Shakespeare, Politics, and Italy

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Shakespeare, Politics, and Italy Intertextuality on the Jacobean Stage

Michael J. Redmond

Shakespeare, Politics, and Italy

Anglo-Italian Renaissance Studies Series Series Editors General Editor: Michele Marrapodi, University of Palermo, Italy Advisory Editors: Keir Elam, University of Bologna, Italy Robert Henke, Washington University, USA This series aims to place early modern English drama within the context of the European Renaissance and, more specifically, within the context of Italian cultural, dramatic, and literary traditions, with reference to the impact and influence of both classical and contemporary culture. Among the various forms of influence, the series considers early modern Italian novellas, theatre, and discourses as direct or indirect sources, analogues and paralogues for the construction of Shakespeare’s drama, particularly in the comedies, romances, and other Italianate plays. Critical analysis focusing on other cultural transactions, such as travel and courtesy books, the arts, fencing, dancing, and fashion, will also be encompassed within the scope of the series. Special attention is paid to the manner in which early modern English dramatists adapted Italian materials to suit their theatrical agendas, creating new forms, and stretching the Renaissance practice of contaminatio to achieve, even if unconsciously, a process of rewriting, remaking, and refashioning of ‘alien’ cultures. The series welcomes both single-author studies and collections of essays and invites proposals that take into account the transition of cultures between the two countries as a bilateral process, paying attention also to the penetration of early modern English culture into the Italian world. FORTHCOMING TITLES IN THE SERIES Identity, Otherness and Empire in Shakespeare’s Rome Edited by Maria Del Sapio Garbero Old Age, Masculinity, and Early Modern Drama Comic Elders on the Italian and Shakespearean Stage Anthony Ellis Machiavelli in the British Isles Two Early Modern Translations of The Prince Alessandra Petrina

Shakespeare, Politics, and Italy Intertextuality on the Jacobean Stage

Michael J. Redmond University of Palermo, Italy

© Michael J. Redmond 2009 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. Michael J. Redmond has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East Suite 420 Union Road 101 Cherry Street Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405 England USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Redmond, Michael J. Shakespeare, politics, and Italy : intertextuality on the Jacobean stage. – (Anglo-Italian Renaissance studies) 1. English drama – Italian influences. 2. English drama – Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500–1600 – History and criticism. 3. Political plays, English – History and criticism. 4. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 – Knowledge – Italy. 5. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 – Sources. 6. Politics and literature – England – History – 16th century. 7. Italy – In literature. I. Title II. Series 822.3’09358–dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Redmond, Michael J. Shakespeare, politics, and Italy : intertextuality on the Jacobean stage / Michael J. Redmond. p. cm. – (Anglo-Italian Renaissance studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-6251-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-7546-9572-1 (ebook) 1. Italy–In literature. 2. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616–Knowledge–Italy. 3. English drama–Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500–1600 – History and criticism. 4. English drama – 17th century – History and criticism. 5. English drama – Italian influences. 6. Intertextuality. 7. Politics in literature. I. Title. PR3069.I8R43 2009 822.3’3–dc22 ISBN EISBN 978 0 7546 9572 1 (ebk.III)

2009006714

For Sophia Mary

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Contents Acknowledgements

ix

1 Introduction: The Politics of Intertextuality

1

2

‘You are better read than I’: Rereading the Italianate Englishman

3 ‘And let them know that I am Machiavel’: Staging Italian Political Theory for the London Audience

29 75

4 ‘I have my dukedom got’: Shakespeare and the Evolution of the Italianate Disguised Ruler Play

121

5 ‘No more a Britain’: James I, Jachimo, and the Politics of Xenophobia in Cymbeline

169

Bibliography Index

205 227


Acknowledgements I first became interested in the representation of Italy in Jacobean drama as an undergraduate student in Canada and now, 20 years later, I am completing a book about the subject in that fateful country itself. Given that writing is a journey as much as a destination, it is a pleasure to have the opportunity to express my appreciation to all the teachers, colleagues, friends, family members, and photocopiers that helped me along the way. My first acknowledgement has to be of Alan Sinfield in gratitude for his encouragement and inspiration over many years. I am content that this book appears under the general editorship of Michele Marrapodi. Since we met at the first Palermo Shakespeare Conference in 1995, he has been a constant champion of my research and a valued friend. I would also like to express my appreciation to the advisory editors of the Anglo-Italian Renaissance Studies, Keir Elam and Robert Henke, and the commissioning editor at Ashgate, Erika Gaffney, for their enthusiastic support of this project. Formal recognition is due to the anonymous external readers for Ashgate. My evolving approach to intertextual studies over the years has benefited from stimulating conversations with scholars like Louise George Clubb, Alessandro Serpieri, Claudia Corti, Gary Taylor, and Lilla Crisafulli. In Canada, the critical acumen of Alan Somerset and Elisabeth Hanson provided me with an auspicious start to my academic career. This book would not have been possible without the assistance and kindness of the librarians at the British Library and the D.B. Weldon Library of the University of Western Ontario over many years. I would also like to thank the Biblioteca centrale della Regione Siciliana ‘Alberto Bombace’ Palermo and the Assessorato regionale Beni Culturali, Ambientali e della P.I. della Regione Siciliana for the permission to use an image from John Florio’s dictionary A Worlde of Wordes on the cover of this book. My reading of Volpone in Chapter 2 revisits arguments that originally appeared in my contribution to Michele Marrapodi’s edited collection The Italian World of English Renaissance Drama. I am grateful to Associated University Presses and the University of Delaware Press for permission to publish a new and improved version. An earlier version of the section on Anglo-Scottish union in Chapter 5 appeared as ‘“My Lord, I fear, has forgot Britain”: Rome, Italy, and the (Re)construction of British National Identity’ in Shakespeare Yearbook 10 (1999). I want to thank the current editor, Douglas A. Brooks, and the editorial board for granting me permission to reprint that material here. My parents Mary and Blair Redmond and brothers Jeff and James have been an unwavering source of support and love. My suoceri Franco and Rosetta have welcomed me into their wonderful family and encouraged my efforts to become a canadese italianato. Above all, I must acknowledge the generosity and tolerance


of my wife Barbara and daughter Sophia Mary, who had to bear my absences as I sweated in front of a hostile computer during a series of sultry Sicilian summers.

Chapter 1

Introduction: The Politics of Intertextuality There is a real sense of liberation in recent intertextual studies of the Italian background of the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, with prominent scholars competing to provide obituaries for the oppressive methodologies of the past. As Louise George Clubb has made clear, ‘The method traditionally employed to account for Shakespeare’s Italophilia is a long and instructive, but now exhausted, practice of source study that has pursued specific parallels in innumerable Italian texts’. Metaphors of critical exhaustion recur in Alessandro Serpieri’s account of how ‘critici e filologici si [sono] trovati in una sorta di impasse, dato che la fase descrittiva e compilativa dei debiti shakespeariani verso le fonti si presentava ormai esaurita’. By abandoning the rigid methodological constraints imposed by the search for verbal echoes, Robert Miola has discovered ‘a new freedom’ and ‘a joyful abundance’ of potential textual relationships to explore. With ‘the radical twist in what constitutes an “intertext”’, Michele Marrapodi notes, there is now the opportunity to ‘embrace such broader intercultural factors as semantic topoi, genre models, ideological codes, and interdiscursive relationships’. Yet, despite all the claims about the death of traditional source criticism, the focus of most research about early modern English drama’s engagement with Italian culture is still the identification of more or less specific parallels with Cinquecento verse, prose narration, and theatre. Even though the rules and the rhetoric have changed, the effective critical orientation has not. Like the post-structuralism craze in English studies of the 1980s, where every article opened with a citation from Derrida or Foucault, many scholars have tended to acknowledge the latest academic fashion Louise George Clubb, ‘Italian Stories on the Stage’, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Comedy, ed. Alexander Leggatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 33. ‘Critics and philologists found themselves in a sort of impasse, given that the phase of the description and collection of Shakespearean sources was now exhausted’ (my translation). Alessandro Serpieri, ‘L’oggetto della ricerca e il percorso tecnico-operativo’, in Nel laboratorio di Shakespeare: Dalle fonti ai drammi, ed. Alessandro Serpieri (4 vols. Parma: Pratiche, 1990), vol. 1, p. 28. Robert S. Miola, ‘Seven Types of Intertextuality’, in Shakespeare, Italy, and Intertextuality, ed. Michele Marrapodi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), p. 23. Michele Marrapodi, ‘Appropriating Italy: Towards a New Approach to Renaissance Drama’, in Italian Culture in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: Rewriting, Remaking, Refashioning, ed. Michele Marrapodi (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), p. 5.


and then went on doing exactly what they did before. For although there is no longer the obligation to demonstrate direct correspondences, Shakespearean intertexts continue to serve as ‘a textual lens through which we can approach and see his plays’. The use of intertextuality as a close reading technique perpetuates the assumption that each canonical work is the final product of a specific cultural transaction, where obscure sources and analogues are subsidiary to the masterpiece we know and love. The perspective is retroactive, based on ‘whatever the literary critic perceives as revelatory of cultural poetics’. History comes into play as a static literary and social context, not as a continuous process uniting dramatists and audiences. The objectives of such a criticism, where even Douglas Bruster claims that ‘early modern plays seldom attributed their quotations’, have little, if anything, to do with the perception of textual and ideological patterns in the theatre of the time. The interpretive premise remains the transmission of ideas to Shakespeare, rather than the provisional place of his works within the ongoing circulation and transformation of Anglo-Italian discourses on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. In focusing upon the use of Italy to generate political meanings in period drama, this book argues that early modern intertextuality was a dynamic process of allusion, quotation and revision. The representation of Italian culture in the London theatre was never an isolated gesture. Playwrights interrogate textual precedents, reworking identifiable stylistic and ideological trends. It is not a coincidence that Francis Beaumont opened The Woman Hater with an acknowledgement of the dramatic conventions established in previous plays: ‘a Duke there is, and the Scene lyes in Italy, as those thinges lightly we never miss’. The self-reflexive stance of Beaumont is consistent with the attitudes of his contemporaries towards the rhetorical implications of using Italian material. Italy was synonymous with intertextuality in early modern English culture. Apart from the persistent place of Italianate drama in the theatre, involving the creation of specific genres and conventions, Italy occupied a privileged place in domestic libraries. What stands out in period accounts of the literature, politics and history of the peninsula are the constant references to the act of reading. The warning to aspiring tourists in Thomas Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller foregrounds the sheer number of Italian texts available to curious English readers: ‘What is here but we may read in books,

Stephen J. Lynch, Shakespearean Intertextuality (Westport: Greenwood, 1998), p. 114. Miola, p. 23. Douglas Bruster, Quoting Shakespeare: Form and Culture in Early Modern Drama (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), p. 18. Francis Beaumont, The Woman Hater, in The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 19661989), ll. 17-19.

Introduction: The Politics of Intertextuality

and a great deal more too, without stirring our feet out of a warm study?’ When asked about her familiarity with Italian literature in Volpone, the response of Lady Would-be is indignant: ‘Which o’ your poets? … I have read them all’.10 As educational practices based on textual reproduction combined with the remarkable proliferation of the printed word in Tudor and Stuart England, it was obvious ‘that such a culture would increasingly conceive of experience in terms of books’.11 The circulation of Italian texts is especially significant in the development of domestic political discourses. In reacting to the turmoil of Cinquecento Italy, the works of influential writers like Niccolò Machiavelli, Francesco Guicciardini, and Baldassare Castiglione provided a unique opportunity to learn about statecraft. The definition John Florio offered of the word politica in his landmark 1598 Italian dictionary concentrates on the textual transmission of political theory from Italy to England: ‘a booke written of policie, or touching the civill government of a state’.12 The typography of the volume sets the meaning apart as a separate entry from other words in the language referring to the practicalities of ‘governance and rule or policie’.13 There is no definition of political thought. Florio’s use of the term ‘booke’ emphasizes the publication and dissemination of political concepts, rather than their production.14 For English students of state affairs, as I will show, Italian politica provided the vocabulary and historical examples for the persistent domestic debates about sovereignty, crisis, and national identity. The prominent references to Italy in English political drama were inevitable. Insufficient attention has been devoted to what it meant to read and write about Italy in the London theatrical community. Even less attention has been devoted to what the highly allusive plays of the period demanded from their original audiences. The argument of this book is the manner in which, as dramatists engaged with the controversies of the time, the intertextuality of Italian culture became a fundamental part of the rhetorical and ideological strategies of Jacobean drama.

Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller. The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works, ed. J.B. Steane (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 343. 10 Ben Jonson, Volpone, ed. Brian Parker (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 3.4.79-81. I discuss the intertextual implications of her choice of Italian reading in Chapter 2, pp. 56-9. 11 Frederick Kiefer, Writing on the Renaissance Stage: Written Words, Printed Pages, Metaphoric Books (Newark, 1996), p. 106. 12 John Florio, A Worlde of Wordes, or Most Copious, and exact Dictionarie in Italian and English (London, 1599), p. 283. 13 Ibid., p. 283. 14 Compare with the definition of politica in a current Italian dictionary on historical principles like Lo Zingarelli: Vocabolario della lingua Italiana (Bologna: Zanichelli, 2001), p. 1366.


The discursive microcircuitry of the darkened Italian palace While there is an extensive scholarly tradition dealing with Italian narrative sources, centred on the plot construction of individual plays, the place of Italy in the cultural politics of Shakespeare and his contemporaries has never been the subject of a book-length study. The historical connection between the example offered by period accounts of the violent upheavals of the Wars of Italy and the Italian themes of the London stage has seemed much too obvious for critics to pursue in any systematic detail. In his influential survey of ‘The Debt of English to Italian Literature’, J.A. Symonds took it for granted that ‘The Italy of the Renaissance fascinated our dramatists with a strange wild glamour – the contrast of external pageant and internal tragedy, the alternations of radiance and gloom, the terrible examples of bloodshed, treason, and heroism emergent from ghastly crimes’.15 Symonds established a tradition of dealing with Cinquecento Italian political history as an evocative setting, distinct from the literary transactions related to the textual legacy of Petrarch and the novella. For the female scholar known as Vernon Lee, the infamous reputation of bloody Renaissance tyrants made it inevitable for representations of statecraft to be set in ‘the darkened Italian palace, with its wrought-iron bars preventing escape; its embroidered carpets muffling the footsteps, its hidden, suddenly yawning trap-doors; its arras hangings concealing masked ruffians; its garlands of poisoned flowers’.16 Lee’s ornate description of the Italian court setting was frequently cited in the prolific writing of Mario Praz, the most prominent figure in the development of Shakespearean studies in Italy.17 Praz interpreted the theatre’s fascination with the peninsula in terms of a persistent English taste for exotic locales: ‘Italy made very good copy, being considered the academy of manslaughter, the sporting place of murder, the apothecary shop of all nations’.18 Even in later studies consciously engaging with the politics of early modern drama, Cinquecento Italy remained a vague and self-evident context. J.W. Lever’s Tragedy of State became an important model for cultural materialist criticism through its effort to highlight the relevance of Jacobean drama to the social debates of the 1960s. However, albeit the majority of the plays in his book are set in the peninsula, Lever’s brief treatment of Italy does not depart from previous generalizations: ‘The annals of the Italian age of despots describe tyrannies and atrocities, plots and revolts, which make the inventions of the 15 J.A. Symonds, ‘The Debt of English to Italian Literature’, in Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece (1898, London, John Murray, 1914), p. 267. 16 Vernon Lee [Violet Paget], Euphorion (1899, London, 1885), pp. 78-9. 17 See Mario Praz, ‘Shakespeare’s Italy’, Shakespeare Survey 7 (1968): p. 95. See also Mario Praz, The Flaming Heart: Essays on Crashaw, Machiavelli, and Other Studies in the Relations between Italian and English Literature from Chaucer to T.S. Eliot (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1966). Many of the essays collected in this volume open with the same passage from Euphorion. 18 Praz, ‘Shakespeare’s Italy’, p. 95.


Jacobeans rather pedestrian’.19 There is no discussion of the rhetorical implications of Italian settings in Jonathan Dollimore’s Radical Tragedy, the seminal work for a generation of politically aware students and scholars. For although Dollimore acknowledges Machiavelli’s decisive contribution to the ideological concerns of Jacobean court drama, the intertextual specificity of radical plays like Antonio and Mellida, Antonio’s Revenge, The Revenger’s Tragedy, and The White Devil is not taken into account.20 Contemporary critics may be loath to be caught using the impressionistic prose of Victorian scholars, but the freedom of current intertextual methodology is not always conducive to a greater understanding of the transmission and reception of Italian political writing in the theatre. What comes to the fore in two recent books comparing Machiavelli and Shakespeare is a deliberate refusal to address the issue from the interpretive perspective of the early modern London stage community. At the start of Shakespeare and Machiavelli, John Roe makes it clear that the Florentine’s direct or indirect influence on Shakespearean drama is not the focus of his study: ‘This is an old question which can never be decided with any certainty; nor do I intend to provide an answer in this book’. 21 Instead, Roe’s concern is what the political theories of Machiavelli can tell the modern reader about Shakespeare’s plays ‘when they are brought together for comparison’.22 Hugh Grady adopts the same approach as Roe, also choosing to privilege the latent discursive parallels between the English dramatist and the Italian theorist. However, he expresses greater misgivings about the lack of a compelling account of the textual mediation of Machiavelli’s works: Without our being certain of quite how it happened, several sets of discourses of Machiavellian provenance somehow got transmitted into the remarkable theatre of late Tudor, early Stuart London. … [E]ven if we cannot be certain what microcircuitry was responsible for each specific transmission. In the end, it matters little whether Shakespeare directly read either Machiavelli or Montaigne. What matters is that we can observe the discursive parallels among them, parallels which help us to read the plays in new (and sometimes old) ways.23

From such a perspective, underlined by the repeated warnings that ‘we cannot be certain’ about the circulation of the Florentine’s texts, the best current scholarship can hope for is to exploit the critical potential of what Shakespeare has in common J.W. Lever, Tragedy of State: A Study of Jacobean Drama (rpt. London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 19-20. 20 See Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy (2nd ed. London: Harvester, 1989), pp. 11-17. 21 John Roe, Shakespeare and Machiavelli (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002), p. ix. 22 Ibid., p. ix. 23 Hugh Grady, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from Richard II to Hamlet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 29-30. 19


with Machiavelli on a conceptual level. Yet, even though there may be no acknowledged textual references to the Florentine in any of his plays, Shakespeare was not the only dramatist in Elizabethan and Jacobean London. Roe and Grady do not consider the extent to which the textual transmission of Machiavelli is an explicit theme in the works of other early modern playwrights. The obvious precedent for a theatre conscious of the intertextuality of Machiavelli is The Jew of Malta, where the Prologue emphasizes his status of an author of books available ‘here in Britany’: ‘Though some will speak openly against my books, / Yet will they read me’.24 Despite the willingness to compare Shakespeare to every social and cultural discourse imaginable in current criticism, there remains a surprising reluctance to interpret his plays in light of the dramatic and allusive strategies of his professional contemporaries even among critics committed to the latest discursive approaches. As the technological changes in printing began to condition the perception and circulation of knowledge, books would have been the most obvious way of transmitting Machiavelli’s ideas. The unambiguous connection between Machiavelli and the act of reading stands out in many of the ‘395 references’ to the Florentine Edward Meyer catalogued in his Machiavelli and the Renaissance Drama, a book characteristic of industrious nineteenth-century source scholarship.25 In The London Prodigal (1605), a city comedy once attributed to Shakespeare, Master Flowerdale calls attention to his exotic choice of reading: By my troth, gentlemen, I have been reading over Nick Machiavel, I find him good to be known, not to be followed. A pestilent inhuman fellow! I have made certain annotations on him, such as they be!26

In period performance, the humour of the allusion to ‘Nick Machiavel’ would have come from the foolish gallant’s pretensions as a political insider. Like Sir Politic Would-be in Volpone, the most famous example of the self-proclaimed annotators of Machiavelli in Jacobean comedy, Flowerdale makes suspect claims about his knowledge of illicit statecraft.27 For modern scholars, the reference here to ‘certain Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta, ed. David Bevington (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), Prologue, ll. 29, 10-11. See my discussion in Chapter 3, pp. 81-9. Roe argues that the Prologue’s main target is Rabelais, see Shakespeare and Machiavelli, pp. 8-9. Marlowe does not appear in Grady’s book. 25 Edward Meyer, Machiavelli and the English Drama (1897, New York: Burt Franklin, n.d.), p. xi. Ironically, Meyer’s argument is that Machiavelli arrived in England via the influence of Gentillet’s Contre-Machiavel. For the scholarly debate about Gentillet, see Chapter 3, pp. 83-6. 26 The London Prodigal in The Supplementary Works of William Shakspeare, comprising his poems and doubtful plays, ed. William Hazlitt (London: Routledge, 1852), 3.2, p. 225. 27 For Volpone, see pp. 46-59. 24


annotations’ is important because it introduces a logical association between reading and writing about Machiavelli. The intertextuality of the annotation, where the original text is reproduced in the reader’s own marginal commentary or commonplace book, is indicative not only of the circulation of Italian political theory in the culture at large, but also of how detailed quotations from writers like Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and Castiglione made their way into period plays. The objective of the commonplace book in Renaissance humanist pedagogy, as Ann Moss has underlined, was to provide a store of striking phrases and provocative ideas when pupils ‘came to construct compositions of their own’, a process which imposed ‘habits of reading and writing which characterised literate culture in Western Europe over a remarkably long period of time’.28 The intertextual legacy of many books derived from the circulation of specific colourful and politically salient quotations. In the case of Roger Ascham’s The Schoolmaster, for example, his scornful representations of the Italianate Englishman and the dangers of translated Italian books became an obligatory citation in subsequent texts about Anglo-Italian relations.29 The most controversial arguments of the Principe, reproduced with and without direct attribution, are a constant feature of period writing about politics. Of course, as we see in Flowerdale’s allusion, the name of Machiavelli had a semantic currency of its own. The rhetorical premise of such citations and allusions is suggestive of the expectations writers have about the interpretive competence of their final audiences. It would be grossly overstated to assert that every playgoer watching The London Prodigal had read Machiavelli, just as modern references to the catchphrase ‘To be, or not to be’ do not demonstrate a mass readership of Shakespeare. The demands the allusion makes upon the collective audience are much more limited. To achieve its comic effect, the scene requires only a widespread idea of the political and cultural implications of reading Machiavelli’s books. References to reading and authorship are unequivocal intertextual signals, different from the customary recycling of narrative sources. Through the citation of particular names and books, early modern plays demand that spectators become complicit in their intertextuality. Another conspicuous allusion to annotations on Machiavelli comes in Robert Greene’s Scottish History of James the Fourth (ca. 1588-1594). When the villain Ateukin returns home after insinuating his way into the graces of the unwary King of Scotland, he asks his servant to find his notes: Ateukin. Where be my writings I put in my pocket last night? Andrew. Which, sir? Your annotations upon Machiavel?30 28 Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), p. v. 29 See Chapter 2, pp. 29-45. 30 Robert Greene, The Scottish History of James the Fourth, ed. Norman Sanders (London: Methuen, 1970), 3.2.52-3.


By demonstrating Ateukin’s familiarity with the works of the notorious Florentine, the brief passage serves to underscore the devious tendencies of the character. Greene’s play has attracted a certain amount of attention in recent intertextual studies because its main narrative source is a novella from Giraldi Cinthio’s Hecatommithi, the same volume that provided Shakespeare with the plots for Othello and Measure for Measure.31 The precedent set by Greene’s use of Cinthio demonstrates the ability of dramatists to adapt such material even in the absence of a published English translation, given that the Hecatommithi were available only in the original Italian or in the 1583 French translation by Gabriel Chappuys. Greene retains many of the features of Cinthio’s tale of court lust, including the Scottish setting. The story forms part of the same group of ten narratives about marital infidelity where Shakespeare found the model for Othello. Nonetheless, despite the character’s similarities with Iago, there is no equivalent of Ateukin in the original Italian prose story. In Cinthio’s version, desire for another woman leads Astatio to kill his wife.32 Greene’s Scottish king gets the idea of murder from Ateukin: ‘Hear me, O king, ’tis Dorothea’s death / Must do you good’.33 What Greene does by adding the villain, complete with a direct allusion to Machiavelli, is to make a play based on an Italian story overtly Italianate in terms of the emerging stereotypes of the London theatre. George Chapman would go on to employ the same strategy of characterization through explicit allusion to Machiavelli in All Fools (1604). Based on a plot from Terence, the play recasts the heavy father of conventional New Comedy as a ‘wretched Machiavellian’.34 The pride Gostanzo takes in his astuteness, marked by frequent references to the Florentine political theorist, gives added comic resonance to the humiliation of the ‘old, politic, dissembling knight’ in the play’s finale.35 However, in updating his narrative source, Chapman does not limit himself to exploiting Machiavelli’s general reputation. The advice Gostanzo provides his supposedly ingenuous son comes straight from the notorious eighteenth chapter of Il Principe: 31

See Barbara Majelli, ‘Riscrivendo “l’alfieri”: Cinthio, Greene e la figura di Iago in Othello’, in Intertestualità shakespeariane, ed. Michele Marrapodi (Rome: Bulzoni, 2003), pp. 255-74 and Jason Lawrence, ‘“The story is extant, and writ in very choice Italian”: Shakespeare’s Dramatizations of Cinthio’, in Shakespeare, Italy, and Intertextuality, pp. 91-106. I discuss Shakespeare’s use of Cinthio in Chapter 4, pp. 143-53. 32 In the original, although the action takes place in Scotland, the central character is the king of Ireland. See Gio. Battista Giraldi Cinthio, Gli Ecatommiti, ovvero cento novelle di Gio. Battista Giraldi Cinzio (Torino: Cugini Pomba, 1853), decade 3, novella 1. 33 Greene, 2.2.190-91. 34 George Chapman, All Fools, ed. Frank Manley (London: Edward Arnold, 1968), 1.1.148. For the citation of the Principe in period drama, see Chapter 3, especially pp. 7997. 35 Chapman, 1.1.401.


Promises are no fetters. With that tongue Thy promise pass’d, unpromise it again. Wherefore has a man a tongue of power to speak, But to speak to his private purpose? Beasts utter but one sound, but men have change Of speech and reason, even by Nature given them, Now to say one thing and another now, As best may serve their profitable ends.36

The starting point of the speech is Machiavelli’s account of ‘In che modo i Prencipi debbono osservare la fede’.37 Gostanzo’s comparison to beasts recalls the metaphors for tactical deceit in the original text: ‘Essendo adunque un Prencipe necessitato saper bene usare la bestia’.38 However, in arguing that ‘Honesty is but a defect of wit’, the vain father far exceeds Machiavelli’s own political agenda.39 Here, instead of a brutish necessity of statecraft, deceit becomes an essential quality of being human. The interdiscursive integration of Machiavelli into the play’s dramatic agenda is self-evident. An aside from a concealed onlooker emphasizes the questionable morality of the precepts: ‘By’r lady, sound instructions to a son’.40 For the well-informed Jacobean spectator, able to pick up Chapman’s intertextual signals, the speech would have functioned as a parody of the excesses of domestic readers of the Principe. The problem for the modern critic is how to provide an authentic historical account of the play’s hypothetical ideal audience.

36 Chapman, 2.1.69-76. Compare with Niccolò Machiavelli, Il Prencipe (Palermo [London], 1584), pp. 30r-32r. Throughout this book, given the focus on the English scene, I cite John Wolfe’s surreptitious London edition of the Machiavellian text. The idiosyncratic text of this version is acknowledged in the printer’s own postscript where the presumed Sicilian compositors apologize in advance for errors deriving from their unfamiliarity with the ‘favella toscana’ (Tuscan language). For the circulation of the edition in England, see Chapter 3, pp. 86-9. 37 Machiavelli, Il Prencipe, p. 30r. ‘How princes should honour their word’, The Prince, trans. George Bull (London: Penguin, 1999), p. 56. All English translations are taken from this edition. 38 Machiavelli, Il Prencipe, p. 31r. ‘a prince is forced to know [well] how to act like a beast’. 39 Chapman, 2.1.84. The Florentine is careful to represent deceit only as a necessity for great leaders. 40 Chapman, 2.1.77.


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Playwrights and Audiences In dealing with intertextuality as a rhetorical strategy, where playwrights exploited the presumed reputation of individual authors, texts and certain widely quoted passages, it is necessary to think about the experiences of the Londoners that watched and read these plays at the time. Yet there is little evidence to reconstruct how Tudor and Stuart spectators interpreted specific works in performance. It is ironic that many studies of period audience response end up discussing anti-theatrical polemics like The Schoole of Abuse and HistrioMastix, rather than the reactions of frequent playgoers.41 For although a number of general references to dramatists and their works have been preserved, there are only ‘four major accounts of performances’ of plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries available for theatre historians to work with.42 Reports such as the diary entries of Dr Simon Forman about the staging of Macbeth, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale at the Globe in 1611 tend to provide only plot summaries, useful primarily for confirming performance dates and the ability of playgoers to remember the overall storylines of the works they had seen. The most compelling answer stage orientated criticism has offered to this quandary is to treat ‘the text as a blueprint for performance (independent of any particular performances), viewing the audience as an entity the playwright sets out to construct with each play’.43 The critical model of an ideal audience presupposes, as Jeremy Lopez has put it, ‘one can better understand the audiences of the English Renaissance if one better understands the plays they watched’.44 Nonetheless, as we will see with Shakespeare’s focus on miscomprehension in the metatheatrical scenes of Hamlet, the subjective responses of the recalcitrant playgoer would not have always coincided with the collective responses envisioned by an ambitious dramatist. John Webster blamed the failure of the theatrical version of The White Devil, filled with verbal echoes of Italian courtship literature, political theory, and historical accounts of the fate of Vittoria Accoramboni, upon ‘those ignorant asses’ who attended its first performances at the Red Bull.45 Webster’s For example, see the opening chapters of Jeremy Lopez, Theatrical Conventions and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) and Thomas Cartelli, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the Economy of Theatrical Experience (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991). 42 Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 132. 43 Kent Cartwright, Shakespearean Tragedy and its Double: The Rhythms of Audience Response (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), p. 29. See also Cartelli, p. xiii. 44 Lopez, p. 7. 45 John Webster, ‘To the Reader’, The White Devil, ed. John Russell Brown (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), l. 8. See my account of Webster’s complaints about the original audience, pp. 118-20. 41


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complaints about the lack of ‘a full and understanding auditory’ make manifest the extent to which dramatic intertextuality takes for granted the interpretive sophistication of a well-read and theatrically astute spectator, an expectation the citizens and apprentices who frequented the ‘open and black’ playhouse in Clerkenwell clearly did not live up to.46 Given the reception of The White Devil, the complexities of Italianate drama may seem to be more suited to the type of audiences we tend to associate with the private theatres. There is a longstanding critical debate about the social exclusivity of the indoor playhouses, where the best argument for the standard paradigm of a clientele composed primarily of courtiers and Inns of Court students is the expensive price of admission.47 The search for a corporate aesthetic of an ‘early modern theatre industry’ in recent repertory studies has reinforced claims the private companies tailored their works to the tastes of a socially and culturally coherent target market, exploiting the commercial potential of specific genres and themes.48 Significantly, most of the parodies of established generic conventions I discuss in this book originated with the children’s companies. Plays like The Fleire, Humour Out of Breath, and The Woman Hater foreground their relationship to previous representations of Italian court politics, complete with extensive metatheatrical references and direct allusions to more famous works. The intertextual premise of such parodies anticipates the predictable responses of regular playgoers, aware of the pattern established by the dramatic repertory. However, when we look at what many private theatre dramatists had to say about their audiences, we find the same complaints Webster had about the Red Bull patrons. The case of John Fletcher’s Faithful Shepherdess (1608), an Italianate tragicomedy staged by the Children of the Queen’s Revels, marks the ease with which dramatists overestimated the sophistication of the private theatre clientele.49 The play draws on the aesthetic principles of Battista Guarini’s Il pastor fido, as the similarity between the titles of the two works suggests. Ben Jonson had already mocked the tendency of ‘English writers’ to copy the Italian pastoral drama in Volpone (1606): 46

Ibid., ll. 6, 4-5. See Gurr, p. 89. The studies of Alfred Harbage and Ann Jennalie Cook represent the extreme positions in the debate about period audience composition. However, both critics privilege the model of an elitist private theatre. Harbage argued the private theatres intentionally excluded the lower classes. See Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions (New York: Macmillan, 1952). Cook maintained the social elite dominated both types of theatre, just as they dominated ‘the rest of the cultural world’. See The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare’s London 1576-1640 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 272. 48 Lucy Munro, Children of the Queen’s Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 12. The most influential example of this approach is Mary Bly, Queer Virgins and Virgin Queans on the Early Modern Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 49 I discuss the influence of Italian theories of tragicomedy in Chapter 4, p. 143-53. 47


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Here’s Pastor Fido ... All our English writers, I mean such as are happy in th’Italian, Will deign to steal out of this author.50

The allusion to widespread plagiarism in Lady Would-be’s catalogue of Italian reading is borne out by the influence Guarini had upon prominent figures in the domestic literary community like Samuel Daniel and John Marston.51 Yet, notwithstanding the evident enthusiasm of Fletcher’s immediate peers, The Faithful Shepherdess seems to have failed because the Blackfriars audience had no previous acquaintance with pastoral tragicomedy. In the preface to the published version of the play, Fletcher warns his potential readers If you be not reasonably assured of your knowledge in this kinde of Poeme, lay downe the book or reade this, which I would wish had been the prologue. It is a pastoral Tragi-comedie, which the people seeing when it was plaid, having ever had a singular guift in defining, concluded to be a play of country hired shepheardes ... . In their error I would not have you fall, least you incurre their censure.52

Here, the private theatre customer is not always right. The responsibility for the fiasco belongs to the spectators, guilty of a lack of literary ‘knowledge’. Such complaints help us to understand more about the expectations of period dramatists, unrealistic or otherwise. Francis Beaumont’s commendatory verse reinforces the idea that the play demands an intertextual sensibility. He underlines the consumers of the book ‘must have the quallitie / Of reading, which I am afraid is more / Than halfe your shrewedest judges had before’.53 Of course, Beaumont had his own grievances towards the Blackfriars patrons. The metatheatrical experimentation of The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607) may delight modern scholars, but his play was another flop for the Queen’s Revels. Like Fletcher, Beaumont seems to have succumbed to the temptation to write for the more refined tastes of his colleagues and a restricted literary coterie. While his parody of stage-struck citizens and apprentices stages the perceived socio-cultural distinctions between the public and private theatres, flattering the comparative sophistication of his intended audience, the original playgoers did Jonson, Volpone, 3.4.86-9. See Jason Lawrence, ‘Who the Devil taught thee so much Italian’: Italian language learning and literary imitation in early modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), pp. 62-100, 140-64. See also Munro, pp. 97-105. 52 John Fletcher, The Faithful Shepherdess, ed. Florence Ada Kirk (New York: Garland, 1980), p. 15. 53 Ibid., p. 6. 50

51


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not get the theatrical in-jokes. The dedication the printer Walter Burre added to the 1613 quarto edition represents it as an abandoned child: ‘by his parents (perhaps because he was so unlike his brethren) exposed to the wide world, who for want of judgement, or not understanding the privy mark of irony about it ... utterly rejected it’.54 The fate of Beaumont and Fletcher’s innovative plays suggests the interpretive competence of the collective Blackfriars audience was not necessarily all that far from the ‘understanding’ grocer portrayed at the start of The Knight of the Burning Pestle, ridiculed for his resistance to the theatre’s ‘study for new subjects’.55 Whatever the responses in the playhouse, aspiring dramatists were keen to gain the appreciation they thought their works were due. An alternative outlet for the misunderstood play was publication, as the authorial prefaces to The White Devil and The Faithful Shepherdess make clear. From the end of the sixteenth century onwards, there were ‘an ever-increasing number of printed playtexts available for purchase, reading, and circulation’.56 The emerging market for printed plays has considerable implications for our understanding of the relationship between dramatic intertextuality and period reception. In his recent study of the existing references to early modern drama, Charles Whitney argues the primary evidence from the period ‘cuts across the venerable binary of stage vs. page, of theatrical presentation vs. literary art, performance vs. text, play going vs. reading’.57 The minimal discussion of ‘in-theatre experiences’ in the descriptions of identifiable plays suggests they ‘may have just as well come from reading as from playgoing’.58 The reading experience would have been very different from that of the playhouse. Unlike the hustle and bustle of Webster’s Red Bull, a quiet room offered readers the leisure necessary to appreciate the literary qualities of complex and highly allusive dramatic works. Publication was also an opportunity for authors to revise and expand their performance versions, producing texts unconstrained by the limits of theatrical representation. Even as the title page of the quarto edition of The Devil’s Charter (1607) invokes the prestige of a court performance, it promises a text designed specifically for reading: ‘As it was plaid before the King’s Majestie ... . But more exactly reviewed, corrected, and augmented by the Author, for the more pleasure and profit of the Reader’.59 In a performance context, as I will show in Chapter 4, the role of the Florentine historian Francesco Guicciardini as the on Francis Beaumont, Knight of the Burning Pestle, ed. Sheldon P. Zitner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), p. 51. 55 Ibid., Induction, ll. 24, 17. 56 David M. Bergeron, Textual Patronage in English Drama, 1570-1640 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), p. 2. 57 Charles Whitney, Early Responses to Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 4. 58 Ibid., p. 4. 59 Barnabe Barnes, The Devil’s Charter, ed. Jim C. Pogue (New York: Garland, 1980), p. 37. 54


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stage chorus immediately introduces the play’s sophisticated intertextual agenda.60 Barnabe Barnes’ depiction of Pope Alexander VI draws on the most famous contemporary works of political theory, consistent with Niccolò Machiavelli’s use of the pontiff as an exemplar of the pragmatics of statecraft in Il Principe. Barnes had already discussed Machiavelli at length in his Four Bookes of Offices, a political treatise published a year earlier, but his limited experience as a dramatist would have made it difficult for him to accomplish his challenging agenda on-stage. The rhetorical density of the prolonged speeches of the Borgia pope, subversively juxtaposing verbal echoes from Machiavelli and James I, may have been more effective on the printed page.61 For successful playwrights like William Shakespeare and John Marston, however, publication was secondary to the economic and aesthetic satisfactions of the stage. The enduring value of Shakespeare’s plays as theatrical properties may explain his notorious disinterest in their printed versions, even though the market demand ensured he would go on to become ‘the period’s leading published playwright’.62 Marston’s preface to The Fawn (1606) represents the volume as an attempt to forestall an unauthorized edition, claiming to ‘print a comedy’ only because ‘it cannot avoid publishing’.63 He privileges the experience of the playtext in performance: ‘Comedies are writ to be spoken, not read. Remember the life of these things consists in action’.64 Nonetheless, on an intertextual level, there is no fundamental difference between the rhetorical strategies of Marston and Barnes. The Devil’s Charter may be remarkable for the scope of its verbal echoes, in line with the play’s declared revision for readers, but Marston had already exploited Italian political writing for dramatic effect in The Fawn, Antonio and Mellida, and Antonio’s Revenge.65 Each of these popular plays foregrounds the cultural associations of the ‘A, B, C, of courtship’ in Baldassare Castiglione’s Il libro del cortegiano.66 Marston’s representation of ‘Castilio’ as a stage character in the two Antonio plays follows the precedent set by his printed satires, where the Italian author incarnates the flattery and deceit of courtiers. Whether on-stage or on the page, all of Marston’s caricatures of Castiglione count on the immediate recognizability of their allusions to the contested domestic reputation of the Cortegiano.

60

See pp. 81-2. This would also explain why the dramatist did not face any form of punishment after the presentation at Whitehall. 62 David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 21. 63 John Marston, The Fawn, ed. Gerald A. Smith (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), p. 3. 64 Ibid., p. 5. The argument recurs in his prefatory material for The Malcontent. 65 See my discussion of these plays, pp. 101-5, 131-2. 66 Marston, The Fawn, 4.1.167. 61


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The historical evidence suggests many contemporary observers had a wideranging awareness of the importance of Italian culture in the London theatrical repertory, notwithstanding the complaints of overambitious dramatists about audience incompetence. Even notorious anti-theatrical polemics offer informed commentary about Italianate drama. Stephen Gosson represents the theatre’s links with Italy as a symptom of its moral corruption: ‘Compare London to Rome and England to Italy, you shall find the theatres of the one, the abuses of the other, to bee rife among us’.67 In a passage which has become ‘a cliché of theatre history’, given its perceptive survey of conventional narrative and dramatic sources, he mocks the lack of originality on the early modern stage: I have seen it that the Palace of Pleasure, the Golden Ass, the Ethiopean History, Amadis of France, the Round Table, bawdy comedies in Latin, French, Italian and Spanish have been thoroughly ransacked to furnish the playhouses of London.68

Here, starting from the same premise as Lady Would-be’s remarks about the Pastor fido in Volpone, Gosson evokes persistent anxieties about England’s lack of cultural autonomy. His reference to William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure, a 1566 collection of novelle adapted from authors such as Boccaccio and Bandello, highlights a text eponymous with the ‘Italian literary conquest of England during the sixteenth century’.69 Roger Ascham had already devoted particular attention to the domestic circulation of ‘bawdy books ... translated out of the Italian tongue’ in The Schoolmaster, equating the phenomenon with the dangers posed by travel to Italy itself.70 The Palace of Pleasure was a perfect example of the influence these translations acquired. Painter’s volume became a source for the plots of as many as 43 Tudor and Stuart plays, in the estimation of Mary Augusta Scott.71 Since the indebtedness was obvious enough to catch the attention of the most reluctant playgoers, we should not be surprised to find references to Italian source material among the accounts of the habitués of the theatre. What comes to the fore in the diary entry of the Inns of Court student John Manningham, reporting on the performance of Twelfth Night at Middle Temple Hall in 1602, is his attempt to interpret the play intertextually:

Stephen Gosson, The Schoole of Abuse in Shakespeare Society of London Publications vol. 15 (Nos 14, 2) (rpt. Nendeln, Kraus, 1966), p. 24. 68 Clubb, p. 32; Stephen Gosson, Plays Confuted in Five Actions (1582), D6v (quoted in Clubb, p. 32). 69 Mary Augusta Scott, Elizabethan Translations from the Italian (1916, New York: Burt Franklin, 1969), p. xli. 70 Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster, ed. Lawrence V. Ryan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), p. 68. See Chapter 2, pp. 29-30. 71 Scott, p. 12. 67

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Shakespeare, Politics, and Italy at our feast we had a play called Twelve night or what you will / ./ much like the comedy of Errores / or Menechmi in plautus / but most like to that in Italian called Inganni / a good practice in it to make the steward believe his Lady widowe was in Love wth him. by counterfeiting a letter / as from his lady in generall termes / telling him what shee like best in him / and prescribing his gesture in smiling his apparaile / etc. and then when he came to practice making him believe they tooke him to be mad.72

Manningham adopts a comparative approach, locating the new play within a network of dramatic precedents. Prior to the usual synopsis, he notes the resemblance of the comedy to Shakespeare’s own Comedy of Errors, the Menaechmi of Plautus, and, in particular, an Italian drama he terms Inganni. His identification of an Italian source is problematic, since the most likely analogue for the main female disguise plot is the anonymous Gl’ingannati.73 The inaccuracy leads Andrew Gurr to conclude that ‘Manningham’s knowledge of Italian drama seems to have been less solid than his studies of Plautus at school’.74 To be fair, Manningham’s plot summary concentrates on Malvolio, a comic steward who has little to do with any of the potential Italian models for the crossdressing of Viola. In the context of a brief diary entry, however, his source attribution is more insightful than it might seem. There are at least two Cinquecento plays with the title Gl’inganni, including a relatively well-known work by Niccolò Secchi.75 Each of these comedies features a woman disguised as a man.76 As a member of the Inns of Court, Manningham formed part of the most vibrant literary community in London. He would have had the opportunity to discuss Twelfth Night with erudite colleagues like John Hoskyns, acclaimed for his extempore performance of the ‘Fustian Answer to a Tufftaffeta Speech’ at the 1597-1598 Middle Temple Revels.77 Manningham entered into a traditional contract of fellowship with Hoskyns at the start of his studies at the Middle Temple and often copied his companion’s witticisms into his diary.78 Law students were a prominent part of the local theatrical clientele, frequenting both the public

72 John Manningham, Diary entry for Candlemas Day, in ‘Records, Documents and Allusions’, The Riverside Shakespeare, p. 1966. 73 For the relationship of the play to Italian drama and prose, see Kenneth Muir, The Sources of Shakespeare’s Plays (London: Methuen, 1977), pp. 132-5. 74 Gurr, p. 132. 75 Michael Shapiro suggests the earlier Gl’ingannati may have influenced the portrayal of the disguised heroine in Secchi’s play. See Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 219-20. 76 See Muir, pp. 132-4. 77 See Michelle O’Callaghan, The English Wits: Literature and Sociability in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 24. 78 Ibid., p. 10.


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and private playhouses.79 Apart from commissioning special presentations from professional companies, the Inns organized their own dramatic productions and provided a starting point for many of the period’s playwrights, including Marston, Beaumont, George Chapman, Thomas Sackville and Edward Norton, and Edward Sharpham. In dedicating the 1616 folio edition of Every Man Out of His Humour to the Inns of Court, commended as ‘the Noblest Nurseries of Humanity, and Liberty, in the Kingdom’, Ben Jonson praises ‘a worthy succession’ of law students who have distinguished themselves ‘as being born the judges’ of the theatre.80 The original 1599 playtext had already advertised its relationship to the community by drawing on Hoskyns’s celebrated mock-oration for the ‘fustian’ talk of the foppish Clove.81 Manningham’s diary provides an important historical precedent for the representation of audience response and awareness in period plays. The Induction of Every Man Out of His Humour demonstrates that an intertextual approach was just what dramatists wanted from their spectators. The comedy opens with the search for an ideal audience, as the satirist Asper invites his companions Cordatus and Mitis to witness the ensuing performance. In his role as a proxy for Jonson, Asper is keen to recruit ‘Attentive auditors, / Such as will join their profit with their pleasure, / And come to feed their understanding parts’.82 What makes Cordatus such a desirable spectator is his ‘discreet and understanding judgement’, an ability which permits him to become ‘a man inly acquainted with the scope and drift of [Asper’s] plot’.83 The repeated emphasis on the word ‘understanding’, as we have seen in the complaints of Webster, betrays the anxieties of early modern playwrights about the fate of their texts in the theatre.84 Through the commentary of his meta-audience, explicitly compared to the Grex of Aristophanic comedy, Jonson positions the performance as a collective experience that demands the approbation and participation of an exclusive interpretive group. Like Manningham, the onstage spectators pay particular attention to the play’s sources: Mitis. You have seen his play, Cordatus? Pray you, how is ’t?

79

For the existing records of the relationship between the Inns of Court and the theatre, see Whitney, pp. 123-33. See also Gurr, pp. 80-82. 80 Ben Jonson, ‘Dedication to the Folio’, Every Man Out of His Humour, ed. Helen Ostovich (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), p. 383. 81 Jonson, Every Man Out of His Humour, 3.1.169. See Ostrovich’s introduction to the play, p. 35 and O’Callaghan, p. 24. 82 Jonson, ‘Induction’, Every Man Out of His Humour, ll. 199-201. 83 Jonson, ‘Characters’, Every Man Out of His Humour, p. 110. 84 For a survey of the word’s use in period drama, see William N. West, ‘Understanding in the Elizabethan Theaters’, Renaissance Drama 35 (2006): pp. 113-44.


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Cordatus. Faith, sir, I must refrain to judge. Only this I can say of it: ’tis strange and of a particular kind by itself, somewhat like Vetus Commedia: a work that hath bounteously pleased me.85

The allusion to the ‘Vetus Commedia’ introduces a lengthy discussion of the play’s affinities with classical comedy, highlighting the established conventions of the ‘Terentian manner’ and the innovations of ‘Menander, Philemon, Caecilius, Plautus, and the rest’.86 Jonson goes on to acknowledge the fashionable role of Italian material in the theatre, supplementing the classical references with the choice of character names like Puntarvolo, Sordido, and Carlo Buffone. The rhetorical strategy at the start of Every Man Out forestalls audience error, in line with Fletcher’s regrets about the absence of an explanatory ‘prologue’ in The Faithful Shepherdess.87 By setting out the generic context in an unequivocal way, Jonson simultaneously educates his actual spectators and provides them with a model for their own responses. ‘Written in very choice Italian’: Hamlet’s intertextual commentary When we turn to the metatheatrical scenes in Hamlet, featuring the Danish prince’s production of The Murder of Gonzago, intertextuality takes centre stage. As Hamlet observes the court performance at Elsinore, the most notable playgoer in the works of Shakespeare offers a running commentary on the action. Audience understanding is essential to Hamlet’s project. To use the Italian court tragedy as a political weapon against Claudius, the prince needs to ensure the prospective references to the death of his father are apparent. Here, what should stand out for an intertextual critic is Hamlet’s explicit attribution of the play within the play to an Italian source: ’A poisons him i’ th’ garden for his estate. His name’s Gonzago, the story is extant, and written in very choice Italian. You shall see anon how the murtherer gets the love of Gonzago’s wife.88

The passage is unique for its implicit allusion to Shakespeare’s customary use of Italian prose narratives as the basis for dramatic plots. The only instances where we find Shakespeare’s narrative sources cited on-stage are the Prologues to Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen, acknowledging the appropriation of 85

Jonson, ‘Induction’, ll. 225-9. Ibid., ll. 234, 256-7. 87 Fletcher, p. 15. 88 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.2.261-4. This and all subsequent quotations from Shakespeare are from The Riverside Shakespeare, gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). The passage is unique to the Second Quarto. 86


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English tales from Gower and Chaucer.89 Yet it is rare to find a play Shakespearean source studies have not linked to the novella and romanzo traditions, although the academic rigour governing the pursuit of obscure parallels has often been questionable. Ironically, one of the exceptions to the rule is Hamlet. Critical attention has concentrated on the elusive Ur-Hamlet, a domestic text routinely postulated as the direct predecessor of the entire work.90 Despite the overt discussion of the narrative provenance of ‘The Mouse-Trap’ on-stage, there has been little interest in finding a specific fictional story to confirm Hamlet’s claim. The Italianate metadrama does not feature, for example, in Kenneth Muir’s Sources of Shakespeare’s Plays.91 Geoffrey Bullough’s approach to the Gonzago story focused on potential historical analogues.92 The absence of any obvious traces of direct textual transmission cannot rule out the possibility a relevant Italian story was extant at the time. The play within the play’s depiction of court intrigue and murder recalls the Italian political drama of the London repertory, consistent with the theatrical context created by the references to the rivalry between adult and children’s companies in the preceding rehearsal scenes. Apart from the question of philological accuracy, however, Hamlet’s Italian source attribution has significant dramatic implications. Like a clever playwright, the prince uses intertextuality to make certain his spectators get the message. Shakespeare’s staging of The Murder of Gonzago is secondary to his representation of the meta-audience. In an influential study, Cesare Segre described the play within the play in Hamlet as a mise en abyme, where ‘Abbiamo due specchi di fronte, e le immagini rimbalzono dall’uno all’altro, all’infinito, così da sovrapporre fantasmagoricamente realtà e finzione’.93 Yet the disruptive commentary of Hamlet foregrounds the interpretation of the performance by the fictional spectators, rather than the pragmatics of theatrical mimesis. Ophelia is right when she says Hamlet is ‘as good as a chorus’ (3.2.245). The prince’s explanation of the narrative and dramatic sources of the murder scene is characteristic of the manner in which his constant interruptions seek to condition the responses of the Danish aristocracy. The provocative exchanges between Hamlet and the court spectators overshadow the players. A significant analogue for the scene is the royal mockery of the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisby in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where the responses of the great and good take precedence over the plebeian metadrama. For although critics have often focused on the capacity of the itinerant actors to influence the court in Hamlet, finding a ‘prominent image of the power For the intertextual implications of Gower’s appearance in Pericles, see pp. 77-8. For the standard account of the sources of Hamlet, see Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. 7 (London: Routledge, 1973), pp. 3-188. 91 See Muir, pp. 158-70. 92 See Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. 7, pp. 29-33. 93 ‘We have two mirrors and the two images reflect from one to the other, to infinity, phantasmagorically superimposing reality and fiction’ (my translation). Cesare Segre, Teatro e romanzo (Turin: Einaudi, 1984), p. 58. 89 90


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of theatricality’, the dominant role of the authentic prince as producer, director, author, and critic leaves little space for the speeches of the player king and queen.94 It is Hamlet’s commentary which catches ‘the conscience of the King’, not ‘The Mouse-Trap’ itself (2.2.605). Unmoved by the two representations of the murder, Claudius only abandons the performance ‘Upon the talk of pois’ning’ as the prince explicates the Italian background of the play (3.2.289). Hamlet’s obsessive concern with audience response dominates the preparation and enactment of The Murder of Gonzago. What motivates the prince’s sudden passion for Italianate court drama is the expectation that the reaction of Claudius to the poisoning scenes will confirm his responsibility for the murder: I have heard That guilty creatures sitting at a play Have by the very cunning of the scene Been strook so to the soul, that presently They have proclaim’d their malefactions. (2.2.588-92)

The prince has chosen the pre-existing play because of its resemblance to the ghost’s narrative: ‘One scene of it comes near the circumstance / ... of my father’s death’ (3.2.76-7). He encourages Horatio to watch the reactions of Claudius during the performance: ‘Give him heedful note, / For I mine eyes will rivet to his face’ (3.2.84-5). Hamlet’s rhetoric represents the theatre as a powerful moral influence upon the spectator. Nonetheless, he does not trust the players to convey his message to the new king. In his final backstage instructions, the prince worries that the clown will distract the audience from the significance of the drama: ‘there be some of them that will themselves laugh to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too, though in the mean time some necessary question of the play is then to be consider’d’ (3.2.40-43). The failure of the ‘excellent play’ featuring the speech about the slaughter of Priam looms as a cautionary example of the risks of the theatre (2.2.439). Its merits may have been ‘receiv’d’ by Hamlet but ‘it was caviary to the general’, a conclusion demonstrated by Polonius’ complaints that the actor’s recital is ‘too long’ (2.2.437, 498). The initial response of the metaaudience does little to relieve such apprehensions. Hamlet finds himself obliged to explain ‘what this show meant’ after the assembly at Elsinore fails to grasp the significance of the opening dumb show (3.2.142). The only response to the first representation of regicide comes from a puzzled Ophelia: ‘What means this, my lord?’ (3.2.136). Consequently, Hamlet intervenes to remove any indeterminacy or complexity by offering overt indications to guide the reactions of the spectators. It is not a coincidence that, as the aggrieved prince betrays his personal investment Kenneth Gross, Shakespeare’s Noise (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 27. There is a significant power imbalance between the prince and players, keen to retain his patronage. See Louis Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 103. 94


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in the play, Claudius begins to address his questions about ‘the argument’ and potential ‘offense’ of the tragedy directly to him (3.2.232). Given the emphasis on the need to manage audience response during Hamlet’s presentation of the play within the play, it is imperative to consider his explicit reference to an Italian source in terms of how it would have helped to create meaning in the early modern London theatre. By foregrounding the production of an Italianate court drama, featuring the first of the many ill-fated dukes I will discuss in this book, the prince’s commentary appeals to the pre-existing knowledge of a genre that was already becoming a standby of the domestic repertory. A prominent example was Antonio’s Revenge, a tragedy with a remarkable resemblance to the main plot of Hamlet.95 Each play features the aggrieved ghost of a poisoned head of state who calls upon his son to avenge his assassination and prevent his wife’s remarriage. John Marston wrote the sequel to Antonio and Mellida for the Paul’s boys, taking advantage of the tragic potential of the original comedy’s representation of Italian state intrigue. However, as with the parallels between The Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet, the critical consensus is that Shakespeare influenced Marston or that the two dramatists independently adapted the Ur-Hamlet.96 The resistance to Marston’s potential influence on the main plot, as G.K. Hunter pointed out, is symptomatic of a residual assumption that ‘Shakespeare was too transcendent a genius to copy other people’ in the theatre.97 Yet there are also significant affinities between Marston’s Italianate tragedy and The Murder of Gonzago. The possibility Shakespeare’s metadrama parodies the style and setting of works like Antonio’s Revenge, providing a foil for the greater complexities of his overall drama, is coherent with the discussion of theatrical competition in the 1623 folio version of Hamlet.98 Artistic quality has nothing to do with the prince’s choice of play. The opening speech of the play within the play scene, where Hamlet instructs the actors, emphasizes the prince’s contempt for ‘inexplicable dumb shows’ (3.2.12). Marston employs three separate dumb shows, each serving to highlight crucial plot developments.99 Despite the parallels with the death of old Hamlet, the crude dumb show presented at Elsinore fails to capture the attention of Claudius. The hackneyed repertory of the itinerant players also recalls Marston in its use of Italian material. As the representation of the villainous Venetian duke in both of the Antonio plays makes clear, the standard argument of Italianate court drama was illegitimate rule. The ideological associations of the Italian character

95

I discuss the play in detail in Chapter 3, see pp. 101-5. See Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. 7, pp. 16-26. 97 Introduction to John Marston, Antonio’s Revenge, ed. G.K. Hunter (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), p. xx. 98 For the references to the London theatre market, see Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 13-30. 99 For Marston’s dumb shows, see Dieter Mehl, The Elizabethan Dumb Show: The History of a Dramatic Convention (rpt. London, Methuen, 1982), pp. 125-32. 96


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names and source of The Murder of Gonzago supplement Hamlet’s open challenge to the new king. Beyond any individual narrative source, the underlying influence upon the theatre’s portrayal of state crisis was the pervasive circulation of Cinquecento political writing in early modern England. The centrality of Italian precedents in domestic discourses of courtiership and statecraft, as Marston’s caricatures of Castiglione suggest, made it inevitable for playwrights to deal with these arguments in an Italian context. Shakespeare’s on-stage depiction of an interpretive community of nobles and courtiers reflects the appeal such drama would have had for genuine and would-be court insiders. The theoretical concerns of Machiavelli and his contemporaries were inextricable from the fate of Italy during the sixteenth century, when the ambitions of France, Spain, and the papacy had disastrous consequences for the autonomous city-states of the peninsula. Even the Cortegiano, famous for its placid debates about the qualities of an ideal courtier, opens with an embittered account of the humiliation of ‘poore Italy’.100 By the time Castiglione wrote his nostalgic portrait of Duke Guidobaldo da Montefeltro’s court, the dukedom of Urbino had already lost its independence.101 The strategic errors of Guidobaldo’s successor, Francesco Maria I della Rovere, earned him the disdain of Castiglione and Francesco Guicciardini, two of the most influential political theorists in early modern Europe.102 Some critics have read the courtly manners in the main plot of Hamlet in terms of the Cortegiano, although Shakespeare offers none of the distinct references or verbal echoes found in other plays from the period.103 A more compelling approach finds a potential historical analogue for The Murder of Gonzago in the presumed murder of Francesco Maria I.104 After the reviled duke died in mysterious circumstances in 1538, his family and followers claimed he had been poisoned via a lotion administered in the ear.105 Francesco Maria’s barber-surgeon confessed under torture to committing the murder on behalf of Luigi Gonzaga, a member of the ruling family of Mantua and immediate relative

Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Sir Thomas Hoby (London: Dent, 1974), p. 286. 101 See my discussion in Chapter 3, pp. 97-100. 102 For Guicciardini’s personal quarrels with the ruler, see James Dennistoun, Memoirs of the Dukes of Urbino, vol. 2 (London: Longman, 1851), pp. 415-19. 103 In particular, see Barbara Johnson, ‘“The Fabric of the Universe Rent”: Hamlet as an Inversion of The Courtier’, Hamlet Studies 9 (1987): 34-52. 104 See Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. 7, pp. 29-33 and ‘The Murder of Gonzago: A Probable Source for Hamlet’, Modern Language Review 30 (1935): pp. 433-4. See also Tanya Pollard, Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 140-41. 105 Some period reports of the murder allegations appear in Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. 7, pp. 172-6. 100


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of the widowed Duchess.106 The surname and alleged modus operandi of Gonzaga seem too close to Shakespeare to be entirely coincidental, leading many textual scholars to argue that the Second Quarto’s references to ‘a murther done in Vienna’ must derive from a compositor’s misreading of Urbino.107 There is also a relevant paralogue in a later work by Marston. In depicting a Duke of Urbino in The Fawn, a Jacobean disguised ruler play mocking the failed state’s reputation for courtiership, he also used the name Gonzago.108 What we find in The Murder of Gonzago, therefore, is that the overt reference to an Italian story is suggestive of a multifaceted array of discourses related to the tumultuous history of the peninsula in the sixteenth century and the use of Italianate drama as a vehicle for political commentary on the English stage. The intertextual accumulation of such material over time created stage conventions which subsequent dramatists could exploit for purposes of parody, political realignment, or simply to mislead their audiences. Intertextual Chronology In considering the place of intertextuality in period performance, it is necessary to look at canonical works from the perspective of the dynamic evolution of theatrical genres and domestic political debates. For although Italianate drama stages complaints which began to surface towards the end of the reign of Elizabeth I, neither the dramatic nor the political climate in early modern England remained constant. The intertextual tension between past and present theatrical traditions is fundamental to the rhetorical strategy of John Ford’s The Fancies, Chaste and Noble, a play interrogating the ideological premises of Italianate revenge drama. The play seems to depict the efforts of an Italian marquis to amass a seraglio of attractive young maidens, rehearsing the sexual politics of Jacobean plays like The Revenger’s Tragedy, The White Devil and Women Beware Women. By rewriting the stock figure of the lascivious Italian ruler in 1635, when such characters had already become a fixture in his own plays, Ford anticipates audience expectations of the association between court drama and the staging of aristocratic vice. The opening scene introduces the familiar predicament of what Jonathan Dollimore has 106

The best account of the controversy in English remains Dennistoun, vol. 3, pp. 668. For the most recent research on the life and death of Francesco Maria, see C.H. Clough, ‘La successione dei Della Rovere nel ducato di Urbino’, in I Della Rovere nell’Italia delle corti, eds Bonita Cleri et al., vol. 1 (Urbino: Quattro Venti, 2002), pp. 35-61. 107 3.2.238-9. For a survey of the critical debate about the location of the play within the play in period editions, see Patricia Parker, ‘Murder in Guyana’, Shakespeare Studies 28 (2000): 169-75. Doubts have also been raised about the Viennese setting of Measure for Measure, see Gary Taylor, ‘Shakespeare’s Mediterranean Measure for Measure’, in Shakespeare and the Mediterranean, eds Tom Clayton, Susan Brock and Vicente Forés (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), pp. 243-68. 108 See Chapter 4, p. 131.


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called ‘the dispossessed intellectual’, encouraged to betray his sister to the ruler in exchange for preferment.109 The Marquis of Siena’s favourite, Troylo-Savelli, makes the usual appeal to the brother’s penury and frustrated ambitions: Could’st thou consider Livio The fashion of the times, their study, practice, Nay, their ambitions, thou would’st soone distinguish Betwixt the abject lownesse of a poverty,

And the applauded triumph of abundance, Though compast by the meanest service.110

The response of the brother is conventional: he begins to plot his revenge. Yet what makes such an openly derivative play stimulating is its ultimate coup de théâtre. Instead of a sexual predator, the marquis turns out to be a friend to impecunious virgins. The sister reappears accompanied by her new companions in the ruler’s academy for the moral edification of attractive young women. The Epilogue underlines the play’s conscious challenge to audience presumptions: ‘Fancie and judgement are a Playes full matter: / If we have er’d in one, right you the latter’.111 Although most recent studies have agreed ‘the drama is essentially a trick played on its viewers’, Ford’s approach tends to be characterized in terms of a bored playwright writing for a jaded audience.112 On an ideological level, however, what is at stake here is Ford’s revision of the political agenda of the Italianate revenge play. Ford explicitly represents the unexpected finale as a lesson to people who assume the worst of their leaders: ‘Great men may be mistooke when they meane best’.113 In the dedication, the dramatist proclaims his deference to authority: ‘I have ever honoured virtue, as the richest ornament to the noblest titles’. Significantly, the patron of the first edition of the play was the Earl of Antrim, the second husband of the widow of the notorious Duke of Buckingham. The play’s subversion of preconceived expectations may have been particularly appealing to the wealthy widow and younger impoverished Irish noble whose liaison had been

109

Dollimore, p. 242. John Ford, The Fancies, Chaste, and Noble, ed. Domenick J. Hart (New York: Garland, 1985), 1.1.15-18. 111 Ibid., Epilogue, ll. 7-8. 112 Donald K. Anderson, Jr., ‘Sequentiality and Manipulation of Response in Ford’s The Fancies, Chaste and Noble’, in ‘Concord in Discord’: The Plays of John Ford, ed. Donald K. Anderson, Jr. (New York, 1986), p. 242. The suggestion of trickery first arises in Juliet Sutton, ‘Platonic Love in Ford’s The Fancies, Chaste and Noble’, Studies in English Literature, 7, 2 (1967): 299-309. 113 Ibid., 5.3.137. 110


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the subject of prolonged malicious gossip.114 Here, the anti-court drama of the past becomes a moral lesson in the errors of presumption. The Caroline audience gets conservative comedy, rather than radical tragedy. Ford’s self-reflexive approach to the revenge play makes manifest the extent to which every early modern representation of Italian culture involves a negotiation with previous writing. What emerges from placing the canonical texts we usually study within a longer sequence of intertextual transactions, consistent with Douglas Bruster’s perceptive suggestion that source criticism needs to be attentive to how authors ‘replied to precursors and their texts’, is a more reliable model of historical process.115 As a consequence, in dealing with specific political themes or theatrical genres associated with Italianate drama on the early modern English stage, this book will pay particular attention to the historical evolution of discourses from the Elizabethan period onwards. The abandonment of the source study tradition, liberating critics from the obligation to demonstrate direct connections between a work and its latent influences or analogues, has distracted from the importance of chronology. Current intertextual methodology permits us to make wide-ranging assumptions about cultural formations, applying textual and historical examples subsequent to the publication of the canonical work under examination. My reading of Volpone in Chapter 2 highlights the potential pitfalls of overusing such an approach. Many studies have interpreted Jonson’s portrayal of English tourists in Venice in light of the later travel narrative in Coryats Crudities, notorious for offering domestic readers an overenthusiastic enumeration of the artistic and sexual attractions of the canal city. However, I show that the understandable emphasis on explicating the famous play has implied a direction of influence that is the exact opposite of how the notoriety of Ben Jonson’s comic subplot conditioned the reception of Coryate’s book and later representations of Italian travel.116 Instead, Volpone follows the precedent set by The Unfortunate Traveller, where Thomas Nashe satirizes the confusion between foreign travel and domestic reading in texts like The Schoolmaster. By focusing on the portrayal of English tourists in Italy in plays and prose including The Merchant of Venice, Patient Grissil, The Unfortunate Traveller, The Ball, and The Novella, the chapter traces how their rhetorical strategies foreground the rehearsal of earlier plays and books about Italy. Even though the failings of Sir Politic Would-be and his fellow theatrical travellers may exemplify longstanding fears about the loss of domestic identity, their real stimulus has been the books they perused at home. The on-stage intertextual references presume that, like the foolish characters themselves, the London audience perceives Italy in terms of domestic reading.

114 For the aspersions towards the couple, see Jane H. Ohlmeyer, Civil War and Restoration in the Three Stuart Kingdoms: The Career of Randal MacDonnell, Marquis of Antrim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 29-49. 115 Bruster, p. 6. 116 For the influence of Volpone on the travel book, see pp. 59-60.


