Shakespeare and Historical Formalism

SHAKESPEARE AND HISTORICAL FORMALISM

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Shakespeare and Historical Formalism

Edited by STEPHEN COHEN Central Connecticut State University, USA

© Stephen Cohen 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Stephen Cohen has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editor of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hampshire GU11 3HR England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA

Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Shakespeare and historical formalism 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 – Criticism and interpretation I. Cohen, Stephen A 822.3’3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Shakespeare and historical formalism / edited [by] Stephen A. Cohen. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-7546-5382-0 (alk. paper) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Formalism (Literary analysis) 3. Historicism in literature. I. Cohen, Stephen. PR2976.S33542007 822.3’3—dc22 2006031641 ISBN: 978-0-7546-5382-0 Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall. Excerpts of Heather Dubrow’s essay, ‘No place to fly to’: loss of dwellings, 1999, © Cambridge University Press and reproduced with permission of the author and publisher. Jean E. Howard, “Shaekpeare, Geography, and the Work of Genre on the Early Modern Stage,” in Modern Language Quarterly, Volume 64, No. 3, pp. 299–322. Copyright, 2003, University of Washington. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the publisher.

Contents

Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction Stephen Cohen Part 1

vii ix 1

Historicizing Form

1 The Materiality of Shakespearean Form Douglas Bruster

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2 Shakespeare, Geography, and the Work of Genre on the Early Modern Stage Jean E. Howard

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3 “I would I were at home”: Representations of Dwelling Places and Havens in Cymbeline Heather Dubrow

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4 Storm versus Story: Form and Affective Power in Shakespeare’s Romances Christopher Cobb

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Part 2

Re-Forming History

5 Crossing from Scaffold to Stage: Execution Processions and Generic Conventions in The Comedy of Errors and Measure for Measure Marissa Greenberg

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6 Partial Views: Literary Allusion, Teleological Form, and Contingent Readings in Hamlet Nicholas Moschovakis

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7 Formalism and the Problem of History: Sonnets, Sequence, and the Relativity of Linear Time R.L. Kesler

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8 Teaching Shakespeare and the Uses of Historical Formalism Mary Janell Metzger

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Further Reading Bibliography Index

209 211 235

Notes on Contributors Douglas Bruster is Professor of English at The University of Texas at Austin. He is author of Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare (1992), Quoting Shakespeare (2000), and Shakespeare and the Question of Culture (2003). He is textual editor of The Changeling for Oxford University Press’s forthcoming edition of the works of Thomas Middleton. Christopher Cobb is an assistant professor of English at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana. His book on the staging of romance in late Shakespeare is forthcoming from The University of Delaware Press. His interests include Renaissance drama, performance theory, and the literature of agriculture. Stephen Cohen is an associate professor of English at Central Connecticut State University. His publications include essays on the history and theory of historical formalism in REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature and Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements (Palgrave, 2002), as well as articles on political and generic conflict in Measure for Measure, and the political significance of cuckoldry in the formal trajectory of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies. He is currently working on the ideological underpinnings of Jacobean tragicomedy. Heather Dubrow, Tighe-Evans Professor and John Bascom Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the author of five scholarly books (most recently Shakespeare and Domestic Loss: Forms of Deprivation, Mourning, and Recuperation) and of a forthcoming edition of As You Like It in the New Riverside series. Her other publications include two chapbooks of poetry and numerous articles on pedagogy and early modern literature. She has recently completed a new book on lyric. Marissa Greenberg is an assistant professor of English at the University of New Mexico. Her current project examines representations of violence in light of changes in dramatic and legal theory and practice in the mid-seventeenth century. Jean E. Howard is William B. Ransford Professor of English and Gender Studies at Columbia University. Her books include Shakespeare’s Art of Orchestration: Stagecraft and Audience Response, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern

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England, and, with Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories. She is one of the four editors of The Norton Shakespeare, general editor of the Bedford Contextual Editions of Shakespeare, and co-editor of Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, of Marxist Shakespeares, and of the four generically-organized Blackwell Companions to Shakespeare. A new book entitled Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy 1598–1642 will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in fall of 2006. R.L. Kesler is Associate Professor of English and Director of the First Nations Studies Program at the University of British Columbia. At present, he is involved in a three-year research initiative with Canadian Aboriginal film maker Loretta Todd engaging scholars and creative artists in the development of new critical and strategic approaches for the representation of Indigenous histories in new media. Mary Janell Metzger is an associate professor at Western Washington University, where she teaches early modern literature and critical theory. She is the author of Shakespeare Without Fear (2004) and articles on early modern drama, teaching, and contemporary women’s literature. Nicholas Moschovakis is Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Humanities at Reed College. He has edited and introduced a forthcoming essay collection, Macbeth: New Critical Essays (Routledge, 2006), and is currently completing a book-length study of Shakespeare’s literary and topical allusiveness. His studies of Shakespeare have previously appeared in College Literature, Shakespeare Quarterly, Othello: New Critical Essays (Routledge, 2002), and Transition magazine.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank the members of the “Shakespeare and Historicist Formalism” seminar at the 2003 Shakespeare Association of America meeting, and the “Forms of Authority: The Politics of Early Modern Forms” panel at the 2003 Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies conference; their insightful papers and stimulating discussion persuaded me that the time was ripe for a collection of essays on historical formalism. I am grateful as well to Mark David Rasmussen and Marc Geisler, who offered encouragement and advice at crucial stages of the project, and to Brook Thomas, who many years ago first helped me to think about—and publish on—historical formalism. Institutional thanks are due to Cambridge University Press and Duke University Press for permission to reprint essays by (respectively) Heather Dubrow and Jean Howard, and to Central Connecticut State University and the CSU/AAUP Research Grant Program for the reassigned time and funding that allowed me to finish this book. My thanks also to my editor at Ashgate, Erika Gaffney, for her guidance as well as her confidence in the project, and to the press’s anonymous reader, whose criticism was truly constructive. I owe a great debt as well to the contributors to this volume, not only for their essays but for the consultation and conversation that made this a truly collaborative effort—and for their patience in seeing it to fruition. And finally, I am immeasurably grateful to my wife, Lia Hotchkiss, whose sage advice and indefatigable assistance at every stage made this project, and many other things, possible.

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Introduction Stephen Cohen

Without overmuch simplification, the institutional history of literary studies over the last hundred or so years can be characterized as a series of agonistic oscillations between the discipline’s two mighty opposites, form and history. From positivist (now “old”) historicism to New Criticism to New Historicism; from structuralism and post-structuralism to cultural studies to what one recent collection of essays has dubbed the “revenge of the aesthetic”:1 each new orthodoxy has staked its claim by repudiating its predecessor’s critical touchstone and re-covering (or re-“new”ing) the concept rejected or abjected by that predecessor. In practice, of course, none of these critical methods was so absolute as to exclude entirely either form or history. But their theoretical articulations—or more precisely, the critical and institutional rhetorics that emerged from and in many cases occluded or supplanted those articulations—were marked by a selfperpetuating cycle of exaggerations, misrecognitions, and demonizations that, while providing the individuating impetus for critical innovation, also ultimately stunted the theoretical scope and developmental potential of the methods they defined. To offer but one familiar example: New Criticism’s repudiation of historicism’s emphasis on extraliterary context as its “heuristic antithesis” invited its caricature as an ahistorical formalism whose limitations, both perceived and real, led in the cultural ferment of the 1960s to its own repudiation by a cultural studies movement wary of any sort of literary exceptionalism as a form of cultural and institutional elitism.2 When it began its rapid rise to prominence in the early 1980s, New Historicism seemed poised to break this cycle. In the introduction to a 1982 special edition of Genre in which he first named the emerging critical practice, Stephen Greenblatt characterized “what we may call the new historicism” as “set apart from both the dominant historical scholarship of the past and the formalist criticism that partially displaced this scholarship in the decades after World War Two.”3 Taking issue with the monological reflectionism and ideological naïveté of the former as well as the literary exceptionalism of the latter, Greenblatt declared New Historicism’s intent to renew the historical reading of literature, but not at the expense of attention to form. Though pointedly rejecting a New Critical formalism in which literary works are treated “as a fixed set of texts that are set apart from all other forms of expression and that contain their own determinate meanings,” he concluded with an assertion of the importance of formal analysis to a truly

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historicist literary criticism: The critical practice represented in this volume challenges the assumptions that guarantee a secure distinction between ‘literary foreground’ and ‘political background’ or, more generally, between artistic production and other kinds of social production. Such distinctions do in fact exist, but they are not intrinsic to the texts; rather they are made up and constantly redrawn by artists, audiences, and readers. These collective social constructions on the one hand define the range of aesthetic possibilities within a given representational mode and, on the other, link that mode to the complex network of institutions, practices, and beliefs that constitute the culture as a whole. In this light, the study of genre is an exploration of the poetics of culture.4

The formal characteristics that distinguish literature from other cultural modes are neither innate nor immutable but rather historically produced and historically productive; consequently, any thoroughly historicist criticism must account for form, even as any rigorous formalism must be historical. Nearly 25 years later, this promise of a historical formalism has gone largely unfulfilled: while notable examples may be adduced of individual New Historical treatments of literary genres and styles, New Historicism has never systematically or consistently engaged the complex question of form. Instead, its unquestionable success in de-essentializing the boundaries between the literary and the nonliterary has functioned to displace, rather than instigate, an exploration of the formal means by which, and ideological ends to which, cultures have sought to establish those boundaries. At least in part as a result of this critical lacuna, while still a productive methodology and a dominant institutional presence, New Historicism has largely ceased to be a source of theoretical innovation in literary studies. In the resultant critical doldrums, there are signs that the form–history pendulum is preparing to swing back to one of the formalist modes that held sway before the rise of New Historicism. On the right, frustration with the decades-long hegemony of New Historicism’s insistence on the political and ideological implication of literature has kindled a movement towards an aestheticist formalism that eschews or rejects history in favor of a more self-contained literary analysis.5 Conversely, on the left, impatience with the neglect of form in New Historicism’s ideological analysis—and perhaps with the perceived conservatism of the subversion/containment model underlying much of that analysis—has led to the resurgence of a utopian formalism that assigns to literary form and to the aesthetic realm in general a defamiliarizing or demystificatory power that reveals or counters the effects of the ideological formations represented in the text.6 While historically and politically engaged, utopian formalism’s designation of a single politico-cultural function for literary form is itself trans- or a-historical: it neglects the historical and ideological pressures on definitions of the nature and function of the literary (including its own), often in favor of a self-fulfilling theory-driven discrimination between “true” literature and “mere” entertainment or propaganda.7 At the same time that this reaction has been taking place, however, a body of

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critical work has begun to emerge that, while (re)turning to matters of form, seeks not to set aside but to capitalize upon the theoretical and methodological gains of New Historicism, and in so doing to fulfill the promise of a historical formalism. Varied and inclusive in its concerns and interests, this work shares not a particular method but a critical commitment: recognizing the limits imposed on each by the absence or neglect of the other and the correspondent gains to be had through their union, it engages the issues raised by both formal and historical criticism, avoiding both the programmatic and the effective exclusion of either form or history that has characterized most formalisms and historicisms (including, as we shall see, New Historicism). In doing so, historical formalism neither imposes nor assumes any single understanding of form, history, or the relationship between them, but instead explores the complexity of their mutual implication. If, generally speaking, form is the set of techniques and conventions that characterize literature and mark its difference from other social practices, those characteristics are neither unchanging, intrinsic nor autonomous, but historically specific, historically determined, and historically efficacious.8 Nor are any of these form–history interactions either singular or simple: enmeshed in a web of institutional and cultural as well as social and political histories, literary forms are overdetermined by their historical circumstances and thus multiple and variable in their results, neither consistently ideological nor inherently demystificatory but instead reacting unpredictably with each other and with other cultural discourses. The goal of a historical formalism is to explore the variety of these interactions, mutually implicating literature’s formal individuation and its historical situation in order to illuminate at once text, form, and history. While by no means comprehensive, Shakespeare and Historical Formalism endeavors to explore the premises and potential of historical formalism by bringing together recent work in Shakespeare studies that takes up its challenge in a variety of ways. In so doing the volume aims to seize the opportunity presented and then let slip by New Historicism, taking advantage of its quarter-century of insights while avoiding and remedying its oversights. To that end, part one of this introduction limns the vexed relationship between New Historicism and literary form, locating its roots in some of the former’s fundamental theoretical commitments and critical practices.9 Part two turns to New Historicism’s affinity for the English Renaissance, describing its partial (in both senses) account of early modern literary theory and practice and offering an alternative perspective on the period’s conception of the literary, finding there not a New Historical minimizing of discursive differentiation but instead a formally-grounded understanding of the particular cultural efficacy of “poesy.” Part three then briefly outlines some of the critical and theoretical possibilities for both formalism and historicism offered by historical formalism’s mutual interrogation of form and history, and part four introduces a collection of essays that present the potential of historical formalism far better than any introduction.

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New Historicism’s most significant contribution to literary studies grew in large part out of its reaction to New Critical literary exceptionalism: its insistence that literature was a part of, not apart from, the larger social formation, with historically specific origins and functions. As Greenblatt’s statement above suggests, the critical consequences of this position are twofold: first the boundaries that separate literature from the rest of society must be broken down, or de-essentialized; then they must be analyzed historically and ideologically for the information they can give us about the function(s) of literature in society. But while New Historicism has been extraordinarily adept at the former—creatively juxtaposing and interpenetrating the literary and the non-literary, often by means of a seemingly idiosyncratic anecdote that opens up to reveal a larger social operation encompassing the literary text in question as well—it has proven less interested in, and less successful at, the latter. While carefully acknowledging the formal characteristics that distinguish literature as a discourse and shape its cultural function, New Historicism’s theoretical interests are pointedly interdiscursive.10 This focus, as well as its consequences, is captured in one of New Historicism’s most resonant rhetorical constructions, Louis Montrose’s chiasmus “the historicity of texts and the textuality of histories.”11 It describes New Historicism’s bidirectional approach to the text–context relationship, emphasizing on the one hand the historical situatedness of all texts, literary and otherwise, including the critic’s own; and on the other the inescapable mediation of our access to that history through texts, literary and otherwise, all of which are subject to critical interpretation. The latter, especially, is at the heart of what Greenblatt and Catherine Gallagher describe as a “new textualism” underlying the practice of New Historicism: the claim that all cultural artifacts, and indeed cultures themselves, are “texts,” which may be “read” with an attention once reserved for literature in order to illuminate the workings of those cultures.12 Even more than its attention to the historical construction of literary texts, this “pan-textualism” effects New Historicism’s desired erasure of the boundaries between literature and society, locating the former as simply one discourse among many which constitute the cultural text. This cultural textualism is also at the root of the most persistent criticism leveled at New Historicism: its tendency to homogenize culture in such a way as to render it incapable of satisfactorily accounting for heterogeneity, conflict, or historical change. In treating culture as a text, the argument goes, New Historicism replaces the diachrony of historical process with the synchrony of a historical product, one often characterized by a single hegemonic imperative associated with the ruling class; if it encompasses multivocality or conflict, it is generally shown to contain that conflict or hold it in suspension, its subversive power remaining in potentia.13 Not surprisingly—though certainly ironically, given its origins in a literary anti-formalism—the results of this textualist imperative are frequently described as a cultural formalism (or in Carolyn Porter’s more forceful phrase, a

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“Colonialist Formalism”), importing the New Critical sense of a text as an organic—if complex and even contradictory—whole from literary to cultural analysis and in so doing effacing the traces of genuine historical conflict, obscuring cultural politics with cultural poetics.14 Less noted than the limiting consequences of New Historicism’s textualism for its approach to history is that same textualism’s effect on the methodology’s treatment of literature—an effect that, as a result, may be closer to the roots of New Historicism’s theoretical exhaustion. For if, in the service of erasing the boundaries between text and context, the textualization of culture invites the effacing of historical difference, so too does the absorption of literature into this broader sense of textuality invite the effacing of the formal elements that set the literary text apart from other texts. Consequently, while New Historicism has never denied —and indeed, has continued to acknowledge, albeit with decreasing vigor—the relevance of form to the historical study of literature, its theoretical interests since Greenblatt’s 1982 statement have increasingly been elsewhere: “There are, to be sure,” write Gallagher and Greenblatt, “specialized skills in [literary] writing, as in the other arts, but these linguistic skills, worthy of being admired, are not independent of a much broader expressive power in language ....”15 Similarly, if by supplanting discursive formal specificity with a more general semiotic or rhetorical analysis of language the “textuality of histories” elides the formal properties of literature, so does the “historicity of texts” divert attention from the specific historicity of literature—the rise and fall of genres, changes in prosodic tastes and practices, the history of aesthetics—in favor of attention to the location of individual texts, literary and otherwise, within a more general (usually political or socioeconomic) historical matrix. The prototypical New Historicist reading emphasizes the interdiscursive congruity between a literary text and a non-literary “text” (which might be an event, person, or object as well as a written document) by subsuming them within the same historical situation or function. In so doing, it too often neglects the historically specific origins and functions of the forms that characterize and differentiate those discourses, and that mediate (and complicate) the relationship between individual text and historical situation. As a result, while some New Historicist critics have written compelling accounts of individual genres, or of individual texts in their generic context, New Historicism has never systematically theorized or consistently incorporated in its practice the historical roots and functions of literary form. Rather than resolving the form–history agon in a truly historicist formalism, New Historicism avoids—or in Montrose’s phrase, “transcends”—it by means of a broader textualism,16 and in so doing risks losing sight of the object of study—the literary text in its full historical specificity—that ostensibly justifies its institutional existence and drives its theoretical development. New Historicism’s troubled relationship to form impacts the theoretical complexity and critical efficacy not only of its historicization of literature, but of another important aspect of its effort to dismantle the literature–culture division, the critical reading of non-literary texts and practices. In their account of New

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Historicism’s attraction to the anecdote, Gallagher and Greenblatt cite the influence of anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s appropriation of the techniques of literary criticism for his “thick description” of cultural practices.17 Geertz, they claim, showed them that literary analysis could be applied beyond the traditional bounds of the literary, slipping the constraints of literary exceptionalism and bringing literature into contact with “the real”: “we had no interest in decisively leaving works of literature behind and turning our attention elsewhere; instead, we sought to put literature and literary criticism in touch with that elsewhere ... Literary criticism could venture out to unfamiliar cultural texts, and these texts— often marginal, odd, fragmentary, unexpected, and crude—in turn could begin to interact in interesting ways with the intimately familiar works of the literary canon.”18 At least in part from this impetus, New Historicism’s anecdotal method was born, with its interpenetrating “readings” of individual literary and non-literary texts. Because of this investment in the homology, if not the homogeneity, of these texts, however—and also, perhaps, because of the inevitable limits of disciplinary knowledge—while New Historicism acknowledges discursive particularity, its interests tend less toward historicized formal analyses of specific non-literary discourses than toward a more generalizable ideological close reading. Unlike Geertz’s often careful structural analyses, the “literariness” of New Historicism’s readings of the non-literary generally takes the form of a rhetorical or tropological lingua franca more in keeping with a post-structuralist textualism than a literary formalism.19 While such treatment of non-literary texts is unquestionably valuable, its insistence on the subtleties of early modern language use functioning much like a historicized version of deconstruction’s expansion of literary tropology to language as a whole, its emphasis on the extra(or sub-) discursive textuality of the idiosyncratic material of the anecdote too often supplants the historical specificity and ideological complexity of the formal analysis of non-literary discourses. If New Historicism’s use of the anecdote has one foot in the methodology’s textualism, the other is firmly planted in an understanding of history equally implicated in—and limited by—its treatment of form. The anecdotal method, write Gallagher and Greenblatt, is rooted in New Historicism’s interest in “counter-history,” or the disruption and rejection of large-scale, comprehensive, teleological histories by means of the intrusion of the specific, undigested “real” of the anecdote.20 They trace this technique to the dual influences of Foucault and the British radical history of E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams; but before turning to these historiographical forebears, they approach the counterhistoricity of the anecdote by way of a less obvious, and more literary, source: Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis. Auerbach’s method, as Gallagher and Greenblatt describe it, is to begin with neither a text’s formal structure nor its historical context, but with a resonant textual fragment, out of which he develops an account of the entire text and its historical moment. New Historicism’s attraction to this technique is based on its purported anti-formalism: Auerbach “is less concerned with sequence and form than he is with ‘the representation of reality.’ Hence he does not need to say

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something about the origin and internal structure of the work so much as he needs to address and explicate its characteristic practice of referring to the world.”21 While New Historicism turns away from Auerbach’s literary canon to the nonliterary for its anecdotes, the intention is the same: the invocation of a resonant cultural moment or artifact that eschews conventional historical structures in favor of a direct connection to the “real.” The result, however, is to replace a structural with an expressive historiography—or formalism with fractalism, in which a fragment of a culture can be used to stand for, or recreate, the whole. New Historicism’s anecdotal method has produced fascinating, unexpected readings of literary and cultural texts; but the historiographical anti-formalism of its dismissal of the “sequence … form … and internal structure” of historical narratives contributes to the sort of undifferentiated cultural formalism discussed above, in which hierarchical, causal, and conflictual relations are effaced by a “principle of ‘arbitrary connectedness’” quite different from the more nuanced and politicized historical methods of Thompson and Williams.22 In disrupting and repudiating history’s “Big Stories”23 rather than analyzing and historicizing their sources, forms and functions, New Historicism sidesteps the sort of historical formalism that would seem essential to a rigorous approach to the textuality—or historicity— of histories. No discussion of New Historicism’s engagement with form would be complete without considering perhaps the movement’s most significant contribution to the study of early modern literature and culture: its account of the integral role of drama in late Elizabethan and Jacobean England, at once shaped by and shaping its sociopolitical milieu. The vehicle for this account has been the umbrella-concept of theatricality, which, much like the function of textuality in the text–context relationship, works to break down the boundaries between drama and culture by exploring the theatrical nature of events and practices beyond the walls of the playhouses and emphasizing their functional and ideological continuity with dramatic performance. Indeed, theatricality, along with cognate concepts like performance, roleplaying, disguise, and spectatorship, have come to seem the master-tropes of early modern culture; and while their exploration has at times shed light on marginal or potentially subversive practices and issues like transvestism, non-normative sexuality, and the obscurability and even malleability of identity, the “theatricality of culture” has most often been associated with the performance of state power in governmentally sanctioned or produced spectacles from royal pro-gresses and entertainments to public executions—what Greenblatt has called “the English form of absolutist theatricality.”24 Taken to their extreme in Greenblatt’s notorious suggestion that by virtue of its congruity with the form taken by political power, the very theatricality of Renaissance drama functioned to contain the subversive potential of its content,25 the hegemonic implications of this account of the social function of early modern drama are rooted in a desire to efface the differences between theater and other cultural spheres that shares the assumptions and consequences of the New Historical resistance to literature’s discursive differentiation.26

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The political discomfort occasioned by Greenblatt’s argument has helped produce within New Historicism a reassessment of the particularity of theater’s role in early modern culture, emphasizing its geographical and social marginality as well as its political and epistemological subversiveness. Louis Montrose’s The Purpose of Playing is typical in its assumptions and methods: replacing the loosely analogical notion of Renaissance cultural theatricality with a carefully historicized description of the complex social, political, and economic situation of the theater in early modern England, Montrose rejects “arguments that bind the practices of the professional Elizabethan theatre to the practices of the Elizabethan state” and offers in their place an argument for the subversive power of early modern theater based on its own formal properties.27 The keystone of his argument is theater’s perspectivism, or dialogism: its structural foundation in the presentation of opposed “characters, interests, and ideologies.”28 This multivocality, Montrose argues, was antithetical to and thus inherently subversive of an Elizabethan absolutism that insisted on a single valid perspective and an unquestioned, divinely sanctioned truth. One might well argue that this position is based on an underestimation of the subtlety and flexibility of Elizabethan “absolutism,” which of political necessity had to acknowledge and accommodate, if not explicitly countenance, a multiplicity of opinions and perspectives—if Elizabethan absolutism were as absolute as Montrose suggests, it would have been subverted by the rancor of parliamentary politics long before the theater could do it in. More germane to our purposes here, however, is the argument’s equally limited formal account of theatricality. For while theater is certainly dialogical, not all of its voices are equal: plays do not simply present characters and opinions; they endorse, condemn, mock, subvert, and transform them, in part through direct argument, but more often—and more effectively—through narrative trajectory, conventions of characterization, rhetorical styles, customary stage practices, and other formal features that inhere not in theatricality in general, but in the specificity of its performative modes and dramatic genres. If Montrose and other New Historical theorists of theatricality have succeeded in reasserting the differences and distances between the theater and other early modern cultural practices and political institutions, they have too often stopped short of the formal differentiations within theater itself.29 To get beyond the stark containment-orsubversion dichotomy epitomized here by Greenblatt and Montrose and endemic to New Historical analyses of early modern drama,30 the politics of theatricality must be augmented by a historicized theory of dramatic and theatrical forms.31

II New Historicism’s difficulty with questions of form is especially notable given the acute formal awareness of the period with which it is most associated: the early modern period combined an interest in the recovery of classical modes and genres

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with a formal inventiveness comparable perhaps only to that of our own era. This awareness was, moreover, firmly grounded in an appreciation of the social function of form: a moment’s thought provides a number of surprisingly sophisticated instances, from George Puttenham’s account of pastoral as a vehicle for political allegory, to the Elizabethan court’s appropriation of the rhetoric and genderdynamics of Petrarchism, to Elizabeth’s own stated dislike of “the woman’s part” in romantic comedy, its marital trajectory at odds with her own resistance to matrimony.32 But while by no means unaware of these and similar examples of the period’s formal sensitivity,33 the vision of early modern literary theory that New Historicists prefer is one much closer to their own, which they in turn use to justify their interest in and approach to the period’s texts. Explaining the attraction of New Historicist critics to Renaissance literature and of Renaissance literary scholars to New Historicism, Montrose observes that “during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the separation of ‘Literature’ and ‘Art’ from explicitly didactic and political discourses or from such disciplines as history or moral and natural philosophy was as yet incipient.” Consequently, as our own historicist critical sensibility allows us to reject the literary exceptionalism and “ideology of aesthetic disinterestedness” that supplanted early modern literary functionalism, Renaissance texts become the ideal vehicles with which “to rearticulate literature as a social practice.”34 But if this emphasis on the shared functionalism of literature and other discourses has the laudable effect of underlining early modern awareness of the sociopolitical power of the former, it also effaces another equally important aspect of early modern literary theory: the integral role of specifically literary forms in the distinctive nature and unique efficacy of that power. “Poesy,” its chief apologist and best known theorist explained, does indeed share with other discourses an essentially social function; for if the various “sciences” each have their own intermediate ends, “so yet are they all directed to the highest end of the mistress knowledge ... which stands (as I think) in the knowledge of a man’s self, in the ethic and politic consideration, with the end of well doing and not of well knowing only ....”35 But while New Historicism seeks to assert literature’s cultural power by downplaying literary exceptionalism and emphasizing its commonality with other discourses, Sidney seeks to defend poetry’s cultural value by distinguishing it from other discourses as singularly efficacious. If all discursive practice has a shared socio-ethical goal, different discourses pursue that goal in different ways, with varying levels of success; poesy does so by bringing to bear the Horatian imperatives to teach and delight, not simply to present virtue but to move one to embrace it. In so doing, it bests its chief rivals, history and philosophy: for if history can teach by example, poesy, by virtue of its fictiveness, can adduce a more effective example; and if philosophy’s precepts may rival the pedagogical value of poesy’s embodiments of those precepts, the dry abstraction of the former cannot compete with the latter’s ability to move its audience to learn through the delights of beautiful language and compelling tales. In each case, the conventions of

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literary form are essential to the effect produced, not merely through the prosodic pleasures of “words set in delightful proportion,” but through the familiar narrative trajectories that guide our responses to the characters and situations we encounter. If, for example, history may be forced to present us with the inefficacious instance of the triumph of evil men, in poesy, “if evil men come to the stage, they ever go out (as the tragedy writer answered to one that misliked the show of such persons) so manacled as they little animate folks to follow them.”36 The importance of form to Sidney’s conception of the cultural function of literature is clearer still when he turns from poesy as a whole to its “parts, kinds, or species,” each of which he defines by its characteristic topics, characters, and narrative movements and the particular socio-ethical effects they produce.37 Comedy, for example, warns us against the “filthiness of evil ... in our private and domestical matters” by showing us familiar comic archetypes—“a niggardly Demea ... a crafty Davus ... a flattering Gnatho ... a vainglorious Thraso”—and their appropriate fates: “And little reason hath any man to say that men learn evil by seeing it so set out, sith, as I said before, there is no man living but, by the force truth hath in nature, no sooner seeth these men play their parts, but wisheth them in pistrinum ....”38 Likewise, Sidney’s treatment of tragedy conflates Aristotelian and medieval definitions of the genre in order to provide it with both a moral and an expressly political function based on the affective power of its mighty characters and their downward trajectory: “high and excellent tragedy ... maketh kings fear to be tyrants, and tyrants manifest their tyrannical humors; [and] with stirring the affects of admiration and commiseration teacheth the uncertainty of this world, and upon how weak foundations gilden roofs are builded ....”39 If Sidney demonstrates the importance of form to the early modern understanding of the cultural power of literature, his status as an avatar of a truly historical formalism must, of course, be qualified. His purpose—defending poesy—as well as his social status and courtly aspirations all play a role in his production and promotion of a mystified version of literature’s social function: not merely his blinkered vision of a poesy that teaches only virtue (dismissing vicious poetry as an abuse, the fault of the poet and not his medium) but also his describing as pedagogy a process that we might today call ideology.40 For a more direct treatment of the politics of literary form in the Renaissance one might look to the aforementioned Puttenham, whose lesser social status and unabashed selfpresentation as an instructor for those seeking to secure a position at court permit him to articulate an understanding of poetry’s metrical, figurative, and generic conventions as means not of teaching but of influencing, not by example but by indirection.41 But certainly the best evidence for the sophistication of the early modern understanding of the role of form in the cultural function of literature will come from its practitioners—not least the period’s most formally versatile and selfaware author, William Shakespeare. While many if not most of Shakespeare’s plays demonstrate a playful dramatic and formal self-consciousness, it is perhaps no surprise that some of his best-loved

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and most-studied works go further, combining formal parody (and parodic formalism) with serious reflection upon the power not just of drama but of its various forms. One thinks immediately of Hamlet, where the arrival of the players occasions both Polonius’ unconscious parody of generic classifications and dramatic rules (“The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastorical-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragicalcomical-histor-ical-pastoral, scene individible or poem unlimited” II.ii.379–82]42) and Hamlet’s own pivotal—and equivocal—experiment in The Mousetrap with the notion that tragedy showed tyrants their tyranny and could made criminals reveal their crimes.43 A more sustained, and strikingly more modern, treatment of the function of dramatic form can be found, however, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Arguably Shakespeare’s most metadramatic and formally self-conscious play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream both parodies and enacts—indeed, parodies in order better to enact—a Sidneian theory of form’s social efficacy. Staged primarily through the preparation for and performance of Pyramus and Thisbe, the play’s competing theories of drama could be said to mock both a naïve materialism (in the mechanicals’ desire for reward and fear of punishment) and an equally naïve idealism (in Theseus’ insistence on drama as a mere play of shadows [V.i.208–9] and poetry as “airy nothing” given “A local habitation and a name” [V.i.15, 16]44); perhaps more germanely, the play’s metadrama may also be taken to satirize the twin poles of contemporary historicist criticism, drama’s royalist orthodoxy (in Theseus’ blithe valuation of plays based on their ability to please him and propensity to flatter him [V.i.39–105]) and its subversive power (in the mechanicals’ unhappy confidence in virtually every aspect of their play to unnerve the ladies in their aristocratic audience). If the play’s poetical satire is broadly distributed, however, it is not evenly applied: it is not the noble Theseus but the foolish mechanicals who bear the lion’s share of the play’s metadramatic derision, and at the heart of their parodic poetics lies a mangled Sidneian (and Aristotelian) theory of tragic form and function. Behind Bottom’s concern about the nature of his role—“What is Pyramus? A lover or a tyrant?” (I.ii.17)—lies a garbled association of each of the period’s two major tragic kinds, the heroic/political and the romantic, with one of tragedy’s two affective powers, Sidney’s “admiration and commiseration” (a version of Aristotle’s fear and pity), which Bottom associates respectively with ranting and weeping. Told by Peter Quince that Pyramus is “A lover, that kills himself most gallant for love,” he replies: “That will ask some tears in the true performing of it. If I do it, let the audience look to their eyes. I will move stones. I will condole, in some measure ... Yet my chief humour is for a tyrant. I could play ’erc’les rarely, or a part to tear a cat in, to make all split” (I.ii.18–23). (Pyramus and Thisbe is, of course, a travesty of the theatrical and rhetorical conventions of romantic tragedy, from its scene-setting prologue to its histrionic death-speeches.) In this context, the mechanicals’ anxiety over the terrifying effects of roaring lions and staged deaths is rooted not simply in a naïve overestimation of the power

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of mimesis, but in a farcically misunderstood version of the cultural function of tragic affect: in the mechanicals’ poetics, the audience’s pity and fear lead neither to Aristotle’s catharsis nor to Sidney’s moral edification, but to the players’ execution. And it is at least in part because of their misguided efforts to mitigate the potential punitive consequences of their play that the mechanicals’ performance fails to fulfill their affective expectations: as Egeus warns Theseus, ‘tragical’, my noble lord, it is, For Pyramus therein doth kill himself; Which when I saw rehearsed, I must confess, Made mine eyes water; but more merry tears The passion of loud laughter never shed. (V.i.66–70)

The play, however, is not a complete failure; for as much as it falls short of the mechanicals’ hopes, it realizes Theseus’: desiring nothing more than a way “To wear away this long age of three hours / Between our after-supper and bed-time” (V.i.33–4), he discovers at its end that “This palpable-gross play hath well beguiled / The heavy gait of night” (V.i.350–51). Pyramus and Thisbe would seem, in short, to parodically repudiate a theory of the cultural function of form in favor of a poetics of escapism that privileges duration and diversion over both form and content.45 But Pyramus and Thisbe is not A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and if the former diverts its on-stage audience from the tedium of their wedding evening, it provides a diversion of a different sort in the latter’s deeper engagement with the intersection of formal affect and social function. For as broadly as Pyramus and Thisbe travesties the conventions of romantic tragedy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream deftly fulfills the conventions of its own genre, romantic comedy, with its multiple couples, parental obstacles and rival suitors, misadventures, and especially its ending in the anticipated and desired marriages. In producing the unions of Hermia with Lysander and Helena with Demetrius, Shakespeare’s play provides the generically appropriate emotional effect that his play-within-a-play fails to: not, in this case, pity and fear, but rather joy and relief. Nor are the play’s formal satisfactions ideologically innocent. Numerous critics have remarked upon the patriarchal implications of the play’s subordination of the Amazon Hippolyta and the defiant fairy queen Titania to their husbands, but few have noted the connection between that subordination and the play’s formal trajectory: Theseus’ eventual decision to allow Hermia and Lysander to wed is carefully linked to his anticipation of his own wedding, and the fairy blessing that assures the mortal couples happy and fruitful marriages depends upon Titania’s surrender of the changeling boy, which restores harmony to the fairy world. Nor is gender the only social hierarchy implicated in the play’s marital trajectory. The chief obstacle to the happiness of the play’s central couple is the

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objection of Hermia’s father Egeus, backed by an Athenian law which, Theseus avows, even he “by no means ... may extenuate” (I.i.120). By Act 4, however, Theseus can casually declare, “Egeus, I will overbear your will” (IV.i.176), allowing Hermia to marry the man whose arrest her irate father had demanded fewer than 25 lines earlier. Legally, nothing has changed; Demetrius’ renunciation of Hermia in favor of Helena heightens our—and perhaps Theseus’—anticipation of the marital symmetry we have desired since the play’s beginning, but it does not annul Egeus’ legal power to keep his daughter from the man he so dislikes. Yet because of its complicity in our formal pleasure, few playgoers object to, if indeed they notice, this fundamental realignment of Athenian authority, which nonetheless has ramifications beyond the play’s matrimonial arrangements: in Elizabethan England, if not ancient Athens, the question of where sovereignty resides—of whether the king is above the law or the law above the king—was of more than theoretical interest, and would eventually become one of the flash points that would spark a civil war.46 If these issues of gender and sovereignty are part of A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s thematic or ideological content, it is, as Sidney argues, the play’s form that works to shape our response to them: our anticipation of romantic comedy’s marital trajectory and the pleasure we take in its fulfillment invite, and perhaps even entail, our acceptance of specific hierarchical arrangements and ideological positions (which as readers and viewers, if not as critics, we may not even be aware are at issue). And if the comical formal frustrations of Pyramus and Thisbe enhance our appreciation of the generic satisfactions of its host play, so too does the former’s pointed cultural inefficacy—its failure to do anything more than pass the time—distract us, even more effectively than Puck’s apologetic epilogue, from the sociopolitical function of the latter’s formal pleasures. If the mechanicals’ laughable anxiety over the power of tragic form leads them to undermine its effecttiveness, Shakespeare’s denial of that power—inviting us to scoff, with Theseus, at the substantiveness of art and the mechanicals’ belief therein— enhances the ideological efficacy of his use of comic form. I do not pretend, in this brief and schematic examination of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, to have exhausted the play’s engagement with form, which extends well beyond the issues of dramatic genre discussed here to include the interrogation-through-parody of theatrical conventions and performance styles in ways that may extend or complicate the relatively straightforward argument offered here.47 My intent is merely to suggest the sort of complex understanding and exploitation of the cultural function of literary form that we can—and should—look for in early modern texts. If historicist criticism is to seek affirmation and inspiration in early modern literature and literary theory, it should be based not on their purported refusal of the differences between literature and other discourses, but on their sensitivity to the particularity of literary forms and their ideological functions—a sensitivity that can help to revivify our own critical practice.

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In calling for a historical formalism, then, the goal of this volume is to reinvigorate New Historicism as a source of theoretical innovation in early modern studies by engaging it with the period’s formal complexity, and in so doing, to arrest the form–history pendulum by producing a historically and ideologically sensitive formalism, one that neither denies the cultural function of form nor reduces it to a single inherent or inevitable effect, whether conservative or liberatory. As the variety of topics addressed and approaches taken in the essays that follow indicates, historical formalism is not defined by a single critical practice but rather by an effort to take seriously the theoretical commitments and complexities of both halves of its name, neither neglecting nor taking for granted either history or form—for if formalism and New Historicism may with some justice be accused of slighting each other’s critical focus, so too may each be said to risk hypostasizing its own, taking form and history (respectively) as givens or critical constants rather than objects of scrutiny, as theory hardens into method. By insisting upon the mutual implication and (over)determination of form and history, historical formalism’s dual focus complicates any singular understanding of either concept or of the relationship between them, and in so doing invites the rethinking of many of the (too) familiar assumptions, objects, and techniques of both formalism and historicism. It accomplishes this by in effect “crossing” form and history, lending itself to a chiasmatic encapsulation that refines and reforms Montrose’s “historicity of texts and textuality of histories”: the historicity of forms, and the forms of history.48 Unlike the historicity of texts, the historicity of form emphasizes the particularity of literary discourse, insisting not only that literary texts have historical roots and functions, but that they do so by virtue of their discoursespecific forms and conventions as well as their extratextual or interdiscursive ideological content. For the literary scholar, this understanding invites the historicization not only of generic and prosodic forms but of many of the other concepts and practices associated with traditional formalism. One might, as Douglas Bruster has done, expand intertextuality beyond descriptive source study and self-contained literary history to explore the ideological motives and functions of “quoting” other texts.49 Or, as in the foregoing brief treatment of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, one might rethink metadrama not as a closed circuit of formal (or deconstructive) self-reflexivity but as theater positioning and interrogating—even as it exercises—its own cultural power.50 Perhaps most enticingly, as Sidney’s emphasis on poesy’s power to move as well as teach suggests, the historicity of forms invites us to (re)turn our attention to the “pleasure of the text,” or literary affect, not as an end in itself but as an essential element of literature’s cultural function. In these ways and others, historicizing form entails consideration not only of what literature says, means, and does, but of how, supplementing New Historicism’s expertise in locating the extraliterary materials assimilated by literary

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texts by attending more carefully to what happens to them once there.51 Rather than focusing primarily on the historical content of a text, historical formalism insists on attention to the shape and composition of the text-as-container and the impact they may have on the meaning and function of that content. Such impact is, moreover, by no means singular or simple: genres, conventions, and styles have their own cultural associations and ideological affiliations that color, magnify, or distort the cultural materials processed through a text in ways that depend upon the historically specific significance of both form and content. One might, indeed, speak of not one but two sources of ideology in the historically situated literary text, an ideology of form as well as an ideology of content; and as the elements of a text’s interdiscursive content interact with the cultural associations and affective functions of its form(s), the complex and unpredictable results—from reinforcement to conflict to mutual modification of many sorts—go well beyond the dyadic and historically static hegemony/subversion model. In this way, historical formalism offers an alternative to New Historicism’s cultural formalism, revealing literature to be not simply a site of ideological confirmation or contradiction, but a model of a more multivalent social interaction, and an engine of social and political change.52 The (historicized) re-formalization of literature thus points the way to the de-formalization of culture.53 If historical formalism illuminates the historicity of literary forms, it also reminds us that the extratextual cultural materials in a literary text upon which those forms work are not themselves formally innocent: the other half of the historical-formalist chiasmus, the forms of history, reframes our approach to the non-literary discourses so important to New Historicism by attending to their formal specificity as well. Historical formalism invites us to read early modern legal, medical, religious, and other historical texts and practices through the lenses of neither a generalized New Historical linguistic textuality nor the literary and theatrical forms and conventions of the period, but rather with attention to their own discursive and performative formal conventions. Like literary forms, nonliterary forms have historical roots and functions; but a methodological insistence upon the discursive specificity of each reminds us that while linked by a common historical situation, they retain a developmental and functional relative autonomy from each other. Rather than assuming a cultural homogeneity, when juxtaposing materials from different discourses a historical formalist reading remains alert to the potential ideological complexity of their formal interactions—perhaps harmonious, perhaps conflicting, and perhaps productive of unanticipated insights and alternatives.54 Moreover, as the phrase “forms of history” suggests, a historically aware formal analysis may be applied not only to the various social practices and discourses that make up our sense of history, but to the discourse of history itself. Rather than the uncritical acceptance—or the almost equally uncritical wholesale repudiation—of the historical narratives that underlie a historicist criticism of literature, historical formalism calls for the formal interrogation of the histories

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deployed by early modern authors, as well as those we deploy ourselves, as a means of understanding their cultural sources and functions.55 One of New Historicism’s most innovative and provocative features when it first appeared on the critical scene was its destabilization of the critic’s objectivity, its insistence that even the seemingly well-grounded historicist reading is colored by the reader’s own historical circumstances and ideological commitments, which are thus as much a subject for critical attention as the circumstances and commitments of its early modern texts and histories.56 This call for historical self-consciousness has, however, gone largely unheeded; New Historicists’ self-analyses have for the most part been limited to personal anecdotes and proud admissions of left-liberal investments, and attention to New Historicism’s constructions of history has come primarily from its critics. The explanation for this failure is perhaps as much epistemological as methodological: what firm ground can the critic stand upon to view her own position? Here again a historical formalism may prove useful, not only by re-inviting our attention to the constructedness of our historical narratives, but by offering the collective, if no more objective or disinterested, social construction of form as a medial position from which to understand, if not resolve, the complicated relationship between an unattainable historical “truth” and an unavoidable critical subjectivity.

IV The essays in this collection are presented in two groups based on the two halves of the historical formalist chiasmus. As its title suggests, the essays in Part I, “Historicizing Form,” focus on the historical sources and functions of literary forms, and on the role of form in a fully historicized critical practice. Taking issue with the materialist turn in early modern studies that focuses narrowly on “literature’s engagement with the matériel of social life—with clothing, printed texts, household goods, even body parts” at the expense of more conventional, less tangible literary forms, Douglas Bruster’s “The Materiality of Shakespearean Form” dismantles the matter/form division by insisting that form too is “material” in the senses valued by recent criticism. Drawing on a variety of definitions of form available to early modern readers and writers—form as appearance, genre, and style—as well as the awareness of form’s cultural function displayed by the plays themselves, Bruster demonstrates that the forms of Shakespeare’s plays were, and are, materially produced, presented, and productive. As such, they fulfill the chief desiderata of recent materialist criticism—they are “real, historical, efficacious, and overdetermined”—and must thus be an essential component of a thoroughgoing materialist analysis of literature. Like Bruster, Jean E. Howard explicitly challenges the dominant historicist critical paradigm that would exclude or neglect form in its efforts to account for literature’s implication in history. In “Shakespeare, Geography, and the Work of

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Genre on the Early Modern Stage,” Howard argues that it is precisely through the historically specific transtextual constructs of genre that literature registers and responds to cultural pressures, allowing texts not simply to reflect or imitate historical content but to give it shape and meaning and thus to assume a sociopolitical function, making genre “a site for the consolidation of a given class’s interests in agonistic relation to those of other classes.” Howard exemplifies this process by exploring the interaction of early modern formal conventions and geographical associations in the cultural work of Shakespeare’s tragedies. As distinct from London-based city comedies and exotically sited adventure plays that celebrate the rise of the commercial class and its encroachment on the geographical and ideological territory of the aristocracy, the geographical and temporal liminality of Shakespearean tragedy’s European settings—at once familiar and different, poised between places and eras—provides the appropriate context for the genre’s exploration of the fractures and contradictions of the ideology of a collapsing ruling class. Heather Dubrow’s “‘I would I were at home’: Representations of Dwelling Places and Havens in Cymbeline” also focuses on the cultural work of particular genres, in this case romance and pastoral, challenging their reputation for “detachment ... escapism ... [and] political conservatism” that epitomizes the historicist attitude towards formalist studies in general. Drawing on generic analogues from Theocritus to the Coen brothers and historical materials from feudal property laws to the threat to early modern buildings posed by fire, Dubrow argues that the two genres’ concern with homes, homelessness and homecomings “mediate and moderate” a specifically early modern anxiety about the loss of one’s dwelling place. This argument provides the basis for a nuanced reading of Cymbeline which sees in the play’s insistent questioning of the desirability, availability, and security of homes elements of both generic parody and ideological instability that color, but ultimately do not undermine, the affective assurances of the play’s closural homecomings. Christopher Cobb’s “Storm Versus Story: Form and Affective Power in Shakespeare’s Romances” shares Dubrow’s generic focus on the romance but explores it from a distinctly different perspective: while Dubrow approaches genre through cultural history and intertextuality, Cobb’s emphasis is on the interplay of generic and theatrical forms. Taking issue with the homogeneity of New Historicism’s notion of the “theatricality of politics,” Cobb offers instead a model that insists on a critical awareness of the affective and ideological differences between the forms of the theater proper and those of “political theatricality” (court masques, royal entertainments, processions), and the complex political implications of their intersection. Cobb traces the refunctionalization that the romance-derived courtly spectacles of political theatricality undergo when represented in the public theater and juxtaposed with that theater’s less spectacular, more story- and actor-centered mode of presentation in Shakespeare’s romances. In readings of The Tempest and Henry VIII, the conventions of romance serve as a

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lens through which to elucidate the political uses of each theatrical mode, linking spectacle to absolutism and actor-centered performance to a mutual, consensual style of rule more in keeping with the harmonies of romance, and ultimately revealing each play to be a meta-theatrical and metapolitical meditation on the role of theatricality in good governance. While the essays in Part I demonstrate the value of bringing historical insight to the study of literary forms, those in Part II, “Re-Forming History,” emphasize the importance of form for a fuller understanding of history—and in so doing challenge and complicate some of the fundamental assumptions of historicist criticism. Marissa Greenberg’s “Crossing from Scaffold to Stage: Execution Processions and Generic Conventions in The Comedy of Errors and Measure for Measure” uses the figure of crossing to theorize the relationship between literary and non-literary forms. At its most fundamental, Greenberg argues, form involves the use of convention and expectation to produce a particular effect—a definition that, as early modern usage suggests, unites literary and non-literary (religious, legal, social) forms. These same characteristics, however, also serve to differentiate forms—each with its own conventions, expectations, and effects—and set the terms of their interaction or “crossing,” which Greenberg employs in two senses: a spatial crossing-over (as non-literary forms are brought into the theatrical space of dramatic representation and literary forms are carried back to the “real world” by theatergoers), and a conceptual and ideological intersection (as the juxtaposing of different conventions, expectations, and effects produces an array of unpredictable results, from mutual support to mutual indifference to a conflict won by either or neither). Greenberg illustrates the complexities of such formal crossings by examining the consequences of the representation of judicial forms and conventions—particularly the execution procession—in two of Shakespeare’s comedies. In The Comedy of Errors, an early play, the trumping of punitive expectations by comedic pleasure asserts the cultural power of theater as an institution. In the later and more problematic Measure for Measure, however, the mutual undermining of both punitive and generic formal expectations that culminates in the play’s notoriously unsatisfactory conclusion leaves its audience at once sensitive to and skeptical of the social efficacy of both dramatic and nondramatic forms. Nicholas Moschovakis’s “Partial Views: Literary Allusion, Teleological Form, and Contingent Readings in Hamlet” examines both the value and the limits of historical formalism by reminding us of the historical overdetermination and formal multiplicity of all texts and the inevitable contingency and partiality of all readings. In a reading grounded in formalist concerns with literary allusion and teleological form, Moschovakis demonstrates that for at least some of its early readers, allusions to The Aeneid in the “literary” Q2-F Hamlet proffer an epic teleology as one way to understand Hamlet’s “story,” allowing the Prince to see his revenge as the fulfillment of a providential purpose. If Hamlet the character invites us to understand his story in this way, however, Hamlet the play thematizes the partiality of its hero’s self-interpretation, by insinuating the ambiguity of epic

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theodicy and pointedly leaving open-ended the Danish court’s understanding of Horatio’s still-to-be-told version of Hamlet’s story. At once partaking of and drawing our attention to the complexity that we have come to associate with “literary” texts, Hamlet, Moschovakis argues, shows its readers the importance of their role both in the interpretation of literature and—if we take Hamlet as our model—the assigning of form and meaning to our own history. In “Formalism and the Problem of History: Sonnets, Sequence, and the Relativity of Linear Time,” R.L. Kesler expands upon the implications of the formal construction of history by taking seriously the acknowledgement often made and almost as often set aside in much New Historicist criticism, of the subjective nature and heuristic function of the notions of history upon which historicist readings of literature are based. In a compelling example of the historicization of form, Kesler locates the development of the sonnet in early modern England in the context of the rise of a commodity capitalism that valued the iterability, systematization, and controlled variation characteristic of the sonnet form, as well as the objectifying mastery with which the sonnet approaches its subject matter. Because of its historical circumstances, the “literary history” of the sonnet’s formal development is regular, documentable, relatively predictable, and causally explicable, akin to the understanding of economic processes necessary for investment—and also to the linear, objective, cause-and-effect understanding of history itself that would emerge only in the coming centuries. That is to say, the development of the sonnet form may be made explicable by a concept of history (or form of historical narrative) which it precedes historically, and the development of which it may indeed have influenced. This circularity, Kesler concludes, need not be crippling—it may, in fact, be inevitable, given our inability to see or understand from outside our own historical situation—provided that we remember that the resultant historical understandings are heuristics to be used to structure our own experience, not to exclude or repress other possibilities. The volume concludes with Mary Janell Metzger’s “Teaching Shakespeare and the Uses of Historical Formalism.” While Metzger’s essay shares with the others in Part II a discomfort with the limits of New Historicism’s treatment of history, her perspective is rooted in personal experience and pedagogical practice. Metzger laments the decline of New Historicism from a source of theoretical innovation to a critical and pedagogical orthodoxy increasingly devoted not to the opening of literary texts to a multiplicity of historical voices but to the production of effecttively monovocal ideological readings of texts. Linking this tendency both to the silencing of alternative views by the increasingly monopolistic media and to the answers-oriented testing philosophy of the current political establishment, Metzger sees in the generation of college students taught by the New Historicist academic establishment an increasing deafness to multiple voices within and about a text, and a concomitant blindness to the ethical import of literary interpretation— not least their own. Her solution is a historical-formalist pedagogy, one that uses formal analysis to complicate the text–ideology relationship, to demonstrate how

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texts shape our responses to their historical contents, and thus to alert students to alternative understandings and give them responsibility for their own interpretive choices. Like the other authors in this volume, Metzger urges a renewed attention to form not to foreclose historical interpretation or repudiate the insights of New Historicism, but to expand the former and reinvigorate the latter; not to effect yet another swing of the form–history pendulum, but to collapse the distance between the poles of its trajectory.

Notes 1 Michael P. Clark (ed.), Revenge of the Aesthetic: The Place of Literature in Theory Today (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 2 On the exaggeration and misperception of the anti- or ahistoricism of various formalisms—from Romantic organicism to Russian formalism to New Criticism—see chapter 1 of Susan Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), esp. pp. 5–10 and n. 13; the use of the phrase “heuristic antithesis” to describe New Criticism’s positioning of itself in relation to historicism is Wolfson’s (p. 8). See also Richard Strier, “How Formalism Became a Dirty Word, and Why We Can’t do Without It,” in Mark David Rasmussen (ed.), Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 208–9, on the (mis)construction of New Criticism as an ahistorical “straw man” (quoting René Wellek) and the demonization of formalism in “the profession[’s]” critical positioning of New Historicism. In “Fiction and Faction: New Directions for New Historicism” (Monatshefte, 84/2 [1992]: 212–19), Heather Dubrow notes the tendency of this conflictual construction of the history of literary studies to ignore and (thus) discourage “coexistence, interaction, and gradual transformation” (p. 218), and links it to the hegemony/subversion historical model often associated with New Historicism. 3 Stephen Greenblatt, “Introduction,” The Forms of Power and the Power of Forms in the Renaissance, Genre, 15/1&2 (1982): 3–6; quotation from p. 5. The issue was subsequently reprinted as Stephen Greenblatt (ed.), The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1982). 4 Ibid, p. 6. 5 See, for example, John Velz’s Introduction to John W. Velz (ed.), Shakespeare’s English Histories: A Quest for Form and Genre (Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1997), in which he notes that “[t]here is no doubt that the reduction of history to politics has had a limiting effect on aesthetic criticism, and that a reaction is under way” (p. 2). Velz and his contributors reject “not the [historicist] mode but its dominance; we see our book as addressing a need for a different kind of investigation of Shakespeare’s English histories” (p. 2). Less accommodating is Angus Fletcher’s “On Shakespeare and Theory” (in W.R. Elton and John M. Mucciolo [eds], The Shakespearean International Yearbook 2: Where are we now in Shakespearean studies? [Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002], pp. 3–19), which calls for a repudiation of the historical/political/contextual mode in favor of a “new formalism” (p. 16) characterized

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by an explicitly New Critical poetics and aesthetics “treating the Shakespearean play as a self-organizing system” (p. 15). For several quite different examples, see the editors’ introductions to Clark (pp. 1–24); George Levine (ed.), Aesthetics and Ideology (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), pp. 1–28; and John J. Joughin and Simon Malpas (eds), The New Aestheticism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 1–19, as well as many of the excellent essays in each. The desire to assign to literature by means of its formal properties or aesthetic qualities an innate critical or revelatory power, partaking of but exceeding the ideological, has a long and honorable lineage that can be traced back from Althusser and Macherey’s writings on literature to Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt to the Russian Formalists and beyond. The theoretical inverse and disciplinary counterweight to this utopian formalism is what might be called an ideological formalism, which holds that literary forms function not to demystify ideological constructions but to instantiate and reinforce them, obscuring social inequality and conflict behind formal harmony and closure. In “Marxism and the New Historicism,” Catherine Gallagher identifies these two critical modes as elements of the mid-twentieth century “left formalism” rejected by New Historicism in favor of a more variable and nuanced relationship between literature and ideology; that (as I will argue below) this relationship was neglectful of if not hostile to formal analysis is signaled by Gallagher’s terminological shift from “form” to “literature” in her description of New Historicism’s position (in H. Aram Veeser [ed.], The New Historicism [New York: Routledge, 1989], pp. 37–48; see especially pp. 43–4). Stripped of their essentializing presuppositions about the inherent politics of literary form, the analytical techniques of both utopian and ideological formalism have much to contribute to a true historical formalism open to the historically specific ideological and demystificatory potentials of form. For an insightful discussion of both critical modes, their histories, strengths, and weaknesses, and their role in a historical formalism, see Wolfson, esp. pp. 1–11. My use of the utopian–ideological terminological binary is informed by, though not identical to, Fredric Jameson’s in chapter 6 of The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), pp. 281–99. As the various senses of “history” invoked here—history as chronology, as agent, and as product—suggest, historical formalism embraces—and interrogates—not only multiple histories, but multiple concepts of history. On the use of the form–history relationship to explore history as well as form, see pp. 15–16 in this introduction. My emphasis in this discussion on the work of New Historicism’s earliest and bestknown practitioners is not meant to ignore the number and variety of outstanding New Historicist critics (self-described and otherwise), but to underscore the often unacknowledged importance of early New Historicism’s foundational assumptions and priorities to a wide range of subsequent practice. While some of the characteristic problems of early New Historicism discussed in this introduction—the limitations of its anecdotal historical method, its difficulties accounting for achieved subversion and historical change—have been addressed and to an extent remedied by the “second generation” New Historicism of the late 1980s and 1990s, their role in and continuing effects on the method’s relationship to form and formalism have yet to be adequately described or addressed.

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10 In “The Circulation of Social Energy,” the introduction to Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), Greenblatt notes that while “I believe that sustained, scrupulous attention to formal and linguistic design will remain at the center of literary teaching and study ... I propose something different: to look less at the presumed center of the literary domain than at its borders ... into the half-hidden cultural transactions through which great works of art are empowered” (p. 4). 11 “Prologue: Texts and Histories,” The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 5. I quote from Montrose’s most recent use of the phrase; its origin—with a singular “history” rather than the plural “histories”—seems to be in his “Renaissance Literary Studies and the Subject of History,” English Literary Renaissance, 16/1 (1986): 5–12, and the plural appears for the first time in “New Historicisms,” in Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn (eds), Redrawing the Boundaries (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1992), pp. 392–418. In each case, the goal of the chiastic construction is to emphasize “the dynamic, unstable, and reciprocal relationship between the discursive and material domains,” underlining New Historicism’s defining difference not only from New Critical formalism’s autonomous aestheticism but from “old” historicism’s reflectionism and Marxism’s base–superstructure determinism as well (“Renaissance Literary Studies,” p. 8). 12 Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Introduction to Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 8. 13 See, for example, Alan Liu, “The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism,” ELH, 56 (1989): 721–71; Carolyn Porter, “History and Literature: ‘After the New Historicism,’” New Literary History, 21/2 (1990): 253–72; Steven Mullaney, “After the new historicism,” in Terence Hawkes (ed.), Alternative Shakespeares vol. 2 (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 17–37, esp. pp. 25–6; and Howard Felperin, “‘Cultural Poetics’ versus ‘Cultural Materialism’: The Two New Historicisms in Renaissance Studies,” in The Uses of the Canon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 142–69, esp. pp. 154–5. 14 This last phrase adapts Mullaney’s description of Greenblatt’s practice as an “approach to a ‘poetics of culture’ [that] tends, in its application, to obscure or homogenize a politics of culture” (p. 28); see also Felperin, “‘Cultural Poetics’ versus ‘Cultural Materialism.’” For “Colonialist Formalism,” see Porter, p. 261. While most critics who designate New Historicism a cultural formalism partake of an almost reflexive critical association of formalism with a- or anti-historicism, the sort of formalism attributed to New Historicism here is, despite its New Critical echoes, less an aestheticist than an ideological formalism (to use the terms invoked above), one however that perpetuates an ideological hegemony not by papering over contradictions but by acknowledging and absorbing them and thus rendering them powerless. 15 Gallagher and Greenblatt, p. 13. 16 Writing of New Historicism’s efforts to break down the barriers between text and context, the discursive and the material, Montrose claims that “[o]ne important implication for literary studies is the possibility of transcending the formalist–historicist opposition in a new mode of textualist–materialist critical practice” (“New Historicisms,” p. 412). New Historicism’s relationship with materialism is, in many ways, as fraught as its use of textualism: on the rise of “the material” in recent historically oriented criticism of early modern literature, see Douglas Bruster’s essay in this volume; on the influence of Marxist historical materialism and Raymond Williams’

Introduction

17 18 19

20 21

22

23 24 25

26

27 28 29 30

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cultural materialism on both New Historicism and historical formalism, see Stephen Cohen, “Between Form and Culture: New Historicism and the Promise of a Historical Formalism,” in Rasmussen (ed.), Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements, pp. 17–41. Gallagher and Greenblatt, pp. 20–31. Ibid., p. 28. “Each of the discursive regimes has its own characteristic concerns, intellectual and procedural boundaries, specialized languages. But each of these also touches and interacts with the others in a loose but powerful association, an association driven by certain mimetic assumptions, shared metaphors, operational practices, root perceptions” (Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991], p. 23). Gallagher and Greenblatt, pp. 49–74. Ibid., pp. 31–48; quotation from p. 40. Auerbach’s method was, however, considerably more formalist than his use here would suggest; as Strier notes, where the New Historicists mine their resonant fragments primarily for content, Auerbach was much more interested in analyzing their style (pp. 211–13). Porter links New Historicism’s use of the anecdote to its tendency towards the occlusion of conflict and the homogenization of culture, citing Walter Cohen on the method’s “principle of ‘arbitrary connectedness’ ... in which ‘the strategy is governed methodologically by the assumption that any one aspect of a society is related to any other’” (Porter, p. 261, quoting Walter Cohen, “Political Criticism of Shakespeare,” in Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O’Connor (eds), Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology [New York: Methuen, 1987], p. 34). Liu also aligns New Historicism’s anecdotalism with its cultural formalism, and connects both of them to a lack of rigorous historical or formal theory. Gallagher and Greenblatt, p. 51. Stephen Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets,” in Shakespearean Negotiations, p. 65. Ibid., pp. 64–5. Greenblatt has since claimed that his argument was meant to apply narrowly to the texts in question in the essay, not as sweepingly as it has often been construed. On the ideological limitations of Greenblatt’s “conflating distinctly different manifestations of Renaissance ‘theatricality’” see Mullaney, pp. 32–3. For readings that demonstrate the value of distinguishing between such manifestations, see the essays by Christopher Cobb and Marissa Greenberg in this volume. Montrose, The Purpose of Playing, pp. 19–105; quotation from p. 78. Ibid., p. 85. On the neglect in recent criticism of genres and other conventional dramatic forms in favor of drama-as-form, see Douglas Bruster’s essay in this volume, p. 32 and n. 8. This dichotomy might also be described as one between an ideological and a utopian formalism, as each option attributes a single, inherent function—hegemonic or demystificatory—to theatrical form. Of course, many New Historical readings of early modern drama do not discuss theatricality at all, focusing instead primarily on the ideological content of the play-as-text. Exemplary work of this sort has been done by Robert Weimann, a critic who has not received the attention he should from New Historicist critics; see especially Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic

24

32

33

34

35 36

Stephen Cohen Form and Function, ed. Robert Schwartz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), and Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre, eds Helen Higbee and William West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Weimann insists upon, and persuasively demonstrates, the historical sources and functions not simply of dramatic forms (comedy, tragedy, etc.) but of theatrical conventions and practices as well (costumes, props, blocking, delivery styles), finding in the interactions and conflicts within and between them no single “purpose of playing” but a variety of sociopolitical functions and effects (see Author’s Pen, p. 8). For work in a similar vein, see also Cobb’s essay in this volume. For pastoral see George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London, 1589; Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1970), p. 53; for Elizabeth’s comment see Calendar of the Letters and State Papers Relating to English Affairs of the Reign of Elizabeth Preserved in, or originally Belonging to, the Archives of Simancas, ed. Martin A.S. Hume, vol. 1, Elizabeth, 1558–1567 (1892; Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1971), p. 633; as well as Valerie Wayne’s discussion of Elizabeth’s remarks in the context of her politically based reluctance to marry in Wayne’s introduction to Edmund Tilney, The Flower of Friendship: A Renaissance Dialogue Contesting Marriage (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 46. Treatments of the Elizabethan politicization of Petrarchism are too numerous to list fully here; see, for example, Arthur F. Marotti, “‘Love is not love’: Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order,” ELH, 49 (1982): 396–428; Catherine Bates, The Rhetoric of Courtship in Elizabethan Language and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and Susan Frye, Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Montrose, for example, has written eloquently on Puttenham and the politics of Elizabethan pastoral: see “‘Eliza, Queene of Shepherdes,’ and the Pastoral of Power,” English Literary Renaissance, 10/2 (1980): 153–82; and “Of Gentlemen and Shepherds: The Politics of Elizabethan Pastoral Form,” ELH, 50/3 (1983): 415–59. Montrose, “Renaissance Literary Studies,” p. 12. For a more developed version of the argument that the Renaissance did not significantly differentiate between literature and other social discourses, see Stephen Greenblatt’s “What Is the History of Literature,” Critical Inquiry, 23 (1997): 460–81, in which he reads Francis Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning as a New Historicist primer avant la lettre. I have discussed Greenblatt’s essay in this context in “Between Form and Culture,” pp. 30–31. Though beyond the scope of this essay, a comparative study of the role that different periods’ formal theories and practices play in the development of the critical practices and principles of those who study them might prove a fruitful historical-formalist project. Cf. Wolfson’s description of Romanticist New Historicists’ different but nonetheless problematic attitude towards form developed in response to their perception of the period’s organic formalism (pp. 10–15). Sir Philip Sidney, Apology for Poetry (1595), ed. Forrest G. Robinson (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), p. 23. Ibid. pp. 38, 34–5. Sidney’s formal argument here may be an implicit response to the antitheatricalists, who in their condemnations of the immoral examples set forth by drama often focus on the contents of plays while ignoring their narrative contextualization—an error not infrequently perpetuated by historicist critics whose identifications of parallels between literary and non-literary figures and situations

Introduction

37

38 39 40

41 42

43

44

25

neglect the ideological implications of the former’s presentation within a particular narrative structure. Ibid., p. 41. Sidney identifies the “most notable” of poesy’s “special denominations” as “the Heroic, Lyric, Tragic, Comic, Satiric, Iambic, Elegiac, Pastoral, and certain others, some of these being termed according to the matter they deal with, some by the sorts of verses they liked best to write in” (p. 21). His interest, however, is less with verse forms than with the “matter” associated with each poetic type: even when he discusses the classical genres typically defined by their metrical forms, Sidney eschews prosodic definitions in favor of describing the emotional responses associated with particular meters and the socially beneficial effects they produce: “the lamenting elegiac ... who bewails ... the weakness of mankind and the wretchedness of the world ... the bitter but wholesome iambic ... which rubs the galled mind in making shame the trumpet of villainy with bold and open crying out against naughtiness” (p. 43). Ibid., pp. 44–5. Ibid., p. 45. For two quite different treatments of the relation between Sidney’s social status and aspirations and his theory of poetry, see Daniel Javitch, “The Impure Motives of Elizabethan Poetry,” in Greenblatt (ed.), The Power of Forms, pp. 225–38; and Robert Matz, Defending Literature in Early Modern England: Renaissance Literary Theory in Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Sidney’s theory is, of course, also deficient as a historical formalism in that it is not truly historicized: though able to offer a pseudo-historical account of what he perceives as the declining quality of poesy over time, his understanding of poetic genres and their functions is an essentialist one rooted largely in classical theory and practice. For a fuller comparison of the poetic motives of Sidney and men like Puttenham and George Gascoigne, see Javitch, to whom I am here indebted. William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, in Stephen Greenblatt et al. (eds), The Norton Shakespeare (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997); all further quotations from Shakespeare’s plays will be from this edition. Polonius’ catalogue may be a satirical glance at Sidney’s list of genres (quoted above, n. 37), his defense of mixed forms (“some poesies have coupled together two or three kinds, as tragical and comical, whereupon is risen the tragi-comical ... Some have mingled matters heroical and pastoral ... if severed they be good, the conjunction cannot be hurtful”), and/or his subsequent condemnation thereof (“mongrel tragi-comedies”) (Sidney, pp. 41–2, 77). Sidney’s discussion of tragedy includes the story of “the abominable tyrant Alexander Pheraeus” who fled from a performance of Euripides’ Troades (Ibid., p. 46 and n. 230). The idea that literature—and especially tragedy—could make criminals reveal their crimes and sinners their sins was a common one: in addition to Sidney’s story of David and Nathan (p. 41), see also Thomas Heywood’s An Apology for Actors (1612), sigs. G1–G2. Sidney’s editor Forrest Robinson notes a similarity in argument between Theseus’ dismissive account of poetry and Sidney’s famous paean to the poet as one who “goeth hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit” (Sidney, p. 14 and n. 55). Theseus, it would seem, accepts but devalues the Sidneian account of poetry’s imaginative essence.

