosophy is his distinctly new response to the question of how to situate 16

See Cassirer, “The Subject-Object Problem in the Philosophy of the Renaissance,” in Individual and the Cosmos, 128–29.

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humanity in terms of knowing (epistemology) and being (metaphysics). Bacon formulated a connection between being and knowing early in his career. In his systematic Of the Proficiencie and Advancement of Learning, Divine and Human (1605), Bacon claims: “[deceit or untruth is] that which doth destroy the essential form of knowledge. For the truth of being and the truth of knowing are one” (MW, 142). That construction reveals how the ethics of truth rests on its enactment in the work of human learning, an elevated form of opus hominis.17 In this short passage Bacon characterizes unethical uses of language as the destroyer of truth, and he locates truth in the concordance of being and knowing. That combination of being, knowing, and doing in a single formula involving “truth” carries Bacon across the three major areas of philosophical inquiry from ancient times to his own. In line with the scale of his ambitions in the Advancement of Learning, Bacon’s terse formula occurs during his discussion of the second of the “vanities” of received learning: credulity and deception (MW, 136–48). In his extended discussion of the vanities and “peccant humours” that have infected the “proficiencies of learning” (MW, 148), Bacon re-orients the strengths and inadequacies of received traditions to serve his own vision of the grounds that learning has yet to discover. This series of insights marks Bacon’s departure from Henrician and Continental traditions, which treat humanity in a line restricted to the political implications for civic or individualist humanism. Bacon’s radicalism begins here in his reformulation of how to construct the problem of the human. Bacon’s address to knowing, being, and doing is nevertheless carried strongly by the philosophical currents with which his text was engaged. There are four basic questions in scholastic and humanist traditions concerned with an individual’s humanity, and each one corresponds to an area of philosophical inquiry: What can I know? (epistemology); What can I be? (metaphysics); What ought I to do? (ethics); What can I hope? (theology). Given the implications of individualism in Continental humanist concerns such as the 17 See for instance, Bacon’s dedication to the king in the second book: “But I know well I can use no other liberty of judgment than I must leave to others; and I for my part shall be indifferently glad either to perform myself or accept from another that duty of humanity” (MW, 175).

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dignity of man, immortality of the soul, and unity of truth, it is not surprising that by the turn of the seventeenth century the determination of humanity would find a place near the center of British early modern literary and social concerns. These stakes take shape through arguments over immediate political and personal issues such as the status of liberty and free will, the value of history, the role of language and eloquence, and the interaction of individual and institutional notions of authority or government.18 Each of the four literary and social concerns above—volition, history, eloquence, and authority—is considered by Bacon’s works. However seriously he may address these problems, he does so in a manner that engages the human actor without defining the function he intends humanity to play. The tension inherent in Bacon’s conception of humanity can thus be understood in terms of the relationship between a nominal philosophy of humanity and its status as an agent of its own cultural conditions. If humanity is essentially determined by its religious, epistemological, and cultural limitations, then it cannot be a primary agent in its self-determination. Bacon follows three methods for constructing the meaning of humanity. He sets the stakes of the problem and, moreover, develops a clear articulation of how humanity shapes the new science. As I have suggested above briefly in my introductory comments on the New Atlantis, two of the possibilities for determining the signification of “humanity” emerge from critical traditions dealing with humanist learning and theological doctrine; the third method for assembling a theory of “humanity” in Bacon tenuously reconciles the proto-scientific and political tenets to which he subscribes. This final method uncovers the hidden structure of virtue in Bacon’s consideration of humanity, and it forms the basis for the later question “what is man?” 18 On the Baconian model of social authority, see Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570– 1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), 18–53, 190–228; and Brian Vickers and Nancy S. Struever, eds., Rhetoric and the Pursuit of Truth: Language Change in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1985), 10–16. On authority and artistic creation, see Paul O. Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and the Arts (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1990), 204–12 and 224–27.

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The first order of Bacon’s reflections on humanist language and humanity in the Advancement of Learning is occupied with the future implications of epistemic practices. Thus in Bacon’s work, the further resonance of humanity with those languages revivified by the tradition of litterae humaniores invites a reflection upon the limits of humanist social policies in language.19 In a recent discussion of seventeenth-century English political language, Quentin Skinner argues that persuasion and eloquence were understood to support “moral ambiguity.”20 While Elyot’s humanism was in conversation with its continental counterparts, his essentialist conception of human virtues remains less adventurous than Bacon’s constructivist approach to the description of virtues. Bacon’s work also develops his concept of virtues further than Elyot’s civic humanism because Bacon tied the practices of eloquence to behavioral norms. In that way, Bacon’s virtues are distinct from Elyot’s normative discussion of the virtuous concord between individuals and the social enactment of shared principles. Bacon entertained more fundamental disagreements about how to participate in society, what role a subject could rightly uphold, and how those spheres of action could be set into social relationships. At something of a distance from Skinner’s conclusion that eloquence is tied to moral ambiguity, in the Advancement of Learning Bacon judges that the powers of public eloquence were often quite threatening. His primary concern with humanist studies of eloquence or copious language departs from the tradition of rhetoric, which he praises unabashedly as “a science excellent, and excellently well-laboured” (MW, 237). Quickly, Bacon raises his laudatory tone to a cautionary pitch as he warns against the misuses of rhetoric to “contract a confederacy between Reason and Imagination against the Affections” (239). If rhetoric pulls the passions out of line with reason or imagination, Bacon warns, then the oppression of one faculty by another troubles “the nature of man” and leads away from a principled life.21 This negative influence skews the assembly of prin19 See F. H. Anderson, The Philosophy of Francis Bacon (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1948), 165–81. 20 Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002), 267. 21 On imagination in Bacon, see John L. Harrison, “Bacon’s View of Rhetoric, Poetry, and Imagination,” in Essential Articles, ed. Vickers, 253–71.

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ciples to guide life and language under the grand heading “De productione axiomatum,” which determines the “rule [of ] how far one [type of ] knowledge ought to intermeddle within the providence of another” (236–37). Whereas Bacon claims that rhetoric should contribute to the investigation of new sciences and that it is rightfully powerful when it is used to convey a proper message, he fears that rhetoric will only continue to enflame passionate responses by playing on the credulity of an uninformed or undiscerning populace. The fear of rhetoric arises over the concern that its force too easily serves affection rather than reason. Here Bacon begins to participate in the growing corpus of tracts denouncing the uses of persuasive rhetoric to bring public commotion because, he judges “the condition of these times . . . [disposes men toward] the consumption of all that can ever be said in controversies of religion” (288). His departure from the consideration of the traditional humanist office of rhetoric announces his entry into an arena concerned primarily with addressing the question of the human through policy. The turn away from a traditional humanist interest in textual aesthetics brings Bacon to confront the political force of language. His concerns with persuasive rhetoric set him on guard to regulate the conditions under which political language emerges. Bacon thus warns: The corrupter sort of mere politiques, that have not their thought established by learning in the love and apprehension of duty, nor never look abroad into universality, do refer all things to themselves, and thrust themselves into the centre of the world, as if all lines should meet in them and their fortunes; never caring in all tempests what becomes of the ship of estates, so they may save themselves in the cockboat of their own fortune; whereas men that feel the weight of duty, and know the limits of self-love, use to make good their places and duties, through with peril. And if they stand in seditious and violent alterations, it [i.e., duty] is rather the reverence which many times both adverse parts do give to honesty, than any versatile advantage of their own carriage. (MW, 135)

Bacon’s point here is to position duty as the decisive factor guiding an actor’s personal, social, and sovereign choices, and to insist that those choices are informed by honesty and altruism. Duty for Bacon, as for James I, is identified with the necessity of referring the

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bonum commune to a higher form, “universality.” Bacon’s attention to a principle of common good is focused on expressing how duty should be conferred by a higher order of discipline upon individual political actors, even if it does not adjudicate the difference between a divine and secular universality.22 The passage thus offers a double focus, treating universality on the one hand, and individual duty on the other.23 This double treatment indicates at a first reading how Bacon envisions the principles of universality to work in a political (and moral) network. While Bacon is in many respects a nominalist who eschews universally ascribing agency to objects, humanity provides a complicated position in which the object is also capable of moral and rational decision. This wrinkle in Baconian nominalism reveals how humanity, as a category and as a rubric for moral agency, brings political considerations into the sphere of natural knowledge. Humanity for Bacon operates in a politically inscribed “third space of enunciation,”24 proximate to the axes of universal principles and individual duties. The repeatedly ambivalent discussions of policy in the Advancement of Learning are shaped by an uncertainty about how to prioritize the elements that compose the distinction between individual and civic motives in public language. Both of these elements are necessarily represented by those members of the national community who contribute most strongly to a secular culture of political language. In formal English political arenas, including Parliament, judicial proceedings, and at royal court, the decision-making capacity of a rational actor had to maintain a balanced relation to increasingly global policy concerns as well as the often intransigent conflicts among royal decrees, civic traditions, and social norms. Bacon’s analysis of these politiques—the men and their power to render decision in a public forum—is rent by the desire to see good policy introduced 22 On Bacon’s influence on parliamentary language, see Karl Wallace, “Discussion in Parliament and Francis Bacon,” in Essential Articles, ed. Vickers, 195–210. 23 This double focus problematizes the distinction between maxims and laws in Paul Kocher, “Francis Bacon on the Science of Jurisprudence,” in Essential Articles, ed. Vickers, 167–94. 24 See Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 37.

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at the same time that he hopes to curtail ill-advised or ill-tempered political discourse. In this departure from tradition, Bacon establishes a model for humanity that takes account of its conditions of production. But he cannot resolve the tension within these conditions and convey the task he envisions humanity to serve; for that answer, Bacon has to depart from the realm of political language. Thus, Bacon formulates a religious context to address the problem of the human before ultimately considering how humanity emerges within natural philosophical discourse. Bacon’s critique of policy in the Advancement of Learning consequently rests on an assessment of the conditions that enable peaceable political rule. In his schematization of ideal political conditions, Bacon runs headlong into the encounter with humanity. Humanity presents Bacon with the problem of how to divide his idealized notion of politics between its individual and civic valances. This division between public and private concerns unsettles the Advancement of Learning because Bacon’s text is invested in shaping normative behavior through a system of learning. Given these pedagogical constraints, Bacon has to formulate an organizational structure to ensure the right transmission of the goals and virtues he establishes for humanity. The task Bacon faces in organizing and describing the operations that shape humanity prove too subtle to be extracted from its bases in the humanist traditions of civic and individualist drives toward self-realization. As a result, the description Bacon offers for the characteristics and conduct of the human agent is irremediably split between its civic and individual energies. The terms of this agency vacillate between two views of the human, attendant at once upon social concerns and individual practices. Rather than administer the human according to one or the other of these two trajectories, Bacon suggests that there are organizational principles within humanity that are not only subject to reason and policy, but also to inspiration, intuition, and passion: that is, they rely on discovery and nature to shape the human. The revolutionary transformation of scientific terms Bacon details in the New Organon (1620) separates experimental practice from Scholastic metaphysics. The primary mode Bacon develops in order to accomplish this goal incorporates the reordering of causes taken from an Aristotelian hylomorphic tradition. The translation of Scholastic causes (efficient, final, formal, and material) into

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categories of praxis enables Bacon to shore up the reinvention of material causes under the direction of empirical sciences by coupling its practice with a separate theoretical groundwork. In other words, he reinforces the tenuous stakes of new science by distinguishing his practices from Scholastic categories of philosophy. Among many instances of this defensive tactic, I will quote a telling one: “The most obvious example of the first type [i.e., a poor philosopher] is Aristotle, who spoils natural philosophy with his dialectic” (NO, 1:63). Natural philosophy, Bacon argues, must be held apart from a premature encounter with metaphysical speculations; the cost of failing to observe a strict separation between the practice and theory of natural philosophy, Bacon asserts, is nothing short of the contamination of experimental practice with needless abstraction and confusion (see NO, Preface, 11–13). Even here, Bacon is at pains to request that the imperfect process should not be dismissed out of hand for seeming “infinite and superhuman, when in fact it is the end of unending error . . . and accepts the limitations of mortality and humanity” (NO, Preface, 13). Bacon’s invocation of the human boundaries for the project resonates with his personal and humble request for his readers to withhold hasty judgment of his own work: “And I cannot be arraigned to stand trial,” Bacon’s juridical voice admonishes, “under a procedure which is itself on trial” (13). Bacon’s epistemic reformation shifts the burden of verification away from a philosophical emphasis on final causes, bringing the weight of science to bear on an entirely new and wholly empirical conception of the material cause.25 As a part of Bacon’s attempt to differentiate experimental practice from the Scholastic emphasis on a metaphysics invested in the discovery of final and efficient causes, he argues for a necessary relationship between precisely observed phenomena and abstract theorizations of scientific possibility. Rather than anticipating the ends of science prematurely, Bacon advocates for an incremental process of interpreting science: “It is a much more serious problem that [natural philosophers] observe and 25 See Antonio Pérez-Ramos, Francis Bacon’s Idea of Science and the Maker’s Knowledge Tradition (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988), 83–96, 115–32; and Perez Zagorin, Francis Bacon (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998), 63–65.