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What makes engaging the spectator so vital in Italianate court drama, as Chapter 3 suggests, is that the debate surrounding the reception of Cinquecento political theory in early modern England centred on the problem of interpretation. In the prologue to The Jew of Malta, focusing on the clandestine readership of Niccolò Machiavelli’s books, Marlowe offers the author of Il Principe as a guide to understanding the ensuing play. The presence of Francesco Guicciardini as on-stage chorus in The Devil’s Charter ostensibly serves to transmit an impression of historical verisimilitude, consistent with the extensive use of detailed marginal notes citing early modern Italian political and historical writing in Barnes’ own political treatise Four Books of Offices. The explicit portrayal of such famous Italian political theorists by the two dramatists becomes a movement towards complexity, obscuring potentially subversive political content, rather than an aid to understanding. Alongside the overt source attribution associated with the role of Guicciardini, Barnes silently interpolates verbal echoes from Machiavelli and James I into the speeches of the villainous Pope Alexander the sixth. The repeated errors of Barabas in the course of Marlowe’s play, set in contrast to the consistent results obtained by the cynical Maltese leadership, call into question the stage Machiavel’s initial endorsement of the character. The inherent potential for misreading in each play evokes period debates about the opacity of Machiavelli’s own agenda in the Principe. In the second part of the chapter, I look at the references to Italian courtesy books in Marston’s Antonio plays and Webster’s White Devil. By approaching Italianate court drama within the context of the domestic circulation of Italian political theory, mediated by dubious translators and paranoid readers, I suggest the intertextual dynamics at stake in these plays are not just specific verbal echoes but the cultural debate about the reception of Machiavelli and his contemporaries in early modern England. Chapter 4 reconsiders the place of the disguised ruler play in Shakespeare’s own drama within the context of its evolution in the Jacobean theatrical repertory. The standard narrative line of early examples like The Malcontent is rooted in Cinquecento Italian political theory, where the humiliation of the loss of independence to foreign invaders demands a new vision of statecraft. The learning process the dukes undergo in these plays, via the use of disguise, transforms them into competent participants in the covert power politics of the Italian Renaissance. Here, I concentrate on a reading of the generic intertextuality of The Tempest, a play where what is at stake in the main plot is control of an Italian city state. It is telling that the play’s staging of the ship of state metaphor in the opening scene has much in common with Machiavelli’s description of the historical ‘tempesta’ which swept the rulers of Naples and Milan from power during the Wars of Italy.117 For although recent criticism has concentrated on the allusions to nascent colonialism in the subplot, eliding the overall focus on Prospero’s surreptitious ‘project’ to regain his dukedom in Milan, the play’s fixation upon how power is acquired and maintained has much more to do with the subject matter and plot Machiavelli, Il Prencipe, p. 43r. See pp. 121-3.

117


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structure of Measure for Measure. By the time Shakespeare returned to the form in 1611, however, the typical situations and ideological stance of the disguised ruler play had become the object of a series of theatrical parodies. By looking at ironic revivals of the form, in light of the growing disillusionment with James’s reign, I suggest that the genre became a target for caricature because of its initial association with hopes for reform at the end of the Elizabethan period. Chapter 5 argues traditional criticism has failed to take account of the complex and contradictory intertextual background of Cymbeline, another play from the final period of Shakespeare’s career. The anachronistic references to early modern Italy in the subplot, where the character of Jachimo functions as a familiar example of an ‘Italian fiend’, seem out of place alongside the main plot’s negotiation of the relationship between British patriotism and Roman civilization. There is no question that the careful ideological distinction between the glories of ancient Rome and the degradation of modern Italy, as the chapter will show, was a typical gesture of patriotic classical scholars in the period. The goal of such a distinction was to represent England (or Britain) as the legitimate heir of the cultural legacy of Rome. Yet Shakespeare confuses the two periods when the archetypical sixteenthcentury Italian politician Jachimo intervenes in the main plot of the play, taking his place in Caesar’s legions in the attack upon Britain. Indeed, the confusion surrounding Jachimo’s role in Cymbeline has obscured a more serious anachronism in the play: the terminology of Britishness. For English nationalists, opposed to James I’s plans to unify his reigns in England and Scotland, the ‘new’ title of Britain introduced by the new ruler was a conscious suppression of centuries of autonomous local history and culture. In rehearsing the rhetorical strategies of the Anglo-Scottish union debate, as the chapter will show through an extensive account of Stuart propaganda texts, the main plot is unable to resolve the tensions between its inspirational story of British resistance to foreign domination and Cymbeline’s ultimate submission to Rome. The inconsistencies in Shakespeare’s ambivalent portrayal of Italy, simultaneously cast as a threatening intruder, a defeated foe, and a model of cultural legitimacy, have much to do with English unease about obedience to a foreign king. The importance of Italy in domestic cultural and political debates ensured the peninsula would remain a constant presence on the London stage right up until the start of the English Civil War. A particular advantage of a chronological approach to intertextuality is the possibility to use successive plays as examples of period responses to the preceding repertory. Through their challenges to established genres and conventions, we are able to use the critical insight of the professional dramatists of the time to measure changing audience tastes and the reception of individual plays.


Chapter 2

‘You are better read than I’: Rereading the Italianate Englishman In his preface to a collection of sermons by the Puritan preacher Richard Greenham (1612), Henry Holland refers to the warnings about the influence of Italian culture written by ‘Mr. Ascham, a man greatly to be commended for his learning and good affection to pietie’: These inchanters of Circes (saith hee) marre mens manners in England, much by example of life, but more by precepts of fond books, translated out of Italian into English. Againe, tenne sermons at Paules Crosse doe not so much good for moving men to true doctrine, as one of these bookes doth harme with inticing to ill living. I say further, these bookes tend not so much to corrupt honest living as they do to subvert true Religion: more Papists be made by your merrie bookes of Italie than by your earnest bookes of Louvain.

What is at stake here is the site where the perceived corruption of ‘mens manners’ takes place. For although it was not uncommon for religious tracts and sermons to allude to The Schoolmaster (1570), famous for its denunciation of the fate of travellers to the Catholic peninsula, it is conspicuous that the preface’s extensive quotation deals with the act of reading ‘in England’. Eager to use Italian texts as a foil for the pious writing of Greenham, Holland isolates the point of slippage when Roger Ascham abruptly concedes that the subversion resulting from ‘fond books, of late translated out of Italian into English, sold in every shop of London’ has superseded the risk posed by ‘living and travelling in Italy’. The original complaint reflects widespread anxieties about the uncontrolled proliferation of books, a consequence of the technological advances in printing during the

Henry Holland, ‘The Preface to the Reader’ in The Workes of the Reverend and faithfull servant of Jesus Christ M. Richard Greenham, rev. ed. (London, 1612), ¶5r-v. The passage is an accurate citation of Ascham’s original text. See Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster, ed. Lawrence V. Ryan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), pp. 67-8. For the relationship of such anti-Italian discourses to Protestant fears about the papacy, see Sara Warneke, Images of the Educational Traveller in the Early Modern Period (Leiden: Brill, 1995), pp. 65-6. Ascham, p. 67.

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sixteenth century. Given that Ascham’s humanist pedagogy was predicated upon the imitation of classical literature, seeking to transmit the social and moral values contained in approved works via paraphrase, translation, and the collection of quotations in commonplace books, it was vital to suppress competing textual influences within England. Specific fears about the use of printed translations as a medium for domestic religious dissent come to the fore as Ascham contends ‘the subtle and secret papists at home procured bawdy books to be translated out of the Italian tongue, whereby over many young will and wits, allured to wantonness, do now boldly contemn all severe books that sound to honesty and godliness’. Despite the place that his characterization of the ‘Englishman Italianated’ would go on to acquire in the popular imagination of the period, as a cautionary figure representing the loss of a tenuous national identity abroad, the ‘more’ pressing threat to local religion and manners in The Schoolmaster is the textual disorder of ‘Italian books made English’. From the starting point of the dynamic process of the cultural reproduction of Ascham’s warnings about Italy in Elizabethan and Stuart writing, the ensuing chapter focuses on how the distant peninsula began to be perceived in terms of the circulation and subversive power of the printed word, rather than the direct experience of travellers. While the intertextual basis of early modern writing practices ensured that authors like Holland learned to search previous books for evocative quotations to support their arguments, consistent with the educational strategies outlined in The Schoolmaster, the metatextual concerns of period representations of Italian voyages have tended to be overlooked in dramatic source criticism. Many modern readers are still content to treat the constant on-stage citations of Ascham, the notorious Italian authors he condemned, and the reports of (in)famous Englishmen abroad like Thomas Coryate as mere local colour. Yet what stands out in the depiction of English travellers in plays like Volpone, The Ball, and The Novella are the explicit references to the nexus between books and travel, following the precedent set by Thomas Nashe in The Unfortunate Traveller. The overt intertextual transactions respond to the ongoing cultural debate about the significance of reading and writing about Italy in early modern London; a debate where much more than the question of the nation’s persistent fascination with a distant country in southern Europe was at stake. The account of the historical evolution of the discourse of the Italianate Englishman in this For period fears about printing, see Frederick Kiefer, Writing on the Renaissance Stage: Written Words, Printed Pages, Metaphoric Books (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), pp. 58-63. For learning based on textual imitation, see Rebecca W. Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996) and Eve Rachele Sanders, Gender and Literacy on Stage in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Ascham, p. 68. Ibid., pp. 67, 69.


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chapter makes manifest the extent to which direct allusions to previous books from and about Italy formed part of deliberate rhetorical strategies that exploited audience awareness of intertextuality in order to engage with received ideas about what it meant to be English. Italy infects you not: Elizabethan Variations on Ascham Since The Merchant of Venice has become notorious for its staging of racial stereotypes, it is striking that Portia describes her English suitor in terms of his lack of a perceptible national identity: He is a proper man’s picture, but alas, who can converse with a dumb show? How oddly he is suited! I think he bought his doublet in Italy, his round hose in France, his bonnet in Germany, and his behavior every where.

Afraid to undertake the casket lottery and unable to communicate, appearing only in Portia’s contemptuous report, Baron Falconbridge is a real and figurative absence in the world of the play. Unlike the exotic foreigners in her international ‘parcel of wooers’, mocked as the personification of conventional prejudices about Germany, France, Naples, and Morocco, the ‘young baron’ has no distinguishing characteristics that can be traced to his native country. The name Falconbridge is an ironic allusion to the hyper-patriotic Philip Faulconbridge in King John, the bastard who became known as Sir Richard Lionheart for standing up to the ‘apish and unmannerly approach’ of the French.10 The ‘dumb show’ who half-heartedly courts the Venetian noblewoman is notable only for his eagerness to adopt the manners and apparel of his erstwhile competitors, a complete departure from his namesake’s association with English resistance to foreign invasion. By casting the suitor as an imitator of other nations, Portia’s speech evokes the recurring anxieties about a domestic identity crisis in early modern English writing. The question of cultural imitation tended to be closely identified with Italy, although it was not uncommon to point to the European continent as a whole in dealing with apparel and fashion. The account of the sales patter of an upscale London barber in Robert Greene’s Quip for an Upstart Courtier (1592), for example, points to a widespread contempt for native traditions: Sir wil you have your haire cutte after the Italian maner, short and round … or like a Spanyarde long at the eares… or will you be frenchified with a love locke William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, 1.2.72-6. This and all subsequent quotations from Shakespeare are from The Riverside Shakespeare, gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. 2nd ed. (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1997). Ibid., 1.2.108, 67. 10 William Shakespeare, King John, 5.2.131.


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down to your shoulders, wherein you may weare your mistresse favour? The English cut is base and gentlemen skorne it, noveltie is daintie.11

To be considered stylish in the Elizabethan court, Greene argues, an English gentleman has to abandon his innate decorum for the ‘daintie’ modes of other lands. The adaptation of foreign fashions is a frequent image of personal and social confusion in Shakespeare. Posthumus changes national dress at frequent intervals in Cymbeline, as we will see in Chapter 5, after Iachimo’s insinuations cause him to lose all confidence in the chastity of Imogen and Britain faces Roman invasion.12 The accusation in Much Ado About Nothing that the lovelorn Benedick appears as ‘a Dutchman to-day, a Frenchman to-morrow, or in the shape of two countries at once’ is not far from Portia’s caricature of Falconbridge, as it would be unlikely for a nobleman of Messina to be condemned for imitating Italian habits.13 The Italian context in which Shakespeare usually deals with such arguments, even to the point of introducing anachronistic references to the early modern peninsula amidst the classical setting of Cymbeline, is consistent with the standard concerns of Roger Ascham and his followers. Xenophobic diatribes like The English Ape, The Italian Imitation, The Footesteppes of France (1588), where William Rankins warns of the tendency of ‘the Englishman (Apelike) to decke himselfe with the deformed quality of forreayne refuse’, emphasize the precise identification of the phenomenon with the popular interest in Italian learning and customs.14 Rankins’ concerns about ‘the contemptuous condition of our Imitators’ privilege the danger posed by ‘our Englishmen blinded with an Italian disguise’.15 Period writers seem to have been very self-conscious about the cultural association between the discourse of the Italianate Englishman and The Schoolmaster. At the start of his own book, Rankins is careful to acknowledge his debt to previous writing: Some terme him then, an English Italian: Other some an Italian Englishman. Some harpe upon the cunning convey of his imitation in inwarde disposition, and externall habite, inventing then to follow in the footsteps of other Nations. A second displays the hatred of his harmeful heart: that (growing in odium with his native soyle) he seekes some other line whereby he may direct the course of his

Robert Greene, Quip for an Upstart Courtier (1592, Menston: Scolar Press, n.d.),

11

D3v.

12

See pp. 182-5. William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, 3.2.33-5. 14 W[illiam] R[ankins], The English Ape, The Italian Imitation, The Footesteppes of France (London, 1588), p. 14. 15 Ibid., p. 3. 13


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life. Thus (imitating the Ape) the Englishman killeth his owne with culling, and prefers the corruption of a forreine Nation, before the perfection of his owne.16

Not unlike the survey of the critical tradition at the start of a modern academic study, locating his newer metaphor of the English ape within the framework of the established terminology and subject matter of the ‘English Italian’, Rankins makes manifest the extent to which Ascham’s warnings had set the parameters for the debate about Englishness in crisis. The rhetoric about how his compatriots ‘aborre nature, and hir divine creation, and seek by some newe found arte to Italianate the course of their newe ledde life’ follows the example of Ascham, notwithstanding the manner in which the insertion of the phrase ‘The Footesteppes of France’ in his title expands the argument to include foreign nations in general.17 Indeed, the status of Venice as the pre-eminent destination for English aristocratic travellers ensures that Rankins reprises the denunciation in The Schoolmaster of the sexual excesses of the city where Shakespeare’s mercantile comedy is set, complete with a marginal note underlining ‘The vilenesse of the Venetians’.18 Presented from the viewpoint of a Venetian noblewoman, the criticism of Falconbridge in The Merchant of Venice has considerable intertextual implications. For although she claims to ‘know that it is a sin to be mocker’, Portia cannot resist including the English penchant for imitation in her series of conventional insults about the cultural inadequacies of her suitors.19 Shakespeare’s other depictions of the domestic appetite for foreign fashions, rehearsing the arguments made famous by Ascham and Rankins, pointedly locate the object of imitation in Italy and Venice.20 The trope of the English ape is essential to the speech in Richard II where the patriotic Duke of York condemns the ruler’s disregard of the impending national crisis in favour of Report of fashions in proud Italy, Whose manners still our tardy, apish nation Limps after in base imitation.21

16

Rankins, p. 2. Ibid., p. 5. 18 Rankins, p. 21. Compare with Ascham, pp. 72-3. Ascham had visited the city in 1551. 19 Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice. 1.2.57. 20 For suggestions that Ascham’s depiction of Italy influenced Othello, see Steven Doloff, ‘Shakespeare’s Othello and Circe’s Italian Court in Ascham’s The Scholemaster’, Notes and Queries, n.s. 48 (2001): 287-9. The argument is based on claims that Shakespeare was influenced by Ascham’s bestiary imagery, although there are none of the verbal echoes characteristic of the material I concentrate on here. 21 William Shakespeare, Richard II, 2.1.21-3. 17


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The cultural topography of the speech, as the comparison with the primate suggests, opposes the ‘base imitation’ of the English to the pride of sophisticated Italy. The comic potential of addressing these fears in a Venetian context, consistent with the importance of the city in the discourse of the Italianate Englishman, emerges in As You Like It. When Rosalind summarizes the received ideas about the consequences of travel, as an explanation for the self-loathing of Jaques, she alludes to the archetypal form of Venetian water transport: Farewell, Monsieur Traveller: look you lisp and wear strange suits; disable all the benefits of your own country; be out of love with your nativity, and almost chide God for making you that countenance you are, or I will scarce think you have swam in a gundello.22

Here, as with unseemly clothing and behaviour, the exotic gondola becomes synonymous with departure from ‘your own country’. What would have made placing such accusations of lost identity in the speech of Portia so effective, however, was that Italian ridicule of the English was central to the rhetorical strategies of Rankins and Ascham. While Keir Elam has argued that the portrait of Falconbridge is an example of one of Shakespeare’s favourite running jokes, an ‘‘‘alienation’’ device’ where the English themselves are exposed to the scrutiny of the foreigners on-stage, Roger Ascham had already taken care to present his condemnation of travel in The Schoolmaster from a contemptuous Italian perspective.23 In the midst of his argument, Ascham pauses to address the potential grievances of domestic proponents of Italian culture: If you think that we judge amiss and write too sore against you, hear what the Italian saith of the Englishman, what the master reporteth of the scholar, who uttereth plainly what is taught by him and learned by you, saying, Inglese italianato è un diavolo incarnato; that is to say, ‘You remain men in shape and fashion but become devils in life and condition’. This is not the opinion of one for some private spite but the judgment of all in a common proverb which riseth of that learning and those manners which you gather in Italy… . And now choose you, you Italian Englishmen, whether you will be angry with us for calling you monsters, or with the Italians for calling you devils, or else with your own selves, that take so much pains and go so far to make yourselves both.24

William Shakespeare, As You Like It, 4.1.32-8. Keir Elam, ‘English Bodies in Italian Habits’, in Shakespeare, Italy, and Intertextuality, ed. Michele Marrapodi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), p. 29. 24 Ascham, pp. 66-7. 22 23


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The provocation exploits the cultural inferiority complex underlying the effort to emulate foreign learning and fashions. By focusing on ‘what the Italian saith of the Englishman’, accentuated by the phrase in the foreign language, Ascham represents ‘Italian Englishmen’ as the butt of universal derision. The Italians repudiate their aspiring imitators, instead of welcoming them as equals. Rankins points out the irony of such a repudiation in a marginal note at the beginning of The English Ape: ‘Strangers deride our strangeness amiddest their dalliance. Englands imitation scornefully mocked of them that they endeavor to follow’.25 Apart from the offence to domestic pride, where the imitators make the country a laughing stock abroad, the foreign contempt becomes a forewarning of more threatening religious and political consequences: ‘sound they forth the trumpe of defame to give an Alarum of our assaulted security’.26 The comic figure of the vain Englishman in borrowed clothes soon gives way to fears about Catholic subversion, where ‘the manifest mischiefs & published impietye of other Countries is dispersed in the flourishing flow of our English hapines’.27 The accusations against the ‘Inglese italianato’ in The Schoolmaster, representing Italy as the source of deviant behaviour within England, became an obligatory point of reference for proponents of Italian learning like John Florio. In the preface to Second Frutes (1591), his landmark textbook of parallel Italian and English dialogues, Florio’s anticipation of potential critics explicitly challenges Ascham’s rhetorical strategy: Demonstrative rethorique is their studie, and the doggs letter they can snarle already. As for me, for it is I, and I am an Englishman in Italiane; I know they have a knife at command to cut my throat, Un Inglese Italianato, e un Diavolo incarnato. Now, who the Divell taught thee so much Italian? speake me as much more, and take all. Meane you the men, or their mindes? be the men good, and their mindes bad? speake for the men (for you are one) or I will doubt of your minde.28

Here, citing the famous Italian phrase, Florio contends that the knowledge and use of the foreign language makes the accuser himself an Italianate Englishman. As with Ascham, he addresses his opponents directly: ‘speake for the men (for you are one)’. A pedagogue like Ascham was keen to deny any hostility to ‘the knowledge of strange and divers tongues, and namely the Italian tongue, which next to the Greek and Latin tongue I like and love above all other’.29 Of course, 25

Rankins, p. 2. Ibid., p. 2. 27 Ibid., p. 16. The metaphor of the imitative ape was later used to attack Puritanism. See John Walker, The English Pharisee, or Religious Ape (London, 1616). 28 John Florio. Florios Second Frutes (1591, Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1969), A5r-v. 29 Ascham, p. 60. 26

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Florio’s preface is more concerned with the enduring reputation and influence of a specific passage in the book than with its deceased author. George Whetstone felt that even a Protestant icon like Sir Philip Sidney, who had been a sceptical visitor to Italy, needed to be defended against potential accusations derived from the widely cited passage: ‘Of this biespeache he ever more had care, / An Englishman that is Italianate, / Doth lightly prove a Devill Incarnate’.30 The circulation of The Schoolmaster during the period marks the intertextuality of prejudice, with the constant citation, elaboration, and denial of Ascham’s warnings against Italy. Fears about Italianate Englishmen only increased the use of Italian settings in the London theatre. Despite the mockery of imitation in The Merchant of Venice, it was common practice for Shakespeare and his contemporaries to compile their own plots from Italian dramatic and prose narratives. The custom of literary imitation, endorsed by even Ascham himself, permitted hard-pressed dramatists to display their ability to remake an established story and, perhaps more importantly, provide a constant flow of fresh plays to a content hungry theatrical market.31 Yet what becomes apparent in Patient Grissil (1600), a collaborative adaptation of the final tale in the Decameron, is the difference between the routine appropriation of Italian stories and an overt engagement with prominent English representations of Italy. In staging the novella by Boccaccio, with its memorable portrayal of the trial of Griselda by her aristocratic husband, Thomas Dekker, Henry Chettle and William Haughton add a comic subplot featuring an English traveller and a Welsh married couple. Although the main function of the new material is to provide a counterpoint to the exaggerated depiction of female constancy in the original story, where the Welsh spouse understandably refuses to accept any mistreatment whatsoever, the portrayal of the traveller gives the collaborators the opportunity to intervene in the debate about the domestic impact of Italy.32 The character of Emulo, as the aptronym indicates, is another example of an Englishman keen to adopt Italian manners and fashions. Here, adopting the same rhetorical strategy we have seen in The Schoolmaster and The Merchant of Venice, Italian observers ridicule such attempts to imitate them:

30 George Whetstone, Sir Philip Sidney, his honorable life, his valiant death and true vertues (London, 1586), B1r. The allusion to Ascham has been noted by Warneke, p. 123. I discuss Sidney’s comments about his Italian experiences in Chapter 2, p. 100. 31 For Ascham’s treatment of literary imitation, see Harold Ogden White, Plagiarism and Imitation during the English Renaissance: A Study in Critical Distinctions (1935, New York: Octagon, 1965), pp. 43-5. 32 The best account of the play’s adaptation of the Decameron remains H.G. Wright, Boccaccio in England from Chaucer to Tennyson (London: Athlone, 1957), pp. 207-11.

‘You are better read than I’: Rereading the Italianate Englishman Vrc[enze]. Far[neze].

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What be the accoutrements now of these gallants? Indeed that’s one of their fustian outlandish phrases to, marrie sir their accoutrements, ar al the fantasticke fashions, that can be taken up, either upon trust or at second hand.33

The on-stage Italians treat the English imitator as a character type, rather than a distinct individual. Gallants like Emulo are ‘outlandish’ in every early modern sense of the word, affecting an appearance that renders them both bizarre and foreign. The innovation in Patient Grissil is the staging of a dialogue between the foolish traveller and his Italian detractors. When Emulo complains about being snubbed, keen for the acceptance of his role models, the courtier Farneze denies the Englishman has any connection with Italy: Emu[lo]. Far[neze].

Italy thou spurnest me for uttering that nutriment, which I suckt from thee. How Italy? away you ideot: Italy infects you not, but your owne diseased spirits: Italy? out you froth, you scumme, because your soule is mud, and that you have breathed in Italy, you’ll say that Italy hath defyled you: away you bore, thou wilt wallow in mire in the sweetest countrie in the world.34

The diction of disease in Farneze’s speech marks it as a response to conventional accounts of the Italianate Englishman, where metaphors of infection and corruption characterize the loss of domestic identity. By repatriating the act of imitation, through the assertion that Emulo came to the peninsula already formed, the scene is a significant forerunner for the portrayal of English travellers in later plays like Volpone and The Ball. Instead of a direct engagement with what Farneze patriotically terms ‘the sweetest countrie in the world’, the masochistic Englishman wants the seduction, intrigue, and defilement promised by domestic representations of Italian vice. What is here but we may read in books: Italy as a textual experience The absurd apparel of the Italianate Englishman was only a symptom of the loss of national identity, where the real peril for Ascham and his followers was the conversion of young gentlemen to Roman Catholicism or what was seen as Machiavellian atheism. One of the recurring figures in anti-travel writing is 33 Thomas Dekker, Henry Chettle and William Haughton, Patient Grissil. The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker. Ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), vol. 1, 2.1.61-4. 34 Ibid., 3.2.90-96.


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the English Catholic, a specific example of the confusion produced by merging foreign and domestic qualities. The paranoid vision of Italy was an attractive ideological fantasy because it promised that, in the absence of external influences, England would be free from social and religious conflict. Yet insofar as Slavoj Žižek has argued nationalist discourses use foreign threats to mask the fact ‘that every process of identification conferring on us a fixed socio-symbolic identity is ultimately doomed to fail’, concealing the impossibility of a stable, homogeneous society, the remarkable thing about early modern Italophobia is the extent to which it foregrounds the radical instability of Englishness.35 The desire of the English to visit Italy is a suitable argument for The Schoolmaster because Ascham perceives domestic identity as the product of education, contingent upon the suppression of alternative lessons. The metaphors of identity in Joseph Hall’s Quo Vadis? A Just Censure of Travell As it commonly undertaken by the Gentlemen of our Nation (1617), the most extensive Jacobean articulation of the conventional warnings against travel, emphasize the ease with which the young Englishman can be transformed: Doe they not see how easily a young twig is bowed any way? Do they not see that the Mid-Wife and the Nurse are wont to frame the gristly head of the Infant to any fashion? May not any thing bee written on a blanke?36

In representing the subject as an empty vessel, the apprehension is that travellers seeking foreign learning and experiences will deliberately ‘crosse the seas to fill their braine’.37 An orthodox alternative to travel was necessary, Hall warned his compatriots, to preclude ‘the dangerous issue of their curiositie’.38 Regardless of Ascham’s qualms about the circulation of Italian books, a common gesture of his successors was to propose that the safest way to assuage the domestic curiosity about the peninsula was through reading. After refuting all the potential benefits of voyages, Joseph Hall exhorted the English to ‘travell through the world of books’.39 The idea was already implicit in Elizabethan accounts, as shown by the provision of a topographical survey of Rome as a substitute for a voyage to the (in)famous city in one of Philemon Holland’s classical translations. A postscript to his renowned edition of the works of Livy rehearses the warnings that contemporary English travellers face ‘exceeding dangerous’ challenges to their ‘religion, conscience, and good manners’, cautioning readers ‘who shall take delight and pleasure in reading the Romane storie above written’ against

Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), p. 127. Joseph Hall, Quo Vadis? A Just Censure of Travell As it is commonly undertaken by the Gentlemen of our Nation (1617, Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1975), p. 6. 37 Ibid., p. 25. 38 Ibid., A4v. 39 Ibid., p. 36. 35

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undertaking ‘a voyage to Rome’.40 Holland supplements the ancient text with a written description of the city in a conscious effort ‘to bring Rome home to them’ so that they may ‘avoide the peril of that travaille’.41 The extent to which English writers filled the demand for knowledge of the cultural achievements of the country by producing books designed as a textual replacement for travel emerges in A Discourse Not Altogether Unprofitable, Nor Unpleasant for such as are desirous to know the situation and customes of forraine Cities without travelling to see them (1600), where Samuel Lewkenor proudly proclaims that his ‘travelles oculatus testis’ is composed of ‘gatheringes and gleaninges out of other mens harvestes’.42 However, his brief section on Modena reveals some of the inadequacies of intertextual travel: ‘When this Cittie was erected, or by whome the Universitie was privileged, I do not remember, that I have read in any Author’.43 By reducing Italy to a textual experience, in accordance with the continual reproduction of warnings against travel, the assumption was that books did not expose the fragile subject to the same risks as direct contact. Hall’s account makes manifest the continuing fascination with the printed book as a sign of technological and intellectual progress in early modern England: A good book is at once the best companion, and guide, and way, and end of our journey. Necessitie drove our forefathers out of doores, which else in those misty times, had seene no light, we may with more ease, and no lesse profit sit still, and inherit, and enjoy the labours of them, and our elder brethren, who have purchased our knowledge with much hazard, time, toile, expence; and have beene liberall of their bloud (some of them) to leave us rich.44

The references here to ‘those misty times’ before knowledge could be acquired with such relative ease suggest that, even though travellers may be only motivated by the desire for learning, the wealth of information now available in ‘so many’ books ensures that ‘the lessons may be as well taken out at home’.45 With censorship mechanisms in place, ensuring a monopoly of representation, the cultural legacy of Italy could be pillaged at will: I have known some that have travelled no further than their owne closet, which could both teach and correct the greatest Traveller, after all his tedious and costly pererrations, what doe we but lose the benefit of so many journals, maps, 40 Philemon Holland, ‘To the Reader’, The Romane History Written by T. Livius of Padua (1600), p. 1346. 41 Ibid., p. 1346. 42 Samuel Lewkenor, A Discourse … of forraine Cities (1600, Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1969), A2r. 43 Ibid., p. 44. 44 Hall, p. 34. 45 Ibid., p. 31.


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historical descriptions, relations, if wee cannot with these helps, travell by our owne fire-side?46

Nevertheless, such advice did nothing to displace the pervasive sense of English provincialism, isolated from the intellectual and artistic ferment of ancient Rome and Cinquecento Italy, which was a fundamental motivation for travel. It was all very well for Hall to claim that ‘Here all liberall Arts raigne and triumph’, given the supply of domestic libraries and bookshops, but not all his compatriots were convinced.47 The desire of the English to find the Italy they read about at home had already been a central theme of The Unfortunate Traveller (1594). Thomas Nashe’s romp through the fleshpots and jails of the peninsula stands out for the manner in which prominent Italianate authors become characters in the narrative, a gesture in keeping with the fixation on reading within the story. From the perspective of Jack Wilton, a typical wily servant, he recounts the fictional European journey of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, a precursor of the aristocratic English Petrachanism fashionable at the time the work appeared.48 Inspired by its poetry of courtly love, his version of Surrey resolves to see Italy for himself: ‘Upon a time I was determined to travel. The fame of Italy and an especial affection I had unto poetry, my second mistress, for which Italy was so famous, had wholly ravished me unto it’.49 Jack is more suspicious of his master’s chosen destination, questioning the ‘changeable humour [that] had so suddenly seduced him from his native soil’ (288). The extended allusion to a dead poet noted for his imitative verse permits Nashe to portray the tensions between the continuing veneration of Italian culture and the paranoid concerns of Elizabethan anti-travel writing. The metaphors of ‘ravishment’ and seduction, used to depict Surrey’s overwhelming passion for all things Italian, take on more sinister connotations when the master and servant enter a nation characterized by rape, sexual commerce and betrayal. Beguiled by the ‘malicious practice of sinful Tabitha’, a courtesan personifying all the stereotypes of the dangerous allure of Italian vice, the ingenuous Englishmen go directly to jail upon their arrival in Venice (304). Surrey still refuses to abandon 46

Ibid., pp. 31-2. Ibid., p. 82. 48 For the parody of English Petrachanism in the text, see Jonathan Bate, ‘The Elizabethans in Italy’, in Travel and Drama in Shakespeare’s Time, eds Jean-Pierre Maquerlot and Michèle Willems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 65-70. See also Agnes Latham, ‘Satire on Literary Themes and Modes in Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveler’, English Studies. N.s. 1 (1948): 85-100 and Robert Weiman, Authority and Representation in Early Modern Discourse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 167-74. 49 Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller. The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works, ed. J.B. Steane (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 289. All subsequent quotations come from this edition. 47


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the Italian ideal he learned to emulate in England. Imprisoned along with a falsely accused adulteress, he woos his cellmate in the style of Petrarch: ‘He praised, he prayed, he desired and besought her to pity him that perished for her … he would leap into verse’ (307). With no investment in courtly love, represented as a pointless intellectual exercise, Jack is better equipped to take advantage of the situation: ‘My master beat the bush and kept a coil and a prattling, but I caught the bird: simplicity and plainness shall carry it away in another world’ (308). Jack Wilton’s description of Italy, rehearsing the stock ideas about the country, conflates the roles of traveller and literary critic. The one-upmanship of his master underscores how Nashe redefines the concept of ‘absurd imitation’, generally used to describe the outlandish clothing and manners of the Italianate Englishman, as the plagiarism of those who have ‘No invention or matter… of their own’ (296). Yet although it may be tempting to interpret Jack in terms of his freedom from preconceptions, able to recognize that Italy is ‘another world’ from that of poetry, his only difference with Surrey is in the choice of a literary model diametrically opposed to Petrarch. Saved from the Venetian jail by the intervention of Pietro Aretino, the wily servant learns to admire the quality and sentiments of the Italian’s scandalous writing. Significantly, the author enters the story as the ‘chief Inquisitor to the college of courtesans’ (309). Jack’s apostrophe to Aretino, defending his benefactor from the ‘malice’ of English opinion, overthrows the traditional canon: Aretine, as long as the world lives, shalt thou live. Tully, Virgil, Ovid, Seneca were never such ornaments to Italy as thou hast been. I never thought of Italy more religiously than England till I heard of thee. Peace to thy ghost, and methinks so indefinite a spirit should have no peace or intermission of pains, but be penning ditties to the archangels in another world. (311)

What is at stake here is that even the servant, contemptuous of his master’s poetic ideals, experiences Italy as a function of famous books. The comic potential of his subversion of conventional literary values anticipates the reader’s awareness of the licentious reputation of Aretino. Infamous for the Ragionamenti, a series of brothel dialogues marked by the refusal of erudite and romantic themes, Aretino had already come ‘to embody all manner of erotic disorder’ in early modern English writing.50 Though Nashe may have admired the Italian as a fellow satirist, there would have been few well-read Elizabethans prepared to rank him above the greats of classical literature or use religious diction to describe him. Indeed, Jack owes his ill fated decision ‘To see Italy throughout’ to the dubious influence of ‘Master Aretine’, who permits him to undertake the journey in the company of his pregnant cellmate at her erstwhile husband’s expense (312).

50 Ian Frederick Moulton, Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 109.


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The explicit intertextuality of The Unfortunate Traveller diminishes travel to an extension of the act of reading. Nashe depicts an incestuous hermeneutic circle where the continual reproduction of text based prejudices and stereotypes renders impossible any reliable, unfiltered experience of the country. For although his Englishmen abroad may not always find the Italy they read about prior to their departure, books provide the framework which defines their responses. When a banished English earl encourages Jack to abandon his journey, after saving him from execution in Rome, the ‘upbraiding lesson’ he gives his reckless compatriot is a series of direct and indirect quotations from classical literature and anti-travel writing (347). In a scholarly version of the catalogue of international insults in The Merchant of Venice, he uses precedents from Homer, Ovid, ‘Tully, Quintilian, Seneca and Hermannus Buschius’ to validate his enumeration of the stereotypical vices of Italy and the rest of the continent (343). The references to ‘so many books’ emphasize that the earl privileges reading over direct experience: What is here but we may read in books, and a great deal more too, without stirring our feet out of a warm study? ... So let others tell you strange accidents, treasons, poisonings, close packings in France, Spain and Italy; it is no harm for you to hear of them, but come not near them. (343)

Here, unlike Italy, books pose no threat to the physical and mental integrity of the English. The earl’s cosy image of reading in ‘a warm study’ acquires further appeal from the context in which it appears in the narrative, placed after Jack’s apocalyptic vision of plague and rape on the streets of Rome. Given the cultural authority that the earl stakes out for himself, through the display of his learning, modern critics tend to identify his lesson with the personal agenda of Nashe. Jonathan Bate argues that the ‘nice self-referentiality’ of the promotion of books makes a virtue out of the relative poverty of the author and a significant part of his intended audience, lacking ‘the means to follow the aristocracy and gentry on their Italian journeys’.51 Most interpret the lesson, however, in terms of how the powerful expression of domestic xenophobia serves ‘to align Nashe alongside Ascham as a critic of the supposed values of European travel’.52 Certainly, with its pedagogical concerns, much of the earl’s advice calls to mind The Schoolmaster. Like Ascham, he rejects the possibility of deriving any educational benefits from the Italy of their time: Countryman, tell me, what is the occasion of thy straying so far out of England to visit this strange nation? If it be languages, thou may’st learn them at home; nought but lasciviousness is to be learned here. (341)

51

Bate, p. 69. Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance, 1545-1625 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), p. 196. 52


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In one of the most widely cited passages from the text, almost always divorced from its original context, the earl identifies travel with the courtly ambitions of dissolute young nobles: Italy, the paradise of the earth and the epicure’s heaven, how doth it form our young master? It makes him to kiss his hand like an ape, cringe his neck like a starveling, and play at heypass, repass come aloft, when he salutes a man. From thence he brings the art of atheism, the art of epicurising, the art of whoring, the art of poisoning, the art of sodomitry. The only good thing they have to keep us from utterly condemning it is that it maketh a man an excellent courtier, a curious carpet knight; which is, by interpretation, a fine close lecher, a glorious hypocrite. (345)

The emphasis on the importation of vices into England, via the corruption of the ‘young master’ abroad, starts from the same premise as Ascham: ‘the fancy that many young gentlemen of England have to travel abroad, and namely to lead a long life in Italy’. The problem is that the earl’s rehearsal of the question of aristocratic travel has nothing to do with Jack, a servant more accustomed to prisons than the court. The conventional warnings might seem applicable to Surrey but the narrative makes it clear that Jack’s master acquired his Italianate tendencies from the poetry he read in England. Like Surrey’s Petrarchan performance in the Venetian jail, the reliance of the earl on books causes him to mistake his audience. In reality, the best example in The Unfortunate Traveller of the earl’s condemnation of Italianate aristocrats is himself. It is not a coincidence he begins to cry at the end of his discourse. Despite the fact that studies of Anglo-Italian relations often claim that the earl’s lesson represents ‘the opinion of Thomas Nashe’ or that ‘Nashe sums up what may be called the typical Puritan view of Italy’, a banished English Catholic is a dubious spokesperson for social and religious conformity.53 The earl’s tears may betray his nostalgia for England but there is a conspicuous absence from his list of conventional Italian vices: Roman Catholicism. Religious deviance is the first attribute in Ascham’s definition of ‘an Englishman Italianated’: ‘he that by living and traveling in Italy bringeth home into England out of Italy the religion, the learning, the policy, the experiences, the manners of Italy. That is to say, for religion, papistry or worse’.54 The sensation caused by Anthony Munday’s The English Romayne Lyfe (1582), a muckraking account of the practices at the English Seminary in the city, was symptomatic of widespread fears that the exile community in Rome was a staging ground for domestic subversion. The theme of religious conversion abroad formed part of the customary allusions to 53 John Hale, England and the Italian Renaissance (1954, London: Fontana, 1996), p. 11, John L. Lievsay, The Elizabethan Image of Italy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964), p. 26. Each comment responds to the ‘young master’ passage discussed above. 54 Ascham, p. 67.

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The Schoolmaster, as with William Harrison’s complaints about the transformation of gentlemen ‘newly come out of Italy who went thither an earnest Protestant’.55 Apart from the irony of placing arguments associated with Ascham in the mouth of ‘a banished exile’ and pensioner of the Pope, the earl’s attack on travel elides the site of his own transgressions.56 The order of banishment demonstrates that, unlike the hypothetical ‘young master’ ruined by the vices of Italy, the earl had already violated the ideal of Englishness at home. To be certain, where Ascham came to privilege the dangers of unrestrained domestic reading over those of travel, the advice of the Catholic exile disregards the fears that ‘More papists be made by your merry books of Italy’.57 The ideological investment in externalizing the origins of domestic dissent ensured there were few period writers who were honest enough to identify the religious exile as a distinct type of English traveller. Sir Thomas Palmer’s How to Make our Trauvailes Profitable (1606) was unique in positing a clear distinction between the voluntary traveller, the young noble or gentleman normally addressed by such guides, and subversive elements ‘that Involuntarily are made travellers ... by offence committed against the law’ and ‘for the maintenance only and preservation of religion’.58 Although there was a significant English Catholic population in the peninsula, most accounts focused on the threat its members posed to the Protestant traveller. For Fynes Moryson, the fear of conversion to Catholicism was the primary motive for the prevailing hostility towards travel: ‘we must give eare to Parents, Friends, and as well private as publike Common wealths-men, who not unjustly seeme to feare, lest young men by this course should be perverted from true Religion, and by this feare, disswade passing into forraigne parts, as the chiefe cause of this mischiefe’.59 Travellers often recounted how their Catholic compatriots sought to betray them to the Inquisition, in an attempt to force their conversion.60 In a harrowing account of an ill-fated journey to Italy, written by a London barber who ended up a prisoner in the galleys of the Duke of Florence, William Davies underlines what he calls ‘the treacherie of the

55 William Harrison, The Description of England. ed. George Edelin (1968, New York: Dover, 1994), p. 114. For the verbal echoes of Ascham’s treatise in the Description, see Warneke, pp. 65-6. 56 Nashe, p. 346. 57 Ascham, p. 68. 58 Sir Thomas Palmer, How to Make our Trauvailes Profitable (1606), pp. 7, 9. 59 Fynes Moryson, An Itinerary: Containing His Ten Yeeres Travell (4 vols. 1617, Glasgow, 1907), vol. 3, p. 362. 60 See p. 67. Milton also complained of feeling threatened during his 1639 visit to Italy. See John Stoye, English Travellers Abroad, 1604-1667 (rev. ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 121.


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English Papists’ there.61 To deter would-be travellers from placing themselves in peril, Davies affirms an English Papist will seeke all the means possible to intrappe the Protestant, and will speake ill words of himselfe, to draw him to the like … then he will make it knowne, and more than the Protestant spake to some chiefe man of a church, by whom he shall be forced to alter his religion or to be burned.62

It is significant that, as we will see, the verb ‘intrappe’ also appears in standard warnings about the Venetian courtesans. The consequence of such rhetoric was to represent the English Catholic as part of the seductive dangers of Italy, rather than a symptom of domestic conflict. Fynes Moryson makes this clear in his defence of travel when he argues ‘If any man object, that some of our young Schollers have passed into their Semanaries beyond the Seas, let him consider that they were not seduced abroad, but first infected at home, in their parents houses, and our Universities’.63 The choice of the loaded words ‘infected’ and ‘seduced’ stress his refusal of the discourse of the Italianate Englishman as he relocates the threat to England. With the proliferation of the printed word in early modern England, as Frederick Kiefer has noted, it was inevitable ‘that such a culture would increasingly conceive of experience in terms of books’.64 Even if the ideological appeal of reading about Italy came from its exercise in a cosy room at home, free from the subversive influences of Catholic exiles, Machiavellian intriguers, and lascivious Venetian courtesans, the weak point in such arguments was always the presumption that textual experiences would not lead the ingenuous reader astray. The obvious response for those inclined to point to the local origins of conflict was to foreground the popularity of suspect Italian books in England. One of the important conclusions to come out of my research is the extent to which, just as Ascham provided opponents of Italian culture with terminology and metaphors for domestic identity in crisis, Nashe established a rhetorical strategy that redefined the Italianate Englishman as an imitator of books from and about Italy. What emerges in the Stuart theatre, as we will see in the remainder of this chapter, is the explicit intertextual framework which characterizes the staging of English voyages to Venice in plays like Volpone, The Ball, and The Novella. The traveller becomes a human commonplace book, privileging direct quotations from his or her domestic reading over any direct attempt to understand the Italian city itself.

61 William Davies, A True Relation of the Travailes and most memorable Captivitie of William Davies, Barber-Surgeon of London under the Duke of Florence (London, 1614), p. 10. 62 Ibid., p. 10. 63 Moryson, vol. 3, p. 363. 64 Kiefer, p. 106.

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Put i’ th’ Book of Voyages: Volpone (1606) When Peregrine meets Sir Politic Would-be at the start of the subplot of Volpone, recounting the misadventures of three English tourists in Venice, his aside to the audience features a telling verbal echo from The Schoolmaster: ‘Heart! / This Sir Pol will be ignorant of nothing’.65 Prompted by his compatriot’s attempts to demonstrate his unique insight into ‘the ebbs / And flows of state’ (1.1.104-5), as Sir Politic reinterprets stale London gossip in terms of elaborate conspiracies, the suspicious traveller repeats the exact words that Roger Ascham uses to condemn English imitation of Italian political intrigue: Another property of these our English Italians is to be marvelous singular in all matters: singular in knowledge, ignorant of nothing; so singular in wisdom (in their own opinion) as scarce they count the best counselor the prince hath comparable with them; common discoursers of all matters; busy searchers of most secret affairs.66

The subsequent discussion of ‘rules for travel’ underscores the extended reference to the familiar anxieties about the consequences of voyages to Italy (2.1.112). Sir Politic embodies Ascham’s definition of the exaggerated self-regard of the Italianate Englishman as he promises to share the expertise about Venice that he has already provided in his consultations with ‘some great men’s sons, / Persons of blood and honour’ (2.1.121-2). The comic energy of Sir Politic on-stage ensures that most critics tend to relegate the less engrossing role of his compatriot to that of a ‘satirical instrument’.67 As the play’s representative of the paranoid vision of Italy, exposing the errors of the gullible knight, Peregrine is an essential part of Ben Jonson’s staging of the debate about travel. However, together with everything the allusion to Ascham tells the audience about Sir Politic, it also reveals Peregrine’s reliance upon the orthodox reading he undertook prior to his departure from England. Although it has become a standard gesture to treat the subplot as a satire on the efforts of gauche English travellers to mimic Italian sophistication, casting Sir Pol and his wife Lady Would-be as the parrots in Jonson’s bestiary, studies of

65 Ben Jonson, Volpone, ed. Brian Parker (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 2.1.97-8. Subsequent references appear in the text. 66 Ascham, p. 74. 67 David Bevington, ‘The Major Comedies’ in Richard Hamp and Stanley Stewart (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Ben Jonson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 78. For an exception to the rule, emphasizing the gratuitous cruelty of Peregrine, see John Creaser, ‘The Popularity of Jonson’s Tortoise’, Review of English Studies n.s. 27 (1976): 38-46.


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Volpone continue to elide the intertextual implications of Peregrine’s scepticism.68 The absurd enthusiasm of the Would-bes for all things Italian makes the play’s characterization of the couple as ‘two unskillful imitators’ indisputable but there is no critical consensus about exactly what specific Venetian models they are imitating.69 Most accounts take it for granted that Sir Politic and his wife are a broad parody of the supposed desire of travellers to reproduce everything they observe along the canals of the iconic city: ‘He and his lady are not inventive or critical spirits, but collectors, devices for the indiscriminate recording of whatever sounds they pick up’.70 On a formal level, the inept schemes of the English couple may appear to be a ‘degrading imitation’ of the more polished intrigues of Volpone and the legacy hunters in the main plot.71 There has also been the temptation to see the affected statecraft of Sir Politic as part of a wider satire on Jacobean curiosity about the political myth of Venice, given the ties the new English monarch established with the republic under Sir Henry Wotton’s ambassadorship.72 None of these approaches to the question of imitation in the subplot considers the one tendency all three of the English characters have in common: their persistent references to books. It has been simple for past source studies to trace ‘the acclaimed accuracy of Jonson’s Venetian atmosphere’ because the English travellers explicitly cite most of his source material on-stage.73 To support his claims that ‘Within the first week 68 See Jonas Barish, ‘The Double Plot in Volpone’, Modern Philology 51 (1953): 83-96. See also Leo Salingar, ‘The idea of Venice in Shakespeare and Ben Jonson’, in Shakespeare’s Italy: Functions of Italian Locations in Renaissance Drama, eds Michele Marrapodi et al. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), pp. 171-84. 69 David C. McPherson, Shakespeare, Jonson, and the Myth of Venice (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990), p. 107. 70 Alexander Leggatt, ‘Volpone: The Double Plot Revisited’, in New Perspectives on Ben Jonson, ed. James E. Hirsh (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997), p. 95. See also McPherson, Shakespeare, Jonson, and the Myth of Venice, p. 107. 71 Brian Parker ‘Introduction’ in Volpone, p. 38. See also John Creaser, ‘A Vindication of Sir Politic Would-be’, English Studies 57 (1976): 502-14 and Judd Arnold, ‘The Double Plot in Volpone: A Note on Jonsonian Dramatic Structure’, Seventeenth Century News 23 (1965): 47-52. 72 See Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), pp. 77-80. For a survey of claims that Sir Politic is related to Wotton, James I’s ambassador to the republic from 1604 onwards, see Gerald Curzon, Wotton and his Worlds: Spying, Science, and Venetian Intrigues (Philadelphia: XLibris, 2003), pp. 86-8. 73 A.J. Hoenselaars, Images of Englishmen and Foreigners in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickenson University Press, 1992), p. 170. The so-called accuracy of the play is also highlighted by McPherson, Shakespeare, Jonson, and the Myth of Venice, Roberta Mullini, ‘Streets, squares and courts: Venice as stage in Shakespeare and Ben Jonson’ in Shakespeare’s Italy: Functions of Italian Locations in Renaissance Drama, eds Michele Marrapodi et al. (Manchester: Manchester

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of [his] landing’ he was taken ‘for a citizen of Venice’, Sir Politic stresses his knowledge of an influential political treatise about the city’s system of government: ‘I had read Contarine’ (4.1.37, 38, 40). The allusion is to the De magistratibus et republica Venetorum libri quinque by Cardinal Gasparo Contarini, made available in English as The Commonwealth and Government of Venice in a 1599 translation by Lewis Lewkenor.74 He also advises Peregrine to take notice of ‘Nick Machiavel and Monsieur Bodin’, dropping two further names eponymous with political theory during the period (4.1.26).75 While Lewkenor supplemented his translation with some details about Venetian art and culture, information that would have been of interest to potential tourists, Sir Politic’s chosen authorities do not have any direct association with the appropriate rules of conduct for travellers.76 Not to be outdone by her husband, as we will see, Lady Would-be offers a hit parade of Italian books popular in England. Indeed, she expresses misgivings about the domestic imitation of Italian models herself, noting that ‘All our English writers, /… will deign to steal’ from poets like Guarini and Petrarch (3.4.87-8). Even Peregrine, whose agenda within the play is to preach resistance to the insinuations of Italian culture, resorts not to the notion of a stable centred self but to The Schoolmaster. By highlighting the sources for each traveller’s knowledge of the country, through the sheer mass of allusions within the play to prominent authors, Jonson redefines the existing debate about travel in terms of the textual transmission of national stereotypes in England. The fixation upon domestic representations in Volpone ensures that Peregrine frequently ponders the impression that Sir Politic would make in travel narratives and the London theatre. In a clever metatheatrical aside, Peregrine notes that this knight, Were he well known, would be a precious thing To fit our English stage: he that should write

University Press, 1993), p. 170 and Murray J. Levith, Shakespeare’s Italian Settings and Plays (London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 16. 74 See Gasparo Contarini, The Commonwealth and Government of Venice, trans. Lewis Lewkenor (1599, Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1969). For the relationship with Jonson’s play, see Daniel Boughner, ‘Lewkenor and Volpone’, Notes and Queries, n.s. 9 (1962): 124-30. 75 Like Machiavelli, the French author Jean Bodin was well known in the period for his writing on sovereignty and history. Parker’s commentary argues that ‘Sir Pol’s glib coupling of the names reveals his ignorance’. See Volpone, p. 213, n. 26. However, studies of period political theory tend to suggest that, albeit surreptitiously, ‘Bodin developed Machiavelli’s historical practice’. See Jacob Soll, Publishing the Prince: History, Reading, and the Birth of Political Criticism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), p. 28. 76 For Lewkenor’s interpolations from other Venetian books, see David McPherson, ‘Lewkenor’s Venice and its Sources’, Renaissance Quarterly 41, 3 (1988): 459-66.


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But such a fellow, should be thought to feign Extremely, if not maliciously. (2.1.56-60).

The character also worries about the potential authority that Sir Pol might acquire at home if his claims were ‘put i’ th’ Book of Voyages, / And his gulled story registered for truth’ (5.4.5-6). Of course, instead of producing his own text, the knight has only been reading previous books and patronising the ‘English stage’. The final appearance of Sir Pol, where Peregrine tricks him into believing that the republic’s senate is impatient to seize his journals as evidence of a plot ‘To sell the state of Venice to the Turk’, reveals that the aspiring political insider has written ‘none but notes / Drawn out of playbooks’ (5.4.38, 42-3). The intertextual practice of making ‘a common-place booke out of plaies’ had already been mocked for its lack of originality in John Marston’s Scourge of Villainie.77 It is characteristic of the subplot’s satiric agenda that, after his physical humiliation in the guise of a tortoise, Sir Politic’s first thought is his potential textual humiliation in the news reports from the city that circulated back in England: ‘O, I shall be the fable of all feasts, / The freight of the gazetti’ (5.4.82-3).78 The visual image of the tortoise ‘creeping with house on back’ in his valedictory speech, as Sir Politic resolves ‘to shun this place and clime for ever’, underlines the English knight’s inability to escape the influence of his homeland (5.4.88, 87). Peregrine’s predisposition towards casting his compatriot as an Italianate Englishman should not distract us from the manner in which Sir Politic attributes his ‘dearest plots’ to ‘the state / Where I was bred’ (2.1.8, 6-7). Even as he boasts about all the books he has read, keen to appear as an expert on statecraft and travel, the knight represents himself as an atypical Englishman abroad. Sir Pol pointedly denies any correspondence between his own motives for undertaking the journey to Venice and those conventionally ascribed to travellers: Yet, I protest, it is no salt desire Of seeing countries, shifting a religion, Nor any disaffection to the state Where I was bred, and unto which I owe My dearest plots, hath brought me out, much less That idle, antique, stale grey-haired project Of knowing men’s minds and manners. (2.1.4-10)

The comprehensive rejection of the usual grounds of education, tourism, or religious and political dissent, a neat encapsulation of the period categories we John Marston, The Scourge of Villainie. The Poems of John Marston, ed. Arnold Davenport, (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1961), I. 43. 78 For Jonson’s contempt for the appetite for foreign news, see Marcus Nevitt, ‘Ben Jonson and the Serial Publication of News’, in News Networks in Seventeenth-Century Britain and Europe, ed. Joad Raymond (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), pp. 51-66. 77


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have looked at in this chapter, concludes with the embarrassing admission that his voyage was occasioned only by a ‘peculiar humour of my wife’s’ (2.1.11). By choosing the aptronym Peregrine, a generic term for ‘a sojourner in a strange land’, Jonson raises the possibility that the suspicious traveller may be more representative of the English presence in Italy than the Would-bes.79 Alongside its place in the beast imagery of the play, where his predatory aggression towards Sir Pol may recall the peregrine falcon, the word frequently appears in early modern travel writing. Jonson’s friend Thomas Coryate, whose 1611 account of his journey to Venice and the rest of the continent went on to become one of the most widely discussed texts of the period, styled himself the ‘Peregrine of Odcombe’.80 William Lithgow entitled his 1632 collection of his travel writing The Totall Discourse of the Rare Adventures and Painefull Peregrinations. In Love’s Labour’s Lost (c. 1597) the pedant Holofernes includes ‘peregrinate’ in his list of complaints about the presence of the Spaniard Don Armado in the court of Navarre.81 Since the desire to learn the language was one of the principal attractions of the peninsula according to Ascham, Peregrine’s admission of studying Italian with a tutor and a ‘vulgar grammar’ brings him much closer to the recognizable figure of the young gentleman in search of learning and new experiences than his foolish compatriots (2.1.113). Despite their clash of personalities, neither Peregrine nor Sir Pol is able to venture an opinion about the Venetian scene without quoting a textual authority familiar to English readers. Characteristically, Sir Politic turns out to be adapting typical domestic advice to travellers at the one point in the play when he claims to have an original idea. The knight overstates his authorship of the ‘instructions’ he provides Peregrine, contrasting the supposed novelty of his account of Venice with ‘old’ arguments like Italianate apparel: You mentioned me For some instructions: I will tell you, sir, Since we are met here in this height of Venice, Some few particulars I have set down Only for this meridian, fit to be known Of your crude traveller; and they are these. I will not touch, sir, at your phrase, or clothes, For they are old. (4.1.2-8)

Ironically, as he encourages his compatriot to ‘Make sure choice / Both of your company and discourse’, his recommendation to ‘never speak a truth’ in the 79

OED. Thomas Coryate, Coryat’s Crudities (2 vols. Glasgow, 1905), vol. 1, p. 6. Odcombe was his hometown. Coryate’s reputation and his portrayal of Venice are discussed in the next section. 81 William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, 5.1.14. 80


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company of strangers recycles standard counsel about the perils of the city (4.1.1516, 17). Sir John Stradling had already concluded A Direction for Travailers (1592), adapted from a text by Justus Lipsius as a guide for the young Earl of Bedford on a journey to the continent, with a specific note about the guile that visitors to ‘Italie and Venice’ must practise: The men, as are inveigling underminers and deep dissemblers, whoe when they have pried into your nature, and are privie to your secrets, wil straight change their coppie, and shew themselves in their colours: against these dissemblers I know no other, or at least no better buckler, then to dissemble also your selfe ... . To deceive a deceiver is no deceit.82

Stradling’s depiction of Italian ‘deceit’ reflects the acceptable face of English travel writing, reproducing domestic anxieties about the peninsula. Such advice was taken seriously by period travellers like Fynes Moryson, who adopted a disguise when he visited Italy. During his 1594 journey, recounted in An Itinerary (1617), Moryson discovered that a reticent German dinner companion at an inn on the way to Venice was actually another paranoid Englishman.83 The extreme distrust of Peregrine, always afraid of being gulled by the knight and his wife, reveals his familiarity with such instructions about disinformation. For all his own failings, therefore, Sir Politic is right to criticize Peregrine’s dependence upon second-hand ideas: ‘Why, this is that spoils all our brave bloods, / Trusting our hopeful gentry unto pedants’ (2.1.115-16). The knight’s insistent queries about the sources of his ‘rules for travel’ make manifest the way in which Peregrine repeats predictable condemnations of Italian vice, suggesting that each Englishman serves to reveal the derivativeness of the other (2.1.111). After denouncing mountebanks as ‘the most lewd imposters, / Made all of terms and shreds’ during Volpone’s performance as Scoto, Peregrine finds himself obliged to concede that he is just passing on what he learned in the ‘discourse’ provided by his ‘instructor / In the dear tongues’ (2.2.14-15 and 2-3). The references to Peregrine’s Italian instructor form part of an extended allusion to John Florio, the most prominent writer and teacher of the language in early modern England.84 The fact that Jonson dedicated a copy of the 1607 quarto Sir John Stradling, A Direction for Travailers Taken Out of Justus Lipsius, and enlarged for the behoofe of the right honourable Lord, the yong Earl of Bedford, being now ready to travell (1592), C3r. The text is a free translation of the Epistola de Peregrinatione Italica by Lipsius. 83 See Moryson, vol. 2, p. 362. The anecdote is discussed in Stoye, pp. 73-4. 84 For Jonson’s references to Florio, see Brian Parker, ‘An English View of Venice: Ben Jonson’s Volpone’, in Sergio Rossi and Dianella Savoia (eds), Italy and the English Renaissance (Milan: Unicopoli, 1989), pp. 187-202. The standard account of Florio’s influence in England is Frances Yates, John Florio: The Life of an Italian in Shakespeare’s England (1934, New York: Octagon, 1968). Among recent studies, see Michael Wyatt, 82

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to Florio, recognizing him as ‘The Ayde of his Muses’, suggest that the linguistic authority had much to do with the variety of Italian expressions in the play.85 Florio produced two remarkable Italian dictionaries, starting from A Worlde of Wordes in 1598, but was also noted for his language manuals and translations.86 As Peregrine feigns interest in Sir Politic’s instructions on how to act in Venice, he declares that he ‘had / Some common ones from out that vulgar grammar, / Which he that cried Italian to me, taught me’ (2.1.112-14). The indication of a ‘vulgar grammar’ recalls the dialogue on travel in Florio’s Second Frutes, featuring ‘divers necessarie, profitable, civil, and proverbial precepts for a travaillour’ in parallel English and Italian texts.87 The scenes between Peregrine and Sir Pol can be read as a parody of the form of Florio’s dialogue, where an expert traveller seeks to advise his novice companion. Although there is no mention of the mountebanks among the precepts regarding a potential journey to Italy, the treatment of Venice in the language manual marks the tension between domestic curiosity and suspicion: P. I would not for any thing in the world, omit the seeing of that renowmed citie of Venice, which of many is called the impossible, within the impossible. S. Who sees Venice cannot esteeme it, But he that sees it payes well for it.88

Florio’s expert traveller represents Venice in monetary terms, setting a precedent for the display of collective greed in Volpone. With an implicit allusion to the notoriety of the city’s sex industry, even the local women become an object of consumption for the wealthy Englishman: ‘Bread of Padova, wine of Vicentia, flesh of Furly, cheese of Placenza, tripes of Trevise, and women of Venice’.89 Peregrine’s perfunctory reproduction of standard warnings about Italy suggests previous studies have been too quick to accept his contention that Lady Wouldbe came to Venice ‘for intelligence, / Of tires, and fashions, and behaviour, / Among the courtesans’ (2.1.27-9). The gendered topography of early travel writing represents women as part of the curiosities and dangers encountered in the peninsula, rather than participants on the journey. For David McPherson, the insult anticipates the detailed references to the apparel of Venetian prostitutes in later voyage narratives like Coryat’s Crudities, where travellers attribute much The Italian Encounter with Tudor England: A Cultural Politics of Translation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) and Jason Lawrence, ‘Who the Devil taught thee so much Italian’: Italian language learning and literary imitation in early modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006) 85 See Jonson, Volpone (1607), British Library call number C.12.e.17. 86 See John Florio, A Worlde of Wordes, or Most Copious, and exact Dictionarie in Italian and English (1598). The dictionary was later revised under the patronage of James I’s consort as Queen Anna’s New World of Words (1611). 87 John Florio, Second Frutes, p. 79. 88 Ibid., p. 107. 89 Ibid., p. 107.

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of their sexual allure to ‘their high fashion’.90 The appeal to Englishmen of such exotic sophistication may explain why one of London’s enterprising brothels traded under the name of Venice during the period.91 Manuscripts by period sexual tourists demonstrate that culture, history, religion, and politics were not the only attractions of undertaking the arduous journey. William Spelman’s description of 1580 titillated his classmates at Cambridge with the claim there was ‘such plentye of Courtesans in venyce, as we passinge in the streetes or rowynge in gondelow botes, might see such numbers at the gase in ther lattice wyndowes and galleryes as I thinke without number’.92 Apart from the prurient interest in their practices and fashion choices, however, the focus of the numerous published discussions of the courtesans was the need for Englishmen to avoid them. A well-prepared visitor like Peregrine would have been well aware of the risks of consorting with the city’s courtesans, an argument already familiar from The Unfortunate Traveller. Even the manuscript of Spelman, betraying fears about his personal reputation, was careful to attribute its detailed information to the practical research of ‘an Inglyshe marchante’.93 The overpowering female sexuality conventionally attributed to the courtesans meant that, like the dangerous attractiveness of Italy itself, the only options open to the ingenuous Englishman abroad were avoidance or surrender. The Direction for Travailers ends with a personal warning to the Earl of Bedford about the sexual perils of the city: So I may be saved as I heere feare your Safetie: unlesse God and good counsell doo helpe you; so great dread have I of your young and slipperie age, and so over sure of the alluring and intrapping natures of the Venetian and Italian Curtesanes: yet Noble Lord, take of me these two precepts: that you refraine your Eyes and your Eares.94

The imagery in the passage recalls the rhetorical allusion to the encounter between Ulysses and the sirens in The Schoolmaster, where Ascham advises the aspiring traveller to the peninsula ‘to stop his ears with wax, [and] to bind himself to the mast of his ship’.95 Yet the undoubted fascination of period men with Venetian prostitution does not justify the critical complacency about Peregrine’s reliability as a spokesperson for Jonson.

McPherson, Shakespeare, Jonson, and the Myth of Venice, p. 108. See E.H. Sugden, A Topographical Dictionary to the Works of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1925), p. 357. 92 William Spelman, A Dialogue or Confabulation between two travellers, which treateth of Civile and pollitike gouvernement in dyvers kingdomes & contries, ed. J.E. Latton Pickering (London, 1896), p. 58. 93 Ibid., p. 58. 94 Stradling, C4v. 95 Ascham, p. 63. 90

91

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The premise that the Englishwoman ‘strives to adopt Italian vices for her own’, based on predictable remarks that Peregrine makes before he even meets Lady Would-be, is not borne out by her own actions when she finally appears onstage.96 Rather than admitting to an admiration for the courtesans, she attributes her anxiety about appearance to a patriotic desire to forestall Italian accusations that ‘The English lady cannot dress herself’ (3.4.34). Indeed, since she is fearful of the stereotypes of their sexual magnetism herself, the wily servant Mosca has no trouble convincing her of the threat posed by Sir Pol’s potential liaison with one of the notorious sex workers. Upon finding Peregrine together with her husband, the lady confuses him with ‘a lewd harlot, a base fricatrice / A female devil in a male outside’ (4.2.55-6). The paranoia and abuse make it obvious that she is anything but a devotee of the courtesans. Nonetheless, accustomed to seeing the city as a sexual marketplace, Peregrine treats her apology for the mistaken identity as an attempt to prostitute herself to him. He resolves to take revenge upon the couple for seeking to exploit his ‘freshmanship’ as a traveller (4.3.23). A more productive approach to Peregrine’s effort to associate Lady Wouldbe with the courtesans is to consider the manner in which his insults rehearse cautionary themes about Venetian courtesans and Englishwomen in period writing about Italy, consistent with his use of Ascham to characterize her husband. For although The Schoolmaster shows no particular interest in female apparel and manners, its influential successor The English Ape, The Italian Imitation, The Footesteppes of France makes the claim that the ‘godly conversation’ of domestic women has been contaminated by ‘apish toyes borrowed from Italian Curtezans’.97 Here, the feminine equivalent of the Englishman’s presumed susceptibility to the politics and religion of the peninsula is a penchant for the vices associated with Italian prostitutes. As he creates a discourse of the Italianate Englishwoman, to coin a term, William Rankins condemns ‘the monstrous pride of some women ... in so much that they rather seeme Curtyzans of Venyce, then Matrones of Englande’.98 There is no explanation, however, of how local women gain access to their ‘apish toyes’. Subsequent diatribes against sartorial excess would persist in using the distant courtesans to represent anxieties about female decorum, although the complaints did not attain the same ubiquity as those regarding domestic men. When the rhetorical juxtaposition of English woman and Venetian sex worker does appear, the focus is on the responsibility of English husbands and fathers for the problem. In texts like My Ladies Looking Glasse (1616), where Barnabe Rich laments that ‘we have spoyled the Venetian Curtizans of their alluring vanities, to decke our English women in the new fashion’, there is a conspicuous lack of

96 Jonas Barish, ‘The Double Plot in Volpone’: 88. See also, among others, Salingar, ‘The idea of Venice in Shakespeare and Ben Jonson’, p. 182 and Hoenselaars, p. 172. 97 Rankins, p. 25. 98 Ibid., p. 23.