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45 For a different but complementary treatment of the complex exploration of the function of literary form in this scene—one which attributes to Theseus a canny grasp of formal efficacy—see Douglas Bruster’s essay in this volume, pp. 42–3. 46 For another perspective on the intersection of comic form and royal sovereignty, see Marissa Greenberg’s reading of The Comedy of Errors in this volume, pp. 132–5. 47 All texts are in some sense overdetermined by their multiple formal engagements (genre[s], style[s], etc.) in ways that both demand and complicate historical-formalist analysis, but this is especially true of drama, which partakes not only of literary form(s) but of theatrical forms as well. For a brief but powerful reading of the sociopolitical implications of the interaction between the forms of textual and performative authority in A Midsummer Night’s Dream—a reading that complicates the politics of my own— see Weimann, Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice, pp. 80–88. (I am indebted to Ashgate Press’s anonymous reader for both underlining the formal overdetermination of drama and pointing me toward Weimann’s reading.) For a more thorough treatment of the play’s many layers of formal parody—albeit one more interested in metadramatic authorial self-assertion than historical function—see J. Dennis Huston’s “Parody and Play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” ch. 4 of Shakespeare’s Comedies of Play (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), pp. 94–121. For fuller discussions of formal overdetermination, see the essays in this volume by Bruster and Nicholas Moschovakis, the latter of which offers a compelling case for the necessity and value of partial readings. 48 If one were to trace the “chiasmatic history” of the form–history relationship, one might note that Montrose’s “historicity of texts and textuality of histories” itself supplanted Greenblatt’s “forms of power and power of forms” (see n. 3 above) in a fashion emblematic of the development of New Historicism’s theoretical priorities, replacing formalism with textualism even while attempting to correct the method’s oft-criticized emphasis on power with a more capacious and flexible concept of history. “The historicity of forms and the forms of history” attempts to retain and enhance this historical commitment by returning to the formal engagement of Greenblatt’s earlier construction and his original, abandoned call to arms (above, p. 2). On historical formalism as a “crossing” see the essay by Marissa Greenberg in this volume, to which my use of the term is indebted. 49 See Douglas Bruster, Quoting Shakespeare: Form and Culture in Early Modern Drama (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), as well as Nicholas Moschovakis’s essay in this volume. 50 For a more developed example, see the essay in this volume by Christopher Cobb. 51 See Peter Brooks, “Aesthetics and Ideology: What Happened to Poetics?” Critical Inquiry, 20 (1994): 509–23. Before they can satisfactorily situate a literary text within a larger ideological system, Brooks argues, “[s]tudents need in their work to encounter a moment of poetics—a moment in which they are forced to ask not only what the text means but also how it means” (p. 517). Cf. Strier’s invocation of analytic philosophy’s “use-mention” distinction to describe the different approaches to a text’s historical content taken by a historically engaged formalism and New Historicism: while the latter focuses primarily on the extratextual significance of materials mentioned in a literary text, the latter begins with the use to which the text puts that material before turning outward to its larger cultural meaning and function (p. 213).

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52 I have written on this topic at greater length in “New Historicism and Genre: Towards a Historical Formalism,” REAL, 11 (1995): 405–23. 53 Critics of New Historicism’s cultural formalism have generally prescribed more and better history as a remedy for its historical generalization and homogenization. I am proposing instead more and different forms, in response to New Historicism’s tendency to allow overgeneralized cultural and textual forms to obscure the greater specificity of literary form. The two solutions are, however, ultimately the same, as literary forms are historical, an aspect of history neglected in New Historicism’s homogenization of culture. 54 For additional discussion and an example of this sort of interaction, see the essay by Greenberg in this volume. 55 See, for example, the essay in this volume by R.L. Kesler. 56 Distinguishing New Historicism from an older historical literary criticism (exemplified in this instance by John Dover Wilson), Greenblatt writes, “[t]he new historicism erodes the firm ground of both criticism and literature. It tends to ask questions about its own methodological assumptions and those of others: in the present case, for example, it might encourage us to examine the ideological situation not only of Richard II but of Dover Wilson on Richard II” (Introduction to The Forms of Power and the Power of Forms, p. 5).

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PART 1 Historicizing Form

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Chapter 1

The Materiality of Shakespearean Form Douglas Bruster

Matter has clearly won the day over form in the study of Shakespeare and early modern literature. A growing fascination with cultural content has focused attention on literature’s engagement with the matériel of social life—with clothing, printed texts, household goods, even body parts. The result has been, in the words of Henry S. Turner, “a moment in early modern studies when a declared interest in material culture—objects, things, bodies, places—has become synonymous with a claim to theoretical currency.”1 Discussing these “new scholars of the object,” Jonathan Gil Harris has noted that the “current vogue for so-called ‘material culture’” has produced “calls to get ‘material’ in a new way—by embracing physical objects as the stuff of history.”2 As evident even in the titles of such works as Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, Material London ca. 1600, the “Material Culture” volume of Shakespeare Studies, and Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, “matter” and “the material” now define a reliable center for early modern studies. If matter is in, form is, for the most part, out. “Formalism” has even become something of a dirty word in the field of early modern literary studies, as Richard Strier has observed.3 With its suspicious-sounding suffix, the term regularly appears as a pejorative epithet in evaluations of scholarship. For instance, one reviewer criticizes a chapter on King Lear because its author’s “concern with representations rooted in history is more or less abandoned as he engages in a stylish piece of textual analysis which owes more to formalism than it does to either old or new historicism.”4 Another takes an author to task for clothing himself in the garb of materialism when his true self is otherwise: “[the author’s] insistent reductiveness suggests an imperfect understanding of postmodern hermeneutics, and a need to level the playing field so that he can set himself up as a peer of Greenblatt (his favorite materialist). Inevitably, he gives the game away in delineating his own critical position, which in the end is a variety of formalism.”5 Form was once regularly opposed to content. As these extracts suggest, it is now contrasted, to its detriment, with history and the material.6 That the low status of form in the study of early modern literature concerns more than critical nomenclature can be seen in the influential New History of Early

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English Drama, edited by John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan. Called by its cover material “one of those rare books that transforms the field” (Stephen Orgel) and “the most inclusive, innovative, and important overview of the drama that we have had to date” (Peter Stallybrass), this critical anthology has quickly become a standard handbook. As its title implies, the volume’s relation to literary form is quite revisionary. Deploying Ben Jonson’s distinction between the “body” and “soul” of drama, the volume’s editors come down decidedly on the side of “body.” This means, in their account, not “playwrights and play texts as the substance of dramatic history,” but instead “the social and material circumstances in which early English drama was enabled and inhibited.”7 It is difficult to resist such an authoritative, attractive phrase as “the social and material circumstances” of early English drama. And A New History of Early English Drama has obviously done valuable work for the field in exploring those very circumstances. Yet the collection is perhaps not as “inclusive” as its jacket suggests, for, defining itself as the history of what it takes to be a form (that is, drama), it oddly limits what circumstances count as “enabl[ing]” by virtually occluding the array of conventional dramatic forms: comedy, tragedy, and history, to name only these.8 For example, the lone index entry for one of the major genres is “Tragedy: influenced by ideas of divine judgment,” and where “genre” might be expected to appear a reader passes from “Geertz, Clifford: on royal entry as sign of dominance” to “Gift: as contract, in royal entry” without encountering the term.9 While conventional literary form makes little impact upon A New History of Early English Drama, the concept of form appears frequently in this study, and most often in reference to the shaping abilities of non-dramatic matter and to the traces of that shaping. Hence in place of index entries for “comedy” or “history,” we get references for such topics as “Ad quadratum construction,” “Audience placement,” “Beating the bounds,” “Book closet,” “Bookshelves,” and “Marriage, aristocratic: as social theater.” Throughout the New History of Early English Drama, such extra-textual agencies, objects, and events supplant traditional literary categories and the elements of form that have conventionally been understood to underwrite literary composition and reception. Clearly the New in this influential volume’s title comes not merely after but at some expense of the old, which in this case means literary form as traditionally conceived. Such invidious positioning is not necessary but remains perhaps the logical progression of a materialism that has grown increasingly literal in its selfdefinition, turning away, as it does so, from form as a significant category and carrier of meaning.10 As Stephen Cohen reminds us, during the 1970s and 80s New Historicists initially displayed interest in the social valences of literary form, yet this interest oddly gave way to a model in which literature and literary form were subsumed under the larger category of “cultural practice.”11 Lost in this movement has been the integrity of literary form as an entity for early modern writers and readers.

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Form, that is, has become critically viable mainly when it is not the form or forms concerning which Shakespeare and his contemporaries would have had conscious thoughts—and by means of which not only authors but publishers, printers, booksellers, and readers variously advertised and consumed works of literature. Unfortunately, critics concerned with the material have largely turned away from not only critical formalism’s varied past but also the more traditional modes of materialist criticism. Materialist criticism was formerly a much broader, more complex method, and based on a capacious understanding of materiality. That capaciousness of definition is largely alien to recent criticism. And because matter and form are so frequently understood to be opposites, the definition of form today is not much more supple. When people speak critically of form, that is, they typically offer little by way of definition, preferring instead to leave it simply as that which is neither material nor historical in nature. Why should matter be so attractive now in literary criticism, especially at the expense of form? Recent criticism appears to take matter to be a good because it is hard, verifiable, and consequential, while form is seen as soft (that is, imprecise), elusive, and without much consequence. We value matter because its significant qualities seem to include being real historical efficacious overdetermined

(that is, it exists) (it exists in and over time) (it not only exists in time but has an effect on its time) (its effect on or interaction with its time is multiple and complex)

These are by no means sufficient, exhaustive, or even necessary qualities of the material. Others could well offer a different list of qualities. Arguably, however, these remain among matter’s most attractive characteristics to critics today. This is perhaps especially the case with recent varieties of historicist and materialist criticism, for which these qualities are near to desiderata. Ironically, this list of attributes for “matter” also functions as an entirely apt set of characterizations for literary form, including, and in some respects especially, early modern literary forms. For Shakespeare and his contemporaries, form was not only materially efficacious, but, in its very efficacy, often a seemingly present, overdetermined “thing” with identifiable dimensions, properties, and consequences. Those interested in literary form today are thus justified in seeing it as a profoundly historical quantity, a thing and a process not easily separated from matter, and in every way as relevant as more apparently “objective” things to the study of early modern society, culture, and history. My aim in this essay is not to hit upon or convey hitherto unrecognized aspects of materiality and form, but rather to foreground the meaningful overlap between them where they relate to the study of literary texts. Before attempting to show the ways in which form can be seen as having possessed a material valence in relation

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to early modern plays, I would like to offer some provisional definitions. First, though, a disclaimer: along with such terms as culture and nature, form is surely among the more complicated words in the English language. Clearly no essay could hope to do justice to either its semantic range or philosophical lineage. I should point out, therefore, that I offer merely a modest range of definitions for “form” as it pertains to the study of Shakespeare’s works, and, by extension, the literary works of his contemporaries and even those from other eras. None of these definitions is controversial. For them, in fact, I have relied on such common reference works as the Oxford English Dictionary (s.v. “form” I.1.a, 5.a) and Alexander Schmidt’s Shakespeare Lexicon and Quotation Dictionary, and bolstered material there with information gleaned from various early modern dictionaries. Emphasizing form as a material thing where it relates to the study of Shakespeare, we can understand the term to include the following senses: 1. The immediately perceivable shape of a work of literature and of its parts; a work’s appearance (form as material) This definition of “form” can be applied immediately to the physical dimensions and qualities of a literary work, whether printed or in manuscript. If it is commonly accepted that every production of a play is an interpretation of it—an essay on the drama, as it were—the same may be said of the various physical forms through and in which we encounter literary works. A play or other work from the early modern era may be many things: bound or unbound, large or small, heavy or light, printed on various kinds of paper, in many varieties (and even combinations) of font and/or style of handwriting. They may come to us titled or untitled, with ornate pages and decorations or without these, paginated or unpaginated (sometimes with foliation or without). The words may be arranged with a strict interest in economizing space (that is, packed onto a page), or with more generous margins. Thus the Shakespearean text, according to a foundational essay by Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass, remains “a provisional state in the circulation of matter.”12 Indeed, as Julie Stone Peters has confirmed in her historical survey, Theatre of the Book, the provisional states of dramatic works have varied widely with time and place of printing.13 This variety across publications is also found within them. Regarding the specific arrangements within the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, for instance, readers may well encounter verse and prose set differently; they may find act and scene divisions, no such divisions, or division by act or scene alone. Owing to (among other things) heterogeneity of authorship and compositorial labor, the pages of an early modern text may display profound differences of spelling, punctuation, and layout. Speeches may be prefixed with the full form of a character’s or figure’s name, an abbreviated form, or a combination of these; a text may even use a variety of terms to designate what

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appears to be the same character or figure. The location of an act or scene may be identified or left to the dialogue (or reader’s imagination). A play text may have a cast list or dramatis personae prefixing or following its dialogue; sometimes this list (and even the speech prefixes and/or stage directions themselves) may indicate which performers have taken or are to take which roles. While I have framed these observations on form as visible shape in relation to early modern texts in their own time, they have clear relevance for readers encountering Shakespeare’s works in today’s formats as well. From editions of the plays or poems on the Internet (including hypertext versions) to mass-market paperback editions and recorded-book versions, Shakespeare’s works come to us in many formats, formats which necessarily affect how we process and evaluate the works. The popular “complete works” editions we may have on our shelves offer modern readers a Shakespeare text that none of the writer’s contemporaries would have had exposure to, for, in addition to their scholarly apparatuses, these collections commonly include the sonnets and narrative poems in addition to plays gathered (and not gathered) in the 1623 Folio of his “Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies.” It perhaps goes without saying that the quasi-monumental Shakespeare that emerges from these editions of his collected works differs from the writer presented by an inexpensive paperback copy of a play or poem, and that the latter differs itself from a paperback that extensively annotates the text and appends to it a variety of primary and secondary materials. All of these elements—“formal” in nature—affect a reader’s definition and experience of the Shakespearean text. 2. Kind, variety (form as materially produced) A second way of defining form in such a way that its material implications are more apparent is as literary type, kind, or variety. “Form,” in this sense, refers to the genre or genres of a literary work. For Shakespeare, such forms included not only the major dramatic genres, but the vast array of forms and modes contained within dramatic works, including, among many others, satire, songs, elegies, epigrams, epigraphs, orations, riddles, and proverbs. Added to these were his collected Sonnets joined to A Lover’s Complaint and two forays into narrative poetry of erotic–tragic orientation, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. Such genres and modes provided authors with both the tools and the raw materials for composing works of literature, works almost always multi-generic in nature. Genre has often struck critics as being too imprecise to be trusted. Because genres can tell similar stories with varied emphasis (and locations, characters, etc.), and because works of substantial length often incorporate or draw on multiple literary kinds, describing a work’s genre can be a frustrating experience. This frustration only increases when one notices the variable ways of describing works in Shakespeare’s own day. Hamlet was alternately advertised as a “tragedy” and a “tragical history”; Richard III as a “tragedy” and a “history”; The Merchant of

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Venice both as “history” and “comedy”; King Lear as alternately a “true chronicle history” and a “tragedy.” Shakespeare enjoys such generic malleability in Polonius’ famous menu of the traveling players and their repertoire of dramatic types: The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral– comical, historical–pastoral, tragical–historical, tragical–comical–historical–pastoral, scene individable or poem unlimited; Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light, for the law of writ and the liberty: these are the only men. (Ham.II.ii.396–403)14

The comic confusion of this list perhaps tempts us to see all such literary forms as merely interchangeable markers in a game of language. And this comic mélange of forms echoes the frequently discussed imprecision of title pages (where a play can be, alternately, a “tragedy” and a “history”). Both of these instances acknowledge the untidiness of generic form. But I would point out that they also insist that we recognize its primacy—in and regarding the material objects that are literary texts—for early modern readers, playgoers, and publishers. That is, Polonius’ confounding list reminds that, while literary form is approximate and composite, it remains a valuable way to convey complicated information (concerning, among other things, plot, character, tone, and theme) in an abbreviated form of advertisement. More than advertisement, however, genre is materially produced by preexisting definitions and expectations; authors, readers, and audience members can share these in contractual understandings. In this way, genre always involves (but is not limited to) questions of classification and relation. 3. The particular character, nature, structure, or constitution of a thing; its style (form as materially productive) Our first definition of literary form stresses the immediately recognizable physicality of a work—what can be registered by the eye or hands, for instance, as they weigh the work in question. The second definition concerns that with and against which works may be constructed, understood, and evaluated. For its part, this third definition of form emphasizes qualities that disclose themselves during the reading process. This sense of form bridges the difference between, on one hand, feeling the weight, sensing the size and length of a printed text (definition #1) and, on the other, noting that a work is comedic, or satirical, or aureate, or laconic, or many other things that pertain to its genre (definition #2). To advance the question of style in the study of Shakespeare is to encounter an irony of the critical tradition. Materialist literary criticism (now invested strongly, as we have seen, in physical objects) was once profoundly interested in questions of representational style and form. From the foundational work of Mikhail Bakhtin and others involved in the project of Russian Formalism through the work of Georg Lukács on the novel and Walter Benjamin on tragic drama, criticism

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invested in what Cox and Kastan confidently dub “the social and material circumstances” of a literary work typically counted form as part of these circumstances. It is worth noting that Fredric Jameson, perhaps the most celebrated materialist of our time, began his career with Sartre: The Origins of a Style, a revised version of his dissertation, and has continued to display his interest in style and genre as important registers of a text’s engagement with the world in essays as widely separated as his compelling treatments of Raymond Chandler, Stanley Kubrick, and Sir Thomas More.15 Understanding style broadly allows one to include, under this definition, not only such large-scale elements as literary structure but also more localized elements, such as verbal or syntactical arrangements. Here I follow Seymour Chatman’s helpful division of “form” into what he calls two “sub-classes”: “‘texture’ or small-scale form vs. ‘structure’ or large-scale form.”16 We could begin by noting that, whether large-scale or small, literary form during this period (as in others) responded strongly to conventional expectations and to assumptions concerning decorum. We often find such expectations and assumptions flagged materially in the large-scale formality of texts. In what way is literary structure a “material” thing? Literary structure can be seen as material in relation to various self-differentiating signposts erected in texts: the designation of such paratexts as titles, prologues, and epilogues (among others), chapter headings and summaries, and the divisions by act and scene, verse and prose, and by speaker. But another, less apparent, way in which literary structure is material can be seen, quite literally, outside the texts themselves, in diagrams on chalkboards and classroom overheads, as well as in tables in scholarly studies of Shakespeare. Form, so defined, can be encountered in metrical scansion of a line of blank verse, or structural arrangement of a carefully balanced prose oration. One thinks also of the diagrammatic analyses of plot “moves,” such as those represented in Thomas Pavel’s The Poetics of Plot, and of the triangular charts often used to teach dramatic structure, whether it be Gustav Freytag’s famous pyramid from Die Technik des Dramas or Mark Rose’s representation of the significant places in A Midsummer Night’s Dream from his study, Shakespearean Design.17 Such diagrams are of course not “in” the plays themselves but can be said to be produced by them. This production follows from their effects upon readers who compose these representations to clarify visually the temporal shapes of language and action, and the symbolic dimensions of place in these dramatic works. Because these chalkboard diagrams or scansion markings typically prove meaningful in direct relation to the accuracy with which they respond to a work’s internally-generated structures—to their “fit,” that is, with its materially realizable elements—they exist not in a formal world apart from the work but as a byproduct of that work’s very material effects upon its readers. Sometimes, as we have seen (and this is especially the case in relation to meter and many structural features), these representations involve the recovery of assumptions and technical skills possessed by those who have produced the works.

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Form is also material in the “small-scale” sense that typically describes the texture of a word or group of words, from the level of sentence all the way to a complete literary work. One could contrast, for instance, the texture of a character’s speeches with those of other characters (in the same or other plays). It was Alexander Pope’s claim, after all, that the speaking styles (what we would call “idiolects”) of Shakespeare’s characters were so distinct that “had all the Speeches” in the Folio “been printed without the very names of the persons I believe one might have apply’d them with certainty to every speaker.”18 More recent readers have examined the seemingly individualized styles of various plays, allowing us to speak tentatively of the idiolects of, for instance, such plays as Richard II, Romeo and Juliet, and The Winter’s Tale.19 Still others have focused on what Mary Thomas Crane has called the workings of “Shakespeare’s brain,” teasing out what seem to be peculiarly Shakespearean modes of thought and expression.20 On all these levels—character, text, author—the open unities of “style” may constitute a statement or statements concerning the world in the play and the larger world outside the playhouse. We could compare as well the “style” of a playwright with other playwrights. Scholars who have performed stylometric analysis of early modern texts have discovered differences not only in the words that playwrights use but in the frequency and position of those words and of the phrases, sentences, and speeches to which they contribute. Often these stylistic analyses are put to forensic use, as in D.H. Craig’s study of The Spanish Tragedy’s additional passages (probably composed circa 1597 and published with the 1602 quarto by Thomas Pavier), or in MacDonald Jackson’s assignment of a radically new date to the play Woodstock.21 Sometimes scholars represent the stylistic differences they have quantified by means of histograms which effectively “map” patterns of linguistic usage on spatial grids. Such two-dimensional representations of style are like the chalkboard and textbook charts mentioned earlier in that they offer physical emplotments of something seemingly not “in” a text but materially derived or made visible from engagement with it. Thus if style is “material” in the sense of the verbal textures of a work, it is always more than verbal. That is, style involves (or rather, can be defined as involving) not only the words on the page but the world or worlds those words picture. With the conjunction of “world” and “picture” here I am calling upon Heidegger’s well-known essay, “The Age of the World Picture.”22 In Heidegger’s account, the phrase “We get the picture” means not only “what is, is set before us, is represented to us, in general, but that what is stands before us—in all that belongs to it and all that stands together in it—as a system.” In discussing character and text-idiolects, I have suggested that the “system” constructed or at the very least proposed by a work of literature (or by, correspondingly, an author’s oeuvre or acting company or playhouse’s repertoire) offers up an argument about the world through its very selection of words, characters, locations, actions, and

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ideas. Chatman has proposed that “it is as meaningful to apply ‘style’ to matters of content as to matters of form,” holding that: It is clearly useful to be able to say that Hemingway’s style includes the choice of characters that are he-men, boxers, toreadors, deep-sea fishermen, big-game hunters and so on, while James’ style sees the world in terms of quite different ‘types’; or that Shakespeare’s sonnet style runs to love, the immortality of art, the urge to procreation, and so on, while Wordsworth’s is more often concerned with the visible beauties of nature or political upheaval. These are stylistic statements, that is, they have to do with those particular choices, among all the alternatives in the world, that these writers elected to make.23

Accepting a definition of “style” that includes what others could see as “content” allows one to understand a literary work’s characters, vocabulary, modes of speech and speech genres, theatrical properties, putative locations, and even represented ideologies as on one hand materially constituting its stylistic engagement with the world and, on the other, conveying the totality of its playworld representations and the manner in which they may differ from the environments of their making. It is worth pointing out something about how these definitions relate to each other. We could begin by noting that our first definition of “form” starts with a literal sense of materiality, with the quiddity of the text as physical object. Our second sense of form, form as kind or variety, moves from what can be touched (a physical text) to what exists prior to, and in abstraction from, the work. Our third sense of form steps away from both the apparently solid base of our first definition and the more abstract generic definition, to something that combines the two in its interest in style, broadly conceived. As we have seen, form can be material, materially produced, and materially productive. If these definitions overlap in significant ways on the semantic level and in their potential for interpretation, they may also be productively distinguished along an axis of time and activation. That is, one may see that the first (physical) sense of form as an immediately perceivable shape of a work is experienced in the present. The second sense (generic), while recognized during and after the text is experienced, has strong links to knowledge of, familiarity with, and even expectations for literary form. Polonius’ catalogue gives us reason to see this aspect of form as emphasizing the past, as form is materially produced and shaped by our acquaintance with genre and our resultant expectations for it. The third sense (stylistic) looks to the future, as stylistic form can be materially productive— generating, for example, not only such critical materials as maps and charts but the extensive scope of resonant play worlds and our subsequent comments upon them. Form’s efficacy remains apparent in and through our responses to literary works. Form, then, takes a compelling role in the present, past, and future of literary interpretation.

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Shakespeare plays on all three of our senses of form in Christopher Sly’s delightfully naïve attempts to define comedy in The Taming of the Shrew. Told by a messenger that players have arrived “to play a pleasant comedy,” Sly responds with a question for his presumed Page: SLY: Marry, I will, let them play it. Is not a comonty a Christmas gambold, or a tumbling-trick? PAGE: No, my good lord, it is more pleasing stuff. SLY: What, household stuff? PAGE: It is a kind of history. SLY: Well, we’ll see’t. Come, madam wife, sit by my side, and let the world slip, we shall ne’er be younger. (Ind.ii.130, 137–44)

Sly shows that he is unfamiliar with the word “comedy” first through his mispronunciation (“comonty”), then with his proffered definitions: “a Christmas gambold, or a tumbling-trick?” A “gambol,” a frolicsome dance, has in common with the gymnastic form of a tumbling-trick a basis in physically expressive movement. Informed that neither of these actions adequately defines “comedy,” Sly tries once more. Taking his cue from the servant’s “pleasing stuff,” he looks to locate the genre on the basis not of the body in motion (“tumbling”) or even of bodies moving in service of a festive occasion (“Christmas”) but of a place (“household”) and even, perhaps, of his expectations for personal enjoyment to be derived from the lordly control of such a place. It is a part of Shrew’s agenda to show Sly, and us, that the household may well be a site of tumbling and gambols, though not invariably of erotic dominion. But the servant corrects him by opposing Sly’s performative definitions of comedy to the narrative dimensions of “a kind of history.” What remains especially remarkable about this short episode of definition, an episode that meta-dramatically frames the “history” we know as The Taming of the Shrew, is its compressed conveyance of Sly’s familiarity with genre. That his three tries at defining “comedy” go amusingly wide of the mark is surely part of Shakespeare’s goal. But, like Polonius’ more eloquent catalogue of genres, they demonstrate the endurance of form in memory. Polonius collects forms that exist in potentia and also, as separate units, in the listener’s imagination and memory: tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral. Sly’s definitions, while testifying that he possesses a different horizon of expectations from Polonius and the Danish courtiers, equally show not only the range that genres possess (from “tumbling trick” to narrative “history”) but also the fact that literary form has a powerful basis in spectators’ and readers’ material experience of various genres. Having offered some illustrations for these senses of literary “form”—the physical, the generic, and the stylistic—I would like to return to the four claims about “the material” with which I began this essay. There I remarked that the turn toward a simple definition of matter in recent criticism concerned with

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Shakespeare appears to be based on assumptions about matter’s strict differences from form. I suggested that matter seems attractive because it is real (that is, it exists); it is historical (it exists in and over time); it is efficacious (it not only exists in time but has an effect on its time); and, finally, it is overdetermined (its effect on or interaction with its time is multiple and complex). In the next paragraphs, I would like to make good on my claim that each of these assumptions about matter holds as well for form. To do so, I will examine the reality, efficacy, historicity, and overdetermination of form in that order. I will conclude by discussing certain implications of my argument for Shakespeare criticism, if I am right about the unwieldiness of the current distinction between matter and form. That form is real seems apparent from our first definition, by which form is held to be the physical appearance of a literary work. This is more than saying that a book is real through its existence as a physical object with perceivable dimensions. It is to say, further, that the dimensions of the work as written or printed have a claim upon what and how it means. Literary forms in the early modern era could be as brief as Hamlet’s “posy of a ring” (III.ii.152) (ring inscriptions nestling against the skin as a reminder of a beloved), as omnipresent as those posters and ballads with which evidence suggests householders covered their walls, or as imposing as those multi-volume chronicles of English history so popular during Shakespeare’s lifetime.24 Along these lines we could contrast, for instance, the physical form of a Shakespeare quarto—say, the 1597 Excellent Conceited Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet—with the more formidable shape and appearance of the 1623 Folio, Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies. Too, are ways in which the mise en texte (the design or layout of a book) and mise en page (the design or layout of a page, including any ornaments or illustrations) can influence a work’s reception. Plays, for instance, were sometimes published with their sententiae marked, something that has an undeniable affect upon a reader’s experience of the text.25 Likewise, as we have seen, the setting of verse and prose, the explicitness with which speech prefixes are signaled (and certainly the regularity of speaker identification), the marking of asides, the choice of font and paper: each of these contributes to the “material” dimensions of a literary text. In dramatic performance literary form often determined the number and variety of stage properties, which typically corresponded to genre and altered in frequency of appearance over time.26 In these and other ways, literary form can be understood to enjoy a thoroughly real, thoroughly material existence through its physical shape, implications, and demands. Unmistakable traces of the material appear in one of the dominant formal words relating to dramatic practice: “role.” This word indicates a truth about the materiality of early modern dramatic works even as it tells us something about acting in the playing spaces of the day. The term comes from the French rôle, the physical “roll” of paper featuring the actor’s part (OED s.v. 1.a). Because paper and copying scripts by hand were both expensive, actors appear to have been given

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not complete scripts but pasted-together rolls containing their speeches and a few cue-words from the end of the speech preceding theirs. One of these rolls, commonly called a “part” or a “side,” survives for the part of Orlando in Robert Greene’s Orlando Furioso.27 Early modern consumers who purchased a printed playtext could thus be in possession of a commodity that few would have had access to, a commodity that contained all the “parts” of a play. In some instances, not only actors but even playwrights would have lacked exposure to what wouldbe readers could gain at their local bookstall: the complete dialogue to a drama. If form is “real” in this sense, having an identifiable shape, texture, extension, or duration, it also does things. Form was considered a special part of a work’s efficacy by early modern readers and playgoers. Our acquaintance with the many anti-theatrical statements of the time has accustomed us to portraits of the stage and playhouse as sites of seduction, transgression, and bawdry. For his part, Hamlet recollects a moral version of this efficacy when he reports having heard “That guilty creatures sitting at a play / Have by the very cunning of the scene / Been strook so to the soul, that presently / They have proclaim’d their malefactions” (II.ii.589–92). Yet literature was also commonly held to make things happen not only by its representational mode or medium (that is, a play staged) but by and through specific literary forms. Theseus displays consciousness of form’s functioning by genre when, in a familiar sequence, he mulls over the menu of “sports” that are “ripe” for performance before the wedding party. Having just defined a play by one of drama’s functions—“Is there no play / To ease the anguish of a torturing hour?” (V.i.36–7)—the Athenian Duke recites and comments on a list of plays available for performance that night: “The battle with the Centaurs, to be sung By an Athenian eunuch to the harp.” We’ll none of that: that have I told my love, In glory of my kinsman Hercules. “The riot of the tipsy Bacchanals, Tearing the Thracian singer in their rage.” This is an old device; and it was play’d When I from Thebes came last a conqueror. “The thrice three Muses mourning for the death Of Learning, late deceas’d in beggary.” That is some satire, keen and critical, Not sorting with a nuptial ceremony. (V.i.44–55)

Theseus lists three plays and evaluates them as to their “sorting with,” or befitting, a wedding reception. None of these plays seems right, but they are wrong, in his account, for various reasons. The first two titles are rejected ostensibly because they are already known (and therefore not “ripe” in another sense). Perhaps significantly, each of these deals with violence across gender lines: the Centaurs

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attempting to steal the bride of Perithous, Theseus’s friend; the “tipsy Bacchanals” dismembering Orpheus. And although Theseus has early on confessed to having wooed Hippolyta with his sword (I.i.16), he seems conscious here of the inappropriateness of such stories for a nuptial evening. Serious stories of violence along gender lines do little to promote romance or sexual arousal, as King Edward notes in a Shakespearean portion of Edward III. There Edward chides Lodwick for including Judith in a love sonnet: “O monstrous line! Put in the next a sword, / And I shall woo her to cut off my head. / Blot, blot, good Lodwick” (II.i.170–72). The function of genre becomes clearer when Theseus discards the third option, “The thrice three Muses mourning for the death / Of Learning, late deceas’d in beggary,” as “some satire, keen and critical,” hence not befitting the occasion. In defining satire as “keen” (that is, sharp, and, by extension, “bitter, acrimonious” [Schmidt]), Theseus not only aligns satire with the kind of aggression represented by the titles of the two preceding plays (“battle ... riot ... tearing”), but touches upon the widely held assumption in early modern England that literary forms do specific things. As Mary Claire Randolph noted in a foundational essay on the subject, satire was held to be a “medical” genre, one which saw the body as a potentially diseased thing that needed to be cut, probed, cleansed, and cured by a satirical agent.28 For Theseus to describe “The thrice three Muses” as “some satire, keen and critical” is to acknowledge the sharpness (“keen”) of satire and, by extension, its relation to the swords of battle and the tearing of the Bacchantes. For Shakespeare, the word “critical” would have had a medical implication as well, relating to the “crisis” or turning-point in a disease’s progress (see OED s.v. “critical” 4; “critic” a. obs., etymology). These three plays thus offer an aggressive and unwelcome relationship between story and body. That the putative tragedy of “Pyramus and Thisbe” is chosen, and chosen over objections, would seem to depend in part on the continual assurance that its violence is literally incredible: not to be believed, and in fact a source of laughter for the assembled on-stage audience. Theseus’s inspection of and commentary on the list of four “sports” presented for performance is only one example from many that could have been adduced here of the period’s belief in the efficacy of literary form. From Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesy, George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie, and the “Athanasian Creed” often published with the Psalms to countless epistles prefacing published texts, much of the critical, theoretical, and advertising discourse in early modern England held that texts worked, and worked via genre.29 Relying on a belief in literary movere, for example, Sidney tells us that parables instruct, epitaphs preserve one’s memory, sonnets gain favor, comedies open one’s eyes, tragedies teach rulers to be humble, and histories both inspire us to be worthy and show us how to be worthy.30 Like that of Theseus, Sidney’s account of literature takes careful notice of literary kind and the situation in which the literary text is to unfold and work.

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Such efficacy comes alongside a historical aspect to literary form. As we witnessed in the two reviews cited at the beginning of this essay, formalism is often held to be a decidedly ahistorical mode of criticism. But this judgment in no way squares with the evidence, for focus on the specifics of literary form, from prosody to vocabulary, and from metaphor to structure, is by definition attention to the historically determined nature of a literary text. To revisit some of the examples from Shakespeare we have already considered, one can see in Sly’s definition of comedy/comonty, for instance, a representation of a folk or plebian understanding of dramatic genre that may well have squared with audiences’ and readers’ notions considering what an uneducated male from the lower orders of society could know about comedy. Form’s relevance for a historical understanding of educational strata in early modern England and their relation to both literature and social class also becomes apparent when we add to Sly’s example the humanistic, Italianate drama of Kate and Petruchio, the respective catalogues of Polonius and Theseus, and these catalogues’ clear acknowledgement of academic learning and close acquaintance with the repertoire of currently-available fare in the playhouses and bookstalls. We see in these evaluations of genre the historicity of literature and of the ways it did and did not appeal to, reach, and imagine various social groups and actors. The engagement with the times and places of its unfolding across texts also reveals literary form’s profound overdetermination, the fact that it proceeds from more than one cause, and is involved in a wide variety of social events and experiences. Perhaps no more heterogeneous texts exist than the plays written for performance in London’s playhouses from approximately 1585 to 1640: the many characters, dialects, actions, costumes, locations, motivations, and ideas represented have few rivals among the literary repertoires of various nations and times. This multiplicity of fictional people, places, speeches, events, and ideas clearly had its roots in the world that gave birth to the commercial theater, and which the theater in turn represented through its performative prism. But literary form was far from constricting where it came to such representation, nor was it commonly a singular thing. Indeed, what is remarkable about literary form during this period (in and out of the commercial playhouses) is its habituation to what Rosalie Colie has called, in her foundational study The Resources of Kind, “mixed genre as a mode of thought.”31 Form, in practice, is almost invariably multiple, even when one is focusing on a particular level or variety (such as genre, diction, or metaphor). Early modern writers, as Colie and others have shown us, were accustomed to thinking of mixed genre as a representation in miniature of the genus universum: “culture as a whole, the total kind.”32 Particular genres seemed to bear with them particular implications: beliefs, ideologies, even arguments about the world. And in so doing, they were able to convey only part of a larger whole that escaped representation in even the largest and most ambitious of literary works. In embracing partiality of a particular sort, and in consciously mixing that partiality with the freight of another

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genre or genres, writers of the time not only acknowledged but deliberately manipulated form’s overdetermined nature. Thus one who purchased a text advertised as containing “Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies,” for example, could expect these genres to be guideposts to the general outlines of various plays but not shackles on the contents thereof: in each of the Folio plays genera mista, or mixed genre, is the rule rather than the exception. This overdetermination—such as that in, say, a tragicomedy—can qualify a work’s particular mode of efficacy without eliminating it, asking us to define generic productivity in multiple ways. Form’s manifold qualities and its near occlusion in recent criticism have served as this essay’s focus. I have argued that our recognition of the importance of form in and to early modern literature has been unnecessarily diminished by an unworkable boundary between form and matter. While extending our knowledge in one direction, a new materialism’s restricted definition of matter threatens to limit it in another. My emphasis here has therefore been on ways we can understand form as a material thing where it relates to Shakespeare. In holding that literary form is real, historical, efficacious, and overdetermined, I have discovered little new about early modern literature. Yet at the same time, the argument I have made for treating form as something neither opposite to nor estranged from the material and historical has clear implications for our critical practice. To be inclusive in our criticism is to value the construction of a play no less than the construction of a playhouse. Form is material in many ways. That early modern commentators and writers were more conscious of this than we are should by itself give us reason to reconsider the ways we define form and recognize its function in the works we study and teach. Form matters.

Notes 1 2 3

4

5

Henry S. Turner, “Nashe’s Red Herring: Epistemologies of the Commodity in Lenten Stuffe (1599),” ELH, 68/3 (2001): 529. Jonathan Gil Harris, “Atomic Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Studies, 30 (2002): 47. Richard Strier, “How Formalism Became a Dirty Word, and Why We Can’t Do Without It,” in Mark David Rasmussen (ed.), Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 207–15. J.G. Saunders, “‘Something Old, Something New ...’: Shakespeare from the Centre to the Margins” (review article), The Review of English Studies, 48/192 (1997): 507. Saunders is commenting upon William C. Caroll, Fat King, Lean Beggar: Representations of Poverty in the Age of Shakespeare (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). Susan Zimmerman, review of The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, edited by Valerie Wayne, and Misrepresentations: Shakespeare and the Materialists, by Graham Bradshaw, in Renaissance Quarterly, 49/2 (1996): 422. Zimmerman’s remarks concern Bradshaw’s study.

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13 14 15

16 17

Douglas Bruster See Seymour Chatman, “On Defining ‘Form,’” New Literary History, 2/2 (1971): 217– 28. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (eds), A New History of Early English Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 4–5. Nomenclature is not of course the problem but rather an indication of the shifting views and assumptions that, to my mind, contribute to form’s occlusion in criticism. For instance, early in their introduction the editors of A New History of Early English Drama define drama as a literary form: “Of all the literary forms, drama is the least respectful of its author’s intentions” (2). Their collection’s decision to pass over the conventional genres may be explained in part by their implicit allocation to drama of form’s range of aspects and functions. This decision is made all the more puzzling by a book review Cox published in 1999 in which he takes an anthology to task for employing the word form in relation to Shakespeare’s histories where Cox seems to feel that genre would be more appropriate: “Significantly the word form is preferred by the authors of these essays to the word genre. Form is much less precise than genre and allows critics to pay lip service to the book’s theme without being rigorous about it.” John D. Cox, review of John W. Velz (ed.) Shakespeare’s English Histories: A Quest for Form and Genre, in Shakespeare Quarterly, 50/1 (1999): 104. It is my contention that, while not interchangeable with it, genre belongs to any definition of literary form. It should be pointed out that two newer genres, “Royal entry” and “Household drama” appear in place of the more conventional ones there. On this new materialism, see Jonathan Gil Harris, “The New New Historicism’s Wunderkammer of Objects,” European Journal of English Studies, 4/3 (2000): 111–23; and “Shakespeare’s Hair: Staging the Object of Material Culture,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 52/4 (2001): 479–91; and Douglas Bruster, ch. 8, “The New Materialism in Early Modern Studies,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Culture: Early Modern Literature and the Cultural Turn (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 191–205. See Stephen Cohen, “Between Form and Culture: New Historicism and the Promise of a Historical Formalism,” in Mark David Rasmussen (ed.), Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements (New York: Palgrave: 2002), pp. 17–41; esp. pp. 28–31. Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass, “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 44/3 (1993): 255–83. For a recent essay that examines the “materiality of narrative form” during the period, see Martin Brückner and Kristen Poole, “The Plot Thickens: Surveying Manuals, Drama, and the Materiality of Narrative Form in Early Modern England,” ELH, 69/3 (2002): 617–48. Julie Stone Peters, Theatre of the Book, 1480–1880: Print, Text, and Performance in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). All quotations from Shakespeare in this essay are from The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed., ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). See Fredric Jameson, “On Raymond Chandler,” The Southern Review, 6 (1970): 624– 50; “The Shining,” Social Text, 4 (1981):114–25; and “Morus: The Generic Window,” New Literary History, 34/3 (2003): 431–51. See Chatman, 220–21. See Thomas G. Pavel, The Poetics of Plot: The Case of English Renaissance Drama (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985); Gustav Freytag, Die Technik des Dramas (1863), trans. from the 6th German edition by Elias J. MacEwan as Freytag’s Technique of the Drama: An Exposition of Dramatic Composition and Art (Chicago:

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19

20

21

22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30

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S.C. Griggs & Company, 1895), pp. 115, 392, 393; and Mark Rose, Shakespearean Design (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. 19. See Pope’s preface to his 1725 edition of Shakespeare, in Brian Vickers (ed.), Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, vol. 2: 1693–1733 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), p. 404. See, for example, Harry Levin, “Form and Formality in Romeo and Juliet,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 11/1 (1960): 3–11; Marion Trousdale, “Style in The Winter’s Tale,” Critical Quarterly, 18/4 (1976): 25–32; and Leo Salingar, “The Rhetoric of Richard II,” Aligarh Critical Miscellany, 9/1 (1996): 14–28. Mary Thomas Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). See also Ian Lancashire, “Probing Shakespeare’s Idiolect, 1.3.1–29 in Troilus and Cressida,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 68 (1998– 99): 728–67; and David Lowe and Robert A.J. Matthews, “Shakespeare vs. Fletcher: A Stylometric Analysis by Radial Basis Functions,” Computers and the Humanities, 29 (1995): 449–61. See D.H. Craig, “Authorial Styles and the Frequencies of Very Common Words: Jonson, Shakespeare, and the Additions to The Spanish Tragedy,” Style, 26/2 (1992): 199–221; and MacDonald P. Jackson, “Shakespeare’s Richard II and the Anonymous Thomas of Woodstock,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 14 (2001): 17– 65. For a survey of attribution studies employing stylometric analysis of early modern drama, see Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Garland, 1977), p. 129. Chatman, p. 221. On the larger cultural arena of early modern writing, see Juliet Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England (London: Reaktion Books, 2001). See G.K. Hunter, “The Marking of Sententiae in Elizabethan Printed Plays, Poems, and Romances,” The Library, 5th ser., 6 (1951): 171–88. See Bruster, ch. 4, “The Dramatic Life of Objects in the Early Modern Theater,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Culture, pp. 95–118. For a facsimile and transcription of this “part,” see W.W. Greg (ed.), Dramatic Documents from the Elizabethan Playhouses; Stage Plots: Actor’s Parts: Prompt Books 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931). See also B.A.P. Van Dam, “Alleyn’s Player’s Part of Greene’s Orlando Furioso and the Text of the Q of 1594,” English Studies, 11/5 (Oct. 1929): 182–203; Van Dam, “Alleyn’s Player’s Part of Greene’s Orlando Furioso and the Text of the Q of 1594 (Concluded),” English Studies, 11/6 (Dec. 1929): 209–20; and Tiffany Stern, “The ‘Part’ for Green’s Orlando Furioso: A Source for the ‘Mock Trial’ in Shakespeare’s Lear?” Notes and Queries, 49/2 (June 2002): 229–31. Mary Claire Randolph, “The Medical Concept in English Renaissance Satiric Theory: Its Possible Relationships and Implications,” Studies in Philology, 38/2 (1941): 125–57. On literary efficacy in Sidney, see Stephen Cohen, “New Historicism and Genre: Toward a Historical Formalism,” REAL, 11 (1995): 405–23. For an account of the didactic and ethical strain in literary commentary and theory of the English Renaissance, see Brian Vickers (ed.,) English Renaissance Literary Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), pp. 1–55; esp. pp.17–19.

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31 Rosalie L. Colie, The Resources of Kind: Genre-Theory in the Renaissance, ed. Barbara K. Lewalski (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1973), p. 19. 32 Ibid., p. 20.

Chapter 2

Shakespeare, Geography, and the Work of Genre on the Early Modern Stage Jean E. Howard

Shakespeare set most of his tragedies somewhere other than England. Consider the list. Titus Andronicus and Julius Caesar take place in Rome; Romeo and Juliet is set in the strife-riven city of Verona, Hamlet in the Danish court at Elsinore; Othello begins in the great maritime city of Venice, though after act 1 the action moves to the island of Cyprus; Antony and Cleopatra ranges over the eastern Mediterranean, oscillating primarily between Rome and Egypt; Coriolanus takes place mainly in Rome, Corioli, and Actium; Timon of Athens, obviously, is set in Athens. Macbeth does unfold in Scotland, with a brief detour to the England of Edward the Confessor, but, as I will discuss later, Scotland to the English was very much a foreign country. Only King Lear, of all the plays we today identify as part of Shakespeare’s tragic canon, is set in the territory we now call England, though the action takes place in the distant past, in the days of the ancient Britons, before England was England.1 Temporal distance in Lear replaces the spatial distance from England that characterizes the other tragedies. Is the pattern of locating tragedy outside England unique to Shakespeare? Is it of critical significance, or just a random curiosity? In attempting to answer these questions, I meditate in what follows on the links among genre, geography, and the class and gender investments of particular kinds of plays on the early modern stage.2 I begin by focusing on one of my key terms, genre. It is a word frequently employed by early modern writers, for whom, as for us, it indicated the differences, in a relational field, separating one type of writing from another.3 Often, comprehending the terms of a generic system can be as much a matter of tacit as of explicit or formal knowledge. For instance, if one asks any twelve-yearold what different kinds (i.e., genres) of TV shows there are, he or she will instantly produce a taxonomy: there are sitcoms, soap operas, quiz shows, cop shows, ten-o’clock-in-the-evening dramas, talk shows, and so on, each with its own narrative conventions, its familiar cast of characters, even its typical time slot. Lacking TV, Renaissance writers nonetheless recognized and worked within generic systems. They distinguished tragedies from comedies, pastorals from

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georgics, odes from sonnets. In the modern as in the early modern instance, however, the purpose of generic classification remains the same. It allows different kinds of similar things to be distinguished from one another. Comedies and tragedies are both plays, but they differ in many ways: effect on an audience, narrative structure, assumptions about time. As a pragmatic matter, genre aids both producers and consumers of texts. For example, familiarity with generic conventions enables readers or consumers to have specific expectations about a given text and so helps organize the viewing or reading experience.4 Genre is useful to writers or producers of texts because it provides them with forms and matter for imitation, with starting points for their own innovations and transformations of received material. However, generic systems do not, as some structuralists have implied, map essential and immutable kinds of writing. Rather, generic differences are established relationally, and a given genre system is constantly in flux in response to a wide variety of historical and social pressures. New genres emerge; old ones mutate; some disappear. Often, one labels a genre as a distinctive entity only retrospectively, and there is always considerable instability around the edges of any generic classification.5 For example, in the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, Richard III on its title page is called The Tragedy of Richard the Third, but it is listed among the histories in the catalog that serves as a preface to the volume.6 Tragedy was a venerable genre in the early modern period; the English history play, which could be written in either a comic or a tragic modality, was a newer one, which Shakespeare did much, in the 1590s, to establish as a recognizable dramatic kind. The difference between the title page and the catalog designations of Richard III in the First Folio inadvertently registers the play’s place in and between two genres. Even today this play differs somewhat in meaning if read as a tragedy, which it is, or as a history, which it also is. One play, that is, can be read by employing (at least) two sets of reading or viewing expectations or conventions. Indeed, there were plenty of other early modern texts that readers might have recognized as inhabiting two sets of generic conventions or that look, in retrospect, as both the tail end of one genre and the start of another (e.g., Heywood’s Edward IV and Dekker’s Shoemaker’s Holiday, both of which mix urban and monarchical chronicle history with the emerging form of city comedy). The Renaissance stage was a veritable factory of experimentation where new genres emerged and were rapidly transformed and where generic hybrids were frequent. Many recent historically oriented studies of the Renaissance stage have slighted genre as critical interest has shifted to the discursive links between a given play and a range of extradramatic texts, for example, to the connections between a play’s treatment of witchcraft and the treatment of witchcraft in contemporaneous religious or juridical writings.7 Moreover, recent historicist attention has often focused on moments in a text, rather than on its overall narrative structure. There are good reasons for this shift in critical practice. Historicist critics have strongly argued against divorcing texts we call literary from the culture that produced them. In their view, many close readings of texts do just that when they treat a text as a

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self-contained entity existing in an aesthetic realm of universal meanings instead of bearing the imprint of its various histories of production and reception.8 Consequently, historicist reading practice often deliberately fractures a text, forcing the juxtaposition of certain of its elements with materials from the extraliterary world. To such critics, genre is uninteresting, because they primarily wish to connect literary texts not to other literary texts but to other kinds of texts in the larger field of cultural practices.9 (In the last decades Shakespeare’s plays have more often been compared to polemical or political or medical tracts than to plays by other dramatists.) Genre critics have also sometimes seemed to divorce texts from history by implying that texts are generated from similar texts in a hermetically sealed process of imitation and formal transformation, rather than from engagement with what we now rather self-consciously call “the world.” Yet the contemporary indifference, even hostility, to genre discounts the possibility of addressing the historicity of texts precisely through its lens. For example, focusing on generic filiations reveals that literature derives both from other literature (generic indebtedness is powerful proof of that fact) and from deep historical entanglements (registered largely through changes in existing generic forms, through the emergence of new and the decline of formerly popular genres, through the symptomatic contradictions at the heart of particular genres, and through the class and gender interests encoded in them). From Georg Lukács to Fredric Jameson to Walter Cohen, a persistent strand of literary criticism has relied on the concept of genre to read the pressure of the world on the text and of the text on the world.10 In Jameson’s famous formulation: The literary or aesthetic act ... always entertains some active relationship with the Real; yet in order to do so, it cannot simply allow “reality” to persevere inertly in its own being, outside the text and at distance. It must rather draw the Real into its own texture ... to carry the Real within itself as its own intrinsic or immanent subtext ... The whole paradox of what we have here called the subtext may be summed up in this, that the literary work or cultural object, as though for the first time, brings into being that very situation to which it is also, at one and the same time, a reaction.11

In other words, we access history only through its textualizations, which, paradoxically, are at once a response to history and its necessary, otherwise unknowable, instantiation. To engage with history is, in part, to engage with the constellation of discourses, narrative paradigms, and stylistic and formal practices, including genre, through which textualization occurs and which form the everchanging horizon of expression at a given historical juncture. Moreover, genre is a crucial category not only for engaging history but also for negotiating between single texts and the whole of a culture’s literary production. There are limits to the historical claims one can base on the analysis of any one text, and the temptation is to become merely topical, linking this text to that event—Macbeth, say, to the coronation of James—rather than engaging with the

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larger discursive and material forces shaping cultural productions. Properly understood, the analysis of generic forms and conventions does not aim to investigate a text’s relationship to a specific event. Rather, it looks at how a genre, compared relationally to other genres, has social consequence because of its construction of distinct types of narratives addressing the tensions and contradictions of a particular social formation and articulating the ideologies of a particular class in opposition to other classes. In short, one need not disparage the gains of New Historicist practice in placing literature in a wider discursive field of cultural practices by simultaneously using the tools of a historical formalism to investigate the historicity of various genres of writing, whether literary or not. Thus it is that I begin with genre in thinking about geography and Renaissance plays. I ask: Among their distinguishing features, do particular dramatic genres construct distinctive and discrete imagined geographies, and what does it mean, historically, if they do? Before I give a provisional answer, and before I take up my other key terms, geography and class, I want to return to the drama. So far I have noted that Shakespeare sets most of his tragedies outside England but primarily in Europe. What about his contemporaries? If we stay with other Jacobean writers of dramatic tragedy, we find that Chapman set his Bussy d’Ambois and his Byron tragedies in France; Middleton placed The Changeling in Spain and The Revenger’s Tragedy in Italy. In fact, Italy was probably the favorite setting for Jacobean tragedy. It is there that the action takes place in The Duchess of Malfi, The White Devil, and Women Beware Women, and it is in ancient Italy, that is, Roman Italy, that Jonson sets his tragedies Sejanus and Cataline and Shakespeare his Julius Caesar and Coriolanus. Interestingly, the only subgenre of tragedy routinely set in England is domestic tragedy, which does not take a king or person of high estate for the protagonist but instead largely focuses on debacles in the households of the rural gentry: in Arden of Faversham a wife kills a husband, in Woman Killed with Kindness a wife commits adultery, in The Yorkshire Tragedy a husband slays his children, in The Witch of Edmonton a man commits bigamy and a woman is accused of bewitching her neighbors.12 Collectively, these plays focus on domestic matters, the right rule of households and neighborhoods. Their bourgeois concerns are quite different from the concerns of their more numerous counterparts: the tragedies of state. But let us consider further the question of geography in general on the early modern stage. Perhaps what I am claiming about tragedy is also true of other dramatic genres in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries wrote. Perhaps plays in general do not have English settings. Of course, one immediately knows that this is not true. Shakespeare’s signature genre of the 1590s was the English history play. He wrote nine of them in that decade, all based on the reigns of the English monarchs whose names furnished their titles. Most of these plays are set primarily in England, and they constituted a major generic innovation on the late Elizabethan stage. While others worked in this genre, Shakespeare did the most to develop it and produced the most involved sequences of interlocking plays.