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investigate the principles of things at rest from which things come into being, and not the moving things through which things come into being” (NO, 1:66). Here we see the sustained interest in a material cause as a transformation of metaphysics, which is specifically delimited by its investment in incremental and verifiable knowledge. This change in priority opens Bacon’s philosophy to expand upon its innovative formal approach to scientific practice. In particular, Bacon’s incremental directions for the interpretation of nature feature two crucial and opposed characteristics. On the one hand, the concentration on material causes and processes sets a cornerstone for his inductive method; on the other hand, Bacon’s concentration on material causes also reveals an incomplete and imperfect human understanding of natural processes. The need to assure a positive human interaction in the material practices of science requires Bacon further to occlude the particular deficiencies in his own plan to complete a scientific instauration. In that vein, we can see immediately that the study of material causes enables Bacon to imagine a robust scaffold within which to erect his operative natural philosophy. The movement toward material causes involving an operative physics occurs in Bacon because natural philosophical processes are set in contrast to a theoretical system of efficient and final causes.26 In the Scholastic and neo-Platonic conception of causes, the role of humanity is secure; in Bacon’s conception of causes, by contrast, humanity occupies a position that oscillates between its interpretive limitations and metaphysical potentials. Despite these evident limitations to human understanding, Bacon pursues new philosophical and practical foundations for science relentlessly. He thus scrutinizes the role humanity occupies in the discovery of material causes no less carefully than the experimental methods he schematizes. It has been widely noted that Bacon’s four Idols of the Mind (Tribe, Cave, Marketplace, and Theater) in the New Organon identify the areas in which he saw it necessary to curtail human misrecognitions and deceptions most urgently.27 Bacon recognizes that we need new intellectual as well as 26

See Bacon’s discussion of “intermediate causes” in NO 1:56. On the Idols, see Jardine, Francis Bacon, 80–83; Paolo Rossi, “Rhetorical Tradition and the Method of Science” in Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago 27

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material practices; without them, he announces, “those who offer to guide one on the way are also lost in the labyrinth,” which is composed of “the fabric of the universe, its structure, [and] the mind observing it” (NO, Preface, 10). These intellectual practices attempt to remedy the “innate” and “artificial” failings in human perception or reason (NO, Plan, 18). The paradox Bacon faces in developing strategies to resist such coercive forces, he quickly admits, is that “the first two kinds of idols can be eliminated, with some difficulty, but the last two [i.e., the Idols of the Marketplace and Theater] in no way” (NO, Plan, 19). Bacon already perceives an underlying social character within scientific practice; its pervasive and negative influences may be mitigated, at best, by the vigilance he prescribes. Such vigilance nevertheless does not hold its edge against the blunting effect that human sense perceptions bring to scientific investigation. Bacon lamented in his preface to the Instauratio that “There may be many kinds of political state, but there is only one state of the sciences, and it is a popular state and always will be” (NO, Preface, 8). Unlike institutional apparatuses or even political modes of rhetoric, the sciences cannot choose the form of their own presentation.28 Bacon consequently acknowledges that the public nature of scientific endeavors ensures (against his highest wishes) that a dull understanding of experimentation would prevail in the untrained eyes of popular reception.29 Bacon’s skeptical assessment of the human intellective capacity counterbalances his hope for a widespread renovation in the execution and dissemination of scientific enterprises. Reservations about the public perception of newly-revealed knowledge are coupled with even greater reservations about the judgments made by individuals based on sense perception. Bacon’s pervasive anxieties about the future prospects for science, an essentially “democratic” undertaking, crystallize around his analysis of Press, 1968), 160–72; and Peter Urbach, Francis Bacon’s Philosophy of Science: An Account and a Reappraisal (LaSalle, IL: Open Court Press, 1987), 83–106. 28 See Marrku Peltonen, “Politics and Science: Francis Bacon and the True Greatness of States,” The Historical Journal 35 (1992): 279–305. 29 See Charles Whitney, “Francis Bacon’s Instauratio: Dominion of and over humanity,” Journal of the History of Ideas 50 (1989): 371–90.

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the steps required to interpret nature well, a process that requires an individual judgment as well as a systematic understanding: But much the greatest obstacle and distortion of human understanding comes from the dullness, limitations and deceptions of the senses; so that things that strike the senses have greater influence than even powerful things which do not directly strike the senses. And therefore thought virtually stops at sight; so that there is little or no notice taken of things that cannot be seen . . . For by itself sense is weak and prone to error, nor do instruments for amplifying and sharpening the senses do very much. And yet every interpretation of nature which has a chance to be true is achieved by instances . . . in which sense only gives a judgment on the experiment, while the experiment gives a judgment on nature and the thing itself. (NO, 1:50)

Bacon’s concern in this aphorism hinges upon the apparent strength of a sense impression, which must be treated by an individual’s (weak) rational capacity to discern significant data from merely striking appearances. The stronger the impression an object or experiment makes on the senses, Bacon warns, the stronger the empirical or evidentiary claim it makes in human apperception. His fear is that perception may translate uncritically and systematically into a misguided “understanding.” Consequently, at the conclusion of the passage above, Bacon coordinates the truth-value of an experimental instance with an incremental form of judgment. This provides as concise a statement of the actual art of interpreting nature as we find anywhere in his work, and it is beset with anxious hesitation. Bacon breaks the judgment of truth down to its constituent elements: the experiment judges nature, whereas the senses only judge the experiment and its outcomes. The problem of the human in Bacon’s experimental science is crystallized in the differentiation of truth into its constitutive elements because it becomes clear that Bacon is not seeking to reconcile the laws of nature with human law: each system of controls has its governing purposes and a method to achieve those ends, but the one system is not meant to be reconciled to the purposes or methods of the other in every instance. For the first time, Bacon counsels his audience to follow a system that is not inherently fixed to a meaningful conclusion. Human society may never comprehend the ends of this Baconian science. Nature remains in excess of virtue

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because of its raw characteristics, but human virtue relies on its total comprehension of the truth it finds in parts. Bacon is drawing upon a new kind of validity—material validity—which does not reflect the interpretive structures of an external system of moral or rational philosophy. The validity asserted by Bacon’s natural philosophy is secure in its material and empirical reality, but the external world does not, therefore, necessarily contribute directly to the formation of subjectivity effects in civic or individual humanity. The stark contrast between Bacon’s view of humanity in natural philosophy and humanity as it appears in his other work strikes out from this split concern: while experiment should guide our reason toward understanding, human understanding has nonetheless become subordinate to the articulation of a self-sufficient and internally consistent method. At any point, results may not make sense, and it may never become clear how a particular set of results fits into larger systems of comprehension and reason. Further, Bacon’s method may not maintain a direct claim on the virtue of understanding at first sight, but it provides a new kind of truth, and for Bacon, there is virtue enough in that. We are now in a position to understand Bacon’s oracular pronouncement on the problem of the human for science: The human understanding is not composed of dry light [Intellectus humanus luminis sicci non est] . . . he rejects what is difficult . . . he rejects sensible ideas . . . he rejects the deeper truths . . . he rejects the light of experience . . . he rejects anything unorthodox. In short, the emotion marks and strains [imbuit et inficit] the understanding in countless ways which are sometimes impossible to perceive. (NO, 1:49; Works 1:167–68)

Like Heraclitus before him, Bacon seeks a “dry light” to convey the truth of divine law,30 and further, to bring humanity back into step with “God’s first creature, which was light” (MW, 472; original italics). In the scientific arena, the “inward authority” that Bacon granted in the “Confession of Faith” is replaced by an empirically verified authority. But the possibility that an “inward” appearance of emotion or intuition might constitute understanding—driven accordingly by something hidden or latent, and thus escaping 30

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See Spedding’s commentary in Works 1:268n.5.

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notice—once again evokes Bacon’s ambivalence toward humanity. For Elyot, humanity formed the highest example of nature; for Bacon, humanity must judge the highest examples in nature’s own context. How can an inconsistent judge use experimentally derived knowledge to elevate judgment to treat nature and truth? Bacon’s articulation of the problem of the human is newly beset by ambivalence. Bacon’s investment in natural knowledge subjects humanity to the authority of his experimental method at the same time that, in its individual capacities, political knowledge must be grounded in the individual authority of one’s perceptive and rational capacities. How does he resolve this new dialectic within the problem of the human? Let me return briefly to a close reading of Bacon’s late utopian fragment, the New Atlantis (ca. 1624) in order to return to the role humanity plays in the articulation of natural and political truths. Bacon’s conception of humanity functions increasingly under the tensions of a latent and administered correspondence between the political and scientific characteristics of reason. In one sense, like the sailors who encounter a people “full of humanity” upon their arrival at Bensalem’s shores, humanity is at its best politically when it can be governed within institutional structures. In a second sense, humanity is at its best scientifically when it discovers a reason in nature. Humanity thus presents the medium by which to transform the contents of reason into practice. A structural analogy governs two registers that Bacon assigns to humanity; its construction by nature reflects its construction by civil society. As I understand its function in the New Atlantis, humanity thus serves as a political and scientific bridge across the experimental and intellectual methods used in the pursuit of reason. In this third space, humanity expresses an immanent law of control that governs psychological and intellectual formations. Whereas humanity should communicate understanding and respect, by contrast it locates a figure for assimilation and coercion. Bacon asserts this late formulation of humanity through Bensalem’s policy toward strangers, which ensures the state’s perpetuity in science and sovereignty. Bacon’s highly ambivalent treatment of humanity culminates in the conclusion of his utopian New Atlantis, which sounds its final note by leaving off abruptly, just as the narrator must figure out how to understand the final combination of an exhortation with a payment.

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Thus, having concluded a private discourse with the narrator, “one of the Fathers of Solomon’s House” offers his captive audience a blessing. The Father’s benediction conveys the freedom “to publish [the lessons of their conversation] for the good of other nations; for we here are in God’s bosom, a land unknown” (MW, 488). A generous gift accompanies these words, amounting to “about two thousand ducats. For they [i.e., the Fathers] give great largesses where they come upon all occasions” (MW, 488). The exhortation moves the Spanish sailor outwards while the payment settles the company further into the adoptive Bensalemite society. Which is it: world or island—voyage outward or inward? This choice forms the last ambiguity in the New Atlantis, one upon which the disrupted text comes to rest. Somewhat earlier, the New Atlantis followed a complete historical narrative, in which the sailors were shown their own potential destinies as visitors: [King Solomon] still desiring to join humanity and policy together; and thinking it against humanity to detain strangers here against their wills, and against policy that they should return and discover their knowledge to this estate, he took this course: he did ordain that of the strangers that should be permitted to land, as many (at all times) might depart as would; but as many as would stay here should have very good conditions and means to live from the state. Wherein he saw so far, that now in so many ages since the prohibition, we have memory not of one ship that ever returned; and but of thirteen persons only, at several times, that chose to return in our bottoms. (MW, 470)

The offer the Governor makes implicitly is sweet. Only thirteen have turned it down in all of Bensalemite recorded history, and their idea of history is quite robust. Apparently none of these dissenters have occupied a position of authority as a ship’s captain or officer because none of the vessels ever returned. Here again, the sailors must abide by the terms of Bensalemite humanity in order to obtain an offer for themselves. But even here, “in God’s bosom” where persuasion is a matter of money as well as one of living justly, there is a darker note. The contrast between promise and threat is all the more striking because both are rendered passively. Neither has a promise been made nor a threat leveled, but both have been held out for

