Shakespeare: a wayward journey

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Shakespeare

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Shakespeare A Wayward Journey

Susan Snyder

Newark: University of Delaware Press London: Associated University Presses

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䉷 2002 by Rosemont Publishing & Printing Corp. All rights reserved. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by the copyright owner, provided that a base fee of $10.00, plus eight cents per page, per copy is paid directly to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, Massachusetts 01923. [0-87413-795-0/02 $10.00 Ⳮ 8¢ pp, pc.] Other than as indicated in the foregoing, this book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (except as permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law, and except for brief quotes appearing in reviews in the public press.

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Contents Acknowledgments Foreword meredith skura Preface

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Romeo and Juliet: Comedy into Tragedy Othello and the Conventions of Romantic Comedy Ourselves Alone: The Challenge to Single Combat in Shakespeare Meaning in Motion: Macbeth and Especially Antony and Cleopatra King Lear and the Psychology of Dying ‘‘The Norwegians Are Coming!’’: Shakespearean Misleadings All’s Well That Ends Well and Shakespeare’s Helens: Text and Subtext, Subject and Object Wild Analysis: The Taming of the Shrew and Freud’s Dora ‘‘The King’s not here’’: Displacement and Deferral in All’s Well That Ends Well Naming Names in All’s Well That Ends Well Theology as Tragedy in Macbeth Ideology and the Feud in Romeo and Juliet Memorial Art in The Winter’s Tale and Elsewhere: ‘‘I will kill thee / And love thee after’’ Mamillius and Gender Polarization in The Winter’s Tale The Winter’s Tale Before and After

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19 29 46 62 78 93 106 118 135 151 170 181 197 210 221


Acknowledgments ON 14 SEPTEMBER 2001, SUSAN SNYDER DIED AFTER BRAVELY BATTLING cancer for more than two years. The previous spring, at my urging, she offered a collection of her essays, including three previously unpublished ones, to the University of Delaware Press, and the volume was accepted for publication. As she was too ill at the time to do some of the additional work that was necessary—for example, checking scanned articles for typos and other errors—a number of her friends and colleagues came to her assistance. These included Barbara Mowat, Rachel Kunkle, Gail Paster, Elizabeth Pohland, Virginia Vaughan, Georgianna Ziegler, and myself. By the fall of 2001, Professor Snyder’s condition had unfortunately worsened, so that I undertook to check the carefully copy-edited typescript and to read proofs. For any errors that remain in the printed volume, it is I who bear sole responsibility. I also undertook to write the editors of those journals in which many of the essays originally appeared for permission to reprint them. On behalf of Professor Snyder, I express thanks to all of them for graciously acceding to the requests, and to the Warburg Institute in London for permission to reproduce the illustration for the essay ‘‘Memorial Art in The Winter’s Tale and Elsewhere.’’ The titles of the essays and the journal references appear in the notes to her Preface. All Shakespeareans are much in Susan Snyder’s debt for the insights and scholarship represented not only in this collection, but in her other published work, and in the careers of those whom she influenced through her teaching. Those of us who had the privilege of knowing her and conversing with her, before and during her illness, will remember with affection and esteem her wonderful wit, breadth of knowledge, and deep interest in all aspects of human endeavor. She will be sorely missed. It is our hope, moreover, that this collection will stand as a sufficient representation of her achievement as well as a tribute to her critical acumen and lively manner of presentation. Jay L. Halio University of Delaware 7

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Foreword Meredith Skura

SUSAN SNYDER INTRODUCED ME TO SHAKESPEARE. IT WAS THE SPRING OF my senior year, and our undergraduate seminar met every week in her apartment, sometimes for five or six hours, talking, smoking, talking, nibbling the food she had set out, talking, and absently stroking her cat Peregrine as he wove in and out through all the legs dangling from her couch. Not much older than we were, Susan guided the meetings so adroitly that each of the half-dozen self-satisfied undergraduates there was convinced that she or he had discovered these exciting insights about the plays independently. That seminar was part of the reason that, despite my ambivalence about academic life, I became a Shakespearean. Later, Susan was an extremely generous mentor who introduced me to the world of professional Shakespeareans and to the professional mysteries of publishability. Lately, she has been introducing me to good novels and mystery stories by new authors she has scouted out. I am really happy at last to have the opportunity to do a little introducing of my own. I had always admired Snyder’s essays but not until sitting down to reread them did I realize fully how much pleasure they give. The essays’ scholarship commands authority, but always with unpretentious and easy reasonableness that encourages debate. Here is a voice one trusts as well as enjoys learning from. Above all, the essays are enlivened by her deadpan humor and by flashes of wit that signal anything from a sparkle in the eye to the glint of a rapier. The present collection includes three new pieces; but the twelve reprints, including the early landmark work on comedy and tragedy in Romeo and Juliet, reveal new facets as well. The last time I read the piece on ‘‘Ideology and the Feud in Romeo and Juliet’’ I had been looking for ideas for an impending class. Though I had come away then with useful material, only this time did I realize how much more Snyder’s approach to the play revealed—as, for example, when she presents the lovers’ shared sonnet as an escape from ideologically prescribed modes of courtship. There is always more in these essays, which are 9

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short but never small. Addressing the generic rupture in Othello, for instance, the second essay included here introduces a provocative theory of Shakespearean tragedy, the full implications of which would expand into the 1979 publication of The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare’s Tragedies. Not only that: the argument of the Othello essay originates in an analysis of Shakespeare’s early comic form and ends by finding analogies in the sonnets. The essays are arranged chronologically and, as Snyder suggests, they reflect developments in the larger world of literary criticism. The earliest work is New Critical, focusing especially on structure; later discussions draw on various psychological schools and on such editorial minutiae as speech headings, minutiae which widen out into far larger concerns touching on the significance of names and their implication for social practice. Beyond Snyder’s own list of reflected developments, readers will notice a variety of methodological and textual concerns, from occasional glimpses at the politics of masques and the courtly aesthetic to the pervasive feminist perspective that highlights the importance of female solidarity in All’s Well That End Well and leads to a savvy riff on varieties of male power in Petruchio’s ‘‘treatment’’ of Katherine and Freud’s of Dora. Contexts are important as well; hardly any of the essays remain within the boundaries of a single play, but instead extend outward to the Shakespeare canon and to literary, dramatic, theological, and other discursive fields. Most striking is the way Snyder, even in the early New Critical essays, regularly grounds formal questions in social matrices. The discussion of the comic in the 1974 Othello essay, to cite one example, puts a new spin on literary ‘‘convention’’ as it was then understood. Shakespeare’s comic conventions, Snyder argues, are based not on themes or plot but on ‘‘common underlying assumptions about love, the values and beliefs that go largely unquestioned and unanalyzed in the dialogue.’’ She thus looks forward to the ideological dimension of texts that the rest of us would only come to explore later on. Similarly, the essay on single combat (‘‘Ourselves Alone: The Challenge to Single Combat in Shakespeare’’), categorized by Snyder as an argument about structure, draws attention not only to literary form but also to a structural fault line in Shakespeare’s world between two differing attitudes toward the wars that, as she also shows, were so important and so constant a part of Elizabethan culture, though often overlooked by critics of the plays. While Snyder sees no continuous thread weaving through the volume, readers will find here a pervasive and quite Shakespearean concern with continuity—or the lack of continuity—itself. Many of

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the essays begin as meditations on sudden ruptures in the plays. Most notably, the early pieces trace generic rupture in such plays as Romeo and Juliet and Othello, which initially resemble comedies and then suddenly turn tragic. But other pieces uncover similar breaks at the level of plot. They explore ‘‘battles that don’t happen’’ (‘‘ ‘The Norwegians are Coming!’: Shakespearean Misleadings’’) or that are anticlimactically displaced by ‘‘the challenge to single combat’’; they trace the implication of a scene whose ‘‘whole content is precisely a non-happening’’ (‘‘ ‘The King’s not here’: Displacement and Deferral in All’s Well That Ends Well). The ‘‘Displacement’’ essay also explores discursive discontinuity, pointing out the telling ‘‘gaps, disjunctions, and silences’’ in Helen’s speech at moments when she shifts from self-assertion to self-negation. At other points, the essays reenvision such rupture as part of a larger cycle and find continuity in discontinuity. For example, Snyder suggests in ‘‘ ‘The Norwegians are Coming!’ ’’ that war and peace are not simply opposite conditions, one destructive and one healing. In certain plays—Titus, Coriolanus, Macbeth, Much Ado—war is instead a prelude to a peace that draws on the same human energies and is often as destructive as war. Several essays similarly reconsider the rupture between generations and the alternate worlds the generations represent: elders caught up in the ideology of the feud in Romeo are confronted by young lovers who threaten to defy it; the grizzled Antony holds to a dying chivalric ideal and is beaten by young Octavius’s modern pragmatic warfare; the aging Lear rants against the cruelty of a daughter’s ‘‘young bones.’’ But, as Snyder writes, what looks to Lear like apocalyptic betrayal of his authority seems only natural to Goneril and the ‘‘takeover generation.’’ Death—of comedy, of an ideology, of love, of a soldier, of unaccommodated man—is both ‘‘unnatural and inevitable,’’ a paradox of mortality that Snyder traces in its multiple forms throughout the canon. The most important continuity in these essays, however, is the voice engaging the reader in conversation and, in true Renaissance spirit, giving pleasure as it instructs. It is not perhaps as zany a voice as that of Monty Python, to whom Snyder compares herself, but it is equally distinctive. It certainly needs no further introduction.

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Preface THE ESSAYS IN THIS COLLECTION WERE WRITTEN OVER A PERIOD OF SOME thirty years. Some are linked by a basic approach, such as psychology, or by focus on a common text. Editorial work, brought to conclusion on All’s Well That Ends Well, and well advanced on The Winter’s Tale before illness caused me to give up the project, led me naturally to explore some aspects of these plays more deeply than was appropriate for inclusion in an introduction. But articles tend to cross categorical boundaries—one of the All’s Well spinoffs, considering displacement and deferral in that play, is founded on Lacanian psychology, while a study of Hermione’s statue in The Winter’s Tale seeks illumination of Leontes’ frozen mourning from another line of psychological investigation. Some essays, such as the study of single combat in three Shakespeare plays, have no obvious affinities with any of the others. Rather than on the one hand arbitrarily choosing a single category for those essays that fit more than one, or on the other hand inventing false connections where no natural ones existed, I decided on a temporal rather than a topical grouping. Arranged chronologically from work done in the sixties onward, these pieces sketch in a kind of intellectual autobiography, which also reflects developments in the larger world of literary criticism. Earlier essays are essentially New Critical in their address to the plays, with special attention to structure. My early bent to genre criticism, reflected here in the essays on Romeo and Juliet and Othello,1 as well as in a more extensive study, The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare’s Tragedies (Princeton, 1979), arose out of pedagogical need. Students in Swarthmore’s double-credit Shakespeare seminars were responsible for the entire dramatic canon—only thirty-seven plays in those days, to be sure, but far too many to discuss even in our lengthy once-a-week sessions. By grouping the works by genre for study and promoting generic thinking, I hoped to provide them a framework for addressing on their own the plays that were slighted in discussion. Whether this approach worked for the students or not, it certainly shaped my own critical thinking for a long time. Dramatic 13

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structure, not necessarily generic, also informs the studies of single combat and ‘‘misleadings’’2 and even the examination of motion imagery in Antony and Cleopatra and elsewhere.3 The application of thanatology to King Lear,4 written toward the end of this period, is possibly a harbinger of a new direction into psychology, although its theoretical base is quite limited. Like the turn to genre criticism, my approach in this essay was born out of need. I had written all but the final chapter of The Comic Matrix when I was paralyzed with writer’s block. My main point was to be the peculiar rhythm of King Lear, which keeps offering the possibility of a comic ending only to snatch it away and plunge us deeper into tragedy. I believed that that rhythm was there, but something prevented me from getting on with writing about it. Out of the resulting intense frustration there gradually emerged a sense of another rhythm coexisting with the fluctuation between despair and hope, an uninterrupted downward cadence of age, intensifying infirmity, and death. It recalled to me the stages of dying outlined by Elisabeth Ku¨bler-Ross in her study On Death and Dying, published several years earlier.5 (I had not in fact read Ku¨bler-Ross at that time; so powerful was the need to recognize and address the block-problem that I dredged up her five stages of dying from inactive memory of a New York Times review read casually some five years before.) What led me in the early eighties to a more thorough investigation of the various psychological schools was a new book-length project, which many years later saw the light of day as Pastoral Process: Spenser, Marvell, Milton (Stanford, 1998). As I searched for the psychic roots of pastoral process, investigations into Freud and his followers, the object-relations school, and finally Lacan began to color my work on Shakespeare as well as the lyric poetry that was my focus in the book. To read Freud decades after his time invites a complex reaction, compounded of admiration for his insights and impatience at his prejudices and blind spots. Impatience wins out in the only partly serious ‘‘wild analysis,’’ in which the Viennese patriarch turns out to be a near relation to the shrew-tamer Petruchio. 6 I might better have rebelled against Lacan, whose discontinuities and paradoxes are meant to destabilize and enrage the reader, and seldom fail of their purpose. With Lacan, I was tempted not to mock but to give up entirely. Yet what I could understand of his premises and processes proved too useful to ignore—in the book and also in explaining the discontinuities and silences of All’s Well.7 Those speculations on displacement and deferral began, however, not with Lacan but with close editoral scrutiny of textual detail, such as the break in Helen’s syntax and thought in All’s Well 1.1, as well

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as larger puzzles like her change of direction from Saint Jacques to Florence and the seemingly pointless scene that begins Act 5, in which the King, said previously to be at Marseilles, turns out to have moved on to Roussillon. Similarly, justifying the editorial decision to use generic rather than personal speech headings for certain characters led me to a more general consideration of names and their resonances in All’s Well.8 The echo of an earlier play in the name of the heroine started my thinking about A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a kind of subtext filling in the silences of All’s Well.9 In The Winter’s Tale the related questions of Mamillius’ age and the nature of his death sent me in quite a different direction, to social history of Shakespeare’s time, particularly the custom of ‘‘breeching’’ boys and its implications as a marker of separate identity.10 Here, too, there was a starting point in textual detail, the need to gloss Leontes’ term coat (1.2.197) as he sees his own childhood reenacted in his son’s. I explored the textual history of The Winter’s Tale from another angle in evaluating internal and external suggestions that the play as printed in the First Folio is a revision of an earlier version which left Hermione dead and ended with Leontes’ recovery of his daughter and his reconciliation with Polixenes.11 Another Winter’s Tale spinoff considers the celebrated statue of the last scene as we now have it, in the context of works of art that have substituted for living wives.12 Two essays grew out of specific occasions rather than general ones. To a team-taught course at Swarthmore in ‘‘Tragedy and Theology’’ I owe not only the context of the essay on fate and free will in Macbeth but also the text with which Shakespeare’s play is set in dialogue, the Biblical account of Hazael.13 I doubt whether I would ever have found his rather obscure story in 2 Kings without the help of my co-instructor, who also taught Hebrew Scriptures. The other occasional piece grew out of my single experience as a dramaturg, for a production of Romeo and Juliet at a local Pennsylvania repertory theater.14 Director and actors were primarily interested in the social milieu. As I thought about the prevalent structures and norms, particularly as they shaped the daily lives of the young principals, it struck me forcibly that the Montague-Capulet feud—lacking as it did not only history but content of any kind, yet strengthened by repeated reflexive behaviors—seemed to enact not an ideology but Ideology itself in its classic Althusserian definition. I didn’t pursue this at the time, since it would have been of no use to the actors, but when Shakespeare Survey some time later called for articles on Romeo and Juliet I had an idea to work out. Long ago the Folger Library ran a series of lunchtime talks in

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which scholars talked about their research in the context of past work and future plans. I was paired, rather dauntingly, with the late Sam Schoenbaum, certainly a giant in Shakespeare scholarship. His career in research unfolded with perfect logic, one project leading into another. Following on this discourse, I could only characterize my own lack of continuity in terms of the Monty Python motto: ‘‘And now for something completely different.’’ What is represented in this collection is not magisterial consistency but varied responses over the years to the demands of teaching and editing, and the changing directions of thought on Shakespeare.

Notes 1. ‘‘Romeo and Juliet: Comedy into Tragedy,’’ Essays in Criticism 20 (1970): 391– 402; ‘‘Othello and the Conventions of Romantic Comedy,’’ Renaissance Drama, n.s., 5 (1972): 123–41. 2. ‘‘Ourselves Alone: The Challenge to Single Combat in Shakespeare,’’ Studies in English Literature 20 (1980): 201–16; ‘‘ ‘The Norwegians are Coming!’: Shakespearean Misleadings,’’ in Elizabethan Theater: Essays in Honor of S. Schoenbaum, ed. R. B. Parker and Sheldon Zitner (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), 200–13. 3. ‘‘Patterns of Motion in Antony and Cleopatra,’’ Shakespeare Survey 33 (1980), 113–22. The expanded version in the present volume has been renamed ‘‘Meaning in Motion: Macbeth and Especially Antony and Cleopatra.’’ 4. ‘‘King Lear and the Psychology of Dying,’’ Shakespeare Quarterly 33 (1982): 449–60. 5. Elisabeth Ku¨bler-Ross, On Death and Dying (New York: Macmillan, 1969). 6. ‘‘Wild Analysis: The Taming of the Shrew and Freud’s Dora,’’ previously unpublished paper, 1990. 7. ‘‘ ‘The King’s not here’: Displacement and Deferral in All’s Well That Ends Well,’’ Shakespeare Quarterly 43 (1992): 20–32. 8. ‘‘Naming Names in All’s Well That Ends Well,’’ Shakespeare Quarterly 43 (1992): 265–79. 9. ‘‘All’s Well That Ends Well and Shakespeare’s Helens: Text and Subtext, Subject and Object,’’ English Literary Renaissance 18 (1988): 66–77. 10. ‘‘Mamillius and Gender Polarization in The Winter’s Tale,’’ Shakespeare Quarterly 50 (1999): 1–8. 11. ‘‘The Winter’s Tale Before and After,’’ previously unpublished paper, 2000. 12. ‘‘Memorial Art in The Winter’s Tale and Elsewhere: I will kill thee/And love thee after,’’ previously unpublished paper, 1997. 13. ‘‘Theology as Tragedy in Macbeth,’’ Christianity and Literature 43 (1994): 289– 300. 14. ‘‘Ideology and the Feud in Romeo and Juliet,’’ Shakespeare Survey 49 (1996), 87–96.

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Romeo and Juliet: Comedy into Tragedy

ROMEO AND JULIET IS DIFFERENT FROM SHAKESPEARE’S OTHER TRAGEDIES in that it becomes, rather than is, tragic. Other tragedies have reversals, but in Romeo and Juliet the reversal is so radical as to constitute a change of genre: the action and the characters begin in familiar comic patterns, and are then transformed—or discarded—to compose the pattern of tragedy. Comedy and tragedy, being opposed ways of apprehending the real world, project their own opposing worlds. The tragic world is governed by inevitability, and its highest value is personal integrity. In the comic world ‘‘evitability’’ is assumed; instead of heroic or obstinate adherence to a single course, comedy endorses opportunistic shifts and realistic accommodations as means to an end of new social health. The differing laws of comedy and tragedy point to opposed concepts of law itself. Law in the comic world is extrinsic, imposed on society en masse. Its source there is usually human, so that law may either be stretched ingeniously to suit the characters’ ends, or flouted, or even annulled by benevolent rulers. Portia plays tricks with the letter and spirit of Venetian law to save Antonio. The Dukes in The Comedy of Errors and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when the objects are family reunions and happily paired lovers, simply brush aside legal obstacles. Even deep-rooted social laws, like the obedience owed to parents by their children, are constantly overturned. But in the tragic world law is inherent: imposed by the individual’s own nature, it may direct him to a conflict with the larger patterns of law inherent in his universe. The large pattern may be divine, as it generally is in Greek tragedy, or it may be natural and social, as in Macbeth and King Lear. Tragic law cannot be altered; it does no good to tell destruction to stop breeding destruction, or to tell gods or human individuals to stop being themselves. In these opposed worlds our sense of time and its value also differs. The action of comedy may be quickly paced, but we know that it is moving towards a conclusion of ‘‘all the time in the world.’’ The events of tragedy, on the other hand, acquire urgency in their uniqueness and their irrevocability: they will never happen again, 19

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SHAKESPEARE: A WAYWARD JOURNEY

and one by one they move the hero closer to the end of his own time in death. In comedy short-term urgencies are played against a dominant expansiveness, while in tragedy a sense that time is limited and precious grows with our perception of an inevitable outcome. In its inexorable movement and the gulf it fixes between the central figure and the others, tragedy has been compared to ritual sacrifice. The protagonist is both hero and victim, separated from the ordinary, all-important in his own being, but destined for destruction. That is the point of the ritual. Comedy is organized like a game. The ascendancy goes to the clever ones who can take advantage of sudden openings, plot strategies, and adapt flexibly to an unexpected move. But luck and instinct win games as well as skill, and comedy takes account of the erratic laws of chance that bring a Dogberry out on top of a Don John and, more basically, of the instinctive attunement to underlying pattern that crowns lovers, however unaware and inflexible, with final success. Romeo and Juliet, young and in love and defiant of obstacles, are attuned to the basic movement of the comic game toward social regeneration. But they are not successful: the game turns into a sacrifice, and the favored lovers become its marked victims. This shift is illuminated by a study of the play’s two worlds and some secondary characters who help to define them. If we divide the play at Mercutio’s death, the death that generates all those that follow, it becomes apparent that the play’s movement up to this point is essentially comic. With the usual intrigues and gobetweens, the lovers overcome obstacles in a move toward marriage. This personal action is set in a broader social context, so that the marriage promises not only private satisfaction but renewed social unity: For this alliance may so happy prove To turn your households’ rancour to pure love. (2.3.91–92)1

The state that requires this cure is set out in the first scene. The Verona of the Montague-Capulet feud is like the typical starting point of the kind of comedy described by Northrop Frye: ‘‘a society controlled by habit, ritual bondage, arbitrary law and the older characters.’’2 Even the scene’s formal balletic structure, a series of matched representatives of the warring families entering on cue, conveys the inflexibility of this society, the arbitrary division that limits freedom of action. The feud itself seems more a matter of mechanical reflex than of

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ROMEO AND JULIET: COMEDY INTO TRAGEDY

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deeply felt hatred. As H. B. Charlton has noted, its presentation here has a comic aspect.3 The ‘‘parents’ rage’’ that sounds so ominous in the Prologue becomes in representation an irascible humor: two old men claw at one another only to be dragged back by their wives and scolded by their Prince. Charlton found the play flawed by this failure to plant the seeds of tragedy, but the treatment of the feud makes good sense if Shakespeare is playing on comic expectations. Other aspects of this initial world of Romeo and Juliet suggest comedy. Its characters are the minor aristocracy and servants familiar in comedies, concerned not with wars and the fate of kingdoms but with arranging marriages and managing the kitchen. More important, it is a world of possibilities, with Capulet’s feast represented to the young men as a field of choice. ‘‘Hear all, all see,’’ says Capulet to Paris, ‘‘And like her most whose merit most shall be’’ (1.2.30–31). ‘‘Go thither,’’ Benvolio tells Romeo, ‘‘and with unattainted eye / Compare her face with some that I shall show . . .’’ (1.2.89–90) and Rosaline will be forgotten for some more approachable beauty. Romeo rejects the words, of course, but in action he soon displays a classic comic adaptability, switching from the impossible love to the possible just as Proteus, Demetrius, Phoebe, and Olivia do in their respective comedies. Violence and disaster are not absent, of course, but they are unrealized threats. The feast yields a kind of comic emblem when Tybalt’s potential violence is rendered harmless by Capulet’s festive accommodation. Therefore be patient, take no note of him. It is my will; the which if thou respect, Show a fair presence and put off these frowns, An ill-beseeming semblance for a feast. (1.5.73–76)

This overruling of Tybalt is significant, for Tybalt is a recognizably tragic character, the only one in this part of the play. He alone takes the feud seriously: It is his inner law, the propeller of his fiery nature. He speaks habitually in the tragic rhetoric of honor and death: What, dares the slave Come hither, cover’d with an antic face, To fleer and scorn at our solemnity? Now by the stock and honour of my kin, To strike him dead I hold it not a sin. (1.5.57–61)

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Tybalt’s single set of absolutes cuts him off from a whole rhetorical range available to the other young men of the play: lyric love, witty fooling, friendly conversation. Ironically, his imperatives come to dominate the play’s world only when he himself departs from it. While he is alive, Tybalt is an alien. In a similar manner, the passing fears of calamity voiced by Romeo, Juliet, and Friar Laurence are not allowed to dominate this atmosphere. If the love of Romeo and Juliet is already imaged as a flash of light swallowed by darkness (an image invoking inexorable natural law), it is also expressed as a sea venture, which suggests luck and skill set against natural hazards, chance seized joyously as an opportunity for action. ‘‘Direct my sail,’’ Romeo tells his captain Fortune (1.4.113); but soon he feels himself in command: I am no pilot; yet, wert thou as far As that vast shore wash’d with the farthest sea, I would adventure for such merchandise. (2.2.82–84)

The spirit is Bassanio’s as he adventures for Portia, a Jason voyaging in quest of the Golden Fleece.4 Romeo is ready for difficulties with a traditional lovers’ stratagem, one that Shakespeare had used before in Two Gentlemen of Verona: a rope ladder ‘‘which to the high topgallant of my joy / Must be my convoy in the secret night’’ (2.4.201–202). But before the ladder can be used, Mercutio’s death intervenes to transform this world of exhilarating venture. Mercutio has been almost the incarnation of comic atmosphere. He is the best of gameplayers, endlessly inventive, full of quick moves and counter-moves. Speech for him is a constant play on multiple possibilities: puns abound because two or three meanings are more fun than one, and Queen Mab brings dreams not only to lovers like Romeo but to courtiers, lawyers, parsons, soldiers, maids. These have nothing to do with the case at hand—Romeo’s premonition—but Mercutio is not bound by events. They are merely points of departure for his expansive wit. In Mercutio’s sudden, violent end, Shakespeare makes the birth of a tragedy coincide exactly with the symbolic death of comedy. The element of freedom and play dies with him, and where many courses were open before, now there seems only one. Romeo sees at once that an irreversible process has begun: This day’s black fate on moe days doth depend [hang over], This but begins the woe others must end. (3.1.124–25)

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It is the first sign in the play’s dialogue pointing unambiguously to tragic causation. Romeo’s future action is now determined: he must kill Tybalt, he must run away, he is fortune’s fool. This helplessness is the most striking quality of the second, tragic world of Romeo and Juliet. That is, the temper of the new world is largely a function of onrushing events. Under pressure of events, the feud turns from farce to fate, from tit for tat to blood for blood. Lawless as it is in the Prince’s eyes, the feud is dramatically the law in Romeo and Juliet. Previously external and avoidable, it has now moved inside Romeo to become his personal law. Fittingly, he takes over Tybalt’s rhetoric of honor and death: Alive in triumph, and Mercutio slain? Away to heaven respective lenity, And fire-ey’d fury be my conduct now! Now, Tybalt, take thy ‘villain’ back again That late thou gavest me. (3.1.127–31)

Even outside the main chain of vengeance, the world is suddenly full of imperatives: against his will Friar John is detained at the monastery, and against his will the Apothecary sells poison to Romeo. Urgency becomes the norm as nights run into mornings in continuous action and the characters seem never to sleep. The new world finds its emblem not in the aborted attack but in the aborted feast. As Tybalt’s violence was out of tune with the Capulet feast in Act 2, so in acts 3 and 4 the projected wedding is made grotesque when Shakespeare insistently links it with death.5 Preparations for the feast parallel those of the first part, so as to underline the contrast when All things that we ordained festival Turn from their office to black funeral— Our instruments to melancholy bells, Our wedding cheer to a sad burial feast. (4.5.84–87)

I have been treating these two worlds as consistent wholes in order to bring out their opposition, but I do not wish to deny dramatic unity to Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare was writing one play, not two, and in spite of the prominence of the turning point we are aware that premonitions of disaster precede the death of Mercutio and that hopes for avoiding it continue until near the play’s conclusion. The world-shift that converts Romeo and Juliet from instinctive win-

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ners into sacrificial victims is thus a gradual one. In this connection the careers of two secondary characters, Friar Laurence and the Nurse, are instructive. In being and action these two belong to the comic vision. Friar Laurence is one of a whole series of Shakespearean manipulators and stage-managers, those wise and benevolent figures who direct the action of others, arrange edifying tableaux, and resolve intricate public and private problems. Notable in the list are Oberon, Friar Francis in Much Ado, Helena in the latter part of All’s Well, Duke Vincentio, and Prospero. Friar Laurence shares the religious dress of three of this quintet and participates to some extent, by his knowledge of herbs and drugs, in the magical powers of Oberon and Prospero. Such figures are frequent in comedy but not in tragedy, where the future is not manipulable. The Friar’s aims are those implicit in the play’s comic movement, an inviolable union for Romeo and Juliet and an end to the families’ feud. The Nurse’s goal is less lofty, but equally appropriate to comedy. She wants Juliet married—to anyone. Her preoccupation with marriage and breeding is as indiscriminate as the life force itself. But she conveys no sense of urgency in all this. Rather, her garrulity assumes that limitless time that frames the comic world but not the tragic. In this sense her circumlocutions and digressions are analogous to Mercutio’s witty flights and to Friar Laurence’s counsels of patience. The leisurely time assumptions of the Friar and the Nurse contrast with the lovers’ impatience, creating at first the normal counterpoint of comedy6 and later a radical split that points us, with the lovers, directly to tragedy. For what place can these two have in the new world brought into being by Mercutio’s death, the world of limited time, no effective choice, no escape? In a sense, though, they define and sharpen the tragedy by their very failure to find a place in the dramatic progress, by their growing estrangement from the true springs of the action. ‘‘Be patient,’’ Friar Laurence tells the banished Romeo, ‘‘for the world is broad and wide’’ (3.3.16). But the roominess he assumes in both time and space simply does not exist for Romeo. His time has been constricted into a chain of days working out a ‘‘black fate,’’ and he sees no world outside the walls of Verona (3.3.17). Comic adaptability again confronts tragic integrity when Juliet is faced with a similarly intolerable situation—she is ordered to marry Paris—and turns to her Nurse for counsel as Romeo does to the Friar. The Nurse replies with the traditional worldly wisdom of comedy. Romeo has been banished and Paris is very presentable. Adjust yourself to the new situation.

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Then, since the case so stands as now it doth, I think it best you married with the County. O, he’s a lovely gentleman! (3.5.218–20)

She still speaks for the life force. Even if Paris is an inferior husband, he is better than no husband at all. Your first is dead—or ‘twere as good he were As living here and you no use of him. (226–27)

But such advice has become irrelevant, even shocking, in this context. There was no sense of jar when Benvolio, a spokesman for accommodation like the Nurse and the Friar, earlier advised Romeo to substitute a possible for an impossible love. True, the Nurse is urging violation of the marriage vows; but Romeo was also sworn to Rosaline, and for Juliet the marriage vow is a seal on the integrity of her love for Romeo, not a separate issue. The parallel points up the progress of tragedy, for while Benvolio’s advice sounded sensible and was in fact unintentionally carried out by Romeo, the course of action outlined by the Nurse is unthinkable to the audience as well as Juliet. The memory of the lovers’ dawn parting that began this scene is too strong. Juliet and the Nurse no longer speak the same language, and estrangement is inevitable. ‘‘Thou and my bosom henceforth shall be twain,’’ Juliet vows privately (3.5.242).7 Like the death of Mercutio, Juliet’s rejection of her old confidante has symbolic overtones. The possibilities of comedy have again been presented only to be discarded. Both Romeo and Juliet have now cast off their comic companions and the alternate modes of being that they represented. But there is one last hope for comedy. If the lovers will not adjust to the situation, perhaps the situation can be adjusted to the lovers. This is a usual comic solution, and we have at hand the usual manipulator to engineer it. The Friar’s failure to bring off that solution is the final definition of the tragic world of the play. Time is the villain. Time in comedy generally works for regeneration and reconciliation, but in tragedy it propels the protagonists to destruction; there is not enough of it, or it goes wrong somehow. The Friar does his best: he makes more than one plan to avert catastrophe. The first, typically, is patience and a broader field of action. Romeo must go to Mantua and wait

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till we can find a time To blaze your marriage, reconcile your friends, Beg pardon of the Prince, and call thee back. . . . (3.3.150–52)

It is a good enough plan, for life if not for drama, but it depends on ‘‘finding a time.’’ As it turns out, events move too quickly for the Friar, and the hasty preparations for Juliet’s marriage to Paris leave no time for cooling tempers and reconciliations. His second plan is an attempt to gain time, to create the necessary freedom through a faked death. This is, of course, another comic formula; Shakespeare’s later uses of it are all in comedies. It is interesting that the contrived ‘‘deaths’’ of Hero in Much Ado, Helena in All’s Well, Claudio in Measure for Measure, and Hermione in The Winter’s Tale, unlike Juliet’s, are designed to produce a change of heart in other characters.8 Time may be important, as it is in The Winter’s Tale, but only as it promotes repentance. Friar Laurence, less ambitious and more desperate than his fellow manipulators, does not hope that Juliet’s death will dissolve the families’ hatreds but only that it will give Romeo a chance to come and carry her off. Time in the comic world of The Winter’s Tale cooperates benevolently with Paulina’s schemes for Leontes’ regeneration; but for Friar Laurence it is both prize and adversary. Romeo’s man is quicker with the news of Juliet’s death than poor Friar John with the news of the deception. Romeo himself beats Friar Laurence to the Capulets’ tomb. The onrushing tragic action quite literally outstrips the slower steps of accommodation before our eyes. The Friar arrives too late to prevent one half of the tragic conclusion, and his essential estrangement is only emphasized when he seeks to avert the other half by sending Juliet to a nunnery. It is the last alternative to be suggested. Juliet quietly rejects the possibility of adjustment and continuing life: ‘‘Go, get thee hence, for I will not away’’ (5.3.160). The Nurse and the Friar illustrate a basic principle of the operation of comedy in tragedy, which might be called the principle of irrelevance. In tragedy we are tuned to the extraordinary. Romeo and Juliet gives us this extraordinary center not so much in the two individuals as in the love itself, its intensity and integrity. Our apprehension of this intensity and integrity comes gradually, through the cumulative effect of the lovers’ lyric encounters and the increasing urgency of events, but also through the growing irrelevance of the comic characters. De Quincey perceived in the knocking at the gate in Macbeth the resumption of normality after nightmare: ‘‘the re-establishment of

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the going-on of the world in which we live, which first makes us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that has suspended them.’’9 I would say rather that the normal atmosphere of Macbeth has been and goes on being nightmarish, and that it is the knocking at the gate that turns out to be the contrasting parenthesis, but the notion of a sharpened sensitivity is valid. As the presence of alternate paths makes us more conscious of the road we are in fact traveling, so the Nurse and the Friar make us more ‘‘profoundly sensible’’ of Romeo’s and Juliet’s love and its true direction. After Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare never returned to the comedyinto-tragedy formula, although the canon has several examples of potential tragedy converted into comedy. There is a kind of short comic movement in Othello, encompassing the successful love of Othello and Desdemona and their safe arrival in Cyprus, but comedy is not in control even in the first act. Iago’s malevolence has begun the play, and our sense of obstacles overcome (Desdemona’s father, the perils of the sea) is shadowed by his insistent presence. The act ends with the birth of his next plot. It is not only the shift from comedy to tragedy that sets Romeo and Juliet apart from the other Shakespeare tragedies. Critics have often noted, sometimes disapprovingly, that external fate rather than character is the principal determiner of the tragic outcome. For Shakespeare, tragedy is usually a matter of both character and circumstance, a fatal interaction of man and moment. But in this play, although the central characters have their weaknesses, their destruction does not really stem from these weaknesses. One may agree with Friar Laurence that Romeo is rash, but it is not his rashness that propels him into the tragic chain of events but an opposite quality. In the crucial duel between Mercutio and Tybalt, Romeo tries to make peace. Ironically, this very intervention contributes to Mercutio’s death. Why the devil came you between us? I was hurt under your arm. Rom: I thought all for the best. (3.1.108–9) Mer:

If Shakespeare wanted to implicate Romeo’s rashness in his fate, this scene is handled with unbelievable ineptness. Judging from the resultant effect, what he wanted to convey was an ironic dissociation between character and the direction of events. Perhaps this same purpose dictated the elaborate introduction of comic elements before the characters are pushed into the opposed

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conditions of tragedy. Stress on milieu tends to downgrade the importance of individual temperament and motivation. For this once in Shakesperian tragedy, it is not what you are that counts, but the world you live in.

Notes 1. All Shakespeare references in this essay are to The Complete Works, ed. G. L. Kittredge (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1936). 2. Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 169. Although the younger generation participates in the feud, they have not created it; it is a legacy from the past. 3. Shakespearian Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948), 56–57. 4. Merchant of Venice, 1.1.166–74. 5. 3.4.23–28; 3.5.202–03; 4.1.6–8; 4.1.77–86; 4.1.107–8; 4.5.35–39; 5.3.12. 6. Clowns and cynics are usually available to comment on romantic lovers in Shakespeare’s comedies, providing qualification and a widened perspective without real disharmony. A single character, like Rosalind in As You Like It, may incorporate much of the counterpoint in her own comprehensive view. 7. Later, in the potion scene, Juliet’s resolve weakens temporarily, but she at once rejects the idea of companionship. The effect is to call attention to her aloneness: I’ll call them back again to comfort me. Nurse!—What should she do here? My dismal scene I needs must act alone. (4.3.17–19)

8. The same effect, if not the plan, is apparent in Imogen’s reported death in Cymbeline. 9. ‘On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’’ (1823), in Shakespeare Criticism: A Selection, ed. D. Nichol Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1916), 378.

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Othello and the Conventions of Romantic Comedy THE MOTIVES ARE SEXUAL LOVE AND JEALOUSY; INTRIGUE AND DECEPTION propel the plot; the outcome is engineered by a clever manipulator; the impact is personal, ‘‘domestic,’’ rather than political and cosmic. These features strike us as appropriate to Shakespeare’s comedies. Yet they also characterize one of his greatest tragedies. Othello is based, not on the chronicles and lives of the great that supply plots for most of the other Shakespearean tragedies, but on a novella in Giraldi’s Hecatommithi. Shakespeare often turned to tales of this sort for the plots and situations of his comedies; in fact, Giraldi’s own collection, the certain source of Othello, is a probable source for Measure for Measure and a possible one for Twelfth Night.1 Yet Othello is overwhelmingly tragic in movement and effect. Are the close ties to comedy at all significant, then? I shall argue that they are, that the tragedy is generated and heightened through the relation to comedy rather than in spite of it, and that Othello develops a tragic view of love by moving from the assumptions of romantic comedy to the darker vision already articulated in some of Shakespeare’s lyric poetry. To see how this is so, we need to look at comedy, and especially at that romantic mode that was dominant in Shakespeare’s comic writing in the decade or more preceding Othello. What are pertinent here are not the explicit themes of these plays but their common underlying assumptions about love, the values and beliefs that go largely unquestioned and unanalyzed in the dialogue but can be deduced from comic forms and conventions. Shakespearean comedy invariably presents as all or part of its initial situation individual characters in a single and unsatisfied state and directs them through plot complications toward appropriate pairings-off at the end. Plays like The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, even The Taming of the Shrew, find their generating tension in barriers between characters, and they stress the uneasiness of isolation even when those barriers are self-imposed. Singleness is no more satisfying to Olivia in her bored mourning or Kate in 29

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her temper tantrums than to the more approachable Rosalind and Portia. The plays’ unquestioning drive toward mass marriage suggests that young individuals are to be seen as incomplete identities, the hemispheres of Aristophanes’ myth in the Symposium which find rest and completion only in union with their opposite halves. The marriage-endings operate as symbols for full participation in life. Marriageable young people who deny or hesitate on the brink are all pushed in. The pushing may be a painful process, involving various kinds of corrective humiliation: Kate endures hunger and embarrassment, Olivia and Phebe fall in love with disguised girls, Beatrice and Benedick hear home truths about themselves in their eavesdropping, Bertram is publicly disgraced, Navarre and his men prove that ‘‘the tongues of mocking wenches are as keen / As is the razor’s edge invisible.’’2 One basic premise of Shakespeare’s comedies, then, is the value of pairing and participation. Unanimous approval extends from supernatural Oberon to bumpkin Costard; Jaques is the only significant dissenter, and even he is made to bless the Arden marriages (one of which he actively promoted) before bowing out of society to brood in his hermitage.3 Indeed, Jaques’ permanent residence in the forest has a certain irony, for his real adversary in this debate is nature itself. The naturalness of mating is explicit in some comedies (Love’s Labour’s Lost, for example), implicit in all. Those that promote release and resolution of conflicts by moving the action to an out-of-bounds locale—described for us spatially by Northrop Frye’s ‘‘green world’’ and temporally by C. L. Barber’s ‘‘holiday’’4 —give structural reinforcement to this sense of nature as love’s ally. For all of the artificial and magical elements in the forests of The Two Gentleman of Verona, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and As You Like It, nature in those places is less trammeled and perverted than in the polite, treacherous court of Milan, Theseus’s lawbound Athens, or the dominions where Duke Frederick sets the ethical standard by crimes against his kindred. Turned out or self-exiled from civilization, the lovers are righted and united in the woods. Love is natural, then, as well as right. Comedy answers to our wishes in this respect, not our fears. But comedy also affirms that love is irrational and arbitrary. Here the fear is dealt with not by ignoring but by disarming it. Bottom’s comment that reason and love keep little company5 holds true generally in these comedies. Oberon’s potent flower is an emblem, not only for the unreasonable passions of Titania, Lysander, and Demetrius, but for those that instantly enslave Orlando to Rosalind (but not Celia), Oliver to Celia (but not Rosalind), Navarre and his friends to the Princess and

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her friends (with balletic tidiness); and, less fortunately, Phebe to Rosalind, Proteus to Silvia, Olivia to Viola. If some of these shifts seem slightly less arbitrary than those of, say, Ariosto’s characters as they veer from one course to another with each sip from the fountains of love and hate, it is only that Shakespeare has provided for his final couplings an acceptable degree of compatibility in sex, rank, and temperament. But there is no suggestion that this compatibility was reasonably appraised by the lovers or that it influenced their decisions at all. This insistence that something as vital as the love-choice is totally beyond rational control might be a disturbing note in comedy, but it is not. Bottom is untroubled by his pronouncement, and by the fairy queen’s amazing dotage that provokes it. Lovers generally abandon what reason they have without a struggle, and this course appears to be the approved one: when they attempt to rationalize their new emotions, as Lysander does when the misapplied lovejuice compels him to love Helena, the result fools no one. Lysander

Helena

Not Hermia but Helena I love: Who will not change a raven for a dove? The will of man is by his reason sway’d, And reason says you are the worthier maid. Things growing are not ripe until their season; So I, being young, till now ripe not to reason; And touching now the point of human skill, Reason becomes the marshal to my will, And leads me to your eyes. . . . Wherefore was I to this keen mockery born? (2.2.113–23)6

What provides the security in which we dismiss Lysander’s attempts at reason with laughter and adopt instead the spirit of Bottom’s ‘‘gleek’’? In Midsummer Night’s Dream the most obvious answer is Oberon: love’s unreason cannot lead to destruction with this powerful and benevolent figure in charge. The other comedies we have been considering lack an Oberon, but they share what may be called an Oberon-principle. That is, the people whose extra wit and knowledge put them one up on the others are men and (more usually) women of good will. Rosalind deceives for Phebe’s good, Helena for Bertram’s, Petruchio for Kate’s, Portia for Antonio’s and Bassanio’s. And beyond the partial control of such characters is a benevolent universe that seconds the drive of nature to unite Jack with Jill, that allows happy coincidences, adjustments, and second chances. This operative benevolence is clear in Twelfth Night, where no character

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manipulates the happy ending; rather, the comic ‘‘natural law’’ of Illyria dictates that shipwrecks will not be fatal and that a chance meeting will save the situation just before it crosses into irrevocability with the deaths of Antonio and Viola. The same natural law of comedy prevents Silvia’s rape and Aegeon’s execution by timely encounters, insures that Claudio’s cruelty doesn’t quite kill Hero, gives time for Dogberry and Verges to bumble their way into awareness and uncover Don John’s villainy. The convention of ending comedies with marriage promised (Love’s Labour’s Lost, Two Gentlemen, Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night), or marriage celebrated (Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It), or marriage ratified emotionally or socially (Taming of the Shrew, Merchant of Venice, All’s Well That Ends Well, Twelfth Night) has a further corollary. Comedies in this dominant pattern7 by implication locate the important stresses and decisions of love in the courtship period. Their silence about postmarital shifts of direction suggests that there will be none, that once Jack has Jill nought can go ill—or, if couples like Touchstone and Audrey seem headed for less than perfect harmony, at least that the ‘‘story’’ is over. To sum up: Shakespeare’s comic forms and conventions assume (1) the value of engagement with a mate and with society at large, and (2) the cooperation of forces beyond man, natural and otherwise, in achieving this mating and forestalling the consequences of human irrationality and malice, as well as plain bad luck. To call these assumptions does not, of course, mean that Shakespeare or his audience accepted them without question as universally true. Rather, the playwright’s use of the comic formulas and the playgoers’ familiarity with them directed which aspects of their diverse perception of experience should be brought forward—wish as well as belief—and which should be held in abeyance. Comedy does not depend for its success on telling the whole truth, any more than tragedy does. The tragic truth of Othello develops out of a closer look at these very assumptions about love, nature, reason. Just as such a scrutiny logically comes after the first unquestioning acceptance, so Othello’s story is deliberately presented as post-comic. Courtship and ratified marriage, the staple of comic plots, appear in Othello as a preliminary to tragedy. The play’s action up until the reunion of Othello and Desdemona in Act 2, scene 1, is a perfect comic structure in miniature. The wooing that Othello and Desdemona describe in the council scene (1.3) has succeeded in spite of barriers of age, color, and condition of life; the machinations of villain and frustrated rival have come to nothing; the blocking father is overruled by the good

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Duke; and nature has cooperated in the general movement with a storm that disperses the last external threat, the Turks, while preserving the favored lovers. Othello’s reunion speech to Desdemona in Cyprus underlines this sense of a movement accomplished, a still point of happiness like the final scene of a comedy: If it were now to die, ’Twere now to be most happy; for I fear My soul hath her content so absolute That not another comfort like to this Succeeds in unknown fate. (2.1.187–91)

But at the same time that Othello celebrates his peak of joy so markedly, his invocations of death, fear, and unknown fate make us apprehensive about the post-comic future. This impression is reinforced indirectly by Desdemona’s mode of agreement (‘‘The heavens forbid / But that our loves and comforts should increase . . .’’ 191–2) and directly by Iago’s threat (‘‘O, you are well tun’d now! / But I’ll set down the pegs that make this music . . .’’ 198–9). In these few lines Shakespeare has prepared us for tragedy, in part by announcing the end of comedy. The happy ending is completed, but Othello and Desdemona are left to go on from there. If I am right to see Othello’s tragedy as developing from a questioning of comic assumptions, then this initial comic movement ought to contain the seeds of tragedy. And it does, in various ways. Othello’s account of their shy, storytelling-and-listening courtship, however moving and beautiful, is in retrospect slightly disturbing. ‘‘She lov’d me for the dangers I had pass’d; / And I lov’d her that she did pity them’’ (1.3.167–68). Is it enough? Some critics upon this hint have proclaimed the Moor totally self-centered, incapable of real love. This is surely too severe. Nevertheless, in his summary their love has a proxy quality. ‘‘The dangers I had pass’d’’ have served as a counter between them, a substitute for direct engagement, or at best a preliminary to something not yet achieved. Twice before, Shakespeare had used comedy to explore the inadequacies of romantic courtship, cursorily in Taming of the Shrew and more thoroughly in Much Ado. In the latter play, Claudio and Hero move through the paces of conventional wooing, depending on rumors and go-betweens, with no direct exploration of each other’s natures. Thus, Hero can be traduced and Claudio can believe it, lacking the knowledge of the heart that should counteract the false certainty of the eyes. Much Ado is a comedy, so the presiding deities give time

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for Dogberry’s muddled detective work and provide in the Friar a benevolent counter-manipulator against Don John. The love of Othello and Desdemona has the same vulnerability, but no time is given; and, instead of Friar Francis, Iago is in charge. Iago is the most obvious potential force for tragedy in the early part of the play. We see him thwarted in his first plot against Othello, but already, at the end of Act 1, planning the next. In this speech both overt statement and imagery suggest the thrust beyond the comic, the germination out of the first failure of a deeper evil: I ha’t—it is engender’d. Hell and night Must bring this monstrous birth to the world’s light. (1.3.397–98)

To a large extent Iago embodies in himself the play’s questioning of comic assumptions. He is the most intelligent character, and reason—or the appearance of reason—is his chief means of controlling others. The power of the rational view, so easily dismissed with laughter or overruled by emotion in the comedies, is grimly realized in Iago’s accurate estimates of character (‘‘The Moor is of a free and open nature . . . And will as tenderly be led by th’ nose . . .’’), his telling arguments from experience (‘‘I know our country disposition well: / In Venice they do let God see the pranks / They dare not show their husbands. . . . She did deceive her father, marrying you . . .’’), his plausible hypotheses (‘‘That Cassio loves her, I do well believe it; / That she loves him, ’tis apt and of great credit . . .’’), his final triumph in converting Othello to the philosophy of ‘‘ocular proof.’’8 Against him the love of Othello and Desdemona is vulnerable, rooted as it is not in rational evaluation or empirical knowledge, but in instinctive sympathy. The same scene (1.3) that underlines the indirectness of their courtship indicates the peculiar strength of their love that is also a weakness: Desdemona

I saw Othello’s visage in his mind. . . . (252)

Othello

My life upon her faith! (294)

There is a core of power in this instinctive mutual recognition that survives Iago’s rational poison and in a sense defeats it, but this victory comes only in death. In his posing of Iago against Othello/Desdemona, Shakespeare fully explores the conventional dichotomy

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between reason and love and discovers its deeply tragic implications.9 If reason’s opposition to love is traditional, nature in Othello appears to change sides. Love’s ally is now love’s enemy, partly because the angle of vision has changed: nature as instinctual rightness gives way to nature as intellectual concept, susceptible like all concepts to distortion and misapplication. Brabantio, Iago, and finally Othello himself see the love between Othello and Desdemona as unnatural—‘‘nature erring from itself ’’ (3.3.231). But there is more to it than this. In key scenes of Othello a tension develops between two senses of ‘‘nature,’’ the general and the particular. It is to general nature that Brabantio appeals in the council scene, the common experience and prejudice by which like calls to like. Attraction between the young white Venetian girl and the aging black foreigner, since it violates this observed law of nature, could only have been ‘‘wrought’’ by unnatural means: She is abus’d, stol’n from me, and corrupted, By spells and medicines bought of mountebanks; For nature so preposterously to err, Being not deficient, blind, or lame of sense, Sans witchcraft could not. (1.3.60–64)

The other sense of ‘‘nature’’ is particular and personal. For example, when Iago says in his soliloquy at the end of this scene that the Moor is of ‘‘a free and open nature,’’ he uses the term to define individual essence: the inscape of Othello. Brabantio tries to bring in this nature to support the other. Desdemona is essentially timid, thus by nature (her own) she cannot love the fearsome Moor. A maiden never bold, Of spirit so still and quiet that her motion Blush’d at herself; and she—in spite of nature, Of years, of country, credit, everything— To fall in love with what she fear’d to look on! It is a judgment maim’d and most imperfect That will confess perfection so could err Against all rules of nature. . . . (1.3.94–101)

But this nature is the very ground of Desdemona’s love. In her answer to the Venetian Senate and her father, she relates how, pene-

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trating through the blackness and strangeness, she saw Othello’s visage in his mind and subdued her heart to that essence, his ‘‘very quality’’ (1.3.250–52).10 For Desdemona, then, nature as individual essence is not the enemy of love. But Iago has the last word in this scene, and his conclusion is ominous: Othello’s very generosity and openness will make him take the appearance of honesty for the fact. That is, Othello will act instinctively according to the laws of his own nature, rather than according to reasoned evaluation (which would perceive that most liars pretend to be telling the truth). This internal law of nature, then, implies the same vulnerability we have seen in the instinctive, nonrational quality of Othello’s and Desdemona’s love. Brabantio’s general nature is implicitly reductive in that it derives rules for individuals from the behavior of the herd. Iago’s is explicitly reductive. The view he expounds to Roderigo has no regard for human values and ethical norms. Natural law for Iago, as for Edmund in Lear, is Hobbesian—a matter of animal appetites promoted by cleverness, with the strongest and shrewdest winning out.11 Desdemona, he assures Roderigo, will tire of Othello because appetite demands further stimuli: Her eye must be fed; and what delight shall she have to look on the devil? When the blood is made dull with the act of sport, there should be—again to inflame it, and to give satiety a fresh appetite—loveliness in favour, sympathy in years, manners, and beauties—all which the Moor is defective in. Now for want of these requir’d conveniences, her delicate tenderness will find itself abus’d, begin to heave the gorge, disrelish and abhor the Moor; very nature will instruct her in it, and compel her to some second choice. (2.1.222–31)

Compel her—here is yet another ‘‘law,’’ generalized from the ways of man’s animal nature. The context is wholly physical, as the persistent images of eating and disgorging emphasize. Iago has begun the discussion by prodding the hesitant lover Roderigo with a bit of folk wisdom: ‘‘they say base men being in love have then a nobility in their natures more than is native to them’’ (213–14). But he does not pretend to believe it himself. Love is rather ‘‘a lust of the blood and a permission of the will’’; Roderigo, in love or not, is a snipe; our natures are ‘‘blood and baseness’’ (1.3.333–34, 379, 329). In Shakespeare’s portrayal of Iago we can see a version of the clash I have been describing. In spite of his reductive general view, he can recognize the essential goodness of Othello (‘‘free and open

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nature,’’ ‘‘constant, loving, noble nature . . .’’) as well as Desdemona’s generosity and Cassio’s daily beauty (1.3.393; 2.1.283; 2.3.330–31; 5.1.19–20). Critics have complained of the inconsistency; and if Othello were naturalistic drama, they would be right to do so. But Iago is not just an envious spoiler; he is the symbolic enemy of love itself. The play’s conception demands that the weapons of both ‘‘natures,’’ like those of reason, be put in his hands. In his great self-summation at the play’s end, Othello says he was ‘‘wrought’’ from his true nature, and so he was. His own nature, noble and trusting, gave him an instinctive perception of Desdemona’s, a perception which breaks forth at the sight of her even while Iago is poisoning his mind: ‘‘If she be false, O, then heaven mocks itself! / I’ll not believe it’’ (3.3.282–83). But Iago is able to undermine this trust with false rationality, the insistence that Desdemona’s honor, which is ‘‘an essence that’s not seen’’ (4.1.16), be made susceptible of ocular proof.12 He succeeds, where Brabantio failed, in using both conceptions of nature against Othello. The Moor’s own generosity of nature, Iago suggests, makes him an easy dupe: ‘‘I would not have your free and noble nature / Out of self-bounty be abus’d; look to’t’’ (3.3.203–04). Taught to look instead of trust, Othello soon sees Desdemona’s choice of him as an aberration, nature erring from itself, and Iago quickly advances the general nature, the law of ‘‘all things,’’ to reinforce the idea: Ay, there’s the point: as—to be bold with you— Not to affect many proposed matches Of her own clime, complexion, and degree, Whereto we see in all things nature tends— Foh! one may smell in such a will most rank, Foul disproportion, thoughts unnatural. (3.3.232–37)

And so Othello violates his own peculiar essence and yields to Iago’s law of the many. Desdemona soon recognizes uneasily that he is altered (‘‘My lord is not my lord’’) and, in an ironic reflection of Othello’s state, seeks the reason in a generalization: ‘‘Men’s natures wrangle with inferior things, / Though great ones are their object’’ (3.4.125, 145–46). Later the Venetian visitors gaze horrified at the change in that nature that passion could not shake, while Othello strikes his wife and then exits mumbling of goats and monkeys. He has internalized Iago’s reductive view of man as animal. In the next scene (4.2) he will see Desdemona in terms of toads mating and maggots quickening in rotten meat.

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In the comedies love was a strength, but in Othello it is vulnerable to attacks of reason, arguments from nature. More than that, vulnerability is its very essence. Before falling in love with Desdemona, Othello was self-sufficient, master of himself and the battlefield. After he believes her to be false, his occupation is gone. Why? Love has created a dependency, a yielding of the separate, sufficient self to incorporation with another. What comedy treated as a new completeness becomes in Othello the heart of tragedy. Tragic vulnerability is there, even in the play’s comic phase. Othello’s images for his love-commitment are those of narrowing and confining: But that I love the gentle Desdemona, I would not my unhoused free condition Put into circumscription and confine For the seas’ worth. . . . (1.2.25–28)

To love totally is to give up the freedom of self for the perils of union and the expansive great world for a personal and contingent one. Othello’s comparison in the last scene is significant in this connection: Nay, had she been true, If heaven would make me such another world Of one entire and perfect chrysolite, I’d not have sold her for it. (5.2.146–49)13

‘‘My life upon her faith!’’ is literally true. Desdemona has become Othello’s world.14 It is in this light, I think, that we can best understand why Othello responds to Iago’s insinuations by renouncing his profession. The great lines on military life notably invoke not chaos and carnage, but order. War is individual passion subordinated to a larger plan: martial harmony, formal pageantry, imitation of divine judgment. O, now for ever Farewell the tranquil mind! farewell content! Farewell the plumed troops, and the big wars That makes ambition virtue! O, farewell! Farewell the neighing steed and the shrill trump, The spirit-stirring drum, th’ ear-piercing fife, The royal banner, and all quality, Pride, pomp, and circumstance, of glorious war!

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And O ye mortal engines whose rude throats Th’ immortal Jove’s dread clamours counterfeit, Farewell! Othello’s occupation’s gone. (3.3.351–61)

Stylistically, the formal catalogues and ritual repetitions strengthen this selective picture of war as majestic order. Earlier in this scene, Othello has said that when he stops loving Desdemona chaos will come again, and now it has happened. With his own world dissolving in chaos, his ordering generalship is gone. Othello’s disintegration of self is the dark side of comedy’s insistence on interdependence, on completing oneself with another. But Shakespeare goes deeper in his exploration of comic assumptions by showing that the desired merging of self and other is, in any case, impossible. The more or less schematized couplings of the comedies combined necessary opposition (male/female) with a series of sympathies in age, background, temperament. Wit calls to wit in Beatrice and Benedick, Berowne and Rosaline; royalty to royalty in Navarre and the Princess of France; rowdiness to rowdiness in Petruchio and Kate. It is enough in comedy to suggest compatibility by outward signs and to look no further than the formal union. But in Othello Shakespeare has taken pains in several ways to emphasize the separateness of his lovers. In the original novella Giraldi’s Moor is handsome, apparently fairly young, and a longtime Venetian resident. Apart from sex, his only real difference from Desdemona is one of color, and Giraldi does not dwell on it much. But Shakespeare dwells on it a great deal; black-white oppositions continually weave themselves into the verbal fabric of Othello. Indeed, the dark skin of Giraldi’s hero, which the author capitalizes on so little, may have been one of the story’s main attractions for Shakespeare. Certainly he alters other details of the story to reinforce this paradigmatic separation into black and white, to increase Othello’s alienness and widen the gulf between his experience and Desdemona’s. Shakespeare’s Moor is a stranger to Venice, to civil life in general: his entire life, except for the brief period in which he courted Desdemona, has been spent in camp and battlefield (1.3.83–87). Even Othello’s speech constantly and subtly reminds us of his apartness. If not rude, as he claims to the council, it is certainly different. His idiom invokes anthropophagi and Pontic seas, roots itself in the exotic rather than in the details of everyday social life familiar to others but not to him. He knows as little of Venetian ways as Desdemona knows of ‘‘antres vast and deserts idle’’ (1.3.140), and he is given no time to learn. While Giraldi’s Moor and

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his bride live for some time in Venice after their marriage, Othello and Desdemona are immediately swept off to Cyprus. When lago generalizes about his country’s habits (‘‘In Venice they do let God see the pranks / They dare not show their husbands . . .’’), Othello can only answer helplessly, ‘‘Dost thou say so?’’ (3.3.206–9). Shakespeare has deprived him of any common ground with Desdemona from which he can fight back—not only to facilitate Iago’s deception, but to heighten the tragic paradox of human love, individuals dependent on each other but unalterably separate and mysterious to one another in their separateness. To sharpen the contrast, Othello is made middle-aged, thick-lipped—everything Desdemona is not. The image of black man and white girl in conjunction, so repellent to earlier critics that they had to invent a tawny or cafe´-aulait Moor, is basic to the play’s conception of disjunction in love, giving visual focus to the other oppositions of war and peace, age and youth, man and woman. This disjunction serves the tragic action: it assists Iago’s initial deception, and it provides most of the tension in the period between the deception and the murder, as Desdemona inopportunely pleads for Cassio and Othello can communicate his fears only indirectly, through insults and degradations. But beyond this plot function, it is a tragic vision of love itself. What I am suggesting is that the action of Othello moves us not only as a chain of events involving particular people as initiators and victims, but as an acting out of the tragic implications in any love relationship. Iago is a human being who generates the catastrophe out of his own needs and hatreds, but he is also the catalyst who activates destructive forces not of his own creation, forces present in the love itself.15 His image of ‘‘monstrous birth’’ quoted above has special significance in this regard: coming at the end of a resolved marriage scene, it suggests that the monster is a product of the marriage. He says, ‘‘it is engender’d,’’ not ‘‘I have engendered it,’’ because he is not parent but midwife. ‘‘Hell and night,’’ embodied in this demidevil who works in the dark, will bring the monster forth, but it is the fruit of love itself. Because Othello is a play, and a great one, tragic action and tragic situation are fully fused in it, and it would be pointless to try to separate them. But a look at some of Shakespeare’s nondramatic work may help clarify the paradoxical sense of love as both life and destruction that informs the events of the play. The sonnets present a range of attitudes toward love, from joyous assurance to disgust and despair, but they return again and again to certain types of tension between lover and beloved. An apparently positive statement like Sonnet 57 (‘‘Being your slave’’) belies its own assent to the relation-

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ship by the double-edged quality of phrases like ‘‘I have no precious time at all to spend’’ and ‘‘Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour,’’ and the bitter wordplay in the couplet, So true a fool is love that in your will, Though you do anything, he thinks no ill.