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Moreover, the farther Shakespeare advanced into the decade, the more details his plays drew from the actual geography of England: its cities, counties, mountains, and regions.13 In all the English histories, England is embodied and personified in its monarch, but gradually it also becomes recognizable, in a more modern, nationalist manner, as a bounded territory, a distinct geographic entity supposedly encompassing a shared language, customs, and history. In short, if Shakespeare’s English histories begin in nostalgia for medieval kingship, they end in celebration of a nation that exceeds the equation of country with king. What happened next in Shakespeare’s career is puzzling and is in part what has prompted the analysis of genre and geography on which I am embarked. After 1599 Shakespeare ceased to write English histories, except for the much later, and quite different, Henry VIII. Throughout his career Shakespeare wrote comedies, whose geography changed over time,14 but his English histories decidedly belong to the first half of his writing career, and the intensity of his involvement with tragedy accelerated after the writing of Hamlet in 1601. Moreover, Shakespeare made the move into tragedy just as many of his fellow playwrights, from 1599 on, began to explore a new, highly localized dramatic genre, London city comedy, in which Shakespeare never extensively worked. In this genre London is the locus of the action, even when the city in question is putatively Venice or Vienna. London streets, London buildings, London customs and stylized versions of its inhabitants are in the representational foreground of plays with names such as Every Man in His Humor, The Shoemaker’s Holiday, Eastward, Northward, and Westward Ho, The Alchemist, Bartholomew Fair, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, Michaelmas Term, The Roaring Girl, and Fair Maid of the Exchange. Like the domestic tragedies, these plays do not deal centrally with kings or other rulers, but neither do they depict the rural gentry. Instead, they focus on the prosperous merchants, the artisans, the gallants, and the women of England’s chief city.15 Cartographic exactitude creates and intensifies identification with the city and marks it, while nominally the king’s, in actuality the familiar territory of its citizens. Ludgate, Cheapside, Bedlam, the New Exchange, Pissing Conduit—all these London places are woven lovingly into narratives of urban life in which the heroes are the clever servants, successful shopkeepers, outspoken city wives, and witty gallants of an imagined universe, urban and commercial, that is light-years away both from the class concerns and from the monarchical politics in the foreground of Shakespeare’s English histories. This observation leads me to my second key term, class. I want to make several brief points about this vexed concept as considered in an early modern context. First, early modern English people did not have a language of class available to them. That language, both in its Marxist and in its non-Marxist registers, is largely a product of the nineteenth century. When they described their own social order, as William Harrison does in his Description of England, they used a language of rank or status to explain their system of social stratification.16 At the top were the peers of the realm, and at the bottom were the unlanded day

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laborers, with many categories of person in between, the greatest divide falling, however, between the 10 percent of the population who were people of leisure and did no manual work and the 90 percent who did. To be a gentleman meant, precisely, not having to labor with one’s hands. Moreover, one’s place in the social hierarchy was determined not primarily by wealth but by lineage and custom. One was born a gentleman, or not. It has classically been assumed that in such a culture identity came not from horizontal affiliations with others in a position similar to one’s own, but from the ties of deference and obligation that bound one to those above and from the ties of obligation that bound one to those below. To put it starkly, identity arose from vertically defined allegiances—I am the king’s subject, Lord Hampton’s servant, Susan Hayworth’s mistress—rather than from the horizontal affiliations we are familiar with today when we talk casually of people belonging to the working class, the middle class, the upper middle class, and so forth, designations in commonsense terms indicating degree of wealth but also the cultural values and lifestyle that define the coherence of the group. Allowing that early modern people understood social hierarchies in other terms than we do does not mean, however, that a culture’s self-description is the only meaningful way we now can describe its social structures. From a Marxist perspective, for example, all societies are class societies in that their most fundamental social relations are economically determined, constituted in terms of relations to the means of production. Consequently, one can productively use an analytic of class to examine a society that did not understand itself in those terms.17 In the early modern period, for instance, agrarian capitalism turned many people off the land and transformed them into wage laborers. We now see that a wage proletariat was forming, though that group did not use such a term to describe itself. Furthermore, early modern England was clearly a social formation in transition. Increasing commercial wealth enabled many people to leave their inherited social positions for the landed estates and lifestyles of their betters. Wealth was beginning to vie with inherited status as a marker of social place, and this development put pressure on prescriptive or normative accounts of the social order. In addition, there is evidence that early modern people in some instances could and did identify with those in what we would now call their class, and that these horizontal identifications, if intense, sometimes sparked political action. For example, Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI stages an artisan rebellion in which, rather than deferentially ask their social superiors for food, Jack Cade and his lower-class rebels seize power by violence and cannily discuss the structural relationship between their poverty and the economic and cultural capital of the rich. In that play the impoverished artisan class sets itself against the rich and the titled, and the artisans, in their politicized moment of revolt, know that the interests of the two groups are not the same.18

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The theater, as I have argued elsewhere, was an institution where various social groups mingled—men, women, citizens, ambassadors from abroad, apprentices, country gentlemen in town for the law term—and where a vast array of dramatic narratives was produced between the opening of the commercial theaters in 1576 and their closing in 1642.19 That plays served as entertainment does not mean that they lacked ideological implications and effects, including the creation of narratives that helped perform into being what in retrospect we could call forms of proto-class consciousness, that is, elaborations of the values, interests, and practices that bind together a social group and put it into conflict with other groups. Again, relationality is a key concept. In Marxist, as opposed to sociological, accounts, class ideologies are not static or essential but are constructed in relation to other class positions to which they are opposed. Hence, in exploring the class politics of early modern drama, I argue that genre provides a site for the consolidation of a given class’s interests in antagonistic relation to those of other classes. That antagonism can register both within a genre, in the dialectic between its subordinated and its dominant elements, and across genres, as one “answers” to another. To see how, let us return once more to the problem of geography on the early modern stage. I have noted that while most English history plays take place in England, Renaissance tragedies are much more likely to be set in other European locations. At the other end of the spectrum, city comedy, flourishing just as the national history play went into decline, takes not England but London as its geographic center. But what of the rest of the world? Are plays ever set farther afield, in the ancient civilizations to the East or in the newly “discovered” territories to the West? The answer is yes, though almost no plays are set in the Americas.20 Some, like The Tempest, make mention of the New World and, even though set in the Old, play with the idea of primitive man and the utopian and dystopic possibilities of brave new worlds. By contrast, a great many plays are set in North Africa, the Levant, and Persia, and a few even in the distant Moluccan islands. The most famous of these plays, Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, features a Scythian shepherd boy who became the ruler of a vast Eastern empire. Many of them are now obscure, with titles such as A Christian Turned Turk, The Fair Maid of the West, The Three English Brothers, The Four Apprentices of London, The Battle of Alcazar, and The Famous History of Sir Thomas Stukeley. Now designated “adventure plays,” many of these dramas depict the triumphs of the English in their encounters with dangerous foes like the Turks and the Spanish.21 What is particularly interesting about the genre from a class point of view, however, is the way it refunctions, that is, reuses but changes, aristocratic conventions to accommodate the fantasies of nonaristocratic social groups who aggressively claim a place in the national story through their largely commercial achievements. Refunctioning actively subordinates the ideologies of a dominant group to those of an emerging social class.22 In The Fair Maid of the West, Part I, for example, a young woman, Bess Bridges, who works in a tavern in an English

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port, makes a spectacular social rise by luck and diligence. Eventually, she takes command of a ship and launches a successful attack on the Spanish in the Azores. She then heads to Morocco, an English trading partner at the time, and vanquishes its king with her beauty and virtue. Such a tale is, of course, a fantasy. No real tavern maid could have come to occupy the place Bess achieves; nonetheless, the play is historically interesting for the way it links adventure, wealth, and conquest with the thrift, hard work, charity, and patriotism associated with the aspiring artisan class.23 Bess, the girl worth gold, assumes the role of heroic adventurer once reserved for nobles, just as the four apprentices of London do, in the play of that name, when they mount a crusade to wrest Jerusalem from the infidels. Of course, these apprentices improbably succeed, each bearing on his shield the insignia of the London guild company to which he belongs. These plays, in a genre in which Shakespeare, again, did not write, show a social group selfconsciously on the move, both literally and figuratively, aggressively pushing into extra-European territory and at the same time inhabiting and transforming the narratives of once hegemonic social groups. I now turn from these observations about genre and class to focus on my third key term, geography. Thanks in part to scholars such as Richard Helgerson and John Gillies, we now know how thoroughly chorography, cartography, and geography more generally engaged the attention of early modern England.24 Part of this interest had to do with early modern nation building and English selfdefinition. As John Stow lovingly mapped the wards of London and John Norden surveyed England’s rural shires, both took a hand in constructing England, not as an extension of the monarch but as a country, a bounded geographic territory with distinctive customs, landmarks, and language. At the same time, England became newly concerned with territories beyond its borders. The early modern period is notable for its projects of expansion, exploration, and plunder. The Spanish and Portuguese first sent wealth-seeking ships to Central and South America, around the Horn of Africa, and as far east as present-day Indonesia. Eventually, the French, English, and Dutch also undertook economic and territorial expansion. For much of the late medieval period England had relied primarily on the cloth trade with Europe for economic stability. But in the second half of the sixteenth century the cloth trade faltered, though it was well into the seventeenth century before the export of woolen goods ceased to be a major part of England’s commerce abroad. However, the second half of the sixteenth century and the opening decades of the seventeenth also saw the founding of the great joint-stock companies, the Moscovy Company in 1555, the Levant Company in 1592, the East India Company in 1599, the Virginia Company in 1609. In the early seventeenth century the most successful of these great trading companies, dominated by London’s merchant elite, were those that looked to the south and east and made huge profits on luxury items such as Barbary sugar, Indian spices, and Chinese silks.25 This commercial activity, because of the travel it entailed and the products it yielded, generated curiosity about geographically

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distant places to parallel the new concern with the cities and the landscape of England itself. Popular books like Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation, first published in 1589 and containing accounts of Cabot, Hawkins, Frobisher, Drake, Gilbert, and many other English adventurers, spoke to that curiosity, as did the books of maps compiled by Ortelius, Mercator, and others and the firsthand travelers’ reports published by Fynes Morrison, Thomas Coryat, and other perambulating Englishmen. At one level the theater simply participated in the broad and accelerating interest in geography. If the city comedy stayed close to home, exploiting the known locale of London, the adventure play ranged far away, following in the path of England’s commercial expansion into North Africa, the Levant, and the East Indies.26 In doing so, it provided pictures, some of them fantastical, of societies that the average theatergoer could never have known at first hand. But equally important, the interest in faraway places provided materials—imagined landscapes and settings and characters—through which to address social relations and social problems at home. In projecting its audiences to distant lands, the stage inevitably kept some of their attention focused on England. Geographic representation on the early modern stage is important, then, in part because it is connected to real-world developments: England’s rapid commercial expansion into distant parts of the globe, the spectacular demographic growth and physical expansion of London after 1550, the increasing consolidation of England from a medieval kingdom into an early modern nation-state, and the changing composition and self-understanding of social groups in that nation-state. These developments were not so much reflected in the drama, however, as they formed its immanent subtexts. What the drama constructed and yields to our analysis (if it is not to be construed simply as the textual reflection of a predetermined context) are those specific features—discursive, stylistic, narrative, and generic—by which early modern theater made its own substantial historical interventions. It was by such means that it produced something new and had its own particular effectivity and relative autonomy. Let me then return to the generic form, tragedy, with which I began, and to the cultural work it performed in the early modern period. Some of the other genres and subgenres I have touched on highlight social groups rising to cultural power and prominence. City comedy, for example, erases monarchs from the urban landscape to make room for the narratives of artisans, shopkeepers, and merchants. The adventure play appropriates aristocratic forms and puts them in the service of aspiring social groups. By contrast, tragedies, particularly those of the first Jacobean decades, narrativize the decline and fall of once dominant groups rather than the emergence of new ones. Their portraits of the new men of an entrepreneurial age, like Edmund in King Lear, are often satiric and condemnatory. It is as if, while much of the drama after 1600 turned to comic exploration of the new urban world of commerce, of buying and selling, tragedy performed the work of mourning, of exposing the cracks in the ideological infrastructure of the ruling

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class.27 Whether one focuses on the degenerate luxury of the genre’s Italian dukes, the unfettered sexual appetites of most of its female protagonists, or even the boundless and destructive egotism of a King Lear, tragedy represents the upper reaches of the social formation in a language of disease and decay. Every one of the great Jacobean tragedies, of course, is distinctive, but they share several features. First, from Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus to Middleton’s Women Beware Women, they are overwhelmingly set in a space within Europe but outside England. This geographic displacement provides a sense both of familiarity and also of distance and difference. What is represented is not, at least not overtly, England, yet neither is it exotic North Africa or Persia. The balance between familiarity and difference is one of the most striking features of Renaissance tragedy, correlating with the idea that its protagonists are both mundanely homely in their suffering and also larger than life, denizens of a heroic, alien realm. Second, many of the tragedies are set, temporally and/or geographically, on a border between two eras or places. Shakespeare set his Roman plays at the cusp of epochal transitions, for example, at the moment when the Christian era is dawning (as in Antony and Cleopatra) or when Rome is caught between her republican past and her imperial future (as in Julius Caesar). In Hamlet the sense of transition is more amorphous, springing from the irresistible sense that an old order, represented by Hamlet’s father, cannot be retrieved or restored.28 One of Shakespeare’s first tragedies, Titus Andronicus, can be best described, perhaps, as a study of the metaphoric borderland between the barbarous and the civilized. The Imperial Rome of that play is paradoxically both, its implacable hero terrifyingly close to the Goths whom he has conquered. Cyprus, in Othello, is a more literal borderland between Europe and the threatening world of the Ottoman Turks.29 These border-land settings furnish Shakespeare with a temporal or geographic analogue for a period of crisis in the ruling order. Third, the articulation of crisis and loss enables the tragedy to create the illusion, partly through soliloquy, of a fractured self, a riven interiority that nonetheless exposes the cracks in an entire cultural edifice.30 Early modern tragedy highlights the protagonist and his (I use the pronoun advisedly) story and interiority, leading humanist critics like Maynard Mack to focus on the individuality, the depth, of the exemplary tragic hero. The illusion of interiority, certainly one of Renaissance tragedy’s most powerful effects, helps decisively to subordinate other stories and other voices in the narrative to the seductive “music” of the hero.31 (Structurally, also, the subplots and subactions of early modern tragedy, unlike those of comedy, never threaten the primacy of the main plot.) Yet even as tragedy puts the hero at the forefront of the reader’s or viewer’s attention, it exposes that subject as profoundly divided and the signifier of a profound division in the larger social order. In exploring such explosive social and political matters, early modern tragedy depends on borderline geographies and temporalities to adumbrate the double vision that is constitutive of the uncanny effects so central

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to the historical work performed by the genre. For illustration, I want to turn to Macbeth. Unusually short and violent in both action and imagery, Macbeth exposes the ruthless violence and tyranny that haunt the institution of kingship and threaten its sanctity, its legitimacy, as surely as Banquo’s ghost haunts Macbeth’s banquet. In setting this play in Scotland, Shakespeare is often said to have paid tribute to James I, who succeeded Elizabeth on the throne of England in 1603 but who had already been the reigning monarch of Scotland, where he held the title of James VI.32 There is probably some truth to this conjecture. The tragedy contains a vision tracing James’s lineage back to the honorable Banquo, and it features witches, figures whom James had investigated, written about, and persecuted.33 But there is also much that a Scottish monarch might find repellent in the play, including its portrayal of a Scotland fallen prey to a tyrannous monster and relying for deliverance on the offices of an English king. Be that as it may, the play’s setting is resonant far beyond its possible interest for or topical references to James. Instead, the idea of a Scottish king and a Scottish landscape opened a window from which to explore from a new angle the contradictions on which the ruling order was built. A number of discourses about Scotland circulated in England during the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods. They tend to bifurcate: some emphasize what is violent, clannish, and primitive in the culture to the north; some emphasize what is ancient, warlike, and noble.34 The former accounts are more numerous than the latter, but both have wide currency. On the primitive side of the ledger, a recurring legend regarding the Scots’ supposed cannibalism is telling. Saint Jerome had written that while in Gaul he had seen Scotsmen eat human flesh, even though cattle were abundant. Moreover, they considered the choicest culinary delicacies to be the buttocks of shepherds and the breasts of women. This story was repeated in all the major histories of Scotland, including those of John Major, John Leslie, and William Harrison. Even a defender of Scotland, Sir Thomas Craig, retold the anecdote so that he could refute it.35 Stories of clan violence and treachery were endemic in accounts of Scotland. James VI himself had nearly been assassinated by disgruntled thanes in his native land, and repeated skirmishes with the Scots along England’s northern border had produced among Englishmen a paranoid discourse about the thievery and rapine to which their neighbors to the north were prone.36 Several vivid visual images from the time suggest the complexity of the discourse of Scottish primitivism. To Thomas Harriot’s famous account of the American colony of Virginia were added a series of drawings by the artist John White, later engraved by the Flemish artist Theodor de Bry and included in the 1590 edition of Harriot’s report. These engravings have been studied for the evidence they afford of how indigenous Americans were interpreted by early English colonists.37 At the end of these illustrations, five ancillary engravings gave “some picture of the Picts which in the old time did habit one part of the great Britain ... [which] show how that the inhabitants of the great Britain have been in

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times past as savage as those of Virginia.”38 The Picts, of course, were widely held to be the early inhabitants of Scotland, and the striking similarities between images of them and of New World Indians in de Bry’s engravings underscore the pervasiveness of a primitivist discourse in Englishmen’s construction of Scotland. In one image a nearly naked male Pict, whose body is gorgeously decorated, bears a large sword and a threatening pick or lance; he holds a severed head. Another engraving shows a female Pict with matching warlike accoutrements who is described in the caption as “no worser for the wars than the men.”39 To these images might be juxtaposed the celebrated portrait by Paul van Somer in which James is dressed in all the regalia of kingship: crown, robes of state, orb and scepter in his left and right hands, respectively. 40 Naked savage or satin-trousered gentleman, wielder of the lance and sword or of the scepter and orb of office— which is the truer image of the inhabitants of Scotland? Of course, there is also considerable ambiguity in de Bry’s engravings of the ancient Picts. Drawing on the supposed nobility of nakedness and recalling the postures of Adam and Eve in numerous Renaissance paintings, de Bry has both figures facing outward, their bodies intricately decorated, complex images of savagery and primitive goodness. In the latter regard, de Bry’s engravings are consonant with a discourse of nobility that permeates a second, more laudatory tradition of writing about Scotland. In particular, the Scots, unlike the English, prided themselves on never having been conquered by a foreign foe. In many texts Scottish hardiness is contrasted with English degeneracy, which is often signaled by scornful allusion to the effeminizing effects of exotic foodstuffs on the English constitution. Yet praise for the Scots was seldom undiluted. By the late sixteenth century Scottish women were increasingly tainted with the stigma of witchcraft. James himself had actively interrogated and prosecuted witches, including those who in the early 1590s had supposedly taken part in the plot against his life and caused a great storm when he attempted to bring his new queen, Anne of Denmark, back to Scotland. In Scotland, unlike in England, suspected witches were interrogated under torture, and the 1591 pamphlet News from Scotland gives a grim account of the hysteria at court and the torturing, questioning, and burning of a group of women and several men.41 Shakespeare draws liberally on these and other aspects of discourse about Scotland in what has come to be known as “the Scottish play,” but the intertextual links between Macbeth and the more general “matter of Scotland” are best understood as complex and associative, rather than direct and definite. For example, is the account of Duncan’s horses eating one another on the day of his murder an allusion to the oft-repeated story of Scottish cannibalism or perhaps to the cannibalism associated with New World peoples and so, by extension, with the Picts of de Bry’s engravings? I think that to draw such direct connections is mistaken. Rather, the varied lore that made up the “matter of Scotland” in the English imagination swirls through the play to create a phantasmagoric landscape

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of horror in which nobility and savagery are inseparably intertwined and given distinctive shape through the conventions of tragedy. The opening scenes of Macbeth play on and call attention to the dangerous northern geography in which the action is located. The chief rebel, the merciless Macdonwald, leads men from the Western Isles, that is, either from the Hebrides or, just as likely, from Ireland, since these men are called “kerns” and “gallowglasses,” common terms for Irish foot soldiers and horsemen. From the north, Norway threatens. Clearly, Scotland is envisioned as ringed with fierce and treacherous neighbors, though the greatest danger comes from within, from the succession of men who attempt to carve their way to power. The gracious Duncan is an exception, a man who cannot see evil in a noble visage, who, as he approaches Macbeth’s castle, can only feel the delicate air, only see the fruitful nests of the procreant birds, and not the serpents within. But Duncan cannot retain his throne without the fiercer energies of his warlike thanes, especially Macbeth, Bellona’s bridegroom. Both Duncan and Edward the Confessor, the pious English king shown in act 4, are what I call weightless monarchs, that is, the flat image, representationally speaking, of an idealized picture of kingship. Both are good and holy men; both are legitimate rulers. They stand for the idea of the monarch as a benevolent, nurturing father. Yet their mystified power depends entirely on the violence of Old Siward, Young Siward, Macbeth, Macdonwald, Banquo, and MacDuff. No blood, no king. Duncan and Edward, as the acceptable faces of kingship, allow Shakespeare to explore something quite different in the figure of Macbeth: not the idealized but the actual operation of kingly power, and the convergence in one person of the figures of king and tyrant, which contemporary monarchical theory insisted on distinguishing.42 The play drives home the doubleness of many key figures and the horrible repetitions of violence by which “legitimate” rule is secured. The first Thane of Cawdor proves a traitor and is beheaded to secure Duncan’s rule; the second, Macbeth, proves a traitor and is beheaded to secure Malcolm’s rule; Macbeth himself comes to the throne by regicide, but so does Malcolm, though the play suggests that a tyrant like Macbeth deserves what he gets. Nonetheless, the play relentlessly and unsettlingly explores the violence that shadows, informs, and underwrites kingship and the lawless desires that the very existence of the crown, the throne, and the trappings of power incite. In Shakespeare’s Scotland, blood is everywhere: it is on the sergeant whose report of battle opens the play; it is on Lady Macbeth’s hands; it is on the airborne dagger that leads Macbeth to Duncan’s chamber; it covers the babe not “of woman born” in the witches’ vision (IV.i.96); it drips from Macbeth’s severed head in the play’s last scene.43 In Macbeth’s Scotland men are slain in their beds, ambushed in the dark; defenseless children are killed by grown men; men are incited to evil deeds by the fair and foul words of women with beards. The play’s Scottish setting allows for the thought that perhaps the violence of rule is necessary only in a “primitive” culture, that in England things are different.

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This thought is at once complicated, however, by the fact that the play’s chief villain is not only the mightiest warrior in a warrior culture but also its most powerful spokesman for a far-from-primitive morality. In him a deeply ingrained and quite traditional moral sensibility expresses itself in some of the most arresting and sensuous imagery in the canon. When contemplating the murder of Duncan, Macbeth intones: This even-handed justice Commends th’ingredience of our poisoned chalice To our own lips. He’s here in double trust: First, as I am his kinsman and his subject, Strong both against the deed; then, as his host, Who should against his murderer shut the door, Not bear the knife myself. Besides, this Duncan Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been So clear in his great office, that his virtues Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against The deep damnation of his taking-off, And pity, like a naked new-born babe, Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubin, horsed Upon the sightless couriers of the air, Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye That tears shall drown the wind. (I.vii.10–25)

Or, having murdered Duncan, he asks: What hands are here! Ha, they pluck out mine eyes. Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather The multitudinous seas incarnadine, Making the green one red. (II.ii.57–61)

This is hardly the voice of savagery. Yet it is the same Macbeth who early on can speak of his “black and deep desires” (I.iv.51) and who longs to play his part in “the imperial theme” (I.iii.128). It is the same Macbeth who, to attain the throne and hold it in perfect safety, will squelch all stirrings of pity, make the firstlings of his head the firstlings of his bloody hand. In short, it is the Macbeth whom everyone finally calls a monster, a bloody tyrant. Nowhere else in the canon does Shakespeare so fully explore the proximity of the holy and the impious faces of kingship, the interdependence of the bloody hand and the crowned head. Macbeth is not a treatise on kingship, but it is a poetic dramatization of the paradoxes of absolutism as felt in the gap between the overwhelming and ruthless will to power let loose in Macbeth, a will to power constitutive of kingship beyond the weightless realm of pious idealization, and the overwhelming ideological pull of this very idealization of kingship as healing,

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nurturant, and just. The border country of Scotland forms an appropriate imaginary landscape for the staging of these recognitions and for the tragic arias of Macbeth, the hero who would, but cannot, simultaneously represent in his own person the idealized and the bloody faces of kingship, cannot have at once the crown and the “honour, love, obedience, troops of friends” (V.iii.26) that would have come from abstention from that crown. Macbeth produces a singular sense that the center will not hold, that the mystifications by which a ruling order hid from itself the knowledge of its founding contradictions have come undone, have been exposed to the light. Part of the work of early modern tragedy is to desacralize kingship and evacuate dominant ideologies of their power. In Macbeth this happens through the protagonist, who, until he deadens his sensibilities and embraces death, speaks with the double voice of moral king and wicked tyrant, exposing their interdependence and interchangeability rather than their difference. Other genres perform different historical work, but always in relation to the work of tragedy and to the other genres that constitute the larger dramatic field. The cheerful certainties of Bess Bridges, amassing a fortune while patriotically confounding England’s enemies, are worlds apart from Macbeth’s tortured interiority, the slow crumbling of the foundations of his selfhood and with it the certainties of his class. In tragedy Shakespeare let himself contemplate the undoing of greatness and the fragility of rule. These plays find their geographic setting not so close as London or so far as Africa but in the next-door countries of Scotland, France, Italy. These locales are not randomly chosen. They are the appropriate venues, distant and close, strange and familiar, where the collapse of a ruling order is anatomized. London, by contrast, and the periphery (the Levant, North Africa, the East) belong to the men of money and wit, to the future and to the commercial classes that will dominate it. The geographies of the early modern stage are thus powerfully correlated with its genres in a complex system that is, precisely because of its conventionality, a means of speaking the historicity of the text.

Notes

1

This essay was previously published in MLQ, 64/3 (September 2003): 299–322, and I am grateful for permission to reprint it here. It also appeared, in Japanese, in Shakespeare Across the Centuries, ed. Shakespeare Society of Japan (Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 2002), pp. 241–75. Jodi Mikalachki, describing King Lear as Shakespeare’s “tragedy of British prehistory,” makes a compelling argument that it dramatizes “a period before civilization” (The Legacy of Boadicea: Gender and Nation in Early Modern England [London: Routledge, 1998], pp. 70, 71). The only other exceptions to the general rule that Shakespeare’s tragedies are set outside England are his tragic histories such as Richard III and Richard II. As I will discuss later in this essay, they are generically double, falling within the rubrics both of English history and of tragedy.

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For a suggestive examination of the relationships among geography, commerce, and Shakespeare’s plays see Walter Cohen, “The Undiscovered Country: Shakespeare and Mercantile Geography,” in Jean E. Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow (eds), Marxist Shakespeares (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 128–58. 3 For a lively discussion of how thoroughly Renaissance writers drew on a language of genres or kinds see Rosalie L. Colie, The Resources of Kind: Genre-Theory in the Renaissance, ed. Barbara K. Lewalski (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). See also Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). 4 For the role of genre in guiding audience response see Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). 5 For further discussion of the social embeddedness and changing nature of genres, especially on the Renaissance stage, see my “Shakespeare and Genre,” in David Scott Kastan (ed.), A Companion to Shakespeare (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 297–310. 6 References to the First Folio are to The First Folio of Shakespeare, prepared by Charlton Hinman (New York: Norton, 1968). The catalog is reproduced on p. 13, the title page to The Tragedy of Richard the Third on p. 527. 7 There are exceptions to this generalization, such as Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare’s Genres (New York: Methuen, 1986). 8 Throughout this essay I am aware that many texts we now call “literary”—such as stage plays—were not considered so in Shakespeare’s time. I anachronistically refer to them as “literary” simply to distinguish them for the purpose of this argument from other kinds of writing in the period. Among the most powerful critiques of the idea of aesthetic autonomy is Terry Eagleton’s in The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). 9 This has been the hallmark, often criticized and even more often imitated, of the New Historicist criticism initiated by Stephen J. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 10 Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Merlin, 1971); Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative As a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Methuen, 1981); and Walter Cohen, Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985). 11 Jameson, pp. 81–2. 12 For excellent discussions of domestic tragedy see Frances E. Dolan, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550–1700 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); Lena Cowen Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture in PostReformation England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); Henry H. Adams, English Domestic or Homiletic Tragedy, 1575 to 1642 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943); Viviana Comensoli, Household Business: Domestic Plays of Early Modern England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996); Frank Whigham, Seizures of the Will in Early Modern English Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Richard Helgerson, Adulterous Alliances: Home, State, and History in Early Modern European Drama and Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

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13 For the chorographical elements of the second tetralogy see Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories (London: Routledge, 1997), esp. pp. 160–85. For the relationship between chorography and land-based national feeling see Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), esp. pp. 107–47. 14 A proper discussion of Shakespeare’s comic geography is too complex to include here. Let me simply say that a number of Shakespeare’s comedies, both early and late, are set, at least putatively, outside England, in France, in Italy, and elsewhere around the Mediterranean. However, both the nature and the function of this displacement to foreign locales diverge from Shakespeare’s practice in the tragedies. First, some of the comedies are set in England (e.g., The Merry Wives of Windsor, or Cymbeline if one is willing to consider a tragicomedy). Moreover, a number of them seem, whatever their stated locations, to be set primarily in England, so thickly are they infused with references to English places, rural customs, and characters (e.g., As You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Taming of the Shrew). In short, if, as I have been arguing, Shakespeare’s tragedies are set abroad, this is not so true for his comedies, and the foreign setting of some of them seems simply to have resulted from Shakespeare’s following the geographic cues of his source texts even as he partly transmogrifies the foreign setting into a domestic one. Risking a huge generalization, I would argue that the relative porousness of the foreign–domestic boundaries in Shakespeare’s comedies, especially his early ones, has to do with their class politics. Unlike the tragedies, the comedies are not about the implosion of a ruling elite but about the negotiation between dominant and emergent cultural ideologies and practices, most conspicuously where love and marriage are concerned. Thus, for example, while the characters in the comedies are often “gentlemen” and “ladies,” the focus on love matches and the scope afforded women’s will articulate domestic concerns of the middling sort. Embodying a fusion or at least a mutual transformation of class interests, romantic comedy finds its geographic complement in landscapes in which the foreign and the domestic are often less distinct than in other genres. 15 For useful discussions of city comedy see Douglas Bruster, Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Brian Gibbons, Jacobean City Comedy: A Study of Satiric Plays by Jonson, Marston, and Middleton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968); L.C. Knights, Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson (1937; rpt. New York: Stewart, 1951); Alexander Leggatt, Citizen Comedy in the Age of Shakespeare (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973); Theodore B. Leinwand, The City Staged: Jacobean Comedy, 1603–1613 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986); Lawrence Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), esp. pp. 431–77; and Gail Kern Paster, The Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985). 16 For a useful discussion of Elizabethan status categories see, in particular, Keith Wrightson, English Society, 1580–1680 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1982). See also William Harrison, The Description of England, 2nd edn (London, 1587). 17 For a powerful theorization of this position see James Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 85–140.

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18 See Thomas Cartelli, “Jack Cade in the Garden: Class Consciousness and Class Conflict in 2 Henry VI,” in Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (eds), Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 48–67; and Holstun. 19 See Jean E. Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1994). 20 An exception to this rule may be afforded by Fletcher and Massinger’s Sea Voyage (1622), set on two islands of ambiguous location but probably off the coast of South America. 21 I discuss the adventure drama more fully in my “Gender on the Periphery,” an essay presented at the World Shakespeare Congress in Valencia, Spain, in April 2001 and appearing in the conference proceedings, Shakespeare and the Mediterranean: The Proceedings of the Seventh World Shakespeare Congress, ed. Tom Clayton, Susan Brock, and Vicente Forés López (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), pp. 344–62. 22 On “refunctioning” see Michael Nerlich, Ideology of Adventure: Studies in Modern Consciousness, 1100–1750, trans. Ruth Crowley (2 vols, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), esp. vol. 1, pp. 61–2. 23 For further analysis of this play see Jean E. Howard, “An English Lass amid the Moors: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and National Identity in Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West,” in Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (eds), Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 101–17. 24 See Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood; and John Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 25 See Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 26 Emerging scholarship on the relationship between early modern English literature and commercial expansion to the east includes Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Barbara Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and European Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Jean-Pierre Maquerlot and Michèle Willems (eds), Travel and Drama in Shakespeare’s Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and John Michael Archer, Old Worlds: Egypt, Southwest Asia, India, and Russia in Early Modern English Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). 27 Franco Moretti, “‘A Huge Eclipse’: Tragic Form and the Deconsecration of Tragedy,” in Stephen Greenblatt (ed.), The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1982), pp. 7–40. 28 For this idea, as for so much else, I am indebted to my dissertation director, Maynard Mack, a scholar among scholars. See his essay “The World of Hamlet,” Yale Review, 41 (1952): 502–23. 29 For an essay acutely attuned to the Turkish background of the play see Daniel Vitkus, “Turning Turk in Othello: The Conversion and Damnation of the Moor,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 48 (1997): 145–76.

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30 On the creation of the illusion of interiority in Hamlet, in particular, see Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (London: Methuen, 1984), esp. pp. 3–69. 31 Maynard Mack, “The Jacobean Shakespeare: Some Observations on the Construction of the Tragedies,” in Alvin B. Kernan (ed.), Modern Shakespearean Criticism: Essays on Style, Dramaturgy, and the Major Plays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1970), pp. 323–50. 32 This view is by now a commonplace. For a sophisticated exposition see A.R. Braunmuller’s introduction to his edition of Macbeth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 8–13. 33 See, in particular, Christina Larner, Enemies of God: The Witch-Hunt in Scotland (London: Chatto and Windus, 1981); and, for a revisionist view, Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations (London: Routledge, 1996). 34 For his excellent work on the construction of Scotland during this period I am indebted to William C. Carroll, particularly to his edition of Macbeth: Texts and Contexts (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999), from which the following material on Scotland is drawn. 35 Carroll, p. 277. 36 In James I and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), Jonathan Goldberg explores how James’s Scottish background and his sense of being a foreigner in England affected his shaping of his public kingship. 37 White’s and de Bry’s engravings and watercolors of New World encounters figure prominently, for example, in Stephen J. Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); and Jeffrey Knapp, An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from “Utopia” to “The Tempest” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). See also Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000). 38 Quoted in Carroll, p. 284. 39 Quoted in Carroll, p. 285. 40 See Goldberg, p. 41. 41 See Deborah Willis, Malevolent Nurture: Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), esp. ch. 4, “James among the Witch-Hunters” (pp. 117–58). 42 For an excellent discussion of the “tyrant” and his putative difference from idealized images of monarchy see Rebecca W. Bushnell, Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990). 43 All quotations from Macbeth are drawn from The Norton Shakespeare, gen. ed. Stephen J. Greenblatt (New York: Norton, 1997).

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Chapter 3

“I would I were at home”: Representations of Dwelling Places and Havens in Cymbeline Heather Dubrow

I Contemporary Shakespeareans, confidently dismissing earlier hypotheses about the interpolations and contaminations in Cymbeline, have neglected overriding evidence for multiple authorship.1 Shakespeare evidently collaborated with the Coen brothers, the enfants terribles of cinema, whose credits include Barton Fink, The Big Lebowski, Blood Simple, Fargo, Intolerable Cruelty, Miller’s Crossing, and Raising Arizona.2 What clearer parallel to the sight of Imogen keening over the wrong body, and the uneasy and shifting permutations of pity and distance that it produces, than Bernie Bernbaum pleading for his life in Miller’s Crossing or the escaped convicts in Raising Arizona wailing because they have left the infant in the road?3 What closer analogue to the audience’s reactions to apparent contradictions in Posthumus than moviegoers’ responses to the policewoman in Fargo, who is variously a pitiable dupe and one smart cookie? Cymbeline also shares with the films of the Coen brothers a delight in parody. If substitution is one of the most common strategies for mastering loss, parody is the postmodern version of substitution. Thus the plot of Intolerable Cruelty is structured around reversals of and riffs on the comedic ending “they got married and lived happily ever after.” Raising Arizona guys, though not without a significant measure of respect, a whole series of romance conventions: the quest, the demonic double, the hero defending his lady’s honor, and above all the return of the lost baby. Similarly, in Cymbeline Shakespeare approaches romance, the genre whose traditionalism Frye has glossed so well, from perspectives often associated with, though of course by no means unique to, postmodernist parody.4 He displays his Chopin score on the piano and then stuffs the long-suffering instrument with nuts and bolts so that it will play Cage. The wonder typically associated with romance appears on the same affective spectrum as unease, and in

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this text one skids into the other. The destabilized tonalities of the play destabilize the process of interpretation as well; it is not wholly surprising that acute critics have adopted diametrically opposed positions on many central issues, notably how the play constructs Rome and gender.5 Above all, the shared aesthetic that connects Cymbeline to the oeuvre of the Coen brothers is manifest in the centrality of dwelling places in all these texts. In Shakespeare’s romance as in the films, literal houses come to represent would-be havens of all sorts, which, like their analogues in King Lear, are variously celebrated and ironized. And when, as is so often the case, those havens are violated, spatial trespass figures aesthetic trespass. For repeated acts of invasion— the break-in at Lebowski’s apartment, the robberies of children’s nurseries in Raising Arizona and Cymbeline, Iachimo’s ruse with the trunk, and so on—render literal and diegetic the ways the texts themselves invade literary form. They purloin, pervert, and yet also pay homage to more traditional structures, notably generic types.6

II The interplay of generic norms and cultural tensions that shapes Cymbeline is a terrain as rough and hard to navigate as the mountainous home of the young princes. Such complexities are not, of course, unique to this play: critical discussions of the relationship between genre and cultural history have been no less contestatory than contradictory. On the one hand, some important early New Historicist work, notably a pair of articles on pastoral by Louis Montrose, focused on that very relationship; and Fredric Jameson’s analyses of romance would appear to have made the world of genre safe for Marxism.7 But on the other hand, the critical habit of seizing on genre studies as the prototype of formalist endeavor, much as Derrida had seized on it as the prototype of foundationalist assumptions, deflected attention from literary types during the final three decades of the twentieth century, especially among those concerned to flourish their poststructuralist and post New Critical credentials. The commonplace though debatable association of both pastoral and romance with detachment and escapism has also encouraged that deflection of attention,8 thus constructing these types as thematizing the putatively apolitical and hence deeply political conservatism of genre studies itself. Yet in fact these two forms repeatedly involve issues central to historicist and materialist inquiry, including some problems at the core of Cymbeline, as well as to many other critical practices. Romance and pastoral appeal to writers and readers in early modern England not least because they mediate and moderate the stresses of loss in its many forms. More specifically, the deprivation and recuperation of dwelling places is as central to them as nostos, the classical motif of homecoming, is to epic; for all that these genres are apparently more concerned with amorphous landscapes than houses, they offer precedents and potentialities for engaging with the very issues about the

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loss and recovery of housing on which this essay concentrates, as well as with larger issues about that complex concept “home.” Virgil’s Eclogues, indubitably one of the most influential collections of pastorals, opens on the banishment of Meliboeus from his home and recurs to that event in Eclogue IX. Thus in his opening eclogue Virgil insistently roots his pastoral in local historical conditions, the loss of land to soldiers, much as King Lear refers to contemporary problems with homelessness.9 But broader issues about losing or leaving dwellings also recur throughout classical pastoral. Theocritus IV discusses someone who has left home in search of athletic glory, thus narrativizing the familiar tension between pastoral on the one hand and the spheres of public achievement on the other. Other poems comment directly on a return to one’s abode; Virgil’s eighth eclogue includes a refrain about lovers coming home, suggesting that on some level home represents fulfilled erotic love. Many of Virgil’s other poems in the genre achieve closure in part by ending on a reference to going home, the technique that Marvell was to borrow and transform in “Upon Appleton House.” And, of course, in texts ranging from Shakespeare’s green comedies to James Dickey’s Deliverance the pastoral world at least ostensibly provides an alternative dwelling that replaces a corrupt or unwelcoming one. In addition, the act of writing in this genre can represent and enact the cyclical dynamics of losing, recovering, and perhaps losing again one’s home. This is one of many ways genres may allegorize their own narratives. Pastoral, like home, is the space of childhood and hence associated with the simplicity Bachelard considers central to home as well.10 Pastoral, again like home, achieves its ideal form in Eden, and the process of return emphasized in both often involves an attempted return to paradise. The concern with protection that Annabel Patterson locates in this genre offers yet another connection to dwelling places; her analysis focuses largely on patronage, but the guardianship so central to pastoral and figured by its central figure the shepherd is also repeatedly realized in a linguistic register that often plays on terms like in and out and a structural propensity for in some measure fencing off the poem and its genre through frames like the introductory stanza of “Damon the Mower” and the concluding lines of “Lycidas.”11 Writing in this, like many other genres, is also a return home in that one is revisiting one’s literary ancestors; the same might be said of literary imitation in other genres as well, but pastoral is unusually self-conscious in its allusions to previous work. Thus, for example, in so insistently repeating names from classical pastoral, those who write texts in the genre during the early modern period at once flag and reverse the loss of the classical past. If, as Paul Alpers observes, “a pastoral convention is a poetic practice that makes up for a loss, a separation, or an absence,”12 the convention of writing about the loss of and return to a pastoral home reduplicates that process through its own workings. From another perspective, however, writing in the genre signals the recurrence of loss, including the loss of dwelling places, in a number of ways.13 Like other substitutes, the poet who sings the song of another (and hence stages an analogue

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to that prosodic instance of recurrence and variation, the refrain) both fills and draws attention to a gap. As the motif of the Virgilian wheel insists, poets must abandon their progenitors in the genre and the literary conventions in which they dwell in order to mature. Those poets, no less than the lovers in Shakespearean comedies, must return to the court, if, indeed, they ever really left it. As Paul Alpers might have observed (and indeed implicitly suggests at many points in his study), a pastoral convention is also a poetic practice that makes up for and replicates that loss, separation, or absence. Pastoral also indirectly alludes to threatened and lost dwellings when it assumes the form of anti-pastoral or what has been termed “hard pastoral,” the latter involving a physically unwelcoming landscape, such as the mountainous terrain in Cymbeline. In both these instances, the material world that is evoked establishes an implicit contrast with the more common and pleasing version of pastoral, thus signalling yet another lost home. In particular, as we will see shortly, the unappealing cave in Cymbeline draws attention to the absence of the more comfortable dwellings in other versions of the genre, much as the antipastoral heath in King Lear reminds us of all the pastoral values, notably protecting and being protected, tragically travestied and, occasionally, movingly recovered in that play. Pastoral, in short, plays its versions of fort–da with the loss and return of dwellings. It performs the sort of symbolization that lies behind that most serious of games. Thus other lost dwellings and the lost concept of home are translated into forms in which they can be controlled and the deprivation reversed: the pastoral world itself symbolizes Eden, the text currently being composed represents classical poems in the same genre, as the repetition of names demonstrates. And thus, like other types of fort–da, the ones in this genre involve the mastery of loss, a mastery sometimes echoed in the achievement of a poetic vocation. Or, to put it another way, in pastoral as elsewhere, the recovery of home involves and interrogates representation: the entry into a realm of the Symbolic does not permit the reentry into Eden, but that process does provide the language that fashions the countryside into another Eden. At the same time, of course, pastorals often remind us of the gap between the world they present and the lost home it represents. Romance, too, offers many potentialities for exploring the loss and recovery of dwellings. In response to the query of whether one can indeed recuperate that and other losses, this literary form’s answer is a firm “Yes and no.” To begin with, the genre often stages the absence of abodes, a state that may be intensified by the threatening substitution of singularly unheimlich environments. Thus the wandering of both the genre and its hero involves a striking absence of dwellings in many senses. It is no accident that The Faerie Queene opens with a knight on a plain, not in an enclosed space of any type; and he shortly enters a wood that is in many senses unhomely. Moreover, the lack of a return to the court of the Faery Queen should be read not as an accidental by-product of the incompleteness of the

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poem but rather as the outward and visible sign of the workings of its genre: the resistance to closure that, as Patricia A. Parker among others has incisively shown, is crucial to this literary form, involves as well a resistance to and loss of dwelling places.14 The Red Cross Knight can bring the princess home but cannot stay long enough to call it home himself. And thus too the versions of romance in popular culture stress the inaccessibility of home for their heroes. The heroes of both the television and cinematic versions of Star Trek trade a hearth and family for that surrogate home that is not one, the starship Enterprise; tellingly, in one of the films, Generations, Captain Picard has a fantasy of a dwelling equipped with fireplace, holiday decorations, what appears to be the portrait of an ancestor, and a brood of adorable children, one of whom actually lisps “I love you” to him, just in case we had missed the point. Indeed, the plot of the whole film pivots on repeated and partially frustrated attempts to recover a home: Kirk returns to his old ship when it is commanded by someone else, and the villain, whose wife and children had been killed, plots to return to Nexus, a realm of originary joy whose very name may play on “nest.” As for that other romance hero James Bond, he is an insatiable wanderer from one foreign locale to another, a restless movement paralleled by his movement from one woman to another. His car and the hotels in which he often stays are substitutes for and antitheses to other forms of dwelling: in particular, like starships, they represent temporariness and movement, in contrast to stability and stasis. Indeed, the glamorous hotels and extraordinary automobiles associated with this hero call attention to the absence of other forms of dwelling much as antipastoral signals the lack of pastoral as a serene and stable environment. Given the range of texts encompassed by romance, it is not surprising that important exceptions to my generalizations about knights who cannot or will not return to their original dwellings immediately present themselves. The last but not least of Sir Gawain’s adventures is confronting the court at which he dwells. This episode has been read in many ways, but the most persuasive interpretations contend that the laughter greeting him is not only welcoming but also uncomprehending, so that in some senses returning home involves returning to the alien and alienating. As this incident suggests, though romance may culminate on a homecoming that is closural in the many senses of that word, more typically the return of a romance hero is either prevented, or truncated, or ironized. Yet if romance repeatedly emphasizes the disappearance or perversion of dwelling places, it frequently culminates in their restoration. And the analogue to that event, bringing home the lost child, is one of the most characteristic conclusions of texts in the genre. These episodes generally suppress or at least delimit the anti-closural propensities of their genre, in part by piling up multiple, related forms of stasis and stability: the unchanging birthmark, the concept of identity (as opposed to subjectivity) that it signals, and the home that welcomes and reincorporates the lost child because of that signal and itself represents narrative closure. The narrative, that offspring of the author, is brought home and

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tucked in. To be sure, the security of such endings is not absolute, as the conclusions of Books I and VI of The Faerie Queene demonstrate. But we should not allow our poststructuralist propensity for uncovering open wounds to prevent us from observing significant symptoms of healing as well: critics too often neglect the distinction between unmitigated disjuncture and instability and resolution qualified but far from denied by unresolved doubts. In particular, though most Shakespeareans have rightly rejected Tillyard’s approach to reading of the histories, the romances, as my reading of Cymbeline will demonstrate, often culminate on the types of stability he associates with the so-called Tudor version of history: although it is not hard to understand why Cymbeline in particular is classified as a tragedy in the First Folio, arguably that play, as well as Pericles, The Tempest, and The Winter’s Tale, are the Tudor myth translated into the Eden myth. Though neither Paulina nor the text can resist reminding us of the paradise lost of her first marriage, another garden opens for her. In Shakespeare’s canon and other texts, then, the conclusion of romance may reverse its praxis: error and errancy may metamorphosize into order, even if uneasy hints of anti-closural unrest remain. The similarities in how King Lear and Cymbeline deploy the potentialities of genre provide a foil for the differences, which largely support the conventional wisdom about the distinction between that tragedy and the romances. As I observed, poststructuralism rightly encourages us to notice the distortions that often occur when texts in that latter genre effect closure; as orthopedists know, bones often knit only partially or, alternatively, produce excessive tissue in doing so, much as the reassurances at the end of Shakespearean romance sometimes seem to be protesting too much. Certainly on the whole Cymbeline is a profoundly unsettling play. Nonetheless, dwellings and what they represent are indeed recovered in Cymbeline and lost at the end of King Lear, and the differentiated perspectives on these enclosures mirror distinctions in closure: Cymbeline, for all its ironies, deploys the romance motifs catalogued above to celebrate recovery in its final scene, while Lear concludes on a bleak heath of loss.

III As the connections with pastoral and romance would lead us to expect, lost dwelling places are central to both the disharmonies of Cymbeline and its resolution; if the preoccupation of this play is searching for havens in the many senses of that term, until the conclusion its praxis is variously demonstrating their inaccessibility, their undesireability, and their liability to invasion. In these recurrent explorations of lost or imperilled abodes, Cymbeline engages with social and cultural history in a range of ways. At a few points, analogous to the deployment of Poor Tom and the allusions to hospitality in King Lear, the text overtly draws on contemporary issues and conditions; witness in particular its association of coinage and houses, to which we will turn shortly. Elsewhere

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Cymbeline is impelled by the instability of dwelling places in early modern culture; the play is a palimpsest with traces of anxieties about migration, legal threats to property, and fires, even though it never refers explicitly to these threats. Furthermore, its recurrent concern with havens and shelters, which are variously embraced and violated throughout the play, participate implicitly but powerfully in the early modern project of defining that complex concept home. When and why, Cymbeline asks, do homes protect those within, and when and why do they threaten their inhabitants? And how are home and homeland connected, affectively and ideologically? In posing such questions, the play enacts the crucial cultural tension between representing dwellings as shelters from harm and as sources of danger, and arguably it stages that tension more clearly than any other text in the canon. Given that, as Emrys Jones observed when drawing attention to the significance of Milford Haven in Tudor history of the Tudors, this place does not appear in Shakespeare’s sources, his repeated references to it are revealing.15 Equally revealing is how the play foregrounds the second word in that place name. “Tell me how Wales was made so happy as / T’inherit such a haven” (III.ii.60–61), Imogen muses before her overwhelming shock.16 Moreover, references to the geographical location in question sometimes omit its proper noun (“I would thou grew’st unto the shores o’ th’haven” [I.iii.1]), thus activating denotations of safety and security. All these references flag the many types of haven within this text: Britain as protected island, the pastoral landscape and the cave within it, the treasure chest that ostensibly protects precious goods but contains its own cave-like hiding place, and the maternal body. 17 In addition, the genre of pastoral, so often twinned with romance, may function as a haven from the wanderings and heroic adventures characteristic of that genre—but the pastoral of Cymbeline calls that role into question. All these valences are further complicated by the possibility of a play on “haven” and the female genitals, a hypothesis strengthened by the likelihood that very pun occurs in The Taming of the Shrew (V.i.128). On one level, such wordplay simply alerts us to the comedic structure of the play, which finds closural shelter when and because lovers are reunited. But on another level this bawdy joke clashes with the dignity associated with nationalism and maternity and with the innocence often though certainly not invariably associated with home, thus again destabilizing the values of the play. And, much as Cymbeline repeatedly asks whether dwellings are truly havens, so the suspicions of Posthumus introduce the possibility that the female body is a source of, not a shelter from, danger. Variously celebrated and interrogated in his own day and more often dismissed than cited today, G. Wilson Knight was quite correct in citing carefully orchestrated symphonies of tropes in defense of the structural unity of the romances.18 Though he does not focus on the repeated references to coinage in Cymbeline, they support his point and in so doing gloss the significance of havens in the play. Coins may variously stand for a stable form of representation that seems virtually prelapsarian in its purity and for the threats that imperil that happy

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state.19 On the one hand, the ideal of Tudor and Stuart currency was a correspondence between face value and intrinsic value: in theory a coin worth, say, a crown would actually contain the amount of metal associated with a crown rather than merely standing for it. But on the other hand, shifts in the value of precious metals evidently threatened that ideal. For many other reasons as well, the crowns that monarchs coined proved no less secure than those they wore. Certain threats arose from the workings of the system; in particular, customary wear and tear could lower the metal content of a coin, and bimetallism, the term for a system that relies on both gold and silver, was destabilized if, as was the case in early modern England, the supplies of either metal changed. The deliberate issuance of debased coins exacerbated such problems. Malfeasance accounted for further instability: counterfeiting, a practice associated with a treasonous usurpation of the royal perogative, and clipping coins to remove some of the metal further eroded the correspondence between face and intrinsic value. English xenophobia, as I have argued elsewhere, was both intensified and justified by the problems of coinage: not only did the presence of foreign coins within England, often having names like those of their English counterparts, complicate financial transactions, but other threats to the system, such as counterfeiting and melting coins into plate or vice versa, were perceived as typically committed by foreigners in England or performed abroad, as Donne’s “Bracelet” reminds us.20 Both the ideal significance of a coin and the threats to it coalesce in the commonplace puns on “angel” as celestial being and denomination of an Elizabethan gold coin: the heavenly creature represents absolute purity and reliable representation, and yet the very act of using that term for the economic realm debases the word, in effect rendering it counterfeit. As recurrent allusions to these issues in such documents as royal proclamations show, coinage was an intense concern throughout the Tudor and Stuart periods. Arguably it would have been an even more immediate issue for Shakespeare and the original audience of Cymbeline. Given that a number of critics have proposed 1611 as the date of that play, it is suggestive that in that year James raised the value of gold coins by ten percent in response to the instabilities created by bimetallism.21 Unlike many other economic changes, this attempt to protect—that concept so often associated with home—an imperilled system had an immediate and obvious effect on Shakespeare and his audience: it assigned inconveniently complicated values to gold coins, with the spurryal, for instance, worth 16s 6d, not 15s as previously. But whether or not the play comments on the events of 1611, it is clearly full of references to coinage that establish connections between money and dwelling places. In describing the Queen as “a mother hourly coining plots” (II.i.59), Imogen hints through the allusion to maternity that the plots are a kind of progeny, perverted maternal issue; telling, too, if more predictable, is Imogen’s portraying her stepmother as usurping the king’s role as coiner, much as she usurps his power in other ways. (Probably any usurping coiner, regardless of gender, would provoke some anxieties, but the passage may also hint that Imogen, who at the conclusion

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of the play will have to surrender the monarchical power she had earlier anticipated, has internalized cultural fears of powerful women, or, alternatively, that she simply serves as their mouthpiece here.) Later in the play, in his misogynistic outburst, the enraged Posthumus himself coins a bawdy pun and figures adultery in terms of adulterated coins: “Some coiner with his tools / Made me a counterfeit” (II.v.5–6). These references are played against the subsequent observation that the gods “coin’d” (IV.iv.23) his life, a phrase that returns the power of coinage to the proper patriarchal monarch, proleptically gesturing towards the concluding scenes in which the patriarchal power of Cymbeline will be restored and the anticipated political power of Imogen substantially reduced. But how are all these references germane to havens in general and lost dwellings in particular? Havens in the play typically resemble in some important ways the norm of equivalent face and intrinsic value: they are associated with unity and with unadulterated and uncontaminated purity. But circulation, whether of coins or of characters who leave their dwellings, puts purity and unity at risk: loss of property and the destabilization of the proper in the dual senses of the self and the morally and socially appropriate are again connected in telling ways. Posthumus, for whom the court is no longer a haven from orphanhood, is contaminated when he goes abroad. Or, from another perspective, the sphere in which face and intrinsic value coincide is the Lacanian Imaginary, a maternal world of dyadic unity; alternatively, coinage leaves home in that sense when it enters into the Symbolic, whether because a government ordinance distinguishes face value and intrinsic value or because counterfeiters effect the difference.

IV Expressed on the level of tropes, notably those involving coins, the preoccupation with havens and other dwellings also recurs in the three principal plot strands of the play, that is, the tale of Belarius and his so-called sons, the story of Imogen and Posthumus, and the political narrative. In each of the three, the valuation of the abodes that are lost or endangered is unstable; in each, that instability gestures towards the social and cultural tensions of early modern England, as well as cognate problems in literary forms. Thus these narratives ask, to what extent is an abode, whether literal or literary, truly a haven? First, then, secure abodes figure repeatedly but problematically in the story of Belarius and the princes. He, like his cave, is deeply ambiguous: the thief and the shepherd, contrasted in The Winter’s Tale and so many other texts, are morphed into a single personage on this screen. Similarly, victim and victimizer merge in the figure of Belarius, recalling cognate ambivalences in near contemporaneous revenge plays. Linked through the name “Morgan” to evil magic and gendered magic at that, he is indubitably an accessory to the kidnapping of the princes, responsible for their losing their original dwelling much as he has been exiled from

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his. On another level, if the boys lose one dwelling, Berlarius substitutes another that, according to the pastoral topoi he so insistently quotes to his impatient charges, is in fact better. In a play highly self-conscious about its generic heritage, Belarius is indubitably at once the displaced courtier of romance and the kindly shepherd who rescues the exposed babes and, making a home for them, proceeds to tend to their moral well being as well as their physical needs. Belarius’s own history also involves the loss of dwellings and the substitution of alternative havens. He, as well as a number of other characters in this play, sustained a loss even before the drama began, a deprivation echoed by events within the time frame of the text. Like so many other Shakespearean characters, he is banished from his home for a crime he did not commit, and when he describes that loss in terms of not an edifice but real estate—“thou refts me of my lands” (III.iv.103)—he uses language that resonates with the changes in land ownership to which we will turn shortly. The loss of a dwelling place, Belarius reminds us here, has material as well as affective consequences, a telling comment for anyone who had been deprived of an abode through a fire or a property dispute. Losses are reduplicated in this play, and in this instance reduplicated chiasmically: before it opens, Belarius is banished and then masterminds the invasion of a nursery, and in the course of the drama Cloten, who is in this sense Belarius’s and Posthumus’s demonic double, invades the nursery Belarius has established for the children he himself stole, an action whose consequences in effect banish Belarius anew, this time by rendering his pastoral haven unsafe. Belarius’s invocation of pastoral conventions tellingly distinguishes him from Bomelio, his counterpart in one of Shakespeare’s sources, the anonymous play The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune. Banished from court much as Belarius was, Bomelio evokes his lost youth in the language of pastoral, but that world is absent from his lengthy initial description of his environment, which he describes in terms of all it lacks, not the values it represents. In Cymbeline, in contrast, Belarius’s pastoral realm participates in the seesaw between celebrating and interrogating havens and the closely related pattern of proffering and then removing apparently secure dwellings: the conflict among opposing versions of this genre echoes other versions of the struggle between home-as-haven and home-as-threat. If pastoral often represents nurture, peace, and unity, here, as in many other texts of the genre, it is repeatedly problematized—much as that other site of nurture, peace, and unity, the maternal body, is problematized in the figure of Imogen, as we will see. Thus the princes, having lost one dwelling before the play begins, lose a second when the murder of Cloten forces them to flee from their cave22—but in another sense they repeatedly lose and regain their dwelling place throughout the episodes set there, for its role as pastoral haven is repeatedly at once signalled and called into question through its status as “hard pastoral” and prison. One function of Belarius’s insistent invocation of pastoral didacticism is to establish the norms of that genre. His highly conventionalized argument for the superiority of countryside to court gains credence from the political intrigue and

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suspicion in the scenes preceding it. And his defense of pastoral, as Rosalie L. Colie rightly insists, is not violated by the mere fact that Shakespeare substitutes rocky mountains whose inhabitants are hunters for rolling hillsides whose denizens are shepherds: he is, she points out, drawing on traditions, rooted particularly in Stoicism, of a harsh landscape that teaches through discomfort.23 Sweet are the uses of adversity indeed. Yet that harshness has several effects that complicate attempts to establish the landscape as a haven and secure dwelling place, thus figuring as well the ways the genre of pastoral, like other literary conventions, is ironized. First, the contrast between Belarius’s enthusiasm and the undoubted discomforts of his home, described by Guiderius as a “pinching cave” in which he spends “freezing hours” (III.iii.38, 39), reminds us of the extent to which pastoral is a construct and a performance. Compare too the telling imperative “you and Fidele play the cooks” [IV.ii.164): in more senses than one, this line demonstrates, pastoral is yet another version of a play-within-a-play. This emphasis on the performativity of pastoral is hardly unique to Shakespeare, and it does not necessarily deprive dwellings within that genre of their status as refuges from courtly treachery. But it renders that status unstable, demonstrating that pastoral caves might be read as, say, prisons rather than sanctuaries, which is of course precisely what happens in Cymbeline. For the play also problematizes Belarius’s cave more directly. In a drama that twists images of locked sanctuaries such as England into tropes of the prisons in which first Imogen and then Posthumus are penned, the pastoral world itself, elsewhere representing home and freedom, becomes a jail.24 Both of the royal brothers are explicit and insistent on their imprisonment: but unto us it is A cell of ignorance, travelling a-bed, A prison. (III.iii.32–4)

The dwelling that Belarius substitutes for the court is, then, criticized both by its denizens and by its own genre. If the pastoral rhetoric of antitheses typically culminates in a series of contrasts between different dwellings and different definitions of home, here as in King Lear hard pastoral serves to establish an implicit but insistent contrast with what might be termed soft pastoral—that is, the type that evokes a pleasing and welcoming landscape. Belarius’s application of the commonplace defenses of pastoral to terrain so different from the one we usually associate with it signals another loss of a haven—the absence of soft pastoral from this landscape and this play. Thus the loss of material homes suffered by so many inhabitants of Tudor and Stuart England is here translated into the loss of a generic alternative. At the same time, that loss is linked back to contemporary cultural conditions. For the segue from field to stream in the piscatory eclogue explored by Sannazaro and most strikingly anglicized in Donne’s “Baite” is far less extreme than the

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contrast between rolling fields and rocky mountains or between open meadows and dark cave or between shepherd and hunter. These antitheses are grounded in a more local one: longstanding associations of Wales with the transgressively foreign and magical hint that in this instance the imputedly welcoming home of pastoral is unheimlich.25 Thus Shakespeare reinterpets romance’s contrasts between home and not-home in terms of the contrasts between self and Other that informed and deformed the emergent nationalism of early modern England; and here as in so many of his texts, the recuperation of home must involve the rejection or the mastery of not-home, the Welsh Other. Two episodes within this mountain-ridden pastoral, Cloten’s entrance and the mourning for Euriphile, intensify its association with lost homes in both literal, material senses and much broader ones. Both incidents reinforce the connections between spatial and literary trespass that structure the play’s representation of dwelling places; in so doing, both gesture towards the dangers threatening the homes of early modern England. Cloten, who paradoxically accuses others of thievery, is the intruder who steals into an abode, destroying pastoral. Thus his behavior mirrors not only the nationalistic questions posed by the Roman demands but also the invasion of property that was, as we will see shortly, so central to early modern legal practices. In any event, his invasion, like Autolycus’s, has literary valences as well, for he brings both burlesque and tragedy into the pastoral world.26 As in the literature of roguery, the interruption of one genre by another mimes a spatial intrusion. From another perspective, Cloten’s entrance into pastoral resembles that of the Sheriff in Act II, scene iv of 1 Henry IV, introducing as it does the Law of the Father into the Imaginary; it is telling that Belarius expresses the fear that he and the princes will be reported and prosecuted. At the same time, of course, his aggressiveness also introduces the Lawlessness of the Father into pastoral, supporting Belarius’s criticisms of the court and providing a demonic parody of the violent heroism that attracts the princes. But it is primarily through the presence of someone who is never present in the play that Belarius’s pastoral abode is established as both home-like and unhomelike, protective dwelling and threatening prison. Totally ignored by most readers, Euriphile is one of the most revealing characters in, or more precisely of, the play. She is the analogue to the lost version of pastoral.27 And she is the nexus of many other questions about gender, pastoral, and home. Mothers, as Mary Beth Rose among others has demonstrated, typically disappear without a trace in so many of Shakespeare’s plays.28 Why, then, is Euriphile mentioned by name no fewer than four times? And why does Belarius use one of these occasions to insist on her putative sons’ continuing ritualistic remembrances of her: “And every day do honor to her grave” (III.iii.105)? Shakespeare’s sources and analogues do not provide answers: when Erminia retreats to the pastoral world in Gerusalemme Liberata, she encounters a shepherd supplied with an aged wife who is very much present; and figures analogous to Belarius in other sources, notably Bomelio, the exiled man who dwells in the

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wilderness in The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune, have neither living nor conspicuously buried wives. Euriphile’s absence is the very point, the very reason she is present: she, like the soft pastoral whose lack the play signals, represents another lost dwelling, the maternal body that corresponds to and is sometimes represented by the more familiar pastoral landscape.29 As I have noted, Janet Adelman suggests that the play responds to the threats of the maternal body in particular and the female in general by variously erasing women and delimiting their power. To be sure, Adelman is quite right, for example, that this play bears evidence of the disease Shakespeare characteristically associates with maternal body and maternal sexuality. Yet, although she does not refer explicitly to Euriphile, Adelman’s paradigm would presumably—and wrongly—suggest that mourning rituals are possible because in this like many other Shakespearean plays the only good mother is a dead one. In fact, much as havens are both celebrated and questioned, much as the customary values of pastoral are both supported and undermined, so the mother, the physical embodiment of haven and the representative of pastoral unity, is not only distanced and disdained as Adelman claims but also lauded through allusions to Euriphile. If the play demonstrates the fear of savage maternal origins explicated by Jodi Mikalachki in a thought-provoking article, I maintain that it also expresses an intense desire for nutritive and irenic maternal origins—yet another type of home central to the play.30 The desire to erase the female in general and the maternal in particular conflicts with the fear and grief engendered by such deprivation. Some psychoanalytic readings have associated the cave itself with maternal origins that must be abandoned to confront the Romans.31 Fair enough—but it is instead primarily through the figure of Euriphile that the loss of the maternal body and the home-like dwelling it represents is emphasized and mourned by the princes and by the text itself. We see virtually no hint of resentment or threat in the references to Euriphile, and it is surely significant that Fidele, though ostensibly gendered male, is eagerly welcomed when she successfully assumes the maternal role of cook. One might rightly maintain that it is safer to celebrate the maternal when it is distanced by death or disguised by male garments, but that is a significantly different point from the claim that it is too threatening to be celebrated at all. The play repeatedly draws attention to the absence of Euriphile and what she stands for—and it does so in the spirit of the princes’ elegies, with regret, not relief.32

V But why is the text’s concern about the loss of Euriphile in particular and havens in general so intense, so recurrent? The psychoanalytical and generic explanations we have already examined interact with cultural conditions that rendered the loss

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of the material dwelling and what it represented a clear and present danger at the time the play was written. Those who had read the book of pastoral conventions and dreamed the dreams of psychological needs could also see the movie, so to speak, by observing quotidian events in their own culture: besides referring overtly to coinage and to cultural attitudes to Wales, the play more implicitly gestures towards practices and events that threatened homes, material and otherwise. To begin with, the poverty-striken inhabitants of Tudor and Stuart England, often deprived of work, were under many circumstances deprived too of what police blotters today call a fixed abode. Social historians have documented the vagrancy of many members of the Elizabethan and Jacobean underclasses, while important studies by William C. Carroll and Linda Woodbridge, among other literary critics, dovetail historical and literary references to these unfortunates.33 The problems of migration and long-term homelessness have, however, been extensively studied by both historians and literary critics. Shakespeare and most members of his audience were more likely to have feared two other sources of the loss of abodes, sources that have often been neglected by literary critics: property disputes and the dangers of fire. The loss of disputed real property often involved that of a dwelling, as well as of the social status so central to subjectivity and of the sense of security so germane to conceptions of home. Hence even a brief explication of the legal complexities in question uncovers many social concerns about the loss of dwelling places that emerge, translated and transmuted, in Cymbeline and other Shakespearean texts. Many uncertainties attending on land ownership in early modern England, with the concomitant danger of loss of home, stemmed from the gradual and inconsistent movement away from feudal conceptions of property. But that generalization immediately calls for caveats: land law differed from region to region, and medieval practices about the passing on of real property were themselves far from monolithic and were in fact under attack throughout the very period that bald historical surveys would confidently label feudal. Hence what the sixteenth century witnessed was not the initiation but the intensification of the conflict between two assumptions about land ownership and the financial interests attached to each. The king wanted to preserve the financial benefits of his feudal land privileges; many of his subjects were no less eager to avoid those payments and to have the right freely to pass land to heirs of their choosing. In addition, the concept of selling land for gain, not merely passing it on, was growing, though not without resistance.34 At the same time, the Tudor period saw the growth of an alternative method of disputing title, the use of the action of ejectment in lieu of so-called real actions.35 The action of ejectment was a version of the laws concerning trespass, a large and amorphous category that comprised the situation of someone stepping onto the property of someone else but also encompassed a range of other imputed actions, including certain crimes against the person. One of the signal differences between real actions and actions of ejectment intensified the insecurities of property

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ownership: the former provided a definitive decision on who owned the property in question and the possibility for continuing enforcement of that decision, but because an action of ejectment merely involved a single instance of trespass, it could be tried again with a different instance—and not infrequently was, a situation Chancery attempted with only limited success to rectify at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Fire, too, threatened homes—and repeatedly tropes other threats in the literary texts I examine. In assessing such perils, however, we again confront the methodological problems attending on the social history of the period. Research by a few practitioners of that discipline has culminated in a series of articles and a useful gazetteer of fires between 1500 and 1900.36 But the authors of that survey are the first to acknowledge the limitations of their statistics. For example, in this instance, as in the records of early modern crime, the northern counties receive inordinately little attention. The documentation of damage from fires includes reports from victims attempting to obtain financial relief, circumstances likely to encourage exaggeration.37 It is obvious, however, that fires were a clear and present danger in early modern England. Wood remained the predominant building material in many areas during the sixteenth century and well into the seventeenth, though this phenolmenon, like the development of land law, needs the nuancing of regional variations. Thatched roofs of course intensified the dangers of timber-framing, as did the continuing presence of open hearths in older buildings even after the chimney had become popular in new ones. In most fires the loss of life seems to have been mercifully slight, perhaps because many houses were small enough to allow relatively easy access to exits.38 The loss of property, however, could be disastrous. Their victims suffered all the more, those cosseted by the securities that attend middle class life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries should remember, because of the absence of insurance. Embryonic systems of fire insurance began to develop in the seventeenth century, and large fires spurred movements for charitable relief, but nonetheless the financial consequences must have been extreme, even devastating, in some cases. And no doubt the poor often suffered more, doubly disadvantaged by lacking the means to make architectural improvements that would help to prevent fire or to recover more easily from them when they did take place. As in the instance of burglary, material consequences interact intriguingly with discursive ones, and, as the myths of Phaeton and Prometheus remind us, some of the resulting concerns are not unique to early modern England. That elemental force fire has of course long been associated with light, radiance, and comfort— and with peril as well. Being too much in the sun was, after all, dangerous even before we learned what we know about the etiology of melanoma. An exemplary pharmakon, fire typically represents the warmth and the nourishment, literal and metaphoric, of the hearth on the one hand, but one of the principal threats to home on the other. More specifically, this household helpmeet turned household

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scourge aptly represents unruly forces lurking within the home, especially the potential rebellions of subordinate women and servants. All of these resonances are of course deepened and complicated by theological valences of fire: as many contemporary sermons and pamphlets attest, it is at once associated with hellfire and with the burning of martyrs. And it is associated as well with the depredations wrought by enemy troops and the threatened devastation of the terrorists behind the Gunpowder Plot.