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precedent. Following the promise, the Governor’s narration closes on a dismissive note of fantasy or, more accurately, disillusionment: “whatsoever that [the thirteen departed foreigners] have said could be taken where they came but for a dream” (MW, 470). Indeed, it may be the case that the sailors are free, but free to what ends? To what benefit would they return “home” if that occasion would only serve them to be held mad in their native lands? Who would choose to be discredited and disbelieved in their own homes? In the face of such a challenge and standing against the full force of reason, who would give up the image of perfection the Bensalemite history has presented the sailors? Tellingly, the sailors quickly adopt a position of suspiciousness and anxiety toward themselves in the encounter with their hosts. Here, in the first moment of anxiety, the formulation of humanity is phrased as a kind of vigilance. The narrator-captain admonishes his company accordingly, to avoid the problem of the human: Besides we are come here amongst a Christian people, full of piety and humanity: let us not bring that confusion of face upon ourselves, as to show our vices or unworthiness before them. Yet there is more . . .: who knoweth whether [the commandment to be cloistered for three days] be not to take some taste of our manners and conditions? And if they find them bad, to banish us straightways; if good, to give us further time. For these men that they have given us for attendance may withal have an eye upon us. (MW, 461)

This passage never places the company’s vices into question; instead the issue is keeping their untoward inclinations under rigid control and out of sight. The face-to-face question of recognition is not only one for philosophy, here it is also a matter of political savvy and perhaps one of psychology—the captain orders that there should be nothing to “bring that confusion of face upon ourselves.” The kind of exchange the sailors drive for at this point is already one sided: they seek to reciprocate the “piety and humanity” their hosts have shown to them fully. Such a humanity in effect carries out policies of incorporation and assimilation forcing independent decisions based on external and intellectual criteria to serve the state. I suggested earlier that the narrative position that humanity occupies at the outset of the fable is eventually closed off by the

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concerns Bacon shows for the work of science, which is carried out through Solomon’s House, “the College of Six Days’ Work” (MW, 464). At the beginning of the final discourse, one that we see foundering on the ambivalence between exhortation and payment, the Father states the purpose or charter of his institution: “The end of our Foundation,” the Father claimed, is “the effecting of all things possible” (480). And yet in a political mode, we have just seen that this foundation for science fails to provide an absolute institutional claim on the narrator at a moment when his humanity would seem to direct his compassion to those ends. A political conception of humanity cannot foreclose the distress that its scientific conception must endure when reason proves insufficient to virtue. The problem of the human, here, is that such virtue is in excess of reason, just as virtue stands in excess of science at every moment. Bacon’s conclusion in the question of humanity breaks apart the conditions of reason—human scientific understanding does not fit seamlessly with its political understanding. The prophetic moments embedded in the New Atlantis clearly still resonate with the plus ultra motto Bacon had inscribed on the frontispiece of his Instauratio Magna. The Father’s exhortation presages a continued influence of Bensalemite science across the political and natural philosophical world;31 but the practice of humanity that the Bensalemite ambassadors bring to their endeavors is not as completely secured in Bacon’s utopia as the effects they promise. Bacon’s development of the conception of humanity increasingly acknowledges the insolubility of this paradox. Virtue in nature is a raw condition of being, but humanity demands a supplement to natural virtue, called reason. Neither does this supplement arise simply in one area of human endeavors, nor does it remain in any single form. The laws of reason, hence the problem of the human, trouble the waters Bacon’s ship of estates casts out upon in search of a plus ultra that does not stand in 31 On colonialization and the New Atlantis, see Charles Whitney, “Merchants of Light: Science as Colonialization in the New Atlantis,” in Francis Bacon’s Legacy of Texts, ed. William Sessions (New York: AMS Press, 1990), 255–68; Albanese, New Science, New World, 112ff.; and Rose-Mary Sargent, “Bacon as an Advocate for Cooperative Scientific Research,” in The Cambridge Companion to Bacon, ed. Marrku Peltonen (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), 146–71.

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excess of its own capacity to envision what the future will bring. As Bacon’s chaplain, William Rawley, noted at the foot of the last page in his first edition of the New Atlantis, “the rest was not perfected” (Works 3:166). So it is for science, and so it would remain for the Baconian heritage of science even as the Royal Society found new potential spaces for virtue to emerge from the “boscage” that conceals the problem of the human. Berea College

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The Glamorous Echoes of Godly Print Thomas W. Dabbs Arise for it is Day —Motto of John Day’s print shop

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rom roughly 1557, the charter year of the London Company of Stationers, there was within the City of London an increase in the circulation of printed works and an unprecedented increase in literacy and semi-literacy within a growing population increasingly able to afford cheap printed works. As scholars of literacy during this period have repeatedly pointed out, it is difficult to determine precise levels of literacy during the Elizabethan period. What is more pertinent is recent research into the accelerated relationship between literacy and word of mouth, what David Cressy calls the “spillover from the literate to the illiterate.”1 There was also a spillover from illiterate or oral culture into literate or print culture; and while it is doubtful that Elizabethan London went through a wholesale transformation from orality to literacy, the city certainly saw an unprecedented upsurge in the popular exchanges between the culture of print and what was spoken or heard on the streets. Recent study of early modern sound and hearing, much of it dealing with the public theater, prompt a more detailed examination of how specific physical structures worked as echo chambers to process speech acts both on and off the stage.2 Here I shall examine the

1 David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980), 14. See also Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), 150. 2 The seminal work on auditory London is Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago:

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physical area of Paul’s Cross and how this venue echoed the sounds of religious print well before the era of the theaters. The first significant cycle of the echo of print erupted during the years immediately following the Stationers’ charter and before the echoes of print made their way, years later, to major public theaters.3 By the Elizabethan period if not before, the area in and around Paul’s Church had become more of a public marketplace than a holy church. Surrounded by booksellers, the great nave, Paul’s Walk, became a vast echo chamber for printed works, a place where newsmongers came to hear what John Earle later called its “strange humming or buzze, mixt of walking, tongues and feete.”4 This is where, according to Ben Jonson, ungainly and pretentious fops attempted to speak and act out the manners prescribed or proscribed in books sold, in a number of cases, at the west door of the nave.5 The preaching pulpit, Paul’s Cross, on the northeast side of Paul’s church, was an equally significant venue for the echo of print. Paul’s Cross had been a public pulpit for centuries, but it was transformed during this time into a center that broadcast religious thoughts that echoed and were echoed by religious texts circulating in the streets before and after a sermon. The echoes from religious print literally echoed from the walls of the north transept and the Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999). On the soundscapes of the early modern theater, see Gina Bloom, Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), Kenneth Gross, Shakespeare’s Noise (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2001), Wes Folkerth, The Sound of Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 2002), and Keith M. Botelho, Renaissance Earwitnesses: Rumor and Early Modern Masculinity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 3 On relationships among playwrights, actors, audiences, and printers see Robert Weimann, Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel eds., Performance to Print in Shakespeare’s England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), and Douglas Brooks, From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000). 4 John Earle, Microcosmography (1628), ed. Alfred S. West (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1897), 92. 5 Ben Jonson, Every Man Out of His Humour, ed. Helen Ostovich (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 2001), 3.1.

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choir outside the enormous cathedral as fiery sermons were heard by multitudes. In 1557 the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers, newly relocated to Peter’s College on the southwest corner of St. Paul’s Churchyard, was granted a royal charter under the Marian authorities. The Stationers’ edifice itself is the third significant physical structure propelling the echoes of print heard in the City of London during the early Elizabethan period. The charter makes it clear that, aside from royally sanctioned imprints, only freemen of the Company or its agents would be able to engage in producing printed material. The charter clearly acknowledged concern for the potentially explosive elements of a rebellious public consciousness inspired by print. The preamble declares that it should be a “remedy” for “certain seditious and heretical books, rhymes, and treatises” that were “daily printed and published by divers scandalous malicious schismatical and heretical persons.”6 Heretical books would be of no concern, of course, without the attendant fear of clamorous public response to such printed works. A number of studies have framed the charter as an overt attempt by royal authorities to censor free thought by co-opting tradesmen in the print industry. The crown’s first priority was to protect the crown, and Elizabethan authorities, when they came to power soon after, confirmed the Marian charter. It is certainly true that the charter sought to protect the crown against insurrection and to secure state religion, and, in doing so, it restricted freedom of speech. But what must be noticed is the connection between the empowerment of these tradesmen, their impressive central office, and the surge in public response to the editions that their now royally sanctioned concerns would print and distribute.7 What the royal authorities missed and modern scholars of the charter have also missed is the resounding upsurge of the echo of print from the streets of London, from Paul’s Walk, 6 Edward Arber, ed., A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554–1640 (London, 1875–94), 1:xxvii. 7 See Cyprian Blagden, The Stationer’s Company: A History, 1403– 1959 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1977), 19; and D. F. McKenzie, “Printing and Publishing 1557–1700: Constraints on the London Book Trades,” in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Vol. IV: 1557–1695 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002), 554.

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and from the public pulpit following the charter—echoes that came from and then fed the print shops and bookstalls around St. Paul’s, and that propelled the religious print work itself and invested it with power and thus a new form of glamour. One example of the new echo effect is the polemical religious debate, or competition, conducted by John Jewel and Thomas Harding primarily during the 1560s. Jewel’s Protestant views were approved by the Stationers’ Company and printed by John Day and Reginald Wolf in London. Harding, a Catholic apologist, was in exile. His responses to Jewel were printed in Leuven and Antwerp, and, though not sanctioned by the Stationers’ Company, they were heard publicly if only in the disputation of his stance. Given the evidence that very large crowds often attended the sermons at Paul’s Cross and that more and more of these people were familiar at least in part with printed versions of this dispute, such debate, raging in print and from an open pulpit, apparently became something of a spectator sport during the years following the charter. Such echoing activity, while of dubious benefit for the crown, was good for the print industry.8 In 1559, just two years after the charter, Stow recorded a Paul’s Cross congregation engaging in the newfangled practice of singing metrical psalms: “you may now see at Paul’s Cross after the service six thousand people, young and old, of both sexes, singing together.”9 As one doubts that so many people had memorized the words, meters, and melodies of these psalms, there must have been a common printed text. Stanley Morison suggests that this text was probably the metrical version of the psalms of David prepared by Sternhold and Hopkins and published in repeated cheap editions throughout the 1550s.10 The echoes of the printed psalms from Paul’s Cross soon echoed from the public sermon into a finer edition of the The Whole Booke of Psalmes released by John Day in 1564. 8 For more on the Jewel-Harding debate, see Gary W. Jenkins, John Jewel and the English National Church: The Dilemmas of an Erastian Reformer (Burlington: Ashgate, 2006), 73–85. 9 Qtd. in Stanley Morison, English Prayer Books: An Introduction to the Literature of Christian Public Worship (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009), 105. 10 Ibid., 105.

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Yet even the singing of psalms was not entirely removed from the echoes of combative theology. The habit of singing after a sermon from biblical texts was Calvinist in origin, and it was meant as an affront to the longstanding liturgies of the Catholic church and the recitations from the Book of Common Prayer, recently approved by the Church of England. Moreover, the title page of Day’s edition offers a challenge to popular culture by indicating that the songs within should displace “al ungodly songes & balades, which tend only to the nourishing of vyce and corrupting of youth.”11 Thus the echoes of printed and vocalized hymns were valorized in their opposition at once to religious authority and to the perceived corruptions of folkways unguided by the new God of the Bible. A New Testament that a common reader could afford and carry was printed in Geneva in octavo in 1557, followed by quarto versions of the full Bible in 1560 and 1561. The Geneva Bible, with its glossary notes and roman type was, according to Gordon Campbell, “intended for private study.”12 This was an exciting prospect, in part because the Stationers’ Company did not approve an edition of the Bible for the next eighteen years. David Daniell holds that before the London printings in the mid-1570s the Geneva Bible was “freely available in England in large enough numbers to stir Archbishop Parker into initiating his rival Bishop’s Bible in 1568.”13 No doubt resistance to the Geneva editions from the establishment added to its attractiveness. This affordable book with its verse divisions empowered common readers to recognize and cross-check the echoing claims coming from the pulpits, print shops, and public stages. The diversity of publication indicates that the freemen of the Stationers’ Company were more focused on building their trade than deciding which texts should and should not be printed. The trade side of the publishing business, so apparent in and around Paul’s Church, so busy and loud, was often indifferent to its chartered mandate to preserve the commonweal, at least in the eyes of certain early Elizabethan religious reformists. Some noticed early on how cavalier the 11

Qtd. in ibid., 107. Gordon Campbell, Bible: The Story of the King James Version (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010), 26. 13 David Daniell, The Bible in English: Its History and Influence (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2003), 265. 12

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print industry had become, and thought the Company should have been much more in touch with the will of God and the common good, especially when it came to the restriction of what they saw as unsavory translations. Reformists, who themselves were central to the market for print, were keenly and despairingly aware of the fact that where there is profit to be made, “the devil drives,” to echo Faustus. There were a number of complaints in particular about stories translated, apparently for an eager readership, from Italian sources. Roger Ascham complained that “it is pitie, that those which have authoritie and charge to allow and dissalow bookes to be printed, be no more circumspect herein than they are” in response to what he called the “bawdie” Italian stories distributed by freemen of the company such as Richard Tottel during the 1560s.14 But, to use a saying of Thomas Heywood’s—who, like Ascham, was published by John Day—the freemen were well aware “what side their bread was buttered on.” As long as they did not find themselves in the way of the Crown, they could allow the printing of any titles they felt would contribute to the profit of their trade. With the exception of such fairly minor diversions into Italy and other ungodly locales, the industry, when it sought popular sales, seemed more focused on the immediate notoriety of religious conflict—the raging polemics and often-violent actions that drove this comparatively larger print market. Indeed, sales of bawdy stories owed much to the promotions they received from the religious writings and public sermons that damned them. Whatever complaints religious reformists had against the printing of bawdy stories, it was religious print itself that fueled and sustained the popular market for books echoing on the street and also fueled suspicion about the trustworthiness of the new content in religious works. One could argue that religious writing, matched with the echoes of public performance from the pulpit, ultimately provided a template for how to move cheap books on many other alluring topics into the hands and voices of buyers on the street. The most influential freeman of the Stationers’ Company, John Day, seems to have invented the art of popularizing religious print works with such writers as Thomas Becon. No one has ever ranked 14

Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster, ed. Edward Arber (Boston: Willard Small, 1888), 162.