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references to female travel.99 The use of the possessive ‘our’ by Rich lays the blame on the predilections of Englishmen, rather than the women’s direct contact with Italy. Comparable sentiments appear on-stage in The Dumbe Knight (1608) when an ingenuous husband proudly compares his spouse to the third wife of the repugnant Roman emperor Caligula: Not Lollia Paulina, nor those blasing shores, Which makes the world the Apes of Italy: Shall match thy selfe in sun-bright splendency.100

The unconventional application of the expression ‘Apes of Italy’, a comic inversion of the negative imagery found in The English Ape and a number of Shakespearean plays, takes audience awareness of the disreputable female imitation trope for granted. The failed seduction scene in Volpone, as the title character attempts to purchase the favour of the chaste Venetian wife Celia, makes manifest the cultural association between the Roman matron and prostitution: ‘A diamond would have bought Lollia Paulina / When she came in like starlight’ (3.7.194-5). The common error of the husbands in The Dumbe Knight and the main plot of Volpone is the attempt to pursue their personal ambitions through their wives, taking on the role of pimp as they encourage them to breach decorum. The responsibility of the husband to preserve his wife’s moral integrity is at issue in Jonson’s subplot, where Sir Pol grants his lady the liberty to embark on a voyage to Venice itself. Consistent with period attitudes, Peregrine ultimately assigns the guilt for Lady Would-be’s questionable conduct to her partner: ‘Sir Politic Bawd! / To bring me thus acquainted with his wife!’ (4.3.19-20). The accusation may seem unfair, since the knight does not encourage his wife to exploit her sexual favours for his advantage like the erstwhile jealous husband Corvino in the main plot, but contemporary audiences would not have spared the Would-bes from censure. With all the widely reproduced anxieties about contact with Italy and Venice in particular, it would have seemed bizarre for a respectable man to allow his wife or daughter to visit the infamous city. Practical and social obstacles meant that, notwithstanding the women who would have gone to the continent for necessity, the figure of the proto-tourist envisioned by early modern writing about travel was almost exclusively male. Chloe Chard has made a convincing case that commentary about the sightseeing and cultural curiosity of female travellers did not begin to appear until the late eighteenth century.101 Sir Thomas Palmer’s 1606 guide to the subject, published in the same year as Jonson’s play was first Barnabe Rich. My Ladies Looking Glasse. Wherin may be discerned a wise man from a foole, a good woman from a bad (London, 1616), B1v. 100 Jarvis Markham, The Dumbe Knight (London, 1608), B3v. 101 See Chloe Chard, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography, 1600-1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 34-9. 99


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performed, summarily dismisses domestic ‘Infants, Decrepite persons, Fools, Women’ as those ‘inhibited travaile’ and there are no obvious historical or literary precedents for the depiction of an Englishwoman in Venice.102 Given the explicit intertextuality in the subplot of Volpone, we should not be surprised that Lady Would-be talks about imitating books, rather than courtesans. In offering a model for her actions, she cites Castiglione’s The Courtier: I would be loath to contest publicly With any gentlewoman, or to seem Froward or violent: as The Courtier says; It comes too near rusticity in a lady, Which I would shun by all means. (4.2.33-7)

Florio had written acerbically in his dedication to Second Frutes about Italian responses to foreigners who ‘hath learnt a little Italian out of Castilions courtier’, marking both the extensive circulation of the original text and the dubious attempts of English readers to comprehend it.103 Lady Would-be’s comments about ‘rusticity’ evoke the third book of the famous collection of debates about courtly conduct. Amidst the discussion of the feminine graces appropriate to a noblewoman, encouraging a ‘certain bashfulnesse’ in behaviour, Castiglione includes a specific condemnation of ladies who ‘speake and willingly give eare to such as report ill of other women’.104 Of course, although she knows what to avoid, the Englishwoman falls well short of the textual ideal she is trying to emulate. For the Italian courtier, the ideal lady should have ‘above all other thinges, a certaine sweetnesse in language that may delite, whereby she may entertain all kinde of men with talke worthie the hearing’.105 The horror with which Volpone responds to Lady Pol’s visits, begging her to accept that the ‘highest female grace is silence’, underlines she has neither the poise of Castiglione’s ideal donna del palazzo nor the sex appeal of the courtesan (3.4.78). With her intellectual pretensions on-stage, Lady Would-be makes manifest the extent to which Italian culture has already been assimilated textually within England. After Volpone inadvertently raises the subject of poetry, the Englishwoman offers her own extensive list of writers from the country:

Palmer, How to Make our Trauvailes Profitable, cited in Clare Howard, English Travelers of the Renaissance (1914, rpt. New York: Burt Franklin, 1968), p. 34. 103 Florio, Second Frutes, A4v. 104 Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Sir Thomas Hoby (London: Dent, 1974), pp. 194, 191. The impact of the conduct book on the theatre is discussed in detail in Chapter 3, pp. 97-105. 105 Ibid., p. 190. 102


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Which o’ your poets? Petrarch? or Tasso? or Dante? Guarini? Ariosto? Aretine? Cieco di Hadria? I have read them all. (3.4.79-81)

Lady Would-be’s pride in the breadth of her reading is symptomatic of the domestic circulation of these books. In the ‘Epistle Dedicatorie’ to his Worlde of Wordes (1598), Florio emphasizes the utility of the Italian-English dictionary for the number of ‘well-forwarde students, that have turned over Guazzo and Castiglione, yea runne through Guarini, Ariosto, Tasso, Bocacce, and Petrarche’.106 Between them, Jonson’s characters manage to cite almost all of the prominent Italian authors that Florio mentions. While critics of the play have conventionally focused on the English couple’s lack of interpretive skills, listing the ‘hilariously inept’ allusions, the ironies are contingent upon the audience’s previous knowledge of these authors.107 By encouraging playgoers to laugh at the understatement implicit in Lady Pol’s comment that Aretino’s pictures ‘are a little obscene’, where Giulio Romano’s notorious illustrations of sexual positions for the Sonetti lussuriosi (1526) challenge even modern tolerances of obscenity, Jonson plays on their own familiarity with such an emblematic figure of Italian vice (3.4.97). Aretino’s association with depravity motivated Nashe’s decision to make him the favourite writer of Jack Wilton in The Unfortunate Traveller. In a letter printed in 1580, Gabriel Harvey singled out Aretino among the suspect Italian authors ‘highly regarded of Schollers’: ‘Matchiavell a great man: Castilio [Castiglione] of no small reputation: Petrarch, and Boccace in every mans mouth: Galateo and Guazzo never so happy: over many acquainted with Unico Aretino’.108 Florio’s list of ‘The names of the Bookes and Auctors, that have bin read of purpose for the accomplishing of this Dictionarie’ at the start of the Worlde of Wordes features 14 relatively orthodox works by Aretino, the largest number by any individual author among the 71 books cited.109 In the main plot, Jonson takes care to highlight the sexual implications of reading Aretino. The jealous husband Corvino expresses his fear of a hypothetical lover ‘That had read Aretine, conned all his prints / … And were a professed critic in lechery’ (3.7.60-63). The responsibility for the Englishwoman’s acquaintance with Aretino would have rested with Sir Politic, since the idea ‘a husband could mould his wife’s character by regulating her reading is an unquestioned commonplace in contemporary conduct manuals’.110 Yet, even though Lady Pol’s knowledge of such filthy texts may be inappropriate, the comic effect relies upon the collective guilt she shares with those laughing in the audience. Florio, A Worlde of Wordes, A4r. McPherson, Shakespeare, Jonson, and the Myth of Venice, p. 110. 108 Gabriel Harvey, ‘Letter to Edward Spencer’, in The Works of Gabriel Harvey, ed. Rev. Alexander B. Grosart (3 vols. 1884, Ann Arbor, 1963), vol. 1, p. 69. 109 Florio, A Worlde of Wordes, B4v. 110 Sanders, p. 8. 106 107

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Lady Would-be’s literary allusions expose the systemic dissemination and imitation of Italian books in England. Jonson’s satiric strategy comes to the fore when, finding a copy of Guarini’s ‘Pastor Fido’ in the sickroom, Lady Would-be lectures Volpone on the theft practised by authors from her own country: All our English writers, I mean such as are happy in th’ Italian, Will deign to steal out of this author ... He has so modern and facile a vein, Fitting the time and catching the court-ear. Your Petrarch is more passionate, yet he, In days of sonnetting trusted ’em with much. (3.4.86-94)

Following the precedent set by Nashe’s conflation of literature and travel, she points to the appropriation of Petrarch in past ‘days of sonnetting’ (3.4.94). Recent critics have read the speech as an attack on specific competitors of Jonson like Samuel Daniel and John Marston, noted for their use of Guarini.111 On a broader level, as with Peregrine’s compulsive references to prejudices about the peninsula, what is at stake is the extent to which a foreign nation has monopolized domestic cultural discourses. The theme of literary imitation is not limited to Lady Would-be’s scenes. During his performance as Scoto, Volpone cites perhaps the most widely copied Italian author in the London theatre. As he encourages his potential clients to reject rival mountebanks, Scoto emphasizes his contempt for those who ‘come in lamely with their mouldy tales out of Boccaccio’ (2.2.54). Whether or not Jonson’s contemporaries always employed the original texts, given the availability of previous adaptations and English collections of Italian novelle like William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure, H.G. Wright’s magisterial source study has shown ‘that Boccaccio’s influence extended in many directions and penetrated into the most remote nooks and crannies’.112 By the time of the first performance of Volpone, the Decameron had been the inspiration for prominent plays by Dekker, Marston, Middleton, Sharpham, and Shakespeare among others.113 The competition between London dramatists was as fierce as that amongst Venetian mountebanks. Jonson went on to use the same depreciative to attack the continued popularity of one of Shakespeare’s imitative works. After the flop of The New Inn in 1629, Jonson complained that his dramatic ambitions were frustrated by the enthusiasm of playgoers for ‘some mouldy tale / Like Pericles’.114 The explicit use of John 111 See Lawrence, pp. 99-100 and Lucy Munro, Children of the Queen’s Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 104-5. 112 Wright, p. 479. 113 See Wright, pp. 196-240. 114 Ben Jonson, ‘Ode to himself’, The New Inn. ed. M. Hattaway (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), ll. 21-2.


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Gower as a chorus in Pericles marked it as an adaptation of another source well past its sell-by date.115 Apart from the direct and indirect comments about his fellow authors on-stage, Jonson’s ‘Epistle’ to the published edition of Volpone challenges the interpretive practices of playgoers and readers. He had ample reason to be wary of those ‘that profess to have a key for the deciphering of everything … or give leave to these invading interpreters’.116 A year before his Venetian comedy appeared onstage, the objections of Scottish courtiers to Eastward Ho! (1605) had led to his imprisonment.117 The experience reflected the dangers of collaborative satires, since Jonson had faced the same fate in 1597 after working with Nashe on the lost Isle of Dogs. However, the incautious references to James I in Eastward Ho suggest the play’s problem was not interpretive errors, but a lack of prudent self-censorship. Yet Jonson’s real or perceived grievances about ‘invading interpreters’ would have made the treatment of the politics of domestic reading in The Unfortunate Traveller a relevant model when he came to write Volpone. The contested place of Italy in English culture, intersecting with debates about everything from literature and statecraft to national identity, made it the perfect setting to rehearse the issue of textual interpretation. The argument of Jonson’s subplot becomes the English reliance upon representations of Italy, where ‘playbooks’, anti-travel writing, and suspect Italian texts lead all of the travellers astray. Without a competent audience, as the failure of Sir Pol’s attempts to emulate Machiavelli via the stereotypes of the London stage suggests, the elusive authorial meaning becomes confused, distorted, or misappropriated in the process of cultural transmission. You remember Coriate: Citing travel books on-stage Ben Jonson’s subsequent assistance in the preparation of a notorious volume of travel writing provides a valuable means of approaching the influence Volpone exerted on the evolution of the discourse of the Italianate Englishman in the theatre. In 1611, four years after his Venetian play appeared in print, the dramatist became involved in the controversy surrounding the publication of Coryat’s Crudities, a text featuring an earnest account of the beauties of Europe and the benefits of foreign travel. To help promote the work, written and self-published at great cost by his friend Thomas Coryate, Jonson contributed characters of the author to both the original book and to a second organized in its defence. Coryate required Jonson’s assistance because of the contempt he attracted by publishing an unique first For the intertextuality of Pericles, see Chapter 3, pp. 77-8. Jonson, ‘Epistle’ in Volpone, ll. 60-62. For the epistle’s political implications, see Richard Dutton, Licencing, Censorship and Authority in Early Modern England (Houndsmills: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 115-31. 117 In Chapter 5, I discuss the collaborative play’s treatment of the monarch in the context of English xenophobia. See pp. 178-9. 115 116


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person account of an encounter with a Venetian prostitute. In what would become the most discussed section of his massive volume, Coryate declares he visited the woman as a conscious effort to fill in the gaps left by earlier descriptions of the city: ‘the more willing I am to treate something of them, because I perceive it so rare a matter to find a description of the Venetian Cortezans in any Authour, that all the writers that I could ever see, which have described the city, have altogether excluded them out of their writings’.118 In departing from the stereotypes of Italian travel, in spite of his promise of adding to domestic knowledge of the city, Coryate left himself open to attack. The original edition appeared with over 100 pages of mock ‘Panegyrick Verses’ that actually condemn the author and his project.119 Richard Badley’s contribution emphasizes that the problem with the Crudities is not the effect that Venice may have had on Coryate personally, but the influence that his book may have upon susceptible English readers: ‘If Schedules of this nature had been found / About Sir Politick, ’twold have made him swound’.120 The allusion to Jonson’s dramatic character functions as a warning against unchecked writing, rather than against the threat posed by the journey to Venice itself. By offering Sir Politic Would-be as an example of the consequences of reading about Italy, Badley’s verse is revealing of the importance that intertextuality continues to acquire in English representations of Italian travel. Jonson himself cited the character in Coryate’s defence: ‘The greatest Politick that advances into Paules he will quite, to go talke with the Grecian who begs there; such is humility’.121 Nonetheless, the proliferation of satirical writing about the flamboyant traveller ensured that he joined Sir Politic Would-be as one of the stock images of the excesses of the Italianate Englishman. The overt allusions to the reception of the Crudities in plays like The Roaring Girl, The Ball and The Novella treat Coryate’s encounter with the Venetian courtesan as part of a discursive network, involving both the original book and the successive commentaries by his critics. For although most source studies persist in approaching the explicit quotation of well-known works as a question of local colour, predicated upon the accuracy of the Venice presented on-stage, what emerges in the self-reflexive staging of the city in Stuart drama is how the cultural aggregation of previous traveller’s accounts, anti-travel writing, and Italianate drama becomes an explicit theme. Thomas Coryate, Coryat’s Crudities, vol. 1, p. 401. For the publication history of the Crudities, see Michael Strachan, The Life and Adventures of Thomas Coryate (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 120-30. See also Katherine A. Craik, ‘Reading Coryat’s Crudities (1611)’, Studies in English Literature 44 (2004): 77-96 and R.E. Pritchard, Odd Tom Coryate: The English Marco Polo (Stroud: Sutton, 2004), pp. 169-85. The social occasion provided by the ‘Panegyrick Verses’, where London wits competed to write verses about Coryate, is discussed in the recent book by Michelle O’Callaghan, The English Wits: Literature and Sociability in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 102-26. 120 Coryate, Coryat’s Crudities, vol. 1, p. 107. 121 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 17. 118 119


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Not unlike the prejudices Peregrine applied towards Sir Pol, marking the latent influence of Ascham, the majority of the verses which appear at the start of the Crudities censure Coryate for being heedless of the manner in which, as Robert Phillips puts it, ‘many of our English men ... returne home corrupted in manner and much worse then they went forth’.122 The numerous suggestions that Coryate may have absorbed ‘the vices of the countries through which [he] traveld’, underlined in the footnote that Phillips added to his contribution, foreground the established anxieties about the loss of domestic identity before the reader approaches the main text.123 The constant derision of the justification that he ‘slipt into the stewes / For learnings cause’, as in the contribution by Inigo Jones, makes the suspect encounter with the Venetian courtesan the main accusation against him.124 The verses by Robert Richmond contend that he was ‘too curious’ about Italian vice: Such places oftentimes make most temperate men most furious. And who dare sweare for you, I pray, that went for satisfaction. (You say your selfe) and so be evicted of the action? So that by your confession, sans verdict of a Jurie, In each place else you shew your wit, but there you shew’d your fury. Say what you list, sweare and protest, for all this great Bravado, It will be said, at least be guest, you were the Puncks Privado, And so you’ll lose great store of those, whose verse may give you glory.125

Apart from the opportunity for bawdy humour about ‘The Ladyes of Lubricity that live in the Bordello’, what is at stake here is the representation of Coryate’s journey in the prefatory verses.126 For although Ann Rosalind Jones has contended that the Crudities offer a predictable ‘vision of irresistible corruption’ where ‘Venetian discourse is typified by the hypercivilized rhetoric of the courtesans’, the reader experiences the opening of the text as a contest between competing versions of travel.127 Coryate makes a point of refuting the portrayal of his supposed sexual adventures, where his ‘Introduction to the ensuing Verses’ pleads for the ‘(courteous reader) to suspend thy censure of me till thou hast read over my whole

Coryate, Coryat’s Crudities, vol. 1, p. 31. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 31. 124 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 64. For Jones’ own extensive voyages to the peninsula, see Christy Anderson, Inigo Jones and the Classical Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 34-8. 125 Coryate, Coryat’s Crudities, vol. 1, p. 51. 126 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 51. 127 Ann Rosalind Jones, ‘Italians and Others: Venice and the Irish in Coryat’s Crudities and The White Devil’. Renaissance Drama 14 (1987): 109. In assuming that Coryate and his versifiers had a common project, this influential article does not consider the tensions surrounding the publication of the book. 122 123


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booke’.128 The embattled author even feels obliged to add footnotes rebutting the personal attacks: ‘Beleeve him not Reader. Reade my Apologie in my discourse of the Venetian Cortezans, p. 270’.129 Coryate attributes the inclusion of ‘so many’ contributions to the personal intervention of the Prince of Wales, noting that ‘the Princes Highnesse ... understanding that I meant to suppresse so many, gave me a strict and expresse commandement to print all those verses’.130 Although the reference to Prince Henry may advertise a privileged relationship with the heir to the throne, it also makes manifest the author’s uneasiness about the extent of his mockery in what was for the most part unsolicited material.131 The dispute about Coryate’s acquaintance with Venetian courtesans becomes an allegory for the problem of slander in The Roaring Girl, a 1612 comedy of the London underworld by Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker. The self-defence of Moll Cutpurse, rejecting the presumption that her knowledge of vice makes her complicit in it, relies upon a verbal echo of the Crudities: Moll. Suppose, my lord, you were in Venice … If some Italian pander there would tell All the close tricks of courtesans, would not you Hearken to such a fellow? Lord Noland. Yes. Moll. And here, Being come from Venice, to a friend most dear That were to travel thither, you would proclaim Your knowledge in those villainies, to save Your friend from their quick danger: must you have A black ill name because ill things you know? Good troth, my lord, I am made Moll Cutpurse so.132

128

Ibid., vol. 1, p. 21. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 64. The note directs the reader to the page where Coryate’s justification of the encounter appeared in the original edition. 130 Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 20-21. 131 For the intervention of the Prince of Wales, see Strachan, pp. 124-5. Evidence that Coryate received a subsidy from the Prince is outlined in Craik, p. 78. The publication of the book came at time when Henry was eager to avoid a potential marriage aligning his family with the Grand Duke of Tuscany or the Duke of Savoy, see Roy Strong, ‘England and Italy: The Marriage of Henry Prince of Wales’, in For Veronica Wedgwood These Studies in Seventeenth Century History, eds Richard Ollard and Pamela Tudor Craig (London: Collins, 1986), pp. 59-87 and Elkins Calhoun Wilson, Prince Henry and English Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1946), pp. 97-100. 132 Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker, The Roaring Girl, ed. Paul A. Mulholland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 5.1.333-43. 129


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With her emphasis on the ‘black ill name’ of the traveller upon his return to England, rather than his conduct abroad, Moll provides a perceptive reading of the reception of the original book. Significantly, the source of the speech is the ‘Apologie’ Coryate promises in his dissenting footnotes to the ‘Panegyrick Verses’: Neither can I be perswaded that it ought to be esteemed for a staine or blemish to the reputation of an honest or ingenuous man to see to see a Cortezan in her house, and note her manners and conversation, because according to the old maxime, Cognitio mali non est mala, the knowledge of evill is not evill, but the practice and execution thereof.133

A significant difference between the two passages is that Moll is careful to emphasize that her hypothetical Englishman abroad only heard about the prostitutes, making his knowledge less exceptionable. What the roaring girl and Coryate have in common, however, is a perception of themselves as victims of misrepresentation. By flouting culturally embedded prejudices, they end up among the ‘chaste whose names fill slander’s books’.134 For although the traveller is keen to argue that he was able to resist the attractions of evil, in contradiction to all the warnings to avoid Venetian courtesans, the real problem for Coryate was the damage to his reputation in the writing of others. The precedent of Coryate made an ideal example of public humiliation because there were an extraordinary number of texts depicting his foibles during the period. It is not a coincidence, for example, that the anti-masque to Thomas Campion’s Caversham Entertainment (1613) features a traveller who admits ‘I have been laught at in most parts of Christendome’.135 Apart from the ideological misgivings about his depiction of Venice, Coryate became famous as a subject of printed jests. The established market for such material prompted the so-called water poet John Taylor to join in the fun, printing a series of works based on the ridicule of Coryate.136 In his mock elegy Odcombs Complaint, Taylor is more interested in the popularity of the ‘Panegyrick Verses’ than in the traveller’s actual experiences: Coryate, Coryat’s Crudities, vol. 1, p. 408. The passage appeared on page 270 of the original edition. 134 Middleton and Dekker, 5.1.345. 135 Thomas Campion, The Works of Thomas Campion. ed. Walter R. Davis (New York, 1970), p. 243. For the masque’s portrayal of travel, see David Lindley, Thomas Campion (Leiden: Brill, 1986), pp. 212-15. 136 A recent account of his attacks on Coryate is Joanne E. Gates, ‘Travel and PseudoTranslation in the Self-Promotional Writings of John Taylor, Water Poet’ in Travel and Translation in the Early Modern Period. Ed. Carmine G. Di Biase (Amsterdam: Rodolpi, 2006), pp. 267-80. See also Bernard Capp, The World of John Taylor, the Water-Poet, 15781653 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994). Taylor mocks the traveller in works including Laugh and be Fat: or, a commentary upon the Odcombyan Banket (London, 1612), The Eighth 133

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Shakespeare, Politics, and Italy Who now wil set a worke so many writers, As he hath done in spight of his back-biters With Panegyricks, Anagrams Acrosticks, T’emblazon him chief among fanstaticks?137

As the reference to ‘so many writers suggests’, the Complaint represents Coryate in terms of his intertextuality. In addition to the subversive position that the ‘Panegyrick Verses’ occupy at the opening of his book, their subsequent circulation ensured that the contest between Coryate and his critics was unequal. The inclusion of the verses may have seemed an astute publicity scheme at first, exploiting the curiosity of the would-be panegyrists to see their work in print.138 However, he soon lost control of the process. Thomas Thorpe published a pirated version of the verses in The Odcombian Banquet Dished Foorth by Thomas the Coriat immediately after the Crudities became a fashionable topic of conversation in London, omitting the travel narrative.139 To add insult to injury, since the verses were the most commercially viable part of the costly volume, the printer added a scornful conclusion condemning the moral and financial danger posed by the original edition: ‘Know (gentle reader) that the booke, in prayse whereof these preceding verses were written, is purposely omitted for thine, and thy purses good’.140 Coryate added to the controversy and his personal expense by publishing Coryats Crambe (1611), a verse collection intended to refute the ‘very scandalous imputations’ in ‘a Booke lately Printed in hugger mugger intituled The Odcombian banquet’.141 Yet even the contributors of verses to this second volume remind the unwary author that ‘Thy example Tom, / Will cause our sharpest heads to stay at home’.142 Wonder of the World, Or Coriats Escape From His Supposed Drowning (London, 1613), The Nipping or Snipping of Abuses (London, 1614), Praise of Hempseed (London, 1620), and Bull, Beare, and Horse (London, 1638). Coryate’s complaints to James I led to a privy council order to burn copies of Laugh and be Fat, but Taylor persisted in mocking the traveller even after his death. For the destruction of the pamphlet, see Capp, pp. 13-14, 137 John Taylor, Odcombs Complaint: or Coriats funeral Epiceduim: or Death-song (London, 1613), A8r. 138 Without taking account of the subsequent circulation of the Crudities and the persistent character assassination of Coryate in other works, most recent studies tend to represent him as having control over his portrayal in the first edition of the verses. See Craik, pp. 78-9 and O’Callaghan, pp. 102-27. See also Richard Barbour, Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of the East, 1576-1626 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 115-20. 139 Coryate’s grievances about the text are discussed in Strachan, pp. 134-7. 140 The Odcombian Banquet Dished Foorth by Thomas the Coriat, and Served in by a number of Noble Wits (London, 1611), P4v. 141 Thomas Coryate, Coryats Crambe (London, 1611), A2r. 142 Ibid., verse by Joannes à Grandi-Bosco.


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With the notoriety he acquired as the embodiment of the stereotypes of the Italianate Englishman, Coryate began to be cited alongside Ascham in plays depicting the debate about foreign travel. When Jack Freshwater announces his return from Venice at the start of The Ball, a 1632 comedy by James Shirley, his compatriots voice predictable fears about Italy’s influence upon the traveller: [Sir ]Am[brose Lamont]. How hee’s transformed. [Sir ]Ma[rmaduke Travers]. Is not his soul Italian? [Mr. ]Bo[stocke]. Ile not bid him welcome home.143

The suspicion Jack has been ‘transformed’ evokes the rhetoric established in The Schoolmaster, where Ascham offers cautionary examples of those ‘who, parting out of England fervent in the love of Christ’s doctrine and well furnished with the fear of God, returned out of Italy worse transformed’.144 With such preoccupations in mind, compounded by Freshwater’s affectation of addressing everyone as ‘Signior’, the London gallants in The Ball may be wise to avoid contact with the traveller. Certainly, fears about Italianate Englishmen are a useful pretext to get out of paying the extensive debts they promised to settle ‘five for one’ upon his homecoming.145 The subplot recalls famous wagers made by travellers during the period, a phenomenon satirized by Ben Jonson in Every Man Out of His Humour.146 Indeed, Coryate had been obliged to pursue legal action to force the settlement of such debts after his own travels.147 To discourage Freshwater’s demands for repayment, the impecunious gallants threaten him with the public humiliation suffered by Coryate:

James Shirley, The Ball (London, 1639), Act 1, A4r. Licensed in 1632, the play is sometimes attributed to both George Chapman and Shirley, since it appeared in the same volume as the collaborative Tragedy of Chabot Admiral of France. The case for attributing it solely to Shirley is outlined in G.E. Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage (7 vols, Oxford, 1948-61), vol. 5, pp. 1077-8. The play has attracted most attention in recent criticism for its portrayal of a French dancing master, see Jean E. Howard, Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598-1642 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), pp. 163-78 and Hoenselaars, pp. 205-8. While the play’s explicit intertextuality has not been addressed, there are brief references to its theme of travel in Howard, pp. 175-7 and Warneke, p. 133. 144 Ascham, p. 63. 145 Shirley, 2, C1r. 146 The most famous example was the wager which prompted Will Kempe to morris dance to Norwich in 1599 but there were also well-known bets undertaken by Coryate and his critic John Taylor. See Capp, p. 64. 147 See Strachan, pp. 118-20. 143

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Shakespeare, Politics, and Italy Ba[rker]. die ere the town takes notice … You remember Coriate. Fr[eshwater]. Honest Tom Odcombe. Ba[rker]. We’ll have more verses o’ thy travels Coxcombe. Bookes shall be sold in bushels in Cheapeside, And come in like the Pescods, waine loads full Of thee.148

Here, the allusion to ‘verses o’ thy travels’ recalls the turbulent history of the publication and the reception of the Crudities. In fact, the Odcombe / Coxcombe rhyme, alluding to the town where Coryate was born, already appears in some of the more disparaging panegyric verses.149 The word play recurs in later references, as with the avowal by Taylor that ‘I am no Duncecomb, Coxecomb, Odcomb Tom… Venus in Venice minded to goe seeke’.150 An earlier dramatist like Joseph Cooke seems to have assumed the combination of Italian and the word coxcomb was enough for audiences to recognize the controversial travel writer. The bogus language teacher in Greene’s Tu Quoque (c.1611) notes that ‘as the Italian sayes; Que que dell fogo Ginni Coxcombie’.151 Notwithstanding The Ball was licensed 20 years after the publication of the Crudities, Shirley clearly expects his audience to still ‘remember Coriate’ as a representative figure for the debate about Venetian travel. The overt allusion to Coryate in The Ball is indicative of the way in which the play treats Venice as an intertextual experience, where both the presumed traveller and his debtors rehearse previous representations. Like Sir Politic Would-be in Volpone, his most notable precursor, Freshwater purports to have inside knowledge of daring covert schemes: ‘two or three English spies told us they had laine / Leger three moneths to steale away the Piatzo, and ship / It for Covent Garden’.152 After the success of Jonson’s play, the association between Venetian travel and boasts about statecraft led period caricatures of ‘Politicans in Shew’, eager to display 148 Shirley, 2, C1v. The references to death also allude to the fate of Coryate during his final trip to India. 149 For example, see the lines about how he ‘hit fame on the Cockscombe, / … that Head-peece that is crown’d with Odcombe’ in the contribution by John Davis, vol. 1, p. 101. Since he was inordinately proud of his provincial origins, referring to himself as the ‘Peregrine of Odcombe’, Coryate became an easy target for London sophisticates. See Melanie Ord, ‘Provincial Identification and the Struggle over Representation in Thomas Coryat’s Crudities (1611)’ in Archipelagic Identities: Literature and Identity in the Atlantic Archipelago, eds Philip Schwyzer and Simon Mealor (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 131-41. 150 John Taylor, The Sculler, rowing from Tiber to Thames (London, 1612), B1r. 151 Joseph Cooke, Greene’s Tu Quoque or, The Cittie Gallant, ed. Alan J. Berman (New York: Garland, 1984), XVI, 2201. 152 Ibid., 5, I1r.


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‘self conceited policy and wisdome, among the simpler sort’, to cast them as ‘the inseparable companions of the realto pillars’.153 However, Freshwater’s report of amorous excess along the canals is even less credible than his acquaintance with local conspiracies: ‘I was compell’d to make / Short stay here by reason of the Dukes Concubines / Fell in love wee mee’.154 The claim is an ironic inversion of the tropes of Italianate seduction, asking his listeners to believe that he captured the hearts of diverse lovers of the Venetian leader. The play’s intertextual agenda takes centre stage when Freshwater finally admits that he ‘stayed at Gravesend all this summer’ because he was afraid to undertake the journey.155 All the preceding references to famous travel narratives emphasize that there was no reason for the character to go abroad in search of exotic stories. Indeed, Freshwater’s borrowed phrases betray his fears of heading to the Italian peninsula: ‘I came to Rome and hardly scap’d the / Inquisition sort’.156 The lie about his escape is a verbal echo of the vivid account in the Paineful Peregrinations, published in the same year the play was licensed, of William Lithgow’s flight from the city: ‘I hardly escaped from the hunting of these blood-sucking Inquisitors, of which the most part were mine owne Country-men’.157 Freshwater would have had a good excuse to remain at home after reading about Lithgow’s brutal experiences at the hands of the Inquisition. Whenever Freshwater needs ‘good words’ to impress his listeners, as the running commentary on his tall tales by his servant Gudgine underlines, he comes out with phrases that recall earlier books: Ba[rker]. And what made you to undertake this voyage, Sweet Signior Freshwater? Fr[eshwater]. An affectation I had to be acquainted with some countries. Gud[gine]. Give him good words.158

References to affectation and affection in conventional apologies for departure from England focus on the desire and inclination of the traveller to gain knowledge, 153 John Melton, A Sixe-Folde Politician. Together with a Sixe-folde Precept of Policy (London, 1609), pp. 7, 8. See also John Stephens, Essayes and Characters Ironicall (London, 1615), pp. 221, 263. 154 Shirley, 5, I1r. 155 Ibid., 5, I3r. 156 Ibid., 5, H4v. 157 William Lithgow, The Totall Discourse of the Rare Adventures and Painefull Peregrinations (Glasgow, 1906), p. 18. While his main claim to fame came from being tortured by the Inquisition in Spain, after his escape in Italy, it is conspicuous that the first part of his text provides his readers the more commercially attractive opportunity to ‘See Rome discover’d, Italy made playne’ (p. 1). 158 Ibid., II, B4r.

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where cultural aspirations remained a more acceptable motive than religious exile or banishment. At the start of The English Romayne Lyfe, a cautionary account of the recusant community based at the English College in Rome, the anti-Catholic polemicist, spy, and playwright Anthony Munday insists he went to Italy ‘When as desire to see straunge Countries, as also affection to learne the languages, had persuaded me to leave my native Countrey, and not any other intent or cause, God is my record’.159 As a rather sleazy figure on the fringes of the theatrical and political scenes in London, often mocked by his contemporaries, he would be a questionable example for travellers.160 Yet, as Freshwater’s ‘good words’ suggest, Munday was part of a long line of writers who attempted to use travel to enhance their personal prestige. What remains a constant in voyage narratives, in spite of the influence of The Schoolmaster, is the claim to be able to present unique information. The most effective counter to such self-fashioning, as with the ideological claims about the social consequences of travel, was to argue the purported information came from other texts. With the relationship between writing and reading about Venice, explicit even in the work of Coryate himself, the experiences of the traveller become an intertextual performance. The obsession of the theatre with Italianate discourses became an inextricable part of the meaning of certain plays. In The Novella (1632), where the stews of Venice provide an unlikely setting for romantic comedy, Richard Brome anticipates audience recognition of previous representations of the city’s sex industry. Performed in the same year as The Ball, although its popularity meant that the King’s Men took care to block its publication during the period, the play features misleading references to a sex crazed English traveller and Coryate’s infamous discussion of Venetian courtesans.161 With his intertextual agenda, recalling the themes established in Volpone, it is telling that Brome had been a servant of Ben Jonson for a number of years before taking his own place as a playwright.162 The title is also the Italian term for the prose narratives beloved of London dramatists, suggesting a potential allusion to the frequent appropriation of plots from Boccaccio and his successors. However, the main function of the word 159 Anthony Munday, The English Romayne Lyfe. Discovering: The lives of the Englishmen at Rome (London, 1582), p. 1. 160 For Munday’s use of the book to advertise his fitness for state service, see Melanie Ord, ‘Representing Rome and the Self in Anthony Munday’s The English Roman Life’, in Travels and Translations in the Sixteenth Century, ed. Mike Pincombe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 45-61. 161 The King’s Men had it included on the Lord Chamberlain’s 1641 list of works which printers were forbidden to publish without permission of the company, a requirement only imposed for plays which were an important part of the repertory. See Bentley, vol. 3, pp. 84-5. 162 For his relationship with Jonson, see Matthew Steggle, Richard Brome: Place and Politics on the Caroline Stage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 13-20.


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novella here is to indicate Victoria, an intriguing new arrival in the brothel district. Of course, given the precedent set by Coryate, the character who stands out amidst the international cast of client-suitors vying to procure Victoria’s affections is an Englishman: They are Abroad, the royallst Nation of the World, What Venetian Rarity has not The English Money-masters purchac’d from Princes and States, to bear home as their triumphs? And for their pleasures – but i’le say no more; Hee thinks I stay too long for him to wait Without, with so much money.163

As her supposed pimp introduces the audience’s compatriot, emphasizing his economic power and cultural inferiority, he maintains that the ‘triumphs’ and ‘pleasures’ that the city sells are status symbols for travellers to display upon their return to England. Unlike the aspiring clientele from the continent, reluctant to pay the exorbitant sum requested, the Englishman is the only one who displays the readiness to accede to ‘that high purchac’d pleasure’.164 The implication is that the prestige of being able to recount his experiences back home makes it worth the expense. Victoria’s obligation to choose from a set of clients representing European stereotypes is a grotesque rehearsal of the courtship scenes in The Merchant of Venice, based on prevalent stereotypes of the city that Shakespeare avoided. Nonetheless, Brome has a more sophisticated rhetorical strategy than his intertextual approach initially suggests. Ironically, the Italianate Englishman on-stage really is in the shape of two countries at once. While it had become conventional to depict travellers as liars, as we have seen with characters like Sir Politic Would-be and Jack Freshwater, the presumed client turns out to be a German admirer in disguise. Brome’s finale defamiliarizes the familiar process of national comparison by revealing the representation of Englishness as a sham. The influence of Coryate on the play becomes explicit when one of the impecunious clients, frustrated by the newcomer’s refusal of his patronage, takes it upon himself to explain to Victoria the standard practices of Venetian courtesans: [Piso.] It cannot be to get a husband! Victoria. Nor a child neither sir, that’s lesse. Piso. That’s soon believ’d, yet, no disparagement To your expert sufficiency in the trade: 163 Richard Brome, The Novella: A Comedie, The Dramatic Works of Richard Brome (1873, New York, AMS Press 1966), vol. 1, 5.1, p. 162. (This Victorian edition is without line numbers.) 164 Ibid., 5.1, p. 162.


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For the best carpenters make the fewest chips, There’s very few of all your function fruitfull: Yet some there be approved men at armes Famous in publique service: and a many Good handy craftsmen in the Arsenall Bred by this bounteous City from such mothers That nere could boast their fathers; and as many Daughters (if they prove worthy in their features) Succeed their active Mothers in their fortunes.165

The passage is taken almost verbatim from the discussion of the offspring of prostitutes in Coryat’s Crudities: If any of them happen to have any children (as indeede they have but few, for according to the old proverbe the best carpenters make the fewest chips) ... the male children are employed in the warres, or to serve in the Arsenall, or Galleys at sea, or some other publique service to the Common weale. And many of the females if they bee faire do matrizare, that is, imitate their mothers in their gainfull facultie.166

The obvious verbal echoes in Piso’s speech may suggest a straightforward example of quotation. In an early source study, based on an exaggerated sense of the cultural standing of Coryate, R.B. Sharpe argued that Brome’s desire for authenticity brought him to cite ‘the recognised contemporary authority on the picturesque life of the twenty thousand Venetian courtesans’.167 Matthew Steggle’s recent book on the dramatist endorses Sharpe’s grandiose claims ‘about the depth and carefulness of Brome’s use of local colour’, without any consideration of this scene or the intertextual agenda of the play.168 Yet what makes the verbal echo remarkable is that, in a subsequent passage overlooked by Sharpe, Brome explicitly stages the citation of Coryate’s text: Victoria. You are better read than I sir. Piso. Tis common knowledge Lady. Nor do I Read this t’inform your selfe, who were instructed (I make no doubt) before your price was set.169

165

Ibid., 3.1. pp. 132-3. Coryate, Coryat’s Crudities, p. 407. 167 Robert Boies Sharpe, ‘The Sources of Richard Brome’s The Novella’, Studies in Philology, 30 (1933): 69. Sharpe proposes a series of more dubious parallels with the Crudities and an unpublished manuscript that Fynes Moryson left out of his Itinerary. 168 Steggle, p. 32. 169 Brome, 3.1, p. 133 (my italics). 166


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With the phrase ‘I Read this’, accentuated by Victoria’s own reference to reading, the implicit stage direction specifies that Piso is consulting a book in front of him. Brome’s self-reflexive performance of the act of quotation changes the focus of the scene from the practices of courtesans, as the local colour argument would suggest, to the ‘common knowledge’ of previous writing about them. As the fact that his main sources lie entirely in domestic texts makes clear, Brome marks the distance that separates the exotic ‘Venice’ produced in England from any possible vision of the place itself. The dramatist would go on to employ an analogous rhetorical strategy in The Antipodes (1640), where the fixation of Peregrine Joyless with ‘Reports of travels and of voyages’ predisposes him to undertake an absurd imaginary journey in the play within a play.170 The quotation scene in The Novella exploits the manner in which reading the Crudities on-stage creates predictable audience expectations, setting up an interpretive framework the play proceeds to frustrate. Piso’s encounter with Victoria has a significant resemblance to the scene in Volpone where Lady Would-be’s preconceptions about the local sex industry prompt her to mistake Peregrine for ‘the most cunning courtesan of Venice’ (3.5.20). As is well known, Jonson was a mutual friend of Coryate and Brome. The difference in Brome’s approach is he delays letting his audience in on the joke, prompting them to share the misreading of the character and intentions of the title character. Only in the finale does Victoria reveal she has employed the disguise of a novice courtesan to surmount the obstacles to her intended marriage. Her chastity is safe, protected by the intimidating tariff and a friar posing as her pimp. The surprise return to a conventional comedic structure exploits the generic tension between the two competing visions of Italian culture in early modern English writing; the peninsula as a site of transgression and the romantic ideal deriving from the literary traditions of sonneteers and the novelle. By withholding the virtue of the title character, placing the spectator amongst the victims deluded by her ruse, the questionable role of the domestic audience comes to the fore. Brome ultimately furnishes a happy conclusion that fulfils the requirements of romantic comedy, reuniting the betrothed lovers after a series of titillating obstacles, but the sleazy innuendo he offers in the meantime suggests London playgoers might have been just as happy to see the representation of uninhibited vice. Conclusion One of the characteristics of most recent studies of early modern English travel writing is the tendency to accept the assumptions of period texts at face value. Richard Brome, The Antipodes, eds David Scott Kastan and Richard Proudfoot (New York: Theatre Arts, 2000), 1.1.132. For the play’s treatment of travel, see Claire Jowitt, Voyage Drama and Gender Politics, 1589-1642 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 214-24. 170


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By highlighting ‘the fancy that many young gentlemen of England have to travel abroad, and namely to lead a long life in Italy’, Ascham established the preconception that Italian travel was prompted by the cultural ambitions of the elite.171 It is tempting, therefore, to look for the origins of the Grand Tour in the increasing contacts with Italy during the Tudor and Stuart period.172 Yet the number of young travellers going abroad in search of adventure or learning was always much lower than the people reading the plentiful books from and about Italy at home. The majority of the English who hazarded the journey to Italy went there for state affairs, trade, or to seek freedom from religious persecution. Even Ascham acquired his direct knowledge as part of the 1551 embassy of Sir Richard Morrison, rather than a personal voyage to further his interest in antiquity.173 Stefano Villani’s recent research on the English presence in the port city of Livorno (or Leghorn as they would have called it) during the seventeenth century demonstrates that the expatriate community there was much larger than those found in more culturally significant cities like Venice, Genoa, and Naples.174 Only Rome, with its Catholic exiles crowded around the Vatican, would have had a sizeable English population not primarily devoted to commerce. Leghorn’s economic importance did not garner it much attention in period accounts of Italy, given its lack of compelling art, state affairs or a fashionable sex industry.175 The English traders of the Tuscan port would have had little in common in terms of class or education with the elite travellers anticipated by the warnings about Italy in this chapter. Apart from brief references to diplomacy, acknowledging ‘those people that are able to benefit their country by their travaile’, period travel writing concentrates on the immature gentleman ‘occupied with every vaine and light cause, as with banketting, and play, and game, & daunting, and dallying with women, and gazing upon vaine

171

Ascham, p. 60. For Ascham’s opposition to educational travel , see Warneke, pp. 52-60 and Melanie Ord, ‘Classical and Contemporary Italy in Roger Ascham’s The Scholemaster (1570)’, Renaissance Studies, 16 (2002): 202-16. 172 See, for example, Edward Chaney, The Evolution of the Grand Tour: Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations Since the Renaissance (London: Frank Cass, 1998) and Chard, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour. For the subsequent development of the ‘Giro d’Italia’, see Stoye, pp. 116-33. 173 See Kenneth R. Bartlett, ‘The Strangeness of Strangers: English Impressions of Italy in the Sixteenth Century’, Quaderni d’italianistica 1 (1980): 54-5. 174 See Stefano Villani, ‘“Una piccola epitome di Inghilterra”. La comunità inglese di Livorno negli anni di Ferdinando II: questioni religiosi e politiche’, in Questioni di storia inglese tra cinque e seicento: cultura, politica, e religione, eds Stefano Villani, Stefania Tutino, and Chiara Francheschini (Pisa; Scuola normale, 2003), pp. 179-208. See also Gigliola Pagano Devitiis, Mercanti inglesi nell’Italia del seicento. Navi, traffici, egemonie (Venice: Marsilio, 1990). 175 For the most part, the port appears in period texts only in passing references to the number of English traders based there. See Stoye, p. 125.


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toyes’.176 The struggle over the representation of Italy in the prefatory material to Coryat’s Crudities betrays the ideological investment in perpetuating the stereotype of the dissolute and debased traveller, a rhetorical strategy projecting the causes of domestic dissent outwards. By portraying the fixation with books in travel plays, consistent with the technological advances in the circulation of knowledge, Brome and his predecessors responded to the way in which reading conditioned the perception of experience during the period. The constant references to previous accounts of Venice in the Crudities, consistent with the allusive strategies of the work as a whole, underscore the extent to which Coryate himself approaches Italy from an intertextual perspective. Significantly, referring to what ‘I have read’, he opens his observations of the city with a series of citations from the verses of ‘Julius Caesar Scaliger’ (Giulio Cesare Scaligero), ‘Jacobus Sannazarius’ (Iacopo Sannazaro), a ‘most elegant Dialogue betwixt one and St. Marke’ and the presumed authority of ‘Sir John Mandevil our English Ulysses’.177 Nevertheless, he makes much of the fact that the only available texts about the courtesans are ‘the same counsel Lipsius did to a friend to his’, citing the passage adapted by Stradling in A Direction for Travailers, where the advice is ‘to furnish thy selfe with a double armour, the one for thine eyes, the other for thine eares’.178 For although he concedes the accuracy of the conventional warnings about the susceptibility of travellers, describing how a courtesan ‘wil very neare benumme and captivate thy senses’, he is careful to present his new report as a contribution to the store of text based learning in England.179 In two prescient contributions to the ‘Panegyrick Verses’, representing the domestic anxieties about the disintegration of identity in terms of the physical text, John Donne makes manifest that the controversy surrounding the publication of the Crudities was about the subsequent circulation of Coryate’s ideas. To mark the manner in which the account of ‘a Cortizan’ would provide the basis for future books, the poet and cleric introduces an elaborate conceit comparing the fate of the offending text to the corpse of an executed criminal: Worst malefactors, to whom men are prize, Doe publique good, cut in Anatomies; So will thy Booke in peeces … Nor shall wit-pyrats hope to find thee lie All in one bottome, in one Librarie. William Bourne, The Treasure for Traveilers (1578, Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1979), A1v. 177 Coryate, Coryat’s Crudities, vol. 1, pp. 301-3. Despite the farfetched nature of the Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the presumed author was still thought to be a real person well into the nineteenth century. 178 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 406. 179 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 404. 176


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Some leav’s may paste strings there in other books, And so one may, which on another looks, Pilfer, alas, a little wit from you, But, hardly much.180

While the depiction of the recycling of Coryate’s pages invokes the value of waste paper during the period, as in the mock introduction to The Unfortunate Traveller, Donne pointedly represents the book as a source for future ‘wit-pyrats’.181 Reading and writing practices in early modern England privileged the compilation of specific quotations in commonplace books. The intertextuality of the commonplace book is consistent with Donne’s metaphor of the physical dissection of the Crudities to contribute to ‘other books’. His prescient verse anticipates how, as we have seen in this chapter, Coryate’s exotic narrative would go on to be perpetuated through the citation of its most striking passages. Donne’s second contribution, a macaronic verse where the confusion provoked by diverse languages evokes the fate of the Italianate Englishman, makes it clear he perceives the danger of the reproduction of the Crudities in ideological terms: ‘Quot, dos hæc, LINGUISTS perfetti, Disticha fairont, / Tot cuerdos STATESMEN, hic livre fara tuus’.182 Given that the verses were written in the same year as his anti-Catholic work Ignatius his Conclave (1611), where Machiavelli and Aretino compete with the founder of the Jesuits for pre-eminence in hell, Donne seems to have been particularly concerned about the political and religious ramifications of Italian reading during this period. As with the texts we have looked at, he represents the two authors according to the conventional stereotypes of the ‘licentious pictures’ of Aretino and the subversive ‘instructions’ of Machiavelli.183 Yet the fantasy scenario of an England safe from the perils of uncontrolled travel and reading continues to betray that the borders separating the nation from the threats of the continent have already been breached. With his portrayal of the two Italian authors as characters in his cautionary narrative, a rhetorical strategy that is the subject of my next chapter, Donne presumes his readers are already familiar with the characteristic vices of Aretino and Machiavelli.

John Donne, ‘Incipit Joannes Donne’, Coryat’s Crudities, vol. 1, p. 38. For Nashe’s representation of the ensuing narrative as potential aristocratic toilet paper, see Georgina E. Brown, Redefining Elizabethan Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 54. 182 Donne, ‘In eundem Macaronicon’, Coryat’s Crudities, vol. 1, p. 39. The phrase has been translated as ‘As many perfect linguists as these two distichs makes, / So many prudent statesmen will this book of yours produce’. See R.S.Q., Notes and Queries, VII (1865), p. 145. 183 John Donne, Ignatius his Conclave, ed. T.S. Healy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), pp. 65, 29. 180 181

Chapter 3

‘And let them know that I am Machiavel’: Staging Italian Political Theory for the London Audience One of the more remarkable alienation effects in early modern English drama comes when the two lovers finally meet again at the climax of Antonio and Mellida: O Heaven that I should hear such blasphemy! Boy, rogue, thou liest, and – Spavento del mio core, dolce Mellida, Di grave morte ristor vero, dolce Mellida, Celeste salvatrice, sovrana Mellida, Del mio sperar; trofeo vero Mellida.

While Italian expressions often provide local colour in plays from the period, with snickering dramatists cribbing expletives or brief idiomatic phrases from Florio’s dictionaries, there are no other examples of characters bursting into the tropes of Petrarchan verse for 20 lines. Most critics have read the change of language as an effort to accentuate the joy of the reunited couple, where plain English becomes inadequate to express the intensity of their passion. There is also the suspicion that, since the following speech refers to the author’s private motives, Marston may be showing off the superior knowledge of the language John Marston, Antonio and Mellida. ed. G.K. Hunter (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 4.1.189-94. Marston himself employs some choice Italian sexual vocabulary in Antonio and Mellida, naming the comic buffoons Dildo and Catzo. For a survey of the use of Italian in early modern drama, see A.J. Hoenselaars, ‘“Under the dint of the English pen”: The Language of Italy in English Renaissance Drama’, in Shakespeare’s Italy: Functions of Italian Locations in Renaissance drama, eds Michele Marrapodi et al. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), pp. 272-91. For example, see Philip J. Finkelpearl, John Marston of the Middle Temple (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), p. 143, Hunter’s introduction to his edition of the play, p. xx, and Jason Lawrence, ‘Who the Devil taught thee so much Italian’: Italian language learning and literary imitation in early modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), p. 130.


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he acquired from his mother Mary Guarsi, the daughter of an Italian physician. Yet the question of the ‘poetic merit’ of the actual Italian verses, as in the case of T.S. Eliot’s misgivings about the ‘absurd dialogue’, was probably beside the point in the original performance. In spite of all of the interest in learning foreign languages at the time, the most compelling aspect of the dialogue pronounced (or more likely mispronounced) by the boy actors at the second Paul’s playhouse would have been its incomprehensibility. Given that critics traditionally privilege coherence and continuity, the temptation has been to condemn such ‘damage to the dramatic form’ as a failed experiment on the part of the playwright. However, the subsequent prose dialogue makes manifest the way in which Marston explicitly presents the Italian verse as a deliberate rupture in the play’s discourse: I think confusion of Babel is fall’n on these lovers, that they change their language; but I fear me my master, having but feigned the person of a woman, hath got their unfeigned imperfection and is grown double tongued. As for Mellida, she were no woman if she could yield strange language. But howsoever, if I should sit in judgment, ‘tis an error easier to be pardoned by the auditors’ than excused by the author’s.

The self-reflexive commentary of the page, acting as an on-stage-representative for the aggrieved theatregoers, underlines the author’s responsibility for the experience of ‘confusion’ and ‘strange language’. By interfering with the transmission of meaning, presenting the romantic climax of the play as bewildering noise, Marston’s ironic ‘error’ exposes the Italian court scene as an arbitrary representation of an alien culture. The suggestion is that when we look at the engagement with the confused and confusing political scene of the peninsula in the Antonio plays, with the equally disturbing use of Castiglione himself as a character in the two works, there is more at stake than mere verisimilitude. The point of Italianate drama was to rehearse an exotic, strange culture for an English audience but it is another thing entirely for the theatrical illusion of that conventional setting to be broken so jarringly.

The page states that ‘some private respect may rebate the edge of keener censure’ in Antonio and Mellida, 4.1.226-7. For the relationship between Marston’s family background and his drama, see George L. Geckle, John Marston’s Drama: Themes, Images, Sources (Newark: Fairleigh Dickenson University Press, 1980), pp. 17-18, 79-80. T.S. Eliot, Elizabethan Dramatists (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), p. 152. Hoenselaars also underlines the contrast between Eliot’s exasperation and the dramatic context of the Babel theme Marston creates for the use of the Italian dialogue. See Hoenselaars,‘“Under the dint of the English pen”:’, pp. 282-3. For example, see W. Reavely Gair’s introduction to John Marston, Antonio and Mellida. ed. W. Reavely Gair (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), p. 47. Antonio and Mellida, (Lincoln, 1965), 4.1.219-26.

‘And let them know that I am Machiavel’

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Source studies of early modern English drama have shown little interest in period audience response. Despite the extent to which intertextual criticism has encouraged the appreciation of a greater variety of potential parallels and influences, most approaches to the cultural background of early modern drama continue to be author-centred. The concern is the author’s direct and indirect recollection of literary and historical models, rather than how those precedents may have implicated readers and spectators during the period. The impression is that only modern professional academics are capable of appreciating the derivation of a play’s storyline, genre, or specific verbal echoes from previous texts. Yet, even though it is notoriously difficult to glean much about the original interpretation of individual scenes from the fragmentary comments of seventeenth-century playgoers, there is much to learn about the types of response a play encourages by looking at the way dramatists foreground certain intertextual relationships. A noted example of this strategy, predicated upon the overt identification of source material, is the appearance of John Gower as chorus in Pericles. As he introduces the ensuing action, the stage version of the author of the Confessio Amantis appeals to his stature in the literature of the fourteenth century: To sing a song that old was sung, From ashes ancient Gower is come, Assuming man’s infirmities, To glad your ear and please your eyes. It hath been sung at festivals; ... And lords and ladies in their lives Have read it for restoratives. … If you, born in those latter times, When wit’s more ripe, accept my rhymes, And that to hear an old man sing May to your wishes pleasure bring, I life would wish, and that I might Waste it for you like taper-light.

The function of the opening speech tends to be read as an elaborate acknowledgement of the play’s primary source, giving the dramatic adaptation the same sort of

While Robert Miola’s concept of the paralogue does focus on what an ‘audience brings to a text’, he defines that audience as the community of literary critics studying the text today. See ‘Seven Types of Intertextuality’ in Michele Marrapodi (ed.), Shakespeare,Italy, and Intertextuality (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 13-25. William Shakespeare, Pericles, 1.1.1-16. This and all subsequent quotations from Shakespeare are from The Riverside Shakespeare, gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).


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authority as that conferred by academic footnotes.10 However, Shakespeare and/or his possible collaborators neglect to cite the other primary source for the story of Pericles: Laurence Twine, the more recent and much more obscure author of The Pattern of Painful Adventures (1576).11 As Ben Jonson’s oft cited comments about the play being a ‘mouldy tale’ suggest, what is imperative here is the cultural valence of Gower in early modern England as an ‘ancient’ literary figure, not the desire to ensure that spectators appreciate the playwright’s depth of research and learning.12 By measuring the distance separating the Confessio from the sophisticated literature of ‘latter times, / When wit’s more ripe’, Shakespeare underlines the romance’s setting in a world long ago and far away. In the staging of Italian political theory, arousing domestic anxieties about statecraft and the problems of the court, the potential for audience recognition of a text’s relationship to controversial authors like Niccolò Machiavelli becomes much more critical. There is no question that the conventional allusions to the evil ‘Machiavillain’ performed very different dramatic functions from the silent interpolation of individual lines from Il Principe in stage dialogue. What makes the role of the spectator so vital in Italianate court drama, this chapter will argue, is that the debate surrounding the reception of Cinquecento political theory in early modern England centred on the problem of interpretation. To defend the reputation of Machiavelli, repeatedly condemned for encouraging the worst excesses of the worst leaders during the wars of Italy, proponents of the Florentine’s theories suggested that his works were in fact an implicit demystification of how rulers maintained their power. In the same fashion, where the increasing grievances about competition for royal patronage in the final years of the Queen Elizabeth’s reign continued unabated after the accession of James I, the vision of the courtly ideal in the Cortegiano began to be reread as little more than a cynical account of self-advancement. From a wider perspective, of course, the debate about these Italian books was about how to interpret the political scene in England. The process of the staging of Italian political theory over time, revising and interrogating the ideological positions of previous plays, makes manifest the extent to which the representation of a foreign culture provided a medium for the rehearsal of English anxieties.

10

See Walter F. Eggers Jr., ‘Shakespeare’s Gower and the Role of the Authorial Presenter’. Philological Quarterly 54 (1975): 434-43, F.D. Hoeniger, ‘Gower and Shakespeare in Pericles’. Shakespeare Quarterly (1982): 461-79, and Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 74-5. For Stephen J. Lynch, ‘Gower almost inevitably suggests an affiliation (though not an identity) with the author of the play’. See Shakespearean Intertextuality (Westport: Greenwood, 1998), p. 64. 11 For the sources, see Kenneth Muir, The Sources of Shakespeare’s Plays (London: Methuen, 1977), pp. 252-8. 12 See Chapter 2, p. 58-9.


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By few perceived On the frontispiece of A Treatise of Treasons Against Queen Elizabeth and the Crown of England, a 1572 tract about the controversial position of Mary, Queen of Scots, the reader is advised to turn to ‘the Page following’ to learn about ‘Treasons committed that are by few perceived’.13 At this point, there is nothing to suggest that the treatise is offering anything other than an orthodox condemnation of disloyalties committed against the English crown. The subsequent ‘preface to the English reader’, however, provides a startling condemnation of Elizabethan England as ‘a Machiavellian State and Governence’, where ‘in appearance and show only, Religion is pretended’.14 The one page delay in its condemnation of Elizabeth, in anticipation of the reader’s presumed willingness to receive the politically acceptable meaning of the title, ensures that the text takes on the deceptive appearances it aims to question. Here, the rhetorical function of Machiavelli is more than just a convenient symbol of political duplicity and expediency. By preparing a trap for complacent readers, the surreptitious tract seeks to dramatize how the subversive, not to mention treasonous, linkage between Elizabethan policy and ‘Machiavellian’ deceit departs from the conventional vision of the monarch. In accusing the English sovereign of every ‘outrage, never so barbarous (that promiseth to advaunce the present policie in hand) without scruple, fear, or conscience of hel or heaven’, a gesture that would have been disturbing in and of itself, the preface draws on the infamous account of the utility of feigned piety in Chapter 18 of Il Principe.15 The misleading frontispiece provides for an object lesson in how, just as the unwary reader has failed to recognize the actual argument of the tract, the Queen’s subjects have been deceived about the true nature of her rule. The ambiguous opening of A Treatise of Treasons provides a valuable insight into the prologues of Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and Barnabe Barnes’ The Devil’s Charter, two plays that consciously foreground the influence of Italian texts on early modern English political discourses. Each work commences with the appearance of a noted Florentine author on-stage, seeking to condition the audience’s understanding of the subsequent action. In the Prologue to The Jew of Malta, warning that he has ‘come from France / To view this land’, Machiavel himself introduces the title character as one of his followers.16 The gesture 13 A Treatise of Treasons Against Queen Elizabeth and the Crown of England (1572), frontispiece. Felix Raab suggested that the author might have been John Leslie, Bishop of Ross. See The English Face of Machiavelli: A Changing Interpretation, 1500-1700 (London: Routledge, 1964), pp. 60-61. 14 A Treatise of Treasons, A4r. 15 Ibid., A4r-v. As this chapter will show, Machiavelli’s treatment of conscience was a standard argument in period debates about statecraft. 16 Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta, ed. David Bevington (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), Prologue, 4. All subsequent citations will be made within the text.


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invites the spectators to respond to Barabas in terms of the stock images of evil Machiavellian policy. In The Devil’s Charter, Barnes employs the authoritative historian Francesco Guicciardini as the chorus, implicitly contrasting his ‘true Fame’ with the ill repute of Machiavelli.17 The presence of Guicciardini to comment upon the play’s depiction of the villainy of Pope Alexander VI ostensibly serves to enhance the impression of historical verisimilitude, consistent with the extensive use of detailed marginal notes citing classical and early modern authorities in Barnes’ own political treatise The Four Bookes Of Offices, printed a year before. The insistent allusions on-stage to one source in particular elide Barnes’ more controversial juxtaposition of two other political sources: Machiavelli’s discussion of Alexander VI’s deception in Chapter 18 of Il Principe and King James I’s treatment of conscience in Basilikon Doron. The emphasis upon specific sources by Marlowe and Barnes suggests that overt citation was a deliberate rhetorical strategy taking account of period audience response, already overdetermined by previous representations of Italian culture. The explicit staging of the reading and interpretation of Italian political theory at issue in this chapter is very different from the critical model of ‘the unobtrusively assumed Machiavellian politics of the plays’ in recent Shakespearean studies, where the focus is subtle thematic parallels regarding the issue of kingship.18 A methodology based upon what John Roe calls ‘Applying the Machiavellian example’ aims only at explaining the cultural context of early modern politics to readers today, highlighting ‘details in Shakespeare that may otherwise seem less clear’.19 Yet the real or perceived subtlety of Shakespearean political drama does not reflect the trajectory of the application of Machiavelli’s example in plays like The Jew of Malta, where the cultural and theatrical stereotypes related to the Florentine take centre stage at the start of the performance. The subsequent discussion concentrates on the extent to which the obtrusive effect of representing Machiavelli and Guicciardini in the theatre serves to anticipate, encourage, and frustrate the conventionalized expectations of period playgoers, meaning that the intertextual dynamics at stake are not just specific verbal echoes but the reputations of the two authors in early modern England as a whole.

Barnabe Barnes, The Devil’s Charter, ed. Jim C. Pogue (New York: Garland, 1980), Prologue, 12. 18 Hugh Grady, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, & Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from Richard II to Hamlet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 31. See also Franco Ferrucio, Il teatro della fortuna: potere e destino in Machiavelli e Shakespeare (Rome: Fazi, 2004). 19 John Roe, Shakespeare and Machiavelli (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002), p. x. 17


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To let you see the Tragedie: Machiavelli and Guicciardini on-stage The use of Italian political material in early modern English drama, with the rise of the disguised duke and court revenge plot conventions, draws on the associations the peninsula had acquired with illicit statecraft, crisis, and courtly intrigue. Alongside the plethora of references to Machiavelli, allusions to other Italian writers provided dramatists with an effective means of evoking specific concepts.20 Plays by Marston, Jonson, and Webster, for example, often name Castiglione in dealing with courtiership or refer to Aretino in talking about licentiousness. Barnabe Barnes establishes the credentials of his Italian court tragedy through the self-conscious rehearsal of such allusive strategies. At the start of The Devil’s Charter, ‘Francis Guicchiardine’ introduces the play’s depiction of the Borgias: Sent from the Christall Palace of true Fame, And bright Starre-Chamber of eternall soules, … To dwell with mortall bodies here on earth: I Francis Guicchiardine a Florentine, Am by the powerfull and commanding Muse, Sent downe to let you see the Tragedie, Of Roderigo Borgia lately Pope, Called the sixt Alexander, with his sonne Proud Caesar: to present unto your eyes, Their faithlesse, fearlesse and ambitious lives. (11-24)

The aspiring dramatist guarantees the potentially suspect orthodoxy of the play’s treatment of Pope Alexander VI with the explicit presence of Guicciardini onstage, cast as a trustworthy chorus. In demonstrating the importance of ‘studious knowledge of Histories’ in The Four Bookes of Offices, as we will see, Barnes had discussed Chapter 18 of Il Principe in much greater detail than any of the works of Guicciardini.21 Yet unlike Machiavelli, noted for his praise of the pontiff’s amoral leadership, Guicciardini dealt with much the same material and his ‘true Fame’ was free from reproach.22 The chorus makes six appearances through the course of 20

The best survey of allusions to the Florentine on the early modern stage is still Edward Meyer, Machiavelli and the English Drama (1897, New York, n.d.). 21 Barnabe Barnes, Four Bookes of Offices: enabling Privat persons for the speciall service of all good Princes and Policies (1606, Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1975), p. 168. 22 For the relative importance of the Borgias in Machiavelli’s political theory, see John T. Scott and Vickie T. Sullivan, ‘Patricide and the Plot of The Prince: Cesare Borgia and Machiavelli’s Italy’, The American Political Science Review 88 (1994): 887-900. See also J.N. Hillgarth, ‘The Image of Alexander VI and Cesare Borgia in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 59 (1996): 119-29.


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the play to guide the audience’s response to the Borgias and, as such an important role indicates, there are a number of phrases and historical details pronounced by the stage Guicchiardine that recall Geoffrey Fenton’s renowned translation of Guicciardini’s history of Italy.23 Fenton set a precedent in his version, first published in 1579 and reprinted in 1599 and 1618, for the opposition between the orthodoxy of the two Florentine political theorists. The translator had taken care to establish the ‘integritie’ of Guicciardini, in comparison to his infamous contemporary, by interpolating phrases warning against Machiavellian treachery throughout the English text.24 Marlowe capitalizes on the fact that Machiavelli’s ‘name is odious’ to set the scene for The Jew of Malta (Prologue, 5). The notoriety of Machiavelli acted as a focal point for widely held anxieties about the role of deceit in affairs of state that went far beyond the actual circulation of his works. The number of cautionary references in Elizabethan and Jacobean writing, advising Englishmen to ‘farre from drifting Florence keep, least Machiavels yee groe’, make manifest the extent to which the names of the author and his city had come to represent a threatening model of political conduct.25 In contrast to the efforts of Barnes to contain the intertextual dynamics of his argument, Marlowe explicitly appeals to such negative preconceptions about Italian political theory. The stage Machiavel’s ironic petition to the ‘grace’ of the spectators provides a deceptively clear guide to the interpretation of the ensuing tragedy of a Jew, Who smiles to see how his bags are crammed, Which money was not got without my means. I crave but this: grace him as he deserves, And let him not be entertained the worse Because he favours me. (30-35)

The personal endorsement of Machiavel encourages specific expectations about the strategies and motives of Barabas, the evident villain of the play. The Prologue introduces a ‘set of associations which resonate throughout the production and influence our response to it’, as Thomas Cartelli has noted in one of the rare studies to consider how Marlowe’s allusions to ‘culturally prescribed prejudices’ function

23

For a detailed discussion of Barnes’ use of Fenton, see Jim C. Pogue, ‘Introduction’, The Devil’s Charter, pp. 7-11. 24 Francesco Guicciardini, The Historie of Gucciardine, Containing the Warres of Italie and Other Partes, trans. Geoffrey Fenton (London, 1579), p. ii. For a discussion of Fenton’s interpolations, see Jeanette Fellheimer, ‘The “Subtlety” of the Italians’, English Miscellany 12 (1961): 27. 25 William Warner, Albion’s England, (London, 1597), p. 307.


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in performance.26 However, as it invokes Machiavelli’s reputation to establish the action in distant Malta, the Prologue also calls into question the scope of the circulation and exploitation of his works in England. While literary critics have always been keen to label any nasty piece of work in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama as a Machiavel, what extends Marlowe’s portrayal of the Florentine beyond the usual stereotypes is its focus upon textuality. The Prologue represents Machiavelli as an author, proud of the influence his writing has obtained, rather than a villain qua villain. The prolific clandestine readership of his books comes to the fore as the stage Machiavel speaks ‘here in Britany’ (29). Dismissing his public detractors, he argues that his domestic followers will conceal their allegiance: To some perhaps my name is odious, But such as love me guard me from their tongues; And let them know that I am Machiavel, And weigh not men, and therefore not men’s words. Admired I am of those that hate me most. Though some speak openly against my books, Yet will they read me and therby attain To Peter’s chair. (5-12)

The ‘Epistle to the Reader’ in the first published English translation of The Prince, which did not appear until 1640, would go on to offer the same argument as the Prologue: ‘thou shalt find him much practised by those that condemne him’.27 Such rhetoric slyly co-opts the Florentine’s opponents, representing the intense criticism of his books as self-interested hypocrisy. Even though the cognoscenti who had access to his writings may have been limited, as the elusiveness of Sir Politic Would-be’s notes on ‘Nick Machiavel’ in Volpone suggests, Machiavelli was ultimately the author of books that could be read.28 The fundamental question is what Marlowe thought his compatriots were reading. Despite the emphasis on Machiavelli’s books in the Prologue, the only published translation of his works prior to the first recorded performances of The Jew of Malta in early 1592 was Peter Whitehorne’s 1560 version of The Arte of Warre, where the early translator still feels free to praise its creator as a ‘worthy Florentine and Italian’.29 There is a long scholarly tradition of ascribing the Prologue’s depiction of Machiavel to the popular circulation of Innocent Gentillet’s Thomas Cartelli, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the Economy of Theatrical Experience (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), p. 164. 27 Niccolò Machiavelli, Nicholas Machiavel’s Prince, trans. E. D[acres] (1640), A4v. 28 Ben Jonson, Volpone, ed. R.B. Parker (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 4.1.26. For the role of reading in Volpone, see Chapter 2, pp. 44-59. 29 Preface to Queen Elizabeth in Niccolò Machiavelli, The Arte of Warre, trans. Peter Whitehorne (1560, Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1969). 26

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Discours […] Contre Nicholas Machiavel Florentin (1576), an approach that accounts for the lack of unambiguous verbal echoes of the original Italian texts in the play.30 The Calvinist minister Lambert Daneau prepared an anonymous 1577 Latin translation of the Discours that was explicitly addressed the English market, complete with a dedication congratulating the island nation for having hitherto escaped ‘this deadly poyson sent out of Italie’.31 The circulation of the Latin edition, aimed at fostering hostility towards the France of Catherine de’ Medici, ensured that Gentillet attracted a certain amount of attention in Elizabethan political and religious writing.32 The domestic appeal of the Discours came from its orthodox exegesis of the dangerous Italian text for a mass readership. The contemptuous discussion of Machiavelli in A Theological Discourse of the Lamb of God and His Enemies (1590), written by the brother of Gabriel Harvey, advises curious English readers to refer to ‘a learned French protestant, whose commentaries are extant, written ex professo, against Machiavil and his antichristian grounds of Government’.33 Of course, the attention Gentillet received was ultimately a symptom of the interest in the original books. Evidence of the surreptitious circulation of Machiavelli’s works prior to 1592, notwithstanding the absence of a published English edition of the Principe or the Discorsi, comes from period commentators like Gabriel Harvey, who highlighted the place of the Florentine he called ‘Matchiavell’ on his 1579 list of the unedifying Italian books ‘highly regarded of Schollers’.34 An English version of the Discours was not on the market until 1602, when Simon Patericke’s translation of the Latin edition 30 Meyer claimed that ‘in the play itself there is not a single line taken from Machiavelli’, p. 41. The argument persists in Irving Ribner, ‘Marlowe and Machiavelli’, Comparative Literature, 6, 4 (1954): 349-51 and Catherine Minshull, ‘Marlowe’s “Sound Machiavill”’, Renaissance Drama, 13 (1982): 35-54. 31 Innocent Gentillet, A Discourse […] Against N. Machiavel. tr. Simon Patericke (London, 1602). The original Latin version of the preface to English readers appears in Commentariorium […] Adversus Nicolaum Machiavellum Florentium. (Geneva, 1577). For Daneau’s relationship to the translation and preface, see Sydney Anglo, Machiavelli: The First Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 357-9. 32 For an extended reading of the political implications of the Latin edition, considering its intervention in Anglo-French relations, see Antonio D’Andrea, ‘Machiavelli, Satan and the Gospel’, Yearbook of Italian Studies 1 (1971): 156-78. English allusions to Gentillet are discussed in Emile Gasquet, Le Courant Machiavelien dans la pensée et la littérature anglaises du XVI siècle (Montreal: Didier, 1974), pp. 178-83 and Anglo, pp. 359-66. 33 Richard Harvey, A Theological Discourse of the Lamb of God and His Enemies (London, 1590), p. 97. 34 Gabriel Harvey, The Works of Gabriel Harvey, ed. Rev. Alexander B. Grosart, 3 vols. (1884, Ann Arbor: Xerox Reprographic Services, 1963), vol. 1, p. 69. Harvey’s reading of Italian books is discussed in Virginia F. Stern, Gabriel Harvey: A Study of his Life, Marginalia, and Library (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). For possible manuscript translations of Il Principe, see Napoleone Orsini, ‘Elizabethan MS Translations of Machiavelli’s Prince’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute 1 (1937): 166-9.