‘‘So true a fool’’ suggests not only the loyally loving innocent, but also ‘‘so absolutely a dupe.’’ ‘‘Fool’’ recalls and completes the sonnet’s identification of beloved as monarch and lover as slave; he is not just any kind of servant but the king’s fool, a hanger-on who is valued only for occasional diversion. The total effect is of a speaker pulled in contrary directions by need of his friend and esteem of himself. In Sonnet 35, ‘‘No more be griev’d,’’ images and syntax make us feel the high price that must be paid for commitment in love. No more be griev’d at that which thou hast done: Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud; Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun, And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud. All men make faults, and even I in this, Authorizing thy trespass with compare, Myself corrupting, salving thy amiss, Excusing thy sins more than thy sins are; For to thy sensual fault I bring in sense— Thy adverse party is thy advocate— And ’gainst myself a lawful plea commence; Such civil war is in my love and hate That I an accessary needs must be To that sweet thief which sourly robs from me.

If we see the poem as striving to repair the damaged relationship by creating a new equality between lover and beloved, it does indeed achieve this, but only at the cost of the speaker’s own integrity. He manages to absolve the friend of fault by natural comparisons, nature having no moral dimension to justify blame, and then implicates himself in fault for making those very comparisons. The last part of the sonnet strains against the first quatrain, and in that strain lies its real impact. Can we accept the absolution given in lines 1–4 if the mode of absolution turns out to be sinful? The images reinforce this sense of disjunction, those of the first quatrain drawn exclusively from the natural world and those of the remainder from the civilized world of moral man, especially the law courts. ‘‘Civil

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war,’’ finally overt in line 12, is implicit earlier in the like-sounding antitheses that shape lines 7–10 into a series of tensions. The couplet, its message of inner division supported by the difficult twisting of the last line, completes the violation of self that love has required. The same kind of violation, expressed with less anguish and more wry acceptance, is the theme of Sonnet 138: When my love swears that she is made of truth, I do believe her, though I know she lies. . . .

Here is a comic answer to the problem of integrity compromised by dependence on another, as Othello is a tragic answer. In its mutual accommodation reached through lies and pretenses, Sonnet 138 also underlines the other side of the paradox, the necessary separateness of lovers. Even the more idealistic sonnets never proclaim the possibility of complete union; and the most idealistic of all (Sonnet 116) presents quite an opposite picture, of love persisting on its own in spite of the beloved’s infidelity: Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove. . . . . . . . . . . . Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

It is selfless but ultimately single, more like God’s love for man than any human relationship. Edward Hubler sees in Sonnet 116 Shakespeare’s affirmation of mutuality as the essence of love, 16 but it seems to me just the contrary, a recognition that the love which depends on being requited is neither lasting nor true. It must necessarily bend with the remover, meet defection with defection. Enduring mutuality does not seem to be a possibility in the sonnets. When Shakespeare does address himself to the merging of separate identities, the result is the rarefied allegory of ‘‘The Phoenix and Turtle,’’ which makes the impossibility even clearer. Phoenix and turtle dove are a perfect union, but they are dead. Most of the poem is a dirge sung at their funeral, and it ends in complete stasis—triplets with a single rhyme sound asserting that these lovers left no progeny, that what they represented is gone forever. Leaving no posterity— ’Twas not their infirmity, It was married chastity.

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Truth may seem, but cannot be; Beauty brag, but ’tis not she: Truth and beauty buried be. (59–64)

What do we make of this? It could be argued that ‘‘The Phoenix and Turtle’’ approaches ‘‘pure poetry’’ in being all vehicle with no tenor; certainly it is hard to relate these dead birds and their metaphysicalparadoxical union to the affairs of mortal men and women. Do phoenix and turtle die because annihilation is implicit in perfect union, or because their obliteration of distance, number, and individuality offends against natural law, or because such perfection is possible only outside of time? In any case, the poem makes it clear that the ideal will never again be realized on earth. The dead-end quality of ‘‘The Phoenix and Turtle’’ illuminates tragic love in Othello in one way, just as the sonnets’ tensions and compromises do in another. The opening lines of Sonnet 36, indeed, provides the most succinct statement of the paradox I have been examining in Othello: Let me confess that we two must be twain, Although our undivided loves are one. . . .

In the comedies Shakespeare viewed the coming together of incomplete opposites from a certain intellectual distance. In Othello he struck a vein of tragedy by exploring the contradiction within such a conception: destruction of self-sufficiency combined with continued isolation in the self. This was, it seems, his general way in Othello. Starting from a romantic story in which love goes wrong, he was sufficiently reminded of his own comic patterns and assumptions to manipulate them consciously in the play, creating the tragic mood (which is lacking in Giraldi’s brisk tale of intrigue) by looking more deeply into the ambiguities and vulnerabilities of romantic love. I have been emphasizing the internal flaws of Othello’s and Desdemona’s love, but it should not be overlooked that the play nevertheless celebrates that love fully. Maynard Mack’s comment on King Lear may serve us here as well: ‘‘Cordelia, we may choose to say, accomplished nothing, yet we know it is better to have been Cordelia than to have been her sisters.’’17 So with Othello. At the end the lovers are dead and their destroyer is still alive, but we know that it is better to have been Othello and Desdemona than to be Iago. After I had reached my own conclusions on Othello, I came upon a similar emphasis in John Middleton Murry’s Shakespeare. For him,

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Othello is the great tragedy of human love, expressing ‘‘the pain and anguish and despair which true lovers must inevitably inflict upon one another, because they are one, and because they are not one.’’18 Iago is central to the tragedy, not merely as an intriguer but as the embodiment of love’s inevitable flaw.19 This reinforcement of my reading of the play was welcome, especially since Murry’s starting point was quite different from mine. He began with the handkerchief, and the paradoxical fact that Desdemona forgets to be concerned for it because she is concerned about Othello’s sudden illness. That is, she loses the love-token because she loves. To call Othello a tragic statement about love in general is not to see it as the vehicle of ‘‘Shakespeare’s philosophy of love.’’ It is one artistic whole, and it expresses one kind of perception, which is demonstrably different not only from that of the romantic comedies but also from those of Troilus and Cressida, Antony and Cleopatra, the late romances. No one of these cancels out the others; they are all part of Shakespeare’s truth. Othello is not an allegory, but a very human drama. Nevertheless, its exploration of romantic love and marriage does give Othello a universal dimension, the wider reverberations that many critics have felt to be lacking in the play. We have perhaps spent too much time asking the traditional questions about this play: Is Othello culpable in succumbing to Iago’s suggestions? And what makes Iago do what he does? These are important questions, but it is also important to see beyond the individual events of Othello, beyond the defeat of a more or less noble dupe by an obscurely motivated villain, to the tragic inadequacies and contradictions of all human love.

Notes 1. Kenneth Muir, Shakespeare’s Sources (London: Methuen, 1950), 70, 101–2. Italianate tragedies of domestic passion and intrigue were common enough on the contemporary stage, but Othello is Shakespeare’s first real venture into the field. His earlier work distinguishes sharply between tragedies based on historic personages and affairs of state and comedies based on private love troubles. The exception, his early love tragedy Romeo and Juliet, really strengthens my point that novelle suggested comedic treatment to Shakespeare, as the characters and devices of comedy are prominent in the play and the tragedy is shaped by their disappearance or revealed irrelevance (see the preceding essay, ‘‘Romeo and Juliet: Comedy into Tragedy,’’ in this volume). 2. Love’s Labour’s Lost, 5.2.256–57. On corrective satire in the ‘‘closed world comedy,’’ see Sherman Hawkins, ‘‘The Two Worlds of Shakespearean Comedy,’’ Shakespeare Studies 3 (1967): 68–73. 3. As You Like It, 3.3.

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4. Frye, ‘‘The Argument of Comedy,’’ English Institute Essays 1948 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948); Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959). 5. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 3.1.131–32. 6. Characters of more depth, like Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well and Viola in Twelfth Night, recognize that they love against all reason, but still irrational emotion prevails over self-awareness. They go right on loving. 7. Only The Merry Wives of Windsor and The Comedy of Errors to some extent depart from it to find plot material in postmarital strain as well as courtship. 8. 1.3.393–95; 2.3.205–10; 2.1.280–81; 3.3.364. 9. The irrationality of love in Othello has called forth some perceptive comment from critics, e.g., Winifred Nowottny, ‘‘Justice and Love in Othello,’’ University of Toronto Quarterly 21 (1952): 330–44; and R. B. Heilman, Magic in the Web (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press,1956), especially the discussion of ‘‘wit’’ versus ‘‘witchcraft,’’ 219–29. Terence Hawkes explores the same opposition in ‘‘Iago’s Use of Reason,’’ Studies in Philology, 58 (1961): 160–69, using for Heilman’s wit/witchcraft the opposition of ratio inferior/ratio superior. 10. The First Quarto has ‘‘utmost pleasure’’ for ‘‘very quality.’’ 11. See J. F. Danby, Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature (London: Faber and Faber, 1949), 31–43. 12. G. R. Elliott notes that under Iago’s influence Othello submerges the individual nature of Desdemona in an impersonal, general conception of nature; see Flaming Minister (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1953), 122. 13. The idea of Desdemona as a world also animates ‘‘I had rather be a toad, / And live upon the vapour of a dungeon, / Than keep a corner in the thing I love / For others’ uses’’ (3.3.274–77), and ‘‘Methinks it should be now [at Desdemona’s death] a huge eclipse’’ (5.2.102); it is implicit in his characterization of her as a place ‘‘where I have garner’d up my heart, / Where either I must live or bear no life’’ (4.2.58–59). 14. Theodore Spencer relates some of these speeches through the similar notion that Othello has given his world to Desdemona; see Shakespeare and the Nature of Man, 2d ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1961), 129–30, 135. 15. In reaching this conclusion I have been influenced by Kenneth Burke’s idea of the ‘‘agent/act ratio’’; see especially his ‘‘Othello: An Essay to Illustrate a Method,’’ Hudson Review 4 (1951): 165–203, in which he shows how the characters of Othello, Desdemona, and Iago are determined by their roles in the play’s central tension, which they actualize. My view of that tension, however, differs from Burke’s emphasis on love as exclusive ownership. 16. The Sense of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952), 92–93. 17. King Lear in Our Time (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965), 117. 18. Shakespeare (London: Harcourt, Brace, 1936), 316–17. 19. Ibid., 319.

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Ourselves Alone: The Challenge to Single Combat in Shakespeare ONE-TO-ONE COMBAT SERVES A VARIETY OF PURPOSES ON SHAKESPEARE’S stage. Individual swordfights are, of course, the conventional way to dramatize battles. The synecdoche, made necessary by limited theater space and personnel, may provide as well a satisfying symbolic climax when the leader of one army personally conquers the leader of another. To have Richmond himself overcome Richard III dramatically focuses the meaning of Bosworth Field. The challenge arising from a private quarrel is a useful device in several plays, with results ranging from comic mistakings in Twelfth Night to tragic denouement in Hamlet. Edgar’s victory over his bastard brother near the end of Lear brings the wheel of Edmund’s fortune full circle. Even a fight that does not come off has its uses: the quarrel between Bolingbroke and Mowbray, both in its theme of blood-guilt and in the King’s uncertain handling of it, is an effective starting point for the mixture of private and political tragedy in Richard II. What I shall be considering, however, are three occasions of a special kind, where single combat is offered in place of massed battle, as a personal response to a public situation. In 1 Henry IV, Hal attempts to prevent general bloodshed at Shrewsbury by appealing to Hotspur to ‘‘try fortune with him in a single fight’’ (5.1.100).1 Hector in Troilus and Cressida sends a challenge to the Greek camp during a stalemate in the Trojan War. And in Antony and Cleopatra the disgraced Antony, defeated at Actium but still commander of a considerable army, tries to revive his waning fortunes by daring Caesar to fight him ‘‘sword against sword, / Ourselves alone’’ (3.13.27–28). The plays make it clear enough that such gestures have little to do with the realities of warfare. Enobarbus and Caesar both scoff at Antony’s romantic impulse, unable to take it seriously. That prudent realist Henry IV, although more respectful about his son’s chivalrous offer, finds ‘‘considerations infinite . . . against it’’ (5.1.102–3). The only duel that actually takes place, that between Hector and Ajax, is ludicrously brief and indecisive. It is exactly this distance between the gestures of chivalry and the practical determination of who will 46

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OURSELVES ALONE

win or lose a war that makes the gestures interesting. They don’t influence the outcome; they do put into sharp focus the clashes of value and character in each of the three plays. The notion of decisive individual combat seems to have touched an Elizabethan nerve. Real war, as some Englishmen experienced it and many more eagerly read of it,2 was not like that. Numbers and technology won the battles, not individual valor. Indeed, the old medieval system had never been very effective. The mailclad knights, however courageous and distinctive, were undisciplined and paid disastrously little attention to tactics. What the chivalric ideal often meant in practice, as Sir Charles Oman points out, was that ‘‘at some critical moment a battle might be precipitated, a formation broken, a plan discarded, by the rashness of some petty baron who could listen to nothing but the promptings of his own heady valor.’’3 Yet the ideal died hard. The modern warfare of siege tactics, massed formations, and (increasingly important) gunnery disturbed many by its impersonality. It was no coincidence that elaborate formal tournaments were so popular in Elizabeth’s reign. As guns came into their own as agents of human slaughter, the process was not surprisingly accompanied by a running debate on the morality of gunpowder. What is striking is that firearms attracted as much criticism for being impersonal as for being inhumane and un-Christian. There was more than class snobbery behind the frequent complaint that guns allowed a baseborn, unworthy fellow to cut down from a distance a renowned knight.4 This was not man against man, but man against machine. Tournaments restored that lost personal element, in the most glamorous way. Even in the fifteenth century some jousts were consciously nostalgic, with outmoded armor, formal pageantry, and rules that invoked not contemporary war situations but the past, half-mythical age of chivalry.5 The literary flavor was even stronger in the Elizabethan tourneys, with their disguises, imprese, and elaborate courtly addresses to the Queen. These rites had nothing to do with the wars currently being fought in France and the Netherlands; they had everything to do with the heroic milieu of Amadis de Gaul and Sidney’s Arcadia. Sidney’s own life illustrates the split I have been outlining. Two radically different pictures of Sidney the warrior have come down to us. One emerges from contemporary accounts of the court tournaments, a singular, gorgeous figure.6 Victory comes through his own prowess—‘‘my horse, my hand, my lance’’ (Astrophil and Stella, Sonnet 41). The other picture derives from Sidney’s letters during his tenure as lord governor of Flushing. Horse, hand, and lance meant

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little amid the frustrations of a siege war, manned by an unpaid, sickly garrison and eyed suspiciously from across the North Sea by a most uncooperative Gloriana. The whole paradoxical contrast between the individualized, romantic, and somewhat silly past and the impersonal, efficient, but unattractive present is there in Sidney’s fatal wounding at Zutphen. Having taken off his thighpieces to show that his courage was equal to that of a lightly armed Lord Marshal, he was struck in the thigh by an anonymous musket-ball and died a month later of gangrene.7 In all three Shakespeare plays which set up the challenge to single combat in a context of mass warfare, its associations of a personal chivalry, outmoded but nonetheless compelling comment critically on the ways of the modern political machine. In two cases, Shakespeare found starting points for the episodes in his source material; the known sources of 1 Henry IV offer no hint for Hal’s challenge of Hotspur. For this reason, and because the history play treats the values of past and present in a more specialized way, I will discuss the two later plays first, moving from elaboration and interweaving in Antony through greater liberty in motivation and tone in Troilus to what is apparently free invention in 1 Henry IV. Plutarch in the Life of Antonius tells of two attempts by Antony to engage Caesar in single combat, one before the battle of Actium and one some time after it.8 Shakespeare developed the second far more than the first, and I shall do likewise, but the one glancing allusion to the initial challenge in Act 3, scene 7 is not without significance: Ant. Cleo. Can. Ant. Eno. Can.

Ant.

Canidius, we Will fight him by sea. By sea, what else? Why will my lord do so? For that he dares us to’t. So hath my lord dar’d him to single fight. Ay, and to wage this battle at Pharsalia, Where Caesar fought with Pompey. But these offers, Which serve not for his vantage, he shakes off, And so should you. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . By sea, by sea. (27–40)

By putting the two dares together, Antony’s to Caesar and Caesar’s to Antony, the dialogue catches in a few words the essential difference between the two leaders. Because Antony’s challenge ‘‘serve[s] not his vantage,’’ Caesar dismisses it casually. Antony, on the other

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hand, is lured into the disastrous decision to fight by sea because he cannot resist any challenge. An isolated incident in Plutarch here becomes fateful, in its posing of flamboyant honor against cool practicality and in its direct effect on the pivotal battle. Plutarch’s account of the second challenge, though brief, suggests the same opposition: ‘‘Antonius sent againe to chalenge Caesar, to fight with him hande to hande. Caesar aunswered him, that he had many other wayes to die then so.’’ On the one side, unrealistic courage; on the other, mingled caution and contempt. A passage that comes directly before this in Plutarch’s account fills out the contrast: Antonius made a saly upon him, and fought verie valliantly, so that he drave Caesars horsemen backe, fighting with his men even into their campe. Then he came againe to the pallace, greatly boasting of this victorie, and sweetely kissed Cleopatra, armed as he was, when he came from the fight, recommending one of his men of armes unto her, that had valliantly fought in this skirmish. Cleopatra to reward his manlines, gave him an armor and head peece of cleane gold: howbeit the man at armes when he had received this rich gift, stale away by night, and went to Caesar.9

It is a very suggestive picture of Antony in the midst of defeat, courageous and gallant in a ‘‘skirmish’’ that will decide nothing. Antony fights in person, Caesar only through his men. Antony rewards his man-at-arms like a saga hero—and the man-at-arms quietly departs with his loot to the winning side like a modern double agent. The analogues of past and present are mine, of course. But Shakespeare must also have seen these things in terms of the old and the new, for he makes the theme of age and youth run through both challenge and response. Ant.

To the boy Caesar send this grizzled head, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . To him again, tell him he wears the rose Of youth upon him; from which the world should note Something particular. His coin, ships, legions, May be a coward’s, whose ministers would prevail Under the service of a child as soon As i’ th’ command of Caesar. I dare him therefore To lay his gay comparisons apart, And answer me declin’d, sword against sword, Ourselves alone. (3.13.l7–28)

Caes.

He calls me boy, and chides as he had power To beat me out of Egypt. My messenger

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Maec.

Caes.

He hath whipt with rods, dares me to personal combat, Caesar to Antony. Let the old ruffian know I have many other ways to die; mean time Laugh at his challenge. Caesar must think When one so great begins to rage, he’s hunted Even to falling. Give him no breath, but now Make boot of his distraction: never anger Made good guard for itself. Let our best heads Know that to-morrow the last of many battles We mean to fight. Within our files there are, Of those that serv’d Mark Antony but late, Enough to fetch him in. See it done, And feast the army; we have store to do’t, And they have earn’d the waste. Poor Antony! (4.1.1–16)

For men of the new world like Caesar and Maecenas, Antony’s challenge is of a piece with his whipping of the messenger Thidias, a sign of ‘‘distraction’’—that is, madness. In Caesar’s eyes it is nonsense for Antony to act ‘‘as he had power / To beat me out of Egypt,’’ for Caesar’s me is his army. It includes all those who have recently deserted Antony, characteristically considered not as individuals but as a number, ‘‘enough to fetch him in.’’ Caesar’s reply is anticipated within the challenge scene itself by Enobarbus: Yes, like enough! high-battled Caesar will Unstate his happiness, and be stag’d to th’ show Against a sworder! I see men’s judgments are A parcel of their fortunes, and things outward Do draw the inward quality after them, To suffer all alike. That he should dream, Knowing all measures, the full Caesar will Answer his emptiness! Caesar, thou hast subdu’d His judgment too. (3.13.29–37)

The word sworder, which equates Antony with a common gladiator, has the same lower-class connotation as Caesar’s later old ruffian. This is a new world, in which one measure of success is having others to do your fighting for you. Why should Caesar jeopardize his advantage? Anticipating Caesar and Maecenas, Enobarbus concludes that Antony has gone crazy. It is in this scene, in fact, that Enobarbus decides to leave Antony. The real artistry of Shakespeare’s handling

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of the challenge is apparent in the way he orchestrates it with other elements, two episodes not connected with it in the Life of Antonius: the desertion of Domitius (Enobarbus), which Plutarch puts before the battle of Actium, and Antony’s jealousy of Caesar’s messenger Thidias, which according to Plutarch took place a full year before the challenge. Shakespeare presents all three incidents as part of the emotional aftermath of Actium and interweaves them to express simultaneously the greatness and weakness of his hero. The Thidias episode shows Antony at his worst, mingling childish self-pity and adult cruelty. It shows him to considerably less advantage than the quixotic challenge to single combat; yet Caesar in the following scene is not entirely wrong to see the two actions as springing from the same state of mind. At stake in both instances is Antony’s sense of self, severely threatened by the shame of running away during the sea-battle and by the subsequent defeat that has left Caesar ‘‘lord of his fortunes’’ (3.12.11). All through the scene directly after Actium (3.11), he is groping to find out who he is now. His recalling the decisive actions that defined his past, public self— ‘‘I strook / The lean and wrinkled Cassius, and ’twas I / That the mad Brutus ended’’—only underlines his present nebulous condition: he has lost command, offended reputation, lost his way forever. At last, in one of those sudden upswings that are typical of Antony, he proclaims that a single tear of Cleopatra’s is worth all that’s won or lost.10 The next scene finds him suing to Caesar for leave simply to exist as a ‘‘private man’’ (3.12.15). To be thus thrown back on his personal manhood brings out in Antony both the assurance that backs the challenge (in himself, he is a better man than Caesar) and the nagging insecurity that makes him order Thidias whipped for being too familiar with Cleopatra. If Thidias can kiss the same hand he kisses, the distinction between Antony the private man and this ‘‘feeder’’ grows doubtful. And what happens to the self refounded on Cleopatra’s rarity and worth? When Antony calls to her servants to punish Thidias, Shakespeare delays their response, presumably to make clear the emotional point. There is no real doubt that they will do what he says, but the delay allows him to lament his loss of authority and to assert defiantly that he is Antony yet (3.13.90–93). And the Antony that he is is as clearly expressed in the whipping as in the challenge. While all this is happening, Enobarbus highlights in his own way Antony’s mixture of greatness and folly. His main activity in the scene of challenge and whipping is a series of asides in which he debates with himself whether to leave his master. It is a fairly one-

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sided debate. He sees Antony as devoid of judgment, a fool, a leaky boat, an old dying lion whose valor preys on his reason. Only once does he sound a different note; the challenge to Caesar calls it forth. While Enobarbus’s commonsense side is scornful, as we have seen, there is another side of him that worries about ‘‘honesty,’’ seeks honor in defeat along with Antony. Mine honesty and I begin to square. The loyalty well held to fools does make Our faith mere folly; yet he that can endure To follow with allegiance a fall’n lord Does conquer him that did his master conquer, And earns a place i’ th’ story. (3.13.41–46)

The same challenge that focuses our dual view of Antony as both admirable and self-deluding discovers a complementary conflict in Enobarbus. Pragmatic soldier that he is, he nevertheless feels the pull of the ‘‘story,’’ recognizes the heroic quality of Antony of which legends are made. Legends are of the past, and Enobarbus at the end of this scene votes for the new world of Caesar. Yet he cannot escape ‘‘the story.’’ When he does leave, and Antony answers betrayal with the grand, generous gesture of the true hero, Enobarbus responds in the most storybookish manner—he dies of a broken heart. For the challenge and duel in Troilus and Cressida Shakespeare seems to have drawn on two sources, conflating two events variously but seriously described to create a third which is strikingly silly and futile. In Book 7 of the Iliad Hector’s challenge to the Greeks is prompted by the gods and carried out with dignity. While the contest between Hector and Ajax is no more conclusive than in Shakespeare, it serves the purpose intended by Athene and Apollo, to halt the general carnage temporarily. The fight is stopped by heralds, not because the participants discover that they are cousins. This latter point Shakespeare could have found in Lydgate’s Troy Book or Caxton’s Recuyell of the Histories of Troye, both of which describe another encounter between Hector and Ajax in the midst of a general battle. When Hector discovers their kinship he not only stops fighting Ajax but, at Ajax’s request, stops the whole battle—even though the Trojans are winning it. In the versions of Lydgate and Caxton, this incident decided the outcome of the war: because Troy’s champion imprudently rejected the opportunity provided by fortune to finish off the enemy, fortune turned against Troy.11

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Shakespeare’s amalgam of these two episodes denies the dignity of the first and the fatefulness of the second. The motif of bloodrelationship, obviously of great emotional power when a real battle is concerned, is trivialized when the fight it ends is only a formal exhibition. And the inconclusiveness of the contest, which did not matter within the divine framework of the Iliad, in Shakespeare’s play underlines for us how pointless the whole thing was. The pointlessness is all the more noticeable because Shakespeare has hung so much of the play’s action and discussion on this challenge. In effect, the proposed duel dominates the camp scenes from 1.3, when Aeneas delivers Hector’s message to the Greek council, to 4.5, when Hector and Ajax finally fight. In between, Ulysses and Nestor manipulate the challenge to promote the rivalry of Ajax and Achilles, hoping to cut Achilles down to size and thus return him to the front lines. Ajax swells, Achilles puzzles and fumes, Ulysses and his co-conspirators help the scheme along with appropriate verbal tactics. With almost all the dramatic action in the Greek camp pointing toward the duel, the long buildup prepares us for some major decisive event. The actual encounter is pure bathos. Not only is it over almost as soon as it begins (Ajax is ‘‘not warm yet,’’ 4.5.118) fizzling out in cousinly compliment, but Ulysses’ plot, which hinged on it, also comes to nothing. It is not the elevation of Ajax as Hector’s adversary that finally drives sulky Achilles back to the battlefield but a completely unrelated event, the killing of Patroclus. But if Hector’s challenge and the abortive joust with Ajax lead to nothing in terms of consequent events, they lead into the ways of this play very directly. The rhythm of buildup followed by collapse into anticlimax is in a sense what Troilus and Cressida is all about. The play repeats that pattern in small compass and large, beginning in the Prologue. In Troy, there lies the scene. From isles of Greece The princes orgillous, their high blood chaf d, Have to the port of Athens sent their ships Fraught with the ministers and instruments Of cruel war. Sixty and nine, that wore Their crownets regal, from th’ Athenian bay Put forth toward Phrygia, and their vow is made To ransack Troy, within whose strong immures The ravish’d Helen, Menelaus’ queen, With wanton Paris sleeps—and that’s the quarrel. (1–10)

Pretentious words and archaic constructions consciously elevate the style—‘‘princes orgillous,’’ ‘‘crownets regal,’’ ‘‘sixty and nine.’’12

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The war is presented in the most heroic terms, but when the cause of it all emerges in line 10, epic grandeur shrinks suddenly to the commonplace and trivial: one man’s wife is sleeping with another, ‘‘and that’s the quarrel.’’ When the prologue-speaker then moves back into high gear, it is only to create a larger unit of the inflationdeflation pattern when he yields the stage to lovesick Troilus, for whom the supposedly all-important war is right now just a distracting nuisance. The same rhythm informs the Greek and Trojan council scenes, in which the chief speakers develop at length highminded notions of cosmic order and right reason only to degenerate at the end, respectively, into Ulysses’ plan to set Ajax and Achilles against each other like curs, and rational Hector’s complete capitulation to the irrational claims of honor. At the beginning of the single combat scene itself, everyday bad timing and matter-of-fact comment undercut Ajax’s bellicose rhetoric: Ajax.

Ulyss. Achil.

Thou, trumpet, there’s my purse. Now crack thy lungs, and split thy brazen pipe. Blow, villain, till thy sphered bias cheek Outswell the colic of puff ’d Aquilon; Come, stretch thy chest, and let thy eyes spout blood; Thou blowest for Hector. [Trumpet sounds.] No trumpet answers. ’Tis but early days. (4.5.6–12)

It is, finally, the rhythm of the whole play. Human pretensions are cast up and then cut down, ideals give way to trivial actualities, high resolve dribbles away. We are led to look for eagles and find instead crows and daws. In her essay on Troilus, Una Ellis-Fermor proposed that disjunctions such as these formally expressed the play’s unsuccessful search for absolute values.13 The world of this play supplies no answer to Troilus’s question, ‘‘What’s aught but as ’tis valued?’’ (2.2.52). Value does not inhere, it is conferred from outside. The debate about Helen’s worth as a war-cause, focused in the Trojan council scene, runs through the entire play, from Troilus’s cynicism in the first scene (‘‘Helen must needs be fair, / When with your blood you daily paint her thus,’’ 1.1.90–91) through Hector’s rational assessments, Troilus’s more idealistic declarations, Paris’s selfish arguments, Thersites’ reductive jibes. Initially the Trojans took Helen in a kind of exchange for Priam’s sister Hesione, who was held by the Greeks;

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later the Greeks will demand Cressida in exchange for Antenor. Such trading-off of persons is not unusual in war, but it is given special emphasis here by the persistent images of Helen as a piece of goods and more generally of people priced, bought, and sold like objects.14 Such images have a degrading effect even when the price is set high. Paris is not trying to debase Helen when he says, Fair Diomed, you do as chapmen do, Dispraise the thing that they desire to buy, But we in silence hold this virtue well, We’ll not commend what we intend to sell. (4.1.76–79)

But even while refusing to trade, he makes explicit the implication of all such metaphors—that price and hence value are not constant but alter with external factors like advertising, sharp bargaining, and comparison shopping. The practice of increasing value by elevated comparison has been introduced early in the play. Pandarus in effect ‘‘sells’’ Troilus to Cressida by comparing him with Hector and Paris—‘‘Paris is dirt to him’’ (1.2.238)—having already used Helen to nudge up Cressida’s price to Troilus: ‘‘And her hair were not somewhat darker than Helen’s—well, go to!—there were no more comparison between the women!’’ (1.1.41–43). As Ulysses later tells Achilles, qualities, not ‘‘formed in th’ applause’’ of others are not quite real (3.3.115–23). Hector’s challenge is the plot vehicle that focuses these trends of statement and image. Shakespeare might have provided another excuse for Ulysses and the others to set about their image-making, whereby Ajax rises to top-warrior status by the sheer power of their words. This one, however, has a special ironic appropriateness: the idea behind single combat is also to compare men, but the measure is properly their own deeds rather than the words of others. If Ulysses’ public-relations scheme seems curiously modern to present-day audiences of Troilus, they must sense as conversely old-fashioned the opposed spirit of Hector’s challenge to single combat. Perhaps it is going too far to see Shakespeare as the prophet of Madison Avenue. What is more clear is that, while irony colors the presentation of both Trojans and Greeks in the play, and pretensions on both sides are regularly deflated, the two sides are nevertheless distinguished, and the distinction is to some extent that between the old and the new. The Trojans, everybody knew, were going to lose the war; even within the play, Cassandra and others prophesy the end of their city and civilization. The Greeks were going to carry the day.

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Events themselves thus suggested an old order yielding to a new, and E. M. W. Tillyard has suggested that the differences between Trojans and Greeks can be understood in this light: ‘‘The Trojans have admirable qualities but they are antiquated in their ideas and they lack the realism of the Greeks who, though in their way inefficient, are at least modern and free from the antiquarian illusions of chivalry.’’15 Formal structure—parallel council scenes, parallel encounters of Hector and Achilles in Act 5—invites us to compare Greek and Trojan, and the comparison bears Tillyard out. However wrong we may feel Troilus and Hector to be in supporting a code of honor divorced from rational value, they have a highminded generosity of spirit that we miss in the petty jealousies and calculations of the Greeks. Hector and Ulysses both preach good doctrine only to depart from it in practice, but their practices are characteristically different: Hector sends a gallant challenge, Ulysses plans a publicrelations stunt. In his final battle, Hector may be seduced by the superficial trappings of chivalry into hunting down a Greek for his armor, but he is incapable of denying Achilles a fair chance in fight. Given the opportunity to return the courtesy when he comes upon Hector unarmed, Achilles answers chivalry with gang murder. So with the challenge itself. The ironies attending it touch both sides: Aeneas’s prologue before delivering it is foolishly over-elaborate, Nestor’s response that ‘‘my lady / Was fairer than his grandam’’ (1.3.298–99) is ludicrous. But again there is a difference between the way Hector sends the challenge and the way the Greeks react. What is presented as a knight’s enterprise to honor his lady they treat (after the first ritual protestations) as a propaganda contest. Ulysses and the others, assuming that Achilles is Hector’s real object, simply ignore the courtly love element. They may be right. Hector himself says of his motive only that he wants to rouse the Greeks. But even if the difference is one of style rather than substance, it is still significant. It is worth asking why, when Shakespeare was clearly in a mood for wholesale debunking, he would have bothered to make the Trojans better than the Greeks—or, more accurately, to make the Greeks even worse than the Trojans. Though the tradition that traced British origins to Troy may have figured here in some way, I suspect the real point is that the Greeks defeated the Trojans. By presenting the winners as even less appealing than the losers, Shakespeare added to his general deflation of the ideals of love and war a sense that human affairs were going from bad to worse. Hector, the character who comes closest to winning our admiration, is the one who dies during the play—the only one, barring the personally insignificant

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Patroclus. Hector does not fit into the world that is coming into being, the Ulysses-world, any more than Antony fits into the Caesarworld that gradually takes over in Antony and Cleopatra. There is a great distance, certainly, between Antony, whose towering stature survives the persistent irony of Shakespeare’s treatment, and Hector, who has to share the stage with several other major characters and seems more a collection of attitudes than a human whole. Still, there is a link between the two that can be summed up in the connotations, good and bad, of the term old-fashioned. Both are pathetic and silly in not recognizing the new rules of the present, yet admirable in upholding values nobler and more personal than anything the debased new order can produce. If the offer of single combat had such associations for Shakespeare in 1 Henry IV as well, it will at first glance seem odd that when he invented a challenge scene he should have given the impulse to Hal, man of the future, rather than to Hotspur, the last of the chevaliers. In fact, the challenge episode does oppose old and new in the manner of the other plays—Hotspur eagerly welcomes Hal’s offer, while the prudent politician Bolingbroke disallows it—but Hal is a new factor in the equation. Shakespeare is working out a special complex of ideas in the second tetralogy of history plays, and the different handling of single combat is instructive both about the play and about Hal. Hal does not offer the challenge as Hotspur would offer it. Their attitude to single combat in place of general battle is only superficially the same. Hal says, I am content that he shall take the odds Of his great name and estimation, And will, to save the blood on either side, Try fortune with him in a single fight. (5.1.97–100)

And Hotspur, when he hears of the proposal in the next scene, replies, O would the quarrel lay upon our heads, And that no man might draw short breath to-day But I and Harry Monmouth! Tell me, tell me, How show’d his tasking? seem’d it in contempt? (5.2.47–50)

While both men are eager to settle the war personally, key phrases in the two speeches point to very different motives. ‘‘To save the

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blood on either side,’’ says Hal. He has been rather quiet in this scene, a parley which has quickly turned into a contest of recriminations between Worcester and King Henry. When the Prince finally speaks it is in quite another key, as if while the other two have bandied abstract causes he has been meditating on the human realities of war: ‘‘In both your armies there is many a soul / Shall pay full dearly for this encounter’’ (5.1.83–84). It is the small and ordinary who pay for the quarrels of the great, and they are seen here not as food for powder, in Falstaff ’s careless phrase, but as souls. They are in fact Hal’s future subjects. The giveaway phrase in Hotspur’s response is ‘‘seem’d it in contempt?’’ He thinks only of Hal’s attitude to him, how the challenge affects his own position. When Hotspur wishes that no one else would fight except himself and Harry Monmouth, there is no suggestion that he is thinking of his soldiers. Rather it is the same spirit with which he has earlier greeted the default of Northumberland’s army, which was to have joined his own men and the Scots under Douglas: ‘‘It lends a lustre and more great opinion, / A larger dare to our great enterprise’’ (4.1.77–78). The smaller the number, the greater the honor. Fighting alone is the greatest honor of all. It would not occur to Hotspur in any case to spare his troops, for he himself loves battle and he is too unimaginative, too self-centered, to see that others may in all honor feel differently. The answer to his ‘‘seem’d it in contempt?’’ is, of course, no. Hal has put forth his challenge with full praise for Hotspur and modesty about himself. To underline the contrast with Hotspur’s self-preoccupation, Shakespeare in the following scene has Vernon rehearse the whole challenge again, an impartial observer testifying to Hal’s princely humility. The different approaches taken by Prince and King in the parley suggest that Shakespeare is playing off Hal not only against Hotspur but against his father. It turns out that the King has his own plan for avoiding battle. With something of Hal’s concern for the common subject (‘‘We love our people well, even those we love / That are misled’’), he offers free pardon for all who will yield at once (5.1.104–08). Worcester does not think he means it. He conceals the royal proposal from Hotspur, and thus we never find out if Henry would have kept his word. Still, it looks commonsensical and realistic next to Hal’s chivalric gesture. But Hal is really a better politician than his father. He knows Hotspur would refuse the amnesty offer: It will not be accepted, on my life. The Douglas and the Hotspur both together Are confident against the world in arms. (5.1.115–17)

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Any gambit has to appeal to that overweening pride. Hotspur will never humble himself before the King but he is, as we shortly see, very willing to fight the Prince. While Henry’s plan is thus doomed by human nature, Hal’s might have worked. It is Henry himself who dooms his son’s plan with what he terms ‘‘considerations infinite’’—presumably political as well as paternal. Neither romance nor risk appeals to King Henry. Shakespeare is using single combat in Hal’s case to make a more complicated comparison than that of Antony or Troilus. The clash of old and new indeed animates the Richard II-to-Henry V tetralogy, but the major figure in these plays, Hal, emerges as distinct not only from the empty forms of Richard’s court but also from the least attractive elements of Richard’s Lancastrian successors and their new politics. In Richard II the transition from old to new is presented to evoke a mixed reaction. Richard is inept but legitimate, Bolingbroke’s takeover means more efficient government but also potential civil war. Richard irritates but ultimately moves us with his selfromanticizing; Bolingbroke’s taciturnity is both refreshing and suspicious. In the Henry 1V plays, Shakespeare goes on exploring the new politics inaugurated by Bolingbroke’s courting of oyster-wenches and made necessary by his overthrow of the traditional sanctions of power. Hal too cultivates the common touch at Eastcheap, and in the famous soliloquy that ends his first scene there we see him consciously building an image, almost in the manner of Ulysses. He plans his wild oats as part of a calculated effect of contrast, to make his ultimate reformation ‘‘show more goodly and attract more eyes’’ (1.2.214). But we are also watching in these plays the education of a hero-king. Shakespeare’s view of Hal is too clear-sighted for uncritical admiration, and he will not let us forget ‘‘the loss of human qualities that appears . . . to be involved in the very fact of political success.’’16 Still, Hal is not to be part of the ambiguous balance of Richard II, but a new factor. He must be a recognizable representative of the Lancastrian politics, and yet something more than that. In 1 Henry IV, even more than in Antony and Troilus, old and new are both found wanting. Hotspur brings out the selfishness of personal heroics as well as the individuality and glamor. Bolingbroke, if he deserves something more than Hotspur’s reductive epithet ‘‘vile politician,’’ is cold and cautious, concerned as much about the public image of royalty as about its substance.17 Hal must move beyond both to shape the future. Thus the mode of 1 Henry IV is not balancing off but subsuming. Hal’s victory over Hotspur is not like his father’s over Richard: he incorporates part of Hotspur while

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defeating him, the positive element in chivalry, and turns it to the practical ends of the new world. In thus reconciling old and new, Hal’s offer of single combat in 1 Henry IV serves the ends of political comedy. In the contexts of disillusioned satire and tragedy, however, the same device calls up the same associations of a romantic but no longer viable past for more pessimistic purposes. No reconciliation is possible with the politics of calculation, which manipulates anonymous armies and public opinion. The old order passes, giving way to the new, and in the process individual men are diminished. Obviously genre played a large part in Shakespeare’s determination of how to use single combat and its connotations. Perhaps one may speculate, in addition, that as he grew older he perceived a deeper breach, essentially unbridgeable, between the heroic and the politic.

Notes 1. Citations of the plays are from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974. 2. There was apparently a good market for books on war in the later years of Elizabeth’s reign: Maurice J. D. Cockle, A Bibliography of English Military Books up to 1642 (London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1900), lists for the 1580s and 1590s fortyfour new items and six new editions of earlier works. 3. The Art of War in the Middle Ages, AD 378–1515, rev. and ed. John H. Beeler (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univiversity Press, 1953), 58. 4. See J. R. Hale, The Art of War and Renaissance England (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1961), 14–18, and ‘‘Gunpowder and the Renaissance,’’ From the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation, ed. C. H. Carter (New York: Random House, 1965), 118–26. Ariosto attacks the ‘‘weapon vile wherewith a foolish boy / May worthy captaines mischeefe and annoy’’; see Orlando Furioso, trans. Sir John Harington (1591), ed. Robert McNulty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 9.27; cf. 11.20–24. Don Quixote too laments that a cowardly nobody can cut down the most illustrious knight with a random shot (Part I, ch. 38). 5. A. V. B. Norman and Don Pottinger, Warrior to Soldier, 449 to 1660 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), 127–31. 6. For example, in Henry Goldwell’s account of the Whitsun Week tournament held in 1581 before the French ambassadors, A Brief Declaration of the Shews etc. (London, 1581), A6v–A7r, Sidney, in blue and gilt armor, was accompanied by four pages on four spare horses, thirty gentlemen and yeomen, and four trumpeters. All, including the horses, were elaborately decked out, and the trumpeters wore scrolls setting forth the motto sic nos non nobis. For Sidney’s participation in other tourneys, see W. A. Ringler’s note to Astrophil and Stella 41, in The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 474. 7. Accounts of Sidney in the Netherlands and excerpts from his letters may be found in the biographies of Malcolm M. Wallace, F. S. Boas, Mona Wilson, and Roger Howell. 8. The Parallel Lives, cited in North’s translation from Narrative and Dramatic

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Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, 8 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957–75), 5:297, 307. 9. Narrative and Dramatic Sources, 5:307; Shakespeare used this episode for scenes 7 and 8 of Act 4. 10. 3.11.36–38, 23, 49, 3–4, 69–70. 11. Lydgate’s Troy Book, ed. Henry Bergen, Part 2, EETS, e.s., 103 (London: K. Paul, Trench, Tru¨bner, & Co., 1908), lines 1958–2151; Caxton, cited from Narrative and Dramatic Sources, 6:198. 12. See Alice Walker’s note on 1.1.2 in the New Cambridge edition of Troilus and Cressida (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957). 13. The Frontiers of Drama, 2d ed. (London: Methuen, 1946), 56–76. 14. 2.2.69–70; 4.1.76–79; 4.5.238; 1.3.358–61; 1.1.100–04. 15. Shakespeare’s Problem Plays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1950), 59. 16. D. A. Traversi, Shakespeare from ‘‘Richard II’’ to ‘‘Henry V’’ (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957), 9. 17. The bulk of his sermon to Hal in 3.2 is a contrast between his own adept manipulation of ‘‘opinion, that did help me to the crown’’ and the failure of Richard, who with appearances too frequent and undignified cheapened the image of majesty (39–91).

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Meaning in Motion: Macbeth and Especially Antony and Cleopatra DECADES AGO, R. A. FOAKES SPOKE OUT PERSUASIVELY FOR A NEW APproach to Shakespeare’s imagery that would go beyond the categories of Caroline Spurgeon. Specifically, he appealed for more attention to dramatic imagery, including props and stage effects; and for analysis and classification of images on bases other than subject matter.1 More recent times have witnessed a new concentration on the direct imagery of stage production, with a corollary withdrawal from verbal imagery—for fear of committing the new cardinal sin, reading the play as a poem. A few critics remained faithful to ‘‘the poetry,’’ assuming that Hamlet can be apprehended in the same way as, say, Paradise Lost. Yet drama is a temporal art, much more so than poetry, and its essence is action. Perhaps one reason that image-critics of the traditional sort and theater-oriented critics have had little to say to each other is that the former are, for the most part, still attending only to image-patterns created by static subject matter, recurring objects like jewels or qualities like darkness. But verbs have their effect in Shakespeare’s language as well as nouns and adjectives. Images create other patterns through repeated motion, and it is this dynamic aspect of imagery that connects most naturally with stage movements and groupings. Not that the dynamics of images have been completely ignored. Few critics will discuss poison or disease references in Hamlet without pointing out their characteristic common movement—spreading unseen, mining all within, and at last breaking forth to betray the inner corruption that can no longer be contained. Yet it is not sufficiently recognized that a recurrent motion connects these images with others in the play whose ‘‘subject’’ is not poison or sickness: for example, with Hamlet’s early prediction that ‘‘foul deeds will rise, / Though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes’’ (1.2.262– 63),2 and with his later one that the hidden, decaying body of Polonius will eventually give away its whereabouts by smell (4.3.37–38). In one play, Richard II, a very pronounced pattern of iterated motion has attracted critical comment. First Paul A. Jorgenson and later 62

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Arthur Suzman pointed out the persistent up-and-down action that informs not only verbal images as diverse as buckets, scales, plants, and the sun, but gesture and stage movement as well—gages thrown down and taken up, kneeling and rising, and most tellingly of all, in the Flint Castle scene that marks the real end of his temporal power, Richard’s descent from the upper stage to the level where his challenger awaits him: Base court, where kings grow base To come at traitors’ calls. . . . Down, court! Down, king! For night-owls shriek where mounting larks should sing. [Exeunt from above.]3 (3.3.180–83)

It is possible to go further than Jorgenson or Suzman have in relating this imagery to dramatic structure. Richard II has a built-in structural ambivalence: politically, Richard’s course is downward and Bolingbroke’s is upward, but in audience sympathies Bolingbroke is the one who falls while Richard rises. Many of the up-down images convey versions of this ambivalence, either in themselves or as qualified one by another. The equation of Richard with the setting sun, for instance, suggests a natural, right transition ‘‘from Richard’s night to Bolingbroke’s fair day’’ (3.2.218). But this image is associated with a less natural, more awesome phenomenon when Salisbury imagines Richard not only as the sun setting but as a shooting star, plummeting suddenly to the base earth and presaging ‘‘storms to come, woe, and unrest’’ (2.4.19–22). Richard’s own choice of Phaeton rather than Apollo in the Flint Castle speech reminds us that his night is an abrupt, violent thing, a violation of natural process rather than the timely closing of day. Night owls forcibly displace the larks of day that should be singing. When in Act 3, scene 4 the Gardener speaks in his own idiom of Richard’s flourishing and fall—‘‘He that hath suffered this disordered spring / Hath now himself met with the fall of leaf ’’ (48–49)—the abrupt passage from spring to fall of leaf carries the same implication that Richard’s decline, while inevitable, is unnatural. So, too, the later image of the scales (84–89) is more ambivalent than it seems. Bolingbroke prevails because his side is heavy with allies, while Richard’s contains only himself and his ‘‘light’’ vanities. Straightforward enough, except that in changing his metaphor the Gardener has also changed, in fact reversed, the values that he and other speakers have established for up and down. Up has been the desirable position, yet this

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vision of Bolingbroke solid in power and popularity and Richard dangling vainly in the air suggests that up can be bad as well as good. The suggestion carries over into the deposition scene that follows, when Richard applies the opposition of up and down to himself and his rival, and reverses the values back again—or does he? In his simile of the two buckets (4.1.184–90), the King is once again on the down side, freighted with tears, while Bolingbroke dances in the air. But this lightness of Bolingbroke’s recalls the implications of ‘‘light’’ in the Gardener’s scale conceit, especially when Richard calls his successor ‘‘empty.’’ The ambiguity may well be conscious on the speaker’s part as well as the playwright’s. Bolingbroke is empty in being free of Richard’s griefs, the weight of tears, but also in lacking proper sanction as a king; without the weight of tradition and inheritance his position is shaky. Another motion-system of oppositions shapes Macbeth. The Macbeths conceive and execute their crime in terms of perversions of natural flow, especially stopping up and leaping over. Legitimate monarchy, passing from one king to his rightful successor, finds its movement in slow, ordered growth. ‘‘I have begun to plant thee,’’ says Duncan to Banquo, ‘‘and will labor / To make thee full of growing’’ (1.4.28–29). His son Malcolm, finally king of Scotland after the dreadful interlude of the Macbeths, plans his restoration of order in the same terms: ‘‘What’s more to do / Which would be planted newly with the time . . . ’’ (5.8.65–66). But in the earlier scene, while Duncan foresees slow but flourishing development for loyal followers and names Malcolm his eventual successor, Macbeth responds with something quite opposite—varieties of convulsive motion. Malcolm’s nomination as Prince of Cumberland is ‘‘a step / On which I must fall down or else o’erleap’’ (1.4.48–49). Stopping and leaping over, disrupters of ordinary flow, return to haunt the imaginations of both Macbeths as they work themselves up to their crime. Lady Macbeth shows why they must violate natural motion in order to do what they do. She calls on the murderous spirits to thicken her blood so as to block the rush of pity that would naturally respond to thoughts of such a murder: Stop up th’access and passage to remorse, That no compunctious visitings of nature Shake my fell purpose. . . . (1.5.44–46)

Night must interfere with the ordinary line of vision to cut off both murderer and judging heaven from the sight of the deed. At the

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same time, she feels propelled past difficulties, leaping past ‘‘this ignorant present’’ to ‘‘feel . . . The future in the instant’’ (1.5.56–58). Her husband in his own soliloquy (1.7.1–28) is obsessed in a parallel way with cutting off the normal progression from cause to result, and wishes rather to trammel up consequence, to stop with his single murderous blow the whole process of reaction and new initiative. The prospect of consequence after death he addresses with overleaping, another form of blotting-out—‘‘We’d jump the life to come.’’ Later on he is more aware of the dangers of ‘‘vaulting ambition,’’ which overleaps itself only to fall on the other side. But his lady retains her faith in stopping-up, even imagines violently cutting off the literal flow of nursing and life itself in her helpless infant. In that savage truncation of the next generation, as many have noticed, what begins as an image later turns into dramatic fact. There are apparently no Macbeth children to rule after him in orderly succession. It is Banquo’s issue who will move forward, generation after generation, an endless line stretching out to the crack of doom. Macbeth’s fury at this vision (4.1.150–54) is displaced onto Macduff, possibly a traitor but guilty mainly of having a ‘‘line.’’ Behind this insistence on Macbeth’s truncated line and his obsession with cutting off others in retaliation lies the original crime, presented to Duncan’s sons as a violent stopping up of the natural flow of life from father to children: ‘‘The spring, the head, the fountain of your blood / Is stopped, the very source of it is stopped’’ (2.3.100–101). Like the cutting off of progeny, other violations of natural motion eventually turn against the Macbeths. The natural laws they depend on (in spite of trying to thwart them), become unreliable. Dead men, like Banquo, refuse to lie still. ‘‘This is more strange / Than such a murder is,’’ says the shaken Macbeth in the banquet scene (3.4.83–84), his turn of phrase inadvertantly revealing how one action answers the other: unnatural stoppage calls forth unnatural movement. The witches’ prophecies give Macbeth confidence exactly because he trusts in natural process and law: men are born of women, trees don’t move. Who can impress the forest, bid the tree Unfix his earthbound root? Sweet bodements, good! Rebellious dead, rise never till the wood Of Birnam rise, and our high-placed Macbeth Shall live the lease of nature. . . . (4.1.95–99)

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But the rebellious dead have already risen, and their refusal of natural stasis will be reprised in the sleepwalking of Lady Macbeth. The fixity of the forest and the universality of the birth process prove no more reliable. Only when the Macbeths are trapped and extinguished by their own perversions of natural motion can the old orderly rhythm be reinstituted, as in Malcolm’s final speech: this, and what needful else That calls upon us, by the grace of Grace We will perform in measure, time, and place. (5.8.72–74)

Antony and Cleopatra is similarly bound together by kinetically linked images that reinforce apparent movements and gather in less obvious ones. Here the clash of Rome against Egypt and Antony’s tragic dilemma are enacted through the imagistic opposition of solid fixity or speedy directness against beautiful, unpurposive motion. The play’s first scene presents without delay the opposed forces that are working and will continue to work on Antony—Egypt in Cleopatra’s changeable, demanding charm and Rome in the harsh judgements of Philo and Demetrius. Philo’s opening lines set up the contrast between what he stands for and what he sees in the Alexandrian court: Nay, but this dotage of our general’s O’erflows the measure. Those his goodly eyes, That o’er the files and musters of the war Have glowed like plated Mars, now bend, now turn, The office and devotion of their view Upon a tawny front. His captain’s heart, Which in the scuffles of great fights hath burst The buckles of his breast, reneges all temper, And is become the bellows and the fan To cool a gypsy’s lust. Flourish. Enter Antony, Cleopatra, her Ladies, the train, with eunuchs fanning her. Look where they come! Take but good note, and you shall see in him The triple pillar of the world transformed Into a strumpet’s fool. (1.1.1–13)

Uniting the images of speech and action are two opposed ideas: one of steadfast, rigid immobility—a fixed measure and temper, the orderly

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files of ranked soldiers, the hard solidity of plated Mars, the unmoving pillar of the world—and the other of fluid, shifting movement, of overflowing, bending, turning, fanning. This last is reinforced by stage action when Cleopatra enters with eunuchs fanning her. Philo’s disapproving stand is simple enough, but the scene goes on to explore and complicate the values of fixity and flux. Measure, a positive notion in Philo’s speech, is undercut in Antony’s ‘‘There’s beggary in the love that can be reckoned’’ (1.1.15). Roman measure has no room for a new heaven or a new earth.4 Similarly, Antony makes Rome’s solidity yield to his larger vision of human fulfillment: Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch Of the rang’d empire fall ! Here is my space. Kingdoms are clay; our dungy earth alike Feeds beast as man. The nobleness of life Is to do thus; when such a mutual pair And such a twain can do’t, in which I bind, On pain of punishment, the world to weet We stand up peerless. (35–42)

The stable pillars and arches of Rome dissolve into fluidity, a fluidity however that is seen as expanding and completing rather than destroying. In what sense can Antony find positive value in dissolution? Against the Roman message, with its implications of purposive action and thinking for the future, he sets up the ideal of the immediate moment perfectly fulfilled: ‘‘There’s not a minute of our lives should stretch / Without some pleasure now’’ (48–49, my italics). This is Cleopatra’s gift, the full realization of all moments and moods. Fie, wrangling queen! Whom everything becomes—to chide, to laugh, To weep; whose every passion fully strives To make itself in thee fair and admired. (50–53)

Antony celebrates a mode of life like the fanning motion which is the visual background to his words, directed to no end except motion itself and the beautifying of the moment. His word becomes is an important one. Cleopatra’s moods serve no consistent purpose except to realize themselves, and her, perfectly. Later uses of the word will bring out the link between gracing the moment and expanding into fuller being. For now, Philo and Demetrius sway the balance

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back again, posing against this hint of identity expanding infinitely a contrary notion of identity as defined by Roman duties. Philo uses become negatively, for degenerated into: Antony’s martial heart ‘‘is become the bellows and the fan. . . .’’ In his eyes, Antony by seeking escape from Roman measure has simply fallen below it, diminished and negated the self that is based on his Roman achievements. ‘‘He comes too short of that great property / Which still should go with Antony’’ (60–61). On this note the scene ends. Its very structure carries out the opposition of fixity and flux, framing Antony’s hyperboles and Cleopatra’s quicksilver shifts with the unyielding judgement of the two Roman onlookers who open and close the scene.5 An equally intractable, though silent, presence is the Roman message itself. The lovers can describe arabesques of constant motion around it, but they cannot blow it away. Antony’s tragedy will be played out between these two imagistic poles, of solid stillness (or direct, purposive motion) and continual shifting activity, with their ambiguous implications for the self. The images that follow continue and fill out the pattern set in the first scene. Cleopatra’s Nile journey, as later described by Enobarbus (2.2.200–215), is all beautiful, self-fulfilling, self-justifying motion. The barge will eventually land somewhere, but there is no sense of direction toward an end in the action of sails and oars. On the contrary, the sails are there to dally with the ‘‘love-sick’’ winds and the oars to keep time with flutes while playing similar games with the water, which is ‘‘amorous of their strokes.’’ The point is in the process—as it is also with the fans plied by pretty boys ‘‘whose wind did seem / To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool, / And what they undid did.’’ So, too, Cleopatra’s waiting women make ‘‘their bends adornings,’’ achieving nothing beyond the graceful movements themselves. Antony calls Cleopatra his serpent of old Nile, and water with its unending shift and flow is clearly her element as solid earth is natural to the Roman soldier Antony. While Shakespeare is not so eager as Plutarch to blame Antony’s decision to fight Caesar by sea rather than by land on his passion for Cleopatra,6 she certainly gives instant support to the choice—‘‘By sea! What else?’’ (3.7.28)—and her only forces mentioned in the play are naval ones. The Cleopatra who first caught Antony’s heart on the river of Cydnus dreams in terms of their favorite river-sport of catching him again and again with her angle and bended hook (2.5.10–15). Enobarbus, who first identified her with winds and waters (1.2.155), at Actium defines the slippery changeability of her element in relation to stable land when he warns Antony not to ‘‘give up yourself merely to chance and

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hazard, / From firm security’’ (3.7.48–49).7 Cleopatra’s actions have the ebb and flow of water: laughing Antony out of patience and then laughing him back in (2.5.19–20), meeting his sadness with dancing and his mirth with sudden sickness (1.3.3–5). Her verbs, so to speak, are intransitive, objectless like the movements of winds and waves and fans. Hopping forty paces in the street, as Enobarbus recalls her doing (2.2.239), has no object beyond spirited activity. It is surely no way to arrive anywhere. Even when Cleopatra is being apparently purposeful, sending messages to the absent Antony (1.5.66–81), what counts is not the message but the act of sending. It hardly needed the ‘‘twenty several messengers’’ (65) already dispatched to make Antony understand her love and longing for him, yet she goes on from there to vow extravagantly, ‘‘He shall have every day a several greeting, / Or I’ll unpeople Egypt’’ (80–81). Roman movement, when there is any at all, is direct, efficient, transitive. The best example is Caesar’s incredibly rapid passage with his troops from Italy to Epirus, which so impresses Antony and Candidius (3.7.20–25; 54-57; 74–75). Antony’s first bemused image is of Caesar, supposed so far away, cutting the sea like a sword to conquer Toryne near Antony’s own camp (3.7.22–23). For the most part, though, Rome evokes images of stationary firmness. Opposed to Cleopatra’s constant movement is Octavia, who is ‘‘holy, cold, and still’’ in her behavior (2.6.124), ‘‘still’’ too in her judgement (4.15.29), who seems ‘‘a body rather than a life, / A statue than a breather’’ (3.3.21–22). Antony’s marriage to her is a binding (2.5.59), Maecenas hopes she will settle his heart (2.2.251–53), and he himself vows his reform to her in terms of fixed, straight lines: ‘‘I have not kept my square, but that to come / Shall all be done by th’rule’’ (2.3.6–7, my italics). From this Roman perspective, Egyptian movement looks stupid and degrading in its lack of purpose. Caesar’s verbs to describe Antony’s ‘‘pleasure now’’—tumbling on the bed of Ptolemy, keeping the turn of tippling, reeling, standing the buffet—have no beauty in them (1.4.16–21). Jostling with knaves ‘‘that smell of sweat,’’ no longer commander of himself or his situation, Antony in Cesar’s eyes is at the mercy of the moment, like the vulgar populace whose loyalties shift with every tide. Caesar might say of him, as he does of the despised public, This common body, Like to a vagabond flag upon the stream, Goes to, and back, lackeying the varying tide, To rot itself with motion. (1.4.44–47)

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In the Roman’s contemptuous image, watery instability is simply servitude—‘‘lackeying the tide’’—and unpurposive motion leads only to helpless decay. Pompey even finds a kind of stasis in Antony’s pleasures of the moment: for him Antony is a tame animal tethered in a field of feasts (2.1.23). Indeed, Antony in his Roman mood can also see the restless motions of pleasure as imprisoning. In the expansive sentiment of ‘‘Let Rome in Tiber melt,’’ it was the world he would ‘‘bind’’ to admire in the activities of Cleopatra and himself the full nobleness of life. When struck by Roman thoughts, however, he sees himself as immobilized, ‘‘bound . . . up / From mine own knowledge’’ (2.2.96–97), pinned down by strong Egyptian fetters (1.2.122). He can even share Caesar’s disdain for the undirected flux of public opinion, now flowing for no good reason toward Pompey—‘‘our slippery people’’ (1.2.192). Later, after he has failed to stand firm at Actium, Antony harks back to that Roman norm of fixed, straight lines to image his disgrace: ‘‘I have offended reputation— / A most unnoble swerving’’ (3.11.48–49, my italics). And, as if in response to his own lack of fixity, others now fall away from him—kings, captains, Enobarbus, Fortune, the god Hercules—in a pattern of repeated desertions that shapes most of Act 4. Nowhere after the first scene does the opposition between Roman fixity and Egyptian fluidity come into sharper focus than in 2.7, the feast aboard Pompey’s galley. The setting himself is suggestive. But only a film version could give us as direct dramatic image the solid ship on evershifting water, secured in a place by a single cable. In this play written for the bare Shakespearian stage, it is words and gestures that must keep us aware of the chancy, changeable element that surrounds this gathering of Romans. Drink is the main reminder, of course. The characters reel and stagger in varying degrees, Lepidus most and Caesar and Menas least, and finally join in the dance whose dizzying motion is indicated in its refrain—‘‘Cup us till the world go round.’’ Verbal imagery reinforces the effect of Roman terra firma threatened and undermined by other, alien elements or perversions of its own. The Romans are ill-rooted plants at the mercy of the wind, Lepidus is sinking in quicksands, cares drown in Bacchus’s vats, Menas wishes the whole world could ‘‘go on wheels’’ (2.7.1–3; 60; 117; 93–94). In answering Lepidus’s drunken catechism Antony invokes Egyptian undulation directly, the swell and ebb of the Nile and the serpentine crocodile it breeds, which like Cleopatra lives by no other law than itself. Caesar is inevitably ill at ease amid all this living for the moment. He cannot, as Antony counsels, ‘‘be a child o’ the time’’ (101). That is Antony’s way, the way he learned in Egypt, but not Caesar’s.