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Becon among the most important voices of the period, but he took most of his reformist colleagues to school when it came to drawing a popular audience. Through the 1540s and 1550s, Becon’s small, short, and theatrically polemical tracts presented a formula for success, if one assumes that repeated titles and editions reflect successful sales. His complete works, designed to be a collection to edify readers with the whole of Becon’s principles of religion and sound prayer, was entered into the Stationers’ Register in 1560 and issued in large folio volumes by John Day in 1564. The set apparently underachieved, but perhaps this was meant to be the case. Day may have been taking a longer view with the Becon project, as he did with his folio printings of John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs in 1563. It seems that Day understood that the echoes of expensive works, achieving as they did in pure mass a certain amount of fame for the writer and prestige for the edition itself, promoted the sales of inexpensive works by the same writers. One immediate example that suggests this market strategy is the release of Foxe’s Brief Exortation, which was printed and distributed in cheap octavo by Day the same year. I shall consider the Day-Foxe collaboration in more detail below. In the comparatively small environs in and around St. Paul’s, word would have gotten around quickly concerning which writers were catching the attention of those on high and which editions were being added to the shelves of the wealthier buyers. Becon’s writings no doubt contributed to the buzz in Paul’s Walk, and perhaps their echoes contributed to Becon’s Sick Man’s Salve, issued by Day during the same period as an inexpensive self-help treatise on preparing one’s soul for the afterlife. Sick Man’s Salve was first printed in 1558 and echoed through the streets of London in multiple cheap editions throughout the Elizabethan period. Though Becon’s themes hail back to pre-Elizabethan times, his style in Sick Man’s Salve, which Patterson describes as “theatrically bossy longwindedness,” was apparently fitted to the tastes of a populace becoming increasingly hungry for the echoing sensations of bombastic presentations on religious topics.15 In 1566 Becon preached 15

Mary Hampson Patterson, Domesticating the Reformation: Best Sellers, Private Devotion, and the Revolution of English Piety (Cranbury, NJ: Associated Univ. Presses, 2007), 101.

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one of the Lent sermons at Paul’s Cross. “His powers as a preacher must have been considerable,” writes his nineteenth-century editor; “for we are informed, not only that generally the people flocked to his discourses, but that on the special occasion just mentioned so deep was the impression made, that the lord mayor requested of the archbishop of Canterbury, that Becon might be appointed to preach one of the Spital sermons the ensuing Easter.”16 The great open space for religious performance art in the city center was Paul’s Cross pulpit, just on the other side of St. Paul’s nave from the offices of the Stationers’ Company and only a short walk from Day’s shop at Aldersgate, where Becon’s work was on routinely on offer. Paul’s Cross had long been a venue for those who wished to eye public spectacles. Scholars since Millar Maclure have noticed that the pulpit, in architectural form and theatrical function, must have influenced the Elizabethan public theater in significant ways. According to Maclure the penitent would often stand in the plain view of attendees and wear “a white sheet, carrying faggots and a taper, signifying the death by burning which he deserved and often suffered.”17 Bishop Grindal specified that the offender be positioned against the pulpit for public display, and sometimes the preacher struck the penitent and asked for recantation. These sermons would report news hot off the press, sensationalized propaganda. In his discussion of the jeremiads that were delivered from Paul’s Cross during this period, Peter Lake points out that print works sounded “from pamphlet to pulpit and back again.”18 These sermons cited grosser, not godly, pamphlets that featured “the whore, the rake and the aspiring, greedy artisan or merchant” to serve their dual purposes of “turning the world the right way up” and also to spice the preachers’ performances with popular images of human depravity.19 Paul’s Cross had been the place where, some fifteen years before the charter, Becon was forced, in theatrical 16 John Ayre, ed., The Early Works of Thomas Becon (Cambridge: The Parker Society, 1843), xiii. 17 Millar Maclure, The Paul’s Cross Sermons: 1534–1642 (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1958), 16. 18 Peter Lake, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists, and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2002), 335. 19 Ibid., 336.

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fashion, to burn his books and twice to recant his heretical beliefs publicly.20 There is some irony in the fact that beliefs once deemed heretical would echo so freely through the streets of London near the same pulpit. The greatest and best-known example of the glamour of the new religion during the 1560s was John Day’s ambitious edition of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, or Book of Martyrs, a folio imprint with intricate and often gripping woodcuts of burned and tortured martyrs designed to expose the horrible abuses of the Roman church. This massive work was subsidized by patrons and probably Day himself.21 Although a work of its size could never have penetrated the popular marketplace as deeply as smaller works issued by Day and others, the buzz it created no doubt resounded strongly on the streets and in the nave of St. Paul’s. Foxe certainly enjoyed a more direct celebrity by reaching the ears of the commoners via his public sermons from Paul’s Cross and with other cheaper imprints of his perspectives in print. His Good Friday sermon of 1570, a highminded defense of the Protestant doctrine of redemption, echoed from the pulpit into an affordable quarto entitled A Sermon of Christ Crucified. Of course by that time Foxe’s Acts and Monuments had helped to make a name for the author. His sermon echoed quickly into a cheaply printed edition that was released by John Day the same year. Such publishing efforts to spread the news of redemption were certainly redeemed by the pennies of the commoners, and Foxe’s sermon echoed into several reprints in affordable editions over the following years. Day had an in-depth understanding of how to manage the echoes of the St. Paul’s marketplace for profit. John King asserts that Day followed the example of Becon, whom he calls Day’s “protégé,” in testing the market first with cheap editions of popular religious writing before risking larger, more expensive editions.22 It seems, too, that Day understood the converse of this strategy: that the release of expensive editions afforded the writer greater celebrity. Day thus cultivated the overall market for further cheap editions that were 20

Early Works of Thomas Becon, viii. John N. King, Foxe’s “Book of Martyrs” and Early Modern Print Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006), 91. 22 Ibid., 83. 21

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distributed by him and others after 1557, and now under reasonably stable rights and protections that he had not enjoyed during the Marian period. Along with Becon’s work, Day had gained the rights for such popular texts as the Whole Book of Psalmes. By understanding how to cross-market the controversial echoes from expensive editions and, in the case of Foxe and others, the celebrated and sometimes fantastical performances from Paul’s Cross, Day and other entrepreneurs drove forward the local demand for cheap editions that further echoed controversies on the streets of London. The desire for religious texts was further cultivated by sponsoring religious institutions that began to seek a wider distribution of religious works in partnership with members of the Stationers’ Company. The 1552 folio imprint of the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer was primarily distributed to churches, but it was released again after the Elizabethan reconfirmation of the charter in a more affordable quarto and then in cheaper octavo editions, obviously for the Paul’s churchyard bookstall. Also the pro-reform prayer book of Catherine Parr was reissued in even cheaper sixteenmo. The move to distribute prayer books seems sensible enough given the effort to consolidate the new national religious system. Nevertheless, several prayer books entered the City of London in the midst of fierce opposition. The often-reprinted Catholic primer popularly known as the Book of Hours was issued in various cheap forms in English during the same time by Day’s sometime partner, William Seres. And no doubt joining the prayer-book mix circulating in the Paul’s Church area were recent and very cheap sixteenmo editions in English of Calvin’s Book of Common Order, published in Geneva under the auspices of the controversial English Church in Geneva. It takes some effort nowadays to appreciate the public drama stirred up around St. Paul’s by prayer books, or to understand how such texts could became so fashionable amidst the controversy. But it was all too clear to contemporaries. Only the rich could afford the best editions, and the rich, said the controversialist William Turner, “obtain them out of ostentation, in order that they may seem godly.”23 A prayer book could be viewed as ostentatious and the holder disingenuous. I would note, by way of conclusion, that just such an idea is echoed from the public stage decades later in Hamlet, 23

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Qtd. in ibid., 111.

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when Polonius tells Ophelia to “read on this book,” while waiting on Hamlet to emerge so that he can be spied upon (3.1.43).24 “This book” would have been understood immediately by early audiences to be a prayer book. We assume Ophelia’s “reading” would be silent reading, but perhaps this is not the case. Polonius may intend that the prayers be read aloud to amplify the sounds of piety, and, in this specific case, to echo Ophelia’s false piety. After offering Ophelia the book, Polonius sugars his own hypocrisy by stating: “’Tis too much prov’d—that with devotion’s visage / And pious action we do sugar o’er / The devil himself ” (3.1.46–48). The point is not lost on Claudius, who overhears Polonius, and who, confronted with the image of a prayer book, is suddenly struck with guilt and, as an aside to the audience, confesses his own hypocrisy: The harlot’s cheek, beautied with plast’ring art, Is not more ugly to the thing that helps it Than is my deed to my most painted word. (3.1.50–52)

Hamlet, desperately vexed already by those who seem to be other than what they are, furthers this analogy between devotion’s false visage and the painted word when he realizes that Ophelia is only affecting to read her “orisons.” He lashes out with his advice to “Get thee to a nunn’ry” (3.1.120) and then says in disgust about Ophelia and women in general, “God has given you one face, and you make yourselves another” (3.1.143–44). To compare the brandishing of a prayer book with the cosmetics used by a whore or the falsely painted words of a murderer is to echo the echoes of print, pulpit, and public during the years immediately following 1557. Claudius and Hamlet echo from the stage the complaint that Turner had made years before and that John Earle would echo years later, when he said of the Paul’s Walkers that “for vizards you need go no farther than faces.”25 Aoyama Gakuin University 24 Quotations from Hamlet follow The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). Cf. Lake, who observes that “the pulpit, the stage, and the pamphlet press should be seen as being in competition for essentially the same audiences and a good deal of the same ideological and cultural terrain” (Antichrist, 484). 25 Earle, Microcosmography, 93.

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“More cullors than the Rainbowe caries”: Catholics, Cosmetics, and the Aesthetic Economy of Protestant England Andrew Tumminia

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olitics and political economy, to be sure, are implicated in every discourse on art and on the beautiful,” Jacques Derrida writes at the outset of “Economimesis” (3).1 Derrida’s subject, Immanuel Kant’s Third Critique, the Critique of Judgment, is no different, though the exact influence politics and political economy have on the Critique is not so certain. Tracing that influence is Derrida’s aim in the article, but he claims that the politicization of historical discursive networks impedes the type of analysis he wants to pursue in “Economimesis,” preventing him from isolating a point of origin and requiring him “once again to feign a point of departure in examples” (2). “Economimesis” exists in spite of discursive politicization and contextualization; my present analysis exists because of that politicization and contextualization. Focusing on Thomas Dekker’s post-Gunpowder Plot play The Whore of Babylon (1606) and early modern discourse surrounding English cosmetics use, I will examine the long and narrow of a particular sequence of imitation and representation in a specific historical system: the Protestant moral aesthetics of early reformed England. This discourse was not just about art; it was socially expansive and prioritized the ideological work of conscience-shaping. It aspired to be socially transformative, advancing an ideal of Englishness based on simplicity and virility.

1

Jacques Derrida, “Economimesis,” trans. R. Klein, Diacritics 11.2 (1981): 2–25.