VI If the interaction between generic history and the cultural tensions we have been exploring shapes the plot of Belarius and the princes, it also informs, in both senses of the verb, the story of Imogen and Posthumus and the political narratives of the play. Posthumus’s banishment participates in a reduplicated loss, as is so often the case when Shakespeare writes of deprivation: having lost one home when he was orphaned, at the beginning of the drama he is deprived of the dwelling that became its substitute, the court. For Imogen, home turns into not-home, a prison inhabited by an evil stepmother and an ineffectual father. For Posthumus, home turns into exile. Posthumus’s loss of the dwelling place in which he was raised again demonstrates how that event and subjectivity can be connected. Our hero is a coin clipped, counterfeited in Italy. He is, as many readers of the play have observed, contaminated by his contact with the foreign, an etiology for moral disease that recurs in so many English texts of the period:39 O master, what a strange infection Is fall’n into thy ear! What false Italian (As poisonous tongu’d as handed) hath prevail’d On thy too ready hearing? (III.ii.3–6)

Critics adducing this passage to buttress generalizations about English xenophobia are, however, prone to neglect the final three words; though the syntax casts Posthumus’s “hearing” as the object of the sentence, much as the sense casts him as the object of a scheming Machiavel, those last words judiciously balance blame as they gesture towards a description of home. Loss of home, the passage hints, involves loss of moral moorings, abandonment of probity and judgment, as though what happens abroad somehow does not matter as much (a phenomenon all too familiar to faculty members who have supervised undergraduates on study abroad programs). Although Imogen does not literally lose her dwelling place at the beginning of the play, it is imperilled and contaminated by the stepmother who participates in the plot to imprison her and by her stepbrother. To an early modern audience,

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many of whose members had experienced the early death of one parent and rapid remarriage of the surviving one, stepmothers and stepsiblings were a recurrent threat to the security of one’s home in the several senses of that charged concept; thus the resonances of a generic norm, the evil stepmother, are activated by contemporary social conditions. The role of the Queen and her son also proleptically figures the principal invasion that threatens Imogen’s literal and metaphoric home, that of Iachimo in the trunk. Patricia Parker rightly notes that the episode gestures towards the Trojan horse;40 thus, one might add, domestic loss is again connected to the originary myth of Troy, and thus too the connection between loss and invasion is emphasized. The episode of Iachimo’s concealment participates in a pattern that, as we have already seen, recurs in Shakespeare’s dramatic and non-dramatic texts: loss and a number of issues associated with it, notably the intrusions to which I just referred and protection from evil, are repeatedly realized through the image of an enclosed treasure. Iachimo reminds us of the customary uses of the chest when he spins his tale about its protecting precious objects; in a complicated passage to which I will turn shortly, England is figured as an enclosed treasure; and, similarly, Imogen is the sort of jewel chests are designed to protect. Indeed, Iachimo congratulates himself that his knowledge of her mole will persuade Posthumus that the conniving Italian has “pick’d the lock and ta’en / The treasure of her honor” (II.ii.41–2). But, not coincidentally, the play that chronicles in its several plots the loss of protection inverts the function of chests: the Queen’s putative poison is tellingly housed in a “box” (III.iv.188) and the poisonous Iachimo in a treasure chest. Much as dwelling places may lose their role as havens and become confining prisons or harsh caves, so their microcosmic analogue, the chest, twists into the opposite of its customary function. That reversal is multiply determined. As is so often the case, one of Shakespeare’s most important sources is earlier Shakespeare: here he returns to the problems of guardianship in Sonnet 48 and to the contrast between imprisonment and protection suggested when Sonnet 5 evokes “a liquid prisoner penn’d in walls of glass” (10). But quite possibly not only his own earlier writing but more recent reading inspired the contrasts among enclosed treasures and their chests in Cymbeline: one of his principal sources, Frederyke of Jennen, notes that the wife neglects to lock the coffer where her precious jewels lie, an object that is thus contrasted with the chest in which John of Florence hides in that it contains something evil, not something precious, but compared as well in that both are associated with perils. Here Shakespeare again reinterprets his culture’s construction of houses as sites of both protection and threat in terms of the chests that respectively represent those poles. Strong essays by Linda Woodbridge and Georgianna Ziegler persuasively gloss the political ramifications of such strongboxes: like England, these feminist studies demonstrate, the female body must be enclosed.41 Anxieties about contamination and pollution, which are associated both with foreign invasion and with the

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inherent uncleanness of the female body, threaten the imperative to enclose it. But the fear of the invading burglar who destroys a dwelling with his contaminating presence also lies behind the episode of Iachimo, again demonstrating the complex relationship between national and domestic spheres. Imogen loses her home to the invader who pollutes it before she loses it through her exile. In any event, Iachimo’s entrance into her house results in her departure from it. Like Posthumus and her brothers, she too is deprived of a dwelling place. Imogen’s reactions to exile occupy a complex and shifting point along a spectrum that runs from loss of agency to its triumphant assertion. First she interrupts Pisanio’s suggestion that she return home: “No court, no father, nor no more ado / With that harsh, noble, simple nothing, / That Cloten” (III.iv.131–3). Her pile of negatives asserts her positive determination; it is not true to say, as one often incisive study of the play does, 42 that she passively follows Pisanio’s lead. But neither would it be correct to say that her determination never falters. Indeed, it is precisely in its falterings and contradictions that Shakespeare marks the contradictory responses exile may incite: if home may represent both constraint and protection, it is hardly surprising that leaving it may be both liberating and frightening.43

VII Havens and their discontents also figure in the third principal plot line of the play, the larger political events, and here too we encounter unstable and shifting valuations. Assigning unmitigated nationalism to the play is as partial a truth as assigning unrelenting misogynistic distrust of the female body to it. Britain, the dwelling place of most of the characters, is at once celebrated for the military victories and internationalist peace it achieves and questioned for the xenophobic nationalism it excites: it is problematized as much as those other dwelling places, pastoral and the court. Exhaustively surveyed by a number of critics, repeated allusions to Troy remind us of England’s heroic ancestry and its mission in transforming the ashes of Troy into the glories of Troynovant.44 On some level, as many students of the play have suggested, the nation is the home that the personages in the text seek. Yet at the same time this play unmistakably demonstrates the folly of claiming that Shakespeare unremittingly served the interests of the powerful by defending the mythology of the Tudors. The passage in which the Queen famously lauds that enclosed treasure the British Isles is far more morally ambiguous than most critics of the play have allowed: together with The natural bravery of your isle, which stands As Neptune’s park, ribb’d and pal’d in With oaks unscalable and roaring waters,

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With sands that will not bear your enemies’ boats, But suck them up to th’ topmast. .................................... and his shipping (Poor ignorant baubles!) on our terrible seas, Like eggshells mov’d upon their surges, crack’d As easily ’gainst our rocks. (III.i.17–22, 26–9)

Cloten seconds his mother’s proud recommendation of defiance immediately after this speech. Although some have claimed that the author’s assignment of these sentiments to the two most evil characters in the play is inconsequential,45 it is hard to understand why he would have done so had he not wished to taint their sentiments. It would have been easy, after all, to give the speech to the king or a courtier. Contrasting this passage with Gaunt’s ostensibly similar lines, rather than merely noting the parallels between them as critics generally do, supports the suspicion that the Queen’s sentiments are questioned, not seconded, by the author: This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, .................................... This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings, .................................... Is now leas’d out—I die pronouncing it— Like to a tenement or pelting farm. (Richard II, II.i.40–44, 51, 59–60)

Gaunt’s narrative recasts the story of the expulsion from Eden that, as I have argued, informs cultural anxieties about domestic abodes; thus he deflects to the nation and a period preceding the early modern the very fears of ejectment experienced by Shakespeare and his early modern audience. More to our purposes right now, the comparison between his speech and the Queen’s crystallizes the belligerence in hers: while both passages extol England’s military might, Gaunt emphasizes the blessed possibilities for defense and tellingly evokes an image of nurture, while the Queen tropes the military potentialities of the country offensively—in more senses than one. Admittedly, in certain ways the contrast, like most of Shakespeare’s contrasts, calls into question the very distinctions it is at pains to establish. Gaunt’s teeming womb is also a fortress; it is odd to associate Eden with Mars, a tension that draws attention to the fraught adjective in the phrase “other Eden” (42; emphasis added). Nonetheless, juxtaposing the two speeches indubitably demonstrates the contrast between Gaunt’s celebration of a defense that enables peace and the Queen’s pride in an aggressiveness that

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culminates in destruction. The Queen’s vision, in contrast to Gaunt’s, exemplifies “self-engrossed exclusivity,” as Murray M. Schwartz, one of the few critics to emphasize the distinction between the passages, notes.46 Her image of the belligerently defended isle, yet another travestied version of protection, may recall for a twenty-first century reader the architectural predilection for designing museums as strong-boxes; critics of Breuer’s Whitney Museum in New York rightly observe that its uninviting exterior, relieved by few and relatively small windows, at once provides an appropriate image of carefully encasing the treasures within it while at the same time aggressively confronting its human bystanders and architectural neighbors. Implied in the Queen’s speech, the dangers of xenophobia are all too apparent in Posthumus’s behavior. Although his behavior recalls Collatine’s in many ways, Posthumus’s nationalistic pride, manifest both in his earlier confrontation in France and in the episode with Iachimo that sparks the trials and tribulations of Imogen, distinguishes the two characters. As Posthumus’s name reminds us, dwellings, whether they be private houses or nations, are not the only site of loss and apparent recovery in the play: Cymbeline repeatedly explores the imputed presence of the dead. Whereas a lengthy discussion of this central issue is outside the scope of this essay, we can at least note in passing that if the impatient but effective ministrations of Jupiter secure the happy ending of Cymbeline, the conventions of romance do so as well, functioning as a shelter from the threats and losses realized in other literary types. In particular, Shakespearean romance, as critics have long observed, provides an alternative to tragedy: Iachimo does not wreck the destruction achieved by his older and nastier brother Iago, Imogen does not suffer the fate endured by another embodiment of purity, Cordelia. In addition to the frequently noted connections between romance and tragedy, we need to explore equally intriguing relationships between Cymbeline and its author’s history plays. The histories chronicle cycles of unending loss, a repetition compulsion of violence—“Q. Mar. Thou hadst a Richard, till a Richard kill’d him. / Duch. I had a Richard too, and thou didst kill him” (Richard III, IV.iii.44–5). One reason Shakespeare dovetails history and romance in Cymbeline, I suggest, is to perform a transformation analogous to the one he effects with tragedy: he creates a world where the losses of history attain reversal and resolution. He achieves, in other words, the linear movement from loss to recovery that is so often problematized elsewhere in the canon. Yet genres become metagenres in this play; as I have already suggested, Shakespeare subjects the conventions of romance and pastoral traced above to the same ironic critique with which the Coen brothers approach virtually all the genres of their movies (and with which Shakespeare approaches many of his own genres, notably romantic comedy in the closural episodes of As You Like It). In particular, the interrogation of Belarius’s pastoral idyl calls into question whether not only that genre but also the romances that incorporate it can indeed provide havens from the ambitions of would-be epic heroes like the princes and the depredations of

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burlesque but dangerous villains like Cloten. Do similar ironies, then, play chiaroscuro games with the sunlit denouement, the scene in which Imogen, Posthumus, and Belarius all return to the dwelling from which they had been exiled and the princes come back to the home from which they had been stolen? Are those processes complicated in the ways other versions of recuperation have been throughout the play—or are lost dwellings definitely restored and the repetitious violence of the history play definitively concluded? The undercurrents suggested by my queries certainly do not disappear completely, any more than Paulina’s reference to her dead husband is completely erased when she is conveniently supplied with a substitute. But critics sometimes refuse to distinguish undercurrents from tidal waves, and on the whole at the end of Cymbeline Shakespeare’s original audience would have experienced a willing and even an eager suspension of disbelief. The play has evoked the metaphoric conflagrations caused by the Queen’s jealousy and her son’s belligerence, and it has staged several versions of invasion. For all their relocation in the fantasies of pastoral romance, the issues about loss, notably loss of dwelling, that the play explores were close to the bone for people living in a world where their own homes were subject to more literal conflagrations and invasions. On threats as immediate as those, many if not all of them surely longed for the wish fulfillment of romance. And even an audience in early twentieth-first-century United States and Britain may well be charmed in more senses than one by the magical restorations of romance as the play draws to its conclusion. The text works to encourage these uncritical responses despite all the preceding scenes that have fostered them.47 The riddling prophecy, its respectable provenance securely established by Jupiter’s intervention, is profoundly closural, as riddles are prone to be. The unity of images for which I have been arguing culminates, too, in the conclusion, thus emphasizing restoration and closure; the bare tree Belarius gives way to the restored cedar Cymbeline (V.v.453–7). A play loaded with tropes of imprisonment culminates on the release of prisoners, and, more to our purposes, at the end of a drama preoccupied with protection, Posthumous, Imogen, and the princes all acquire protective parents.48 And in discrediting Iachimo, the text implicitly discredits his anti-closural cynicism as well: it deflects onto and banishes with him much of the skepticism that would undermine its restoration of dwellings and lost children, much as Jaques’s disappearance stages the disappearance of discordant generic potentialities in As You Like It. In writing the final scene of Cymbeline, Shakespeare finds and creates havens from his own ambivalences about maternal nurture, the security of dwelling places, the accessibility of the dead, and the norms of romance. He trades his postmodern version of his genre for a more traditional one. He fires the Coen brothers and invites a beneficent deity to replace them as his collaborator.

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Notes

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This essay was previously published, in slightly different form, in Heather Dubrow, Shakespeare and Domestic Loss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 82–141. Reprinted with permission. I am indebted to Sarah Armstrong and Stephen Cohen for valuable assistance with this essay. For a general discussion of elements associated with postmodernism in pre-twentiethcentury texts, see Ralph Cohen, “Do Postmodern Genres Exist?” Genre, 20 (1987): 241–57. Bertrand Evans comments thoughtfully on what he terms “discrepant awarenesses” in the play (Shakespeare’s Comedies [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960], p. 248); in “Irony and Romance in Cymbeline” (SEL, 2 [1962]: 219–28), F.D. Hoeniger argues that the characters are approached with mockery and irony. For Northrop Frye’s interpretation of romance, see esp. The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976). Robert S. Miola argues in “Cymbeline: Shakespeare’s Valediction to Rome” (in Annabel Patterson [ed.], Roman Images, Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1982 [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1984], pp. 51–62) that the play rejects Roman values; Linda Woodbridge finds the portrait of Rome more ambivalent, arguing that that civilization represents two sides of Britain, the invader and the invaded (The Scythe of Saturn: Shakespeare and Magical Thinking [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994], pp. 53–4. An earlier version of Woodbridge’s argument appears as “Palisading the Elizabethan Body Politic,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 33 [1991]: 327– 54.) One of the most important treatments of gender and sexuality appears in Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, “Hamlet” to “The Tempest” (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 198–219; in contrast to the critics who emphasize the celebration of women and the female body in the romances, she finds in this play a pervasive fear of both and a defensive celebration of male community. Marianne Novy, in contrast, finds in the play a repudiation of military values and an increased acceptance of family (Love’s Argument: Gender Relations in Shakespeare [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984], pp. 167–70). Another important study is David M. Bergeron, “Sexuality in Cymbeline,” Essays in Literature, 10 (1983): 159–68; he maintains that the play creates a world of sterile sexuality. Many critics have noted the destabilizaton of generic norms in this play. For example, in “Generic Sleight-of-Hand in Cymbeline” (South Atlantic Review, 46 [1981]: 34–40), Carol McGinnis Kay traces several patterns of generic reversals. Judiana Lawrence analyzes how the drama interrogates romance (“Natural Bonds and Artistic Coherence in the Ending of Cymbeline,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 35 [1984]: 440–60). J.S. Lawry’s essay “‘Perishing Root and Increasing Vine’ in Cymbeline” (Shakespeare Studies, 12 [1979]: 179–93) notes that pastoral is criticized, yet nonetheless produces regeneration; though we agree about this ambivalence, he interprets the sources and effects of it differently from the way I do. In “The Island of Miracles: An Approach to Cymbeline” (Shakespeare Studies, 10 [1977]: 195), Alexander Leggatt suggests that Iachimo’s emergence from the trunk will seem comic on stage. My argument differs from these

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essays in a number of ways, however, notably its emphasis on genres as imperfect havens. See Louis Montrose’s two essays, “‘Eliza, Queene of shepheardes,’ and the Pastoral of Power,” ELR, 10 (1980): 153–82, and “Of Gentlemen and Shepherds: The Politics of Elizabethan Pastoral Form,” ELH, 50 (1983): 415–59; Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), ch. 2. Renato Poggioli also draws attention to political elements in pastoral, suggesting the genre is characteristically conservative (The Oaten Flute: Essays on Pastoral Poetry and the Pastoral Ideal [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975], pp. 29–30). One of the most influential analyses of the putative escapism of pastoral is Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet: Theocritus and the European Pastoral Lyric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969); on escape in romance, see, e.g., Frye, esp. p. 136. See esp. Paul Alpers, The Singer of the “Eclogues”: A Study of Virgilian Pastoral (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), p. 68. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), pp. 29–37. Annabel Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valery (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), esp. pp. 49–57. Paul Alpers, What Is Pastoral? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 89. I am indebted to this important study throughout my discussions of pastoral. For a thoughtful exposition of loss in pastoral, see Judith Haber, Pastoral and the Poetics of Self-Contradiction: Theocritus to Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). She argues in particular that the intimate connection between loss and consolation in the genre demonstrates that so-called anti-pastoral represents contradictions within the genre (see esp. pp. 1–2). This study does not focus on the relationship of loss and dwelling places, though it does analyze that relationship within Marvell’s “The Mower to the Glow-worms” (pp. 99–105). The deferrals of romance are traced throughout Patricia Parker’s Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); also cf. Eugene Vinaver, Form and Meaning in Medieval Romance, The Presidential Address of the Modern Humanities Research Association, 1966 (np: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1966), esp. pp. 11–12. Emrys Jones, “Stuart Cymbeline,” Essays in Criticism, 11 (1961): 93. All citations from Shakespeare are to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). Compare Georgianna Ziegler’s observation that Cymbeline, The Rape of Lucrece, and Othello associate both the mother and the female body in general with enclosed spaces (“My Lady’s Chamber: Female Space, Female Chastity in Shakespeare,” Textual Practice, 4 [1990]: 73–90). This argument appears throughout G. Wilson Knight’s Crown of Life: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Final Plays (London: Oxford University Press, 1947). For a brief overview of the history and significance of coinage in early modern England, see my study, Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and Its Counterdiscourses (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 187–9.

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20 On the connections between coinage and nationalism, see my Echoes of Desire, p. 189, and the paper I delivered at the 1992 Modern Language Association convention in New York City, entitled “The Currency of Nationalism: Coinage in Tudor and Stuart Culture.” 21 See George C. Brooke, English Coins From the Seventh Century to the Present Day (London: Methuen, 1932), pp. 195–6; and C.H.V. Sutherland, English Coinage 600– 1900 (London: B.T. Batsford, Ltd., 1973), p. 160. Although he does not refer specifically to coinage, A.A. Stephenson, S.J., argues that value is the central image of the play (“The Significance of ‘Cymbeline,’” Scrutiny, 10 [1942]: 329–38). Derek Traversi also emphasizes the role of value (Shakespeare: The Last Phase [London: Hollis and Carter, 1954], esp. pp. 50–57). 22 Howard Felperin suggests that the entrance of Cloten demonstrates the vulnerability of pastoral but does not pursue the point (Shakespearean Romance [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972], p. 182). 23 Rosalie L. Colie, Shakespeare’s Living Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), pp. 302–16. 24 Although she focuses on the implications for family structure, Meredith Skura’s observation that Belarius, like Cymbeline, pens up the young is germane here (“Interpreting Posthumus’ Dream from Above and Below: Families, Psychoanalysis, and Literary Critics,” in Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn [eds], Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980], p. 208). 25 On the position of Wales in English culture, see, e.g., the speech Benjamin Rudyerd delivered before the Commons in 1628 (William Cobbett, Parliamentary History of England [London: R. Bagshaw, 1807], vol. 2, columns 385–7); I thank Mark Netzloff for sharing his work before publication and hence drawing this speech to my attention. I am also indebted to an unpublished paper by my student Margaret Quintanar, “Dephallocentralizing the Realm of the Proper: Foreign Marriages in the Henriad.” 26 I am indebted to Melissa Walter for useful observations about these issues in The Winter’s Tale. 27 As Adelman (pp. 203–4) rightly suggests from a different perspective, in Cymbeline Shakespeare creates a type of pastoral that is firmly male; but, as my argument suggests, I take issue with her claim that in the pastoral scenes as elsewhere Shakespeare celebrates its freedom from the female. 28 On the paucity of mothers, see esp. Mary Beth Rose, “Where Are the Mothers in Shakespeare? Options for Gender Representation in the English Renaissance,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 42 (1991): 291–314. 29 Though his argument differs from mine in its emphasis on possession and control, Lawrence Danson’s suggestion that the play shows the inability of masculine desire to control female space is related to my emphasis on inaccessibility (“‘The Catastrophe is a Nuptial’: The Space of Masculine Desire in Othello, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale,” Shakespeare Survey, 46 [1993]: 69–79). 30 Jodi Mikalachki, “The Masculine Romance of Roman Britain: Cymbeline and Early Modern English Nationalism,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 46 (1995): 301–22. 31 See, e.g., Murray M. Schwartz, “Between Fantasy and Imagination: A Psychological Exploration of Cymbeline,” in Frederick Crews (ed.), Psychoanalysis and Literary Process (Cambridge, MA: Winthrop Publishers, 1970), pp. 250–59.

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32 Though I take issue with some of Schwartz’s psychoanalytic readings of the play, he too suggests that the homage to Euriphile involves idealization of her (p. 257). 33 A.L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640 (London: Methuen, 1985); William C. Carroll, Fat King, Lean Beggar: Representations of Poverty in the Age of Shakespeare (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966); and Linda Woodbridge, Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature (University of Illinois Press, 2001). 34 See Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr., “‘Arden lay murdered in that plot of ground’: Surveying, Land, and Arden of Faversham,” ELH, 61 (1994): 231–52. 35 For a useful overview of this procedure, see William S. Holdsworth, A History of English Law, vol. VII, pp. 4–23; A.W.B. Simpson, A History of the Land Law, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 144–7. Simpson also tellingly describes the social consequences of one dispute about land in his book Leading Cases in the Common Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 13–44. 36 See esp. E.L. Jones, S. Porter, and M. Turner, A Gazetteer of English Urban Fire Disasters, 1500–1900, Historical Geography Research Series, 13 (Norwich: Geo Books, 1984); C.J. Kitching, “Fire Disasters and Fire Relief in Sixteenth-century England: The Nantwich Fire of 1583,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 53 (1980): 171– 87; and Stephen Porter, “The Oxford Fire Regulations of 1671,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 58 (1985): 251–5. 37 On these and other methodological challenges, see Jones, Gazetteer, pp. 7–13. 38 On deaths as a result of fire, see Jones, Gazetteer, p. 60. 39 On that contamination, see, e.g., Knight, pp. 146–7. 40 Patricia Parker, “Romance and Empire: Anachronistic Cymbeline,” in George M. Logan and Gordon Teskey (eds), Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 199. 41 Woodbridge, Scythe of Saturn, esp. pp. 55–6; Ziegler. 42 Adelman, p. 210. 43 Leah S. Marcus describes the play as “a parable of exile” (Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988], p. 125); her argument focuses mainly, however, on parallels between Posthumus’s situation and that of the Scots. 44 On these allusions, see esp. J.P. Brockbank, “History and Histrionics in Cymbeline,” Shakespeare Survey, 11 (1958): 42–9; Felperin, esp. p. 193; and Parker, “Romance and Empire,” esp. pp. 191–203. 45 See, e.g., Knight’s contention (p. 136) that on this subject they behave uncharacteristically well. His defense of them and his argument that the play juxtaposes British manhood with Italianate intrigue may both be related to the nationalism intensified by World War II: his book appeared in 1947. 46 Schwartz, p. 249. 47 Compare R.S. White’s suggestion that at the conclusion of the play Shakespeare retreats from the complex characterization established earlier in order to effect closure (“Let Wonder Seem Familiar”: Endings in Shakespeare’s Romance Vision [New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1985], pp. 130–44). 48 Ruth Nevo, Shakespeare’s Other Language (London: Methuen, 1987), p. 90, also notes that Posthumus and Imogen gain protective parents.

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Chapter 4

Storm versus Story: Form and Affective Power in Shakespeare’s Romances Christopher Cobb

I To speak of the forms of romance, as I propose to do in this essay, is to echo formalist criticism at its most hierophantic. Northrop Frye’s myth criticism, in which the mode of romance held a central place, sought to bring all literature into a harmoniously arranged formal order.1 Myth criticism’s disregard of historical specificity and its presumption of an essential order of literature helped to provoke the early New Historicist and cultural materialist critiques of formalism. Jonathan Dollimore’s programmatic rejection of the modernist ideology of form and its misrepresentation of early modern drama in Radical Tragedy is typical: Unlike the influential movements in recent literary criticism, the response of the drama to crisis was not a retreat into aesthetic and ideological conceptions of order, integration, equilibrium, and so on; on the contrary, it confronted and articulated that crisis, indeed it actually helped precipitate it. Every major theme of the plays which I explore in this book transgresses or challenges the Elizabethan equivalent of the modern obsesssion with a telos of harmonic integration.2

Although not named by Dollimore, romance is the genre that most consistently plays out “the Elizabethan equivalent of the modern obsessions with a telos of harmonic integration,” as Fredric Jameson notes when he describes romance as bringing about a “resolution that can be projected in the form of a nostalgic (or less often, a Utopian) harmony.” Certainly, romance is a chaotic genre: were it not, it would not be useful as an arena in which to strive for the resolution of conflicts. However varied and disorderly its particular forms may be, romance is nevertheless recognizable as romance precisely because it strives to achieve harmony through virtuous action within a morally ordered world.3

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To return, then, to consideration of the forms of romance might seem a cavalier rejection of the critical modes that have defined Renaissance studies since the early 1980s. I submit, to the contrary, that analysis of the forms of romance in theatrical performance can in fact usefully extend the study of the theatricality of politics in the early modern period with which New Historicism has long been concerned.4 Such analysis can extend this study not only because the value that the forms of romance place upon the achievement of harmony has led to their neglect, but also because the forms of romance used in theatrical performance are so varied and complex that their proper analysis entails a reconsideration of the role of form, especially theatrical form, in historicist methodology. This complexity follows from the ubiquity of romance in English Renaissance representations of political order. The major theatrical expressions of royal, aristocratic, and civic power were all importantly related to the forms of romance narrative—Medieval chivalric romance, Greek romance, and contemporary continental and English adaptations of both older forms—that were a mainstay of sixteenth-century English story-telling.5 Pageants, processions, and tournaments were important topoi of chivalric romances, while more complex forms of political theater such as entertainments, entries, and court masques regularly featured these and other romance topoi of homecoming and reunion. These theatrical forms were, therefore, closely linked to the values of romance, whose harmonies formally effect the reconciliation of social and moral order, as studies of the Elizabethan chivalric revival and its Jacobean continuations have shown.6 In romance narrative, these harmonies are arranged through the resolution of long and complex plots, but the use of spectacular representations of romance topoi in political theater suggests that these harmonies might be extracted from narrative and effected in politics through the mediation of theatrical performance. Shakespeare’s last plays offer an exceptional opportunity to interpret the uses of romance in political theater because these plays take romantic political spectacles and their uses as one of their major subjects. The plays return these theatrical forms to one of their generic origins by embedding them within the sort of fully developed romance plot from which they were extracted for political use during the reigns of Elizabeth and James. It will be the argument of this essay that careful consideration of the dramatic arrangement of these theatrical forms within the romance frameworks of Shakespeare’s last plays, especially The Tempest and Henry VIII, can reveal aspects of the politics of these forms inaccessible to the intertextual and topical studies enabled by New Historicist methodologies. Specifically, such analysis reveals that these plays interrogate the politics of extravagant visual displays by putting them in tension with actor-centered modes of performance. Such displays are essential to the distinctive appeal of these plays, but the displays are contained within larger structures that test their fitness as vehicles for political action against the vehicles offered by the traditional stage practices of the public theater. These tests find that the political uses of romance are many and varied, depending as much upon the form and style of their theatrical

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presentation as upon the typical values of the genre. This finding suggests that no artistic form, even one attempting harmonic integration, possesses a fixed and essential politics. Its political effects depend upon the circumstances of its use, which must be tracked by detailed formal analysis. New Historicist methodologies are unable to track the broad and flexible political uses of romance in performance (or the political functions of other complex theatrical forms) because they tend to treat theatricality too simply. While the New Historicism’s interest in the theatricality of politics has provided a salutary corrective to the isolation of literary and theatrical works of art from politics in earlier formalist practice, it has tended to treat political theater in early modern England as a show of power, a view summed up by Richard Halpern: “The power of sovereignty worked primarily by making itself visible.”7 This view of the politics of visual display, which has been applied equally to events ranging from public executions to royal pageants, derives from Stephen Orgel’s seminal work on the court masque (the form for which this view of political theater is most justifiable). It leads to three analyses of theatrical power that appear frequently in New Historicist scholarship. First, the magnificence of the visual display and its trompe l’oeil effects is shown to convey the wealth and sophistication of those sponsoring the performance. Second, the narrative, conveyed in visual terms, is shown to represent the natural and hegemonic quality of the sovereign power authorizing the performance. Third, the display of subversion (typically in an antimasque) is shown to be sanctioned so that the sovereign power can be re-asserted and relegitimized by its containment of subversive disruptions.8 All three of these analyses shift somewhat when applied to the public theater, most notably in arguments that the subversive elements of plays might not be wholly recontained and in studies of genres that have little in common with the romance forms used in overtly political theater, but the view of the basic potentials of theatrical politics remains fairly constant in New Historicist scholarship.9 Recently, critics have begun to address the oversimplifications of the New Historicist treatment of theatricality in both theoretical and historical terms. Stephen Cohen has argued that “by setting aside the specificities of Renaissance theatrical practice in favor of a generalizable model of theatricality as selfconscious presentation to a largely passive and receptive audience, New Historicism presents—or at least implies—an unjustifiably homogeneous version of Renaissance culture and at the same time further devalues the study of dramatic forms and conventions as culturally specific practices.”10 In the collection of essays The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque edited by David Bevington and Peter Holbrook, scholars have revisited the form that has provided the most influential model for the theatricality of politics to assess the complexity of political activity overlooked by earlier interpretations of the masque as a monolithic celebration of royal absolutism: “What we hope to have undertaken is a deepening politicization of the masque; and by ‘politics’ we mean not solely the idealism of Tudor–Stuart political theology but the actual political processes

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through which things happened. However much the Tudor and Stuart monarchs may have fashioned images of themselves as absolute rulers, authority in those regimes was less a one-way transmission of power than a complex negotiation.”11 If court masque, then, is not necessarily a straightforward celebration of absolute monarchy, then other forms that include a telos of harmonic integration may likewise perform political functions that cannot be understood within the “show of power” or “subversion/containment” paradigms.12 This study of displays of political theater within Shakespeare’s late romances supplements in several ways the New Historicist methods for interpreting the theatrical circulation of cultural materials in order to correct the tendency of those methods to see in this circulation only shows of power. Three principles for the analysis of theatrical form will be particularly important. One, formal analysis entails examining how the performance of drama recontextualizes everything it includes within the spatial and temporal frames of performance.13 Theatrical signification is powerfully metonymic: it brings words and images, people and objects into close visual and temporal proximity with one another, allowing meanings to shift from one element of the performance to another. The dramatic use of forms of political theater recontextualizes them within the larger plot; the representation of political entertainments on the public stage brings two kinds of theatrical forms together; public displays create proximity between the daily lives of their audiences and the contents of the spectacle. Two, formal analysis considers how theatrical forms arrange the sensory field of the performance to guide the attention of spectators, and it considers the sensory attractions they use to compel that attention. Each form of entertainment arranges the sensory field of its performance in distinctive ways. For example, most political entertainments, from executions to masques, transform the visual field of the spectators, using largeness of scale, complexity of images, or the intrigues of trompe l’oeil effects. Both masques and plays use dramatic plot to focus the spectators’ attention on performers. The public theater’s plays rely also on the skills of the professional actor to hold the spectators’ attention within a relatively empty visual field.14 Three, formal analysis considers that the recontextualizing and arranging work of the performance acts on the audience in two different ways because it organizes two distinct but simultaneous actions. One the one hand, it creates a representation that conveys a story just as a literary narrative does (though in a different medium), and that story acts upon the spectators. On the other hand, the performance acts directly upon the spectators as sensory display or demonstration of physical virtuosity. The spectators can be moved by the story and its characters, they can be moved by the performers themselves, and they can influence the performers.15 In considering how the performance acts upon its audience, formal analysis reaches the subject of politics, because it identifies power relations between the performance and its spectators. Political entertainment attempts to use the power it gains with its spectators for political ends; early modern public theater did not have an overtly political purpose, but political work could be part of its cultural role.

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Shakespeare’s last plays, by bringing forms of political entertainment related to romance into dramatic romance (the romance form typical of the public theater), become overtly involved with theatrical politics. The burden of this essay will be to show clearly the significance of that involvement.

II The interplay between romance staged in the manner of the public theaters and forms of political entertainment begins at the outset of Shakespeare’s last three extant plays. The materials from political entertainments brought into the plays are not the undigested inclusions they were sometimes thought to be by early textual critics: their recontextualization for use in the plays (their role) begins to receive definition at the outset of each play, and this role influences the whole dramatic and visual structure of the play.16 The concern with forms of political entertainment in the openings of The Tempest, Henry VIII, and The Two Noble Kinsmen becomes clear when they are compared to the openings of the earlier romances Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale. The earlier openings use devices of narration to introduce spectators to the plots of the plays. Their form and content stress the plays’ continuity with narrative romance traditions and ground the theatrical power of those plays in the relation between story-teller and listener, the sensory arrangement typical of the public theater. These openings thus metonymically associate the values and the appeal of romance story with the basic actor–audience power relationship established in the public theater. The openings of the final plays shift to sensory arrangements drawn from political entertainments, and they reflect upon elaborate visual spectacle as a source of power instead of the linked powers of narrative and story-teller. The formal shift is encapsulated in the titles of the two plays between which this shift takes place. The Winter’s Tale works out Shakespeare’s fullest exploration of the power of romantic story; The Tempest begins his final exploration of theatrical spectacle. This shift transforms the relationship of the spectators to the performance and so alters the ostensible basis and value of the play’s power over its spectators. Some of the values of romance are still present in these scenes, since the visual spectacles are themselves romance topoi, but their narrative expression has been attenuated. From this change in the power relationship between performance and spectators comes a change in the political inflection of romance values. Tracing out the details of this formal shift can reveal the political changes it effects. The opening devices of the earlier romances use characters outside the main action of the play to introduce the story. Pericles uses Gower, while Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale employ gossiping gentlemen. These opening narratives acclimate their audiences to romance, introducing the genre’s conventions and foregrounding its elevated view of human virtue, as in this description of Posthumous:

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He that hath miss’d the Princess is a thing Too bad for bad report, and he that hath her (I mean, that married her, alack good man! And therefore banish’d) is a creature such As, to seek through the regions of the earth For one his like, there would be something failing In him that should compare.17

The expectations these openings set up will be seriously challenged as the plays unfold, but they give the audience an initially clear framework for interpreting the plots in romance terms, accepting its values and its claims about the power of its values to bring harmony to those who witness them in action. These plays claim that their stories function as “restoratives” for their audience, as Gower puts it in the prologue to Pericles (8). In The Winter’s Tale, it is claimed that the virtue of young Prince Mamillius “physics the subject, makes old hearts fresh” (I.i.39). The power of these stories of virtue, then, is to restore emotional health to their audiences, and they seek to make their audience conscious of their impact as stories. In these openings, the nature of the form and its promised effects are discursively explained, and the visual organization of the scenes focuses the spectators’ attention wholly on the narrating performers, to whom the audience listens as to a story-teller. Such a teller has power with an audience because he controls access to the tale, which itself carries medicinal power, and because of the narrowly focused sensory relationship he establishes with the spectators, through which his feelings may be readily perceived and empathetically received. The powers of story and of story-teller are closely associated. This theatrical style was regularly employed during the first decades of the dramatic romance tradition.18 Its use in that tradition was originally more a practical than a political choice: narration offered a way to present romance content that exceeded the staging resources of the professional companies. (The use of a more spectacular style in political theater was similarly as much a practical as a political choice: it was the only way to reach huge audiences in disorganized, open performance spaces.) Shakespeare’s deliberate return to the traditional story-telling style when The King’s Men possessed much more extensive resources and when the use of those resources was increasingly fashionable brings out the earlier style’s political implications, focusing attention on the social and moral value of the relationships cultivated by this sort of interaction. In the three later plays, the visual forms of the openings are more varied, but each ostentatiously employs the extensive resources of the company to create elaborate theatrical spectacles that match forms of political theater. The contrast between these openings and the openings of Shakespeare’s earlier romances again emphasizes the deliberate choice to bring the spectacular style of political theater into the public theater. The Tempest begins with a tumultuous evocation of a storm at sea; Henry VIII begins with a detailed recounting of the pageantry of the Field of

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the Cloth of Gold followed by Cardinal Wolsey’s processional entrance; The Two Noble Kinsmen begins with a royal wedding procession. The spectacles of each of these three openings, like the narrative openings of the earlier plays, are suggestive of romance. They position the audience differently in relation to romance’s forms and values, however, because they do not introduce a story or explain its value. Therefore, they do not lead the spectators to develop clear expectations about the play’s plot or its impact it on them as they watch. Instead, these openings focus the spectators’ attention within the sensory field of the play much less narrowly, seeking to make a powerful impact on the spectators immediately by means of an elaborate spectacle. Immediately following these visual displays, they use irony to push the spectators toward conscious consideration of the opening scenes as theatrical spectacles rather than as events in a romance tale. This irony tends to undermine the apparent glory of the spectacle, so spectators who have been immersed in the sensory thrill of the spectacle may be drawn out of it rather quickly. The interplay of spectacle and irony, then, seems designed to provoke feelings of uncertainty in the spectators about the value of what they are witnessing in place of the feelings of expectation established by the narrative openings of the earlier romances. The later the play, the sharper the irony. The Two Noble Kinsmen’s wedding procession seeks to create harmony in its world in the manner described by its accompanying song. The song begins by presenting an ideal image that surpasses natural limits—roses without thorns, first among the flowers to be strewn before Theseus and Hippolyta as they proceed—and ends with a comprehensive banishment of discord: The crow, the sland’rous cuckoo, nor The boding raven, nor chough hoar, Nor chatt’ring pie, May on our bridehouse perch or sing, Or with them any discord bring, But from it fly. (I.i.19–24)

The procession organizes the lives of its participants into a harmonious order that emerges out of its artistry and that is strong enough to prevent the intrusion of any disruptive influences. This ideal harmony is no sooner established, however, than it is disrupted: Enter three Queens in black, with veils stained, with imperial crowns. The first Queen falls down at the foot of Theseus. (s.d.)

The timing of their entrance, coupled with the mourning garb that links them to crow and “boding raven,” mocks precisely the song’s claim to drive out discord.

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Instead, the queens bring in discord, disrupting the marriage ceremony and stirring war in its place. The thorns cannot be removed from the rose. The discussion of the Field of the Cloth of Gold in Henry VIII’s first scene likewise evokes a world brought to harmonious perfection by its organization into romance form, only to dismiss the reality of that movement. The jousts at the Field appear so great “that former fabulous story, / Being now seen possible enough, got credit, / That Bevis was believ’d” (I.i.36–8). The qualities of lived experience have been organized and heightened in such a way that the distinction between romance fiction and theatrically organized reality is broken down. This laudatory description is almost immediately ironized, however, as the lords replace it with a view of the Field’s lavish displays as ruinous, claiming that those required to finance their production have “sicken’d their estates” (82) and that “The peace between the French and us not values / The cost that did conclude it” (88–9). The perfecting of life accomplished in the Field’s pageantry is undone by its exhaustion of the material means needed to create such theatrical perfection. The art of this pageant is reduced to transitory, and costly, illusion. Both Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen dismantle their evocations of the perfecting of life through its reorganization according to the forms of romantic pageantry with an almost savage swiftness. These dismissals of romance pretensions may seem to position the plays as anti-romances, which gain credibility by substituting hard truths for romantic wishes, but neither play wholly sustains its ironic view of romance even to the end of its first scene. In The Two Noble Kinsmen, the three queens in black come not to destroy the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta but merely to claim the consideration due to their grief. In Henry VIII, the power of pageantry is reasserted later in the first scene when Wolsey enters with the full procession due to his rank (whether or not he personally deserves the honors he holds), and the play will look again and again at the power and meaning of royal pageantry. The openings of Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen ironize the pretensions of royal spectacle, but they do not indicate why they bring such harmonizing spectacles into view only to insist upon their inadequacy. The politics of their choices are left wholly implicit. The opening of The Tempest suggests some reasons for Shakespeare’s development of the form of opening that is obviously but tersely displayed in the swift and severe ironies of Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen. It does so by handling the pattern of elaborate theatrical spectacle, the evocation of romance, and ironization of spectacle’s power in a more extended fashion than the later plays do and by constructing that ironization around a clear return to the narrative, actor-centered style of the earlier romances. It sets the two theatrical styles for staging romance in competition, contrasting the very different power relations that the two styles establish between spectators and performance and opening the way for exploration of the styles’ political implications.

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The spectacular element of The Tempest’s opening is, of course, the tempest itself, and its staging engages complexly with the dramatic romance tradition of the public theater and the spectacular form of court political theater, combining elements of each to create a new effect. The storm topos links the play to the dramatic romance tradition. Storms are common in romance, playing prominent roles in Pericles and The Winter’s Tale, as well as non-Shakespearean romance plays and narratives. The staging of the storm sets The Tempest apart from this tradition, however, because of its emphasis on the spectacle of the violent weather. In its stage effects, it more closely resembles the court masque.19 No overt connection to political entertainments is established, however, because The Tempest does not present its opening spectacle as theatrical within the world of the play and because the spectacle reveals a scene of chaos rather than harmony. The Tempest’s opening thus sends distinctly mixed signals to its spectators about the kind of theatrical form they have before them. The spectacle itself creates a decisive break with the narrative devices used to stage storms in earlier romances. In plays prior to The Tempest, storms are represented more through descriptive poetry than through stage effects. Speakers emphasize the power of the storm to terrorize or destroy the humans caught in it. The first storm in Pericles is evoked entirely through such commentary: PER: Yet cease your ire, you angry stars of heaven! Wind, rain, and thunder, remember earthly man Is but a substance that must yield to you; And I (as fits my nature) do obey you. (II.i.1–4) 3 FISH: Faith, master, I am thinking of the poor men that were cast away before us, even now. 1 FISH: Alas, poor souls, it griev’d my heart to hear what pitiful cries they made to us to help them, when, well-a-day, we could scarce help ourselves. (II.i.18–22)

The power and pathos of the second storm in Pericles is established by the focus on Marina’s birth and Thaisa’s apparent death in the midst of it (III.i.1–37). In each case, the human suffering created by the storm and the impact of that suffering on those who witness it are explicitly described. In The Tempest, to the contrary, the storm is evoked through sound effects, lighting effects, and the ongoing work of the mariners. The play withholds poetic descriptions of both the storm and the suffering of those caught in it. Instead, the audience is given the sounds and sights of the storm-tossed ship and the ungrateful complaints of its noble passengers. The presentation of the characters, without either particularizing details or any sign of humane behavior, does not seem calculated to create sympathy for them. Rather, the scene seems to solicit interest in the capacity of the theater for vivid special effects, to encourage the spectators to revel in the impact of its sights and sounds without much regard for the fate of the characters on shipboard. Thus, it encourages the spectators to be aware of the scene’s theatricality even while it claims that the storm is real for the characters.20

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The second scene of the play seems to repair the storm scene’s break with tradition by a shift back to the narrative mode of the earlier romances with Miranda’s plea to her father to allay the storm. Her speech fits the older conventions of storm description, and it is here that the potential of the storm scene for pathos is finally articulated: The sky it seems would pour down stinking pitch, But that the sea, mounting to th’ welkin’s cheek, Dashes the fire out. O! I have suffered With those that I saw suffer! A brave vessel (Who had, no doubt, some noble creature in her) Dash’d all to pieces! O, the cry did knock Against my very heart! Poor souls, they perish’d. (I.ii.3–9)

With this speech, Shakespeare deftly shapes a contrast between two modes of theatrical representation, one derived from the court and founded in the spectacular effects of stage-machinery and an acting style subdued to fit a new way of constructing material reality, the other derived from the public theater and founded in the capacity of the actor’s spoken words to evoke the full range of human experience in ways that draw the audience into sympathetic engagement with it. Which mode is more compelling? Does Miranda draw the spectators away from their rapture in the stage effects, or does she appear to the spectators as simple and unsophisticated in the earnestness of her sympathies with the mariners? In the movement of the spectators’ sympathies in response to the interplay between spectacle and narrative, the relative powers of two modes of theater are being tested. This interplay is further complicated when an ironic perspective on the situation is introduced just after the tension between the two modes of theatrical representation has been fully established. At the moment Miranda speaks, the spectators may be drawn to sympathize with her passion even after the unsympathetic characterizations of the opening scene. The growth of such sympathy receives a check, however, when Prospero explains that the storm, produced by his art, has done none of the damage it appeared to inflict. This revelation ironizes Miranda’s sympathies by showing them to be unneeded: she is responding to an illusion of destruction, not reality. If some spectators have been chastened by Miranda’s generous emotions, Prospero justifies the spectators who appreciated the storm’s theatrical artistry when he explains that he created it as one scene in a drama of revenge and restitution. Prospero does not repudiate Miranda’s sympathy, describing it as “the virtue of compassion” (I.ii.27), but he seeks to temper it by pointing out her error of perception. With this irony, The Tempest’s opening finally completes the form more succinctly set forth in Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen. All three contextualize the kind of spectacle typical of political theater to create an ironic perspective upon it or its reception. The irony can be directed at three targets: the

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spectacles themselves (which may claim to perform more than they actually can), the onstage witnesses who would take their illusions for reality, and the off-stage spectators who invest too much belief in the reality of such spectacles. By provoking and undermining spectators’ belief in the creations formed by political entertainments, the plays create an opportunity to examine the fitness of these forms for political work, as the audience can both observe and experience their function as political tools. Obviously, one of the theater’s main uses as a political tool is to induce beliefs whose truth-claims and consequences extend beyond the performance itself to affect the spectators as political subjects and hence to affect the polity as a whole: this is the sort of belief that performs an ideological function. Accomplishing this end is no easy task; Stephen Orgel’s conclusion about the court masque was that those who employed it for this end ultimately deceived themselves instead of inducing belief in others.21 The theater is a useful tool for inducing belief, but it is less obvious that it is a fit tool for inducing belief that fulfills an exact ideological function or for fostering harmonious relations among members of the body politic as it works to induce such belief. The Caroline court masque was a conspicuous failure in this latter respect, while Elizabethan pageantry was a conspicuous success, so attention to the formal specifics of theatrical practice in this regard seems crucial for historical analysis.22 Formal analysis precisely refuses to rest at the point at which ideology is identified; the claim of form, as the plays make it, is that there are important distinctions to be made between ways of constructing and inducing belief in ideology, because the intended goal of the expression cannot be separated from its form. To be concerned with the fitness of the forms of political theater is to ask the question: How does the form of theater employed conduce to the humane and responsible use of theater for political ends? The third and fourth sections of this essay will examine, in turn, how The Tempest and Henry VIII work out the effectiveness of theatrical forms for inducing political beliefs and the consequences for relations within the body politic of government by theatrical means.23 These plays are nothing if not attentive to the formal specifics of uses of theater for political ends, relentlessly calling attention to distinctions between forms of theatrical expression. The Tempest examines the effects of the various forms of political entertainment that Prospero uses to rule the island and to arrange his reintegration into the Italian political structure. The intimacy of Prospero’s little realm enables Shakespeare to compare readily the quality of political relationships mediated by spectacle to the quality of relationships mediated by person-to-person contact, the mode of relation associated with the story-teller and the actor-centered public theater. Henry VIII likewise examines the effects of various forms of political entertainment as they are employed as part of English government, but it places them in less intimate contexts. Henry VIII thus brings its study of the fitness of forms of political theater much closer to political reality than does The Tempest, which has about it the quality of a thought-experiment. Henry VIII both extends and qualifies The Tempest’s conclusions about the fitness of forms of political theater for governing.

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More open-ended than The Tempest, it leaves the full working out of such conclusions to its audience, who must judge the play based on their own experience of its spectacles.

III The Tempest includes three major spectacles, all devised by Prospero, modeled on contemporary forms of political entertainment: the opening storm already discussed; the vanishing banquet, which draws upon the form of the royal entertainment; and the betrothal masque for Ferdinand and Miranda.24 In addition, Prospero arranges many other smaller theatrical displays, in which one or more characters are positioned as audience to a scene they can perceive but in which they cannot intervene (at least at first), from Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo hearing Ariel’s music to Prospero witnessing Miranda and Ferdinand’s declarations of love to the Neapolitans wondering at the discovery of Ferdinand and Miranda playing chess. Neither the major nor the minor spectacles have difficulty soliciting belief from their audiences. Miranda never suspects that what Prospero calls “the direful spectacle” of the shipwreck might be an illusion, nor does she suspect that Prospero’s punishment of Ferdinand is a mere stratagem. When the Neapolitans witness a banquet being laid for them by mysterious spirits, they respond with fervent belief in wonders: “Now I will believe / That there are unicorns; that in Arabia / There is one tree, the phoenix’ throne” (III.iii.21–3), says Sebastian. The only notably skeptical spectator is Caliban, who sees the “glistering apparel” laid out by Ariel as “but trash” (IV.i, sd, 224), but he is as credulous as any when he meets with Stephano and hears the invisible Ariel’s music. The Tempest implies, then, that people are prepared, even overly desirous, to believe what they see, inside the theater or out of it. The problem, then, for the organizer of political entertainments is to use that belief to achieve political ends. The long critical debate over Prospero’s success in achieving his goals shows that the play represents such use of theater as difficult to manage.25 This difficulty arises, I would argue, from the double nature of Prospero’s political work (which is representative of political work in general). On the one hand, his goal is to exercise control over his subjects. On the other hand, his goal is to establish a relationship to his subjects that justifies his exercise of control, so that his realm is not only well-ordered (by his standards) but harmonious and marked by the mutual affection of ruler and subject, and of subject and subject.26 For instance, Prospero may be willing to tolerate a contentious relationship with Caliban, but he would hardly desire Miranda to take a similar attitude, so his efforts to control her must also make provision for her feelings. Also, his plan for his restoration depends on his capacity to cultivate affection between Miranda and Ferdinand and between Alonso and himself. Political control is desirable, but it is insufficient to achieve all of Prospero’s political ends.

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Theater as a political medium is capable of doing work of a double nature, since it simultaneously tells a story and establishes a relationship between the performers and the audience. The interaction between these two aspects of performance differs, however, from theatrical form to theatrical form, so not all are suited to achieving Prospero’s two goals together. Thus, Prospero employs many different major and minor theatrical forms, attempting to achieve his complex goals by moving back and forth from spectacular displays to actor-centered performance. Through his experimentation, The Tempest examines the tension between the available theatrical means and the desired political ends. The three major spectacles function quite consistently in terms of the relationship that they establish between the power behind the spectacle and its witnesses. They create for their originator a godlike stature, which authorizes the exercise of power that creates the spectacle and its effects. The storm is linked by those who see it to powers of nature outside human authority. Miranda implicitly assigns the maker of the storm godlike stature when she imagines what she would do if she had power to match the storm: “Had I been any god of power, I would / Have sunk the sea within the earth or ere / It should the good ship so have swallow’d” (I.ii.10–12). At the disappearing banquet, Ariel sternly tells his amazed audience that this direful spectacle and all their prior suffering have been arranged by higher powers: “You are three men of sin, whom Destiny, / That hath to instrument this lower world / And what is in’t, the never-surfeited sea / Hath caus’d to belch up you” (III.iii.53–6). Finally, Ferdinand’s pleasure in the masque likewise suggests the godlike stature of its author: “Let me live here ever; / So rare a wond’red father and a wise / Makes this place Paradise” (IV.i.122–4). That these spectacles direct their witnesses’ attention back to a source outside the performance itself works with the visual complexity of the spectacle to hinder the development of empathetic relations between the performers and the spectators; the attention of the spectators is directed through the performers to a higher power and authority. The relationship between designer and audience created by these marvelous spectacles shows the suitability of these theatrical forms to a politics of absolutism, and to say that the form of the court masque affirms absolute monarchy is to say nothing new.27 If a ruler wishes to be regarded as divine, these sorts of spectacles seem capable, in their different ways, of creating that belief. But however much these spectacles create the sort of relationship of ruler to subject desired by the absolute monarch, The Tempest as a whole does not create this sort of relationship, as it intersperses these spectacles with other theatrical forms. Prospero himself takes pains not to have such stature attributed directly to him, despite the fact that he stages these spectacles to create awe in their audiences. Whenever he becomes known as the originator of the spectacle, he undermines any attributions of divinity to himself. When Miranda speaks of gods of power, Prospero quickly names himself in more humble terms as “Prospero, master of a full poor cell, / And thy no greater father” (I.ii.20–21). When Ferdinand speaks of Paradise, Prospero cuts his effusions short—“Sweet now, silence!” (IV.i.125)—and concludes the masque

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with a “distemper’d” speech that emphasizes his “old brain” and his “infirmity” (145, 159–60). In those cases where he is not known to be the author of the spectacle, he declines to reveal his responsibility. Ariel, performing according to Prospero’s instructions, claims to be a minister of fate as Prospero seeks through this spectacle to put the fear of God into the Neapolitans. When he appears in his own person before the Neapolitans, however, Prospero makes no reference to this performance, nor does he claim that fate has worked on his behalf. Such a claim would be inconsistent with his presentation of himself to Alonso as an Italian aristocrat. Accoutered with hat and rapier, Prospero claims for himself a human identity, not a divine one. To achieve control over Alonso and awake remorse in him, Prospero needs the major spectacle’s power to overwhelm the sense of its audience. To achieve reconciliation with Alonso, he needs to appear before Alonso as a person, and this entails a different kind of political theater. Prospero separates not only his roles but his styles of performance in order to achieve his ends, as he recognizes the limits of his more potent art for the practice of politics. The wisdom of Prospero’s recognition is suggested if one imagines how Alonso might react if he had full knowledge of all Prospero has done. However, the presence of the one skeptical witness of Prospero’s spectacles— Caliban—provides more direct evidence of the dangers of using elaborate political spectacles to achieve control over subjects, dangers which arise from the godlike stature that such spectacles create for their originators. That the chief political danger here is assuming a godlike stature and not the use of spectacular theater itself is emphasized in Caliban’s interaction with Stephano and Trinculo. An appearance of divinity can be created by very simple means at the moment of contact with a person from a radically different culture. At this moment, attributes that are ordinary within the context of one’s own culture become wonderful. This quality, often exploited in colonial enterprises, shapes Caliban’s meeting with Trinculo and Stephano,28 as he gets drunk on their “celestial” liquor and takes Stephano for a god: CAL: Hast thou not dropp’d from heaven? STE: Out o’ th’ moon I do assure thee. I was the Man i’ th’ Moon, when time was. (II.ii.137–9)

Where Prospero takes care to avoid any claim to divine stature, Stephano declines to correct Caliban’s mistake and instead takes advantage of the power it confers upon him. Stephano’s entry into this role wins Caliban’s instant affection for delivering him from Prospero’s oppression, but the ultimate consequence of Stephano’s false claim is Caliban’s bitter disillusionment and self-contempt at the end of the play, when he comments, “What a thrice-double ass / Was I to take this drunkard for a god, / And worship this dull fool!” (V.i.296–8). The affection of subject for ruler is destroyed and, with it, Stephano’s little realm.