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If Caesar has misgivings about flux undermining firmness, they are justified. While Antony is being a child of the time, Menas urgently reminds Pompey that he need only cut one cable to set the whole Roman government adrift and manipulate it at his own pleasure. Order and stability are worth something, after all, and in a play not notably sympathetic to Rome Shakespeare makes us feel here, at least, how vulnerable and how necessary Roman order is. Where Caesar offers in his bearing a dramatic image of fixity at the reeling feast, Menas is the other image of Rome—direct, purposive action. He dogs Pompey’s steps relentlessly about the stage to prod him to the decisive act. ‘‘Wilt thou be lord of all the world? . . . Wilt thou be lord of the whole world? . . . Let me cut the cable’’ (62–72). Menas’s urgent movements and speech-rhythms are another kind of Roman counterpoint to these self-fulfilling Egyptian Bacchanals. The plot to cut the cable comes to nothing, because of Pompey’s ambiguous but nevertheless inhibiting honor. Caesar, the real man of the future, who will later cut the sea, has no such inhibitions. The galley scene is typical of Antony and Cleopatra as a whole in its ambivalence about the values of fixity/direct-drive and flux. Menas’s plan of action, which involves cutting throats as well as cables, makes the boasting talk of Egyptian tourist attractions seem trivial; but Antony, the child of the time, is more alive than cautious, calculating Caesar. When the Nile’s flow quickens Egypt, Antony tells Lepidus, it brings forth grain and also crocodiles. So it is with Antony’s Egyptian excess, as Janet Adelman observes: ‘‘it too will breed serpents as well as crops. But the man of measure—the man who never overflows— will not breed at all.’’8 Both aspects of breeding, positive and negative, come through in the play’s persistent references to melting, merging, and ‘‘becoming.’’ As in Antony’s speech in the first scene Rome’s hard outlines melt to allow a new heaven and a new earth, so later we learn that Egyptian life breaks down normal divisions between day and night (2.2.187–88), between land and water again (2.5.79), even between male and female. Cleopatra recalls how she and Antony expanded into each other’s roles, he wearing her tires and mantles and she his sword Philippan (2.5.22–23). What was play then becomes a more profound merging later, in Antony’s startling invitation to her: Leap thou, attire and all, Through proof of harness to my heart, and there Ride on the pants triumphing. (4.8.14–16)

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Hard-and-fast limits (‘‘proof of harness’’) give way, in his imagination at least, before the leaping, pulsing motion that fuses separate selves. Antony has also said that every passion becomes Cleopatra, gracing her by its full realization; later she will likewise expect him to ‘‘become / The carriage of his chafe’’ (1.3.84–85), make his anger an ennobling thing. ‘‘Be’st thou sad or merry,’’ she says of him in his absence, ‘‘The violence of either thee becomes, / So does it no man else’’ (1.5.62–64). The Roman notion of ‘‘becoming’’ is conversely narrow: soldierly dress becomes Romans, reveling does not (Caesar’s ‘‘say this becomes him’’ after that unattractive list of Antony’s activities in Egypt is obviously ironic). Becoming means ‘‘fitting for Roman,’’ and any other kind of becoming is degeneration—as in Philo’s image Antony has degenerated into a mere appliance catering to Cleopatra’s lust. Egypt finds even negative passions ‘‘becomings,’’ ways to fuller being. When Enobarbus claims that ‘‘vilest things become themselves’’ in Cleopatra, it is impossible to disentangle in the knotted sense ‘‘vilest things are graces’’ from ‘‘vilest things are fully realized.’’ In this paradoxical merging of earnings divisions between good and bad also give way to the expansiveness of endless process.9 Rome, in contrast, finds true being only in sharp outlines and distinctions. Caesar is aware in his own way of the melting of sex distinctions between Antony and Cleopatra—as adulterating Antony’s soldier-self, not enlarging it: ‘‘[Antony] is not more manlike / Than Cleopatra, nor the queen of Ptolemy / More womanly than he’’ (1.4.5–7). For Caesar that self of Antony’s is defined by hardship and his unyielding sameness in the face of it, the retreat from Modena when, in spite of eating strange flesh and drinking horses’ urine, his cheek ‘‘so much as lank’d not’’ (1.4.56–72). Later events bear out to a certain extent Caesar’s view of identity as persisting in one’s own ways, observing one’s own boundaries. After Antony has yielded at Actium to Cleopatra and her fluid element instead of standing fast on his own, images of wayward movement express disintegration rather than fuller being. Antony is ‘‘unqualitied’’; he has left himself, lost his way forever, lost command (3.11.19–20; 3–4; 23). Melting is not completion but loss, as authority melts from him (3.13.91). Like Caesar, he seeks ‘‘Antony’’ in past exploits of war: He [Caesar] at Philippi kept His sword e’en like a dancer, while I struck The lean and wrinkled Cassius; and ’twas I That the mad Brutus ended. He alone

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Dealt on lieutenantry, and no practice had In the brave squares of war. Yet now— (3.11.35–40)

Antony is very Roman here. He defines his past self by opposition, between himself and Cassius, himself and Brutus, himself and Caesar. And his typically Roman images combine direct, efficient action (‘‘struck,’’ ‘‘ended’’) with the right-angled solidity of ‘‘squares.’’ But the Egyptian notion of identity has not been dropped. I have been looking at the two scenes that follow the defeat at Actium, 3.11 and 13. While both of them give full expression to Antony’s Roman mood, both also swing up eventually from despair to an affirmation of self that includes Cleopatra. Indeed, the first seems to discard Roman values entirely for Egyptian ones: ‘‘Fall not a tear, I say; one of them rates / All that is won and lost. Give me a kiss; / Even this repays me’’ (3.11.68–70). The second affirmation is more comprehensive. When Antony exclaims, ‘‘Where hast thou been, my heart?’’ (3.13.175), he is recovering both his own essence and the Cleopatra he had earlier thought lost to him (‘‘what’s her name / Since she was Cleopatra?’’ (99–100). Thus restored, Antony can in the same speech proclaim himself tripled in strength and valor, and call for one other gaudy night of feasting (3.13.181–88). In the final movement of Act 4, Antony again feels his outline dissolving like the dragonish cloud (4.14.2–14), melting into indistinctness like water in water. It is important here that this newly endangered identity is not simply the Roman soldier but the fused self of warrior and lover. His earlier promise, on leaving Cleopatra for Rome, to make peace or war according to her wishes (1.3.69–71) was only words: the peace he concluded with Caesar was pure Roman policy and its seal, his marriage to Octavia, could not have been less to Cleopatra’s liking. In the last battle it is finally true that he has ‘‘made these wars for Egypt and the queen’’ (4.14.15). Again the pendulum swings to affirmation. Antony dies affirming both sides of that greater self—a Roman by a Roman valiantly vanquished, still relishing wine and Cleopatra’s kiss. Still, Antony can bring together incompatible modes of life only when he has no more life to live. Images of fixity and flux have acted out kinetically the terms of his dilemma, the fixity necessary to define the self and the fluidity necessary to transcend the self ’s limitations. However much Antony wants to encompass both, he cannot be fixed and constantly moving at the same time, calculate and seize just the right moment for action while living every moment for its own sake. Antony and Cleopatra is distinctive among Shakespeare’s

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tragedies not only in its relative lack of high-drama scenes, which Bradley noted,10 but in a corollary lack of dramatic build-up. Actium is a turningpoint, to be sure, but there is no long sequence building toward it as the early scenes of Macbeth build toward the murder of Duncan or the early scenes of King Lear toward Lear’s self-exile and madness on the health. In Antony and Cleopatra, although we are reminded in various ways that the triumph of Caesarism is inevitably coming,11 scenes tend to be complete in themselves. Each fulfills the potential of the immediate situation, and if it links with what follows it is by ironic juxtaposition rather than as part of a sustained dramatic crescendo. Pleasure is a term in Antony’s tragedy, and its quality of immediacy (‘‘pleasure now’’) is bound to create a different kind of structure that such motives as power and revenge. Bradley also observed, with some regret, Shakespeare had passed up the opportunity to make intense drama of inner conflict out of the contrary pulls of Rome and Cleopatra on Antony.12 Such a conflict, though, would necessarily undercut Antony’s capacity—which is both his weakness and his greatness—to fulfill each moment wholeheartedly. He cannot, as Ernest Schanzer remarks, be shown like Brutus or Macbeth, ‘‘with himself at war’’; rather, ‘‘he is like a chronic deserter, forever changing sides.’’13 In the end both Antony and Cleopatra are for stillness over constant flux. Once Cleopatra challenged the hard pillars and arches of Eternal City with something softer, more alive, more mobile: ‘‘Eternity was in our lips eyes, / Bliss in our brows’ bent’’ (1.3.35–36). But that claim was undercut by its situation (Antony is leaving her) and even by its form. ‘‘Eternity was’’ is a contradiction. Ultimately she must be something less malleable, ‘‘marble constant’’ (5.2.240), and commit her volatile self to the act ‘‘which shackles accidents, and bolts up change’’ (6). Yet her death is not, any more than Antony’s, a simple submission to Roman fixity. It is not just that her mode of dying combines Egyptian means with Roman end. Beyond that, image and reference project the sense that in dying both lovers rise to the moment one last time and do it so perfectly as to arrest time. Each strains toward death as to lover’s embrace (4.14.99–101; 5.2.293–96). Cleopatra prepares again for Cyndus (5.2.277–28), catching up that perfect moment out of the flux of time. Even Caesar sees in the dead queen not so much cessation as eternal attraction, ‘‘as she would catch another Antony . . .’’ (347). At Antony’s suicide what the onlookers sense is time itself frozen: The star is fall’n. And time is at his period. (4.14.108–9)

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This effect of rising through constant motion to timelessness is what distinguishes the resting point of Antony and Cleopatra from the hard immobility of Rome. The paradox comes across most compactly in the climax of Cleopatra’s rhapsody on the dead Antony, the last of the fish images. His delights Were dolphin-like; they showed his back above The element they lived in. (5.2.87–89)

What meanings attach to flux and superior solidity in this vision of the dolphin’s firm back gleaming above the dancing, shifting sea? For Kittredge, who was later followed by Dover Wilson, Cleopatra means that ‘‘as the dolphin shows his back above the water, so Antony always rose superior to the pleasures in which he lived.’’ This separates Antony’s superiority from his pleasures, opposes them in fact. But ‘‘delights’’ are the agents of his rising: it is they who show his back above the sea. Another gloss, this one from the Riverside Shakespeare, says that Antony ‘‘in his pleasures . . . rose above the common as a dolphin rises out of its element, the sea.’’14 Now the pleasures have been dissociated from the sea, which is simply ‘‘the common.’’ But the sea with its unceasing flux is the element in which those uncommon pleasures lived. Antony’s delights are both flux, the succession of moments, and that which ultimately lifts him above flux—because the moment is fully realized. Finally, then, the motion patterns convey not only the essential, tragic incompatibility between stillness and flux but also a hint of transcendence. Image-patterns created by actions may shape other plays as well. Indeed, the whole question of motion in Shakespeare’s verse invites further study. Years ago, F. C. Prescott pronounced that Portia’s ‘‘the quality of mercy is not strain’d’’ was not poetry, because it presented an abstraction rather than the concretes that characterize true poetry.15 Prescott would doubtless grant more pictorial respectability to Portia’s following words, ‘‘It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven / Upon the place beneath’’ (Merchant of Venice, 4.1.183–84). But in fact the whole passage has a poetic force, which is more kinetic than visual: the tightness of ‘‘strained’’ easing into the free release of ‘‘droppeth,’’ heaven’s benign gesture refusing even the constraint of a single line to spill over into the next. Even critics who would reject Prescott’s dogmatism have not paid enough attention to the peculiarly kinaesthetic qualities of Shakespeare’s word-painting. His descriptive passages typically depend more on verbs than

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on adjectives. Consider Perdita’s ‘‘Daffodils, / That come before the swallow dares, and take / The winds of March with beauty’’ (The Winter’s Tale, 4.4.118–20); or Romeo’s warning, ‘‘Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day / Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops’’ (Romeo and Juliet, 3.5.9–10); or even the Shakespeare of the sonnets. Full many a glorious morning have I seen Flatter the mountaintops with sovereign eye, Kissing with golden face the meadows green, Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy. (Sonnet 33)

It is kissing and gilding, not golden, that makes us feel the sun lighting up a landscape, just as outdaring the swallow and taking the March winds express the daffodils’ brave yellow better than any color-adjective could. To return to our beginning: drama’s essence is action, and Shakespeare—in his lyric verse as well as his plays—is preeminently a dramatic artist.

Notes 1. Foakes, ‘‘Suggestions for a New Approach to Shakespeare’s Imagery,’’ Shakespeare Survey 5 (1952): 81–92. 2. All Shakespeare references in this essay are to the Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington, 4th ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). 3. See Jorgenson, ‘‘Vertical Patterns in Richard II,’’ Shakespeare Association Bulletin 23 (1948): 119–34, and Suzman, ‘‘Imagery and Symbolism in Richard II,’’ Shakespeare Quarterly 7 (1956): 255–70. 4. In The Common Liar: An Essay on ‘‘Antony and Cleopatra’’ (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1973), Janet Adelman discusses the play’s images, including many that I cite below, in terms of measure and overflow (122–31). 5. The contrast between hard Roman efficiency and the lush prodigality of Egypt comes out in Antony’s own speech patterns. Compare the leisured, expansive quality of his ‘‘Let Rome in Tiber melt’’ speech with the brusque economy of this interchange with the Roman messenger: Messenger. News, my good lord, from Rome. Antony. Grates me, the sum. (1.1.18; I follow the Folio punctuation, a comma between Antony’s terse phrases. Alexander omits the comma, but the phrases make better sense separated.) 6. ‘‘Now Antonius was made so subject to a womans will, that though he was a great deale the stronger by land, yet for Cleopatraes sake, he would needes have this battell tryed by sea,’’ North’s Plutarch (1579), cited in the New Arden edition, ed. M. R. Ridley (Cambridge, Mass., 1954), 274. 7. Compare in this same scene the Roman soldier: ‘‘Let th’Egyptians / And the

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Phoenicians go a-ducking; we / Have used to conquer standing on the earth / And fighting foot to foot’’ (64–67). 8. The Common Liar, 130. 9. On the double meaning of ‘‘becoming,’’ cf. Adelman, The Common Liar, 144; ‘‘process—infinite variety—is her decorum.’’ 10. ‘‘Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra,’’ Oxford Lectures on Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1909), 283–84. 11. Direct reminders are the soothsayer’s warning Antony that Caesar’s daemon will defeat his in any contest (2.3.18–31) and Caesar’s own prophecy the pax romana, ‘‘The time of universal peace is near’’ (4.6.5). Awareness comes more indirectly from the stress on Antony’s age and Caesar’s youth, and from the overplot movement in which Caesar eliminates a ‘‘world-sharer,’’ first Pompey and then Lepidus, creating the expectation that Antony will be eliminated in his turn. The conflict between Antony and Caesar, ‘‘half to half the world opposed’’ (3.13.9), is imaged by Enobarbus as two jaws inevitably grinding against each other (3.5.13– 15), a picture which combines Roman stillness and directness in its slow but inexorable motion. 12. Oxford Lectures, 285–87. 13. The Problem Plays of Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1963), 135. 14. Antony and Cleopatra, ed. G. L. Kittredge (Boston: Ginn, 1941); New Cambridge, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950); Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). 15. The Poetic Mind (New York: Macmillan, 1922), 44.

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King Lear and the Psychology of Dying PONDERING ‘‘THE THEME OF THE THREE CASKETS,’’ CERTAIN CHOICESamong-three in literature and legend, Freud concluded that in King Lear Shakespeare had somehow pierced through the myth’s defensive disguises to its original unpalatable meaning. The right choice—the third casket, the third woman—is really death. While students of Shakespeare may well object that a straightforward identification of Lear’s third daughter with death says at once too much and too little about the loving Cordelia, many of them have nevertheless heard a ring of truth in Freud’s formulation of the play’s underlying action: ‘‘Eternal wisdom, in the garb of primitive myth, bids the old man renounce love, choose death and make friends with the necessity of dying.’’1 In a sense, all tragedy addresses the necessity of dying. That is, regardless of whether or not the tragic hero is dead at the end (Shakespeare’s always are), tragedy’s peculiar blend of dignity and defeat expresses our deeply paradoxical reaction to our own mortality. What that mortality means is that the highest human potential cannot be infinite, that death will inevitably undo our treasured, allabsorbing construction—the self. From one point of view, dying feels right. Man is a part of nature, governed, as our vulnerable bodies remind us, by nature’s laws of growth and decay. Man is also a moral being with convictions of guilt and unworthiness, a far cry from the God he venerates. At the same time, it is impossibly wrong that the precious ego must submit like any oblivious beast to death’s impersonal blotting-out. We cannot really imagine our own nonbeing, as Freud observed: ‘‘at bottom no one believes in his own death, or to put the same thing in another way, in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality.’’2 Tragedy provides an objective correlative for this basic ambivalence of ours. Its inevitable downward course toward destruction embodies one reaction: death is right, death comes from inside us. Against this arc of tragic action develops that special dimension of the protagonist we call heroic, which by asserting the ever-expanding human capability protests implicitly that death is wrong, a disaster unfairly imposed by 78

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some outside enemy on ‘‘else immortal us.’’3 Tragic events themselves generate heroic expansion. Oedipus becomes wiser in his searching and suffering than was the confident ruler who opened the play. Macbeth in his agony of conscience and his full experience of despair has explored more of the human condition than the admired military man whom we first meet. It may be that our pleasure in tragedy is owning in part to its power of bringing together what in our psyches simply coexist unrelated, these two reactions of recognition and resistance—bringing them together, not in resolution, which is impossible, but in energizing interaction.4 Of course, to say that tragedy enacts our ambivalent response to death and to what death makes absolute, the failure of power and the end of hope, is not at all to say that all tragedies are ‘‘about’’ death. If King Lear in fact corresponds to the rhythm of dying, as Freud suggests, it is a special sort of tragedy; and its undeniable special potency may derive from this direct appeal to the very springs of tragic power. No tragedy of Shakespeare moves us more deeply, involves us, so that like Dr. Johnson we can hardly bear to look at the final catastrophe. Yet on the surface Lear seems remote in both matter and manner from our lives. Lear himself is no Everyman but an autocratic king. He begins the play by abdicating, but even in the act of giving up power he clings to ‘‘the name, and all th’ addition to a king’’ (1.1.136),5 retaining a train of 100 knights and conducting a bizarre inquest of his three heirs to find out which of them pays him most tribute of love. Goneril and Regan soon reveal themselves as totally selfish, destructive to the point of denying Lear even shelter, so that he must endure the fury of the elements unprotected on a desolate heath. The rejected Cordelia, on the other hand, is so good that she ‘‘redeems nature from the general curse / Which twain have brought her to’’ (4.6.206–7). Eventually she seeks out this rejecting father, rescues him, forgives him, and in a way dies for him. Amid these all-or-nothing characters and situations, Lear’s sufferings are correspondingly hyperbolical. They push him into complete mental breakdown before he returns to sanity, is reconciled with Cordelia, and in response to her death himself expires in exhaustion. These improbable events are made even more improbable by duplication. Gloucester’s children are as archetypal in their moral sets as Lear’s, and behave with parallel exaggeration. Allowing full impact for Shakespeare’s extraordinary language, which ranges in this play from the richly complex to the shockingly simple, we may still ask if there is not something special in this highly stylized dramatic pattern to tap such deep springs of recognition and emotional response.

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Can it be that what we recognize in Lear is the process of dying? Each of us in that sense is a king who must eventually give up his kingdom. The loss of power and autonomy can be bitter, and the takeover generation will naturally look heartless and ungrateful to the loser. Culture’s niceties and abstract concerns are stripped away as death draws closer, yielding to the demands of the ailing body. Mind as well as body may go out of control—a humiliation, but also perhaps a release. Or, under the stress of this fearful new experience, the mind may need to wrestle with the meaning of past life, call into question the principles never before examined. We may hope to win through before the end to peace with ourselves, to make friends at last with the necessity of dying. Lear’s career from that reluctant abdication through struggle and pain to his reconciliation with Cordelia parallels the course of many dying patients observed by Elisabeth Ku¨ bler-Ross and other students of death and dying, from initial denial to acceptance.6 Indeed, the stages of response Ku¨bler-Ross outlines in her study all have their correspondences, naturalistic and symbolic, in the action of the play.

1 Symbolism is the more consistent mode in this stylized, half-allegorical play, but Shakespeare has also given in Lear and Gloucester a picture of old age full of naturalistic detail. Lear habitually repeats himself.7 He is querulous, touchy, as prone as any child to self-pitying tears and impotent threats. You see me here, you gods, a poor old man, As full of grief as age, wretched in both. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [T]ouch me with noble anger, And let not women’s weapons, water-drops, Stain my man’s cheeks! No, you unnatural hags, I will have such revenges on you both That all the world shall—I will do such things— What they are yet I know not, but they shall be The terrors of the earth! (2.4.272–82)

Gloucester has an old man’s fondness for the past over the degenerate present—‘‘we have seen the best of our time’’ (1.2.112). Lear, even before he goes mad, tends to withdraw to an inner reality where others cannot reach him. Like the old people whom Elaine

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Cumming and William E. Henry characterized in their study as gradually disengaging from the systems around them, Lear responds not so much to outer as to inner stimuli, and these are likely to come from the past.8 His ‘‘dialogue’’ speeches are often, as Wolfgang Clemen observed, really monologues. We see him, as in the following passage, tuning fitfully in and out of the life around him.9 Fool. Lear. Fool. Lear. Fool. Lear. Fool. Lear. Fool. Lear.

. . . Thou canst tell why one’s nose stands i’ th’ middle on ’s face? No. Why, to keep one’s eyes of either side ’s nose, that what a man cannot smell out, he may spy into. I did her wrong. Canst tell how an oyster makes his shell? No. Nor I neither; but I can tell why a snail has a house. Why? Why, to put ’s head in, not to give it away to his daughters, and leave his horns without a case. I will forget my nature. So kind a father! Be my horses ready? (1.5.19–33)

Once, perhaps twice, the old man’s mind slips out of the conversation, back to his hasty banishing of Cordelia and then to his more recent affront at Goneril’s hands. Later in the play the line between past and present, inner reality and outer, crumbles further as Lear relives sporadically his kingly roles of judge and military leader (3.6, 4.6). The dark side of Gloucester’s lament for the good old days comes out in Lear’s rage against the all-powerful young. He complains of Goneril’s neglect, her lack of respect—‘‘to grudge my pleasures, to cut off my train, / To bandy hasty words’’—and shows all the bitterness of unwonted dependence on his former dependents when he rehearses for Regan his ironic plea: Dear daughter, I confess that I am old; Age is unnecessary. On my knees I beg That you’ll vouchsafe me raiment, bed, and food.

Because he feels so acutely his own loss of function (‘‘age is unnecessary’’), his curses on Goneril are directed specifically at her functions of youth, her strength and fertility: ‘‘Into her womb convey sterility, / Dry up in her the organs of increase . . .’’; ‘‘Strike her young bones, / You taking airs, with lameness!’’10

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2 The intense physicality of this play also links it with the process of dying. Action and metaphor both are preoccupied with the body, its demands and vulnerabilities. The plot of King Lear has its share of physical violence, perhaps more than its share. There is nothing in the other plays so savage as the scene in which Cornwall and Regan, partners in sadism as well as marriage, put out Gloucester’s eyes. Cornwall’s servant stabs him and is immediately run through by Regan’s sword. Oswald takes a beating from Kent and later a fatal one from Edgar, who also kills his brother in a duel. Goneril stabs herself after poisoning Regan. Cordelia is hanged. Lear is quick in his choler to threaten violence. Others, like Albany, helplessly anticipate it: ‘‘It will come, / Humanity must perforce prey upon itself, / Like monsters of the deep’’ (4.2.48–50). Unlike most of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, Lear and Gloucester are made to suffer physically as well as mentally. The audience must register, along with Gloucester’s despair, his grotesque mutilated face with wounds where the eyes should be. And in Lear’s spiritual ordeal on the heath we are not allowed to forget his physical exposure. ‘‘The tyranny of the open night’s too rough / For nature to endure. . . . [T]his contentious storm / Invades us to the skin. . . . In such a night / To shut me out? Pour on, I will endure. . . . the pelting of this pitiless storm. . . . this cold night. . . . this extremity of skies. . . . this tyrannous night.’’11 All through the storm-scene runs the insistent leitmotiv—cold, cold, COLD, eight times in the space of 184 lines. These evocations of physical suffering cluster in the middle of the play, although retrospective references continue to remind us of the body’s pains and frailties.12 But the blows, stabs, and buffetings of Lear are not confined to dramatic action and situation. They are woven all through the language, so that physical violence dominates the metaphoric world of the play. Caroline Spurgeon found that the imagery of Lear keeps in our consciousness ‘‘a human body in anguished movement, tugged, wrenched, beaten, pierced, stung, scourged, dislocated, flayed, gashed, scalded, tortured and finally broken on the rack.’’ What is more, evils of the mind or emotions are typically expressed as physical ones.13 So Lear feels Goneril’s contempt as a kick, necessity as a pinch. Britain after the war is a ‘‘gor’d state.’’ The sight of the mad Lear is ‘‘side-piercing.’’ Oswald in undermining family loyalties is a rat which bites holy cords in twain. Slandered Edgar feels his good name ‘‘by treason’s tooth bare-gnawn and canker-bit.’’14 Most of all, his daughters’ ingratitude affects Lear as a gnawing and tearing of his flesh, piercing him like

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the serpent’s fang. ‘‘Unkindness’’ is a sharp-toothed vulture savaging his heart. Goneril’s impatient insults also attack Lear’s heart physically, ‘‘most serpent-like.’’15 Goneril and Regan are not only vultures and serpents but pelicans, feeding on their parent’s flesh. And behind this image is one even more frightening, of Lear’s own body turning against itself. ‘‘’Twas this flesh begot / Those pelican daughters.’’ Betrayed by his own, he asks in bewildered anguish, ‘‘Is it not as this mouth should tear this hand / For lifting food to’t?’’16 In the process of dying, the body calls attention to itself. It becomes unreliable, falters before the habitual simple tasks (‘‘Pray you, undo this button’’), shames its owner with incontinence or weeping (‘‘these hot tears, which break from me perforce’’). Above all, it hurts. As in the language and action of Lear, it cannot be ignored. Nor does Shakespeare spare us the grosser details of infirmity— chilblains, cataracts, corns, plagues, boils, sores, carbuncles, colic, giddiness.17 The play is haunted by bad smells. Lies, flattery, lust, all are known by their stench.18 These indeed, as Robert B. Heilman suggests, build up a sense of the world’s moral corruption.19 But it is important that this corruption comes through to us in crudely physical terms that call attention to the process of organic decay, terms appropriate for the drama of aging, decline, and death. We could say of the play as a whole what Lear says of his own hand: ‘‘it smells of mortality’’ (4.6.133).

3 The directness of Lear’s words is all the more telling for modern audiences in that until recent years mortality has been the great taboo of our society. As many have observed, death became for us what sex was for the Victorians, something from which to avert the eyes. We still do our best to pretend, through a whole system of institutions and conventions, that it doesn’t exist. But in the last two decades more and more professionals have addressed their research and analytic efforts to an understanding of dying. Thanatology, newly respectable, draws sociologists, psychiatrists, medical practioners. Of their many publications, one of the earliest and most influential was Dr. Ku¨bler-Ross’s On Death and Dying. Her work with dying patients led her to formulate a kind of rhythm of responses through which patients pass as they cope with their imminent mortality. It begins with denial, the dying one refusing to admit his condition. When that defense begins to crumble, confidence gives way to anger: ‘‘it can’t be me’’ to ‘‘why does it have to be me?’’ From this

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perception of the unfairness of personal mortality, one moves naturally to a bargaining posture, offering good behavior in exchange for a release from the sentence of death. But the decline goes on nevertheless, and the resulting sense of loss brings on depression, the grief that anticipates final separation from this life. At last the struggle ends in acceptance. The patient’s grip on the world loosens; he is weary, withdrawn, at peace with himself. In pointing out a similar rhythm in King Lear, I do not mean to suggest that Ku¨bler-Ross’s five stages represent some universal truth that Shakespeare intuited hundreds of years before the thanatologists. Rather, it seems to me that following out in Lear the pattern she postulates—taking dying as a kind of subtext for the play— illuminates the psychological movement of Shakespeare’s drama, which in turn can contribute to the thanatologists’ study, compelling poetic insight into this last human journey.

4 The play’s ‘‘story’’ is not, of course, of two old men coping with terminal cancer. Lear and Gloucester do not face death overtly until the action is far advanced, and Shakespeare does not dwell on their reactions when the time comes. What the two do face from the beginning is the loss of power—which is, after all, what dying is about: increasing helplessness, dependence on others with the accompanying indignities, autonomy waning until the self has no more function. Gloucester’s power is wrested from him. By the middle of the play he has lost his title and lands, and he never regains them. The plot requires that Lear as king initiate his own transfer of power, but two aspects of the abdication are striking. First, the decision seems to have been imposed on him by age and weariness: ‘tis our fast intent To shake all cares and business from our age Conferring them on younger strengths, while we Unburthen’d crawl toward death. (1.1.38–41)

For all the King’s vigor and authority, he is clearly entering a terminal phase.20 Second, Lear is by no means psychologically ready to yield up power, whatever he says. Denial, the first stage in Ku¨blerRoss’s rhythm, begins immediately. When he banishes Kent for defending Cordelia, he is exercising automatically, unconsciously, the

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royal authority he has just supposedly handed over to others. There is a stagy quality to this scene—Lear formally dividing his lands among his daughters in response to their ritual protestations of love—that underlines its unreality for Lear himself. What rings true is his rage at being crossed, both here by Cordelia and Kent and later when Goneril and Regan try to get rid of his retinue of knights. Those hundred knights, as director Grigori Kozintsev realized when he was filming Lear, are not separate individuals but a collective representation of Lear’s royal way of life.21 In defending his knights— ‘‘My train are men of choice and rarest parts / . . . And in the most exact regard support / The worships of their name’’ (1.4.263– 66)—he asserts his own worth as a person. When his daughters chip away at that worth, the worship of his name, by reducing his retinue, Lear reacts with the curses and commands of angry majesty. He ignores the new realities of power, just as he often fails to hear the Fool’s jibing reminders that a king with no kingdom is nothing.22 Another denial sequence occurs when Lear refuses to believe what he sees—that Regan and Cornwall have exercised their new power to put his servant in the stocks. Lear. Kent. Lear. Kent. Lear. Kent. Lear.

No. Yes. No, I say. I say yea. No, no, they would not. Yes, they have. By Jupiter, I swear no. (2.4.15–21)

The self, convinced at the deepest level of its own immortality, rejects even the most direct evidence to the contrary.

5 In Deaths of Man, Edwin S. Shneidman observes that, in general, pessimistic diagnoses hit the dying patient less forcefully than those around him. ‘‘What is real for the patient is pain, weakness, vertigo, disfigurement. . . .’’23 So, as his daughters’ cruelty and his own exposure force on Lear some recognition of his true state, and as the physical element begins to permeate the plays’ language, Lear responds like the Ku¨bler-Ross patients, with anger. On the heath, his tirade against the elements that batter him challenges the unfairness of fate. Why me?

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But yet I call you servile ministers, That will with two pernicious daughters join Your high-engender’d battles ’gainst a head So old and white as this, O, ho! ’tis foul. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I am a man More sinn’d against than sinning. (3.2.21–24, 59–60)

Since in King Lear the force that seeks to destroy is most directly embodied in Goneril and Regan, Lear’s anger at the storm is a displacement of sorts—one familiar in the dying, who often direct their hostility beyond its true object.24 Full of his own grievances, Lear also projects his situation onto others. Any obvious misery, like that of Poor Tom, must have been caused by vicious daughters (2.4). All judgment is arbitrary and unfair (4.6). Seeking to answer that outraged ‘‘why?’’ Lear calls his destroyer-daughters to trial. ‘‘Let them anatomize Regan; see what breeds about her heart. Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?’’ (3.6.76–78). But Goneril ‘‘escapes’’ from the fantasy-trial, and no judge or doctor can explain Regan’s hard heart. The abortive trial, like Lear’s rages at the uncaring storm and the absent daughters, underlines how futile anger is in this situation. It can alter nothing. The trial of Goneril and Regan is also a kind of bargaining process, with Lear pleading against his daughters for his rights. The bargaining instinct observed by Ku¨bler-Ross and others runs all through this phase of the play. Lear promises to be good. ‘‘I’ll forbear’’ (2.4.109); ‘‘I will be the pattern of all patience’’ (3.2.37). The promises, like those of Ku¨bler-Ross’s patients, are not kept. More typically, as in the trial scene, he presents himself to the powers of heaven and earth as unfairly used, a poor old man cheated in his bargain.25 The giving away of his kingdom is important here. Has he not received a poor exchange for all that he gave his daughters? He reiterates that ‘‘all’’ to his chosen mirror-image, Poor Tom: ‘‘Didst thou give all to thy daughters? . . . Wouldst thou give ’em all?’’ (3.4.49, 64). Bargains of the dying which attempt to put off the inevitable do not work, and Lear’s pleas get him no reprieve from his daughters or the gods. Like the dying patients observed by Avery D. Weisman and Thomas P. Hackett, he fears insanity: ‘‘O let me not be mad, sweet heaven! Keep me in temper, I would not be mad!’’ (1.5.46– 47). But this plea against the extreme loss of control goes as unheard as the others. The dying experience of dislocation and disintegration has seldom found fuller dramatic expression than in

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Lear’s madness. As Weisman and Hackett point out about the process of dying, for the patient who experiences it in the vivid, private, intrapersonal world into which no one else can enter, the fear of dying is the sense of impending dissolution or disintegration of all familiar ways of thought or action. The world normally at one with our perceptions suddenly becomes alien, disjointed, and runs along without us.26

6 But if the world of the mad Lear is alien, disjointed, and painful, it also stimulates growth. The King with no kingdom discovers his kinship with unaccommodated man, recognizes how superficial was his kingly authority uninformed by human and humane understanding. They flatter’d me like a dog, and told me I had the white hairs in my beard ere the black ones were there. . . . When the rain came to wet me once, and the wind to make me chatter, when the thunder would not peace at my bidding, there I found ’em. . . . [T]hey told me I was every thing. ’Tis a lie, I am not ague-proof. (4.6.96–105)

Only his unaccustomed exposure on the heath makes him feel for the houseless heads and unfed sides of the poor who should have been his concern as king (3.4.26–36). Only the offhand cruelty of the storm and his daughters shows him how little justice he dispensed as justicer. ‘‘Change places, and handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief ? . . . [A] dog’s obey’d in office’’ (4.6.153– 59). In The Psychiatrist and the Dying Patient, Kurt Eissler speculates from his case histories that for some persons dying may indeed be a process of growth. Facing the end enables them to step back from their total involvement in life and look at themselves from a longer perspective: [A] person may discover the futility of his past. . . . [H]e may be seized by greatest regret. But . . . this recognition may lead to a triumph of individualization, and the final processes of structurization during the terminal pathway may provide the past life with a meaning which it could never have acquired without them.27

Given the awesome energy that drives Lear on to his insights, there is little room in his dramatic career for the fourth stage of reaction

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described by Ku¨bler-Ross, depression. Certainly he is exhausted by the end of Act 4, when he is finally reunited with Cordelia, and the reunion scene hints at ‘‘preparatory grief ’’ when the weary King projects his own death: You do me wrong to take me out o’ th’ grave: Thou art a soul in bliss, but I am bound Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears Do scald like molten lead. (4.7.44–47)

Indeed, the vigor of his anger and madness is spent, but the anguish here soon gives way to peaceful acceptance. It is the more passive Gloucester who carries the burden of despair at this stage in the play. Pained in body and mind, he rejects all comfort, sees the gods as careless children who kill men as casually as flies, seeks the end of all consciousness in suicide. Having been brought to grief by trusting his bastard son Edmund, he is guided through this stage by Edgar, who prepares him for final acceptance: Men must endure Their going hence even as their coming hither, Ripeness is all. (5.2.9–11)

Lear’s progess to acceptance is also marked, perhaps even symbolized, by his shift of dependence from bad children to good, from Regan and Goneril to Cordelia. The plays’ schematic character groupings—old men of mixed natures surrounded by good and bad offspring—invites us to see the children not only on the naturalistic level, as the nurturing or rejecting takeover generation, but also as aspects of Lear and Gloucester themselves. Lear’s orientation to Goneril and Regan makes manifest his resentment at the loss of power, the tortured sense of impending death as both part of him (‘‘’Twas this flesh begot . . .’’) and something preying on him from without (‘‘. . . those pelican daughters’’). For all their protested devotion, Goneril and Regan end up offering him only their own ugly version of what Cordelia in her honesty offered at the beginning— that is, ‘‘nothing.’’ In this choice-among-three, then, it seems that all three choices are death. The difference is that what was perceived as a hostile force while Lear struggled is a loving presence when the struggle is over. Before acceptance his daughters are assassins. ‘‘His daughters seek his death,’’ says Gloucester (3.4.163); ‘‘I have o’erheard a plot of death upon him’’ (3.6.89). But in the reconciliation

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with Cordelia, Lear offers himself freely to death: ‘‘If you have poison for me, I will drink it’’ (4.7.71). Cordelia had once thrust upon him an unexpected, unwanted ‘‘nothing,’’ which he rejected in a rage of denial. Now he has come to terms with nothingness, the self soon to end. The truth she represented is absorbed. In Act 5, after the forces on Lear’s side have been defeated, he accepts with equanimity the loss of freedom. So removed is he from outside concerns that he does not care even to see his captors Goneril and Regan. In his lyric invitation to Cordelia, ‘‘come let’s away to prison,’’ he envisions himself and her, secure in their apartness, looking on at the world’s affairs without caring (5.3.8–19).

7 By now many readers are probably objecting that I have fallen into an old trap for Lear critics, that of ignoring or refusing to face fully the play’s agonizing last scene. Lear’s last trauma is not his own death but Cordelia’s; and he does not go gentle into his good night. True, and in both cases it could not be otherwise, because Shakespeare was writing a tragedy. Whatever psychiatrists may see as desirable adjustment, tragedy’s business has always been to assert the self in the face of annihilation, to protest even while bowing to the inevitable. Ending King Lear with not one but two deaths—splitting death, so to speak, between Lear and Cordelia—allows the fullest expression of tragedy’s ambivalent address to personal mortality. Cordelia dies first. Like the other two daughters, she is in some sense a part of Lear as well as a separate person. Her death is thus an aspect of his own, but its separateness allows Lear to do the impossible, to experience his own death28 and cry out against the terrible wrongness of it. Howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones! Had I your tongue and ears, I’ld use them so That heaven’s vault should crack. . . . No, no, no life! Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, And thou no breath at all? (5.3.258–60, 306–8)

Lear’s why brings back, intensified, his earlier angry question: Why me? Unable to sustain the awful reality of ‘‘no breath at all,’’ he slips at times into denial. ‘‘This feather stirs, she lives. . . . Look on her!

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Look, her lips, / Look there, look there!’’ (5.3.266, 311–12). We seem, in the very face of death, to have gone back to the earliest stages of the Ku¨bler-Ross rhythm. Indeed, Lear’s reversion to anger and denial would make sense to many thanatologists who find these stages too neat and see the process of coping with death more in terms of fluctuations between states.29 Ku¨bler-Ross herself says that the states may exist side by side, and that hope persists through them all.30 One cannot give up entirely on the breath of life. The feather is never quite still. Together Cordelia’s death and Lear’s act out the paradox of mortality as both unnatural and inevitable. Hers is senseless and violent. Edmund has ordered the nameless captain to do away with her, but he repents and sends a countermand. He is, for no good dramatic or moral reason, too late. ‘‘I might have sav’d her,’’ says Lear (5.3.271), and we do in fact feel that someone easily might have. Cut off young against all expectation and justice, Cordelia embodies our sense of death as wrong, outrageous. The hanging, the attack from without, expresses our unconscious conviction that, since death cannot be natural to us, it must come as ‘‘a malicious intervention from the outside by someone else.’’31 Lear, on the other hand, is old and exhausted. As he collapses over Cordelia’s body, those looking on see nothing unnatural, only the inevitable end of aging and decay; ‘‘The wonder is he hath endur’d so long’’ (5.3.317). No outside assassin here, but an internal process of wearing out, experience taking its toll. The enemy is he who would try to interfere with that process: he hates him That would upon the rack of this tough world Stretch him out longer. (5.3.314–16)

‘‘Ein alter Mann ist stets ein Ko¨ nig Lear.’’ Goethe’s epigram is about the loneliness of the old, missing their contemporaries and cut off from the next generation. But in the light of recent work in the psychology of dying, it may be true in a deeper way that every old man is a King Lear.

Notes 1. Sigmund Freud, ‘‘The Theme of the Three Caskets,’’ in Collected Papers, vol. 4 (London: Hogarth Press, 1925), 256. 2. ‘‘Thoughts for the Time on War and Death,’’ in Collected Papers, 4:305.

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3. I have borrowed the phrase from Donne’s holy sonnet beginning ‘‘If poisonous minerals,’’ in which he questions the justice of God’s punishment of mankind for Adam’s sin. The Jahwist account of the Fall of Man in Genesis, the archtragedy which in Judeo-Christian tradition ‘‘explains’’ death, sets forth the same ambivalence about mortality. Adam belongs to created nature, and when he disobeys God by eating the forbidden fruit he is justly condemned to return to the dust from which he came. But Adam sinned at the prompting of Eve, and Eve at the prompting of the serpent—and the serpent’s motives for his act are left a mystery. Thus a contradictory sense grows up that death, rather than proceeding from human imperfection, has been laid upon naturally immortal man by a mysteriously malevolent outside force. 4. I have explored this view of tragedy at more length in the introduction to The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare’s Tragedies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). 5. All Shakespeare quotations in this essay are from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). 6. Elisabeth Ku¨ bler-Ross, On Death and Dying (New York: Macmillan, 1969), chapters 3–7; cf., for example, Robert Kastenbaum and Avery D. Weisman, The Psychological Autopsy (New York: Community Mental Health Journal, 1968), 24, and C. Knight Aldrich, ‘‘The Dying Patient’s Grief,’’ Journal of the American Medical Association, 184, no. 5 (1963): 329. 7. 1.1.94; 2.4.15–23; 4.6.88–92, 187, 203; 5.3.8, 258, 306–12. 8. Cumming and Henry, Growing Old: The Process of Disengagement (New York: Basic Books, 1961), 127. 9. Clemen, The Development of Shakespeare’s Imagery (London: Methuen, 1951), 134; E. A. J. Honigmann discusses Lear’s retreats from present reality in Shakespeare: Seven Tragedies, The Dramatist’s Manipulation of Response (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1976), 109, 114–15. 10. 2.4.174–75, 154–56; 1.4.278–79; 2.4.163–64; my italics. 11. 3.4.2–3, 6–7, 17–18, 29, 78, 102, 151. 12. Cordelia broods on Lear’s ordeal in 4.3 and 4.7. Lear himself recalls it in 4.6. Any time the eyeless Gloucester is onstage, of course, such verbal reminders are unnecessary. 13. Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us (New York: Macmillan, 1936), 339, 342–43. 14. 3.6.47–48; 2.4.211; 5.3.321; 4.6.85; 2.2.73–75; 5.3.122. 15. 1.4.288–89; 2.4.134–35, 160–61. 16. 3.4.72–75, 15–16. 17. 1.5.9; 3.4.17; 3.2.33; 3.4.67; 4.1.46, 64; 2.4.56–57. On the ‘‘mother’’ in the last passage, Kenneth Muir cites one of Shakespeare’s sources for Lear, Samuel Harsnett’s A Declaration of Egregious Popishe Impostures (1603): ‘‘It riseth . . . of a wind in the bottom of the belly, and proceeding with a great swelling, causeth a vary painfull collicke in the stomacke, and an extraordinary giddines in the head’’; see Muir, ‘‘Samuel Harsnett and King Lear,’’ Review of English Studies, n.s. 2 (1951): 14. 18. 1.4.111–13; 4.6.96–103; 127–31. Heilman, cited in the next note, lists several more smell references. 19. This Great Stage: Image and Structure in ‘‘King Lear’’ (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1948), 14–17. 20. Freud observed in ‘‘The Theme of the Three Caskets’’ that when one considers Lear as not only old but soon to die, ‘‘the extraordinary project of dividing the inheritance . . . loses its strangeness’’ (255). 21. Kozintsev, ‘‘Hamlet and King Lear: Stage and Film,’’ in Shakespeare 1971, ed.

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Clifford Leech and J. M. R. Margeson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), 197. 22. On the communication blocks that dying patients may erect as aids to denial, see Edwin S. Shneidman, Deaths of Man (New York: Quadrangle, 1973), 30–31, and Barney G. Glaser and Anselm L. Strauss, Awareness of Dying (Chicago: Aldine, 1965), 134. 23. Shneidman, 12–13. 24. Ku¨bler-Ross, 50–52. 25. ‘‘You see me here, you gods, a poor old man. . . .’’; ‘‘Your old kind father, whose frank heart gave all’’ (2.4.272; 3.4.20); cf. his complaints quoted above against the heavens as servile ministers, and the quid pro quo implication of ‘‘more sinn’d against than sinning.’’ 26. ‘‘Predelection to Death,’’ in Death and Identity, ed. Robert Fulton, rev. ed. (Bowie, MD: Charles Press, 1976), 304. 27. Eissler, The Psychiatrist and the Dying Patient (New York: International Universities Press, 1955), 53–55. Robert Jay Lifton emphasizes that the ‘‘ideal death . . . is associated with a realized life,’’ and adds in a note, ‘‘Ku¨bler-Ross has been criticized by some for creating overly-schematized stages [see below, n. 29] and for a tendency to idealize dying. . . . More importantly, however, Ku¨bler-Ross has been restating an ancient theme of self-completion from within her compassionate contemporary experience’’; see The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 105. 28. Shneidman points out how paradoxical it is that this great universal human event can be experienced only indirectly, through empathy with others. If one could experience death directly, one wouldn’t be dead (55). 29. Shneidman comments, ‘‘My own limited work has not led me to conclusions identical with those of Ku¨bler-Ross. Indeed, while I have seen in dying persons isolation, envy, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, I do not believe that these are necessarily ‘stages’ of the dying process, and I am not at all convinced that they are lived through in that order, or, for that matter, in any universal order. . . . One does not find a unidirectional movement through progressive stages so much as an alternation between acceptance and denial’’ (6–7). Cf. John Hinton, Dying, 2d ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 12; Richard Lamerton, Care of the Dying (London: Priory Press, 1973), 118–22; and Robert J. Kastenbaum, ‘‘Evaluating the Stage Theory,’’ in Death, Society, and Human Experience, 2d ed. (St. Louis: C. V. Mosby, 1981), 188–91. Glaser and Strauss stress response as a process rather than a single impact, but they add that ‘‘a particular patient’s response may stop at any stage, take any direction, or change directions’’ (212–22). 30. Ku¨bler-Ross, 138. 31. Ibid., 2.

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‘‘The Norwegians Are Coming!’’ Shakespearean Misleadings TO EXPLORE WHAT SEEMS TO ME A CHARACTERISTIC SHAKESPEAREAN strategy, I want to consider two battles that don’t happen: the Turkish attack against Cyprus in Othello and the invasion of Danish lands by Fortinbras and his Norwegian force in Hamlet. Both of these loom large in the early action of their respective plays. The upcoming wars are the focus for agitated discussion, diplomatic maneuver, and (especially) martial preparation. For a few scenes at least, we have every reason to believe that the Turks/Norwegians will attack, and that the ensuing wars will be the main substance of the dramas we are watching. Yet early in Act 2 of Hamlet, the ambassadors Voltemand and Cornelius report back to Claudius that Fortinbras has been diverted to Poland. By this time, in any case, we have heard the Ghost’s tale of fratricide and know that Denmark’s malaise has nothing to do with Norwegians. At a similar point in Othello, the Turkish peril and the expectations it arouses are even more cleanly cut off when a storm demolishes the enemy’s fleet. Speculation, anxiety, and mobilization end abruptly with ‘‘News, lads! Our wars are done’’ (2.1.20).1 Why so much ado about these wars if they are to be ‘‘done’’ so quickly, in fact never to happen at all? Of course these lines of action, even unfulfilled, have some secondary functions in their respective dramatic designs. Fortinbras’s mission to recover the lands Old Hamlet took from his father introduces the repeated motif of the revenger-son in Hamlet. And the shrewd move by which Claudius forestalls this danger begins the buildup of the King into a suitably mighty opposite for the heroprince. In a similar way, the formidable threat posed by the Turks affirms Othello’s stature by showing how much the state depends on his generalship. It also occasions a significant move of the action from civilized Venice to the demonic green world of Cyprus. Even so, what is the structural point of these abortive wars? What does Shakespeare accomplish by raising expectations he is not going to fulfill? Something is already deeply wrong in Denmark when Hamlet 93

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opens. We are immediately introduced to a jumpy, apprehensive watch and fragmentary reports of a supernatural presence. ‘‘This thing,’’ ‘‘this dreaded sight,’’ ‘‘this apparition,’’ as the watchers call it, is perhaps only ‘‘fantasy,’’2 but in any case it is not yet described or named. Then the Ghost appears—fully armed and holding the truncheon that marks the military commander (1.2.200–204). The audience has not been prepared for anything beyond the fact of the Ghost: when it appears, its martial accoutrements thus have greater impact for being unexpected. Now ‘‘this thing’’ is identified with the dead King Hamlet, and specifically the King as leader in battle. This is what Horatio registers in saluting ‘‘that fair and warlike form / In which the majesty of buried Denmark / Did sometimes march’’ (1.1.45–47, my emphasis). Later remarks add to the military emphasis. Old Hamlet’s Ghost moves with ‘‘martial stalk’’ (1.1.65), he frowns (1.1.61, 1.2.229–30).3 A generally bad omen, the King who walks abroad after death instead of lying in suitable repose, is thus apparently specified in its import, directing the mind to his role as defender of Denmark against foreign adversaries. Specificity pinpoints the adversary, too: the Ghost appears in the same armor he wore long ago in combat with ‘‘th’ambitious Norway.’’ It is natural that the frightened onlookers should look immediately to Norway as the source of the current trouble. When the Ghost disappears, Horatio predicts from it ‘‘some strange eruption to our state,’’ and at once the talk turns to the warlike vigilance and preparation that are already present as signs of trouble, in addition to the armed specter. The strange eruption on the horizon is young Fortinbras’s mission of revenge against Denmark, occasioned by that longago fight between Old Hamlet and ‘‘ambitious Norway,’’ Fortinbras’s father. The elder Fortinbras was defeated and killed, and now his son wants to refight the battle. It all fits: the strict watch, the munitions-makers and shipwrights working overtime, and now this ghost in the likeness of the original combatant. Barnardo adds it up: Well may it sort that this portentous figure Comes armed through our watch so like the king That was and is the question of these wars.4

Horatio the scholar seeks parallels in history, especially the unnatural events before Julius Caesar’s fall. Viewers who were familiar with Roman history, perhaps through Shakespeare’s own recent dramatization in Julius Caesar, might be subconsciously troubled by the parallel—it was, after all, his closest friends who destroyed Caesar, not a foreign force5 —but the main emphasis is consistent, as Horatio

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points to similar, more recent harbingers of disaster in Denmark’s own past. Frank Kermode observes, ‘‘So far as plot goes, this might be the opening scene of a play about a Caesar-like Hamlet now dead but still posthumously interested in empire.’’6 In the next scene we leave the midnight watch on the battlements for a formal court gathering, but the signs seem to go on pointing the same way. The threat of Fortinbras and his lawless resolutes is the first business of the new king. Only after taking steps against that threat does Claudius turn to other concerns, the petitions of Laertes and Hamlet to leave the court and especially the embarrassment of Hamlet’s prolonged grief. Claudius with characteristic wiliness speculates on what has prompted the belligerent boldness of young Fortinbras: perhaps contempt for the new king himself as not the equal of his mighty brother, or perhaps conjecture that a state in transition between rulers will be ‘‘disjoint and out of frame’’ (1.2.20). Since we suspect that both these propositions are true, however Claudius tries to dismiss them, the false signal continues, reinforced: beware the Norwegians, ready on the horizon to take advantage of internal disruptions in Denmark. Claudius counters Hamlet’s grief with platitudes, and, having given Laertes leave to travel to Paris, refuses his nephew-son’s request to go back to Wittenberg. I have observed elsewhere that this play is full of young men coming and going on foreign expeditions. Only Hamlet is, until late in act 4, confined to his Danish ‘‘prison’’ (2.2.241–48),7 thus enacting physically the claustrophobic quality of the play’s central action. When the false lead of the Norwegian invasion fizzles out after attracting such attention in the opening scenes, this claustrophobic inwardness is reinforced. The threat is not the visible foreign one but a hidden one at home, not even a serpent slithering from somewhere else into the secluded royal retreat. The enemy is not outside at all, but inside the kingdom, inside the family—‘‘The serpent that did sting thy father’s life / Now wears his crown’’ (1.5.39–40). And perhaps inside Hamlet’s own self as well. The Turks in Othello are similarly clear as outside enemies. Their intentions and strategies may occasionally be in doubt, but their status as alien adversaries is not. To understand their role, I would like to examine a general perspective on war and peace that colors several of Shakespeare’s plays. Though he is no particular friend to bloodshed, at times he presents war as having certain advantages over peace. It offers clearcut action, more or less publicly sanctioned, against known enemies: something straightforward—that is, as opposed to the temptations, complications, and evasions characteristic of society’s peacetime practices. In All’s Well That Ends Well

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Bertram gladly goes off to war in Italy to escape from married life with Helen, a situation in which personal dislike strains against obligation to his patron the King. By comparison, doing battle in a foreign land looks easy and desirable. ‘‘Wars is no strife / To the dark house and the detested wife’’ (2.3.288–89). The dying Henry IV recommends to his son and successor a campaign abroad as a way out of intrigue and dissension at home. The ‘‘giddy minds’’ Henry fears have in the past turned all too readily against him and each other, and ‘‘daily grew to quarrel and to bloodshed, / Wounding supposed peace’’ (2 Henry IV 4.3.323–24). In counseling Hal to occupy those unstable minds in foreign quarrels, Henry makes a different but relevant distinction: not war as opposed to peace, but overt war against a sharply defined Other as an alternative to the tragic muddles of internecine struggle. Henry’s strategy is successful. Henry V shows us the new king leading an army away from England against an outside enemy—if not the absolute Other his father had dreamed of fighting, the Muslim infidel, still the notably foreign French, who go far beyond the variant versions of English that divide Henry’s Irish, Scots, and Welsh contingents to speak another language entirely. (Or rather, they necessarily speak the same tongue as the English most of the time so that London audiences can understand them, but even apart from Princess Catherine’s language lesson Shakespeare colors the defending army’s discourse with enough incidental French to keep their differentness constantly before us.) And the ‘‘English,’’ after the treason of Cambridge, Scrope, and Grey is disposed of, are indeed more or less united against this obvious foe, their internal differences submerged in the common cause, in the manner of those heterogeneous U.S. bomber crews in World War II films.8 Several plays present war as a kind of prologue to the main action. Much Ado About Nothing opens just after a war has ended. Don Pedro and his officers are unsuspicious, ready to relax and play. During the war, Don John’s hostility was clear when he ‘‘stood out’’ against his brother (1.3.20).9 Now, the defeated John dissembles malice under apparent accord—and becomes twice as dangerous in the intricate pastimes of peace: dances with masked partners, the merry wars of courtship. Destructive forces are present still, but concealed: in the bastard brother, and even in the unthinking assumptions of Pedro himself and his callow prote´ge´ Claudio. The troubles of Titus Andronicus also begin after open battle has ended. Titus goes by the rules. The principle of primogeniture rather than personal merit dictates his choice for emperor, the requirements of ritual lead him to sacrifice Tamora’s son and thus set her against him, and an overs-

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imple idea of honor bids him kill his own son. The straightforward, rigid code that served Titus well enough in the field fails miserably in the tangle of passion and ambition that he encounters at home. What Aufidius criticizes in Coriolanus marks Titus’s limitations as well: Not to be other than one thing, not moving From th’ casque to th’ cushion, but commanding peace Even with the same austerity and garb As he controlled the war. . . . (Coriolanus 4.7.42–45)

Coriolanus himself can conquer a whole city singlehanded, but he finds civil life as unnegotiable a maze as Titus finds personal relationships. The corresponding prologue-battle in Macbeth is over almost before we hear of it. Seventy-five lines into the play, the bleeding captain and Ross have given their report and Duncan is rejoicing in total victory. Even before Macbeth makes his first entrance, their glowing accounts call attention to his sphere of achievement—and then cut it off. Macbeth is a highly effective warrior, but there are no more wars in prospect. Though he is not as unused to civil life as Coriolanus is, the shift to peace opens him to more complex imperatives of self-fulfillment, as it brings to Coriolanus a different, more perplexing duty. It is women who promote these new roles, Volumnia the mother and Lady Macbeth the wife, domestic counselors with their own devious agendas who replace the male companions of the straightforward combat. Different from each other as these plays are—the comedy, the early and late Roman plays, the tragedy—they all use the war-prologue to make us conscious of the transition from the loud clash of armies to more oblique and subtle encounters. So does Othello, another play about a professional soldier. From this perspective the jubilant cheer that greets the perdition of the Turkish fleet, ‘‘Our wars are done,’’ is as ominous for the hero’s future as any of Iago’s sneers. The play has begun with concerns of peacetime like intrigues for professional advancement, courtship, and marriage. In the second scene, however, the war threat breaks into these preoccupations with disruptive force. The danger is at first unnamed, as in Hamlet: Cassio and the officers arrive with breathless tidings of ‘‘something from Cyprus,’’ ‘‘a business of some heat’’ in which the Duke has urgent need of his general: The galleys Have sent a dozen sequent messengers This very night at one another’s heels.