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appeared in print.35 By that time, interested monolingual book buyers already had access to Machiavelli’s own Florentine Historie in the 1595 translation by Thomas Bedingfield. If people in England were interested in reading Machiavelli, the Preface to English readers in the Latin edition of Gentillet’s Discours offered Marlowe a broad target for satire. The dedication to Francis Hastings and Edward Bacon features the reassuring claim that, unlike France, their country has remained free from the doctrine of the Florentine: he is of no reputation at the court of France, which hath not Machiavels writings at the fingers ends … as though the onely way to obtain honour and riches were by this deceivers direction. But now to turn mine eyes from beholding so many miseries of poor afflicted France … O how happy are yee, both because you have so gratitious a Queen, and also for that the infectious Machiavelian doctrine hath not breathed nor penetrated the intrailes of most happy England.36

The opening of The Jew of Malta argues the exact opposite. The stage Machiavel that appears on-stage to introduce Marlowe’s play, pointedly crossing the channel from France, refuses any cultural or geographical differences protecting England from his influence: Albeit the world think Machiavel is dead, Yet was his soul but flown beyond the Alps, And, now the Guise is dead, is come from France To view this land and frolic with his friends. (1-4)

G.K. Hunter has contended that the Prologue’s relation ‘to any image of Italy as a whole is very tenuous’ because of the way that the speaker ‘ranges through France and appears in England’.37 This is precisely the point, however. Machiavel’s disquieting claims about the popularity of his books are strengthened by the domestic context of the speech, occasioned by the opportunity ‘to frolic’ with 35 The references to England in the dedication to the 1577 Latin edition have often created confusion about the date of the English translation, leading to unfounded speculation about Patericke’s authorship of the prefatory material. See, for example, Raab, p. 56 and C. Edward Rathé, ‘Innocent Gentillet and the First “Anti-Machiavel”’, Biblioteque d’Humanisme et Renaisssance 27 (1965): 196. For a critical survey of past studies of Gentillet’s circulation in England, see N.W. Bawcutt, ‘The “Myth of Gentillet” Reconsidered: An Aspect of Elizabethan Machiavellianism’, The Modern Language Review 99, 4 (2004): 863-74. 36 Gentillet, A Discourse […] Against N. Machiavel, G3-4v. 37 G.K. Hunter, Dramatic Identities and Cultural Tradition: Studies in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1978), p. 110. However, Machiavel does go on to refer to his followers in the papacy.


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his English adherents. The ominous reference to Henri de Guise’s leadership of the Catholic party in the persecution of the Huguenots, a subject Marlowe dealt with in The Massacre at Paris, casts Machiavelli’s relentless migration across the continent and over the channel as a direct threat to the national scene.38 As the staging of the Florentine author’s movement into ‘this land’ implies, the claims about his English readership had a basis in fact. For although there was a dearth of translations, John Wolfe had published surreptitious Italian language versions of five works by Machiavelli in London between 1584 and 1588, including editions of the Principe and the Discorsi with a fake imprint from Palermo.39 Wolfe used his experience studying printing in Italy to make a large part of his rather shady career out of publishing Italian books for the domestic market, including works by Gentili, Ubaldini and Aretino.40 The demand for Wolfe’s editions reflects the continuing interest in the study of Italian in early modern England, where William Thomas’s remarkable Principal Rules of the Italian Grammar (1550) was the first in a series of locally produced grammars, conversation books and dictionaries.41 In particular, the importance of Italian political theory and historical writing meant that aspiring courtiers felt obliged to advertise their familiarity with the language. Thomas’ grammar was a sideline to his research on Italian statecraft, reflected in his use of Machiavelli in secret counsels for the young Edward VI and in his 1549 Historie of Italie.42 An ambitious writer like Charles Merbury proudly 38

For the influence of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre on anti-Italian discourses in the works of Gentillet and his compatriots, see Anglo, pp. 271-86 and Henry Heller, Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth Century France (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), pp. 131-3. 39 John Wolfe’s editions of Machiavelli are discussed in Anglo, pp. 366-70, Michael Wyatt, The Italian Encounter with Tudor England: A Cultural Politics of Translation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 185-91, Peter S. Donaldson, Machiavelli and Mystery of State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 87110 and Dennis B. Woodfield, Surreptitious Printing in England, 1550-1640 (New York: Bibliographical Society of America, 1973), pp. 95-117. 40 For Wolfe’s apprenticeship in Italy, where his name appeared on the frontispieces of books printed in Florence, see Harry R. Hoppe, ‘John Wolfe, Printer and Publisher, 1579-1601’. The Library 14 (1933): 243-7 and Wyatt, pp. 185-98.Wolfe’s Italian books are discussed in Lawrence, pp. 187-200, Harry Sellars, ‘Italian Books printed in England before 1640’. The Library 5 (1924): 105-28, and Maria Grazia Bellorini, ‘Le pubblicazioni italiane dell’editore Londinese John Wolfe (1580-1591)’. Miscellanea 1 (1971): 17-65. 41 For Italian learning materials in the period, see Spartaco Gamberini, Lo studio dell’italiano in Inghilterra nel’500 e nel’600 (Messina: D’Anna, 1970), R.C. Simioni, Italian Scholarship in Renaissance England (Chapel Hill: Orange, 1952), Lawrence, and Wyatt. 42 See Joseph Khoury, ‘Writing and Lying: William Thomas and the Politics of Translation’ in Travel and Translation in the Early Modern Period, ed. Carmine G. Di Biase (Amsterdam: Rodolpi, 2006), pp. 91-102. For Thomas’ use of Machiavelli, see E.R. Adair, ‘William Thomas: A Forgotten Clerk of the Privy Council’ in Tudor Studies, ed.


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supplemented the political content of his 1581 treatise A Brief Discourse of Royall Monarchie with a dedication to ‘la serenissima Reina Elisabetta’ and ‘A Collection of Italian proverbes, In benefite of such as are studious of that Language’.43 It would not be surprising, however, if most readers of Wolfe’s editions of Machiavelli struggled with the Italian text, trying to work things out from the early language manuals and the Latin they had acquired at school. The prestige of being able to tell their friends they had a copy of the enigmatic book may have been enough. A common object of satire in the period was, as John Stephens put it, the ‘simple Politician’ who ‘pretends Machiavell should be his sire: but he proves a mungrell’.44 The stereotype of ‘vaine Politicians’, eager to ‘repute themselves wise and politicke’ by referring to half-understood Italian books, suggests that the fascination of Machiavelli had much to do with the desire to seem a part of the hidden world of court intrigue.45 One of the known readers of Wolfe’s editions of Machiavelli is Barnabe Barnes, a self-appointed expert on royal policy, poet, and the author of The Devil’s Charter. Barnes’ copy of the Wolfe version of the Principe, with an autograph on the frontispiece, is in the library of York Minster.46 N.W. Bawcutt has found a reference to a copy of the Discorsi with Barnes’ signature in an 1858 auction catalogue, consistent with the evidence indicating the two texts appeared in a common binding.47 Barnes also had a personal relationship with the printer. Wolfe published his collection of Italianate sonnets Parthenophil and Parthenophe in 1593 and, according to Thomas Nashe, Barnes and Gabriel Harvey lodged at the printer’s house.48 Apart from the question of ownership, Barnes extensively displayed his knowledge of the Principe and Discorsi in his Four Bookes of Offices: Enabling Privat persons for the speciall service of all good Princes and Policies. In the lengthy 1606 treatise on statecraft, dedicated to King James I, there are detailed R.W. Seton-Watson (London: Longman, 1924), pp. 155-6, Donaldson, pp. 41-4, and Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance, 1545-1625 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), pp. 30-31. 43 Charles Merbury, A Brief Discourse of Royall Monarchie (London, 1581). 44 John Stephens, Essays and Characters Ironicall, and Instructive (London, 1615), p. 221. Apart from Jonson’s Volpone, see also plays like The London Prodigal and Chapman’s All Fools. 45 John Melton, A Sixe-Folde Politician: Together with a Sixe-folde Precept of Policy (London, 1609), pp. 6-7. See also the discussion of ‘Machiavill’, pp. 157-60. 46 A photograph of the frontispiece is printed in Mark Eccles, ‘Barnabe Barnes’, in Thomas Lodge and Other Elizabethans, ed. C.J. Sisson (1933, London: Cass, 1961), p. 236. See also Anglo, p. 452. 47 See N.W. Bawcutt, ‘Barnabe Barnes’s Ownership of Machiavelli’s Discorsi’. Notes and Queries n.s. 29, 5 (1982): 411. For the common binding of the two books, see Donaldson, p. 90n. 48 See Victor A. Doyno, ‘Introduction’ in Barnabe Barnes, Parthenophil and Parthenophe: A Critical Edition, ed. Victor A. Doyno (Carbondale, 1971), pp. xviii-xix and lxix-lxxi.


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marginal citations of specific chapter headings that follow the idiosyncratic Italian of the Wolfe editions. In the preface, for example, Barnes’ citation of ‘Il. Prencipe cap. 18 comme se debbe osservare la fede’ reproduces the spelling of Principe in the chapter heading and overall title of the Wolfe text.49 Guicciardini merits only three superficial references in the entire treatise, notwithstanding the visibility Barnes would give the historian in The Devil’s Charter.50 The aphorisms about ‘the sweet name of a just prince’ which Barnes attributes to Guicciardini lack the meticulous bibliographical apparatus that he employs for his extensive discussions of Machiavelli.51 In spite of his clear preference for Machiavelli, however, Barnes takes care to attack the ‘corrupt Florentine’ at length in the dedication to the Four Bookes.52 The evident imbalance in the use of the two authors gives credence to the portrayal of the furtive enthusiasm of Machiavelli’s avowed critics in the Prologue to The Jew of Malta. Insofar as there was a market for Italian political texts, composed of readers with an interest, if perhaps not a great competence, in the language, the real problem was how to interpret these books. Although Marlowe and Barnes’ contemporaries might have agreed on the importance of deception as an argument in Machiavelli, some commentators in England and the continent argued that his books were themselves deceptive. A 1585 defence of Machiavelli by Alberico Gentili, an Italian professor of law at Oxford, forcefully asserted that Machiavelli’s true purpose was to promote republicanism by discrediting the tactics of tyrants: It was not his purpose to instruct the tyrant, but by revealing his secret counsels, to strip him bare, and expose him to the suffering nations. This is the reason why princes of that type object to the survival and publication of his works. The purpose of this shrewdest of men was to instruct the nations under pretext of instructing the prince, and he adopted this pretext that there might be some hope that he would be tolerated.53

The hostility towards the circulation of Machiavelli’s works, Gentili underlines, comes from their subversive insight into the covert activities that maintain princes See Four Bookes, A1r. Compare with Niccolò Machiavelli, Il Prencipe, (Palermo [London], 1584), p. 30r. 50 See Book 2, pp. 113, 114, and 126. 51 Four Bookes, p. 126. There was a tendency to reduce Guicciardini’s lengthy tome to brief aphorisms: see A briefe collection or epitomie of all the notable and material things contained in the hystorie of Gucciardine being verie necessarie for Parliament, councell, treatises, and negotiations (London, 1591) and Sir Robert Dallington, Aphorismes Civill and Militarie: Amplified with authorities, and exemplified with historie out of the first quatrne of Fr. Guicciardine, (London, 1613). 52 See Barnes, Four Bookes, A1r. 53 Alberico Gentili, De legationibus libri tres, tr. Gordon L. Laing (New York: Oxford University Press, 1924), II, p. 156 (cited in Donaldson, p. 89). 49


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in power. This interpretation represents the apparent focus of Il Principe on practical advice for the personal attention of a ruthless Florentine prince as a ‘pretext’ for the mass distribution of its demystification of statecraft. The prominence that Gentili acquired in his adopted country as a representative of Italian culture ensured that John Florio invited him to provide prefatory verses for Queen Anna’s New World of Words in company with Samuel Daniel.54 Wolfe printed a number of works by the Italian legal scholar, although he was not responsible for the London publication of Gentili’s analysis of Machiavelli. The preface from ‘lo stampatore al benigno lettore’ in Wolfe’s fake Palermo edition of the Discorsi shares Gentili’s idea, as Peter Donaldson has noted, that the Florentine brings to light the hidden vices of tyrants.55 The frontispieces to Wolfe’s Principe and Discorsi prominently display the motto ‘Il vostro maligno non giova nulla’ and the rejection of calumny is indicative of the attack in his prefatory material on slanderers of Machiavelli who seek to preclude access to the original works.56 More than letters can import: Interpretation and Deception Such apologies for Machiavelli are significant to The Jew of Malta and The Devil’s Charter because they emphasize the subversive power of interpretation, demanding that readers learn to discredit the ostensible meaning of the text. The equivocal frontispiece of the Treatise of Treasons, as we have seen, becomes the starting point for a lesson in political understanding. The didactic use of prefatory material, taking into account established cultural stereotypes, is indicative of how Marlowe and Barnes’ explicit references to Italian political authors complicate the interpretive process by encouraging an overly simplistic vision of the real issues at stake in each play. The intuition that many critics have had in recent years about The Jew of Malta, namely that Barabas does not really seem like the play’s principal follower of Machiavelli, has everything to do with the unreliable introduction he receives in the Prologue. Machiavellian stereotypes interested early modern dramatists, Victoria Kahn has argued, because the cultural anxiety about political deceit ‘was equally an anxiety about theatrical representation’, since the performances of the politician and the actor denied their real selves.57 Given that Machiavel is the master of deception per eccellenza, it may be advisable for the audience to be particularly suspicious about the interpretive guidance it receives as See prefatory verses in John Florio, Queen Anna’s New World of Words (1611), ¶

54

3v-r.

‘The printer to the gentle reader’ (my translation) – See Machiavelli, Il Prencipe, frontispiece. For the preface, see Donaldson, p. 95. See also Wyatt, pp. 188-9, and Anglo, pp. 367-8. 56 ‘Your spite is useless’ (my translation). Machiavelli, Il Prencipe (London, 1584). 57 Victoria Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric: From the Counter-Reformation to Milton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 88. 55


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Marlowe’s play begins. The appeal to the ‘grace’ of the spectators, casting Barabas as a follower of Machiavelli because of his craving for money, threatens to be doubly false (Prologue, 6). Machiavel’s primary concern in the Prologue is the acquisition and maintenance of power, rather than financial gain: Many will talk of title to a crown; What right had Caesar to the empery? Might first made kings, and laws were then most sure When like the Draco’s they were writ in blood. Hence comes it that a strong built-citadel Commands much more than letters can import. (20-25)

When Barabas wins the governorship of Malta, however, he is more interested in ‘making a profit of [his] policy’ and immediately seeks to relinquish the post offered by the Turks in exchange for more wealth (5.2.112). The title character’s overwhelming desire for profit seems to have more to do with the anti-Semitic stereotypes Shakespeare would evoke in The Merchant of Venice than Florentine subtlety. Nonetheless, Barabas does talk a lot about his mastery of policy, openly daring the Maltese leaders to interpret his constantly shifting alliances as ‘slender policy’ (5.5.65). He notifies his daughter that he will ‘make bar of no policy’ to revenge himself upon his Christian enemies (1.2.273). He cannot resist taking pride in his tactical cunning when he succeeds: ‘Thus thou hast gotten, by thy policy, [ – he tells himself – ] / No simple place, no small authority’. (5.2.27-8). At every opportunity, Barabas gleefully recounts examples of his villainy: As for myself, I walk abroad o’ nights, And kill sick people groaning under walls; Sometimes I go about and poison wells; … But mark how I am blest for plaguing them: I have as much coin as will buy the town! (2.3.177-203)

Yet Barabas is a bit of a big mouth. It is important to note that these grandiose claims come not in a bravura aside to the audience but in talking with his slave Ithamore, who will be tempted to cash in on the information. It may be that Barabas’ villainy is ‘pure performance’ but such self-promotion has little to do with the furtive scheming of the real Machiavel.58 In the Prologue, the stage Machiavel reminds the spectators that silence is the hallmark of effective policy: ‘such as love me guard me from their tongues’ (6). The ideological excess of Marlowe’s 58

For the suggestion that Barabas imitates Jewish stereotypes and the models of Christian villainy he has observed on the island, see Jonathan Gil Harris, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in early modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 98.


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blatant conflation of Machiavellianism and anti-Semitism, recalling the clichés of the Herod figure in medieval cycle plays, overdetermines Barabas’ status as a villain. The unknown quantity in the play is the agenda of the Christian authorities. The public statements of Ferneze and the Knights of Malta are filled with noble appeals to religion and propriety, justifying their decisions to seize the property of the Jews to pay the tribute to the Turks, to ally with the Spanish against the Turks, and, finally, to take advantage of Barabas’ assistance in annihilating the Turkish forces of occupation. Whenever Ferneze acquires a more advantageous deal, he represents his shift of allegiance in terms of faith and honour: We and our warlike Knights will follow thee Against these barbarous misbelieving Turks. … Honour is bought with blood, and not with gold. (2.2.45-6, 56)

New Historicist critics like Stephen Greenblatt often argue that ‘the public invocation of Christian ethics or knightly honor is invariably linked by Marlowe to baser motives’.59 Marlowe does not provide a reliable or objective voice for the on-stage criticism of the Maltese ruling class. The attacks on the pious rhetoric of Ferneze and the Knights of Malta come from the overt villain of the play, problematizing audience identification with any censure of the Christian leadership. It is Barabas who calls attention to their politic use of religion to justify the seizure of Jewish assets: ‘What? Bring you scripture to confirm your wrongs? / Preach me not out of my possessions’ (1.2.111-12). He points to the abrupt change in the discussion between Ferneze and the Knight after the acquisition of the funds needed for the tribute to the Turks. The Knight, shelving his earlier concern for the welfare of the local nuns, switches the conversation to issues of ‘policy’ (1.2.160). Barabas underlines that the terminology of statecraft is more representative of the Christian authorities: ‘Ay, policy, that’s their profession’ (1.2.161). The mistake of Barabas is to think that he is better at it. His fate in the final scene, dying in the steaming pot after his betrayal by Ferneze, suggests that it was not a good idea to taunt his Christian antagonist: ‘think you not / ’Twere slender policy for Barabas / To dispossess himself of such a place?’ (5.2.64-6). For although the Maltese leader is careful to attribute his ultimate success ‘Neither to fate nor fortune, but to heaven’, the circumstances of that victory demonstrate his superior tactical skills (5.5.2-3). Unlike the Turk Calymath, who ends up as a hostage on the island, the Maltese ruler does not make the mistake of keeping his word to Barabas. Such strategic dishonesty, rather than the random evil and public pronouncements of the title character, was what the infamous Florentine political Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 204. See also Minshull, 46-9, and Luc Borot, ‘Machiavellian Diplomacy and Dramatic Developments in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta’. Cahiers Elisabethains 33 (1988): 1-11. 59

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theorist admired in leaders like Pope Alexander VI. In the absence of a trustworthy guide to interpretation, like the satirist commentators in Marston’s court plays, the audience’s acknowledgment of all this necessitates a refusal of the interpretive framework introduced in the Prologue. Yet if we look at who is left standing at the end of the play, holding power, Ferneze is the real exemplar of Machiavel’s theories about how ‘Might first made kings’ (20). By foregrounding an unambiguous character like Barabas, who rehearses all the stereotypes of evil in early modern drama, the obtrusive intertextuality of The Jew of Malta distracts from the possibility of recognizing a more challenging, more Machiavellian, depiction of power. To make the interpretive leap involved in identifying alternative villains in the play, not immediately apparent to complacent viewers, the individual spectator has to abandon all the cultural preconceptions that the Prologue works so hard to evoke. The unreliable performance of conventional ideological positions, apart from protecting the playwright against accusations of unorthodoxy, demands a critical perspective towards the text. In learning how to recognize the play’s ideological stance as a politic deception, the most characteristic tactic of the leaders endorsed in the Principe, the spectator is better equipped to understand the complex intrigues of court and state. It is significant that Machiavelli’s own works define reading in terms of the revision of traditional historical judgments, a basis for a more authentic understanding of the strategies underlying the acquisition and preservation of sovereignty.60 The interaction between the theatrical text and the audience, uniting subjects of diverse levels of literary and political competence, is fundamental to the dramatic strategies of Marlowe and Barnes. The tension between overt and covert source material in The Devil’s Charter, where the account of Italianate vice draws on the undisputed authority of Guicciardini, creates a play text that is remarkable for its ideological instability, anticipating both orthodox and politically risky interpretations. The title page of the original quarto advertises that it was presented at court by the King’s Men, Shakespeare’s own company. On the surface, by staging Guicciardini’s account of the Borgias, Barnes provides a shrewd combination of the most engaging elements of Jacobean Italophobia: political intrigue, religious hypocrisy, violent death, and kinky sex. The play narrates the manner in which Pope Alexander VI acquires his position, fends off a challenge from Charles VIII of France and fosters the collapse of his family in a spree of incest, paedophilia, and poisonings. The potential risk consists in the play’s direct quotation from James I’s own writing. We know that the royal performance of The Devil’s Charter took place on Candlemas night in 1607 and the play’s depiction of a pact between the pope and the devil may have had special interest for the monarch.61 When Alexander VI 60 See Jacob Soll, Publishing the Prince: History, Reading, and the Birth of Political Criticism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), pp. 22-40. 61 For the performance history, see Jim C. Pogue, ‘Introduction’, The Devil’s Charter, pp. 2-3.


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laments the loss of his soul, in a scene without precedent in the historical sources, the speech revolves around the question of conscience: … my covenent with thee Made for this soule more pretious then all treasure, Afflicts my conscience, O but Alexander Thy conscience is no conscience; if a conscience, It is a leprous and poluted conscience. But what? a coward for thy conscience? The divill is witnesse with me when I seald it And cauteriz’d this conscience. (1.4.354-61)

The pope’s words are a verbal echo of the counsel that James offers his heir in the treatise Basilikon Doron: Above all then, my son, labour to keep sound this conscience, which many prattle of, but few feel; especially be careful to keep it free from two diseases, wherewith it useth oft to be infected: to wit, leprosy and superstition; the former is the mother of atheism, the other of heresies. By a leprous conscience, I mean ‘a cauterized conscience’, as Paul calleth it, being become senseless of sin.62

David Farley-Hills first noted the quotation from the royal text, treating it as a conventional attempt to praise the wisdom of the king.63 Yet, even taking into account the proverbial intellectual vanity of James I, Barnes could hardly have chosen a worse setting than the discourse of a demonic pope in which to compliment the reigning English monarch. Placed within the context of the entire scene, the effect of the papal discussion of conscience is much more complex than the flattery argument would suggest. The issue of conscience, marking the monarch’s obligation to religion and morality, was without doubt an essential part of James I’s political writing. The theory of divine right demanded that, as Kevin Sharpe has underlined, the king ‘demonstrate that his conscience was neither mere opinion, nor, as the “politics” would have it, a disguise’.64 Since the declared purpose of Basilikon Doron was the desire of James I to confer his political wisdom on Prince Henry, the continuation of the 62 James I, Basilikon Doron. The True Law of Free Monarchies and Basilikon Doron, eds Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier, (Toronto: CRRS, 1996), pp. 109-10. 63 David Farley-Hills, ‘King James and Barnes’s Devil’s Charter’, Notes and Queries n.s. 37, 2 (1990): 208. 64 Kevin Sharpe, ‘Private Conscience and Public Duty in the Writings of James VI and I’, in Paul Morrill, Paul Slack and Daniel Woolf (eds), Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England: Essays in Honour of G.E. Aylmer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 99. See also Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), pp. 114-15.

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scene’s discussion of conscience threatens to become a perverse parody of the royal text. Alexander VI goes on to advise his own son of the need for great leaders to renounce their consciences. The pontiff’s contempt is blatant as he argues ‘all this world is but opinion … And they that live puling upon the fruits / Of honest consciences, starve on the Common’ (1.4.485, 488-9). Here, in a second allusion to a less orthodox political treatise, Alexander discards the wisdom of the Stuart monarch in favour of that of Machiavelli: You must not be so ceremonious Of oathes and honesty, Princes of this world Are not prickt in the bookes of conscience, … Learne this one lesson looke yee mark it well, It is not always needfull to keepe promise, For Princes (forc’d by meere necessity To passe their faithfull promises) againe Forc’d by the same necessity to breake promise. (1.4.442-50, my italics)

Barnes supplements the initial reference to Basilikon Doron with the discussion of political deceit in Chapter 18 of the Principe, ‘In che modo I Prencipi debbono osservare la fede’.65 For the evil pope on-stage, signalling the conflicting textual allusions with the reference to ‘bookes of conscience’, Machiavelli’s cynical analysis of ‘necessity’ is preferable to the moral precepts of James I. The eighteenth chapter of the infamous text hinges on the question of political expediency, representing the Borgia pontiff as a leader who maintained power by breaking his promises: ‘Alessandro Sesto, nò fece mai altro che ingànare huomini, nè mai pensò ad altro’.66 In the brief paragraph explaining the lessons to be drawn from Alexander’s conduct, Machiavelli uses the words ‘necessario’, ‘necessitato’, and ‘necessità’ eight times. For a prince, Machiavelli argues, a public image of honor ‘è ben necessario’ but he must not acknowledge any idea of real integrity: ‘un Prencipe ... non può osservare tutte quelle cose, per le quali gli huomini sono tenuti buoni; essendo spesso necessitato, per mantener lo stato, operare contro la fede’.67 We know that Barnes was very familiar with this part of Il Principe because he chose Chapter 18, clearly cited in the margins of his text, as one of the central

65 I cite the Wolfe edition used by Barnes. Machiavelli, Il Prencipe, p. 30r. ‘How princes should honour their word’, The Prince, trans. George Bull (London: Penguin, 1999), p. 56. All English translations are taken from this edition. 66 Il Prencipe, p. 31r. Trans. Bull, ‘Alexander VI never did anything, or thought of anything, other than deceiving men’, The Prince, p. 57. 67 Il Prencipe, pp. 31r, 32r. Trans. Bull, ‘A prince … cannot observe all those things which give men a reputation for virtue, because in order to maintain his state he is often forced to act in defiance of good faith’, The Prince, p. 57.


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arguments in the dedication to King James I at the start of the Four Bookes of Offices. Addressing the monarch, Barnes condemns Machiavelli: Vile is that wretched analogie, which the corrupt Florentine Secretarie Nicolo Machiavelli servant to Duke Pietro di Medici, did in his puddle of princely policies produce betwixt a true Prince and a mixt monster, resembling him … unto a lion and fox, importing his strength and caution in all affaires: whereas it is well knowen, how no true prince can be aptly compared to that unsavory curre. (A1r)

The comments allude to the animal metaphor used in the discussion of the practical advantages of deceit at the start of Chapter 18. Barnes goes on, following the order of his source, to reject the Florentine’s endorsement of Alexander VI: Me seemeth that there should not be found any such difference in the state and condition of Princes, which the subtle Italian Sanazar made of a Pope in his time: that he was Bonus Principus & malus vir: because he knew well how to governe, and did rule the people well. (A1r)

The focus then immediately shifts to the virtues of James I, with praise for his ‘Sanctitie and Justice’, creating an overt opposition between two different models of leadership. In The Devil’s Charter, following the precedent offered by the comedies of Machiavelli and Giordano Bruno, Barnes exploits the immediacy of the dramatic text to represent the concerns of his theoretical writing. There is a remarkable scene where Lodowick Sforza and Cardinal Ascanio use their expert knowledge of state intrigue to explain the devious conduct of the Pope to the King of France: Lodowick: Your majesty may well perceive how feare, And jealeous judgement of a wounded conscience, Workes hard in Alexander. Ascanio: And how foxe-like. (2.1.931-4)

The passage explicitly stages political commentary. The analysis offered to Charles VIII, like the treatise which Barnes himself dedicated to James, provides a careful blend of the theories of Machiavelli and the Stuart monarch. The reference to ‘a wounded conscience’ by Lodowick, a character representing the ruthless Duke of Milan during the Wars of Italy, recalls the advice to Prince Henry about the importance of preserving personal scruples from infection in Basilikon Doron. The comment of the Cardinal continues the verbal echoes introduced in the previous dialogue between Alexander and his son, evoking the famous image of the ‘foxe’ in Chapter 18 of the Principe. Here, in spite of the persistent presence of Guicciardini as a chorus on-stage, the vocabulary of political discourse is limited to Machiavelli and James I.


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The effect of such intertextuality in performance would have depended on the ability of the court audience to recognize and contrast the specific verbal echoes of the Principe and Basilikon Doron, each among the most representative works of the two authors. The complex rhetorical strategy may have been more effective on the printed page, consistent with the frontispiece’s claim to offer a version ‘more exactly reviewed, corrected, and augmented by the Author, for the more pleasure and profit of the Reader’.68 The potential ambiguity of the allusions reflects a greater uncertainty in the play about the value of studying Italian political precedents. At the conclusion, Guicciardine calls on the spectators to consider the preceding drama as a ‘tragike myrrour to your eyes’ (5.5.3606). However, given the complexity of looking glass symbolism in early modern rhetoric, the term ‘myrrour’ is equivocal.69 What is at stake here is whether the object in view is a faithful reflection of how great leaders wield power, consistent with Machiavelli, or a cautionary antithesis of the English monarch’s good government. In representing the text itself as a mirror, Debora Shugar has argued, period writers tend to appeal ‘to an ontology of similitude rather than identity/difference: it reflects those whom one will or can or does resemble’.70 It is telling that Barnes employs the metaphor of the text as a ‘myrrour’in the Four Bookes of Offices as well, immediately after his detailed references in the dedication to the analysis of Alexander VI in the Principe: ‘this ensuing myrrour, framed out of the 4. immediate ministers or columns rather of kingly Maiestie … I present to your royall hands’ (A1v). Set at the beginning of the political treatise, the subsequent four part text promises to furnish James with a mirror image of his own ‘4. cardinall virtues’ (A1v). At the end of a bloody Italian tragedy, however, the ideological implications of the image in the ‘myrrour’ are less certain. For although Alexander’s dismissal of the Jacobean theories of conscience maintains the distinction with the British ruler, as in the prefatory material in the Four Bookes, the optical property of every mirror is to show a reflection of reality. The range of possible readings of the political agendas of Barnes and Marlowe are a symptom of the uncertain place of Machiavelli within early modern English culture. The interpretive frameworks the plays offer are contingent upon the circulation and credibility of anti-Italian stereotypes in the society as a whole. If the role of literary criticism is to determine the meaning of a text, the function of Machiavelli within the Devil’s Charter and The Jew of Malta is particularly 68

Barnes, p. 37. See my discussion of the publication history, pp. 13-14. For an extensive survey of specific examples from the period, see Herbert Grabes, The Multiple Glass: Mirror-Imaging in Titles and Texts of the Middle Ages and the English Renaissance. Trans. Gordon Collier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). See also Philippa Kelly, ‘Surpassing Glass: Shakespeare’s Mirrors’. Early Modern Literary Studies 8 (2002): 2.1-32, http://purl.oclc.org/emls/08-2/kellglas.htm. 70 Debora Shugar, ‘The “I” of the Beholder: Renaissance Mirrors and the Reflexive Mind’, in Renaissance Culture and the Everyday, eds Patricia Fullerton and Simon Hunt (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 1999), p. 37. 69


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challenging because he embodies a movement towards complexity, an unsettling denial of reliable signification. Poore Italy While Machiavelli’s guide to political expediency in Il Principe might seem far removed from Castiglione’s discussion of the ideal courtier, set amidst an idyllic portrait of Urbino under the Montefeltros, the precepts offered by both writers are inextricable from the fate of the Italian states at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The loss of independence and the humiliation of defeat, as the peninsula was carved up amongst the French, Spanish, and Papal forces in the wake of the invasion of Italy by Charles VIII of France in 1494, compelled Italian writers to reassess the qualities necessary for effective leadership and courtly conduct.71 In the final chapter of Il Principe, placing his account of the realities of statecraft within the context of an ‘Esortatione a liberare l’Italia da i Barbari’, Machiavelli underlines the desperate condition of the nation: così al presente, volendo conoscere la virtù di uno spirito Italiano, era necessario, che la Italia si conducessi ne termini presenti, & la fussi più schiava, che gli Hebrei; … senza capo, senza ordine, battuta, spogliata, lacera, corsa, & havessi sopportato di ogni sorte ruina.72

The nostalgic tone of Il libro del cortegiano, a product of the political and military crises facing Cinquecento Italy, constantly foregrounds the subsequent collapse of the sophisticated and elegant court of Urbino.73 In the fourth book, dealing with the advice that a courtier should offer his prince, Castiglione treats the decline of the entire nation as a consequence of poor leadership: 71

For the role of crisis in Cinquecento political theory, see Artemio Enzo Baldini, ‘Tempi della Guerra e tempi della politica tra Quattro e Cinquecento. Alle origini del “realismo politico” di Macchiavelli e Guicciardini’, in La riscoperta di Guicciardini, eds Artemio Enzo Baldini and Marziano Guglielminetti (Genoa: Name, 2006), pp. 79-93. 72 Il Prencipe, p. 45 r-v. Trans. Bull, ‘Exhortation to liberate Italy from the barbarians’, ‘at the present time, in order to discover the worth of an Italian spirit, Italy had to be brought to the present extremity. She had to be more enslaved than the Hebrews … leaderless, lawless, crushed, despoiled, torn, overrun; she had to have endured every kind of desolation’, The Prince, pp. 82-3. 73 For an incisive account of the work’s nostalgic character, see Wayne Rebhorn, Courtly Performances: Masking and Festivity in Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978), pp. 91-115. The implications of Rebhorn’s approach are discussed at length in Harry Berger, Jr., The Absence of Grace: Sprezzatura and Suspicion in Two Renaissance Courtesy Books (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 136-65.

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Shakespeare, Politics, and Italy … perché molte volte le eccessive ricchezze son causa di gran ruina; come nella povera Italia, la quale è stata e tuttavia è preda esposta a genti strane, sí per lo mal governo, come per le molte ricchezze di che è piena.74

For Castiglione, the questions of royal authority and the ‘mutazione di Stato’ are not theoretical matters, but rather an agonized response to how the weakness of Italian states led to the downfall of the dukedom of Urbino.75 When Sir Thomas Hoby came to translate the passage about ‘povera Italia’ into English, as part of his version of The Book of the Courtier that was first published in 1561, he detached it from the rest of Castiglione’s long sentence and allocated it a separate paragraph: Because many times aboundance of wealth is cause of great destruction, as in poore Italy, which hath been and still is, a pray and bootie in the teeth of straunge nations, as well for the ill government, as for the aboundance of riches that is in it.76

The decision to express the phrase as an independent sentence, a typical strategy of English translators then and now, serves to simplify the peripatetic Italian syntax. However, as the separate paragraph makes clear, it also has the effect of calling more attention to the original discussion of political crisis by treating it as a distinct argument. In translating the words themselves, Hoby’s rendering of the ‘preda esposta’ metaphor from the source text amplifies the depiction of the foreign domination and pillage of the peninsula. His use of the expression ‘pray and bootie’ places emphasis on both principal meanings of the word ‘preda’, simultaneously casting Italy as an object of plunder in wartime and as an animal being hunted. The addition of the metaphor ‘in the teeth of’ evokes the savage visual image of a quarry caught by its pursuers, even though the context of the discussion about excessive wealth should privilege the idea of booty. Hoby’s rendering of the ‘povera Italia’ passage marks the ideological significance for early modern English readers of the discourse of Italian humiliation. Alongside the immediate importance that it had as an inspiration for Castiglione and Machiavelli, the fate of Italy acquired an important role in the debate about the circulation of the nation’s cultural products within England. From the Tudor period onwards, there was a proliferation of political treatises concerned with the events in the peninsula after 1494, arguing that the crises that afflicted Italy offered

74 Baldesar Castiglione, Il libro del cortegiano, ed. Walter Barberis (Torino: Einaudi, 1998), p. 392. 75 Il libro del cortegiano, p. 393. 76 Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Sir Thomas Hoby (London: Dent, 1974), p. 286.


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cautionary lessons for domestic politicians.77 Despite his manifest enthusiasm for the land and its people, leading him to produce a pioneering Italian Grammar in 1550, William Thomas carefully positioned his early Historie of Italie (1549) as a collection of negative examples of ‘tyranny and ill govetnaunce’.78 In A Brief Discourse of Royall Monarchie (1581), supporting his argument with a citation from Guicciardini, Charles Merbury marks the contrast between the benevolent rule of the English Queen and the Italian princes and popes who consume the treasores of the countrey, dissipating the publike demaines … As Guicciardine in his storie of the warres of Italie reporteth that the forenamed Leo the tenth, what with warring against the Duke of Urbyne, and with maintaining the costlinesse of his sister Magdalena and his owne pride, and prodigalitie.79

Here, it is significant that Merbury focuses upon the actions of Pope Leo X, the leader whose conquest of Urbino in 1517, ending the rule of the Montefeltros, inspired the writing of the Cortegiano. By supplementing his historical material with a collection of Italian proverbs, as we have seen, Merbury explicitly links political analysis with the study of Italian culture and misgovernment. The strategy persisted in the prefatory material to translations like Thomas Bedingfield’s 1595 edition of Machiavelli’s Florentine History, presenting Italy’s ‘mutation, disorder, and utter ruine’ as essential reading for those ‘becalled to the consultation of publike affaires and government’.80 Hoby’s amplification of the original comments about ‘ill government’ in the Cortegiano reflects such efforts to remind the reader of the unique historical experiences underlying Italian political theory. The dedicatory epistle to his translation of The Book of the Courtier promises ‘Princes and great men … matters, that friendes durst not utter unto kings’, representing the conduct book as a source of secret insights into statecraft and court intrigue.81 The persistent cultural influence of Italy throughout Europe was always in sharp contrast with the fortunes of the nation itself. Since the peninsula’s fame as a source of political knowledge derived from the circumstances surrounding 77

The use of Italian history as a cautionary model in English political writing will be discussed in detail in the next chapter. 78 William Thomas, The Historie of Italie (1549, rpt. Amsterdam, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1977), A2r, p. 3. His influence on Italy’s reputation in England is discussed in Kenneth R. Bartlett, ‘The Strangeness of Strangers: English Impressions of Italy in the Sixteenth Century’. Quaderni d’italianistica, 1 (1980): 51-2 and Laura Sanna, ‘“A boke excedyng profitable to be redde”: William Thomas’s Italy’, in Una civile conversazione: lo scambio letterario e culturale anglo-italiano nel rinascimento, eds Keir Elam and Fernando Cioni (Bologna: Clueb, 2003), pp. 159-80. 79 Merbury, pp. 30-32. 80 Machiavelli, The Florentine History, trans. T[homas] B[edingfield] (London, 1595), A2r. 81 Castiglione, The Courtier, pp. 2-3, 286.


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its invasion and decline, many readers began to question English dependence upon the learning produced by a humiliated people. Sir Philip Sidney advised his brother Robert, for example, that the nation’s ignominious fate discredited the study of Italian political systems: As for Italy, I know not what we have or can have to do with them, but to buy their silks and wines. And as for other provinces (except for Venice, whose good laws and customs we can hardly proportion to ourselves, because they are quite of a contrary government) there is little there but tyrannous oppression and servile yielding.82

Such considerations about national humiliation only added to the widespread contempt for Italy in English cultural discourses, where the peninsula was a lightning rod for Protestant unease about the ambitions of the Papacy, disgust at the sexual licence associated with cities like Venice, and the loss of domestic practices and traditions. In tracing the reception of a writer like Castiglione, therefore, it is fundamental to take into account the tension between the use of Italy as a source of refined learning and the emerging hostility towards the excessive influence of the debased nation. As the increasing number of contemptuous references to the courtesy book suggest, the initial enthusiasm towards Hoby’s edition of The Book of the Courtier waned in the later years of Elizabeth’s reign onwards as concerns emerged that the English establishment was taking on the corrupt practices attributed to Italian courts. The loss of influence of the translation in England took place alongside the decline of the reputation of Castiglione in Italy itself, where his successors cast the Cortegiano as the affirmation of a misleading courtly ethos.83 Lady Would-be’s imprudent reliance upon ‘The Courtier’ in Volpone is not a coincidence, given that the book and its author became synonymous with absurdity and affectation.84

Sir Philip Sidney, Letter to Robert Sidney in Sir Philip Sidney. The Oxford Authors. ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 286. Sidney’s misgivings about Italy are discussed in David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge, 1984), p. 97. 83 See Peter Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione’s Cortegiano (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), especially pp. 99-124. The decline in Castiglione’s reputation is also discussed in Daniel Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 131-2. 84 Lady Would-Be’s reliance on what ‘The Courtier says’ is part of the persistent allusions to suspect Italian writing in the play. See Chapter 2, pp. 56-7. Compare with the Bawd’s admiration of what ‘shee hath red in the Italian Courtyer’ in Dekker and Webster’s Westward Ho! See The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953-61), 1.1.12. 82


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Well knowne and view’d: Castiglione on-stage The plays and satires of John Marston are replete with such dismissive allusions to Castiglione. These references follow the spelling of Castiglione’s surname adopted by Hoby in the preface to his translation. The recognizable ‘Castilio’ ensures that the target of Marston’s satire is obvious to domestic readers, even though the dramatist had an Italian mother and repeatedly foregrounded the language within his plays.85 In mocking English fascination with ‘the poynts of courtship’, the subject of the first of his Certaine Satyres (1598), he condemns ‘the absolute Castilio’: Tut, he is famous for his reveling, For fine sette speeches, and for sonetting; He scornes the violl and the scraping sticke, And yet’s but Broker of anothers wit. Certes if all thinges were well knowne and view’d He doth but champe that which another chew’d.86

The postures that the aspiring courtier employs to gain repute are pure imitation, recalling the discourse of the Italianate Englishman. Without a distinct identity, recycling ‘anothers wit’, the domestic adherent of Castiglione incarnates nationalist anxieties about the reliance upon a foreign culture for models of conduct and literary endeavour. Thus, the servile yielding typically attributed to the courtier becomes a symptom of England’s transformation into a humiliated, culturally subjugated nation. Marston’s most significant dramatic engagement with the author occurs in Antonio and Mellida and Antonio’s Revenge, where ‘Castilio Balthazar’ appears as one of the Duke of Venice’s followers at court. There are four characters in Shakespeare alone called Balthazar or Balthasar but none of these contemporary examples has the same intertextual force as Marston’s use of the name. Despite the refined Italian settings, the Balthas/zars in Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, and Much Ado About Nothing have bit parts as passing servants, rather than

Despite the lengthy passages in Italian in Antonio and Mellida, Finkelpearl’s biographical study has attempted to discredit Marston’s linguistic knowledge, see p. 179. In this case, Marston would have been obliged to use Hoby’s edition. 86 John Marston, Certaine Satyres, in The Poems of John Marston, ed. Arnold Davenport (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1961), lines 27, 28, 41-6. For further references to ‘Castilio’, see The Scourge of Villanie, in The Poems of John Marston, lines 15-22, 45-50, 75. Marston’s disguised ruler addresses Bilioso, a senex, as ‘my dear Castilio’ in The Malcontent, ed. M.L. Wine (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), 1.4.87. See also the mocking reference to ‘Courtier Baltazar’, picking up on the first name of the Italian, in What You Will (London, 1607), 4.1.F3r. 85


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as courtly lovers or authorities on conduct.87 The comparison is instructive because there has been a great deal of research over the years attempting to link Castiglione and Shakespeare.88 The majority of these studies are content to highlight basic thematic associations regarding courtiership, none of which should be surprising given the obsession with the relationship between the ruler and the aristocracy in early modern European drama and political theory. For although Marston’s casting of the renowned Castiglione as an inept courtier on the make provides a few easy laughs, not unlike those provoked by the absurdity of Surrey’s Petrarchan love conceits amidst the sexual licence of The Unfortunate Traveller, the rhetorical efficiency of his unequivocal allusions ensures that things get personal and specific.89 The most important action of Castilio in Antonio and Mellida takes place when, in a standard comic situation, he attempts to pass off a bill from his tailor as a missive of love. Consistent with the focus on obstacles to understanding in the comedy, as we have seen with its use of the Italian language, the perceptive on-stage reader Feliche discovers that the initial romantic words in the proudly displayed text soon trail off into a list of third-rate fabrics: ‘To her most esteemed, lov’d and generous servant, Signior Castilio Balthazar’. Pray thee, from whom comes this, I must see … ‘Item, for straight canvas, thirteen pence halfpenny; item, for an ell and a half of taffeta to cover your old canvas doublet, fourteen shillings and three pence’.90

The incident is a precursor for the detection of Sir Politic Would-be’s phony notes on statecraft in Volpone, reflecting the extent to which Italian political thought was associated with the circulation of the printed word.91 Marston’s intertextual strategy stages a critical analysis of Castiglione. The portrayal of Castilio Balthazar underlines the idea of reading as an interrogation of a misleading or deceptive text, even though the character’s role as comic relief in the two Antonio plays may initially seem a much simpler example of literary allusion than the star turns of Italian political theorists in The Jew of Malta and There is also an inconsequential Balthazar in The Comedy of Errors. Among recent examples, see Philip D. Collington, ‘“Stuffed with all honourable virtues”: Much Ado About Nothing and The Book of the Courtier’. Studies in Philology 103 (2006): 281-312, Viviana Comensoli, ‘Music, The Book of the Courtier, and Othello’s Soldiership’, in The Italian World of English Renaissance Drama, ed. Michele Marrapodi (Newark: Delaware University Press, 1998), pp. 89-105, and Donatella Baldini, ‘The Play of the Courtier: Correspondences between Castiglione’s Il libro del Cortegiano and Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost’, Quaderni d’Italianistica 18 (1997): 5-22. 89 Nashe’s jokes about the ineffective wooing of the Earl of Surrey, complete with citations of his verse, rely upon the reputation of Henry Howard as one of the first English sonetteers. See Chapter 2, p. 40-41. 90 3.2.91-101. 91 See Chapter 2, p. 49. 87 88


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The Devil’s Charter. The astute satirist-commentator Feliche, named with the Italian word for happiness, does not humiliate Castilio gratuitously. After Castilio counsels him to ‘Put your good parts in presence graciously’, taking on the pose of an authority on courtiership, Feliche makes it clear that he is sick and tired of supposed experts giving him advice about how to conduct himself: There are a number of such things as thou Have often urg’d me to such loose belief; But ’slid, you all do lie, you all do lie. (3.2.76, 80-83)

Castilio then makes the fatal mistake of showing ‘him the superscription of a seeming letter’ as proof of his success in courtly love, underlining the fragility of his reputation (3.2.91 sd.). Through its revaluation of one of Castilio’s lesser works, offering proof of the accusation of lying, the counterfeit letter scene rehearses suggestions that the Cortegiano was a disingenuous account of court practices. Marston’s overt parody of Castiglione is significant because it corresponds with the scrutiny of the contradictory images of Italian courts on the English stage over the course of the two Antonio plays, where the Venetian setting is equally conducive to romance, political satire, and bloody revenge tragedy. The seasonal imagery which opens Antonio’s Revenge, as the Prologue warns that ‘The rawish dank of clumsy winter ramps / The fluent summer’s vein’, represents the ensuing ‘sullen tragic scene’ as a natural progression from the comedy of Antonio and Mellida.92 Despite the shift in dramatic genres, Marston changes surprisingly little of the original characterization and location. The explicit references to Seneca throughout the sequel, complete with a remarkable scene where Antonio reads his works on-stage, continue to encourage the audience to think intertextually.93 As before, the ostensible focus of the plot is Antonio’s attempt to combat the malevolent Duke Piero by observing the vices of his court in disguise.94 The ease with which the leader of Venice returns to his wicked ways shows that his reconciliation with the ruling family of Genoa was only a delaying tactic. The changes in tone and plot structure come from the absence of the Duke of Genoa and Feliche, both murdered in the opening scene’s mockery of the contrived happy ending of the first play. The elimination of Feliche suggests that a satirist-commentator is no longer necessary to highlight the failings of the Venetian aristocracy, given that Piero openly admits his villainy:

John Marston, Antonio’s Revenge. ed. G.K. Hunter (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), Prologue, 1-2, 7. Further references will appear within the text. 93 See 2.2.46-65. 94 For an account of the rhetorical and structural parallels between the two plays, see G.K. Hunter, ‘Henry IV and the Elizabethan Two-Part Play’, Review of English Studies 19 (1954): 236-48. 92

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Shakespeare, Politics, and Italy He is a virtuous man; what has our court got to do With virtue, in the devil’s name! (2.1.90-91)

Amidst the seamless transition from romantic comedy to revenge tragedy, Castilio Balthazar continues to be a favourite of the Duke of Venice. For although the second play has no time for Castilio’s pretensions as an authority on conduct, Piero finds it useful to surround himself with slavish sots Whose service is obedience and whose wit Reacheth no further than to admire their lord, And stare in admiration of his worth. (2.1.54-7)

Here, the duke’s definition of ‘obedience’ encompasses much more than the stereotypical servility of the ambitious courtier. The main action of Castilio in Antonio’s Revenge is as the willing participant in a public killing, strangling an inconvenient witness to the intrigues of the ruler. Before the gathering of the Venetian Senate, Piero calls upon the eponymous character to tighten the cord around the neck of the credulous victim: ‘Ay, pluck, Castilio! / I change my humour! Pluck, Castilio!’ (4.1.196-7). The courtier goes right to work without protest: ‘Castilio aideth him; both strangle Strotzo’.95 While it may have been a surprise for students of the Italian author’s so-called ‘comely exercises’ to hear his name uttered in such an extreme context, Marston dramatizes issues that are already implicit in his satirical verses about the dangers of the flattery and abasement promoted in The Courtier. The stanza that comes after the survey of ‘Castilio’s beggary’ in the Certaine Satyres, with its predictable ridicule of English attempts to ape Italian culture, shifts to consider the darker motives behind the false representations that let ‘this devill thrive / And by an holy semblance bleare mens eyes / When he intends some damned villanies’.96 Even the indolent speakers in the Cortegiano admit that the well-rehearsed performance of sprezzatura, the requisite image of effortless style, is not enough for the wily follower to win the favour of the ruthless princes of the Italian Renaissance.97 By supplementing the previous depiction of courtly affectation with an on-stage assassination, Marston indicates that Castiglione’s precepts for self-fashioning are not out of place in the ruthless political violence of the revenge play. As the victim expires on the 95 4.1.188, s.d. Ironically, the name of the victim refers to the Italian word for strangling. 96 The Poems of John Marston, ll. 50, 52-4. 97 My reading discounts claims that Castiglione’s speakers avoid mentioning the pressures and moral compromises involved with the competition for patronage. Compare with Daniel Javitch, ‘Il Cortegiano and the Constraints of Despotism’, in Castiglione: The Ideal and the Real in Renaissance Culture, ed. Robert W. Henning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 17-28.


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Senate floor, Piero complacently appraises his manipulation of a courtier’s desire to please: Why, thus should statesmen do, That cleave through knots of craggy policies, Use men like wedges. (4.1.200-202)

The participation of Castilio Balthazar in the murder is not because the dramatist forgot that the character was a playful allusion to the Italian author but because Marston sees the struggle for place in the same terms as Webster does in The White Devil. The vicious competition for favour tempts the courtier to abandon all moral principles in the hope of advancement. The Courtier becomes a servant to the Machiavel. So well translated into English: Italian conduct books and domestic nationalism Fears about the abuse of Castiglione’s code are evident in the decision by George Pettie to translate Stefano Guazzo’s La Civil Conversazione, an Italian rereading of the courtesy book genre first published in English in 1581.98 What makes Pettie’s approach to translation significant is that he used his English text to intervene in the debate about the domestic circulation of Italian political writing. Pettie’s radically transformed version of the Civil Conversazione would go to become, as we will see, one of the principal sources for the anti-court rhetoric in Webster’s White Devil. The domestic appeal of Guazzo’s treatment of the issue of personal conduct, written 46 years after the original edition of the Cortegiano, came from its scornful treatment of the ambitions of would-be courtiers. Guazzo’s focus upon civility and virtue in every sphere of life, rather than just the court, was a transparent challenge to the limited preoccupations of Castiglione.99 Instead of a debate amongst the best and brightest of Urbino, as in its predecessor, the narrative framework of the Conversazione is a series of sickbed conversations between William Guazzo, the ailing brother of the author, and his doctor, Anniball Magnocavalli. Guazzo was ‘a man almost as versed in the affairs of princes and prelates as Castiglione himself’ and, as John Lievsay has argued, his approach

98 The historical background of Pettie’s translation is discussed in John L. Lievsay, Stefano Guazzo and the English Renaissance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961) and ‘Stefano Guazzo e il Rinascimento Inglese 1575-1675’, in Stefano Guazzo e la Civil Conversazione, ed. Giorgio Patrizi (Rome: Bulzoni, 1990), pp. 163-225. 99 For the relationship between the authors see G. Bartocci, ‘La riscoperta del Guazzo’, The Canadian Journal of Italian Studies (1978): 188-95 and Daniel Javitch, ‘Rival Arts of Conduct in Elizabethan England: Guazzo’s Civile Conversation and Castiglione’s Courtier’, Yearbook of Italian Studies 1 (1971): 178-98.


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reveals a profound cynicism about an idealized vision of courtliness.100 The third of the four books of the Civil Conversazione concludes with an explicit allusion to the Cortegiano, pointedly associating it with affectation and sycophancy. This discussion of Castiglione acquired particular importance in the first edition of the English translation because it passed for the conclusion to the entire work, since Pettie omitted the last book ‘for that it contayneth much triflying matter in it’.101 As William presses Anniball for his opinions about ‘the Conversation betweene the Prince and the Courtyer’, the doctor resists the familiar argument: ‘Besides that it is now late, and that I am called away to other businesse, you know we are eased of this labour by him who with his learned penne hath most perfectly fourmed the Courtier’.102 Despite the apparent endorsement of Castiglione within the dialogue, Anniball goes on to offer a short but contemptuous reading of the previous book’s project: there are ‘two drougs. the one of which or both, the Courtier using may maintain himselfe in his princes favour: These are abstinence, or else suger soppes’.103 The doctor’s comments dismiss the book of ‘the Courtier’ as a guide for the ambitious, underlining the need to appease the caprices of rulers with sugar coated flattery. The increased prominence of Guazzo’s challenge to Castiglione in the English version of the Civil Conversazione is symptomatic of an uncomfortable relationship with Italian culture in general. It was a common gesture of early modern translators to underline the importance of the act of translation in their prefaces and dedications. For Hoby, ‘it is learning it selfe’.104 However, there is more at issue than just occupational pride when Pettie’s introductory remarks go so far as to attack people who may ‘preferre the Originall before the Translation’.105 The original text formed part of the standard reading of would-be students of the Italian language, as shown by John Florio’s unenthusiastic reference to Englishmen who

See Stefano Guazzo and the English Renaissance, p. 44. George Pettie, supplementary note to ‘Gentle Readers’ in Stefano Guazzo, The Civile Conversation of M. Steeven Guazzo, trans. George Pettie (London, 1925), vol. 1, p. 12. The fourth book was added to the second English edition of 1586 with a translation by Bartholomew Young. 102 Stefano Guazzo, Civile Conversation, vol. 2, p. 111. Compare with La Civil Conversazione, ed. Amadeo Quondam (Modena: Franco Cosimo Panini, 1993), p. 261. 103 Civile Conversation, vol. 2, p. 112. Compare with La Civil Conversazione, p. 262. 104 Sir Thomas Hoby, ‘Hoby’s Epistle’ in The Book of the Courtier, pp. 2-3. Theo Hermans surveys the efforts translators made to defend their endeavors in ‘Images of Translation: Metaphor and Imagery in the Renaissance Discourse on Translation’, in The Manipulation of Literature: Studies in Literary Translation, ed. Theo Hermans (London: Croom Helm, 1985), pp. 103-35. 105 George Pettie, ‘The Preface to the Readers’, vol. 1, p. 10. 100 101


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‘hath learnt a little Italian out of Castilions courtier, or Guazzo his dialogues’.106 The hostility that emerges in Pettie’s preface, defining the process of cultural appropriation in nationalist terms, reflects his apprehension that certain readers ‘wyll set lyght by my labours, because I write in Englysh’.107 He defends his project by condemning the desire of his compatriots to copy the manners and fashions of foreign nations: But for our Countrie, I am perswaded that those which know it, and love it, wyl report it for the civilest Countrey in the worlde: and if it thought to be otherwise by strangers, the disorders of those traveylers abrode are the chiefe cause of it … their contemning of their Countrey fashions, their apish imitation of every outlandish Asse in their gestures, behaviour, and apparell, are the only causes that make Strangers count our Countrey and our people barbarous: for at home it well knowne that we live … in every way as civilly, as any Nation under Heaven.108

Of course, Pettie’s rhetorical strategy elides the sense in which his translation is itself the imitation of another culture. His references to the ‘apish imitation’ of English travellers rehearse the conventional tropes of the discourse of the Italianate Englishman, dealing with travel and fashions.109 Above and beyond the importation of vices from abroad, as William Rankins would go on to argue in The English Ape, what was really offensive about the enthusiasm for Italian culture was that it called into question domestic pride: ‘[the] Italian Englishman ... prefers the corruption of a forreine nation before the perfection of his owne’.110 Even though it might seem an own goal to use the preface to a translation of an Italian conduct book to condemn the domestication of foreign manners, Pettie is keen to deny that the need for a book of this type implies a sense of English cultural inferiority. The circulation of the courtesy books within Elizabethan England, as Pettie’s approach suggests, was a function of the conflicting attitudes about Italy in the society as a whole. At the same time as Roger Ascham railed against the threat posed by Italian books in The Schoolmaster, he was loath to dismiss a work of such evident cultural value as Hoby’s edition of the Courtier. Notwithstanding his misgivings about Italian books in general, Ascham proposed studying the translation as a substitute for direct contact with Castiglione’s nation: 106

Florio compares the ‘bookish’ quality of the language spoken by ‘strangers’ to that of native Italians. See Florios Second Frutes (1591, Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1969), A4v. 107 ‘The Preface to the Readers’, p. 9. 108 Ibid., pp. 10-11. 109 The relationship of the cautionary figure of the Italianate Englishman and the metaphor of the ape is dealt with in detail in Chapter 2, see pp. 29-37. 110 W[illiam] R[ankins], The English Ape, The Italian Imitation, The Footsteppes of France (London, 1588), p. 2.

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Shakespeare, Politics, and Italy To join learning with comely exercises, Conte Baldassare Castiglione in his book Cortegiano doth trimely teach; which book, advisedly read and dilligently followed but one year at home in England, would do a young gentleman more good, iwis, than three years’ travel abroad spent in Italy … seeing it is so well translated into English by a worthy gentleman, Sir Thomas Hoby, who was many ways furnished with learning and very expert in knowledge of divers tongues.111

Here, as F.O. Mathiessen pointed out, Ascham overlooks the fact that Hoby himself had to spend significantly more than three years abroad to perfect his Italian.112 Apart from his time as a student at the University of Padua, Hoby travelled extensively in Italy in the years from 1548-1550 and 1554-1555, going beyond the usual haunts of the early English travellers to visit more exotic places like Sicily.113 What must have reassured Ascham of the appropriateness of Hoby’s translation for impressionable young readers, beyond the qualities of the work itself, was the involvement of his friend and patron Sir John Cheke in its publication. Exiled in 1554 by Mary Tudor for his Protestant allegiances, Cheke had begrudgingly spent time in Padua before he was able to return to England and shared Ascham’s hostility towards the domestic assimilation of Italian culture.114 In the letter printed at the end of the prefatory material to Hoby’s translation, Cheke’s sole concern is the purity of the English language: I am of this opinion that our own tung shold be written cleane and pure, unmixt and unmangleled with borowing of other tunges, wherin if we take heed by tijm, ever borowing and never payeng, she shall be fain to keep her house as bankrupt. For then doth our tung naturallie and praisablie utter her meaning, when she doth bouroweth no counterfeitness of other tunges to attire her self withall, but useth plainlie her own.115

Unlike the prefatory verses of Thomas Sackville ‘in commendation of the worke’, praising ‘Castilios’ account of ‘what in Court a Courtier ought to be’, 111 Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster, ed. Lawrence V. Ryan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), p. 55. See my discussion of Ascham in Chapter 2, pp. 29-37. 112 F.O. Mathiessen, Translation: An Elizabethan Art (1930, New York: Octagon, 1965), p. 19. 113 See Kenneth R. Bartlett, ‘Thomas Hoby, Translator, Traveler’, in Travel and Translation, pp. 123-41. The journal of Hoby’s travels has been published as The Travels and Life of Thomas Hoby, Kt. of Bisham Abbey, Written by himself, 1547-1564, ed. Edgar Powell, Camden Miscellany 10 (London, 1902). 114 Bartlett recounts the complaints that Cheke sent home in his letters from Padua. See ‘The Strangeness of Strangers’, pp. 52-4. 115 Sir John Cheke, ‘To his loving friend Mayster Thomas Hoby’, in Courtier, p. 7.


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Cheke has nothing to say about the argument of the book itself.116 Instead, noting his involvement in ‘changing certein wordes’, he focuses on the choice of English vocabulary.117 Cheke’s nervousness about the use of foreign terms reflects what Carmela Nocera Avila has described as a ‘crisi linguistica’, marked by an exponential growth in the number of loan words appropriated from other languages.118 Unease about the ‘friuolous accumulation of words, unnecessarily produced’ persists in succeeding editions of Italian books, as translators anticipate the potential ‘reprehension’ of critics for their domestication of foreign terms.119 Even as Hoby’s preface advocates the importation of culture from abroad, seeking to ‘welcome it out of Italy into England’, the inclusion of the letter by Cheke at the end of the introduction locates nationalist concerns about that activity within the book itself.120 For both Hoby and Pettie, the pressure to make the Italian originals conform to the demands of English nationalism conditioned the translation process, leaving conspicuous signs of the anxieties about cultural domination as a part of their published texts. Despite his excision of the final book of the source, one of the ironies of Pettie’s version of the Civil Conversazione is that he makes great claims about the accuracy of his translation: I have supplyed divers thinges out of the Italian original, which were left out by the French translator, with what judgment, I referre to your judgement. I have included the places within two starres, as you may see throughout the Booke.121

However, even though he admits to the primary use of French translation, Pettie asserts that his rendering is more complete than its predecessor and provides asterisks within the text to signal a number of passages added directly from the Italian.122 Such avowals did not dissuade Pettie from silently interpolating two pages of spurious material praising Queen Elizabeth into the second book, making it seem as though the Italian author acknowledged the supreme virtues of the Thomas Sackville, ‘To the Reader’, in Courtier, p. 1. Cheke, p. 7. 118 Carmela Nocera Avila, Tradurre il Cortegiano: The Courtyer di Thomas Hody (Bari: Adriatica, 1992), p. 53. 119 I.K., ‘To the curteous and benevolent Reader’, in Annibale Romei, The Courtiers Academie (1598, Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1969), sig. A4r. 120 ‘Hoby’s Epistle’ in Courtier, p. 6. 121 Pettie, ‘Gentle Readers’, vol. 1, p. 12. Lawrence does not take this compelling issue into account in his reading of the translation, p. 44. 122 1579 saw the publication of translations by both Gabriel Chappuys and François de Bellforest. Pettie seems to have used Chappuy’s version, supplemented with the 1580 Italian edition of Guazzo that was published in Venice. The main facts are laid out in Sir Edward Sullivan’s introduction to The Civile Conversation, pp. xxxvi-iii. 116

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English monarch in his treatment of princely conduct.123 In the Italian version, the doctor alludes to ‘la grave e venerabile maestà del Re di Spagna’ and ‘il benigno e gioviale aspetto del Re di Francia’ as examples of the idea that common people are not competent to judge the practices of monarchs.124 Pettie’s rendering supplements the references by Anniball to ‘the reverent and redoubted majestie of the King of Spain’ and ‘the milde and gracious countenance’ of the French King with lengthy praise of Elizabeth: Present to your view (if your eyes bee able to beholde it without dazeling) the famous government of the Queene of England, the reverence is borne her by strangers, the obediance by her subjects … to be short, her unspeakable perfection in al things.125

Here, Pettie offers a pragmatic response to nationalist apprehensions about the dependence on Italian writing about policy and courtiership, rewriting the foreign text to include a confirmation of the supremacy of his domestic sovereign. What is striking, however, is that the praise for Elizabeth is followed by a dialogue where William questions the doctor’s endorsement of a ruler who ‘hath banished out of her countrey the aucthoritie of our holy father the Pope’, adding a discussion of the religious tensions between England and Rome that has no precedent whatsoever in the original.126 The response of Anniball, confirming local Protestant biases, is that ‘her religion is the very high way to heaven’ and that the flourishing state of England is proof of ‘a singuler blessing of God, and an undoubted signe that he liketh wel of her religion, and is well pleased with her proceedings’.127 The deceptive impression given by these spurious additions is that Guazzo, a former ambassador to Pope Pius V, admires Elizabeth’s religious exceptionalism. At this point, accepting the argument, Pettie’s version of William encourages the doctor to ‘return to the matter wee have in hande’ and the translation picks up from the point it left off in Guazzo’s text.128 The interpolation of the extratextual material shamelessly distorts the original book to cater to domestic concerns, transforming a text critical of Castiglione into a celebration of English prejudices. Yet, by adopting an Italian text as a vehicle for his nationalist agenda, Pettie implicitly concedes that English policy and courtliness must be considered in relation to precedents from the peninsula. Pettie’s presentation of the Civile Conversazione underlines the ideological pressures underlying the act of translation, affecting both the choice of text and its 123 The addition arouses the ire of Lievsay. See Stefano Guazzo and the English Renaissance, pp. 58-60. 124 Guazzo, La Civil Conversazione, p. 142. 125 Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 200-201. 126 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 201. 127 Ibid., p. 202. 128 Ibid., p. 202.