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Dekker’s The Whore of Babylon captures the Protestant ideal of simplicity by contrasting it with Catholic adornment. Envisioning England as a Faerie realm, the play pits its figure of the pope, the Empress of Babylon, against Titania, an idealized Elizabeth. It chronicles three attempts by Catholic conspirators on Titania’s life and culminates in the defeat of the Armada. In the Lectori preceding the play, Dekker describes the middle course he tries to navigate between Protestantism and Catholicism: “In sayling vpon which two contrary Seas, you may observe, on how direct a line I haue steered my course: for of such scantling are my words set downe, that neither the one party speakes to much, nor the other (in opposition) too little in their owne defence.”2 Dekker claims that he has bound himself to harmony; equality and symmetry direct him. But he tips the scales of representation toward his own Protestant agenda. Julia Gasper has argued influentially that the play’s idealized portrayal of Elizabeth actually implies criticism of state policy toward Catholics in Dekker’s contemporary England.3 Dekker, she claims, elevates Elizabeth to a status that even she never attained, a tactic that would imply even deeper criticism of James, who already was thought well below Elizabeth’s standard. In light of Dekker’s vigorous anti-Catholic commitments, Gasper calls The Whore of Babylon “the definitive militant Protestant play” (62).4 Little scrutiny is needed before Dekker’s claims of balanced representation disintegrate; the play is so transparently and unapologetically ideological that one modern critic has deemed it “Dekker’s lame-brained anti-Catholic allegory.”5 Dekker presents an anti-Catholic allegory that foregrounds the formation of an idealized ideological English Protestant self. “Economimesis” offers an approach to analyzing the play. Since Kant seeks an encompassing 2 Thomas Dekker, The Whore of Babylon, lines 16–19, in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Fredson Bowers, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1958). 3 Julia Gasper, The Dragon and the Dove: The Plays of Thomas Dekker (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1990), 81. 4 For more on the play’s political context, see Susan Krantz, “Thomas Dekker’s Political Commentary in The Whore of Babylon,” SEL 35 (1995): 272–91. 5 Arthur Marotti, “Shakespeare and Catholicism,” in Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare, ed. Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay, and Richard Wilson (New York: Manchester Univ. Press, 2003), 222.

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discourse of the beautiful, Derrida breaks Kant down by pursuing what Kant’s system cannot contain. Militant English Protestant aesthetics, however, were exclusionary; my argument works toward what this aesthetic sense must contain but cannot acknowledge. What is true of Kant’s Critique holds for the play as well: both must be approached on their own terms. The aims and limits of militant Protestant aesthetics can be seen only by looking for what the discourse could not represent. Anticosmetics discourse typically depicts face paints as a technology of exterior, superficial deception. In this, in their foreignness, and in the coloring they allow, they coincide with the stereotypical papist menacing early modern English Protestant polemic. The central figure of Catholic cosmetics use is the Whore of Babylon, an Antichrist figure from the Book of Revelation popularly understood by early Protestants as a female figure for the pope. By defining themselves against popery, militant English Protestants advanced a negative sense of self; since they attributed all evil to popery, still-forming English Protestantism oriented itself according to what it was not.6 Nevertheless, in Dekker’s allegorical scheme, by displacing everything undesirable onto their essential others, the Catholics, Protestant militants could create at least the impression of absolute difference. However, it remains just an impression. Jean Howard has argued that cracks mar the façade of 6 Chen Bo Zhong has collaborated with other social psychologists to study what they term “negational identification,” self-identification of individuals or groups according to who or what they are not: “Unlike affirmational identities, negational identities focus on intergroup differences, defining individuals in terms of characteristics of others that they do not possess. With negational categorization, the outgroup becomes the central focus. Thus, the effect of negational identification is more of contrasting from the outgroup than assimilating to the ingroup. For negational identity, outgroups are ‘psychologically primary,’ in the sense that dissimilarity or distance from one’s outgroups comes before similarity to or attachments with ingroups. Consequently, opportunities for unequal treatment should lead people who identify themselves negationally to derogate outgroup members” (Zhong, et al., “Negational Categorization and Intergroup Behavior,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34.6 [2008]: 797). Zhong and his collaborators note that negational identification is particularly attractive when the need for distinctiveness is high (795, 797).

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Dekker’s ideological vision in The Whore of Babylon.7 Plaine-Dealing, the play’s clown, repeatedly points out Faerie vices. For Howard, these cracks are mistakes. But I suggest that they are mistakes of a certain sort. They, along with the English selves peeping out from behind the masks of the Netherlanders mentioned briefly in the play, glimpse the activities, largely commercial, that Dekker’s ideologically driven Protestant aesthetics could not wrap the chains of discourse around. The otherness within frustrates ideological representation, yet it also could not be expelled. Protestant polemicists conveyed their moral sense of the beautiful most tangibly when they defined it negatively, in contradistinction to representations of Roman Catholicism. That they did is not a sign of uncertainty or imprecision. On the contrary, they were merely honoring the fundamental dynamic of English Protestantism, which Anthony Milton characterizes simply: “Conflict with Rome was seen as being the essence of Protestantism.”8 The more conservative among English Protestants forced the issue and followed an overwhelmingly anti-Catholic, militant Protestant agenda. They helped to mold an overtly politicized notion of what was artistically and ritualistically valuable and, thus, permissible. Catholicism was therefore an integral part of the Protestant English conception of the beautiful, but in a wholly negative sense. Popery quickly became an umbrella term for a litany of vices; Protestant conceptions of popish corruption effectively set the range of what Englishness could be by specifying what Englishness was not. In “Economimesis,” Derrida describes an aesthetic tradition that dates back to Plato and Aristotle and winds its way into modernity, forming what he calls consecutively a “powerful chain” and a “long sequence” (2). The chain, though seemingly having always been there, actually has not always been there, and its history reveals its wear. Subject to time, the chain is affected by political contexts, historical introductions of “narrower sequences,” which are “[v]ery tightly interlaced with” the longer ones. Derrida notes that when 7 See Jean E. Howard, The Stage and Struggle in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 1993). 8 Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought 1600–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), 36.

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these sequences are “folded into a new system,” they “are displaced; their sense and their function change”; “[o]nce inserted into another network,” he notes, “the same ‘philosopheme’ is no longer the same” (2). Displaced and transformed, modes of conceptualization, such as those that produced discourses on aesthetics, are politically reanchored from one historical moment to the next. Thus, over time, Western aesthetics demonstrates both a continuity with and modification of the ever-lengthening chain of its past, which is but one strand forming a larger net of a culture’s overall discourse. So when Protestant English moralists wrote against the use of cosmetics, they did not inveigh against anything new, nor did they start a new chain of motifs. They exploited entrenched early modern English prejudices and created new ones. They imitated and extended a chain that already reached back centuries to the Church fathers and beyond. Their contentions were of a piece with the Fathers’—or so they argued. Yet, as Derrida would expect, there was something new in what they wrote, something characteristic of a different political environment. This insight resonates with some of the central assumptions in Frances Dolan’s Whores of Babylon.9 “Catholicism,” Dolan writes of the early modern English treatment of the Roman religion, “works not as a coherent identity but as a site at which available systems of distinction intersect” (6). Later, Dolan reasserts the elasticity of the term Catholic by arguing, “Catholics are rarely one thing or another, but usually both, thus blurring needful distinctions between categories,” and by citing Peter Lake’s contention that popery was “‘a free-floating term of opprobrium’” (18, 22). The break from Rome certainly introduced a new site for displacement, but that site was “subtle and shifting” and “had to be reasserted or recreated constantly” (23). In other words, the same old chains wrapped themselves around ever-new contexts, lengthening as they conformed to the altered shape of the emerging social reality. Protestant moralists could adopt the arguments against cosmetics advanced by an Augustine or an Ambrose, but when they charged those traditional arguments with anti-Catholic sentiment, they added links to the chain. The 9

Frances E. Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame Univ. Press, 2005).

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ancient roots of anticosmetics polemic, dating at least as far back as Ovid’s Medicamina Faciei Femineae, renders this re-engagement of the traditional discourse more pronounced. These networks of associations structure what Howard, discussing Thomas Tuke’s A Discourse Against Painting and Tincturing of Women (1616), deems the “slippage” from criticism of face paint toward the anti-Catholicism typical of anticosmetics polemic (37). These slippages expanded discourse. As we will see, they were also systemic. The full title of Tuke’s Discourse demonstrates the range of associations he makes in the text: A Discourse Against Painting and Tincturing of Women. Wherein the Abominable Sinnes of Murther and Poysoning, Pride and Ambition, Adultery and Witchcraft, Are Set Forth & Discouered. The “painting and tincturing” pairing yields further sins, themselves split into pairs. All of these “abominable sinnes” are relevant to a discussion of cosmetics use; pulling on the chain of one tugs at the others. Tanya Pollard captures a similar network in her description of Lucretia Borgia’s application of poisoned cosmetics in Barnabe Barnes’s The Devil’s Charter (1607): “Corrupt and duplicitous in every possible way—Italian, Catholic, female, adulterous, murderous, from a bad family—Lucretia meets her fitting end through the corrosion of poisoned face-paints.”10 The various signs of corruption are mixed into the poisons Lucretia applies to her face. The danger posed by cosmetics resided only partly in themselves—early modern writers routinely point out cosmetics’ corrosive properties.11 Far more dangerous was the deception they facilitated, how they befitted a character like Lucretia Borgia. The murderer, the adulterer, and the Catholic in early modern England each had something to hide. Each was a deceiver along the lines of a 10 Tanya Pollard, “Beauty’s Poisonous Properties,” Shakespeare Studies 27 (1999): 188. 11 For example, in Tracte Containing the Artes of Curious Painting, Carvinge and Buildinge (1598), Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo describes the effects of lead sublimate: “Wherefore such women as vse it about their face, haue always black teeth, standing out of the their gums like a Spanish mule; an offensiue breath, with a face halfe scorched, and an vncleane complexion” (Ll7). He continues, “So that simple women thinking to grow more beautifull, become disfigured, hastening olde age before the time, and giving occasion to their husbandes to seeke strangers insteede of their wiues; with diuers other inconveniences” (Ll7v).

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Borgia, and cosmetics were a technology intended to trick. Painted women were deemed whores and were posited as early modern versions of the bible’s Jezebel and Whore of Babylon, ignominious designations they shared with Roman Catholics. Painted faces deceived, tempted, and blasphemed, just as the pope and Jesuits did. Popery was constructed as repugnant to Protestant sensibilities; Derrida’s critique culminates in an extended discussion of disgust. His search for the other that breaks Kant’s economy of imitation guides, if silently, “Economimesis.” He finds it eventually in vomit, inducing it (so to speak) in order to take Kant in a most un-Kantian direction. Derrida uncovers the economies latent in Kant’s Critique so that he can raze them in the name of the other: And we are not yet defining economy as an economy of circulation (a restricted economy) or a general economy, for the whole difficulty is narrowed down here as soon as—that is the hypothesis—there is no possible opposition between these two economies. Their relation must be one neither of identity nor of contradiction but must be other. (4)

As pervasive as economy is in the article, Susan Blood contends, “In Derrida’s reading, the concept of economy remains indeterminate” (837)— partly, it would seem, because “Economimesis” is an article of the “not yet.” The sense of circulation and exchange Derrida traces in the article relates to vicariousness; he outlines an economy of imitation predicated on exchangeability, or a vicariousness of representation. By the end of the article, it is clear that Derrida’s reading had never quite settled on its terms because he had yet to find within Kant’s Critique what was inherently other to it, what the Third Critique’s economies of likeness, its economimetic systems, expelled. Derrida discovers it in the disgusting, but merely “the disgusting” is not enough, because even vomiting can be sublime, and “[a]lthough repulsive on one of its faces, the sublime is not the absolute other of the beautiful” (21). So it is not simply vomit, but the smell of vomit that breaks Kant’s system; it is the “something more disgusting than the disgusting” (25). Derrida explains, What is absolutely foreclosed is not vomit, but the possibility of a vicariousness of vomit, its replacement by anything else—by some other unrepresentable, unintelligible, insensible, unassimilable, obscene other which forces enjoyment and whose irrepressible

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violence would undo the hierarchizing authority of logocentric analogy—its power of identification. (25)

“Economimesis” is challenging, but its general movement translates rather easily into moralist perspectives on culture; in fact, Derrida’s desire to challenge the great systematic statement of modern Western aesthetics suggests at least an ethical intent, and likely a moral one. In The Possessions at Loudun, Michel de Certeau considers the early modern exorcist to be sinister and charges the modern historian with following in his evil. Drawing on Claude Lévi-Strauss’s distinction between societies characterized by anthropemy, those that eject the other, and anthropophagic ones, those that absorb the other, de Certeau urges modern historians to pursue the second aim. There is no question that early modern English Protestant polemicists attempted the former. De Certeau notes that anthropemy derives from “emein, ‘to vomit.’”12 Derrida’s vomit returns. The Catholic was that which could not be assimilated definitionally into state ideology; Catholicism defined the limits of English representation. Protestant English ideology so deeply assumed its own distinction from popery that there could be no Catholic vicariousness for the English self. Catholicism within the boundaries of the English self had to be expelled, vomited. Catholicism was intrinsically other and so could not be stomached. Jesuits were banished; Catholicism was made illegal. Foreign papists complemented English Protestant sublimity; grotesque Continental Catholic villains abound in early modern English poems and plays. In spite of all this, domestic Catholics persisted. So elusive, so varying, so idiosyncratic, they were also so hard to represent. But that was not the case with the Whore of Babylon, who already had a lengthy history of representation. Tuke complains that cosmetics use “ill beseemes chast and godly Christians, suting fitter with the fauorites and louers of that Mother of harlots, araied in purple and scarlet colours, and full of allurements” (D1r). Cosmetics have long been associated with lasciviousness, so the fact that those opposed to their use linked them with harlotry makes sense. But Tuke goes further, identifying the “Mother of all harlots” via a simple marginal gloss that pulls another chain from a different 12

Michel de Certeau, The Possessions at Loudun (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000), 227.