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Othello is ‘‘hotly called for,’’ must come ‘‘haste-post-haste’’ (1.2.37– 44). Great national events are clearly in the making. As the summons to the Venetian council interrupts Othello’s conversation with Iago about his recent marriage, the dynamic of action suggests that the public emergency will displace this private matter. In the council scene that follows, there are almost fifty lines of agitated speculation about the numbers and intentions of the enemy, now identified as the Turks, punctuated by two more of those sequent messengers arriving with fresh news. Only after all this does Brabantio enter to plead his personal grievance against the Moor for marrying his daughter. But Brabantio’s cause makes little headway amid pressing affairs of state. After hearing the defenses of Othello and Desdemona, the Duke turns quickly back to his overriding concern and orders the Moor at once to Cyprus. Not only does the imperative of war seem to put parentheses around Othello’s new marital relationship—he himself exits telling his bride, ‘‘We must obey the time’’ (1.3.300)—but even his long lyrical account of their courtship has served to remind us that Othello’s proper scene is war. We have already learned that from the age of seven his home has been the tented field, his experience all ‘‘feats of broil and battle’’ (1.3.83–87). This is what Othello knows. There is a sense in which, when the Turkish fleet is suddenly blown to destruction early in Act 2, Othello’s occupation is already gone, even before Iago poisons his mind against Desdemona. The end of hostilities is the signal for revelry; and, as in Much Ado, revelry is a good cover for the insidious attack. The Otherness to be feared now shifts from the defeated Turks to the concealed enemy, Iago, who wears his honesty like a mask and is all the more dangerous for being the trusted battle-companion as well as the domestic counselor who acts, ostensibly, out of love. (To Cassio) Good lieutenant, I think you think I love you. . . . I protest, in the sincerity of love and honest kindness. (To Othello) My lord, you know I love you . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I humbly do beseech you of your pardon For too much loving you.10

The Turks were a convenient manifestation of the Other in Shakespeare’s time. They were foreign. They zealously followed and promulgated an alien, inimical religion. Powerful in battle, they were a real and continuing threat at the gates of southern and eastern Eu-

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rope. ‘‘Not-us’’ in race, nation, and religion, Turks were also traditionally imaged as the epitome of rampant, unchecked sexuality. Edgar as Poor Tom, claiming that he ‘‘in women out-paramoured the Turk’’ (Lear 3.4.85–86), invokes that stereotype, which perhaps was based on Europeans’ knowledge that Muslim men were allowed four wives as well as additional concubines.11 When the Other in Othello is relocated to the familiar and close-at-hand, it is Iago who manifests the Turk’s malevolence and formidable power, and his foreignness as well: though Venetian and nominally Christian, Iago is alien to all human community. The dialogue slyly links him with the missing Turk. Challenged in banter with Desdemona for a wholesale slander of wives that anticipates the later, greater deception, he protests, ‘‘Nay, it is true, or else I am a Turk’’ (2.1.117). It is not true. Later when Othello surveys the drunken brawl that has interrupted his wedding night and caused Cassio’s disgrace, he asks, ‘‘Are we turned Turks, and to ourselves do that / Which heaven hath forbid the Ottomites?’’ (2.3.163–64). The answer, at least for Iago as sole architect of the recent disaster, is yes. Iago is somewhat like Don John of Much Ado in his urge to sabotage whatever is attractive and admirable and in his closeness to the people he means to harm. If not trusted as much as Iago, John at any rate attracts no suspicion from Claudio, or even the brother he has betrayed once already, Don Pedro. Indeed, these two siblings are close in another sense, both meddlers in the affairs of others who back off from real human engagement. Pedro has more surface charm, but the bastard brother at his elbow reminds us that his drive to control has its dark underside.12 There is a shadow side to Othello as well, which Iago makes manifest. He could not have succeeded without the Moor’s self-doubts, his sexual and social insecurities, and his defensive pride, all of which Iago helps bring into full articulation in order to play on them. In the same shake of the kaleidoscope pattern brought about by the disappearance of the external enemy, the Turk’s raging sexuality finds a new but different home: not in actuality with Iago and Othello but in fantasy, projected by Othello onto Desdemona. Such imaginations of female desire as out of control and insatiable are as old as stories of Eve, part of the more general male impulse to construct the woman as feared Other. Othello discovers the ‘‘curse of marriage’’ almost by reflex: ‘‘That we can call these delicate creatures ours / But not their appetites!’’ (3.3.272–74). Only after Desdemona is dead does he finally recognize the enemy in himself. In timing his own death blow to coincide with that earlier stroke in his story, by which he punished the Turk who did harm to Venice and

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its native citizen, Othello identifies with that ‘‘malignant’’ felon— malignant gathering in not only ‘‘rebellious,’’ but ‘‘contagious,’’ like a disease, poisonous.13 In both Hamlet and Othello, the relocation of the Other is a destabilizing shift from out there to right here: in someone or something close at hand, in one’s own being. My uncle (O my prophetic soul!), my brother, my self. Inevitably this brings with it a displacement like that in Much Ado and Titus, from the prospect of marching out against a declared foe, with the battle lines clearly drawn, to the confusions inherent in the concealed enmity of one’s own kind. This distinction comes through well in the second scene of Macbeth, where the enemies detailed in the complicated battle report are of both kinds. On the one hand are the foreigners, the Norwegians (again!)14 who come on like obvious adversaries, defiantly showing their banners (Macbeth 1.2.49). To these we might add the Hebridean soldiers whose label of ‘‘kerns and galloglasses’’ links them with the alien Irish.15 These, the official Other, present a hard fight but no particular confusion or ambiguity. But there are inside enemies too, the rebels Macdonwald and Cawdor. In these cases of Scot against Scot, as reported by the Captain and Ross, ambiguities abound. When the Captain describes Macbeth’s confrontation with Macdonwald, the signifying pronouns ‘‘he’’ and ‘‘his’’ slide about so loosely as to leave us unsure for a moment just who was killing whom when Macbeth Carved out his passage till he faced the slave, Which ne’er shook hands nor bade farewell to him Till he unseamed him from the nave to th’ chops, And fixed his head upon our battlements. (1.2.20–23)

If it is hard at this point to sort out Macbeth grammatically from the enemy Macdonwald, the later account of Macbeth’s fight with the traitorous Thane of Cawdor seems designed to muddle rebel and loyalist even more thoroughly: Bellona’s bridegroom . . . Confronted him with self-comparisons, Point against point, rebellious arm ’gainst arm[.] (1.2.54–56)

The Scots Macdonwald and Cawdor bring with them the tensions and confusions of the Other as ‘‘we,’’ beginning the more radical

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relocation in this play that will find in the hero himself the King’s worst enemy and his own. How does this redirection of our expectations work on us? If the road we thought we were traveling turns out to be a dead end, if the signs keep saying ‘‘this way . . . this way’’ only to pull us up short with ‘‘no, this way,’’ the result should be that we are now paying closer attention to the new road on which we find ourselves. What are its landmarks and what do they mean? How will this new journey both substitute for the aborted one and differ from it? Since the first frustration of expectation has shaken our passive, easy acquiescence in the playwright’s guidance, we should become more alert, more actively focused on the new, subtler markers of our progress. Or, to change the metaphor, think of a sleight-of-hand artist, who keeps us focused on one hand while performing his magic with the other: when we see the result, we concentrate with special force on the hand newly identified as powerful. This spotlighting of the real tragic arena, by presenting an alternative and then leaving it in darkness, need be no less effective for operating below the level of consciousness. I have used ‘‘should be’’ rather than ‘‘is’’ in discussing this effect because I am trying to recover at least theoretically an experience that was far more available to Shakespeare’s original audiences than to most of us. Playgoers at productions of Hamlet nowadays usually know that the Norwegians are not the real menace: they studied the play in high school, they saw the Olivier film or the Mel Gibson one, or they just absorbed the outlines of the dramatic action through cultural osmosis. Test this on your students. Even if they have never read the play, they probably know the Ghost’s mission is not to alert the Danes to danger from Norway but to lay a burden of revenge on his son. Since the plots of Shakespeare’s great tragedies are the common currency of our English-speaking culture, lay audiences as well as professional Shakespeareans experience the plays in ways that might have surprised Shakespeare. They have no hope that King Lear or Romeo and Juliet will end happily, they are confident that the Ghost of Old Hamlet is telling the truth about his murder and Claudius’s guilt—and they are probably not taken in by the Norwegian decoy. The same osmosis deprives Othello of its novelty too. Even if the plot is somewhat less familiar than that of Hamlet, people know enough about what is coming to focus on Iago as the important destructive force rather than on the Turks. But the Globe audiences had no such certainties. Unfamiliar with the stories of Othello and Hamlet, they could be made to watch the wrong hand first, to follow the ignis fatuus, and then in reassessment

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to be jolted into superawareness. In several of his sonnets, where Shakespeare uses a similar strategy to develop lyric material that is less familiar in our culture than the major plays, the experience is still available to modern readers. In Sonnet 129, for example, ‘‘Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame,’’ the whole body of the poem is given over to sexual nausea. The couplet starts out still on this tack, summarizing ‘‘all this,’’ but then turns aside with ‘‘yet’’ to find a radically new direction. All this the world well knows, yet none knows well To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

The climactic point is not disgust but ecstasy, a ‘‘heaven’’ of pleasure so intense that it can effortlessly sweep away the weight of denunciation of the first twelve lines. The ‘‘in spite of ’’ or ‘‘nevertheless’’ structure intensifies the affirmation. ‘‘Nevertheless’’ also drives home with extra force the point of Sonnet 130, ‘‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun.’’ One quatrain after another presents a clear-eyed, judicious view of the mistress as an ordinary woman, nothing special, not living up to the extravagant analogies of the sonnet convention. Again the couplet changes direction, continuing the satiric gaze at traditional love poetry with its shopworn conceits (‘‘false compare’’), but now celebrating the mistress as very special indeed. She is not only as ‘‘rare’’ as other sonnet heroines, but by implication even rarer than these, in that she has not been degraded by impossible analogies. The three-quatrains-and-a-couplet format lends itself to this kind of italicizing reversal in the last two lines. Sonnet 66, however, ‘‘Tired with all these, for restful death I cry,’’ keeps its reversal for the very last line. The first thirteen lines enact deep disgust with a society that disdains virtue and skill while exalting worldly power and gaudy show. The basic structural unit here is not the quatrain but the single line, one following another in parallel grammatical form to create the cumulative effect of one injustice after another: And purest faith unhappily forsworn, And gilded honour shamefully misplaced, And maiden honour rudely strumpeted, And right perfection wrongfully disgraced, And strength by limping sway disabled, And art made tongue-tied by authority. . . . (4–9)

The catalogue of wrongs ends with a climactic summing-up and conclusion in line 13: ‘‘Tired with all these, from these I would be

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gone.’’ Only the final line enters a telling reservation, turns the ‘‘would’’ from the simple wish we heard first to a conditional: ‘‘Save that to die I leave my love alone.’’ ‘‘My love’’ gains extraordinary power through placement. Just the simple two-word allusion counters the whole negative accumulation of abuses and affronts, and in effect cancels them—if not as realities, at least as grounds for despair. World-weariness is the keynote of Sonnet 30 as well, ‘‘When to the sessions of sweet silent thought.’’ Since the poem is about griefs remembered and reexperienced, there is seemingly no end to its sorrow. Repetition and alliteration enact endless recapitulation: ‘‘old woes new wail . . . grieve at grievances foregone . . . woe to woe tell o’er . . . fore-bemoaned moan.’’ How can a poem so bound up with recurrence ever end? But the couplet breaks the circle, leads us quickly out of the maze. A simple appeal to the beloved friend allows poem and speaker to find their place of rest, appropriately, on the word ‘‘end’’: But if the while I think on thee, dear friend, All losses are restored, and sorrows end.

Sonnet 84, part of the ‘‘Rival Poet’’ group, is especially unpredictable. The body of the sonnet offers apparently straightforward praise of the friend, who is so excellent that those who write of him need only copy what is there. Rhetorical embellishment is unnecessary, even detrimental (‘‘making worse what nature made so clear’’). But then without warning the couplet turns on the friend himself, accusing him of being ‘‘too fond on praise’’: perhaps ‘‘too indiscriminate in commending tributes’’ to himself, but chiefly ‘‘too greedy for compliments of any kind.’’ Because of this ‘‘curse,’’ the friend encourages embellishment whether it is needed or not, and thus cheapens praises of himself.16 The battle lines between ally and enemy have apparently been clearly drawn in Sonnet 84. On the one hand are the bad poets with their too-elaborate meretricious praises, and on the other are the poet-speaker and his exemplary young friend. The couplet, however, transfers those meretricious impulses to the friend himself. As in Hamlet and Othello, the enemy is no longer out there but right inside the circle of intimacy. As an italicizing relocation of the Other, this sonnet returns us from this excursus to our main concern. Though the changes of direction in the plays are less patterned than those appropriate to the highly formalized sonnet, they are just as deliberate. In fact, the plays themselves call attention to the strat-

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egy they employ. They make it a matter for comment and show us characters who make use of it for their own ends. In Othello, it is the Turks themselves who borrow Shakespeare’s device of the false direction. First they seem to be making for Cyprus (1.3.8), but then according to a new message they are heading for Rhodes (14). The self-reflexive dimension is accentuated when Shakespeare has a Venetian senator analyze the Rhodes maneuver as sleight-of-hand: ‘‘ ’tis a pageant / To keep us in false gaze’’ (19–20). Iago, of course, takes over the trickery of the false gaze along with other aspects of the Turkish Other. In Hamlet, the hero has his own devious strategies to approach Claudius on the bias, but the one who articulates the basic theory of false leading to underline the truth is—perhaps unexpectedly—not Hamlet but Polonius. His elaborate instructions to Reynaldo on how to check up on Laertes’ behavior in Paris (2.1) are themselves a kind of dramatic false lead, since we never see their result. More important, Polonius assumes that the true report he wants on his son cannot be got at by any direct question but must be evoked at one remove, by hypothesis and conjecture. True, Reynaldo is to focus on his real topic, Laertes, and not start by asking about some other young man. Still, he is ordered to be consciously deceptive in order to jolt the people he questions into a truth they would otherwise not have given up so readily. See you now, Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth; And thus do we of wisdom and of reach With windlasses and with assays of bias By indirections find directions out. (2.1.61–65)

Polonius’s summary suggests his own skill in plotting, and in a different register Shakespeare’s as well. Norwegians and Turks are bait; by such pageants that detain us in false gaze he refocuses that gaze with special intensity.

Notes 1. Here and elsewhere in this essay the plays and poems are cited from William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). 2. 1.1.19, 23, 26, 21. 3. Old Hamlet’s frown is linked to a specific occasion, of an ‘‘angry parley,’’ but Harold Jenkins notes that the frown is generally appropriate for the warrior, citing

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Merchant 3.2.85 and Cymbeline 2.4.23; see the Arden Hamlet (London: Methuen, 1982), 169, 195. 4. Additional Passages, A.2–4. These lines, like the discussion of Julius Caesar immediately following, are in Q2 but not in F. 5. Similarly, eruption, ‘‘violent outbreak,’’ suggests trouble within rather than without. 6. Introduction to Hamlet in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 1138. 7. See Snyder, The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare’s Tragedies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 115. 8. Michael Neill considers the varieties of English in Henry V as on a continuum with the more foreign French, all ultimately playing out linguistically England’s forcible colonization; see ‘‘Broken English and Broken Irish: Nation, Language, and the Optic of Power in Shakespeare’s Histories,’’ Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994): 18–22. 9. Stood out means ‘‘mounted a rebellion,’’ but the phrase also functions in its modern sense of ‘‘was conspicuous.’’ 10. 2.3.304, 320; 3.3.121, 216–17. 11. Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 82–83. 12. Jean E. Howard, in an excellent essay, shows how both brothers use ‘‘theatrical deceptions’’ that call on cultural stereotypes to manipulate others; see ‘‘Renaissance Antitheatricality and the Politics of Gender and Rank in Much Ado About Nothing,’’ in Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, ed. Howard and Marion O’Connor (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), 172–83. While her sociological argument emphasizes the contest between Don Pedro and Don John for control of an aristocratic male prerogative, the two brothers in their close parallelism can also be seen as different angles on a single problematic activity, two versions of the same thing. 13. OED, s.v. ‘‘malignant,’’ a.1, 2, and 3. 14. The Viking marauders of medieval history and legend are a far cry from the cheerful ski fans of the 1994 Winter Olympics, let alone the repressed good citizens chronicled by Garrison Keillor. In any case, Holinshed’s account of the incursion used by Shakespeare in Macbeth assigns it to the Danes. 15. Kenneth Muir, ed., Arden Macbeth (London: Methuen, 1953), note to 1.2.13. 16. In certain sonnets reversals like these feel strained and unconvincing, as the speaker tries to accommodate the inequalities of devotion, his own great dependency, and the friend’s waywardness and shallowness. In Sonnet 34, for instance, ‘‘Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day,’’ the couplet cannot entirely blot out the effect of the preceding three quatrains of anguished question and reproach. The young man’s ‘‘tears of pearl,’’ which are set up to ‘‘ransom all ill deeds,’’ seem merely decorative against the earlier blunt pain of ‘‘Though thou repent, yet have I still the loss.’’

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All’s Well That Ends Well and Shakespeare’s Helens: Text and Subtext, Subject and Object I’M GOING TO MOVE INTO MY SPECULATIONS FROM TWO DIFFERENT DIRECtions. One point of departure is a set of gaps, disjunctions, and silences in All’s Well, places where we lack an expected connection or explanation in the speeches or actions of the main character, Helena. The other is, on the contrary, an unexpected coincidence, a connection between that somewhat mysterious Helena and a character in another play which on the face of it is quite unlike All’s Well. Helena’s career strangely mixes aggressive initiative and passivity. She begins All’s Well in a state of social and psychological constriction: a physician’s orphaned daughter silently in love with a young nobleman who cares nothing for her and is about to leave Roussillon for the court. Helena can only grieve passively. She is interrupted by Parolles, who engages her in a joking conversation, advancing the standard arguments against women retaining their virginity; and by the end of the scene she is suddenly resolved to go to Paris herself and offer a medicine of her father’s to cure the desperate illness of the King. The initiative is a success, and brings the reward she dared to stipulate for her service, a choice of husbands from among the King’s wards. But the chosen Bertram refuses to play his part in the fairy-tale match; he rejects her in outrage, and after the King terrorizes him into going through with the marriage, runs away with Parolles to the wars in Italy rather than consummate it. Bundled off to Roussillon at his order, Helena there receives by letter his cruel farewell: he will never accept her as his wife until she can get possession of his ancestral ring and conceive a child by him. He means the setting of impossible tasks as a total dismissal: ‘‘in such a ‘then’ I write a ‘‘never’ ’’ (3.2.58).1 She recapitulates her initial despair, blames herself for exposing him to danger on the battlefield, and vows to get out of the way so that he can come home. But almost immediately we find her as a pilgrim in Florence, where Bertram is, where she meets Diana, the girl whom he is trying to seduce. Helena again takes forceful control of the action, persuading the Widow to agree to the bed-substitution, instructing Diana, pursuing Bertram 106

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back to France, seeking an audience with the King, and manipulating the final revelation-scene to expose Bertram, prove her fulfillment of the impossible tasks, and claim her reluctant husband all over again. The gaps and disjunctions I want to examine are associated with these shifts between assertion and self-abnegation. One of them occurs in the center of that early, apparently extraneous banter with Parolles about virginity. What moves Helena from hopeless assent to fate to the contrary proclamation that ‘‘our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, / Which we ascribe to heaven’’ (1.1.212–13)? Why should some bawdy conversation with a coarse braggart convert her from despairing withdrawal—‘‘the hind that would be mated by the lion / Must die for love’’ (89–90)—to an energetic plan to follow Bertram to Paris and use this suddenly remembered medical remedy to win favor with the King? The answer is probably a complicated one, but we might look particularly at an odd break in the text at the very center of the conversation. Listening to Parolles’ exuberant arguments against virginity, Helena has answered first, ‘‘I will stand for’t a little, though therefore I die a virgin’’ (131–32); and after some more, ‘‘How might one do . . . to lose it to her own liking?’’ (147). Parolles argues further: Off with’t while ’tis vendible; answer the time of request. . . . [Y]our virginity, your old virginity, is like one of our French wither’d pears: it looks ill, it eats drily; marry, ’tis a wither’d pear. It was formerly better; marry, yet ’tis a wither’d pear. Will you anything with it?

Helena’s response is disjointed, tangential: Not my virginity yet:2 There shall your master have a thousand loves, A mother, and a mistress, and a friend. A phoenix, captain, and an enemy, A guide, a goddess, and a sovereign, A counsellor, a traitress, and a dear[.] (150–66)

And so on through several more lines of epithets for the beloved lady familiar from the love sonnet tradition. Some textual commentators have denied any break here, reading something like ‘‘In my virginity, which is far from a withered pear, Bertram will find everything he ever wanted in a mistress.’’3 But why should she suddenly reveal her love, kept secret from everybody, to this insensitive blabbermouth? And the epithets of the sonnet-lady tyrannizing over her

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enslaved lover—captain, enemy, goddess, traitress—are violently at odds with her habitual attitude to Bertram, expressed before and after this speech, which is the self-abasing devotion of one who feels herself inferior. It seems more likely that ‘‘there’’ means the court, where Bertram will find some all-consuming love. But what unenunciated pressure has brought up this powerful new mental vision? Editors have speculated that the rest of the short line 161 has dropped out here, some reference to the court. Perhaps. The Folio copy for All’s Well seems to have been especially messy, and recent textual work has uncovered signs of authorial second thoughts.4 Yet even if we hypothesize a few missing words (Hanmer adds ‘‘You’re for the court’’; Gary Taylor conjectures ‘‘yet at the court’’), Helena’s transition from her maidenly defense against Parolles to imagining love-life at court is still abrupt, and it seems likely that the emotions suppressed here may figure in her larger transition in this scene from quiescent grief to active pursuit. Textual corruption is not an issue in my second example. At court Helena has a hard time persuading the King, who has lost all hope of being cured. She argues professional skill (her father working through her), and the possibility of a miracle (God working through her). But the King maintains his steady resistance until he asks what she is willing to risk if she fails. He gets a strange reply: Tax of impudence, A strumpet’s boldness, a divulged shame, Traduc’d by odious ballads; my maiden’s name Sear’d otherwise; ne worse of worst, extended With vildest torture, let my life be ended. (2.1.169–73)

As in the Boccaccio story from which Shakespeare drew his plot, she risks death. That is what convinces the King. What he does not respond to, what is not in the source, is the kind of punishment she first feels compelled to propose: versions of public shame for immodesty and sexual boldness. Failure might convict her of professional or religious presumption, but why of being a strumpet? There is something operating here that she leaves unsaid. In my next example, it is Shakespeare who leaves something unsaid, something very important. We are never told whether Helena deliberately pursues Bertram to Florence in order to fulfill his impossible demands or rather arrives where he is by accident and acts only on fortuitous opportunity. This is a deafening silence, all the more noticeable because the early acts have been so firmly centered

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in Helena’s subjectivity. her soliloquies and her confidings in the sympathetic Countess, her foster-mother, keep us close to her feelings and motives. That centering is reasserted in the latter part of the play, when Helena finds new confidantes in Diana and the Widow. But at the crucial point Shakespeare opens a gap which prevents full understanding. Helena’s soliloquy after she hears of her husband’s defection to Italy is all shame and withdrawal: And is it I That drive thee from the sportive court, where thou Was shot at with fair eyes, to be the mark Of smoky muskets? . . . Whoever shoots at him, I set him there; Whoever charges on his forward breast, I am the caitiff that do hold him to’t; And though I kill him not, I am the cause His death was so effected. . . . I will be gone. . . . Come night, end day. For with the dark, poor thief, I’ll steal away. (3.2.105–29)

Bertram’s own mother and friends have just condemned his conduct, but Helena locates all the guilt in her own action: pursuit of Bertram is equated with theft and murder. The new ‘‘action’’ she proposes is really a form of self-effacement: she will go away not with any particular destination but just to remove herself as an obstacle. Soon afterward we hear that she does have a destination, one that accords with her feelings of guilt: I am Saint Jaques’ pilgrim, thither gone. Ambitious love hath so in me offended That barefoot plod I the cold ground upon, With sainted vow my faults to have amended. (3.4.4–7)

At this point, however, we are not given Helena’s direct speech but a letter she has left behind for the Countess; and we are further distanced from her thoughts by the letter’s highly wrought sonnet form. As G. K. Hunter remarks, ‘‘by its various inversions and alliterations [it] produces an effect more archaic and formal than anything in The Sonnets or the early plays.’’5 Purpose is conveyed to us without intimacy, at two removes. And in the next scene there is Hel-

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ena—in Florence. Saint Jaques, later called Saint Jaques le Grand, is Saint James the Great, and Florence is considerably off the road from Roussillon in southern France to his shrine in northwestern Spain. Is the whole pilgrimage scheme simply a pretense, then, to cover her pursuit of Bertram? It is interesting that later one of the French Lords actually uses that word in describing her action.6 Alas, the apparently pointed term doesn’t point clearly in one direction: it could mean ‘‘false pretext’’ all right, but in Shakespeare’s English it could equally well mean just ‘‘intention,’’ with no deception implied (OED, s.v. ‘‘pretense,’’ 3). In the same ambiguous way, while Helena’s route to Santiago may raise suspicions in the audience, no one in Florence finds it odd. In fact, there are several pilgrims bound for the same place lodging there. Why this deliberate mystification, and how are we to fill in the gap it creates? And now for my second point of departure. This mysterious Helena in All’s Well is highly unusual among Shakespeare’s comic heroines in that she not only loves before she is loved but actively, overtly, chases the man she wants. Even Rosalind and Portia, however spirited and ready to take control, wait to be wooed; in love, theirs are strategies of reception, not initiation. There is really only one other exception, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: a young woman who loves without response, who, after beginning in as passive and despairing a mode as the heroine of All’s Well, turns to active pursuit and continues it even when pained and shamed by the rebukes of the man she pursues. And her name of course is Helena. The repetition of name and situation is striking, especially since as far as we know Shakespeare chose the names in both cases. He seems to have invented the Midsummer lovers and their story; and for All’s Well, he deliberately rejected the name supplied by his source, Giletta, and substituted that of Helena or Helen. We can’t know what private associations the name Helena had for Shakespeare, if any, but the public one is unavoidable: Helen of Troy, the fought-over woman, the archetypal desired object in his culture’s myth of origins. Did this legendary Helen influence Shakespeare’s naming? It’s not clear in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, although the Helena there is of course Greek. In the play’s one allusion to the legend, Theseus’s scoff at the lover who ‘‘sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt’’ (5.1.11), Shakespeare could well be glancing at Demetrius’s earlier rejection of Helena’s fairness for the dark complexion of her rival (Hermia, when out of favor, is called an Ethiop and a tawny Tartar). In All’s Well it may be significant that, after first introducing his heroine as Helena, Shakespeare settled into a notable preference for the shortened form of her name, the

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form he always used for the archetypal queen.7 But the play provides direct evidence for associating the two: Steward: Countess: Clown:

May it please you, madam, that he bid Helen come to you; of her I am to speak. Sirrah, tell my gentlewoman I would speak with her—Helen I mean. Was this fair face the cause, quoth she, Why the Grecians sacked Troy? (1.3.63–68)

The Countess’s ‘‘Helen I mean’’ is doubly superfluous: the Steward has just named Helen, and in any case she has no other attendant gentlewoman to confuse us. The name thus accented highlights the Clown’s response, which is to sing a ballad of the Trojan War that had Helen’s fair face as its object. This undoubted association may throw retrospective light on Parolles’ first greeting to Helena, ‘‘Save you, fair queen’’—a title she emphatically denies (1.1.104–7). Not only is she far from a queen in her social rank, so much lower than Bertram’s, but she is an anti-Helen: not the desired one but the desirer. Shakespeare’s own representation of Helen of Troy in Troilus and Cressida, a play probably near in time to All’s Well, only sharpens the ironic contrast. She is argued about and fought over, but seen as an actual character only briefly, as a totally passive object. I am suggesting, then, that the Helenas of the two comedies are linked by the name chosen for them, a name that ironically contradicts its prototype and thus underlines their peculiar situation as subject, the locus of active desire, rather than the usual ‘‘woman’s part’’ as pursued object. Because the implications of this situation are clearer in Midsummer than in All’s Well, for reasons I’ll suggest later, I’m going to try the first play as a kind of subtext for the second, using what is manifest there to fill in the silences and suppressions surrounding the second Helena. Helena in the first scene of All’s Well goes from the threat of ‘‘old virginity’’ as a withered pear to a sudden sharp anticipation of Bertram in love with a court lady who has all she lacks, to the active quest for Bertram. Helena in the first scene of Midsummer is mopingly jealous of her rival, the favored Hermia: ‘‘Demetrius loves your fair. . . . Your eyes are lode-stars’’ (1.1.182–83, my emphasis). What spurs her to unwonted action is the news that Hemia is running off with Lysander to consummate her love, leaving her behind. Her course illuminates that of the second Helena, impelled by Parolles’ reminder of time’s passage and the fear of being left to wither, to

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the sharp realization that Bertram will find fulfilling love elsewhere, and to an answering urgency that propels her to act on her desires. So Helena in Midsummer sets Demetrius in pursuit of the lovers and herself pursues him into the wild forest, beyond the walls of Athens and the accepted cultural constructions the city embodies. When Demetrius denounces her, the deeply rooted code of sexual difference speaks clearly: You do impeach your modesty too much To leave the city and commit yourself Into the hands of one that loves you not, To trust the opportunity of night And the ill counsel of a desert place With the rich worth of your virginity. (2.1.214–19)

Helena herself feels the deep unease of her reversal of cultural roles—‘‘We should be woo’d, and were not made to woo’’—but she persists in the radical venture: the story shall be chang’d: Apollo flies, and Daphne holds the chase; . . . the mild hind Makes speed to catch the tiger. (230–33)

The Helena of All’s Well also leaves home to venture into alien territory. While she too has called herself a retiring hind, at court she ‘‘unnaturally’’ chases her lion instead of pining quietly away. The exchanges between Demetrius and Helena in Midsummer spell out her own unvoiced conflict as the shamed but persistently pursuing Daphne. She knows that healing the King is not her ultimate purpose but a means to achieving her sexual desire: she has already admitted to the Countess that but for loving Bertram she would never have thought of offering her father’s medicine to the King.8 Failure to win his gratitude would fully expose her cultural transgression. What should follow more inevitably than her public branding as an unwomanly woman, a shameless strumpet? Success is shaming enough. She is embarrassed and self-denigrating when choosing among the King’s wards, and almost can’t go through with it. I am a simple maid, and therein wealthiest That I protest I simply am a maid.

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Please it your majesty, I have done already. The blushes in my cheeks thus whisper me: ‘‘We blush that thou should’st choose; but, be refused, Let the white death sit on thy cheek for ever’’. . . Now, Dian, from thy altar do I fly, And to imperial Love, that god most high Do my sighs stream. (2.3.66–75)

If refusal of her self-offering would be the ultimate humiliation, she has to blush for the public choosing itself as a deep contradiction to the accepted image of ‘‘a maid.’’ We might also remember that when Helena’s love seemed hopeless she could claim to the Countess that ‘‘Dian / Was both herself and love’’ (1.3.207–8). But now that she has acted, chastity and love split apart. Helena’s name, of course, associates her through the myth of Troy with Venus, the source of ‘‘imperial Love’’ and in Shakespeare’s own most notable presentation the quintessential female pursuer of a reluctant Adonis.9 But where Venus as a goddess can simply be desire, the socially conditioned human Helena is abashed by her public exposure as wooer. When she finally addresses Bertram, she does her best to deny her role as aggressive, desiring subject and to recast herself properly as object: I dare not say I take you, but I give Me and my service, ever whilst I live, Into your guiding power. (2.3.102–4)

Reshaping the situation with words, however, fails to disguise for either Bertram or Helena herself the radical reversal of male and female. He bitterly protests being the chosen rather than the chooser; and even before his desertion, she sees her act as illicit. She cannot claim her husband’s kiss by right, because her marriage feels like a kind of robbery: I am not worthy of the wealth I owe, Nor dare I say ’tis mine—and yet it is; But, like a timorous thief, most fain would steal What law does vouch mine own. (2.5.79–82)

When Bertram runs off to the wars, escaping his unwanted wife and reasserting his threatened status as active male, the same sense of

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having usurped a role not rightfully hers shapes her self-reproaches: ‘‘with the dark, poor thief, I’ll steal away’’ (3.2.129) In her exaggerated guilt, Helena enacts on herself a form of the penalty for failure which she enunciated to the King, the ‘‘tax of impudence’’ (2.1.169) for chasing her Apollo like a bold strumpet instead of withdrawing like a chaste nymph. The deeply imbedded, internalized story by which we are constituted in terms of sexual difference is not so easy to change. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream the story is in fact not changed. When Oberon observes the Athenian Daphne pursuing her Apollo, he intervenes forcibly to reconstruct the traditional pattern. It is not enough to make Demetrius reciprocate Helena’s love. Puck must apply the love juice so that their roles are truly reversed: ‘‘Fare thee well, nymph: ere he do leave this grove / Thou shalt fly him, and he shall seek thy love’’ (2.1.245–46). ‘‘Nymph’’ in this context implies a whole sexual ideology. As Louis Montrose points out, Oberon is enacting another version of his reassertion of patriarchal control over Titania.10 Under his magic ministrations, Helena becomes an object with a vengeance, wooed furiously by both Demetrius and Lysander. Yet this does not make her happy. Instead, she feels used by the men, and she especially resents Hermia’s perceived defection from their old sisterhood to support the men in objectifying her. In a long, moving passage (3.2.198–219) she recalls their self-mirroring girlhood friendship, a support of subjectivity now lost to her. The play sorts out its love-tangles into neat unions, but it never reinstates that close bond between Hermia and Helena. Rather, the passage marks what must be left behind in the process of growing up and being fully inscribed in the patriarchal order. No so in All’s Well. In that play Helena, as desiring subject, drives its plot onward. She inserts herself uninvited into Bertram’s bed, and acts as her own Oberon to bring about her own order. No wonder Bertram has so little to say at the close, and no wonder that the ending in general has made critics so uneasy. Shakespeare was following his source, of course, but in giving an internal life to Boccaccio’s externally conceived characters, he created something much more subversive.11 Did it make him uneasy too? He apparently revised the central husband-choosing scene in such a way as to underline Helena’s feminine shame.12 At the conclusion he gave Bertram no speech of full endorsement, and caused even the authoritative King to amend the play’s affirming title into a more doubtful ‘‘All yet seems well’’ (5.3.327).13 And he deliberately mystified the middle, leaving the thrust of purpose undefined. Indefinition opens space for multiple interpretations, an espe-

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cially useful effect for an unorthodox play. Fill in the gap with your own assumptions and needs, as you like it. Without claiming to be exhaustive, I shall propose two of interpretations, a ‘‘safe’’ one as well as a subversive one. For the first, I resort once more to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which questions culturally constituted sexual identities only to replace male subject and female object in a fully reaffirmed patriarchal system. Indeed, just because of that reversal the earlier comedy can voice more directly the conflicts that must remain half-submerged in the more problematic later one. The central actor in Midsummer is Oberon, who achieves his purposes by magic means unrecognized by those he works on. This godlike dominance may seem to offer no relevant subtext for All’s Well, with its all-too-human Helena apparently in charge. Yet the characters there keep alluding to an offstage operative power, a supernatural manipulator who is as invisible to us as Oberon was to the lovers. When Helena’s initiative in curing the King succeeds, everyone hails her, not as a good doctor, but as a channel of divine purpose. ‘‘A showing of a heavenly effect in an earthly actor . . . the very hand of heaven . . . in a most weak minister great power, great transcendence’’ (2.3.1–37). The age of miracles is not over, proclaims Lafew. Helena herself, when persuading the King to try her cure, dwells at length on scriptural examples of great deeds done by God through agents without power in themselves (2.1.135–40), and when successful presents herself as a tool of God: ‘‘Heaven hath through me restored the King to health’’ (2.3.64). In her pilgrimage to Saint James, proposed at the crucial juncture of blurred motivation, it is not hard to see her yielding to divine direction, which then guides her to Florence and the means of consummating her marriage. When it turns out that the money she can give for Diana’s help will enable a poor girl to marry well, that is another providential sign, as she assures the Widow: Doubt not but heaven Hath brought me up to be your daughter’s dower, As it hath fated her to be my motive And helper to a husband. (4.4.18–21).

Helena’s purpose must be God’s purpose, since he has already signally intervened in the natural course of events to bring it about. The action is propelled by God’s desire, not Helena’s. Doubt not. That’s a safe way to fill in the silence. But Helena herself has pointed in a different direction when she said, ‘‘Our remedies oft in

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ourselves do lie, / Which we ascribe to heaven’’ (1.1.212–13). The text also invites a riskier reading, grounded in psychology rather than religion. Suppose Helena is drawn to Florence by Bertram’s presence. We may still think something more than mere opportunity is needed to reempower her as desiring self against the crippling guilt and shame that followed on her first action of pursuit. And in this respect we may notice different aspects of the scene (3.5) that introduces the Florentine women. Diana’s mother and her neighbor Mariana discuss thoroughly Bertram’s wooing of Diana, sizing him up realistically and counseling Diana in resistance, with her considered agreement. The female integrity of self they support, being predicated on Diana’s chastity, is far more conventional than the kind Helena has earlier acted on; but there’s a clear emphasis on it, and on the mutual support of women in maintaining it. What Helena walks into, and quickly joins, is a version of the kind of selfconfirming female friendship that was so notably denied to the Helena of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In confirming the illicit nature of Bertram’s own sexual initiative, this friendship allows her to project the felt guilt of her own different kind of transgression onto him, and makes renewed activity psychologically possible. But there are no fewer than three additional scenes of conference and mutual assurance among the women to remind us how important their solidarity is. Solidarity strengthens Helena; it empowers Diana to take complete control of the last scene, manipulating not only Bertram but even the King, who is nominally in control. The connection seems clear between the strength of a woman and the strength of women. Does All’s Well really ‘‘change the story?’’ I don’t know. What it does do, I think, is to enact by disjunction, indirection, and suppression as much as speech and action the difficulties and conflicts of imagining a woman as active, desiring subject. It doesn’t end unambiguously ‘‘well,’’ and has trouble ending at all. That shouldn’t surprise us.

Notes 1. Quotations from All’s Well That Ends Well and A Midsummer Night’s Dream in this essay are from the New Arden editions of G. K. Hunter (London, Methuen: 1959) and Harold F. Brooks (London, Methuen 1979). 2. Folio punctuation; later editors have variously repointed according to their interpretations of the textual crux. 3. First advanced by Steevens in the 1773 Johnson-Steevens edition of the plays. 4. See Fredson Bowers, ‘‘Shakespeare at Work: The Foul Papers of All’s Well that

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Ends Well,’’ in English Renaissance Studies Presented to Dame Helen Gardner, ed. John Carey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 56–73. 5. Introduction to All’s Well, xx. 6. ‘‘Sir, his wife some two months since fled from his house. Her pretence is a pilgrimage to Saint Jaques le Grand’’ (4.3.45–47). 7. ‘‘The heroine of All’s Well That Ends Well is called Helena four times in the Folio; three of these occurrences are in stage directions, only one in dialogue, a prose passage in the opening scene. . . . The occurrences in stage directions are in the opening direction and in two others in Act Two, Scenes Four and Five. . . . The short form of her name Hel⬍l⬎en—occurs twenty-five times, sixteen of them in dialogue, both verse and prose. It seems that Shakespeare was initially rather inconsistent but that he eventually abandoned the long form’’; see Stanley Wells, Re-Editing Shakespeare for the Modern Reader (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 47. 8. Countess: This was your motive For Paris was it? Speak. Helena: My lord your son made me to think of this; Else Paris and the medicine and the King Had from the conversation of my thoughts Haply been absent then. (1.3.225–30)

Even here she cannot fully enunciate her plan to win Bertram in marriage through service to the King. Similarly, as Bertrand Evans has observed, her soliloquy of determination at the end of 1.1 ‘‘does not make even her incidental purpose explicit—the cure of the king—let alone the deeper purpose to be served by that cure’’; see Shakespeare’s Comedies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), 151. For him this is an early hint of the drive and duplicity of a ‘‘relentless hunter,’’ which the text only gradually reveals. Evans’ obvious distaste for a woman in this role is a good example of the critical unease with All’s Well I mention below, and the constructions of sexual difference that underlie it. 9. I am indebted to Professor Donald Cheney of the University of Massachusetts for calling to my attention the relevance of Venus and Adonis to Helena’s situation. Among several points where play resonates with poem, we might notice especially Adonis’s accusing Venus of immodesty (53), Venus’s persistent plea for a kiss, his disdain of love in favor of manly exercise, and her lament when these pursuits lead to his death: ‘‘Love’s golden arrow at him should have fled, / And not death’s ebon dart to strike him dead’’ (947–48; cf. All’s Well 3.2.106–7). The traditional opposition between Venus and Diana may have figured in Shakespeare’s naming of the Florentine Diana who will be ‘‘most chastely absent’’ (3.7.34) while Helena takes her place to conclude the rites of love with Bertram. 10. Louis Adrian Montrose, ‘‘ ‘Shaping Fantasies’: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture,’’ Representations 1, no. 2 (1983): 82–83. 11. The Third Day of the Decameron is devoted to tales of those who gain what they desire by their wits; and the telling of Giletta’s story stresses her clever methods of achieving her aim rather than what it feels like to be the desirer. 12. Bowers (61) speculates on the basis of a misplaced stage direction that lines 66–73, which I discuss above, were added to 2.3 after the first writing. 13. My emphasis; cf. his less than confident appeal to the audience in the epilogue, ‘‘All is well ended if this suit be won, / That you express content.’’

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Wild Analysis: The Taming of the Shrew and Freud’s Dora As the unconscious traverses consciousness, a theoretical body of thought always is traversed by its own unconscious, its own ‘‘unthought,’’ of which it is not aware, but which it contains in itself as the very conditions of its disruption, as the possibility of its own self-subversion. We would like to suggest that, in the same way that psychoanalysis points to the unconscious of literature, literature, in its turn, is the unconscious of psychoanalysis. —Shoshana Felman, ‘‘To Open the Question’’ *

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ONCE THERE WAS A FATHER WHO HAD AN INDEPENDENT DAUGHTER. DISmayed by her rebellious, disruptive behavior, he handed her over with a large fee to a man who he hoped would change her ways. The man worked hard on her, using his position as sole authority to take control of her mind. He tried to redirect her into a socially acceptable pattern by showing her how that was what she really meant and what she really wanted. This is the plot of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. But it also summarizes Freud’s case history of the young woman he called ‘‘Dora.’’ Written in 1901 and published in 1905, his most extensive discussion of a woman patient, this study became for psychoanalysts the touchstone analysis of hysteria. You have to wait till the end to distinguish Shakespeare’s story from Freud’s. While Kate does a complete about-face in behavior, Dora revives her rebellion—now against her doctor as well as her family—and breaks off her treatment. The Freudian script from which Dora finally departed resembles in many ways the dynamic of stage comedy: it seeks to reveal what has been hidden; to remove paralyzing constraints, fears, and fixations; and to propel the protagonists into productive social roles.1 The course of successful analysis, which Freud sometimes envisioned glumly as a limited advance from acute misery to just normal unhappiness, looks more like what we call comedy when, with greater optimism, he defines the goal as making patients able to love 118

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and work. (Of course, when the patient was a woman the goal was only love, not work; and the social role was reproductive rather than productive.) Even when we acknowledge the aborted end of Dora’s comedy, the two scripts of shrew-taming and analysis of a hysteric have enough in common to create an instructive dialogue. Some more about Dora (my summary is brief and keyed to features that her story shares with Shrew). Her father brought her to Freud when she was eighteen, complaining of her ‘‘impossible behavior’’ and worried about her hysterical symptoms: loss of voice, shortness of breath, migraine, dragging foot, and more. Dora had once adored her father but was now at odds with him. Her anger focused on the complicated relations between her family and a couple Freud calls K: Frau K had nursed Dora’s father through an illness, Dora had grown attached to the K children and to Frau K, Herr K had singled Dora out for attentions and gifts. What everyone was busy not saying was that Frau K and Dora’s father were having an affair. In this context, Herr K made two advances to young Dora, a passionate kiss when she was fourteen and two years later a sexual proposition of some sort, which she cut off by slapping him. When Dora told about this incident later, Herr K denied any impropriety and said that reading sexual books had overheated her imagination. It was his wife who informed him about this reading, which she had shared with Dora. Dora’s father believed their version. Dora was bitter at this wholesale betrayal by all three adults, and especially about being implicitly traded by her father to Herr K in return for the latter’s closing his eyes to his wife’s affair. In parsing out the two major dreams around which Dora’s analysis revolved, Freud was eager and free with interpretations—most of them insisting on Dora’s repressed love for Herr K. He constructed the bricks of this love undeterred by a notable absence of straw, labeling as ‘‘conclusive proof ’’ what seems to a later reading more like tortuous deduction from his own premises, ignoring pointers in other directions, and paying no serious attention to the lack of concurrence from Dora. When Dora broke off the analysis, she said she had made the decision two weeks before. Freud pointed out that that was the way you dismissed a servant, with two weeks’ warning. My title is what Freud would call overdetermined. ‘‘Wild analysis’’ fits my own activities in more than one sense. Freud used the term for hamhanded technique that might be applied by an analyst who wasn’t properly trained; and here am I, with no credentials in psychology or psychoanalysis, criticizing the technique of the founding father himself. Even where I do have some standing, in literary criticism, my project looks wild in the sense of ‘‘wayward,’’ ‘‘method-

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ologically out of bounds.’’ These two texts are rooted in decidedly different cultural traditions, with the distance of some 300 years between them. There is nevertheless some rationale for putting them into this ahistorical conjunction. The social narratives of women did not alter that much in their broad outlines from Elizabethan England to turn-of-the-century Vienna, and the means of domesticating them into those narratives are remarkably enduring. So are the goals of social and personal advancement served by such operations for those doing the domesticating. The historical difference between these texts is, for all that, more real than the difference in genre. Indeed, one is fiction and the other is an account of a real person; one is a play and the other is a case history. But I will argue that ‘‘Dora’’ is very much Freud’s creation, not only in terms of the retooled feminine product towards which he was working but in the way he tried to define her desires by his interpretations, her concerns through his mediation. Beyond my own transgressions, the active agents in these texts—Petruchio the shrew-tamer, and Freud the psychotherapist—both practice this forceful mediation, the wild analysis I wish to demonstrate: ‘‘wild’’ as fierce and violent, ‘‘analysis’’ as a coercive operation practiced on Kate and Dora.2 Petruchio and Freud are the active agents who write the socializing narratives, although only Petruchio can bring his to closure. And both of these agents do what authors have the traditional right to do, name their characters. Freud’s patient was actually named Ida Bauer; in order to use her treatment as a teaching device, he displaced her own name with one of his invention—a name that, as it turned out, had meaning for him, to present his refashioning process to the world. For his part, Petruchio wastes no time in renaming the woman he will refashion. Pet. Good morrow, Kate, for that’s your name, I hear. Kat. Well have you heard, but something hard of hearing— They call me Katherine that do talk of me. Pet. You lie, in faith, for you are called plain Kate, And bonny Kate, and sometimes Kate the curst. But Kate, the prettiest Kate in Christendom, Kate of Kate-Hall, my super-dainty Kate— For dainties are all Kates. . . . (2.1.178–85)3

It’s clear enough here that renaming is an act of appropriation. When Katherine asserts her own name, Petruchio dismisses it as a lie and reinscribes her as Kate: a domestication, a diminutive, a

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sound that aligns her with food bought for consumption (a cate in Shakespeare’s English is a choice morsel, a delicacy). Later in the same scene he adds another pun, bragging that he will transform her from a ‘‘wild Kate’’ into ‘‘a Kate / Conformable as other household Kates’’ (2.1.266–67). That is, he will tame this wildcat into a nice domestic pussycat. This programmatic rechristening is remarkably successful. Even the Folio stage directions, which initially favor her full name, after the wedding scene go over almost entirely to the ‘‘Kate’’ instituted by Petruchio. Renaming, for Petruchio an expression of control, may for Freud have been a kind of retrospective retaliation against the young woman who finally escaped his control. He tells us in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life that the cover name he assigned this patient came to his mind because ‘‘Dora’’ was a false name given to his sister’s nursemaid, an imposed substitute for her own name which couldn’t be used because it was the same as his sister’s. Having been dismissed by his impatient patient like a servant, with two weeks notice, Freud could hardly help finding some unconscious gratification in imposing on her—all in the name of professional discretion—the name of a maid.4 Freud certainly carried the day as godfather. Everyone knows Dora, no one knows Ida Bauer. And Shakespeareans, not to speak of Cole Porter, tend to follow Petruchio in calling the shrew by her domesticated nickname. I will use these familiar names too, but under erasure, so to speak. Kate and Dora may talk different languages in their respective texts, but they have in common the act of talking itself. Why else are they sent off for remodeling? Kate’s first action in the play is to intervene in a transaction between males, asserting herself where women were expected to be silent. When Baptista tells Bianca’s suitors that he will not give his younger daughter in marriage until the older one is provided with a husband, they rudely reject such a bride; and when the putative bride objects out loud to being thus objectified, made a ‘‘stale’’—a bait, a stalking-horse, a prostitute for sale—their outrage is doubled. She’s too rough for me. There, there, Hortensio, will you any wife? Kat. [To Baptista] I pray you, sir, is it your will To make a stale of me amongst these mates? Hor. ‘Mates’, maid? How mean you that? No mates for you Unless you were of gentler, milder mould. Kat. I’faith, sir, you shall never need to fear. I wis it [marriage] is not halfway to her heart— Gre.

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But if it were, doubt not her care should be To comb your noddle with a three-legged stool And paint your face and use you like a fool. Hor. From all such devils, good Lord deliver us! Gre. And me too, good Lord! (1.1.55–67)

Lucentio and Tranio, mere onlookers and not emotionally involved as are Bianca’s thwarted suitors, are calmer but no less condemning in their judgment. Tranio concludes that the talkative sister is ‘‘stark mad, or wonderful froward,’’ while Lucentio perceives in the mute Bianca the normative feminine sanity and propriety that Kate is so signally transgressing: ‘‘But in the other’s silence do I see / Maid’s mild behaviour and sobriety’’ (1.1.69–71). ‘‘Stark mad’’ and ‘‘wonderful froward’’ amount to the same thing. It was an easy extension from the original notion of a shrew as someone devilish or possessed by a devil to its use to label a scolding, railing woman. Kate’s language, as Joel Fineman observes, gathers in the archetypes of female speech: ‘‘prophetic and erotic, enigmatic and scolding, excessive and incessant,’’ as it interrupts and interferes with the speech of men.5 Dora is not especially talkative in this sense, but her symptoms constitute another kind of discourse that is equally insistent. Like Kate’s verbal tantrums, Dora’s breathing problems and indirect threats of suicide disrupt family and social life. They demand attention. Speech, whether verbal or symptomatic, is a way of asserting presence—I’m here, don’t ignore me—and of at least trying to control the situation. Dora’s rage at being used to buy off Herr K had only a limited impact on her father. She was more effective in mocking and scorning her doctors (SE 7:22, 78). The strategy carried over into her therapy with Freud, where she often interrupted his interpretations with resistance and finally cut him off for good by abandoning the analysis. If you can’t get back at one father, dismiss another. Unchecked speech has to be tamed out of women because it is a metonymy for independence. We come at the assumption from the other side with another female character in Shakespeare’s play, the Widow who becomes Hortensio’s wife. She is not noticeably loquacious when she finally appears in the last scene; yet when Hortensio earlier contemplates marrying this ‘‘wealthy widow’’ (4.2.37), he immediately plans to take lessons in husbandly mastery from Petruchio at the ‘‘taming school.’’ His prospective bride is assumed to require domestic remodeling, if not as a certified shrew then in any event as a woman whose private fortune and freedom from a controlling husband have made her undesirably autonomous. In this regard, we might note in Freud’s account how Dora’s intellectual aspirations

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suggest in one way what her hysterical symptoms manifest more dramatically, a resistance to the circumscribed role assigned to women in late-nineteenth-century Vienna. At the time when she started treatment, she had turned her back on conventional social life, preferring attendance at lectures and pursuit of what Freud condescendingly calls ‘‘more or less serious studies’’ (7:23). Within their different frames of reference, Kate and Dora share a groping toward autonomy, and a complementary rebellion against the role of passive object. Woman’s main function as object was to be passed on in what Levi-Strauss identified as the fundamental principle of kinship structures, the exchange of women among men.6 The famous question that Freud asked later in life—‘‘Was will das Weib?’’—came rather oddly from him after years of being very sure what women wanted and frequently telling them about it.7 ‘‘Was will das Weib?’’ Why, to be a ‘‘Weib’’ in every sense of the word, not just a woman but a married woman. Sexual relations within marriage and the bearing of children are the true answer to hysteria. Perhaps Freud was shaken in this certainty when it occurred to him that ‘‘What do women want?’’ is not the same question as ‘‘What are women for?’’ The patriarchal answer to the second question—‘‘to exchange in deals with other men’’—may be quite irrelevant to the first question. At any rate, in the texts I am examining, it’s the fathers who want as Freud would have the daughters want. Dora’s father wants to make a deal with Herr K: you take my daughter in exchange for my taking your wife. Dora’s outrage, the refusal of such a deal that her hysterical symptoms articulate, blocks the circulation of women in one way,8 as does Kate’s stubborn spinsterhood in another. Indeed, Kate has brought the whole local exchange system to a halt by standing in the way of her sister Bianca’s marriage as well as her own. The nature of the system, its equation of women with goods, is manifest when that obstacle of the older sister is removed and Baptista can auction the more desirable younger sister to the highest bidder. Baptista’s wishes about his daughter, then, are even more apparent than those of Dora’s father. He accepts the wild Petruchio as a gift from heaven and happily agrees to a quick wedding. Indeed, the quicker the better, since he knows he must sell off this merchandise of dubious value before the buyer can change his mind: Gre. Was ever match clapped up so suddenly? Bap. Faith, gentlemen, I play the merchant’s part, And venture madly on a desperate mart. (2.1.325–27)

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To this proposition that disposing of Kate is a risky piece of business, Tranio agrees that she is a ‘‘commodity’’ that is deteriorating in value the longer she remains in stock (2.1.314–18). This kind of mercantile language, which unmasks the exchange situation, also surfaces in the transactions about Dora. In Freud’s account, Dora sees herself as an ‘‘object for barter’’ in the trade between her father and Herr K; she is to be ‘‘handed over to Herr K as the price of his tolerating the relations between her father and his wife,’’ ‘‘in the interests of his own love-affair.’’9 Freud read in Dora’s second dream a rebellious text: ‘‘Men are all so detestable that I would rather not marry. That is my revenge’’ (7:120). Dora never confirmed this interpretation, but it would not have been an unreasonable conclusion to draw from her experiences with the two men she knew best, her father and the family friend. The third man in her life, her doctor, did nothing to make her think better of men. What is this wild analysis practiced on Dora and Kate by their analyst and husband? (These categories, like those of fiction and fact, are less separate than they seem.) Physical violence is not the issue in either case. Freud stayed well clear of the physical methods that were sometimes recommended for treating hysterics in his time, like temporary suffocation, beating with wet towels, and dousing with ice-cold water.10 And he soon gave up on the hypnosis he had learned from Charcot, as a means of overt manipulation.11 Even Petruchio, though he leans toward such ancillary techniques (favored also by twentieth-century brainwashers) as depriving the subject of food and sleep, works primarily by mental methods. Shakespeare’s version of the familiar shrew-taming story is notable for the absence of beatings, among numerous analogues in which beating is the norm.12 It is interesting, however, that editors of The Taming of the Shrew, most of whom in the ‘‘Sources’’ section firmly separate Shakespeare’s play from these stories of physical subjugation, in the ‘‘Stage History’’ section all record cracking a whip as a traditional piece of stage business for Petruchio. No whips in Shakespeare’s text; but perhaps that long theatrical tradition, easy to dismiss as show-biz embellishment, might be enacting in a different dimension what is already there, giving physical expression to an assault that is carried on in the Shakespearean script by other means. The same veiled violence, now dressed up in a clinical white coat, can be discerned in Freud’s 1912 analogy of the analyst to a surgeon: he puts aside all sympathy and applies his ‘‘mental forces’’ to the operation.13 Not a bludgeon this time, but a scalpel; not beating, but selective listening and coercive speech. For an account of language as

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sharp-edged weapon, there is no improving on Grumio’s forecast of how Petruchio will tame Kate: She may perhaps call him half a score of knaves or so—why, that’s nothing. An he begin once, he’ll rail in his rope-tricks. I tell you what, sir, an she stand him but a little, he will throw a figure in her face and so disfigure her with it that she shall have no more eyes to see withal than a cat. (1.2.105–9)14

The strategy is coded into the pun that gives us ‘‘rope-tricks’’ for ‘‘rhetorics.’’ With language you can attack, tie up in knots, disfigure or distort, blind. No need for real ropes. Or, for that matter, whips. To tame the shrew is to ‘‘charm her chattering tongue’’ (4.2.58). The word ‘‘charm’’ suggests not only the desired end, a hypnotized silence, but the means to that end: spells, incantations. The tamer sets against the shrew’s illicit speech his own magic speech, which transforms reality itself. That is, of course, what the Lord and his servants do for Christopher Sly in the Induction to The Taming of the Shrew. They join efforts to ‘‘practise’’ on Sly so that he will ‘‘forget himself ’’; ‘‘he shall think by our true diligence / He is no less that what we say he is’’ (Ind.1.32–67).15 In the play proper, Petruchio outdoes even these practisers; he uses the power of language to rewrite Kate’s reality by appropriating her signifiers. When she says, ‘‘I won’t marry him,’’ he paraphrases, ‘‘Send out the invitations.’’ When, having lost that round, she then says, ‘‘I want to stay for the wedding feast,’’ he translates, ‘‘Help, save me from these men who are forcing me to go to the feast.’’ By telling the world that they two have agreed she’ll still act shrewish in front of others, Petruchio negates in advance the meaning of any protest Kate might make.16 Dora too finds her ‘‘No’’ preempted, and turned magically into ‘‘Yes.’’ As Freud magisterially assures us, The ‘‘No’’ uttered by a patient after a repressed thought has been presented to his conscious perception for the first time [it is, of course, the analyst who does the presenting, and who decides in the first place that it is a repressed thought] does no more than register the existence of a repression and its severity; it acts, as it were, as a gauge of the repression’s strength. (7:58)

In short, the patient is not an agent of willed meaning but a living allegory, a dream to be interpreted. To read this dream-text correctly, the analyst must brush aside the literal meaning and lay hold of the real, hidden one. This response leaves Dora in a bind like

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Kate’s. However strongly she contradicts, she only succeeds in showing how powerful this thought is for her, by pushing up the repression-index. If the analyst ignores the patient’s ‘‘No,’’ Freud promises, he will soon find evidence that ‘‘in such a case, ‘No’ signifies the desired ‘Yes’ ’’ (59).17 Working from a master-theory (master is classically overdetermined here) Freud casts Dora as an abstraction, ‘‘the patient’’; sometimes he even refers to her with the masculine-normative ‘‘he.’’ Petruchio also has a master-strategy for asserting his reality over Kate’s, which he formulates with no reference to her individuality, indeed before he has even met her. Say she be mute and will not speak a word, Then I’ll commend her volubility And say she uttereth piercing eloquence. If she do bid me pack, I’ll give her thanks As though she bid me stay by her a week. If she deny to wed, I’ll crave the day When I shall ask the banns, and when be married. (2.1.170–76)

Rope-tricks, figures in her face. Freud throws figures at Dora, too, even into her dreams. He inserts something into her second dream, something that she didn’t in fact report but that should have been there. ‘‘In reproducing the dream Dora had forgotten one of the questions which need to be inserted into the course of the second situation of the dream. This question could only be: ‘Does live here?’ ’’ Then, having produced this significant deHerr tail all by himself in the first place, he wonders why she forgot to report it (7:104 n). The associations to the second dream that figure so prominently in the case history are in any case more Freud’s than Dora’s. So is the hypothesized episode in which the child Dora looked up sexual topics in an encyclopedia. Like the question in the second dream, Freud deduced without any hint from Dora that such guilty exploration must have happened. Also Freud’s, rather than Dora’s, is the whole scenario he constructed about Herr K’s kiss when she was fourteen, to account for the repulsion that she felt.18 One can’t help sensing at times that Freud wished the actual Dora would go away and leave him to get on with her analysis in peace. Especially since she kept resisting his master-narrative, her love for Herr K. ‘‘You are ready to give Herr K what his wife withholds from him,’’ pronounces Freud; ‘‘. . . these efforts prove once more how deeply you loved him.’’ Accuracy compels him to add, however,

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‘‘Dora would not follow me in this part of the interpretation’’ (7:70). He tries hard to construct her responses to fit the chosen story. As a girl of fourteen who is grabbed and kissed by a family friend, she should (says Freud) have been excited and responsive; that she felt repulsion instead shows that she was already a hysteric (28).19 He spruces up the lover for his part: Herr K, Freud assures us, is ‘‘still quite young and of prepossessing appearance’’ (29). With Freud as scriptwriter, casting director, and makeup artist, what emerges seems more his desire than Dora’s. In the passage I quoted above about the denying patient, it is significant that No is not made to mean just Yes, but rather ‘‘the desired Yes,’’ the Yes the analyst wants. Certainly Freud’s need to affirm both the centrality of heterosexual love and his theory of hysteria seems to direct the emphases and elisions of his interpretations.20 He even hypothesizes the traditional happy ending, a marriage between Dora and a divorced Herr K (see note 9). But, as Steven Marcus says, Dora ‘‘refused to be a character in the story that Freud was composing for her, and wanted to finish it herself.’’21 She did finish it, after a fashion. A year or so after breaking off her analysis, she confronted her father and the K’s and forced them to acknowledge the truth of their devious, tangled relations. Freud disapproved. Historical fact was not what he was interested in, and insisting on it was to him just a way for the patient to resist inner truth and refuse adjustment to reality.22 (What reality, one wonders?) Freud’s failure with Dora offers a perspective on Petruchio’s success, all the more so since the patriarchal narratives in and through which they work are much the same. The reality that Kate must take over as hers is ‘‘natural,’’ like Dora’s putative desire for Herr K. That is certainly the implication when Petruchio says of his tamed wife, ‘‘thus the bowl should run / And not unluckily against the bias’’ (4.5.24–25). Shrewish independence and resistance go against the bias, the natural inclination of her sex. As in Dora’s case but more successfully, fact is downgraded and finally discarded altogether in the service of ‘‘inner truth’’ (Petruchio’s truth) and adjustment to reality (Petruchio’s reality). When Kate announces that the sun is the moon, her husband declares her to be a properly directed bowling ball. Later she agrees with him that the old man they meet is in fact a girl; by now, Kate knows how to give the ‘‘desired Yes’’ to whatever her husband proposes. The remodeling process brings personal gratification to Petruchio, as—allowing for his lesser success—Freud’s did to him. But those who are supposed to benefit most are the women themselves. Kate will stop being unhappy when she is conformable as other household Kates. Dora’s symptoms will

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vanish if she accepts the desire she doesn’t know she has, and becomes the second Frau K. The ‘‘taming school’’ to which Hortensio repairs in preparation for marriage with his wealthy widow will educate him on two levels. He will learn from Petruchio tricks to tame a shrew, which in application will then school his bride into obedience. Because the taming process thus has reference both to subduing the female subject and to asserting primacy among male colleagues, it is no surprise to see in both play and case history a struggle for mastery not on one front but on two. On the one hand, the open verbal and physical battles in Shakespeare’s play highlight what is half-concealed in Freud’s text, the adversarial relation between him and his patient. It emerges in his choice of word and figure, as when he talks of Dora’s being ‘‘forced’’ to recognize that what she presents as truthful memory is a screen (7:102), or of something she remembers ‘‘which I could not fail to use against her’’ (59). While he sees that she wants to keep her secrets from him as she had from her other doctors, he can read into a certain gesture that ‘‘Dora only wanted to play ‘secrets’ with me, and to hint that she was on the point of allowing her secret to be torn from her by the doctor’’ (78). That is, he perceived in her a kind of coquettishness ‘‘allowing’’ violence on herself, inviting to rape.23 The same confidence that he is forcibly penetrating her private places—and the same sexual dimension that this language suggests—inform his comment to Fliess in a letter of 14 October 1900, that Dora’s case ‘‘has opened smoothly to the existing collection of picklocks.’’ The power struggle that ultimately matters more takes place between men.24 Both the process of analysis/taming and the female subject of it are ammunition in a combat between males. Again our two texts reinforce each other: when Shakespeare presents as his dramatic finale not the successful taming per se but its use to win a competition among Petruchio and the other husbands, he clarifies an aspect of Freud’s situation as well. Freud didn’t exactly lay a bet, but he had a great deal invested in his theoretical positions, which had been attacked or—even worse ignored by the medical establishment, and in using Dora’s treatment to validate those positions. Sexuality is the root of all hysteria, dreams are pointers to unconscious memories and wishes. The demonstration would have been all the more convincing if Dora had stayed to be cured, but he got considerable mileage even so from publishing her history. Disciples began to gather around him, as Hortensio resorted to Petruchio; Ernest Jones, for example, was converted to psychoanalysis by reading of Dora’s case.25 Kate likewise operates successfully in Petruchio’s