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adaptation. The need to translate an Italian original implied a deficiency in English learning, raising preoccupations about cultural inferiority. This is unmistakable even in the prefatory material of the most enthusiastically cosmopolitan translators of the mid-sixteenth century, where the rendering of foreign works in English becomes ‘un atto di conquista e arrichimento culturale’.129 Sir Thomas Hoby’s epistle to his version of the Courtier already reveals specific anxieties about the inadequacy of local knowledge. To advocate the value of translation and the use of foreign books, a practice ‘most famous throughout Italy’, he underlines the disparity where ‘In this point (I know not by what destiny) Englishmen are much inferiour to most of all other Nations’.130 Through the clear opposition that he creates with Italy, where translators are noted for ‘their profound knowledge and noble wit’, Hoby’s rhetorical strategy slyly takes advantage of English nationalism to defend the importance of his own project.131 The first local translator of Machiavelli, Peter Whitehorne, had made much the same claims in the postface to his edition of The Art of Warre (1560), contending that the appropriation of foreign learning ensures that the English ‘will not be inferior to any in warlyke knowledge, but rather to excell in the same, whereby withoute ayde or help of any forein nation, we may alwayes most renowned and famous’.132 The symbolic identification of the art of translation with power rationalizes the debt to a foreign country. By taking the knowledge of the Italians, the translators argue, England can assert its rightful place in the world. The whole point of the conversion into the national language becomes, as in Pettie’s extreme tampering, not cultural exchange but the eventual assurance of English dominance. The watching Englishman: Guazzo and The White Devil The mediation of Italian culture in early modern England, as the afterlife of Pettie’s translation suggests, was a constant process of reception, citation, and transformation, conditioned by the extent to which the distant nation occupied domestic political discourses. The English version of the Civile Conversation provided the basis for the portrayal of ‘court wisdom’ in the fifth act of The White Devil (1612), where Flamineo and the disguised Duke of Florence debate the moral compromises necessary to maintain the favour of the prince.133 Marcia Lee Anderson’s pioneering study of the use of Guazzo in the play was content to Carmela Nocera Avila, Studi sulla traduzione nell’Inghilterra del Seicento e del Settecento (Caltanissetta: Sciascia Editore, 1990), p. 16. ‘An act of conquest and cultural enrichment’ (my translation). 130 Courtier, p. 4. 131 Ibid., p. 4. 132 Machiavelli, The Arte of Warre, N1v. 133 John Webster, The White Devil, ed. John Russell Brown, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 5.3.67. All further citations will appear in the text. 129

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identify the plentiful verbal echoes, without reference to the cultural dynamics involved in its appropriation of Italian political writing.134 The extensive use of the courtesy book is characteristic, as R.W. Dent has shown, of the frequent appropriation of phrases and imagery from other works in John Webster’s stage dialogue.135 A more recent study by Laura Tosi has acknowledged the relevance of Guazzo’s contemporary reputation to the verbal echoes in the play but her reading does not make any distinction between the agendas of Pettie’s translation and the Italian original.136 To appreciate the sophistication of Webster’s response to the Civile Conversation, given that all his accepted verbal echoes paraphrase the English version, it is essential to take account of the specific use of a nationalist translation that appropriates and distorts the ideas of Guazzo in response to local concerns. The dramatic and ideological implications of Webster’s choice of material make it imperative to avoid the pitfalls of the direct borrowing approach to source studies, fixing an ahistorical relationship between the source and target text. With the importance that Italianate court drama had acquired in the Jacobean theatrical repertory, responding to the country’s place in political theory, the engagement with direct Italian sources was always circumscribed by previous English responses to the same material. The self-reflexive staging of the fascination with Italian crisis is one of the most glaring features of The White Devil. By focusing upon the disgrace of Vittoria Accoramboni, a subject featured in manuscripts, newsletters and histories throughout early modern Europe, Webster gave his audience the opportunity to observe some of the most scandalous events that the courts of Italy could offer.137 As an addition to the historical sources of the plot, Pettie’s patriotic translation forms part of a more general challenge to Castiglione’s vision of courtiership and the reputation that it enjoyed amongst domestic readers. It is not a coincidence therefore that the English ambassador takes centre stage at the climax of the play when he intervenes to shield the young prince from the massacre orchestrated by the Duke of Florence: ‘Keep back the prince. – Shoot, shoot’ (5.6.282). For although the citations from the Civile Conversation are seamlessly integrated into 134 See Marcia Lee Anderson, ‘Webster’s Debt to Guazzo’, Studies in Philology 36 (1939): 192-205. 135 See R.W. Dent, John Webster’s Borrowing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960). 136 Tosi only notes that Guazzo’s proverbs are ‘slightly altered in Pettie’s translation’, p. 83. See Laura Tosi, ‘Webster’s Borrowing from Guazzo’s Civile Conversazione in The White Devil’, in Michele Marrapodi (ed.), Il mondo Italiano del teatro Inglese del Rinascimento (Palermo: Flaccovio, 1995), pp. 81-95. 137 For a valuable survey of contemporary accounts of the life of Vittoria Accoramboni, see Gunnar Boklund, The Sources of the White Devil (New York: Haskell House, 1966), pp. 33-98. The extensive circulation of such court gossip, marking the violence of aristocratic life in early modern Rome, is discussed in Peter Rietbergen, Power and Religion in Baroque Rome: Barberini Cultural Policies (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp. 338-40.


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the dialogue, without the sort of blatant intertextual signals to the audience that we have seen in Marlowe, Barnes, and Marston, Webster takes pains to present his condemnation of court practices from the perspective of the English gaze. As Monticelso assembles foreign envoys from every part of the known world to view the trial of Vittoria, in an implicit allusion to the circulation of the gossip throughout Europe, the Englishman takes on a distinctive role as observer and commentator during crucial moments of the plot.138 Flamineo spares him from the insults he dishes out to the diplomats from Spain, Savoy, and France, conspicuously praising the superiority of his nation: ‘You are happy in England, my lord, here they sell justice’ (3.2.28). However, the ambassador is well aware of the courtier’s penchant for flattery: ‘Fie, fie, Flamineo’ (3.2.31). Webster’s English representative provides an on-stage model for the interpretation of the Italian political scene, explaining the intricacies of the papal election to the other ambassadors and questioning the reactions to the judgment of Vittoria. The group of ambassadors has no precedent in period accounts and, after the pope’s excommunication of Elizabeth, England did not have diplomatic relations with Rome at the time of the original events.139 Despite Gunnar Boklund’s dismissal of this addition to the historical material as ‘dramatically inconsequential splendor’, represented as ‘a touch of exotic color … of doubtful value to the plot’, the portrayal of the foreign diplomats reflects a significant motif of cultural comparison within the play.140 Indeed, as Ann Rosalind Jones has noted, the Italian characters measure the failings of their own compatriots by comparing them to the distant Irish and Welsh.141 The audience’s representative is at the forefront of a series of outsiders, where the appearance of the envoys adds to the roles of two self-professed Hungarian noblemen, a phony Moorish warrior, and a much-disparaged Moorish maid. Unlike the colourful parade of foreigners in The Merchant of Venice, where Portia mocks the English suitor, there is no sense in which Webster points to the failings of his own compatriots in his survey of national stereotypes.142 The moral authority the Englishman acquires in the course of the play comes to the fore when the young prince Giovanni defers to him in the closing speech: ‘See, my honoured lord, / What use you ought make of their punishment’ (5.6.2989). For although the English ambassador witnesses the spectacular scenes of the judgment of Vittoria, the election of the pope, and the wedding in Padua alongside the other diplomats, he alone intervenes to restore order at the point of maximum 138

It is surprising that Ann Rosalind Jones, ‘Italians and Others: Venice and the Irish in Coryat’s Crudities and The White Devil’, Renaissance Drama 18 (1987): 101-19 elides such a representative character for the cultural oppositions within the play. 139 See A.J. Hoenselaars, Images of Englishmen and Foreigners in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickenson University Press, 1992), p. 157. 140 Boklund, Sources, pp. 68, 151. 141 See Jones, ‘Italians and Others’, 110-15. 142 See Chapter 2, pp. 31, 33-5.


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crisis. He discovers the deadly aftermath of the masque, ordering the guards to fire on the conspirators: ‘This way, this way, break ope the doors, this way’ (5.6.277). The interpretive framework provided by the character, as a proxy for the Jacobean audience, ensures that Webster’s presentation of his direct Italian sources focuses on the need to resist the dangerous allure of the practices associated with the country. The courtly peacock Despite the play’s endorsement of the ideological agenda of the Civile Conversation, marking the incompatibility of court service and personal integrity, Webster places the material he takes from Guazzo in an ironic context. The majority of the verbal echoes arise in dialogue where Flamineo, the frustrated courtier and pandering brother, attempts to display his understanding of the Italian political scene. As he discusses the need for courtiers to measure their words, unaware that he is addressing the disguised Duke of Florence, Flamineo states that ‘To reprehend princes is dangerous; and to over-commend some of them is palpable lying’ (5.3.68-9). The dramatic irony of his unwitting disclosures to the prince is consistent with Webster’s selective citation of Guazzo. The comment reproduces almost verbatim William’s arguments in the section of the Civile Conversation that considers the ‘faultes of princes’.143 It is telling that, marking the appeal of such anti-court rhetoric, John Florio also included Guazzo’s warning to ‘never speake of Princes’ in his parallel Italian and English dialogues in Second Frutes.144 However, when William raises this point in the original, Anniball rebukes his presumption in attempting to understand ‘the hidden secrets’ of authority.145 Here, as with the topic of courtiership, Anniball maintains that discussion of the affairs of princes is best avoided: ‘I had rather wee might say nothing at all of this matter’ (198). Although William bemoans the vices of the court, he continues to remain implicated in them. For the doctor, the best strategy for preserving personal integrity is to shun the competition for patronage. In assigning verbal echoes from William to his stage courtier, without the corresponding reproaches from Anniball, Webster highlights the tension between Flamineo’s bitterness and his unrelenting sycophantic observance. Without the financial resources to remain independent of the duke, obliged to participate in conspiracies leading to the public humiliation of his own sister, Flamineo cannot 143

‘That to reprehend princes it is dangerous, and to commend them, plaine lying’ Guazzo I, 198-9. Noted by Anderson, ‘Webster’s Debt’, 195 and Dent, p. 146. 144 The Italian and English phrases from Guazzo form part of a series of aphorisms in a dialogue about strategies for effective travel. See Florios Second Frutes, pp. 95-7. 145 Anderson recognizes this instance where Flamineo mouths a position that is rejected by the doctor in Guazzo’s text. However, her article confuses Guazzo with the depiction of his brother in the Civile Conversation. See ‘Webster’s Debt’, 195.


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conceive of any alternative to his vicious course of action. He tells his mother that, after his experiences in Italian academia, he is prepared to take any moral short cut that will ensure Brachiano’s favour: At least seven years; conspiring with a beard Made me a graduate; then to this duke’s service. I visited the court, whence I returned More courteous, more lecherous by far, But not a suit to the richer. And shall I, Having a path so open and so free To my preferment, still retain your milk In my pale forehead? No, this face of mine I’ll arm and fortify with lusty wine ’Gainst shame and blushing. (1.2.324-33)146

Webster dramatizes Guazzo’s belief that the court is irredeemably corrupt. In choosing to remain at court, as a peripheral figure amidst the power politics of Italy’s renaissance men, Flamineo deprives himself of an opportunity to honourably pursue his personal aspirations or contribute to social reform. Yet Flamineo derives a certain perverse pleasure from the moral bankruptcy underlying the courtly ideal. In seeking the favour of Giovanni, the heir to Bracciano, he flaunts his presumed mastery of the dissembling necessary to gain patronage. As the young prince enters the room, Flamineo provides a step by step commentary of his cynical shift from furtive contempt to public praise: I have known a poor woman’s bastard better favoured. This is behind him; now, to his face all comparisons are hateful. Wise was the courtly peacock, that, being a great minion, and being compared for beauty by some dottrels that stood by, to the kingly eagle, said that the eagle was a far fairer bird than herself, not in respect of her feathers, but in respect of her long tallants. His will grow out in time, – My gracious lord. (5.4.2-10)

The passage has its origins in the debate within the Civile Conversation about the manner in which courtiers should respond to the obvious imperfections of the

146 Alan Sinfield and Jonathan Dollimore suggest, in their edition of the play, that Webster’s association of courtiership with lechery in this speech may draw on a famous passage from The Unfortunate Traveller. See The White Devil. The Selected Plays of John Webster, eds Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 377n. Nashe’s English exile condemns Italy for ‘mak[ing] a man an excellent courtier … which is, by interpretation, a fine close lecher’. See The Unfortunate Traveller, p. 345.


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prince.147 Flamineo’s pun on ‘tallants’, suggesting the power of the ruler compels praise, extends the bird imagery William uses to describe the successful courtier. The metaphor of the shrewd peacock encapsulates the ethical compromises necessary to advance at court. However, Flamineo tries out this approach on the wrong prince. Through his unconvincing performance, Flamineo incurs the displeasure of Giovanni and finds himself expelled from the royal presence. By refusing the courtier’s flattery, the prince offers hope for a new discerning leadership. The suspicion is that, as with Middleton’s The Phoenix and indeed all depictions of young princes in early Jacobean literature, the character is a gesture towards the inspirational figure of Prince Henry. The ‘court ejectment’ mandated by Giovanni obliges Flamineo to undergo the course of preventive action prescribed by Guazzo’s doctor (5.4.48). Given the futility of deriving any wisdom ‘touching the conversation betweene Princes and private persons’, Anniball counsels desperate courtiers to renounce their ambitions and avoid being ‘broken by leading their lives with princes’.148 While Giovanni’s actions recall the wisdom of Anniball, the only verbal echoes of the doctor’s advice in the Civile Conversation occur in the unreliable discourses of the disguised Francisco de Medici. To gain Flamineo’s confidence, in his role as the Moorish warrior Mulinassar, the Duke of Florence pretends to discount the affectations of the court. The dramatic irony is palpable as Francisco, surreptitiously gesturing towards the ease with which he is able to pass unnoticed in the court of his enemy, denies any innate hierarchical distinctions between the ruler and his subjects: What difference is between the Duke and I? No more than between two bricks; all made of one clay. Only’t may be one is placed on the top of a turret, the other in the bottom of a well by mere chance. If I were placed as high as the duke, I should stick as fast, make as fair a show, and bear out weather equally. (5.1.106-11)

Though Francisco claims that political authority derives from ‘mere chance’, the source for these comments forms part of a larger passage where Anniball invokes divine agency to fix social distinctions.149 In accordance with Guazzo’s appeal for 147

‘… but perchaunce he liked to yeelde with his tongue, then with his heart, by the example of the Peacocke, who saide the Eagle was a fayrer byrde then hee, not in respect of his feathers, but of his beake and talents, which caused that no birde durst stand in contention with him’ (p. 203). The borrowing is noted by Anderson, ‘Webster’s Debt’, p. 195 and Dent, p. 155. 148 Guazzo, Civile Conversation, pp. 204, 211. 149 The borrowing has been identified by Dent, p. 138. Compare Francisco‘s speech with Guazzo, pp. 191-2: ‘There are many gentlemen, who not understanding what gentry is per eccellenza … think it no lesse shame to be seene in the company of the baser sort, then to be taken in the common stewes: not knowing that there is no more difference between


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good manners, since the ambitions of the Civile Conversation are much closer to a modern etiquette guide than the type of courtesy book associated with Castiglione, the original image of the bricks refers only to the obligation that William has to be courteous in ‘the companie of his inferiours’.150 The version pronounced by the disguised ruler caters to Flamineo’s hostility towards his masters, encouraging the disgruntled courtier to imagine being free to commit ‘the devil knows what villainy’ (5.1.125). When he is expressing his own opinions, in his public role, the duke has different ideas. It is conspicuous that, when Francisco confronts Brachiano over the affair with Vittoria, he attacks his fellow duke precisely for failing to live up to his innate superiority: Some eagles that should gaze upon the sun Seldom soar high, but take their lustful ease, Since they from dunghill birds their prey can seize. (2.1.49-51)

The intertextual sophistication of Webster’s appropriation of the Civile Conversation, set in counterpoint to the moral inadequacies of Flamineo and Francisco, underlines the absence of any authentic voice of court wisdom in the world of The White Devil. The potential enjoyment of the audience comes from the manner in which Flamineo fails to recognize the ideological posturing as a sham, eagerly seconding the performance of dissent by the Florentine. The joke is on the self-absorbed courtier, unable to see past the disguise, as the counterfeit Moor represents political authority as a question of image and setting: ‘As ships seem very great upon the river, which show very little upon the seas: so some men i’ th’ court seem Colossuses in a chamber, who if they came into the field would appear pitiful pigmies’ (5.1.120-23). It is indicative of Francisco’s agenda that the source of the speech, gaining the instant approval of Flamineo, is Anniball’s account of conversation with the ignorant.151 By drawing on the sections of Guazzo’s treatise that consider affectation and deceptive appearances, the conversation between the disguised duke and Flamineo becomes a parody of the edifying relationship that Guazzo’s doctor forms with his patient.152 Apart from the interaction with specific texts, as direct sources for incidents or dialogue, the act of writing about Italian politics implied a negotiation with the the gentleman and the yeoman, then there is between two brickes made of self same earth: wherof the one is set in the top of a towre, the other in the bottome of a wel’. Anniball goes on to remind his listener, nonetheless, that gentlemen should ‘degenerate not from their kinde’, ibid., p. 192. 150 Guazzo, Civile Conversation, p. 192. 151 ‘that as some ships seeme great uppon the ryver, which shewe very little uppon the Sea: so some seeme learned amongest the ignorant, whiche have but a little when they come amongest the learned’, ibid., p. 221. See Dent, p. 139. 152 Compare also Francisco’s speech at 5.1.101-3 with Guazzo, Civile Conversation, p. 95. Noted by Dent, p. 138.


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expectations created by previous representations of the peninsula. The only overt allusion to an Italian theorist in Webster’s tragedy is to the ubiquitous Machiavelli. The historical figures who determine the fate of Vittoria, Francesco de Medici and Pope Paul IV, are the descendents of the Florentine and papal leaders featured in the Principe. Prompted by the concealed Duke of Florence himself, always eager to mock his interlocutor’s lack of awareness, Flamineo accuses Francisco of employing ‘the rare tricks of a Machivillian’ (5.3.194). The pun on ‘villain’, accentuated by the metre, underlines the facile appeal to political and dramatic clichés in the characterization of the duke. For although the Jacobean spectators may not have identified the specific verbal echoes from Guazzo, without the elaborate on-stage citation mechanisms employed in the other plays discussed in this chapter, the covert machinations of the Florentine leader recall the plot structure of the Italianate disguised ruler plays popular at the time of James I’s accession to the English throne. There is no question that, as Andrew Gurr has noted, references to the repertory of the London stage anticipate ‘no more education in the audience than frequent playgoing’.153 The customary pretext for disguise, as established in The Malcontent, The Phoenix, and Measure for Measure, is the ruler’s desire for reform. In The White Devil, concluding with Giovanni’s inclusion of Francisco amongst the list of conspirators to be castigated, the Duke of Florence fails to fill the void created by the lack of any responsible leadership among the current Italian ruling class. As the duke entangles himself in slapstick comedy with the lovelorn Zanche and the unwary courtier, Ludovico pleads with him to abandon his absurd performance as the moor Mulinassar: My lord, upon my soul you shall go no further: You have most ridiculously engaged yourself Too far already. (5.5.1-3)

What makes the parody of earlier plays important here is that its success in the theatre depends upon a shared intertextual awareness of author and audience. The departure from the stage conventions in Webster’s disguise plot compares the lack of dignity of Francisco to predecessors like Marston’s Malevole and Shakespeare’s Vincentio. Conclusion In The White Devil Webster demands a lot of his audience and, if his preface to the printed edition is to be believed, the patrons of the Red Bull theatre did not live up

153 Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 101. Gurr speculates that Webster employed more sophisticated literary allusions to flatter educated viewers.


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to those expectations.154 As he seeks to justify the failure of the first performances early in 1612, the dramatist laments that the play was acted, in so dull a time of winter, presented in so open and black a theatre, that it wanted (that which is the only grace and setting out of a tragedy) a full and understanding auditory; and that since that time I have noted, most of the people who come to that playhouse resemble those ignorant asses (who visiting stationers’ shops their use is not to inquire for good books, but new books).155

Webster’s use of the term ‘understanding auditory’ to describe the ideal audience for his tragedy makes manifest the extent to which his intertextual strategies anticipate a playgoer able to unlock the concentrated stage dialogue, an expectation consistent with the extensive citations within the preface from Martial, Horace, and Euripedes. Given his contempt for ‘the uncapable multitude’ of the Red Bull, lacking the cultural literacy to appreciate such allusions, Webster took care to ensure that The Duchess of Malfi appeared before the comparatively sophisticated clientele of the Blackfriars.156 Webster’s preface does not support critical claims that the decision to publish The White Devil was merely a way to surmount ‘the boundaries and limitations of the theater where one’s work may be poisoned’.157 The dramatist makes no effort to privilege the potential readership of his printed text, comparing the ‘ignorant’ spectators of the popular theatre to capricious book buyers. Instead, as his continued work at the Blackfriars suggests, Webster’s survey of the most prominent playwrights of the period underlines his desire to present his work in a theatrical environment where it can gain recognition alongside ‘that full and heightened style of Master Chapman, the laboured and understanding works of Master Jonson’, and ‘the right happy and copious industry of Master Shakespeare’.158 The wish that The White Devil ‘may be read by their light’ is not only an attempt to establish its importance, as with the appeal to classical precedents in the preface, but also a symptom of the manner in which Webster encourages his ideal ‘auditory’ to compare and contrast the play with existing traditions.159

154 For the reception of the play, see Alexander Leggatt, Jacobean Public Theatre (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 123-9. 155 ‘To the Reader’, The White Devil, p. 30. 156 Ibid., p. 30. For the audiences of the Blackfriars, see Lucy Munro, Children of the Queen’s Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 61-73. 157 David M. Bergeron, Textual Patronage in English Drama, 1570-1640 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), p. 98. 158 ‘To the Reader’, p. 31. He also complements Beaumont, Fletcher, Dekker, and Heywood. 159 Ibid., p. 31.

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The role for the audience in Italianate political drama, therefore, is to recognize the individual dramatist’s contribution to an ongoing debate. The intertextual concerns of plays like The Jew of Malta, The Devil’s Charter, and Antonio and Mellida need to be seen as part of a constant process, developing in response to the trajectory of previous works, rather than a static ‘cultural context’ or ‘world picture’ for the period as a whole. When Webster’s happy and industrious contemporary came to stage statecraft and courtiership, as we will see in the discussion of The Tempest in the next chapter, it is telling that he adapted a plot structure from the London stage whose reputation had changed over time. For although Measure for Measure may have capitalized on the popularity of the disguised ruler play at the start of the Stuart era, it had become an object of open mockery by the time Shakespeare presented his portrayal of Prospero’s efforts to regain power in Milan.

Chapter 4

‘I have my dukedom got’: Shakespeare and the Evolution of the Italianate Disguised Ruler Play Chapter 3 considered the dramatic strategies underlying the citation and appropriation of Italian political writing in the drama of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. The centrality of Machiavelli in domestic debates ensured the Florentine had a unique influence upon early modern English drama, whether represented on-stage as in The Jew of Malta or quoted without attribution as in The Devil’s Charter. The possible references to Machiavelli in the works of Shakespeare are much less explicit, displaying none of the direct appeals to audience recognition we have seen in other period plays. The object of this chapter will be to show how Shakespeare’s treatment of statecraft in The Tempest is rooted in the conventions of the London theatre, adapting the Italianate plot structures established in Measure for Measure and other plays to deal with the contested figure of James I. However, within that context, I would like to start my discussion by looking at a significant potential analogue linking The Tempest to the most influential political treatise of the time. The Principe refers to the exact Italian states featured in The Tempest as part of its denunciation of the complacency of the hereditary rulers of the peninsula. The passage was present in the 1584 John Wolfe edition of the Principe, a text already used by dramatists like Barnabe Barnes. The catastrophic consequences of incompetent leadership come to the fore as Machiavelli points to the fall from grace of Milan and Naples after 1494: Et se si considera quei signiori, che in Italia hanno perduto lo stato ne nostri tempi, come il Re di Napoli, il Duca di Milano, & altri, si troverrà in loro prima un comune difetto … questi nostri Prencipi, i quali di molti anni erano stati nel loro Prencipato, per haverlo dipoi perso, non accusino la fortuna, ma l’ignavia loro, perché, nò havendo mai ne tempi quieti pensato che possino mutarsi (il che è comune difetto degli huomini, non far conto nella bonaccia della tempesta).

See pp. 94-6. Niccolò Machiavelli, Il Prencipe (London, 1584), p. 43r. (my italics). The publication of this edition is discussed in pp. 86-9.


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Let us consider those Italian rulers, such as the king of Naples, the duke of Milan, and so forth who have lost their states in our own times. If we do so, we shall find that they shared, first, a common weakness … these princes of ours, whose power had been established many years, may not blame fortune for their losses. Their own indolence was to blame, because, having never imagined when times were quiet that they could change (and this is a common failing of mankind, never to anticipate a storm when the sea is calm).

Machiavelli’s characteristic emphasis on the contingency of power, privileging alert and adaptable leaders, scorns any notion of a divine right to rule a state. The accusation of indolence against the deposed princes of Milan and Naples recalls Prospero’s regrets about how his own self-indulgence and disregard of ‘worldly ends’ precipitated the coup d’état which deprived him of his dukedom. By failing to take responsibility for the government of the state, preferring to enjoy his books, Prospero made it easy for his brother Antonio to seize his title. The ‘Hereditary sloth’ of the King of Naples also faces a grave threat in the course of The Tempest when Antonio encourages Sebastiano to eliminate the ruler (2.1.223). Furthermore, in line with the storm imagery that opens the play, the title of Shakespeare’s island drama employs the same metaphor of political crisis used in the chapter explaining ‘Perche i Prencipi d’Italia habbiano perduto i loro stati’. Machiavelli uses the concretizing metaphor of a ‘tempesta’ to represent the sudden change in national fortune provoked by the Wars of Italy. After the forces of Charles VIII crossed the Alps, the limited military and diplomatic options of regional powers like Milan and Naples were soon exposed. With such unambiguous affinities with the depiction of political instability in the Principe, the absence of any reference to The Tempest in recent studies of Shakespeare and Machiavelli is surprising. The passage has considerable implications for our understanding of the representation of leadership Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. George Bull (2nd ed. London: Penguin, 1999), pp. 78-9. In the final line, the word ‘tempest’ would be an even more suitable translation of the original ‘tempesta’. All English translations are taken from this edition. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, 1.2.89. This and all subsequent quotations from Shakespeare are from The Riverside Shakespeare, gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. 2nd ed.(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). Il Prencipe, p. 42v. Trans. Bull, ‘Why the Italian princes have lost their states’, The Prince, p. 78. The centrality of crisis in Florentine political theory after 1494 emerges in Gennaro Maria Barbuto, La politica dopo la tempesta: ordine e crisi nel pensiero di Francesco Guicciardini (Naples: Liguori, 2002). For example, the play does not appear in Franco Ferrucio, Il teatro della fortuna: potere e destino in Machiavelli e Shakespeare (Rome: Fazi, 2004), John Roe, Shakespeare and Machiavelli. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002, or Hugh Grady, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, & Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from Richard II to Hamlet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

‘I have my dukedom got’

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and sovereignty in the first act, given that Prospero causes his enemies to undergo a tempest to instigate the process of recovering his title. Machiavelli’s storm imagery is suggestive of the contemptuous vision of aristocratic rule in the opening scene of The Tempest, where the conflict with the Italian statesmen over ‘the name of king’ distracts the mariners from saving the ship (1.1.17). Although the quarrel draws on the metaphor of the ship of state in Plato’s Republic, a common trope in early modern teaching of rhetoric, there is no reference to any inclement weather in the original Socratic parable. Plato’s sailors mutiny because of a craving for individual power, reflecting fears about government by the uncultured masses, whereas the crew in Shakespeare expresses only the imperative to proceed unhindered with the response to the crisis. The storm scene stages the consequences of a lack of leadership, not insubordination. The boatswain is right to observe that, even as the King of Naples, the usurping Duke of Milan and their retinue assert hierarchical precedence, they contribute nothing to the resolution of the emergency caused by the rough sea: ‘if you can command these elements to silence, and work the peace of the present … . Use your authority’ (1.1.21-3). The great leaders are powerless against the tempest because their titular authority does not coincide with any practical ability to govern the vessel. When the boatswain calls on Sebastiano and Antonio to ‘Work you then’, exasperated by the continuous whining, the attention-seeking courtiers do not even consider the possibility of helping to move the masts and sails (1.1.41). By failing to contribute to the efforts to ensure its safety, the Italian ruling class exemplifies the warnings about the ruinous effect of indolent leadership in the Principe. The lesson of the coups in Naples and Milan, Machiavelli argues, is that the only way for a prince to preserve power in a period of turmoil is to take personal responsibility: ‘et quelle difese solamente buone, certe & durabili, che dipendono da te proprio, & dalle virtù tue’. Prospero’s subsequent manipulation of the shipwrecked nobles, without recourse to any ideals of an innate right to govern, demonstrates that he has attained the skills and the cynicism necessary to recoup his title. The Machiavellian undertones of Prospero’s unyielding quest to reclaim the dukedom of Milan provide a valuable insight into the genre and setting of The Tempest.10 Shakespeare’s emphasis on the political education of Prospero, as he learns how to rule by stealth, underlines his transformation from a bookish The importance of the figure in the period is discussed in Eric Cheyfitz, The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from The Tempest to Tarzan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), pp. 26-7. Il Prencipe, p. 43v. Trans. Bull, ‘The only sound, sure, and enduring methods of defence are those based on your own actions and prowess’. The Prince, p. 79. 10 The difficulties involved in defining the genre of The Tempest have been discussed in Gerald Schorin, ‘Approaching the Genre of The Tempest’ in Shakespeare’s Late Plays: Essays in Honor of Charles Crow, eds. Richard Tobias and Paul Zolbrod (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1974), pp. 176-80 and Gary Schmidgall, Shakespeare and the Courtly Aesthetic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), esp. pp. xiv – xvii.

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hereditary duke to a competent participant in the covert power politics of the Italian Renaissance. The story of Prospero’s new found ability to dominate his enemies conforms with the narrative line of the Italianate disguised ruler play, a theatrical plot structure that emerged around the time of the succession of James I to the English throne. Popular examples such as The Malcontent (c. 1599-1604) reflect the morbid curiosity with which early modern English debates about government survey the disorder, corruption and failed leadership of Cinquecento Italy. The experience of watching the secret intrigues of an Italian duke in an early modern playhouse would have provided the same frisson of obtaining inside information about the practices of great leaders would-be cognoscenti hoped to glean from their half-understood copies of Machiavelli’s Principe.11 The subversive effect of Machiavelli’s writing, as period commentators like Alberico Gentili argued, was his disclosure of the secret tactics of statecraft to a mass readership.12 For although the distinguishing characteristic of a political disguise plot is the manner in which the ruler operates in secret, to the detriment of his unwitting enemies, the dramatic representation offers the audience an omniscient perspective on the covert exercise of power. At the time of the court performance of The Tempest in November 1611, the continued relevance of the disguised ruler play derived from its explicit staging of statecraft. The similarities between how Prospero secretly controls the action on the island and the dominating, manipulative presence of the disguised Duke of Vienna in the earlier Measure for Measure have not gone unnoticed.13 Yet, given the temporal difference between the two works, the relationship of Shakespeare’s portrayal of Prospero to the popular plot structure of his previous work has never been the subject of a major study. The original compilers of the first folio grouped The Tempest and Measure for Measure together as comedies, a generic classification the critical tradition associated with each work has resisted or ignored. Our understanding of The Tempest has been conditioned by its subsequent inclusion among Shakespeare’s romances, a category invented to encompass the magical and allegorical aspects of his works from the 1609-1611 period.14 Recent efforts to 11 The fascination with reading Machiavelli during the period is discussed in pp. 83-9. 12 For claims that Machiavelli’s goal was the demystification of statecraft, see pp. 88-9. 13 In particular, see Harold S. Wilson, ‘Action and Symbol in Measure for Measure and The Tempest’, Shakespeare Quarterly 4 (1953): 375-84. See also Barbara Tovey, ‘Wisdom and the Law: Thoughts on the Political Philosophy of Measure for Measure’ in Shakespeare’s Political Pageant: Essays in Literature and Politics, eds Joseph Aluis and Vickie Sullivan (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), pp. 61-75, and Derrick Marsh, ‘Shakespeare and Politics’ in Shakespeare: Readers, Audiences, Players, ed. R.S. White (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1998), pp. 91-105. 14 Polonius has nothing to say about romances in his famous list of genres in Hamlet. The anachronistic term posits a generic connection between The Tempest, Cymbeline,


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trace the play’s relationship to contemporary political debates have concentrated on the role of Caliban in the subplot, where the master-slave dialect is evocative of emergent colonialist discourses.15 By discussing The Tempest and Measure for Measure within the broader context of the evolving Jacobean theatrical repertory, the immediate context of their production and reception, this chapter will argue that Shakespeare’s dukes evoke the ideological concerns of sovereignty, crisis, and court intrigue that period playwrights customarily staged in Italianate disguised ruler plays. The persistence of the plot structure on the London stage over the course of Shakespeare’s career provides an historical continuity between the political narrative of Prospero and the cynical vision of statecraft presented in prior versions like The Malcontent, recounting how a deposed ruler has to struggle and connive to regain power after his exclusion from the court. Shakespeare foregrounds the grievances arising from the coup d’état in Milan with the long exposition in Act 1, scene 2, as Miranda learns the story of their exile to the remote island. The concern with a lost Italian dukedom has a much closer relation to the recognized conventions of the form than Measure for Measure, where Vincentio renounces his public role to observe and correct the follies of his subjects for a brief time. The motives for concealment of the Italian dukes of the theatre have little to do with mere voyeurism or prudishness. Studies of Measure of Measure often assert the disguised monarch figure is ‘a wishful image of the Christian God’, unaffected by temporal events, but the ousted rulers in most examples of the form are subject to political catastrophes that force them to abandon the security of the court.16 Faced with internal treason and the territorial ambitions of neighbouring states, they have no choice but to rebuild their power base from scratch. John Marston’s usurped Duke of Genoa ‘lie[s] in ambush for conveniency’, spying on conspiracies in his lost court as a means of regaining his title.17 The former ruler bitterly laments being compelled to act out the sordid role of Malevole: ‘O God, how loathsome this toying is to me!’ (5.3.41). The disguised duke framework gives the main storyline of The Tempest a clear overall focus on the recovery of Prospero’s title, belying claims that the play is ‘virtually plotless’.18 The relative The Winter’s Tale, and Pericles. For a challenge to the manner in which the classification of romance has distracted from the play’s political implications, see Jonathan Hart, ‘Redeeming The Tempest: Romance and Politics’, Cahiers Élisabéthans 49 (1996): 23-38. 15 The critical history of the play is discussed below on pp. 137-9. 16 Ivo Kamps, ‘Ruling Fantasies and the Fantasies of Rule: The Phoenix and Measure for Measure’, Studies in Philology, 92 (1995): 250. The argument that the form stages the ideology of absolutism is also the basis of Leonard Tennenhouse, ‘Representing Power: Measure for Measure in its Time’, in The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Norman: Pilgrim, 1982), pp. 143-56. 17 John Marston, The Malcontent, ed. M.L. Wine (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), 3.3.22. Subsequent citations will appear in the text. 18 Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead, 1998), p. 666.


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classical unity of the dramatic construction emphasizes Prospero’s surveillance and stage direction of the shipwrecked nobles, creating the conditions for his return to power in Milan. The only significant innovation is the delegation of the actual spying to Ariel, extending the duke’s covert vision to the island as a whole and relieving him of the burden of controlling the multiple characters himself. There is something squalid about even the best disguised ruler plays. With the urgency of regaining his title, in order to secure the future of Miranda and himself, Prospero has little time or inclination to bother with moral reform. Dissatisfaction with the manner in which Measure for Measure rehearses the conventions of New Comedy has fostered its continual definition as a so-called problem play, notwithstanding the constant references to the Duke of Vienna’s efforts to promote public morality.19 The lessons learned by the rulers on-stage in subsequent examples have little to do with morality, as playwrights began to use the politically charged plot structure as a medium for the expression of domestic dissent. Even the banished prince in John Day’s Humour Out of Breath (1608), notable for all the exquisite moral tenets he affirms at the start of the play, comes to accept that the expediency of reclaiming power in Mantua obliges him to discard any pretence of personal integrity. The former Duke of Florence in Edward Sharpham’s The Fleire (1606), the most unashamedly amoral disguise play of all, finds that the only effective tactic to restore his fortunes is by surreptitiously working as a pimp to his own daughters. The extent to which women become an object of exchange in such versions of the form, where marriages serve primarily to ensure the Duke’s return to the throne, provides an important contemporary critical precedent for interpreting the fate of the heroines at the end of The Tempest and Measure for Measure. The rhetoric of love comes easy to Shakespeare but the historical perspective of Italian crisis, where the status of the ruler and the state are always under threat, demands a new understanding of the amoral realities of power. Disguise is worne thread bare upon every stage While the ideological concerns of the Italianate disguised ruler play reflect complaints that arose during the final years of the reign of Elizabeth I, neither the dramatic nor the political climate in early modern England remained constant. The first examples of the form coincided with the initial honeymoon period after the accession of James I to the English throne, reflecting hopes that the new monarch would challenge entrenched court corruption.20 By the time of the first The oft-used term first appears in F.S. Boas, Shakespeare and his Predecessors (rpt. New York: Haskell House, 1968). For the critical history, see Rosalind Miles, The Problem of Measure for Measure (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1976), pp. 31-48. 20 For the enthusiasm the new monarch inspired in London’s literary community, see David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge, 1984), 19


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performances of The Tempest, however, political disguise had long become an object of parody. In tracing the extent to which later plays encourage audience recognition of generic intertextuality, demanding comparison with previous examples, this chapter deals with the transformation of the genre over time. When the disguise of a friar is proposed in George Chapman’s May-Day (1611), recalling the imposture of the duke in Measure for Measure, the immediate refusal dismisses it as a hackneyed theatrical device: ‘Out uppon’t, that disguise is worne thread bare upon every stage, and so much villainy committed under that habit that ’tis growne as suspicious as the vilest’.21 The scene mocks the attempts of ‘miserable Poets, by a change of a hat or a cloake, to alter the whole state of a Comedie’.22 The manner in which parodies rely upon audience recognition offers a unique measure of the circulation and transformation of theatrical conventions.23 The subplot in Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614), with the portrayal of Justice Overdo’s decision to go ‘disguis’d (as the careful magistrate ought) for the good of the republic, in the Fair, and weeding out of enormity’, marks the extent to which the disguised ruler play had already become an anachronism in the later years of the Jacobean period.24 Here, in a sly allusion to the perceived failures of Stuart rule, the humour comes from the frustration of the naive demand ‘for detection of ... enormities ... in Justice’ name and the King’s; and for the Commonwealth!’25 Consistent with his derision of audience members whose theatrical taste ‘hath stood still’, as the play’s induction mocks ‘he that will swear Jeronimo or Andronicus are the best plays yet’, Jonson parodies a dramatic genre associated with a specific political moment.26 The appeal to audience awareness of an established theatrical repertory recurs amidst the explicit references to old works like ‘Shakespeare’s chronicled histories’ in the play within a play in Richard Brome’s The Antipodes (1638), where the would-be King of the Antipodeans adopts a political ‘disguise’: ‘Great kings have done the like / To make discovery of passages / Among the

pp. 195-8. The expectations of reform in court circles are dealt with in Michael B. Young, ‘Illusions of Grandeur and Reform at the Jacobean Court: Cranfield and the Ordinance’, The Historical Journal 22 (1979): 53-73. 21 George Chapman, May-Day (London, 1611), Act 2, D3v. 22 Ibid., D3v. 23 The explicit intertextuality of parody is discussed in Clive R. Thomson, ‘Parody / Genre / Ideology’ in Le singe à la porte: Vers une théorie de la parodie, ed. P.B. Gobin (New York: Peter Lang, 1984), pp. 95-103. See also Margaret A. Rose, Parody / MetaFiction (London: Croom Helm, 1979). 24 Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, ed. E.A. Horsman (rpt. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979), 5.2.92-4. I have discussed this play in detail in ‘“Low Comedy” and Political Cynicism: Parodies of the Jacobean Disguised Duke Play’, Renaissance Forum 7 (2004): http://www.hull.ac.uk/renforum/v7/redmond.htm. 25 Ibid., 2.1.45-50. 26 Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, 111, 107-8.

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people’.27 The intertextual strategies of dramatists returning to the plot structure after the first productions of canonical works like The Malcontent and Measure for Measure foreground the ideological and dramatic implications of rehearsing a dated form with unequivocal cultural associations. At the start of The Woman Hater (1607), Beaumont openly concedes that the Italianate disguised ruler play had become a cliché: ‘a Duke there is, and the Scene lyes in Italy, as those thinges lightly we never miss’.28 The startling effect of the opening scene, where the Duke of Milan asks his followers to discern his latest covert endeavour, is contingent upon conventional notions about the role of an Italian duke on the London stage. The courtiers, obviously frequent playgoers, immediately assume that their ruler must be preparing ‘to cure / Some strange corruptions in the commonwealth’.29 The speculation on-stage about a ‘waightie court plot’, adding to the impression given by the prologue, encourages a complacent acceptance of the work’s generic affiliation.30 The Duke, however, abruptly dismisses any political motives: ‘You are my friends, and you shall have the cause; / I breake my sleeps thus soone to see a wench’.31 He claims his sexual agenda is ‘Waightier farre’ than his obligations to good government.32 The prologue pointedly encourages comparisons with the formula established in previous works, prompting audience expectations Beaumont does not intend to fulfil. The parodic implications of the ruler’s anticlimactic denial of political reform are telling when placed alongside the self-justifications of Duke Vincentio in Measure for Measure, who denies ‘that the dribbling dart of love / Can pierce a complete bosom’.33 For the ruler of Vienna, disguise is a pretext for reconstructing order in an upside down society where

27 Richard Brome, The Antipodes, eds David Scott Kastan and Richard Proudfoot (New York: Theatre Arts, 2000), 1.2.68, 4.1.2-5. See also the discussion in Chapter 3, p. 71. 28 Francis Beaumont, The Woman Hater, in The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, ed. Fredson Bowers, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 19661989), ll. 17-19. Albert Tricomi has cited the line as proof that ‘Francis Beaumont clearly perceived something of the pattern’ established in previous disguise plays. See Anticourt Drama in England, 1603-1642 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), p. 13. 29 Beaumont, 1.1.11-12. 30 Ibid., 1.1.9. 31 Ibid., 1.1.28-9. 32 Ibid., 1.1.27. 33 William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, 1.3.2-3. I have already discussed the plot of Measure for Measure, with less emphasis on the relationship to Italian dramatic analogues, in ‘The Politics of Plot: Measure for Measure and the Italianate Disguised Duke Play’, in Shakespeare, Italy, and Intertextuality, ed. Michele Marrapodi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 158-75.


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liberty plucks justice by the nose, The baby beats the nurse, and quite athwart Goes all decorum. (1.3.27-30)

Yet, notwithstanding his declared ambitions, Shakespeare’s duke ends up seeking a woman as well. The audience-centred model of theatrical intertextuality, based on the premise that playwrights encouraged spectators to recall specific sources and cultural discourses, is a useful starting point for looking at the representation of statecraft in The Tempest and Measure for Measure. The critical insight of Beaumont’s parody, underlining the constant tension between politics and romantic comedy in earlier plays, presumes an audience capable of recognizing the allusion to the conventions of a typical disguised ruler plot. Critics of Measure for Measure have felt obliged to acknowledge the manner in which Shakespeare’s revision of the Duke’s role places the drama within a so-called ‘theatrical vogue’ that emerged in the first ‘five or six years’ following the accession of James VI of Scotland to the English throne.34 Historical evidence and claims in the frontispieces of published editions make it clear that, prior to the staging of Measure for Measure before James on Boxing Day 1604, there had already been court performances of Thomas Middleton’s The Phoenix and John Marston’s The Malcontent. Each of these tragicomedies treats disguise as an opportunity for political renewal, where the ruler must abandon the flattery and isolation of the court to discover abuses in secret and learn how to wield power more effectively. Prince Hal’s immersion in the tavern world of King Henry IV employs some elements of political disguise, with the future king’s pretence of embracing the vices of Eastcheap.35 However, the depiction of Vincentio’s efforts to reform the government and morals of Vienna in the semblance of a friar adopts the specific narrative model associated with notable successes in the London repertory. Marston’s tale of Genoese court intrigue was one of the most influential and popular works of the time, a sensation on the public and private stages and available in three published quartos in 1604 alone.36 Nonetheless, in stating that ‘the disguised ruler was fashionable in the theatre’, 34 Thomas A. Pendleton, ‘Shakespeare’s Disguised Duke Play: Middleton, Marston, and the Sources of Measure for Measure’, in ‘Fanned and Winnowed Opinions’: Shakespearean Essays Presented to Harold Jenkins, eds John W. Mahon and Thomas A. Pendleton (London: Methuen, 1987), p. 82. Other accounts of the role of the disguised duke (or disguised ruler) plot structure in Shakespeare’s play include Stephen Cohen, ‘From Mistress to Master: Political Transition and Formal Conflict in Measure for Measure’, Criticism 41 (1999): 431-64, Kamps, ‘Ruling Fantasies and the Fantasies of Rule’, Tennenhouse, ‘Representing Power: Measure for Measure in its Time’, and Miles, pp. 134-60. 35 See Anthony Kendall, ‘The Prince who desired “Small Beer”: King Henry IV and the Disguised Duke Tradition’, Quaderni (Università di Lecce) 4 (1982): 49-62. 36 The popularity of The Malcontent in 1604, following upon its revival by the King’s Men, does not preclude an earlier composition date. While James’ accession raised hopes

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traditional studies have not gone on to consider how Shakespeare’s use of an established narrative structure with such explicit political concerns fits within the dynamic appropriation, citation, and revision of the structure in the plays of his contemporaries.37 The self-reflexive agenda of plays like The Woman Hater makes manifest the continuity of Shakespeare’s treatment of such distinct character types as a duke and a set of treacherous courtiers with the conventional staging of Italian statecraft. The story of a deposed ruler of Milan struggling to regain power in the main plot of The Tempest would have been more immediate to regular playgoers than the printed sources associated with the depiction of aboriginal peoples in the subplot, such as narratives of voyages to the Americas and Montaigne’s essay on cannibals.38 A precarious Italian dukedom, rather than the Vienna of Measure for Measure, is the most conspicuous setting of political disguise drama. Notwithstanding Marston’s disclaimer of topical references in his prologue to The Malcontent, where the denial of any slander towards distant Genoa suggests he is more interested in domestic concerns, the authors of most plays exploit the precise historical and cultural connotations individual Italian city states had already acquired in England.39 In The Phoenix, for example, Middleton supplements the treatment of the potential dangers of royal succession by setting the action in Ferrara, a state notorious for losing its independence in 1598 after the ruling Este family failed to produce a legitimate heir.40 The shock the downfall of the Este created around Europe was such that the former Italian tutor of James in Scotland, Giacomo Castelvetro, responded by producing a manuscript explaining why the family was unable to resist the Papacy’s takeover of Ferrara.41 The play for reform, as shown by the emergence of similar plays, satire of the court had already become prominent in the waning years of Elizabeth’s reign. 37 Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (8 vols. London: Routledge, 1958), vol. 2, p. 411. 38 For the standard sources of The Tempest, see Bullough, vol. 8, pp. 236-339. It is surprising that even specific studies of the play’s cultural background limit their interest to literary and historical texts, rather than the dramatic works of Shakespeare’s immediate peers. See, for example, Barbara A. Mowat, ‘“Knowing I loved my books”: Reading The Tempest Intertextually’ in ‘The Tempest’ and its Travels, Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman (London: Reaktion, 2000), pp. 27-36. 39 See The Malcontent, ll. 4-12. 40 After the death of Alfonso II in 1597, the Papacy took direct control of Ferrara. See Anne MacNeil, The nature of commitment: Vincenzo Gonzaga’s patronage strategies in the wake of the fall of Ferrara’, Renaissance Studies 16 (2002): 392-403. See also Bonner Mitchell, 1598: A Year of Pageantry in Late Renaissance Ferrara (Binghampton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1990) and Luciano Chiappini, Gli Estensi: mille anni di storia (Ferrara: Corbo, 2001). 41 See Chiara Franceschini, ‘Nostalgia di un esule: note su Giacomo Castelvetro (1546-1616)’ in Questioni di Storia Inglese: tra Cinque e Seicento: cultura, politica e religione, eds Stefano Villani, Stefania Tutino and Chiara Franceschini (Pisa: Scuola


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recounts how the future ruler of Ferrara qualifies himself for power through his effort ‘to look into the heart and bowels of [the] dukedom, and, in disguise, mark all abuses ready for reformation and punishment’.42 Middleton’s portrayal of a vigorous young prince, eager to stem the corruption and uncertainty fostered by his aged predecessor, would have appealed to the hopes of domestic reformers at the start of the reign of James I.43 The disguise plot in The Fawn (1604), Marston’s second use of the form, features a Duke of Ferrara’s surreptitious observation of the court of Urbino, another state noted for the inglorious termination of a ruling family line. The decline of each of the two dukedoms, as Thomas Gainsford noted in The Glory of England, provided a cautionary vision of failed leadership and the loss of sovereignty: ‘you see, how pitifully Ferrara and Urbine have lost their reputation of courtshippe, and offered their coronets on the altar of Clergie man’s usurpation’.44 Marston’s contemptuous depiction of Urbino, the duchy that Baldassare Castiglione presented as a model for courtly conduct and judicious government in the nostalgic Libro del Cortegiano, forms an integral part of his satiric strategy. The surreptitious investigation of Castiglione’s own court, recalling the frequent mockery of the precepts of ‘the absolute Castilio’ in other plays and satires by Marston, exposes the ‘A, B, C, of courtship’ as mere sycophancy.45 The argument of the play becomes how the disguised Duke of Ferrara learns good government from the errors he observes in Urbino: ‘Another’s court shall show me where and how / Vice may be cured’ (2.1.565-6). The historical destiny of the two dukedoms, familiar from the representation of Italian statecraft in period writing, provides an ironic subtext to the play’s optimistic finale. Shakespeare may have normale, 2003), pp. 90-98. The extensive interest about the fate of the Este in Britain is also discussed in June Salmons, ‘An Unpublished Account of the End of Este Rule in Ferrara: Niccolò Contarini’s Istorie Veneziane and Events in Ferrara 1597-1598’ in The Renaissance in Ferrara and its European Horizons, eds J. Salmons and W. Moretti (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1984), pp. 123-4. 42 Thomas Middleton, The Phoenix, The Works of Thomas Middleton, ed. A.H. Bullen (rpt. New York, AMS Press, 1964), 1.1.100-102. 43 There has been extensive critical discussion of the relationship between Middleton’s play and the new monarch: significant accounts include Tricomi, pp. 15-16; N.W. Bawcutt, ‘Middleton’s The Phoenix as a Royal Play’, Notes and Queries n.s. 3, 7 (1956): 287-8; and D.B. Dodson, ‘King James and The Phoenix – Again’, Notes and Queries n.s. 5, 10 (1958): 434-7. 44 Thomas Gainsford, The Glory of England, or A True description of many excellent prerogatives and remarkable blessings, whereby She Triumpheth over all the Nations of the World (London, 1618), p. 227. 45 John Marston, Certaine Satyres in The Poems of John Marston, ed. Arnold Davenport, (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 1961), line 27, and The Fawn, ed. Gerald A. Smith (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), 4.1.167. For Marston’s representations of Castiglione, see Chapter 3, pp. 101-5. The phrase ‘A B C of courtship’ recurs in the second act of Philip Massinger, Great Duke of Florence (London, 1636), as the comic servant Calandrino consults his ‘notes’.


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had such examples in mind when he came to write The Tempest, an island drama where the primary motivations of the main characters regard the ill-fated states of Milan and Naples. He thinks me now incapable At the start of The Tempest, consistent with the precedent for the storm imagery of the opening scene in the Principe, Italian political crisis overshadows romance. What comes to the fore in Prospero’s lengthy account of his exile to the island is his nostalgia for the time when he ‘was the Duke of Milan and / A prince of power’.46 The enthusiasm with which he greets the ‘most auspicious star’ and ‘bountiful Fortune’ of the arrival of his enemies makes manifest the longing of the Italian prince to redeem his past errors (1.2.182, 178). Prospero admits that the coup d’état was a consequence of his own failings as a leader, even though he blames Antonio for betraying his trust. By delegating the responsibilities of government, to indulge in the personal pleasures of scholarship, he made it easy for Antonio to depose him in league with the King of Naples: I, thus neglecting worldly ends, all dedicated To closeness and the bettering of my mind ... in my false brother Awak’d an evil nature, and my trust, Like a good parent, did beget of him A falsehood in its contrary, as great As my trust was, which had indeed no limit, A confidence sans bound. He being thus lorded, Not only with what my revenue yielded, But what my power might exact … – he did believe He was indeed the Duke. (1.2.89-103)

Despite his protests to Miranda that his ‘library / Was dukedom enough’, he is keen to have another opportunity to prove his ability to rule the state (1.2.109-10). The ease of his conquest of the island, with the enslavement of Caliban in the process, underlines Prospero has learned ruthless action. Aware of the advantages to be gained from the ‘accident most strange’ that has brought the King of Naples and the usurping Duke of Milan close by, he is quick to cause the storm that brings them under his control (1.2.178). In The Tempest, every claim to sovereignty is always under threat. Amidst his effort to regain power in Milan, Prospero has to worry about challenges to his control over the desert isle. Prospero betrays his fears of a second usurpation when he accuses the shipwrecked Ferdinand of conspiring to seize power: William Shakespeare, The Tempest, 1.2.53-4.

46


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Thou ... hast put thyself Upon this island as a spy, to win it From me, the lord on’t. (1.2.454-7)

For Caliban, enslaved by the banished ruler, Prospero’s lordship is itself illegitimate: ‘This island’s mine by Sycorax my mother, / Which thou tak’st from me’ (1.2.331-2). To maintain his authority, Prospero compels Caliban’s obedience with threats of physical punishment: ‘If thou neglect’st or do unwillingly / What I command, I’ll rack thee with old cramps’ (1.2.369-70). For although Murray Levith has contended that political conflict is ‘held in check in Shakespeare’s play’, there is always the potential for the outbreak of violence.47 Caliban seeks to convince two other castaways, Stephano and Trinculo, to assassinate the ‘tyrant, / ... that by his cunning hath / Cheated me of the island’ (3.2.42-4). The plot to ‘batter his skull or paunch him with a stake’ does not succeed but it is not for want of trying (3.2.90). The transitory menace posed by the conspiracy of Caliban, undermined by the ineptitude of the two drunkards, is a comic parallel of the vicious power politics of the play’s Italian statesmen. Indeed, Prospero and Miranda only escaped death after the coup in Milan because of ‘Providence divine’, or, more specifically, Gonzalo’s failure to follow orders (1.2.159). The standing of the King of Naples is just as tenuous as that of Prospero. Bereft of his son, daughter, and state apparatus, a shipwrecked Alonso begins to look like a good candidate for a coup himself. Even as Gonzalo daydreams about an ideal commonwealth with ‘No sovereignty’, Prospero’s deceitful brother is at work plotting a second fraternal betrayal (1.2.156). Emboldened by the ease of his takeover in Milan, Antonio encourages Sebastiano to overthrow the King. He argues that sovereignty is contingent: ‘There be that can rule Naples / As well as he that sleeps’ (2.1.262-3). With his rejection of the claims of conscience, a concept that had specific associations with the political discourses of both James I and Machiavelli, the usurping duke embodies all the period stereotypes of the amoral politician:48 Twenty consciences, That stand ’twixt me and Milan, candied be they, And melt ere they molest! (2.1.279-80)

The survival of Alonso, prey to such unprincipled ambition, comes about only because of the surveillance of Ariel, acting on behalf of Prospero. Worried that the death of the King might affect the plans to regain his title, ‘For else his project dies’, the spirit causes Gonzalo to wake up and disrupt the assassination (2.1.299).

47 Murray Levith, Shakespeare’s Italian Settings and Plays (London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 81. 48 See the discussion of conscience, pp. 93-5.

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The experience of Prospero, as a deposed ruler of Milan, is consistent with the accounts of the chaotic events of the Quattrocento and Cinquecento that circulated in early modern England. The extent to which Italian politics dominate the main plot has led some recent critics to express reservations about New World centred readings of The Tempest.49 It is significant that the name of Shakespeare’s exiled duke recalls the description of the ‘overthrow’ of Prospero Adorno, Doge of Genoa for a brief period around 1460, in William Thomas’s Historie of Italie.50 Thomas foregrounds the instability of Genoese politics, where after a short interval ‘the Fregosi having the better hande, expulsed Adorno, & made one of theyr owne name Duke’, as part of the book’s cautionary narrative of the ‘eternall slaunder and shame’ deriving from ‘ill govertnaunce’.51 The fate of Genoa was symptomatic of the predicament of individual Italian states at the time: weak leaders were unable to counter regular crises produced by events such as the local power struggles between the Fregoso and Adorno merchant clans, the intervention by the neighbouring state of Milan in 1463, and French and Spanish attacks during the national conflict after 1494.52 Another potential source for the power politics of The Tempest is Geoffrey Fenton’s 1579 translation of The Historie of Gucciardin. The opening section of the history foregrounds a pertinent Shakespearean character name in its condemnation of the role that the ‘ambitious thoughts’ of ‘Ferdinand of Aragon King of Naples’ played in precipitating the ruinous Wars of Italy.53 Ferdinand’s

49 See Nigel Smith, ‘The Italian Job: Magic and Machiavelli in The Tempest’ in Linda Cookson and Bryan Loughrey (eds), Critical Essays on The Tempest (Harlow: Longman, 1988), pp. 90-100, David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare After Theory (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 183-97, Robin Kirkpatrick, ‘The Italy of The Tempest’ in ‘The Tempest’ and its Travels, pp. 78-96; and Robin Headlam-Wells, ‘Blessing Europe: Virgil, Ovid and Seneca in The Tempest’ in Shakespeare and Intertextuality, ed. Michele Marrapodi (Rome: Bulzoni, 2000), pp. 69-84. See also David Norbrook, ‘“What cares these roarers for the name of king”: Language and Utopia in The Tempest’ in The Politics of Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and After, eds Gordon McMullan and Jonathan Hope (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 21-51. 50 William Thomas, The Historie of Italie (1549, rpt. Amsterdam, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1977), pp. 181. For the correspondence of the character names to period historical accounts see Bullough, vol. 8, pp. 249-50. The similarities are also noted in Nigel Smith, ‘The Italian Job’, pp. 90-92, 99. 51 Thomas, p. 181, A2r. Thomas uses the term ‘Duke’ for the rulers of the city. 52 See Stephen A. Epstein, Genoa and the Genoese, 958-1528 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), pp. 286-8. 53 Francesco Guicciardini, The Historie of Guicciardin, Conteyning the Warres of Italie and Other Partes, trans. Geoffrey Fenton (London, 1579), p.2. The importance of Naples in Machiavelli’s and Guicciardini’s accounts of the wars of Italy is discussed in Carlo De Frede, La crisi del Regno di Napoli nella riflessione politica di Machiavelli e Guicciardini (Naples: Liguori, 2006).


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military preparations aroused the suspicions of Ludovico Sforza, already in control of the Duchy of Milan: Lodowicke Sforce, uncle and tutor to John Galeas Duke of Myllan, fearing least Ferdinand King of Naples would make warre upon him, breaketh of from the league that had been renewed betweene the sayd Ferdinand, John Galeas, and the Commonwealth of Florence, against the Venetians: he procureth the French King Charles the viii, to passe into Italy to conquer the kingdom of Naples.54

When he became ruler himself in 1494, after the death of the ‘incapable’ Giangaleazzo who had retained ‘onely the name of Duke’, the strategic errors of Ludovico’s foreign policy ensured that the city became a pawn in the contest between the French and Spanish for control of Northern Italy.55 Charles VIII’s forces eliminated the threat posed by Naples, but Milan would lose its independence after 1499. One of the few figures of the time whose conduct earns the praise of Guicciardini is Prospero Colonna, a condottiero who achieved ‘more with industrie, with stratageme, and with temporising, then with the force or fortune of armes’.56 Guicciardini also extols ‘el signor Prospero’ in the Ricordi, highlighting his successful defence of Milan from the French at the Battle of Bicocca in 1522.57 Yet although Prospero Colonna achieved notable personal success in battle for the city, preserving Ludovico’s son Francesco II as Duke, Milan had become a puppet state of the Habsburgs.58 By the end of the play, Shakespeare’s Prospero has acquired the tactical cunning of a leader like Colonna but the initial circumstances of his overthrow by a close family member, already running the dukedom on his behalf, are closer to the historical position of Giangaleazzo Sforza. Prospero’s failure to undertake the responsibilities of government, as he admits to Miranda, encouraged Antonio’s plot to seize power in Milan: ‘He thinks me now incapable’ (1.2.111).

54 The Historie of Guicciardin, p. 1. The sentence is reproduced with minor changes in A briefe collection or epitomie of all the notable and material things contained in the hystorie of Guicciardine being verie necessarie for Parliament, councell, treatises, and negotiations (London, 1591), p. 1. 55 The Historie of Guicciardin, p. 2. Robert Gomersall drew on Fenton’s translation for The Tragedy of Lodovick Sforza, Duke of Milan (1628). See Jeanette Fellheimer, ‘The “Subtlety” of the Italians’, English Miscellany 12 (1961): 26-8. 56 The Historie of Guicciardin, p. 703. The discussion of Ferdinand of Naples and Prospero Colonna in Remigio Nannini’s Civill Considerations upon Many and Sundrie Histories may also be relevant to the play. See William W.E. Slights, ‘A Source for The Tempest and a Context for the Discorsi’, Shakespeare Quarterly 36 (1985): 68-70. 57 Francesco Guicciardini, Ricordi, Mario Furbini and Ettore Barelli (eds), (Milan: Rizzoli, 1995), p. 113. 58 See Domenico Sella, Lo stato di Milano in età spagnola (Turin: UTET, 1987).


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The incapable ruler, a figure highlighted at the start of The Tempest and Fenton’s translation of The Historie of Gucciardin, was nothing new for students of early modern Italian history. In spite of all the preoccupations about Englishmen like Sir Politic Would-be, eager to emulate the sprezzatura of Castiglione and the subtle schemes of Machiavelli, most early modern political historians depict specific Italian princes as examples of how not to govern a state. The loss of sovereignty, as the city states of the peninsula were divided among French, Spanish, and Papal forces in the aftermath of the invasion of Italy by Charles VIII of France in 1494, inspires a palpable sense of national humiliation in the works of Guicciardini, Machiavelli, and Castiglione.59 For domestic readers, responding to the agenda set by these influential authors, the plight of Italy was a warning of the ‘mutation, disorder, and utter ruine’ provoked by inadequate leadership.60 On the heels of self-appointed Tudor experts on Italian culture like William Thomas, there was a proliferation of translations and studies of Italian history by those eager for preferment under the Stuarts. The case of Sir Robert Dallington, who was one of the few courtiers to serve in the households of both Prince Henry and Prince Charles, marks the tangible benefits of being an expert on Italian affairs in Jacobean England.61 Dallington wrote two texts on judicious government, each of which used Italian precedents as negative examples. At the opening of the published version of his Aphorismes Civill and Militarie, dedicated to Charles after the demise of Henry, he cites Francesco Guicciardini’s history of Florence as a warning for his royal readers: About the year 1490, Italy the most glorious and goodliest countrie of Europe, stood in fairer termes of happiness and prosperitie, then ever it had done since the first declination of the Romane Empire: she was not subject to any command, but of naturall Italians ... . All of which faire flowers of peace were soddainly blasted: most of the governments changed: the people wasted: the wealth exhausted: the cities demolished: Arts and Armes decayed: and all by the heart burning and jealousie of her own Princes, which set that noble countrie in combustion; and being once on fire, ministred so much fuell of herselfe, as in fortie years space it could not be quenched.62

Here, with his contemptuous account of the factionalism and blind self-interest of Italian princes, Dallington draws on the nostalgia for the past and the disgust 59

See Chapter 3, pp. 97-100. Dedication to T[homas] B[edingfield]’s translation of N. Machiavelli, The Florentine History (1595), A2r. 61 See Karl Josef Holtgen, ‘Sir Robert Dallington (1561-1637): Author, Traveler, and Pioneer of Taste’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 47 (1984): 147-77. See also Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance 1545-1625 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), pp. 34-45. 62 Sir Robert Dallington, Aphorismes Civill and Militarie (London, 1613) B1r-v. Compare with The Historie of Guicciardin, pp. 1-2. 60


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for the present shame of Italy that characterizes Cinquecento political theory. The importance of Guicciardini and Machiavelli as reference points for the discussion of government does not translate into any respect for the nation itself. In his Survey of the Great Dukes State of Tuscany, as he denies that he acquired any useful ‘matter of pollicy, or history or Art’ during his time in Florence, Dallington endorses the position of Gentillet’s Contre-Machiavel: I am of that French-mans minde, that could not finde where that great wit of theirs lay, whatsoever either by Macciavel his report in his historie, or in his person may to the contrary be alleadged ... I dare say that if Macciavel were again living, and should see them, that were wont to rule a state, now not [fit] to bring a few Lettice from their Villa ... he would unsay that which hee had formerly said, and sweare that they had no witte.63

Dallington casts the state’s loss of its tributary cities and, finally, its very independence as an instructive lesson in political incompetence. The vehemence of the attack was such that the Duke of Florence protested to the English authorities about the book.64 As part of the relentless production and circulation of texts dealing with Italian crisis, a theme already associated with the representation of the country’s leaders in the London theatre, the examples of Machiavelli, Dallington, Thomas, and Guicciardini suggest the diverse intertextual associations that the long monologue recounting Prospero’s exile from his dukedom would have had for audiences in 1611. My dukedom The explicit focus on power and authority in the first act, introducing the main plot’s rehearsal of themes drawn from the circulation of Italian political theory in early modern England, is not at issue in the standard approaches to the play. In sentimental readings, where critics have always been tempted to represent the work as Shakespeare’s valediction to his own art, the pivotal moment of The Tempest comes in the final scene when Prospero renounces his magic, resolving to break his staff and drown his book.65 The emotional appeal of the gesture derives from the aging magician’s acceptance of his mortality, underlined by the implicit 63 Sir Robert Dallington, A Survey of the Great Dukes State of Tuscany, (London, 1605), pp. 61, 61-2. For the influence of Gentillet on English depictions of Machiavelli, see pp. 84-6. 64 See Anna Maria Crinò, Fatti e figure del Seicento anglo-toscano (Florence: Olschki, 1957), pp. 41-8. 65 For a critique of sentimental interpretations of the play, see Harry Berger Jr., ‘Miraculous Harp: A Reading of Shakespeare’s Tempest’, Shakespeare Studies 5 (1969): 255-83.