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The development of Caliban’s attitude towards Stephano hints at the history of the relations between Prospero and Caliban. That Prospero may also have let Caliban believe him to be divine is suggested by the resemblance of Caliban’s meeting with Stephano to his remembrance of his early life with Prospero: When thou cam’st first, Thou strok’st me and made much of me, wouldst give me Water with berries in’t, and teach me how To name the bigger light, and how the less, That burn by day and night; and then I loved thee. (I.ii.332–6)

Delicious drinks, knowledge of the heavens, and consequent love are the common elements of both encounters. Caliban’s later contempt for Stephano and himself also resembles the contempt that he expresses for Prospero and for himself when he urges Stephano to kill his old master: “Remember / First to possess his books; for without them / He’s but a sot, as I am” (III.ii.91–3). Caliban has learned to be a skeptical audience to Prospero’s grand self-presentation before the play has begun, and he learns to be skeptical of Stephano’s, but such skepticism is learned at considerable cost. The consequence of relationships based on false claims to divinity is degradation for all involved. Since any spectacular staging may implicitly establish such a claim, its use in politics runs the risk of leading to this end, unless it is supplemented with a theatrical form that affirms the merely human stature of its performers. The tension between the forms of political spectacle and the form of the public theater established in the opening scenes of the play thus develops into a more complex interaction, in which the controlling power exercised by the spectacular political forms is tempered by the affective power of the actor-centered forms. Recognition of this interaction brings out the political complexity of Prospero’s relationship with his daughter. Miranda plays a political role that goes beyond that of a pawn in the game of dynastic marriage. Her emotional power guides Prospero in his political maneuvering, helping him to accommodate the spectacular forms of political theater to the values and the form of narrative romance, which enter the play through Miranda’s sensibilities and the conventional meanings of beautiful, virtuous princesses. Miranda’s role in I.ii associates the values of romance with the actor-centered form of the public theater. Her verbal response to the storm at the outset of the scene makes her a representative of the actor’s power to hold the spectators’ attention with poetic description and to inspire pity for human suffering; Prospero’s revelation of her royal birth and her meeting with the lost prince makes her clearly a figure of romance.29 In terms of dramatic form, Miranda’s influence on Prospero causes him to fit his own quest for revenge and restoration into the form of her romance plot. Driven as he is by the “high wrongs” with which he is “strook to th’ quick” (V.i.25), he nevertheless claims to Miranda as he has begun to arrange his plot,

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“I have done nothing, but in care of thee” (I.ii.16). In terms of theatrical form, Miranda’s influence causes Prospero to add a layer of visual indirection to the staging of his play. Revenge is staged so that the revenger can see his wronger suffer and take satisfaction from that suffering. Prospero arranges for his wrongers to suffer, but for the most part he does not watch them himself. Instead, others, primarily Miranda, watch the suffering, and Prospero watches them. Miranda, herself not part of the revenge story, watches from the romance perspective that extends pity for suffering. This theatrical substitution transforms Prospero’s spectacles from revenge into romance and provides him (complementing the cautionary example of Caliban) with a more positive example of how meetings between persons can create affection between actor and spectator, ruler and subject, which he integrates into his staging of his reconciliation with Alonso. The formal transformation of revenge into romance appears most vividly in the scene that begins with Miranda going to Ferdinand to help him carry logs and ends with the two planning to marry. Prospero has prepared the way for this scene by arranging Ferdinand’s punishment, and he watches closely as it unfolds, but does not otherwise intervene.30 Miranda’s outrage at Ferdinand’s suffering quickens her feelings for him, her generosity in helping him affects him similarly, and their shared experience builds trust. Their downright haste serves Prospero’s restoration plot, but as spectator to the scene he is caught up in the emotions of the young lovers, not in the neatness of his plot. Indeed, he measures his own emotions by comparing them to those that Ferdinand and Miranda feel: “So glad of this as they I cannot be, / Who are surpris’d withal; but my rejoicing / At nothing can be more” (III.i.92–4). By becoming a spectator in Miranda’s play (which he has helped to arrange) Prospero replaces the satisfaction of revenge with the rejoicing of love. While the log-carrying scene most explicitly places Prospero as the audience to Miranda’s reaction to a display of suffering, it is only one of many points in the play where Prospero measures and guides his own emotions by careful study of the feelings of others. Even with his servants Ariel and Caliban he watches their moods closely, and, at the crucial moment when he must decide whether or not to end the suffering of his captive Neapolitan audience, he observes Ariel’s reaction to the spectacle of their suffering rather than witnessing it directly. Ariel, for all his native magic, relies on the chief power of the professional actor to render this scene for Prospero. Just as Miranda did after observing the shipwreck, he renders human suffering vividly in language and uses his own sympathetic emotion to inspire sympathy in his audience: PROS: How fares the King and ’s followers? ARI: Confin’d together In the same fashion as you gave in charge, Just as you left them; all prisoners, sir, In the line-grove which weather-fends your cell; They cannot boudge till your release. The King,

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His brother, and yours, abide all three distracted, And the remainder mourning over them, Brimful of sorrow and dismay; but chiefly Him that you term’d, sir, “the good old Lord Gonzalo,” His tears runs down his beard like winter’s drops From eaves of reeds. Your charm so strongly works ’em That if you now beheld them, your affections Would become tender. (V.i.7–19)

Prospero engages with Ariel’s representation of suffering intently, and uses the sympathy it evokes as his guide to action: PROS: Dost thou think so, spirit? ARI: Mine would, sir, were I human. PROS: And mine shall. Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling Of their afflictions, and shall not myself, One of their kind, that relish all as sharply Passion as they, be kindlier mov’d than thou art? (V.i.19–24)

Prospero guides his feelings and actions not by following his own reaction to witnessing the suffering he inflicts but by considering the feelings of observers who, lacking his long personal engagement in the situation, are only involved with those who suffer because they see that suffering. Prospero thus sets limits on his use of marvelous spectacle for political ends based on the way in which those spectacles play within scenes focused on human persons and their perceptions. This theater provides the final standard for political action in the play, as Prospero shows most fully when he incorporates the form of the scene in which Miranda and Ferdinand come to trust and love into his meeting with Alonso. With the help of Ariel’s mediation, he pities Alonso as Miranda pities Ferdinand. He presents himself as Alonso’s peer and establishes a bond of shared suffering with him over the loss of beloved children. He then transforms that bond of shared suffering into a bond of shared joy, using the tried and true device of a sudden discovery to enable him and Alonso to share together in the revelation of their children’s romantic love, just as he had learned to do himself by watching Miranda. If, at this moment of reunion, Prospero has as his political goal the replacement of past animosity and present distrust with amity, this goal remains in tension with his punitive designs, as indicated by the difference between his treatment of Alonso and his treatment of his brother. Prospero’s willingness to make his revenge plot acceptable to Miranda’s sensibilities, his determination, to a degree, to make himself answerable to those he loves, exists in tension with his tendencies to secrecy and authoritarian rule. The Tempest does not represent Prospero as a perfectly just ruler any more than it repudiates the usefulness of elaborate political entertainments that subordinate their audiences to their authors rather than

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affirming their shared humanity. It does, however, show the importance of keeping the actor-centered theater and its unavoidable emphasis on the mere humanity of its spectacle as a standard for the political uses of theater. Insofar as Prospero achieves his political goals, he does so because he recognizes that the controlling powers of theater have a strictly limited usefulness as political tools. In The Tempest’s polity, impersonal coercive power, whether it be a battering storm or the pinches and cramps with which Caliban is afflicted, carries little or no meaning for those it acts upon. They do not see a personal source of that power, and it does not engage with them by human means, so it does not touch their emotions or their reason, except with respect to their own struggle for survival. Therefore, such power can control or destroy those it acts upon, but it cannot change them. Human, personal powers that create a relationship between those who act and those who are acted upon are necessary for this polity to be harmonious as well as orderly. If early modern English writers found a literary form for the representation of political harmony in romance, Shakespeare finds in The Tempest that the actor-centered theater provides the theatrical form suited for enacting the political values of romance on stage, turning an image of harmony into an active relationship between performer and spectator that could serve as a model for political relationships more generally.

IV If The Tempest demonstrates the value of actor-centered theater as a mode for staging political spectacles, the play leaves unaddressed the issue of how the arrangement of the sensory field of the theater necessary for its employment could be applied in large-scale political spectacles presented to the general public. In processions, pageants, and the like, there seems no practical alternative to the impersonal power of marvelous spectacle. A mode of theater that builds empathetic personal connections may function well within elite circles, but can it mediate between a ruler and great numbers of his or her subjects? If it cannot, how can the dangers of marvelous spectacle be avoided? Henry VIII takes up these questions, exploring the uses of what might be termed customary political spectacles and their resistance to the sorts of personal ambitions that make the powers of marvelous spectacle so potentially dangerous when put to political use. Like The Tempest, Henry VIII is full of many different theatrical forms. Unlike The Tempest, however, it presents these forms in ways that emphasize the responses of their spectators rather than the intentions of their originators. The play’s spectacles are not arranged within the play by a single controlling intelligence but by a variety of originators pursuing a variety of purposes. In most instances, the originator is not actually a person, but custom or tradition. The order of Anne Boleyn’s coronation procession, for example, is arranged “by custom of the coronation” (IV.i.16), and this sort of customary pomp and precedence appears

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also in other processions and entries, such as the entry of the full court to Katherine’s hearing in III.iv and the baptismal procession in V.iv. No one person is the originator of these displays or the designer of them, although some but not all are set in motion by the intentions of a single individual, as, for example, Henry’s arrangement of Katherine’s trial. These spectacles show the working of state power, where the state is to be understood not narrowly as the government but broadly as the whole set of people who have interest, influence, or rights in the exercise of power in England. The play’s episodic plot and its lack of a group of central characters who can serve as a focus for the audience’s sympathies are consistent with the design of its political spectacles, not an unfortunate consequence of collaborative composition.31 Its ending in Elizabeth’s baptism and Cranmer’s prophecy of the glory of her reign provides an emphatically happy ending for the play and suggests that its loose sequence of events be interpreted in romantic terms as creating the conditions for this marvelous birth, but if they have prepared the way for this moment, they have done so independently of the human intentions that have driven the sequence of events forward. Henry VIII unfolds within a romance framework, but that framework is even looser and more deeply implicit than The Tempest’s. This loose dramatic construction gives to all of the play’s spectacles a quality similar to that of the opening spectacles of Shakespeare’s final plays, which are not given a clear place within a narrative or a dramatic structure. Where The Tempest brings back narrative and dramatic forms in its second scene, using Prospero’s story to establish the tension between the spectacular and the histrionic theatrical forms on which the play’s study of the politics of theater will turn, Henry VIII does not. The lack of dramatic form requires the spectators to respond to each spectacle as a semi-independent event, interpreting it based on the experience it creates and not on a plot that tells them where their sympathies should lie. This interpretive situation resembles the circumstances in which English subjects would see political spectacles in ordinary life and so makes the play’s explorations of political spectacle relevant to these circumstances. The play’s careful framing of its spectacles so that spectators must experience them mainly theatrically rather than dramatically appears clearly in the treatment of Anne Boleyn’s coronation procession. Prior to the scene, the play does little to lead the spectators to view the coronation as the satisfaction of any long-held hopes. The play has introduced Anne Boleyn only briefly, and the spectators have not been led to identify their satisfactions with her success. Anne has appeared sympathetic, but her rise to the queenship seems to give her no satisfaction and is balanced against the fall of the equally sympathetic Queen Katherine. Fletcher reminds the spectators of this sobering balance as the gentlemen watching the coronation procession pity Katherine even as they celebrate Anne. The set-up for this scene has discouraged the spectators from viewing it as the climax of either a romance or a tragedy. 32 The spectators are positioned to be not uninterested, but disinterested observers. Similarly, the post-processional framing works to keep the

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coronation spectacle from fitting into a well-formed dramatic plot that could lead spectators to develop a close relationship to the characters. Before the scene itself ends, Fletcher sees to it that the spectators are reminded of the fall of Wolsey and are introduced to the rivalry between Gardiner and Cranmer, which will be the focus of Shakespeare’s remaining scene. The play’s next scene returns spectators to the dying Katherine, and the scene after that juxtaposes the birth of Elizabeth with the developing struggle over the English Church. Anne never appears on stage again. Both the lead-in to the scene and its aftermath work to prevent the spectators from experiencing the coronation with dramatic satisfaction. While this framing of the coronation (and other spectacles) within the play’s larger plot in ways that minimize its dramatic impact has been taken as an indication that the play is subverting the pageantry that it is displaying, the play’s glowing account of the immediate impact of the coronation procession and its careful staging of the procession itself indicate that such a view is insufficient to the scene’s formal and political complexity.33 The descriptions of the coronation explain it as exercising power on its originators, its performers, and its spectators. Before the procession appears, the gentleman commentators explain how it is arranged: 2. GENT: May I be bold to ask what that contains, That paper in your hand? 1. GENT: Yes, ’tis the list Of those that claim their offices this day By custom of the coronation. The Duke of Suffolk is the first, and claims To be High Steward; next, the Duke of Norfolk, He to be Earl Marshal. You may read the rest. (IV.i.13–19)

This description presents the coronation as reaffirming the customary organization of the nobility around the monarch. The noble performers submit themselves to the form of the spectacle by claiming their places, and the king, who originates the spectacle in marrying Anne, submits to that form by accepting them. In a play of precipitous rises and falls in fortune, the customary titles and places in the coronation offer an alternative to political turbulence. The play emphasizes this ordering effect in the elaborate, thorough staging of the coronation procession, which includes the presentation of each major participant with his or her signs of rank and office prominently displayed, in this fashion: “DUKE OF SUFFOLK, in his robe of estate, his coronet on his head, bearing a long white wand, as High Steward. With him, the DUKE OF NORFOLK, with the rod of marshalship, a coronet on his head” (IV.i, s.d.). Immediately following the procession’s appearance in accordance with the gentlemen’s preview of it, they go on to describe its tremendous impact on its audience:

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Believe me, sir, she is the goodliest woman That ever lay by man—which when the people Had the full view of, such a noise arose As the shrouds make at sea in a stiff tempest, As loud and to as many tunes. Hats, cloaks, (Doublets, I think) flew up, and had their faces Been loose, this day they had been lost. Such joy I never saw before. Great-bellied women, That had not half a week to go, like rams In the old time of war, would shake the press And make ’em reel before ’em. No man living Could say, “This is my wife” there, all were woven So strangely in one piece. (69–81)

The organizing and harmonizing of the realm anticipated prior to the procession is described as having been carried further by the event itself, as the people’s sense of themselves as divided from one another is broken down as they are “woven / So strangely in one piece” by the physical intimacy in which they share in “general joy” (IV.i.7). The strange weaving accomplished by this spectacle and the enthusiastic participation of its audience fashions a national identity. The coronation procession, like the court masque, performs political work by making power visible, but the particulars of that work are quite different. The visual opulence of the nobility and the singing of choirs and trumpet flourishes of the procession in Henry VIII should fill up the senses of the spectators as fully as The Tempest’s masque-like spectacles, but it focuses the attention of the spectators differently. Here the identities of the performers are emphasized, and it is they (and most especially the Queen) who are celebrated, not the originator of the spectacle as in the court masque. Prospero’s wedding masque is performed by infinitely malleable spirits summoned to enact Prospero’s fancies. They are of no importance and of little interest to the spectators, who admire Prospero’s power. This treatment of performers, when moved out of Prospero’s magical economy into the ordinary economy of England, is criticized in the arrangement of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, where Wolsey has treated those he has forced to fund it without consideration, destroying them rather than affirming their roles in the kingdom. In the coronation, the persons who submit themselves to the spectacle’s order display and confirm their particular roles. Like Prospero’s masque, however, which is “melted into air” (IV.i.150), the coronation procession vanishes quickly from sight and leaves little trace in the play afterwards, as the dramatic framing of the procession emphasizes. Henry VIII’s spectators are confronted, then, with the gap between what the coronation accomplishes as a theatrical spectacle while it lasts, and the larger action of the play, which appears indifferent to its impact. It is this gap, which corresponds to the gap between the two assessments of the Field of the Cloth of Gold offered in

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the first scene, which must be interpreted for the political effects of the coronation to be understood. This sort of interpretation entails a return to narrative, to story. Interpretation of the political effects of The Tempest’s spectacles is possible because they are placed within the stories of the characters. Miranda’s romance story of sympathy with suffering and love at first sight, which supports and is supported by the empathetic powers of actor-centered theater, ultimately directs Prospero’s political uses of spectacle, and the value of his spectacles is determined by their suitability to the achievement of this desirable story, superceding their suitability to his story of revenge and restitution. Henry VIII, as we have seen, does not offer its spectators a dramatic framework readily useful for judging its political spectacles. I would suggest, however, that its traditional political spectacles imply a story that is in tension with the play’s loosely plotted drama. Because these spectacles—the coronation, the judicial processions—are built out of customary elements, they integrate their action into the ongoing story of England, where these customary spectacles have developed to explain and to arrange the disposition of the kingdom’s political power. In these performances, the roles are fixed, and each person who takes on a role takes on a set of limitations and responsibilities that accompany its powers. The story implied by these spectacles, then, tells of the constitution of power and authority. Both the generative and legal meanings of “constitution” are relevant here: customary spectacles are suited to a constitutional monarchy as masques are suited to an absolutist state. If this interpretation of the political function of customary political spectacles is correct, then subversion or affirmation of spectacles in Henry VIII may produce quite diverse political meanings, depending upon the political purpose of the spectacle and the purposes of those who subvert it. These political meanings develop out of tension between the narratives implied by the play’s various customary spectacles and the plot of Henry VIII, because the plot focuses on the rise and fall of individuals who use and abuse the system that constitutes authority as they seek for personal greatness or satisfaction. This tension appears most strongly in Katherine’s trial in Act II, scene iv. There, the court enters with a customary and elaborate procession, with the placement of each person indicating their role in the legal proceedings necessary to achieve justice: The KING takes place under the cloth of state; the two Cardinals sit under him as judges. The QUEEN takes place some distance from the King. The Bishops place themselves on each side the court, in the manner of a consistory; below them, the Scribes. The Lords sit next the Bishops. The rest of the Attendants stand in convenient order above the stage. (II.iv, s.d.)

The representation of properly constituted legal authority in the court’s formal entry—the spectacle’s implicit story—is contradicted by the drama of the scene, which shows Henry’s use of the power of the court to pursue his personal interests.

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Katherine’s elaborately performed response to the constitution of this court highlights the abuse of the court’s power: SCRIBE: Say, Katherine Queen of England, come into the court. CRIER: Katherine Queen of England, etc. The Queen makes no answer, rises out of her chair, goes about the court, comes to the King, and kneels at his feet; then speaks. Q. KATH: Sir, I desire you do me right and justice, And to bestow your pity on me; for I am a most poor woman, and a stranger, Born out of your dominions; having here No judge indifferent, nor no more assurance Of equal friendship and proceeding. Alas, sir! In what have I offended you? (II.iv.11–19)

Katherine’s refusal to acknowledge being called into court and her personal address to Henry as her husband show that, despite the court’s impersonal appearance, it serves Henry’s interests and therefore does not possess the indifferent equity to which its ceremonial entry lays claim. Katherine’s personal appeal to the king, focusing attention on her suffering and her long affection for Henry by telling the story of their lives together, subverts that ceremony by bringing the powers of story-telling and actor-centered theater into the scene, turning its majesty into a sign of cruel injustice. Katherine’s rejection of the place assigned to her in the customary spectacle of a trial contrasts with Anne’s acceptance of the place offered her in the customary spectacle of a coronation. That both women are presented as admirable in their choices suggests the complexity of the play’s treatment of political spectacle. Anne takes on her brief glory in service to the kingdom, and the play’s citizenaudience joys in that choice. Katherine refuses a role that would mean consent to an abuse of power, and she has won the admiration of spectators throughout the play’s stage history. Customary spectacle provides a potentially valuable alternative to the absolutist tendencies of the masque, but the play does not endorse the form unequivocally; each particular use must be assessed independently, and an actor-centered theater of empathetic response remains the source of the standards of value by which other forms are judged.

V As Shakespeare arranges them, then, theatrical forms of romance at this time certainly do not comprise the radical mode of representation Jonathan Dollimore was looking for, but neither does theatrical romance retreat from crisis into aesthetic and ideological conceptions of order. The plays’ romance stories indeed hold to the traditional set of social and political values that were the general

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standard of justice and harmony of their time, but the plays’ treatment of the political uses of theater suggests a variety of practical ways in which forms of theater could be used to undermine or to maintain that standard. In both The Tempest and Henry VIII, the theatrical form of the masque is shown to be dangerous or damaging to social harmony, although it is tempting to rulers as means of control or self-glorification. Both plays also suggest that the empathetic power of romance stories and of the actor-centered performance style of the public theater can serve as useful checks on absolutist theatricality. Henry VIII, with greater political realism than The Tempest, shows the limits of any individual resistance to expressions of absolute, sovereign power by theatrical means and introduces a third form of theater—customary political spectacle—as a mode of performance that can transcend the personal scale of the public theater’s power without the consequences of abuse and unrest that accompany the exercise of the masque’s deifying powers. Power constituted by custom is not exempt from appropriation by individuals pursuing their own interests outside of the limits of custom, as the excesses of Wolsey and of Henry show, but the harmony of the kingdom, and its best future, is articulated in Henry VIII when the rulers are working through customary spectacle in Anne’s coronation and Elizabeth’s baptism. The practical analysis of the politics of theater in these plays becomes accessible to criticism only with an attention to form that notes the framing of political spectacles within a play’s dramatic structure, distinguishes between different ways of arranging such spectacles, and assesses their impact on spectators, by which their political work is accomplished.

Notes 1

2

3

See especially Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 117–8, and The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), pp. 3–31, esp. 14–15 and 30–31. Frye wryly recognizes the resistance to his project on the part of Marxist critics, on p. 25 of Secular Scripture. Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 5. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 148. For studies of Shakespearean romance that register both its resistance to formal harmony and its arrival at that promised end, see Heather Dubrow’s essay in this volume, as well as Simon Palfrey, Late Shakespeare A New World of Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). The idea that “a morally ordered universe” is central to Medieval romance and its Renaissance descendants has recently been vigorously asserted by Michael Hays in Shakespearean Tragedy as Chivalric Romance (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2003), p. 19 and passim. In this brief essay I do not propose to enter or resolve the debates over the boundaries of the romance genre in early

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modern English literature and over the particular generic terminology applicable to Shakespeare’s last plays. For my purposes, I infer that, since what Madeleine Doran has termed “romantic story” clearly underlies these plays, and since Shakespeare has clearly not shaped his materials in the last plays to conform precisely to classical forms, the plays engage with the genre of romance, even if they do not perfectly conform to its conventions. See Madeleine Doran, Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1954), pp. 186–90. This scholarship has typically focused on the display of the royal body, the role of spectacle in the life of the court, and the public display of punishment. See, for example, Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983); Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare’s Genres (New York: Methuen, 1986); Stephen Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and its Subversion, Henry IV and Henry V,” in Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (eds), Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 18–47; and Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). Two pervasive influences on all this criticism are the work of Michel Foucault and Stephen Orgel’s work on the court masque in The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). For the history of prose romance in the period, see Paul Salzman, English Prose Fiction, 1558–1700: A Critical History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985). David Margolies, The Novel and Society in Elizabethan England (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1985), offers a Marxist account of the role of prose romance in the formation of class consciousness among those below the rank of the gentry. Frances Yates, “Elizabethan Chivalry: The Romance of the Accession Day Tilts,” in Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1975), pp. 88–111; Roy Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (London: Routledge, 1977); Arthur B. Ferguson, The Chivalric Tradition in Renaissance England (Washington: Folger Books, 1986); Jean Wilson, Entertainments for Elizabeth I (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 1980); Richard McCoy, The Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); and Martin Butler, “Early Stuart Court Culture: Compliment or Criticism?” The Historical Journal, 32 (1989): 425–35. The early work of Yates and Strong argues that royal control of the aristocracy by means of romance pageantry was effective and thorough; the more recent scholars, especially McCoy and Butler, qualify this view by showing how nobles could employ romance pageantry and chivalric themes for their own ends against monarchical control. See also note 25 below. Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 3. Orgel, The Illusion of Power, pp. 37–40. The subversion/containment analysis is most famously developed in Greenblatt’s “Invisible Bullets” essay. See Jean E. Howard, Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 1–15 for a nuanced argument that “stage plays ... were identical neither in their constitutive elements nor their social effects to executions or to royal entries” (4) that nevertheless remains largely within the subversion/containment

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paradigm. Louis Montrose makes a similar argument in The Purpose of Playing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 39–40. Stephen Cohen, “Between Form and Culture: New Historicism and the Promise of a Historical Formalism,” in Mark David Rasmussen (ed.), Renaissance Literature and its Formal Engagements (New York: Palgrave, 2002), p. 30. David Bevington and Peter Holbrook, Introduction to The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 9. They represent the collection as extending, rather than repudiating, the work of Orgel and Goldberg. McCoy has shown that forms of harmony and integration could serve the interests of parties other than the monarch, while recent feminist scholarship on romance has shown how the genre worked to break down social hierarchies that privileged an elite male readership and military versions of heroism. See Helen Hackett, Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Lori Humphrey Newcomb, Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); and Mary Beth Rose, Gender and Heroism in Early Modern English Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). For the origins of this view of the theater’s semiotization of all it contains in the work of the Prague structuralists, see Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Methuen, 1980), pp. 6–10. For the re-theorizing of this point within a cultural studies approach to Renaissance drama, see Barbara Hodgdon, The End Crowns All: Closure and Contradiction in Shakespeare’s History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 16–18; and W.B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 151–91. Recent scholarship on stage properties in London’s professional theaters has challenged the notion that the early modern English stage was a fundamentally empty space. See Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda, “Introduction: Towards a Materialist Account of Stage Properties,” in Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 2–17. The professional theater remained, nevertheless, fundamentally actor-centered, whereas in the court masque, the spectacle often took precedence over the performers. On the dynamic relations between the performed action of the play in a fictive world and the action of performance, in which all present in the theater participate, see Thomas Whitaker, Fields of Play in Modern Drama (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 7–34. The early modern professional theater could recognize and play self-consciously with the distinction between these two different worlds in performance by means of the locus/platea distinction famously analyzed by Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function, ed. Robert Schwartz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp. 73–85, 215–46. The inclusion of spectacles based on court theater practices quite frequently provoked claims that the scenes were later, possibly non-Shakespearean interpolations. On claims that the wedding masque in The Tempest is a later addition, see David Lindley (ed.), The Tempest (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 220–22, and Frank Kermode (ed.), The Tempest (London: Methuen, 1954), pp. xxi–xxiv. On claims that the saltiers’ dance in The Winter’s Tale is an interpolation drawn from a masque, see Stephen Orgel (ed.), The Winter’s Tale (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 79–80, and J.H.P. Pafford (ed.), The Winter’s Tale (London: Methuen, 1963), p. xxii. On the claim

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that the morris dance in The Two Noble Kinsmen is borrowed (authorially) from a masque see Eugene Waith (ed.), The Two Noble Kinsmen, by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 143, 215–16. No claims of this sort have been advanced about Henry VIII, but critics have frequently responded to its extensive use of pageantry by dismissing the seriousness of the whole play. For a response to that dismissal, see Jay Halio (ed.), King Henry VIII, or All is True, by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 24–6. In each of these cases, whether the particular spectacle imitates court spectacle or is borrowed from it, its inclusion in the play does not constitute a mere diversion but contributes to the plays’ investigation of the politics of spectacle. William Shakespeare, Cymbeline, in The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed., ed. G. Blakemore Evans and J.J.M. Tobin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), I.i.16–22. Further quotations from Shakespeare’s plays will be from this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the body of the text. By “dramatic romance tradition,” I refer to the continuing efforts of early modern English playwrights to make dramas out of narrative romance sources without reference to classical dramatic structures. On this tradition, see Patricia Russell, “Romantic Narrative Plays: 1570–1590,” in John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (eds), Elizabethan Theatre (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1966), pp. 107–30; Leo Salingar, Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1974); Brian Gibbons, “Romance and the Heroic Play,” in A.R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway (eds), The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 207–36; and Barbara Mowat, “‘What’s in a Name?’ Tragicomedy, Romance, or Late Comedy,” in Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (eds), A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, vol. 4 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 129–49. Andrew Gurr, “The Tempest’s Tempest at Blackfriars,” Shakespeare Survey, 41 (1989): 91–102, argues that The Tempest’s staging of the storm marks a significant departure not just from Shakespeare’s past practice but from the staging traditions of the public theater as a whole. While one might make the case that the pathos of the storm in The Tempest is shown in action and therefore does not need to be described, the theatrical record stresses spectacle over sympathy. From the later seventeenth century to the present, commentaries on performances of The Tempest have dwelt at length on the impact of the scene as a tour de force of technical stagecraft. Christine Dymkowski’s performance edition of the The Tempest (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) shows that the usual eighteenth- and nineteenth-century practices “usually relegated 1.1 to the second scene of the play and/or cut its dialogue” (p. 95), thus removing any occasion for the scene to function as anything besides an engrossing stage spectacle. See Orgel, Illusion of Power, pp. 88–9. On the success of Elizabethan court pageantry, see Strong and Wilson. Although more recent scholarship has shown that the pageantry of, for example, the Accession Day tilts was used by members of the aristocracy to advance their own interests, the displays organized around Elizabeth generally reinforced her subjects’ loyalty. The uncommon occasions on which overt struggle appeared in this pageantry have been subjected to careful scrutiny, and it is not clear that anyone was able to undermine Elizabeth’s

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authority effectively by such means. See Paul E.J. Hammer, “Upstaging the Queen: The Earl of Essex, Francis Bacon, and the Accession Day Celebrations of 1595,” in Bevington and Holbrook (eds), pp. 41–66. I omit The Two Noble Kinsmen from the fuller study of the contextualization of forms of political entertainment partly for considerations of space, partly because the nature of its co-authorship (the Shakespeare sections and the Fletcher sections are less consistent than in Henry VIII) makes it less rich in its treatment of political entertainments. The opening of the play, and other points in it (including the morris dance and the judicial combat) are clearly concerned with the political function of entertainments, but the play as a whole focuses more on the troubled aftermath of such events than on the particular qualities of the events themselves. The royal entertainment is a broad form, encompassing the varied formal treatments of social occasions arranged for the monarchs by persons or groups playing host to them. Famous examples of this form include the entertainments provided for Elizabeth by the Earl of Leicester at Kenilworth and by Sir Henry Lee at Woodstock, in which Elizabeth’s movements about the estate and her sitting down to meals were surrounded by a spectacle endowing her visit with narrative purpose and providing a continuous stream of elegantly complimentary diversion. James tended to receive more restrained entertainment, but his visits were still elaborately arranged with performances and presentations aimed at complimenting and diverting him. See, for example, Nancy E. Wright’s description of James’ “attendance at the midsummer feast of the Merchant Tailors’ company in 1607” (200) in her “Civic and Courtly Ceremonies in Jacobean London,” in Bevington and Holbrook (eds), pp. 200–203. That the presentation of the banquet in The Tempest is recognized by the Neapolitan spectators as following the form of an entertainment is indicated by Sebastian’s comment on the spectacle: “a living drollery” (III.iii.21). The generally accepted New Historicist view is that Prospero’s chief goals are to achieve colonial dominance of his island plantation and to recover his dukedom, and that in fulfilling these goals, his plan succeeds on its own terms. For examples of this argument, see Stephen Orgel (ed.), The Tempest (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 51; Paul Brown, “‘This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine’: The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism,” in Dollimore and Sinfield (eds), pp. 63–8; and Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Methuen, 1986), p. 120. This view has recently been challenged from two quite different directions. Richard Strier, “Normal and Magical Politics in The Tempest,” in Derek Hurst and Richard Strier (eds), Writing and Political Engagement in SeventeenthCentury England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 25–30, argues that Prospero wants not only ordinary political success but to control and transform his enemies morally, and that in this respect his plan fails. Here, the play shows the limits of Prospero’s power. John D. Cox, “Recovering Something Christian About The Tempest,” in Christianity and Literature, 50/1 (Autumn, 2000): 37–8, argues to the contrary that Prospero is “possessed with virtual omnipotence” but nevertheless forgives his enemies, even though that entails political risk. On the insufficiency of pure coercion as a strategy for governance, see Constance Jordan, Shakespeare’s Monarchies: Ruler and Subject in the Romances (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 175. My treatment of problems of governance in The Tempest is indebted to Jordan’s work; it builds on her analysis by looking specifically at

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the uses of theatrical forms as political tools to address problems of governance in the play. On The Tempest’s relationship to contemporary discourses about absolutism, see Jordan, pp. 153–60. On “playing God” as a standard colonialist practice for seizing and exercising arbitrary power, see Jordan, pp. 190, 194. This appearance of divinity at a moment of first contact is also represented in Miranda’s and Ferdinand’s initial perceptions of each other at I.ii.418–23. Notably, Prospero is quick to correct Miranda’s mistake. The thematic significance of Miranda and her relationships to her father and to Ferdinand has seldom been considered seriously in generic terms in recent criticism, but it is this relationship that most strongly links The Tempest to Shakespeare’s earlier romances. For a fuller account of Miranda’s generic affiliations, See G.K. Hunter, English Drama 1586–1642: The Age of Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 502–6. Readers and directors have often mistaken Prospero’s presence in the scene for Prospero’s control of the scene. Except, perhaps, for Prospero’s concealment (which could be arranged by a non-magical stage device), III.i is one of only two scenes in the play in which neither Prospero nor his agents use magic to manipulate others’ perceptions. It is worth pointing out that my interpretation of the form of the scene and its function within the play runs against most recent, well-known stagings of The Tempest. In recent stagings, Miranda has generally been acted to show not the independent strength and judgment that her resolve and language suggest but Prospero’s (mis)treatment of her. See Dymkowski’s survey of reviews of post-1970 productions (pp. 120–22) for examples. Also, stagings of III.i tend to revolve around inventive designs for Ferdinand’s restraint and his log-hauling, taking the scene as an opportunity to reveal something about Prospero’s tumultuous psyche through his elaborate punishment of Ferdinand. Ferdinand speaks as if he considers his punishment inconsequential, but productions tend to make it the most consequential feature of the scene. Dymkowski (pp. 233–4) provides numerous examples. The evidence that Henry VIII is a work of collaboration between William Shakespeare and John Fletcher is clear and convincing. For the most recent major addition to the case for coauthorship, see Jonathan Hope, The Authorship of Shakespeare’s Plays: A Sociolinguistic Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 67–83. On the history of the authorship question, see Halio, pp. 18–24; and Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 333–402. Both Halio (pp. 22–3) and Vickers (pp. 486–9) argue that Shakespeare and Fletcher planned the play carefully together. Although the coronation scene, IV.i, is generally agreed to be Fletcher’s work, as Shakespeare fashions the appealing characters of both Anne and Katherine in II.iii and II.iv, the framing of the coronation as a deeply ambivalent moment is clearly as much Shakespeare’s design as Fletcher’s. Cyrus Hoy, “The Shares of Fletcher and his Collaborators in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon,” Studies in Bibliography 15 (1962): 71–90, has argued that this scene, along with several others, was originally composed by Shakespeare and later retouched by Fletcher. On the debate over Hoy’s claims, see Vickers, pp. 378–87. This scene certainly shows Fletcher writing at his most Shakespearean. On Fletcher’s alteration of his style in imitation of his collaborators, see Marco Mincoff, “Henry VIII and Fletcher,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 12 (1961): 239–60.

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33 Hugh M. Richmond (ed.), King Henry VIII (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994) argues (following Sir Henry Wotton’s contemporary remarks) that the play’s pageantry “seems covertly subversive of the very effects which it superficially exploits but ultimately discredits” (p. 26).

PART 2 Re-Forming History

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Chapter 5

Crossing from Scaffold to Stage: Execution Processions and Generic Conventions in The Comedy of Errors and Measure for Measure Marissa Greenberg

I Over a decade and a half ago, at the height of the discipline’s most recent wave of methodological self-investigation, Anthony Dawson asked scholars of early modern English drama: “What exactly is theatrical activity and what does it do? How is enactment, theatricality, on a stage different from monarchical theatre?”1 As Dawson and numerous scholars before and since have argued, New Historicist discourse often sidesteps questions about theater’s distinctiveness because, as Paul Yachnin writes, it tends “[to regard] drama as a mirror of the culture, as if it had no particular institutional content or agenda of its own.”2 This tendency to assume a one-to-one correlation between theatrical representations and their real-world counterparts shapes much recent criticism on Shakespeare’s dramatizations of punitive practice: the spectacular violence exerted upon traitors on England’s scaffolds makes transparent the meaning of the bloodied head and stage at the end of Macbeth; Aaron’s proclamations of his villainies in Titus Andronicus are read as subversive dying speeches that expose the limits of punitive authority, while Saturninus’ summary execution of the Clown occludes and thus allows for the continuation of such violence; similarly, Prospero’s theatrical manipulations of offenders reveal—and thereby alternatively undermine or confirm—the techniques by which state and church exert control over their subjects.3 These studies have made important strides in our understanding of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English punitive practices and their simulation on the commercial stage. Indeed, I began the current project as an investigation of the execution procession as a particular procedure that although represented in several of Shakespeare’s plays, has been overlooked by scholars. Ultimately I became less interested in the analogies between dramatic and disciplinary performances than in their differing formal commitments. In this essay, I formulate a response to the question of the

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theater’s distinctiveness by focusing on the interaction of generic and punitive forms—specifically, on what happens when Shakespeare’s comedies represent execution processions. In so doing, I retrieve the conventions and procedures that distinguish comedy and the execution procession from one another, as well as from other genres and punishments. At the same time, I recuperate some of the defining characteristics shared by a host of formal practices, which allow us to productively juxtapose dramatic and disciplinary performances. These seemingly incongruous acts of recovery register an early modern understanding of form more expansive, inclusive, and socially efficacious than our own. It is this understanding that Shakespeare’s comedies exploit, scrutinize, and sometimes undermine through the enactment of execution processions. A notoriously capacious and flexible term, form may designate a range of official and quotidian practices, including ecclesiastical rites, state ceremonies, societal decorum, as well as dramatic enactment.4 Shakespeare’s plays bear witness to this semantic excess, invoking (among other senses) the “noble rite [and] formal ostentation” of burial, “[t]he glass of fashion and the mold of form,” “the plain form of marriage,” and the “form[s] of justice” and “of law.”5 While Shakespeare does not use form to refer to kinds of plays—what would be dubbed genre in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries—his contemporary George Puttenham indicates that the term was used thusly at the time: in his Arte of English Poesie (1589), he describes the “foure sundry formes of Poesie Dramatick … to wit, the Satyre, old Comedie, new Comedie, and Tragedie.”6 With no pretense of offering a comprehensive definition, I would like to suggest that these literary and non-literary uses of form have in common a triumvirate of interrelated characteristics that suggest the power of the concept in the early modern period as well as its value for current historical criticism: familiarity, expectation, and efficacy.7 We may briefly survey this common ground by focusing on the two formal categories at the heart of this essay: the generic and the punitive, as exemplified by comedy and the execution procession. To begin with, to function and be recognized as such, forms create and rely upon familiarity. Through repeated encounters one becomes familiar with a form’s principles, patterns, and conventions, and these encounters, whether first- or second-hand, experiential or textual, create shared memories and understandings that bind together communities.8 Early modern London, despite its population explosion and urban congestion and sprawl, was no exception—especially in terms of punitive forms. Public hearings and lay law books produced a population well versed in the codes and customs of English jurisprudence. But London residents did need not to attend court or be literate in order to become familiar with the itineraries and procedures of the execution procession. Offenders were frequently carted through the city’s commercial and civic hubs, literally bringing processional practices to the people. Indeed, knowledge of the route to the Triple Tree gallows became so pervasive that Sir John Oldcastle (1600) describes it as proverbial: “From Newgate up Holborn, Saint Giles in the Field, and to Tyburn: it’s an old

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saw.”9 Like those who attended executions, London’s community of theatergoers retained the memorial residue of their experience. The induction to A Warning for Fair Women (1599) plays to the audience’s recognition of generic convention when it refers to comedy’s “puling … lover,” history’s martial displays, and tragedy’s portrayal of “some damnd tyrant, [who] to obtaine a crowne, / Stabs, hangs, impoysons, smothers, [and] cutteth throats.”10 Furthermore, just as the proliferation of crime pamphlets familiarized readers outside of London with its punitive practices, the publication of play-scripts—their generic commitments prominently (if not always consistently) displayed on the title-page—disseminated knowledge of the “sundry formes” of drama. Familiarity, of course, creates expectation: principles, patterns, and conventions may become so well known that a form’s contents, trajectory, and outcome can be anticipated. But whereas familiarity gestures backward to collective memories, expectation points forward to shared notions of formal possibilities, prospects, and desires. And if familiarity accrues passively, expectation in contrast requires active participation, an outlay of intellectual and emotional capital in a wager between repetition and variation, tradition and novelty. The routine omission from juridical records in early modern London of the exact routes by which offenders were to be transported indicates the firm establishment of expectations for the execution procession. On 15 March 1596, for instance, John Taylor was condemned for coining and sentenced to be “drag[ged] bound through the middle of the City of London directly to Tyburn.”11 This sentence assumes that magistrates, executioners, and would-be onlookers did not need reminders of the route to the scaffold or the traditional rites performed along this path. Likewise, audiences could anticipate the broad outlines of a play’s action from its stated generic affiliation. In Thomas Heywood’s formulation, “Comedies begin in trouble, and end in peace; Tragedies begin in calmes, and end in tempest.”12 Not unlike modern audiences, who self-consciously decide between “feel-good movies” and “tear-jerkers,” early modern playgoers paid their pennies in anticipation of a particular dramatic arc and denouement. As we shall see, formal expectations could be frustrated as well as fulfilled, and neither option was without consequences for form’s efficacy. Essential to any historical comprehension of early modern forms is the understanding that forms did things, at least in part through their established familiarity and predictable expectations. Forms had effects not only on those who performed them or those upon whom they were performed, but upon those who witnessed them as well. For example, while the early modern state used judicial penalties to punish offenders for their violations of law and order, another and possibly more essential function was to work on the witnesses of these often violent spectacles. As Arthur Golding describes in his 1577 account of the executions of George Sanders’ murderers, punishment “shoulde by the terrour of the outwarde sight of the example, driue vs to the inwarde consideration of our selues,” for “excepte their [i.e., offenders’] example leade vs to repentance, we shall all of vs come to as sore punishment in

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this worlde, or else to sorer in the worlde to come.”13 Through public demonstrations of the long arm of law—of its vicious and inevitable blow—the state attempted to deter illicit and disorderly behavior. The execution procession promulgated this effect by disseminating punitive forms to a wider population than only those gathered around the scaffold. Similarly, literary forms also “make things happen,” as Douglas Bruster demonstrates earlier in this volume, and particular genres “work” on audiences in specific ways. 14 Indeed, according to drama’s theorists and advocates, comedy shared with punishment a prophylactic effect. In An Apology for Poetry (c. 1595), Sir Philip Sidney claims “that the comedy is an imitation of the common errors of our life, which he [one of the “play-makers and stage-keepers”] representeth in the most ridiculous and scornful sort that may be, so as it is impossible that any beholder can be content to be such a one.”15 Similarly, Thomas Heywood describes comedy’s capacity to “to shew others their slouenly and vnhansome behauiour, that they may reforme that simplicity in themselves.”16 At first blush, this (at least theoretical) convergence of the effects of punitive and generic forms returns us to the question with which we began, and brings us dangerously close to the conflation of theater and culture decried by Yachnin and Dawson. Examined more closely, however, the seeming functional coincidence of execution and comedy reveals the significant differences within the broad commonalities of form—what Stephen Cohen describes in the introduction to this Forms collectively rely on familiarity, volume as “formal specificity.”17 expectation, and effect, but each individual form—as a result of its specific institutional affiliation, venue and medium of performance, and sphere of efficacy—produces particular associations, expectations, and effects that distinguish it from other forms. Accordingly, despite the superficial coincidence of claims to social prophylaxis, what was familiar and expected about the execution procession, and how it worked on audiences, was very different from, and in many ways contradictory to, what was familiar, expected, and efficacious about comedy. On the one hand, execution processions achieved their putative deterrent effects by repeatedly showing audiences the spectacles of humiliation and pain that attended the procession, and teaching them to anticipate its fatal conclusion on the gallows or the block. On the other hand, after repeatedly attending the playhouse, these same London audiences became familiar with the reprieves, delays, and pardons by which comedy conventionally evaded disciplinary action, presaging its dramatic denouement in a space where reconciliation, forgiveness, and often marriage can take place. In this sense, despite the socially responsible apologetics of its defenders, comedy might have a very different effect than Sidney and Heywood claim. Circumnavigating or surpassing deterrence and reprehension, comedy elicits the pleasures of hard-won unions and long-sought reunions, and the relief of rehabilitation and absolution. Evidence that at least some early modern audiences and authors recognized punishment’s incompatibility with comedy may be found in the Epistle to Ben Jonson’s Volpone (1605–1606). Answering critics who

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“censure” his play for violating “the strict rigour of comic law” because it ends not in forgiveness and reconciliation but in punishment, the neo-classicist Jonson turns to “the ancients themselves, the goings-out of whose comedies are not always joyful, but oft-times the bawds, the servants, the rivals, yea, and the masters are mulcted.”18 Despite Jonson’s claim that the function of comedy was “to imitate justice ... as well as ... stir up gentle affections,”19 his self-justification would seem to suggest that the “comic law” produced associations and expectations with a force akin to, and an effect opposed to, judicial laws and sentences. What happens, then, when familiar forms, each with its own expectations and effects, intersect—when, for example, the procedures of the execution procession are simulated as part of a comedy? Given the above, the representation of extratheatrical forms onstage is clearly more complex than a simple mirroring, or the transparent reproduction of ideological function. In this essay, I use the concept of crossing to identify and examine what is maintained, lost, and changed when comedy and the execution procession intersect.20 The term crossing proves particularly appropriate because it describes the process by which forms encounter one another onstage as well as the possible effects of that process. 21 Modern readers are perhaps most familiar with the term’s spatial meaning. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well, crossing denoted movement: “[t]he action of passing across; ... traversing.” When a play represents an execution procession, it removes offenders and officials, shackles and weapons, confessions and condemnations, from London’s streets, fields, and marketplaces, and situates them within the theater. As a result of physically crossing punitive forms from one venue of performance to another, a play may produce a crossing in a variety of other senses: from perhaps the ideal outcome of interchange or reciprocity—a cross-fertilization in which one form’s expectations and effects coincide with or reinforce the other’s—to the less fortuitous sense of crossing as “thwarting, opposing, or contravening.” Perhaps not surprisingly, it is the latter that results from the crossing of punitive and generic forms in the plays discussed in this essay. Written as many as ten years apart, Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors and Measure for Measure both begin with condemned characters crossing over the stage toward unseen yet looming scaffolds, and both conclude with the thwarting of juridical death.22 From the opening scene of The Comedy of Errors the conventions and expectations of comedy have an obvious advantage over those of the execution procession. In the play’s final moments, genre decidedly preempts punishment, but whatever sense of loss or frustration this might occasion is overwhelmed by a surplus of comic pleasures. As generic effects captivate playgoers’ imaginations, any unsettling consequences of the disruption of punishment are expunged—crossed out, so to speak. By contrast, Measure for Measure introduces comic convention and disciplinary procedure in parallel and continues to alternate between them, evoking the associations and expectations of first one and then the other. In the end, the play fulfills conventional and procedural necessity, but the concluding discharge of expectation undermines the

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efficacy of both forms. Genre and punishment exhaust one another, like “a crosse currant of waters,” as John Florio in his late-sixteenth-century dictionary defined the Italian word for crossing.23 The play’s overall structure thus reveals a strategic consequence of Shakespeare’s formal crossing. Raising the stakes of genre and punishment in parallel and showing them cross and thwart one another, Measure for Measure heightens playgoers’ awareness of form—and not solely those of comedy and the execution procession. Finally, the play undermines this collective sense of form by demonstrating that inside the theater, no less than outside it, the satisfaction of what is familiar and anticipated may not produce the intended effects. When Shakespeare’s comedies enact execution processions, then, they do not simply scrutinize the distinctions between drama and punishment; they also raise questions about formal efficacy that bear on these and other literary and nonliterary practices.

II The Comedy of Errors opens with an execution procession. Egeon enters with the Duke, the “[j]ailer, and other attendants,” and in anticipation and acceptance of his death sentence, says, “Proceed, Solinus, to procure my fall, / And by the doom of death end woes and all” (I.i.0 s.d., 1–2). The Duke does so, announcing that because Egeon is a “[m]erchant of Syracusa” but possessed of less than “a hundred marks,” he is “by law … condemned to die” (3, 24–5). Then the Duke asks Egeon to “say in brief … for what cause” he came to Ephesus, to which Egeon replies that he is looking for his son and servant, who went in search of their twin brothers, lost at sea with Egeon’s wife eighteen years earlier (28–30).24 This tragic tale inspires the Duke to “favour” Egeon, to postpone his procession, and to “limit [him] this day” to “[b]eg … or borrow to make up the sum, / And live” (149–54). This dramatic sequence represents many of the customary procedures of late sixteenth-century English execution processions. Like his offstage counterparts, Egeon is led through the streets by a jailer; the Duke’s explanation of Egeon’s offense corresponds to the public announcement of offenders’ crimes at different points along the processional route; and just as Londoners would stop to see the condemned and listen to these pronouncements, numerous “other attendants” enter with the procession. It is to these unnamed Ephesians, as well as to the Duke, that Egeon addresses the story of how he came to Ephesus, a narrative that recalls the confessions that the condemned often delivered along the processional route. Egeon acknowledges but then qualifies his guilt, asserting that his “end / Was wrought by nature, not by vile offence” (I.i.33–4). He goes to the scaffold, in other words, claiming to be innocent of any crime against Ephesus, and guilty only of “nature,” which most editors gloss as meaning paternal love. This qualification would not have proven alien to late sixteenth-century theatergoers, who were familiar with the ways in which offenders attempted to sway punitive procedures.25

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Similarly, the deferral that Egeon’s narrative inspires recalls the rare but not unheard of postponements of processions and executions.26 At the same time that this opening sequence crosses the execution procession onto the stage, it reminds playgoers that they have paid their pennies to see The Comedy of Errors. Speaking immediately after Egeon’s opening lines in which the condemned alludes to his impending death, the Duke of Ephesus explains that the law to which Egeon’s life is forfeit originated with the “rancorous outrage” and “rigorous statute” of the Duke of Syracuse (I.i.6, 9). The Duke’s explanation calls attention to the play’s adherence to a commonplace of Shakespeare’s comedies: the initiation of dramatic action in an “absurd, cruel, or irrational law,” as Northrop Frye describes it.27 In The Comedy of Errors the law to which Egeon’s life is forfeit also provides the impetus and opportunity for the central action. If this law were not in place, Antipholus of Syracuse would advertise his identity in his effort to find his brother.28 Subsequent action suggests this effort would prove successful, leading to a swift reunion of the brothers and the premature end of the play. Even as it conventionally opens with legal severity, Shakespearean comedy typically concludes with its elusion or violation. Whereas in tragedy law is inevitable, Susan Snyder explains, in comedy “‘evitability’ is assumed”; rather than an absolute and unyielding law, “opportunistic shifts and realistic accommodations” lead to comic resolution.29 In The Comedy of Errors this “evitability” appears, first, within the harsh law itself, which sanctions the payment of “a thousand marks … To quit the penalty” (21–2); and second, in the Duke’s “favour,” which provides an opportunity for Egeon to “make up the sum.” As Patricia Parker’s extensive work on The Comedy of Errors has shown, the Duke’s “favour” serves to “procrastinate” both Egeon’s and the play’s “end” (158).30 But it does not, as we will see, allow for the cancellation of his execution procession. In its opening scene, The Comedy of Errors stages a general rule for Shakespeare’s not-uncommon crossings of punishment and comedy. By presenting juridical sentences in conjunction with generic cues, Shakespeare allows audiences to delight in the obstruction or annulment of punishment that the realization of comedy necessitates. The announcement of nuptials in the opening lines of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for instance, invites the audience to anticipate the “extenuat[ion]” of “the ancient privilege of Athens” that allows Egeus to marry his daughter to a suitor of his choosing, or else to condemn her “to her death, according to our law / Immediately provided in that case” (I.i.120, 41– 5). Likewise, in As You Like It the spectacle of a wrestling match that ends with the winner conquered by beauty permits the audience to enjoy the threats of banishment and death that propel the young lovers into the forest, where comic devices delay and facilitate the expected generic conclusion. Unlike these later comedies, which stage the events that occur during the period of procrastination, in The Comedy of Errors Egeon does not appear onstage between acts 1 and 5. Though unseen, he is not forgotten, for numerous episodes of violence and arrest and repeated references to the passage of time remind the audience of the

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approaching juridical and generic denouement. Because playgoers anticipate a comic resolution, they may be entertained by the threat to Egeon’s life, confident that somehow he will escape punishment. They may enjoy being kept at the edge of their seats, as it were, eager to see how Egeon’s release will be pulled off. As the pleasure of comic expectations supplants the satisfaction of punitive associations, the play endorses drama over, and at the expense of, law. When Egeon enters the final scene in a second execution procession, the play raises the stakes of, and hence the payoff from, its formal crossing. Once again the play evokes actual punitive procedure. The headsman probably carries an axe; officers bear “halberds” (V.i.187); and Egeon, described as “bound” and in “bonds,” wears chains or other penal restraints (294, 340).31 Furthermore, the stage direction calling for Egeon to enter “bareheaded” suggests the custom of shaving the condemned’s head (130 s.d.). In Measure for Measure, as we will see, Shakespeare describes this practice as well known: when the Duke of Vienna wishes to substitute another man’s head for Claudio’s, he allays the Provost’s fears of discovery, saying, “O death’s a great disguiser, and you may add to it. Shave the head and tie the beard, and say it was the desire of the penitent to be so bared before his death; you know the course is common” (IV.ii.161–4; emphasis added).32 The Comedy of Errors refers to contemporary execution processions, as well, in the detailed itinerary that precedes Egeon’s entrance. The audience learns that Egeon is to be “[b]eheaded publicly” at “[t]he place of death and sorry execution, / Behind the ditches of the abbey here” (V.i.128, 122–3). In late sixteenth-century London, the ruins of three abbeys stood near both scaffolds and ditches: the Priory in Holywell, St. Mary’s Priory, and the Abbey of Minoresses.33 Tell-tale generic cues emerge alongside these invocations of actual punitive properties, customs, and spaces. Precisely because Egeon enters the concluding scene a doomed man, the repeated postponements of his passage across the stage to the scaffold signal and draw out the shift from deferral to pardon. First the Duke orders the procession to pause so that the option of ransom may be “once again proclaim[ed]” (V.i.131). Before an officer has a chance to fulfill the Duke’s command, the action is interrupted first by one, then another, and then another character, and each interruption leads the Duke to postpone further Egeon’s procession. A sort of reprieve is announced when the Duke decides to await the Abbess, whom he orders to be “call[ed] hither” in order to set straight the conflicting appeals and testimonials he has heard (281). As they await the Abbess’ entrance, Egeon approaches Antipholus and Dromio of Ephesus, whom he erroneously believes to be the son and servant who left his home only five years before. Egeon’s recognition of his son and servant—like the loophole of ransom, procrastination of execution, and repeated interruptions of procedure—promises but ultimately falls short of accomplishing his release. After so many missed opportunities, the play seems to exhaust every stratagem by which to satisfy its generic obligations. Yet this elimination of options may be exactly the point. By running through one comic device after another, Shakespeare creates a situation in

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which it becomes virtually impossible to fulfill both procedure and convention. He orchestrates a face-off between punitive and comic necessity such that the play presumably must breach one form in order to accomplish the other. More than simply justifying the play’s disruption of the execution procession, the exhaustion of mutually satisfying options creates an opening for the stage to privilege its own formal practices over those it represents. The celebration of theatrical prerogative is particularly evident in the flouting of law not once but twice in the play’s concluding moments. First the Abbess contravenes punitive procedure by invoking one of drama’s most radical conventions: deus ex machina. Throughout The Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare maintains the unities of time and place touted by early modern neoclassicists. But with the introduction of the Abbess in the final scene, he violates ancient strictures, blatantly rejecting Aristotle’s claim that “the unraveling of the plot … must arise out of the plot itself, it must not be brought about by the deus ex machina,” as well as Horace’s prohibition to “not have a god—a deus ex machina—intervene unless there is a knot worthy of having such a deliverer to untie it!”34 Of course, the Abbess is not a goddess; yet she is an agent of the divine, and it is in this role that she resolves the play’s confusions and effects Egeon’s release. Whereas elsewhere in the play narratives serve to postpone Egeon’s punishment, the Abbess’ tale of twins confused and family members re-united “loose[ns] his bounds” and sets Egeon at “liberty” (V.i.340– 41). Like the repeated delays of Egeon’s procession, the Abbess’ miraculous appearance out of the abbey, so to speak, flaunts genre’s power over procedure. Theatrical imperatives gain such momentum in the play’s concluding scene that the comic machine wholly sweeps away the raison d’être of the execution processsions represented in the play. After the Abbess illuminates identities and relationships, Antipholus of Ephesus offers the “ducats” needed to “pawn” his “father here” (V.i.391). But the Duke refuses, in a somewhat gratuitous affirmation of the Abbess’ effect: “It shall not need. Thy father hath his life” (392). By demanding neither Egeon’s head nor his ransom, the Duke undermines his assertion in the opening scene that to pardon Egeon would be “against our laws— / Against my crown, my oath, my dignity, / Which princes, would they, may not disannul” (I.i.142–4). In the name of comedy, the law’s decree is deferred and then reversed. Moreover, in the service of dramatic pleasure, questions raised by the cancellation of procedure—about legal rigor, juridical efficacy, or the legitimacy of worldly authority—are set aside. The concluding moments of The Comedy of Errors drive home how princes may not quash punitive forms, but comedy may.

III Not every execution procession followed the itinerary described as an “old saw” in Sir John Oldcastle. Points of origin and destination, location and frequency of stops, mode of transportation—these and other elements might vary from

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procession to procession. What remained constant in all but the rarest instances was the public performance of these procedures. One exception that proves this rule occurred in 1601. That year Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, attempted to incite Londoners to rebellion and was condemned for treason. Because Essex was imprisoned in the Tower of London and beheaded inside the Tower walls, his processional itinerary did not include any of the city’s streets, fields, or marketplaces. Instead, a handful of officers led Essex directly from his cell to the scaffold, where his beheading was witnessed by a small group of nobles. In order to understand this rare deviation from established procedure, we must look to the dangers Essex’s execution posed to all three parties involved: the condemned, the people, and the state. In a sermon preached at St. Paul’s Cross shortly after Essex’s death, William Barlow explained that the condemned requested a private death because he “feared” the people’s “acclamations should haue houen him vp … and so haue withdrawne his minde from God, and haue beene a temptation vnto him.”35 The people’s cheers and applause could distract the condemned from humble and sincere repentance, rendering the execution procession a direct path to eternal damnation rather than a hallowed pilgrimage to divine grace. In the same sermon, Barlow also asserted that by experiencing Essex’s execution second hand, the people escaped a “dangerous intended course.”36 At first blush, this phrase alludes to Essex’s botched insurrection; but it also, if not primarily, refers to the hazards that faced the men and women who attended executions. Although the people did not respond to Essex’s calls for rebellion, they might rise up upon witnessing his death.37 The same acclamations that endangered the condemned’s soul could incite a misplaced sympathy for the traitor, if not rebellion. Yet we cannot take Barlow’s words at face value. However much it benefited the condemned and the people, Essex’s private beheading served primarily the interests of the state. Barlow preached on the subject of the Earl’s death under direct orders from Queen Elizabeth’s Secretary of State, Robert Cecil. Cecil dictated the sermon’s contents in a letter to Barlow, including an instruction “precisely to declare … how great suit the Earl made that he might die privately in the Tower, … wherein also you may not forget how himself was possessed with an opinion that he should have had of the people a great acclamation.”38 Through these directives, Cecil was attempting to control the people’s interpretation and reception of Essex’s execution, efforts that imply an official recognition that the conventions of the pulpit could backfire.39 The same potential attended the scaffold. However scripted the people’s encounter with execution, the state could not ensure that the performance of punitive procedure would not produce skepticism, rather than endorsement, of its authority. The motives behind the Essex variation, both those Barlow’s sermon states outright and those it intimates, point up how the putative dangers to the condemned, the people, and the state were not unique to Essex’s execution. Rather, these perils were inherent in punishment itself: the forms of execution could be fulfilled and still not achieve their intended functions. An execution

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procession could follow the expected routes and procedures yet nonetheless fail to reconcile the condemned to his guilt and punishment, elicit the people’s endorsement of state punishment, or enhance the official authority that produces such spectacles. The threat extends, then, beyond any particular historical moment in which civic order is at risk to a broader, more theoretical possibility that punitive form could be exposed as empty and inadequate. The Comedy of Errors curtails the sort of ideological difficulties raised by Essex’s execution. The law proves efficacious throughout the play: it successfully produces the urgency and anxiety necessary to the pleasures of comic confusion and anticipation, and in the end does not fail but is canceled. By the time execution becomes a “mere” formality that the Duke can dismiss with ease, punitive expectations have been swept away by the tide of comic pleasures. Measure for Measure offers a markedly different version of the crossing of punishment and genre. This famously problematic play unsettles by design, leaving the audience with the sort of concerns that the elision of procedure was meant to avoid in the Essex variation. Significantly, the play does so not by explicitly or implicitly dramatizing this event or any other actual execution, but rather by identifying and complicating the usual results of crossing disciplinary and comic forms. Measure for Measure begins by invoking and then disrupting punitive associations, and more gradually, it also establishes and then undermines generic ones. Although both sets of expectations are eventually fulfilled, they fail to provide the satisfaction they should; rather, both forms are exposed as nothing more than pro-forma. In the second scene of Measure for Measure, audiences are invited to anticipate a punitive transportation on a par with those they witnessed regularly outside the theater. But unlike The Comedy of Errors which opens with a readily identifiable disciplinary procedure, Measure for Measure evokes two similar but distinct procedures: execution processions and shaming rituals. Indeed, it is compelling to consider how the dialogue preceding Claudio’s entrance reflects the ambiguity with which “news” of punishment actually spread (Additional Passage A: I.ii.0, 1). As they went about their daily business, Londoners might learn by word of mouth that a procession of one sort or another was approaching, and interrupting their quotidian activities, they would discuss the offender and await his or her passing. The play stages this process when Mistress Overdone, a bawd, enters and announces, “There’s one yonder arrested and carried to prison was worth five thousand of you all” (I.ii.54–5). Mistress Overdone’s “to prison” might suggest a shaming ritual followed by jail time, a combined sentence frequently imposed upon petty offenders. But she then adds, “and which is more, within these three days his head to be chopped off,” implying that this transportation is, in fact, an execution procession (60–61). Further complicating this procedure is the crime for which Claudio has been arrested. Claudio is charged with fornication, his guilt “too gross writ” on the pregnant Juliet (I.ii.132). Shakespeare’s audiences would have been familiar with the spectacular shaming rituals, including processions, customarily performed by men and women convicted of premarital sex, adultery,

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and prostitution.40 But Claudio is not merely to be paraded publicly, as befits a shaming ritual; he is also to be beheaded. The scene remains procedurally ambiguous even after Claudio enters, attended by the Provost and officers (93 s.d.). The fact that Juliet enters with Claudio seems to confirm that their transportation is a shaming ritual meant to chastise both fornicators.41 Yet another bawd, Pompey, undermines any procedural certainty when he says, “Here comes Signor Claudio, led by the Provost to prison” (94–5). Ostensibly the line is meant to alert playgoers to the connection between Mistress Overdone’s previous announcements and the entering figures. But it also invites attentive auditors to recall that the prison is not, in fact, Claudio’s final destination; the block is. This confusion of procedure thematizes, rather than distracts from, the play’s exploration of the propriety and justice of punishment. In inexorably crossing shaming rituals and execution processions, Measure for Measure turns proverb into quandary: does the punishment fit the crime? The play emphasizes this problem when Claudio asks the Provost, “Fellow, why dost thou show me thus to th’ world?” (I.ii.96). Unlike early modern English theatergoers, who would expect both shaming rituals and execution processions to be performed publicly, Claudio clearly anticipates a private transportation. These opposing expectations highlight how the procedures of punishment are neither universal nor absolute but human constructions that may or may not fulfill their intended functions. As a case in point, Claudio’s procession is designed to convey the legitimacy of Angelo’s authority and the laws he reinstates (see II.i.1–40). This goal is undermined when, in response to Claudio’s surprise at his public transportation, the Provost explains: “I do it not in evil disposition, / But from Lord Angelo by special charge” (I.ii.98– 9). Although Angelo gives playgoers the public procession they expect, its origin in a “special charge” calls into question the propriety and justice of that procedure and the authority who commands it. Moreover, Claudio insists upon his innocence and rejects Angelo’s mandate to send him to the block. He begins to deliver a traditional confession, customary to both shaming rituals and execution processions. Turning to the Viennese gentlemen who witness his procession, Claudio admits that his “restraint” results from excessive “liberty,” or the perpetration of sexual transgressions, until he was “surfeit[ed]” (104–10). But he then upends the confessional form. In a one-on-one exchange with Lucio, Claudio claims that Juliet is “fast [his] wife, / Save that [they] do the denunciation lack / Of outward order” (124–6). Therefore, Angelo is the one at fault, not Claudio, and he is guilty of “tyranny,” a crime much more heinous than fornication (140). Lucio responds sympathetically and advises Claudio to appeal for pardon, a suggestion that sets in motion the next four acts. In addition to creating the conditions for dramatic action, this exchange furthers the play’s formal quandaries. Claudio’s defiant confession and Lucio’s sympathetic response point up how Angelo’s special charge fails to have the intended effect on either the condemned or the people. The play establishes these procedural difficulties before venturing any generic cues, another significant divergence from The Comedy of Errors in which punitive

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and comic signals emerge concurrently. It is only in the final moments of the second scene that Measure for Measure intimates its generic commitment. The Duke cannot be found, so Claudio asks Lucio to seek out his sister, Isabella, and “Implore her … that she make friends / To the strict deputy” (I.ii.157–8). Describing her faculty for “reason and discourse,” Claudio claims she will be able to “persuade” Angelo to pardon him (162–3). In the promise of Isabella’s rhetorical skills, the play opens up a space for comic evitability by which execution and tragedy may be avoided. Yet the satisfaction of comedy is only momentary. Problems soon begin to crystallize around genre, progressively undermining the efficacy of comic convention. The first frustration occurs after Isabella’s attempt to persuade Angelo leads the deputy to offer her brother’s head in exchange for her maidenhead. This turn of events conforms to Shakespeare’s possible sources, including Beard’s Theatre of God’s Judgments (1597), Whetstone’s Promos and Cassandra (1578), and Cinthio’s Hecatommithi (1561), which relate the story of a woman who yields to an official’s sexual blackmail in order to save her condemned husband or brother. Audiences would likely expect the play to adhere to these contemporary renditions, an assumption endorsed by Claudio’s description of Isabella’s “youth” as “a prone and speechless dialect / Such as move men” (I.ii.159–61). Shakespeare upends this expectation, however, by breaking from this popular form and having Isabella refuse to “lay down the treasures of [her] body” (II.iv.96). Isabella’s failure to secure her brother’s pardon, either through her “reason and discourse” or her “body,” disappoints the prospect of comic evitability. Whereas Claudio’s procession disrupts punitive associations, Isabella’s rebuff of Angelo frustrates generic ones. The play seems to get back on the comic track through the machinations of Vincentio, the Duke of Vienna, who spends most of the play disguised as Friar Lodowick. After Isabella tells her brother that his release is not possible, Vincentio steps in to propose that Angelo’s jilted fiancée, Mariana, take Isabella’s place in Angelo’s bed. Following this coital ruse, a messenger arrives at the prison with a “note” for the Provost, and the audience probably assumes, like Vincentio, that “here comes Claudio’s pardon” (IV.ii.96, 94). It comes as a surprise, then, when the Provost explains that Angelo’s note not only confirms but also hastens Claudio’s sentence. Vincentio, left flailing for a way to avoid the consequences of his contrivances, reworks his former scheme, this time switching men’s heads rather than women’s maidenheads. Trumping Angelo’s note with “the hand and seal of the Duke,” Vincentio convinces the Provost to postpone Claudio’s execution and to deliver the head of another condemned criminal, Barnardine, in place of Claudio’s (177). The substitution or crossing of heads will be disguised, he suggests, by “death” and the “common” practices of penitent offenders (157– 64). As the bed-trick is reworked as the head-trick, the play holds out the possibility that a variation on the theme of substitution will prompt the hoped-for generic ending. Yet this strategy proves untenable as well, when Vincentio finds

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Barnardine “unprepared, unmeet for death” and decides that “to transport him in the mind he is / Were damnable” (IV.iii.60–61). By this point in the play comic evitability, in the forms of Isabella’s appeal and the Duke’s bed-trick and head-trick, has repeatedly promised but ultimately failed to deliver the pardon invoked at the end of the second scene. I have argued that in The Comedy of Errors a similar exhaustion of comic devices allows for a celebration of theatrical prerogatives over punitive ones. At first blush, Measure for Measure engages an analogous strategy, promising to evade legal stricture and satisfy generic expectation by replacing Claudio’s head with that of “Ragusine, a most notorious”—and quite dead—“pirate” (IV.iii.63). In a rather parodic echo of the twinning at the heart of The Comedy of Errors, the Provost explains that Ragusine’s “visage” is more likely than Barnardine’s to “satisfy the deputy” because the pirate was “[a] man of Claudio’s years, his beard and head / Just of his colour” (64–8).42 Also evocative of Shakespeare’s earlier comedy, like the Abbess’ appearance, Ragusine’s death occurs in exactly the right place—“[h]ere in the prison” (61)—at precisely the right moment—“this morning” (62). We could say that, while the Abbess functions as dea ex machina, Ragusine provides a caput ex machina. Even Vincentio aligns Ragusine’s head with divine intervention, exclaiming, “O, ’tis an accident that heaven provides” (69). But whereas the Abbess’ appearance facilitates comic resolution, Ragusine’s head provides only temporary relief. Like the generic devices deployed in earlier scenes, it too fails to either satisfy or obviate the play’s legal difficulties. Claudio may be alive but he is still under a sentence of death, and the corrupt deputy who condemned him remains in power. Ragusine’s head thereby serves to highlight the inefficacy of form in the play. The disappointment of generic expectations time and again undermines the audience’s confidence in the capacity of comedic conventions to thwart punishment. Vincentio attempts to resolve the play’s formal difficulties by staging his ducal entry into the city. A series of conflicting accusations and testimonials repeatedly interrupt the procession, such that this scene may appear to be a purposeful variation on the final scene of The Comedy of Errors. These delays provide an opportunity for Vincentio, who has entered in the garb of the Duke of Vienna, to exit the stage and reenter wearing the hood of Friar Lodowick. This costume change signals a broader formal strategy on Vincentio’s part to assume roles analogous to both the Duke of Ephesus and the Abbess in The Comedy of Errors. Yet Vincentio proves unable to wield both legal and generic authority. In large part, his failure is inevitable. The play opens up problems of propriety and justice that are too big for comedy to resolve adequately. Conventionally, nuptials conclude a comedy, but the weddings and proposals at the end of Measure for Measure are too tainted by punishment to be satisfying. When Angelo confesses his crimes and asks for “[i]mmediate sentence then, and sequent death,” Vincentio orders him first to “marry” Mariana (365–8). Although “sequent death” is ultimately evaded, the marital sentence remains enforced.