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game, as we might expect from a bowling ball that no longer runs against the bias. From this angle, it is clear that the men and not the women are at the center of both texts, a perception confirmed by their titles. In The Taming of the Shrew, Petruchio the tamer is the active agent and Kate, or rather a category that is said to include her, is only the object. Freud’s less catchy title, ‘‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,’’ similarly privileges the analyst’s activity over the female subject he acts upon, who is here not even a stereotype but a ‘‘case.’’ Petruchio’s speeches are longer and more numerous than Kate’s; and while no one counts dialogue lines in a case history, there is no question that Freud outtalks Dora by a considerable margin. Am I pushing too hard on the commonality of these texts, pushing them into it, in fact? Even if these are both constructed narratives about constructed women, even if they both really center on men and their competitions rather than the women who are worked over, even if the techniques of working on them have much in common, isn’t there a decisive difference between an analyst and a husband? For one thing, analysts are not supposed to engage their female subjects sexually, while husbands are supposed to do just that. But this line of demarcation soon blurs. In The Taming of the Shrew Petruchio’s marriage is chaste while the taming process goes on: there will be no sex until his mission is accomplished. In psychotherapy we have the complication Freud later called transference, that process by which the patient fixes on her therapist the strong feelings that belong to earlier relationships. It was the transference, Freud thought in retrospect, that he had mishandled in his treatment of Dora, though he is less than clear on exactly what went wrong. What seems striking now is his own extensive identification with Herr K, and his relative unawareness of that self-investment.26 Dora’s father sets the scene for this identification by ‘‘hand[ing] her over’’ to Freud for treatment (7:19), as he earlier wished her to be ‘‘handed over’’ to Herr K (34, 86).27 Freud carries on the assimilation when he imagines Herr K’s puzzlement at Dora’s refusal and then matches it with his own puzzlement (46); and perhaps when he pleads the case of this man he carefully characterizes as not bad looking although past his first youth (Freud was forty-four in 1900). The erotic metaphor by which he characterized to Fliess his progress with Dora, opening her case with picklocks, resonates not only with the sexual symbolism he later made standard but with something specific to this case: the key to Dora’s room, which on one significant occasion Herr K had stolen. Freud and Herr K both hold illicit keys that admit them to secret places, are implicated with each other

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as prospective seducers. Freud saw Dora’s termination of treatment as a way of getting back at both of them, Herr K and himself—but especially himself, thwarting his hopes for her total cure (7:109). It is not easy to decide which speaks louder in his disappointment, the doctor’s wish to cure or the theorist’s need for validation and ego gratification. In any case, Freud’s whole presentation of Dora’s defection is strangely overwrought. What is a passage like the following doing outside a romantic novel? No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed. (109)

Just as Dora was ‘‘brutal’’ in slapping Herr K (38 n), so in cutting off her connection with Freud she has ‘‘cruel impulses and revengeful motives’’ (120); both rejections call forth from him the same highflown rhetoric of passion. Freud surely did not want to marry Dora or even to seduce her. But there was an attraction in the relationship to which he paid no attention, an attraction that strengthened on the one hand his need to conquer in his struggle with Dora, and on the other his complicity with Herr K and his promotion of Herr K as appropriate lover. The jilted Freud found it hard to let Dora go. He delayed publishing her case history; he continued to mull over her dreams and fantasies, as a cast-off lover might brood over mementos; he added long footnotes trying to get a more complete perspective on her case.28 The psychotherapist, then, has some unexamined personal-romantic stake in his patient’s choices about sex and treatment. And the husband in Shakespeare’s play not only forswears conjugal relations while he is taming his bride but receives payment at the end of the process, as if he were indeed a psychotherapist. In addition to what Petruchio collects from Lucentio and Hortensio for winning the obedient-wife contest, he gets a whacking fee from father-in-law Baptista for services rendered: I will add Unto their losses twenty thousand crowns, Another dowry to another daughter, For she is changed, as she had never been. (5.2.112–15)

Another dowry: on top of the usual husband-payment, a therapist’s bonus for remolding Kate so successfully and banishing the disrup-

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tive shrewish symptoms. The relationship between Kate and Petruchio, begun in hostility, is reworked into what can be seen as an extreme transference, which is to go on forever: analysis interminable. Appearances to the contrary, my point in all this is not simply or primarily to mock Freud, nor even to find new and subversive truth in his favorite thesis that Shakespeare had anticipated his great discoveries. While the target Freud presents in his handling of ‘‘Dora’s case’’ is irresistible, it is no news that the intrepid trailblazer of modern psychology was very much of his own time in his understanding of women, and no great discovery that one can’t be revolutionary on all fronts at once. But it is not only amusing that Freud fits all too easily into the patriarchal bully role of Shakespeare’s shrew-tamer; it is also disconcerting that the manipulations of farce so readily blend into the ‘‘coercive interpretation’’ that characterizes psychanalysis, in one of its founding documents as in much later practice (the phrase is borrowed from Madelon Sprengnether’s study of the Dora case history).29 Julia Kristeva is more sweeping, and more violent: ‘‘the propagation of psychoanalysis . . . has shown us, ever since Freud, that interpretation necessarily represents appropriation, and thus, an act of desire and murder.’’30 Backing off from Kristeva’s extremism, we may still see how Freud’s unexpected affinities of purpose and method with Petruchio highlight persisting tendencies in psychotherapy, to accept unfounded notions of the normal and then impose them on the female subject, or alternately blame her unhappiness on her refusal of her ‘‘natural’’ role. We have, some think, changed all that. But consider the fairly recent experience of John Cleese, who was rehearsing Petruchio for the BBC production of The Taming of the Shrew. He asked a psychiatrist friend to read the play. The psychiatrist did so, and reported back that ‘‘when Kate and Petruchio meet for the first time he was laughing out loud because this is exactly what he does with shrews.’’31

Notes 1. Cf. Meredith Skura, The Literary Use of the Psychoanalytic Process (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), chap. 6, especially 202–16. She builds on Hans Loewald’s description of the analytic method as the disorganization and reorganization of the ego; see Loewald, ‘‘On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis,’’ International Journal of Psychoanalysis 41 (1960): 17. 2. As early as 1904, in ‘‘On Psychotherapy,’’ Freud was warning against insufficient finesse in technique as injurious to the patient; see The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, 19 vols. (London:

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Hogarth Press, 1953–62) 7:261–62. (The Standard Edition is hereafter referred to as SE.) He extended the strictures against heavy-handed directness in his 1910 paper on ‘‘wild’’ psychoanalysis (SE 11:221–27). Just instructing the patient will not effect a cure without address to resistances; indeed, imparting knowledge too early and brusquely will drive the patient away (226). Freud poses himself and his disciples in opposition to the undertrained wild analysts, but the practices he denounces resemble his own earlier modes of treatment, especially of Dora ten years earlier. 3. The Taming of the Shrew is cited throughout this essay from the New Cambridge edition, ed. Ann Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). I have abbreviated the speech prefixes. 4. SE 6:240–41; cf. Suzanne Gearhart, ‘‘The Scene of Psychoanalysis,’’ in In Dora’s Case, ed. Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane, Columbia Gender and Culture Series (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 121. Madelon Sprengnether sees in the specific link with a nursemaid one last attempt at getting Dora into a pseudo-maternal position, under proper patriarchal control; see ‘‘Enforcing Oedipus: Freud and Dora,’’ in In Dora’s Case, 256. 5. ‘‘The Turn of the Shrew,’’ in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York and London: Methuen, 1985), 141. Fineman pursues an analogy between Petruchio and Kate in the play, and psychoanalysis (Lacan) and its critics (Derrida) in recent theoretical debate. He anticipates me in linking Freud’s ‘‘Dora’’ with The Taming of the Shrew; see his extended note, 158. 6. Claude Levi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, rev. ed., trans. J. H. Bell et al. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), 481–85. See also Gayle Rubin, ‘‘The Traffic in Women: Notes Toward a Political Economy of Sex,’’ in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157–210, and Jane Gallop, The Daughter’s Seduction: Psychoanalysis and Feminism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), 133. 7. See Hannah Lerman, A Mote in Freud’s Eye: From Psychoanalysis to the Psychology of Women (New York: Springer, 1986), 26. 8. Sharon Willis notes that ‘‘Dora, not wanting to be the currency in which her father pays his debts to another man, is blocking circulation, damming up the flow of exchange’’; see ‘‘A Symptomatic Narrative,’’ Diacritics 13 (Spring 1983): 47. Willis cites Catherine Cle´ment and He´le`ne Cixous (La jeune neé [Paris: Editions 10/18, 1975], 104) on the economic significance of the hysteric’s illness as her ‘‘inexchangeability.’’ 9. The latter two terms I have italicized translate Ger. Preis (7:34) and [Liebes]interessen (86); Interessen, like Eng. ‘‘interest,’’ can have financial connotations. It is not clear whether the barter is to include marriage. When Dora interrupted Herr K’s proposition with her slap, he had intimated only that he wanted from her the sexual satisfaction that he didn’t get from his wife. Although Freud earlier reported that Herr K was too attached to his children to divorce Frau K, he managed to convince himself that Herr K could nevertheless have intended to get a divorce and marry Dora: ‘‘this would have been the only possible solution for all the parties concerned’’ (108). But in the shady, unspoken deal that Dora’s father is promoting, there is little to choose between marriage and illicit sex. 10. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Knopf, 1985), 211. 11. On the other hand, Freud warned against spoiling patients. To make things pleasant for them was exactly contrary to the treatment. ‘‘As far as his relations with the physician are concerned, the patient must be left with unfulfilled wishes in abundance. It is expedient to deny him precisely those satisfactions which he de-

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sires most intensely and expresses most importunately’’; in this position, quoted from ‘‘Lines of Advance in Psycho-Analytic Therapy,’’ 1918 (SE 17:164), he comes close to Petruchio’s deprivation-practices. 12. Brian Morris canvasses folktale analogues and scholarship on them in the introduction to his Arden edition of The Taming of the Shrew (London: Methuen, 1981), 70–76. 13. ‘‘Recommendations to Physicians Practicing Psycho-Analysis,’’ SE 12:113. 14. I have changed and to the less confusing an (for ‘‘if ’’) in lines 106 and 108. 15. The Lord’s verb practise is a timely reminder that we use the same word for ‘‘trick, delude’’ and for ‘‘perform professionally, e.g., as a doctor.’’ 16. 2.1.270–308; 3.2.196–228. 17. The very reasonableness of the patient’s position is somehow a sign of its lack of authenticity. Freud assures us that ‘‘when a patient brings forward a sound and incontestable train of argument during a psycho-analytic treatment . . . it soon becomes evident that the patient is using thoughts of this kind, which the analysis cannot attack, for the purposes of cloaking others which are anxious to escape from criticism and from consciousness’’ (7:35). 18. Freud’s scenario becomes, as Steven Marcus says, ‘‘the principal ‘reality’ of the case . . . more Freud’s than Dora’s, since he was never quite able to convince her of the plausibility of the construction’’; see Representations (New York: Random House, 1975), 288. Even the chain of associations for the second dream, from Bahnhof (railway station) and Friedhof (cemetery) to Vorhof (vestibule) to nymphae/female genitals (SE 7:99–100) is supplied by Freud with no help from Dora: ‘‘I informed Dora of the conclusions I had reached.’’ See Sprengnether, ‘‘Enforcing Oedipus,’’ 266. 19. David Riesman, in ‘‘Authority and Liberty in the Structure of Freud’s Thought,’’ Psychiatry 13 (1950), argues that Freud’s thinking was marked by determinism and type-categories, with little allowance for a range of taste and choice, and little attention to the individual. His parody-version of Freud’s attitude to Dora’s first sexual encounter with Herr K is not so great an exaggeration: ‘‘A penis is a penis, and that is enough for a ‘normal’ woman who has attained, as 14-yearold Dora had, the genital stage’’ (172). 20. In a footnote added to the case history some time after the first writing, Freud speculated that Dora’s homesexual attraction to Frau K ‘‘was the strongest unconscious current in her mental life’’ (7:120 n). But although he earlier shows himself aware of this ‘‘gynaecophilic’’ love and includes a few pages on it at the end of the ‘‘clinical picture,’’ he never integrates this element into his analysis or uses it to question his own emphasis on Dora’s supposed passion for Herr K. It is introduced as a ‘‘complication,’’ the sort of thing that a fiction-writer would omit because it muddles his central plot line (59). Freud distinguishes himself from the fiction-writer as a scientific investigator who must include all the data; but in fact after this brief excursus he behaves like a writer of fiction himself, consigning Dora’s putative love for Frau K to footnote-limbo in order to save his romantic narrative. 21. Marcus, 306. 22. Erik Erickson characterizes Freud as seeing in the ‘‘active emphasis on the historical truth a mere matter of resistance to the inner truth.’’ Erikson, on the contrary, finds such an emphasis appropriate to Dora’s stage of life; see Insight and Responsibility (New York: Norton, 1964), 170. 23. Janet Malcolm thinks that Freud’s language here suggests defloration; see Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (New York: Knopf, 1981), 98. More generally,

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she sums up, ‘‘Freud treated Dora as a deadly adversary. He sparred with her, laid traps for her, pushed her into corners, bombarded her with interpretations, gave no quarter, was as unspeakable, in his way, as any of the people in her sinister family circle’’ (97). Peter Gay comments, ‘‘Freud’s interpretations leave the impression that he viewed Dora less as a patient pleading for help than as a challenge to be mastered’’; see Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: Norton, 1988), 250. 24. For the rivalry between males in an erotic situation as equaling or outweighing desire for the contested woman, see Rene´ Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 25. See Gay, 183–84. 26. Sprengnether notes that among the possibilities for identification in the cast of characters—the impotent father, the lesbian love object Frau K—Freud chooses the only representative of ‘‘aggressive male heterosexuality’’ (260). 27. Marcus makes the connection (253). The German ausliefern, used twice for the father’s transaction with Herr K, is somewhat more bureaucratic and impersonal than ubergaben, selected by Freud for the father’s transaction with himself. But, as their identical rendering by the English translators shows, the two verbs are very close in meaning. 28. Claire Kahane, Introduction to In Dora’s Case, 19. 29. Sprengnether, 263–67. 30. ‘‘Within the Microcosm of ‘The Talking Cure’,’’ in Interpreting Lacan, ed. Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan, Psychiatry and the Humanities 6 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 33. Cf. J. Dennis Huston’s term for Petruchio’s courtship of Kate, ‘‘psychological rape’’; see ‘‘‘To Make a Puppet’: Play and PlayMaking in The Taming of the Shrew,’’ Shakespeare Studies 9 (1976): 74. 31. Pamphlet accompanying the BBC video of The Taming of the Shrew (1980), 23.

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‘‘The King’s not here’’: Displacement and Deferral in All’s Well That Ends Well ALTHOUGH ACCUSED BY CRITICS OF BEING UNPOETIC, ALL’S WELL THAT Ends Well has a few memorable lines. My title quotation is not one of them. The brief scene in which it occurs is sometimes cut in production because nothing happens in it. Its whole content is precisely a non-happening. Helen has brought the Florentine Widow and Diana to Marseilles, where the King of France is in residence, to prove before him her case as Bertram’s wife. But when they get there and ask a courtier for access, he says that the King is now somewhere else: ‘‘He hence removed last night, and with more haste / Than is his use’’ (5.1.25–26).1 Is there a story in this unusual haste of the King’s? You might think so, but when we catch up with him at Roussillon, no one ever mentions it. Perhaps the scene builds up suspense: Helen is, we know, thought dead, and we’ve just heard of a plan to replace her by marrying Bertram to Lafeu’s daughter. But the prospective marriage is not presented in Act 4, scene 5 in a way that makes us fear Helen will be too late in revealing herself to the King. In any case, whenever she arrives her very existence as a prior wife would invalidate any contract with Maudlin. I suppose a director might justify the Marseilles scene as underlining Helen’s perseverance. She shows no discouragement at the bad news, but cheers on her companions by repeating the title proverb: ‘‘All’s well that ends well yet, / Though time seem so adverse, and means unfit’’ (5.1.28–29). But the four acts we have already seen surely leave no question about Helen’s perseverance in love, as she first pursues Bertram to the French court to win him by curing the King’s illness, and then in Florence takes Diana’s place in bed with him to consummate their marriage and fulfill his impossible conditions. There needs no fifth-act addendum to convince us of her persistence. The scene then exists, it seems, simply to put off an expected conclusion. Marseilles, the destination that was to produce the King, can offer instead only a kind of royal representation, a man of the court 135

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who gives news of the King. The King himself is not where we thought he was but has moved on. It is after the second stage of the journey, at Roussillon, that Helen and her party catch up with the King and stage the exposure and reclamation of Bertram that ends the play. Helen’s journey has brought her full circle, from Roussillon to Paris and then via Roussillon again to Florence, to Marseilles, and once more to Roussillon. This geographical progression may suggest one point to the pointless scene I’ve just been looking at, a function in structure if not in plot. Helen’s ‘‘voyage out’’ was in two stages: the first stage in Paris resulted in marriage with Bertram but denied consummation of that marriage, requiring the second stage in Florence to achieve sexual union with her husband. Like Marseilles on the way back, Paris provides only a representation of what is desired: as the courtier is not the King but can only report on him, Helen in her first condition as Bertram’s wife is, in her own later words, ‘‘the name and not the thing’’ (5.3.310). Paroles, linked by his own name with words rather than things, is appropriately sent to Helen by Bertram to put off the consummation that would make their marriage real, acknowledging ‘‘the great prerogative and rite of love’’ but putting it off ‘‘to a compelled restraint,’’ assuring her that ‘‘delay is strewed with sweets . . . To make the coming hour o’erflow with joy’’ (2.4.41–46). His flowery insincerities strive to dress up the emptiness of that marriage ceremony and to prettify with romance the deferral of sexual union. But it is still deferral. Even in the most optimistic reading Helen could give it, Paroles’s text in Paris is the same as her own more straightforward later acknowledgment in the Marseilles scene that gratification must be postponed: ‘‘All’s well that ends well yet.’’ She must go further each time, beyond ‘‘the name’’ to achieve ‘‘the thing’’: in the first movement, out beyond France, and, in the second movement of return, further in from the coast of France to the place where she started. Each half of the play enacts the non-stasis of ‘‘beyond A to B,’’ pushing yet onward from the expected conclusion. The structural repetition accentuates Helen’s double achievement of Bertram—‘‘Will you be mine now you are doubly won?’’ (5.3.316). But it also casts the whole action in a rhythm of deferral that is hard to cut off, implying that the expected end to the journey will always turn out to be the start of a new one. The conjunction of the two central features of the Marseilles scene—the King is absent, and in the place where we expected to find him is a representative telling about him—may stand as an emblem for the persistent tendency of All’s Well toward displacement and (more or less inadequate) substitution. That tendency begins

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‘‘THE KING’S NOT HERE’’

almost as soon as the play does, when Lafeu assures the widowed Countess and the orphaned Bertram that the King will fill for both of them the place vacated by the dead Count of Roussillon: ‘‘You shall find of the King a husband, madam; you, Sir, a father’’ (1.1.6– 7). We hear no more of the King’s husbandly concern for the Countess, but he does profess parental love for Bertram—‘‘My son’s no dearer’’ (1.2.76)—and in loco parentis exerts control over his marriage, perhaps a stricter control than the real father would have exercised. Helen’s father, the physician Gerard de Narbonne, is also absent in death. Even his memory is displaced in Helen by the image of Bertram, but on a more public front Lafeu tells her she must be his representative, and ‘‘hold the credit of your father’’ (1.1.76–77). And so in fact she does when she presents herself to cure the King, though she also invokes a higher power acting through her agency than her father’s medical skill. In addition to this form of self-parenting, Helen also gets a substitute parent in the Countess—a rather stern and inquisitorial one in the first interview we see between them, but later such a supportive ally that she displaces herself as Bertram’s mother in order to play the substitute maternal role for Helen. A major player in this game of displacement and substitution is the Clown. This rather perverse figure gets varying responses from critics, who agree only that he is an untypical Shakespearean clown: far from promoting a festive atmosphere, he is notably unfunny, his cynicism promoting more pessimistic gloom than liberating laughter. It is hard to find consistency in a single character who both rebukes sinful man like a Calvinist preacher and rebels against authority; who opts for the humble ‘‘house with the narrow gate’’ (4.5.50–51) over worldly pomp and the pretensions of rank, but lords it over the fallen Paroles with malicious glee; who is driven by desires of the flesh and weary of lust all in the space of one scene. The Clown’s moralist voice may well be his own, but the placement of some of his other, disparate attitudes sometimes suggests that here he may be mirroring or speaking for others. This is perhaps most obvious in the scene where Paroles, down on his luck, begs a favor from this underling he had patronized in better days, calls him ‘‘Master Lavatch’’ instead of ‘‘knave,’’ uses the respectful ‘‘you’’ rather than the dismissive, familiar ‘‘thou.’’ Now the Clown does the condescending, calls him ‘‘thou,’’ and exaggerates refined distaste for this apparent tramp (5.2.1–15). We can easily recognize a parody of the earlier Paroles who was so quick to appropriate the manners and taste of a gentleman. Indeed, the Clown may have begun his caricature of Paroles’ court language, all fashion and no meaning, when

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in 2.2 he demonstrated to the Countess the adaptability to all polite situations of ‘‘O Lord, sir!’’ (40–57). Already self-proclaimed as a prophet, the Clown may even here be forecasting the fall of Paroles when he discovers that his fine words eventually get him into trouble; the verbal talisman ‘‘may serve long, but not serve ever’’ (54).2 When the Clown earlier claimed to be a prophet, it was because he spoke the truth ‘‘the next way’’ (1.3.59). He means to defend direct speech, but in that defense his term ‘‘next’’ (nearest) establishes his truths as not in himself but nearby. More interesting than his use of Paroles’ own language to mock him are some occasions of deflected speech when the Clown voices what someone ‘‘nearby’’ must keep suppressed. On one of these occasions, which several critics have noted,3 the Countess has just learned of Helen’s love for Bertram and orders the Clown to fetch her. He responds, rather gratuitously, with resentment and barely concealed rebellion: That man should be at woman’s command, and yet no hurt done! Though honesty be no puritan, yet it will do no hurt; it will wear the surplice of humility over the black gown of a big heart. (1.3.90–93)

He implies that a situation where woman exerts power over man is upside down and leads naturally to harm. Developed nowhere else in the Clown’s relationship with the Countess, this male resentment of female rule seems to float free of that relationship. On the other hand, it bears directly on the object of his errand, Helen. Her love for Bertram is hopeless because men do not bow to women’s desires; if she is ‘‘shut . . . up in wishes’’ and helpless to act on them (1.1.179–82), it is because of her gender as well as her class. But she is now evolving a plan to win the King’s favor, that way gaining the power to enact her wish. Bertram will soon be at her command. Only just freed from one woman’s control by leaving home, he will come immediately under the sway of another woman. The resentment in the Clown’s words belongs proleptically to him. So does the grudging concession by which the Clown covers up in outward submission his ‘‘big heart,’’ his proud spirit. Bertram goes through the marriage ceremony under duress. His submission is only external, like that of the restive Puritans in the Clown’s metaphor: ‘‘Although before the solemn priest I have sworn, / I will not bed her’’ (2.3.266–67). The Clown voices in advance what Bertram, silenced by the King, cannot say. In the same scene, the Clown articulates what is even less possible for the adolescent Count to say—namely, his fear of sexual-

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ity and especially of being unable to fill his wife’s sexual demands. As later the Clown thinks that Bertram incurs less danger in mortal combat than in ‘‘standing to’t’’ sexually to meet those demands (3.2.40–42), so here, apparently on his own part, he looks forward with positive relief to being cuckolded. It will be a welcome rest from his onerous husbandly labors: ‘‘for the knaves come to do that for me which I am aweary of. He that ears my land spares my team . . . . If I be his cuckold, he’s my drudge’’ (1.3.42–46). Seekers of a consistent Clown have wondered why he should talk of needing such sexual stand-ins just after he has proclaimed consuming desire for his prospective wife: ‘‘I am driven on by the flesh’’ (28–29). But we need not strive to make character sense of this strong desire that so quickly turns to distaste if we recognize the Clown as a voice available to say the unsayable, in his sexual aversion speaking for Bertram but in his obsessive, driving desire speaking for Helen. She has already spoken for herself, of course, in two soliloquies, but what even these revelations must not spell out too clearly is the physical basis of that love; only the Clown has license to talk of the body’s compelling needs.4 Helen and Bertram, by their insertion into social formations of class, gender, family, etc., are variously restrained from certain kinds of speech. Shifting the articulation of their desires, fears, and resentments onto the Clown appears at first like a downward displacement, since he is well below both of them in station. But the point is rather that, as a peripheral dependent kept to amuse and provide ‘‘sport,’’ he is outside most of the prevailing formations, not bound by their obligations and prohibitions. The direction of displacement onto the Clown is more from the center to the margin. Such a shift from the consequent to the inconsequent that allows the unsayable to be said, in some distorted form, is the very basis of the displacement process as expounded by Freud: the dream image of something trivial, the neurotic symptom centered in some ‘‘innocent’’ bodily part, the joke that routes psychic intensity through a detour of absurdity, the screen memory that conceals another one more fraught with fear or guilt5 —all evade or placate the social and internalized censors by this same process of deviation and substitution. Wit theory is especially relevant to these displacements from the hero and heroine to the Clown, for between them Helen and Bertram demonstrate precisely the two unacceptable tendencies that Freud saw wit as concealing: sexual display/desire in her, aggression in him. Only the speech of an ‘‘allowed fool’’ can give them voice, his license to speak enacting dramatically what Freud expresses as the protection provided by nonsense against critical reason.

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The body’s repressed desires and fears, then, can emerge in the privileged nonsense of the Clown, who is both joke and symptom. More familiar, perhaps, than this sideways deflection from center to margin is displacement upwards, a process in which the focus of attention and emotion shifts from the unspeakable, unmanageable ‘‘down there’’ to some region of the body that is literally and figuratively more elevated. Freud understood certain symptoms he observed in the young woman he called ‘‘Dora’’—shortness of breath, nervous coughing, catarrh, loss of voice—as upward displacements of disturbances involving the genital region.6 Upward displacement as a clinical theory was, of course, unknown to Shakespeare’s time but not its manifestation, as seems clear from the jokes equating nose and penis.7 In All’s Well itself, Lafeu makes fun of Paroles’ gartered sleeves that turn his arms into legs: ‘‘Dost make hose of thy sleeves? . . . Thou wert best set thy lower part where thy nose stands’’ (2.3.248–50). This is not the first time Lafeu has uncovered the upward displacement process by discerning the ‘‘low’’ under a more elevated surface. He presents Helen to the ailing King less as a doctor to treat him than as a woman to arouse him. I have seen a medicine That’s able to breathe life into a stone, Quicken a rock, and make you dance canary With sprightly fire and motion; whose simple touch Is powerful to araise King Pe´pin, nay, To give great Charlemagne a pen in’s hand And write to her a love-line. (2.1.71–77)

She quickens, she gives fire and motion, she could produce tumescence even in kings long dead. Perhaps quibbling, in this French play, on the French for ‘‘doctor,’’ Lafeu’s term ‘‘medicine’’ presents Helen as not only the healer bearing the cure (an ‘‘upper,’’ rational frame of reference) but also the cure itself (a ‘‘lower,’’ more primitive dimension). Cotgrave glosses medecine as ‘‘a she Phisition.’’8 Certainly sex rather than medical skill is the salient point in Lafeu’s introduction of his prote´geé as ‘‘Doctor She’’ (78). Even when apologizing for the jokes and innuendos in which he has collapsed high into low, he carries them on: Now by my faith and honour, If seriously I may convey my thoughts In this my light deliverance. . . . (79–81)

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On the upper level ‘‘deliverance’’ is a style of talking, but on a deeper, more primal one it suggests setting free what was restrained or suppressed. In the same way ‘‘light,’’ besides its upper orientation of levity and frivolity, has a lower one of sexual wantonness. Lafeu’s parting lines show clearly the kind of scene he envisions between the King and Helen: ‘‘I am Cressid’s uncle / That dare leave two together’’ (97–98). What follows is not in fact an overtly sexual encounter.9 Helen pleads for a chance to cure the King not with her own body but with her father’s prescription and with the divine power that sometimes works miracles through weak agents. Nevertheless, her self-presentation keeps Lafeu’s ambiguities in play. The prescription is her father’s ‘‘only darling’’ (106), a term that suggests herself as well. Her formula, ‘‘I come to tender it and my appliance’’ (112), also tends to blur the line between the remedy and the one who administers it: what do we make of ‘‘my appliance’’ when the word could mean not only ‘‘treatment’’ but also ‘‘complaisance’’? The bodily site of the King’s fistula is not clearly defined in the text. In his own announcement it is his heart that ‘‘owes [i.e., owns] the malady,’’ though reluctant to acknowledge it (8–9). The heart as a bodily part is respectable, speakable. And Helen’s cure is a medicine mixed according to prescription, the product of rational thought and experiment. But the text, through Lafeu and even through Helen herself, keeps obliquely insisting that these are upward displacements of something more primitive, that the King’s mortal impairment is sexual, and that this young woman is brought in to him as Abishag was to David in the Bible, to rekindle his potency. What did not work for King David is highly successful with this later king, whose revival is expressed in sexually suggestive words and images: ‘‘your dolphin is not lustier . . . . Lustig, as the Dutchman says . . . . Why, he’s able to lead her a coranto’’ (2.3.27, 42, 44). The coranto, a leaping dance, repeats the dolphin-idea of a sudden upward thrust. The same image informs the angry exchange between the King and the reluctant bridegroom Bertram. King Bertram

Thou know’st she has raised me from my sickly bed. But follows it, my lord, to bring me down Must answer for your raising? (112–14)

Bertram’s unpolitic question glances at the King’s sexual arousal while he rebels against being used to pay his foster-father’s debts. From this point of view, he himself and the marriage forced on him are displacements of the old King’s sexual fascination with Helen:

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the formal coupling with her that would be unseemly for the King he imposes by fiat on his ward. Upward displacement in this sequence is very incomplete. Primitive sexual forces are visible in their half-suppressed state, coexisting uneasily with the manifestations of the high (intellect, heart) that are supposed to screen them. Perhaps as a further counterforce, Shakespeare pushed displacement even further upward, beyond the rational to the divine. The King’s recovery is seen by the court as a miracle: what is only a hint in Boccaccio’s tale is extensively developed in Shakespeare’s play. That God might intervene in the process is the basis of Helen’s long plea to the King in 2.1 and of his agreement to try her medicine. Afterwards, the same Lafeu who acted as pointer to things sexual—and indeed continues to do so— holds forth at length on the cure as something ‘‘supernatural and causeless,’’ with Paroles agreeing (2.3.1–39). It is tempting to see this miracle talk as a way of rationalizing a woman’s success in a male province where men had failed. We hear no one applauding Helen’s skill in medicine, and she herself modestly gives all credit to Heaven (2.3.65)—though we may remember her earlier declaration in private, when she was planning this initiative, that ‘‘our remedies oft in ourselves do lie / Which we ascribe to heaven’’ (1.1.212–13). The miracle-emphasis has a function beyond covering Helen’s personal success, operating as a necessary mystification, a further and stronger attempt to conceal what must not be said. The actual healing of the King is not shown: because a miracle is hard to stage, or because the cure is sexual in nature? We feel that nevertheless it is represented for us somehow by the scenes before and after—critics and reviewers talk confidently of ‘‘the scene in which Helena cures the King’’—but how is the cure represented? By the references to heavenly power or by the bawdy jokes? In ways like these the play displaces what is powerful, real, significant, shifts it below or beyond in a sleight-of-hand that imitates our psychic processes. The King’s not here—even when the character with that title is. And the substitutes are felt as substitutes: the Clown speaking from oddly disjointed perspectives, the King’s erection as ‘‘a showing of a heavenly effect in an earthly actor’’ (2.3.24–25). This is the context in which we may examine the play’s most central and obvious case of displacement and substitution, the so-called bed-trick. From one point of view, by taking Diana’s place in bed with Bertram, Helen achieves a quid pro quo against him. In the very act by which she unites for herself the name and the thing, the title of wife and the actual condition, she separates these two for her husband: he gets only the name of the woman he desires and not

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the physical presence, thus duplicating the state he earlier imposed on Helen. But a view of this reversal that confines displacement and substitution in a pattern of neat reciprocity breaks down as soon as we look beyond the intrigue plot. In reality, the situations of Bertram and Helen alike, both falsified by the absent term of Diana, enact the displacement that Lacan finds at the heart of desire itself. Both are involved in a kind of ‘‘reference back’’ to the woman who isn’t there, highlighting the lack that propels desire.10 The bed scene itself, of course, can’t be shown onstage. Like the parallel sexual encounter in Measure for Measure, it must be displaced. Unlike Measure for Measure, though, All’s Well doesn’t just elide what can’t be portrayed; it offers a substitute for it. And like other substitutes and representations we have seen—the courtier in Marseilles, for example—the replacement action gives news of what’s absent, allows it to speak obliquely through what’s present. The ‘‘screen’’ scene, 4.3, directly follows Bertram’s apparently successful seduction of Diana, which ends with plans for their rendezvous at midnight. Diana is specific about the duration of their meeting: ‘‘When midnight comes, knock at my chamber window. / . . . When you have conquered my yet maiden bed, / Remain there but an hour . . .’’ (4.2.55–60). They exit, and we immediately hear the French lords discuss that seduction and that rendezvous and its length—the times are pinpointed with unusual precision—while they wait for Bertram to join them in the interrogation and showingup of Paroles. Bertram must be present for this game, which has been elaborately set up with their anonymous capture of Paroles so that he thinks they’re the enemy: to disabuse the young Count about his tinsel friend is the whole point of the elaborate exercise. Delaying Bertram’s entrance for some seventy-five lines and filling in with allusions to his offstage activities creates a sense that this scene is filling the exact time allotted to the assignation and thus taking its place. While the absent bed scene is the most radical example of ‘‘what can’t be said,’’ the scene that substitutes for it has at its center the wordsman Paroles and abounds with freely invented language. Perhaps this foregrounding of the verbal comes about in compensation for the silence that is doubly enjoined on the bed scene, not only by stage propriety but in the text by Diana as well: ‘‘Remain there but an hour, nor speak to me’’ (60). In any case the silenced scene ‘‘speaks through’’ this one in devious ways. Bertram’s lack of perception operates both there and here; he couldn’t tell that ‘‘Diana’’ wasn’t Diana, and he is the slowest to see through Paroles’ pretenses. The sexual dalliance that Helen later recalls, in the only direct de-

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scription of her assignation with Bertram—‘‘sweet use,’’ ‘‘play’’ (4.4.22, 24)—here finds its equivalent in the exuberance of the nonsense language and First Lord’s enjoyment of Paroles’ excesses: ‘‘I begin to love him for this’’ (4.3.266). The whole masquerade was devised by the lords as ‘‘sport,’’ ‘‘for the love of laughter’’ (3.6.102, 35, 42). But the main parallels that point to the bed scene are between Bertram and Paroles. Each is the object of a ‘‘plot.’’11 Paroles is blindfolded (‘‘hoodwinked,’’ 4.1.83), as Bertram in bed is literally and metaphorically in the dark. Paroles and Bertram meet with the familiar (fellow soldiers, wife) and take it for the unknown and foreign. Both are reduced in motivation to basic, primitive drives: where Bertram is totally propelled by lust, Paroles is stripped down to simple self-preservation. The imperfect overlap of this present scene with the absent one permits Bertram to be not only there with Helen/Diana but here with Paroles. Insofar as Paroles in this blind encounter obliquely represents the part Bertram himself has played in the lovemaking just concluded, Bertram can see his own malaise manifested in a displaced way, like a neurotic symptom—though he does not profit from the opportunity for self-recognition. Many viewers have found that self-recognition of Bertram’s inadequate, even when he is finally shown up in the play’s last scene as Paroles was earlier. It is this scene that returns the characters to home base in Roussillon, thus theoretically completing the structural rhythm of delay I pointed out above, the twice-repeated deferral beyond A to B. But the structural signal announces a closure that we don’t in fact experience. For one thing, this elaborate scene of revelation and comeuppance keeps generating new displacements. Helen herself is mourned as dead and then put aside: ‘‘and now forget her’’ (5.3.68). Like her own father and Bertram’s at the beginning of the play, she is to be replaced by a living substitute, Lafeu’s daughter, Maudlin. But Maudlin, who never appears onstage, is in turn quickly displaced by Diana, who claims Bertram as her husband. Diana, of course, is herself a surrogate. We know that Helen is not dead, and we keep expecting her to appear and press her own claims and accusations. It was she, after all, who wanted to appear before the King ‘‘fore whose throne ‘tis needful, / Ere I can perfect mine intents, to kneel’’ (4.4.3–4), and who in Marseilles asked the courtier to deliver her petition. Yet this document has itself undergone displacement and now pleads the case of Diana. Even when the much-deferred Helen finally appears, she is still articulating displaced fulfillment: ‘‘ ’Tis but the shadow of a wife you see, / The name and not the thing’’ (5.3.309–10). Bertram indeed contradicts

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her, closes the gap with ‘‘Both, both’’ (310). But his (half-hearted?) half-line is not enough to achieve stasis and satisfaction. Enthusiastic acceptance from Bertram might have glossed over what in its absence is not sufficiently concealed. On some level we have to recognize that Helen has produced the happy ending through a kind of conjurer’s trick, a sleight of hand that displaces the significance of Bertram’s original letter of dismissal. On first receiving it, she recognized Bertram’s words as ‘‘a dreadful sentence’’ (3.2.61): they did not enjoin hard tasks on her but banished her from his life. Somewhere along the way, she has turned his hyperboles of impossibility—I won’t accept you till hell freezes over—into conditions for acceptance: if you can make hell freeze over, I’ll be your husband. In this spirit she presents her credentials to him at the close: And, look you, here’s your letter. This it says: ‘When from my finger you can get this ring And are by me with child,’ et cetera. This is done. (5.3.313–15)

Significantly, Helen ‘‘quotes from’’ the letter in phrases different from those we heard when the letter was read out loud in Act 3, just as she has recast the original sentence of banishment or death into an obstacle course.12 Like the petition—the other document in this scene—the letter has been made to veer off course. Veering off, failing to converge and close, is characteristic of the end of All’s Well That Ends Well. Various critics have shown how the ending that its title insists on is rendered problematic:13 by repetitions of the ‘‘all’s well’’ proverb that become more and more tentative; by disturbing conditionals where we expect straightforward affirmation; by the King’s offer to Diana, qualified by yet another conditional: If thou be’st yet a fresh uncroppe`d flower, Choose thou thy husband and I’ll pay thy dower. (5.3.328–29)

Some have felt here the play trying (or threatening) to start all over again. But it is not at all clear that Diana will accept the offer; she doesn’t answer the King, and we have earlier heard her swear she’ll never marry at all (4.2.76). The non-definition of Diana’s response again frustrates dramatic closure, thrusts us beyond the official ending into the dim post-play future. Similarly, Helen’s pregnancy transmutes the accomplished motherhood of her prototype in Boccaccio

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(Giletta arrives with not one but two babies) into another postponement, the promise of a child that must wait for the future to be realized. The play keeps stopping short of, as well as derailing and questioning, fulfillment. Again the mode seems to enact Lacanian desire: intrinsically metonymic, the ‘‘veering off of signification,’’14 shunted onto contiguous substitutes, continuing to reach after a fullness of presence and significance that is always denied. Fulfillment is forever beyond. That’s too long, as Berowne said, for a play. Since desire is a function of subjectivity itself, its rhythm of displacement and incompleteness is built into our living. If that rhythm is unusually prominent in All’s Well, it is perhaps because the dramatic situation itself is predicated on Lacanian terms: Helen’s obsessive, all-engulfing desire on the one hand and, on the other, Bertram’s utter inadequacy as that desire’s object and fulfillment. Other comedic couplings may raise questions in readers and viewers—won’t Rosalind find Orlando dull after a while? how long will it take Bassanio to go through Portia’s fortune?—but in no other play do the fictive characters themselves raise such questions and point so insistently to the hero’s defects. Bertram thinks himself too good, in class terms, for Helen, but only Paroles supports him in this. Even before she makes her choice, Lafeu finds her more valuable than the lords presented to her; and when Bertram refuses her, the King also elevates Helen over him: ‘‘Proud, scornful boy, unworthy this good gift’’ (2.3.152). ‘‘Unworthy . . . unworthy . . . of his wife’’ (3.4.26, 30), agrees the Countess: There’s nothing here that is too good for him But only she, and she deserves a lord That twenty such rude boys might tend upon And call her, hourly, mistress. . . . (3.2.81–84)

Even the French lords, his friends, implicitly measure Bertram against Helen and find him inferior, as they compare this reckless, self-willed boy, who easily sacrifices honor for pleasure, with ‘‘so good a wife and so sweet a lady’’ (4.3.7–8). While Helen’s desire pushes her to greater and greater efforts, then, we are simultaneously more and more aware that the ‘‘bright particular star’’ (1.1.85) she pursues is her own fantasy, a far cry from the increasingly soiled and compromised actuality of Bertram. When she finally gets him, the few, inadequate words he speaks only underline the anticlimax of desire attained. She has the real, dingy Bertram, and the bright particular star of full presence is somewhere else.

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The whole shape of the story thus enacts desire in Lacanian terms: at best you get a flawed, imperfect substitute for the image that drives you. I find it interesting that Shakespeare did not inherit this shape from his source story but imposed it himself. Boccaccio’s Beltramo is not the cad that Bertram is and does not attract wholesale condemnation. It is class difference alone that separates him and Giletta, Helen’s original, and when Giletta makes up for her lowerclass birth by her cleverness in conceiving his children and getting his ring, both are well satisfied with the union that results. No gulf between desire and reality, no incompleteness at the end. We can only speculate on why Shakespeare altered the story as he did. But, as several critics have observed, his reshaping brought the emotional situation very close to that of the Sonnets: an object of love who is physically attractive and nobly born but shallow, heartless, unfaithful, and a lover much inferior in social status who worships him in spite of defects and snubs. Without canvassing in detail the vexed question of the Sonnets as autobiography (John Kerrigan reminds us that autobiography in the modern sense of tracing the development of the individual self hardly existed in Shakespeare’s time),15 it seems reasonable to guess that the situations and attitudes refracted in these poems had their roots in Shakespeare’s own experience. If so, he might well return after some years to this frustrating relationship that, after costing so much anguish, trails off unresolved in the sonnet collection. Roger Warren suggests that it was exactly this reflection of his own love for the aristocratic young man that drew Shakespeare in the first place to Boccaccio’s story of suffering intensity in a lover lower in class than the beloved. From this point of view, All’s Well as a whole may be one giant act of displacement. Richard Wheeler notes the usefulness of drama for ‘‘working through’’ the situations and experiences originally examined in lyric form. In the Sonnets resentment constantly threatens idealized love, to be submerged in willed adoration or perhaps barely held in check; these tensions can be untangled in a drama, their elements projected onto different characters. Helen can enact and keep inviolate the self-abnegating love of the sonnet-speaker, while everyone else speaks the condemnation that the long-suffering lover struggled to keep unspoken in the Sonnets.16 The Sonnets suggest an experience of love that is overtly Lacanian, balancing against the lover’s idealization another recurrent sense that the young man is self-centered and third-rate. A sonnetgroup like this need give no hint of whether/how the relationship was resolved; most contemporary sonnet collections have no such resolution. Conceivably, one of the pressures toward reworking this

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emotional material was that the need to set up and realize a dramatic ending would help such a resolution to come about. That All’s Well does not really ‘‘end well’’ both Warren (implicitly) and Wheeler attribute to emotional pressures left over from the Sonnets affair: Wheeler’s analysis suggests a personal, unconscious motive—revenge against the aristocratic young man—for the extended exposure and shaming of Bertram in the last scene that makes conventional redemption and reconciliation difficult if not impossible to bring off convincingly. But even apart from revived resentment against the unworthy young man, it is possible that the reactivating of the love situation of the Sonnets reactivated its Lacanian chain as well: desire eternally renewed, closure forever beyond. The play maneuvers fervent lover and reluctant object into position for a happy ending but leaves them emotionally at loose ends. What about the title, though, which insists that the action of All’s Well does end, indeed end well? It is an unusual title, unique in the Shakespeare canon in calling attention to the ending and affirming something about that ending. Is this unusual title, the only one of his that makes a statement and the only one as statement to be invoked, even repeated, in the actual dialogue, protesting too much? Insisting on this tidy proverbial wisdom may be an attempt to direct our attention to the more or less satisfactory wrapping up of plot strands in order to provide some sense of closure in a notably openended play. Indeed, even the proverbial saying is not as straightforward as it seems. When Helen hopefully repeats it (4.4.35; 5.1.28), she apparently means something like ‘‘Our pains and efforts will all be worthwhile as long as they end in success’’; but those who find her deceptions degrading to both herself and Bertram may be tempted to read the maxim cynically as ‘‘The end justifies the means.’’ And we might remember, though she does not, how the Clown has already thoroughly problematized that word ‘‘well’’: Helen Lavatch Helen Lavatch Helen Lavatch

My mother greets me kindly. Is she well? She is not well, but yet she has her health. She’s very merry, but yet she is not well. But thanks be given she’s very well and wants nothing i’th’ world. But yet she is not well. If she be very well, what does she ail That she’s not very well? Truly, she’s very well indeed, but for two things. What two things? One, that she’s not in heaven, whither God send her quickly. The other, that she’s in earth, from whence God send her quickly. (2.4.1–12)

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The Countess is in health, but not well; cheerful, but not well; well, but not well—because not yet delivered from this world into eternal well-being. What is ‘‘well’’ in the world’s eyes—wealth, physical health—may not be so well sub specie aeternitatis. At the end of the play, all is well in only the first, more external sense: the plot has come right, Helen’s claim on Bertram is validated. What is still pending, like the Countess’s entry into life everlasting, is the complex of desire and frustration that Shakespeare could not resolve for his heroine, nor perhaps for himself. Real fulfillment of desire, like the Countess’s true well-being, is deferred to somewhere beyond the life we know.

Notes 1. All citations from Shakespeare in this essay are to William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). 2. For the relation of ‘‘O Lord, sir!’’ to Paroles, see John D. Cox, Shakespeare and the Dramaturgy of Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 135. 3. G. K. Hunter finds a parodic connection between ‘‘Helena’s request to the Countess that she may pursue Bertram’’ and ‘‘Lavatch’s request that he may marry Isbel, where ‘driven on by the flesh’ etc. reflects directly on the emotions and ambitions of the heroine’’; see the Arden edition of All’s Well That Ends Well (London: Methuen, 1959), xxxv. In Barbara Hodgdon’s view, the fact that the Clown’s first appearance ‘‘separates Helena’s initial statements of her desire for Bertram and her confession of that desire to the Countess and that he speaks of what occupies her mind—marriage’’ shows another link between Helena and the Clown; see ‘‘The Making of Virgins and Mothers: Sexual Signs, Substitute Scenes and Doubled Presences in All’s Well That Ends Well,’’ Philological Quarterly 66 (1987): 47–72, esp. 50. She uses this parallel to argue for Lavatch as Helena’s ‘‘substitute, surrogate or double.’’ 4. The physical basis of Helen’s attraction to Bertram comes through in her early focus on his bodily features (‘‘His arched brows, his hawking eye, his curls’’) and her metaphors of kissing and joining (1.1.93, 219), and supports her later comment on the sexual encounter with Bertram, detailing remembered pleasure (4.4.21–25). 5. ‘‘It is a case of displacement on to something associated by continuity; or, looking at the process as a whole, a case of repression accompanied by the substitution of something in the neighborhood (whether in space or time)’’; see ‘‘Screen Memories,’’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, 19 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–62), 3: 301–22, esp. 307–8). 6. ‘‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,’’ in Standard Edition 7: 3–124, esp. 30 and 82 n. The context, Freud’s notorious account of ‘‘Dora,’’ has come under considerable skeptical scrutiny, but the principle of upward displacement has weight of its own apart from Freud’s dubious methods with Dora; he speaks of its clinical application to ‘‘a large class of symptoms’’ (30 n).

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7. See Eric Partridge, Shakespeare’s Bawdy (London: Routledge, 1947), 59, on nose and nosepainting. 8. Randle Cotgrave, A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (London, 1611), fol. Fffiii. 9. Though it was played so in Elijah Moshinsky’s 1980 BBC version. 10. Jacques Lacan, ‘‘The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud,’’ in Ećrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1977), 164: ‘‘the connexion between signifier and signifier . . . permits the elision in which the signifier installs the lack-of-being in the object relation, using the value of ‘reference back’ possessed by signification in order to invest it with the desire aimed at the very lack it supports.’’ Later he describes the metonymic relation as being caught ‘‘in the rails—eternally stretching forth towards the desire for something else’’ (167). 11. Helen: ‘‘Why then tonight / Let us essay our plot [against Bertram]’’ (3.7.44); Paroles: ‘‘Who cannot be crushed with a plot?’’ (4.3.327). 12. ‘‘ ‘When thou canst get the ring upon my finger, which never shall come off, and show me a child begotten of thy body that I am father to, then call me husband; but in such a ‘‘then’’ I write a ‘‘never’’ ’ ’’ (3.2.57–60). The word sentence, which Helen uses initially to describe Bertram’s letter (1.61), is sometimes understood by editors to mean ‘‘imposition of tasks,’’ but Shakespeare never uses the word in that sense; what Helen understands on her first reading of the letter is not a list of stipulations but an absolute casting-off. Carolyn Asp notes Helen’s paradoxical rewriting of her ‘‘orders’’: ‘‘her campaign initiatives arise from the very messages he sends denying her’’; see ‘‘Subjectivity, Desire, and Female Friendship in All’s Well That Ends Well,’’ Literature and Psychology 32 (1986): 48–63, esp. 55. Jane Gallop’s observation in summarizing Lacan’s thought on language is also pertinent here: ‘‘since any signifier can receive signification by deferred action, after the fact, no signification is ever closed, ever satisfied’’; see The Daughter’s Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), 30. Patricia Parker points out that Helen’s action and her reinterpretation here open up what Bertram meant to close down, and turn her husband’s final sentence into a new beginning by her pregnancy; see Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987), 20. 13. See, for example, Thomas Cartelli, ‘‘Shakespeare’s ‘Rough Magic’: Ending as Artifice in All’s Well That Ends Well,’’ Centennial Review 27 (1983): 117–34; Ian Donaldson, ‘‘All’s Well That Ends Well: Shakespeare’s Play of Endings,’’ Essays in Criticism 27 (1977): 34–55; David Scott Kastan, ‘‘All’s Well That Ends Well and the Limits of Comedy,’’ English Literary History 52 (1985): 575–89. 14. Lacan, 160. 15. ‘‘Introduction’’ to The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint, New Penguin Shakespeare (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 11. 16. Parallels between All’s Well and the Sonnets were noted first by M. C. Bradbrook, ‘‘Virtue Is the True Nobility: A Study of the Structure of All’s Well That Ends Well,’’ Review of English Studies 1 (1950): 289–301, esp. 290, and G. Wilson Knight, The Sovereign Flower: On Shakespeare as the Poet of Royalism (London: Methuen, 1958), 157–58. The more detailed studies cited here are Roger Warren, ‘‘Why Does It End Well?: Helena, Bertram, and the Sonnets,’’ Shakespeare Survey 22 (1969): 79–92, and Richard P. Wheeler, Shakespeare’s Development and the Problem Comedies: Turn and Counter-Turn (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), 57–75.

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Naming Names in All’s Well That Ends Well IN EDITING SHAKESPEARE, AN APPARENTLY TECHNICAL QUESTION WILL often open out into a larger area of theory or interpretation. The case at hand begins but does not end with speech prefixes. The Oxford Shakespeare offers to its editors this guideline on speech prefixes: ‘‘In general, personal names are preferred to generic ones . . . [,] but exceptions may be allowed.’’1 The general rule sounds conducive to a welcome precision, avoiding any confusion about who is speaking. But were all personal names equally ‘‘preferred’’ by Shakespeare? If the text of the play that is supposed to be closest to his hand suggests rather that some names are central to the character while others are casual afterthoughts tacked onto a conception that is essentially generic and functional—tacked on in order to answer a local, practical need and abandoned when it is past—is there not some distortion in treating all names the same? Whether they appear twenty times in the text or only once? Whether they are underlined by comment and wordplay or just mentioned in passing? This distinction seems to me to operate with special force in All’s Well That Ends Well, separating names of considerable structural significance and mythic resonance like ‘‘Helen’’ and ‘‘Diana’’ from those of ‘‘Dumaine,’’ ‘‘Reynaldo,’’ and ‘‘Lavatch,’’ which are introduced late and quickly dropped once they have served their immediate purpose. The editors of the Oxford Complete Works, adhering to their own principle, give us in All’s Well the headings ‘‘First/Second Lord Dumaine’’ rather than the Folio’s ‘‘First/Second Lord,’’ ‘‘Reynaldo’’ rather than the Folio’s ‘‘Steward,’’ ‘‘Lavatch’’ rather than the Folio’s ‘‘Clown.’’ In this they depart from the practice of most recent editors, who often list some or all of these names in the dramatis personae but tend to retain for the repeated speech headings the generic designations used consistently in the Folio text. And, for this play at least, I think this is the wiser practice. It is better to leave these prefixes as indicated throughout the Folio All’s Well— ‘‘Steward,’’ ‘‘Clown,’’ and ‘‘Lords’’—than to key all their entries and speech headings to those nonce names. Does it matter? Yes, more than we might think. The spectator at a 151

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production of All’s Well recognizes and understands such characters without names; when a name is introduced, late and briefly, it may well pass him or her by completely. At best it constitutes a minor detail in the viewer’s experience of that character. To multiply such a nonce name in every stage direction and speech prefix of an edited text creates a significant divergence between the reader’s apprehension of that character and the spectator’s. At the same time, it muddles what seems to me the important distinction between incidental names and those that are truly significant. I am not suggesting that the Folio’s generic speech headings for any character indicate in themselves that his or her name is unimportant. A look at some clowns and fools in the Folio texts, for whom the generic speech heading is usual, prompts a further distinction. Pompey in Measure for Measure is designated ‘‘Clown’’ throughout, but much is made of his name in the dialogue. In the Induction to The Taming of the Shrew, the speeches of Christopher Sly are headed ‘‘Beggar,’’ but the initial stage direction establishes his name, and he insists on it more than once in the ensuing identity games. Touchstone (‘‘Clown’’), although named only three times in the dialogue of As You Like It, gets additional (promptbook?) emphasis on his name in the stage direction to Act 2, scene 4: ‘‘Clowne, alias Touchstone.’’2 Surely these figures have earned their names, so to speak, in the speech prefixes. I am dubious, though, about the Twelfth Night fool. His repeated ‘‘Clown’’ label is only once temporarily offset by a personal name, dropped without emphasis (at 2.4.11)3 and never repeated. ‘‘Feste’’ is an appropriate name for a professional fool, to be sure, but rather perfunctory and impersonalized compared with those of Pompey, Sly, and Touchstone. The character is, of course, no less compelling for his lack of a dimension-adding name than is the totally nameless Fool in Lear, or the Shepherd and Clown in The Winter’s Tale. More like Feste’s than like Pompey’s are the names at issue in All’s Well; I question not their accuracy but their importance. It may be useful, however, to begin with another group of characters who never are given individual names and whom modern editors must perforce designate as the Folio does, by title or type. The rulers of France and Florence appear in stage directions and speech prefixes as ‘‘King’’ and ‘‘Duke’’ respectively—a common phenomenon in Folio texts even when the personal name is otherwise part of the play’s vocabulary (‘‘Henry’’ in Henry V, ‘‘Orsino’’ in Twelfth Night). Note that here too a name or the lack of one tells us nothing about the prominence or complexity of a character: the Duke of Florence is a bit of functional pasteboard to set the war scene, while the King

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of France is many-sided and deeply involved in the play’s power competitions and nuanced relationships. Greatly developed from the corresponding figure in Boccaccio’s story, he is effectively Shakespeare’s invention. The Countess of Roussillon, another involved and complex character, is wholly invented by Shakespeare, and like the King, she is known throughout by a general title rather than a personal name. Her title can, of course, like the King’s and the Duke’s, be seen as an individual designation of sorts, since there is only one holder of it at a time (since, although Helen becomes Countess of Roussillon upon her marriage to Bertram in Act 2, no one ever calls her that). But the variations of reference in stage directions and speech prefixes suggest an essentially generic notion of this character: ‘‘Countess’’ (but never ‘‘of Roussillon,’’ in contrast to designations of her son), ‘‘Mother,’’ ‘‘Lady,’’ ‘‘Old Countess,’’ ‘‘Old Lady.’’ These highlight her role in the action, as Bertram’s mother, as Helen’s foster mother, as an old noblewoman who has carried for many years the title she will be happy now to yield to Bertram’s wife. In the same way, the King has no need of a name: his royal title gathers in both the power he has—to give or withhold alliance in war, to ennoble Helen, to marry off Bertram—and the sad separation between the king’s two bodies, the debilitating illness of the man at odds with the monarch’s sovereign sway. The characters whose naming I call into question—the French lords, the Countess’s Steward, and her Clown—are also defined essentially by title and function; in this regard they differ from the first group only in that each is momentarily named in a single scene, well after they have been introduced. The French lords have wildly varying speech prefixes, a few suggesting, with other indications, that at some stage in the evolution of the script these lords were intended to be not one pair but two or even three.4 They are ‘‘Lords’’ in 1.2 and 2.1, ‘‘Lords and Frenchmen’’ in 3.1, ‘‘Frenchmen/Gentlemen’’ in 3.2, ‘‘Frenchmen/Captains’’ in 3.6, ‘‘Frenchman/Lord’’ (only one onstage here) in 4.1, ‘‘French Captains’’ in 4.3, and ‘‘French Lords’’ again in 5.3 (only in the stage directions, as they have no lines—another trace of script evolution?). Linking this array of headings are the occasional numerals ‘‘1’’ and ‘‘2’’ and the more consistent initials ‘‘G’’ and ‘‘E.’’ These may designate the actors who were to play the roles (Gough and Ecclestone have been suggested), notations added possibly by Shakespeare in writing or revising, or possibly by the bookkeeper; there is in any case no indication that they are meant to abbreviate the names of the characters. These two have no Christian names, and it is only in their seventh scene onstage, 4.3, that they get any name at all. That a name is necessary

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at this point is clear from the situation, the gulling of Paroles. The blindfolded Paroles must be invited to slander the two in their presence, and the interrogator can hardly ask him, ‘‘What do you think of First Lord and Second Lord?’’ They are thus suddenly christened ‘‘Dumaine,’’ a name Shakespeare had used before in Love’s Labor’s Lost. A recycled name might be significant all the same; but this one, borrowed from a character who himself lacks individuality and is important only as part of a group, suggests nothing more specific than ‘‘French.’’ And as soon as the immediate situation in All’s Well is sufficiently exploited, the name ‘‘Dumaine’’ is discarded. It seems the better course, then, to use generic speech prefixes for these two and, from the variety the Folio provides, to choose the most basic designation, ‘‘Lords,’’ rather than those like ‘‘Frenchmen’’ and ‘‘Captains’’ that are dictated by their presence in the Italian wars. The Steward is a lesser figure than either lord, primarily a bringer of news to the Countess. He appears only twice, in one scene telling her what he’s overheard of Helen’s love for Bertram (1.3) and in the other delivering to her Helen’s letter of farewell (3.4). The Countess calls him ‘‘you’’ through the first scene, but in the second he is twice personalized as ‘‘Rynaldo’’ (as the Folio spells it). Once again, the name conjured up for this brief foray into personal address is recycled rather than selected for this character alone: in a play that already contains several echoes of Hamlet, Shakespeare adds one more here by recalling Polonius’s servant Reynaldo, who was also involved in reporting to the elderly the secrets of the young.5 Since the Steward is named in half of his small total of scenes and since the name is not quite arbitrary (having even this small connection with its previous use in Shakespeare’s nomenclature) there is somewhat more of a case for naming the Steward in speech prefixes than for the others in this group. Ironically, he is himself the least individual of the characters in question, almost pure function. The Clown, on the other hand, is onstage in six scenes and when present usually dominates the discourse. The people he talks with— the Countess, Helen, Paroles, Lafeu—become, whether they want to or not, his straight men, feeding him questions in response to his provocative propositions. They address him as ‘‘Sirrah’’ or ‘‘Knave’’ or just ‘‘thou.’’ These do very well until the last of these scenes when he too gets a nonce name: Paroles addresses him as ‘‘Good [Monsieur] Lavatch’’ (5.2.1).6 Unlike the names assigned to the lords and the Steward, ‘‘Lavatch’’ in its uniqueness hints at some sort of significance. Commentators have played with la vache (cow) and, at the prompting of the Clarkes, lavage (slops) without arriving at a con-

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vincing application of either. It seems likely that a local, perhaps visual comic effect was intended, now impossible to recover; it is very unlikely that the name had a more integral meaning for the characterization of the Clown, or it would surely have been introduced earlier and used more than once. Rather, in this, the Clown’s final scene, a name is needed to make a situational point, Paroles’s precipitate fall in status. Formerly, as the companion of counts and lords, Paroles used ‘‘thou’’ and ‘‘knave’’ in talking with the Clown, aping his betters; now down and out, and indeed newly determined himself to live by fooling, he sees this same Clown as the back door into noble patronage. Paroles thus marks their new relationship by giving him not only the respectful ‘‘you’’ but a title and a name. The title, abbreviated in the Folio text as ‘‘Mr,’’ could be expanded as either Master or Monsieur; there is a compelling reason for favoring the latter, apart from the French milieu, in that ‘‘Monsieur’’ has been Paroles’s own title in this play, exclusively his in eleven uses. He now applies the same honorific to the Clown, underlining his own loss of status as he reverses their former positions; the Clown cooperates by answering him with the condescending ‘‘thou.’’ The name ‘‘Lavatch,’’ then, is like ‘‘Angelica’’ in Romeo and Juliet—thrown in once, late, and adding no consistent dimension to a character already familiar. Editors of Romeo and Juliet have preferred the function name ‘‘Nurse,’’ and editors of All’s Well should do likewise with the Clown.7 Or, to take a model from All’s Well itself, the name ‘‘Lavatch’’ (as well as ‘‘Dumaine’’ and ‘‘Reynaldo’’) should be treated in the same way as yet another very late introduction, the family name of ‘‘Capilet’’ for Diana and her mother. Speech prefixes and stage directions in the Folio have featured Diana’s first name, with ‘‘Widow’’ for her essentially nameless mother. When Diana’s petition is presented to the King in the last scene, she must have a last name to sign to it, and Shakespeare once more recycles an old one—this time from Romeo and Juliet, perhaps an unconscious association prompted by this other marriageable Italian girl. Some editors include the family name for Diana and hence her mother in their dramatis personae; but, in general recognition that its nature is accidental rather than essential, none uses it instead of or in addition to ‘‘Widow’’ in stage directions and speech prefixes—not even the Oxford editors. Indeed, in a play with such an unusual number of older people, the only one of them with an integral name is Lafeu, whom I will discuss below. The function labels for the others—‘‘King,’’ ‘‘Countess,’’ ‘‘Widow’’—keep the focus firmly on the initiatives and identity crises of the young. To keep repeating in speech prefixes and stage directions the