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tension between the pastoral world of the island, governed by his ‘potent art’, and the quotidian life of Milan, where ‘every third thought shall be [his] grave’ (5.1.50, 312). Contemporary critics have been more concerned with the fate of Caliban in the subplot, as Prospero’s grudging acknowledgement of his ‘thing of darkness’ embodies the master-slave dialectic of nascent colonialism.66 In the context of European expansionism, rather than the wonder of his supernatural art, Prospero’s systematic subjugation of Caliban becomes a function of his assertion of dominance over ‘the mutinous winds’ and ‘dread rattling thunder’ of the inhospitable island (5.1.42, 44). The magician wants power over the native people and resources of the New World. However, the play does not finish with Prospero’s renunciation of magic or the exit of Caliban. Neither post-colonial nor sentimental readings devote much attention to the remaining part of the final scene, staging the resolution of the main plot. On the rare occasions when critics do discuss the actual conclusion, the tendency is to represent its predictable union of the charming young lovers as an anticlimax or a distraction from more compelling issues the play evokes. In claiming that The Tempest is about ‘the triumph of art’, Northrop Frye dismisses the outcome of the main plot as ‘the conventionally comic aspect of the play’, where ‘Prospero puts up a token opposition to this marriage, apparently because it is customary for fathers to do so’.67 From the perspective of the subplot’s account of native resistance, where Prospero risks becoming the oppressor rather than the hero, the resort to a ‘safely comic mode’ at the end of the play betrays ‘a fundamental disquiet concerning its own functions within the projects of colonialist discourse’.68 Yet what is missing in these prevailing critical approaches is an acknowledgment of how the conclusion fulfils the usurped duke’s own political ambitions in Italy. Through his choice of future son-in-law, creating a bond with the ruling family of Naples, Prospero ensures the successful restoration of his dukedom. The closing moments resolve the problem of his overthrow and exile, the grievances highlighted at length in Prospero’s narrative to Miranda in the first act. Prospero anticipates his return to Milan in triumph, eager to exchange the privations of the ‘bare island’ for the throne of the great city (Epilogue, 8). Even though the attempt of an Italian duke to regain sovereignty became a familiar plot structure in the wake of the success of The Malcontent, most readings of the play The sheer number of articles and books rereading The Tempest in light of New World discourses is intimidating for the footnote compiler with a word limit to respect. The most influential discussion remains Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Learning to Curse: Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth Century’, in First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old, ed. Fredi Chiapelli (2 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), vol. 2, pp. 561-80. 67 Northrop Frye, ‘Shakespeare’s The Tempest’, Northrop Frye Newsletter 2 (1990), pp. 26, 25. 68 Francis Barker and Peter Hulme, ‘“Nymphs and Reapers Heavily Vanish”: The Discursive Con-texts of The Tempest’ in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 201. 66


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continue to address non-theatrical precedents that do not account for the stated dramatic motivation of Prospero himself: the desire to regain the title of Duke of Milan. What is at stake in The Tempest is the question of who is to govern an Italian city-state. Prospero’s Epilogue defines the object of the drama exclusively in terms of his own return to power in Milan: Let me not, Since I have my dukedom got, And pardon’d the deceiver, dwell In this bare island. (5-8)

The union of Miranda and Ferdinand does not merit any attention in the Epilogue, suggesting that the rehearsal of New Comedy is not the main plot’s primary concern. From the opening line of the final scene, revealing that ‘Now does my project gather to a head’, Prospero emphasizes that the events which follow are the culmination of a coherent strategy designed to recover his title (5.1.1). Throughout the scene, employing the term introduced in his long monologue in the first act, he obsessively refers to ‘My dukedom’.69 In asserting his claims, there is no indication that Prospero’s ambitions extend beyond Milan. He expresses no desire to maintain his domination of the remote island. Even though he may well miss sparring with Caliban, portraying the departure for Italy as a prelude to death, Prospero is impatient to end his exile and get back to his place as ruler of the great city. As he confronts his enemies in the magic circle, Prospero takes care to cast himself in the role of an Italian statesman: ‘I will discase me, and myself present / As I was sometime Milan’ (5.1.85-6). Divested of his magician’s robes, he forces the terrified Alonso to respond to his political grievances: ‘Behold, sir King / The wronged Duke of Milan, Prospero’ (5.1.107-8). The emphasis Shakespeare places on Prospero’s change of costume, with the shift from the garments of a magician to those of a duke, reflects the established conventions of the disguised ruler play. The pivotal moment in the genre is when the duke reasserts his public persona, reclaiming his rightful position and using the information he has furtively collected to punish those who have offended against him. Indeed, the scene takes place twice in Marston’s The Malcontent, where Altofront initially discloses his identity to the usurping duke, to ensure his return to power in Genoa, and then drops his pose as Malevole in front of the corrupt court as a whole, chastising its vices.70 In Measure for Measure, playing with the convention, the duke’s disguise comes off prematurely, as Lucio unwittingly grabs at the false friar’s hood. Shakespeare’s Vincentio is already prepared to return to power, however, and forces the offenders into unwanted marriages that demonstrate his power to rule and dispose of his subjects. The revelation scenes in these plays 69

See 5.1.133, 168, 172. Compare with 1.1.110, 115, 126, 168. See The Malcontent, 4.5.125-46 and 5.6.100-115.

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are particularly dramatic, involving the duke’s self-conscious performance of his public role at a point of maximum tension. The metatheatricality of the disguised ruler plot structure, where the leader has to learn how to command the stage before he can govern the state, may explain why so many critics have been ready to envisage Prospero as a dramatist or a director. In assessing Prospero’s ability to control events in the main plot, Northrop Frye noted that he ‘seems an admirable ruler [of the island]. Yet he appears to have been a remarkably incompetent Duke of Milan’.71 The movement from naiveté to astuteness is the main narrative line of a disguised duke play. John Day’s parody of the form in Humour Out of Breath underscores the learning process demanded by Italian power politics, where the ability to use covert surveillance becomes synonymous with survival. To the shock and amusement of the more theatrically aware characters, the son of the usurped Duke of Mantua vows to renew his family’s fortunes by overt revenge: ’twere base to go disguised; No my revenge shall wear an open brow; I will not play the coward, kill him first And send my challenge after; I’ll make known My name and cause of coming ... Your low comedy Craves but few actors.72

Needless to say, this is not an effective strategy. The usurping duke secretly observes all of the preparations. In failing to appreciate the connection between ‘policy and knavery’, underscored by the successful intriguer’s own concealment, the young heir is ‘too honest’ for the task at hand (2.1). The comic effect of Humour Out of Breath presupposes a familiarity with disguised duke plot conventions and their underlying political messages. Self-reflexive references to acting and ‘low comedy’ in the dialogue underscore the commentary on established stage practices. Here, instead of a means to reform the state and acquire self-knowledge, disguise becomes a symptom of the irredeemably corrupt world of the court. Confident in his superior understanding of the realities of power, the disguised ruler of Venice does not even bother to kill such a naïve figure: ‘A secret friend’s worse than an open foe’ (2.1). It is inevitable that the prince becomes more cynical as the play progresses, having learned that subterfuge is the only viable way to gain power in Italy. The heir confirms the restoration of his family’s power through an improbable marriage with Florimell, the bawdy daughter of the usurper. Such a 71

Northrop Frye, Introduction to the Pelican Shakespeare edition of the play (New York, Viking, 1969), p. 1370. 72 John Day, Humour Out of Breath, ed. Arthur Symons, Nero and Other Plays (London, 1888), 1.2. This Victorian edition does not provide line numbers. All subsequent citations appear in the text.


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sexually charged female character, as Mary Bly has argued, ‘is manifestly lewd and unmarriageable … within the context of early modern drama’.73 By mocking any form of idealism, as political expediency triumphs over romance, Humour Out of Breath underlines how conventional Shakespeare’s depiction of a deposed Italian ruler really is. After the way in which he lost power through the treachery of his own brother, Prospero has no time for romanticism or complacency. In exploiting the practical applications of the ‘secret studies’ that distracted him in the past, a magic that now permits him to force his enemies onto the island, Prospero makes it clear that the dukedom has to be seized through his own cunning and ability to manipulate the fears of the shipwrecked Italian ruling class (1.2.77). Failure means having to remain within the confines of the island. The dramatic revelation he stages once all his enemies are ‘at [his] mercy’, humbled by Ariel’s supernatural intimidation, gives him the strength to assert his political demands (4.1.263). It is the ‘torment, trouble, wonder, and amazement’ of the coup de théâtre he organizes, rather than any principle of legitimacy, that drives the King of Naples to surrender authority: ‘Thy Dukedom I resign, and do entreat / Thou pardon me my wrongs’ (5.1.104, 118-19). Here, consistent with the play’s focus on insubordination and betrayal, the legitimate ruler of Milan does not rely on a mere promise to ensure the restitution of his dukedom. Instead, taking advantage of the omnipresent vigilance of Ariel, Prospero uses his knowledge about Sebastiano and Antonio’s treasonous plot against the King to extort their acceptance of his claim: But you, my brace of lords, were I so minded, I here could pluck his Highness’ frown upon you And justify you traitors. At this time I will tell no tales. (5.1.126-9)

Information is everything in The Tempest. Despite their place at the top of society, leaders like Alonso and Prospero have been ignorant of the threats posed by those closest to them. The importance that espionage acquires in the play is characteristic of political disguise drama. At the conclusion, as the characters come to recognize how the restored Duke of Milan has monitored them, Shakespeare uses the term ‘true spies’ to describe the act of vision (5.1.259). While Caliban may learn to curse, disguised rulers learn how to spy. Prospero distinguishes himself from earlier stage dukes only because his magical powers allow him to outsource the act of surveillance. By controlling the action on the island, through Ariel’s ‘observation strange’, Prospero gathers the intelligence he needs to manoeuvre against his enemies without getting his own hands dirty (3.3.87). The marriage of his daughter to the son of the King of Naples provides added security to his new hold on power. For although Ferdinand and Miranda may view 73 Mary Bly, ‘Licence Taken: Borrowed Prurience and the First Whitefriars Company’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 10 (1998): 155.


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their love story in conventional romantic terms, overlooking how their courtship was stage-managed by the would-be duke, their union is an essential part of Prospero’s project to regain his title. The dynastic alliance of the heirs to the titles of Naples and Milan, as Gonzalo’s exegesis shows, is politics as usual in early modern Italy: Was Milan thrust from Milan, that his issue Should become kings of Naples? O, rejoice ... in one voyage Did Claribel her husband find at Tunis, And Ferdinand, her brother, found a wife Where he himself was lost; Prospero, his dukedom In a poor isle, and all of us, ourselves. (5.1.206-12)

As with the state marriage of Claribel to the King of Tunis, the wedding ceremony serves a political function by creating a tie between the ruling families of two states to consolidate their individual positions.74 The care that Prospero takes in setting the scene for the revelation of the young couple playing at chess, where the delay prompts Alonso to despair for the ‘Irreparable’ loss of his son, is intentional (5.1.140). Indeed, as he strings out the agony with his equivocal claim that both of them have lost a child, there is an element of sadism in Prospero’s manipulation of the king. Before he finally discloses the information, Prospero emphasizes that the liberation of Ferdinand is recompense for his reinstatement as Duke of Milan: My dukedom since you have given me again, I will requite you with as good a thing, At least bring forth a wonder, to content ye As much as me my dukedom. (5.1.168-71)

Prospero’s compulsive repetition of ‘my dukedom’ casts doubt on the sincerity of his efforts to placate Alonso at the end of the final scene. In spite of his appeals to their shared interest in ‘the nuptial / Of these our dear-belov’d’, representing it as a final joy before he goes to his grave and the title passes to their joint heirs, it is hard to believe he will be ready to relinquish his authority anytime soon (5.1.308-9). The newly restored Duke has nothing to say about the nuptials in the Epilogue. Intertexts and Ideologies The more than legitimate paranoia of Italian stage dukes like Prospero, constantly menaced by treason, has little to do with the portrayal of the Duke of Vienna 74 The relationship of the alliance of Miranda and Ferdinand to dynastic marriages is addressed in Kastan, pp. 183-97 and Robin Headlam-Wells, ‘Blessing Europe’, pp. 69-84.


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in Measure for Measure. What stands out immediately in Shakespeare’s earlier play is the security of the position of Vincentio. Confident in his ability to retain sovereignty, he chooses of his own accord to avoid the popular view for a brief period. By adopting the costume of a friar, the ruler will be able to test the allegiance of the court: ‘hence shall we see / If power change purpose: what our seemers be’ (1.3.53-4). The Duke’s public absence creates the potential for state violence and sexual exploitation, but the consequences of misrule threaten only the subjects of Vienna. Unlike Antonio in The Tempest, a ducal deputy whose will to power is not satiated even by the throne of Milan, Angelo’s betrayal of the ruler’s trust has little to do with personal ambition. In spite of his eagerness to abuse his temporary standing through sexual blackmail, once given ‘Mortality and mercy in Vienna’, the bureaucrat does not even conceive of seizing permanent authority (1.1.44). Even though power may be the greatest aphrodisiac, as the play itself suggests, Angelo makes no attempt to prolong his hold upon it. Isabella’s principled rejection of the substitute, ‘Dressed in a little brief authority’, does not offer a precedent for resistance to the legitimate ruler (2.2.120). Vincentio disposes of the bodies of his subjects as he sees fit. Barnadine’s comic refusal to die is an exception that proves the rule. After the Duke’s proposal of marriage at the conclusion, a significant departure from the customary resolution of the woman’s plight, the conspicuous silence of Isabella exposes the contradictions between the concern with the exercise of power in the disguised duke plot, the challenge to oppressive authority in the ransom story, and the celebration of individual choice in standard New Comedy. In considering the intertexts of Measure for Measure, the radical expansion of the role of the Duke is the most striking innovation that the dramatist makes in his appropriation of the traditional monstrous ransom story. It has become a critical convention to treat the fifth story of the eighth day of Giraldi Cinthio’s Hecatommithi as the main inspiration for Shakespeare’s play. Yet there are references to a corrupt magistrate exploiting the plight of the attractive kinswoman of a condemned prisoner in texts as varied as a pamphlet by Martin Luther, a narrative by a Hungarian student, a Latin tragedy by a French author, and the subsequent prose and theatrical versions in English by George Whetstone.75 Indeed, Cinthio was the first to adapt his own prose narrative for the theatre in Epitia, a work printed posthumously in the 1583 collection of his tragedies edited by his son Celso. These versions represent the duke, or emperor, as an a posterori judge, punishing his official after the fact for the lewd treatment of the condemned criminal’s sister or wife. By placing his Duke in the disguise of a friar, intimately involved in the fate of Isabella, Shakespeare’s dramatic framework gives the head of state an active role in the outcome of the action. Rather than responding to events, the Duke of Vienna surreptitiously manipulates them, becoming the 75 For accounts of the intertextual background of the ransom story and its use by Shakespeare, see Bullough, vol. 2., pp. 399 and ff., and Kenneth Muir, The Sources of Shakespeare’s Plays (London: Methuen, 1977), p. 174.

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most prominent character in terms of the number of lines allocated to him by the dramatist. For all its reputation as a problem play, as Franco Moretti has argued, Measure for Measure aspires to be the ‘“de-problematising” play par excellence ... a comedy written by the Duke’.76 With Shakespeare’s use of the disguised ruler plot structure, the personal crisis of the young woman is no longer the central focus of the ransom narrative. The ruler’s control of the stage, as he imposes his version of the customary happy endings of New Comedy, ensures that the moral integrity of his government and the physical integrity of Claudio and Isabella are never really at stake, in contrast to the betrayed promises, executed brothers, and violated sisters of the sources. The play becomes about the tension between the public performances of Vincentio, observed by ‘millions of false eyes’, and the maintenance of power by covert direction, exposing the corruption of Angelo and the treasonous slanders of Lucio (4.1.58). The Duke continually defines his official role in theatrical terms: I love the people, But do not like to stage me to their eyes; Though it do well, I do not relish well Their loud applause. (1.1.68-71)

Of course, notwithstanding his reluctance to play a part himself, he does relish a behind the scenes role in determining the outcome of the performance. Through his surveillance, invading every private space, the Duke of Vienna casts his subjects as the main actors.77 He gleefully recounts how his ‘craft against vice’ will force an unwitting Angelo to ‘perform an old contracting’ via the bed-trick (3.1.531, 536). Yet, despite his distrust of ‘loud applause’, the entire purpose of the disguised ruler play is to represent the confidential practices of great leaders for a public audience. The demystification of statecraft, the Viennese ruler’s metatheatrical imagery underlines, is more subversive than the sexual offences and slander that the ruler uncovers himself. Machiavelli’s proponents argued that the importance of the Principe came from its representation of governance for a mass readership, denying ruthless princes the secrecy to practise their tyranny.78 Vincentio finds himself exposed to the attention of playgoers throughout the drama, even as

76 Franco Moretti, Signs taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms (London: Verso, 1983), pp. 57-8. 77 Jonathan Goldberg notes the Duke’s violation of religious privacy when he acts as a confessor to Mariana. See James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and their Contemporaries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), p. 233 note. See also Jonathan Dollimore, ‘Transgression and Surveillance in Measure for Measure’, in Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (eds), Political Shakespeares (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), pp. 72-87. 78 See pp. 87-9.


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Shakespeare establishes his reputation in the city as ‘the fantastical Duke of dark corners’ (4.3.154-5). The critical tradition of defining Measure for Measure as a problem play, what we might prefer to call complexity today, has much to do with the variety of sources it attempts to reconcile. The intertextual density of Shakespeare’s plot construction, encompassing material from diverse cultural positions, complicates the transmission of individual forms. The central European setting is an evident departure from conventional representations of disguised rulers, although Shakespeare does adopt the Italianate character names beloved of the Jacobean theatre. For Gary Taylor, who has hypothesized a more typical version based in Ferrara, the references to Vienna suggest a posthumous adaptation by Middleton.79 However, the anomalous location serves to highlight the distance separating the providential vision of the ransom story from the standard representations of Italian crisis. In the final scene, a chastened Angelo makes manifest the outcome’s association with theories of the ruler as a proxy for God: O my dread lord, I should be guiltier than my guiltiness To think I can be undiscernable, When I perceive your grace, like pow’r divine, Hath looked upon my passes. (5.1.367-71)

The disguised ruler’s surveillance of his officials promises to be a logical development of the role of the monarch in the ransom story as the ultimate guarantor of divine justice, permitting the prevention of abuses before they occur.80 However, the drawback of the Viennese setting is that it fails to suppress the political implications of previous disguised duke plays altogether. The immediate English source for the sexual blackmail plot, George Whetstone’s Promos and Cassandra (1578), takes place ‘In the Cyttie of Julio (sometimes under the dominion of Corvinus Kinge of Hungarie, and Boemia)’.81 Lucio’s gossip at the beginning of Measure for Measure emphasizes the relationship between Vienna and Hungary: ‘If the Duke with the other dukes come not to composition with the King of Hungary, why then all the dukes fall upon the king’ (1.2.1-3).82 Placed at the start of the second scene of 79 Taylor argues that the change in location suggests an allusion to Ferdinand II’s persecution of Protestants in 1620. See Gary Taylor, ‘Shakespeare’s Mediterranean Measure for Measure’ in Shakespeare and the Mediterranean, eds Tom Clayton, Susan Brock and Vicente Forés (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), pp. 243-69. 80 See Richard Proudfoot, ‘“It is an accident that heaven provides”: Shakespeare’s Providence in Measure for Measure’, in Italy and the English Renaissance, eds Sergio Rossi and Dianella Savoia (Milan: Unicopoli, 1989), pp. 155-66. 81 George Whetstone, Promos and Cassandra in Bullough, vol. 2, p. 444. 82 The provenance of the scene has been disputed. See John Jowett and Gary Taylor, ‘With New Additions: Theatrical Interpolation in Measure for Measure’, in Shakespeare

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the play, consistent with Lucio’s penchant for voicing inconvenient opinions, the reference to the sovereignty of the King of Hungary introduces a discussion raising the prospect of national civil war. The gentleman soldiers who chat with Lucio are keen to take advantage of such a potentially lucrative crisis: ‘Heaven grant us its peace, but not the King of Hungary’s!’ (1.2.4-5). What becomes apparent here, even as Shakespeare’s rhetorical strategies emphasize the Duke of Vienna’s paternal control of his state, are the traces of the political instability typical of Italianate drama: the King of Hungary is a prospective victim of an aristocratic coup attempt. With the insinuation that Vincentio would be disposed to collude in the overthrow of a legitimate ruler, whether or not the audience is willing to give credence to the flippant courtier, Lucio raises the possibility for more cynical interpretations of statecraft in the play.83 While contemporary intertextual scholars are inclined to sneer at Victorian ‘source hunters’, there remains the tendency to see Shakespeare’s sources as just a big commonplace book, full of neat ideas that the bard used and superseded in the course of writing his masterpieces. Yet one of the collateral effects of intertextuality, where every direct and indirect source reflects a specific ideological agenda, is the potential for conflicting messages. By forcing the ransom story into the disguised ruler frame, Shakespeare precludes any consistent characterization of the Duke of Vienna. The tensions inherent in the presentation of Vincentio embody the competing world views associated with early modern Italy: the CounterReformation’s conflation of spiritual and secular authority and the rousing call of political theorists like Machiavelli and Guicciardini to face up to the realities of power. Apart from a challenging moral predicament, Cinthio provided Measure for Measure with a model for representing the virtuous prince defined by post-Tridentine theology. The monarchs in the Hecatommithi and Epitia are remote figures, seen only in their benevolent public personas. The pastoral role of the sovereign was the subject of official decrees of the Council of Trent and the arguments of antiMachiavellian polemicists like Giovanni Botero, even though such efforts ensured that statecraft remained a subject of open debate.84 The willingness of the Emperor Reshaped 1606-1623, eds Taylor and Jowett (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), pp. 151-5. 83 The following discussion of Shakespeare and Cinthio was first presented at the Fourth International Palermo Conference – Shakespeare and Renaissance Literary Theories: Anglo-Italian Transactions. University of Palermo, June, 2006. I thank the participants for their stimulating discussion of the ideas raised here. 84 The ideological strategy made obedience to secular authorities a religious duty. See Wolfgang Reinhard, ‘Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and the Early Modern State: A Reassessment’, Catholic Historical Review 75 (1989): 383-405. For Catholic efforts to refute Machiavelli’s vision of power, see Robert Bireley, The Counter-Reformation Prince: Anti-Machiavellianism or Catholic Statecraft in Early Modern Europe (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). The active persecution of slander by the Duke of Vienna within the disguise plot may recall the manner in which the hierarchy of the Roman Church encouraged Catholic rulers to enforce religious orthodoxy via the Inquisition and the Index of forbidden books, but that was realpolitik, not theology.


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in Epitia to punish the offending magistrate, answering the pleas of the female victim, validates his fame as God’s representative on earth: Voi trouerete in lui quel, c’hauer deue Ogni Signor, c’habbia gouerno in terra, Somma giustitia à gran pieta congiunta.85

The religious implications of sovereignty motivate the unique choice of disguise that Shakespeare assigns his ruler. Insofar as the dukes in other disguise plays have to surrender all social standing, Vincentio stands out for the manner in which he maintains his dignity ‘Like a true friar’, claiming the respect due to a spiritual elder (1.3.48). In accepting to perform in the deception of Angelo, hazarding their bodies and personal reputations in the scheme, both Isabella and Mariana make it clear that they are relying upon the assurances of the fake friar that ‘tis no sin’ (4.2.71). The staging of Vincentio’s obsessive need to control his subjects threatens to cancel out the lessons Shakespeare derived from Cinthio, where the final distribution of reward and punishment by the monarch becomes a counterpart of divine judgment. Here, the irony about the choice of a costume granting moral authority is the extent to which the Duke requires his subjects to engage in disquieting physical actions like the bed trick, a sexual bait and switch involving a would-be cloistered nun, and the desperate attempt to find a ‘convenient’ corpse to substitute for Claudio (4.3.100). For a play that attempts to portray the Duke of Vienna ‘like power divine’, Measure for Measure gives the audience too much information. The ‘unknown sovereignty’ that the characters experience throughout the play, failing to recognize the hidden identity of the helpful friar, is the exact opposite of what Shakespeare offers his playgoers (5.1.388). By placing Vincentio in the midst of the corruption in his state, as he pushes events towards a conclusion which seems to owe as much to his personal vanity as to his obligations to good government, the disguise plot negates any ambiguity about the manipulative role of the ruler. Since all the sordid details of the Duke’s strategy appear on-stage in a context of dramatic irony, there can be no doubt about his responsibility for the outcome. Cinthio is essential to our understanding of how Shakespeare’s new framework for the ransom story affects the ideological coherence of Measure for Measure, as traces of the moral and political agendas from diverse sources find their way into the final play. The significance of Epitia comes from its status as the first precedent for staging the sexual blackmail story with a happy ending.86 There is no reprieve Gio. Battista Giraldi Cinthio, Epitia, Le tragedie di M. Gio. Battista Giraldi Cinthio (1583), vol. 2, 4.2i, p. 75. ‘You will find in him that which every lord who governs on earth must have: absolute justice joined with great mercy’. All of the translations from Cinthio are my own. 86 For the potential relationship between Epitia and Shakespeare’s play, see Mariella Cavalchini, ‘L’Epitia di Giraldi Cinzio e Measure for Measure’, Italica 45 (1968): 59-69; 85

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for the condemned brother in the original novella from the Hecatommithi. Yet the Emperor in Epitia has nothing to do with the sudden revelation of the brother’s wellbeing; an event ascribed only to the manner in which ‘Il variar del la Fortuna fece / Lo stato human si dubbioso e tanto / Incerto’.87 Cinthio’s emphasis on Providence, rather than ragion di stato, marks the aesthetic innovations driven by the propaganda offensive against Protestantism in the Cinquecento.88 The CounterReformation’s insistence on the importance of absolute faith demanded a new type of dramatic structure, underscoring the inscrutability of divine intervention in human affairs. The aim of Cinthio’s concept of tragedia a fin felice (tragedy with a happy ending) was to create an engrossing and unpredictable experience for the spectator, surprised by a reassuring conclusion that departs from the expectations of conventional tragedy. In his 1554 dramatic manifesto, the Discorso […] intorno al comporre delle comedie e delle tragedie, Cinthio argues that mixing tragic and comic plot structures provides the audience with the opportunity to witness the mysteries of Providence. By withholding information, refusing to stage key events, he seeks to heighten the indeterminacy of the theatrical scene: Si debbono nondimeno far nascere gli avvenimenti di queste men fiere tragedie in guisa che gli spettatori tra l’orrore e la compassione stiano sospesi insino al fine, il qual poscia riuscendo allegro gli lasci tutti consolati. E questo far stare sospeso l’auditore, dee però essere condotto talmente dal poeta che egli non stia sempre nelle tenebre, ma dee l’azione di parte in parte andare sciogliendo la favola di modo che lo spettatore si veda menare al fine, ma stia dubbioso a che egli debba riuscire … . Gli spettatori ne sentono le voci di fuori, ovvero che lor sono narrate, o da messo, o da altra persona che scelga l’autore atta a far questo.89 Proudfoot, ‘‘It Is An Accident That Heaven Provides’, pp. 155-166, and Walter Moretti, ‘La novella di Epitia e Measure for Measure’ in Measure for Measure: Dal Testo Alla Scena, ed. Mariangela Tempera (Bologna: Clueb, 1992), pp. 17-23. 87 Cinthio, Epitia, Prologo, p. 7. ‘The fickleness of Fortune makes the human state so doubtful and very uncertain’. 88 See Michele Marrapodi, ‘Beyond the Reformation: Italian Intertexts of the Ransom Plot in Measure for Measure’, in Shakespeare, Italy, and Intertextuality, pp. 73-90 and Barbara Majelli, La cultura italiana in Othello e Measure for Measure: fonti e intertestualità (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Palermo, 2006), pp. 182-245. For the relationship of Cinthio to sixteenth-century Italian thought, see Camillo Guerrieri Crocetti, G.B. Giraldi ed il pensiero critico del sec. XVI (Milan: Dante, 1932). 89 Cinthio, Discorso […] intorno al comporre delle comedie e delle tragedie in Scritti critici, ed. Camillo Guerrieri Crocetti (Milan: Marzorati, 1973), pp. 184-5. ‘You must make events in these less proud tragedies come to life in such a way that the spectators are left suspended between horror and pity up until the end, so that when it turns out happily everyone will be left consoled. And in keeping the listener suspended, the poet must control the action so that he is not left always in the dark; unravelling the plot in such a way that


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The power of the poeta is paramount here. For all his interest in performance, Cinthio has very little, if anything, to say about the contribution of actors in the Discorso. Despite the contempt in his theoretical writing for plays meant only to be read, his theatre is based on narration, rather than representation. Cinthio’s stress on the role of onlookers and messengers in recounting crucial actions after the fact reflects his frequent definition of the spectator as an ‘auditore’, a listener. He appeals to classical precedent for this, citing Aristotle’s criticism of Euripides for staging the death of the children in Medea. The indeterminacy serves to maintain suspense up until the end of the play: ‘insino al fine’. The aesthetic of the auditore sospeso, the theatregoer left hanging in doubt about the outcome, places the responsibility for the success of the performance on the dramatist’s ability to restrict the flow and presentation of crucial plot details. The importance that surprise endings acquire in his dramatic aesthetics led Cinthio to rewrite tragic stories from the Hecatommithi as plays with positive outcomes: io, non a caso ma deliberatamente, in alquante di felice fine composte da me, tratte nondimeno dagli Ecatommiti miei, ho seguito questo ordine, ed ho veduto che questo mio ardire non è riuscito ingrate a giudicosi spettatori.90

In this marginal note written in his own copy of the Discorso, Cinthio’s emphasis on the approval of judicious spectators is important. Audience response is the principal justification in the treatise for departing from Aristotelian dramatic conventions, where he argues that the mixed genre of tragedia a fin lieto has a unique didactic effect in performance. Though Epitia seems to have remained unperformed, the text envisages a spectator left unaware of key events in the plot, encouraged to see the action as moving towards the negative conclusion described in the original novella. The Prologue reflects this theoretical position, demanding that the members of the audience follow the contorted action with particular concentration: ‘benigni spettatori, / Mirar questo soccesso attentamente’.91 The concern with the spectator in Cinthio underlines the extent to which Shakespeare’s use of the disguise frame drains the portrayal of Vincentio of any dramatic tension. Whilst God may remain enigmatic to the faithful, as demonstrated by the providential resolution of the plot in Epitia, the means and motives of the Duke of Vienna’s exercise of power are obvious before the time he calls for Isabella’s hand in marriage. the spectator sees himself brought to the conclusion but remains doubtful about how it will work out … The spectators hear voices off stage or events are narrated to them by messengers or by other characters that the author chooses as being appropriate to do this’. 90 Cinthio, Discorso, p. 280. ‘Not by chance but deliberately, in some of the [tragedies] with happy endings composed by me, I followed this imperative and I have seen that my efforts were not received without gratitude by judicious spectators’. 91 Cinthio, Epitia, Prologo, p. 8. ‘Gentle spectators focus on this performance attentively’.


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As a measure of the absence of suspense about the outcome in Measure for Measure, it is telling that Shakespeare’s third act features a credible verbal echo from the conclusion of Epitia: ‘and here, by this is your brother sav’d, your honour untainted, the poor Mariana advantag’d, and the corrupt deputy scal’d’ (3.1.254-6). The three lines give the English audience a quick précis of the storyline of the play. The speech’s concern with honour and safety recalls the intercession by the captain of the guard in Cinthio’s tragedia a fin lieto: Per questo aviso mio, ridotte havere Le guerre à pace & à vita le morti, Ch’erano per empir molti di pianto. Salvo è Vico, è salvo Iuriste, & salvo E’ d’Epitia l’honor, & l’honor anche De la violata Donna da Vico.92

The Captain’s speech recapitulates the positive outcome of the potentially tragic plot: the preservation of Vico, the brother of the title character, saves his would-be judge Iuriste from execution and consequently the honour of both Epitia and the nameless victim. Though the absence of comparable lines in either the Hecatommithi or Whetstone’s Promos and Cassandra is itself significant, encouraging standard source studies to add yet another book to the steep pile on the bard’s creaking desk, my interest in this verbal echo comes from what it suggests about staging tragicomedy. The all-inclusive happy ending, saving the condemned brother and the licentious magistrate, is unique to the three theatrical versions of the ransom story. Yet there is no equivalent diction or phrasing in Whetstone’s play, the first English dramatization of the novella, where the accounts of the jailer’s rescue of the brother do not refer to either honour or safety. The only analogous speech to the announcements in Shakespeare and Cinthio is a bystander’s laconic comment: ‘Andrugio lyves, Promos is repriv’d’.93

Cinthio, Epitia, p. 117. ‘By this my announcement, wars have been reduced to peace and the dead brought back to life, when many were about to be filled with tears. Vico is safe, Iuriste is safe, and Epitia’s honour is safe and also the honour of the violated woman of Vico’. The relationship between the two passages is noted in P.R. Horne, The Tragedies of Giambattista Cinthio Giraldi (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 113. For other potential verbal echoes, see Naseeb Shaheen, ‘Shakespeare’s Knowledge of Italian’, Shakespeare Survey, 47 (1994): 161-9, and F.E. Budd, ‘Material for a Study of the Sources of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Revue de Litterature Comparèe (1931): 711-36. 93 Whetstone, Promos and Cassandra in Bullough, vol. 2, p. 511. 92


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The speech of the Captain in Epitia stands out for its rhetorical function as an a posteriori summary of the speaker’s efforts to ensure a favourable resolution to the ransom story, underlined by the insistent use of the terms ‘salvo’ and ‘l’honor’ to refer to the moral and physical preservation of the main characters. Lengthy retroactive plot outlines are an inevitable side effect of tragedia a fin felice, a form requiring a great deal of exposition to help the audience keep track of the decisive events taking place offstage. Without any privileged position in relation to the characters, Cinthio’s spectator is always the last to know what is going on. After keeping secret his refusal to carry out the death sentence on Vico, the brother of Epitia, the Captain only reveals the opportune information at the point of maximum crisis in the final scene. Shakespearean critics have talked about the ‘trite’ CounterReformist moral vision of the final scene of Epitia, with its claim ‘that despite the strange reversal and uncertainties of fortune man must place his faith in divine providence’.94 Such volatility is fundamental to Cinthio’s aesthetics. Instead of an Aristotelian catharsis marked by a detachment from the tragic hero, acting as a surrogate for the audience’s cultural anxieties, the auditori share the confusion and uncertainty of Epitia. Alongside the process of anagnorisis undergone by the heroine, the mixed genre forces the playgoers to question their own expectations. When we look at the context of the speech about honour and safety in Measure for Measure, the dramatic agenda is quite different. If Cinthio’s pull on his audience recalls that of a convoluted detective story, where the pleasure comes from arriving at the unforeseen solution to the mystery, what Shakespeare gives us is closer to an episode of Columbo. The central role of the Duke of Vienna in determining the course of the action ensures he provides the plot summary himself. The dialogue forms part of the fake friar’s attempt to convince Isabella to participate in the bed trick, anticipating the outcome before the play is half over. Shakespeare’s anticipation of the happy ending marks the extent to which he mitigates the moral predicaments found in previous accounts of the ransom story: Angelo does not really go to bed with Isabella, Claudio has not raped Juliet. The lack of indeterminacy is remarkable even by the standards of the disguised ruler play. In the opening scenes of The Malcontent, the most important precedent for the plot structure, the audience shares the confusion provoked by the disguise because Marston withholds Malevole’s identity as the usurped Duke of Genoa. Since critics have often talked about the ‘genuine moral turmoil’ created by the withholding of information in Measure for Measure, it is important here to distinguish the ignorance of the characters from the ignorance of the spectators.95 To be certain, Isabella does not receive definitive confirmation of Claudio’s safety until late in the final act. The set piece where she pleads for mercy towards the corrupt magistrate takes place much later than For example, see N.W. Bawcutt’s introduction to Measure for Measure (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 19. 95 For example, see Jason Lawrence, ‘Who the Devil taught thee so much Italian’: Italian language learning and literary imitation in early modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), p. 140. 94


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in Epitia. With the security offered by the Duke’s presence on-stage, however, there is no need for the playgoers to doubt the promise of a comforting outcome. Shakespeare’s audience can believe what it sees the Duke do to administer justice, even if Isabella remains in the dark. Shakespeare’s change in the presentation of the ransom story has considerable ideological ramifications. The focus of Measure for Measure is the unfolding of a coherent political strategy, with explicit causes and effects, not the mysteries of divine intervention in human affairs. The motivation of the Duke at the start of the play is the desire to reassert his control over the state, casting the severe magistrate as a convenient scapegoat for the unpopular measures, rather than a disinterested intention to further the general good: I have on Angelo impos’d the office, Who may in th’ ambush of my name, strike home, And yet my nature never in the fight To do in slander. (1.3.40-43)

Even before Angelo demonstrates his lack of integrity, the ruler has already taken care to distance himself from the new campaign against vice: ‘Sith ’twas my fault to give the people scope, / ’Twould be my tyranny to strike and gall them’ (1.3.35-6). Yet the Duke of Vienna’s obsession with slander, an action whereby the dissenting subject introduces alternative interpretations of the ruler, marks the problematic role that Shakespeare’s assigns to his own audience. For although the play reveals the secret practices of statecraft on the public stage, in the best tradition of Machiavelli, the inevitability of the positive outcome arranged by the Duke threatens to deny the spectators any active involvement in interpreting the performance. The absence of indeterminacy in Measure for Measure is not just a significant departure from Cinthio’s representation of providence. The security of Vincentio’s control over the state has little to do with the dramatic strategies of other Jacobean disguised duke plays, where what is at stake is the vulnerability of the ruler’s position. Here, instead of staging the Principe, Shakespeare veers closer to the proclamation of the end of history in the writing of Filippo de’ Nerli: non pare che più occorra far memoria dei fatti civili della nostra città perché … non doveranno i nostri cittadini aver più cagione di contendere civilmente insieme delle cose dello stato e del governo della città, essendo tutta la somma del governo ridotta nell’arbitrio d’un solo Principe e d’un solo Signore.96 Filippo de’ Nerli, Commentari dei fatti civili occorsi dentro la città di Firenze (1728), p. 301. (Cited in Jean-Louis Fournel, ‘Cessazione della guerra e fine della storia in alcuni storici fiorentini della prima parte del Cinquecento’, La riscoperta di Guicciardini, eds Artemio Enzo Baldini and Marziano Guglielminetti (Genoa: Name, 2006), p. 112.) ‘It no longer seems necessary to record the civil affairs of our city because … our citizens 96


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In a conscious rejection of the tradition of Machiavelli and Guicciardini, after the fall of the Florentine Republic, de’ Nerli contends that the presence of a strong ruler negates any need for the individual citizen to peer into the affairs of state.97 The passive role Shakespeare defines for the audience risks becoming an endorsement of such efforts to absolve great leaders from public scrutiny, even as the play itself portrays the exercise of authority. Indeed, the Duke of Vienna is well aware of the incompatibility of political commentary with absolute sovereignty. With his relentless pursuit of slanderers, an extension of his painstaking direction of the action on-stage, Vincentio resists any attempt to question his monopoly on power. The difficulty for the Duke, however, is that Lucio refuses to keep his mouth shut. The gall in the slanderous tongue Despite regular denials of any yearning for the approval of his subjects, where he notes that ‘the man of safe discretion’ will not affect it, the Duke of Vienna’s decisions constantly betray his fear of libel (1.1.72). The threat it poses to the ruler is such that the enforced marriages imposed by Vincentio at the end of the play equate the conduct of Lucio, guilty of trading in malicious gossip, with the human cost of Angelo’s abuse of power. The Duke pointedly excludes him from the general amnesty: ‘And yet here’s one in place I cannot pardon’ (5.1.499). The final punishment of the gallant, forcing him to wed the ‘punk’ who bore his child, does not come from the desire for moral reform. Instead, the Duke intones that ‘Slandering a Prince deserves it’ (5.1.524). He makes it clear that the unpardonable offence consists in the caricature of him as ‘a fool, a coward, / One all of luxury, an ass, a madman’ (5.1.501-2). Nevertheless, as the Duke’s anger suggests, many of Lucio’s slanders are accurate. Of all the characters in the play, Lucio is the only one who recognizes that Vincentio’s sudden disappearance is a political stratagem: The Duke is very strangely gone from hence; … but we do learn By those that know the very nerves of state, His givings-out were of an infinite distance From his true-meant design. (1.4.50-55).

There is no equivalent figure to Lucio in the Italianate disguise drama of the period, except perhaps for the usurped Duke of Genoa’s persona of Malevole in The Malcontent. The traitors in other plays have designs on the dukedom, rather will not have any reason to dispute state matters and the government of our city, given that the entire government has been reduced to the judgement of a single prince and a single lord’ (my translation). 97 See Jean-Louis Fournel, ‘Cessazione della guerra e fine della storia’, pp. 112-13.

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than a penchant for rumour and innuendo. His claims to be among the elite who understand the secret practices of statecraft may recall figures like Sir Politic Would-be in Volpone or Gostanzo in All Fools, comic posers whose delusions of Machiavellian expertise are exposed with devastating effect. Yet Lucio’s fate derives from modesty, not hubris. He fails to recognize that his offences are great enough to provoke ‘the Duke of dark corners’ into watching him (4.3.52). Harry Berger, Jr. has pointed out the ‘culture of suspicion’ implicit in early modern Italian theories of courtiership, where ‘self-surveillance’ is essential to Castiglione’s and Della Casa’s precepts for social advancement.98 The paranoia of the ruler demands an equivalent distrust on the part of his subjects, whether hardened conspirators or mere gossips. The possibility of surreptitious loyalty tests corresponding to those practised by disguised rulers like Vincentio would not have been a surprise to students of political theory in the period. Lorenzo Ducci’s Ars Aulica, one of the most cynical courtesy books imported into England, emphasizes the need for ambitious courtiers to anticipate the ruler’s ‘underminings which are done by dissimulation & falsely’.99 For Ducci, like Shakespeare, statecraft is most effective at identifying offenders when it works in secret. The difference between Lucio and Caliban, another recalcitrant subject who plagues a Shakespearean duke, is the islander in The Tempest who suspects that he is being watched: His spirits hear me, And yet I needs must curse. But they’ll nor pinch, Fright me with urchin-shows, pitch me i’ th’ mire, ... unless he bid ’em. (2.2.3-7)

And he is right. The cosmic espionage of Ariel, offering Prospero an absolute vision of potential threats, immediately uncovers the risible plot Caliban organizes with the two Italian drunks, Stephano and Trinculo. Nonetheless, the erstwhile Duke of Milan still does not feel secure. To Ferdinand and Miranda’s consternation, he breaks off their wedding masque to deal with ‘that foul conspiracy / Of the beast Caliban and his confederates’ (4.1.139-40). Prospero has learned that his position depends upon constant vigilance. Unlike Prospero, the Duke of Vienna allows his vanity to get in the way of political expediency. The fascinating thing about Vincentio’s response to slander is his interpretation of it as a personal betrayal, not just a challenge to his authority. What makes the encounters with Lucio so traumatic for the disguised ruler is that he does not seem to have recognized that the love he received from his subjects was only an act. The offhand remarks that the gallant makes, in teasing the prim 98 See Harry Berger, Jr., The Absence of Grace: Sprezzatura and Suspicion in Two Renaissance Courtesy Books (Stanford, 2000), pp. 12-13. 99 Lorenzo Ducci, Ars Aulica or The Courtiers Arte, trans. Edward Blount (London, 1607), p. 178.


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and proper friar, crush Vincentio’s delusions of popular consent.100 After all his efforts for the good of his subjects, at least as he sees it, the Duke is unable to accept any display of contempt for him: O place and greatness! Millions of false eyes Are stuck upon thee. Volumes of report Run with their false, and most contrarious quest Upon thy doings; thousand escapes of wit Make thee the father of their idle dream, And rack thee in their fancies. (4.1.58-63)

Here, as N. W. Bawcutt notes in his edition of the play, the repetition of false does not refer to the artifice of the flatterer, but to the treachery of counterfeit love.101 Confronted with the epistemic distance between private contempt and public deference, Vincentio’s response is to compel displays of affection. The early modern idea of power, as Stephen Greenblatt has suggested, is about more than social position and wealth: ‘[its] quintessential sign is the ability to impose one’s fictions upon the world’.102 In returning to his outward role, after Lucio unwittingly removes his disguise, the Duke of Vienna regains the authority to suppress dissent and exact affection. The marriage he demands for himself at the end, set alongside the enforced unions, comes as his ultimate revendication of authentic love. The obsession with slander in Measure for Measure is a significant departure from the disguised ruler plays of Marston and Middleton. The form became so popular with London dramatists precisely because of its potential for subversive political commentary. Given the official wrath his satires incurred under both Elizabeth and James, it was unlikely that Marston would encourage fears about libel. As Brian Gibbons has argued, the disguised duke of The Malcontent becomes ‘a dramatic metaphor for the imaginative art of the satiric poet, encouraging vice and folly in order to exhibit their true nature and contrive their exposure and correction’.103 Marston depicts surveillance as a learning process for the ruler, where the study of error brings him to correct his own weaknesses. In The Fawn, after participating in the sycophancy at the court in Urbino, the disguised Duke of Ferrara admits that the experience has forced him to confront his susceptibility to flattery:

100

Dollimore notes that ‘perhaps the most subversive thing in the play is the most casual, namely Lucio’s slurring of the Duke’s reputation’. See ‘Transgression and Surveillance’, p. 83. 101 See Bawcutt, note 58, p. 180. 102 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 13. 103 Brian Gibbons, Jacobean City Comedy (2nd ed. London: Methuen, 1980), p. 69.

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Shakespeare, Politics, and Italy By Him by Whom we are, I think a prince Whose tender suffrance never felt a gust Of bolder breathings, but still liv’d gently fanned With the soft gales of his own flatterers’ lips, Shall never know his own complexion ... Mortal till now, I scarce had known myself. (1.2.306-14)

Shakespeare’s Duke of Vienna only learns about the errors of his subjects. Since political disguise drama equates sovereignty with clarity of vision, flattery poses a significant risk to the government of the state. Confronted with the consequences of his vanity, after his heir has exposed the conspiracy of disloyal courtiers, the aged Duke of Ferrara in Middledon’s Phoenix admits that he is unfit to hold power: To thee let reverence all her powers engage, That art in youth a miracle to age! State is but blindness; thou hast piercing art: We saw only the knee, but thou the heart.104

Here, with the physical opposition of the knee and the heart, the use of synecdoche in the abdication speech extols the covert insight of the young prince, able to determine the disposition of the individual subject. The political illegibility of the knee, representing an obligatory performance of reverence, demands that an astute ruler discount the external gestures of his subjects. The importance of corporeal synecdoche in plays like Measure for Measure, as Elizabeth Hanson has noted, derives from its ‘promise [of] access to unseen essences – things whose nature is to elude mediation’.105 The surveillance of Middleton’s Phoenix, rhetorically depicted as seeing the heart, overcomes the divide between the public and private spaces of the subject. Nonetheless, when disguise permits Shakespeare’s Duke to hear himself ridiculed by Lucio, he resists the unmediated version of his reputation: No might nor greatness in mortality Can censure scape; back-wounding calumny The whitest virtue strikes. What king so strong Can tie up the gall in the slanderous tongue? (3.2.185-6)

The synecdoche used by Vincentio, asserting that the tongue of the subject menaces the ducal back, point to the desire of the ruler to protect his public image 104 Thomas Middleton, The Phoenix, in The Works of Thomas Middleton, ed. A.H. Bullen (rpt. New York: AMS Press 1964), 5.1.175-80. 105 Elizabeth Hanson, Discovering the Subject in Renaissance England (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 80-81.


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by silencing the opinion of the individual subject. Unsettled by Lucio’s disrespect, he actually comes to lament the absence of ‘dearer love’ (3.2.151). The would-be friar’s defensive portrayal of the Duke as an archetypal Renaissance man has the air of self-flattery about it: Either this is envy in you, folly, or mistaking. The very stream of his life, and the business he hath helm’d, must, upon a warranted need, give him a better proclamation. Let him be but testimonied in his own bringings-forth, and he shall appear to the envious a scholar, a statesman, and a soldier. (3.2.141-6)

Despite his readiness to punish the vices and pretensions of his subjects, there is never any suggestion in Measure for Measure that the Duke of Vienna has learned something about himself. The absence of any direct challenge to his authority discourages him from arriving at the same political maturity as the rulers we have seen in the plays of Marston and Middleton. Indeed, Vincentio’s proud description of his own qualities recalls the narcissism of Gonzago, the foolish Duke of Urbino in The Fawn who continually trumpets his own sagacity and learning. By now, there is a long critical tradition of interpreting Gonzago’s craving for flattery as a satirical depiction of King James.106 The emphasis the ruler of Urbino places upon his qualifications as ‘a philosopher’ and a prince ‘of discerning wit’ certainly corresponds with period accounts of the Stuart king’s proud evaluation of his writing and scholarship (1.2.171, 147). The appeal by Shakespeare’s Duke to the value of his public statements, with the reference to ‘his bringings-forth’, suggests an analogous allusion to the royal authorship of works like The True Law of Free Monarchies and Basilikon Doron. The English publication of Basilikon Doron in 1603, permitting James’s new subjects to anticipate his agenda, reflected the cultural interest in the issue of royal authority that fostered the explosion of Italianate court drama on the London stage.107 Yet the affinities between Gonzago and Vincentio should not distract us from the fact that Marston’s Duke of Urbino is a cautionary model of an incapable ruler, not the disguised duke. Gonzago does not become a more effective leader after his humiliation by the Duke of Ferrara. Even at the end of The Fawn, unable to punish the mockery of his fellow head of state, he maintains ‘There is no folly in pretended wit’ (5.1.456). With the recognition in the theatre community of the disguised duke play as a distinct genre, the portrayal of the ruler in Measure for Measure must be read in terms of an evolving theatrical repertory. The ideological implications of the staging of sovereignty are at issue in Edward Sharpham’s The Fleire, where the great innovation is to bring a super-sophisticated deposed Duke of Florence to a clearly defined Jacobean London. Even though critics often tend to idealize 106 For example, see Albert W. Upton, ‘Allusions to James I and his Court in Marston’s The Fawn and Beaumont’s The Woman Hater’, PMLA 44(1929): 1048-65 and Tricomi, p. 22. 107 See Kamps, ‘Ruling Fantasies’: 248ff.

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the ability of Shakespeare to interrogate existing forms, rather than merely reproducing them, generic parody became part of the satiric strategies of many dramatists in the period. Composed after the works of Marston, Middleton and Shakespeare, Sharpham’s approach depends upon audience recognition of the disguised ruler figure. The name of the main character, Antifront, recalls that of Altofront, the usurped Duke of Genoa in The Malcontent. Even the Fleire of the title is a synonym for Marston’s Fawn, marking the persistent concern with flattery. However, the novelty of a domestic perspective exposes the rhetorical function of location in previous plays. Duke Antifront explicitly observes the court of James himself, rather than a distant Italian state or a city in central Europe. When asked why he came ‘out of Italy into England’, the Florentine provides a self-reflexive gloss on the early modern drama’s treatment of political issues within an Italian context: ‘Because England would not come into Italy to me’.108 Insofar as The Fleire provides a series of citations and revisions of Marston and other dramatists, the pleasure for the original audience, especially for the cognoscenti, must have come from the possibility his play offers for intertextual interpretation.109 The focus on Italy and England suggests the incongruity of Viennese setting of Shakespeare’s first disguised ruler play, falling outside conventional strategies of political commentary. The Malcontent already alludes to travel to England, ironically denying any correspondences with the overdetermined Italian scene: Malcontent: Ay, ’tis your young lord’s fashion to do so, though he so lazy, being a bachelor, that he would never travel so far as the university: yet, when he married, tails off, and – catzo! – for England! Mendoza: And why for England? Malcontent: Because there is no brothel houses there. Mendoza: Nor courtesans? Malcontent: Neither; your whore went down with the stews, and your punk came up with your Purtian.110

The glee with which The Fleire goes on to depict the London stews, with the sex trade of the aptly named ducal daughters Florida and Felicia, makes explicit Marston’s sly jokes about the cultural superiority of his compatriots. However, in

108 Edward Sharpham, A Critical Old Spelling Edition of the Works of Edward Sharpham, ed. Christopher Gordon Petter (New York: Garland, 1986), 1.3.258, 259. All further citations will appear within the text. For the reference to theatrical precedents, see Tricomi, p. 23. 109 See Michael J. Redmond, ‘“’Tis common knowledge”: Italian Stereotypes and Audience Response in Much Ado About Nothing and The Novella’ in Shakespeare Yearbook 13 (2002): 419-41. 110 The Malcontent, 5.4.23-31. The term ‘catzo’ is a vulgar expression of contempt even in current Italian.


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contrast to Sharpham’s recklessness, Marston made the pretence of denying any overt political applications of his play: in some things I have willingly erred, as in supposing a Duke of Genoa, and in taking names different from that city’s families: for which some may wittily accuse me, but … it was my care to write so far from reasonable offense that even strangers in whose state I laid my scene should not from thence draw any disgrace to any, dead or living.111

By gesturing towards the possibility of subversive interpretation, as Annabel Patterson has noted, such disclaimers tend to become ‘entry codes to precisely that kind of reading they protest against’.112 Through his repatriation of the stereotypes of Italian political error, forcing the London audience to watch a Florentine mock the domestic scene, Sharpham challenges the manner in which previous dramatists evade direct references to James I. A standard set piece in Italianate court drama is the catalogue of foreign abuses and corruption. In John Mason’s The Turke, another play which is remarkable for its derivative intertextuality, the English traveller Burdello recounts his disappointment in the administration of distant Florence: ‘Since my coming to Florence I have seene ignorance in the shape of a Cittizen mufled in the scarlet of magistracy that could not write his own name’.113 The Second Act of The Fleire features the Florentine’s response, as an expert on statecraft, to the Jacobean court: I saw a Farmers Son sit newly made a courtier, that sat in the presence at cardes, as if the chaire of state had bin made of a peece of his fathers Barne-doore: O tis a shame: I would have state be state in earnest and in game. (2.1.223-8)

Here, as in The Fawn, a foreign expert contemptuously reviews the ineptitude of a fellow ruler. The reference to ‘the presence’, denoting that the events described took place before the monarch, ensures that the disguised duke’s criticisms of the court appear to be directed at James himself. The association of ‘the chaire of state’ with a country squire’s ‘Barne-doore’ targets his failure to maintain appropriate standards of royal decorum.114 The specific criticism of the behaviour of a ‘newly made’ courtier picks up, of course, on the widespread unease about 111

Ibid., ‘To the Reader’, ll. 4-12. As we have seen, Genoa had a system of government similar to Venice. 112 Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), p. 57. 113 John Mason, The Turke. Ed. Joseph Q. Adams (Louvain: A. Uystpruyst, 1912), ll. 1142-6. 114 Tricomi, p. 23.

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the new sovereign’s prodigality with honours.115 Sharpham makes explicit the link between disguised duke plots and the contested reputation of the Stuart king, representing grievances already implicit in Measure for Measure and The Fawn. One of the most striking aspects of the parody, alongside the risky topical satire, is the depiction of the squalid means by which the duke regains his title. Instead of merely observing folly and vice, Antifront encourages the activity of his two daughters as prostitutes on the fringes of Whitehall, installing himself unbeknownst to them as their enterprising pimp. Aware that the son of the current ruler of Florence is one of their most enthusiastic clients, the would-be Duke uses the sexual labour of his daughters to gain access to the Jacobean court and search for the information he needs. There is no doubt that such a depiction of the disguised ruler figure lacks ‘serious moral pressure’.116 Nonetheless, as Mary Bly’s recent study of the repertory of the Whitefriars theatre has demonstrated, plays with bawdy language and situations did have a notable commercial appeal in the London theatre marketplace.117 Approaches based on subjective values like morality and dramatic quality distract from the manner in which Sharpham’s engagement with the disguised ruler genre, fortified with transgressive sexual material designed to satisfy the particular tastes of his fellow students at the Inns of Court, offers an insightful reading of the political agendas of his predecessors. For although many scholars have been quick to argue that it would be difficult ‘to imagine Shakespeare dealing in such ware’,118 the play is an important critical tool because it documents what a contemporary dramatist thought were the fault lines in the staging of sovereignty in the Jacobean theatre. Indeed, where Shakespeare’s Duke seeks to exploit the sexual desires of Angelo, Mariana, and Lucio for his own ends, we should not be too hasty in assuming that control over the body politic in Measure for Measure is divorced from the fate of individual bodies. Everie thing so well doth sort Even with all the explicit political themes in Measure for Measure and The Tempest, Shakespeare still feels obliged to rehearse romantic comedy at the conclusion of each play. Everyone enjoys a happy ending, modern intertextual 115 In just the first year of his reign, James tripled the number of knights. See Linda Levy Peck, Court Patronage and Corruption in Early Stuart England (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990), p. 32. 116 Alexander Leggatt, Citizen Comedy in the Age of Shakespeare (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), p. 120. See also G. K. Hunter, Dramatic Identities and Cultural Traditions (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 1978), pp. 103-32. 117 See Mary Bly, Queer Virgins and Virgin Queans on the Early Modern Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 118 Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare and The Rival Traditions (New York: Macmillan, 1952), p. 208.


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critics included, but it soon becomes clear that love is not immune from the will to power of the disguised duke. The success of Prospero and Vincentio in stagemanaging the wedding ceremonies to their own advantage means that both plays end up celebrating the triumph of the would-be blocking figure. Instead of a young couple overcoming obstacles to celebrate their mutual love, we see the ruler, the greatest heavy father of all, getting exactly what he wants. Aware of the importance a union with the son of enemy has for the recovery of his dukedom, the ‘project’ he obsessively refers to, Prospero directs the love story of Ferdinand and Miranda. Despite the manifest resistance of his subjects, given the protests by Angelo and Lucio and the unsettling silence of Miranda, the Duke of Vienna imposes a series of marriages that bolster his personal authority. The standard teleological plots of New Comedy have little to do with the early modern idea of statecraft. For the great leaders of the period, as the persistent controversies surrounding dynastic alliances in England demonstrate, marriage was political. The growth of court espionage from the time of Elizabeth onwards was a consequence of the complexities of international royal marriage negotiations, involving competing nations from both Catholic and Protestant Europe.119 The anxieties about the fate of Elizabeth I, only abating towards the end of her life, marked the extent to which her choice of consort had significant implications for the nation as a whole, not to mention the careers of individual courtiers.120 Concerns about royal matrimony did not subside even after the accession of a married Scottish ruler to the English throne. The desire of James I to promote peace with Catholic Europe through the strategic marriages of his children became a subject of open discussion as early as 1605, arousing profound unease in Protestant circles.121 Sharpham’s self-reflexive handling of comic closure in The Fleire offers a valuable Jacobean critical precedent for the dramatic relationship between romantic comedy and disguised duke plots. In the 12 lines of rhyming couplets which conclude the play, by this time a sign of parody, Duke Antifront quickly marries his unwilling daughters to their most pathetic clients. He has no qualms about claiming that the marriages fulfil all the requirements of New Comedy: ‘And now since everie thing so well doth sort, / Let all be pleas’d in this our comic sport’ (5.5.112-13). The only confirmation that there is a happy ending comes from the Duke, since his chatter about genre drowns out any potential opposition from the couples. Notwithstanding all his blustering at the end, Antifront makes no effort throughout the course of the action to hide the fact that the need to ‘regaine our right in Florence’ outweighs anything else (2.1.430). Sharpham treats the Duke’s efforts to match his daughter Florida with Piso, the son of the dead usurper of See John Michael Archer, Sovereignty and Intelligence: Spying and Court Culture in the English Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). 120 See Susan Doran, Monarchy and Matrimony: The Courtships of Elizabeth I (London: Routledge, 1996). 121 See Roy Strong, Henry Prince of Wales and England’s Lost Renaissance (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986), pp. 71-85. See also Headlam-Wells, esp. pp.79-84. 119


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power in Florence, as part of a perverse inversion of orthodox New Comedy, where the father succeeds in imposing his wishes in spite of the resistance of his daughters and the disgust of the grooms. As in Measure for Measure, the transition from the very real threat of execution to a series of enforced marriages serves a clear political function. Brought to desperation by his condemnation to death, after a trial engineered by Antifront, a distraught Piso unwittingly renounces his new title: Let them call back the banisht Signior Antifront, whome they and we, and al have wrong’d: O could I live but to enquire him out, in satisfaction of his wronges, ide marry his eldest Daughter and whilst a liv’d a should be restored to his estate, but O hee’s – (5.5.100-104)

The spontaneous disavowal of a dukedom, overheard by the disguised ruler, closely follows a similar scene in The Malcontent.122 At this point, taking up the offer, Antifront reveals his identity and marries Piso to his daughter, a prostitute who has already shown her contempt for him. For both Antifront and Piso, the marriage with Florida is a function of political expediency. Despite the lack of potential for a successful relationship, recalling the union of Lucio and his ‘punk’ in the earlier work by Shakespeare, Piso’s long term agenda at this point is to ensure his legitimate succession to power in Florence after Antifront. The conclusion’s reminder of the role of dynastic marriages in consolidating the fortunes of a royal house would not have scandalized the Jacobean audience, since English political life for the final half of the sixteenth century was conditioned by the interminable discussion of Elizabeth’s wedding prospects. The absurdity arises from the ruler’s unconvincing effort to represent a cynical arrangement as romantic comedy, a genre promoting ideals of love and personal autonomy. The temptation for traditional critics has been to interpret all this as evidence of a ‘hideously disorganised’ play: The Fleer is disorganised because it tries to move from Italian melodrama to citizen comedy inside the action of one play, and without any subtlety of modulation … Once the disguised-duke reaches London, the play turns into pure citizen intrigue of weak knights and cheeky servants, improbably dragged back by a resolution of the forgotten dukedom in the last few lines.123

The ludicrous conclusion of the play, stretching the tensions between disguised ruler plots and New Comedy to breaking point, makes it clear that ‘subtlety’ is 122

The spontaneous renunciation, overheard by the disguised ruler, echoes that of the usurping Pietro in The Malcontent, 4.4.119-30. For the possible dramatic and personal relations between the two authors, contemporaries at the Middle Temple, see Christopher Gordon Petter’s prefatory material to his edition of Sharpham, pp. 33, 185-8, and 201-3. 123 Hunter, p. 127. See also Tricomi, p. 23.


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the least of Sharpham’s concerns. In The Malcontent, the most direct target of the parody, all of the contenders to the throne of Genoa seek an alliance with either the past or present Duchess, eager to exploit the power and influence coming from such a marriage. The explicit focus of the absurd courtship plots in Marston’s play, in spite of the claims that the love of the title character is diverse from that of the ruthless Mendoza and Pietro, is on how ‘wise men do love great women to ennoble their blood and augment their revenue’.124 With his evident knowledge of the precedents established by his forerunners, consistent with the self-reflexive agenda of the parody as a whole, Sharpham’s contemptuous finale points to the failure to provide a convincing rehearsal of romantic comedy in previous political disguise plays. Such generic tensions are at the heart of what modern audiences and critics have come to see as the disturbing outcome of the final scene in Measure for Measure, where Shakespeare seeks to resolve the three different plotlines he derived from his diverse sources.125 The uncomfortable silence of Isabella at the conclusion, after receiving the abrupt proposal of marriage from the Duke of Vienna, feels like ‘a rent in the play’s coherence, a site of unspeakable confusion in its discourse’.126 Even scholars like Michele Marrapodi, who has written eloquently about what he sees as the ‘natural closure’ of the moral and political debates in the scene, concede that there is a ‘convoluted rush to the play’s finale’, with the sudden transition from statecraft and punishment to the Duke’s love proposal.127 The silence of a female character, eliding the absence of a coherent dramatic motivation, is not unique in Shakespearean comedy. At the end of Twelfth Night, as Alan Sinfield has cogently noted, Shakespeare distracts from the inadequacies of his plot by leaving Olivia ‘improbably silent at just the moment when anything she might possibly say would disrupt the normalising patriarchal closure’.128 The lack of any response by Isabella, as with Olivia, naturalizes her impromptu betrothal to an unexpected suitor. The difference between the silences of the two women, however, comes from the generic context in which they are set. While Olivia’s seeming acceptance of marriage to the male twin of the disguised woman that she had been courting serves to complete the reassuring final tableau of happy couples, leaving only the comic victim Malvolio excluded, the power relations involved in the Duke of Vienna’s desire evoke the broader pattern of enforced marriages at the conclusion of Measure for Measure. After continuing to renounce Mariana when she appears before him, Angelo himself offers no response when ordered to ‘marry her instantly’ (5.1.378). While Mariana and Isabella come to plead for The Malcontent, 3.3.98-9. For example, see Cohen, ‘From Mistress to Master’: 52 and Tennenhouse, ‘Representing Power’, p. 147. 126 Hanson, p. 74. 127 Marrapodi, ‘Beyond the Reformation’, pp. 87, 88. 128 Alan Sinfield, Cultural Politics-Queer Reading (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 37-8. 124 125

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the remission of his execution, his only further comment is that he ‘crave[s] death more willingly than mercy’ (5.1.479). Angelo’s own silence about his new wife smoothes over the fact that, to paraphrase Mariana, the Duke is mocking her with a husband. Among the none too happy couples in this tableau of unconvincing reconciliation, only Lucio enunciates his disgust at the Duke’s match making: ‘Marrying a punk, my lord, is pressing to death, whipping, and hanging’ (5.1.524-5). Placed at the climax of this sequence of unwanted unions, as Lucio is forcibly taken away to wed in prison, the proposition to Isabella threatens to betray the ideological antagonisms dividing the romantic ideal of personal choice, the ruler’s incarnation of state power, and his role in the sexual blackmail plot as the defender of female chastity. Despite Vincentio’s frequent denials of sexual motives, Friar Thomas suspected right from the beginning that the ruler was led by the ‘ends / Of burning youth’ (1.3.5-6). Isabella remains voiceless because she is the bond holding together Shakespeare’s unstable amalgam of the traditional ransom story, the disguised duke plot, and romantic comedy. Anything she says could upstage the ostensible closure, exposing the conflicts of interest between the different roles that Vincentio is attempting to perform simultaneously. The intertextual background of Measure for Measure, mediating sources with diverse ideological visions of the individual subject, precludes a harmonious comic resolution to the political discourses it attempts to manage. Given the explicit focus on coercion and Italian power politics in earlier works, what may have made Shakespeare’s subsequent revival of the genre in The Tempest particularly provocative in 1611 was that there were controversial negotiations underway to find a bride for Henry Prince of Wales among the ruling families of the Italian dukedoms of Savoy and Tuscany.129 Consistent with his opposition to any Catholic match, the heir to the throne ordered his treasurer, Sir Charles Cornwallis, to compile a specific case against the possibility of an alliance with the sister of Cosimo II, the rich Grand Duke of Tuscany.130 The long term diplomatic collaboration between King James and Ferdinand de’ Medici, Grand Duke until 1609 and another notable proponent of peace policies, gave the Tuscan ambassadors unique access to the English court.131 For although there were many tentative marriage discussions at the time, the possibility of a large dowry and useful political connections ensured both the English monarch and Prince Henry took the Tuscan match seriously. A significant addition to the prince’s entourage 129 See Roy Strong, ‘England and Italy: The Marriage of Henry Prince of Wales’ in Veronica Wedgwood These Studies in Seventeenth-Century History, eds Richard Ovilard and Pamela Craig (London: Collins, 1986), pp. 59-87. See also Elkin Calhoun Wilson, Prince Henry and English Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1946), pp. 97-100. 130 Strong, ‘England and Italy’, p. 74. See Cornwallis, ‘A Discourse Concerning the Marriage Propounded to Prince Henry With a Daughter of Florence’, in Collectanea Curiosa, ed. John Gutch (Oxford, 1781). 131 See J.D. Mackie, Negotiations between King James VI and I and Ferdinand Grand Duke of Tuscany (Oxford: Clarendon, 1927), pp. 71ff.


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during this period was the self-made expert on Italian political theory and practice Sir Robert Dallington, the author of the contemptuous Survey of the Great Dukes State of Tuscany (1605).132 Shakespeare’s Ferdinand is more pliable than Prince Henry ever was. When the shipwrecked prince of Naples appears on the island, Prospero contemptuously dismisses any possibility of resistance to his project: ‘The Duke of Milan / And his more braver daughter could control thee’ (1.2.439-40). Yet, unlike the display of ducal command in Measure for Measure, where the enforced marriages of the final act flaunt Vincentio’s power to dispose of his subjects, Prospero succeeds in effacing his role as instigator. The dramatic irony is palpable as Miranda pleads for her father to accept the match. As he admits in an aside, Prospero has resolved to bring the couple closer together by acting out the role of a New Comedic heavy father: They are both in either’s pow’rs; but this swift business I must uneasy make, lest too light winning Make the prize light. (1.2.451-3)

With the preparation that has gone into staging their engagement, Prospero is unable to share Ferdinand and Miranda’s spontaneous emotions: ‘So glad of this as they I cannot be, / Who are surpris’d withal’ (3.1.92-3). The young lovers experience the encounter in romantic terms, even as Prospero gloats over his achievement in orchestrating it. The torments that Ferdinand has undergone, through the connivance of his future father-in -law, do not distract him from his ardour: My father’s loss, the weakness which I feel, The wrack of all my friends, nor this man’s threats To whom I am subdu’d, are but light to me, Might I but through my prison once a day Behold this maid. (1.2.488-92)

Prospero maintains a close surveillance on the meetings between the couple. As the scheme begins to function, the watching duke does not hesitate to express his elation and gratitude to his spying spirit: ‘It works … / Thou hast done well, fine Ariel!’ (1.2.493-4). In spite of the ease with which Prospero advances the dynastic alliance in The Tempest, Miranda’s disquiet about the political convenience of her sentiments threatens to come to the fore during the chess match at the end of the play. For all the emphasis past criticism has placed on the innocent optimism of Miranda, with her faith in a ‘brave new world’, Shakespeare’s heroine is no fool. When Prospero presents the couple to the King of Naples, intending to make a public display of 132

See the discussion of Dallington, pp. 136-7.