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Likewise, for committing fornication Lucio is doomed to wed the prostitute “[w]hom he begot with child,” a sentence Lucio equates with “pressing to death, whipping, and hanging” (505, 515–16). Marriage is not a condition of Claudio’s pardon for fornication or Isabella’s for slander, yet Vincentio implies that both would do well to wed. He tells Claudio to “restore” Juliet (518), and to the continuing consternation of scholars, the text does not indicate how Isabella responds to Vincentio’s two proposals of marriage. At the same time, these marital sentences are the only punishments not repealed in the play’s final moments. Although such forgiveness is appropriate to the end of comedy, it fails to address the play’s legal quandaries—which are heightened rather than elided in the final scene—and therefore produces distress rather than pleasure. The audience cannot dismiss Angelo’s repeated abuses of authority as easily as does Vincentio; Lucio’s slanders are also forgiven rather flippantly. But perhaps most troubling is Vincentio’s pardon of Barnardine. Although guilty of the most heinous crime mentioned in the play—murder (IV.ii.51)—Barnardine is also the only offender whose release comes with no strings attached. Vincentio offers only the feeble “pray[er]” that Barnardine will “take this mercy to provide / For better times to come” (V.i.478–9). In this absolute deference to the convention of forgiveness, the play fails to address the quandaries of propriety and justice that it provokes. After repeatedly undermining what is familiar and expected about both comic convention and punitive procedure, Measure for Measure fulfills the audience’s associations with both forms but in ways—enforced marriages and inefficacious punishments—that thwart their intended effects. This problematic conclusion, scholars have argued, reflects Shakespeare’s frustrations and experimentations with comedy; it has provided ample fodder for reading the play as a critique of contemporary legal practice, as well.43 Yet the ending of Measure for Measure does not subvert genre or law per se, so much as it offers a broader critique of form. Whereas Jonson insists that comedy can both please and reprehend, Shakespeare exposes not simply the irreconcilability of comic and punitive effects, but a rupture within the early modern concept of form itself. The disciplinary residue of the concluding marriages impedes the “gentle affections” that comedy ought to “stir up.” The same punitive nuptials, in conjunction with the facile pardon of offenders, also forestall any faithful “imitat[ion of] justice.” As a result, the play does not “drive” the audience “to the inwarde consideration of [them] selues,” as Golding describes the effect of execution, and, in similar fashion, some of his contemporaries endorse comedy. Rather, by fulfilling generic conventions and punitive procedures, and simultaneously undermining their efficacy, Measure for Measure alerts audiences to the potentially fundamental disconnect between the performance of what is familiar and expected about a particular form and its actual effects. This disjunction, thematized throughout the play, is a direct result of physically crossing a historically specific formal procedure from the scaffold to the stage. The profound scrutiny of form that this crossing allows has real-life consequences, if only because audiences eventually cross out of the playhouse.

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But these consequences were not necessarily or exclusively felt along the paths by which offenders were brought to execution, or around the gallows or block. Rather, the demystified understanding of form that Measure for Measure invites might shape the perception of a diverse range of practices. Audiences returned to London’s streets aware that the forms in which they were most invested, dramatic, official, or otherwise, could prove hollow, inadequate, “mere” formalities.

Notes

1 2

3

4 5

6

I am enormously indebted to Stephen Cohen, whose comments on numerous drafts and unflagging support of this essay were essential to its development. For their input at various stages, I am grateful to Margreta de Grazia, Jane Degenhardt, Michelle Karnes, Clare Costley King’oo, Cary Mazer, Phyllis Rackin, Elizabeth Williamson, an anonymous reader from Ashgate Press, and the members of Stephen Cohen’s 2003 Shakespeare Association of America seminar, “Shakespeare and Historicist Formalism.” Anthony B. Dawson, “Measure for Measure, New Historicism, and Theatrical Power,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 39/3 (1988): 333 n. 20. Paul Yachnin, Stage-Wrights: Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and the Making of Theatrical Value (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), p. xiii. Earlier critiques include Clifford Davidson, “The ‘New Historicism’ and Early Modern Drama: A Review Article,” Comparative Drama, 22/4 (1988–1989): 359–69, and Jean E. Howard, “The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies,” English Literary Renaissance, 16/1 (1986): 13–43. On Macbeth, see Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), ch. 5; see also Gillian Murray Kendall, “Overkill in Shakespeare,” in Gillian Murray Kendall (ed.), Shakespearean Power and Punishment (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998), pp. 173–96. On Titus Andronicus, see Molly Easo Smith, “Spectacles of Torment in Titus Andronicus,” SEL, 36/2 (1996): 315–31; and Francis Barker, “Treasures of Culture: Titus Andronicus and Death by Hanging,” in David Lee Miller, Sharon O’Dair, and Harold Weber (eds), The Production of English Renaissance Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 226–61. On The Tempest, see Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), ch. 5; Curt Breight, “‘Treason Doth Never Prosper’: The Tempest and the Discourse of Treason,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 41/1 (1990): 1–28; and Richard Wilson, “The Quality of Mercy: Discipline and Punishment in Shakespearean Comedy,” Seventeenth Century, 5/1 (1990): 1–42. OED s.v. “form,” 11–14. The Norton Shakespeare, eds Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), Hamlet IV.v.210, III.i.152; Much Ado About Nothing IV.i.1–2; King Lear III.vii.24; and 2 Henry VI III.i.58, and Richard III III.v.40. All in-text citations refer to this edition. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London, 1589; rpt. n.p., 1906), p. 49. Significantly, unlike many of his contemporaries, who discuss drama solely in terms of

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11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

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reading, Puttenham specifies that these “formes of Poesie Dramatick” are “put in execution by the feate and dexteritie of mans body”—that is, performed on a “stage” that “the Greekes called theatrum, as much to say as a beholding place” (pp. 49, 52). I am grateful to Stephen Cohen for formulating and helping me to articulate this defining triumvirate of formal characteristics. See Douglas Bruster’s essay in this volume, p. 40. A Critical Edition of I Sir John Oldcastle, ed. Jonathan Rittenhouse (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994), scene v, lines 57–8. A Warning for Fair Women: A Critical Edition, ed. Charles Dale Cannon (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), lines 23, 50–51. By placing history on equal footing with the classical dramatic genres of comedy and tragedy, the induction to A Warning for Fair Women demonstrates how the history play, which had its heyday in the 1590s, was becoming conventional by the mid-1580s, when Cannon argues the play was written (“Introduction,” p. 48). “[E]t a binde per medium civitat’ London direct’ vsq’ ad furcas de tiborne trahatur ...” (Middlesex County Records, ed. John Cordy Jefferson [Clerkenwell Sessions House, n.d.], vol. 1, p. 231). Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors (London, 1612), sig. Fv. Arthur Golding, A briefe discourse of the late murther of master George Sanders (London, 1577), sig. B5r. Bruster, pp. 42–3 in this volume. In Hazard Adams (ed.), Critical Theory Since Plato, rev. edn (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers, 1992), p. 152. Heywood, sig. F4r. See the Introduction to this volume, p. 15. Ben Jonson: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Ian Donaldson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 3, ll. 93–4, 98–102. Ibid, ll. 103–04. Douglas Bruster uses “quotation” for similar purposes in Quoting Shakespeare: Form and Culture in Early Modern Drama (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002). See OED “crossing” vbl. n. 3, 8; “cross” a. 1, 6; and “cross” v. 8, 11. The editors of The Norton Shakespeare posit that The Comedy of Errors was written 1592–1594 and Measure for Measure around 1603–1604. John Florio, A worlde of wordes, or Most copious, and exact dictionarie in Italian and English (London, 1598), p. 430, cited in OED “cross-” 5. Egeon’s reply is anything but “brief”: it occupies over one hundred lines of a 158-line scene, and interrupted only twice (at about lines 60 and 80), it is essentially a monologue. On how sixteenth-century theatergoers would have responded to this lengthy speech, see Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Douglas Bruster, “Local Tempest: Shakespeare and the Work of the Early Modern Playhouse,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 25/1 (1995): 33–53. See Peter Lake and Michael Questier, “Agency, Appropriation and Rhetoric Under the Gallows: Puritans, Romanists and the State in Early Modern England,” Past and Present, 153 (1996): 64–107; and Frances E. Dolan, “‘Gentlemen, I have one thing more to say’: Women on Scaffolds in England, 1563–1680,” Modern Philology, 92/2 (1994): 157–78.

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26 See, for example, Henry Barrow’s description of the two postponements of his and John Greenwood’s executions in 1593—reprieves that did not, however, lead to the hoped-for pardon (The Writings of John Greenwood and Henry Barrow: 1591–1593, ed. L.H. Carlson [London: Allen & Unwin, 1970], pp. 242–52). 27 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 166. 28 Merchant of Ephesus to Antipholus of Syracuse: “Therefore give out you are of Epidamnum, / Lest that your goods too soon be confiscate. / This very day a Syracusian merchant / Is apprehended for arrival here, / And, not being able to buy out his life, / According to the statute of the town / Dies ere the weary sun set in the west” (I.ii.1–7). 29 Susan Snyder, Shakespeare: A Wayward Journey (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002), p. 19. 30 Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 56–82; Parker, “Deferral, Dilation, Différance: Shakespeare, Cervantes, Jonson,” in Patricia Parker and David Quint (eds), Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 182– 209; and Parker, “Dilation and Delay: Renaissance Matrices,” Poetics Today, 5/3 (1984): 519–35. 31 Alan C. Dessen and Leslie Thomson, A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), s.v. bind, bound, and bonds. 32 Stage directions calling for characters with shaved heads indicate the availability of baldcaps (cf. Dessen and Thomson, s.v. shave and hair). Of course, bareheaded could indicate simply without his hat, as Dessen and Thomson indicate; yet they also link this direction to barefoot, often in dramatizations of rites of ecclesiastical discipline, such as public penance. 33 The Priory of Holywell was situated in Finsbury Field near Sewers Ditch and was the possible site of William Hartley’s execution in 1588; see John Stow, A Survey of London (London: John Windet, 1598, 1603), ed. Charles Lethbridge Kingsford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), vol. 2, pp. 73, 262; and A true report of the inditement, arraignment, conuiction, condemnation, and execution of Iohn Weldon, William Hartley, and Robert Sutton (London: Richard Iones, 1588), sig. C1v. Citing these connections, Thomas Whitfield Baldwin argues that Egeon’s processions are based on Hartley’s execution in Holywell and that The Comedy of Errors was written for Lord Strange’s Men to be played at the Curtain (William Shakespeare Adapts a Hanging [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1931]). St. Mary’s Priory stood in Clerkenwell near Fleet Ditch and possibly near the site of Robert Sutton’s execution in 1588 (Stow, vol. 1, p. 13; vol. 2, p. 83; and A Trve Report, sig. C3r). The Abbey of Minoresses was located west of Tower Hill towards Aldgate, and “on the other side of that street lyeth the Ditche, without the wall of the Citie from the Tower unto Aldegate” (Stow, vol. 2, p. 262; vol. 1, p. 126). 34 Aristotle, Poetics, XV.6, and Horace, Art of Poetry, in Adams (ed.), pp. 58, 70. 35 William Barlow, A sermon preached at Paules Crosse, on the first Sunday in Lent: Martij 1. 1600 (London: Mathew Law, 1601), sigs D6v–D7r. 36 Barlow, sig. C1r. In order to provide this vicarious experience, Barlow describes “what these eares of mine haue heard from his owne mouth, in that two houres conference with him before his death, and these eyes of mine seene vnder his own hand, and subscribed

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39 40

41

42

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w[it]h his name [i.e., Essex’s confession]” (sig. C1r), and gives a detailed account of Essex’s death. See Greenblatt’s discussion of the people’s response to the executions of the Bye Plotters in Shakespearean Negotiations, ch. 5. Quoted in Thomas S. Nowak, “Propaganda and the Pulpit: Robert Cecil, William Barlow and the Essex and Gunpowder Plots,” in Katherine Z. Keller and Gerald J. Schiffhorst (eds), The Witness of Times: Manifestations of Ideology in Seventeenth Century England (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1993), pp. 37–8. Nowak, p. 38. On Claudio’s procession as a shaming ritual, see Victoria Hayne, “Performing Social Practice: The Example of Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 44/1 (1993): 1–29. On the gendering of shaming rituals, see Lynda Boose, “Scolding Brides and Bridling Scolds: Taming the Woman’s Unruly Member,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 42/2 (1991): 179–213; Laura Gowing, “‘The freedom of the streets’: women and social space, 1560– 1640,” in Paul Griffiths and Mark S.R. Jenner (eds), Londinopolis: Essay in the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 130–51; and Laura Lunger Knoppers, “(En)gendering Shame: Measure for Measure and the Spectacles of Power,” English Literary Renaissance, 23/3 (1993): 450– 71. Jacques Lezra shows how “the pirate’s head becomes the play’s reflexive device for staging its own conventions and tricks,” in “Pirating Reading: The Appearance of History in Measure for Measure,” ELH, 56/2 (1989): 273; 268. For discussions of the play as a formal experiment, see especially Jean E. Howard, “Measure for Measure and the Restraints of Convention,” Essays in Literature, 10/2 (1983): 149–58, and Stephen Cohen, “From Mistress to Master: Political Transition and Formal Conflict in Measure for Measure,” Criticism, 41/4 (1999): 431–64. For analyses of its ideological resonance, representative examples include Mullaney, ch. 4; Greenblatt; and Arthur L. Little, Jr., “Absolute Bodies, Absolute Laws: Staging Punishment in Measure for Measure,” in Kendall (ed.), pp. 113–29; a more recent example is James Ellison, “Measure for Measure and the Execution of Catholics in 1604,” English Literary Renaissance, 33/1 (2003): 44–87.

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Chapter 6

Partial Views: Literary Allusion, Teleological Form, and Contingent Readings in Hamlet Nicholas Moschovakis

The early modern reception of Shakespearean dramatic forms is a subject that presents daunting challenges to historicist criticism. We have “relatively little hard evidence about how people read specific texts in the period,” and scarcely any detailed information about how most members of early audiences understood Shakespeare’s plays.1 Much less are we able to cite Shakespeare’s own explicit testimony as to what he thought about his work—which to us can appear both intricate and equivocal—or how he might have expected particular individuals or groups in his audience to respond to it. In any historicist study of Shakespeare’s forms, then, the most consequential as well as the most speculative step in any critic’s procedure must lie in attempts at reconstructing aspects of intention and reception through probable conjectures. Most “historical formalist” readings of Shakespearean drama will consist of hypothetical accounts of how some early audience members might have responded to form in the plays. To develop such accounts, we can normally do no better than to infer from our own perceptions of form to the likely responses of certain persons—or of distinct, historically identifiable segments of an audience—in an early modern milieu that encompassed many different cultural norms, divergent perspectives, and frequently conflicting interests.2 But this inferential process can also tend to make us unnervingly aware of the historical contingency and partiality of our own formal perceptions. After all, if a form is a “thing” that proves “efficacious” only in relation to some particular historical context, then even the most elementary formal perceptions must have emerged initially through individual acts of reception; and yet the very cognitive paradigms that enable us to perceive and identify forms—concepts pertaining to genre, prosody, narratological structures, etc.—will also be historically “overdetermined” by their multiple, often divergent associations with different contexts.3

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The difficulty of accounting for the historical contingencies that might have affected a play’s early reception, while also making due allowance for those that affect our own perceptions of form, threatens to confound our efforts to historicize a play like Hamlet: one so complicated that it has become a classic case study in the relativity and partiality of all criticism.4 While recognizing this difficulty, the present essay aims to explore one sort of response that Hamlet (or rather the Q2–F texts of Hamlet) might have been likely to evoke in the minds of some of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. I shall examine how Hamlet alludes to passages from Vergil’s Aeneid; these allusions, I argue, may have enabled some members of Hamlet’s early audience to identify the form of its revenge plot conceptually with that of Vergil’s epic. By showing why, and how, Hamlet might have met with such a reception, I hope to illuminate some of the problems and possibilities inherent in any serious pursuit of a historicist approach to form in Shakespeare’s plays, as well as in any attempt to address the contentious issues surrounding Shakespearean intertextuality. I am the first to admit that the reading of Hamlet’s allusiveness offered here can amount only to a partial study of its form. But this is inevitable, given the extent to which partiality characterizes all our formal perceptions. The importance of rigorously developed, unitary readings of Shakespearean form, however partial and contingently motivated, lies precisely in their ability to reveal the further dimensions of formal multiplicity in a work like Hamlet—and to make us inquire further into the conditions that might have led to the emergence of one such response in a recipient’s mind, as opposed to other equally possible formal perceptions. By reconstructing a response that presupposes an interest in literary allusions, we may thus learn something about how Shakespeare positioned his play to appeal to a readership in its time. At the same time, I would suggest, Hamlet exploits its special position in relation to this reading audience by presenting itself—in part through literary allusion—as a work with an irreducible formal complexity, one which discloses itself through a reader’s experience of the text. If Hamlet was regarded as an imitation of life, it may therefore have impressed some early readers with a conception of history itself as an infinitely complex reality: one that the contingent forms of cognition can only partially and inadequately represent. Two questions immediately present themselves. Are there good grounds for thinking that, historically, Shakespeare wrote Hamlet even partly for the benefit of a literary audience, of the sort that might be noticing and reflecting on Vergilian intertexts? And even if Hamlet did have such an audience, could its members have responded to the play’s allusiveness as a fact that was somehow relevant to its form? I shall answer both questions in the affirmative, reconstructing formal perceptions somewhat like those that might have emerged in a literary encounter with the play as an allusive text. Section I accordingly begins with my inquiry into one of the historical contingencies that looms largest in questions about Hamlet’s early reception, namely, the play’s existence in the two substantially different

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media of text and performance. As we are by now acutely aware, every physical medium sets practical limits to the variety of possible and likely interpretations of a work (though of course this is far from implying that any medium can simply or absolutely determine our perceptions of form). My approach to Hamlet’s allusiveness is predicated specifically on the work’s dissemination in the material form of texts. It is the readers of such texts who will have been most able to subject verbal allusions to deliberate scrutiny; they are also more likely than most play-goers to have had direct knowledge of a play’s possible poetic intertexts, including the Aeneid. Hence my first concern will be to establish the historical probability that Hamlet’s early audience included readers, and that some of these readers were familiar with Vergil. In section II of the essay I take up a series of Vergilian allusions in Hamlet, and I try to describe some formal perceptions that may have been warranted by these allusions. Noting that many early modern readers who knew the Aeneid could have shared a certain concept of its teleological form—one that would have been regarded as commonplace, even by individuals with different ways of reading the epic—I find that the allusive passages may have prompted readers to identify this form with that of the revenge plot in Hamlet. “Teleological form,” here, denotes a concept that should be familiar to historicist critics, who have recourse to something like it whenever they analyze fictive resolutions of conflict in narrative and dramatic works. For instance, teleology is frequently at issue in critiques of “ideological closure.” But to identify a teleological form as such is not always to interpret a work’s resolution. It is, more broadly, to explain any implicit or explicit conceptual structure whereby certain represented actions may be related to prescribed ends (that is, their Aristotelian final causes). Teleological forms enable an author, narrator, or character to frame one agent as an instrument of another’s intentions, or a series of events as relatively determinate links in an order of causation, leading to an outcome that can be conceived as inevitable—or at any rate as premeditated, the effect of a perfected design. So, in the Aeneid, the concluding triumph of Aeneas is purposed by fate and Jupiter’s will, as is the advent of the Augustan imperium.5 To some of Hamlet’s early modern recipients, Shakespeare’s allusions to the Aeneid may have indicated how something like a Vergilian epic teleology informs Hamlet’s representations of the heroic life he admires and idealizes. At the same time, this teleology may have seemed to frame some of Hamlet’s partial, contingent, and contradictory perceptions of the erratic form that his own life takes in the play. Needless to say, the extent to which individual readers actually found these formal implications in Hamlet’s allusiveness must have depended on a large number of contingencies—not the least of which will have been their perception of the tragedy as a specifically literary work, existing in textual form, and as such implicitly “designed to be read.”6

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The contingency of a work’s reception in multiple contexts, and in the minds of various individuals, is perhaps most pronounced when we try to identify and interpret its allusions to other texts that early audience members might have known. How many factors must we keep in mind when reconstructing possible early perceptions of a work’s intertextuality? Even where we may be quite sure that Shakespeare’s plays borrow elements from other texts that he had read (and in some cases written), we cannot always be equally confident that he or others would have wanted to stress the provenance of these passages, or would have taken the time required to reflect on them as meaningful allusions. Hamlet is more helpful than some works in this regard, however; for it contains one place in which we may be practically sure of Shakespeare’s intent to allude to Vergil. In response to the Player’s Speech, if nowhere else, readers who know and remember something of the Aeneid can be expected to access their memories of the poem. Hamlet himself calls the Speech part of “Aeneas [tale] to Dido” (II.ii.442– 3).7 Here it may be assumed that the prince is remembering not just a scene from a play, but the inset history of Troy’s fall that Aeneas recounts in Books II and III of the Aeneid. Shakespeare’s contemporaries could have known of this episode at second hand, rather than in the original text—for other Elizabethan plays had staged the story of Troy’s fall, and even its narration by Aeneas at Dido’s court— yet Hamlet is not the sort of early modern character who would have had to rely on plays or ballads for his own knowledge of the materia Troiae. Instead, as a “scholler” and a “souldier” (III.i.153, 152) who continually invokes classical topoi, Hamlet is just the kind of princely intellectual who would have studied the Aeneid itself (King James VI of Scotland being a notable example).8 We may infer that the Player’s Speech pleases Hamlet, in part, precisely because he judges it worthy of the epic’s exemplary hero, and because it recalls Vergil’s account of Aeneas narrating his past—even though the Player’s Speech is not a close verbal imitation of the relevant passage in Aeneid II. Shakespeare could have expected some of his contemporaries to be as capable as Hamlet of identifying the allusiveness in the Player’s Speech, and, I think, in other parts of Hamlet as well. Certainly some members of the play’s early audience would have studied the Aeneid, or parts of it, in Latin—just as Shakespeare probably had in his youth, since the poem was taught in Elizabethan grammar schools.9 The older Shakespeare retained an active interest in Vergil, though the nature and precise extent of this interest are debatable. Many of the plays that Shakespeare wrote or co-wrote, from Titus Andronicus to The Tempest, evince a familiarity and fascination with the Aeneid.10 As for the usual historicist objection to studies of Shakespeare’s literary allusiveness—that his plays were written solely to be performed, and, hence, cannot have been received as works of “highly literary poetry” outside a theatrical

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context11—scholarship has very recently begun to expose the limitations of this assumption. To be sure, anyone who believes that early modern audiences were supposed to get their ideas about Shakespearean drama exclusively from rapidly paced performances, and that no one was ever expected to read early modern playscripts (except by way of bringing them to the stage), must infer that any allusions which seem too subtle or fleeting to have registered with theatergoers are historically inconsequential. But a historicist turn toward the study of material texts and early modern cultures of reading has made this premise untenable. Many early modern authors affirmed their sense of Shakespeare’s importance as a writer of literary texts, and not merely as a play-maker; thus, in a portrait of Sir John Suckling painted around 1638 by Sir Anthony Van Dyck, the subject holds a folio volume of Shakespeare that is conspicuously open to a page marked “HAMLET.” Moreover, Shakespeare’s early audience included readers, as well as literate playgoers, not just after his death—when the First Folio of 1623 inaugurated the period of his properly “literary” reception—but also during his lifetime.12 By the end of the sixteenth century, the time of Hamlet’s probable composition, playbooks had already begun displaying Shakespeare’s name on their title pages; in 1598, three quartos were issued that advertised his authorship. (These were Richard II, Richard III, and Love’s Labors Lost—appropriately, since the comedy is engaged with questions about the value of literary culture.) From this time onward, a play’s authorial attribution to Shakespeare was “increasingly ‘vendible’ in the marketplace of print.”13 Manuscript evidence, moreover, shows that speeches in Shakespeare’s plays were sometimes copied—evidently from memory—into commonplace books. The practice suggests that at least some playgoers thought it worth the trouble to record passages of Shakespeare’s dramatic poetry for future reference as texts.14 It may be objected that even within this early “literary” audience for Shakespeare’s plays, comparatively few individuals would actually have been well versed in Latin—enough to read Vergil in the original, for example. However, vernacular versions of the Aeneid were available, and were not especially scarce. By the end of the sixteenth century, two complete English translations existed; the most recent one had been reprinted in 1596, and again in 1600.15 Furthermore, the fact that most play-books were printed in roman type “suggests that the publishers of plays were aiming more at the middle class than the working class”; that is, they were setting their sights not only on the market for “jestbooks and ballads,” but also on an audience that professed somewhat more cultivated tastes (including at least a few elite readers, even if these rarely valued play-books enough to preserve them in their libraries).16 Readers of Shakespeare who knew Vergil’s writing, if only from translations into English, would have sensed the weight of his canonical authority among readers and writers of Latin verse. Having often seen or heard the Aeneid ranked among the greatest poems ever written, such readers would appreciate the ambitiousness of Shakespeare’s attempt in the Player’s Speech to rewrite part of

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the Troy narrative in Aeneid II–III, rivalling Vergil’s authoritative treatment. To some members of Hamlet’s audience the Speech must have signaled Shakespeare’s ambition to see Hamlet valued as a “poem” rather than merely as a play, and to invest himself, a dramatist, with the dignity of authorship and poetic authority; we may note that the words “poem” and “author” are both used in Hamlet with reference to play-texts.17 Certainly it would be stretching a point to imagine Shakespeare strenuously cultivating an audience for printed texts of his plays, and I am not proposing that we can understand all of Hamlet this way. For some years after Shakespeare’s death in 1616, it would remain the case that “play texts ... had not yet fully made the transition ... to the artifacts of high culture,” and that “the Shakespearean canon did not yet exist.”18 Yet printing was not the only material form in which Hamlet appears to have found a readership during Shakespeare’s life. Some members of the play’s early audience evidently read it in manuscript, and we must suppose that such readers would have been especially likely to prize Hamlet for its literary features such as allusion and imitation. The famous note written by Gabriel Harvey, praising Hamlet as a play qualified “to please the wiser sort,” apparently predates Hamlet’s appearance in print, and would seem to indicate that Harvey had seen a manuscript of the play. 19 In any event, it allows us to identify at least one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries who had read Hamlet appreciatively, while being familiar enough with the Aeneid to contemplate possible relationships between the two texts; for the bookish Harvey, unsurprisingly, portrayed himself as a reader and re-reader of Vergil.20 Hamlet’s history in print may further support the hypothesis that Shakespeare anticipated the play’s scribal publication, and conceived his Hamlet with a readership partly—though only partly—in mind. Arguably, the editions we use most today correspond to an original “reading version” of Hamlet.21 This claim has been advanced by textual scholars trying to account for the origins of the First Quarto Hamlet (1603) as opposed to the Second Quarto (1604) and First Folio (1623). Not only are the Hamlets of Q2 and F manifestly superior to that of Q1 as reading texts, but, as critics have become more and more aware, they can also seem dramaturgically inferior in many ways to Q1 (making due allowance for the textual difficulties presented by the latter). Q1 is effectively a revenge thriller, paced for performance; Q2 and F are considerably amplified with rhetorical and satirical passages. While these more copious and discursive texts (Q2–F) can be deemed “better” from a literary point of view, their length makes it practically impossible to stage them without major cuts. More and more, scholars have tended to agree that Q1 has its origins in a deliberately reduced acting edition (whether or not this was also “memorially reconstructed”), and that it approximates, however imperfectly, what a theatrical audience might have heard.22 Conversely, Q2 and F are now often seen as examples of Shakespearean “literary” drama, produced for a reading audience23—perhaps from one of the texts that, as we have already seen, was circulating in manuscript before Q1’s publication.24

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The longest version of Hamlet that Shakespeare wrote, a version corresponding better to our Q2–F Hamlets than to our Q1 Hamlet, was probably originally received as a reading text.25 It therefore merits consideration by historicist critics as a “literary” work, in not just one but two senses of the term. First, it is literary in the elementary and material sense of having been physically read, by people who followed lines of text and were able to flip back and forth between pages, much as we do. This is important because the formal perceptions I will be discussing below (in section 2), involving the discernment of allusive patterns, are surely more likely to have occurred to readers than to playgoers. A reader can pause over a line, and can take a moment to recollect the passage alluded to, or even to consult a copy of the intertext if this is conveniently available. No doubt, even the Q2 Hamlet’s literary audience (in this sense) must have contained individuals who lacked the requisite knowledge, leisure, or bibliographical resources to give careful thought to its classical intertexts; still, even those without a Latin education might have read enough of the Aeneid in English to remember parts of the poem well—especially Books I, II, IV, and VI, to which Shakespeare alluded most frequently in Hamlet as well as in his other works.26 Second, Hamlet (Q2–F) also appears to have existed as a “literary” text in another, more restricted sense of the term, reflecting the intellectual pretensions—and the implicit social exclusivity—of Harvey’s “wiser sort.” When Harvey praised Hamlet, he also named The Faerie Queene as one of the works “now freshest in request,” suggesting that Hamlet ought to appeal to a courtly, erudite readership much like that which Spenser envisioned for his epic.27 Readers who appreciated the latter’s overt imitation of Vergil, while accepting or at least recognizing the authority that poets like Spenser vested in the Aeneid’s teleological form, will have been all the more likely to read Hamlet with an eye to its Vergilian associations. Some of them, too, will already have noticed the Vergilian epic allusions that were prominent in earlier printed revenge plays, The Spanish Tragedy28 and Titus Andronicus29—as well as in Shakespeare’s recent drama of imperial conquest, Henry V30 —and these readers, no doubt, will have derived an additional pleasure from the recognition of comparable allusive patterns in Hamlet (a pleasure hardly distinguishable from that of feeling themselves, once again, members of a literate minority whose education equipped them to appreciate such gestures). Previous critics have investigated some aspects of Hamlet’s classical intertextuality more fully than others. Many have elucidated the play’s problematic stance toward Senecan tragic conventions;31 fewer, by far, have endeavored to trace its allusive relationship to the Aeneid. I have reviewed a number of reasons for thinking that Vergilian allusions in Hamlet are likely to have informed the play’s reception by part of Shakespeare’s early audience: a part that was capable of noting, and even attending closely to such allusions. Historically, we have found “substantial evidence of a Shakespeare who regularly wrote ... plays too long and complex to be staged in the theatre of his day, plays for which the only plausible audience was one of readers.”32 Hamlet (Q1) and Hamlet (Q2–F)

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appear to represent two distinct forms of the play that differed materially and by design, one tailored to the stage and the other more suited to the study. In fact, several of the allusions to the Aeneid with which I shall be concerned appear in the Q2 and F texts, but not in Q1. This distribution is consistent with the proposed distinction between literary and theatrical Hamlets. The presence of a more developed allusive pattern in Q2–F fits a plausible—if inevitably hypothetical— account of the intentions that shaped these texts’ historical production, and of the interests of a readership to which they evidently appealed.

II Patterns of Allusion: Vergil’s Aeneid and Teleological Form in the Literary Hamlet (Q2–F) If the preceding arguments can suffice to establish the historicity of a “literary” Hamlet (Q2–F), then it would appear that, historically, some members of the play’s early audience were well situated to mark the presence of Vergilian allusions in the text. Needless to say, even these individuals’ responses to such a perception will have varied. Every effort at reconstructing a single “original” meaning for Hamlet’s allusiveness will yield a view of the play that is severely partial (as well as partly conjectural). Still, we may consider it highly probable that an early reader who knew the elements of Vergil’s narrative, and recalled something of its teleological form, might have thought to compare this form with that of the revenge plot in Hamlet. To explain why memories of the poem may have prompted this cognitive juxtaposition, and to what effect, this section shall build on recent work showing how Hamlet alludes to the Aeneid repeatedly, not just in the Player’s Scene, but also at other points in the action.33 In three scenes that advance Hamlet’s revenge plot, Shakespeare gives us occasion to remember three critical junctures in the Aeneid’s teleological quest-narrative. (I exclude the Player’s Speech from this discussion; for while it is instrumental to our perception that Hamlet is an allusive text, it does nothing to directly advance the main action of revenge.) These three allusive passages suggest a partial identification between Hamlet and Aeneas: an identification that Hamlet himself has implied by speaking part of the Player’s Speech in the persona of Vergil’s hero (II.ii.446–514). As a result, it is contingently possible to find a Vergilian epic teleology emerging in Hamlet’s execution of the Ghost’s command—notwithstanding the manifest differences between the two texts, particularly with respect to the actual end or telos of heroic action in each plot. The three Vergilian episodes that concern me here, as conducing most to this formal perception, are found in Books I, IV, and VI of the Aeneid. As I noted earlier, these are the parts of the epic to which Shakespeare mostly tended to allude throughout his work. The first episode is the tempest in Aeneid I, which threatens

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to divert Vergil’s fugitive hero away from his supernaturally ordained route toward Italy; though the storm leads initially to his detention by love at Queen Dido’s court, it also thereby occasions and necessitates his correction by the gods, and his apprisal of his peculiar destiny. In the second episode, from Book IV, Aeneas resumes his fated journey at the urging of divine apparitions which proclaim his fate and warn against further distractions from it. Lastly, in Aeneid VI, Aeneas visits the underworld; there the shade of his father, Anchises, instructs him in the benefits to be derived by future generations from his pious accomplishment of Jupiter’s will. These blessings will one day culminate in Rome’s re-subjection to monarchical rule, under the purportedly benign Augustus Caesar. The passages from Hamlet that, on my reading, allude to these three Vergilian episodes do not follow the order of the episodes’ appearance in the Aeneid. Instead, they invert the order of Vergil’s narrative (though I am not inclined to find significance in this inversion). Thus, Shakespeare’s allusions to Aeneid VI, IV, and I are found—respectively—in the Ghost’s first conversation with Hamlet (I.v), the Ghost’s second appearance to the prince during the Closet Scene (III.iv), and Hamlet’s return to Denmark at the hands of the pirates (IV.vii–V.i). First: In Hamlet’s first dialogue with the Ghost (I.v), Shakespeare invites readers familiar with Vergil to recall the meeting of Aeneas with the shade of Anchises in Aeneid VI. Hamlet here confronts an apparition which resembles his dead father, and which claims to be his “fathers spirit” (I.v.9). The Ghost urges Hamlet to a filial duty that it will represent later—in the Closet Scene—as Hamlet’s overriding “purpose” in life (III.iv.111). Considered strictly with reference to the revenge plot, the first conversation between Hamlet and his father’s Ghost is Hamlet’s most consequential dialogue, for it supplies the revenger with his motive. Only the Ghost can persuade Hamlet that the telos, or end of his existence lies in killing Claudius. Conversely, without the Ghost’s information, as well as its injunction to “Revenge” (I.v.25), the prince would have little or no reason for performing an almost certainly suicidal attempt at regicide. In Vergil’s poem, the conversation with the shade of Anchises occupies a comparably important place in the hero’s teleological trajectory. Shortly before this meeting occurs, and at a moment when the hero feels thoroughly oppressed by misfortune, a dream of Anchises appears to to give him “counsel” (“praecepta,” Aen. V, 747).34 The dream directs Aeneas to the underworld, where his last doubts about his future (Aen. VI, 700–703) will be dispelled by the paternal shade that instructs him there in his “destiny” (“fata,” Aen. VI, 759).35 Similarly, in Hamlet, the Ghost’s appearance confirms and seems to explain the earlier promptings of Hamlet’s “propheticke soule” (I.v.41). Its message will elicit a teleological concept of revenge as the fulfillment of a supernaturally imposed task, like that of Vergil’s Aeneas.36 Hamlet’s own implied familiarity with the Aeneid may appear to explain why he is even partly willing to entertain a view of the Ghost, despite the dubiousness of its origins (considered from any Christian standpoint), as a prophetic herald of his own life’s “purpose.”37 Many historicist critics have

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reacted quizzically to this receptiveness on Hamlet’s part. It is now commonly assumed that Hamlet’s early modern audience could not have conceived of any ghost that did not arise—according to various current opinions—“from Purgatory or from Hell.”38 But as a number of scholars have observed, the Ghost’s account of its own condition—“confind to fast in fires, / Till the foule crimes done in my dayes of nature / Are burnt and purg’d away” (I.v.11–13)—closely reprises several elements of a classical, pagan purgatory also known to the Renaissance, one that was located in the underworld described by the shade of Anchises: “Therefore are they schooled with penalties, and for olden sins pay punishment ... from some the stain of guilt is washed away ... or burned out in fire” (Aen. VI, 739–42).39 Of course Hamlet himself is a Christian, and as such regards this ghostly “shape” as a “questionable” one from which to receive prophecies and instructions (I.iv.43). But as the Player’s Scene will suggest, Hamlet is also familiar with Vergil’s preChristian epic, and one way in which a reader of the Aeneid could bring himself to frame the Ghost in his own mind as “honest” (I.v.144)—if only provisionally—is to identify his own role with that of Aeneas, and the Ghost with Anchises’ shade. Second: When the Ghost visits Hamlet for the second time, in the Closet Scene (III, iv), readers who know Vergil may remember the providential machinery that induces the hero to abandon Dido and Carthage in Aeneid IV. In Vergil’s epic, a revelation from the god Mercury sets Aeneas hurriedly packing in pursuit of his divinely ordained future (and leaving the desolate queen to commit suicide). As Shakespeare’s editors have long noted, Hamlet’s comparison of his late father to “the herald Mercury, / New lighted on a [heaven-kissing] hill” (III.iv.58–9) closely recalls Vergil’s image of the messenger-god alighting upon “Atlas, who props heaven on his peak” (“Atlantis ... caelum qui vertice fulcit,” Aen. IV, 247). Less than fifty lines later, the Ghost enters (III.iv.103, s.d.), reminding Hamlet of his “purpose” (III.iv.111) and spurring him on to revenge. Some early readers might actually have envisioned this resurgent Ghost as a figure like Mercury, the last of the gods to whom Hamlet has compared his father in the preceding passage. Certainly the allusion might have cued some readers’ associations between the Ghost’s reappearance and the celestial messenger’s descent in the Aeneid.40 The allusion to Mercury is more than a merely verbal one, since it heralds an action that parallels a pivotal event in Aeneid IV. Much as the Dido episode sets a new course for Vergil’s hero, so the Closet Scene can be regarded as a structural “turning-point” in Hamlet.41 In the Aeneid, Mercury rebukes Aeneas as Jupiter has commanded him to do—“Alas! Of thine own kingdom and fortunes forgetful!” (Aen. IV, 267)—before urging the hero onward to Italy, where his destiny lies. When the Ghost reappears to Hamlet in Gertrude’s closet, the prince does not even need to wait for it to speak to him as the god spoke to Aeneas. It is almost as if the example of Aeneas is already present to Hamlet’s mind, so quickly does he anticipate the Ghost’s mission and confess that he has been remiss in his task: “Doe you not come your tardy sonne to chide, / That lap’st in time and passion lets goe by / Th’important acting of your dread command” (III.iv.107–9).

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Significantly, commentators on Book IV of the Aeneid had moralized the hero’s decisive change in direction as an exemplum of the rejection of worldly attachments.42 Hamlet begins thinking along the same lines immediately after the Ghost’s second visitation, telling his mother to “Repent what’s past, avoyd what is to come,” and to “throwe away the worser part of” her heart “and leave the purer with the other halfe” (III.iv.152, 159–60). At the same time Hamlet himself begins to seem more careless of his mortal life. Third: in Hamlet’s fortuitous homecoming after his interrupted voyage (V.i), one may perceive an allusion to Aeneid I. There, at the outset of Vergil’s epic, the god Neptune saves Aeneas from being shipwrecked by Juno’s plots, and deposits him in Libya under Dido’s care. Toward the end of the Closet Scene in Hamlet, the prince reminds us of the trip “to England” that Claudius has ordained for him (202).43 The misadventures that follow suggest yet another way in which Hamlet’s life may seem to be conforming ever more persuasively to a Vergilian epic teleology. The perilous voyage by water, and the prince’s redemption from its perils, are “romance motifs,”44 intimating a common teleological form for which the first half of the Aeneid itself was a well-known model. Hamlet’s “improbable” deliverance from the designs of a tyrannical enemy reprises that of Aeneas, and can only suggest “a providential explanation.”45 Most critics of Hamlet would agree that if the prince is ever completely reconciled to his revenge, it is only now that he starts conveying this sense of a confirmed vocation, speaking of the providential turn his life seems to have taken (V.ii.7–11, 48), and of God’s “speciall providence” (215–16). Like Aeneas, Hamlet must be saved miraculously from the sea as proof of his peculiar destiny, one appointed by the “divinity that shapes our ends” (10). Accordingly, in his letter to Claudius, Hamlet announces his “suddaine [and more strange] returne” to Denmark (IV.vii.45), and declares—in tones of calculated irony, if not parody—“I am set naked on your kingdom” (42–3). His phrase echoes that of the storm-tossed Aeneas of Book I, who invisibly infiltrates Dido’s palace and then suddenly emerges from his concealment to introduce himself: “I, whom ye seek, am here before you, Aeneas of Troy, snatched from the Libyan waves” (Aen. I, 595–6). Hamlet again recalls this memorable entrance when he steps forward dramatically at Ophelia’s burial, revealing himself to the mourners and proclaiming: “this is I / Hamlet the Dane” (V.i.250–51). Ophelia’s fate resembles Dido’s, at least in one crucial respect; Hamlet’s discovery of the way in which her death has followed upon his own embarkation from Denmark may seem to supply him with one more reason for identifying himself as a new Aeneas. Such an identification would allow Hamlet to believe, for instance, that while he has sacrificed his love—bringing madness and ignominious death to his beloved—he has done so for the sake of an irresistible calling and an inevitable, providential end (cf. Aen. IV, 361). Another way of putting this would be to note that now, more than ever, Hamlet stands in need of justification. He seems to answer this need by

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discovering a new confidence in the righteousness of the Ghost’s cause, which now becomes unequivocally his own. The actions accompanying these three Vergilian allusions in Hamlet all tend toward a common telos: Hamlet’s submission to the Ghost’s vengeful will. Similarly, what links the three episodes in Vergil is their propulsion of the hero toward the realization of a dead father’s prophecy. Perhaps, then, it is partly by recollecting the Aeneid’s teleological form, and thinking that he can identify a form like it in his own experience, that Hamlet finally becomes willing to embrace his revenge as his proper end—even if this means making vengeance the end of life itself. There is nothing very novel in my perception of Hamlet as a character who seeks a teleology in events, and does so by framing them with a familiar concept of teleological form. In the past, many critics have read Hamlet as a work about the hero’s fraught relationship to the conventional, generically prescribed roles that his life requires him to assume; such critics have analyzed the play’s “questioning of the genre of tragedy,” and described the prince as struggling for a form that will be sufficient to embody his vengeful purpose while satisfying his conscience.46 Fewer interpreters, however, have asked what form a prince like Hamlet might plausibly have wanted his life to take. If Hamlet tracks its protagonist’s gradual perception of a teleological form in events, then we must consider what teleology such a character might have desired to find in his own history, or to impart to it in his own thoughts—even to the point of making identifications that to us seem radically partial and incomplete. In fact, the form on which Hamlet settles at last will significantly resemble a teleological form generically common to Vergilian epics, which culminate in virtue’s triumph and the attainment (or at least the promise) of a providential reward. Over many centuries, the vast majority of commentators on the Aeneid have affirmed that Vergil depicts the hero’s victory in Book XII as a providential one, despite the costs that it has incurred to other individuals: to Dido, to the Trojans who are lost along the way, and to the many others who must suffer and die for the sake of Rome’s eventual foundation. Like Aeneas, Hamlet makes other people endure terrible sacrifices for his “cause” (V.ii.344). By killing Polonius he precipitates Ophelia’s madness and death, and this in turn tempts Claudius and Laertes to adopt a course that will bring an agonizing death to Gertrude, whom the Ghost has explicitly enjoined Hamlet to shield from harm. The furious accomplishment of Hamlet’s revenge itself has been said to resemble the ambivalent and problematic conclusion of Aeneid XII, where the enraged Aeneas kills a defeated and submissive Turnus, deaf to the victim’s supplications and intent only on avenging the loss of his friend Pallas.47 But in the katabasis of Aeneid VI (as well as in the ekphrasis of the shield in Aeneid VIII), the poem’s teleological form reveals itself as a conceptual structure extending far forward in time, beyond the troubling narrative abruption of Book XII; it vaults the whole of Roman history and terminates in Vergil’s own age. The peace of Augustus is

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supposed to justify the sacrifice and bloodshed that Vergil has recounted (and will continue to recount in Books VII–XII), as if these were simply a necessary means to the end of establishing Augustan Rome. The shade of Anchises explains how Aeneas, by conquering Italy, will prepare the ground for Rome’s increase and at length for its boundless empire. Throughout the poem Aeneas is not only exalted for the heroic fortitude with which he commits bloody deeds, but also portrayed as a model of pietas, the central Roman virtue combining patriotism, filial piety, and religious duty. At the end of his earthly life he will not die. Instead he will ascend to the skies to be placed—as Jupiter declares—in “the starry heaven” (Aen. I, 259; cf. Aen. XII, 794–5). Of course, Shakespeare’s culture allowed for varying sorts of response to this Vergilian epic teleology. Early modern texts can be critical in many ways of the imperialistic, patriarchal Augustanism that informs the Aeneid’s representations of fate and Roman history.48 Yet the conviction that the Aeneid was, in effect and by design, a providentialist epic, praising Aeneas and Augustus and attributing their triumphs to heaven’s will, was almost universally shared at this time. While Shakespeare may have been aware of the English medieval tradition’s “widespread interest in the counter-tradition of Aeneas the cad and traitor,” along with its “great sympathy for and fascination with Dido,” early modern commentators on the Aeneid overwhelmingly agreed that the poem conveyed a positive image of Aeneas.49 In fact, early modern readers seem likely to have been more impressed than we are by the Aeneid’s justification of its hero. The stellification of Aeneas was especially instrumental to this perception, being undeniably reminiscent—in one way or another—of Christian sanctification. Maffeo Vegio emphasized this final affirmation of the epic’s teleology in an influential Latin sequel to the poem, the “thirteenth book” or Supplement, which some Latin editions of Vergil included, and which was translated and printed as an appendix to both complete sixteenthcentury English versions of the Aeneid. Near the end of Vegio’s text, Jupiter proclaims: ... I the capteine great of Trojans to invest In heaven have now decreed, and sure he shall mee seeming best Increase the number of the Gods, and glad I do agree. Thou what in him is mortall take away, and make him free, And ad him to the mighty starres that shine in lofty skies. Yea, others that with vertue fraught herafter shall arise, And eke themselves adorne with praise eterne not to decay, Fulfilling eke the world with noble deedes of glory gay, Those likewise will I to the skies advance.50

Horatio’s wish that Hamlet may be sung to his “rest” by “flights of Angels” (V.ii.365) suggests a concept of the prince as one of these exemplars of Vergilian pietas, arising to heaven “with vertue fraught” and “adorne[d] with praise eterne,” even as it also evokes his Christian salvation.51

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By the end of the play, Hamlet has begun representing his revenge as an act that can be justified theologically and scripturally: “perfect conscience” (V.ii.67), “speciall providence in the fall of a Sparrowe” (215–16). These utterances, which seem startling on the revenger’s lips, are Christian and not Vergilian; but so are the redemptive vocabularies of those Renaissance epics that were most indebted to the Aeneid’s teleological form, such as Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, or Books I and II of The Faerie Queene. Much like the heroes of those Vergilian epics, Hamlet has framed his own imitation of the violent deeds of Aeneas—a pagan hero—with an explicitly Christian conception of these deeds’ pious motives (“conscience”) and their divine causes (“providence”). To early readers, the identification of a Vergilian teleology in Hamlet’s revenge would have seemed basically consistent with Horatio’s image of the soul’s celestial ascent. The form of the Aeneid supplies Hamlet with an audacious solution to the Renaissance revenger’s basic moral and ideological problem, that of “the classical versus the Christian traditions” and their respective stances on the justification of mortal violence.52 The prince’s humanistic education has prepared him to think in terms of both traditions, as when he first goes to meet the Ghost and invokes the teleology of “fate” (I.iv.81) alongside the more distinctly Christian teleological concept of vocation, “Still am I cald” (84).53 By the end of the play, he has sought to blend pagan and Christian conceptual structures within a teleology that identifies revenge and regicide—if only formally—with the divine election and piously heroic acts of an Aeneas. Other critics have identified Aeneid VI as a relevant intertext for Hamlet’s first interview with the Ghost, pointing out the allusion to the shade of Anchises in Hamlet’s reception of the Ghost’s command to revenge. But these previous readings have stressed the ironic implications of this juxtaposition, reading Hamlet’s end—revenge and death—simply as a tragic conclusion to his history, in stark opposition to the Trojan’s triumphant destiny.54 In fact there is another view of Hamlet in which the prince’s emulation of Aeneas appears more successful, leading to a heroic end, an assurance of providential justification, and a promise of future glory and fame. A partial view to be sure, it is one that many early modern audience members would have been able to conceptualize and to attribute to Hamlet, the character, even if they were unable to affirm it in their own judgments. This is because post-Reformation readers could have recognized a topical urgency in Hamlet’s efforts to justify regicide by yoking it to salvific ends. Some would have been familiar with both Protestant and Catholic justifications for political resistance, and even for regicide if committed by a specially elected agent of providence. A few might have read recent accounts of tyrannicide that were informed by the Christian redemptive teleologies of hagiography, martyrology, and biblical epic. And all must have been quite familiar with another model for sacred violence, the biblical holy war, which was central to Henry V.55 Unlike Henry V or Aeneas, Hamlet wins neither a war nor a royal wife; yet he is granted a warrior’s funeral. It is an honor that confirms the possibility, though not the necessity, of

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identifying Hamlet as a Christian soldier, much like other contemporary Vergilian heroes such as Henry or (despite the even more obvious differences) Spenser’s Redcrosse Knight. Before dying, when Hamlet urges Horatio to tell his “story” (V.ii.354), he does not specify the form of the tale to be told. Asking that his “cause” be reported “a right / To the unsatisfied” (344–5), he seems to be charging his friend simply to make the king’s crimes known and to excuse his own actions as far as possible. Hamlet can scarcely expect Horatio to be so partial a narrator as to give his troubled “story” a truly heroic form, let alone a properly Vergilian teleology ending in a prophesied and providential triumph. And yet Hamlet’s pattern of allusions to this epic form—a pattern constructed partly through the prince’s own partial and contingent perceptions—may imply that such a life, the life of an Aeneas, is the one that Hamlet would most wish to have had. Readers who note Hamlet’s Vergilian allusiveness can plausibly infer that the prince ultimately hopes to be flattered into the shape of Vergil’s pious hero, if not in life, then in death.

Conclusion On the foregoing, admittedly partial view of Hamlet (Q2–F), Shakespeare’s revenger identifies himself as an elect hero, and tries to justify his revenge as a redemptive act, by framing it conceptually with the teleological form of the Aeneid. After Hamlet’s deliverance from the sea, he becomes able to perceive this Vergilian form in events more confidently and distinctly than before. He piously invokes providence, and conscience, in order to affirm his perception to himself, and also in order that others may assent to it and consider him justified. By fulfilling the Ghost’s command, he may seem to have completed a prophetic trajectory resembling that of the Aeneid. And the impression of spiritual confidence that he gives out toward the end of the play might help to persuade Horatio, and us, that Hamlet’s soul has really been rapt into heaven. The identification of Hamlet as a triumphant, “pious” Aeneas—by himself and by others—can thus be considered his life’s final purpose. But a reader’s willingness to assent to this identification, or to consider Hamlet’s purpose successful, will have depended on a number of contingencies. We cannot assume that readers who knew the Aeneid would therefore have seen an invocation of Vergilian epic form as a sufficient justification for behavior like Hamlet’s. Poets had often flattered princes by appealing to the Aeneid’s imperialistic values. The Faerie Queene portrayed Elizabeth I’s reign as a fulfillment of dynastic prophecies, like that received by Aeneas, and identified her enemies as spiteful Junos and Didos. In 1604, the royal entry of King James I was accompanied with fine Vergilian conceits.56 Yet it was clear enough that any prince who became the object of one poet’s epic praises might just as easily be vilified by others as a Juno, a Dido, or a Turnus. By extension, readers of Hamlet with some grasp of ancient

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history might have found themselves pondering the contingencies that informed the writing of epideictic poems such as the Aeneid itself57—or, perhaps, on the places in which Vergil himself had left the epic open to subversive readings, provoking reflection on his own admission of partial views and partisan sympathies into his work’s teleological concept of Roman history. Any reader who had ever sensed a hint of this ambivalence in the Aeneid might have been reminded of its troubling quality in the Player’s Scene, which is where our attention is drawn most explicitly to the prince’s Aeneas act. Hamlet delivers the first part of the Player’s Speech himself; he thus assumes the role of “the narrator, pious Aeneas,” who signifies “filial duty,” and whose example admonishes him to obey the Ghost’s will.58 But in the last part of the Speech (spoken by the Player), this same narrator voices keen doubts about the providentialism that must underlie any Vergilian epic teleology, crying that the gods would have pitied Hecuba “Unlesse things mortall moove them not at all” (II.ii.512). This specter of impassive, callous gods evokes the awful revelation imparted to Aeneas by Venus during the destruction of Troy—that “the gods, the relentless gods” have willed the city’s ruin (Aen. II, 602).59 It may also echo the ambiguous rhetorical question at the beginning of the Aeneid: “Can resentment so fierce dwell in heavenly breasts?” (Aen. I, 11). Vergil implicitly disclaims a literal belief in Homeric myth (the basis for his own fictional accounts of pagan deities such as Juno), but by foregrounding the fictionality of this major narrative element in the Aeneid, he also insinuates that its epic teleology may be arbitrarily imposed on events. The Player’s Speech may have offered the like subversive insights to Hamlet’s readers. It proposes an Epicurean concept of an indifferent heaven, blind to human pain, which recalls the shadow cast by this distressing concept in the Aeneid, and bleakly undercuts the providentialism that will ultimately anchor Hamlet’s hopes for redemption.60 In another way, Hamlet’s concluding scene also threatens to undermine the identification of Hamlet as an Aeneas destined for heaven and eternal fame. Here, as in many other plays by Shakespeare, the end of the dramatic action is also a beginning of narratives. The revenger’s death deprives him of control over the form of his own “story”; and although he has entrusted this “story” to Horatio, we cannot know how it will be told, or how Hamlet’s Danish peers will judge him after the fact. Horatio’s reference to “accidentall judgements, casuall slaughters” (V.ii.387) may imply his critical dissent from “Hamlet’s ... providential interpretation” of his life. Could Horatio mean to betray his friend’s last wishes, and to present the Danish nobles with an account of “disorderly social reality,” rather than redeeming Hamlet’s life by providing it with a teleological form?61 If Horatio were to tell such a Machiavellian “story,” it might obviate all our “optimistic” readings of the play, including the historicist view of Hamlet as a champion of post-Reformation religious resistance as well as my argument about the form of Hamlet’s revenge. But Horatio does not tell his version of events, nor does he render a consistent verdict on Hamlet for posterity. Without one, a reader must remain uncertain whether Horatio and the other Danes will be more likely to

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affirm or to reject Hamlet’s bid for “ideological closure”—just as we must now be unsure whether most early modern readers were inclined to accept it or to dismiss it.62 Because of these contingencies, we cannot be certain about what the tragedy’s Vergilian allusions might have suggested to most readers concerning the form of Hamlet’s life, or the telos of his soul’s flight. The play’s formal allusiveness can be understood as a source of elusiveness. And if the play’s teleology seems most elusive when we confront the work in its material, textual form, then we might legitimately wonder whether Shakespeare’s readers apprehended textuality and literariness themselves as qualities that were potentially inimical to formal stability and poetic affirmations of ideology. 63 Even so, just as we should not hastily assume that the literary Hamlet left readers uniformly skeptical of the revenger’s appeal to a Vergilian epic teleology, so we must beware of facile assumptions about reading’s subversive consequences as we attempt to position Shakespeare’s work socially and politically in relation to his times. History warrants at least a few general inferences concerning the place of Hamlet (Q2–F) in Shakespeare’s culture, and the motives that might have impelled contemporaries to read and admire such a text. As I have been at pains to point out, the formal perceptions discussed above are specifically literary perceptions, likely to have emerged only in the minds of readers who possessed some knowledge of the Aeneid (and perhaps a text in hand). And the kind of literacy that was needed to read Hamlet was broadly—though not exclusively—associated with wealth and status.64 Hamlet’s political and intellectual preoccupations place it in the company of other contemporary texts designed to appeal to a genteel audience. Its theme and style have much in common with those of the “ideological tragedies of learned writers, both courtly and professional,” that flourished in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean literary culture; with its flights of daring speculation and its intensely interrogative mood, Hamlet can even seem akin to closet drama (though without being in any strict sense a closet play).65 Taken together with Gabriel Harvey’s note, these features of the literary Hamlet suggest that this was an instance of the “commercial playwright aspiring to literary status,” catering to the expectations of “an exclusive, educated minority” and leaving a deep impression on some members of this “elite private culture.”66 Hamlet’s allusions to Vergil made flattering advances toward these “wiser” readers of Shakespeare. The text could have indulged their vanity with reminders of the culture that they shared with the play’s princely hero, and that comprised their ostensible distinction as people marked by a superior understanding and sensibility. 67 Those who noted the text’s allusiveness, even if they found no further meaning in it, could have received it as a gratifying tribute to their own literary sophistication. If some readers also associated this consciousness of their own literariness with a sensitivity to formal complexity in plays like Hamlet, then they were taking a modest step toward later views of “literature” as an expression of the complex, puzzling subjectivity that educated and cultivated individuals would attribute to themselves and people like themselves (while denying it to

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others). Nor should we be surprised if the “literary” Hamlet signaled an early phase in the historical convergence between the idea of a literary text and that of the literate consciousness—both of them teeming with partial and contingent perceptions of form, to which the individual mind must precariously struggle to accommodate the objects of experience in their full complexity. For Hamlet himself would become the emblem and archetype of this modern convergence. However, what seems indubitable is that on its first reception, the “literary” Hamlet was already able to intimate a conception of history—and time itself—as inherently multiform, susceptible to an indefinite number of partial representations. The proliferation of partial forms in the text, including forms adumbrated by literary allusions, evokes a vivid impression of temporal contingency through the uncertain deliberations and decisions whereby the prince must evaluate, negotiate with, and navigate among these forms.68 Hence we may be tempted to think of Hamlet as though he were responsible, finally, for the form that his actions assume. Yet as we revisit and reconsider Shakespeare’s text in the ways especially facilitated by literary reception, we may well come to believe that it is the contingency of our individual perceptions, as readers, on which the prince is ultimately forced to depend for the emergence of a redemptive teleology in his life; if we are reading the play, then only we can determine the form of his story. And to recognize this is all but to have arrived at a keen realization of our freedom—as individual readers of history—to form and reform the past, in our own minds, according to our own partial views.