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discourse into the fold: “Reu. 17:4–5” (D1r). The Mother of all harlots is the Book of Revelation’s Whore of Babylon, “the great whore that sitteth vpon many waters” (17:1), whom the Geneva marginal commentary calls a “Romish harlot” and “the newe Rome which is the Papistrie”13 (17:1a, 3d). Without acknowledging the shift, Tuke turns to the papacy in his next sentence, binding together the anticosmetics writings of the Church Fathers with Protestant exegesis of Revelation. He relays Bartolomeo Platina’s accusation that Pope Paul II “vsed to paint himself,” mockingly dismissing the practice as “a thing not to be found much fault with in such a friend vnto the Whore” (D1r). For Tuke, the association between painted pope, painted women, and the whore of the Apocalypse is seamless. The Whore of Babylon stages exactly what allows for Tuke’s yoking together of cosmetics, magic, fornication, and the Catholic Mass. Dekker captures it most vividly in the four-word stage direction introducing the play’s final of its four dumb shows—“Empresse on the Beast”—which Cyrus Hoy calls The Whore of Babylon’s most spectacular moment. Hoy adds that this scene was “the one readers of Spenser must have been waiting for,” noting that the dumb show represents “Dekker’s equivalent to The Faerie Queene, I.vii.16–18.”14 However, not only readers of The Faerie Queene would have been looking forward to the Empress’s appearance on the Beast, because both Spenser and Dekker were adapting the same source, the scriptural episode also indicated in Tuke’s marginal note, Revelation 17: [. . .] I sawe a woman sit vpon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemie, which had seuen heads, & ten hornes. And the woman was araied in purple & skarlat colour, & guilded with golde, & precious stones, and pearles, and had a cup of golde in her hand, ful of abominations, and filthines of her fornication. And in her forehead was a name written, A Mysterie, great Babylon, the mother of whoredomes, and abominations of the earth. (3–5) 13 Revelation 17:18 shows that the Whore represents a place: “And the woman thou sawest, is the great citie, which reigneth ouer the Kings of the earth.” All quotations come from the Geneva. 14 Cyrus Hoy, Introductions, Notes, and Commentaries to Texts in “The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker,” vols. 2 and 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980), 309.

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Gasper traces the English lineage of the association between the papacy and the Whore of Babylon, exploring both its place within the larger discourse of the papal Antichrist and its pre-Reformation roots. Though never an official part of reformed English doctrine, the link was held widely as pseudo-doctrine (69). English theologians and polemicists could draw on it casually, confident that their allusions would situate themselves within the common discourse. Despite its wide recognition, the association could nonetheless be inflected to serve a variety of Protestant viewpoints; if English Protestants disagreed on the extent of reform, they could maintain a unity despite their division by agreeing on papal evil. Thus, for Gasper, while both The Whore of Babylon and Protestant martyrologist John Foxe’s relatively unknown play Christus Triumphans (1556) are examples of what she terms Protestant comedia apocalyptica, she sees Dekker as the more militant of the two (75). Both could treat the pope as the Antichrist, but one could advance a more extreme agenda than the other. In this way, the papal Whore of Babylon represented a rallying point for discrete English Protestant agenda. The Book of Revelation provides the details—the iconography, the costuming, the beast’s look—absent from Dekker’s stage direction. The scene following the dumb show draws heavily on the same chapter of John’s Apocalypse. The Third King15 enumerates the charges against the Empress that the “Faiery Adders hisse”: they call you The superstitious Harlot: purple whore: The whore that rides on the rose-coloured beast: The great whore, that on many waters sitteth. . . . (23–26)

The colors, the beast, and the “many waters” stem from scripture; Dekker, perhaps following the Geneva marginal commentary,16 adds Harlot and the codeword for popish, superstitious. The Third King 15 Dekker identifies the Third King, the Empress’s most active agent, as Spain. For an analysis of his role in the play, see Sandra Clark’s “Spanish Characters and English Nationalism in English Drama of the Early Seventeenth Century,” BHS 84 (2007): 140–43. 16 To explain “full of names” in verse three, gloss e reads, “Ful of idolatrie, superstition and contempt of the true God.”

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elaborates on the waters, “Which they call many Nations” (27), by alluding to 17:15: “The waters which thou sawest, where the whore sitteth, are people, and multitudes, and nations, and tongues.” The kings of those nations, says the Third King, “Are slaues to your lust” (27–28), a reference to verse 2: “With whome haue committed fornication the Kings of the earth.” The Third King’s report also includes an allusion to the name written on the Whore of Babylon’s forehead: That on your brow (they say) is writ a name In letters misticall, which they interpret Confusion, by great Babylon they meane The Citie of Confusion. (4.4.55–58)

Her aims, her appearance, her complaints—everything about her points to her role in English Protestant eschatology. The same colors that mar her face are the emblems of her wardrobe. She has “carbuncles,” she dresses as one, and she rides on another. Sarah Scott notes that the play “teems with images of contagious disease, pollution, and porousness” (67).17 The Empress is the focus of these images, and “[h]er body, and those she manipulates, [. . .] function in the drama to metaphorize anxieties and fears of the strange that exist within and from beyond Fairyland’s (England’s) geographical boundaries” (67). Scott’s reading is thorough and persuasive, but it neglects cosmetics discourse, another chain in the same discursive fold. Annette Drew-Bear conflates the languages of disease and painting in her treatment of Dekker’s Whore of Babylon,18 and, 17 Sarah Scott, “The Empress of Babylon’s ‘carbuncles and rich stones’: The Metaphorizing of the Pox in Thomas Dekker’s The Whore of Babylon,” Early Theatre 7 (2004): 67–95. 18 “The obvious ‘small poxe’ (4) of ‘this freckled faced queane’ (57–58) who ‘hast collour enough in [her] face already’ (48), are pointed to as signs of fraud and corruption. Like Plaine-Dealing, who was previously ‘betwitched’ by Falsehood who ‘was then in [his] eye, the goodliest woman that euer wore the fore part of Sattin’ (61–63), the audience instructed to see that the colored face of Falsehood signals deceit. Falsehood’s paint counterfeits Truth’s beauty and proclaims visually what Time declares verbally at the beginning of the scene: Falsehood ‘calles forth men / To their destruction’ (2–3)” (Annette Drew-Bear, Painted Faces on the

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historically, Hugh Platt’s Delights for Ladies (1602) suggests ways that pox sufferers could seek remedy through beauty recipes. He includes entries for various whitening agents as well as advice for how “To helpe face that is red or pimpled,” “How to take away any pimple in the face,” and how “To take away the freckles of the face” (G4r–v, H2r, H3r). Once diseased, a person is diseased; the promiscuous Catholics of polemic may irresponsibly spread contagion, but they cannot will infection away. The cosmetics user, however, has greater choice and, therefore, greater agency (at least from the polemicist’s position, uninterested in the fairness of social norms and ideals). Disease signifies corruption; cosmetics indicate deception. The Empress responds to the “Confusion” rumor: View our forehead? Where are we printed with such Characters? Point out these markes: Which of you can lay A finger on that Moale that marks our face? (4.4.58–61)

The painted woman can hide her blemishes through artificial means, and so can the Empress: “They say you throw mists before our eyes, / To make vs thinke you faire” (Third King 62–63). The mist she uses to deceive those who gaze upon her corresponds to cosmetics use. Tuke chides the painted woman, “And is not this a tricke of a wanton, to vse these arts to procure and t e [sic] the eies of people to thee, or to gaine some vnfortunate seruant?” (D2v). The sins of both the venereal disease carrier and of the cosmetics user manifest as colors on the face. The colors characteristic of the Whore are not coincidental. More than carnal overindulgence accounts for them: They say the robes of purple which you weare, Your scarlet vailes, and mantles are not giuen you As types of honor and regality, But dyed so deepe with bloud vpon them spilt, And that (all or’e) y’are with red murder gilt: They drinke euen in that golden cup, they sweare Renaissance Stage: The Moral Significance of Face-Painting Conventions [Lewisburg, Bucknell Univ. Press, 1994]: 49–50).

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Is wine sophisticated, that does runne Low in the lees of error, which in taste, Is sweete and like the neate and holsome iuyce Of the true grape, but its ranke poyson downe. (Third King, 4.4.39–48)

In Dekker’s dramatic allegory, means and ends are inseparable.19 Thus, while the manner in which the Empress achieves her appearance, indeed, makes all the difference, those means are inextricably linked to their result through a simplified allegorical schema. Her robe is purple, but that purple is a result of murder. Likewise, the purple truly on her face must stem from sexual promiscuity. In the Discourse, Tuke puns repeatedly on die, but Dekker’s allegory gives the pun a grotesquely literal twist. Together, her murderous and licentious ways color Dekker’s Empress, referred to in the play’s Lectori as “that Purple Whore of Roome” (l. 6). These robes give the appearance of regality, but they serve, as do cosmetics, merely to cover corruption. Nor is depravity limited to her person. Her equally ornate golden cup may appear an appropriate vessel for wine that tastes “like the neate and holsome iuyce”; however, both appearance and taste, accidental qualities, mask poison. With the Empress, poison always resides within, in her person and in her chalice/vagina (“a cup of golde in her hand, ful of abominations, and filthiness of her fornication” [Rev. 17:4]). As is the case with a brightly marked poisonous plant, her appearance should be a sign, but that presupposes familiarity with the sign system. It is a sign system anchored in scripture; Dekker merely extends its chain of representation. Still, the play does not presuppose its characters’ familiarity with that sign system; all must experience Protestant Truth. Meeting Truth, a confused Plaine-Dealing asks how he can know she is “the right truth,” and Truth offers a simple explanation: “Because I am not painted” (3.3.2). This response is not enough for PlaineDealing, a well-traveled foreigner coming to rest on English shores 19 The Geneva Bible explains, “Antichrist is compared to an harlot because he seduceth the worlde with vain wordes, doctrines, & outewarde appearance” (Rev. 17:1b). Another gloss specifies the signification of the Whore’s robes: the Whore is “the newe Rome which is the Papistrie, whose crueltie and blood sheding is declared by skarlat” (Rev. 17:3d).

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from Babylon, and he sarcastically retorts, “Im’e sure your fairest wenches are free of the painters” (3.3.4–5). Truth is more concerned with establishing her credentials: Besides I am not gorgious in attire, But simple, plaine and homely; in mine eyes, Doues sit, not Sparrowes: on my modest cheekes, No witching smile doe dwell: vpon my tongue No vnchast language lies: my Skins not spotted With foul disease, as is that common harlot, That baseborn trueth, that liues in Babylon. (3.3.6–12)

Truth uses the word not three times to describe herself, no twice, and but once. In other words, she defines herself negatively, not positively. She defines herself through her opposite, which is her negation. Truth can be known, then, not by what she is, but by what she is not. Dekker, whatever his assumptions and intentions are, does not depict a Truth that is valuable and desirable in herself; rather, the value and desirability of Dekker’s Protestant Truth stem from what she does not embody. She is not immodest in appearance or speech. She is not elaborate in her dress. She is not marked by cosmetics or disease. If the absence of all these characteristics indicate what Truth is, then the presence of those same characteristics reveal what Truth is not, a false truth, Babylon’s “baseborn trueth.” Faerie Land’s Truth, the real, plain Truth, represents an ideal only insofar as she is not un-ideal. The subsequent dumb show picks up on Truth’s description of her counterpart and, with it, the focus on appearances. In the dumb show, baseborn truth, now called Falsehood, is “attir’d as Truth,” and Time, a newly entered commentator on the dumb show, tells his daughter that Falsehood “counterfets thy voyce” (4.1.2). Yet Falsehood is noticeably different. Not only does she imitate Truth in order to “[call] forth men to their destruction” (Truth, 4.1.2–3), something actual Truth would presumably never do, but she also has set up her own banner outside the cave from which she has emerged and bears spots on her face. Plaine-Dealing wonders why she displays the colors of her flag when she “hast collour enough in [her] face already” (4.1.48). Falsehood should be easy to recognize.