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nonce names I have been discussing obscures for the reader the function designations that the characters involved seem to have maintained in Shakespeare’s working imagination, and in their place elevates to misleading prominence names he snatched at briefly for purely local purposes. More important, as I have said, converting accident into essence this way fails to distinguish between such casual local namings and those that have considerably more significance in the imaginative design of the play. Character conception and name are intimately connected, for example, in the case of Paroles, the man of words who is named in the Folio speech prefixes and stage directions and repeatedly in the dialogue from first scene to last.8 He has achieved his entree to the nobility with impressive talk, accounts of his travels (2.3.203–4; 2.5.27–30) and—what has especially impressed Bertram—of his military adventures. That it is only talk soon becomes apparent in Italy to the two French lords, though Bertram takes considerably more persuading. The basic notion of Paroles’ words as show-without-substance finds an analogy (perhaps through the cliche´ of language as the dress of thought) in the poseur’s elaborate costume, sleeves gartered and scarves and bannerets too loudly proclaiming the soldier. Because so much of Paroles’s fine language, like his soldier’s gear, is put on rather than owned, it tends to desert him in moments of stress. In his first encounter with Lafeu in 2.3, the stock phrases with which he takes umbrage and then forgoes a duel on grounds of Lafeu’s age are so punctured by the old lord’s deflating wit that he sounds like a furious child casting about unsuccessfully for insults that are bad enough: ‘‘Scurvy, old, filthy, scurvy lord!’’ (234). To complete the symmetry, language is the vehicle of Paroles’ fall as it was of his rise. The nonsense language that his own colleagues adopt while pretending to be foreign soldiers carries to extremes his own separation of words from realities by signifying nothing at all. Attacking and exposing Paroles seems to be Lafeu’s major dramatic function. Unlike the King, the Countess, and the Widow, he does not figure prominently in the troubled coupling of Bertram and Helen; he gains entry for the latter to cure the King,9 and cheers her on from the sidelines in the husband-choosing scene. But his principal intervention in the main plot, which is to offer his own daughter as Bertram’s second wife when Helen is supposed dead, quickly comes to nothing. Apart from passages of nostalgia and friendly joking with the Countess, the King, and the Clown, what we see him doing is cutting Paroles down to size. His sharp verbal wit exposes the pretender not only by what he says but also by the verbal agility with which he says it, defeating Paroles with his own favorite

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weapon. Perhaps this variation on the play’s pattern of presenting older characters as focused on the affairs of the young suggested a relevant name for this old courtier, who in any case required some kind of name for practical reasons. He could not be just ‘‘Lord’’ in a play that already has too many so designated—the French lords already discussed, the other lords seen departing for both sides in the Italian war, the royal wards presented to Helen to choose a husband from—especially since they are all young and he is old. Shakespeare invented this character, who has no counterpart in the Boccaccio source story, and the name ‘‘Lafeu’’ highlights a central part of the invention: ‘‘fire’’ suits his quick-moving, damaging wit and his occasional explosions of impatience. With Bertram, whose name Shakespeare adapted from Boccaccio’s Beltramo, the significance is not so much in the name as in the prominence of its use. He could have gone by his title, and indeed he is ‘‘Count’’ or ‘‘Roussillon’’ at times in stage directions and speech prefixes and in dialogue. But at several points in the text and even more frequently in stage directions and speech prefixes, he is designated by his Christian name. It is understandable, of course, that Helen in her doting attachment should use his personal name, and that a play primarily about mating rather than war or politics should stress this individual aspect rather than the more public one implied by his title. Beyond this consideration, however, which might apply in any romantic comedy, we note that the other dialogue uses of ‘‘Bertram’’ belong mainly to his mother and to the King, who now stands to him in place of a father. The Countess’s farewell advice and blessings in the first scene convey maternal protectiveness for this ‘‘unseasoned courtier’’ as he leaves home for the first time and suggest in her repetition of his first name that his entry into his father’s title and estate is premature. Even away from home, introduced into the scene of manhood at court, he cannot shake that mark of his youth and inexperience. When the King asks who he is, First Lord replies, ‘‘It is the Count Roussillon, my good lord’’—but then deflates the implication of full adulthood by adding ‘‘Young Bertram’’ (1.2.18–19). In other words, not the count you knew but his son; and from the King’s first words, ‘‘Youth, thou bear’st thy father’s face’’ (19), it is that dead father who dominates this conversation, not his newly arrived heir. The achievement of independent manhood proves no easier at court with his substitute parent than at home with the real one. The King first forbids Bertram to go to the Italian wars (‘‘ ‘Too young’ . . . and ‘ ‘ ’tis too early’ ’’ [2.1.28)) and then commands him to marry Helen, marking parental care and authority here with his repeated ‘‘Bertram’’ as the

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Countess did earlier. When Bertram rejects Helen, both King and Countess call him ‘‘boy’’—‘‘Proud, scornful boy’’ (2.3.152), ‘‘rash and unbridled boy’’ (3.2.28)—reinforcing the sense of wayward youth already generated by their early emphatic use of Bertram’s Christian name. But the names that most repay special attention are those of Helen and Diana. There are signs that Shakespeare arrived at each of these after some consideration, quite unlike the random christening of the Dumaines and Reynaldo. He seems to have started out calling his heroine ‘‘Helena’’: she is so designated in the opening stage direction and once in the dialogue of the first scene. By the end of that scene, however, Paroles is already addressing her as ‘‘Helen,’’ and in her next scene, 1.3, we hear that form of the name no less than seven times. Shakespeare continues to use ‘‘Helen’’ in the rest of the play’s dialogue, in prose as well as in verse, and, after a few more early stage directions for ‘‘Helena,’’ settles there, too, into a decided preference for the shorter form.10 The preference, as I have argued elsewhere,11 suggests that an association with Helen of Troy, the most famous bearer of that name, was becoming important to him. Indeed, the outbreak of ‘‘Helens’’ in 1.3 begins just before, and is perhaps partly generated by, a direct allusion to the fatal queen: [Steward] Countess [Clown]

May it please you, madam, that he bid Helen come to you? Of her I am to speak. (to [Clown]) Sirrah, tell my gentlewoman I would speak with her. Helen, I mean. [sings] ‘Was this fair face the cause’, quoth she, ‘Why the Grecians sacke`d Troy?’ (65–70)

The Countess first emphasizes Helen’s name by repeating it, and the Clown responds immediately with a ballad of Troy. But though this Helen’s face may be fair, she is not sought after by the man she loves or, so far as we know, by anyone else. Later in the play, when choosing a husband from the King’s wards, she in fact recapitulates part of the story of the legendary Helen, who also had many suitors to choose from. Yet, though the lords presented to Shakespeare’s Helen by the King play their parts properly—Bertram excluded—it is not clear that any of them really wants to marry her;12 in any case, the one she chooses decidedly does not. It was because the rejected suitors of Argive Helen were bound by a vow to come to her defense

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when summoned by her husband that the Trojan War happened at all. The husband of Shakespeare’s Helen goes to war to get away from her, not to get her back. From the aspect of her position in love—ignored, unsought, and later rejected by the man she loves— this Helen ironically inverts her mythic prototype. Nevertheless, insofar as she is directed and dominated by sexual passion, she can claim in her own way a status as Venus’s prote´geé, not indeed as desired object but as desiring subject. It was possibly this creation of a heroine dedicated to—or driven by—Venus that influenced Shakespeare’s final naming of the other young woman in the play, Diana. As the girl Bertram wants rather than the one he flees, she is constructed as an opposite to Helen. In her first scene (3.5), the Folio text introduces her, along with the other Florentine women, through a problematic stage direction: ‘‘Enter old Widdow of Florence, her daughter, Violenta and Mariana. . . .’’ The Widow, her daughter Diana, and Mariana all have lines in this scene, but there are none for Violenta. She may be a vestigial first thought, a figure for whom Shakespeare found no use but whom he forgot to revise out completely. On the other hand, while naming this extra figure, the stage direction does not name Diana. These two facts taken together suggest that we should ignore the comma after ‘‘daughter’’—i.e., that the Widow’s daughter who is the target of Bertram’s seduction was originally named ‘‘Violenta’’ and that, when he had a better idea, Shakespeare changed the speech prefixes but neglected to change the entrance direction. Such authorial rethinking would account for the oddly emphatic entrance direction in Diana’s next scene, ‘‘Enter Bertram, and the Maide called Diana’’ (4.2). The name ‘‘Violenta’’ has been discarded, perhaps because in its suggestion of strong passions it seemed to belong more in the Venus-Helen line. At any rate, now Helen’s opposite is ‘‘called Diana,’’ with a mythic resonance appropriate to the other emphasis of the entrance direction, ‘‘the Maide.’’ Even the stage audience, who would of course be unaware of these shifts and stresses in stage directions, would be forced to register something special about the name by the opening exchange between seducer and maiden. Bertram Diana

They told me that your name was Fontibel. No, my good lord, Diana. (4.2.1–2)

That this confusion serves no purpose in the plot only puts more stress on the names themselves. Since no previous or future intrigue rests on it, the point seems to be that Bertram has made a mistake

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about this young woman’s nature, which her contradiction now corrects. The following lines gloss the terms of that opposition from Bertram’s perspective: Titled goddess, And worth it, with addition. But, fair soul, In your fine frame hath love no quality? If the quick fire of youth light not your mind, You are no maiden but a monument. When you are dead you should be such a one As you are now. . . . (2–8)

He seems to praise her association with divinity, but what he really approves is the fact of being titled. That is to say, for Bertram ‘‘goddess’’ is an agreeable hyperbole, but the chastity that gives meaning to Diana’s divinity is unnatural and wrong. His seducer’s plea goes on to set the rapid movement and light of fire against cold chaste immobility: in his terms, life against death. In this context the initial opposition of names becomes relevant. ‘‘Fontibel,’’ the name he has been ‘‘told,’’ posits as the natural accompaniment of beauty the sexually suggestive yielding flow of liquid. And in contradiction to his wish is the unyielding fact: not Fontibel, but Diana. Bertram confirms in his own way both parts of the mythic sexual polarity invested in Venus and Diana. In stories of the virgin goddess and of the attendant nymphs she saves from sexual attack, chastity is there to be desired, to be pursued, and to frustrate pursuit. Bertram affirms the prototype not only by pursuing but by being, in the bedsubstitution, tricked and denied. The prototype on the other side is confirmed negatively in the very style of his rejection of Helen. When promoted by the Duke of Florence to leadership of the cavalry, Bertram vows his wholehearted service in mythic terms: This very day, Great Mars, I put myself into thy file. Make me but like my thoughts, and I shall prove A lover of thy drum, hater of love. (3.3.8–11)

That final declaration may sound somewhat gratuitous. Why bring up love at all? But his renouncing of desire is clearly meant to seal Bertram’s soldierly dedication. It is as if war calls up love as its natural antithesis, so that asserting hatred of the latter demonstrates one’s adherence to the former.

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G. K. Hunter observes that the trumpet is a more usual attribute for Mars than the drum Bertram loves so much; but in glossing this line, he points to two other passages in Shakespeare where the drum metonymically conveys war,13 passages that are instructive for other reasons as well. At the opening of The Two Noble Kinsmen, the three queens, whom Theseus has already agreed to help by marching against Creon, fear that if he first proceeds with his marriage to Hippolyta, he will lose interest in battle. When Theseus protests that his wedding is ‘‘a service . . . / Greater than any war’’ (1.1.170–71), First Queen rejects the kind of difference he posits between the two, a difference in degree of temporary urgency only, and asserts the traditional absolute contradiction between battlefield and boudoir: ‘‘her arms . . . shall / By warranting moonlight corslet thee!’’ (174– 76). Like the military terms arms and corslet themselves, this warrior will be converted from war to private delights. Preoccupied with these, the First Queen goes on, . . . what wilt thou think Of rotten kings or blubbered queens? What care For what thou feel’st not, what thou feel’st being able To make Mars spurn his drum? (178–81)

It is just this unwarlike spurning of what the drum represents that the professional soldier Othello anxiously denies in advance when he asks that his bride go with him to the war at Cyprus: ‘‘[when] my disports corrupt and taint my business, / Let housewives make a skillet of my helm . . .’’ (1.3.271–72). He fears that others will see in such a dereliction of military duty the same conversion of war equipment into domestic intimacy—here helmet into skillet—that the First Queen assumes. Aware of this traditional either/or disposition, the barely fledged soldier Bertram expresses his fervor not only by allegiance to Mars’ drum but by the corollary hatred of love.14 What is unspoken but implicit in these portrayals of preoccupying love, especially those like the one in All’s Well that also invoke Mars and his drum, is the figure of Venus. The passionate affair that completely diverted the god of war from battle to bed was a familiar theme not only in verbal fiction but in visual imagery, where the representation of the lolling, satiated lover typically included his idle instruments of war. Shakespeare’s other drum passage, from Venus and Adonis, brings the central mythological embodiment of love into focus. Venus boasts to Adonis of her complete conquest of Mars, who hung his lance and shield over her altars and learned instead

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to dance and dally, ‘‘Scorning his churlish drum and ensign red, / Making my arms his field, his tent my bed’’ (107–8). It is the same conversion, though this time not linguistic, from outside to in, public to private. Claiming Mars as ‘‘my captive and my slave’’ (101), Venus fuses her roles as both the object of his passion and the passion itself.15 The passage is all the more relevant to All’s Well in its situation: Venus is offering herself to Adonis, who, wanting neither her body nor the passion she stands for, is another handsome young man who would rather pursue a dangerous activity than accept love. Reviewing Renaissance manifestations of the myth of Mars and Venus, Janet Adelman remarks that, in the welter of meanings attached to the myth, one constant is that Mars and Venus are always opposites.16 Before Bertram’s formal renunciation of Venus in pledging allegiance to Mars, that opposition has already figured in his decision to run from sex to war. Disconsolate after the enforced marriage in Paris, he has heard Paroles urge him to the wars by denigrating the private and domestic in favor of the public: He wears his honour in a box unseen That hugs his kicky-wicky here at home, Spending his manly marrow in her arms, Which should sustain the bound and high curves Of Mars’s fiery steed. (2.3.276–80)

There is a kind of pre-Freudian economy of libido operating here, of Bertram’s ‘‘manly marrow,’’ which he will either spend (deplete wastefully) in orgasms or convert to martial fury. This young Adonis needs little convincing to flee his own undesired Venus; the Italian war, his version of the boar hunt, draws him just as compellingly. ‘‘Wars is no strife,’’ says Bertram, ‘‘To the dark house and the detested wife’’ (288–89). The reversal matches that of his later phrase, ‘‘hater of love’’: hostility resides not with war but with love. The Clown later glosses the point in his own way, asserting that Bertram is safer having run away (even to the war) than in ‘‘standing to’t’’ (3.2.41), which punningly equates standing fast in the battle with performing sexual service. ‘‘[T]hat’s the loss of men, though it be the getting of children’’ (41–42). Through the common pun on ‘‘die’’ and the widely held contemporary notion that orgasms shorten a man’s life, love again becomes more lethal than war. But the fundamental opposition remains intact. The Venus-Mars polarity has helped to contextualize Helen as one term in Bertram’s choice, the term he rejects. He does, of course,

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seek sexual adventure in Florence, in spite of his disclaimer to the Duke. But in his seduction of Diana, he is not at all like Mars enslaved and idled by passion for Venus. The Diana affair doesn’t interfere with his military duties, or indeed any other kind.17 He means it, or at least easily accepts it, as a one-night stand, an isolated episode that with luck will have no future consequences. From this point of view, going after Diana is not a contradiction of his military orientation but rather an extension of it. What matters is the physical conquest.18 Bertram pursues Diana as any number of lustful gods and men pursued her namesake and parallel nymphs, while he flees Helen as Adonis did Venus. It has been convenient in initially setting forth this schematic figuration to treat Diana and Venus-Helen as opposites, totally contrary principles and values. Yet Shakespeare was not creating an allegory of absolutes but a human action deeply implicated in the ambiguities and problematics of sexuality. These problematics emerge more from the various negotiations between the two characters and their orientations than from their simple polar opposition. The names do of course highlight their different roles in the action: one woman, driven by love from the beginning, finally achieves sexual union with her husband in the place of the other woman, who is ‘‘most chastely absent’’ (3.7.34). But even this focus on plot reminds us that the substitution of one woman for another comes about through the close cooperation of these women so differently directed. This cooperation continues through the denouement, where Diana speaks for Helen in more ways than one: we assume that Helen has coached her in how to conduct her accusation of Bertram, but for a while at least she also speaks as the woman to whom he made love in Florence. This deployment of one as the alter ego of the other, as well as their general common purpose in the latter part of the play, enacts a compatibility between chastity and desire that eluded Helen in the earlier part. At Roussillon and Paris, Helen has more than once invoked the goddess of chastity, who was traditionally the patron of young unmarried women. But because she is deeply in love, already committed to Venus, the allusions are beset with conflict. The Steward tells how he overheard her rail against Love for failing to visit on Bertram a passion to match her own and against the goddess Diana for allowing ‘‘her poor knight [to be] surprised without rescue in the first assault or ransom afterward’’ (1.3.112–13).19 Like the speaker in Donne’s Holy Sonnet 14, ‘‘Batter my heart,’’ who is vowed to God but taken and held by Satan in an act of violent capture, Helen images herself as owing allegiance to Diana but forcibly removed by

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love from her accustomed sense of self, made a prisoner of war. Passion is strange to her. It feels like an assault from outside on her natural and familiar condition. But it also quickly incorporates, becomes part of, the self. The sense of estrangement that the Steward reports in Helen appears to be contradicted later in this scene, when in begging pardon from the Countess for her love, Helen stresses that she has no hope of commanding an answering love from Bertram but also appeals to the old woman’s own youthful passions. . . . but if yourself, Whose age`d honour cites a virtuous youth, Did ever in so true a flame of liking Wish chastely and love dearly, that your Dian Was both herself and Love, O then give pity To her whose state is such that cannot choose But lend and give where she is sure to lose, That seeks to find not that her search implies, But riddle-like lives sweetly where she dies. (1.3.205–13)

While overtly attributing this fusion of chastity and passion (‘‘Dian / Was both herself and Love’’) to the Countess, Helen also appropriates it for herself. The point of the passage is to ally her and her foster mother in fellow feeling, in sameness; and she goes on to show that, in having no hope and in not pursuing its object, her own Cupid need not be at odds with Dian. Is this oneness of chastity and love in Helen more assertion than fact? In the earlier speech overheard by the Steward, when talking to herself rather than defending her case, she imaged them as enemies and herself as forcibly wrested from the one to the other. And even in this same plea to the Countess, another way of imaging herself has already suggested that desire, even unrequited desire, is sharply opposed to chastity. Helen knows her love is hopeless, she says, Yet in this captious and intenable sieve I still pour in the waters of my love And lack not to lose still. (198–200)

Where we might hear only a figure of general futility, water always pouring in and always pouring out, Shakespeare’s contemporaries were likely to pick up a specific reference. The story of the vestal virgin Tuccia, who, when accused, proved her chastity by carrying

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water in a sieve from the Tiber to the temple, was well known,20 especially since several portraits of Queen Elizabeth featured this favorite device of the sieve.21Tuccia’s triumph over natural law, turning the perforated sieve into a vessel of containment by the power of her virginity, supports the power of the Virgin Queen to withstand attacks of love, and of the land closely identified with her body to withstand foreign invasion. But Helen has been invaded by the alien power of passion. Her sieve is the opposite of the virgin’s vessel of wholeness and self-containment, an expression rather of vulnerability, openness, helplessness. One painting of the queen in this vein, the Siena portrait, adds to the sieve motif illustrative medallions from the Aeneid: we are clearly meant to read in the chaste Elizabeth Aeneas’s self-restraint and sense of national duty. In All’s Well it is the contrary figure of Dido that better glosses Helen’s image and situation.22 Unlike Queen Elizabeth, Helen is vulnerable through desire. Although critics for almost 200 years have periodically tried to make her a selfless saint, her love for Bertram is not the abstract devotion of the Virgin Queen to England. It is very much of the flesh. Her first soliloquy shows her obsessed with his good looks, and the second carries out that physicality in metaphor: What power is it which mounts my love so high, That makes me see and cannot feed mine eye? The mightiest space in fortune nature brings To join like likes and kiss like native things. (1.1.216–19)

In her figural imagination, those separated by fortune not only meet but kiss. Helen sees Bertram and wants to devour what she sees (‘‘feed mine eye’’).23 Helen can harmonize chastity and desire only when her love seems hopeless. Even then, she seems torn between them: vowed to Diana but held captive by Venus, invoking the vestal virgin but turning her sieve symbol into a leaky vessel. When Helen in fact wins Bertram, it would seem that the conflict is about to be resolved by wholehearted yielding to Venus. She prefaces her choice of him as husband by formally marking her change of allegiance, the transition from chaste self-sufficiency to erotic attachment: Now, Dian, from thy altar do I fly, And to imperial Love, that god most high, Do my sighs stream. (2.3.75–77)

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But the image of Helen sighing under the domination of ‘‘imperial Love’’ recalls the helplessness and passivity of the prisoner of war, the ever-draining sieve. Complete subordination to Venus is not a true resolution; she will need to achieve a real fusion that incorporates the power and initiative of the virgin huntress as well. In plot terms Bertram must be won all over again, this time in alliance with ‘‘the Maide called Diana.’’ Acting through Diana, taking her place in bed, Helen achieves not only sexual union with her husband but reconciliation of the play’s mythic oppositions as well—the conflict between Venus and Diana in herself, and in Bertram the standoff between Venus and Mars. His pursuit of war and martial love-conquest finally bonds him sexually with the wife he had fled for fear of ‘‘standing to’t.’’ Mars and Venus turn out not to be mutually exclusive after all.24 But it is the cooperation of Helen and Diana that is central to the significance of names. Each achieves her own ends, the prote´geé of passion taking the place of virginity ‘‘most chastely absent’’; and in the process, each benefits the other. This final configuration of mythic models, then, encompasses two possible orders of meaning. Helen and Diana may set forth two alternative courses for women, in the manner of Amoret and Belphoebe in Spenser’s Faerie Queene: loving matrimony and self-sufficient singleness. Diana, after all, explicitly renounces marriage and vows to ‘‘live and die a maid’’ (4.2.75). But it is only Spenser’s allegorical mode that makes acceptable such a spurning of marital connection: Belphoebe’s life is set forth more as a principled ideal than as an approved social practice. The queen herself raised constant anxiety by her choice of perpetual singleness. More in accord with general social values as well as with Shakespeare’s other comedies is a perception of Diana and Helen as two stages in the same process of maturation. The Florentine girl is as Helen used to be before she fell in love, a ‘‘virgin knight’’; and as the play ends, Diana seems set to repeat Helen’s subsequent story. ‘‘If thou best yet a fresh uncroppe`d flower,’’ promises the King, ‘‘Choose thou thy husband and I’ll pay thy dower’’ (5.3.328–29). Diana’s introduction onstage in the company of women and her subsequent fervent loyalty to Helen support her role in this developmental idea, which Shakespeare tends to dramatize as a passage from close relations with one’s own sex to a focus on someone of the opposite sex. We become aware of this process in A Midsummer Night’s Dream when Helena recalls the close bond between herself and Hermia before they were drawn to men, and in As You Like It when the primary loyalty initially felt by the princesses for each other yields to stronger ties of heterosexual love, first in

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Rosalind’s case and then in Celia’s. The harmony of Venus with Diana that the play’s action suggests may point to Helen’s original consuming passion as chastened (tempered, made chaste) by new knowledge of her husband’s shortcomings, but it also has this temporal, developmental dimension. All’s Well, which seems to many critics to trace the adolescent rebellion and subsequent maturing of Bertram, offers as well a female rebellion and subsequent maturing version of the road to adulthood. The names of Helen and Diana, then, are suggestive about larger currents and issues of All’s Well. Mythically resonant and variously underlined in dialogue, they will be highlighted all the more for the reader as well as the viewer if character names of minimum importance are not featured in the text.

Notes 1. ‘‘Editorial Principles,’’ 79–80, issued as guidelines to editors of individual volumes of the Oxford Shakespeare. 2. According to Kenneth Muir ‘‘Touchstone’’ is a name taken up by the Clown in the Forest of Arden, as Rosalind and Celia take up ‘‘Ganymede’’ and ‘‘Aliena’’; see Shakespeare’s Sources, vol. 1: Comedies and Tragedies (London: Methuen, 1957), 57 n. 3. Line numbers and quotations throughout this essay refer to William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986); I have in some quotations altered speech headings and stage directions in the ways defended in this article. Where I have made such changes, my emendations appear in square brackets. 4. In 1.2 they appear like elder statesmen: they function as confidants of the King, comment on the desirability of war as an outlet and proving ground for restless young sparks, and label Bertram ‘‘Young.’’ But in 2.1 they are Bertram’s contemporaries, about to go off themselves to the Italian wars. That is their position throughout the rest of the play, and later variations like ‘‘Frenchmen’’ and ‘‘Captains’’ in stage directions and speech prefixes are consonant with that role; but in 3.2 the entrance designation ‘‘Gentlemen’’ and the Countess’s address to them as ‘‘gentlemen’’ may suggest that Shakespeare did not originally think of them as the noblemen seen earlier (the King’s ‘‘young lords’’ at 2.1.1). 5. E. K. Chambers points to these among other recycled names in his William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), 451. 6. The Oxford text has ‘‘Good Master Lavatch.’’ 7. After writing this article I found that L. A. Beaurline, faced with a similar situation in editing Fletcher’s The Noble Gentleman (The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, ed. Fredson Bowers, vol. 3 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976]), has also argued in favor of generic speech prefixes for characters who are named late and without emphasis, as preferable to repeating the names throughout and thereby separating readers’ experience from that of theater audiences (119–20). Anne Barton, in The Names of Comedy (Toronto and Buffalo: Univer-

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sity of Toronto Press, 1990), agrees with Beaurline, citing as one Shakespearean example the Steward in Timon of Athens, named ‘‘Flavius’’ in dialogue and speech prefixes in only one scene, 1.2; she finds the consistent speech prefix ‘‘Steward’’ adopted by the Arden and Oxford editors preferable (on the grounds articulated by Beaurline) to the Riverside editor’s use of ‘‘Flavius’’ throughout. Barton distinguishes between such nonce naming and another sort of delayed naming evident in Twelfth Night and Coriolanus, where there are good reasons why Viola and Volumnia are not named until Act 5. Viola in the dialogue is an anonymous ‘‘Lady/ Madam’’ or a disguised ‘‘Cesario’’ until she is restored to her family and full social identity at the end of the play (137–38), while the late uttering of Volumnia’s personal name, after she is addressed in earlier acts as ‘‘mother,’’ ‘‘madam,’’ and ‘‘noble lady,’’ marks her move beyond interests of family and class only to the salvation of the city (194 n). In such cases, for editors to withhold these names from speech prefixes in an attempt to match the theatrical effect of the delayed naming might mislead, ‘‘imposing a false suggestion of type upon characters for whom, unlike those of The Noble Gentlemen, it would be inappropriate’’ (94–95). 8. For the connection between this kind of name and Jonsonian comedy, see Lachlan MacKinnon, Shakespeare the Aesthete: An Exploration of Literary Theory (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 27, citing Anne Barton, Ben Jonson, Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 167. 9. He probably does not know who she is. Editors have puzzled over his apparent surprise later (2.3.46) at recognizing the King’s healer as Helen when he introduced her himself in 2.1, but Gary Taylor hypothesizes, plausibly, that Helen was disguised in that earlier entrance; see Gary Taylor and Stanley Wells, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 495. 10. See Stanley Wells, Re-Editing Shakespeare for the Modern Reader (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 47. 11. ‘‘All’s Well That Ends Well and Shakespeare’s Helens: Text and Subtext, Subject and Object’’ (reprinted in this collection). 12. Lafeu, looking on at the choosing scene, though perhaps out of earshot, thinks they are all rejecting her (2.3.87–89, 94–96). 13. See the Arden edition of All’s Well That Ends Well (London: Methuen, 1959), 81. 14. The either/or opposition between war and love informs the play’s metaphoric language. See R. B. Parker, ‘‘War and Sex in All’s Well That Ends Well,’’ Shakespeare Survey 37 (1984): 99–113, esp. 101–8. 15. Cf. Spenser’s Acrasia, who, in an image obviously indebted to the Venus-Mars tradition, keeps the young knight Verdant in a trance of love at the center of the Bower of Bliss, while ‘‘His warlike armes, the idle instruments / Of sleeping praise, were hong vpon a tree’’ (The Faerie Queene, Bk. 2, canto 12, stanza 80). 16. The Common Liar: An Essay on ‘‘Antony and Cleopatra’’ (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1973), 83. 17. His list of tasks accomplished when departing from Florence (4.3.89–99) briskly ticks off Diana’s seduction along with formal leave-takings, logistical arrangements for his journey home, and perfunctory mourning for the wife he has been told is dead. If the Diana ‘‘business’’ gets slightly more attention, that only reflects a practical worry about later repercussions. 18. The Second Lord’s metaphor, in which Bertram is the aggressive hunter and Diana the prey (‘‘this night he fleshes his will in the spoil of her honour’’ [4.3.17]), shows how easily this sexual adventure assimilates to the primacy of Mars. 19. The Folio does not name Diana, but Theobald’s insertion of the name of the

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‘‘queen of virgins’’ is universally accepted. ‘‘Dian’’ is probably better than his ‘‘Diana,’’ being the form reserved for the goddess in this play while the character is called ‘‘Diana.’’ 20. The story is related in Augustine’s City of God, Bk. 10, chap. 16, and Petrarch’s ‘‘The Triumph of Chastity’’ in Trionfi, 223 ff., both widely known, and through the Petrarch medium became a motif in the visual arts. 21. William Camden, Remaines (London: 1605), cited by Roy C. Strong, Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 66. 22. So, less directly, do the Danaids, principals in another sieve story. They were married against their will and killed their husbands on their wedding night; their punishment was perpetually to pour water into vessels that could not contain it; see Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (New York: Atheneum, 1985), 245–48. Their story exemplifies in a different way the unwilling capture by passion, but the irony in their punishment—perforated, leaky vessels for women still chaste—parallels Helen’s own ironic posture as unmaidenly but unfulfilled lover. Emblem 77 of Thomas Combe’s Theater of Fine Devices (London, 1614), a translation of Guillaume de La Perrie` re’s Le Theatre des bons engins . . . (Paris, 1539), shows a young man pouring water through a sieve held by Cupid, while the motto glosses, ‘‘All those that loue do fancie most, / But lose their labour and their cost’’ (sig. F4’’); the verses set out the expense of an active wooing, but the outpourings of the frustrated Helen are emotional rather than material wealth. The emblem is noted by Peggy Mun ˜ oz Simonds in ‘‘Sacred and Sexual Motifs in All’s Well That Ends Well,’’ Renaissance Quarterly 42 (1989): 33–59, esp. 51. 23. McKinnon notes how the metaphor of the feeding eye stresses ‘‘the carnality of her desire,’’ (6). 24. The names of Helen and Diana have not received much systematic attention from critics. An exception is David M. Bergeron in ‘‘The Mythical Structure of All’s Well That Ends Well,’’ Texas Studies in Language and Literature 14 (1972): 559–68, who focuses on a pattern of opposition between Venus and Mars, Helen and Bertram. Paroles as a parodic Mars enacts the inferiority of arms as a choice, and in the final reconciliation of hero and heroine, life and fertility triumph over war and death. Helen includes Diana as well as Venus, until the splitting off of her Diana side into another character ‘‘both figuratively and literally frees Helena to pursue her Venus role’’ (562).

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Theology as Tragedy in Macbeth MODERN CHRONOLOGIES OF SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS GENERALLY PLACE Macbeth right after King Lear. The two plays were probably written in the same year, 1606. They are nevertheless very different, so much so that together they make up a sort of object lesson in Shakespeare’s diversity. Both are tragic, but they seem to move in quite opposite directions. Where King Lear came close to nihilism, Macbeth is notable for its moral clarity, as if reacting to the earlier play by putting it in reverse. King Lear gives us not only personal tragedies but a tragic universe. Some of the wholesale destruction is significant—Edmund is killed by the brother he wronged. But some of it is random— Cordelia dies by accident. In the Fool’s nonsequiturs and in other flashes of deflating comedy, meaning itself keeps breaking down in absurdity. Characters constantly appeal to the gods who rule over men’s affairs to deal justly and restore order, but the gods revealed by the course of the dramatic action aren’t like that. They’re indifferent, or they’re actively malevolent, or they’re just not there at all. The action of King Lear takes its characters to the limits of moral apprehension and then propels them beyond, into uncharted and perhaps unchartable terrain. Individuals may make new sense of their suffering lives, may forgive and be forgiven, may rediscover the value of human community. In the great world, however, all order seems to crumble away, even the grim consequentiality of tragedy. Possibly Lear’s journey took Shakespeare too close to total chaos. In any case, the play he wrote soon after seems to work in the opposite way, enclosing its personal tragedy in a universe that is not only morally comprehensible but even shares our ethical sympathies. When Macbeth kills his kinsman and guest in violation of his sacred ‘‘double trust,’’ the natural world reacts violently with storms, earthquakes, unnatural behavior by animals. The sun, ‘‘as troubled with man’s act’’ (2.4.7), refuses to shine on the day after Duncan’s murder—and as far as the script is concerned, darkness continues in Scotland until the usurper’s reign is over.1 (Most of the major scenes take place at night or look forward to night. Macbeth’s early morn170

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THEOLOGY AS TRAGEDY IN MACBETH

ing visit to the witches is marked by stormy weather and the atmosphere created by the ‘‘secret, black and midnight hags’’ (4.1.49) themselves.) To expel Macbeth and his wrongs, the natural world violates its own laws: a dead man walks, a forest moves, a man exists who was not born of woman. When the tyrant is gone, the orderly processes that Duncan fostered—planting and growing, loyalty properly enacted and rewarded—can be renewed by Malcolm. The disintegration and chaos that Macbeth experiences inside this cosmic frame is peculiar to himself, and we understand it as the result of his own action, an action he recognized from the beginning as unambiguously wrong. To do what he did, he had to suppress by force part of his own nature, what his wife calls the ‘‘milk of human kindness’’ (1.5.17). He has to separate himself as much as possible from his own criminal actions. When this violent, almost schizophrenic, repression leads him to nihilism and despair, it makes sense psychologically and morally. Macbeth, then, encloses individual chaos in a larger moral order. But that’s not the whole story. From a different perspective its moral frame looks radically unstable. At Swarthmore I used to teach a course called ‘‘Tragedy and Theology,’’ with a colleague from the Religion Department.2 Our texts ranged from Sophocles to Dostoevsky, from Shakespeare to Frederick Douglass. We focused on situations where divine justice was mysterious, where the ways of God to men seemed to call for a tragic understanding along with—or in place of—the traditional rational ‘‘justifying.’’ We probed certain episodes in the Bible: the Fall of Adam and Eve with its curiously displaced responsibility; God’s endorsement of Abel’s sacrifice but not Cain’s; the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart while plagues rained down on Egypt; the God-initiated afflictions of Job. In this context Macbeth looked very different. Students who were now accustomed to questioning theodicies and alert to problems in supernatural causality didn’t find Macbeth morally straightforward at all. And especially they asked, what about those Weird Sisters? Well, what about them? Where do they come from? Where do they go when they disappear from the action in Act 4? Why do they confront Macbeth with their prophecies? What is their place in the moral universe the play seems to be demonstrating? The Weird Sisters don’t abide our question. They’re unaccountable, in all senses: their nature is mysterious, their origins are obscure, they cannot be called to account (see OED 1a, 2b). Most of all, how do they affect the events of the play? They know Macbeth will be king. Does their foreknowledge make inevitable the action by which he achieves that position? Do they incite him, anyway, toward murdering Duncan by

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letting him know what the reward will be? Or do they merely spell out an end, leaving any decisions about the means to that end— active or passive—entirely to him? ‘‘If chance will have me king, why chance may crown me / Without my stir’’ (1.3.159–60). The question of responsibility has occupied generations of Macbeth critics, especially the older ones. It’s not my main concern now, and I don’t propose to go over the pros and cons in detail. In trying to apportion responsibility between the Macbeths and the Weird Sisters, it seems fair to say that the script doesn’t place the blame entirely with either party. The witches don’t compel Macbeth to murder or even urge him to it. But the dramatic sequence creates the impression that if they had not hailed him as the future King of Scotland, he probably would not have killed the incumbent king. Between these extremes of black and white is a large grey area. And the grey, like the hell Lady Macbeth sees in her night visions, is murky. In dramatic terms, at least, the Weird Sisters have primacy as a malevolent agency. They open the play, and before we see Macbeth we hear of him from them, as the object of some plot that is already conceived. (The sense this creates in a theater audience, that they take the first initiative and not he, is reinforced by contrast when he next meets them in Act 4. By then it is Macbeth, far gone in blood, who initiates the encounter and demands that they tell him what will happen.) Returning to the play’s beginning, in the second scene we hear of Macbeth as a grimly effective captain of the King’s forces, unseaming rebels from the nave to the chops. This is the loyal soldier Macbeth who finally comes onstage in scene three. And yet, as editors and critics are fond of observing, his first line—‘‘So foul and fair a day I have not seen’’—echoes the ‘‘fair is foul’’ chant of the opening scene and thus suggests that something in him has affinities with the witches before they even meet. Or does it? Macbeth, after all, may merely be commenting on the bad weather in conjunction with the good outcome of the battle. Perhaps Macbeth echoes the witches’ linguistic reversal of values because he already harbors an intention, or at least a wish, that resonates with the prophecy they will give him—a wish to kill Duncan and take the crown for himself. Later Lady Macbeth, in a rage at Macbeth’s indecision, accuses him of wavering from some earlier resolve: What beast was’t, then, That made you break this enterprise to me? When you durst do it, then you were a man;

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And to be more than what you were, you would Be so much more the man. Nor time nor place Did then adhere, and yet you would make both. They have made themselves, and that their fitness now Does unmake you. (1.7.54–61)

She says she would have taken her nursing baby from the breast and dashed its brains out, ‘‘had I so sworn as you / Have done to this’’ (66–67). When did he propose this ‘‘enterprise’’ (one of those chilling euphemisms by which Lady Macbeth makes murder sound heroic). Before the action of the play, as Coleridge thought (68–69)? In a scene that was cut from was cut from the text we the text we have, as John Dover Wilson thought (xxxiv–xxxvii)? In an unwritten scene meant to have taken place some time after 1.5, as Alwin Thaler supposed (89–91)? Or is she talking about the letter she read onstage in that scene, sent by Macbeth to his ‘‘dearest partner of greatness’’? Like the witches’ prophecies that prompted it, the letter told only of outcomes; but like her husband on hearing these prophecies Lady Macbeth in her mind leaped easily from desired end to murderous means—so easily that she might well think later, or wish to think, that the letter actually talked of killing Duncan.3 Certainly, given the play as we have it, she is exaggerating when she says that Macbeth swore to do it. There may well have been some predisposition on Macbeth’s part to get rid of Duncan and take over the throne, but the play denies us any clear assessment of his intentions before he meets the Weird Sisters. I’ve been using two titles for the mysterious trio, ‘‘witches’’ and ‘‘Weird Sisters.’’ They’re called witches in the stage directions, though never in the dialogue, and their appearance and activities are like those described in contemporary works on witchcraft (Curry, 53–54, 223–24). Seen as human witches, they are fairly limited in power: allied with evil spirits but able only to abet human villainy rather than bring it about; accessories before or after the fact, but not causal agents. In the language of the play, though, they’re the ‘‘Weird Sisters,’’ a repeated title that hints at actual control over events. And even in this area of their significance the murk descends again, because the Folio printers sometimes spell the word weyard and sometimes weyward. Should we see them as versions of the Fates, or on a smaller scale as wayward, in the sense of ‘‘perverse’’ or ‘‘perverting’’? The adjective that should define them instead mystifies their nature, situates them somewhere between causative power and mere ill-intentioned speech.

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However the Sisters’ prophecy figures in directing Macbeth toward the murder of Duncan, it is clear enough as a message. They say he will be king hereafter, and he does become king. The oracles they give in Act 4, when Macbeth returns to them for more knowledge of the future, sound to him equally direct in meaning. He should beware Macduff; no one born of woman will harm him; he will not be vanquished till Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane. But while the words of the second and third prophecies confirm Macbeth’s grasp on power, they encode alternative meanings that foretell his defeat. A baby that has to be taken from its mother’s womb is not, strictly speaking, ‘‘born.’’ ‘‘Wood’’ may be understood as a fixed topographical designation, but it may also name a substance that can be cut down and transported somewhere else. The Weird Sisters, as Macbeth will realize only later, use the slipperiness of language to foretell disaster in the guise of absolute security.4 ‘‘Fiends,’’ he calls them, when he finds out that Macduff was not ‘‘born’’ of woman, ‘‘fiends . . . / That palter with [him] in a double sense’’ (5.8.23–24). But earlier, when the advance of Birnam Wood on Dunsinane showed that assurance to be false as well, he talked about the ‘‘equivocation of the fiend, / That lies like truth’’ (5.5.49– 50). ‘‘Fiend,’’ in the singular, reminds us that equivocation is the favored weapon of the capital-F Fiend himself, Satan. It is there already in the primal words of temptation in the Garden of Eden. In the Genesis narrative, God warns Adam not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge, ‘‘for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.’’ But the serpent assures Eve, ‘‘you will not die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil’’ (Gen. 3:4–5). Like the Weird Sisters, the serpent gives three prophecies. All three come true in some sense, but not as the hearer imagines. ‘‘You will not die’’: no, not right away, but all life from this point will be shadowed by mortality, ‘‘a long day’s dying’’ in the bleak phrase of Milton’s fallen Adam in Paradise Lost (10.964). ‘‘Your eyes will be opened’’: yes, but their new awareness will be only of the body’s shame and weakness. ‘‘You will be like God, knowing good and evil’’: yes, but this ‘‘knowing’’ entails subjection rather than mastery, apprehending evil by experience and good only in contrast with evil—and therefore not knowing like God at all. What Adam and Eve will know, to make use again of Milton’s succinctness, is ‘‘good lost, and evil got’’ (9.1072).5 In the long view, the witches may have their place in a moral universe. When the riddling prophecies eventually unfold their full meaning, they show us an organism purging itself of infected matter and regaining healthy equilibrium. Macbeth falls; Malcolm insti-

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tutes good rule; Banquo’s line will triumph. The sin of Adam and Eve can be seen as leading eventually to redemption and greater grace in Christ. Yet even if the long view can reveal sin and suffering as God’s instruments in bringing about an eventual larger good, that doesn’t cancel out the tragedy of the short view: the perspective of the single individual who has to act according to his limited human vision and take responsibility for the results. I propose to put Macbeth’s story, with its mystification of responsibility, in dialogue with a story from the very repository of moral order in Shakespeare’s culture, the Bible. In 2 Kings 8:7–15 the account of Hazael, servant of the king of Syria, and Elisha, the man of God, blurs the line between supernatural and human causality in a way that brings us close to Macbeth. Now Elisha came to Damascus. Ben-hadad the king of Syria was sick; and when it was told him, ‘‘The man of God has come here,’’ the king said to Hazael, ‘‘Take a present with you and go to meet the man of God, and inquire of the Lord through him, saying, ‘Shall I recover from this sickness?’ ’’ So Hazael went to meet him, and took a present with him, all kinds of goods of Damascus, forty camel loads. When he came and stood before him, he said, ‘‘Your son Ben-hadad king of Syria has sent me to you, saying, ‘Shall I recover from this sickness?’ And Elisha said to him, ‘‘Go, say to him, ‘You shall certainly recover’; but the Lord has shown me that he shall certainly die.’’ And he fixed his gaze and stared at him, until he was ashamed. And the man of God wept. And Hazael said, ‘‘Why does my lord weep?’’ He answered, ‘‘Because I know the evil that you will do to the people of Israel; you will set on fire their fortresses, and you will slay their young men with the sword, and dash in pieces their little ones, and rip up their women with child.’’ And Hazael said, ‘‘What is your servant, who is but a dog, that he should do this great thing?’’ Elisha answered, ‘‘The Lord has shown me that you are to be king over Syria.’’ Then he departed from Elisha, and came to his master, who said to him, ‘‘What did Elisha say to you?’’ And he answered, ‘‘He told me that you would certainly recover.’’ But on the morrow he took the coverlet and dipped it in water and spread it over his face, till he died. And Hazael became king in his stead.

The short view here is murky, all right. The prophecy that prompts Hazael to murder his king comes not even from some Weird Sisters of mysterious origin but from God’s own prophet. And along with this message for Hazael, God sends an assurance to Benhadad that will make the king feel falsely secure. Is God, through his prophet, engaging in entrapment? To give the dialogue between Macbeth and the 2 Kings narrative some cultural common ground,

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it’s useful to look at some sixteenth- and seventeenth-century commentary on Hazael. And when you look, you see a lot of uneasiness. In the Hebrew, Hazael is to tell Ben-hadad, ‘‘Living, you shall live,’’ though God has shown Elisha that ‘‘dying, he shall die.’’ The Geneva Bible (1560) translates the first part as ‘‘Thou shalt recover,’’ but then takes pains to clarify in the margin: ‘‘Meaning that he should recover of this disease.’’ That doesn’t take care of the whole problem, since Ben-hadad doesn’t, in fact, have time to recover before Hazael kills him. The Bishops’ Bible, in the same decade, also gives ‘‘Thou shalt recover,’’ with a similarly inadequate marginal explanation. Some time later comes the King James version (1611), where the translators apparently saw the problem with the usual translation and gloss; their solution was to alter the passage itself so that it reads, ‘‘Thou mayest certainly recover.’’ That is, according to one later commentary, because the disease in itself was not mortal, ‘‘he might have lived if no other thing had intervened.’’6 Elisha’s prophecy to the sick king is at worst a lie, at best equivocal. It promises to Ben-hadad a safety that is totally illusory, as the Weird Sisters’ equivocations did to Macbeth. The question of divine entrapment is even stickier. Did the prophet’s double assurance, that the king would surely die and that his servant would be king of Syria, create in a previously blameless Hazael the will to murder Benhadad? The story’s laconic brevity offers little help to commentators struggling to absolve God. But they make the most of one verse, directly after Elisha privately foretells Ben-hadad’s death: ‘‘And he fixed his gaze and stared at him, until he was ashamed.’’ Hazael is ashamed under the prophet’s scrutiny, they reason, because he already harbors a guilty purpose to kill his master. Alas, like the hazy reference in Macbeth to some earlier resolution by Macbeth to take Duncan’s crown by violence, the evidence here of Hazael’s previous bent to crime is ambiguous. ‘‘He stared at him, until he was ashamed’’: the first ‘‘he’’ who stares is Elisha; the second ‘‘he’’ could be Hazael, revealing his sinful intentions under the prophet’s gaze, but it might just as well still be Elisha, staring too long for politeness.7 Those who want to find Hazael already guilty in his heart also have to account for his apparent shock and disbelief when Elisha tells about the atrocities he will commit against Israel. Perhaps he’s being hypocritical, or perhaps he lacks self-knowledge, is unaware of his own capacity for cruelty. Does this apply to the murder of Benhadad too? It was this act, as far as we know, that started Hazael on his bloody career, as Macbeth’s murder of his own king led him into wholesale killing.8 We’re back at the basic question, for both Hazael and Macbeth: if they both have the potential for corruption and

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they are both moved to actualize that potential by an authoritative prophecy, to what extent does the agency of that prophecy share with the human murderers responsibility for their crimes? Beyond the murky short view, however, students of the Bible see something larger, the great epic of God’s dealings with his chosen people Israel. The wider context for these events is Israel’s desertion of Yahweh to worship Baal, a desertion that began in the later years of Solomon’s reign and became more flagrant under the later rulers of the two kingdoms. In the first book of Kings, the still-small voice of the Lord has already given three missions to his prophet Elijah. He is to call Elisha as his own successor; he is to anoint two rulers who will rain destruction on Israel to punish its apostasy: Jehu, king of Israel, and Hazael, king of Syria—‘‘And him that escapes from the sword of Hazael shall Jehu slay; and him who escapes from the sword of Jehu shall Elisha slay.’’ In the big picture, then, Hazael is the counterpart of Jehu, both instruments of divine punishment. Their destructive acts receive their sanction from the ‘‘scourge of God’’ principle that shapes, in 2 Kings and elsewhere, prophecies of Israel’s defeat at the hands of Assyria and the Babylonian exile.9 Elijah in fact carries out only one of his three missions, casting his mantle on Elisha and implicitly leaving the other two tasks to his successor. But in the narratives that follow, Jehu fits the pattern of God’s scourge much better than Hazael does. He is actually anointed by an emissary of Elisha, as Hazael is not. He is given divine orders to strike down Jezebel and the house of Ahab. And as he carries out his bloody program, which wipes out Ahab’s entire family and purges the worshippers of Baal, Jehu directly invokes earlier prophecies.10 In Hazael’s story, though, there is nothing to indicate that he thinks of himself as a divine instrument, or that anyone else does. Jehu’s motives for his carnage are mixed with greed and ambition, but the presentation makes it easy to keep his personal failings separate from his role as God’s agent. God sorts things out himself when he rewards Jehu for exterminating Ahab’s house but punishes him for not stamping out the worship of the golden calf. Hazael’s moral situation gives us no such neat boundaries and distinctions. As a foreigner, not of Israel, he is less interesting to the narrator than Jehu, and we are told nothing about his motives. Was he already ill-disposed, waiting for an opportunity to betray Benhahad? Or did the prophet’s words give him a new goal, which he then went on to achieve by criminal means? Even if he can be understood in the long view as God’s scourge,11 where does that leave the question of individual culpability? If God implants a goal in a man

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for His own larger purposes, can the man be said to choose his actions freely and thus bear full responsibility? Hazael’s story, like Macbeth’s, resists moral logic. If we understand it at all, it has to be tragically, as a mysterious knot in which fate and free will cannot be disentangled. The seventeenth-century commentary I quoted earlier instructs us to understand Ben-hadad’s murder on two levels at once: ‘‘The event was according to the murderer’s intent / and the Prophet’s answer.’’ The commentators use the simple conjunction ‘‘and’’ to glide over potential contradiction. In an earlier try, they assert that Hazael must have already had an evil disposition, but they find that the prophecy ‘‘You are to be king over Syria’’ was necessary to move him to act on it. We are back once more, then, to questions of motivation in Macbeth. What purpose do the Weird Sisters have for confronting Macbeth—or what is their masters’ purpose, if they in fact have such masters? The play offers no answers to these questions. Even Macbeth’s personal motives are mystified. In early soliloquies he explores at length the moral and political consequences of killing Duncan—but not his reasons for doing so. Does he long to be king? Lady Macbeth says he does, but what comes through in her Act 1 speeches is more her desire than his. Perhaps we should take it as self-evident that royal power and prestige are desirable. But it’s strange that, apart from one reference to ‘‘vaulting ambition,’’ there is nothing in Macbeth’s long soul-searchings about how gratifying it will be to rule over Scotland. He seems not so much consumed by desire as driven by some kind of obligation. Positive longings are oddly absent in him, as A. C. Bradley long ago observed: ‘‘The deed is done in horror and without the faintest desire or sense of glory— done, one may almost say, as if it were an appalling duty’’ (358). What duty? What obligation? Perhaps to be what he is meant to be, to fulfill his destiny.12 Macbeth does consider simply letting it happen to him (‘‘If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me’’). But his wife convinces him, by appealing to his manhood, to take the initiative. Not only will he be greater than before as king, but taking positive action to reach the crown will in itself make him more of a man. The laconic narrative of Hazael tells nothing about what he felt as he followed out his destined role. But it is clear enough that the prophecies Macbeth and Hazael encounter totally alter their sense of what they are, as if an enormous mountain had suddenly appeared on their internal landscape. The mountain’s very presence may be imperative, as Mount Everest challenges men like George Mallory to climb it ‘‘because it’s there.’’ Mallory died trying for the summit; Macbeth is lost because he reaches the summit.

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Hazael lacks his heroic stature, but has a place with him nevertheless in a tragic theology.

Notes 1. All citations in this essay are from the New Folger Library edition of Macbeth, ed. Barbara Mouret and Paul Werstine (New York: Washington Square Press, 1992). 2. I wish to record my debt in what follows to the students in this course, and especially to my co-leader Patrick Henry, now director of the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research, Collegeville, Minnesota. It was Dr. Henry who called my attention to the biblical narrative of Hazael, discussed below. 3. ‘‘She might naturally take the words of the letter as indicating much more than they said; and then in her passionate contempt at his hesitation, and her passionate eagerness to overcome it, she might easily accuse him, doubtless with exaggeration, and probably with conscious exaggeration, of having actually proposed the murder’’ (Bradley 483). 4. Bushnell observes that ‘‘the language of the witches becomes duplicitous as the play progresses, in proportion to Macbeth’s own irony and hypocrisy’’ (202). 5. On the specific equivocation involved in ‘‘knowing good and evil,’’ see Blackburn. Renaissance commentators on Genesis 3 such as Pareus and Pererius note the serpent’s equivocating promises, usually citing Rupert of Deutz’s De trinitate 3.8. In Willet’s paraphrase they are likened to oracles: ‘‘The deuill in euery one of these points speaketh doubtfully, as he gave the oracles of Apollo, that euery word which he spake, might haue a double meaning: ye shall not die, that is, not presently the death of the bodie; though presently made subject to mortalitie; your eyes shall be opened, so they were to their confusion: knowing good and euill, not by a more excellent knowledge, but by miserable experience after their transgression’’ (D6r). Sir Thomas Browne uses Satan’s temptations to demonstrate words with multiple meanings: ‘‘This fallacy is the first delusion Satan put upon Eve, and his whole tentation might be the same continued; so when he said, Yee shall not dye, that was in his equivocation, ye shall not incurre a present death, or a destruction immediately ensuing your transgression. Your eyes shall be opened, that is, not to the enlargement of your knowledge, but discovery of your shame and proper confusion. You shall know good and evill, that is you shall have knowledge of good by its privation, but cognisance of evill by sense and visible experience. And the same fallacy or way of deceit so well succeeding in Paradise, has continued in his Oracles through all the world’’ (24). 6. These glosses on 2 Kings 8:10 appear in Downame Lll4r. 7. Coverdale sees both pronouns as referring to Elisha. So does Giovanni Diodati, who glosses ‘‘until he was ashamed’’ as ‘‘for a long time’’—that is, Elisha was made ashamed by the continuation of his staring at Hazael (Cc3r). The Holy Scriptures (London, 1535). 8. Hazael’s status under Ben-hadad is unclear in the biblical text but may be parallel to Macbeth’s under Duncan. The Downame annotations find it likely that Ben-hadad would send on such a mission ‘‘the greatest in the kingdom next to himself ’’ and suggest that Hazael was commander of the king’s armies. On Hazael’s apparently easy ascent to the throne they remark, ‘‘It appears by this that none of the Syrians suspected the murder of their King, and therefore questioned not Hazael for it, but quietly suffered him to succeed to the throne, either because the

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King had no children, and Hazael was of kin to him, or because he was so powerfull as none durst oppose him, or so gracious with the people as they chose him’’ (Lll4r–v). 9. See especially 2 Kings 24:2–4 and Jeremiah 25:8–12 on Babylon as God’s agent in punishing Judah: ‘‘Therefore thus says the Lord of hosts: Because you have not obeyed my words, behold I will send for all the tribes of the north, says the Lord, and for Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon, my servant, and I will bring them against this land and its inhabitants. . . . This whole land shall become a ruin and a waste, and these nations shall serve the king of Babylon seventy years. Then after seventy years are completed, I will punish the king of Babylon and that nation, the land of the Chaldeans, for their iniquity.’’ Note that Babylon, though acting for God’s purpose (‘‘my servant’’) does not escape punishment. Armstrong discusses the prophets’ perception of God’s hand in Israel’s disasters as part of Yahweh’s evolution from tribal war-god to the lord of all nations, chastising moral deficiencies in his people (chap. 2). 10. 1 Kings 21:19, 23, 29; 2 Kings 9:25–26, 36–37. 11. This argument raises another sort of question, directed this time to the biblical chronicler: why did Yahweh need the usurping Hazael as his chastising instrument when Ben-hadad has already been making war on Israel? The chronicler cannot do a perfect job of retrospectively rationalizing history. 12. My thinking on this subject has been clarified by a discussion with Professor Paul Yachnin of the University of British Columbia.

Works Cited Armstrong, Karen. A History of God. New York: Knopf, 1993. Blackburn, Thomas H. ‘‘ ‘Uncloister’d Virtue’: Adam and Eve in Milton’s Paradise.’’ Milton Studies 3. (1971): 119–37. Bradley, A. C. Shakespearean Tragedy. 2d ed. London: Macmillan, 1924. Browne, Sir Thomas. Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica. Ed. Robin Robbins. Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon, 1981. Bushnell, Rebecca. ‘‘Oracular Silence in Oedipus the King and Macbeth.’’ Classical and Modern Literature 2 (1981–82): 195–204. Coleridge, S. T. Coleridge’s Shakespearean Criticism. Ed. T. M. Raysor. Vol. 1. London: Constable, 1930. Curry, Walter Clyde. Shakespeare’s Philosophical Patterns. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1937. Diodati, Giovanni. Pious Annotations upon the Holy Bible. London, 1643. Downame, John, et al. Annotations upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament. 3d ed. London, 1657. Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler. London: Longmans, 1968. Thaler, Alwin. Shakespeare and Democracy. Knoxville, University of Tennessee Press, 1941. Willet, Andres. Hexapla in Genesis. Cambridge, 1605. Wilson, John Dover, ed. Macbeth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1947.