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I should like to thank Stephen Cohen for his editorial assistance, patience, and perseverance, and James P. Bednarz and Robert S. Miola for the time and attention that they generously gave to this essay; I have benefited from their comments. Thanks are also due to Joan Ozark Holmer, Heather James, Bernice W. Kliman, and Peter McCullough, for their encouragement and helpful conversation on Shakespearean and Vergilian subjects, and to Thomas P. Roche, Jr., for directing the dissertation that led me to this topic. Richard Dutton, Licensing, Censorship and Authorship in Early Modern England: Buggeswords (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2000), p. xii. For my emphasis on historical contingency in the reception of poetic forms I am indebted to Jean E. Howard, “The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies,” in Richard Wilson and Richard Dutton (eds), New Historicism and Renaissance Drama (London: Longman, 1992), pp. 19–32 (reprinted from ELR 16 [1986]: 13–43). Here, in one of Shakespearean historicist criticism’s earliest and most sensible manifestoes, Howard advised us to analyze texts “relationally” as “sites where many voices of culture and many systems of intelligibility interact” (p. 29). While Howard acknowledged that authors do often adhere rigorously to received formal conventions (e.g., of genre), at times in the most didactic of ways, she reminded us that the reception of their work is and always was subject to contingent circumstances, since there is after all a “gap between what discourse authorizes and what people do” (p. 32). On the approaches to form staked out by early New Historicist and

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materialist critics, and the retreat from these positions in later historicist and materialist criticism, see Stephen Cohen, “Between Form and Culture: New Historicism and the Promise of a Historical Formalism,” in Mark David Rasmussen (ed.), Renaissance Literature and its Formal Engagements (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 17–41. Douglas Bruster, “The Materiality of Shakespearean Form,” pp. 31–48 in this volume, quoted at p. 33. Bruster convincingly uses the quoted terms to highlight certain “material” aspects of form (ibid.); I find his remarks equally applicable to forms viewed as conceptual structures, emergent in the act of reception. For a relevant discussion of the junctures between materialist and cognitive criticism, see, e.g., Mary Thomas Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), esp. pp. 4–10, 17. Morris Weitz, Hamlet and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964). I take the phrase “teleological form” from Duncan F. Kennedy, “Modern receptions and their interpretative implications,” in Charles Martindale (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Virgil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 38–55, at p. 53. A Vergilian critic might more properly refer to the Aeneid’s “narrative teleology;” but since I am not chiefly interested here in the generic peculiarities of either narrative or drama, I shall avoid reference to “narrative” (except where that is precisely what I mean) and shall instead refer consistently to “teleological form.” See also Duncan F. Kennedy, “Virgilian Epic,” in Martindale (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Virgil, pp. 145–54, at pp. 146–7; both here and in the previously cited passage, Kennedy acknowledges his significant debts to David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Barbara A. Mowat, “The Theater and Literary Culture,” in John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (eds), A New History of Early English Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 213–30, quoted at p. 214. My citations of passages in Hamlet by act, scene, and line number refer to the conflated text in the second Arden edition of Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1982). When quoting Hamlet I generally follow the text of Q2, as reproduced in Paul Bertram and Bernice W. Kliman (eds), The Three-Text Hamlet: Parallel Texts of the First and Second Quartos and First Folio (New York: AMS Press, 1991), and checked against Shakespeare’s Hamlet: The Second Quarto, 1604, Reproduced in facsimile from the copy in the Huntington Library, intro. Oscar James Campbell (San Marino: The Huntington Library, 1964). Square brackets sometimes denote readings that Jenkins substituted or interpolated from F (as in the present quotation, where Jenkins adopts “tale” from F, as opposed to Q2’s less familiar “talke”); at other times they may denote emendations adopted from other modern editions of Q2. Finally, I have left texts unmodernized, except through the substitution of typographical “j” for “i” and “v” for “u” (or vice versa). On the vogue for Trojan subjects at around the time of Hamlet’s composition, see John S.P. Tatlock, “The Siege of Troy in Elizabethan Literature, Especially in Shakespeare and Heywood,” PMLA 30/4 (1915): 673–770. Tatlock does not discuss dramatizations of the narration scene in Aeneid II and III (either Shakespeare’s or, earlier, that of Marlowe in The Tragedie of Dido, Queene of Carthage). See also Andrew Hiscock, “‘What’s Hecuba to him ...’: Trojan Heroes and Rhetorical Selves in Shakespeare’s Hamlet,” in Alan Shepard and Stephen D. Powell (eds), Fantasies of Troy: Classical Tales and the Social Imaginary in

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Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2004), pp. 161–75, at pp. 167–79. On King James VI & I and the Aeneid see T.W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine & Lesse Greeke (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944), vol. 1, p. 550. 9 See Baldwin, vol. 1, esp. pp. 343–4, 400, 405, 436, 446–7, 457 on the place of the Aeneid in sixteenth-century English accounts of the Latin curriculum; cf. vol. 1, pp. 492–3, on the strong likelihood that the school at Stratford followed this curriculum. See also Colin Burrow, “Shakespeare and Humanistic Culture,” in Charles Martindale and A.B. Taylor (eds), Shakespeare and the Classics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 9– 27. 10 According to one recent overview, “Shakespeare is not usefully to be described as a Virgilian poet”; yet this verdict needs to be understood in historically relative terms, meaning only that Shakespeare’s “reading of Virgil did not result in a profound modification of his sensibility and imagination in the way that other books did” (Charles Martindale, “Shakespeare and Virgil,” in Martindale and Taylor, pp. 89–106, quoted at pp. 89–90). Cf. the similarly reticent account in Stuart Gillespie, “Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro),” in Shakespeare’s Books: A Dictionary of Shakespeare Sources (London: Continuum, 2001), pp. 495–506. However (and setting aside all questions about the precise critical force of terms like profound), it is apparent that even the most un-Vergilian of early modern poets could have found strong reasons for alluding deliberately and pointedly to the Aeneid; these included the Aeneid’s historical preeminence among Latin epics, its frequent and overt emulation for political purposes, and the weighty poetic and ideological authority that many contemporaries accorded to Vergil. See Heather James, Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and cf. Patrick Cheney, Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). On Shakespeare and Vergil see also Baldwin, vol. 2, pp. 479–96; John Doebler, “When Troy Fell: Shakespeare’s Iconography of Sorrow and Survival,” Comparative Drama, 19/4 (1980): 321–31; Kenneth Muir, “Four Notes on Hamlet,” The Aligarh Journal of English Studies, 6/2 (1981): 115–21; Barbara J. Bono, Literary Transvaluation: From Vergilian Epic to Shakespearean Tragicomedy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 140–224; Robert S. Miola, “Aeneas and Hamlet,” Classical and Modern Literature, 8/4 (1988): 275–90; Donna B. Hamilton, Virgil and The Tempest: The Politics of Imitation (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1990); Craig Kallendorf, “Introduction,” in Craig Kallendorf (ed.), The Classical Heritage: Vergil (New York: Garland, 1993), pp. 1–20, esp. pp. 11–14; Robert S. Miola, “Vergil in Shakespeare: From Allusion to Imitation,” in Kallendorf (ed.), The Classical Heritage: Vergil, pp. 271–89; James Black, “Hamlet Hears Marlowe; Shakespeare Reads Virgil,” Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme, 18/4 (1994): 17–28; Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, Jonson, Shakespeare & Early Modern Virgil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 194–244; Robin Headlam Wells, Shakespeare on Masculinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 117–43; and Hiscock. 11 James, p. 38 (sounding an early protest against this recent historicist aversion to intertextual and allusive readings of Shakespeare). On the way in which studies of Shakespearean intertextuality have been relegated to a dark, dusty drawer labeled “source study,” see Douglas Bruster, Quoting Shakespeare: Form and Culture in Early Modern Drama (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), pp. 27–36; and for a cogent argument that source study is, in fact, an indispensable critical category (one with an occluded de facto

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relationship to New Historicist practice), cf. Douglas Bruster, Shakespeare and the Question of Culture: Early Modern Literature and the Cultural Turn (New York: Palgrave, 2003), pp. 167–90. On the Suckling portrait see Nigel Wheale, Writing and Society: Literacy, print and politics in Britain 1590–1600 (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 6–8. Major new arguments for the approach to Shakespeare as a self-consciously literary author include Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), and Cheney, especially on Shakespeare’s early reputation as an author of non-dramatic verse. David Scott Kastan, “Plays Into Print: Shakespeare to His Earliest Readers,” in Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer (eds), Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), pp. 23–41, quoted at p. 38; cf. pp. 32–3. In 1599 “1 Henry IV was reissued with Shakespeare’s name added” (ibid., p. 33); on the circumstances see Douglas A. Brooks, From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 74–5. Cf. Sasha Roberts, Reading Shakespeare’s Poems in Early Modern England (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 158, with references. Laurie E. Maguire, Shakespearean suspect texts: The ‘bad’ quartos and their contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 125–35. The English Aeneid of Thomas Phaer and Thomas Twyne was in print throughout the later 1580s, 1590s, and 1600s. Phaer’s initially incomplete translation, as first published in 1558 (with seven books) and then in 1562 (reaching Book X, line 297), had then been completed by Twyne—who first printed the twelve-book version in 1573, and added an English version of Maffeo Vegio’s Supplement (or thirteenth book; see below, p. 159 and n. 50) to his later editions of 1584, 1596, 1600, 1607, and 1620. For details see Thomas Phaer and Thomas Twyne, The Aeneid of Thomas Phaer and Thomas Twyne: A critical edition introducing Renaissance metrical typography, ed. Steven Lally (New York: Garland, 1987), p. lxi. The other complete sixteenth-century translation was the Scots Eneydos of Gavin Douglas, which was printed in London, and which programmatically incorporated English word-forms, so that historically, readers in England must be included in its target audience; see Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, “Richard Carew, William Shakespeare, and the Politics of Translating Virgil in Early Modern England and Scotland,” International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 5/4 (1995): 507–27, esp. n. 36 and refs. Peter W.M. Blayney, “The Publication of Playbooks,” in Cox and Kastan (eds), pp. 383– 422, quoted at p. 415; on libraries, cf. ibid., p. 414. On the market for printed plays, cf. Andrew Murphy, Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 30–32. For “poem” and “author,” see respectively Ham. II.ii.395, 439; I owe this point to Cheney (pp. 26 and 81, n. 2). For uses of the term poem with reference to printed play-texts by John Marston (in 1606) and by John Webster (in 1612), see respectively Brooks, p. 62, and Maguire, p. 156 (where it is suggested that poem may have signified especially the dramatic text to be read, as opposed to the play in performance). However, the phrase “true Drammaticke Poem” for Webster specifically meant a drama adhering to classical laws; see J.E. Spingarn (ed.), Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1908), p. 65. Kastan, “Plays Into Print,” p. 38. Dutton, pp. 105–6; Erne, pp. 226, 260. The full text of Harvey’s note can be found in Hamlet, ed. Jenkins, pp. 573–4 (see also p. 4), and in Hamlet, ed. G. R. Hibbard

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(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 4. It was almost certainly written before 1602, the date of Hamlet’s earliest recorded performance (ibid., p. 3). Some of Harvey’s references to the Aeneid are quoted in Virginia F. Stern, Gabriel Harvey: His Life, Marginalia and Library (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), at pp. 24, 181; cf. ibid., pp. 106–7, 250–51 for other places in which Harvey expresses admiration for Vergil and claims to have been reading his poetry. Dutton, p. 102. Dutton suggests that, more generally, “Shakespeare’s plays have survived in versions that reflect his expectation that they would be read as well as acted” (ibid.). His argument is based partly on a refutation of the common assumption that only a lack of concern with the plays as textual artifacts could have prevented Shakespeare from seeing them personally through the press; instead, Dutton traces this failure to Shakespeare’s idiosyncratically strong company commitments (Dutton, pp. 97–8). For one version of this argument, with a consideration of various hypotheses, see Shakespeare, The First Quarto of Hamlet, ed. Kathleen O. Irace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 7–20. See Giorgio Melchiori, “Hamlet: the Acting Version and the Wiser Sort,” in Thomas Clayton (ed.), The Hamlet First Published (Q1, 1603): Origins, Form, Intertextualities (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), pp. 195–210; Leah Marcus’s chapter, “Bad Taste and Bad Hamlet,” in her Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 132–76; Erne, pp. 234–41; and Jesse Lander, Inventing Polemic: Religion, Print, and Literary Culture in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), chap. 3. Dutton, pp. 105–6. For simplicity’s sake I shall ordinarily discuss both “literary” texts as if they constituted one Hamlet, quoting and citing Q2 for the most part, but with occasional reference to F. Clearly, however, the difference between the two longer texts is one of many contingencies that could provide a basis for conflicting perceptions of the “literary” Hamlet’s teleological form. Books I, II, IV, and VI were evidently best known to Shakespeare; see Hamilton, p. 17, with references. They are also the portions of the Aeneid that were most often translated into English during this period. By 1584, when Shakespeare was still a youth, Books II and IV had been published in four different English versions (beginning with the Earl of Surrey’s, which appeared posthumously in 1554 and in 1557; see Henry Howard, Poems, ed. Emrys Jones [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964], p. 132). Books I and III had received three different renderings apiece (including Richard Stanyhurst’s translation of Books I–IV in 1583). Of course, at this time it was also possible to read the whole of the Aeneid in English, both in the Douglas version and in that of Phaer and Twyne. Hamlet, ed. Jenkins, p. 573. In the play’s opening speech, Don Andrea’s Ghost refers to Elysium and to “gates of horn,” alluding explicitly to the hero’s katabasis or descent to the underworld in Book VI of the Aeneid—much as the Ghost in Hamlet recalls Aeneid VI when giving its own account of the afterlife (see below, pp. 155–6). See Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, ed. Philip Edwards (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959), I.i.73, 82, with notes and references. Concerning Hamlet, Jenkins notes, “Shakespeare sheds the classical allusions customary with Kyd and others” (Hamlet, ed. Jenkins, note to I.v.3). I do not think this suggests that Shakespearean audiences and readers who were versed in the Aeneid would be any less able to relate Hamlet to their memories of the poem—though it is significant that

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Shakespeare’s Ghost, more than Kyd’s, leaves its pedigree open to speculation. (It might of course be conjectured that allusions to the Aeneid in Shakespeare’s Hamlet are derivative from an earlier pattern of Vergilian allusion in the Ur-Hamlet, of which Kyd is likely to have been the author. Even if this were the case, Shakespeare should presumably be credited with an awareness of their presence.) See esp. James, pp. 42–84; and Nicholas R. Moschovakis, “‘Irreligious Piety’: Persecution as Pagan Anachronism in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 534 (2002): 460–86, at pp. 463–4. Henry V’s relationship to the Aeneid—like Hamlet’s—has not been sufficiently studied. Like Hamlet, Henry V is concerned with dynastic legitimation and perpetuation, the rise and fall of empires, and the subjection of romantic to political (and putatively divine) ends. All of these concepts are of course implicated in the Aeneid’s teleological form, and in that of early modern “Vergilian” epics. The two plays are nearly contemporary—Hamlet may well have been “written in or about the year 1600” (Hamlet, ed. Hibbard, p. 5); a “probable date” for Henry V is 1599 (King Henry V, ed. T.W. Craik [London: Routledge, 1995], p. 3)—and both stage encounters between the “antithetical values” of Homeric or Vergilian antiquity and of Christian culture, values that only Henry, as both an epic and a comic hero, is able to “synthesise” successfully (Paul A. Cantor, Shakespeare: Hamlet [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989], p. 18). On Henry V’s thematic and structural debts as well as some of its particular allusions to the Aeneid, see further Bono, pp. 143–4; King Henry V, ed. Craik, p. 234 (note to III.vi.33–4); and Scott E. Goins, “Pain and Authority in the Aeneid and Henry V,” Classical and Modern Literature, 15/4 (1995): 367–74, with references. In John H. Betts, “Classical Allusions in Shakespeare’s Henry V With Special Reference to Virgil,” Greece & Rome, 2nd Ser., 15/2 (1968): 147–63, Vergil’s Georgics are mainly at issue. See esp. Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy: the Influence of Seneca (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 32–67. Dutton, p. 109. Much, though not all, of the primary evidence cited in this section has been discussed in Miola, “Aeneas and Hamlet.” For an earlier, perceptive parallel between Hamlet and Aeneas cf. Reuben Brower, Hero and Saint: Shakespeare and the Graeco-Roman Heroic Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 86; some fertile suggestions also appear in Hiscock, 172–3. For further discussion and references see below, note 36. Except where otherwise noted, I quote the Aeneid in both Latin and English from the Loeb edition of Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I–VI, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967). A possible objection to the Ghost’s identification as an imitation of the shade of Anchises is that, in Book VI of the Aeneid, Aeneas must voyage under the earth to meet the shade, while in Hamlet the Ghost walks the earth. But this difference does not signify a departure from Vergil so much as a consolidation of different passages from the Aeneid, in which the hero sees a vision of his dead father above the ground before going on a journey beneath it to seek his shade. Thus, in Book V of the Aeneid, when Aeneas is done with his early misadventures and his erratic sojourn in Carthage (but before his arrival in Italy and his visit to the underworld), he sees a miraculous apparition in “the likeness of his father Anchises” (Aen. V, 722–3). This vision in Book V directs Aeneas to Cumae, where in Book VI, with the Sibyl’s help, he will learn his fate and confirm his providential vocation. The Ghost in Act I of Hamlet imitates this Vergilian apparition, first by appearing at midnight, and again

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by vanishing at the approach of dawn (Miola, “Aeneas and Hamlet,” pp. 278–9; cf. Aen. V, 720–23, 738–9, and Hamlet, I.i.152–61; I.v.58–9, 88–90). More important, Shakespeare’s Ghost comes at a time when Hamlet is similarly close to despair. The mood of Vergil’s hero at the corresponding point in Book V of the Aeneid—he is “stunned” after the Trojan women have sabotaged the ships, able to do nothing but revolve the “mighty cares” in his breast “now this way, now that,” and feels “torn asunder in soul amid all his cares” (Aen. V, 700–702, 720)—may be recollected specifically in Hamlet’s anguished first soliloquy (I.ii.129ff.). For earlier comparisons between the Ghost’s function in Hamlet and that of the shade of Anchises in the Aeneid, see Miola, “Aeneas and Hamlet,” pp. 278–81; Anthony DiMatteo, “Hamlet as Fable: Reconstructing a Lost Code of Meaning,” Connotations, 6/2 (1996/97): 158–79, at 168–9, 173–5; and A.D. Nuttall, “Hamlet: Conversations With the Dead,” in E.A.J. Honigmann (ed.), British Academy Shakespeare Lectures 1980–89 (New York Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 213–29, at p. 220. All of these accounts differ from mine in their emphases; see below, note 54. In the French narrative source for the Hamlet story, although no Ghost appears, the dead father’s “shade” (“ombre;” cf. Lat. umbra) is mentioned twice; see Arthur P. Stabler, “King Hamlet’s Ghost in Belleforest?” PMLA, 77/1 (1962): 18–20. Protestants, in principle at least, ought to have viewed the Ghost with suspicion, while legitimate doubts could have led Catholics to mistrust the apparition and its message. See, e.g., Roland Mushat Frye, The Renaissance Hamlet: Issues and Responses in 1600 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 14–22, with references. Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 240. Cf. ibid., pp. 230–44; Anthony Low, “Hamlet and the Ghost of Purgatory: Intimations of Killing the Father,” English Literary Renaissance, 29/1 (1999): 443–67, esp. 453, with references; and John Freeman, “This Side of Purgatory: Ghostly Fathers and the Recusant Legacy in Hamlet,” in Dennis Taylor and David Beauregard (eds), Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern England (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), pp. 222–59. See A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: Hamlet, ed. Horace Howard Furness (1877; New York: Dover, 1963), note to I.v.12–13 (including a quotation from Gavin Douglas’s version of the Vergilian passage that may seem to be recalled in Hamlet: “Till the mony vices / Contrakkid in the corpis be done away / And purgit”). Cf. John Erskine Hankins, Backgrounds to Shakespeare’s Thought (Hamden: Archon Press, 1978), pp. 53–4, 58–9, with references; Hamlet, ed. Jenkins, pp. 453, note to I.v.10–13; Frye, p. 16; and Miola, “Aeneas and Hamlet,” pp. 279–80, with references. The verbal echo is cited in Hamlet, ed. Jenkins, note to III.iv.59. Other supporting parallels may be cited. When Hamlet sees the Ghost, his “bedded haire like life in excrements / Start up and stand on end” (121–2, in Gertrude’s account); similarly, Vergil describes how Aeneas’s “hair stood up in terror” in response to Mercury’s first appearance (“arrectaeque horrore comae,” Aen. IV, 280). Again, Hamlet’s first impulse on seeing the Ghost here is to appeal to his guardian angels for protection: “Save me and hover ore me with your wings / You heavenly gards” (III.iv.104). In view of the allusion already made, Hamlet’s reference to winged guardian angels may glance at the descent of Mercury “with winged feet” to Carthage (Aen. IV, 259). Finally, it is Mercury who tells Aeneas, “A fickle and changeful thing is woman ever” (“varium et mutabile simper / femina,” Aen. IV, 569–70); considering the strong emphasis that Vergil’s lineation places on the word woman (“femina”), a

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comparison may be justified with Hamlet’s early outcry, “frailty thy name is woman” (Ham., I.ii.146). On the widespread epic topos of the divine messenger, see Thomas M. Greene, The Descent From Heaven: A Study in Epic Continuity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963). R.A. Foakes, Shakespeare and Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 125–31, quoted at p. 107; cf. R.A. Foakes, Hamlet Versus Lear: Cultural Politics and Shakespeare’s Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 166–7, and Erne, p. 236. Don Cameron Allen, Mysteriously Meant: The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), pp. 135–62; Bono, pp. 46–7; Michael Murrin, The Allegorical Epic: Essays in its Rise and Decline (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 46, 198; Christopher Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the Aeneid from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 116. It is possible to make another intertextual association—provocative, if somewhat more tenuous—between the Closet Scene and the descent of Venus, narrated by Aeneas in Book II of the Aeneid. During the destruction of Troy, Aeneas was prepared to wreak revenge on the cowering Helen; his divine mother appeared to him, directing him instead to flee the burning city. It has been suggested that the Ghost is like Venus: “Aeneas obeys his mother, embarking that night on the long voyage to Italy; Hamlet obeys his father—and stepfather— setting forth that night on a ship bound for England” (Elizabeth N. Watson, “Old King, New King, Eclipsed Sons, and Abandoned Altars in Hamlet,” Sixteenth Century Journal, 35/2 [2004]: 475–91, at p. 489). Alternatively, “Gertrude ... collapses Helen and Venus, the culpable woman and the mother/goddess reprehending her son” (ibid., p. 488). Michael L. Hays, Shakespearean Tragedy as Chivalric Romance: Rethinking Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2003), p. 135. On sea travel in romances generally, see Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 106–36. Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 227. Sinfield’s reading of Hamlet’s providentialism is forceful, and acknowledges Hamlet’s perception of a teleological form in his experience, but not how this form might be conceptualized as having a triumphant and redemptive end. Margaret W. Ferguson, “Hamlet: letters and spirits,” in Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (eds), Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (New York: Methuen, 1985), pp. 292–309, quoted at p. 298. Readings of Hamlet as a formally self-reflexive work—which are far too numerous to be reviewed here—have by and large tended to concentrate specifically on dramatic conventions and metatheatrical allusions, as opposed to more conceptual formal categories (e.g., teleology). As a result, formalist critics have tended to stress the implications of specifically dramatic allusions in Hamlet, while setting aside possible associations with narrative and other nondramatic works. See, e.g., Mark Rose, “Hamlet and the Shape of Revenge,” English Literary Renaissance, 1 (1971): 132–43; William Empson, Essays on Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 79–92; and Graham Bradshaw, Shakespeare’s Scepticism (Sussex: Harvester, 1987), pp. 95–125.

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47 Miola, “Vergil in Shakespeare,” p. 284; and DiMatteo, p. 175. For alternative parallels with the savage wrath that Aeneas demonstrates in Book X of Vergil’s epic, see Miola, “Aeneas and Hamlet,” pp. 289–90. 48 Quint, p. 11; and R. Malcolm Smuts, Culture and Power in England, 1585–1685 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), p. 60. On Shakespeare’s critical posture toward Vergilian ideology in his plays about antiquity, see James. 49 Craig Kallendorf, “Historicizing the ‘Harvard School’: Pessimistic Readings of the Aeneid in Italian Renaissance Scholarship,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 99 (1999): 391 –403, with references. 50 Phaer and Twyne, ed. Lally, pp. 315–16. Vegio’s Supplementum was appended to multiple English editions of the Latin text; see Tudeau-Clayton, Jonson, Shakespeare & Early Modern Virgil, p. 25; and Tudeau-Clayton, “Supplementing the Aeneid in Early Modern England: Translation, Imitation, Commentary,” International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 4/4 (1998): 507–25, n. 5. The sequel’s wide dissemination in England had resulted from its inclusion in earlier, continental editions: “by 1513 ... almost every major edition of Vergil included Vegio’s supplement” (Charles S. Ross, “Maffeo Vegio’s ‘schort Cristyn wark,’ with a Note on the Thirteenth Book in Early Editions of Virgil,” Modern Philology, 78/3 [1981]: 215–26, quoted at 217). 51 On Christian depictions of the soul’s flight to heaven in early modern culture, see Frye, pp. 270–77. In the lines from Twyne’s version of Vegio, quoted above, Jove is responding to Venus’s plea for her son—“even ripe by this / Aeneas vertue longes to dwell above in lasting blis”—and a marginal note, the only one supplied for the passage, reads: “Verteous deedes make men immortal” (Phaer and Twyne, ed. Lally, p. 316). Twyne thus seems to minimize the distinction between Vergilian stellification and Christian sanctification, allowing his readers all the more easily to assimilate the two (whereas Vegio’s original, Latin text was not so clearly allegorical; see Maffeo Vegio, Short Epics, ed. and trans. Michael C.J. Putnam with James Hankins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. xiii–xviii). Cf. Tudeau-Clayton, “Supplementing the Aeneid,” on Christian implications in Gavin Douglas’s translation of the Supplement (which was included with his version of the Aeneid). 52 Cantor, p. 29; cf. pp. 32–64, and pp. 6–12 on Christian epic. See also, e.g., Brower, pp. 277–316; and R.A. Foakes, “Hamlet’s Neglect of Revenge,” in Arthur F. Kinney (ed.), Hamlet: New Critical Essays (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 85–99. 53 Cf. Robert Watson, The Rest is Silence: Death as Annihilation in Renaissance Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 85. 54 Thus Miola sees a “contrast” between the “confidence, purpose, and vision” gained by Aeneas in the underworld and the “poignant existential uncertainty” felt by Hamlet after hearing the Ghost’s injunction to revenge (“Aeneas and Hamlet,” p. 281). While I am indebted to Miola’s reading on many points, I differ from him here, finding that the Ghost’s intimation of a Vergilian teleological form in Hamlet’s life may seem to give Hamlet hope that his end itself will be as triumphant as an epic hero’s. DiMatteo’s reading is more tendentious than Miola’s, and to my mind far less persuasive in its account of literary allusion. However, DiMatteo anticipates one of my claims, that the memory of Aeneid VI could seem to motivate Hamlet’s own projection of a providentialist teleology onto his future history—though DiMatteo’s reading is even less open than Miola’s to the possibility that an audience might affirm the analogy between Hamlet and Aeneas; instead, DiMatteo insists on the “stark contrast” between them (p. 168).

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55 On Hamlet and justifications for tyrannicide, see, e.g., Frye, pp. 22–4, 28–30, 38–75, 259– 68, with references; Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Renaissance Politics (London: Thomson Learning, 2004), pp. 2–3, 92–7, with references; and cf. Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 16–24, on the relevant analogies between Hamlet’s experience and those of Elizabethan religious dissidents. The invocation of teleologies from hagiography and martyrology in accounts of regicide can be seen in, e.g., Juan de Mariana’s account of King Henri III’s assassination; for discussion see Frye, pp. 58–60; and Susan Doran, “The Politics of Renaissance Europe,” in Andrew Hadfield and Paul Hammond (eds), Shakespeare and Renaissance Europe (London: Thomson Learning, 2005), pp. 21–52, at pp. 37–8. Biblical epic was employed in the 1570s by the French Protestant poet, Salluste du Bartas, to suggest the justifiability of tyrannicide in La Judit; see Frye, p. 191. This work on Judith’s assassination of Holofernes was translated into English at least twice by 1600; John Harington praised it in a note to his translation of Ariosto, published in 1591 (see Anne Lake Prescott, “The Reception of du Bartas in England,” Studies in the Renaissance, 15 [1968]: 161, 167). For holy war in Shakespeare see Steven Marx, “Holy War in Henry V,” Shakespeare Survey, 48 (1995): 85–97. 56 The new king was flattered on this occasion with an archway bearing lines from the imperial prophecy in Book VI of the Aeneid, along with other Augustan emblems that evoked the Roman empire’s translatio or transference westward from Rome (James, pp. 18–20, with references). 57 Shakespeare suggested a critical view of this partisanship in Antony and Cleopatra, in which the protagonists anticipate, and preemptively critique, the providentialist narrative into which Vergil will inscribe them as defeated antagonists. Their opposition to Octavian mounts a proleptic struggle against the Aeneid’s arbitrary authority, contesting and, in some ways, resisting its representation of the Augustan monarchy as Roman history’s teleological fulfillment; see esp. Linda Charnes, Notorious Identity: Materializing the Subject in Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 106–35, and James, pp. 119–50. (For a different but complementary point of view, cf. Bono, p. 219.) 58 Harry Levin, The Question of Hamlet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 147. Cf. Miola, “Vergil in Shakespeare,” pp. 281–4, with references. 59 Miola has noted, as well, that this line “recalls several desperate prayers of the Aeneid” (“Aeneas and Hamlet,” pp. 282–3, and p. 283, n. 21 [citing Brower, p. 292]). 60 The Player’s Speech may be thought to resemble early modern closet dramas, such as those of Fulke Greville, which took advantage of the medium’s privacy to engage in transgressive speculations on the absence of God from secular history. See Una Ellis-Fermor, The Jacobean Drama: An Interpretation, 4th edn (New York: Vintage, 1964), pp. 191–200; cf. Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, 2nd edn (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), pp. 130–31. Certainly the Speech (unlike Hamlet as a whole) may be seen as a specimen of closet drama, or something quite like it, having been rarely or never performed (II, ii, 430–33); see further below, note 65. 61 Karin S. Coddon, “‘Such strange desygns’: Madness, Subjectivity, and Treason in Hamlet and Elizabethan Culture,” in Susan Zimmermann (ed.), Shakespeare’s Tragedies (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), pp. 84–108, quoted at p. 102. 62 Ibid.

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63 This speculation rests on the difference between the temporal experience of performance and the spatial extension of texts. Consider the contrast between the complaint about uncaring gods in the Player’s Speech and the order for Hamlet’s military funeral. Whether we encounter the play in a text or on stage, both passages are parts of Hamlet. But in the literary Hamlet they coexist in a particular, material and synchronic sense—simultaneously, and to this extent equally. At the end of the text, the Speech is not a fading memory, as it is for a theatrical audience watching the end of the play; instead, as a physical place in the text, it exists concurrently with every other part of Hamlet. The reader may revisit it at will, though this contingent act should threaten to discompose the order of events and the teleological form of Hamlet’s progress toward his end. In this sense, an exclamation in the Player’s Scene may seem to carry equal weight with the end of the text, when Fortinbras orders martial music to honor Hamlet’s corpse. 64 See Wheale, esp. pp. 11, 23, 31. 65 Albert H. Tricomi, Anticourt Drama in England 1603–1642 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), pp. xii; cf. pp. 53–92. Marta Straznicky defines early modern English “closet drama” as a “tradition ... stemming from the Greek and Roman classics and including academic translations, plays of moral or religious instruction, and the topical political drama written by the Sidney circle” (Privacy, Playreading, and Women’s Closet Drama, 1550–1700 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004], p. 12). Hamlet is not such a play; nor is it “nearly indistinguishable from a closet play,” like some other works that professional dramatists saw through the press at around this time (ibid., p. 54, discussing John Marston’s The Wonder of Women Or The Tragedie of Sophonisba [1606]). Yet the publication of early modern plays with such an ambiguous affiliation to closet drama supports the hypothesis that Shakespeare conceived of Hamlet as an amphibious work, with qualities ranging across the whole continuum between theatrical and literary values. On the fluidity of this continuum in closet plays proper, cf. Jonas Barish, “Language for the Study; Language for the Stage,” in A.L. Magnusson and C.E. McGee (eds), The Elizabethan Theatre XII: Papers given at the Twelfth International Conference on Elizabethan Theatre ... in July 1987 (Toronto: P.D. Meany, 1993), pp. 19–43. The closest approach to purely literary values in Hamlet is found in the Player’s Speech, which, like true closet drama, “prefers language that does not imply or promote presentness of action. It chooses narration rather than direct dramatization for anything involving violence, bloodshed, or death. It ponders what is past, or yet to come; what is passing concerns it less” (ibid., p. 43). 66 Straznicky, pp. 12, 11. 67 Of course, this is not necessarily to say that Shakespeare would have endorsed the judgments of this part of his audience. For a contrary opinion (stated in terms that anticipate some of my remarks on the Player’s Speech), cf. John Buxton, Elizabethan Taste (London: Macmillan, 1965), pp. 314–16. 68 On how Hamlet creates such effects by continually enjoining its audience to question what events may forebode, yet withholding closure, perhaps the classic formalist study is Stephen Booth, “On the Value of Hamlet,” in Norman Rabkin (ed.), Reinterpretations of Elizabethan Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), pp. 136–76. On the way in which other generic forms besides tragedy are partly manifested in Hamlet and affect its audience’s expectations, see, e.g., Susan Snyder, The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare’s Tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); and Louise George Clubb, “The Arts of Genre: Torrismondo and Hamlet,” ELH, 47

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(1980): 657–69. Shakespeare’s allusiveness, like his use of the interrogative mood and of mingled and confused conventions drawn from different genres, conduces to our sense of contingency in events.

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Chapter 7

Formalism and the Problem of History: Sonnets, Sequence, and the Relativity of Linear Time R.L. Kesler

I Formalism has had a long and checkered history in western literary theory, especially in the twentieth century, in which formalist movements associated with either positivist objectivity or trans-historical abstractions of universalized human experience and cognition have been countered by more situated discursive methodologies in which considerations of context and social power have had privilege. The attempt to define and track formal elements in literary works has often taken the form of an attempt to distinguish them as separate and independent systems, as in Eliot’s “ideal order” of masterpieces against which new works were to be tested, Šklovskij’s concept of “literariness,” or the New Critics’ metaphors of poems as objects or icons, interpretable through some presumed commonality of perception. The harshest attacks on this position, perhaps, fell on Šklovskij, who, in the wake of the Russian revolution, had chosen a particularly unfortunate time to be making such an argument, but the attack, for denying the engagement of literature in politics and therefore the active processes of history, has come in conjunction with a wider theoretical critique on the underpinnings of the formalist position that was both technical and epistemological, which has resonated from that time to the present.1 In 1930, in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, V.N. Vološinov launched a broader attack on Saussure’s entire model of language, and in particular, on what he understood to be its concept of synchronicity, which he argued artificially hypostatized language so as to reveal its systemic and formal characteristics. In treating language as an “isolated, dead utterance,” Vološinov argued, Saussure had effectively eviscerated its involvement in politics, history, and life. Vološinov’s argument was that language was constituted not on the level of system but of utterance, and not in abstract relations but in the contest over form and meaning involved in every conversation. In making this argument, he

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sought to shift the ground of discussion from langue to parole, from syntax to pragmatics and discourse, and from form to politics and history. In his statement that “language is ideology,” he marked the opposite edge of a territory that extended from Šklovskij’s formalism, and would define a middle ground, not only for Bakhtin and the Prague school, but, in a later revolt against formalism, for Foucault, Derrida, and many others for whom politics, power, and indeterminacy were central concerns.2 In some respects, though, his critique was not a fair one, since, though defining the site of exchange as contestatory, it did not further define the territory or means of the contest—exactly those elements that Saussure’s attention to form and structure had attempted to identify. In addition, Jakobson and Tynjanov had already argued in 1925 that pure synchronicity was a fiction, opening the door to the Prague school’s later formation of theories of systemic change. The point was arguably implicit in Saussure’s theory of diachronic linguistics, in which he had posited, beyond a notion of form, a notion of function. In noting that variants in language acquired systemic importance only as they gained acceptance, Saussure acknowledged both the possibility of systemic change and its relation to functionality. While not abandoning the notion that the systemic operation of language could be understood, if through the misrecognition of a heuristically invented object, la langue, he acknowledged the basic premise of Vološinov’s position, that although language functions by the recognition of what we expect to see, it is therefore always simultaneously implicated in the misrecognition of what is actually there (we always interpret the new event through the lens of the absent past).3 The juncture between recognition and misrecognition is the slippage between system and function and the juncture between form and history. But it is a juncture in which neither term remains exactly stable, and neither term functions with transparency. For Vološinov, and perhaps for ourselves as we reflect on any conversation, the resulting uncertainties are aspects of every act of interpretation and ascription of meaning, and they are only aggravated by differences in cultural context or time. In theory, fields such as anthropology, which intentionally straddle cultural boundaries, seem to carry a double burden, but aspire as well to the double validation of accurately tracking an unfamiliar terrain while remaining credible within the conventions of their own. The difficulty, of course, lies in determining whether the apparently successful interpretation is not simply a particularly convincing or useful misrecognition. A similar problem affects the practice of history, whether formalist or otherwise: given the constructed or discursive nature of knowledge, what determines the parameters of our own historical practice? If we attempt to overcome the objectifications of formalist isolation through location of form within the context of history, what stabilizes our notion of history, as we construct it through the reifications of its forms, its presumed conventions of time, order, and evidence?4 Have we really rescued our ideas of “form” by “historicizing” them, or merely deferred our positivism to another level, the level on which our notions of history are formulated? And if to advance an

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interpretation at all, we suspend the skepticism that these examples of earlier iterations of formalist and structuralist thoughts seem to invite, at what point do we reintroduce them to our analysis?

II Heuristics is the last refuge of both the recalcitrant skeptic and the indefatigable optimist, allowing the acceptance of the discursive frames of formalism, history, or both, with the hope that the benefits derived from their operation will outweigh the consequences of their assumptions. In thinking about the early modern period, for instance, it is possible to define and track some formal categories and theorize about their importance for a concept of history, if, as a premise, a familiar modern narrative of sequential history is assumed. For instance, we might take as an example the sonnet, one of the most formally distinct categories of literary production that emerges in England at a historical moment in which its formal characteristics appear to play very identifiable and historically situated roles. In specific, though sonnets begin with continental models developed considerably earlier, in England, they emerge in the developing environment of commercial printing with which they share some interesting similarities. On one hand, printing expanded the market for literacy and written products, and the burgeoning production of sonnets helped to fill that demand. In addition, sonnets, while compact enough to engage the attention of an emerging readership, were also excellent platforms for conceptual tours de force, demonstrating the capacities of the new medium to not only encode language, but reveal its formal features and open them to comparison and analysis. Finally, the sonnet as a compact form was well positioned to emphasize the physicality of the printed word and its role in establishing a recontextualization of language in the apparently neutral and floating context of the page. This latter feature is particularly important in thinking about the way in which many forms of language, now readily accessible in print, could operate outside the physical and institutional boundaries of their origins and be, in various ways, recombined in the equivalency of their printed form, on, for instance, the desk of the scholar, on which liturgical, scientific, and literary texts might all share the same physical status. The very principal of the sonnet’s highly determined formal structure, to allow the recombination of existing elements (end rhymes, for instance, or metrical units, or thematic materials) in the formation of new poems, thus analogically replicates on a medial level both the more physical recombination of movable type in print, and the discursive recombination of discourse patterns, taken from other institutional settings, for service on the page. In their short but explosive development as a major English poetic form in the latter half of the sixteenth century, sonnets also participated in the formation of another distinctly modern development. The following half-century would see

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René Descartes argue for the solution to any problem through the process of its repetitive division into its component parts. In contrast to the larger cyclical forms that had preceded them, such as the medieval romances, the liturgy, or the extended syncretic and metonymic system of medieval philosophy, the sonnets operated not by agglutinating representations into an extended and inclusive system often including incommensurate parts, but through exactly the reverse, through the division of representation into formally identical and distinct units of limited size and indefinite repeatability. Rather than the presumed integration of their subject matter in a single, unified system (Scripture, creation, the book of nature) that representation captured from several angles, the sonnets offered a method, a single repeatable formal procedure through which experience could be broken down into a series of moments, logical or emotional problems, or conundrums, that could all be addressed by the same means. Even, then, when presented as a sequence, the sonnets presented themselves as isolating and analytical, dissolving the integration of their represented world in favor of the integrity of their analysis, and reinforcing, on yet another level, the abstract and neutral context of the page as a frame for understanding removed from ties to any immediate or determinate stabilizing institutional context. In this respect, they typified the contemporaneous shift from the memorization and mastery of extensive systems of metonymically connected bodies of thought to the emergence of a single “methods,” individual techniques of navigation designed to negotiate a growing body of textual information too vast to be assimilated by traditional integrative means, a movement that Walter Ong traces, in Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, from Melanchthon.5 Like sonnets, “methods” were defined by their portability and consistency, and their applicability to a range of potential subjects and circumstances, substituting for extensive and inclusive knowledge of materials the more specialized and focused knowledge of a single analytical technique that functioned, in a proto-Cartesian way, by the disintegrating division of the large into the manageably small. By arguing that a vast array of thematic materials (the nominal subject matter of so many individual sonnets and sequences) could be understood, or at least reprocessed into variants on the same technical and formal theme, sonnets stood as a paragon of the methodological argument—that all subjects could be resolved, through an explicit statement of problem and resolution, by the application of the same compact analytical pattern: fourteen lines, one hundred and forty syllables, rhymed iambic pentameter. And because such “methods” emphasized not the location of their practitioners as embedded nodes within a vast system of knowledge and linked discourses, defined by their relations within them, but rather their identities as practitioners of the single consistent method through which the elements of those vast narrative systems were broken down into formally identical, bite-sized units, they defined their users not by their membership and location in those contexts, but by their separation and freedom

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from them, their objectivity (and subjectivity) as consistent masters of a consistent method. Elsewhere I have argued for some aspects of the consequences of this realignment. One is typified by its effects on gender representation: if the nominal subject of a sequence of poems is a woman, the woman herself, as Nancy Vickers has argued, is never fully represented, but only glimpsed synecdochally as a collection of parts. Yet since the argumentative process of the sonnet is typically to present a problem and then resolve it through its argumentative method, as it breaks down the conceptual integration of the woman, it reinforces the efficiency of the method, and, by extension, the integrity of its practitioner, the speaking subject, who is typically male. Since the “problem” the poem is typically resolving is often an emotional one, and one attached to the idea of the woman and his involvement with her, which varies in intensity, relation, and level of success, the repetitive ability of sonnet after sonnet to resolve this problem in a contained and logical statement reifies not only the subject’s procedural integrity, but his freedom, on the level of logic, statement, and form, from exactly those perplexing attachments. As the poem, through its containment and its distinctness as surrounded by the white border of the page, separates language from attachment to a spoken social context, so also it projects a speaker who thinks and resolves by method, free of attachment to women, relationships, or any particular situation, and stands outside as an observer rather than a participant. That subject is free to recombine and reformulate, a master of all he represents, at least in the act of representing it.6

III Continuous history is the indispensable correlative of the founding function of the subject: the guarantee that everything that has eluded him may be restored to him; the certainty that time will disperse nothing without restoring it in a reconstituted unity; the promise that one day the subject—in the form of historical consciousness—will once again be able to appropriate, to bring back under his sway, all those things that are kept at a distance by difference, and find in them what might be called his abode. Making historical analysis the discourse of the continuous and making human consciousness the original subject of all historical development and all action are the two sides of the same system of thought.7

While it is worth considering Michel Foucault’s more generalized association of the appearance of this kind of autonomous subjectivity to the idea of a sequential history, a “formalist” analysis of the sonnet perhaps has some further linkages to reveal. In thinking to this point about the “methodical” characteristics of the sonnet and the autonomous subject, we have had no reason to think at all in terms of temporality. Indeed, to the extent that a poem such as the sonnet defines its subject by the application of a method, that definition lies in the moment of

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application and is strengthened by its repetition—a kind of steady state of being in which the integrity of the subject is reflected back to the subject. As many theorists have argued over the last half-century, however, that reflection backwards itself contains a rupture, and, in that the process of the sonnet, once complete, is a past reflection, it is always escaping the plenitude of the relationship it seems to promise, exactly that falling out of the plenitude of the present which leads into Vološinov’s (and Derrida’s) diachronic, and into something like “history.” There are, however, several aspects of the sonnet’s form and its historical placement that are worth further consideration in this respect. The aspects of form, again, are the sonnet’s closure, formal stability, and repeatability. The aspect of its historical placement in the emerging economies of print is its persistence as record, multiply held in many locations. The rapid proliferation of the sonnet and its utility as a “method” depended on its application to a broad range of materials. This very profusion of applications, however, took on a new kind of significance in the environment supported by print, since each new publication took its place in the increasingly crowded field established by its predecessors, who, in their printed form, all remained “present” to its arrival. In manuscript culture, or in the vaster systems of oral tradition that preceded and surrounded manuscript culture, items were to a much greater extent preserved only as they were valued as necessary. In oral culture, as Jakobson and Tynjanov argued long ago and many others have argued since, items endure only as they are formalized in oral narratives and repeated over generations through a considerable expenditure of social energy.8 If items are not repeated, they are forgotten. In manuscript culture, items had greater independent stability, but were preserved over time and distributed only if they were valued enough to be recopied, re-read, and accompanied by further oral transmission. As Jesse Gellrich and others have argued, such a system was both flexible and persistent, capable of encoding and transmitting critical information while constantly editing and absorbing and assimilating necessary changes.9 For instance, in medieval church drama or liturgy, the emphasis was not on neologism, but the yearly repetition of a consistent message, the constant reinforcement of remembered themes. But that was not the case with sonnets, which, as harbingers of the new regime of printed records, occupied a curious and somewhat contradictory position, structured in incompatible demands. On one hand, the cheap production of multiple copies of even insignificant books ensured their longevity and stability, precluding the mnemonic function of oral repetition. On the other, the economics of print in an emerging capitalist economy demanded continued and expanded production, thus requiring more “original” texts as the market became saturated with copies of older works. To copy the work of another, once the highest form of tribute as it validated the original as worthy of preservation, became “imitation” just as that term began to acquire the pejorative denotation of lacking wit or originality. As more sonnets and sonnet sequences came to be published, in other

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words, sonnets entered into something very like the productive economics of twentieth century mass production, in which producers, facing a market increasingly saturated with essentially equivalent products, were forced to define their productions with signature markers of novelty and difference. In this respect, sonnets entered a familiar modern productive cycle: to be marketable as proven products, sonnets had to be recognizable, and therefore substantially “the same” (formal continuity), while to stimulate the rationale for another purchase, they had to be recognizably different from what consumers already owned. The result, in economic terms, was the institution of a system of product differentiation and incremental change that defined both producers and consumers against the context of a recorded past (what they already knew), and set the stage for the emergence of the future (the succession of new productions). To understand this better, we will consider a set of four sonnets, beginning with Spenser’s Amoretti 15: Ye tradefull merchants, that with weary toyle Do seeke most pretious things to make your gain, And both the Indias of their treasures spoile, What needeth you to seek so farre in vaine? For loe my love doth in her selfe containe All this world’s riches that may farre be found. If saphyres, loe her eyes be saphyres plaine; If rubies, loe her lips be rubies sound; If pearls, her teeth be pearls both pure and round; If yvorie, her forhead yvory weene; If gold, her locks are finest gold on ground; If silver, her faire hands are silver sheene. But that which fairest is, but few behold: Her mind, adornd with vertues manifold.10

Spenser’s sonnet, even though it is the first of the sequence presented here, is a fairly late work that includes a number of signature innovations, notably its integration, in the Petrarchan context, of images of trade and Protestant pragmatism. It is also a tour de force of conventional techniques, and encapsulating many of the arguments made above. It is, in fact, a paragon of the duality of the sonnet form in that it preserves its ties to the medieval analogical construction of the unified world (microcosm/macrocosm), while at the same time, through its persistent repetition of comparisons, participates in the analytical division of its object (here “the woman”) into components, and the projection of a speaking subject who not only dismantles that object, but acquires power and integrity through its sleight-of-hand reassembly in its ending trope of transcendence.11 Though complex in all these ways, however, it serves here as an example of a kind of baseline of standard sonnet form based upon an affirmative comparative structure.

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Consider now this second example, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease hath all too short a date; Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimmed; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed: But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st, Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st. So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.12

There are many respects in which this poem is less complicated than Spenser’s, but there is one major respect in which it is far more sophisticated in that it operates, in effect, as two sonnets simultaneously, one of which is present and explicit, the second of which is absent and implied, though perhaps equally critical to the meaning. The second, virtual sonnet is Spenser’s, or, more properly, the aggregate of conventional sonnets of which Spenser’s is only our chosen example. It is this convention that is both invoked and rejected in the first line, since the speaker raises the possibility of unfolding a sonnet based upon this convention only to reject it in favor of an extension of the convention that supersedes it at every point, praising the lover not by alleging her equivalence to each item of comparison, but her superiority to them at every point. With that superiority, of course, the speaker confirms his own superiority as well, not in replicating a familiar cliché, but in superseding it as well by the surplus value generated through each stage of comparison. While this tactic is nominally placed in the service of allowing the assignation of a greater level of value than would conventionally be allowed to the lady, the real beneficiary is, of course, the poem, since it is the poem (and its author) who transcend cliché through this maneuver and secure a level of notoriety and recognition through the novelty of innovation (it is, after all, the poem, and not the lady, that is remembered). The crucial point here, however, is that this second example depends, in a far more explicit way, on the existence of the first, or some other poem like it: there can be no superseding of an initial comparison without the convention of an initial comparison to supersede. In her very provocative study of the relationships between form, innovation, and temporality in the sonnet’s predecessors, Marianne Shapiro makes the important point that negation, as we find it here in this example, is always ancillary, and always metonymic (always referring back to its positive term):

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Since the negative entails, or includes, the positive term of an opposition (such as any of the fundamental Petrarchan ones), since the negative term of an opposition necessarily makes reference to the positive term, there being no negatives in nature (whereas the positive term only implies or makes covert reference to its negative opposite), the positive is included in the negative; the latter is a specified absence of the former. This obligatory, overt inclusion of the positive in the expression of the negative is what renders the negative a metonymy of the positive and demonstrates the ultimately inclusional nature of the metonymy.13

One might, in fact, argue further that while a positive term can function as a naming and thus, by privileging presence and analogy, appear independent, a negation requires syntax and grammatical relation, tying it to its positive pair and to a metonymic linkage to absence and what is not there. While in this respect it only makes explicit relations underlying all instances of language, it ties negation far more explicitly to the diachronic and history.14 In this case, it is the requisite reference to the past “presence” of the affirmative term (the convention of simple comparison) that generates an explicit reference to time. In a field crowded with competition, this poem, then, achieves distinction by taking the idea of comparison this a second level and in doing so establishes itself as innovative, but also enters more explicitly into the field of “history,” since it distances itself by its form from the recorded instances of the conventions that have preceded it, and, perhaps in a way distinct from what had occurred before, defined them, by its annunciation of this innovative present, more clearly as a superseded “past.” This tactic created new possibilities for a form that was perhaps reaching the limits of its extensibility, but also made explicit the entry into a progression that would lead, inevitably, to the sonnet’s decline in this period, since it undermined the functional credibility of the older form. In invoking the conventional formulation of the sonnet only to reject it as inadequate, Shakespeare was simultaneously announcing and hastening its decline into cliché. The next example, also by Shakespeare, demonstrates a further position in this movement. Where Sonnet 18 had countered cliché with relatively gentle inversion and distance, Sonnet 130 extends that distance into explicit parody and burlesque: My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun— Coral is far more red than her lips’ red— If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun— If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head: I have seen roses damasked, red and white, But no such roses see I in her cheeks, And in some perfumes is there more delight Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. I love to hear her speak, yet well I know

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That music hath a far more pleasing sound. I grant I never saw a goddess go; My mistress when she walks treads on the ground. And yet by heav’n I think my love as rare As any she belied with false compare.

This poem extends the rejection of comparison as simple equivalency beyond supplement to inversion and denial, rejecting, in parallel sequence, every possibility of comparison, while still effecting the traditional movement towards transcendence in the final couplet. The result is to create a striking pattern of antithesis, arrayed against the pattern it draws from, builds upon, and rejects, but with the additional consequence of discrediting far more completely the functionality of that earlier pattern to generate subsequent unambiguous and “serious” deployments. In the final stages of this sequence of logical developments, the extension of the form comes at the expense of the destruction of its base (a pattern recapitulated, as I have argued elsewhere, in Jacobean tragedy15). With these movements, all predicated on the need to further define possibilities for innovation (and therefore “meaning” and individuality) against the collapse of meaning into the cliché of extant records, the sonnet as a form generates a formal progression that defines itself, diachronically, as a conceptual sequence in which new terms depend upon the stability of their predecessors but participate in their extinction, or rather redefine their functionality in terms of a new kind of tradition, extending backwards from the present. Such developments foreground the wit of the producer who defies cliché with successful neologism, but they place increasingly great demands on every subsequent position in the sequence. Consider, then, finally, this example of the final major extension of the sonnet tradition in this period: Batter my heart, three-personed God; for You As Yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend; That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new. I, like an usurped town, to another due, Labor to admit You, but O, to no end: Reason, Your viceroy in me, me should defend, But is captived, and proves weak or untrue. Yet dearly I love You, and would be loved fain, But am betrothed unto Your enemy. Divorce me, untie or break that knot again; Take me to You, imprison me, for I, Except You enthrall me, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste, except You ravish me.16

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Donne’s Holy Sonnet 14, finally, resuscitates the whole trope of the sonnet, not by playing within the rules of this entire system of romantic comparisons, but by modifying both its formal pattern and comparative argumentative structure in far more radical ways. It does so first by challenging the rhythmic conventions of its predecessors by inverting the relationship between regularity and substitution, and second by repositioning the entire notion of comparison to function at a completely different discursive level. Rather than invoking comparison as a trope within a single contained discourse (the convention of courtly love, or, in Spenser’s extension, its expansion to include mercantilism) and deploying it repetitively as an internal element within the argumentative structure (on the “line level” in which individual comparisons are made in successive parts of a larger construction), Donne shifts the level of comparison to the level of the framing metaphors that form the constructive premise of the whole poem (and to a large extent, the entire sequence of poems) by effecting a radically “inappropriate” and blatantly transgressive linking of discursive tracks (religious experience, violent sexuality, inversion of gendered positions) normally separated by institutional boundaries. In doing so, Donne completes the process initiated by the decontextualizing properties of print (the location of different discursive modes in the single collocation of the scholar’s desk), while developing as well the fundamental properties of metaphor to establish linkages across syntactic or logical categories (a metaphor that does not assert difference is merely an identity—unless, of course, one is as clever as Gertrude Stein) in radically destabilizing ways. Donne’s tactics focus other currents of his period in a profound way, but they also create, by the standards of twentieth century critics beginning with Eliot, a spectacular poetic success.17 While allowing Donne to avoid the collapsed clichés of simple romantic love and “appropriate” comparison (clichés he had already superseded through the reverse tactic of applying explicitly religious imagery in his love poetry), this maneuver extends the sonnet form through a much more radical transformation that others would find hard to follow. The point of this tracking of the modifications of form is not to posit a particular causality among these specific poems, or even to place them as individual instances in a particular temporal sequence, although in a general sense this might not be particularly difficult to do. It is rather to note their logical sequence and the sense that each depends upon the conceptual premise represented by its predecessor while simultaneously compromising its viability, and to argue that the development of this set of variations is a consequence of the formal compactness, closure, and proliferation of the poems themselves, their formal characteristics, when considered in the “historical” circumstances of their production, not as single works, but as participants in a system of production that imposes certain conditions upon their functions—conditions in which temporality (and therefore “history”) begins to perform a different role. It is also to argue that, given those formal characteristics as a premise, the development of these

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variants is neither accidental, nor merely ingenious, but a necessary consequence of their form in the specific circumstance of the relocation of representation into the emergent medium and economy of print. It is to argue a role for understanding form as linearity and causality, but it is also to argue, not just for the explanatory power of linear history, but for a way of understanding the circumstances of its foundation. It explains this history, in other words, because it has this history to explain.

IV To understand this last point more fully, however, and to enable our return to a reconsideration of the heuristic bracketing of “history” with which we began, it is worth considering further how the representational apparatus of print may have structured the perception of time by returning to a few key points. The kind of pattern noted above, in which one style of speaking distinguishes itself against another it displaces, of course, happens all the time in the verbal structure of social circumstances that are primarily auditory or oral or are in other ways ephemeral. William Labov’s seminal study Language in the Inner City, for instance, documents the rapidity with which similar modifications of form have been made in more contemporary circumstances in a single conversation to negotiate power relations in urban street gangs, and contemporary mass culture is saturated with similar examples.18 On one hand, printed materials, for their readers, emphasized the rapidity of change for the reasons indicated above, because change was foregrounded as a signature characteristic rather than the stability of repetition foregrounded in more ritualized and repetitive oral or ceremonial forms which might easily contain change without presenting it as the defining functional characteristic. On the other, print also impeded change by pacing the development of its market. One could publish the satire at the beginning of the market, but it would be unlikely to function as a satire for audiences who were not already highly aware of the conventions it lampooned (for a parallel case, consider the relative fates of Titus Andronicus, a satire produced before its public was fully saturated in the conventions of revenge tragedy, and The Spanish Tragedy, which appeared, in later years, to function somewhat unintentionally as a satire to a public that was.) The other crucial difference between these environments, of course, is the changed formal status of their products. In the spoken environment, even the rapid deployment of morphological changes functions primarily as a situational trope. It can serve as a marker of individuality in a moment, as Shapiro argues for the sestina, and function again in a later or different circumstance because its prior use has largely evanesced, unless it has reached canonical proportions.19 The published sonnet, however, persists, and the development of its form can be undertaken precisely because of the documentary record that surrounds it and stabilizes the position of all of its predecessors, forming, in addition, the

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possibility of a “history,” which can then be assembled to trace its developments and to construct an explanation of their importance. Forms such as the sonnets, or the commercial dramas, which similarly repackaged the integrated or amassed forms of older cultural settings into the commodified compartments of their regular and structured forms marked most clearly by closure into marketable units, not only set in motion patterns of incremental formal change based on product differentiation and the need for signature neologism, but left a record of those changes as they occurred. That record not only created the basis for tracking a developmental history, but provided the instances for thinking about change in the form of a causality—an explanation of the linkages, such as that given above, based upon the logic of their formal development from one stage to the next. They provided the conceptual base, in other words, for a model of causal change and causal history, even though, in a formal sense, the formation of such histories per se would not occur until considerably later. In the early modern period, the emergence of both print and commercial theatre marks the development as well of a capitalist economy based on trade, the abstraction of wealth as capital, and most of all, the necessary role of investment. Investment, of course, is the surrendering of assets now in the hope of a higher future return, based on the prediction of a series of events that will lead to an expected result. As the appearance of a ghost in the first scene of a revenge tragedy presages the death of the revenging hero in the closing scene three hours later to the theatre audience steeped in revenge convention, so the investor predicts the return of money after a predicted linkage of intervening events. Sonnets, drama, and their patterns of development not only participate in the formation of this emerging social regime, but model aspects of its operation and its necessary way of thinking about change, order, and time. In this respect, they are far more than mere pastimes or entertainments: they are the conceptual laboratories in which new narratives of understanding can be both developed and disseminated. When models of history later begin to describe change as an ordered sequence of causes and effects, they make explicit the patterns of understanding long at work in both the thematics and functional structures of these literary forms.

V Returning to the complexities of the relationship between history and form with which this discussion began, it is now perhaps possible to infer some of the ways in which the contextualizing of notions of form within a concept of history cannot be regarded as a seamless or transparent project. In the above analysis, a way of thinking about the consequences of an instance of “form” contextualized within a particular historical moment was advanced, based on the assumption that notions about sequential history common in our own time could be assumed. Yet part of

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what that very argument suggested was ways in which the relocation of representational forms such as the sonnet in the historical circumstances of sixteenth-century England produced their development in such a way as to establish a relevance for that very notion of sequential history as a mode of explanation. They in effect not only created sequences modeling sequential change that can be productively explained by such a historical notion, but also represent a kind of larger social development that requires such a pattern of explanation. In essence, they produce (eventually) the possibility of analytical tools adequate to the explanation of their own circumstances. They explain form, but only because they are produced as form, and genealogically related as parts of the same contingent process. Understood in this way, sonnets as a set of formal developments help to document, if they did not more materially contribute to, the very circumstances through which notions of sequence and causality become central to the functioning of that culture, and to the formation of the conceptual apparatus through which it will eventually seek to understand its own operations. There is a rather obvious way in which this structure of operations is circular, since it seeks to use the concept of history that derives from the alleged operation of its forms in order to explain the operation of those forms it is alleging. And yet, one might argue further, as many did during the debates over structuralism in the 1970s, that that apparent solipsism is simply an inevitable consequence of the linguistic formulation of thought: we think through the tools available to us to explain the operation of those tools. We think of “history,” therefore, in the pattern most suited to what we most need to understand—the operation of our own culture and the forms, structures, and patterns that define it. That heuristic is perhaps inescapable, and only truly problematic if we lose sight of its highly contingent nature and begin to assign to it a universality or truth value in excess of its purpose and utility. It may serve us well, but only in a very limited way does that make it right. It may be well suited to purpose, but only if we keep that purpose— and its limitations—firmly in sight. At other points, it may serve only as an obstruction. The emergence of the circumstances for imagining something like modern notions of sequential and linear history in the sixteenth century are contemporaneous with the voyages of discovery and emergence of modern nation-states and the narratives that would come to both document and legitimate them. By some recent accounts, one such voyage by Sir Francis Drake extended as far north on the Pacific coast of the Americas to what is now the border between British Columbia and Alaska. With Drake’s contacts and those of other Europeans along this coast, this region entered the narrative of European linear history.20 In the early 1990s, this region would again become the battleground for two very different notions of history and patterns of historical narratives, as land claims advanced by the Gitxsan and Wet’suet’en peoples of this region went to court in what became known as the Delgamuukw’ case. The trial began with the

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unusual and extensive public presentation of the adwaak and kungax, traditional oral narratives of these peoples, the method that had long been used to establish their occupation of their territories and negotiate their relations with others in the region. In his judgment at the end of the trial, Judge Allan MacEachern dismissed the oral narratives as unconvincing and irrelevant, and commented that, before contact, these people had no history and no civilization. Demonstrating his mastery of the written traditions of his own people, he quoted Hobbes in describing their lives as “nasty, brutish, and short.”21 In a system constituted to recognize and validate its own concepts of history, their accounts remained invisible, or, at best, inscrutable and ineffective. By the end of the decade, however, MacEachern’s ruling had been overturned by the Supreme Court of Canada, which argued that oral tradition had status in Canadian courts, though it did not precisely define its form, or specify what that status is. The practical results of this judgment are still in doubt, but the judgment itself returns attention to the question of purpose and the heuristics of both history and form. At issue is not only the form of historical accounts and their relationship to different infrastructures of formulation and preservation, but the incommensurate objectives of both histories and negotiation in some interactions. If the end of any society’s understanding of form and history is to order and interpret its own operation or enforce its operation on others, its operation within the solipsism of its own assumptions is perhaps efficient if not justified. If its purpose is to better understand that system and the consequences of those assumptions more completely (what we claim to do), or to effect a more functional and reciprocal relationship with those who form their understandings through other means (that which perhaps we ought to do), a more circumspect approach is best—one in which heuristics are not naturalized but remembered for what they are, and within which we show a willingness to hear more than the sound of our own voice.