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But it is not that simple. After the dumb show, Time proposes trailing Falsehood (“How full of the small poxe shee is [PlaineDealing 4.1.4]) and her new protégé, the infamous Jesuit Edmund Campion (“Campeius” in Dekker’s play), but Plaine-Dealing fears they will follow them “[t]o the gallowes,” adding that “this freckled faced queane, may be a witch” (4.1.57–58). Plaine-Dealing did not always have this fear, though. Time is quick to remind Plaine-Dealing that “[t]his is the Truth, that did bewitch thee once” (61). An incredulous Plaine-Dealing, who had just expressed similar superficial confusion about Campeius (“what good cloathes hee weares, and yet is a villaine?” [38–39]), laments, “Is this speckled toade shee? She was then in mine eye, the goodliest woman that euer wore fore part of Sattin” (63–64). The satin/Satan pun may be lost on PlaineDealing, but it would not be lost on the audience; she dons Satan. The Empress is no longer the beautiful woman he had taken her to be. Now, Plaine-Dealing sees her as an emblem for the promiscuity of “these female creatures,” a case demonstrating what happens “when they deale with two or three Nations: how quickly they wear carbuncles and rich stones? now shee is more vgly then a bawd” (4.1.64–66).20 However, the artificiality of her beauty is obvious only, as in the discovery of all counterfeits, when compared to the authentic: “fairness it selfe doth cloth her / in men’s eyes, till they see me, and then they loath her” (Truth, 4.1.67–68). Howard considers Plaine-Dealing’s social satire a sign of the play’s failure to represent its ideology convincingly. She argues that Plaine-Dealing “would not have had to ask” “if Truth’s identity were so obvious” (56). Protestant exegesis of the Book of Revelation suggests, however, that he would. The Geneva gloss for the mysterious markings on the Whore of Babylon’s forehead reads, “Which none can know to avoide but the elect” (Rev. 17:5h). Plaine-Dealing had first to embrace Faerie Land’s Truth as his truth before he could see Catholic Truth as a good English Protestant should.21 In Buying Whiteness (2005), Gary Taylor contrasts Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess with The Whore of Babylon to support 20

On the London gem trade, see Scott, “Empress,” 86. His disorientation is similar to the knights’ reaction to Duessa’s stripping in The Faerie Queene 1.8.49. 21

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his notion that Middleton attempted “in 1624 a wholly unprecedented act of artistic creation.”22 Though both plays allegorize “the struggle between Protestant virtue and Catholic vice,” Taylor sees Middleton’s contrasting black and white chess pieces as entirely different from anything Dekker accomplishes in The Whore of Babylon: “Dekker’s nationalistic and moral binaries do not inhabit visual binaries, or any kind of coherent visual design” (135). Though Taylor finds Middleton’s play more artistically compelling, he concedes that Dekker better reflects early modern English life than does Middleton’s black-Catholic/white-Protestant dichotomy: “Indeed, in the social iconography of the day, Protestant piety was usually indicated not by expensive and wasteful white vestments, but by plain black clothes” (135–36). Nevertheless, Taylor implies that, in the absence of a coherent visual system, color is ultimately irrelevant to Dekker’s play. Without question, Middleton innovates through A Game at Chess’s abstract visual design, but that does not mean The Whore of Babylon fails to use color to appeal meaningfully to what the play’s prologue calls “the Optick sence” (Pro. 10). The opening dumb show demonstrates the importance of color from the outset of the play. It begins with Truth, “vncrownd: her haire disheveld,” dressed in mourning attire and “sleeping on a Rock” (Pro. 27–28). Truth’s father, Time, is costumed, like his daughter, “in black,” and he carries his traditional properties, “(as Sithe, Howreglasse and Wings) of the same Cullor [black]” (Pro. 29–30). They are in mourning because England is Catholic. However, as Queen Mary’s funeral procession passes, his costume is “shifted into light Cullors,” and his properties that are “altred into siluer” (Pro. 36–37). Truth, for her part, emerges “Crowned” and “cloathed in a robe spotted with Starres” (Pro. 37–38), perhaps as some anthropomorphized version of the Star Chamber—the royal legal court rising in importance under the Stuarts. The scheme is not dichotomized, but it is contextually coherent: Truth and Time are dressed in black because they mourn the return of English Catholicism under Mary; they change their costumes because they have realized that Mary has died and Protestant Eliza-

22

Gary Taylor, Buying Whiteness: Race, Culture, and Identity from Columbus to Hip Hop (New York: Palgrave, 2005), 136.

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beth has acceded to the throne. From the start of the play, Dekker uses color and ornamentation to convey meaning. A few lines into the first scene, however, Dekker complicates the straightforward symbolism of the funerary dumb show. The Empress, the play’s enemy of Truth, complains about “That strumpet, that inchantresse,” who “Calles her selfe Truth,” donning “robes / White as is innocence” (1.1.56–57). Truth’s initial black robes have become white with the reinstitution of English Protestantism. From the Catholic perspective, however, she wrongfully assumes the pure whiteness of actual truth. Issued from the Empress in this play, the appraisal is ironic. The play considers the Empress its strumpet and enchantress; she is identified with the play’s character Falsehood. Yet she directs the same charges toward Truth later leveled at Catholicism. Truth, the Empress claims, pretends to be Catholic Truth; Protestant Truth “has stolne faire Truths attire, / Her crowne, her sweet songs, counterfets her voyce, / And by prestigious tricks in socerie, / Ha’s raiz’d a base impostor like Truths father” (1.1.59–62). The play and the Empress do not recognize the same truth, which also means that the Protestant and the Catholic ideas of truth do not coincide. Howard acknowledges the contrast between the opening dumb show and the opening scene, observing, “the first scene of the play at once underscores the fact that how one interprets these events really is a matter of interpretation” (54). She identifies a “game of ‘J’accuse’” carried through the play (54), as the papal Empress and Protestant Fairies cast each other in the same disparaging terms. Since the terms both sides use are identical, they are also, ultimately, arbitrary: “The effect is to call attention to the political motivations underlying such readings, the malleability of signifiers to the interpretive determinations of various readers” (54). The Truth from one perspective is Falsehood from another. Derrida’s opening assurance in “Economimesis” applies to The Whore of Babylon: Dekker’s politics are implicated in his understanding of the beautiful. His ideology may not be rigidly color coded, but he conveys ideology through color nonetheless. There is little doubt that Dekker’s ideological heavy-handedness betrays the personal convictions that blind him to the ambiguities bound up in his subject, but ambiguity is built into what he is trying to capture. For Howard, “the play constructs the difference

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between Protestant and Catholic, Englishmen and foreigners, chiefly as a difference between an allegiance to essential, unchanging truth and an allegiance to illusion and false appearances” (52). This is certainly true of the play, but its Catholics try to create the appearance of essential, unchanging truth, a truth they do not see as illusory. The central problem of representation in The Whore of Babylon stems from the identical rhetoric used by each side; Taylor is right that there is no black-white clarity in the play. Dekker’s Catholics do not conceive of themselves as the play depicts them; on the contrary, Catholics and Protestants claim to possess the truth and to be sole possessors of that truth. The play gestures toward a binary structure of Protestant Truth opposed to Catholic Falsehood, but while there can be only one Truth, there can be many falsehoods. Insofar as Dekker solves the problem, he does so through the multiplicity of Catholic representations and the duplicity of Catholic agency. Dekker’s Catholics are infinitely variable, as is evident through the Empress’s orders to the three kings (of France, the Holy Roman Empire, and Spain) who serve her as they attempt to infiltrate the Faerie court to woo Titania: Empr. Draw all your faces sweetly, let your browes Be sleeked, your cheekes in dimples, giue out smiles, Your voyces string with siluer, wooe (like louers) Sweare you haue hils of pearle: shew her the world, And say shee shall haue all, so she will kneele And do vs reuerence: but if shee grow nice, Dissemble, flatter, stoope to licke the dust Shee goes vpon, and (like to serpents) creepe Vpon your bellies, in humilitie; And beg shee would but with vs ioyne a league, To wed her land to ours: our blessinge, goe. 3. King. When mines are to be blowne vp, men dig low. All three. And so will wee. (1.1.102–11)

The Empress does not mean her command to draw metaphorically. Catholics are those who decorate their faces and adorn their wicked voices in order to seduce. Dekker emasculates the three Catholic kings with the language of cosmetics. Consistent with the terms of Dolan’s argument, the Empress charges them to “draw all your faces sweetly.” The comparison highlights the disingenuousness of

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their sweet looks, sleeked brows, dimpled cheeks, and smiling faces. The command to draw corresponds with the idea that their behaviors, their interests, and their “faces” are put on. The charge to silver their voices also focuses on adornment, in this case the appearance of their words. Dekker is quick to remind his audience of the familiar result of Catholic scheming: “When mines are to be blowne vp, men dig low.” The Third King gestures toward the event that occasioned this Gunpowder Plot play. For Dekker, donning fake Catholic faces logically and inevitably leads to conspiracy and threat. Before seducing Campeius to the papal cause, the Third King asks his companion, “Stands my beard right?” (2.2.1). He continues, “I must looke graue, / White haires like siluer cloudes a priuledge haue, / Not to be search’d, or be suspected fowle” (1–3). The papist devils assume pleasing aspects and shapes, but they participate in the same evil, dissimulations, and counterfeiting, that drive men to “dig low.” Dekker had already explored popish multiplicity in The Double PP (1605), very much a companion piece to The Whore of Babylon. In that brief poem, Dekker asserts that the Jesuit “varies / More cullors than the Rainbowe caries, / Hee’s Brown, hee’s Gray, hee’s Black, hee’s white, / Hee’s Any thing” (B1v). Dekker’s Jesuit is a monstrous shape-shifter, comprised of various animal parts and yet able to mimic specific animals, who “puts on seuerall Transmutations” (A4r): “Sometimes hee’s neither beast nor man, / Nor Bird, nor a Leuiathan, / But an Essential diuell” (B1v). To the polemicist, Jesuits are infinitely other, a quality they share with painted women: “She is a rainbow, colors altogether,” writes Thomas Draiton in the prefatory verses to Tuke’s Discourse (B2r). Tuke connects Jesuits explicitly to cosmetics use in the Discourse’s longest antipopish passage. They are not users of cosmetics, but teachers encouraging their use: “Surely it is a doctrine that doth well enough become the Iesuites, who as they are the great Masters of lying, equiuocation, and mentall reseruation, so doe they make no difficultie, to teach that it is lawfull to belie the face, and the complexion” (H1v). Deception is the law of the Catholic Church. Disguise typifies the activities of Catholic minions at work in England, aligning their work with overall deceit of the play’s popish agents, including Falsehood. In the opening dumb show, the Faerie officials mourning Mary’s death wonder at, and are dazzled by,