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their love, his daughter’s spontaneous accusation of cheating momentarily breaks the romantic illusion. Consistent with the game’s connotations as a metaphor for state intrigue, she condemns the strategic and territorial ambitions of Ferdinand: ‘Sweet lord, you play me false / … Yes, for a score of kingdoms you should wrangle’ (5.1.172-4). The complaint expresses the fear that, now aware of the political advantages of the alliance, the young prince has become more of a statesman than a lover. Even if she chooses to renounce such suspicions, with her pragmatic admission that she ‘would call it fair play’ all the same, Miranda’s brief moment of unease betrays her awareness of the value that her marriage has in furthering the ambitions of both Prospero and Ferdinand to rule Milan (5.1.175). The trajectory of New Comedy proceeds to its forgone conclusion but the underlying ideal of a union based exclusively on love loses some of its force. It is conspicuous that, after the chess scene, Miranda has no further dialogue in the play. For although Shakespeare immediately suppresses her misgivings, returning to sententious phrases about ‘beauteous mankind’, Miranda’s accusation points to the manner in which the play’s initial promises of conventional romance have been overshadowed by a plot concentrating on statecraft and power. Conclusion Shakespeare concludes The Tempest with an Epilogue spoken by Prospero, reinforcing the play’s focus upon what he calls ‘my dukedom’ (Epilogue, 6). The pretext of the speech is the need for applause to release him from ‘this bare island’, a conceit which merges a petition for audience approval with a plot summary based on Prospero’s effort to return to Italy (8). Even the language of the standard address to the spectators recalls his oft-mentioned project to regain power: ‘Gentle breath of yours my sails / Must fill, or else my project fails’ (11-12). The petition is a verbal echo of Ariel’s commentary after spying on the conspiracy against the King of Naples: ‘My master through his art foresees the danger ... For else his project dies’ (2.1.297-9). There is no mention here, as we have seen, of Miranda or Caliban. The king is the sole member of the cast to merit Prospero’s attention. Prospero emphasizes the manner in which he has ‘pardon’d the deceiver’, a gesture that will allow him to resume his place in Milan once the performance has ended (7). The repetition of the word ‘pardon’d’ in the final couplet equates the expedient act of forgiveness with the demand for applause: ‘As you from crimes would pardon’d be / Let your indulgence set me free’ (19-20). The combination of politics and reconciliation in the Epilogue is consistent with the themes established in Shakespeare’s other so-called romances from the 1610-1611 period. At the end of Cymbeline, as the next chapter will show, the King of Britain declares ‘Pardon’s the word to all’.133 The pronouncement encapsulates 133 William Shakespeare, Cymbeline, 5.5.422. Compare with the overdue plea for pardon by Leontes in the final speech of The Winter’s Tale, 5.3.146. The implausible finale


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the incongruous resolution of the international conflicts that dominate the play, as Cymbeline chooses to defer to the Roman invaders after his victory in the supposed battle for British independence. The staging of the need to overcome past grievances has particular relevance to the contemporary reputation of James I. Royal peacemaking was, of course, an activity closely associated with the policies and iconography of the Anglo-Scottish monarch.134 From the time of his accession, when he sought to defuse the traditional tensions between England and Scotland, James became famous for his efforts to avoid foreign and domestic conflicts. By 1604, he had already brokered the historic Treaty of London with Spain, Elizabeth’s greatest continental antagonist.135 The ongoing efforts to arrange a Catholic match for Prince Henry was an essential part of the king’s diplomatic strategy, aimed at establishing a dynastic union to counterbalance future religious differences. During the 1609-1611 period in particular, the king was working in league with France, the United Provinces of the Netherlands, and the German Evangelical States to promote a negotiated settlement to the question of the Cleves-Julich succession.136 The hope was that the dukedom of the strategic territory in the Holy Roman Empire would go to one of three legitimate Protestant claimants without antagonizing the Catholic powers of Europe. Shakespeare’s treatment of the reconciliation theme in The Tempest supplements the potential references to the policies of James I by using a disguised ruler plot, a framework whose stage history had established it as a medium for commentary about the Stuart monarch. The dominant presence of Prospero, a function of the plot structure, underlines the active role of the ruler in ensuring a peaceful resolution of the tensions within the world of the play. Yet the speed with which the reinstated Duke of Milan forgets his daughter, harping on his dukedom in the Epilogue instead, should be disconcerting. A consummate man of the theatre like Shakespeare would have been well aware of the difficulty of containing the questionable ideological associations the disguised duke plot structure had acquired by 1611. Contemporary dramatists had previously based entire plays upon the potential for audience recognition of generic intertextuality when, as Beaumont underlined at the start of The Woman Hater, ‘a Duke there is, and the Scene lyes in Italy’.137 The fundamentally optimistic vision of the late Elizabethan Malcontent, where the deposed ruler learns how to combat corruption, was no longer tenable amidst the fading hopes for domestic reform and the repeated mockery of the form as a theatrical cliché. Prospero only talks about the need to regain power, never displaying any interest in the quality of Milan’s in the Sicilian court has no precedent in the play’s primary sources. 134 For the iconography of the king’s peace policies, see James Doelman, King James I and the Religious Culture of England (Oxford: D.S. Brewer, 2000), pp. 83-101. 135 Maurice Lee, Jr. James I and Henri IV: An Essay in English Foreign Policy, 1603-10 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970), pp. 17-40. 136 See Lee, pp. 146-73. See also W.B. Patterson, King James and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 155ff. 137 Beaumont, ll. 17-18.


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government. The tensions between New Comedy and political expediency, the object of parody in Sharpham’s conflation of dynastic unions and prostitution in The Fleire, are already implicit in the conclusion of Measure for Measure. The use of the term ‘pardon’ by the Duke of Vienna, like Prospero, has more to do with his personal agenda than disinterested mercy. Vincentio links the announcement of Claudio’s pardon with a marriage proposal to his sister: If he be like your brother, for his sake Is he pardon’d, and for your lovely sake, Give me your hand, and say you will be mine, He is my brother too. (5.1.490-93)

The ruler’s proposition to Isabella is more honourable than that of Angelo, his discredited substitute, but Vincentio persists in representing the preservation of Claudio in terms of a sexual quid pro quo. Without anything to offer in exchange, as we have seen, Lucio fares even worse: ‘And yet here’s one in place I cannot pardon’ (5.1.499). The refusal to extend mercy towards the gallant because of his slanders marks the risks of political commentary on the Jacobean stage. The controversy resulting from the derision of the monarch’s Scottish origins in Eastward Ho (1605) would go on to demonstrate the consequences of engaging in overt satire, with orders of imprisonment issued for George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and John Marston.138 Since all the historical evidence suggests Shakespeare was an astute businessman, unlikely to hazard his livelihood or physical wellbeing, we should not be surprised that his disguised ruler plays do not engage in such an explicit challenge of the domestic king.139 What the plot structure offers, however, is an opportunity to rehearse simultaneously orthodox and dissident positions. Lucio and Caliban seize the opportunity to curse even as the play depicts their suppression. When we come to look at Cymbeline, the subject of Chapter 5, the ideological confusion provoked by the play’s intertextual complexity makes manifest that a univocal interpretation of James I and his contested policies was not the primary objective of either the dramatist or his audience.

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Chapman and Jonson ended in up in prison and were obliged to write fawning letters to obtain their release. Marston managed to flee. For the scandal, see Janet Clare, ‘Art Made Tongue-Tied by Authority’: Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 139-45. I discuss the play’s treatment of the monarch and period grievances about Anglo-Scottish union in Chapter 5, pp. 178-9. 139 See E.A.J. Honigmann, ‘“There is a World Elsewhere”: William Shakespeare, Businessman’, in Images of Shakespeare: Proceedings of the Third Congress of the International Shakespeare Association, 1986, eds Werner Habict, D.J. Palmer and Roger Pringle (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1986), pp. 40-46.

Chapter 5

‘No more a Britain’: James I, Jachimo, and the Politics of Xenophobia in Cymbeline By now, there are two critical commonplaces about Cymbeline: it deals with ‘King James’ vision of a unified Britain’ and it is an ‘awkward mixture of sources, genres, and chronology’. While Shakespeare’s anachronistic portrayal of Jachimo has attracted a certain amount of attention in recent studies, marking the disjunction between the presence of a stock Italianate stage villain and the classical setting of the rest of the play, readings of the Jacobean context of the play continue to relegate the wager plot to footnotes or ignore it altogether. The implicit suggestion is that the retelling of a familiar Italian prose narrative about jealousy is a distraction The first quotation is from Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 161. The second appears in Heather James, Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics and the Translation of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 151. A valuable account of the state of current criticism is Willy Maley, ‘Cymbeline, the Font of History, and the Matter of Britain: From Times New Roman to Italic Type’, in Alternative Shakespeares 3, ed. Diana E. Henderson (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 119-37. Among studies of British nationalism in the play, recent examples of the tendency to elide the wager plot are Lisa Hopkins, The Cultural Uses of Caesars on the English Renaissance Stage (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 111-26, Ros King, Cymbeline: Constructions of Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), Philip Schwyzer, Literature, Nationalism, and Meaning in Early Modern England and Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 169-74, Joan Fitzpatrick, Shakespeare, Spenser and the Contours of Britain: Reshaping the Atlantic Archipelago (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2004), pp. 82-119, and Tristan Marshall, Theatre and Empire: Great Britain on the London Stage under James VI and I (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 65-78. For the anachronistic references to early modern Italy, see Patricia Parker, ‘Romance and Empire: Anachronistic Cymbeline’, in Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance, eds George M. Logan and Gordon Teskey (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 189-207 and Thomas G. Olsen, ‘Iachimo’s “Drug-Damn’d Italy” and the Problem of British National Character in Cymbeline’, Shakespeare Yearbook 10 (1999): 268-96. The suggestion in these readings, as I will discuss below, is that the presence of contemporary Italy is a coherent part of the play’s celebration of ancient Rome. There is an extensive survey of previous accounts of the wager plot in Peter Parolin, ‘Anachronistic Italy: Cultural Alliances and National Identity in Cymbeline’, Shakespeare Studies 30 (2002): 188-216.

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from the more pressing ideological concerns of nationhood and cultural prestige in the main tribute plot. The abrupt reconciliation with Rome at the end of the play, where Cymbeline decides to pay the tribute despite winning the battle, comes across as a deliberate intervention in the contentious debate about the plans of James I to bring together his reigns in England and Scotland under the ancient title of Britain. Upon his accession to the English throne, the Stuart monarch introduced a policy of Anglo-Scottish union, predicated upon the equality of the two component kingdoms, which had as its centrepiece the creation of a single British nationality. Within days of receiving his new title, the king declared ‘the memory of all preterite Discontentments abolished, and the Inhabitants of both the Realmes to be the Subjects of one Kingdome’. The importance of Rome as a model of cultural attainment in the play, a standard that the British are keen to measure themselves against, evokes the rhetorical strategies of Stuart propaganda texts, which represent the ancient conflict with the legions of Julius Caesar as the defining moment in the historical formation of a unique British identity. To account for the complex negotiation between domestic patriotism and classical civilization at the conclusion of Cymbeline, where Britain emerges as both vanquisher and vassal of Rome, the customary critical gesture is to argue the loyal playwright provides ‘a dramatic endorsement of the Roman roots of Britishness’. Shakespeare’s project becomes an effort to represent the new composite nation as a direct descendant of the glories of ancient Rome, lending prestige to the contested royal policy. The logical explanation for the anachronistic wager plot, from this perspective, turns out to be that the ideological supplement of Jachimo severs the desirable historical legacy of the peninsula from the persistent stereotypes of ‘all the complex evils of contemporary Italian politics and religion’. Such arguments also have the advantage of clearing up the awkward role of the Queen and Cloten, Bruce Galloway, The Union of England and Scotland, 1603-1703 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1986), pp. 170-71. See also Jenny Wormald, ‘The Creation of Britain: Multiple Kingdoms, or Core and Colonies’. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 2 (1992): 175-94. ‘Proclamation for the Unity of England and Scotland’, Stuart Royal Proclamations, Volume 1: The Royal Proclamations of King James I, 1603-1625. eds James F. Latham and Paul L. Hughes. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), p. 18. Willy Maley, ‘Postcolonial Shakespeare: British Identity Formation and Cymbeline’, in Shakespeare’s Late Plays: New Readings, eds Jennifer Richards and James Knowles (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), p. 147. Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare, Spenser and the Matter of Britain (Houndsmills: Palgrave, 2004), p. 166. Compare with Olsen, p. 282, Parker, p. 205, Jodi Mikalachki, ‘The Masculine Romance of Roman Britain: Cymbeline and Early Modern English Nationalism’, Shakespeare Quarterly 46, 6 (1995): 309, note 25, Leah S. Marcus, ‘Cymbeline and the Unease of Topicality’, in The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literature, eds Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988), p. 145, and G. Wilson Knight, The Crown of Life: Essays in the Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Final Plays (rpt. London: Methuen, 1965), p. 150.

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characters who function simultaneously as the most vocal exponents of domestic nationalism and the main villains of the play. The rousing patriotic sentiments espoused by the villains are to be deplored, in spite of the apparent tension with the nationalistic agenda of the work as a whole, because they ‘disrupt the bonding between Britain and Rome’. Here, the underlying assumption is Shakespeare believed in what he was writing and was able to maintain the coherent expression of a single overall idea. Nonetheless, in spite of the critical mass of allusions to the Jacobean union project, most studies are obliged to concede ‘the play stubbornly refuses to make sense at the level of Stuart interpretation’. The subject of this chapter is the ideological incoherence provoked by the complex and contradictory intertextual structure of the two plotlines in Cymbeline, where every direct and indirect source introduces a diverse understanding of national identity. Given the engagement with Jacobean politics in the tribute plot, it is strange that Shakespeare assigns the villain in the wager plot the name Jachimo, a variant of the Italian word for James. The name Giacomo does not appear in either the Italian or the English sources for the wager plot. In the original story from the Decameron, Boccaccio calls his villain Ambrogiuolo. In Frederyke of Jannen, an English adaptation of the tale set in Genoa, the equivalent character is Johans, a conniving Florentine.10 There is no evidence London audiences of the time associated the Italianate stage villain, coming to the island to exploit the credulity of ‘duller Britain’, with the Scottish king who had come from Scotland to take over the throne of England.11 Yet the ambiguous choice of name adds to the allusions to James I already inherent to the main plot, fostering the interpretive confusion characteristic of the play’s critical history. In his portrayal of Cymbeline, Shakespeare encourages comparisons with the Stuart monarch. The ancient British king has two sons and a daughter, a departure from the historical chronicles that mirrors the composition of James’ own family unit. Cymbeline stands out for his promotion of peace and reconciliation, the distinguishing principles of Fitzpatrick, p. 97. Compare with Mikalachki, p. 305, Parker, p. 205, and Olsen, pp. 287-90. Marcus, p. 136. While I appreciate the continuing editorial debate about the character names of Jachimo/Iachimo/Giacomo and Imogen/Innogen, I have made the arbitrary decision to use the spellings in the Riverside Shakespeare edition. 10 Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (8 vols. London: Routledge, 1975), vol. 8, pp. 75-7. The references to Florence evoke the city’s association with Machiavelli. 11 William Shakespeare, Cymbeline, 5.5.197. This and all subsequent quotations from Shakespeare are from The Riverside Shakespeare, gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. 2nd. ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). Simon Forman’s manuscript notes about the 1611 Globe performance identify Jachimo as ‘the Italiã’, distinguishing him from ‘the Romains’ in the rest of the play. See ‘Records, Documents, and Allusions’, The Riverside Shakespeare, p. 1967.


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Stuart domestic and foreign policy. As he disclaims the seductive patriotism of the Queen, however, Cymbeline’s capitulation to Augustus makes manifest the dominant role of Roman authority in the allegorical treatment of Anglo-Scottish union. The eagerness of James I to appropriate the legacy of the Romans was such that his accession medal evoked Roman iconography, representing the new king in the apparel of an ancient emperor.12 The submission to Rome is necessary in the final scene, apart from the cultural prestige of the classical tradition, because any statement of Britishness in Jacobean England has to take account of the manner in which James I straddles the boundaries between native and foreigner. A glaring absence in the play, consistent with how James redubbed his subjects ‘South and North Britaines’, is any reference to England or Englishness.13 Not unlike the Italian trickster Jachimo, who fosters the confusion of time and place on-stage, the Stuart monarch was vulnerable to accusations that he was an interloper whose project to unite his two kingdoms disrupted the coherent history and traditions of an autonomous English culture. To conclude a play supposed to be celebrating a distinctive historical British identity, legitimated by the victory over the legendary Roman legions, Shakespeare depicts the nation’s capitulation to foreign rule. Cymbeline’s repudiation of jingoistic belligerence, a position associated with a dead queen, recalls England’s obligation to accept an unfamiliar Scottish king after the death of Elizabeth I. With the genuine religious and political anxieties of the isolated Protestant nation, the Elizabethan period was not conspicuous for its tolerance of the country’s European neighbours.14 One of the main reasons why the queen remained unmarried was that ‘many at court disliked the idea of the queen marrying a foreigner’, since the influence a foreign prince acquired ‘would put at risk England’s national independence’.15 Indeed, although the specific threat posed by Mary Queen of Scots derived from her potential claims to the Crown, the urgency to remove the mother of the Stuart monarch from circulation came from fears that she would work to transform the religious identity of the English nation by reinstating Catholicism.16 Such strongly felt opinions would not have evaporated upon the 12

See King, pp. 80-81. ‘A Proclamation declaring what Flaggs South and North Britaines shall beare at Sea’, in Stuart Royal Proclamations, p. 135. 14 The political and cultural manifestations of Elizabethan xenophobia are discussed in Laura Hunt Yungblut, Strangers Settled Here Amongst Us: Policies, Perceptions and the Presence of Aliens in Elizabethan England (London: Routledge, 1996). 15 Susan Doran, Monarch and Matrimony: The Courtships of Elizabeth I (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 213. 16 For the campaign by English bishops in favour of the execution, see Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500-1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), p. 45. After the death of Elizabeth, many Protestants worried the Stuart monarch would share his mother’s desire to reinstate Catholicism. See Stefania Tutino, ‘Thomas Pound, Andrew Willet e la questione cattolica 13


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death of Elizabeth. John Watkins has noted that ‘in the opening weeks of 1603, some of James’s new subjects objected to James’s succession on the grounds that the Crown was an English property and could not be inherited by a foreigner, especially one whose mother had been executed for treason against an English sovereign’.17 What the determined opposition to the Anglo-Scottish union policy suggests is the immediate ambition of James to (re)unite his two kingdoms aggravated pre-existing apprehensions about the subversion of England by an alien rule. The visual image Shakespeare employs to depict the final reconciliation between Britain and Rome, the two ensigns flying ‘Friendly together’, is expressive of the fundamental ideological contradictions in the play’s allusions to the policy (5.5.481). For although past critics have read it as a metaphor for Jacobean ambitions for a peaceful union of England and Scotland, as we will see, the imagery also recalls the specific historical circumstances of James’ attempt to combine the flags of his two kingdoms. The imposition of the first Union Jack, where the Cross of St George lost its traditional precedence, caused uproar because it incarnated all the fears about the loss of domestic independence under the new monarch. Many intertextual studies continue to expend disproportionate energy perpetuating the Shakespeare myth, an endeavour that does not allow for dramatic or ideological loose ends. Even though the rehearsal and interrogation of existing material is typical of all early modern writing, as we have seen throughout this book, critics feel obliged to remind us of Shakespeare’s unique ability to transcend his immediate influences: Sources can help us not only expose the cultural embeddedness of Shakespeare’s plays, but also, and perhaps more important, the moments when Shakespeare expands beyond the perceptual limits of his culture … the moments of textual innovation when Shakespeare exploits his source texts in order to improvise new dimensions and new strata of texts.18

The multiplicity of cultural discourses within a Shakespearean play demonstrates, we are told, his success in producing dense and elaborate but ultimately coherent all’inizio del regno di Giacomo I’, in Questioni di Storia Inglese tra Cinque e Seicento: cultura, politica, e religione, eds Stefano Villani, Stefania Tutino, and Chiara Francheschini (Pisa: Scuola normale, 2003), pp. 49-77 and Michael Questier, ‘The Politics of Religious Conformity and the Accession of James I’, Historical Research 71 (1998): 14-30. 17 John Watkins, Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England: Literature, History, Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 14. The Stuart monarch had already anticipated such accusations. See Susan Doran, ‘James VI and the English Succession’, in James VI and I: Ideas, Authority, and Government, ed. Ralph Houlbrooke (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 25-42. 18 Stephen Lynch, Shakespearean Intertextuality: Studies in Selected Sources and Plays (Westport: Greenwood, 1998), p. 114.

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works. From this perspective, it is easy to see Samuel Johnson’s condemnation of the ‘confusion of the names and manners of different times’ in Cymbeline as a naïve response to the play’s sophisticated engagement with Jacobean political debates.19 Shakespeare’s dramatic agenda must have ‘demanded exactly such a level of con-fusion’, as a generic prerequisite of the fantasy world of romance or to forestall potential apprehensions about the role of history in the play.20 Indeed, for most critics, the apparent confusion becomes a symptom of the play’s essential coherence: ‘Cymbeline finds strength in its awkward inconsistency’.21 Nonetheless, even though the norms of academic discourse demand that professional critics present a logical argument, this does not mean that Shakespeare was under the same constraints or even wanted to do so. By putting all this incongruous material together, with or without the constant application of all his rhetorical skills, Shakespeare’s writing practice militates against the production of a univocal text. The dramatist may have been ambivalent about the Jacobean ideal of Britishness, as many of his compatriots were, or simply unable to suppress the traces of competing discourses of nationhood. Anachronistic Nations Shakespeare does not isolate the Augustan Rome of the main plot from the Machiavellian Italy of the subplot, even though the vices associated with Jachimo may be antithetical to the great classical traditions. The meticulous distinction between ancient Rome and early modern Italy was a characteristic gesture of English classical scholars, keen to advance the cultural ambitions of their own aspiring young nation. In publishing his renowned translation of Livy, as we have seen, Philemon Holland added a lengthy postscript reminding his readers not to confuse the Italians of their time with ‘that auncient people, so devout, so virtuous, so uncorrupt, in old time’.22 It is rare to find a period text like A Discovery of the Great Subtiltie and wonderful Wisedom of the Italians (1591), which conflates how ‘Julius Caesar, an Italian, pillaged and ruined, not only France, but also other parts of Europe’ with the efforts of the Borgias and de’ Medici ‘to advance and enrich themselves by the overthrow and pillage of others’.23 Even Roger Ascham was 19 Cited in Maley, ‘Postcolonial Shakespeare’, p. 147. Another clever literary figure, George Bernard Shaw, made similar objections to the play. See ‘Introduction to Cymbeline Refinished’ in Geneva, Cymbeline Refinished and Good King Charles (London: Constable, 1946), pp. 133-6. Shaw’s reading is discussed below, pp. 201-4. 20 Maley, ‘Postcolonial Shakespeare’, p. 147. 21 James, p. 151. 22 Philemon Holland, ‘To the Reader’. The Romane Historie Written by T. Livius of Padua (London, 1600), p. 1346. See Chapter 2, pp. 38-9. 23 A Discovery of the Great Subtiltie and wonderful Wisedom of the Italians (London, 1591), pp. 2, 3. The dedication of this work to Henry IV of France suggests it is a translation


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quick to deny ‘any private malice’ to ancient Rome in The Schoolmaster: ‘But now that time is gone and, though the place remains, yet the old and present manners do differ as far as black and white, as virtue and vice’.24 The acknowledgment of past glories is not just an effort to protect the Latin curriculum of his classroom from any association with his condemnation of modern Italy. The objective of Ascham is to represent England as the true heir of classical Rome. He calls upon the illustrious Cicero to admit that for learning, beside the knowledge of all learned tongues and liberal sciences, even your own books, Cicero, be as well read, and your excellent eloquence is as well liked and loved and as truly followed in England at this day, as it is now, or ever was since your time, in any place of Italy.25

Such a line of attack recalls the Soothsayer’s final prophecy of British ascendance in Cymbeline, where the accommodation with Augustus confirms the cultural succession promised by his vision of ‘the Roman eagle, / From south to west on wing soaring aloft’ (5.5.470-71). Critics find it attractive, therefore, to interpret the anachronistic villainy of Jachimo in terms of the ‘passing of the true Roman virtues not from Rome to a later Italy but from Rome to the Britain symbolized by Posthumus and Imogen’.26 Yet the crucial distinction between ancient and modern is lost when Jachimo, the overdetermined representative of every English discourse of Italianate vice, takes his place among the commanders of the Augustan legions. Upon the arrival of the Roman invasion force at Milford-Haven, ready to punish the British for their defiance, Caius Lucius receives the reassuring news ‘from Rome’ that The Senate hath stirr’d up the confiners And gentleman of Italy, most willing spirits That promise noble service; and they come Under the conduct of bold Jachimo, Sienna’s brother. (4.2.337-41).

Here, the announcement of Jachimo’s impending arrival merges the two plot lines. The temporal disorder becomes explicit in the battle scenes. Posthumus Leonatus may earn glory as ‘the Romans’ bane’, saving king and nation from certain defeat, but it is his old enemy Jachimo whom he vanquishes in the on-stage from a French text, reflecting the hostility provoked by Catherine de’ Medici. Of course, the fact that an English translation was desirable is in itself significant. 24 Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster. ed. Lawrence V. Ryan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), pp. 60-61. For the cultural influence of Ascham, see Chapter 2, pp. 29-37. 25 Ascham, p. 150. 26 Parker, p. 205. Compare with Olsen, p. 282.

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combat (5.3.58). For all the claims the play exorcizes the vices of contemporary Italy, leaving Britain to inherit only the benefits of classical civilization, Jachimo faces no punishment in the finale. The anachronistic ‘Italian fiend’ remains an incongruous presence in the background as Cymbeline proclaims his peace, with Britain’s submission ‘to Caesar, / And to the Roman empire’ (5.5.210, 460-61). The royal pardon he obtains, along with the other Roman invaders, is a significant departure from the violent deaths meted out to the character’s forebears in the sources for the Italianate wager plot.27 The blatant absurdities deriving from Jachimo’s historical time shifting, frustrating our desire for Aristotelian dramatic coherence, should not distract us from the extent to which every form of identity and allegiance comes into question in Cymbeline. The British king vacillates about whether Rome is an enemy or an ideal, explicitly foregrounding the anomaly of his ultimate decision to pay the tribute: ‘Never was a war did cease / (Ere bloody hands were wash’d) with such a peace’ (5.5484-5). Jachimo succeeds in convincing Posthumus of Imogen’s infidelity. The Queen’s hyper-patriotism emerges alongside all the attributes of a conventional stage villain. The final scene may restore all three of the British king’s missing children, as a parallel to the reconciliation with Rome, but what stands out is the ease with which Imogen, Guiderius, and Arviragus were lost. Only the distinctive mole on the neck of Guiderius saves the royal sons from execution, notwithstanding their heroics on behalf of the British nation. The anachronistic references to early modern Italy reflect the constant state of confusion in which Shakespeare’s characters find themselves as the two plots begin to unite. In her pose as Fidele, changing sex and national allegiance, Imogen joins her Italian slanderer in the invading Roman army. Faced with the corpse of Cloten, she mistakes it for her absent husband. Without a fixed position on the British battlefield, passing unknown in diverse forms of national dress, Posthumus goes on to incarnate the tenuousness of any sense of origin or recognition in the play. On a political level, Shakespeare’s main plot foregrounds a more controversial historical anachronism: the term Britain itself. The absence of any references to England or Englishness in Cymbeline, albeit conforming to the historical context of the distant, if inconsistent setting, elides the contemporary complaints about the enforced transition to new British symbols and terminology under the new monarch. Though A.J. Hoenselaars has denied that Jacobean playgoers would have ‘marked any distinction’ between the words England and Britain, the distinction was already an established dramatic and political theme.28 There was a thriving market in court masques ‘investing James in prestigious images of a specifically

27 See A.J. Hoenselaars, Images of Englishmen and Foreigners in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickenson University Press, 1992), p. 182. 28 Hoenselaars, pp. 178-9.


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British kingship’.29 The standard argument for the use of Britain in such masques, as rehearsed by a dutiful Ben Jonson in The Masque of Blackness, was that it marked a return to a common national origin: ‘With that great name BRITANIA, this blest Isle / Hath wonne her ancient dignitie and stile’.30 Yet, in the midst of his orthodox celebration of historical continuity, Jonson slyly highlights the effective novelty of the term: ‘BRITANIA (whose new name makes all tongues sing)’.31 For English nationalists, the Jacobean terminology was not a revival of a glorious past, but a suspect repression of centuries of autonomous local culture. The Stuart vision of ancient times did not coincide with previous accounts of the formation of England, even though the supposed legitimacy of the union project derived from ‘the order of Histories’.32 It was all very well for the new policy’s proponents to enthuse about the ‘fayre and admirable blessings which God hath powered upon the Ilands of great Brittanie’, but there were few accepted precedents for any common Anglo-Scottish identity.33 On the infrequent occasions when ancient British history did appear in Tudor political discourse, the rhetorical function tended to be the demonstration of the manifest destiny of the English people to rule the entire island.34 In contrast to the Jacobean promise of an equal union between the two kingdoms, the 1587 edition of William Harrison’s Description of Britain denies any place for the Scottish in the history of the Atlantic archipelago: ‘they are but strangers, and such as by obscure invasion have nestled on thys Islande’.35 Scottish monarchs do not even appear in Harrison’s list of the Princes of Britain,

Martin Butler, ‘The Invention of Britain and the early Stuart Masque’ in The Stuart Court and Europe: Essays in Politics and Political Culture, ed. Malcolm Smuts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 69. 30 Ben Jonson, The Masque of Blackness. Ben Jonson, eds C.H. Hereford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1941), vol. 7, lines 246-7. 31 Ibid., line 251. My italics. 32 John Gordon, A Panegyric of Congratulations for the Concord of the Realmes of Great Britainie in Unitie of Religion and under one King (London, 1603), B1r. A useful collection of the non-dramatic writing on the union, especially for the Scottish approach to the issue, is The Jacobean Union, eds Bruce R. Galloway and Brian P. Levack (Edinburgh: Scottish Historical Society, 1985). 33 Gordon, B3r. 34 There have been two excellent recent articles about the conflation of Britain and England in Tudor nationalist rhetoric, see Alan Macoll, ‘The Construction of England as Protestant “British” Nation in the Sixteenth Century’, Renaissance Studies 18, 4 (2004): 522-608, and Stewart Mottram, ‘Reading the Rhetoric of Nationhood in two Reformation Pamphlets by Richard Morison and Nicholas Bodrugan’, Renaissance Studies 19, 4 (2005): 523-40. 35 William Harrison’s Description of Britain (1587), B2r-v, cited in Macoll, p. 601. The text appeared as part of Holinshed’s Chronicles. For the role of Harrison in the over all text of the Chronicles, see Annabel M. Patterson, Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 58-62. 29


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reflecting the nationalistic priorities of an English text published in the same year as the execution of Mary Queen of Scots.36 The danger for James I was that any dispute about origins and identity threatened to call into question his own national affiliation. The fate of his mother was emblematic of the historical tensions surrounding England’s relationship with Scotland. The intense diplomatic activity prior to the Scottish monarch’s accession to the English throne had much to do, as Susan Doran has recently shown, with his unease about potential assertions ‘that as a foreigner he could not inherit land or the crown of England’.37 The third part of this chapter will look at the rhetorical strategies of the competing sides in the Anglo-Scottish union debate in detail, focusing on the complex negotiations of national identity involved. At this point, I want to discuss the representation of English dissent by Shakespeare’s contemporaries in the London theatre. Domestic grievances about the union project were the result of a persistent attachment to an exclusively English national identity. What must have made the notorious allusion to James in Eastward Ho (1605) so subversive was not just that he became the object of ridicule on the public stage, but the explicit identification of him as a foreigner. The comic effect of the imitation of the reigning monarch by the First Gentleman, addressing the shipwrecked Sir Petronel, comes from the exaggerated Scottish brogue: ‘I ken the man weel; he’s one of my thirty pound knights’.38 The accompanying satire of the deflation of honours, where Petronel ‘stole his knighthood for four pound, giving to a page all the money in ’s purse’, is consistent with the staging of anxieties about recent changes in social status in the play.39 The references to Anglo-Scottish union make manifest the confusion between the positions of native and foreigner produced by the policies of the new king. Even as Seagull provides the orthodox observation that ‘we are all one countrymen now’, applauding the recent arrival of ‘a few industrious Scots’ in the Virginia colony, the context of his remarks encourages English xenophobia: indeed, [they] are dispersed over the face of the whole earth. But, as for them, there are no greater friends to Englishmen and England, when they are out on’t, in the world, than they are. And for my part, I would a hundred thousand of ’em were there, for we are all one countrymen now, ye know; and we should find ten times more comfort of them there than we do here.40

36

Macoll, p. 601. Doran, ‘James VI and the English Succession’, p. 34. Doran also outlines the monarch’s efforts to bolster his position through the publication and circulation of tracts supporting the legitimacy of his claims. 38 George Chapman, John Marston, and Ben Jonson, Eastward Ho, ed. R.W. Van Fossen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979), 4.1.197-8. 39 Ibid., 4.1.198-200. 40 Ibid., 3.3.44-52. 37


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The scene anticipates that the London audience members will identify themselves with ‘Englishmen and England’, a subject position at odds with the inclusive principle of Jacobean Britishness. However, the presence in the theatre of an offended Scottish knight like Sir James Murray, able to use his political influence with the new monarch to punish the unwary dramatists, would have been an ironic demonstration of the very social changes the play denounces.41 With the subsequent portrayal of James himself as a Scot in the next act, implicitly casting him as part of this unwanted foreign presence in England, it is no wonder that George Chapman, John Marston and Ben Jonson ended up in prison.42 The king may have found the play’s ridicule of the foolishness and corruption of the Jacobean court unpleasant, although he would have to get used to it over the course of his reign. Finding himself represented as an interloper in his own kingdom would have been intolerable. Shakespeare’s depiction of the problematic status of national affiliation in Cymbeline is a dubious tactic for a play dedicated to the promotion of Britishness. The overt staging of anti-Scottish sentiments in Eastward Ho is symptomatic of the prevailing estrangement from a contingent British identity, perceived as an absurd cultural construct imposed by a capricious new king. The potential punishment for seditious political commentary suggests we should not be surprised about the absence of such explicit satire of the Jacobean union project in Shakespeare’s play.43 Yet, whether or not Shakespeare shared the sentiments expressed by Chapman, Marston and Jonson, the anxieties they expressed would have implicated any treatment of the present and past connotations of Britain. Shakespeare’s constant emphasis on foreign subversion distracts from his ostensible political agenda, overshadowing the makeshift reconciliation of diverse nations in the final scene. For the portrayal of Jachimo and Posthumus, in particular, the wager plot reinforces the cultural perspective of Tudor patriotism by drawing on the paranoid rhetoric of the discourse of the Italianate Englishman.

41 The personal investment that Murray had in blocking such satire, as a new Jacobean knight, is discussed in Theodore B. Leinwald, Theatre, Finance and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 53 and Lucy Munro, Children of the Queen’s Revels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 80. 42 After the courtier’s protests, the dialogue about Scottish ‘friends to Englishmen and England’ was excised from the play. For the controversy the play provoked, see Janet Clare, ‘Art Made Tongue-Tied by Authority’: Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 139-45 and Munro, pp. 73-82. 43 For example, see the discussion of Jonson’s responses to his troubles with the Elizabethan and Jacobean authorities in Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), pp. 49-58.


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Forgetting Britain The international quarrels in Cymbeline ensure that, as in Othello, the wager plot is about more than simple jealousy.44 What distinguishes Posthumus from Othello, each an outsider in Italy, is the manner in which the Briton becomes a champion of domestic ambitions. When Posthumus arrives in Rome after his enforced exile, in the first scene of the subplot, his hosts refer to him only in terms of his country of origin: ‘Here comes the Britain’ (1.4.28). The opening stage direction of the scene, ‘Enter Philario, Jachimo, a Frenchman, a Dutchman, and a Spaniard’ recalls the elaborate taxonomies of national character so popular in early modern English rhetoric (1.4.1). A typical set piece in the theatre, as we have seen in The White Devil, is the encounter between a compatriot of the London audience and a group of continental stereotypes.45 With the addition of a British character to the traditional story, taking advantage of the possibilities suggested by the cast of European merchants in Frederyck of Jennen, Shakespeare employs the Roman location as a site of transnational cultural comparison.46 The eagerness with which the foreign characters debate the virtue of Imogen, disputing claims by Posthumus that she is the embodiment of the superior qualities of British womanhood, stages the cultural antagonisms underlying any appeal to patriotic pride. The sexual competition in the source material, where the supposed conquest of the woman determines male status, becomes an interrogation of national potency. The delay in the appearance of Posthumus on-stage, permitting the characters to speak behind his back, reveals the disrespect underlying the formal courtesy of the reception accorded the Briton. The Frenchman’s contemptuous evaluation has as much to do with partisanship as personal qualities: ‘I have seen him in France. We had very many there could behold the sun with as firm eyes as he’ (1.4.11-13). Jachimo is well aware of the advantageous match with ‘his king’s daughter’, but he refuses to grant the foreigner any esteem: ‘I have seen him in Britain … But I could have then look’d on him without the help of admiration, though the catalogue For a comparison between Cymbeline and Othello, see Floyd-Wilson, pp. 159-60. It is worth noting, given the critical focus on the anachronisms in Shakespeare’s wager plot, that the presence of an English ambassador in the Vatican at the time has no historical basis. See my discussion of the play, pp. 111-14. The most compendious study of national stereotypes in the theatre is Hoenselaars, Images of Englishmen and Foreigners. 46 The European context of the scene is discussed in Peter Holland, ‘Staging Europe in Shakespeare’, in Setting the Scene: Shakespeare in European Culture, eds Ladina Bezzola Lambert and Balz Engler (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), pp. 21-40. The introduction of merchants from diverse countries is one of the signs that Shakespeare likely used the English text as a supplement to the more famous novella by Boccaccio, where there is a homogenous group of Italian merchants. For the sources of the wager plot, see Bullough, vol. 8, pp. 10ff, Kenneth Muir, The Sources of Shakespeare’s Plays (London: Methuen, 1977), pp. 262-5, and H.G. Wright, Boccaccio in England from Chaucer to Tennyson (London: Athalone, 1957), pp. 220-26. 44

45


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of his endowments had been tabled by his side’ (1.4.13, 1-6). The Spaniard and Dutchman remain silent, presumably too disdainful even to involve themselves in the conversation. From what we find out about his experiences abroad, however, it is clear Posthumus has a knack for causing offence. The Frenchman is quick to remind him of the ‘contention in public’ he instigated through the excessive praise of his mistress, ‘vouching (and upon warrant of bloody affirmation) his to be more fair, virtuous, wise, chaste, constant, qualified, and less attemptable than any the rarest of our ladies in France’ (1.4.54, 57-61). The continual recourse to the possessive in the scene, with the quarrel over the pre-eminence of ‘your unparagon’d mistress’, ‘our ladies in France’ and ‘ours of Italy’, marks the links between sexual and patriotic pride (1.4.80, 61, 66). The dispute with Jachimo arises because the Italian construes the exaltation of the British woman as an aspersion on the women of his country: ‘You must not so far prefer her ’fore ours of Italy … As fair and as good – a kind of hand-in-hand comparison – had been something too fair and too good for any lady in Brittany’ (1.4.65-72). The ensuing wager may be a specific test of the fidelity of Imogen, but Posthumus casts the challenge to Jachimo in nationalist terms: ‘Your Italy contains none so accomplish’d a courtier to convince the honor of my mistress’ (1.4.94-5). What is at stake here, consistent with the rivalry between Britain and Rome in the main tribute plot, is the negotiation of the nation’s place in the European hierarchy of cultures. The overt refusal of ‘hand-in-hand comparison’ is significant because only at the end of the play does Britain succeed in claiming equal precedence to Rome, marked by the two national flags hanging ‘Friendly together’ (5.5.481). The obstinate persistence of Posthumus in asserting the merits of Imogen, notwithstanding the warning offered by the previous row in France, is symptomatic of the British obsession with reputation and status in the play. When Cymbeline refuses to acquiesce to the demands of Augustus, he makes it clear the tribute is only a pretext for war. The real imperative is to follow the precedent set by other rebelling Roman tributaries: I am perfect That the Pannonians and Dalmatians for Their liberties are now in arms, a president Which not to read would show the Britains cold. (3.1.72-5)

The use of the verb ‘show’ marks the risk of inaction for the king, where a failure to respond would corroborate Roman contempt for the nation’s valour. The British need to cancel out the humiliation of the past defeat by Julius Caesar:

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Shakespeare, Politics, and Italy You must know, Till the injurious Romans did extort This tribute from us, we were free. Caesar’s ambition… Did put the yoke upon ’s; which to shake off Becomes a warlike people, who we reckon Ourselves to be. (3.1.45-53)

What his focus on ‘who we reckon / Ourselves to be’ betrays, however, is the fragility of the national self-image. The fantasy scenario of military victory is compelling, like that of Imogen’s resistance to the wiles of the Italian courtier, because it promises to demonstrate that British honour is a universally accepted truth, rather than a partisan opinion. As the two plotlines overlap, Posthumus also reveals the extent to which his personal and patriotic affiliations are contingent upon the respect of others. His defiant response to Philario’s prediction of a British capitulation to the tribute demand centres on the standing of his nation in the eyes of the world: Our country-men Are men more order’d than when Julius Caesar Smil’d at their lack of skill, but found their courage Worthy his frowning at. Their discipline (Now wing-led with their courages) will make known To their approvers they are people such That mend upon the world. (2.4.20-26)

With his concern for the estimation of Britain’s ‘approvers’, eager to revise the appraisal of Caesar, Posthumus concedes a powerful authority to his would-be antagonists. The refusal or withdrawal of such esteem by the Romans threatens to undermine his vulnerable ideal of Britishness, an insecurity underlined by his disorientation after Imogen’s presumed failure of the trial of British womanhood. While the British seek to enhance their prestige in the eyes of the Romans/ Italians, fixing the nation’s status, they find it difficult to recognize each other and themselves. At the start of the play, the First Gentleman is unable to give a convincing description of Posthumus: ‘I cannot delve him to the root’ (1.1.28). The subsequent error that Imogen makes in the identification of the corpse of Cloten, based on the presence of ‘The garments of Posthumus’, reflects the unreliability of any sign of identity in Cymbeline (4.1.308). The clothes do not make the man, since Posthumus changes national dress throughout the course of the play. Indeed, the inconstancy of Posthumus precipitates an even more profound transformation in Imogen, as she abandons the status of a British princess for the garments of a male commoner in the service of the Romans. In spite of all his categorical assertions about ‘our not-fearing Britain’ resistant to foreign incursion, the only defining attribute of Posthumus is the volatility of his personal and national allegiances (2.4.19). When Jachimo returns from his


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encounter with Imogen, derisively proclaiming the ease with which he won the wager, the impressionable Briton has no doubts about ‘The cognizance of her incontinency’ (2.4.126). Only the moral support of Philario, warning that the Italian’s slanders are ‘not strong enough to be believ’d / Of one persuaded well of’ delays the immediate termination of his love (2.4.131-2). Denied the confirmation he was so desperate to receive from Jachimo, the once proud husband falls victim to his tenuous personal beliefs. Postumus evokes the standard theme of female inconstancy to justify his repudiation of Imogen, arguing ‘They are not constant, but are changing still’ (2.5.30). Yet, after all his boasts about her fidelity, it is Posthumus who fails to maintain his convictions. He joins the Augustan invasion force, returning to his country of origin ‘No more a Britain’ (5.3.75). The residual patriotism of Posthumus is weaker than his impatience to exploit the conflict to end his life ‘by some means for Imogen’, in spite of his claim to remain ‘a favourer to the Britain’ (5.3. 83, 74). Prior to consigning himself as a Roman soldier to the victorious British, as Patricia Parker has shown, he ‘goes through a dizzying series of exchanges of national identity’.47 In the course of the battle, constantly shifting sides, he appears on-stage in ‘Italian weeds’, ‘a silly habit’ of a British peasant and dressed as ‘A Roman’ (5.1.23, 5.3.86, 89). A frequent object of satire in the theatre, as we have seen in Chapter 2, was the extent to which the adaptation of foreign fashions was indicative of the loss of domestic characteristics.48 Shakespeare had already alluded to the trope of the English ape in Much Ado About Nothing, where Benedick is notable for the fancy that he hath to strange disguises – as to be a Dutchman to-day, a Frenchman to-morrow, or in the shape of two countries at once, as a German from the waist downward, all slops, and a Spaniard from the hip upward, no doublet.49

The irresistible power of romantic love deprives Benedick of a coherent identity, reducing his appearance to a set of traits taken from elsewhere.50 In contrast, 47 Parker, ‘Romance and Empire’, p. 200. Some critics have seen the Latinate name of Posthumus Leonatus as a sign of a predisposition to non-British identities. For example, see Robert S. Miola, ‘Cymbeline: Shakespeare’s Valediction to Rome’, in Roman Images, ed. Annabel Patterson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), pp. 54-5. 48 See my discussion of the trope of the English Ape and Portia’s depiction of Falconbridge in The Merchant of Venice, p. 31-5. Some critics have cast Cloten as an English Ape, given his use of the borrowed clothes of Posthumus and his courtly ambitions. See Olsen, pp. 289-90, Floyd-Wilson, pp. 178-9, and Parolin, ‘Anachronistic Italy’, p. 200. However, the explicit association of the Briton abroad with changes in national apparel makes the term more appropriate to Posthumus. 49 William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, 3.2.32-6. 50 For a detailed discussion of the intertextual strategies in the comedy, see Michael J. Redmond, ‘“Tis Common Knowledge”: Italian Stereotypes and Audience Response’ in Much Ado About Nothing and The Novella’, Shakespeare Yearbook 13 (2002): 419-41.


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Posthumus and Imogen succumb to the disappointment provoked by the false insinuations of Jachimo. The ‘inconstancy and impressionability’ of Posthumus has been noted by Mary Floyd-Wilson, who claims the character ‘represents early modern Scotland – still barbaric in nature, but prepared to receive the civilizing embrace of England in the proposed Jacobean union project’.51 This speculative argument neglects to take account of the fact his inconstancy begins in Italy, pointedly recalling the representation of the place in popular discourses about subversive threats to English identity. By focusing on clothing and travel as symptoms of the loss of domestic characteristics, Shakespeare’s intertextual montage attributes Posthumus with the precarious disposition of both an English Ape and an Italianate Englishman.52 Significantly, in attempting to justify the offence he caused in France, Posthumus’ apology emphasizes his past status as an uninformed traveller: By your pardon, sir, I was then a young traveller, rather shunn’d to go even with what I had heard than in my every action to be guided by others’ experiences: but upon my mended judgment (if I offend [not] to say it is mended) my quarrel was not altogether slight. (1.4.43-7).

In the dangerous confines of Rome, however, Posthumus maintains an unfounded confidence in his own prudence. Although he claims to have ‘mended judgment’, the ease with which he gets himself into another traumatic quarrel belies his assertions. As we have seen in Chapter 2, early modern anti-travel writing warned of the need for English travellers obliged to go to the peninsula to follow the suggestions of reputable authorities in order to protect against the local vices.53 The travel discussion indicates the extent to which the comparison scene at the start of the wager plot evokes the rhetorical tropes of Elizabethan Italophobia, introducing an implicit reference to a national subject position diverse from Jacobean Britishness. To interpret the radical change in the affections of Posthumus during his time in Rome, the characters on-stage resort to the cautionary figure of the Italianate Englishman. Upon reading the order to kill Imogen, Pisanio has no hesitation about blaming the malicious influences the traveller encountered in Italy:

51

Floyd-Wilson, p. 160. Marcus has also associated the character with Scotland, noting that ‘Posthumus is a nobly born beggar like many of the Scottish aristocrats’. See ‘Cymbeline and the Unease of Topicality’, p. 144. 52 The association of Posthumus with fears about contact with Italy has been discussed by Olsen, p. 285 and Parolin, p. 198. 53 See pp. 50-52.


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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? (3.2.4-6).

However, as the phrase ‘too ready hearing’ suggests, Shakespeare’s servant ascribes equal responsibility to the inherent receptiveness of Posthumus. The stress upon poison, contagions and ‘hearing’ rehearses the established metaphors of the consequences of unguided travel, where incautious English travellers fail to escape unharmed from the confrontation with the suspect attractions of Italy. In The Schoolmaster, Roger Ascham compared the ‘siren songs of Italy’ to the Circean Sirens who obliged ‘Ulysses in Homer … to stop his eares with wax’.54 The fatal allure of the Sirens provides a classical analogue for his warning that the peninsula provides only ‘vain pleasures which may poison the mind’.55 Here, Ascham’s specific focus is the threat to English identity: the Italian ‘Circe shall make him, of a plain Englishman, a right Italian’.56 Ascham has nothing to say about Scotland. The rhetorical combination of toxins and irresistible female sexuality recurs in the shocked response of Imogen: ‘That drug-damn’d Italy hath outcraftied him’, ‘Some jay of Italy / (Whose mother was her painting) hath betray’d him’ (3.4.14, 49-50). The dangerous allure of the Italian prostitute, like that of the Circes, was a common symbol of the threat posed by the country as a whole.57 As with Pisanio, Imogen does not anticipate any heroic effort of resistance by her exiled husband. During the attempted seduction scene, encouraged by Jachimo to think the worse of her husband’s conduct in Rome, she has no doubt that Posthumus ‘Has Forgot Britain’ (1.6.113). The journey to the Italian peninsula, exposing him to the machinations of Jachimo, may challenge his status as a Briton, but the cultural traditions expressing such fears of foreign subversion all derive from England. Given the depiction of Englishness under threat in anti-union complaints, Shakespeare’s account of the loss of domestic identity would have risked reminding the London audience of more immediate reasons to be paranoid.

54 Ascham, p. 63. For the rhetoric and circulation of Ascham’s remarkably influential treatise, see pp. 29-37. 55 Ibid., p. 61. 56 Ibid., p. 62. 57 See my discussion of the role that Coryate’s depiction of his encounter with a Venetian courtesan played in the criticism of his travel writing, pp. 59-64. Imogen’s reference to the ‘mother’ of the Italian jay shares the emphasis on filial succession found in the infamous passage in the Crudities, explicitly cited by Brome in The Novella, about the extent to which daughters followed their mothers into the trade.


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Written by the Victors While the conclusion of Cymbeline underlines the historical antecedents of Britain, through the progress towards a peaceful accommodation with the cultural legacy of ancient Rome, the new subjects of James I found it difficult to separate the word from Stuart ambitions. The political obstacles the Anglo-Scottish union project faced were substantial, extending well beyond the jingoistic sentiments of a few playwrights. In spite of the official rhetoric celebrating a united crown of Great Britain, part of a propaganda campaign which coincided with his accession to the throne, the monarch had to find a way to overcome the fact that ‘“Britain” might appeal to, or outrage, the imagination, but it lacked any clear constitutional existence’.58 Without the assent of Parliament, the royal policy could amount to little more than a statement of intent. The initial ‘Proclamation for the Unity of England and Scotland’ of 19 May 1603 acknowledged the need for the king to build a consensus for the new style: ‘his Highnes will with all convenient diligence with the advice of the Estates and Parliament of both the Kingdomes make the same perfited’.59 However, with the emergence of widespread complaints about Scottish opportunists coming south to profit from their compatriot’s new dominion, there was no political or emotional will to disavow established patriotic ties to England. Insofar as members of the House of Commons ‘hated the Scots and they were afraid of them’, xenophobic anxieties inspired by the competition for royal patronage heightened parliamentary opposition to James’s policy.60 In his second proclamation on Anglo-Scottish union of 20 October 1604, where he assumed the style of King of Great Britain, the monarch felt obliged to respond to the doubts about his personal motives in reviving the name Britain: Nor that We covet any new affected Name devised at Our pleasure, but out of undoubted knowledge doe use the true and ancient Name, which God and Time hath imposed on this Isle, extant, and received in Histories, in all Mappes and Cartes, wherein this Isle is described, and in ordinary Letters to Ourselfe from divers Forraine Princes, warranted also by Authenticall Charters, Exemplifications under Seales, and other Records of great Antiquitie.61

58 Jenny Wormald, ‘James VI, James I and the identity of Britain’, The British Problem c. 1534-1707: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago. (London: Macmillan, 1997), p. 148. See also Brian P. Levack, The Formation of the British State: England, Scotland and the Union, 1603-1707. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), pp. 1-3. 59 Stuart Royal Proclamations, p. 18. 60 Maurice Lee, Jr. Great Britain’s Solomon: James VI and I in his three kingdoms (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), pp. 117-20. There were particular English concerns about the Scottish character of the royal household. See Levack, p. 61. 61 Stuart Royal Proclamations, p. 97.


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The supplementary proclamation, necessitated by the refusal of Parliament to endorse the contested royal agenda, is a direct response to English dissent.62 Here, foreshadowing the obsession with national origins in Cymbeline, ancient history serves as unequivocal evidence for the ‘true’ name of the greater nation. James takes care to cite ‘God and Time’, ‘Histories’, ‘Mappes and Cartes’ and ‘great Antiquitie’. Yet, even as he appeals to ‘undoubted knowledge’ of the past, James concedes that the crux of the debate about the royal policy was the prevalent association of the ‘new affected Name’ with his own ‘pleasure’. Concerns about the plight of English culture under the new regime emerge in Edward Sharpham’s The Fleire (1606), a comedy staging a disguised Florentine duke’s survey of a Jacobean court besieged by Scots and oafish country squires with debased new knighthoods.63 The play features a fascinating passage where, prompted by the disguised Italian’s queries, one of the would-be courtiers ponders the nationality introduced by the current monarch: I did pray oftener when I was an Englishman, but I have not praid often, I must confesse since I was a Brittaine: but doost heere Fleire? canst tell me if an Englishman were in debt, whether a Brittaine must pay it or no?64

By reducing the significance of Anglo-Scottish union to its impact on a gallant’s religious observance and opportunities for debt evasion, the topical satire highlights the clear division that the character makes between his innate perception of himself as an Englishman and the incongruous Jacobean construct of Britishness. In arguing for the historical continuity of Britain, James and his apologists had to address the effective novelty of the change in national terminology. As the Commons responded to the second royal proclamation with continuing intransigence, the Bishop of Bristol, Joseph Thornborough, published a controversial tract defending the union project. The strategy of the tract, dedicated to James himself, is to challenge the prestige of English history and culture: ‘it is certain and evident, that the name of England, though it hath bene worthily most famous and great, yet is not equal to the title of great Britaine’.65 It was not a politically astute idea, however, to demean the precedence of England at a time of mounting local intolerance. Accused of breach of privilege, for presuming to answer parliamentary objections to the revived style, the ambitious cleric succumbed to the demands for him to apologize in person to the Commons.66 62

Wormald, ‘James VI, James I and the identity of Britain’, p. 152. See my account of the play’s intertextual agenda in Chapter 4, pp. 157-62. 64 Edward Sharpham. The Fleire. A Critical Old Spelling Edition of the Works of Edward Sharpham. ed. Christopher Gordon Petter (New York: Garland, 1986), 2.1.233-6. 65 Joseph Thornborough, A Discourse Plainely proving the evident utilitie and urgent necessitie of the desired happie union of the two famous Kingdomes of England and Scotland: by way of answer to certaine objections against the same (London, 1604), p. 24. 66 Galloway, p. 23. 63


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The tract’s account of the origins of England was an ill-considered provocation, arousing the nationalist sentiments it proposed to quell. Thornborough represents the concept of England as the product of an incoming foreign aggressor, hostile towards local customs and pride: Saxons entring at disadvantage of that mightie nation ... conquering the remnant of the people of famous Britaine, enforced them to distinguish and devide themselves by flying into mountaines and fortified places. And afterward King Egbert, utterly to root out the remembrance of great Brittaine, commaunded that the Land should be called no more by that name, but England, and the people, Englishmen. But Egbert is dead, his power weake, nay none at all: let none therefore feare to restore his countrie to its old name, and ancient honor: for Egbert I say is dead, and Iames liveth.67

By emphasizing royal force majeure, the slippages in this passage mark the difficulty of marshalling patriotic fervour for a British ideal. As we have seen, the union policy is susceptible to accusations that James is an external aggressor threatening the manner in which his newly acquired subjects identify their land and themselves. Here, the imprudent declaration ‘Egbert is dead ... and Iames liveth’ casts the new monarch as a de facto successor to the Saxon conqueror. From the perspective of the still prevailing Tudor vision of an autonomous English national identity, Thornborough’s line of defence was an unforgivable own goal. The very real threats that Queen Elizabeth and her subjects had to confront as an isolated nation state surrounded by an antagonistic Catholic continent to the south, the Irish and Welsh to the west, and the Scottish to the north, had privileged a paranoid construction of national identity.68 The pragmatics of self and other become increasingly problematic in a Jacobean England where the king is himself foreign. The conundrum for enterprising writers eager to court the self-proclaimed British monarch’s favour, as the hostility Thornborough faced makes clear, was how to celebrate the new style without offending existing patriotic sentiments. Rather than hazarding a direct comparison between England and Britain, most aspiring Jacobean propaganda texts adopt the strategy of pointedly ignoring traditional English nationalist imagery.69 The most compelling argument, in this context, is the association the name Britain has with the island’s past resistance to Roman invasion. In The Speeches at Prince Henry’s Barriers, performed in the royal presence in January 1610, Ben Jonson’s version of Merlin the magician does not privilege the achievements of King Arthur. Instead, he invokes the myth of a British exception to Julius Caesar’s domination of the rest of Europe: ‘Britayne, 67

Thornborough, p. 6. See Chapter 2, p. 43-5. 69 For example, Martin Butler notes the conspicuous absence of the stock figures of English patriotism in the Stuart masques of Ben Jonson. See p. 75. 68


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the only name, made CAESAR flie’.70 For writers like Jonson and Edward Ayscu, the rhetorical advantage of referring to the defeat of Caesar comes from the universally acknowledged prestige of Roman culture and military prowess. In his defence of the union policy, Ayscu goes so far as to say that the people of the island did not exist in historical terms prior to Caesar’s invasion: It appeareth manifestlie by the search of all ancient recordes, that untill the comming of the Romaines, this Iland was never attempted by invasion, neither is there any memorie made of the Brittaines untill that time. But when Julius Caesar that valiant and mightie Conquerer had subdewed the Gaules ... with much difficultie and small advantage hee arrived here in the foure and fiftith year before the incarnation of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, with which intertainement being much discontented he departed.71

By attributing the origins of British history to the consequences of Roman aggression, Ayscu retains the Tudor concept of national identity defined in crisis. However, when he turns to his main argument, there is none of the oppositional patriotic imagery found in his account of British resistance to the Romans. Centuries of tensions between England and Scotland become mere family infighting. He attributes the failure to maintain the two kingdoms united to misguided or venial leaders, cast as a foil for the distinctive qualities of James. Ayscu’s concern with Julius Caesar restricts the paranoid construction of national identity to a defunct threat, locating Anglo-Scottish relations outside the paradigm of foreign conflicts. The focus on the distant past in Cymbeline, marked by the pattern of allusions to Julius Caesar’s invasion, rehearses the rhetorical strategies of texts promoting Anglo-Scottish union. The main plot deals with the consequences of Augustus Caesar’s effort to collect unpaid tribute from Britain, reaching its climax with the landing of Roman legions on the coast of the island. Shakespeare makes it clear that the disputed reputation of the previous invasion, encouraging Roman complacency and offending British pride, is the catalyst for war. Confident in the precedent established by Julius Caesar, the Roman characters dismiss the possibility of British resistance. The ambassador sent by Augustus, Caius Lucius, prefaces his request for overdue payment by recalling what took place

Ben Jonson, The Speeches at Prince Henry’s Barriers, in Ben Jonson, vol. 7, line

70

183.

71 Edward Ayscu, A Historie Containing the Warres, Treaties, Marriages, and Other Occurents betweene England and Scotland untill the happy Union of them both in our gratious King James (London, 1607), p. 8.

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Shakespeare, Politics, and Italy When Julius Caesar (whose remembrance yet Lives in men’s eyes, and will to ears and tongues Be theme and hearing ever) was in this Britain, And conquer’d it. (3.1.2-5)

With their emphasis on ‘remembrance’, the Romans take for granted the fame that they ascribe to Caesar’s achievement. Even from his distant perspective, Philario assures Posthumus that the British will ‘grant the tribute, send th’ arrearages, / Or look upon our Romans, whose remembrance / Is yet fresh in their grief’ (2.4.13-15). Nonetheless, despite the persistent appeal to the memory of distant events, there is no consistent version of Julius Caesar’s foray in Cymbeline. The local characters, filled with patriotic zeal, deny all the Roman accounts. The defiant response of Philario’s British guest, as we have seen, reminds him that ‘Julius Caesar … found their courage worthy his frowning at’ (2.4.21-3). With a pointed allusion to the renowned phrase in Caesar’s commentaries on the conquest of Gaul, the Queen warns the ambassador that A kind of conquest Caesar made here, but made not here his brag Of ‘Came and saw and overcame’. With shame (The first that ever touch’d him) he was carried From off our coast twice beaten; and his shipping (Poor ignorant baubles!) on our terrible seas, Like egg-shells mov’d upon their surges, crack’d As easily ’gainst our rocks. For joy whereof The fam’d Cassibelan, who was once at point (O giglet Fortune!) to master Caesar’s sword, Made Lud’s-Town with rejoicing fires bright, And Britains strut with courage. (3.1.22-34)

The competing versions of the invasion centre on the question of national precedence, as the British seek to devalue the ‘kind of conquest’ attributed to the great Roman leader. Through the claim of an exception from the Roman domination of Europe, set in counterpoint to the proverbial expression of Caesar’s continental victories, the Queen casts the forthcoming war as a campaign to enforce the British reading of history. By representing remembrance as a partisan act, Shakespeare exposes the contingency of historical discourses. Given the importance of the past in legitimating the Anglo-Scottish union policy, the staging of the lack of an authoritative narrative of British history can only add to the ideological confusion produced by the blurring of national origins in the play. Perhaps the most vulnerable point of the policy was the constant appeal to antiquity, a gesture incompatible with the relative absence of British historical discourses in Tudor culture. Sir Francis Bacon accused the king’s opponents of forgetting the history of the entire island.


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In the Advancement of Learning (1605), as he praises the royal project whereby ‘this island divided from all the world should be united in itself’, he asserts that James I is unique in his capacity to recall the remote common heritage of his two kingdoms: ‘knowledge is nothing more than remembrance … . For certainly the best and clearest instance for this Assertion shines in your Majesty’.72 Yet memory is selective in Stuart propaganda. The emotive currency of the name Britain is contingent upon the portrayal of ancient conflicts and the erasure of intervening versions of Englishness. The historian and antiquary Sir Henry Spelman warned that ‘If the honourable name of England be buried in the resurrection of Albion or Britannia, we shall … drown the glory of a nation triumphant throughout the world to restore the memory of an obscure and barbarous people, of whom no mention almost is made in any notable history’.73 Here, in a devastating contemporary critique of the union policy, the Jacobean metaphors of ‘memory’ and ‘resurrection’ emerge in the context of fears about the consequences of forgetting England. The restoration of Britain, represented as a definitive burying or drowning of recent glories, takes on connotations of violent death. In contrast, James and his tame panegyrists exhort his new subjects to recollect military triumphs under the name of Britain ‘in the foure and fiftith year before the incarnation of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ’.74 Shakespeare’s paranoid account of past Roman aggression, where Cymbeline and his nation emerge as ‘the victor’, rehearses an emotionally engaging vision of Britishness, but there is nothing in the equivocal staging of the ancient invasion to appeal to a more recent sense of English pride (5.5.460). In an influential reading of Cymbeline, Robert S. Miola has argued the main tribute plot responds to the historical blemish of ‘the past invasion of Britain by Julius Caesar, a Roman victory that Shakespeare in this play takes pains to diminish and finally expunge’.75 There is no question that the strident British nationalists on-stage are keen to rewrite the story of the nation’s defeat by the Roman Empire. Nonetheless, where every exponent of patriotic sentiments in the play is suspect, it seems excessive to identify the dramatist’s agenda with the conniving Queen, the foolish Cloten, or the blustering Posthumus in Italy. Indeed, Shakespeare takes care to minimize the import of the British victory over the forces of Augustus, suggesting an ambivalence towards the Jacobean rhetoric of a glorious past. There is a revealing scene prior to the invasion where two Roman Senators admit that 72 The italics come from Bacon. The passage is cited in Philippa Berry and Jayne Elisabeth Archer, ‘Reinventing the matter of Britain: Undermining the State in Jacobean Masques’ in British Identities and English Renaissance Literature, eds David J. Baker and Willy Maley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 125. In 1604, Bacon had been entrusted with the preparation of a report to Parliament on the objections to the new British terminology. See King, p. 73. 73 Henry Spelman, ‘Of the Union’ (1604), in The Jacobean Union, p. 170. 74 Ayscu, p. 8. 75 Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare’s Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 216.

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the number of current rebellions prevents Augustus from sending the empire’s best soldiers to attack Britain: This is the tenor of the Emperor’s writ: That since the common men are now in action ’Gainst the Pannonians and Dalmatians, And that the legions now in Gallia are Full weak to undertake our wars against The fall’n-off Britons, that we do incite The gentry to this business. (3.7.1-7)

The unease about the depleted Roman forces persists in the scene depicting the start of the campaign. As soon as he sets foot on British soil, Caius Lucius is keen to know about the arrival of the urgent reinforcements ‘Under the conduct of bold Jachimo’ (4.2.340). The feeble victory of the British, seemingly achieved by the heroic actions in isolation of three cave dwellers and a neurotic exile, comes against an makeshift militia drawn from the classical equivalent of cafe society; a ‘gentry’ characterized by dilettantes like the parlour Machiavellian Jachimo, rather than Julius Caesar’s crack legions. Despite the weakness of the opposition, Cymbeline’s army distinguishes itself only for the hastiness of its retreat. The failure of mainstream British courage in the test of battle, notwithstanding all the defiant rhetoric, reveals that partisan interpretations of the past do not offer a reliable vision of the present. In the aftermath of the encounter, scorning a cowardly lord’s eagerness for a report of a famous victory, an embittered Posthumus pointedly describes the disgraceful flight of his compatriots: for all was lost But that the heavens fought; the King himself Of his wings destitute, the army broken, And but the backs of Britains seen, all flying Through a strait lane; the enemy full-hearted … and cowards living To die with length’ned shame. (5.3.3-13)

While the disappointment of national pride may recall the trial of Imogen, the relentless dramatic irony of the wager plot gives the audience the consolation that Jachimo’s denigration of British womanhood is mere slander. Here, Shakespeare provides few excuses for the appalling conduct on the battlefield. The account that Posthumus offers of the stand against the Romans, disproving all his bellicose claims to Philario about the ‘discipline’ and ‘courage’ of ‘not-fearing Britain’, exempts only Belarius, Guiderius, and Arvirigus from the condemnation of how the British ‘turn’d coward’ (2.4.23, 22, 19, 5.3.35).