Notes 1

2 3

For one account of the struggles between Šklovskij and Trotsky in particular, see Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism: History–Doctrine, 3rd edn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), pp. 99–117. V.N. Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I.R. Titunik (New York: Seminar Press, 1973), esp. pp. 45–82. Jurij Tynjanov and Roman Jakobson, “Problems in the Study of Literature and Language,” trans. Herbert Eagle, in Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska (eds) Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1978), pp. 79–81; Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin, ed. Charles Bally, Albert Sechehaye, and Albert Reidlinger (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), esp. pp. 71–100, 168–73.

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5 6 7 8

9 10

11 12 13 14

15

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For an extended modern investigation of the relationship between formalism, history, and narrative, see Hayden White, Metahistory: the Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); and White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). For an equally extended investigation tracing these relationships back to their western origins in Aristotle and Augustine, see Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlan, Kathleen Blamey, and David Pellauer (3 vols, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984–1990). Walter Ong, S.J., Ramus, Method and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958). R.L. Kesler, “The Idealization of Women in the Renaissance: Morphology and Change in Three Poetic Texts,” MOSAIC, 23/2 (1990): 107–26. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), p. 12. Pëtr Bogatyrëv and Roman Jakobson, “Folklore as a Special Form of Creativity,” trans. Manfred Jacobson, in The Prague School: Selected Writings, 1929–1946, ed. Peter Steiner (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), pp. 34–46. Jesse Gellrich, The Idea of the Book in the Middle Ages: Language Theory, Mythology, and Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). Edmund Spenser, “Amoretti 15,” in The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin Greenlaw, et al. (9 vols, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1947), vol. 7, pt. 2, p. 201. For a more detailed consideration of this poem, see Kesler, “Idealization.” William Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Stephen Booth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). Marianne Shapiro, Hieroglyph of Time: The Petrarchan Sestina (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), p. 24. A further pursuit of this point, based on the exposition of these categories in Roman Jakobson’s extensions of Saussure in the aphasia articles that influenced a generation of theorists, lies beyond the scope of this article. See Roman Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,” in Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language, 2nd edn (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), pp. 69–95. Another way to look at this distinction is to see naming as “analogue” (always composed of quantities or positive terms that may be presented as an unordered collection), and negation as “digital” (composed of contrasting pairs, and therefore necessarily systemic), though this identification obscures somewhat the linkage of negation to temporality. R.L. Kesler, “Subjectivity, Time and Gender in Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, and Othello,” in Viviana Comensoli and Anne Russell (eds), Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), pp. 114–32. John Donne, “Holy Sonnet XIV,” in Herbert J.C. Grierson (ed.), The Poems of John Donne (2 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), vol. 2, p. 219. T.S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” in Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1932), pp. 281–91.

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18 William Labov, Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972). 19 See Shapiro, Hieroglyph of Time, p. 25. 20 Samuel Bawlf, The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake, 1577–1580 (Vancouver: Douglas & MacIntyre, 2003). 21 Stan Persky, Commentary, in Delgamuukw: the Supreme Court of Canada Decision on Aboriginal Title (Vancouver: Greystone, 1998), p. 8.

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Chapter 8

Teaching Shakespeare and the Uses of Historical Formalism Mary Janell Metzger

Recently, critics have begun to explore the neglect of form within the field of English Studies as a consequence of the widespread practice of New Historicism. In doing so, writers like those represented in this volume have been overwhelmingly concerned with the effects of New Historicism upon the understanding of scholars in the field. In this essay I take up the problem of New Historical practice and its neglect of form within the context of the classroom, where, I will argue, in conjunction with the effects of legislated standards of achievement and the increasing monopolization of the media, it has had a significant effect not only on students’ learning but on their perception of the very nature of learning itself. The story is my own. But in the process of telling it, I hope to show that whether it is a matter of critiquing and correcting the excesses of New Historicism, reinventing if not recuperating access to ethical agency by way of form, or considering the effects of doing either on the nature of our work, our students’ experience of learning is no less important than our own. In them we can begin to discern the effects of our work and its success in offering an ethical alternative to the shifting yet recurrent divisions between historical and formal approaches to literary representation.

I When I entered the profession, the advantages of New Historicism for teaching seemed, if anything, richer than I could possibly hope for or do justice to within the constraints of quarters and semesters. Like the best of my own teachers, I sought to help my students understand Shakespeare not as the receptacle of transcendent aesthetic or fixed historical truths, but as part and parcel of culture—both Shakespeare’s and their own. The excitement of such pedagogy lay in the possibility of developing an understanding of works of the imagination as actors in historical and social dramas. The charge was both ethical and deeply pleasurable:

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by locating Shakespeare’s plays within a context of cultural production we both recovered our interpretive power from strict formalism and explored the force of such production for our understanding of our own historical and nonetheless immediate lives. Thus, like many of my peers, I asked my students to read Shakespeare’s plays with and against many non-literary texts such as travel narratives, sermons, pamphlets, paintings, and emblem books. In the early 1990s students were quite receptive to such reading strategies, coming as they did from high school classrooms in which literature was often treated in purely formal or otherwise reductive terms. It was during these early years of teaching that I began to try to teach The Merchant of Venice within a New Historical framework. At the time I was teaching deep in the Bible Belt and simultaneously moving within an especially vibrant Jewish community. My motives were then, like now, hardly pure and if conscious, admittedly indeterminate in their effects. I was thinking a great deal about fundamentalism of many kinds and often found myself resisting its institutionalization in both substantial and reactive ways. In teaching The Merchant then I wanted to help my students begin to see Shakespeare’s play not as a pure vehicle of ideology—whatever their response to its representations of anti-Semitism—but as a significant instance within a long history of religio-political discourse. Our reading often included excerpts from Augustine’s Confessions and Maimonides’ The Guide for the Perplexed, Erasmus and Luther’s Discourse on Free Will, Luther’s On Jews and Their Lies, and accounts of the Reconquest, Inquisition, and establishment of the Pure Blood Laws. In addition, we read first-person descriptions of medieval and early modern Jewish persecution, narratives of early modern English Jews’ history, and contemporary Protestant uses of Hebrew history and texts, and we reviewed the play’s reception over the years. In short, I sought to help my students situate Shakespeare’s work as a conflict-ridden discourse whose meaning could only be understood through its relation to other competing and affirming discourses and the forms of knowledge and power those make possible. The effect of this work was mixed. Much as I had, my students often felt liberated by the sense that they were no longer bound to belief in transcendent or motiveless literary creation. Their interest in the possibilities for reading Shakespeare within the context of larger cultural movements was ignited. Gone was any space for ignoring the historical nature of the play’s representation of Jews and Christians or lapsing into unselfconscious apologies for oppression as an unavoidable feature of a distant age. Further, the stronger students seemed to rise to the challenge of the argument that what should take the place of the old formalism was not just a new set of interpretive codes but a much more dynamic and highly charged form of social exchange that demanded engagement with a culture’s wide-ranging discourses. Students were clearly invigorated by the possibilities of reading The Merchant as a problem rather than an answer. Yet every time I taught The Merchant I would get a number of papers which seemed to defy the work of the course. The writers of these papers were not

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formalist holdouts or reactionary ideologues aimed at preserving a transcendent Shakespeare or Renaissance. Neither were they left-wing critics of Shakespeare as a force of hegemonic culture. No, these writers undertook New Historical practice with enthusiasm, situated the play in relation to other texts drawn from and about the period, and worked with a clear understanding of the premise of literary discourse as a product of cultural negotiation. Yet the arguments would be boldly sexist, racist, or anti-Semitic. In short, these students used New Historical methodologies and Shakespeare’s play as a means of advancing fundamentalist ideologies that left me swearing off teaching The Merchant. For a long time, I’m ashamed to say, though these instances troubled me, I wrote them off as failures of intelligence and skill. Such students didn’t mean what they wrote: they simply couldn’t connect the dots effectively in Shakespeare’s text, those of the other writers they cited, or in their own minds and writing. That is, they aimed for something complex and resonant with the text’s cultural and linguistic tensions, but their own abilities simply forced them back upon absolutes. Then I had a student I’ll call Nathan.1 By this time, I had left the Deep South and settled in the West where my students bring a complete absence of religious experience as often as fundamentalist Christianity with them into the classroom. Nathan, with his dramatic piercings and command of the Bible, intrigued me from the start. His rigorous questions appeared to indicate an incisive and ambitious intellect, and because he often wanted to discuss issues beyond the scope of our planned class sessions, he made use of my office hours more than any other student. I found myself feeding him texts, ideas, and challenges on a regular basis. He seemed to be nothing if not hungry for understanding. Then he wrote an essay for me on The Merchant and Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta. Nathan’s essay began with a description and analysis of The Dirge of Moses Remos, a fifteenth-century Jew’s raging lament, written in the face of imminent execution for refusal to convert. In this instance and throughout the essay, Nathan made clear his understanding of the long and specific history of Jewish persecution at the hands of Christians that preceded Shakespeare’s Merchant. Further, Nathan situated that history within the context of struggle between early modern Christians over the nature and meaning of Christian theology, a framework for analyzing The Merchant I have employed myself. Drawing upon the debate between Erasmus and Luther and select examples from the plays themselves, however, Nathan read Shakespeare’s and Marlowe’s respective representations of Shylock and Barabas as examples of a Christian discourse which, given its assumptions about Christians’ covenant with God, celebrates anti-Semitism as a scourge of God precipitated by Jews’ rejection of Jesus as Messiah. “As Moses Remos explains,” Nathan argued, finding in Remos a figure of all Jews’ rejection of the Christian Messiah, “it is the difference in perspectives on salvation that entails the binary of righteousness/unrighteousness from which stems Christian persecution of the Jews.” Collapsing contexts and ignoring the form of Remos’s dying insistence on

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his God, Nathan concluded that the Jews themselves offer the justifying narrative for their own oppression at Christian hands: “One need only read the Pentateuch to find that much of Jewish persecution stems from breaking covenantal agreement with God. The Jews, by rejecting the ways of Yahweh and rebelling from their covenant with God, allowed themselves to be handed over to destruction by other nations.” Reading Nathan’s work I was struck by his ability to accurately represent fundamentalist Christian arguments for the persecution of Jews even as he overlooked competing Christian theological injunctions against the judgment and persecution of others found in the texts we read (not least the play itself). The problem for me was that, of course, Nathan was more than capable of representing the perspective of early modern anti-Semites. He shared their views. But my New Historical pedagogy had clearly failed. Despite my attempt to situate The Merchant within a context of competing and complex discourses, Nathan was inured to such complexity because he was prepared to read any representation in ideological terms which admitted no tension. That is to say, so useful to him was the premise of our analyses that discursive power and knowledge are constitutive of “truth,” that he could see in Shakespeare’s play nothing more than an expression of the “truth” that early modern Jews rejected Jesus in full knowledge of the punitive consequences of that choice. Prepared by his own absolutism and, as I shall also argue, an education and media that reward reductive arguments, he found in our ideological analysis of Shakespeare and Marlowe’s plays a ready vehicle for his fearful anti-Semitism. Clearly, Nathan is far from alone among students in his weakness for absolutes. Other, more liberal students have occasionally produced equally narrow if more palatable sympathetic readings of Marlowe and Shakespeare’s representation of religious difference. But until Nathan came along, I saw these instances, if less disturbing than explicitly racist and sexist versions, as similar failures of individual literacy rather than pedagogy. Nathan’s clarity and rhetorical force helped me recognize my part in these instances. Just as the constraining practices of old style formalism emerged from an institutional affirmation that consolidated power by excluding alternatives, New Historicism has similarly become the reigning critical and pedagogical orthodoxy. This orthodoxy affirms itself by rejecting (in practice, if not in theory) its critical other—the formal properties of texts—in the rush to determine ideological content. But what is effectively abandoned in such a practice, students like Nathan reveal, is the very multivocality and complexity (of text and reading) that originally made New Historicism such a compelling critical turn. In this way, the liberating insight gives way to orthodoxy; and if a loss of critical complexity is the result, it is my generation of critics and teachers that is responsible. Just as earlier critics’ enthusiasm for formalism appears in retrospect so clearly a flight from the pressures of social history, so too the historicist quest for ideological “keys,” whether orthodox or subversive (much like the critical

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schools that house them), may always be, the more and less sophisticated Nathans of the world teach me, necessarily limiting.

II Despite my sense of dismay, there is no use for blame but surely plenty for understanding. Attempting to comprehend the ways in which such limits become de rigueur has led me to believe that the longstanding debates about New Historicism and its ethical charge may be illuminated by a close consideration of not only my own pedagogical practice but debates about the study and teaching of literature in general. Unfortunately, for my students and for us all, the forces of absolutism are in high gear at present. Thus, the institutionalization of New Historicism within which I struggle intersects for students with two movements, alluded to earlier, that shape their ability to undertake the work of interpretation at all. The first is an educational culture of achievement, most visibly evidenced by high stakes testing. The second is the increasingly monopolistic nature of the media. Both movements are rooted in a belief in the essentially commodified and eternally contemporaneous nature of learning and collective memory. In this way, as Geoffrey Hartman explains, the sense of the past as pluralistic and diverse is overcome by a “self-consuming present.” This state is one in which the past is lost or subsumed by “a present with very little presence beyond the spotlight moment of its occurrence.”2 History and its partner, the arts, become tools of “achievement” and its master, socioeconomic power, in search of an ever receding “security.” The rewards for such reductive practices are, admittedly, hard to resist, especially given the widespread rhetoric of fear that marks the discourse of the media and educational reform. Fewer and fewer students who enter my classroom remain unmarked by these movements. Legislation at both the national and local levels aimed at the “accountability” of public education makes sure of that by establishing high stakes testing as the principal measure of student learning. Elementary and high schools respond, under threat of financial retribution, by standardizing the curriculum for test-taking success. Students consequently learn that test-taking strategies and correct answers constitute the most valuable educational currency. At the same time, an increasingly global and yet shrinking media ownership affirms an impersonal, corporate, and highly nationalistic form of public memory—the official history that surrounds us despite growing cynicism toward all forms of official information. For scholars and teachers of literature, these movements raise problems of ethical and aesthetic practice: what is the nature and value of our work? In terms of New Historicism and the promise of historical formalism, the question motivates arguments for loosening the oppositional grip of New Historicism’s anti-formalist origins. Stephen Cohen makes this case when he suggests the mediating and hence fruitful function of historical formalism for literary scholars. Seeking to recuperate

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the socially productive and thus ethical charge of New Historicism, Cohen seeks to “[treat] every text as a complex and unique interaction of historically specific formal and contextual ideologies” by “accounting for the literary text’s relative autonomy from its informing discourses and rooting any consequent subversive potential not (as in the Marxist model) in post-facto ideological analysis but in audience expectation and its frustration and complication.”3 The appeal is to a reconsideration of the “relative” independence of literary texts via form, not in opposition to history or the ideological force of specific non-literary discourses, but as a means of recovering the dialectical and thus progressive potential of literary studies. Cohen’s frustration with New Historical practice seeks something Foucault himself clung to and struggled with: the possibility and importance of the aesthetic imagination in an inescapably ideological context. “For me intellectual work is related to what you would call aestheticism, meaning transforming yourself,” Foucault explained. “[Y]ou see that’s why I really work like a dog and worked like a dog all my life … Why should a painter work if he is not transformed by his own painting?”4 Foucault’s remarks have long been valuable to me, for they suggest the constitutive problem of art within a post-Kantian framework, a problem of understanding and relation, of contingency, rather than the determinism of pure relations of knowledge and power which Nathan’s absolutism so readily harkened to. What is missing in Foucault’s remarks is the ethical charge of such transformation, which Cohen seeks to recover. This connection is established forcefully, as Cohen’s allusion to “audience expectation” suggests, by recognition of form as a matter of negotiation between artists and their audience. Stephen Greenblatt himself assures us that “great works of art are not neutral relay states in the circulation of cultural materials.” He insists that “[s]omething happens to objects, beliefs, and practices when they are represented, reimagined, and performed in literary texts, something often unpredictable and disturbing” and “[t]hat something is the sign both of the power of art and of the embeddedness of culture in the contingencies of history.”5 Yet students schooled to achieve rather than question and for whom the American mass media constitutes a central source of historical information are often unprepared to explore the nature of such possibilities or understand the nature of historical contingency itself as it concerns literary texts or themselves. Given the effects of such education “reforms” and media consolidation, I have begun to explore how I might balance the virtues of New Historical practice with historical formalism. In doing so I seek to offer my students Shakespeare’s work as well as other literary texts not only as products of ideological discourse but as instances of formal negotiation in which ideology, history and aesthetics combine to shape, for one reason or another, our collective memory. It is precisely such collective memory, Geoffrey Hartman argues, which, by reminding us of the complexity and diversity of the past, demands not only a hermeneutic response, but a resuscitation of the connection between memory and the imagination.6 And I am

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concerned not a little with how such a practice prepares my students to engage the politics of commodification at work in our culture and how I and they understand the role of the imagination and historical memory in that process. Why formalism? No doubt, I wish to help my students recuperate some ethical agency from the morass of popular forms of cynicism. More importantly, I want to help them discover or recover literary interpretation as a complex form of communal construction. In the process, I hope to complicate and thus heighten their sense of responsibility as readers to the texts they read and the historical formations those texts represent. I wish to nurture in them what Schiller calls the potential for freedom.7 Realizing such potential means grasping not only the workings of ideology, but the shaping force of history and the forms—not least aesthetic—that make possible or foreclose new modes of existence. Satya Mohanty and others have discussed just such a “detheologizing” and postpositivist move in literary criticism as one toward a more flexible and less holistic epistemology. 8 Linda Alcoff explains such a move this way: Our aim in inquiry, at least in the social and human sciences, is to see things in new ways, to find new conceptual tools that can advance eudaimonia or human flourishing. As a Nietzschean, the criterion Foucault uses to justify his theories (or narratives, if you [prefer]) of sexual identity or power is whether they help to free us from locked-in ways of thinking in which we have lost the ability to reflect critically on our dominant concepts. By this account, the issue is not whether Foucault’s theories refer to a reality independent of discursive construction, but whether or not they have a liberating effect on human thought and imagination.9

Alcoff rather optimistically bridges Foucault’s Nietzschean method to a theory of social progress his work defies. But she nevertheless helps me, and my students in turn, see how belief in what Hartman calls “the scarred rather than sacred” nature of artists’ work, and our own work as cultural memoirists, can be preserved from the ravages of fundamentalism of many kinds. Last, a renewed insistence on literary forms as both cultural constructions and individual responses that complicate, reinforce and/or resist the forces of ideology and history allows me to recognize and respond pedagogically to the way in which the ethical charge of New Historicism has diminished in direct proportion to its establishment as a sacred form of story-telling.

III Returning to form for me has meant a renewed insistence on genre and rhetoric. While attention to rhetoric helps students attend to the structure and conventional effects of language, turning to genre points them toward the communal nature of all meanings. More specifically, I find in genre a means of reconnecting my

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students to the world while helping them negotiate between that world and the texts we study together. In concrete terms my practice involves not only introducing students to significant related nonliterary discourses but helping them see the ways in which any literary work, like The Merchant, is a creative as well as ideological response to many previous works, not least its formal kin. This revisionary work is especially the case for Shakespeare, who rarely originated his narratives and was highly attuned to the relationship between popular taste and theatrical possibility. Bringing students back to genre as a means of developing interrogative and yet deeply historical relationships to Shakespeare’s texts is, I want to insist, not simply a matter of adding in literary history. It means helping students grasp the dialectical nature of genre itself as a vehicle of human understanding. The dialectic is, in one sense, the relation between the communal construction of meaning (or convention and its corollary, expectation) and the possibility and thirst for change featured by life itself. I have never found anyone better equipped than Heather Dubrow to explain this feature of genre to my students. According to Dubrow, genre is a matter of social codes (the New Historical view) and a qualified, but nevertheless significant, human freedom. This freedom is suggested not only by the variety of codes witnessed from culture to culture but by the pleasure of expectation both met and reconstructed as new understanding by generic innovation. As Dubrow explains, “It is often possible to challenge [genre], sometimes to overthrow [it] but it is virtually impossible to exclude [it] from our lives.”10 The reason is that we make meaning not in isolation but in community. But while New Historicism rescued us from a universalism and transcendent aestheticism that ignored the cultural role of community in the construction of meaning, it has in turn often neglected the force of the individual in its overthrow. Yet it is precisely in the dialectic between ideology and the human imagination that form takes life as new meaning. Though I’d often spoken of it in the past, I now ask my students to attend explicitly to the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays follow and depart from formal conventions. In the case of The Merchant of Venice, Il Pecorone, The Jew, The Jew of Venice and The Jew of Malta as well as other comedies of the period all provide important contexts for negotiating the meaning of Shakespeare’s work. Indeed, comparing the narratives of The Merchant and Il Pecorone helps students situate the ideological framing of Shakespeare’s work, much like familiarity with the Inquisition or the history of Jews in England does. Moreover, combining their study challenges students to resist the appeal of readings that conform too easily to the recipes of teachers or master theorists by confronting them with complex instances of ideological and formal negotiation. For instance, despite the fact that Shakespeare follows the plot of Il Pecorone quite closely, he develops a relationship of longstanding hostility between the merchant and the moneylender of the play, gives the moneylender a troubled and converting daughter, and adds a forced conversion. Noting such innovations raises important questions about how Shakespeare’s formal theatrical representation of Jews intersects with the

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discourses of Christian anti-Semitism and the work of previous playwrights. Further, by grappling with Shakespeare’s use of Jews as comic villains and his development of a vivid portrait of Jewish “sufferance,” students more readily find in the play a problem than an instance of ideological mirroring. Thus it is that I regularly revisit a sense of the power of form in Shakespeare’s work these days. By discovering the dialectical nature of literary forms within a context of historical struggles for discursive power, students sometimes discover their responsibility for readings which are at once historical in their attention to ideology and profoundly hopeful in their understanding of the potential for change. For example, equipped with a sense of early modern discourses of religion and patriarchy and the forms of comedy and theatrical villains Shakespeare inherited, we spend more time now coming to grips not only with the nature and relative complexity of Shakespeare’s characters and the rhetorical forms that shape the meaning and significance of their speech, but also with their resultant roles as vehicles for perpetuating and shaping cultural memory. Students develop analyses of Portia and Shylock’s most famous speeches (“The quality of mercy” and “Hath not a Jew eyes?”) but not, as the formalists of old might have, to celebrate the unmitigated beauty and power of Portia’s or the pure pathos of Shylock’s. Rather, students grapple with the creative uses of language in a profoundly ideological world by parsing out Shakespeare’s highly structured and conventional use of rhetoric and figures in both speeches in the context of Christian and Jewish discourses on the nature of human and divine law. Students are in this way more likely to reckon with the disparity between the formal attractions of a generic heroine’s speech like Portia’s and the ideological effects of these forms in the play as a whole. The rhetorical grace and complexity of Portia’s appeal for mercy thus confronts not only her own lyric manipulation of Bassanio’s choice of caskets in her song, but Maimonides’s arguments for equality before the law as the ground of justice. Similarly, our understanding of Shakespeare’s construction of Shylock shifts by coming to grips with his frequent use of rhetorical questions and his prosaic accumulation of terms, definitions and evidence in the context of antiSemitic history and myth. What is the significance of such interrogative and insistent desire for fixed meanings? The consequence of such considerations of form is that history and art are not treated as opposed matters of ideology or aesthetics but as inextricable yet distinct vehicles of meaning and community that are always being created. I think of Nathan here. What if he had had to negotiate not only between Shakespeare’s Merchant and texts like The Dirge of Moses Remos but the dialectical effects of genre and thus the relative significance of his own hunger for ideological purity in Shakespeare’s play? By studying, say, the forms of early modern comic villains along with early modern discourses of English anti- and philo-Semitism, would it have been more difficult to reduce the play, and Shakespeare’s representation of Shylock, to a purely ideological event? Would doing so have encouraged him to reckon with the ways in which Shakespeare’s

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text, whatever its ultimate value, both affirms and denies the expectations of aesthetic form because of its contradictory re-imagining of an ideological, which is to say religious and proto-racial, conflict? I want to think so — not least because I hope to sustain the “problem” nature of Shakespeare’s work for my students and help them resist the forces of sacralization that seem everywhere at work. I want to preserve if not reinvent their capacity for and hope in the imaginative construction of meaning even as I help them grasp the historical and formal power of ideology writ large and small in the literary texts we explore. I realize the meaning of such work, always, in my students’ ability to insist on the cultural relevance of Shakespeare’s work, and specifically here The Merchant, while engaging the literariness, which is to say the formal and thus dialectical nature, of the texts they read.

IV What does such student response look like? There are many possibilities, but in my experience the key features are a keen sense of historical forms of ideology, an understanding of literary form as a force that both contains and provokes changes in understanding, a recognition of self in relation to community created in the work of narrating each, and an energetic willingness to take on the work of learning and writing the stories we tell about the text, and hence ourselves. A recent paper on The Merchant by a student, Adah, gives me hope that such pedagogical shifts might be worthwhile. Adah situates her reading of The Merchant within a context of formal pleasure in Shakespeare’s comedies and historical understanding of the material effects of anti-Semitic discourse. Like Nathan, she identifies the anti-Semitism of The Merchant but rather than reduce the play to such instances, her recognition becomes a starting point for exploring the rhetorical power of the play’s representation of Shylock as a comic villain. For Adah, The Merchant presents a problem of political hatred which intersects powerfully with theatrical form. She develops her argument about comic villains in the context of other Shakespearean figures and the history of early modern antiSemitism. Thus while developing a comparative analysis of Twelfth Night’s Malvolio and Shylock, Adah concludes that: [m]uch like in Twelfth Night, the audience is left uncomfortable with the knowledge that, while the lovers have triumphed, one character has suffered greatly at their hands. The consequences for Shylock are much worse than those for Malvolio, however. This sort of duality (comedy/tragedy) pervades the play and Shylock’s own character, and centers on the confusion of whether or not Shylock is a sympathetic character. Played comically, Shylock is the bad guy and everyone gives three cheers when he gets taken down at the end. Played tragically, Shylock is a victim of discrimination driven to desperate means to avenge himself and the dignity of his people.

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While arguing for the severity of Shylock’s punishment, unlike Nathan, Adah insists on the “duality” of his character, resisting the temptation to reduce him or the play to an ideological formula. Indeed, Shakespeare’s revisions of Il Pecorone figure for her as important evidence of the play’s complexity. Arguing that Shakespeare’s addition of Jessica softens the depiction of Shylock, Adah also grapples with the effects of Shakespeare’s “most notable change”: the forced conversion of the Jewish moneylender. Like many critics, Adah finds Shylock’s compulsory conversion a stark and unsettling resolution of his conflict. Nevertheless, though ideologically drawn to arguments for Shylock’s humanity and the force of his speeches in sympathetic performances, Adah takes up the historical contexts of the play’s comic form and Shylock’s role as a Jewish villain. Thus, like Nathan, Adah struggles with the meaning of Shakespeare’s Shylock, but she does so in historical, generic, and affective terms. In the end, she concludes that Shakespeare gives us a villain who is, while “[no] one-dimensional emblem of evil,” a fulfillment of both comic form itself and the practice of religious hatred. She arrives at this conclusion in part by considering Shylock’s infamous speech within the context of the play’s formal need for a villain bent on vengeance: The rhetorical questioning of the speech is very effective as a result of the repetitive phrasing. It carries the message that ‘Jews are human like Christians, they respond to injury in the same way.’ But how does this speech function within the larger body of the text? It is here that Shylock justifies his pursuit of vengeance. He expresses his anger and his dismay at the hard lessons he and other Jews have learned through discrimination and Christian prejudice … Shylock shows himself to be human, and to be human is to be fallible and susceptible to the overwhelming power of hatred.

Reckoning with Shakespeare’s use of rhetoric and genre within an historical context allows Adah to test her own responses to the play and thus begin to construct a narrative analysis which refuses narrow arguments. In the end she is able to see the ways in which Shakespeare’s text, its historical moment and literary forms, offer a testimony of a kind of scarred collective memory to which she contributes her own. She writes: Throughout my research, I have struggled with the question of whether Shakespeare intended Shylock to be a villain or a victim ... I can only come to the conclusion that Shylock was intended to be a Jewish villain. He is a more complex villain than those that came before but a villain nonetheless … Shylock has been grievously wronged, but … Shakespeare understands that malice and evil intentions have some root and cause, and makes The Merchant of Venice a better play for explaining the creation of such a villain.

Notably, Nathan and Adah come to the same conclusion about the play’s representation of Jews. But Nathan’s reading reduces literature to a function of ideology, simplifying its and his role in the construction of meaning in the process.

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Adah, on other hand, attempts to understand the play as a function of both literary form and the force of history as ideology. Adah’s work offers me evidence of the potential of literary analysis as a transformative experience when we insist on the complex yet shifting nature of form and the discourses of ideology. I think of Gadamer’s claim that “the language of art is an encounter with a still unfinished process and is itself part of this process … In the experience of art we see a genuine experience induced by the work, which does not leave him who has it unchanged, and we enquire into the mode of being of that which is experienced in this way.”11 Adah, unlike Nathan, was transformed in the process of her analysis of Shakespeare’s work. And thus so are we, her community. Such transformation is rooted in her ability to engage not only the discourses of ideology but the potential for change implicit in Shakespeare’s imaginative recreation of comic villains in Shylock. It is also marked by her willingness to stake out her own interpretation and judgment and the significance of both for her understanding of the necessary yet imperfect nature of our histories—all features missing from Nathan’s work. Unlike Adah’s reading, Nathan’s reductive rendering of The Merchant as a vehicle of Christian triumphalism refused the invitation to imagine a diverse past in the form of Shakespeare’s literary rendering of longstanding and still new forms of meaning-making. Nathan’s failure, of course, was my own. Students across the political spectrum, like Nathan, will readily accept the work of literary hermeneutics as a matter of parsing the grammar of ideology if I offer it to them. And they accept the offer increasingly because the promise of surety—whether in the form of Nathan’s fundamentalist Christianity or academic achievement— appears to abate the possibility and dangers of failure and loss. Thus this story is one not merely of theory but of practice and the work of each as an exercise in the construction of communities: intellectual, historical, discursive, affective, ethical. As a scholar and, much more immediately, as a teacher, I regularly negotiate between helping others grasp the determinative nature of literary and nonliterary discourses and encouraging them to understand and believe in the transformative possibilities of all writers’ reconstructions. I do not study or teach literature, let alone Shakespeare or The Merchant, because the problems of meaning and value are solved but because they are always under construction. Nathan reminded me that such construction requires a conscious commitment to the dialectical, insistently transformative and yet “relatively autonomous” nature of literary texts. Interpretation as a matter of parsing ideological formations alone loses sight of this fact and, as Nathan’s work made clear, can become the interpretive absolutism New Historicism originally sought to resist. In the end, despite my desire to believe such practices might offer the Nathans of this world a means of grappling with the paradoxical nature of the texts we read, I can’t be sure. Still, Adah and others like her suggest that a truly new historicism cast as historical formalism can short circuit the cultural and academic pressure to find the right answer my students face while allowing them (and thus us) to

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resuscitate the connection between memory and imagination. Writing in 1995, Hartman decried “the outbreak of unreal memory,” with “its fundamentalist notions of national destiny and ethnic purity,” and asserted the role of the arts in resisting this pandemic.12 His words are no less meaningful today in their confirmation of the importance of the reconstruction of meaning the arts demand. Critiques of literature as ideology are both necessary and insufficient. Aesthetic form as a vehicle of dialectical consciousness, when understood in the light of material history, seems well worth recovering.

Notes 1 2

All student names used in this essay are pseudonyms. Geoffrey Hartman, “Public Memory and Its Discontents,” in Marshall Brown (ed.), The Uses of Literary History (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 84. 3 Stephen Cohen, “Between Form and Culture: New Historicism and the Promise of a Historical Formalism,” in Mark David Rasmussen (ed.), Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements (New York: Palgrave, 2002), p. 25. 4 Michel Foucault, “Michel Foucault: An Interview with Stephen Riggins,” Ethos, 1/2 (1983): 8. 5 Stephen Greenblatt, “Culture,” in Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (eds), Critical Terms for Literary Study, 2nd edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 230–31. 6 Hartman, p. 85. 7 Friedrich von Schiller, “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man,” in Hazard Adams (ed.), Critical Theory Since Plato (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), p. 423. 8 Satya Mohanty, “Can Our Values Be Objective? On Ethics, Aesthetics, and Progressive Politics,” New Literary History: Objectivity in Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics, 32/4 (2001): 803–34. 9 Linda Martin Alcoff, “Objectivity and Its Politics,” New Literary History, 32/4 (2001): 838. 10 Heather Dubrow, Genre (London: Methuen, 1982), p. 3. 11 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroad Press, 1982), p. 359. 12 Hartman, p. 91.

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Further Reading The following is a highly selective list of works related to, or having an influence upon, historical formalism (HF) as described and practiced in this volume, as well as works that might themselves be considered historical formalist in method or interest. Entries without annotations are exemplary works of the latter sort whose titles speak for themselves. Bruster, Douglas, Quoting Shakespeare: Form and Culture in Early Modern Drama (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000). Presents and justifies intertextuality and source study as species of HF. Cohen, Stephen, “Between Form and Culture: New Historicism and the Promise of a Historical Formalism,” in Mark David Rasmussen (ed.), Renaissance Literature and its Formal Engagements (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 17– 41. Describes the troubled relationship between New Historicism and formalism, and the value of the Marxist formalism of the 1970s for HF. ———, “New Historicism and Genre: Toward a Historical Formalism,” REAL, 11 (1995): 405–23. An early description of and call for a historical formalist critical practice. Dubrow, Heather, Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and Its Counterdiscourses (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). ———, A Happier Eden: The Politics of Marriage in the Stuart Epithalamium (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). Galen, F.W., Historic Structures: The Prague School Project, 1928–1946 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985). Useful account of an important early effort to theorize the relationship between history and form. Greenblatt, Stephen (ed.), The Forms of Power and the Power of Forms in the Renaissance, a special issue of Genre, 15/1&2 (1982); reprinted as The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1982). Brief Introduction describes the importance of form to a nascent New Historicism; essays that follow take up the challenge to varying degrees. Howard, Jean E., Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy 1598–1642 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). Jameson, Fredric, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981). Important Marxist historical and ideological account of form.

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Montrose, Louis, “‘Eliza, Queene of shepheardes,’ and the Pastoral of Power,” ELR, 10 (1980): 153–82; and “Of Gentlemen and Shepherds: The Politics of Elizabethan Pastoral Form,” ELH, 50 (1983): 415–59. Two political analyses of form by an important early New Historicist critic. Orgel, Stephen, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). Influential work on the politics of the Renaissance masque. Patterson, Annabel, Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valery (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). Rasmussen, Mark David (ed.), Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements (New York: Palgrave: 2002). See especially the Introduction and Section I, “Toward a Historical Formalism.” Tennenhouse, Leonard, Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare’s Genres (New York: Methuen, 1986). Wayne, Don E., Penshurst: The Semiotics of Place and the Poetics of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984). Weimann, Robert, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function, ed. Robert Schwartz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). On the historical sources and functions of forms of theatrical practice; an essential corrective to HF as purely textual analysis. See also the more recent Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre, eds Helen Higbee and William West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). White, Hayden, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). Examines the function of the narrative forms used in the writing of history. See also Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). Wolfson, Susan J., Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). Calls for and demonstrates a historical approach to form in Romantic poetry. ——— (ed.), Reading for Form, a special issue of Modern Language Quarterly, 61/1 (March 2000). Wide-ranging collection of ten HF-oriented essays, with useful Introduction.

Bibliography Adams, Henry H., English Domestic or Homiletic Tragedy, 1575 to 1642 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943). Adelman, Janet, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, “Hamlet” to “The Tempest” (New York: Routledge, 1992). Alcoff, Linda Martin, “Objectivity and Its Politics,” New Literary History, 32/4 (2001): 835–48. Allen, Don Cameron, Mysteriously Meant: The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970). Alpers, Paul, The Singer of the “Eclogues”: A Study of Virgilian Pastoral (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). ———, What Is Pastoral? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Archer, John Michael, Old Worlds: Egypt, Southwest Asia, India, and Russia in Early Modern English Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). Aristotle, Poetics, in Hazard Adams (ed.), Critical Theory Since Plato, rev. edn (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers, 1992), pp. 49– 66. Rpt. from S.H. Butcher, trans., Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, 4th edn (New York: Dover Publications, 1955). Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953). Augustine, Confessions (New York: Penguin, 1961). Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969). Baldwin, T.W., William Shakespeare Adapts a Hanging (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1931). ———, William Shakspere’s Small Latine & Lesse Greeke (2 vols, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944). Barish, Jonas, “Language for the Study; Language for the Stage,” in A.L. Magnusson and C.E. McGee (eds), The Elizabethan Theatre XII: Papers given at the Twelfth International Conference on Elizabethan Theatre ... in July 1987 (Toronto: P.D. Meany, 1993), pp. 19–43. Barker, Francis, “Treasures of Culture: Titus Andronicus and Death by Hanging,” in David Lee Miller, Sharon O’Dair, and Harold Weber (eds), The Production

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of English Renaissance Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 226–61. ———, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (London: Methuen, 1984). Barlow, William, A sermon preached at Paules Crosse, on the first Sunday in Lent: Martij 1. 1600 (London: Mathew Law, 1601). Barrow, Henry, and John Greenwood, The Writings of John Greenwood and Henry Barrow: 1591–1593, ed. L.H. Carlson (London: Allen & Unwin, 1970). Baswell, Christopher, Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring the Aeneid from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Bates, Catherine, The Rhetoric of Courtship in Elizabethan Language and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Bawlf, Samuel, The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake, 1577–1580 (Vancouver: Douglas & MacIntyre, 2003). Beier, A.L., Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640 (London: Methuen, 1985). Bergeron, David M., “Sexuality in Cymbeline,” Essays in Literature, 10 (1983): 159–68. Betts, John H., “Classical Allusions in Shakespeare’s Henry V With Special Reference to Virgil,” Greece & Rome, 2nd Ser., 15/2 (1968): 147–63. Bevington, David, and Peter Holbrook (eds), The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Black, James, “Hamlet Hears Marlowe; Shakespeare Reads Virgil,” Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme, 18/4 (1994): 17–28. Blayney, Peter W.M., “The Publication of Playbooks,” in John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (eds), A New History of Early English Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 383–422. Bogatyrëv, Pëtr, and Roman Jakobson, “Folklore as a Special Form of Creativity,” trans. Manfred Jacobson, in Peter Steiner (ed.), The Prague School: Selected Writings, 1929–1946 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), pp. 34–46. Bono, Barbara J., Literary Transvaluation: From Vergilian Epic to Shakespearean Tragicomedy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). Boose, Lynda, “Scolding Brides and Bridling Scolds: Taming the Woman’s Unruly Member,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 42/2 (1991): 179–213. Booth, Stephen, “On the Value of Hamlet,” in Norman Rabkin (ed.), Reinterpretations of Elizabethan Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), pp. 136–76. Bradshaw, Graham, Shakespeare’s Scepticism (Sussex: Harvester, 1987). Braunmuller, A.R. (ed.), Macbeth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Breight, Curt, “‘Treason Doth Never Prosper’: The Tempest and the Discourse of Treason,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 41/1 (1990): 1–28.

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Index Adams, Henry H. 64n12 Adelman, Janet 81, 90n5, 92n27, 93n42 adventure plays 55–6 Alchemist, The 53 Alcoff, Linda 201 Allen, Don Cameron 171n42 Alpers, Paul 71–2, 91n9 Althusser, Louis 21n6 Apology for Actors, An 25n43, 129, 130 Archer, John Michael 66n26 Arden of Faversham 52 Aristotle 10, 11–12, 135, 149, 192n4 Athanasian Creed 43 Auerbach, Erich 6–7, 23n21 Augustine, St. 192n4 Confessions 196 Bachelard, Gaston 71 Bakhtin, Mikhail 36, 178 Baldwin, Thomas Whitfield 144n33, 166nn8–10 Barish, Jonas 174n65 Barker, Francis 66n30, 142n3 Barlow, William 136 Barrow, Henry 144n26 Bartholomew Fair 53 Baswell, Christopher 171n42 Bates, Catherine 24n32 Battle of Alcazar, The 55 Bawlf, Samuel 193n20 Beard, Thomas, Theatre of God’s Judgments 139 Beier, A.L. 93n33 Benjamin, Walter 36 Bergeron, David M. 90n5 Betts, John H. 169n30 Bevington, David 97 Black, James 166n10

Blayney, Peter W.M. 167n16 Bond, James 73 Bono, Barbara J. 166n10, 169n30, 171n42, 173n57 Boose, Lynda 145n41 Booth, Stephen 174n68 Bradshaw, Graham 45n5, 171n46 Braunhmuller, A.R. 67n32 Brecht, Bertolt 21n6 Breight, Curt 142n3 Brenner, Robert 66n25 Brockbank, J.P. 93n44 Brook, George C. 92n21 Brooks, Douglas A. 167n13, 167n17 Brooks, Peter 26n51 Brower, Reuben 169n33, 172n52 Brown, Paul 122n25 Brückner, Martin 46n12 Bruster, Douglas 14, 16, 22n16, 23n29, 26n45, 26n47, 26n49, 46n10, 47n26, 65n15, 130, 143n8, 143n20, 143n24, 165n3, 166– 7n11, 209 de Bry, Theodor 59–60 Burrow, Colin 166n9 Bushnell, Rebecca W. 67n42 Bussy d’Ambois 52 Butler, Martin 119n6 Buxton, John 174n67 Cantor, Paul A. 169n30, 172n52 Carroll, William C. 45n4, 67n34, 82 Cartelli, Thomas 65n18 Cataline 52 Cecil, Robert 136 Chandler, Raymond 37 Changeling, The 52 Chapman, George 52

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Bussy d’Ambois 52 Charnes, Linda 173n57 Chaste Maid in Cheapside, A 53 Chatman, Seymour 37, 39 Cheney, Patrick 166n10, 167n12, 167n17 Christian Turned Turk, A 55 Cinthio, Giraldi, Hecatommithi 139 Clark, Michael P. 20n1, 21n6 class 53–5 closet drama 163 Clubb, Louise George 174n68 Cobb, Christopher 17–18, 23n26, 24n31, 26n50 Coddon, Karin S. 173n61 Coen brothers 17, 69–70, 89 Cohen, Ralph 90n2 Cohen, Stephen 22n16, 32, 47n29, 97, 130, 143n7, 145n43, 165n2, 199–200, 209 Cohen, Walter 23n22, 51, 63n2 coinage 75–7, 84 Colie, Rosalie L. 44, 64n3, 79 comedy 10, 36, 40, 65n14, 128–31, 133– 5, 139–41 city 53, 55, 65n15 romantic 12–13 Comensoli, Viviana 64n12 Cooper, Helen 171n44 Coryat, Thomas 57 Cox, John D. 32, 37, 46n8, 122n25 Craig, D.H. 38 Craig, Sir Thomas 59 Crane, Mary Thomas 38, 165n3 cultural studies 1 Danson, Lawrence 92n29 Davidson, Clifford 142n2 Dawson, Anthony 127, 130 de Grazia, Margreta 34 deconstruction 6, 14 Dekker, Thomas Shoemaker’s Holiday, The 50, 53 Witch of Edmonton, The 52 Delgamuukw’ case 190–91 Derrida, Jacques 70, 178, 182 Descartes, René 180

Dessen, Alan C. 144n31, 144n32 Dickey, James 71 DiMatteo, Anthony 170n36, 172n47, 172n54 Doctor Faustus 58 Doebler, John 166n10 Dolan, Frances E. 64n12, 143n25 Dollimore, Jonathan 95, 117, 173n60 Donne, John 76, 79 Holy Sonnets 186–7 Doran, Madeleine 119n3 Doran, Susan 173n55 Douglas, Gavin 167n15, 170n39, 172n51 Drake, Sir Francis 190 drama 7–8; see also theatricality du Bartas, Salluste 173n55 Dubrow, Heather 17, 20n2, 91n19, 92n20, 118n3, 202, 209 Duchess of Malfi, The 52 Dutton, Richard 164n1, 167n19, 168n21, 168n24, 169n32 Dymkowski, Christine 121n20, 123n30 Eagleton, Terry 64n8 Eastward Ho 53 Edward IV 50 Elam, Kier 120n13 Eliot, T.S. 177, 187 Elizabeth I 9, 121n22 Ellis-Fermor, Una 173n60 Ellison, James 145n43 Empson, William 171n46 Erasmus, Desiderius, Discourse on Free Will 196 Erlich, Victor 191n1 Erne, Lukas 167n12, 171n41 Essex, Earl of 136–7 Evans, Bertrand 90n3 Every Man in His Humor 53 Fair Maid of the Exchange, The 53 Fair Maid of the West, The 55, 66n23 Famous History of Sir Thomas Stukeley, The 55 Felperin, Howard 22n13, 22n14, 92n22 Ferguson, Arthur B. 119n6 Ferguson, Margaret W. 171n46

Index Fleming, Juliet 47n24 Fletcher, Angus 20n5 Fletcher, John Henry VIII 113–14, 122n23, 123n31, 123n32 Sea Voyage 66n20 Florio, John 132 Foakes, R.A. 171n41, 172n52 formalism 31, 95, 177–8, 198, 201 aestheticist 2 ahistorical 1, 20n2, 43–4 “Colonialist” 5 cultural 4–5, 7, 15, 22n14, 23n22, 27n53 historical, see historical formalism ideological 21n7, 23n30 Russian 21n6, 36 utopian 2, 23n30 Foucault, Michel 6, 119n4, 178, 181, 200, 201 Four Apprentices of London, The 55 Fowler, Alastair 64n3 Frederyke of Jennen 85 Freeman, John 170n38 Freytag, Gustav 37 Frye, Northrop 90n4, 95, 133 Frye, Roland Mushat 170n37, 170n39, 172n51, 173n55 Frye, Susan 24n32 Fuchs, Barbara 66n26 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 206 Galen, F.W. 209 Gallagher, Catherine 4, 5, 6, 21n7 Geertz, Clifford 6, 32 Gellrich, Jesse 182 Genre 1 Gerusalemme Liberata 80, 160 Gibbons, Brian 65n15, 121n18 Gillespie, Stuart 166n10 Gillies, John 56 Goins, Scott E. 169n30 Goldberg, Jonathan 67n36, 119n4 Golding, Arthur 129, 141 Gowing, Laura 145n41 Greenberg, Marissa 18, 23n26, 26n46, 26n48, 27n54

237 Greenblatt, Stephen 1–2, 4–8, 20n3, 22n10, 23n19, 23n25, 23n26, 24n34, 27n56, 64n9, 67n37, 119n4, 142n3, 145n37, 145n43, 170n38, 200, 209 Greene, Robert, Orlando Furioso 42 Greene, Thomas M. 171n40 Greg, W.W. 47n27 Greville, Fulke 173n60 Gurr, Andrew 121n19, 143n24 Haber, Judith 91n13 Hackett, Helen 120n12 Hadfield, Andrew 173n55 Hakluyt, Richard, Principal Navigations 56–7 Halio, Jay 121n16, 123n31 Halpern, Richard 97 Hamilton, Donna B. 166n10, 168n26 Hammer, Paul E.J. 121n22 Hankins, John Erskine 170n39 Harington, John 173n55 Harriot, Thomas 59 Harris, Jonathan Gil 31, 46n10, 120n14 Harrison, William 53, 59, 65n16 Hartman, Geoffrey 199, 200, 207 Harvey, Gabriel 152, 153, 163 Hayne, Victoria 145n40 Hays, Michael L. 118n3, 171n44 Hecatommithi 139 Heidegger, Martin 38 Helgerson, Richard 56, 64n12, 65n13 Heywood, Thomas Apology for Actors, An 25n43, 129, 130 Edward IV 50 Fair Maid of the Exchange, The 53 Fair Maid of the West, The 55, 66n23 Famous History of Sir Thomas Stukeley, The 55 Four Apprentices of London, The 55 Woman Killed with Kindness, A 52 Hiscock, Andrew 165n8, 169n33 historical formalism 2–3, 14–16, 52, 147, 199–200, 206 Historicism, New, see New Historicism

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historicism, “old” 1 history play 52–3, 63n1, 88, 129 Hobbes, Thomas 191 Hodgdon, Barbara 120n13 Hoeniger, F.D. 90n3 Holbrook, Peter 97 Holdsworth, William S. 93n35 Holstun, James 65n17 Hope, Jonathan 123n31 Horace 9, 135 Howard, Henry, see Surrey, Earl of Howard, Jean E. 16–17, 64n5, 64n13, 66n19, 66n21, 66n23, 119n9, 142n2, 145n43, 164–5n2, 209 Hoy, Cyrus 123n32 Hulme, Peter 122n25 Hunter, G.K. 47n25, 123n29 Huston, J. Dennis 26n47 Irace, Kathleen O. 168n22 Iser, Wolfgang 64n4 Jackson, MacDonald 38 Jakobson, Roman 178, 182, 192n14 James I/VI 59–60, 67n36, 150, 166n8 James, Heather 166n10, 166n11, 169n29, 172n48, 173n56 Jameson, Fredric 21n7, 37, 51, 95, 209 Javitch, Daniel 25n40, 25n41 Jew, The 202 Jew of Malta, The 197–8, 202 Jew of Venice, The 202 Jones, E.L. 93n36, 93n37 Jones, Emrys 75 Jonson, Ben 32 Alchemist, The 53 Bartholomew Fair 53 Cataline 52 Every Man in His Humor 53 Sejanus 52 Volpone 130–31, 141 Jordan, Constance 122–3nn26–8 Joughin, John J. 21n6 Kallendorf, Craig 166n10, 172n49 Kastan, David Scott 32, 37, 167n13, 167n18

Kay, Carol McGinnis 90n6 Kendall, Gillian Murray 142n3 Kennedy, Duncan F. 165n5 Kermode, Frank 120n16 Kesler, R.L. 19, 27n55, 192n6, 192n11 King’s Men, The 100 Kitching, C.J. 93n36 Knapp, Jeffrey 67n37 Knight, G. Wilson 75, 93n39, 93n45 Knights, L.C. 65n15 Knoppers, Laura Lunger 145n41 Korda, Natasha 120n14 Kubrick, Stanley 37 Kupperman, Karen Ordahl 67n37 Kyd, Thomas, The Spanish Tragedy 153, 188 Labov, William 188 Lacan, Jacques 77 Lake, Peter 143n25 Lancashire, Ian 47n20 Lander, Jesse 168n23 Larner, Christina 67n33 Lawrence, Judiana 90n6 Lawry, J.S. 90n6 Leggatt, Alexander 65n15, 90n6 Leinwand, Theodore B. 65n15 Leslie, John 59 Levin, Harry 47n19, 173n58 Levine, George 21n6 Lezra, Jacques 145n42 Lindley, David 120n16 Little, Arthur L. Jr. 145n43 Liu, Alan 22n13, 23n22 Low, Anthony 170n38 Lowe, David 47n20 Lukács, Georg 36, 51 Luther, Martin Discourse on Free Will 196 On Jews and Their Lies 196 McCoy, Richard 119n6, 120n12 MacEachern, Allan 191 Macherey, Pierre 21n6 Mack, Maynard 58, 66n28 Maguire, Laurie E. 167n14, 167n17

Index Maimonides, Moses, The Guide for the Perplexed 196, 203 Major, John 59 Malpas, Simon 21n6 Manley, Lawrence 65n15 Maquerlot, Jean-Pierre 66n26 Marcus, Leah S. 93n43, 168n23 Margolies, David 119n5 Mariana, Juan de 173n55 Marlowe, Christopher Doctor Faustus 58 Jew of Malta, The 197–8, 202 Tamburlaine 55 Marotti, Arthur F. 24n32 Marston, John 167n17 Martindale, Charles 166n10 Marvell, Andrew 71 Marx, Steven 173n55 Marxism 22n11, 22n16, 53–5, 70, 119n5 masque 97, 103, 105, 107, 115, 117, 118, 119n4 Matar, Nabil 66n26 materialism 16, 31–3, 36–7, 45, 70 Matthews, Robert A.J. 47n20 Matz, Robert 25n40 Maus, Katharine Eisaman 173n55 Melanchton, Philip 180 Melchiori, Giorgio 168n23 metadrama 14 Metzger, Mary Janell 19–20 Michaelmas Term 53 Middleton, Thomas Changeling, The 52 Chaste Maid in Cheapside, A 53 Michaelmas Term 53 Revenger’s Tragedy, The 52 Women Beware Women 52, 58 Mikalachki, Jodi 63n1, 81 Mincoff, Marco 123n32 Miola, Robert S. 90n5, 166n10, 169n31, 169n33, 170n35, 170n36, 170n39, 172n47, 172n54, 173n58, 173n59 Mohanty, Satya 201 Montrose, Louis 4, 5, 8, 9, 14, 22n11, 22n16, 24n33, 120n9, 209 More, Sir Thomas 37

239 Moretti, Franco 66n27 Morrison, Fynes 57 Moschovakis, Nicholas 18–19, 26n47, 26n49, 169n29 Mowat, Barbara A. 121n18, 165n6 Muir, Kenneth 166n10 Mullaney, Steven 22n13, 23n26, 142n3, 145n43 Murphy, Andrew 167n16 Murrin, Michael 171n42 myth criticism 95 Nerlich, Michael 66n22 Netzloff, Mark 92n25 Nevo, Ruth 93n48 New Criticism 1, 4, 177 New Historicism 1–9, 14–16, 19–20, 21n9, 52, 95–8, 166–7n11, 202, 206 anecdotal method 6–7, 23n22 and critical subjectivity 16, 19 and cultural formalism 4–5, 7, 15, 22n14, 23n22, 27n53 and drama 7–8, 17–18, 97, 127 and form 1–9, 14–15, 16, 21n9, 70, 165n2, 195, 199–200 and pedagogy 195–201 New History of Early English Drama 31–2, 46n8 new textualism 4 Newcomb, Lori Humphrey 120n12 News from Scotland 60 Nietzsche, Friedrich 201 Norden, John 56 Northward Ho 53 Novy, Marianne 90n5 Nowak, Thomas S. 145n38 Nuttall, A.D. 170n36 Ong, Walter 180 Orgel, Stephen 32, 97, 105, 119n4, 120n16, 122n25, 210 Orlin, Lena Cowen 64n12 Pafford, J.H.P. 120n16 Palfrey, Simon 118n3 Parker, Patricia A. 73, 85, 93n44

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Paster, Gail Kern 65n15 pastoral 9, 70–74, 78–81, 89, 91n7 hard pastoral 72, 79 Patterson, Annabel 71, 210 Pavel, Thomas 37 Pecorone, Il 202, 205 Persky, Stan 193n21 Peters, Julie Stone 34 Petrarchism 9, 183 Phaer, Thomas 167n15, 168n26, 172n50 Poggioli, Renato 91n7 Poole, Kristen 46n12 Pope, Alexander 38 Porter, Carolyn 4–5, 22n13, 22n14, 23n22 Porter, Stephen 93n36 post-structuralism 1 Prague school 178 Prescott, Anne Lake 173n55 Promos and Cassandra 139 Purkiss, Diane 67n33 Puttenham, George 9, 10, 43, 128 Questier, Michael 143n25 Quint, David 165n5, 172n48 Quintanar, Margaret 92n25 Rackin, Phyllis 64n13 Randolph, Mary Claire 43 Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune, The 78, 81 Rasmussen, Mark David 210 Remos, Moses, The Dirge of Moses Remos 197–8, 203 revenge plot 104, 109–110, 116, 148–9, 152–7, 160–62, 189 Revenger’s Tragedy, The 52 Richmond, Hugh M. 124n33 Ricoeur, Paul 192n4 Roaring Girl, The 53 Roberts, Sasha 167n13 romance 17–18, 70, 72–3, 88–9, 90n4, 95–103, 109–10, 113–14, 116, 118, 118n3, 119n5, 120n12, 121n18, 157, 180 Rose, Mark 37, 171n46 Rose, Mary Beth 80, 120n12

Rosenmeyer, Thomas G. 91n8 Ross, Charles S. 172n50 Rudyerd, Benjamin 92n25 Russell, Patricia 121n18 Salingar, Leo 47n19, 121n18 Salzman, Paul 119n5 Sanders, George 129 Saunders, J.G. 45n4 Saussure, Ferdinand de 177–8, 192n14 Schiller, Friedrich von 201 Schmidt, Alexander 34 Schwartz, Murray M. 88, 92n31, 93n32 Scotland 59–63 Sea Voyage 66n20 Sejanus 52 Shakespeare, William 10–11, 16, 17, 18, 31, 33–8, 41, 43, 45, 49–53, 58– 59, 63, 65n14, 69, 71, 74, 80–81, 82, 96, 98–100, 117, 127–8, 132–3, 147–8, 150–54, 164, 195–6, 202–3 Antony and Cleopatra 49, 58, 173n57 As You Like It 65n14, 88, 89, 133 Comedy of Errors 18, 131–5, 137, 138–9, 140 Coriolanus 49, 52 Cymbeline 17, 65n14, 69–70, 72, 74–82, 84–9, 99 Edward III 43 First Folio 35, 41, 44–5, 50, 74, 151, 152 Hamlet 11, 18–19, 25n42, 35, 36, 41, 42, 44, 49, 58, 148–64 1 Henry IV 80 Henry V 153, 160–61 2 Henry VI 54 Henry VIII 17, 96, 99, 100–102, 105–6, 112–18, 121n16 Julius Caesar 49, 52, 58 King Lear 36, 49, 57–8, 63n1, 70, 71, 72, 74, 79 Love’s Labors Lost 151 Macbeth 49, 59–63, 127 Measure for Measure 18, 131–2, 134, 137–142

Index Merchant of Venice, The 35–6, 196– 8, 202–6 Merry Wives of Windsor, The 65n14 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 11– 13, 14, 25n44, 26n47, 42–3, 44, 65n14, 133 Othello 49, 58 Pericles 74, 99–100, 103 Richard II 38, 63n1, 87–8, 151 Richard III 35, 50, 63n1, 88, 151 Romeo and Juliet 38, 49 Sonnets 35, 85, 184–6 Taming of the Shrew, The 40, 44, 65n14, 75 Tempest, The 17, 55, 74, 96, 99, 100, 102–13, 115–16, 120n16, 127, 150 Timon of Athens 49 Titus Andronicus 49, 58, 127, 150, 153, 188 Twelfth Night 204 Two Noble Kinsmen, The 99, 101–2, 104, 121n16, 122n23 Winter’s Tale, The 38, 74, 77, 99– 100, 103, 120n16 Shapiro, Marianne 184, 188 Shoemaker’s Holiday, The 50, 53 Sidney, Sir Philip 9–10, 11–13, 14, 24n36, 24–5n37, 25n40, 25n42, 25n43, 25n44, 43, 130 Simpson, A.W.B. 93n35 Sinfield, Alan 171n45 Sir John Oldcastle 128, 135 Šklovskij, Viktor 177–8 Skura, Meredith 92n24 Smith, Molly Easo 142n3 Smuts, Malcolm 172n48 Snyder, Susan 133, 174n68 van Somer, Paul 60 sonnets 19, 179–83, 187–9 Spanish Tragedy, The 153, 188 Spenser, Edmund Amoretti 183–4 Faerie Queene, The 72–4, 153, 160, 161 Stabler, Arthur P. 170n36 Stallybrass, Peter 32, 34

241 Star Trek 73 Stein, Gertrude 187 Stephenson, A.A. 92n21 Stern, Tiffany 47n27 Stern, Virginia F. 168n20 Stow, John 56, 144n33 Straznicky, Marta 174n65, 174n66 Strier, Richard 20n2, 23n21, 26n51, 31 Strong, Roy 119n6, 121n22 structuralism 1, 179, 190 style 36–9 Suckling, Sir John 151 Sullivan, Garrett A. Jr. 93n34 Surrey, Earl of 168n26 Sutherland, C.H.V. 92n21 Tamburlaine 55 Tasso, Torquato, Gerusalemme Liberata 80, 160 Tatlock, John S.P. 165n8 Taylor, John 129 Tennenhouse, Leonard 64n7, 119n4, 210 Theatre of God’s Judgments 139 theatricality 7–8, 17–18, 96–9, 102–4, 127 Theocritus 17 Thompson, E.P. 6–7 Thomson, Leslie 144n31, 144n32 Three English Brothers, The 55 Tillyard, E.M.W. 74 tragedy 10, 11–12, 35–6, 52, 55, 57–8, 63, 63n1, 129, 133, 158 Jacobean 186 revenge, see revenge plot Senecan 153 tragicomedy 65n14 Traversi, Derek 92n21 Tricomi, Albert H. 174n65 Trotsky, Leon 191n1 Trousdale, Marion 47n19 Tudeau-Clayton, Margaret 166n10, 167n15, 172n50, 172n51 Turner, Henry S. 31 Twyne, Thomas 167n15, 168n26, 172n50, 172n51 Tynjanov, Jurij 178, 182

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Van Dam, B.A.P. 47n27 Van Dyke, Sir Anthony 151 Vegio, Maffeo 159, 167n15, 172n50, 172n51 Velz, John W. 20n5, 46n8 Vergil 72, 166n10 Aeneid, The 18, 148–63, 166n9, 167n15, 168n26, 169–70n35 Eclogues 71 Georgics 169n30 Vickers, Brian 47n21, 47n30, 123n31, 123n32 Vickers, Nancy 181 Virgil, see Vergil Vitkus, Daniel 66n29 Vološinov, V.N. 177–8, 182 Volpone 130–31, 141 Waith, Eugene 121n16 Wales 80 Walter, Melissa 92n26 Warning for Fair Women, A 129 Watson, Elizabeth N. 171n43 Watson, Robert 172n53 Wayne, Don E. 210 Wayne, Valerie 24n32, 45n5 Webster, John 167n17 Duchess of Malfi, The 52 White Devil, The 52 Weimann, Robert 23–4n31, 26n47, 120n15, 210 Weitz, Morris 165n4

Wells, Robin Headlam 166n10 Westward Ho 53 Wheale, Nigel 167n12, 174n64 Whetstone, George, Promos and Cassandra 139 Whigham, Frank 64n12 Whitaker, Thomas 120n15 White Devil, The 52 White, Hayden 192n4, 210 White, John 59 White, R.S. 93n47 Willems, Michèle 66n26 Williams, Raymond 6–7, 22n16 Willis, Deborah 67n41 Wilson, Jean 119n6, 121n22 Wilson, John Dover 27n56 Wilson, Richard 142n3 Witch of Edmonton, The 52 Wolfson, Susan 20n2, 24n34, 210 Women Beware Women 52, 58 Woodbridge, Linda 82, 85, 90n5 Worthen, W.B. 120n13 Wotton, Sir Henry 124n33 Wright, Nancy E. 122n24 Wrightson, Keith 65n16 Yachnin, Paul 127, 130 Yates, Frances 119n6 Yorkshire Tragedy, The 52 Ziegler, Georgianna 85, 91n17 Zimmerman, Susan 45n5