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Ideology and the Feud in Romeo and Juliet ROMEO AND JULIET ARE VERY YOUNG. THEY ARE YOUNG TO BE MARRIED, and also young to be protagonists in a tragedy. Shakespeare made a special point of Juliet’s extreme youth, first subtracting two years from the already tender age of Arthur Brooke’s heroine (instead of sixteen, just under fourteen), and then having the characters disagree more than once over whether she is old enough to marry.1 Romeo, presumably somewhat older than Juliet, is nevertheless not yet grown up: still in the family home, fussed over by his parents, free to roam about with his friends but apparently not seen as ready for adult responsibility. Why did Shakespeare insist on his tragic lovers as adolescents? To be sure, their youthfulness accentuates the generational conflict implicit in the story, the tragic disjunction that Franco Zeffirelli exploited so well in his compelling film version. But the extreme youth of Romeo and Juliet opens up a possibility beyond the traditional clashes of young and old. The very embeddedness in family that signals their tender years may itself be the point. It is surely significant that each of the two protagonists is introduced to us first as the object of parental concern. In the opening scene the Montagues worry about Romeo’s solitary moping, fearing that some secret sorrow may blight their promising son before he ever arrives at maturity.2 In the scene directly following, Capulet is busy providing for his daughter’s future by negotiating her marriage with Paris. It is important that each of these parental discussions takes place before we even meet the young person being discussed. Our initial view is of Romeo as a son, Juliet as a daughter. Juliet as daughter of the house continues a prominent emphasis. Even her love scenes with Romeo are played out inside the Capulet enclave, with one family member or another always threatening to intrude. Romeo is seen in the streets rather than enclosed in Montague domesticity, in the company of his friends rather than his parents. This reflects, of course, the relative freedom accorded to young males as opposed to young females. But the difference in terms of family embeddedness may be more apparent than real. Romeo’s 181

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peer group is not separate from kinship structure but a kind of extension of it, in that his habitual companions are Montague allies. All of us are always being shaped into our ways of being and knowing by extensive social processing, but the lives of the young make this process especially visible. Romeo and Juliet do not necessarily have less autonomy than adults who have undergone the full ideological conditioning afforded by society’s institutions. Yet their subordinate situation as children, acted on (cajoled, lectured, ordered, modeled) by the parents who in effect own them, makes that lack of autonomy more apparent. And the major constituting force that operates in their society is the feud between Montagues and Capulets. At first glance this would seem too comprehensive a claim for the feud’s reach and impact. The quarrel involves only two families, and it is not always taken seriously even by Montagues and Capulets. H. B. Charlton finds the family feud unsatisfactory as Fate’s instrument in Romeo and Juliet, ‘‘unsubstantial,’’ because it is sometimes treated comically and does not consistently inform the feelings and actions of most characters. In any case, thinks Charlton, such barbaric mores are not realistic in the civilized Verona the play depicts.3 (On this last point, one wonders how a study published soon after World War II could ignore such abundant evidence in the recent history of civilized Western Europe of resurgent group hatreds and the barbaric behavior they generated.) Critics in our own time have less trouble seeing the destructive dimensions in Veronese civility. Marilyn Williamson, for example, points to the violent atmosphere of the play’s society.4 For Coppe´lia Kahn, the feud is ‘‘an extreme and peculiar expression of patriarchal society.’’5 I agree that informing social institutions are the play’s major tragic force, though I would quarrel with Kahn’s term ‘‘peculiar,’’ if it is meant to characterize the feud as uncommon, individual rather than general. The dramatic expressions of dynastic hostility may seem extreme and eccentric, but the feud in its operations acts like any ideology, indeed offers a model of how ideology works. Like ideology in Althusser’s classic formulation, the feud has no obvious genesis that can be discerned, no history. It pervades everything, not as a set of specific ideas but as repeated practices. The feud-system is not in fact predicated on any substantive difference between Montagues and Capulets. A Jerusalem production which presented Montagues as Arabic-speaking Palestinians and Capulets as Hebrew-speaking Jews had its own political point to make about the clash of rival cultures.6 Shakespeare, though, with his ‘‘two households both alike in dignity,’’ seems to be creating a different

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sort of division, one that is obviously arbitrary and artificial. The members of his rival houses belong to the same culture, use the same verbal and behavioral languages. When Montagues intrude on the Capulet festivities, only their faces have to be covered; nothing else in their bearing or manners marks them as outsiders. What’s in a name? Everything, it would seem. One thinks of Lacan’s two identical doors with Ladies over one and Gentlemen over the other. Shakespeare also emphasizes the artificial nature of the feud by suppressing the account of its origins given in this source. Brooke explains that it was their very equality of station that gave rise to enmity between the two families, breeding envy and hatred which in time became ‘‘rooted.’’7 Shakespeare says only that the quarrel is ‘‘ancient.’’8 The first scene subtly enacts this ‘‘always already’’ quality of the feud, when a question of origins is raised only to fall short of an answer. The elder Montague asks Benvolio what started the latest round of hostilities—asks, we should note, only after both of them have automatically taken part in the fighting. Benvolio can’t give a good explanation because the clash was already under way when he entered. The audience has been on the scene longer than he has, but any answer spectators can give to ‘‘how did this start?’’ is no more definitive than Benvolio’s. We have seen the Capulet servants come on already primed to fight, as if they need contrary Montagues to define their manhood. Or rather, this has been Sampson’s stance, while Gregory twits him and plays generally with words. But the feud, like ideology, flattens out personal differences, slotting individuals into predetermined roles; after some actual Montagues arrive on the scene, Gregory quickly falls into line with Sampson’s pugnacity—just as Benvolio, whose natural bent is to peacemaking and who a few minutes later tries to stop the servants’ scrap, must nevertheless slide into his appointed slot to cross swords with Tybalt. The dominance of an ‘‘assigned form of subjectivity’’9 over individual temperament or initiative is evident in the exaggerated symmetry of the whole sequence; servants matched by opposing servants, nephew of one house paired off against nephew of the other, Capulet patriarch answered by Montague patriarch, all entering as if on cue and doing the same thing. The Montague-Capulet feud may be like ideology in having no apparent beginning, but is it not different in coming to a publicly announced end in the last moments of the play? I shall delay addressing this somewhat problematic issue till the end of my essay, and consider here another question that has probably occurred to more than one reader already. Is it legitimate to see the feud as shaped by Shakespeare enacting the workings of ideology as con-

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ceived by modern theorists? Where we may accept without difficulty readings that discern in his plays and poems the features of specific ideological systems, explore their contradictions, and trace their transmutations, the assumption in these cases is that Shakepeare need have made no conscious effort to delineate the systems, which rather inscribe themselves through us without our awareness or cooperation. But doesn’t taking the feud as a metaphor for ideology in general imply some conscious intent on Shakepeare’s part? Yes, it does, and the assumption is not unwarranted. Without precognizing Althusser, Shakespeare nevertheless displays in Romeo and Juliet a very conscious concern with society’s impact on the individual, especially in the characters’ meditations on names and their power. Names define us as individuals, announce who we are. Yet no name is unique to one person. It has been attached to others in the society, blood kin in the case of the surname, saints or leaders or forebears in the case of the given name. Names are imposed on infants before they are individuals, by society and its central unit the family. The considerable dynastic and cultural freight they carry begins the child’s constitution as a subject. ‘‘Romeo Montague’’ inscribes the young man who is called that into a particular subjectposition. (We tend to see this dimension mainly in the family name, but Juliet laments over the given name as well: ‘‘Deny thy father and refuse thy name’’ is preceded by ‘‘Wherefore art thou Romeo?’’ And her lover, invited to doff his offending name, responds ‘‘Henceforth I never will be Romeo.’’) Juliet’s familiar ‘‘what’s in a name?’’ meditation shows up the power of ideology by signally underestimating its force. She and Romeo have met unlabeled, as it were, a faceless youth and an anonymous girl at a party. They have not encountered each other before in the usual contextual way because of the enmity between their families. Each asks for the name of the other, and discovers conflict: Romeo

Is she a Capulet? O dear account! My life is my foe’s debt.

Juliet

My only love sprung from my only hate! Too early seen unknown, and known too late! (1.5.116–17, 137–38)10

In soliloquy later, Juliet convinces herself that seeing, responding to individual looks and attitudes, can blot out knowing, which acknowledges the social context. She tries to separate her lover’s name from his essential properties.

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’Tis but thy name that is my enemy. Thou art thyself, though not a Montague. What’s Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot, Nor arm, nor face, nor any part Belonging to a man. (2.1.80–84)

Name and self are not so easily divisible, though. While Romeo immediately disavows his name, Juliet even here goes on calling him ‘‘Romeo’’ and ‘‘Montague,’’ and worries about the danger of his staying with her, ‘‘considering who thou art’’ (2.1.106). A name may not be a body part, but Romeo will soon feel it to be just as intrinsic. Fearing that Juliet hates him for killing her cousin Tybalt, he attributes the act to ‘‘that name’s cursed hand.’’ The contorted phrase makes manifest the social construction of his agency. Contradicting Juliet’s earlier optimism, he feels ‘‘Romeo’’ as something so enmeshed with his being that it needs to be forcibly ripped out of his body (3.3.101–07). What has happened to change his perception from ‘‘Henceforth I never will be Romeo’’ to ‘‘In what vile part of this anatomy / Doth my name lodge?’’ is the reactivation of the feud: the need to avenge Mercutio, who died taking Romeo’s own place against Tybalt, by killing in turn the enemy Capulet. Romeo’s name has turned out to be a part of his self after all, directing his actions and defining his responses. Juliet’s hopeful separation of essence from what seems to her an external label—‘‘Thou art thyself, though not a Montague’’—is soon shown to be wrong, then. Even the supporting argument that she uses at the time is suspect. ‘‘That which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet’’ (2.1.85–86) sounds self-evidently true. But would that flower really retain its full sweetness in our subjective judgment if we were not conditioned to think of the rose as the best, the most worthy? The blossom itself retains its natural properties under any name, but our use and valuation of it must alter. The name ‘‘rose’’ carries with it considerable cultural baggage, suggesting surpassing beauty combined with difficulty of access (surrounded by thorns), hence something supremely precious, as well as the paragon, the ideal. What Ophelia means when she calls Hamlet ‘‘th’ expectancy and rose of the fair state’’ (Hamlet 3.1.155) would be significantly altered if she talked of ‘‘th’ expectancy and lilac,’’ even though lilacs smell sweet too—especially since the ‘‘fair state’’ of the audience for whom Shakespeare wrote this line had a rose as its familiar symbol. Shakespeare did not need Althusser’s analysis in order to grasp

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the workings of interpellation or to feel the force of the dual meaning of subject, the ‘‘autonomous’’ agent who is formed by and in a social formation to which he is subjected. Jonathan Dollimore approaches the same qustion through parallels between Montaigne’s ‘‘custom’’ and Althusser’s ‘‘ideology,’’ concluding that ‘‘the Renaissance possessed a sophisticated concept of ideology if not the word.’’11 The preoccupation with names in Romeo and Juliet points directly to the most basic function of ideology, central also to the feud: identifying, hailing, or interpellating into predetermined subject-positions. The feud operates in the classic way of language, and of ideology: it creates meaning by differentiating. Terry Eagleton, following Jameson, finds the opposition between self/familiar/good on the one hand and non-self/alien/bad on the other ‘‘the fundamental gesture of all ideology.’’12 Capulets define who they are against Montagues, Montagues against Capulets. ‘‘This’’ can only be distinguished when set against ‘‘that,’’ however arbitrary such distinctions are in language and other social constructions.13 The feud is not a matter of contrary ideas, not a matter of ideas at all, but of repeated, habitual actions that keep reasserting the defining distinctions between ‘‘us’’ and ‘‘them.’’ Ideology is what constructs our consciousness and makes sense of our world. It is pervasive, working everywhere. Can this be said of the feud? After all, not everyone in Verona is a Montague or a Capulet. We get fleeting glimpses of some nameless citizens, and various members of another family come in for more extended attention as individual characters: Prince Escalus, and especially his two kinsmen Mercutio and Paris. But on scrutiny the Montague–Capulet hostility can be seen to gather in and organize these third parties as well as the two central clans. The feud exemplifies the workings of any ideology, of Ideology itself, but the specifics of its enactment express their historical moment.14 The Veronese discourse of family division thus embraces some important social imperatives of early modern elite culture in Western Europe: the obligation to maintain one’s honor by avenging insults, the obligation to contract a suitable marriage and adapt appropriately to the married state. To some extent these were gendered. It was men who were bound in this way by the code of honor. Marriage, though expected of both sexes, was more central and defining for women, since a wife took on the loyalties as well as the status of her new family along with its name. In Romeo and Juliet Lady Capulet not only makes the case for marriage to her young daughter but also demonstrates her own thorough conditioning as a wife. Presumably not a Capulet by birth, she nevertheless has committed herself totally and fervently to the

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family feud. Her husband, born into the anti-Montague faith, can be easygoing about it at times, as when he accepts Romeo’s presence at the party. His wife, a typical convert, is possessed by her acquired faith. She is not on hand to comment on this first occasion, but after Romeo has killed Tybalt she fills the air with cries of grief and demands for revenge. Indeed, it is presumably her role as chief mourner for Tybalt in 3.1, as contrasted with her husband’s silence, that led Malone and subsequent editors to list Tybalt in the dramatis personae as the nephew of Lady Capulet, not Capulet himself.15 But family titles like nephew and brother routinely included in-laws as well as blood relatives,16 and Tybalt’s own deep investment in Capulet family values, not to speak of his interment in the family tomb, strongly suggests that he is a Capulet born. While a woman’s transfer of loyalties to her husband’s kin was fitting, a man’s proper adherence was to his own clan. Lady Capulet’s extreme sorrow for Tybalt, then, and her murderous designs on his slayer convey not special concern for her own family of birth but complete interpellation as a Capulet by marriage.17 To Juliet as a prospective bride she lays out the same course, inviting her to be the decorative cover to the book that is Paris—in other words, to take her meaning from her husband. ‘‘So shall you share in all he doth possess / By having him, making yourself no less’’ (1.3.81–96). Paris himself, like Juliet initially, gives docile heed to the imperative of suitable alliance; indeed, this is his sole motive for action in the play. The marriage of Paris and Juliet never takes place, but it is his moves towards that union that involve him fatally in the bloodshed of the feud. Like his kinsman Paris, Mercutio gets entangled in the feud and dies in consequence. By his intervention in the fight to uphold Romeo’s masculine good name when Romeo himself refuses to rise to Tybalt’s insulting provocations, Mercutio brings out the other specific historical face of ideology in this play, the masculine code of honor. Mercutio presents himself as a scorner of codes and conventions. He shows no sign of negotiating like Paris for a bride, he delights in recasting Romeo’s Petrarchan metaphors of adoration for Rosaline into leering physicality. He mocks standard beliefs like the power of dreams to prognosticate, and standard practices like the formulas of fencing. Yet Mercutio is as deeply implicated in ideology as anyone else. His reduction of woman to a set of sexual parts to be attacked is not really his own, but derives from another ideological strain, as extreme as Petrarchan adoration and even hoarier as a cultural tradition. And for all his disdain of the duello, he hurls himself with no question at all into the duel proposed by Tybalt. His response is as mechanical as any we have witnessed in the opening

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Montague-Capulet brawl. Mercutio himself attributes his death to the family feud, obsessively repeating through his last moments ‘‘A plague o’ both your houses . . . A plague o’ both your houses! . . . A plague o’ both your houses . . . Your houses!’’ (3.1.91–108). When these specific ideological ramifications thus draw in the two chief ‘‘outsiders’’ in the play, and the third ‘‘outsider’’ finally reads his own implication in theirs (‘‘And I, for winking at your discords, too / Have lost a brace of kinsmen,’’ 5.3.293–94), the feud does appear all-pervasive. No part of society that we see can escape from its influence.18 Romeo and Juliet themselves are deeply conditioned by it, although they also, necessarily, transcend the family division. I call this movement beyond the feud necessary not only because it allows their love for each other to begin and develop, but also because their venture outside the circumscribing feud-ideology makes that ideology visible, as it would never be if everyone continued to operate inside its unspoken premises. Transcendence is perhaps a misleading term for the lovers’ attempted isolation of themselves from the feud. Enclosed by Veronese social formations, they do not rise above so much as withdraw inward. Romeo and Juliet have no space of their own. Their love scenes are all played out inside the Capulet establishment, constantly impinged upon by Tybalt, or the Nurse, or Lady Capulet. The closest the lovers come to a shared private space is Friar Laurence’s cell, where they met in 2.5 to be married. But the encounter is brief and driven (Friar Laurence feels it necessary to ‘‘make short work’’ of the marriage ceremony, line 34). Moreover, this respite from the feud is granted not by escape from ideology but by the temporary ascendancy of a rival one, the Friar’s Christian agenda of reconciling the two warring houses. Nor does a freer space seem to be imaginable for Romeo and Juliet somewhere else. A milieu less insistently enclosing might make visually possible the option of leaving the city together and finding a new life somewhere else. Instead, the play’s physical dimensions only confirm that ‘‘there is no world without Verona walls’’ (3.3.17). Verona, constituted by the feud, asserts itself like any ideology as the only reality there is.19 Even as they die, another Capulet enclave surrounds the young pair, the family tomb. Hemmed in as they are, how can Romeo and Juliet constitute even an inner space in terms different from the all-powerful norm? As is suggested by Friar Laurence’s transgression of the feud’s dictates to sanction their love, opportunity arises through the presence of rival ideologies coexisting with and sometimes challenging the dominant one. For example, Romeo and Juliet can initially meet and talk as they do not only because they are momentarily free of family-name

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labels but because Juliet’s father is for once tolerating the presence of a Montague. He restrains the angry Tybalt, swayed by imperatives other than the feud: Content thee, gentle coz, let him alone. A bears him like a portly gentleman, And, to say truth, Verona brags of him To be a virtuous and well-governed youth. I would not for the wealth of all this town Here in my house do him disparagement. (1.5.64–69)

Such indulgence at first glance seems to support Charlton’s dismissal of the feud as too lightweight to sustain its role in the tragic structure, let alone to express the central shaping force of any culture. If the family enmity can be so easily set aside by the leader of one faction, how can it nevertheless represent the all-powerful operations of ideology? But one can see in Capulet’s attitude not a casual shedding of the feud but an internal disruption in the social ideology, as the dominant discourse is crossed by other, locally influential ones. Montagues are to be spurned, yet good cheer must be fostered at social gatherings, especially by the host. Categorically, a Montague is an enemy, yet a particular young man’s good behavior and reputation make it hard to treat him rudely. For convivial Capulet, whose favorite activity is preparing and presenting feasts, the primary value at this moment of cross-purposes is surely hospitality. ‘‘Here in my house,’’ whatever you do, don’t spoil the party. Normally kept apart by the reigning ideology, Romeo and Juliet can thus come together in a kind of aporia created by ideological contestation, which in turn enables them to find in their sonnet-exchange discourses that they can share, of romantic courtship and religion. Religion will continue as a common discourse embodied in Friar Laurence. The commonality has in fact preceded this first meeting: it is another sign of crossed ideologies that these two young people so firmly separated by the feud can nevertheless share without any special dispensation the same confessor. His cell is another aporia, or a version of the first, the (only) place where hereditary enemies can meet and formally unite. The discourse of romantic courtship presents a more complicated picture. The first exchange between Romeo and Juliet is in some ways highly conventional, grounded in a familiar cultural masterscript. Their dialogue falls neatly into the standard sonnet’s three quatrains and a couplet, and in typical sonnet fashion elaborates a

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conceit, the lover as pilgrim. In showing so clearly the impress of literary tradition, this wooing passage may remind us of Romeo a few scenes before, expounding his hopeless love for Rosaline in Petrarchan cliche´s. If that earlier love-talk nevertheless feels more artificial, it is partly because the speaker’s diligence in piling up the conceits and oxymora suggests a scholar’s zeal rather than a lover’s;20 but partly because, with the other party to the courtship not even present, Romeo’s one-sided romance acquires the flavor of rhetorical exercise. The passage between Romeo and Juliet at the Capulet party moves more naturally: proposition, response, adjustment, and further proposition, new response. Here Romeo’s speech has a real purpose, pleading for a kiss. And they do kiss, twice. Juliet breaks off the second sonnet begun by Romeo with ‘‘You kiss by th’ book’’ (1.5.109). While the latter part of her teasing complaint underlines how the impersonal discourse of literary love has written itself through their exchange, the first part nevertheless acknowledges real physical contact between them. The later love-speech of Romeo and Juliet uses rhyme much less and highly wrought form not at all. Their language cannot of course completely escape tradition—no language can. But in subsequent dialogue between the lovers convention is not prominent as such, and familiar materials are reworked to flow, with the verse, more freely.21 This often-noted evolution, from romantic discourse shaped by convention to a more direct lyricism that seems to override form, enacts through language the withdrawal of Romeo and Juliet from the defining difference imposed on them by the feud, into immediate, fervent engagement with each other. Perhaps their very youthfulness, which on the one hand highlights the social processing they are undergoing, on the other hand makes that withdrawal more possible in that the processing is not complete. They are less fixed by constant conditioning than their elders, less habituated to their social roles as Montague and Capulet. Even so, the grip of ideology is tenacious, and apt to tighten in moments of emotional crisis. Both lovers offer examples of this tenacity, and both temporary re-conformings are accentuated by a lapse into ‘‘speaking by the book.’’ Trying to deal with Tybalt’s rage right after his marriage to Juliet, Romeo has been unconventional in both action and speech: ‘‘I do protest I never injured thee, / But love thee better than thou canst devise . . . good Capulet—which name I tender / As dearly as mine own—be satisfied’’ (3.1.67–71). But when Mercutio takes up Tybalt’s challenge on Romeo’s behalf and is mortally wounded as a result, conventional reactions and conventional language suddenly reclaim Romeo. Now, not before, he worries about his ‘‘reputation stained /

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With Tybalt’s slander’’ (111–12). The news that Mercutio is dead completes Romeo’s total absorption into the avenger-role prescribed for him in the code of honor, the role from which he had earlier distanced himself so carefully. He gad in triumph, and Mercutio slain? Away to heaven, respective lenity, And fire-eyed fury be my conduct now. Now, Tybalt, take the ‘villain’ back again That late thou gav’st me. (122–26)

The style of his speech as well as its substance belongs to revenge tragedy. In the scene following, Juliet in her turn is repossessed by ideology. She has begun this sequence in soliloquy, wishing impatiently for night and her bridegroom, her speech hastening along with her desire and overflowing the artificial pentameter bounds. Now the Nurse tells her that Tybalt her cousin is dead by the hand of that same bridegroom. O serpent heart, hid with a flow’ring face! Did ever dragon keep so fair a cave? Beautiful tyrant, fiend angelical! Dove-feathered raven, wolvish-ravening lamb! Despise`d substance of divinest show! Just opposite to what thou justly seem’st— A damne`d saint, an honourable villain. (3.2.73–79)

When Juliet lapses into her feud-assigned form of subjectivity as outraged Capulet, her speech changes. All at once, she is speaking in hackneyed images and formally balanced end-stopped lines. Her shock at suddenly having to superimpose Romeo the murderer on Romeo the lover is certainly real, but its articulation through neat oxymora (reminiscent of Romeo’s own conventional language of emotion before his meeting with Juliet) makes clear that she is speaking as a generic Capulet.22 As Orwell might say, feudthink generates bookspeak. Yet if the language of Romeo and Juliet, apart from these lapses, hints at a journey beyond the prevailing ideology, the constraints implicit in the play’s action leave them with nowhere to go, nothing to do except die. For individuals who try to advance beyond their ideology but cannot undo its constitutive influence, there is no feasible way to live. The deaths of Romeo and Juliet can be seen as the

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final expression of a process of excommunication that was adumbrated earlier when Romeo was banished from Verona. Exclusion, as Goran Therborn reminds us, is the main form of sanction invoked by ideology against those who transgress its barriers and definitions.23 The crime that cut Romeo off from his social existence came about through acts of ideological rebellion: crossing over the feud-barrier to love an ‘‘enemy,’’ refusing (as a result) a challenge in violation of the code of honor. The lovers’ deaths look avoidable on the plot level, a matter of misunderstanding and bad timing, but from this perspective that tragic finale inside the family tomb (a setting that visibly manifests the weight of past practices) is all too inevitable. Lawrence Stone thinks that an Elizabethan audience would have understood the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet as self-inflicted: their destruction came about because, by placing personal passion before obedience to family imperatives, they violated the norms of their society.24 I have been arguing that, on the contrary, the norms themselves bring about the tragedy. One could go further and propose that the tragic predicament—possibilities for human development narrowed down and cut off—is built into the operation of ideology. That which is necessary to give us a stable identity and a consistent view of the world is by the same token what limits and distorts us. The suicides of Romeo and Juliet represent one version of ideology’s destructive power. An alternative outcome to the action, less dramatic but just as tragic in its own way, would portray the two young people as recaptured for good by their social conditioning. Romeo would become the Tybalt of the Montagues, challenging Capulets on cue and advancing his manly reputation. Juliet would have an elaborate church wedding and afterward live comfortably in her different sphere as the rich and decorative cover to Paris’s book. Does the destruction of this young pair do anything to transform the feud and the ideological force it represents? Certainly Capulet and Montague join hands in their mutual grief at the very end of the play, initiating what the Prince calls ‘‘a glooming peace.’’ Taking the hopeful view, we might conclude that the union of Romeo and Juliet, born in the contradictions of ideology that open up possibilities for change and development, signals even in their death the end of the old system and the beginning of a new phase. But the hopeful view has to ignore or discount the ironies that hedge that reconciliation of the patriarchs. The fathers propose to seal their peace by erecting gold statues to their children, an image that not only suggests vulgar show but also resonates disturbingly with Romeo’s recent diatribe against gold as a poison, a murderer (5.1.81–85). Memorializing the feud’s victims in a medium that is synonymous

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with corruption and death makes at best an inauspicious beginning for a new era of peace. What is more, as many readers have observed, the proposals of Montague and Capulet suggest in their form renewed competition rather than cooperation. Capulet Montague

Capulet

O brother Montgue, give me thy hand. This is my daughter’s jointure, for no more Can I demand. But I can give thee more, For I will raise her statue in pure gold, That whiles Verona by that name is known, There shall no figure at such rate be set As that of true and faithful Juliet. As rich shall Romeo’s by his lady lie. . . . (5.3.295–302)

Both fathers speak the language of commercial rivalry as they strive not to be outdone in conspicuous display. If mercantile competition played a part in their feud, it has never been so noticeable as in this moment of supposed reconciliation.25 Traditional productions of Romeo and Juliet, while often cutting or omitting entirely Friar Laurence’s lengthy explanations in the last scene, usually present the reconciliation to be taken at face value. Directors more inclined to social criticism interrogate it. Viewers of Michael Bogdanov’s 1986–87 RSC production, for example, could have little assurance of a brave new world in Verona when they witnessed the actual unveiling of those golden statues, staged as an empty public relations event with the Prince speaking from cue cards and papparazzi photographing all the surviving principals in appropriate poses. The handshake of Capulet and Montague became a photo op.26 In any case, even the most optimistic reading or staging of the final exchange between Capulet and Montague as marking a definitive social change leaves unaltered the larger tragic script of ideology. If this particular instrument of forming subjectivities becomes outmoded, a new system of distinctions and codes will replace it as the ‘‘ancient’’ order of things that divides and excludes in order to define.

Notes 1. Arthur Brooke, The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (London, 1562), fol. G4. Her mother says that most of the girl’s friends are already married. In William

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Painter’s version Juliet is almost eighteen; see The Palace of Pleasure (London, 1567), Nnn2r. 2. Montague likens him to ‘‘the bud bit with an envious worm / Ere he can spread his sweet leaves to the air / Or dedicate his beauty to the sun’’ (1.1.148–50). William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). 3. Shakespearian Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948), 59–60. 4. ‘‘Romeo and Death,’’ Shakespeare Studies 14 (1981): 135–36. Her main point is Romeo’s bent to self-destruction, which she sees as expressing his society’s pervasive violence. 5. ‘‘Coming of Age in Verona,’’ in ‘‘Romeo and Juliet’’: Critical Essays, ed. John F. Andrews, Garland Shakespearean Criticism Series, no. 10 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1993), 337. 6. Reported on All Things Considered, National Public Radio, 27 July 1994. 7. Romeus and Juliet, A2r. 8. Prol.3; 1.1.101. G. K. Hunter points to the lack of content in the enmity between Capulets and Montagues when he observes that the feud has ‘‘little political reality’’ and exists to put pressure on the love of Romeo and Juliet; see ‘‘Shakespeare’s Earliest Tragedies: Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet,’’ Shakespeare Survey 27 (1974): 5. 9. This term, preferred by Goran Therborn over role (The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology [London: NLB, 1981]), better emphasizes inward conditioning along with the behavior it generates. 10. For the formality of the lovers’ rhymed couplets here as an expression of the feud mentality, see below. 11. Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, 2d ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993):17–18; the idea is developed in chap. 10. 12. Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London and New York: verso, 1991), 126; cf. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981),114–15. Althusser came close, in his essays on Freud and Lenin and in Lenin and Philosophy (London: New Left Books, 1971), to equating language and the symbolic order with ideology as agents constructing the subject. Catherine Belsey completes the connection in Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 1980), chap. 3. 13. The lack of real difference between Montagues and Capulets (see above) illustrates Saussure’s central dictum that language is a system of differences with no positive terms, a system which creates meaning rather than discovers a preexisting one. For the inextricable relation of language and ideology, see Rosalind Coward and John Ellis, Language and Materialism: Developments in Semiology and the Theory of the Subject (London: Routledge, 1977). Erik Erikson in Identity and the Life Cycle (New York: Norton, 1980) discusses the function of group identification and exclusion in the adolescent years, the founding of identity on difference (97–98). 14. Therborn observes that ‘‘Existential ideologies always exist in concrete historical forms, but are never reducible to them,’’ 44. 15. Eighteenth-century editions before Malone’s of 1790 list Tybalt as Capulet’s kinsman. 16. Both Capulet and Lady Capulet refer to Tybalt as the son of ‘‘my brother’’ (3.5.127; 3.1.146). 17. Lady Capulet demonstrates that one of Juliet’s propositions about names is not naı¨ve wish but fact. Her assertion that in union with Romeo she would ‘‘no

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longer be a Capulet’’ (2.1.78) has the whole weight of contemporary theory and practice of marriage to support it. 18. The feud is an example of Althusser’s ideology of the ruling class, as that class is embodied in the three elite clans on view. The potentially opposing interests of the lower classes are not thematized: Capulet and Montague servants are instead shown as interpellated by their masters’ feud, identified with the interests of the houses they serve. Althusser’s formulation is not completely appropriate here, however, since the cui bono question—whose interests are served by the constituting force?—is not relevant to the feud as presented by Shakespeare. Ideology in Romeo and Juliet is not analyzed structurally but experienced from the subject’s point of view; its origins and purposes are not visible. 19. Here again Shakespeare departs significantly from earlier versions of the story, in which Juliet begs to accompany her lover into exile, either openly as his wife or in disguise. Brooke has Romeus refuse for fear that Capulet will pursue and harm them, but in the world Shakespeare has created, to leave the city together is not even conceived as possible. 20. Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health, Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is! ...................... Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs, Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers’ eyes, Being vexed, a sea nourished with lovers’ tears. (1.1.177–89)

21. Several critical studies chart the lovers’ shift out of conventional speech. Perhaps the best known of these is Harry Levin, ‘‘Form and Formality in Romeo and Juliet,’’ Shakespeare Quarterly 11 (1960): 3–11. Kiernan Ryan applies Romeo’s line ‘‘Love goes toward love as schoolboys from their books’’ (2.1.201) to this movement beyond the ‘‘prescribed texts’’; see ‘‘Romeo and Juliet: The Language of Tragedy,’’ in The Taming of the Text: Explorations in Language, Literature, and Culture, ed. Willie van Peer (London: Routledge, 1988), 116. 22. W. H. Auden notes the radical disparity between this conventional speech and the one that opened the scene, without suggesting any function for the difference; see ‘‘Commentary on the Poetry and Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet,’’ in the Laurel edition of Romeo and Juliet (Dell Publishing, New York, 1988), 26. 23. The victim ‘‘is excluded from further meaningful discourse as being insane, depraved, traitorous, alien, and so on. The excommunicated person is condemned, temporarily or forever, to ideological non-existence. . . . Usually ideological excommunication is connected with the material sanctions of explusion, confinement, or death’’; see Therborn, 83. 24. The Family, Sex, and Marriage, 1500–1800 (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 87. 25. Among critics who have found irony in the final rapprochement of Capulet and Montague, see Clifford Leech, ‘‘The Moral Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet,’’ English Renaissance Drama, ed. Standish Henning et al. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976), 70; (on the competitive nature of their speeches) Nathaniel Wallace, ‘‘Cultural Tropology in Romeo and Juliet,’’ Studies in Philology 88 (1991): 342; Thomas Moisan, ‘‘’O Any Thing, of Nothing First Create!’: Gender and Patriarchy in The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet,’’ in In Another Country: Feminist Perspectives on Renaissance Drama, ed. Dorothea Kehler and Susan Baker (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow

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Press, 1991), 125; Greg Bently, ‘‘Poetics of Power: Money as Sign and Substance in Romeo and Juliet,’’ Explorations in Renaissance Culture 17 (1991): 163–64. 26. For an account of several stagings of the final scene, see Barbara Hodgdon, ‘‘Absent Bodies, Present Voices: Performance Work and the Close of Romeo and Juliet’s Golden Story,’’ in Andrews, 243–65. Bogdanov’s is discussed, 252–54.

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Memorial Art in The Winter’s Tale and Elsewhere: ‘‘I will kill thee / And love thee after’’ NIGEL LLEWELLYN DISCUSSES THE EFFIGIES SCULPTED ON EARLY MODERN English tombs in terms of the familiar ‘‘two bodies’’ theory of monarchy: ‘‘The monumental body was an invented form designed to replace, in theory forever, the life that had been lost or was eventually to be lost.’’ That is, the natural body with its attendant individuation, pollution, and decay, is replaced by an image that is ideal and unchanging. In linguistic terms, death releases the signifier from the restraint of the signifying natural body, so that ‘‘soldiers become Roman heroes, male politicians become statesmen, wives and mothers become paragons of virtue, according to models created deep within patriarchy.’’1 Or, as Shakespeare’s Marc Antony says more succinctly, of his wife Fulvia, ‘‘She’s good, being gone.’’ Fulvia was troublesome to him in life, but dead she acquires the greatness worthy of a monument. Antony’s second wife Octavia is so exemplary that she seems already a tomb sculpture—‘‘holy, cold, and still,’’ comprehending all virtues. The messenger describing her to Cleopatra all but places her on a plinth: ‘‘She shows a body rather than a life, / A statue than a breather.’’2 ‘‘Chaste, silent, and obedient,’’ the familiar formula of wifely perfection, is here carried to its logical conclusion, all motion and agency stilled. Wives like Octavia were rare, though paragon-portrayals of wives after death were not. My concern here is the statue of Hermione in The Winter’s Tale, which does not adorn an actual tomb (though it is sometimes staged that way) but is certainly an idealized image of a woman thought to be dead. Who made the statue of Hermione? On one level, of course, this is a silly question, since there is no statue. The masterly likeness which invites such fervent comment and then such wondering gazes in the final scenes is in fact Hermione herself. But because the ‘‘statue’’ so preempts the dialogue in this final phase it has its own existence in the play’s imaginative world. We speak, rightly, of Act 5, scene 3 of The Winter’s Tale as ‘‘the 197

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statue scene,’’3 just as we call Act 4, scene 6 of King Lear ‘‘the Dover cliff scene,’’ although Dover cliff is precisely where it doesn’t take place. The dizzying perspective created by Edgar’s description of samphire gatherers and fishermen like mice is at least as real in experience and rich in signification as the level ground that is finally revealed as reality. Who, then, made the statue that the discourse of the play makes real—even though that reality is finally denied? The answer is more complicated than it appears to be. The immediate agent is ‘‘that rare Italian master, Julio Romano’’ (Winter’s Tale 5.2.98). But this agency is anything but straightforward as the play presents it. Giulio Romano, anomalous as the only contemporary artist referred to in the whole of Shakespeare’s oeuvre and chronologically absurd as a Renaissance Italian invoked in pre-Christian Sicilia, is also a bad fit for the role Shakespeare assigned to him, being famed as a painter rather than as a sculptor. Vasari, indeed, in his Lives of the Painters, quotes an epitaph on Giulio’s skill in rendering lifelike bodies through both painting and sculpture,4 but this tribute receives no support at all from contemporary accounts or Giulio’s known work. Perhaps, as Capell (Notes and Various Readings to Shakespeare, 3 vols. (London, 1779–83), 2:182) and others thought, the description of the statue as ‘‘a piece many years in the doing and now newly performed by . . Julio Romano’’ (5.2.96–98) means that Romano only painted a statue that somebody else had created over the years.5 Or perhaps the miscast, anachronistic artist calls for no special attention in a play that features the notorious seacoast of Bohemia. But if the problematics are not accidental they may point us beyond the suddenly introduced Italian master. Leontes himself, told already about Giulio Romano, nevertheless presses the question: ‘‘What was he that did make it?’’ (5.3.63). First behind the self-canceling artist in the statue’s provenance is surely Paulina, who has not only caused the statue to be made, according to the official fiction, but, presumably in fact, has worked at her mysterious project daily since Hermione’s death in a removed house—‘‘some great matter there in hand’’ (5.2.105–8). This private work parallels her daily mission observed by everyone, that of reiterating to Leontes the goodness of his dead queen and the magnitude of his loss. In secret as in public, in physical materials as well as Leontes’ mind (i.e., in received fiction as in dramatic reality), Paulina laboriously creates the image of Hermione’s perfections. At first she has to thrust it on a resistant Leontes, obsessed with his own paranoid creation of Hermione the adulteress. Then she repeatedly displays it to his more receptive eyes over the long years of grieving.

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The first part of 5.1, before Florizel and Perdita arrive, stands as an emblem of all those instances of the penitential image presented and accepted: the courtiers urge Leontes to put the past behind him and take another wife, but Paulina asserts Hermione’s perfections all the more strongly, and Leontes sorrowfully assents. (Robin Phillips’s 1978 production at Stratford, Ontario, used its late-nineteenthcentury decor to good effect in this scene. Our first view of Sicilia after the passage of sixteen years showed an older Paulina pouring tea for an older Leontes, both of them hobbling in a slow-motion, Chekhovian manner through a ritual they had clearly performed countless times, repeating and waiting.) As a generator of tomb sculpture, a woman seeking to redeem the honor of another woman by creating a permanent countering image, Paulina has a historical analogue in the Dowager Countess of Derby, whose self-commissioned monument in the Church of St. Mary the Virgin at Harefield, Middlesex (c. 1636), includes kneeling figures of her three daughters as well as her own recumbent one. One of these daughters was Anne, Countess of Castlehaven, who was accused by her husband during his sensational trial of herself committing lewd acts with servants. Even if Castlehaven’s word was not to be trusted, by 1636 Anne’s honor was decidedly tarnished. Her mother Alice, the Dowager Countess, used the elaborate tomb she ordered not only to erase time for herself and her daughters (they are depicted as in youth, with long hair flowing loose), but to reclaim honor for the family by designating her daughter Anne only as Lady Chandos, omitting her disastrous second marriage entirely, and by placing her on a par with the two other sisters untouched by scandal (see figure 1).6 But the main efficient cause of the statue of Hermione is Leontes himself. In one way, the existence of the statue is a surprise to him, revealed by Paulina only after his reunion with Perdita fulfills the oracle. In another way, he has been cooperating with Paulina through the whole sixteen years in the creation of the perfect Hermione-image and doing daily homage to it. It was Leontes himself who began the process, removing the living wife and thus meeting the basic condition for her representation, as for representation of any kind: absence. The living Hermione, like Fulvia, was troublesome, but the idealized marble Hermione is a treasure that commands only admiration. His exclamation when the statue is revealed—‘‘O royal piece!’’—embraces both the lost queen and the splendid artistic creation and entangles them beyond distinction (5.3.38). The Duke of Ferrara uses the same term for his own precious possession in Browning’s ‘‘My Last Duchess’’: ‘‘I call / That

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Fig. 1 Hearse monument of Alice, Countess of Derby (1636). Certainly by Maximilian Colt. Harefield, Middlesex. It was to her that Milton dedicated his Arcades.

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piece a wonder, now,’’ he says of his onetime bride, now a wall painting. Leontes is chastened and remorseful as Ferrara is not, yet resembles him in valuing his dead wife as a work of art, when the living model produced anxiety. The Duchess of Ferrara, a gratifying wonder now, was in life disturbingly responsive to others besides her husband. She had A heart—how shall I say?—too soon made glad, Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.

Hermione too was open and receptive, especially with her husband’s best friend. In Leontes’ eyes, her gracious touch on Polixenes’ hand became ‘‘paddling palms and pinching fingers,’’ cordial warmth swelling out of control into a fever of lust. ‘‘Too hot, too hot!’’ pronounced Leontes: This entertainment May a free face put on, derive a liberty From heartiness . . . But . . . (l.2.111–16)

But what if the free—i.e., innocent—face (OED, s.v. ‘‘free,’’ sense 7) that marks the generous manners of good breeding (s.v. ‘‘free’’ 3, 4) is masking something more dangerous, lacking proper restraint, escaping bounds, roaming at will (s.v. ‘‘free’’ 24, 25b)? Hot and free also go together in Othello’s version of hand-anxiety. ‘‘Hot, hot and moist, this hand of yours requires / A sequester from liberty.’’ Desdemona’s hand, if left free, may reach out to anyone. ‘‘So free, so kind, so apt, . . . framed as fruitful / As the free elements,’’ loving company and free of speech, Desdemona in her generosity and readiness to respond (so apt) becomes as dangerous and endangered as Browning’s Duchess. Too soon made glad, too hot. Security resides instead in the immobile sleeping Desdemona that Othello adores in the play’s final scene, as he admires her skin ‘‘smooth as monumental alabaster’’ and resolves to keep her that way forever. ‘‘I will kill thee / And love thee after.’’7 Like the alabaster tomb effigy Othello imagines, the monumental body created by Giulio Romano (or Fra Pandolf in Browning) replaces the living wife who is moved by her own desires, who looks and touches where she will, with something fixed and possessible.8 The motif haunts pop culture as well. In the early 1940s male

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voices crooned on every jukebox about wanting a paper doll to possess entirely, a doll that other fellows could not steal; ‘‘I’d rather have a paper doll to call my own / Than have a fickle-minded real live girl.’’ Marina Warner cites a ’50s song that exults in a ‘‘crying talking / Sleeping walking / Living doll’’ and plans to ‘‘lock her up in a trunk / So no big hunk/ Can steal her away from me’’ (213). Perhaps each decade has its own version.9 The archetype is presumably Ovid’s Pygmalion, who also found the real live girls fickleminded and, being an artist, could make his own doll to keep sequestered—an ivory one in this case. The skillfully contrived figure seems to live and wish to move (‘‘velle moveri,’’ Metamorphoses 10.251), yet Pygmalion made her precisely to negate the wayward mobility that disgusted him in living women.10 I am especially interested in the lover-dollmakers who actively clear the way for the monumental bodies they prefer by deanimating their living dear ones. Othello goes about it most overtly, stilling breath and motion in Desdemona while we watch. Leontes demands Hermione’s death in the trial scene, though by the time his wishes apparently come true he is appalled at what his actions have brought about. His paranoia has put her life ‘‘in the level of [his] dreams’’ (determined it by his perceiving/designing eye, as well as placed it within range of his attack) and forced her to lay it down (3.2.81–82). As he first seeks to empty out life from Hermione and then as penitent mourner joins with Paulina in perpetuating her cold, perfect image, Leontes is closer than he seems at first glance to his parallel in the source-narrative for The Winter’s Tale, Greene’s Pandosto. Pandosto, whose unjustly accused wife Bellaria really does die, directly monumentalizes her. First he embalms her body, literally draining out its volatile fluids and replacing them with preservatives. Then he surrounds that fixed version of her with an elaborate sepulchre that he has erected and had engraved with gold (Bullough, 172). Another artist-spouse, in Poe’s story ‘‘The Oval Portrait,’’ quite literally transmutes his living wife into a work of art (see Bronfen, 111– 17). He paints her obsessively while denying the reality of her literal body, ignoring signs of her growing weakness as she sits for him. When he is finished, his portrait is perfect and his wife is dead. As for Browning’s Duke, his complicity in the death of his wife is left ominously unarticulated. He ‘‘gave commands,’’ we are told, and all her smiles stopped; and now he is available for another alliance. Next question? Such wife-memorials suggest how extreme mourning may conceal, or turn into, its opposite—the need to have the loved woman safely dead. The dear departed wife is dear because she is departed,

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and finally departed because dear. She is so dear that she can be loved without danger only in memorial form. Therefore, kill her literally to seal the symbolic deanimation.11 Idealizing love slides into murder on the way to necrophilia. And not in fiction only. Seventeenth-century history offers a parallel text in Sir Kenelm Digby, whose passionate love for Venetia Stanley (a third cousin, as it happens, of the problematic Countess of Castlehaven) manifests the same knot of desire and anxiety we have seen in Shakespeare’s spousal sculptors, the same drive to still wayward life into changeless beauty. Their romance had to overcome many obstacles, including a false rumor of Digby’s death and Venetia’s subsequent involvement with another lover, the Earl of Dorset. Too quick to get over her grief ? Too hot?12 In spite of this proof of her unstable desires, Sir Kenelm did later marry Venetia, ‘‘very much against the good will of his mother,’’ Aubrey gossips; ‘‘but he would say that a wise man, and lusty, could make an honest woman out of a Brothell-house’’ (Aubrey, 100). When Venetia died of tuberculosis at thirty-three, her husband was devastated. Yet some said he himself brought about her death, or at least hastened it, by his efforts to preserve her and her good looks: making her wear strange cosmetics he concocted, feeding her snail soup and capons fed on vipers (Fulton, 17). More straightforward suspicion had it that Sir Kenelm murdered Venetia because he was ‘‘jealous of her that she would steale a leape’’ (Aubrey, 101). Although even Aubrey reports that Venetia lived virtuously after marriage, perhaps her husband had second thoughts about achieving complete reform of the brothel house. As a preservative of her beauty more effective than snail soup and vipers, he had Van Dyck take her likeness on her deathbed for a memorial picture which, like Pygmalion’s image and those of Hermione and the Duchess of Ferrara, looks as if she were alive.’’13 In this safely fixed state, Sir Kenelm kept his wife always with him. He wrote to his brother, ‘‘This is the onely constant companion I now have’’ (Gabrieli, 248). Considerably more constant than the living Venetia, especially in her husband’s anxious imagination.14 Dear because departed, departed because dear. Lovers for the most part don’t gloss their processes as clearly as Othello does in proposing to kill his wife and then love her, post hoc leading naturally to propter hoc; but this is surely the subtext of their desired dolls of paper, paint, and ivory. Consider the idealist in Marvell’s ‘‘Garden,’’ retreating from sexual passion so as to transmute it into something isolated, intellectual, and safe. ‘‘Apollo hunted Daphne so, / Only that she might laurel grow.’’ Apollo didn’t really want the real live

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Daphne, who resisted, thwarted, ran off. He wanted the thing she turned into, the laurel tree: fixed, always there, ready with its leaves to crown his greatness. Yet for Leontes, in particular, there is a countering need to deny absence and death. The extreme lifelikeness of the statue, as of Pygmalion’s image and the paintings by Poe’s artist and Browning’s Fra Pandolf, may manifest in part the male artist’s wish to rival and outdo the woman’s generative function, by producing through art a product more perfect than one of woman born. Nevertheless, the implied teleology of these works of art is independent life. Desirous of moving or just about to speak, they strain toward the supreme moment when cold art becomes breathing nature. Leontes, who has kept the unchanging image of Hermione before his eyes for so many years, in the last scene of The Winter’s Tale begs that it actually move and speak, even while fearing the uncanny ‘‘magic’’ that could bring about such reanimation. To wish alive the wife he has tried for so long, in one way or another, to immobilize marks a seismic shift in Leontes’ psyche. Fears and associations accompanying the reanimation project suggest that the older desire is still powerful. ‘‘The idealized pictures of restoration hovering about the statue are infected by more unsettling versions of return and rebirth,’’ remarks Kenneth Gross (106); the memory of Antigonus’s dream of Hermione as a vengeful ghost (3.3.15–38), the fantasy voiced by Paulina and Leontes that if he were to marry again Hermione’s spirit would reanimate her buried body to haunt him with reproaches. Leontes’ conflicted wishes about the Hermione-image encapsulate the whole sixteen years of remorse that have passed since we last saw him. When Time entered in 4.1 to figure that ‘‘wide gap,’’ his words emphasized the slow revolutions that reverse old situations into their opposites and enable the emergence of the new generation, the gradual maturing of Florizel and particularly Perdita. But we are invited also to consider how this time was for Leontes, condemned to ‘‘live without an heir,’’ set apart from this generational development. When we return to Sicilia in that epitome-scene at the beginning of the fifth act, the sense it conveys of Leontes’ sixteen years is not slow transformation but rather endless repetition of the same rituals of rebuke and penitence before the fixed image of the dead Hermione.15 The courtiers in 5.1 underline this frozen, iterative mourning by pleading against the stasis that freezes their fortunes as well, begging the King to move onward into a new marriage, ‘‘for royalty’s repair, / For present comfort and for future good’’ (31–32). But if the play calls our attention to this non-progression, how

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should we understand it? And, for that matter, how should we understand its sudden cessation when that which was lost is restored and the statue comes to life? A modern way into the mysterious images and actions of Leontes’ redemption is offered by the work of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok on blocked mourning. If the mourning process is not allowed to go its course, a process of incorporation may take place, which instead of working through loss and change seeks to deny them by secretly ‘‘encrypting’’ the lost loved one, perfect and fixed, within the psyche. This (delusory) recuperative magic of incorporation is distinct from, and opposite to, introjection, the normal process by which the ego expands and transforms itself by taking in internal and external changes. The encrypted imago marks desires that could not be assimilated, i.e., the failure of introjection. Torok compares it to a memorializing work of art: ‘‘Like a commemorative monument, the incorporated object betokens the place, the date, and the circumstances in which desires were banished from introjection: they stand like tombs in the life of the ego’’ (Torok, 114). Leontes and the Sicilian court are magically held in suspension by the oracle, which like the remembered words and affects described by Abraham and Torok is ‘‘the objectal [sic] correlative of the loss . . . buried alive in the crypt’’ (130). From this point of view, Leontes’ long penance before the encrypted image of Hermione is not a healing process in itself but at best a step towards it, corrective of his former mistrust but still conditioned by his need to fix and freeze what he loves.16 Only when he can move beyond the whole system and accept the changing, moving woman does he undo the spell of the oracle and wish Hermione into volatile life. What you can make her do I am content to look on, what to speak I am content to hear. (5.3.91–93)

The very visibility of the statue in the last scene signals the breakdown of the incorporation, by removing the secrecy on which that fantasy depended. In a normal mourning process, the magically preserved beloved would now be allowed to die, but because the original problem was in fact rooted in Leontes’ desire for an ‘‘exquisite corpse’’ rather than a living wife, he arrives at introjection by allowing the beautiful form to be alive. For Leontes, accepting loss is accepting imperfection. He takes the first step when, after first objecting to the wrinkles on Hermione’s face, he assents to these

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marks of time’s passage. Admitting imperfection and alteration into his treasured image,17 he empowers both Hermione and himself to reenter the realm of change. To wish the statue into life means not only canceling her death (which Abraham and Torok would see as part of the same fantasy that encrypted her in the first place) but undoing his whole necrophilic need for immobile perfection, moving from the false magic of preserving the lost one by fantasied incorporation to ‘‘an art / Lawful as eating’’ (5.3.110–11).18 This is the transformative art of introjection, the magic of the everyday that reasserts the rhythm of growth and enables the classic comic ending: life goes on. Yet this tragicomedy concludes neither as a simple comedy, in uncomplicated restoration and forgiveness, nor as a tragedy, in suicide (Gross, 109). Reanimating the statue implies a more complex transition, ‘‘a return to the commonplace.’’—not the absolutes of perfect virtue or total betrayal but the small gestures and graces of quotidian relationship.

Notes 1. See Llewellyn, Art of Death, 102, 51; and ‘‘Royal Body,’’ 222. 2. Antony and Cleopatra 1.2.129–33; 2.6.124–25; 3.3.21–22. 3. Even that notorious stickler for accuracy Charles Kean, while finding the usual title of this scene not ‘‘proper,’’ can’t help using the label: he writes to his historical advisor, ‘‘What should the last scene (the statue scene) be called?’’ (letter to George Godwin, bound with Folger copy 1 of Kean’s acting edition, 1856). 4. ‘‘Videbat Jupiter corpora sculpta pictaque / Spirare aedes mortalium aequarier coelo / Julii virtute Romani [Jupiter saw sculpted and painted bodies breathe and the homes of mortals made equal to those in heaven through the skill of Giulio Romano]’’; cited from Barkan, 656. This single reference to Giulio as sculptor was first noted in connection with The Winter’s Tale by Elze (287). 5. For Capell’s reading of performed as ‘‘completed by painting’’ see notes on these lines in the Variorum and Arden editions. Notice that this interpretation leaves the actual maker of the statue unspecified. 6. Herrup, 76 and passim. The prosecutions of Castlehaven and the servant Giles Broadway for raping the Countess resulted in conviction, but nevertheless damaged her honor. ‘‘Castlehaven’s defense rested upon the assumption that women were generally more sexually voracious . . . than men; pace the verdict, the Countess and Lady Audley [her daughter-in-law] emerged from the trial with sullied reputations’’ (Herrup, 148). For an unfavorable rewriting of history by the same means, see Julia Walker’s account of how James I used the tomb he erected for Elizabeth I in the Henry VII Chapel in Westminster Abbey to marginalize and diminish his predecessor, displacing her from the centrality of the altar to a place in the north aisle shared with her unpopular sister Mary I, and enclosing her body in a tomb that was smaller and far less elaborate than the one erected at the same time for his mother Mary Queen of Scots. 7. Othello 3.4.39–40; 2.3. 14, 335–36; 3.3.198–99; 5.2.5, 18–19.

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8. On independent movement as well as speech as homologous with unchastity, see Stallybrass, 255–56. Traub sees the fetishization of Ophelia’s virginal corpse as well as the symbolic displacement of the living Desdemona into a jewel and Hermione into a statue as male strategies for containing and negating female erotic power. Traub’s associations parallel mine to some extent, though her emphases are different. Cavell identifies Leontes as the cause of Hermione’s turning to stone and links Othello’s image of Desdemona as an alabaster tomb statue, again with different emphases (481–82). 9. The song is Lionel Bart’s ‘‘Living Doll’’ (1959). Johnny Black’s ‘‘Paper Doll’’ itself served for several decades: written in 1915, it was not published until 1930, then reissued in 1942 when the Mills Brothers made their hit record. 10. In an early modern version of the story recounted by Pettie (1576), the protagonist makes his statue specifically as a substitute for his beloved, Penthea, who he feels has betrayed him by preferring another lover. 11. Llewellyn notes that ‘‘Monuments to living people effectively ‘kill’ their subject and fix their images in time’’ (‘‘The Royal Body,’’ 238). 12. It is also possible that the false rumor of Digby’s death in France is itself a fiction, invented by him when writing his glamorized reconstruction of their perfect love to exculpate his wayward beloved. Though Digby and Venetia were real enough, accounts of their relationship depend heavily on Aubrey’s unreliable gossip in Brief Lives and a narrative written by Digby himself, cast as a romance but clearly based on his own life. It was first published in 1827–28 as Private Memoirs, and again in 1968 as Loose Fantasies, the title that appears in the original manuscript; its historical accuracy lies somewhere between the two poles indicated by these titles, but exactly where is hard to determine. ‘‘Loose fantasies’’ implies free invention or maybe meditation. ‘‘Loose’’ may mean just unstructured, not wrought into a finished work of art (a throwaway title in the mode of gentlemanly sprezzatura). Neither reading can exclude the disturbing other meaning (loose ⳱ wanton, dissolute). 13. ‘‘One could not distinguish whither it were of a sleeping or of a dead bodie; and so, lying in such a posture as required neither speech nor motion, it had the advantage to deceive one in iudging whither it be a picture or not. . . . It is the Master peece of all the excellent ones that ever Sir Antony Vandike made, who drew her the second day after she was dead’’ (Sir Kenelm Digby to John Digby, 19 June 1633; cited from Gabrieli, 246). The painting is now owned by Earl Spencer; there is a copy in the Dulwich Picture Gallery. 14. A memorial in a different medium is Digby’s Loose Fantasies, celebrating ‘‘the perfect friendship and noble love of two generous persons, that seemed to be born in this age by ordinance of heaven to teach the world anew what it hath long forgotten, the mystery of loving with honour and constancy, between a man and a woman’’ (Digby, 5). Since such perfect accord is almost always prevented by failures of constancy and regulated will on the woman’s side (5–6), an artistic restaging of one’s relationship in idealized romance terms is gratifying. For one thing, it allows considerable opportunity to vent anxiety about Venetia’s sexual straying, in strictures about the defects of ‘‘ordinary women’’ and in Theagenes’ lengthy ravings against Stelliana (Digby, 66–67, 83–84) when he learns of her infidelity without the mitigating circumstances (she believed him to be dead), before his rage is subsumed in forgiveness and rapturous reunion. 15. Even in Time’s speech, Michael Bristol observes, ‘‘The chorus openly admits here [4.1.4–9] that the passage of time is not only without duration in the ordinary meaning of the concept but also without content. Sixteen years are missing, and for

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all intents and purposes they are empty . . . ideas of growth or of lived experience or of any sequence of developmental stages or incremental stages are suppressed’’ (146). During the sixteen years, Leontes ‘‘shuts up himself ’’ (4.1.18) in static grief for the wife and children he believes all dead, not reaching out to the only wronged person he knows to be alive, Polixenes. B. J. Sokol also sees Leontes’ penitential years as nonprogressive: ‘‘Leontes’ years of fruitless suffering represent dangerous stultification as well as worthy contrition, in effect idolising pain. . . . Leontes verges on making a fetish of his own suffering’’ (78). 16. Granville Barker observes that Leontes’ instant repentance is marked by the same nervous excess that characterized his jealousy: ‘‘in the scene of the trial when the tyrant breaks down under the sudden swift punishment of his folly, there is something a little ridiculous in his breathless confession to the surrounding courtiers, his frantic promises to undo what he has done’’ (iv–v). 17. Thus separating it finally from tomb sculpture, in which nothing is allowed to mar the idealization; Esdaile reports that Bushnell’s monument to Lady May was deliberately buried when the church of Mid Lavant, Sussex, was restored in 1871, because she was marked with the smallpox (119). 18. ‘‘If accepted and worked through,’’ Abraham and Torok argue, ‘‘the loss would require major readjustment. But the fantasy of incorporation merely simulates profound psychic transformation through magic. . . . The magical ‘cure’ by incorporation exempts the subject from the painful process of reorganization’’ (126–27).

Works Cited Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok. ‘‘Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation.’’ In The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalvsis, ed. and trans. Nicholas T. Rand, vol. 1: 125–38. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Aubrey, John. Brief Lives. Ed. Oliver Lawson Dick. London: Secker and Warburg, 1949. Barkan, Leonard. ‘‘Living Sculptures: Ovid, Michelangelo, and The Winter’s Tale.’’ ELH 48 (1981): 639–67. Bristol, Michael. ‘‘In Search of the Bear: Spatiotemporal Form and the Heterogeneity of Economies in The Winter’s Tale.’’ Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991): 145–67. Bronfen, Elisabeth. Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic. New York: Routledge, 1992. Browning, Robert. Poetical Works. London: Oxford University Press, 1964. Bullough, Geoffrey, ed. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. Vol. 8. London: Routledge, 1975. Cavell, Stanley. The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979. Digby, Sir Kenelm. Loose Fantasies. Ed. Vittorio Gabrieli. Tema a testi, vol. 14. Rome: Edizioni di storia a letteratura, 1968. Elze, Karl. ‘‘The Supposed Travels of Shakespeare.’’ In Essays on Shakespeare. Trans. L. Dora Schmitz. London: Macmillan, 1874, pp. 254–315. Esdaile, Katharine A. English Church Monuments, 1510 to 1840. London: Batsford, 1946.

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Fulton, John F. Sir Kenelm Digby: Writer, Bibliophile, and Protagonist of William Harvey. New York: Oliver, 1937. Gabrieli, Vittorio. Sir Kenelm Digby: Un inglese italianato nell’eta della controriforma. Rome: Edizioni di storia a letteratura, 1957. Granville Barker, Harley. Producer’s preface to Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale: An Acting Edition. Boston: Walter H. Baker, 1913. Gross, Kenneth. The Dream of the Moving Statue. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992. Herrup, Cynthia B. A House in Gross Disorder: Sex. Law, and the 2d Earl of Castlehaven. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Llewellyn, Nigel. The Art of Death: Visual Culture in the English Death Ritual, c. 1500–c. 1800. London: Reaktion Books, 1991. ———. ‘‘The Royal Body: Monuments to the Dead, For the Living.’’ In Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure in English Culture, c. 1540–1660, ed. Lucy Gent and Llewellyn, 218–40. London: Reaktion Books, 1990. Ovid. Metamorphoses. Trans. Frank Justus Miller. 2d ed. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934. Pettie, George. ‘‘Pigmalions freinde, and his Image.’’ 1576. In A Petite Pallace of Pettie his Pleasure, ed. Herbert Hartman, 228–47. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938. Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works. Ed. David Bevington. 4th ed. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. ———. Shakespeare’s Play of The Winter’s Tale, Arranged for Representation at The Princess’s Theatre with Historical and Explanatory Notes by Charles Kean. London: Chapman, 1856. Sokol, B. J. Art and illusion in ‘‘The Winter’s Tale.’’ Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994. Stallybrass, Peter. ‘‘Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed.’’ In ‘‘Othello’’: Critical Essays, ed. Susan Snyder, 251–77. New York: Garland, 1988. Torok, Maria. ‘‘The Illness of Mourning and the Fantasy of the Exquisite Corpse.’’ In Abraham and Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, 107–24. Traub, Valerie. ‘‘Jewels, Statues, and Corpses: Containment of Female Erotic Power in Shakespeare’s Plays.’’ Shakespeare Survey 20 (1988): 215–38. Walker, Julia M. ‘‘Reading the Tombs of Elizabeth I.’’ English Literary Renaissance 26 (1996): 510–30. Warner, Marina. Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form. New York: Atheneum, 1985.