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In his pose as a poet, not unlike the position of Shakespeare himself, the exile rejects any form of British mythmaking. The intentionally banal verse with which Posthumus recapitulates the battle ascribes the victory to people excluded from official Britain: ‘“Two boys, an old man (twice a boy), a lane, / Preserv’d the Britains, was the Romans’ bane”’ (5.3.56, 57-8). For although Jodi Mikalachki has contended that the scene stages the process of ‘instant historicization’, where the ‘victory is immediately described and preserved’, Posthumus makes a conscious effort to frustrate the ideological value of such a process.76 After the cowardly lord’s refusal to accept that the outcome was the result of ‘strange chance’, Posthumus introduces his rhyming couplet as a deliberate ‘mock’ry’ of the craving for a stirring narrative of national pride: Nay, do not wonder at it; you are made Rather to wonder at the things you hear Than to work any. Will you rhyme upon’t, And vent it for a mock’ry? (5.3.51, 52-6)

The lord’s response to the verse confirms the absence of any patriotic agenda: ‘Nay, be not angry, sir’ (5.3.59). With the debate about the invasion by Julius Caesar completed, the debate about the invasion by Augustus has just begun. The representation of the battle by Caius Lucius makes it clear the Romans have remained unimpressed by the British victory: ‘the day / Was yours by accident’ (5.5.75-6).77 One of the main motives for war may have been the need to change the nation’s reputation, but neither Posthumus nor the Roman commander have any attention of giving the British that satisfaction. Consistent with the critical history of the play itself, there is a resistance to any authoritative interpretation in Cymbeline. While it ‘displays various characters in the act of finding political meaning’, as Leah S. Marcus has emphasized, the meanings derived are always tentative and self-interested.78 The sycophantic Roman soothsayer Philarmonus, who adapts his providential vision of ‘the Roman eagle / From south to west on wing soaring aloft’ to retroactively augur an unanticipated British victory, is a fundamental figure for understanding Shakespeare’s portrayal of the connections between nationalism, opportunism, and history (5.5.470-71). When he was working for Caius Lucius, Philarmonus provided a different reading of the import of the noble bird:

76

Mikalachki, p. 316. For a discussion of the extent to which the Romans treat the British victory as ‘incredible good fortune’, see Hadfield, p. 163. 78 Marcus, p. 153. 77


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Last night the very gods show’d me a vision … I saw Jove’s bird, the Roman eagle, wing’d From the spungy south to this part of the west, There vanished in the sunbeams, which portends (Unless my sins abuse my divination) Success to th’ Roman host. (4.2.346-52)

Despite the changed circumstances at the end of the play, given the failure to the Roman host, the soothsayer has the gall to maintain he was right all along: The vision Which I made known to Lucius, ere the stroke Of this scarce-cold battle, at this instant Is full accomplish’d … which foreshow’d our princely eagle, Th’ imperial Caesar, should again unite His favor with the radiant Cymbeline, Which shines here in the west. (5.5.467-76)

The revised interpretation arrives at a predetermined conclusion attractive to the monarch in power, not unlike the efforts of certain Jacobean panegyrists. Notwithstanding the obvious suspicions about the credibility of such a figure, however, Cymbeline is quick to endorse the soothsayer’s predictions: ‘This hath some seeming’, ‘Laud we the gods’ (5.5.452, 476). The comforting prophecies provide a sort of cosmic flattery, appealing to the vanity of the British ruler. A penchant for sycophancy was, of course, one of the principal vices attributed to James I himself.79 Shakespeare’s portrayal of interpretation does not offer a reliable framework for our own responses to the play. The finale appeals to the glories of the past linked with the name of Britain, encouraging us to read the return of Cymbeline’s lost sons as an allegory for the recovery of a lost national identity, but it assigns the providential material to an incongruous deus ex machina and a shifty, obsequious soothsayer. The tablet left by Jupiter proclaims that When as a lion’s whelp shall … be embrac’d by a piece of tender air; and when from a stately cedar shall be lopp’d branches which, being dead many years, shall after revive, be jointed to the old stock, and freshly grow; then shall Posthumus end his miseries and Britain be fortunate and flourish in peace and plenty (5.5.435-42).

Asked to ‘Read, and declare the meaning’ of the text, the soothsayer does not hesitate to confirm it ‘Promises Britain peace and plenty’ (5.5.434, 458). The ‘lopp’d branches’ become a reference to the sons ‘who, by Belarius stol’n, / 79

See my discussion of the staging of flattery in Chapter 4, pp. 153-7.


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For many years thought dead, are now reviv’d’ (5.5.455-6). Here, with the repetition of ‘revive’, Shakespeare appropriates an essential rhetorical figure in texts promoting the British ideal. In ‘The Triumph of a Re-United Britain’, a pageant presented by the Lord Mayor of London in 1605, Anthony Munday claims the monarch’s project ‘To resurrect Britannia revived ancient glory’.80 The justification that the soothsayer offers for such politically astute conclusions, however, exemplifies ‘the worst traditions of allegorical exegesis’.81 By relying on a laboured pun, his reading of the tablet’s reference to ‘a piece of tender air’ destroys his already shaky credibility: The piece of tender air thy virtuous daughter, Which we call mollis aer, and mollis aer We term it mulier; and which mulier I divine Is this most constant wife. (5.5.437, 446-9)

It is not inconceivable that, as Mary Floyd-Wilson has argued, the term ‘mollis aer’ recalls the use of the word ‘mollified’ in Camden’s British histories, but such an addition to our understanding of the intricacy of the ambiguous intertextual structure of the final scene does not make the soothsayer any more plausible.82 Even as Shakespeare engages with the nationalist discourses of Anglo-Scottish union, joining in with the cynical attempts of dramatists like Ben Jonson to cash in on a booming patronage scene, his staging of the act of interpretation suggests that the portrayal of British history serves as an a posterori justification of royal whims. Our wicked queen When all of the surviving characters gather on-stage at the end, with the theme of forgiveness uniting the various plot strands of the play, Cymbeline’s words emphasize the incongruity of the scene: ‘Never was a war did cease, / (Ere bloody hands were washed) with such a peace’ (5.5.484-5). As he declares ‘My peace we will begin’, the monarch orders his followers to ‘Let / A Roman and a British ensign wave / Friendly together’ (5.5.459, 481-3). The reconciliation with Rome, where ‘Pardon’s the word to all’, negates the rewards of the British victory (5.5.422). The defeated Romans achieve all of their war aims, obtaining the tribute 80

Cited in Galloway, p. 34. Munday’s pageant is discussed in detail in King, pp. 50-53. The importance of such rhetoric is shown by the care that Spelman took to disparage the idea of a British ‘resurrection’ in ‘Of the Union’, See p. 191. 81 Brian Gibbons, Shakespeare and Multiplicity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 23. See also Marcus, pp. 157-8. Marcus argues that, in accordance with the king’s love of authorship, Jupiter’s text recalls the writing of James I himself. 82 See Floyd-Wilson, p. 166.


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and acknowledgement of the legitimacy of their empire. Even the sins of Jachimo, ‘the Italian fiend’, are not beyond forgiveness (5.5.210). The central irony in Cymbeline, a play that superficially celebrates the nation’s courage in repelling foreign invasion, is that the only characters who commit unpardonable offences are the Queen and Cloten, the most enthusiastic advocates of British patriotism. In a pointed repudiation of the entire dispute with Rome, Cymbeline blames his wife for the bloody conflict: Although the victor, we submit to Caesar, And to the Roman empire, promising To pay our wonted tribute, from the which We were dissuaded by our wicked queen, Whom heavens, in justice both on her and hers, Have laid most heavy hand. (5.5.460-65).

By choosing to ‘submit to Caesar’, rather than the ‘wicked queen’, Cymbeline does not offer much of a convincing patriarchal symbol of nationhood. The British king ends up representing himself as a hen-pecked husband, rather than a courageous wartime leader. Most critics have been happy to accept Cymbeline’s condemnation of the Queen at face value, holding ‘her and hers’ responsible for the divisions between Britain and Rome. The standard argument is that the patriotism of the mother and son is excessive, displaying a lack of respect towards a Roman culture that the nation must defer to at the end of the play. In addition to serving as a foil for British patriotic heroism, a heroism that becomes less credible as the action continues, Shakespeare’s Romans embody a political and cultural legitimacy that overrides partisan concerns. Unlike the king, who always maintains a courteous tone in his dealings with the Romans, the Queen and Cloten mock their ‘crook’d noses’ (3.1.37). For Jodi Miklachki, where ‘All roads of male bonding lead to Rome in this play’, the Queen must be silenced because her unseemly aggression disrupts the homosocial expression of power.83 Mary Floyd-Wilson suggests that she is ‘cheering (in the context of the play) for the wrong tribe’.84 As war makers, Glynne Wickham notes, the Queen and Cloten contravene James’ explicit peace policy towards the continent.85 Given her overdetermined status as a treacherous villain, Philip Schwyzer reads her partisan sentiments as a ‘grotesque parody’ of nationalism.86 Ros King makes a similar argument, questioning the sincerity of

83

Mikalachki, ‘The Masculine Romance of Roman Britain’: 308. Floyd-Wilson, p. 177. 85 Glynne Wickham, ‘Riddle and Emblem: A Study of the Dramatic Structure of Cymbeline’, in English Renaissance Studies: Essays Presented to Dame Helen Gardner in Honour of her Seventieth Birthday, ed. John Carey (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), pp. 106-8. 86 Schwyzer, p. 170. 84


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villains ‘in a permanent state of disguise’.87 Nonetheless, while it may say as much about the ideological stance of the critic as it does about the play, most studies concede that such powerfully expressed patriotic sentiments cannot be completely negated by Shakespeare. A common strategy is to acknowledge such doubts with a rhetorical question before explaining them away: ‘We might wonder … why this great display of nationalistic pride should come from the mouth of a villainous female protagonist’.88 After admitting that Britishness seems to be ‘expressed even more satisfyingly [in comparison to the good characters] by the Queen and Cloten’, G. Wilson Knight’s instinct was to throw up his hands in confusion: ‘How are we to read all this?’89 The confusion of modern critics may be suggestive of the potential responses of the original London playgoers, who watched Cymbeline at a time when the political debate about Anglo-Scottish union was at its height. The divisive sentiments of the Queen and Cloten give a voice to an attractive form of exclusive nationalism, even as the final act makes the obligatory gesture of trying to contain it. Of course, Shakespeare often gives his best speeches to his villains. What makes Richard III and Iago compelling on-stage is the pervasive dramatic irony, as the audience takes a perverse satisfaction in the skilfulness of their deceptions of the blander heroes. Yet our culturally ingrained vision of Shakespeare as the national dramatist encourages us to expect a straightforward expression of patriotic ideals in his plays. Here, it remains unclear what type of national dramatist Shakespeare wants to be: a voice of English dissent or a shill for Jacobean Britain. Like many of his English compatriots, especially in the theatrical community, Shakespeare may have felt either ambivalence or resentment towards the new regime, with its unfamiliar British terminology and the influx of the Scots. The first London audience would have also been tempted to endorse the ‘wicked’ Queen’s antagonism towards foreign influences, given the extent to which she evokes all the deep-seated paranoia characteristic of the established Tudor anti-Italian discourses and the more recent fears about the status of England. The problem with giving English playgoers such a temptation was that anti-foreign sentiment was a risky emotion in Stuart Britain, where the king was both ruler of the new composite nation and a Scotsman taking power in England. Insofar as the critical tradition continues to point to the play’s failure to cohere, a reasonable response to the persistent questions about the play’s political agenda is that Shakespeare the theatrical impresario is rehearsing the rhetorical strategies of texts promoting the union without any real conviction, taking advantage of the evident royal demand for such material. By appropriating the orthodox discourses, furnishing the mixed audiences of Englishmen and Scots in Jacobean London with the familiar themes established in previous examples of

87

King, p. 75. Fitzpatrick, p. 97 Compare with King, p. 77. King wonders ‘Why should the fairytale, wicked stepmother carry the play’s most apparently patriotic moment’. 89 Knight, pp. 136, 137. 88


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Stuart propaganda, the ideological incoherence of Cymbeline ensures the potential for English dissident reading. Put out more flags By highlighting the equal precedence of native and foreign symbols, the final speech in Cymbeline exemplifies Shakespeare’s ambivalent staging of Jacobean rhetoric. As the definitive expression of Cymbeline’s implementation of ‘My peace’, the speech appears to be an obvious allusion to Jacobean peace policies (5.5.459). Confidant in the promise of a great future for the nation, given the rosy predictions of the soothsayer, Shakespeare’s British king confirms his reconciliation with Rome: Publish we this peace To all our subjects. Set we forward. Let A Roman and a British ensign wave Friendly together. So through Lud’s-Town march, And in the temple of great Jupiter Our peace we’ll ratify. (5.5.478-83)

Unlike his predecessor, James promoted an ideology of peaceful coexistence towards the Catholic powers of the continent and, indeed, the different cultures encompassed by his new British kingdom. Consequently, the few studies which have taken account of the two flags placed ‘Friendly together’ interpret the image as an uncomplicated affirmation of the principle of peaceful union, ‘a vision of harmonious internationalism and accommodation that mirrors James’s own policy’.90 However, consistent with the ambiguous intertextual ramifications of the play as a whole, Shakespeare’s reference to flags is more than just a metaphor for Jacobean policy. Uniting the flags of Scotland and England was Jacobean policy. Cymbeline’s use of two flags to mark the cessation of hostilities evokes the controversial introduction of the first Union Jack, a composite flag devised by James as a public symbol of Anglo-Scottish union. In ‘A Proclamation declaring what Flaggs South and North Britaines shall beare at Sea’ of 12 April 1606, James decreed that from hencefoorth all our Subjects of this Isle and Kingdome of great Britaine and the members thereof, shall beare in their Mainetappe the Red Crosse, commonly called St. Georges Crosse, and the White Crosse commonly called S Andrewes Crosse, joyned together.91 90

Marcus, p. 141. See also Wickham, p. 100. Stuart Royal Proclamations, p. 135. I have added the italics to emphasize the phrases similar to those in the final speech of Cymbeline. 91


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Here, as in Cymbeline, the proclamation’s address to ‘South and North Britaines’ conspicuously excludes the traditional names of England and Scotland. The new composite flag, imposed without parliamentary consultation, formed part of a deliberate strategy to replace local symbols, including coins and official seals, with ones that represented a single united nation.92 By ending with a threat against noncompliance, warning his subjects not ‘to beare their Flagges in any other sort, as they will answer the contrary at their perill’, the monarch betrays the expectation that the union flag would meet the same hostility as every other element of the Stuart policy.93 With the declaration ‘Publish we this peace / To all our subjects’, the speech of Cymbeline adopts the language of such royal proclamations (5.5.478-9). Given the protracted controversy that ensued, where both English and Scots were offended by the idea of seeing their traditional banners ‘joyned together’ in a composite ensign, an attentive reader of the cultural zeitgeist like Shakespeare would have been well aware of the political significance of placing the flags of two former enemies ‘Friendly together’.94 Despite the common hostility, one of the few instances where James succeeded in uniting his northern and southern kingdoms, the new flag remained in use until Charles I felt it was expedient to order its withdrawal.95 Shakespeare’s allusion to the collective flag, symbolizing a new relationship of equality, underlines the abrupt change in the explicit rhetoric of the play from patriotic defiance to a definitive accommodation with foreign rule. While the reference to the flags forms part of a pattern of allusions comparing Cymbeline to James, ensuring that the play could be read in flattering terms by the patron of the King’s Men, Shakespeare’s final image of Britain’s future is more equivocal than the discourses of the ingratiating soothsayer. The parity of the Roman and British flags raises the prospect of one of the great apprehensions of English opponents of the Jacobean union: the loss of precedence. With the paranoia about Scottish incursions into the patronage market, obtaining positions which would have previously gone to domestic claimants, apologists for James’ policy had to account for fears that ‘whereas now England in the style is placed before Scotland; in the name Brittaine that degree of prioritie will be lost’.96 92

Galloway, p. 82. The importance of the new flag as part of the Stuart suppression of traditional English iconography is noted in Claire McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590-1612 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 140-41. Apart from the production of new symbols like coins, there was also an antiquarian interest in ancient British and Roman coins as cultural artefacts demonstrating the Jacobean version of history. See King, pp. 65-70, 80-81. 93 Stuart Royal Proclamations, p. 134. 94 For accounts of the flag controversy, leading to its withdrawal by Charles I, see Galloway, pp. 82-90, W.G. Perrin, British Flags (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), pp. 55-9 and Barlow Cumberland, The Story of the Union Jack (Toronto: William Briggs, 1897), pp. 70-80. 95 For its withdrawal, see Galloway, p. 90. 96 Thornborough, sig. A2v.


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The redefinition of the nation formerly known as England, placed before Scotland in the traditional Tudor expression of royal titles, had obvious implications for the political and cultural privileges of its inhabitants. Thornborough’s typically obtuse answer to the objections, declaring that ‘when all is one there is no precedence’, misses the point that precedence over Scotland was precisely what any English patriot wanted.97 What the persistent unease about new names and symbols suggests, consistent with the focus of Shakespeare’s play, is that the Anglo-Scottish union debate was ultimately about representation. In a more astute treatise on the Jacobean policy, arguing in favour of the revived national nomenclature, Sir John Hayward suggests that its success depends upon creating a ‘union of mindes between the English and the Scots’.98 The solution, for Hayward, is to suppress the traditional iconography of the two kingdoms. With an allusion to the Wars of the Roses, an evocative reminder of the consequences of internecine divisions within England, he observes that ‘many lawes have been occasioned against liveries and badges, the mischiefs whereof were most famous with us, in the late badges of the White Rose and the red’.99 Hayward asserts that symbols of difference produce conflict: In ancient times in Rome ... runners began to clothe themselves in different colours; some in green, and some in grey. The common people which beheld these games began to be divided in affection, some applauding the one colour, and some the other: hereupon was kindled first emulation, then envie, which did rise by degrees to such violence and extremitie, that the games ceasing, the colours were for a long time maintained, and infinite murthers committed in Syria, Egypt, Graecia, and other provinces, which the Emperours by their letters were not able to suppress.100

The problem with Hayward’s argument, printed two years before the proclamation of the union flag, was that there were no emotionally appealing British symbols to replace the divisive local ones. The ideal of a united island had lain more or less dormant for centuries. When James’ heralds attempted to design a composite flag, having rejected proposals to use unfamiliar British iconology, ‘it was impossible to combine the two flags so as to form a new one without giving precedence to one of them’.101 The fact that the heralds proposed several alternative designs, with ingenious attempts to balance the competing symbols, makes manifest the

97

Ibid., p. 26. Sir John Hayward, A Treatise of Union of the two Realmes of England and Scotland (London, 1604), p. 18. 99 Ibid., p. 28. 100 Ibid., pp. 27-8. 101 Perrin, p. 57. 98


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fear of offending local patriotic sensibilities.102 Instead of encouraging a new form of nationalism, reconciling the two traditions, the union flag would go on to create ‘disagreement between the nations, spilling over into public and political relations’.103 The flag debate epitomized the persistent competition between the two kingdoms of Britain, even though it would have been no longer acceptable to emphasize traditional enmities on-stage. The experience of the dramatists who wrote Eastward Ho precluded a revival of scenes like that in The Merchant of Venice (ca. 1597), where Portia recounts that the Scottish lord ‘hath a neighbourly charity in him, for he borrow’d a box of the ear of the Englishman, and swore he would pay him again when he was able’.104 Given Shakespeare’s evasive interventions in the union debate in Cymbeline, the intertextual implications of his flag imagery cannot be reduced to an unequivocal representation of peace between nations. As the ensigns wave ‘Friendly together’, with the historical context giving ironic emphasis to the word ‘Friendly’, English xenophobic hostilities towards Scotland threaten to resurface in the final words of the play. Conclusion When Bernard Shaw wrote Cymbeline Refinished, he blamed what we today would call intertextuality for Shakespeare’s failure to provide a satisfying resolution to all the diverse storylines in the original play: ‘instead of taking Nature’s hint and discarding plots, he borrowed them all over the place and got into trouble through having to unravel them in the last act’.105 It was necessary to write an alternative fifth act, from his perspective as a pragmatic man of the modern theatre, to remove distracting contrivances like the use of a birthmark to confirm the identity of Cymbeline’s missing sons: ‘I really could not keep my countenance over the identification of Guiderius by the mole on his neck’.106 For although he does not take into account the references to Stuart and Tudor political discourses, adding to the quantity of contradictory material his Jacobean colleague struggled to manage, Shaw is not alone in finding the Shakespearean conclusion unacceptable. Yet what should capture our attention in the final act of Cymbeline is the extent to which Shakespeare explicitly foregrounds the awkward plot resolution. With a protracted series of questions, in a speech excised from the Shavian rewrite, the British king makes it clear that even the characters on-stage are dissatisfied about the outcome:

102 For examples of the proposed designs, see Galloway, pp. 88-90, McEachern, p. 140, and Perrin, p. 59. 103 Galloway, p. 82. 104 William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, 1.2.79-81. 105 Shaw, p. 136. (also cited in Hallett Smith’s introduction to Cymbeline, p. 1568). 106 Ibid., p. 135.


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When shall I hear all through? This fierce abridgment Hath to it circumstantial branches, which Distinction should be rich in. Where? How liv’d you? And when came you to serve our Roman captive? How parted with your [brothers]? How first met them? Why fled you from the court? And whither? These, And your three motives to the battle, with I know not how much more, should be demanded, And all the other by-dependances, From chance to chance; but nor the time nor place Will serve long interrogatories. (5.5.382-92)

Cymbeline’s complaint about ‘This fierce abridgment’ foregrounds his desire for a more compelling account of the abrupt reappearance of his three lost children, an explanation that the play is unwilling to provide. What makes the soothsayer attractive to the British king (and some literary critics as well), therefore, is that his providential interpretations promise to clarify the residual confusion at the end of the play. Philarmonus may get it right at the end, ‘for once, interpreting accurately what everybody now knows’ about the destinies of Imogen, Guiderius, and Arviragus, but this does not mean that his political conclusions about British ‘peace and plenty’ have the same authority.107 Despite Shaw’s reservations about the plot device of the mole, the ‘mark of wonder’ on the neck of Guiderius is perhaps the only unequivocal sign of identity in Cymbeline (5.5.364). Stolen from their father, as a reprisal for grievances against the king, the experience of the two would-be princes marks the fragility of self-recognition. Things do not get any better when Cymbeline’s heirs return to the British court dressed as commoners, placing them outside the exclusive world of the aristocracy. Belarius may praise their innate nobility, a judgement confirmed by their unique heroism in the battle, but Shakespeare emphasizes that their personal merit has little to do with their social status. Indeed, when bereft of overt badges of identity, Guiderius, Arviragus and Imogen all face death at the hands of those who should be closest to them. Notwithstanding the fact that the brothers have saved the nation, Cymbeline has few qualms about ordering the execution of Guiderius for presuming to kill Cloten. Even though the treachery of the Queen and her son has already been exposed, the offence is against the class hierarchy: ‘He was a prince’ (5.5.289). With the unsubstantiated claim ‘This man is better than the man he slew’, privileging the cave dweller, Belarius only exacerbates the transgression (5.5.301). The violent attack by Posthumus on the disguised Imogen exhibits the same underlying patrician disdain, provoked by the sight of inferior garments. Enraged by the breach of privilege, given the overt signs of class, gender and nationality which define her appearance as Fidele, the repentant husband refuses to accept a male servant of the Romans interfering with his grief: ‘Shall’s have a 107

King, p. 36.


203

play of this? Thou scornful page, / There lie thy part’ (5.5.228-9). Even after all of his own personal transformations, Posthumus still thinks clothes make the man. The final Shakespearean contrivance that irritated Shaw is the revelation ‘that Iachimo is now an occupant of the penitent form and very unlike his old self’.108 The fate of Jachimo under the indulgent regime of Cymbeline is the opposite of that of Iago, Shakespeare’s most infamous Italian slanderer. In the closing speech of Othello, Lodovico emphasizes the need to excise Iago from the body politic: ‘To you, Lord Governor, / Remains the censure of this hellish villain, / The time, the place, the torture, O, enforce it!’109 In early modern dramas of Italianate intrigue, ranging from The Revenger’s Tragedy to The Duke of Milan, the action usually concludes with orders for the Machiavellian villain to be taken away for torture and execution. Shakespeare and his contemporaries tend to deny such characters the status accorded by an on-stage death scene, a privilege reserved for tragic heroes. Nor does the pardon have any precedent in the sources of the wager plot. However, Jachimo’s survival does not mean that state vengeance is not a viable option in the Britain of Cymbeline. When Posthumus discovers Jachimo in the British court, in the midst of a display of penitence, his call for punishment represents ‘torturers ingenious’ and ‘cord, or knife, or poison’ as the legitimate responses to villainy (5.5.215, 213). While the Briton has his own culpability, given his rapid loss of faith in Imogen, he casts the Italian as the acme of all treachery: ‘every villain / Be call’d Posthumus Leonatus, and / Be villainy less than ’twas!’ (5.5.223-5). For although it may be tempting to accept Posthumus’ depiction of the ‘Italian fiend’, with its evident rehearsal of previous plays, the complex intertextual array contributing to the characterization of Jachimo transcends the stock figure of the stage Machiavel. What all the manifestations of Jachimo in Cymbeline have is common, however, is their focus on unstable identity. His transition from early modern to Augustan Rome subverts any complacent interpretation of history and nationality, confusing the play’s overt appeal to ancient times. The ease with which he destroys the certainties of the domestic traveller exemplifies the seductive allure of Italy in the discourse of the Italianate Englishman. Shaw’s craving for dramatic coherence, still present in current scholarship, is antithetical to a character that embodies incoherence. Even Jachimo’s unexpected penitence evokes instability. In an ironic inversion of how the English risked their identities in contact with Italy, he represents his changing outlook as the result of his sojourn in Britain: The heaviness and guilt within my bosom Takes off my manhood. I have belied a lady, The Princess of this country; and the air on’t Revengingly enfeebles me. (5.2.1-4)

108

Shaw, p. 136. William Shakespeare, Othello. 5.2.364-9.

109

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With his confession of guilt in the last scene, highlighting how Imogen taught him ‘the wide difference / ’Twixt amorous and villainous’, the erstwhile symbol of Italian villainy ends up completely altered by his encounter with ‘duller Britain’ (5.5.194-5, 197). Jachimo’s transformations suggest that the only way to retain your identity is to stay at home. Perhaps his royal namesake, suspended between England and Scotland, should have taken more account of Cymbeline.

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Index

Accoramboni, Vittoria 10, 112 A Discovery of the Great Subtiltie and wonderful Wisedom of the Italians 174 Adorno, Prospero (Doge of Venice) 134 Alexander VI (Pope) in Il Principe 14, 80, 81, 92, 94-6 in The Devil’s Charter 13-14, 26, 80, 81, 92-7 allusion; see intertextuality anachronism in Cymbeline 27, 174-8, 180n45 Anderson, Marcia Lee 112n134, 114n143, 116n147 Anglo-Scottish union 27, 168n138, 170-73, 177-9, 185-91 British history and 170-71, 177-8, 18791, 195 English opposition to 185-9 loss of precedence 173, 187, 198200 union flag debate 173, 198-201 Jacobean references to Cymbeline 170-73, 184-95 Eastward Ho 178-9 The Fleire 187 masques 176-7, 188-9, 195 political tracts 177-8, 187-9, 19091, 200-201 royal proclamations 170, 186-7, 198200 suppression of traditional names and symbols 199, 200-201 see also Britain; flags; James VI and I; nationalism anti-travel writing 37, 40, 42, 59, 60, 184; see also Ascham, Roger; Hall, Joseph; identity; Italianate Englishman, figure of; Rankins, William; travel; travel writing;

Anglo, Sydney 84n31, 86n38, 87n46, 89n55 Aretino, Pietro character in The Unfortunate Traveller 41 obscenity of 41, 57, 74, 81 Ragionamenti 41 readership in England 57, 74, 86 discussion in Volpone 57 Sonetti Lussuriosi 57 Ariosto, Ludovico 57 Ascham, Roger The Schoolmaster 25, 29-31, 32, 33, 34-6, 37-8, 42, 44, 46, 48, 53, 54, 65, 68, 72, 174-5, 185 English representations of Italy, influence on 7, 29-36, 42-4, 45, 46, 50, 53, 54, 61, 65, 72, 185 translated Italian books, references to 15, 29-31, 38, 107-108 see also Castiglione, Baldassare; identity; Hoby, Sir Thomas; Italianate Englishman, figure of; Rankins, William; travel; travel writing A Treatise of Treasons Against Queen Elizabeth and the Crown of England 79-80, 89 audiences complaints by dramatists about Beaumont 12-13 Fletcher 12 Webster 10-11, 118-19 composition of 10-13, 15-17 private theatres 11-13 public theatres 10-11 see also audience response; Blackfriars playhouses; Red Bull playhouse audience response Cinthio’s theory of 148-53

228


intertextuality and 2, 3, 7-24, 31, 55, 57, 59, 66, 68-71, 75-80, 82, 103, 113-14, 117-18, 120, 121, 171, 197 in The Devil’s Charter 81-2, 92-7 in disguised ruler plays 127-30, 137, 158-61, 167-8 in Hamlet 18-23 in The Jew of Malta 82-7, 91-2 meta-audiences and in Every Man Out of His Humour 17-18 in Hamlet 19-21 studies of 10-11, 118 see also audiences; Cinthio, Gio. Battista Giraldi; intertextuality; Italy; metatheatricality; reading Avila, Carmela Nocera 109, 111 Ayscu, Edward 189, 191n74; see also Anglo-Scottish union; Britain Bacon, Sir Francis 190-91 Badley, Richard 60 Baldini, Donatella 102n88 Bandello, Matteo 15 Barish, Jonas 47n68, 54n96 Barker, Francis and Peter Hulme 138n68 Barnes, Barnabe 113, 121 The Devil’s Charter 13-14, 25-6, 79-82, 87-8, 89, 92-7, 103, 120, 121 Four Bookes of Offices 14, 25, 80, 81, 87-8, 95, 96 Parthenophil and Parthenophe 87 Bartlett, Kenneth R. 72n173, 99n78, 108n113 Bate, Jonathan 40n48, 42 Bawcutt, N.W. 85n35, 87, 131n33, 151n94, 155 Beaumont, Francis 17, 119 Knight of the Burning Pestle 12-13 The Woman Hater 2, 11, 128-9, 130, 167; see also disguised ruler play Bedingfield, Sir Thomas 99, 136; see also Machiavelli, Niccolò; translation Bentley, G. E. 65n143, 68n161 Berger Jr., Harry 97n73, 137n65, 154 Bergeron, David M. 13n56, 119n157 Blackfriars playhouses 12-13, 119; see also audiences

Bly, Mary 11n48, 141, 160 Boccaccio, Giovanni The Decameron 58 source for Cymbeline 171, 180n46 source for Patient Grissil 36-7 reputation in England 15, 57-8, 68 Bodin, Jean 48 Boklund, Gunnar 112n137, 113 Borgia, Rodrigo; see Alexander VI Botero, Giovanni 146 Bourne, William The Treasure for Traveilers 72-3 Britain in Cymbeline 170-71, 176-201 Jacobean ideal of 174, 177-8 English opposition 185-201 Roman origins of 170-71 see also Anglo-Scottish union; flags; identity; James VI and I; nationalism Brome, Richard 73 The Antipodes 71, 127-8 The Novella 25, 45, 68-71, 185n57 see also Coryate, Thomas; Jonson, Ben Bruno, Giodano 95 Bruster, Douglas 2, 24-5 Bullough, Geoffrey 19, 21n96, 22n104, 130n37, 134n50, 143n75, 171n10, 180n46 Burke, Peter 100n83 Burre, Walter 12 Butler, Martin 177n29, 188n69 Caesar, Augustus in Cymbeline 27, 174, 176, 189-92, 196; see also Caesar, Julius; Rome Caesar, Julius British nationalism and 174, 188-9 in Cymbeline 170, 181-2, 189-94 see also Caesar, Augustus; Rome Campion, Thomas Caversham Entertainment 63 Capp, Bernard 63n136, 65n146 Cartelli, Thomas 10n41, 82-3 Castelvetro, Giacomo 130 Castiglione, Baldassare Il libro del cortegiano

Index La Civil Conversazione and 105-7, 110-11, 112, 117 courtiership and 78, 100, 105-6, 154 English drama and 7, 81 Italian crisis in 3, 22, 97-100, 136 reputation in England 57, 78, 99101, 106-9, 112, 136 Shakespeare and 22, 101-2 translation by Hoby 98-100, 107-9, 111 Volpone and 56-7, 100, 136 Marston and 14, 21 The Fawn 14, 131 stage character of Castilio Balthazar 14, 101-5 verse satires 101, 104, 131 see also Ascham, Roger; courtesy books; courtiership; Francesco Maria I della Rovere; Guazzo, Stefano; Marston, John; Montefeltro; Pettie, George; political theory; Urbino; translation Chapman, George 17, 119 All Fools 8-9, 87n44, 154; see also Machiavelli, Niccolò May-Day 127; see also disguised ruler play Tragedy of Chabot Admiral of France 65n143 see also Chapman, George, John Marston, and Ben Jonson Chapman, George, John Marston, and Ben Jonson Eastward Ho 59, 168, 178-9, 201 Chappuys, Gabriel 8, 109n122 Chard, Chloe 55, 72n172 Charles I (King of England) 136, 199 Charles VIII (King of France) 97, 122, 135, 136 character in The Devil’s Charter 92, 95 Cheke, Sir John 108-9 Children of the Queen’s Revels 11, 12 Cicero 175 Cinthio, Gio. Battista Giraldi Discorso […] intorno al comporre delle comedie e delle tragedie 148-51

229

Epitia source for Measure for Measure 143, 146-53 Gli Hecatommithi source for Measure for Measure 8, 143-6, 148-50 source for Othello 8 source for The Scottish History of James the Fourth 8 see also audience response; Italian prose literature; tragedia a fin lieto; tragicomedy citation; see intertextuality Clare, Janet 168n138, 179n42 Clubb, Louise George 1, 15n68 Cohen, Stephen 129n34, 163n125 Colonna, Prospero 135 comedy audience expectations and 17-18, 68, 71, 126, 129, 140, 160-63, 164 see also audience response; New Comedy; tragicomedy commonplace books 7, 30, 45, 74, 146; see also intertextuality; reading; source studies conscience in Basilikon Doron 80, 94 in The Devil’s Charter 93-6 in Hamlet 20 in Il Principe 79, 94-5 in The Tempest 133 see also James VI and I; Machiavelli, Niccolò Contarini, Gasparo (Cardinal) De magistratibus et republica Venetorum libri quinque 48 Cook, Ann Jennalie 11n47 Cooke, Joseph Greene’s Tu Quoque 66 Cornwallis, Charles Coryate, Thomas Coryats Crambe 64 Coryat’s Crudities 25, 50, 59-64 ‘Panegyrick Verses’ 60-62, 63, 64, 66, 73-4; see also Donne, John; The Odcombian Banquet source for The Roaring Girl 62-3 source for The Ball 65-8

230


source for The Novella 68-71 satirised by John Taylor 63-4, 66 Venetian prostitute, description of 52-3, 60-63, 70, 185n57 see also courtesans; Donne, John; Italianate Englishman, figure of; travel; travel writing; Venice Counter-Reformation Cinthio and 146-8, 151 courtesans English travellers and 52-4, 56, 60-63, 68-71, 73, 185n57 in Coryat’s Crudities 60-63, 73 in The Novella 68-71 in The Unfortunate Traveller 40-41, 45 influence on English women 54-6 in Volpone 52-6 see also Coryate, Thomas; Italy; prostitution; travel; Venice; courtesy books reputation in England 99-101 reputation in Italy 57, 109-13 suspicion, theme of 154 sources for English drama 26, 81, 101-18, 120, 131 see also Castiglione, Baldassare; Della Casa, Giovanni; Ducci, Lorenzo; Guazzo, Stefano; political theory; reading courtiership cultural association with Italian texts 21-3, 81, 102, 110, 112 see also Castiglione, Baldassare; courtesy books; Della Casa, Giovanni; Ducci, Lorenzo; Guazzo, Stefano; intertextuality; reading Craik, Katherine A. 60n119, 62n131, 64n138 Creaser, John 46n67, 47n71 Dacres, Edward 83; see also Machiavelli, Niccolò; political theory; translation Dallington, Sir Robert Aphorismes Civill and Militarie 98n51, 136-7

Survey of the Great Dukes State of Tuscany 137, 165 Daniel, Samuel 12, 58, 89; see also Guarini, Battista Dante Alighieri 57 Daneau, Lambert 84; see also Gentillet, Innocent Davies, William A True Relation of the Travailes and most memorable Captivitie of William Davies, Barber-Surgeon of London under the Duke of Florence 44-5 Day, John Humour Out of Breath 11, 126, 14041; see also disguised ruler play; metatheatricality; revenge play Dekker, Thomas 58, 119n158; see also Dekker, Thomas, Henry Chettle and William Haughton; Dekker, Thomas and John Webster; Middleton, Thomas and Thomas Dekker Dekker, Thomas, Henry Chettle and William Haughton Patient Grissil 25, 36-7; see also Italianate Englishman, figure of Dekker, Thomas and John Webster Westward Ho! 100n84 Della Casa, Giovanni 154 Galateo 57; see also courtesy books; courtiership Dent, R.W. 112, 114n143, 116n147, 117n151 dictionaries (Italian-English) 3, 52, 57, 75, 86-7; see also Florio, John; Italian language; language manuals disguised ruler play audience recognition of 118, 127-30, 157-60 conventions of 26, 124-6, 130-132, 139-41, 143-5, 155-7 comic resolutions 160-67 flattery, depiction of 129, 155-8 surveillance 126, 133, 140-41, 144-5, 154, 155-6, 161, 165 Italian politics and 81, 121-6, 130-142

Index James I and 126-7, 157, 159-60, 164-5, 166-7 parodies of 118, 126-30, 140-41, 157-63 reputation of 120, 126-30, 157 Shakespeare and 26, 120, 121-68 see also audience response; Beaumont, Francis; Day, John; Marston, John; Middleton, Thomas; parody; Shakespeare, William; Sharpham, Edward Dollimore, Jonathan 5, 23, 115n146, 144n77 Donaldson, Peter S. 86n39, 87n42, 89 Donne, John Ignatius his Conclave 74 “Panegyrick Verses” for Coryat’s Crudities 73-4 Doran, Susan 161n120, 172n15, 173n17, 178 Ducci, Lorenzo Ars Aulica 154 Elam, Keir 34 Eliot, T.S. 76 Elizabeth I (Queen of England) court politics and 23, 26, 78-9, 100, 126 international conflicts 113, 167, 172-3, 188 Machiavelli, associations with 83n29, 99 in A Treatise of Treasons Against Queen Elizabeth and the Crown of England 79 marriage prospects 161-2, 172-3 Pettie’s translation of Guazzo and 109-10 succession question 172-3 see also James VI and I; Mary, Queen of Scots English ape, figure of; see Italianate Englishman, figure of; Rankins, William English Catholics domestic subversion and 35, 37-8, 43-4, 45 in Italy 43-5, 72

231

threat to Protestant travellers 44-5 in travel writing 37-8, 43-5 see also Davies, William; Munday, Anthony; travel; travel writing Englishness; see Anglo-Scottish union; Britain; identity; Italianate Englishman, figure of Farley-Hills, David 93 Fellheimer, Jeanette 82n24, 135n55 Fenton, Geoffrey 82, 134, 135n55, 136; see also Gucciardini, Francesco; translation Ferdinand I (King of Naples) 121-2, 134-5 Ferrara historical reputation 130-31 represented on English stage 130-31, 145 Ferrucio, Franco 80n18, 122n7 Finkelpearl, Philip J. 75n3, 101n85 Fitzpatrick, Joan 169n2, 171n7, 197n88 flags in Cymbeline 173, 181, 198-201 Jacobean union flag 173, 198-201 see also Anglo-Scottish union; James VI and I Fletcher, John 119 The Faithful Shepherdess 11-13, 18 Florence English drama and Duke of Florence in The White Devil 111-12, 114, 116-18 Duke of Florence in The Fleire 126, 157-62, 187 Florentine Republic, fall of 152-3 reputation in England 136-7 association with Machiavelli 82-4, 85, 88, 137, 171n10 see also Dallington, Sir Robert; Machiavelli, Niccolò; Guicciardini, Francesco; Medici, Cosimo II de’; Medici, Ferdinand de’; Medici, Francesco de’ Florio, John 75, 106-7, 114 Queen Anna’s New World of Words 52, 89 Roger Ascham and 35-6 Second Frutes 35-6, 52, 56, 107, 114

232


Volpone and 51-2, 56, 57 A Worlde of Wordes 3, 52, 57 see also dictionaries (Italian-English); Italian language; Italianate Englishman, figure of; language manuals Floyd-Wilson, Mary 169n1, 180n44, 183n48, 184, 195, 196 Ford, John The Fancies, Chaste and Noble 23-4; see also revenge play Forman, Simon 10, 171n11 France Italophobia in 86n38, 174 object of English imitation 31, 33 readership of Machiavelli The Jew of Malta 79, 85-6 Latin edition of Discours […] Contre Nicholas Machiavel Florentin 84-5 role in the Wars of Italy 22, 97, 136 see also Charles VIII; Daneau, Lambert; Gentillet, Innocent; Italianate Englishman, figure of; Machiavelli, Niccolò; Medici, Catherine de’ Francesco Maria I della Rovere (Duke of Urbino) 22 Frederyke of Jannen 171 Frye, Northrop 138, 140 Gainsford, Thomas The Glory of England 131 Galloway, Bruce 170n3, 187n66, 195n80, 199n92, 201n102 Gamberini, Spartaco 86n41 Genoa English community in 72 English drama and Antonio and Mellida and Antonio’s Revenge 103 The Malcontent 130, 139, 158-9 The Tempest 134 political history 134 see also Adorno, Prospero; Thomas, William

genre; see comedy; disguised ruler play; intertextuality; tragedia a fin lieto; parody; tragicomedy Gentili, Alberico 86 De legationibus libri tres 88-9, 124 Gentillet, Innocent Discours […] Contre Nicholas Machiavel Florentin English translation 84-5 French Italophobia and 86n38 Machiavelli’s reputation in England and 6, 84-5, 137 source for The Jew of Malta 83-6 see also Daneau, Lambert; Machiavelli, Niccolò; Patericke, Simon Gibbons, Brian 155, 195n81 Goldberg, Jonathan 47n72, 93n64, 144n77 Gomersall, Robert The Tragedy of Lodovick Sforza 135n55; see also Milan; Sforza, Ludovico Gonzaga, Luigi 22 Gordon, John 177 Gosson, Stephen Plays Confuted in Five Actions 15 The Schoole of Abuse 10, 15 Gower, John 18, 59, 77-8 Grady, Hugh 5-6, 80n18, 122n7 Greenblatt, Stephen 91, 138n66, 155 Greene, Robert The Scottish History of James the Fourth 7-8 Quip for an Upstart Courtier 31-2 Greenham, Richard 29 Guarsi, Mary 76 Guarini, Battista Il pastor fido source for The Faithful Shepherdess 11-12 Volpone and 11-12, 48, 57-8 see also tragicomedy Guazzo, Stefano La Civil Conversazione Castiglione and 105-7, 110-11 source for The White Devil 111-18 translation by Pettie 105-7, 109-11 reputation in England 57, 112

Index

233

see also Castiglione, Baldassare; courtesy books; courtiership; Pettie, George; translation Guicciardini, Francesco The Historie of Gucciardine (Storia d’Italia) translation by Fenton 82, 134-6 quarrel with Francesco Maria I della Rovere 22 reputation in England 3, 7, 81-2, 88, 99, 137 compared to Machiavelli 81, 88 reputation in Italy 153 Ricordi 135 source for English drama 7, 146 The Devil’s Charter 13, 25-6, 80, 81-2, 88, 92, 95 The Tempest 134-7 see also Fenton, Geoffrey; Florence; Italy; Machiavelli, Niccolò; Milan; Naples, Kingdom of; political theory; translation Guidobaldo da Montefeltro (Duke of Urbino); see Montefeltro Gurr, Andrew 10n42, 11n47, 16, 118

Sir Robert Dallington and 136, 165 marriage prospects 161, 164-5, 167 Italy and 62n131, 164-5 stage princes and 116 see also Coryate, Thomas; Dallington, Sir Robert; James VI and I Hoby, Sir Thomas 98-100, 101, 106, 107-9 in The Schoolmaster 107-8 see also Ascham, Roger; Castiglione, Baldassare; Cheke, Sir John; Italian language; translation Hoenselaars, A.J. 47n73, 54n96, 65n143, 75n2, 76n5, 113n139, 176, 180n145 Holland, Henry 29-30 Holland, Philemon 38-9, 174 Holtgen, Karl Josef 135n61 Homer 42, 185 Horne, P.R. 150n92 Hoskyns, John 16-17 Howard, Henry (Earl of Surrey) 40, 102n89 Howard, Jean E. 65n143 Hunter, G.K. 21, 75n3, 85, 103n94, 160n116

Hadfield, Andrew 42n52, 87n42, 136n61, 170n6, 193n77 Hall, Joseph Quo Vadis? A Just Censure of Travell 38-40; see also anti-travel writing; Italianate Englishman, figure of; reading Harbage, Alfred 11n47, 160n118 Harris, Jonathan Gil 90n58 Harrison, William 44, 177-8 Harvey, Gabriel 57, 84, 87 Harvey, Richard A Theological Discourse of the Lamb of God and His Enemies 84 Hayward, Sir John A Treatise of Union of the two Realmes of England and Scotland 200 Headlam-Wells, Robin 134n49, 142n74, 161n21 Henry, Prince of Wales Basilikon Doron and 93-4, 95 Coryat’s Crudities and 62

identity contingency of in Cymbeline 176-9, 182, 201-4 in Quo Vadis? A Just Censure of Travell 38-40 loss of Englishness Italian books and 29-30, 37-45, 101 travel to Italy and 25, 30-31, 34, 37-40, 45, 59, 61, 73-4, 171-2, 182-3 see also Ascham, Roger; Hall, Joseph; Italianate Englishman, figure of; Rankins, William; travel; travel writing Gl’ingannati 16 Inglese italianato; see Italianate Englishman, figure of Inns of Court theatre and 11, 15-17, 160 Every Man Out of His Humour 17

234


intertextuality dramatic incoherence and 145-8, 163-4, 173-4, 195-8, 201-4 ideological implications of 6, 21-3, 26, 31, 36, 42, 75-120, 137, 142-53, 158-64, 167-8, 171-4, 195-201 on-stage citations and allusions 6-9, 17-19, 30, 45, 47-8, 56-9, 62-3, 65-71, 82-3, 85-6, 92-5, 101-5, 113 rhetorical implications of 9-10, 17-19, 31, 42, 60, 64, 68-71, 73-4, 79-81, 96, 113, 117-20, 127-9, theories of 1-3, 173-4 chronological approaches 2, 23-7, 120, and early modern reception 2, 1011, 13, 15-20, 30-31, 77-8 and source studies 1-6, 18-19, 30, 47-8, 60, 77-8, 146, 173-4 see also audience response; reading; source studies Italianate Englishman, figure of definitions of in The Schoolmaster 29-31 in The English Ape, The Italian Imitation, The Footsteppes of France 32-3 Englishwomen and Lady Would-Be in Volpone 52-9 intertextual reproduction of 7, 29-74, 101, 107 in The Ball 65 Coryate’s reputation and 60-61, 73-4 in The Novella 69 in Patient Grissil 36-7 in Shakespeare 31-6, 179, 183-5, 203-4 in The Unfortunate Traveller 40-41 in Volpone 46-7, 49, 59 rebuttals of 35-7, 45 see also Ascham, Roger; Brome, Richard; Coryate, Thomas; identity; Jonson, Ben; Nashe, Thomas; Rankins, William; Shakespeare, William; travel; travel writing Italian language

in Antonio and Mellida 75-6 influence on English 108-9, 111 study in England 35-6, 42, 50, 51-2, 66, 68, 76, 106-7 political expertise, association with 86-8, 99 see also dictionaries (Italian-English); Florio, John; language manuals; Thomas, William; translation Italian prose literature source for English drama 4, 8, 15, 18, 36, 58, 146-53, 180n46 translated into English 15 see also Bandello, Matteo; Boccaccio, Giovanni; Cinthio, Gio. Battista Giraldi; Painter, William Italy English presence in Catholic exiles 43-5, 72 merchants 72 travellers 50-51, 55-6, 59-62, 67, 72-3 history classical period; see Caesar, Augustus; Caesar, Julius; Rome Wars of Italy 21-3, 26, 97-100, 121-3, 134-7 politics loss of sovereignty 4-5, 22-3, 97100, 121-3, 130-132, 134-7 reputation in England Catholicism, association with 37-8, 43-5 courtiership, association with 21-3, 101-18 fashion, association with 31-4, 107, 183-5 reading, association with 2-3, 6-9, 14-16, 25, 29-31, 37-74, 83, 85-9, 110-11 statecraft, association with 4-5, 46-8, 78-120, 121-68 political incompetence, association with 97-100, 121-3, 134-7, 158-60 setting for English drama 4-6, 21-3, 36, 59, 76, 103, 130-31, 145, 158

Index see also courtiership; Ferrara; Florence; Genoa; intertextuality; Italianate Englishman, figure of; Italian language; Italian prose literature; Livorno; Milan; Naples, Kingdom of; political theory; Rome; reading; Sicily; travel; travel writing; Urbino; Venice James VI and I (King of England and Scotland) Basilikon Doron 80, 157 source for The Devil’s Charter 93-6 Castelvetro and 130 Elizabeth I and 172-3 flattery, association with 93, 157, 194 iconography of 172 peace policies 166-7 proclamations “A Proclamation declaring what Flaggs South and North Britaines shall Beare at Sea” 172n13, 198-9, 200 “Proclamation for the Unity of England and Scotland” 170n4, 186-7 Scottish origins of 168, 172-3, 178-9 English crown and 172-3, 178 parodied in Eastward Ho 178-9 see also Anglo-Scottish union; Britain; disguised ruler play; Elizabeth I; flags; Henry, Prince of Wales; Mary, Queen of Scots James, Heather 169n1, 174n21 Javitch, Daniel 100n83, 104n97, 105n99 Jones, Ann Rosalind 61, 113 Jones, Inigo 61 Jonson, Ben 78, 81, 119, 195 Bartholomew Fair 127; see also disguised ruler play Richard Brome and 68, 71 Thomas Coryate and 59-60, 65, 71 Every Man Out of His Humour 17-18, 65 The Masque of Blackness 177 The New Inn 58 The Speeches at Prince Henry’s Barriers 188-9

235 Volpone 3, 6, 11-12, 15, 25, 30, 37, 45, 46-59, 60, 66, 68, 71, 83, 87n44, 100, 102, 154 see also Chapman, George, John Marston, and Ben Jonson

Kahn, Victoria 89 Kamps, Ivo 125n16, 129n34, 157n107 Kastan, David Scott 14n62, 134n49, 142n74 Kempe, Will 65n146 Kiefer, Frederick 3n11, 30n4, 45 King, Ros 169n2, 172n12, 191n72, 195n80, 196, 197n88, 199n92 Kirkpatrick, Robin 134n49 Knight, G. Wilson 170n6, 197 Kyd, Thomas The Spanish Tragedy 21 language manuals 52, 86-7; see also Florio, John; Italian language; Thomas, William Lawrence, Jason 8n31, 12n51, 52n84, 58n111, 75n3, 86n40, 109n121, 151n95 Lee Jr., Maurice 167n135, 186n60 Lee, Vernon 4 Leggatt, Alexander 47n70, 119n154, 160n116 Leghorn; see Livorno Lever, J.W. 4-5 Levith, Murray 48n73, 133 Lewkenor, Lewis 48 Lewkenor, Samuel A Discourse … of forraine Cities 39; see also reading Lievsay, John L. 43n53, 105n98, 110n123 Lipsius, Justus 51, 73 Lithgow, William The Totall Discourse of the Rare Adventures and Painefull Peregrinations 50, 67 Livorno English community in 72 Livy 38, 174 The London Prodigal 6-7, 87n44 Lopez, Jeremy 10 Luther, Martin 143

236


Lynch, Stephen J. 2n5, 78n10, 173 MacDonnell, Randal (Earl of Antrim) 24 McEachern, Claire 199n92, 201n102 Machiavelli, Niccolò The Arte of Warre translation by Whitehorne 83, 111 Counter-Reformation responses to 146-7 Discorsi 84 edition by Wolfe 86-7, 89 The Florentine History translation by Bedingfield 99, 136 Gentillet and the Contre-Machiavel 83-6, 137 interpretation, debate about 78-80, 83, 88-90, 92, 124, 144, 152-3 on-stage citations and allusions 6-9, 78, 118, 121 All Fools 8-9, 154 The Jew of Malta 6, 79-80, 82-3, 85-6, 90-91 The London Prodigal 6-7 The Scottish History of James the Fourth 7-8 Volpone 6, 48, 59, 83, 154 Il Principe Chapter 18,‘In che modo i prencipi debbono osservare la fede’ 8-9, 79, 81, 94-6 edition by Wolfe 9n36, 86-9, 94n65, 121 storm imagery and The Tempest 121-4 translation by Dacres 83 readership England 6, 37, 45, 74, 82-9, 98-9, 124, 136-7 France 84-6 references to Cinquecento political crisis 14, 97-9, 121-3, 136-7, 146 source for English drama 5-9, 25-6, 59, 75-120, 121-4, 136-7 character of Jachimo in Cymbeline 174, 192, 203 The Devil’s Charter 14, 81-2, 87-8, 92-7 The Jew of Malta 6, 79-80, 82-92

The Tempest 121-4, 133, 137 source for English political writing A Treatise of Treasons Against Queen Elizabeth and the Crown of England 79 Four Bookes of Offices 14, 81, 87-8, 94-5 Ignatius his Conclave 74 studies of Shakespeare and 5-6, 80, 122 see also Alexander VI; Barnes, Barnabe; Castiglione, Baldassare; conscience; Dacres, Edward; Elizabeth I; Florence; Gentili, Alberico; Guicciardini, Francesco; intertextuality; Italy; Jonson, Ben; Milan; Naples, Kingdom of; political theory; reading; translation; Wolfe, John Macoll, Alan 177n34, 178n36 McPherson, David C. 47n69, 48n76, 52, 53n90, 57n107 Majelli, Barbara 8n31, 148n88 Maley, Willy 169n1, 170n5, 174n19, 191n72 Mandeville, Sir John (fictional traveller) 73 Manningham, John 15-17 Marcus, Leah S. 170n6, 171n8, 184n51, 193, 195n81, 198n90 Markham, Jarvis The Dumbe Knight 55 Marlowe, Christopher 113 The Jew of Malta 6, 25-6, 79-80, 82-6, 88, 89-92, 96, 102, 120, 121 The Massacre at Paris 86 Marrapodi, Michele 1, 148n88, 163 Marston, John 12, 16, 58, 81, 92, 113 Antonio and Mellida 5, 14, 21, 26, 756, 101-5, 120 Antonio’s Revenge 5, 14, 26, 76, 101-5; see also revenge play source for Hamlet 21 Certaine Satyres 101, 104, 131 The Fawn 14, 23, 131, 155, 157, 158, 159, 160; see also disguised ruler play The Malcontent 14, 26, 101, 118, 124, 125, 128, 129, 130, 138, 139, 151,

Index 153, 155, 158-9, 162, 163, 167; see also disguised ruler play The Scourge of Villanie 49 What You Will 101n86 see also Castiglione, Baldassare; Chapman, George, John Marston, and Ben Jonson Mary, Queen of Scots 79, 172, 178 Mason, John The Turke 159 Massinger, Philip The Great Duke of Florence 131n45 Mathiessen, F. O. 108 Medici, Catherine de’ (Queen of France) 84, 175n23 Medici, Cosimo II de’ (Grand Duke of Tuscany) 164 Medici, Ferdinand de’ (Grand Duke of Tuscany) 164 Medici, Francesco de’ (character in The White Devil) 116, 118 Melton, John A Sixe-Folde Politician 67, 87 Merbury, Charles A Brief Discourse of Royall Monarchie 86-7, 99 metatheatricality 10, 12, 17-20, 48-9, 140-41, 144; see also audience response; intertextuality Meyer, Edward 6, 81n20, 84n30 Middleton, Thomas 58, 145 The Phoenix 116, 129, 130-31, 155-6, 157, 158; see also disguised ruler play The Revenger’s Tragedy 23; see also revenge play Women Beware Women 23 see also Middleton, Thomas and Thomas Dekker Middleton, Thomas and Thomas Dekker The Roaring Girl 60, 62-3 Mikalachki, Jodi 170n6, 171n7, 193, 196n83 Milan political crisis and in Guicciardini 135 in Il Principe 121-3

237

intertexts for The Tempest 121-4, 134-5 see also Colonna, Prospero; Guicciardini, Francesco; Sforza, Giangaleazzo; Sforza, Ludovico Miles, Rosalind 126n19, 129n34 Minshull, Catherine 84n30, 91n59 Miola, Robert S. 1-2, 77n8, 183n47, 191 Montefeltro (ruling family of Urbino) Castiglione and 22, 97, 99 Guidobaldo da Montefeltro (Duke of Urbino) 22 see also Castiglione, Baldassare; Urbino Moretti, Franco 144 Morrison, Sir Richard 72 Moryson, Fynes 44-5, 51, 70 Moss, Ann 7 mountebanks in Volpone 51-2, 58 Muir, Kenneth 16n73, 19, 78n11, 144n75, 180n46 Mullini, Roberta 47n73 Munday, Anthony The English Romayne Lyfe 43, 68 ‘The Triumph of a Re-United Britain’ 195 Munro, Lucy 11n48, 12n51, 58n111, 119n156, 179n41 Murray, Sir James 179 Nannini, Remigo Civill Considerations upon Many and Sundrie Histories 135n56 Naples, Kingdom of political crisis and in Guicciardini 134-5 in Il Principe 121-3 intertexts for The Tempest 121-4, 134-5 see also Ferdinand I; Guicciardini, Francesco Nashe, Thomas 45, 87 The Unfortunate Traveller 2-3, 25, 30, 40-44, 53, 59, 74, 102, 115 see also Ascham, Roger; courtesans; English Catholics; Italianate

238


Englishman, figure of; travel; travel writing nationalism 27, 38, 101, 105-12, 171, 178-9, 188, 193, 196-8, 201; see also Anglo-Scottish union; Britain; identity; Italianate Englishman, figure of Nerli, Filippo de’ 152-3 New Comedy 8 disguised ruler play and 126, 139, 143-4, 161-3, 168 see also comedy; disguised ruler play; tragicomedy Norbrook, David 100n82, 126n20, 134n49 Norton, Edward 17 novella; see Italian prose literature; Brome, Richard O’Callaghan, Michele 16n77, 17n81, 60n119, 64n138 The Odcombian Banquet 64; see also Coryate, Thomas Olsen, Thomas G. 169n2, 170n6, 171n7, 175n26, 183n48, 184n52 Ord, Melanie 66n149, 68n160, 72n177 Ovid 41, 42 Paget, Violet, see Lee, Vernon Painter, William The Palace of Pleasure 15, 58 Palmer, Sir Thomas How to Make our Trauvailes Profitable 44, 55-6 pardon, acts of in Cymbeline 166-7, 178, 195-6, 203 in Measure for Measure 153, 168 in The Tempest 139, 141, 166-8 see also James VI and I Parker, Brian 47n71, 48n75, 51n84 Parker, Patricia 22n107, 169n2, 170n6, 171n7, 183 parody intertextuality of 11, 47, 103, 118, 127-9, 158, 196-7 see also disguised ruler play; intertextuality Parolin, Peter 169n2, 183n48, 184n52

Patericke, Simon 84-5; see also Gentillet, Innocent Patterson, Annabel 21n98, 159, 179n43 Pendleton, Thomas A. 129n34 Perrin, W. G. 199n94, 200n101, 201n102 Petrarch 4, 41, 43, 48, 57-8, 75, 102 Pettie, George 105-7, 109-11, 112; see also Guazzo, Stefano; translation Phillips, Robert 61 Plautus 15-16, 18 political theory Italian political history, references to 97-100, 136-7 reception in England cultural association with Italian texts 3, 48, 81-7, 136-7, 154 interpretation, debates about 78-9, 88-9 source for English drama 7, 10, 14, 25-6, 75-120, 134-7, 154 see also Castiglione, Baldassare; Guicciardini, Francesco; Italy; intertextuality; Machiavelli, Niccolò; reading Praz, Mario 4 prostitution cultural association with Italy 52-5, 60, 158, 185 in The Fleire 158, 160, 162, 168 see also Coryate, Thomas; courtesans; Venice Prynne, William Histrio-Mastix 10 Raab, Felix 79n13, 85n35 Rankins, William The English Ape, The Italian Imitation, The Footsteppes of France 32-3, 35, 54-5, 107 see also anti-travel writing; Ascham, Roger; identity; Italianate Englishman, figure of; travel reading compared to playgoing 12, 13-14 cultural importance of 2-3, 7, 45, 73-4 English knowledge of Italy and 2-3, 6-9, 14-16, 25, 29-31, 37-74, 83, 85-9, 110-11

Index on-stage references to 6-9, 25, 46-59, 65-71, 80, 85-6, 102-3 substitute for travel 25, 38-40, 42-4, 49, 67-8, 72 see also commonplace books; intertextuality; Italy; political theory; travel writing Rebhorn, Wayne 97n73 Red Bull playhouse 10, 11, 13, 119-29 Redmond, Michael J. 127n24, 128n33, 158n109, 183n50 revenge play 23-4, 81, 103-5, 140-41, 203; see also audience response; Day, John; Ford, John; intertextuality; Marston, John; Webster, John Rich, Barnabe My Ladies Looking Glasse 54-5 Richmond, Robert 61 Roe, John 5-6, 80, 122n7 Romano, Giulio 57 romance Italianate drama and 103, 141 Shakespeare and 78, 124-6, 166-7, 174 romanzo; see Italian prose literature Rome ancient history compared to early modern Italy 15, 27, 38-9, 174-5 Cymbeline and 170-76, 181-2, 188-98 cultural model for Britain 170, 172, 173, 175-6, 188-9 English Catholic community in 72 in The Unfortunate Traveller 42-4 in The English Romayne Lyfe 43, 68 English travellers in 67-8 site of the Vatican 110, 113 see also Britain; Caesar, Augustus; Caesar, Julius; Italy Sackville, Thomas 17, 108-9; see also Hoby, Sir Thomas Salingar, Leo 47n68, 54n96 Sanders, Eve Rachele 30n5, 57n110 Sannazaro, Iacopo 73 Scaligero, Giulio Cesare 73 Schwyzer, Philip 169n2, 196

239

Scotland; see Anglo-Scottish union; Britain; James VI and I Scott, Mary Augusta 15 Secchi, Niccolò 16 Segre, Cesare 19 Seneca 41, 42, 103 Serpieri, Alessandro 1 Sforza, Giangaleazzo (Duke of Milan) 135 Sforza, Ludovico (Duke of Milan) 135 stage character in The Devil’s Charter 95 The Tragedy of Lodovick Sforza 135n55 Shakespeare, William As You Like It 34; see also Italianate Englishman, figure of Comedy of Errors 16 Cymbeline 10, 26-7, 32, 124n14, 166-8, 169-204; see also Anglo-Scottish union; Britain; flags Hamlet 10, 18-23; see also audience response King Henry IV 129; see also disguised ruler play King John 31 Love’s Labour’s Lost 50 Measure for Measure 26, 118, 120, 121, 124-6, 127, 128-31, 139-40, 142-58, 163-4, 165, 168; see also disguised ruler play The Merchant of Venice 8, 25-6, 31-6, 42, 69, 90, 101, 113, 183n48, 201; see also Italianate Englishman, figure of A Midsummer Night’s Dream 19 Much Ado About Nothing 32, 101, 183; see also Italianate Englishman, figure of Othello 8, 180, 197, 203 Pericles 18, 58-9, 77-8, 125n14 Richard II 33-4, 197 Romeo and Juliet 101 The Tempest 26, 120, 121-7, 129, 130, 132-42, 154, 165-8; see also disguised ruler play Twelfth Night 15-16 The Two Noble Kinsmen 18 The Winter’s Tale 10, 125n14, 167n133

240


Sharpe, Kevin 93 Sharpe, Robert Boies 70 Sharpham, Edward 17, 58 The Fleire 11, 126, 157-60, 161-3, 168, 187; see also disguised ruler play Shaw, George Bernard 174n19, 201-4 Shirley, James The Ball 65-8 Shugar, Debora 96 Sicily 9n36, 108, 167n133 Sidney, Sir Philip 36, 100 Simioni, R. C. 86n41 Sinfield, Alan 115n146, 163 slander Coryate and 62-3 in Measure for Measure 144, 152-7, 168 see also Coryate, Thomas; disguised ruler play Smith, Nigel 134n49 Soll, Jacob 48n75, 92n60 sources; see courtesy books; intertextuality; Italian prose literature; political theory; source studies source studies 1-6, 18-19, 30, 36, 47-8, 60, 70, 77-8, 112, 146, 150, 173-4; see also intertextuality Spelman, Sir Henry 191, 195 Spelman, William A Dialogue or Confabulation between two travelers 53; see also courtesans; Venice sprezzatura 104, 136; see also Castiglione, Baldassare statecraft; see Italy; Machiavelli, Niccolò; political theory Steggle, Matthew 68n162, 70 Stephens, John Essays and Characters Ironicall, and Instructive 67n153, 87 Strachan, Michael 60n119, 62n131, 64n139, 65n147 Stradling, Sir John A Direction for Travailers 51, 53, 73 Strong, Roy 62n131, 161n121, 164n129 surveillance; see disguised ruler play Symonds, J. A. 4

Tasso, Torquato 57 Taylor, Gary 23n107, 145 Taylor, John Coryate and 63-4, 65n146, 66 Odcombs Complaint 63-4 The Sculler 66 see also Coryate, Thomas Tennenhouse, Leonard 125n16, 129n34, 163n25 Thornborough, Joseph (Bishop of Bristol) 187-8, 200; see also Anglo-Scottish union; Britain Thorpe, Thomas 64 Thomas, William 136, 137 The Historie of Italie 99 potential source for The Tempest 134 Principal Rules of the Italian Grammar 86-7, 99 see also Genoa; Italian language; language manuals Tosi, Laura 112 tragedia a fin lieto 149-50; see also Cinthio, Gio. Battista Giraldi; tragicomedy tragicomedy 11-12, 134; see also Guarini, Battista; Cinthio, Gio. Battista Giraldi; tragedia a fin lieto translation English nationalism and 38-9, 174-5 dangers of translated books 7, 29-30 Italian political theory in 26, 48, 82, 83-6, 99, 134-6 Italian courtesy books in 98-100, 105-12 Italian prose literature in 8, 15 see also Ascham, Roger; Castiglione, Baldassare; courtesy books; Dacres, Edward; Fenton, Geoffrey; Guazzo, Stefano; Hoby, Sir Thomas; Italian prose literature; nationalism; Pettie, George; political theory; Whitehorne, Peter travel dangers of travel Catholic persecution 43-5, 67

Index loss of English identity 25, 30-31, 34, 37-40, 45, 59, 61, 73-4 prostitution 52-4, 56, 60-63, 68-71, 73, 185n57 female travellers historical emergence 55-6 parodied in Volpone 52-9 prohibition against in How to Make Our Trauvailes Profitable 55-6 types of travellers 43-4, 55-6, 71-73 English Catholics 43-4 merchants 72 problems with aristocratic model 71-3 see also anti-travel writing; Ascham, Roger; Coryate, Thomas; courtesans; English Catholics; Italianate Englishman, figure of; travel writing; Italy; prostitution; Rome; Venice travel writing critical presumptions about 71-3 defences of travel 45, 63 intertextuality of references to Coryat’s Crudities 62-71, 73-4 references to The Schoolmaster 45, 46-8, 59-62 rules for travel 44, 51-3, 73 parodied in Volpone 49-52 see also anti-travel writing; Ascham, Roger; Coryate, Thomas; intertextuality; Italianate Englishman, figure of; Moryson, Fynes; Palmer, Sir Thomas; Rankins, William; Stradling, Sir John; reading; travel Tricomi, Albert 128n28, 131n33, 157n106, 158n108, 162n123 Twine, Laurence 78 Union Jack; see Anglo-Scottish union; Britain; flags Urbino Castiglione and 22, 97-8, 105 historical reputation 22-3, 98, 99, 131 setting of The Fawn 131, 155, 157

241 see also Castiglione, Baldassare; Francesco Maria I della Rovere; Italy; Montefeltro; political theory

Venice historical reputation politics 47-8, 66-7, 100 prostitution 40-41, 51, 52-6, 60-63, 68-71, 100 as travel destination 46-74 representation in English drama 25, 45, 140 Antonio and Mellida and Antonio’s Revenge 101, 103-4 The Ball 65-8 Volpone 46-59 The Merchant of Venice 31, 33-5 The Novella 68-71 see also Coryate, Thomas; courtesans; Italy; Nashe, Thomas; prostitution; travel; travel writing Vienna reference in Hamlet 22 setting of Measure for Measure 124, 130, 145-6, 158 see also disguised ruler plays Villani, Stefano 72 Villiers, George (Duke of Buckingham) 24 Walker, John 35n27 Warneke, Sara 29n2, 36n30, 44n57, 65n143, 72n171 Warner, William Albion’s England 82 Watkins, John 173 Webster, John 81 The Duchess of Malfi 119 The White Devil 5, 10-11, 13, 17, 23, 26, 105, 111-20, 180 see also audiences; Dekker, Thomas and John Webster; Guazzo, Stefano; Pettie, George; revenge play Whetstone, George Promos and Cassandra 143, 145, 150 Sir Philip Sidney, his honourable life, his valiant death and true vertues 36

242


Whitehorne, Peter 83, 111; see also Machiavelli, Niccolò; translation Whitney, Charles 13, 16n79 Wickham, Glynne 196, 198n90 Wolfe, John 9n36, 86-9, 94n65, 121; see also Machiavelli, Niccolò Wormald, Jenny 170n3, 186n58, 187n62

Wotton, Sir Henry 47 Wright, H. G. 36n32, 58, 180n46 Wyatt, Michael 51n84, 86n39, 89n55 Yates, Frances 51n84 Žižek, Slavoj 38

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