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the brilliance of Protestant Truth, who has removed the veils from their eyes (38–41). They have been following the wrong version of truth, which the play posits as following Catholic Falsehood. Their initial wonder at the sight of transformed Truth does not draw attention to Truth but, rather, to the observers’ reaction. Truth has not changed as much as the Faerie eyes had become accustomed to Catholic dimness. The mourner’s veiled eyes prefigure the mist obscuring the Empress’s mysterious markings. However one determines the relative value of Middleton’s and Dekker’s artistic visions, the absolute visual contrast Middleton depicts between Catholicism and Protestantism would, simply, undermine part of Dekker’s polemical point: there may be one Truth, but recognizing her means embracing English Protestantism sincerely. For this reason, Dekker could not employ color with systematic consistency in the play; also for this reason, color is crucial to the play. Some colors have specific meaning, such as Catholic reds and purples, but all colors mean something, and how that color is produced is most important. When the three kings gain access to the Faerie court, they disguise themselves as masquers—“Three Princes (so themselues they style) [. . .] / From whence, they’l vs not learne” (1.2.70–71, emphasis added)—in The Whore of Babylon’s second dumb show, and after “doing honour to” Titania, Dekker instructs his readers, they “intreat to dance with her maides” (1.2.81, stage direction). After this display of amorous availability, the kings doff their disguises to Titania’s horror: “Your painted cheeks being off, your owne discouers [sic], / You are no Fairies” (82–83). Beyond acknowledging the fear of miscegenation expressed in this moment, we should note that the kings are not found out; instead, they expose themselves as non-Faeries by removing their cosmetics. Though at war with popery, the Faerie kingdom, this episode demonstrates, is vulnerable to Catholic influence and infiltration. It is surprised by Catholicism within. The oppositional logic of militant Protestant aesthetics holds for all the agents of Catholic evil in the play.23 The absolute alterity 23 Even the would-be assassins are all treated as alien to English culture. Campion’s name is Latinized in the play to “Campeius”; Ropus is Portuguese; and Paridell is a Welshman, and, according to Scott, Dekker’s audience would think of him “as not ‘entirely native’” (85). Scott maintains that, in the play, Babylon exploits Titania’s “subjects who

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of the papist disgusts Protestant mores, but that disgust is integral to the play’s representation of the English Protestant self. Dekker’s strict Protestant dichotomies cannot, however, accommodate the vices of that self. Howard finds Dekker’s ideological investments so obvious that his attempts to infuse the play with a sense of drama, for her, “end up destabilizing the binary oppositions upon which the play’s whole polemical strategy rests” (53). The play’s most disruptive character according to Howard’s reading is Plaine-Dealing, whom she calls “a Kent figure,” “through whom the difficulties of ‘proper’ interpretation are most comically registered and who ironically does the most to complicate the binary oppositions upon which the text’s dominant ideological positions depend” (55). From the perspective of ideological transmission, Plaine-Dealing’s characterization, his “social satire of the contemporary English scene [that] awkwardly contradicts the idealized panegyric of Elizabeth and her rule” (54–55), is, in a word, a mistake. Plaine-Dealing violates the oppositional logic of the play by exposing it as a construct. The Faerie people exhibit unsavory behavior. Catholicism is associated with magic, but Plaine-Dealing calls London (“the citie” [3.3.30]) “the maddest circle to coniure in, that euer raiz’d a spirit,” before enumerating the abuses he encountered there (3.3.36–37). Papists are the play’s sexualized beings, but PlaineDealing also announces the birth of an illegitimate child in the camp, though Titania, in effect, immediately christens him (5.6.34–52). Plaine-Dealing exposes what the play’s allegorical fantasy cannot support, what is more disgusting than its disgusting Babylonians. He reveals Faerie abuses, activities the play and Protestant polemic in general associate with Catholicism. The absolute Us-versus-Them dichotomy crumbles. In the Faerie camp bracing for the Armada, he informs Time of an “infection new broke out, if it be not stop from running, will choake vs all” (5.3.30–31). His description of the specific abuses suggests the reason for the Faerie’s vulnerability: A Broker and his wife that dropt out of the Hangmans budget but last day, are now eating into the Camp, and are victualers to it: their very Cannes haue hoopes of gold lace now,

are located on the political and ideological margins of Titania’s political body” (“Empress,” 81).

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that hand Captaines Ierkins all or’e but yesterday: fifteen Liefetenants haue eaten vp their buffe Ierkins with cheese and mustard: Nay this villaine of fourscore ith hundred has set vp three Armourers shops with harnesse caps, and pewter coates, that linde cleane out with Ale: the Rogue lies euery night vpon as many fethers which grew in soldiers hats, as will vndooe foure hundred schoolemasters to hire them for their boyes to goe a feasting. (5.3.33–43)

Plaine-Dealing’s description is comical, but it hinges on images of consumption and consumerism. Catholics are the ones Protestant aesthetics depict as appetite-driven, but that otherness here becomes part of the self. Upon hearing Plaine-Dealing’s further tale of the entrepreneur’s wife sparking the “flaskes and tuch-boxes” of “three Musketeers” who stop by to smoke—Catholic Spain dominated the tobacco trade in the early modern period24—Time’s immediate command is for Plaine-Dealing to “Goe ridde the Camp of these and al like these” (5.3.45–46, 48). But Time reconsiders, concluding that expelling the abusive Faeries would “scarce leaue two in the Army” (5.3.50). The idealized English Protestant breaks down when viewed outside the abstraction of allegory. Real-life English citizens elude the economy of representation. Concerns about English consumerism are deeply buried under another cover in the play. A brief moment in The Whore of Babylon’s glimpses the corrupting influence of Catholic countries outside the play’s Revelation scheme. Titania’s closest advisor, Fideli, mentions the Netherlands’ calls for English assistance: “Neighbors [. . .] / With whome our Faries enterchange commerce, / And by negotiation growne so like vs, / That halfe of them are Fayries” (2.1.233–36). This allusion to English agreements with the Low Countries is striking for the effect on national identity it attributes to commercial exchange. The Netherlanders are becoming English Faeries through their material contact with English goods. That the movement of trade would be solely from England to the Netherlands seems obvious in a play about an idealized Faerie Land. A 24 Dekker obliquely condemns tobacco in The Whore of Babylon on the grounds of its Spanish and hellish associations. Watching as the Armada burns, the Spanish king remarks, “The Diuels: the sea’s on fire, / The Diuel sure takes Tabacco” (5.4.4–5).

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realm depicted in its Golden Age is not going to absorb the traits of another, necessarily (according to the play’s fiction) lesser people. Still, recalling Gasper’s notion of idealization as a form of criticism, we can see the discussion of the Low Countries as self-reflexive. Both Dolan and Scott note the precariousness of English identity in the play,25 and the trade imbalance suggests the paranoid English insularity of a time when more and more foreign goods entered English markets. Despite recipes for homemade beauty treatments, England imported its cosmetics. Dolan accounts for English uneasiness with cosmetics use, in part, by noting that they were “costly and imported (hence ‘foreign’ and corrupting).”26 According to Hoy, the basis for chronicle accounts of the Elizabeth’s promised aid to the Low Countries is the Queen’s Declaration of the Cavses Mooving the Queen of England (1585) (332n.). The royal pamphlet discusses the two-way commercial activity between England and the Low Countries: “By [. . .] mutuall Bondes, there hath continued perpetuall vnions of continuall entercourses, from age to age the same mutuall loue hath bene inuiolablie kept and exercised, as it had bene by the worke of nature” (A4r). Throughout the pamphlet, Elizabeth emphasizes the time-honored naturalness of the “continuall traffique and commerce betwixt the people of Englande, and the Naturall people of these lovve Countries” (A3v). What is unnatural, Elizabeth contends, is Philip II’s policy toward the Low Countries, from which he acceded to the Spanish throne, specifically his decision “to appoint Spaniardes, forreners and strangers of strange blood, men more exercised in vvarres then in peaceable gouernment” (B1r). The Spanish ministers’ propensity for war has led the Netherlands to seek English aid, which Elizabeth grants for three reasons: to bring peace and restitution to the Low Countries, to attain “suretie for our selues and our realme to be free from inuading neighbours,” and to restore trade between England and the Netherlands (C4r). The order of Elizabeth’s list is no accident. The pamphlet reveals a deep paranoia about invasion, consistent with English insularity. Though the Armada would soon demonstrate the reality of the 25

Dolan, Whores, 55; Scott, “Empress,” 75. Frances E. Dolan, “Taking the Pencil Out of God’s Hand: Art, Nature, and the Face-Painting Debate in Early Modern England,” PMLA 108 (1993): 229. 26

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threat, it would also exhibit, ultimately, the difficulty of the task. The most obvious point is also perhaps the most crucial: as an island, England faced far less threat of invasion than did its Continental peers.27 Its borders were less permeable, except, notably, to trade. For this reason, it is interesting that Elizabeth charges Spain with exploiting the Low Countries for “priuate lucre” and “by means of certaine rebelles, to haue procured sundry inuasions of our Realme” (C1v). Elizabeth casts the political and military activities of Spain’s king, “our brother and allie” (B2v), not just in economic terms, but what we now recognize as capitalist ones. Spain enjoys newly gained private wealth and has demonstrated its purchasing power. Spain indulges its greedy agenda while Elizabeth assures that England has no mind to profit. Spain is an early master of the new marketplace. The Low Countries illustrate the potential impact of Spanish influence. While half the Netherlanders become Faerie-like through commerce, th’other halfe Blast their corne feilds [sic], deface their temples, cloth Their townes in morning, poyson hallowed founts, And make their goodliest Citties stand (like tombes) Full of dead bodies, or (like pallaces, From whence the Lords are gone) all desolate. (2.1.36–41)

Dekker blurs the line between commerce and war entirely; he does not mention the means employed by the unnamed corrupter of the Low Countries. He trusts his audience to know that Spain is to blame, and Fideli offers a bleak vision of what happens when Catholic Spain exerts itself in a foreign land. Social institutions, social centers, even the very land itself wither and die. Fideli speaks of the destructive consequences of Spanish “Lust and Auarice,” the barbarity, the ravishment, the “polution” it causes, all of which he figures in stereotypically hypersexual, Catholic terms (246–49). Fideli shows 27 Economic historian Douglass C. North lists England’s geographic insularity and the consequent diminished threat of invasion among his reasons for the relative strength of Parliament in early modern England compared to its French and Spanish analogues (Structure and Change in Economic History [New York: Norton, 1981], 156).

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Spain intent on deflowering the seventeen daughters of the Netherlands in every sense of the word. Dekker may have seen reason to offer a cautionary example. The strictly oppositional, anthropemic character of Protestant English self-definition suggests an isolationist ideal. England’s most vulnerable interior point was its marketplace, which consumed but did not expel what it took in. Dekker depicts through the Low Countries, whose inhabitants resemble Faeries but are not quite Faeries, the dangers of permeable boundaries. The play’s aesthetic, a product of its ideological investments, demands a Faerie self that is impervious to the influence of commodity contact. The Low Countries, according to the play’s fantasy, are fortunate for becoming Faerie-like. But the play’s ideology cannot accommodate the mutual influence of “enterchange”; the warning must be issued outside the Faerie self. Ejecting the surplus of one’s own production, the unilateral influence of commodity contact of goods in the play is acceptable. Exposing the Faerie self to the influence of Babylonian others occasions more than disgust. Pauline Croft finds the extent of Elizabethan England’s trade with Spain remarkable, especially considering the political climate of the day.28 English merchants conducted commerce with Spain without the government’s blessing, circumventing England’s efforts toward a Europe-imposed trade blockade on Spain, violating the spirit of the Anglo-Spanish War, defying “the current of antiSpanish hostility running through Elizabethan public opinion,” and disregarding the state’s avowed Protestantism.29 Croft portrays a mercenary commercial culture capable of “flexible responses in order to survive” during the war, one willing to mix privateering and illegal trade to pursue its own interests (302). She detects no

28 Pauline Croft, “Trading with the Enemy 1585–1604,” The Historical Journal 32 (1989): 295, 297, 300. 29 Croft’s 1989 article predates the wave of Catholic-centered revisionism in early modern studies, but acknowledges the then-recent work building toward it. Despite her explicit surprise at the mixture of religious sentiment, Croft depicts a complex English religious culture. Also, while she indicates that anti-Spanish prejudice was very real, she notes that it was limited. England was more popularly disposed against France, and the Elizabethan government had “to whip up anti-Spanish sentiment” after 1585 (300).

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“thrusting protestant sentiment” in the growing body of merchant literature of the late sixteenth century, yet she finds no reason to view Elizabethan merchants as “traitors or crypto-papists” (298, 302). “Rather,” she concludes, “they were the heirs and representatives of a cooler and altogether more pragmatic strand of Elizabethan opinion” (302). They were also heirs and representatives of an innovating marketplace, expanding regardless of state policy and operating with considerable independence from governmental control. Through commerce, English merchants thwarted the insularity promoted by an extreme Protestant aesthetic ill-equipped to represent them. They are a typical counterexample to Dekker’s allegory in The Whore of Babylon, which could represent absolutes and embody abstractions, but could not capture what hard-line Protestants would most want to know: the internal dispositions of individual early modern English men and women. Church papists, lukewarm Protestants, merchants, and consumers lived their ambivalence to the militant Protestant ideal, but they bore no consistently discernible faces to adorn. Spring Hill College

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