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Mamillius and Gender Polarization in The Winter’s Tale MAMILLIUS,

THE YOUNG SON OF LEONTES AND HERMIONE IN THE

Winter’s Tale, is onstage for only two scenes. In Act 1, scene 2 he is in attendance for most of the scene, but like a good child present at an adult occasion, he speaks only when spoken to; and he is spoken to only by his father. Leontes runs the usual gamut of adult address to a child, from affectionate endearment (‘‘that’s my bawcock,’’ ‘‘sweet villain’’ [1.2.119, 135]) to dialogue with a pseudo-grownup (‘‘Come, captain,’’ ‘‘thou’rt an honest man’’ [121, 208]),1 but he returns again and again to the progenitorial bond that identifies son with father. Since the fidelity of his wife has suddenly become an issue, paternal pride keeps being destabilized by anxious question, too-vehement assertion, or dependence on doubtful authority: ‘‘Art thou my boy? . . . Art thou my calf ? . . . they say we are / Almost as like as eggs; women say so, / That will say anything. . . . yet were it true / To say this boy were like me’’ (116–34). The question posed rhetorically in familiar kitchy-koo gambits—are you my own darling child?—is freighted here with real neurotic need for confirmation. Mamillius tries to supply that need verbally as well as visually. Yes, he says confidently, he is Leontes’ boy; yes, he is Leontes’ calf—but now less confidently, puzzled at his father’s mood, turning declaration into accommodation with his cautious proviso ‘‘if you will, my lord’’ (127). His last attempt to give the desired answer resorts to the same dubious third-person authority that troubled Leontes’ own perceptions of filial likeness: ‘‘I am like you, they say’’ (206).2 Sent off to play soon after this, Mamillius next appears in 2.1. Again he is with adults, his mother and other court ladies, but now they attend on him, rather than the other way round, as it was in the court scene. He initiates the conversational gambits, and they respond. In this milieu he doesn’t have to wait to be noticed by grownups or guess the right answers to their mystifying questions. He is fully at home, the center of attention. But happy self-display abruptly ends when his father, with other lords, breaks into this 210

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women’s world to wrench him away from it. ‘‘Give me the boy. . . . Bear the boy hence, he shall not come about her’’ (2.1.56–59). And that’s the last we see of Mamillius. From now on he is only an offstage presence, suddenly ill and then shockingly dead. It is almost as if removing him from motherly care takes away his palpable physical reality. Even though he is no longer corporeally before us, however, Mamillius continues to be a central point of emotional reference, and several characters try to come to terms with the meaning of his sickness and death. I shall return later to these diagnoses, but first I want to examine the implications of Leontes’ sudden removal of his son from the nursery world and its maternal figures. How old is Mamillius? About ten, guessed J. H. P. Pafford, judging from his public appearance in 1.2 and his general precociousness.3 But Shakespearean children of whatever age are precocious—this one is actually more like a real child than most—and the text suggests that he is in fact much younger than ten. Mamillius is the same age as Florizel, who in Act 5 is implied to be twenty-one (5.1.125); hence, when the play action began, sixteen years before, both princes were about five. The boy actor who played Mamillius on Shakespeare’s stage was presumably older than that, especially if he was also to play Perdita in the second part of the play,4 but what counts is the image in the playwright’s mind. If Mamillius were really ten years old, it would be surprising to find him still at home in a nursery world populated by women. But the younger child envisioned here is, like his father twenty-three years before, still ‘‘unbreeched’’ (1.2.153–55): dressed in his ‘‘coat’’ or ‘‘coats,’’ the skirts worn by young boy-children before they put on the breeches that completed their gendering as male. Among the upper classes in early modern England, the breeching of boys was a marked event, a formal transition to the next stage of childhood, often coinciding with a shift from the nursery and women’s care to male tutors and attendants. Change of clothing and change of regimen didn’t always come together: Richard Norwood tells us he was already going to school when he ‘‘left off [his] long coats to wear breeches’’—though it was a dame school, attended with his sister, rather than one run by a schoolmaster.5 In any case, when a boy took on male attire it was the outward and visible sign that he was leaving behind the special cherishing accorded to early childhood and setting out on a gendered course that was more strenuous but held appropriate rewards. This is the aspect stressed by Edward VI in a third-person account of his early years:

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[He was] brought up, ’til he came to six yeres old, amoung the wemen. At the sixt yere of his age, he was brought up in learning by Mr. Doctour Cox, who was after his amner, and Jhon Chieke, Mr of Art, tow wel learned men, who sought to bring him up in learning of toungues, of the scriptures, of philosophie, and all learned sciences.6

Before Cox took over, followed in 1544 by Cheke, women dominated young Edward’s household: the ‘‘lady mistress’’ of the royal nursery, Lady Bryan, with the dry-nurse Sibylla Penn and four ‘‘rockers’’ (who were presumably female, as in all the OED examples of this term) doing the more hands-on child-tending—not to speak of Edward’s older sisters, especially Mary, who spent time with him when they could. In this context, Leontes’ sudden appropriation of Mamillius looks like a violent and perhaps premature masculinizing of his son. Opinion varied somewhat about the right age to breech a boy. Ancient authority extended infancy through the first seven years, only then succeeded by childhood.7 In the accounts of early modern English family life gathered by Ralph Houlbrooke, we find that John Greene’s son Jack was just under six when he was put in breeches, but Sir Henry Slingsby thought his son Thomas too young to wear breeches ‘‘being but five years old.’’ Ferdinando Isham was well over eight when he was breeched.8 Sir Thomas Elyot stipulated female care for the first years of his young nobleman, excluding all men except physicians until serious study began at the age of seven. At that point, says Elyot, ‘‘I hold it expedient that he be taken from the company of women, saving that he may have one year, or two at the most, an ancient and sad matron attending on him in his chamber.’’9 Ralph Josselin in the seventeenth century records both his son John’s arrival at this important milestone and (indirectly, in his appended comment) the dangers of infancy and early childhood that he had survived to do so: his diary entry for 3 October 1657 reads, ‘‘John put in breeches, I never saw two sons so clad before.’’10 In between his oldest son Thomas, by then an adult, and six-year-old John, two other Josselin boys had been born, but neither survived his infancy. As a marker of progress towards adulthood, this transition was eagerly anticipated by boys like Francis North, whose breeching was described in detail by his grandmother in a letter to his absent father, Lord Chief Justice North, in October 1679. Young Frank strutted in his breeches and sword, acting the man and rejoicing, as she says, ‘‘to throw off the coats and write man.’’11 No one was more eager than the son of Henri IV of France, who would become Louis

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XIII. Before he was six he was impatient to be wearing ‘‘chausses,’’ though his gouvernante told him he had to wait till he was eight. In fact, the next year, June 1608, he formally took on breeches and sword.12 Separation from his gouvernante and the nursery-establishment at Saint-Germain followed a few months later, after his seventh birthday, in January 1609. Women’s care was felt to be appropriate for boys well past their weaning. Sir John Hayward’s account of Edward VI, written in the early years of the seventeenth century, glosses the journal passage I have already quoted as follows: ‘‘This young Prince was brought vp among nurses, vntill he arriued to the age of sixe yeares, when he had passed this weake and sappie age he was committed to Dr Coxe, who after was his Almoner, and Master John Cheeke.’’13 ‘‘Sappy’’ had near-literal force: the Flemish physician Lemnius, cautioning that children are especially vulnerable to epidemics of contagious diseases, observes: ‘‘those are soonest sick that are very young, and weak and of moist constitution.’’14 The first years of childhood required close, gentle care: in the Sarum Use manual, godparents at baptism were charged to protect the children from fire and water until they were seven—after that, presumably, they could fend for themselves.15 Medieval tradition favored keeping boys in care at home till they were seven, not set to training or study but fed and nurtured to growth.16 Even Erasmus, promoter of the puer senex, counsels a young mother, ‘‘This time will come some day . . . when you must send the boy out from home to learn his letters—and harder lessons, which are the father’s responsibility rather than the mother’s. Now his tender age should be cherished.’’17 The urge to push the child onward had to be balanced against his perceived frailty and softness, his literally fluid state of extreme malleability,18 which needed protection and cherishing. In delaying the assumption of male clothing and accoutrements for young boys, then, social custom acknowledged their need for ‘‘nursing’’ in the more general sense. Postponing the breeching rite, with all that it entailed, until the age of six or seven also allowed for the dissolution of what modern psychologists call symbiosis, the child’s early implication with the maternal figure, out of which a separate identity emerges only gradually.19 Both considerations seem to apply to five-year-old Mamillius, still in this malleable and vulnerable state and unable to survive separation from his mother. How in fact does Mamillius die? The play supplies no definitive answer, but many partial ones. One, perhaps the most basic, is articulated only indirectly: his name, introduced by Shakespeare in place of the ‘‘Garinter’’ that he found in his source story, implies in its

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root mamilla (breast or teat), the young child’s strong connection to the maternal body. Critics have interpreted that connection in terms of origin and of contamination,20 but the primary emphasis must surely be dependence of a quasi-bodily nature, as the unweaned infant depends on the nourishing breast. Though past weaning, Mamillius in his vulnerable, ‘‘sappy’’ childhood still participates in the feminine in some somatic way and needs female nurture. Leontes interprets his son’s illness in terms of his own. Overwrought and sleepless himself, he is sure that consigning Hermione to the fire will make him feel better (2.3.1–9). When he follows this assertion by inquiring about the equally febrile and restless Mamillius, we may suspect an irrational conviction that the child’s sickness is an extension of his own and will similarly be cured by the permanent removal of his mother. On a more conscious level, Leontes explains the boy’s sudden illness in psychological terms, as the result of his mental ‘‘conceiving.’’ He fell ill, says Leontes, Conceiving the dishonour of his mother. He straight declined, drooped, took it deeply, Fastened and fixed the shame on’t in himself, Threw off his spirit, his appetite, his sleep, And downright languished. (2.3.13–17)21

Paulina also attributes the child’s death to ‘‘conceiving’’: Mamillius died when his honorable thoughts cleft the heart That could conceive a gross and foolish sire Blemished his gracious dam. (3.2.194–96)22

Though these two differ violently on the target of blame—what for Leontes is Hermione’s dishonor is for Paulina her undeserved dishonoring—they both focus on Mamillius’s internalization of what has happened to Hermione, his identification with his mother. So does a third account, that of the servant who announces his death: ‘‘The prince, your son, with mere conceit and fear / Of the Queen’s speed, is gone’’ (3.2.142–43). Anticipating his mother’s death, Mamillius dies himself. All three commentators see a direct connection between physical death and the psychological identification of child with mother, and all three use a terminology that does not distinguish the mental from the physical: conceit could mean ‘‘a (morbid) affection or seizure of the body or mind,’’ and conceive was used

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for the generation of a physical illness.23 These voiced explanations of decline and death thus fill out rather than contradict the unvoiced implications of symbiotic bond that inhere in the name Mamillius—rationalizing, as Lacan might say, in the Symbolic register the wordless bodily truth of the Real. The point of this premature rupture of the mother-child bond, as many critics have observed, is Leontes’ effort to realign his son with himself. Betrayed by his former mirror-comrade Polixenes, he seeks a new one in this loved boy who looks so much like him,24 a new twin lamb who will be his mate in another alliance apart from women (as the boy Polixenes was in their youth).25 Although Leontes doesn’t take formal possession of Mamillius until Act 2, he starts enlisting him on his side as soon as his sexual suspicions are awakened in Act 1. The coopting move is apparent not only in the dialogue I have already glanced at—are you mine? are you like me?—but visually, as a new stage grouping is inaugurated: the initial configuration of the court scene, three adults conversing with each other and a child on the margins, shifts to two and two. Leontes places himself with the boy, whose sex and appearance mirror his, and apart from the heterosexual pair of Hermione and Polixenes,26 withdrawing from the adult conversation to commune with his son and then sending the others off by themselves: ‘‘We two will walk, my lord, / And leave you to your graver steps’’ (1.2.170–71).27 The forcible masculinizing of Mamillius is thus part of a more widespread change in stage dynamics, an alignment of males against females that begins before the decisive act of separating him from his mother and continues until his death. After the boy goes off to play in the play’s second scene, Leontes seeks another male ally, Camillo. In the nursery scene that follows, the King with his male entourage enters an enclave of women to carry off the male child and banish the chief offending woman to prison. Hermione will be thus kept apart from his ‘‘free person’’ (2.1.194), and from Mamillius ‘‘barred, like one infectious’’ (3.2.96).28 Subsequent scenes repeat the spatial separation of genders: in the next one the women are together at the prison, in the one following that Leontes is withdrawn among his lords until Paulina forces her way in. The prison grouping, with the women focused on Hermione and her newborn infant (and easily marginalizing the ill-at-ease jailer), replicates the actual social custom of women gathering around a new mother at and after the birth, excluding men. ‘‘The social space of birth was,’’ in the words of Adrian Wilson, ‘‘a collective female space, constituted on the one hand by the presence of gossips and midwife, and on the other hand by the absence of

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men.’’29 Leontes meanwhile has set up his opposing male world which excludes not only Hermione but other women, specifically Paulina: ‘‘I charged thee that she should not come about me’’ (2.3.43). When she nevertheless crosses over from the woman’s world of childbirth to violate his male space, and doubles her offense by bringing in from that same world a child whose very sex must compound her alienness in Leontes’ eyes, his rage is homicidal. He wants not only Hermione consigned to the fire but Paulina and the baby girl as well. Speaking through his abuse of Paulina, and of Antigonus for not controlling her, are his fear of women’s power over men and his need to keep the genders absolutely separated. On the one hand, Paulina is ‘‘a mankind witch,’’ a woman arrogating male power and force (2.3.67). On the other, Antigonus is unmanned by weak compassion: You that have been so tenderly officious With Lady Margery, your midwife there, To save this bastard’s life. . . . (2.3.158–60)

Paulina is seen as a midwife—literally ‘‘with-woman’’—and Leontes’ scornful addition ‘‘your midwife’’ associates Antigonus as well with the women’s party. If Leontes then pulls the older man’s beard, as his next line seems to imply,30 he is only reinforcing this demotion of Antigonus from the ranks of true manhood. Other men besides Antigonus support Hermione, of course. A stage blocking that expressed sympathies rather than enforced allegiance would place Leontes alone on one side and all the others together opposed to him. An incursion like Paulina’s or counterarguments like her husband’s keep reminding us that the grouping imposed by Leontes has its artificial, even obsessive side, rooted in adolescent fears: the massing of same-sex brothers against the alien female, the boys against the girls. It is there full force in the last scene he dominates, the trial scene, where the Folio stage directions call first for ‘‘Leontes, Lords, Officers,’’ and then ‘‘Hermione (as to her trial), Ladies’’ (Aa5v). By imposing this pattern of gender groups in formal, hostile encounter, Leontes does violence to a separation of the genders more grounded in nature and custom. Hermione complains that his legal proceedings have broken into the new mother’s lying-in period of sanctioned withdrawal from marital relations and patriarchal authority.31 The childbed privilege denied, which ’longs To women of all fashion; lastly, hurried

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Here, to this place, i’th’ open air, before I have got strength of limit. (3.2.101–4)

Leontes has short-circuited this normal process temporarily separating men and women to bring about the artificial, adversarial lineup of the trial. The effect is to freeze this liminal oppositional gender-grouping for sixteen years, with a monklike Leontes among his male courtiers, dominated by a Paulina whose first allegiance is always to Hermione, affirming her living presence in remembrance and finally in fact. The epithet of ‘‘midwife’’ once applied to Paulina plays out in her long dominance over him and his court, a muchextended parallel to the temporary supremacy of the midwife in the patriarchal household during and after childbirth.32 The ceremonial last scene, which restores Hermione to her husband and family and joins Paulina to a new mate, from this point of view operates like a long-delayed churching ceremony, resocializing the new mother and reinstituting normal relations between men and women.33 Indeed, this final, formal reappearance of Hermione invokes the churching ritual in more than one way. Like the new mother in her traditional veil,34 Hermione is first seen behind a curtain. Mysteriously returned from the grave, redeemed from death, she figures renewed life, like the Countess of Bridgewater at whose churching Donne preached in the early 1620s. The Countess, having suffered the curse on Eve’s daughters, now partakes also of ‘‘a sense of the last glorious resurrection, in having rais’d her, from that Bed of weaknesse, to the ability of coming into his presence, here in his house.’’35 The churching rite celebrated a woman’s deliverance not only from death but from social and sexual sequestration. In The Winter’s Tale the concluding ritual ends a sexual separation inscribed on a whole society. The other effect of Leontes’ short-circuiting of time is not redeemable. He attempts to pull Mamillius precipitously forward from what a contemporary calls ‘‘first childhood’’36 as he himself recoils backward from adult responsibility so that the two can meet in boyhood bliss apart from all women. But Mamillius isn’t ready even to live on his own, let alone to play the role for which his father has cast him. Leontes’ own picture, at the opening of the play, of the unbreeched boy-child—himself twenty-three years before, now repeated in his son—clearly expresses an identity not yet fully male: ‘‘In my green velvet coat, my dagger muzzled / Lest it should bite its master’’ (1.2.155–56). Not male breeches but the ungendered skirt worn by both girls and boys; the phallic weapon that will mark

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the man still inoperative. Mamillius is clearly on his way to masculinity: he will fight rather than take eggs for money, he enjoys teasing and dominating the ladies in waiting. But he is not yet arrived there, not yet completely separated from the female matrix in its larger sense. In a world that ruthlessly polarizes male and female, Mamillius can’t survive. Unable to be an ally, he can only be a victim.

Notes 1. All quotations of The Winter’s Tale are from the Oxford Shakespeare edition, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 2. Certainty is even further undermined in the original Folio version of this line, which refers the authority back to the doubting father: ‘‘I am like you say’’ (Aa2r). But since his own assertion could hardly give Leontes even the limited satisfaction that he voices here in response to Mamillius (‘‘Why, that’s some comfort’’), F2’s addition of they is likely to be right. 3. Introduction to The Winter’s Tale, ed. Pafford (London: Methuen, 1963), lxxxii. 4. See Richard Proudfoot, ‘‘Verbal Reminiscence and the Two-Part Structure of The Winter’s Tale,’’ Shakespeare Survey 29 (1976): 67–78, esp. 72–74; and Stephen Booth, ‘‘Speculations on Doubling,’’ in ‘‘King Lear,’’ ‘‘Macbeth,’’ Indefinition, and Tragedy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 145–46. Proudfoot missed or discounted the Act 5 reference, and thought nine to eleven a likely age for Mamillius (73). Even if Mamillius was played by a child actor with no other part to perform, the actor would probably have been older than five. 5. Richard Norwood, The Journal of Richard Norwood, Surveyor of Bermuda (1631), ed. W. F. Craven and W. B. Hayward (New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1945), 4. 6. Edward VI, Literary Remains of Edward the Sixth, ed. John Gough Nichols, vol. 2 (London: J. B. Nichols, 1857), 209–10. 7. See Hippocrates, cited by Philo Judaeus, in De opificio mundi, vol. 1 of Philo, trans. G. H. Whitaker, Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann, 1929), 6–137, esp. 103–05. 8. See English Family Life, 1576–1716: An Anthology from Diaries, ed. Ralph Houlbrooke (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 150, 147, 164. 9. The Book named The Governor (1531), ed. S. E. Lehmberg (London: Dent, 1962), 19. 10. The Diary of Ralph Josselin, ed. Alan Macfarlane (London: Oxford University Press, 1976), 407. 11. Roger North, The Lives of the Norths, ed. Augustus Jessopp, vol. 3 (London, 1890), 216. 12. Jean He´rouard, Journal de Jean He´rouard, ed. Madeleine Foisil, vol. 1 (Paris: Fayard, 1989), 1148, 1446. 13. Sir John Hayward, The Life and Raigne of King Edward the Sixth (1630), ed. Barrett L. Beer (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1993), 33. 14. Levinus Lemnius, The Secret Miracles of Nature (London, 1658), Bb2r. 15. Manuale ad Vsum Percelebris Ecclesie Sarisburiensis, cited by Nicholas Orme,

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From Childhood to Chivalry: The Education of the English Kings and Aristocracy (London: Methuen, 1984), 7. 16. See Orme, 6, citing Aristotle, Politics 7.17, and Giles of Rome, De regimine principum 2.2.15–17. 17. Desiderius Erasmus, ‘‘The New Mother,’’ in The Colloquies of Erasmus, trans. Craig R. Thompson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 273. 18. Gail Kern Paster, conversation with author. 19. On symbiosis, separation, and individuation, see Margaret S. Mahler, with Manuel Furer, On Human Symbiosis and the Vicissitudes of Individuation (New York: International Universities Press, 1968). On the specific question of the boy’s male identity developing in the process of ‘‘disidentification’’ with the mother, see Robert J. Stoller, ‘‘Facts and Fancies: An Examination of Freud’s Concept of Bisexuality,’’ in Women and Analysis: Dialogues on Psychoanalytic Views of Femininity, ed. Jean Strouse (New York: Dell, 1974), 343–64; and R. R. Greenson, ‘‘Disidentifying from Mother,’’ International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 49 (1968): 370–74. 20. See Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, ‘‘Hamlet’’ to ‘‘The Tempest’’ (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 226; Carol Thomas Neely, Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare’s Plays (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 194–97. 21. The symptoms described here—failure of spirit, appetite, sleep, languishing—call to mind modern diagnoses of clinical depression in a child bereaved of a parent, who tries to rationalize his overwhelming loss by locating its cause in himself, and becomes oppressed with guilt. 22. Orgel thinks that in her choice of ‘‘dam,’’ usually used of animals, Paulina is ironically echoing Leontes’ earlier dismissive consignment of baby and mother, ‘‘brat’’ and ‘‘dam,’’ to the fire (2.3.92–95). But ‘‘dam’’ need not be, as Orgel asserts, contemptuous in reference to human mothers: Macduff uses it for his own wife as mother when his family is slaughtered (‘‘all my pretty chickens and their dam,’’ Macbeth 4.3.218) not to denigrate but to foreground the biological, bodily link—as I think Paulina does here. 23. OED, s.v. ‘‘conceit,’’ 11; s.v. ‘‘conceive’’ 5. 24. See Adelman, 225 and 356, citing Neely and others. 25. Adelman notes that the mirror-twin stage ‘‘offers protection against engulfment by the mother while allowing for the comforts of union’’ (356 n). 26. In Brian Bedford’s 1998 production at Stratford, Ontario, Leontes accentuated the new alignment and its roots in his jealousy of Polixenes by snatching Mamillius back after Polixenes had picked the child up and fondled him to illustrate his delight in his own son (1.2.163–69). 27. Leontes’ urge to gather male allies also informs the meditation on cuckolds in this scene: even in his anguish, he finds ‘‘comfort in ’t’’ that unfaithful wives are the common male fate, shared by ‘‘many thousand on’s’’ (1.2.188–205). 28. Leontes’ retrospective satisfaction that, although she has ‘‘too much blood in him,’’ Hermione did not breastfeed Mamillius (2.1.57) is part of the same effort to preserve the male from the contaminating female. His ‘‘I am glad you did not nurse him’’ (56) may be alluding more specifically to the widespread belief that character traits were passed on through suckling. For a discussion of this perception, see Thomas Phaer, The Boke of Children (1544), cited by G. F. Still, The History of Paediatrics (London: Oxford University Press, 1931), 109; Patricia Crawford, ‘‘The Construction and Experience of Maternity in Seventeenth-Century England,’’ in Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England, ed. Valerie Fildes (London: Routledge, 1990), 8; Elyot, 15; Erasmus, 283; James Guillemeau, Child-Birth or, The Happy

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Deliverie of Women . . . (London, 1612), Kk4v. But the whole transformed stage configuration supports a more general insistence on the female itself as polluting. 29. Adrian Wilson, ‘‘The Ceremony of Childbirth and Its Interpretation,’’ in Fildes, 73; see also David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 55– 94. Cressy notes that ‘‘from the viewpoint of ministers and physicians, and perhaps too for many husbands, the gathering of women at childbirth was exclusive, mysterious, and potentially unruly’’ (55). 30. ‘‘So sure as this beard’s grey’’ (2.3.161) presumably refers to Antigonus, since Leontes himself is only twenty-eight or so. He may just gesture at the older man’s beard, but editors since Malone have seen an implied stage direction for the furious Leontes to pull at it. 31. See Wilson in Fildes, 85–88. 32. See Cressy, who notes that ‘‘Midwives were summoned as servants but performed as officiants. . . . [T]hey supplanted husbands . . . and took temporary command of the intimate core of [the] household’’ (61). 33. I am indebted for this suggestion to Gail Paster’s discussion in The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 278–79, and to a conversation with Richard McCoy. 34. For the practice of wearing a veil to one’s churching and radical Protestant attacks on the custom, see Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), 59–61, and Cressy, 216–22. Wilson sees the veil as an emblem of enclosure, symbolically continuing the new mother’s confinement as she moves from house to church (78). 35. John Donne, Sermons, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, 10 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1953–62), 5:198. 36. The phrase is from John Trevisa’s translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus, On the Properties of Things, ed. M. C. Seymour et al., vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 300, ultimately deriving from Isidore of Seville on the divisions of life.

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The Winter’s Tale Before and After THE SECOND PART OF THE WINTER’S TALE, WITH ITS CHANGE OF SEASON and scene after sixteen years, promises a new beginning following on the tragic dead end of the first part. Nevertheless, the long pastoral scene in Bohemia (Act 4, scene 4) that started out with young love and lighthearted festivity eventually turns sour. Polixenes in his fury not only moves to separate Prince Florizel definitively from the putative shepherdess Perdita but lays dire threats on her and her family for their presumption in encouraging the prince’s suit. The second movement of the play seems to be turning, like the first, toward catastrophe. There is a counter-direction, though, set in motion when Camillo tells the young lovers how to flee Polixenes’ rage and seek refuge in the court of Leontes. It was Camillo too who initiated a contrary force in the play’s first movement, removing the endangered Polixenes beyond reach of Leontes’ murderous designs. That first counter-direction had limited and ambiguous effect: it saved Polixenes and himself but did nothing to assist Hermione. Indeed, the flight of Polixenes and Camillo made things worse for the accused queen, now the only available target of Leontes’ rage. This second counter-direction looks more hopeful. It is focused directly on the endangered couple, and it is reinforced by Autolycus’s introduction of the Old Shepherd and the Clown onto the prince’s ship. Perdita’s family is thus removed from immediate peril, and the secret of her birth goes with them toward the home of her real father. The convergence of the main Bohemian characters on Sicilia— Perdita with Florizel, Shepherd, and Clown carrying tokens of her royal origins, Autolycus as go-between, Polixenes following soon after in pursuit of the runaways—seems to be setting things up for a full-scale recognition scene. All the Bohemians have parts to play in the identification of Perdita, the fulfillment of the oracle, the mutual restoration of father and daughter, the reconciliation of kings. It is a scene we never see. The climax of this defined movement toward revelation and reconciliation instead takes place offstage, and is relayed to us only at second hand, by several anonymous nar221

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rators. Critics complain of the awkwardness of 5.2—gentlemen rushing in every few minutes to augment the recounting, events familiar to the audience rehearsed once more, profound emotion told about rather than shown. That their interlocutor is Autolycus, when it could be anybody, only makes it obvious that this character who has been so central in the Bohemian scenes lacks any real function of his own in this final Sicilian phase of the action. Had the PerditaLeontes recognition been staged, he would have a role as bridge between royals and peasants, along with the Shepherd and Clown as witnesses sixteen years before to things dying and newborn: the castaway baby, the bear’s assault on Antigonus, the shipwreck. Without that scene, none of them is really necessary. This elaborate preparation for what doesn’t happen in the play, together with the awkwardness of the 5.2 narration, suggests that the scene we have in The Winter’s Tale is a second thought, a departure from the original plan. It is easy to recognize the necessity of narrating the father-daughter recognition and reunion, or otherwise distancing it, in order to reserve full emotive force for the following scene, also one of recognition and reunion, which restores Hermione to her husband and daughter. But what if the celebrated statue scene was itself a second thought, a later addition that required the recasting and downplaying of the original final scene to create the proper dynamics for a new one? This is not a new idea. In 1952 J. E. Bullard and W. M. Fox wrote to the Times Literary Supplement arguing for an earlier version of The Winter’s Tale. Their hypothesis was based on Shakespeare’s departure from his source, Greene’s Pandosto, which does not resurrect its dead queen; Hermione’s appearance to Antigonus in a vision, which in line with other such apparitions in Shakespeare suggests she is dead; the ‘‘change of ‘direction’ between the fourth act and the fifth’’; and the absence of the ‘‘striking and unexpected incident’’ of Hermione’s revivification from the notes of Simon Forman, who saw the play in May 1611.1 The case made briefly by Bullard and Fox has never been fully worked out or its implications examined. Editors of recent significant editions tend to dismiss it rather quickly and, as we shall see, on not very adequate grounds. Critics who acknowledge the possibility of revision do so somewhat backhandedly, intent on demonstrating that the final scene is in no way tacked on but integral to the larger vision of the play.2 The logic is faulty here, too, since the same creative mind that conceived the first version of the play was at work in the process of revision; the final scene could be added later and still extend and complete the values and dynamics of the play, whatever new elements it contained.

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THE WINTER’S TALE BEFORE AND AFTER

As well as it works in the healing movement of The Winter’s Tale, the last scene is in terms of dramatic structure unusually detachable, ungrounded in what came before. The careful preparation for the recognition of Perdita, which is then not shown, is matched by a notable lack of preparation for what is shown, the final stunning revelation of Hermione alive. Not that the last-scene introduction of someone the characters believe to be dead is un-Shakespearean. Several comedies and romances resolve their plot problems and add to the wonder and joy of the last scene by bringing back the supposedly dead: Hero in Much Ado, Viola and Sebastian in Twelfth Night, Claudio in Measure for Measure, Helena in All’s Well, Thaisa and Marina in Pericles, Imogen and her brothers in Cymbeline. In every one of these instances, though, the audience is in on the secret. We are privy to the plots, we have seen the lost ones delivered from the sea. When they reappear, we are pleased but not astonished. Only in Hermione’s case do we share the ignorance of Leontes and the others. Geoffrey Bullough asserts that ‘‘looking back over the dialogue, it is obvious that from the moment when Paulina brought news of Hermione’s supposed death . . . the intention was to bring her back.’’3 But Bullough offers no particulars to support his hindsight certainty, and one wonders how obvious Hermione’s survival could be to any spectator not already familiar with the last scene. In the other plays, certainly, the continued life of characters believed dead was conveyed not through veiled hints but directly and unambiguously. Even the statue that will be the vehicle of Hermione’s rebirth, though ‘‘many years in doing,’’ is mentioned for the first time in 5.2.944 —that is, in a scene that would have had to be revised to make way for the new conclusion. Most striking of all, the oracle that seems set up in the middle of the play to govern the later action says nothing of Hermione’s restoration. Hermione is chaste, Polixenes blameless, Camillo a true subject, Leontes a jealous tyrant, his innocent babe truly begotten, and the King shall live without an heir if that which is lost be not found. (3.2.130–34)

In its projection forward, the oracle puts all its emphasis on the recovery of Perdita—forecasts, in fact, just the finale I have been postulating in the play’s first state. Had the statue scene been part of the plan from the beginning, here was the natural opening for some parallel stipulation: the lost must be found and the dead must live

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again. Instead Shakespeare more or less follows Pandosto, where the oracle is appropriate because Bellaria, Pandosto’s wife, is in fact dead. Certainly Shakespeare might have decided on a major departure from his source story, but if Hermione’s survival was part of the original design, why did he not change the oracle as well? Along with the silence of the oracle, the text may mislead more actively in the scene following Hermione’s reported death offstage, when Antigonus relates his vision of the grief-stricken queen. To me comes a creature[.] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I never saw a vessel of like sorrow So filled, and so becoming. In pure white robes, Like very sanctity, she did approach My cabin where I lay, thrice bowed before me, And, gasping to begin some speech, her eyes Became two spouts. . . . (3.3.18–25)

Antigonus has left the court before Hermione’s death was announced, but this vision convinces him she must now be dead. The audience, witness to Hermione’s collapse and then Paulina’s declaration of her death, would be confirmed in its prior knowledge. J. H. P. Pafford in his 1963 Arden edition points to Walton’s account of Donne’s vision of his wife when they were separated in 1612 as evidence that such an apparition need not imply that its subject was dead.5 But audiences used to complaining ghosts in Senecan drama as well as the popular Mirror for Magistrates (perhaps directly recalled in Hermione’s spouting eyes) would most likely accept this apparition as something in the same vein, and its words as a similar communication from beyond the grave. Then there is the question of Simon Forman, who set down in his Book of Plays and Notes Thereof the only contemporary account of a performance of The Winter’s Tale. In The Winter’s Tale at the Globe 1611 the 15 of May Wednesday, observe there how Leontes the King of Sicilia was overcome with jealousy of his wife with the King of Bohemia, and how he contrived his death and would have had his cupbearer to have poisoned, who gave the King of Bohemia warning thereof and fled with him to Bohemia. Remember also how he sent to the oracle of Apollo, and the answer of Apollo, that she was guiltless and the the [sic] King was jealous, etc., and how except the child was found again that was lost the King should die without issue, for the child was carried into Bohemia and there laid

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in a forest and brought up by a shepherd. And the King of Bohemia his son married that wench, and how they fled into Sicilia to Leontes, and the shepherd having showed the letter of the nobleman by whom Leontes sent a was [away?] that child, and the jewels found about her, she was known to be Leontes’ daughter, and was then sixteen years old. Remember also the rogue that came in all tattered like colt-pixie, and how he feigned him sick and to have been robbed of all that he had, and how he cozened the poor man of all his money, and after came to the sheep-shear with a pedlar’s pack and there cozened them again of all their money, and how he changed apparel with the King of Bohemia his son, and then how he turned courtier, etc. Beware of trusting feigned beggars, or fawning fellows.6

The last sentence of Forman’s plot summary that ends the second paragraph describes the revelation of Perdita’s birth and her restoration to Leontes as if Forman saw it rather than heard it recounted; at the same time, his fairly detailed rehearsing of the play’s main plot leaves out the striking final scene. What should we make of this? Modern editors caution us that Forman is unreliable, which as a general proposition is indisputable. But the accuracy of his account here makes this major omission problematic to say the least. Pafford thinks we should not conclude that the statue scene was not in the version of the play seen by Forman because his notes were, as his title suggests, for ‘‘common policy’’: ‘‘He was recording things which could be useful to him; one third of his notice is devoted to Autolycus and the lesson to be learnt.’’7 But that leaves two-thirds devoted to simple plot summary, in which it is hard to see any lessons of policy. Having given so much of the story on this basis, Forman was unlikely to have left out the last scene because it lacked moral instruction. Indeed, as his account of a 1610 performance of Macbeth indicates, Forman was as much interested in spectacle and the supernatural as he was in policy: would the spectator who was so struck with the Weird Sisters, the blood that wouldn’t wash off, and especially Banquo’s ghost find unimpressive or empty of meaning a statue that comes to life? Yes, contends Oxford editor Stephen Orgel, arguing that ‘‘although the Shakspere Allusion Book records twenty allusions to the play in the seventeenth century . . . not one of these refers to the statue or the resurrection of Hermione.’’8 But the Allusion Book is really irrelevant to his case, since almost all the citations of The Winter’s Tale refer to specific passages or are general in nature (character lists, source attributions, etc.). The single exception, Dryden’s inclusion of The Winter’s Tale among plays ‘‘grounded in impossibilities,’’ might well be gesturing at the play’s most notorious impossibility in

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its final scene. Later drama offers some evidence that the statue scene was striking and memorable for those who saw it performed: in the climax of Massinger’s City Madam, two portraits come alive as part of the final stroke in the hypocrite’s comeuppance. Presented as Sir John’s crowning wonder, accompanied with incense and ‘‘mystical gesticulations,’’ the two figures first give ‘‘signs of animation’’ and then ‘‘descend and come forward.’’9 One large question looms about this postulated first state of The Winter’s Tale. Would Shakespeare in his romance mode have allowed to stand unrevoked the death of a major character who invites full audience sympathy? Guarini’s well-known formula calls for dangers but not deaths. Fletcher, defining tragicomedy in his preface to The Faithful Shepherdess, likewise declares ‘‘it wants deaths.’’10 Fletcher, in his large body of tragicomic drama, adheres to this principle— except, as Richard Dutton observes, when he is collaborating with Shakespeare.11 The Two Noble Kinsmen is marked by the death of one of the two titular heroes, while Henry VIII, a hybrid of history and romance, is structured by no less than three deaths, of Buckingham, Katherine, and Wolsey. Shakespeare’s tragicomic vision, which seems to have swayed his junior collaborator, had in fact always had room for mortality. In Pericles and Cymbeline death strikes down mainly the ill-intentioned—Antiochus and his daughter, Cloten and the Queen—so as to sweep away impedimenta to the happy ending. There is an interesting exception, however, in Thaisa’s father Simonides, whose death in reported at the end of Pericles. Simonides is not among the wicked; his death seems introduced so that he can be replaced by his son-in-law as ruler of Pentapolis, leaving Tyre for Marina and Lysimachus. In the plays that followed The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest (in which no character dies), death involves various modes of replacement. Arcite’s death in The Two Noble Kinsmen functions like that of Simonides in Pericles, though far more centrally. The two cousins are equal in valor and devotion, yet only one of them can win Emilia; the death of Arcite the victor, yielding the field to Palamon the lover, fulfills up to the limit of possibility Emilia’s wish that her two suitors be ‘‘metamorphosed / Both into one’’ (5.3.84–85).12 Henry VIII works out the process of replacement more elaborately, as part of the historical shift from the old religion to the new. Each of the falls that together shape the play is balanced by the rise of a new and better figure. Wolsey as churchman/statesman, all-powerful in the first part of the play, is replaced eventually by Cranmer in the second part: to underline the parallel, both are threatened with royal disfavor (3.2; 5.1), but Cranmer, whose ‘‘sin’’ is promoting Protestant

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doctrine, regains the King’s favor while Wolsey, convicted of greed and highhandedness, does not. The case of Katherine, a guiltless queen put on public trial, most closely matches Hermione’s situation in The Winter’s Tale. Yet Katherine’s replacement, Anne, whatever we know of her subsequent disgrace, is presented in the play as not only beautiful but virtuous, pitying the sufferings of the embattled queen, and—most important of all—Protestant. The first character to fall receives the most brilliant replacement when the play’s last character appears. On the basis of a false prophecy, Buckingham aspired to reign in the place of Henry and his heirs. The end of the play gives us instead the infant Elizabeth, not just as the (Protestant) heir of the Tudor dynasty but as the subject of a prolonged prophecy by Cranmer that the audience, living decades later, could confirm as true. The Winter’s Tale, even in the state that survives, seems in this context to be a related experiment in absorbing and compensating for mortality. Two characters other than Hermione die as indirect victims of Leontes’ tyranny, and neither returns at the end of the play. Nor are these culpable in the manner of the incestuous Antiochus or Cymbeline’s queen. The child Mamillius is wholly innocent, and even Antigonus has been forced into his complicity in the exposing of the infant Perdita. Here as in Henry VIII the deaths are redeemed by the presentation of new figures—or old ones seen in a new light. When Leontes in Act 5 first sees Florizel and Perdita, he likens them to his lost son and daughter: O! Alas, I lost a couple that ’twixt heaven and earth Might thus have stood, begetting wonder, as You, gracious couple, do. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What might I have been, Might I a son and daughter now have looked on, Such goodly things as you! (5.1.130–33, 175–37)

Perdita is in fact the daughter he cast off, while Florizel, the son-inlaw she brings to him, makes up in some sense for the truly lost son Mamillius. In similar manner, when Paulina vows at the play’s conclusion to go on mourning Antigonus, her ‘‘mate, that’s never to be found again’’ (5.3.134), Leontes counters with a new husband for her, Camillo in place of the lost Antigonus. These substitutions do not blot out the irreplaceable individualities of those lost, let alone

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follow out the ‘‘better than before’’ pattern of Henry VIII.13 Rather, they seem a part of the give-and-take of the seasonal cycle so prominent in this play, the year’s natural renewal that offers a fresh start but never entirely duplicates what was lost to the winter past. A version of The Winter’s Tale that contained no actual revivification would still reinforce this dynamic. Hermione is dead, but Perdita is like her in beauty (5.1.94–109); Leontes’ attraction to the young woman before him is based on memories of the long-ago woman she resembles (222–27).14 The original Winter’s Tale created the same movement of regeneration that we find informing the play in its second state. Bullard and Fox end their letter wondering what might have occasioned revision of The Winter’s Tale into the form that we know, but providing no hypothesis. Was it a change in theatrical venue? Perhaps Shakespeare was moved to take advantage of the indoor accommodations at Blackfriars: the candlelight effects thus enabled could have encouraged him to create a coup de the´ aˆ tre that would have more power than in the light of common day at the Globe, the magic moment of Hermione’s translation from marble to living flesh. Or was Shakespeare prompted toward his magical new conclusion by a summons to perform at court? Two such occasions involving The Winter’s Tale have been recorded during his working life, one on 5 November 1611 and another at some point during the prolonged festivities celebrating the marriage of Princess Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine, December–February 1612–13. The Winter’s Tale is listed among fourteen plays presented by the King’s Men.15 Physically the court offered greater staging potential and culturally a considerable impetus toward special effects. The statue scene would have great appeal for an audience enamored of masques and their attendant wonders. They were familiar with the semi-divine figure, elaborately presented with music and suggestions of magic, that gradually came to life as spectators joined in the action and interacted with the central royal presence. Bacon, writing ‘‘Of Masques and Triumphs’’ some time after 1612, documents not only the royal taste for masques (‘‘princes will have such things’’) but moving statues as a familiar element.16 Indeed, David Bergeron observes that two of the masques presented at the 1612–13 wedding festivities— Beaumont’s Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn and Campion’s Lords’ Masque—featured statues that came to life.17 It was most likely this taste of the Jacobean court for wonders that underlay Shakespeare’s revision, rather than a need to cancel the death of Hermione. At first glance, the latter motive is plausible: a drama of fatal marital jealousy hardly suits a marriage celebration.

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Or does it? Othello was among the plays presented on the same occasion. Bergeron, whose essay ‘‘The Restoration of Hermione in The Winter’s Tale’’ is the fullest consideration of the last scene as addition, thinks the change was occasioned not by Princess Elizabeth’s wedding but by Prince Henry’s sudden death the preceding year. A restored Hermione ‘‘would be deemed most appropriate for a court and nation that had suffered much sorrow’’ at the loss of the promising young heir to the throne.18 Even in its first state, however, The Winter’s Tale coped with a dead brother, by offering a living sister and brother-in-law in his stead. With specific motives in doubt, we are left with the general influence of the courtly esthetic. This influence may also be seen in another possible addition to the play, the satyrs’ dance in 4.4. Ashley Thorndike long ago pointed out its likely origin in Jonson’s Masque of Oberon, performed at court on 1 January 1611. Presented in honor of Prince Henry, the entertainment featured satyrs with bells on their shaggy thighs, first in ‘‘antic dance, full of gestures and swift motion’’ and then leaping when Oberon’s chariot approaches.19 In The Winter’s Tale, Polixenes is offered a similar rough dance executed by ‘‘men of hair’’ who excel at leaping: as if to underline the courtly provenance, we are then told that some of these performers have danced before the king (4.4.319–34). Since Robert Johnson, who composed the music for Oberon, was affiliated with the King’s Men, the satyrs’ dance in The Winter’s Tale may well have used the same music.20 At some point, Shakespeare decided to include this anti-masque in his drama— perhaps in the course of the first writing, but more likely as a second thought. The Oxford Textual Companion makes a good case for the dance sequence as an insertion: the passage introducing it ‘‘could be omitted without disturbing the dialogue’’; there is no comment on the dance after it is performed; and Polixenes’ ‘‘O, father, you’ll know more of that hereafter’’ (338) at the end of the dance should follow more closely after the Clown’s statement that Polixenes and his father are in ‘‘sad talk’’ (308). As the text now stands, this line suggests that Polixenes is concluding a conversation with the Old Shepherd that he was carrying on during the dance, not paying attention to the entertainment that he specifically asked to view.21 The satyrs sequence was added to a long scene already adorned with a dance of shepherds and shepherdesses (167)—more suited to the pastoral ambience, but perhaps not so attractive to court tastes as the antic anti-masque. Oberon, in which two bears draw Oberon’s chariot, may also have suggested to Shakespeare the surprising end of Antigonus,22 although it is impossible to say when. We can only note in passing that

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the bear in The Winter’s Tale, which appears so suddenly on the seacoast of Bohemia that it lacks even an entrance direction, is not really prepared for in previous dialogue and not really necessary as a way of dispatching Antigonus. Again, a spectacular eruption of the bestial might be preferred to an offstage shipwreck, however well observed and reported. That the satyrs’ dance was probably a later addition to The Winter’s Tale proves nothing, of course, about the statue scene; it only points in a similar direction. Plays with masque elements were in fashion at this time, as Jonson himself grumpily records in his preface to The Alchemist (1612), scoffing at contemporary dramas ‘‘wherein, now, the concupiscence of dances and antics so reigneth, as to run away from Nature, and be afraid of her, is the only point of art that tickles the spectators.’’23 Jonson himself wrote masques as well as plays, but he liked to keep them separate as genres, avoiding the escape into fantasy and pure spectacle that in his opinion vitiated drama. Shakespeare drew no such line: he accommodates antics and even an ascendance beyond ordinary nature, but without sacrificing dramatic integrity. We can never know for sure whether the last scene of The Winter’s Tale was added after first composition, for court or Blackfriars performance, and the original ending recast. Each anomaly that points in that direction is susceptible of some other plausible explanation. But there are so many that together they make a good case for revision. It is interesting that the faults most commonly noticed in the play’s workmanship are explained, if not justified, by the transformation I have postulated. The awkwardness of 5.2, wonders and emotional extremes all filtered through the narration of nobodies, makes sense as an artistic decision not taken on its own terms but pressured by the need to make way for the new finale. Another fault sometimes advanced is the failure to integrate Autolycus into the dramatic action. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch complains that Autolycus, for all his prominence in the later phase, lacks a proper role in the play. Bill Overton points out that at the end of 4.4 Shakespeare sets up the expectation that Autolycus will be instrumental in the discovery of Perdita, an expectation not fulfilled. ‘‘This is to contradict a long tradition in the role he is playing, that of the ingenious low-life figure who enables the comic ending.’’24 In the first version, with the Perdita-Leontes scene fully staged, he doubtless did so. In the second, the only role Shakespeare can find for him, and for the Shepherd and Clown similarly deprived of onstage function, is a reversal of their former relative status when the rogue who formerly lorded it over these two must play supplicant for their favor as newly minted

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royal relations. If this passage (121–68) was added when the rest of 5.2 was revised, it is interesting that Shakespeare went back to his own past writings for the situation. The encounter echoes that between Parolles and the Clown at the same point in All’s Well that Ends Well, with the same reversal of relative position as Parolles, like Autolycus a swaggerer who pretends to greater status that he owns, must humble himself to the formerly scorned Clown. If this pendant to the narrated recognition scene was in fact part of the revision, it seems reasonable that Shakespeare might borrow from his earlier work to create some purpose for these characters, who are essentially extraneous to the high doings in Sicilia. Accepting the likelihood that a previous version of The Winter’s Tale preceded the one we know entails no textual or practical consequences. Any rough edges that might have been left in in the revised manuscript would have been smoothed over and regularlized by the transcriber, Ralph Crane. It would be fascinating to stage the play in its hypothetical first state, but who would dare to reconstruct the lost recognition scene between Perdita and Leontes? What the hypothesis of revision offers is rather an explanation of some of the peculiarities of the play as we have it, and a glimpse of Shakespeare’s art as process rather than single act, responding to new tastes and situations as well as, perhaps, his own later inspiration for a heightened dramatic finale.

Notes 1. Times Literary Supplement, 14 March 1952. 2. See, for example, Frank Kermode, Introduction to The Winter’s Tale, in The Complete Signet Shakespeare, ed. Sylvan Barnet (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1972), p. 1336, and Kenneth Muir, ‘‘The Conclusion of The Winter’s Tale,’’ in The Morality of Art, ed. D. W. Jefferson (London: Routledge, 1969), 91–92. 3. Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. 8 (London and New York: Routledge, 1975), 132. 4. Quotations of The Winter’s Tale are from Stephen Orgel’s Oxford Shakespeare edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 5. Izaak Walton, Life of John Donne (1640), cited by J. H. P. Pafford, ed., The Winter’s Tale (London: Methuen, 1963), xxv. 6. Cited in modernized form from Orgel’s edition of The Winter’s Tale, 233. 7. Pafford, xxvii. 8. Orgel, ed., The Winter’s Tale, 63. 9. Philip Massinger, The City Madam, ed. Cyrus Hoy, Regents Renaissance Drama Series (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), 5.3.104–9. 10. John Fletcher, The Faithful Shepherdess, ed. Cyrus Hoy, in The Dramatic Works of the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, ed. Fredson Bowers, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), ‘‘To the Reader,’’ line 21.

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11. Richard Dutton, Modern Tragicomedy and the British Tradition (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986), 35. 12. John Fletcher and William Shakespeare, The Two Noble Kinsmen, ed. Lois Potter, The Arden Shakespeare, 3d ed. (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson, 1997). Potter remarks that Fletcher, treating a parallel situation some time later in The Mad Lover, solves the problem of brothers in love with the same lady by having one give her up and return to a soldier’s life (11–12). 13. Conceivably Camillo might be seen as ‘‘better’’ than his predecessor, since he disobeys a criminal royal command where Antigonus in a parallel situation reluctantly obeys. But this schematic opposition is at odds with the human values of the play. 14. Doubling the roles of Hermione and Perdita, which is occasionally attempted in modern productions but made awkward by the presence of both in the final scene, would be quite feasible without that scene and would strengthen the PerditaHermione equation. 15. See E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), 343. 16. ‘‘Of Masques and Triumphs,’’ in Francis Bacon, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 416–17. Bacon may provide a staging hint for the raising of anticipation in the statue scene when he recommends, ‘‘let the masquers, or any other, that are to come down from the scene, have some motions upon the scene itself before their coming down; for it draws the eye strangely, and makes it with great pleasure to desire to see that it cannot perfectly discern’’ (416). 17. Bergeron, ‘‘The Restoration of Hermione in The Winter’s Tale,’’ in Shakespeare’s Romances Reconsidered, ed. Carol McGinnis Kay and Henry E. Jacobs (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978), 129. Both masques are reprinted in A Book of Masques in Honour of Allardyce Nicoll (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967). 18. Bergeron, 130. 19. Ben Jonson, Oberon, The Fairy Prince, ed. Richard Hosley, in A Book of Masques, 55, 59, 60. See ‘‘Shakespeare as Debtor,’’ Shakespeare Studies, ed. B. Matthews and A. Thorndyke (New York, Columbia University Press, 1916), 172. 20. See Pafford,‘‘Music and the Songs in The Winter’s Tale,’’ Shakespeare Quarterly 10 (1959): 164. The original discovery belonged to W. J. Lawrence. Johnson’s music for the satyrs’ dance appears in Four Hundred Songs and Dances from the Stuart Masque, ed. Andrew Sabol (Providence, RI: University Press of New England, 1978), 209–10. 21. Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor et al., William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 601. Allardyce Nicoll earlier pointed to the ‘‘textual peculiarity’’ that suggested later insertion; see ‘‘Shakespeare and the Court Masque,’’ Shakespeare Jahrbuch 94 (1958): 56–57. It is tempting to connect this probable late addition to the typographical crowding noticed by Pafford in the second column of Folio p. 293, near the satyrs’ dance: a speech by a new character begun on the same line as the one just finished by another, the heading ‘‘Song’’ put at the side of the first line rather than above (even in one instance when it displaces a speech heading to the song’s second line), abbreviations like Gent. and Mist., the song itself perhaps huddled up by making lines 1 and 2 into line 1 and lines 4 and 5 into line 3; see Pafford, ‘‘The Winter’s Tale: Typographical Peculiarities in the Folio Text,’’ Notes and Queries, n.s., 8 (1961): 173. This would assume that the typesetter’s calculations were thrown off by a late insertion into the copy text, however, and Crane’s transcript is most likely later than 1613.

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22. See Chambers, 1: 489. 23. ‘‘To the Reader,’’ in The Alchemist, ed. F. H. Mares (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 5. 24. Quiller-Couch, ‘‘Shakespeare’s Later Workmanship: The Winter’s Tale,’’ North American Review, May 1906, 757; Overton, ed., The Winter’s Tale (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1989), 74.

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Index Abraham, Nicolas, 205–6, 208 Adelman,Janet, The Common Liar, 76, 162 Ahab, 177 Alice, Dowager Countess of Derby, 199, 200 All’s Well That Ends Well, 10, 13, 14, 15, 24, 26, 31, 32, 45, 95, 106–117, 135– 50, 151–69, 223, 231 Althusser, Louis, 182, 184, 185–86, 194, 195 Amadis de Gaul, 47 Anne, Countess of Castlehaven, 199, 203 Antony and Cleopatra, 11, 14, 44, 46, 48, 49–50, 52, 57, 59, 66–76, 197 Ariosto, Lodovico, 31 As You Like It, 21, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 39, 110, 146, 152, 166 Asp, Carolyn, 150 Aubrey, John, Brief Lives, 203, 207 Auden, W. H., 195 Augustine, City of God, 169 Bacon, Sir Francis, 228 Barber, C. L., 30 Barker, Harley Granville, 208 Barton, Anne, 167, 168 Bauer, Ida, 121 Beaumont, Francis, 228 Beaurline, L. A., 167 Bedford, Brian, 219 Belsey, Catherine, 194 Bentley, Greg, 196 Bergeron, David, 169, 228–29 Blackfriars Theatre, 230 Boccaccio, Giovanni, The Decameron, 108, 114, 117, 142, 145–46, 153, 157 Bogdanov, Michael, 193 Booth, Stephen, 218 Bowers, Fredson, 116, 117

Bradbrook, M. C., 150 Bradley, A. C., Shakespearean Tragedy, 74, 178, 179 Breeching of boys, 211–13 Bristol, Michael, 207 Broadway, Giles, 206 Brooke, Arthur, 181, 183, 195 Browne, Thomas, 179 Browning, Robert, ‘‘My Last Duchess,’’ 199, 201, 202, 204 Bullard, J. E., 222, 228 Bullough, Geoffrey, 223 Burke, Kenneth, 45 Camden, William, 169 Campion, Thomas, 228 Capell, Edward, 198 Cartelli, Thomas, 150 Cavell, Stanley, 207 Caxton, William, Recuyell of the Histories of Troye, 52 Charlton, H.B., Shakespearian Tragedy, 21, 182 Cheke, John, 212, 213 Cheney, Donald, 117 Churching, 217 Cleese, John, 131 Clemen, Wolfgang, 81 Cockle, Maurice J. D., 60 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 173 Colt, Maximillian, 200 Combe, Thomas, Theater of Fine Devices, 169 Comedy of Errors, The, 19, 21, 45 Coriolanus, 11, 97, 168 Cotgrave, Randle, 140 Couch, Sir Arthur Quiller, 230 Coverdale, Miles, 179 Cox, John D., 149 Crane, Ralph, 231 Cressy, David, 220

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INDEX

Cumming, Elaine, 81 Curry, Walter Clyde, 173 Cymbeline, 28, 223, 226 Danby, J. F., Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature, 45 De Quincey, Thomas, 26 Digby, Sir Kenelm, 203, 207 Dollimore, Jonathan, 186 Donne, John, 217; Holy Sonnets, 91, 163 Dryden, John, 225 Dutton, Richard, 226 Eagleton, Terry, 186 Edward VI, 211–12, 213 Eisler, Kurt, The Psychiatrist and the Dying Patient, 87, 92 Elijah, 177 Elisha, 175–77 Elizabeth I, 165, 206 Elizabeth, Princess, 228, 229 Elliott, G. R., Flaming Minister, 45 Ellis-Fermor, Una, 54 Elyot, Sir Thomas, 212 Erasmus, Desiderius, 213 Erikson, Erik, 133, 194 Evans, Bertrand, Shakespeare’s Comedies, 117 Fall of Man, 91, 171, 174 Felman, Shoshana, 118 Fletcher, John, 226 Foakes, R. A., 62 Folger Shakespeare Library, 15 Folio, First (1623), 15, 117, 151, 152, 155, 159, 168, 173, 216, 218, 232 Forman, Simon, 222, 224–25 Fox, W. M., 222, 228 Freud, Sigmund, 10, 14, 131; and ‘‘Dora,’’ 118–34; ‘‘On Psychotherapy,‘‘ 131; ’’Screen Memories,‘‘ 149; ’’The Theme of the Three Caskets,‘‘ 78–79 Frye, Northrop, Anatomy of Criticism, 20, 30 Gallop, Jane, 150 Gay, Peter, 134 Gearhart, Suzanne, 132 Genesis, Book of, 174, 179 Gerard, Rene´, 134 Giraldi, Cintio, Hecatommithi, 29, 39, 43

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Glaser, Barney G., 92 Globe Theatre, 101 Goethe, Joahnn Wolfgang von, 90 Goldwell, Henry, 60 Greek tragedy, 19 Greene, Robert, Pandosto, 202, 222 Gross, Kenneth, 204 Guarini, Alessandro, 226 Hackett, Thomas P., 86–87 Hale, J. R., 60 Hamlet, 46, 62, 93–94, 97, 101, 103, 154, 185 Hanmer, Sir Thomas, 108 Harsnett, Samuel, 91 Hawkes, Terence, 45 Hawkins, Sherman, 44 Hayward, Sir John, 213 Hazael, 15, 175–78, 179 Heilman, Robert B., Magic in the Web, 45; This Great Stage, 83 Henri IV, 212 Henry IV, Part I, 46, 47, 57–60, 96 Henry IV, Part II, 96 Henry V, 96, 152 Henry VIII, 226, 227–28 Henry, Patrick, 179 Henry, Prince, 229 Henry, William E., 81 Hodgdon, Barbara, 149, 196 Homer, The Iliad, 52, 53 Honigman, E. A. J., 91 Houlbrooke, Ralph, 212 Howard, Jean, 105 Hubler, Edward, The Sense of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 42 Hunter, G. K., 109, 149, 161, 194 Huston, J. Dennis, 134 Indefinition, 114 Irrelevance, Principle of, 26 Isham, Ferdinando, 212 2 Kings, 175, 180 James I, 206 Jameson, Fredric, The Political Unconscious, 194 Jehu, 177 Jenkins, Harold, 104 Job, Book of, 171 Johnson, Robert, 229

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INDEX

Johnson, Samuel, 79 Jonson, Ben, The Alchemist, 230; Masque of Oberon, 229 Jorgenson, Paul A., 62, 63 Josselin, Ralph, 212 Julius Caesar, 94 Kahn, Coppe´lia, 182 Kastan, David Scott, 150 Kean, Charles, 206 Kermode, Frank, 95, 231 Kerrigan, John, 147 King Lear, 11, 14, 19, 36, 46, 74, 78–92, 99, 101, 170, 198 King’s Men, The, 228, 229 Kittredge, George Lyman, 75 Knight, G. Wilson, 150 Kozintsev, Grigori, 85 Kristeva, Julia, 131 Ku¨bler-Ross, Elisabeth, On Death and Dying, 14, 80, 83–84, 85–86, 88, 90, 92 Kunkle, Rachel, 7 Lacan, Jacques, 14, 147, 148, 150, 183, 215 Lawrence, W. J., 232 Leech, Clifford, 195 Lerman, Hannah, 132 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 123 Levin, Harry, 195 Lewis, Bernard, Islam and the West, 105 Lifton, Robert Jay, 92 Llewellyn, Nigel, 207 Love’s Labour’s Lost, 30, 32, 39 Lydgate, John, Troy Book, 52 Macbeth, 11, 15, 19, 26, 62–66, 64, 74, 79, 97, 170–80, 225 Mack, Maynard, ‘‘King Lear’’ in Our Time, 43 MacKinnon, Lachlan, 168 Mahler, Margaret S., 219 Malcolm, Janet, 133 Mallory, George, 178 Marcus, Steven, 127, 133, 134 Marvell, Andrew, ‘‘The Garden,’’ 203–4 Mary I, 206, 212 Mary Queen of Scots, 206 Massinger, Philip, The City Madam, 226 McCoy, Richard, 220

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Measure for Measure, 24, 26, 29, 143, 152, 223 Merchant of Venice, The, 19, 22, 29, 32, 75, 110, 111–12, 114 Merry Wives of Windsor, The, 45 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A, 15, 19, 21, 22, 30, 31, 110, 115–16, 166 Milton, John, Arcades, 200; Paradise Lost, 62, 174 Mirror for Magistrates, The, 224 Moisan, Thomas, 195 Montaigne, Michel, 186 Montrose, Louis, 114 Morris, Brian, 133 Moshinsky, Elijah, 150 Mowat, Barbara, 7 Much Ado about Nothing, 11, 20, 24, 26, 30, 32, 33–34, 96, 98, 99, 105, 223 Muir, Kenneth, 91, 167, 231 Murry, John Middleton, Shakespeare, 43–44 Nature, 35–37, 43, 78 Neill, Michael, 105 New Criticism, The, 10, 13 Nicoll, Allardyce, 232 North, Francis, 212 Norwood, Richard, 211 Nowottny, Winifred, 45 Oman, Charles, 47 Orgel, Stephen, 219, 225 Orwell, George, 191 Othello, 10, 11, 13, 27, 29–45, 93, 95, 97– 99, 101, 103, 201, 203, 229 Overton, Bill, 230 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 202 Pafford, J. H. P., 211, 224, 225, 232 Painter, William, The Palace of Pleasure, 194 Parker, Patricia, Literary Fat Ladies, 150 Parker, R. B., 168 Paster, Gail Kern, 7, 219, 220 Penn, Sibylla, 212 Pericles, 223, 226 Petrarch, Francesco, 187, 190 Pettie, George, 207 Phaer, Thomas, The Boke of Children, 219 Phillips, Robin, 199 ‘‘Phoenix and the Turtle, The,’’ 42–43

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INDEX

Plutarch, Life of Antonius, 48–49, 51, 76 Poe, Edgar Allan, 204 Pohland, Elizabeth, 7 Porter, Cole, 121 Potter, Lois, 232 Prescott, F. C., The Poetic Mind, 75 Proudfoot, Richard, 218 Python, Monty, 11 Reisman, David, 133 Richard III, 46 Richard II, 46, 59, 62–64 Romano, Giulio, 198, 201, 206 Romeo and Juliet, 9, 11, 13, 15, 19–28, 76, 101, 155, 181–96 Rupert of Deutz, 179 Ryan, Kiernan, 195 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 194 Schanzer, Ernest, 74 Shneidman, Edwin S., Deaths of Man, 85, 92 Sidney, Sir Philip, 46–47; Arcadia, 47; Astrophel and Stella, 47; Sonnet 41, 47 Simonds, Peggy Mun ˜ oz, 169 Skura, Meredith, The Literary Use of the Psychoanalytic Process, 131 Slingsby, Sir Henry, 212 Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, 132 Snyder, Susan, The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare’s Tragedies, 10, 13, 14, 91, 105; Pastoral Process: Spenser, Marvell, Milton, 14 Sokol, B. J., 208 Sonnets, The, 40, 109, 147–48; Sonnet 30, 103; Sonnet 33, 76; Sonnet 34, 105; Sonnet 35, 41; Sonnet 36, 43; Sonnet 57, 40; Sonnet 66, 102–3; Sonnet 84, 103; Sonnet 116, 42; Sonnet 129, 102; Sonnet 130, 102; Sonnet 138, 42 Spencer, Theodore, Shakespeare and the Nature of Man, 45 Spenser, Edmund, The Faerie Queene, 166, 168 Sprengnether, Madelon, 131, 132, 134 Spurgeon, Caroline, 62, 82 Stoller, Robert J., 219 Stone, Lawrence, 192 Strauss, Anselm L., 92

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Suzman, Arthur, 63 Swarthmore College, 15, 171 Symbolism, 80 Tachnin, Paul, 180 Taming of the Shrew, The, 29, 31, 32, 33, 39, 118–34, 152 Taylor, Gary, 108, 168 Tempest, The, 24, 226, 227 Thaler, Alwin, 173 Therborn, Goran, 192, 194 Thomas, Keith, 220 Thorndike, Ashley, 229 Tillyard, E. M. W., 56 Time, 25, 26 Timon of Athens, 168 Titus Andronicus, 11, 96 Torok, Maria, 205–6, 208 Traub, Valerie, 207 Traversi, Derek, 61 Troilus and Cressida, 44, 46, 48, 52, 53, 59 Tuccia, 164–65 Twelfth Night, 21, 29, 31, 32, 46, 152, 168, 223 Two Gentlemen of Verona, The, 22, 30 Two Noble Kinsmen, 226 Vasari, Giorgio, Lives of the Painters, 198 Vaughan, Virginia, 7 Venus, 159–63 Venus and Adonis, 161 Walker, Alice, 61 Walker, Julia, 206 Wallace, Nathaniel, 195 Warburg Institute, 7 Warner, Marina, 169, 201 Warren, Roger, 147–48 Weisman, Avery D., 86–87 Wells, Stanley, 168 Wheeler, Richard, 147–48 Williamson, Marilyn, 182 Willis, Sharon, 132 Wilson, Adrian, 215 Wilson, John Dover, 75, 173 Winter’s Tale, The, 13, 15, 26, 76, 152, 197–209, 210–20, 221–33 Zeffirelli, Franco, 181 Ziegler, Georgianna, 7

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