The Improbability of Othello: Rhetorical Anthropology and Shakespearean Selfhood

The Improbability of Othello

The Improbability of Othello Rhetorical Anthropology and Shakespearean Selfhood JOEL B. ALTMAN

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

Joel B. Altman is professor emeritus of English at the University of California, Berkeley. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2010 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2010 Printed in the United States of America 19  18  17  16  15  14  13  12  11  10    1  2  3  4  5 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-01610-8 (cloth) ISBN-10: 0-226-01610-2 (cloth) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Altman, Joel B.   The improbability of Othello : rhetorical anthropology and Shakespearean selfhood/Joel B. Altman.   p. cm.   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN-13: 978-0-226-01610-8 (cloth : alk. paper)   ISBN-10: 0-226-01610-2 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564—1616. Othello. 2. Probability in literature. 3. Self in literature. 4. Rhetoric, Renaissance. I. Title.   PR2829.A845 2010   822.3’3—dc22 2009021507 a The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

For Elizabeth and Caroline

Nothing is more odious in Nature than an improbable lye; And certainly never was any Play fraught like this of Othello with improbabilities. thomas rymer, A Short View of Tragedy O false and treacherous Probability, Enemy of truth, and friend to wickednesse; With whose bleare eyes opinion learnes to see Truths feeble party here, and barrennesse. When thou hath thus misled Humanity, And lost obedience in the pride of wit, With reason dar’st thou judge the Deity, And in thy flesh make bold to fashion it. Vaine thought, the word of Power a riddle is, And till the vayles be rent, the flesh newborne, Reveales no wonders of that inward blisse, Which but where faith is, every where findes scorne; “Who therfore censures God with fleshly sprite, “As well in time may wrap up infinite. fulke greville, Caelica 103

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments / ix

/ “As If for Surety”: The Problematics of Shakespearean Probability / 1

PROLOGUE

p a r t i . toward a rhetorical g enealogy of othello ONE

/ “My Parts, My Title, and My Perfect Soul”: Ingenuity, Apodeixis, and the Origins of Rhetorical Anthropology / 33

T wo

/ “Against My Estimation”: Ciceronian Decorum, Stoic Constancy, and the Production of Ethos / 55 p art ii. the logic of renaissance rhetoric T hre E

FOUR

/ “Apt and True”: Speech, World, and Thought in Shakespeare’s Humanist Dialectic / 89

/ “Yonder’s Foul Murders Done”: Place, Predicament, and Grammatical Space on Cyprus / 119

part iii. willful words, c hris tian anxieties, and shakespearean dramaturgy FIVE

/ “‘ Tis in Ourselves That We Are Thus, or Thus”: Will, Habit, and the Discourse of Res / 153

SIX

SEVEN

/ “Preposterous Conclusions”: Eros, Enargeia, and Composition in Othello / 183

/ “Prophetic Fury”: The Language of Theatrical Potentiality and the Economy of Shakespearean Reception / 207

p a r t i v. tropings of the self in s hakespeare’s scripts EIGHT

NINE

/ “I Am Not What I Am”: Shakespeare’s Scripted Subject / 235 / “Nobody. I Myself”: Discovering What Passes Show / 261 p art v. performing the improbable other on shakespeare’s s tage TEN

/ “Were I the Moor, I Would Not Be Iago”: Ligatures of Self and Stranger / 287

ELEVEN

/ “It Is Not Words That Shakes Me Thus”: Burbage, as if Othello / 317

/ “Make Not Impossible / That Which But Seems Unlike”: The Twilight of Probability and the Dawn of Shakespearean Romance / 339

EPILOGUE

Notes / 375 Bibliography / 429 Index / 443

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Two portions of this book have been previously published and appear here by permission of the publishers. A version of chapter 6 appeared in Representations 18 (1987): 129–57 (copyright by the Regents of the University of California). A version of chapter 7 appeared in Studies in the Literary Imagination (1993): 85–113 (copyright by the Department of English, Georgia State University). Early stages of my research were made possible by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In the course of researching, writing, and composing this book, I have become indebted to many colleagues and friends, who read parts originally presented as conference papers and also drafts of chapters that were shaped with the benefit of their thoughtful questions and advice. For all their help, I want to thank Janet Adelman, Paul Alpers, Bradin Cormack, Richard Feingold, Stephen Greenblatt, Lorna Hutson, Victoria Kahn, Jeffrey Knapp, Peter Platt, Norman Rabkin, and especially Thomas Sloane, whose historical insight, rhetorical mastery, and generous friendship were resources I drew upon again and again. I also wish to thank my editor, Alan Thomas, for so astutely shepherding the manuscript to publication. I am most grateful to my family, for their patient skepticism and unflagging faith over the years, and to my dear Sandra, for her exemplary moral courage and loving support.

Prologue

“As If for Surety”: The Problematics of Shakespearean Probability There is a moment early in Othello when Shakespeare reveals with startling clarity the medium in which all the actions of the play unfold. Alone onstage at the end of Act I, Iago declares his hatred of the Moor and offers as cause the rumor that Othello has cuckolded him. Then he makes what appears to be an unconscionable decision: I know not if ’t be true, Yet I, for mere suspicion in that kind Will do, as if for surety. (1.3.387–89)

“Bloody, bawdy villain!” we may be tempted to exclaim at this peremptory leap of logic. But if we follow Iago with the kind of cool curiosity he still invites at this point, we may find ourselves grateful for his candor. For he is telling us that he will seek revenge within that intersection of mind and world that Locke, later in the century, will call “the twilight of probability”—that region of variegated grayness between the light of certain knowledge and the darkness of nescience in which men and women, for the most part, manage their lives.1 “Mere suspicion,” to be sure, is a relatively weak degree of probability by any count, and we may recognize the promptings of malice behind the rashness with which Iago grasps it as a basis of action. Nonetheless, his bold announcement that he will be acting only “as if” he possessed the truth opens a unique perspective on the behavior of everyone in the play, even those we are not inclined to call villain. Everyone, that is to say, does “as if for surety.” This means that Shakespeare’s dramatis personae—with intermittent awareness and differing degrees of consciousness—all inhabit a phantom

 / Prologue

sphere in which a finely woven mesh of supposition creates the illusion of connection between knowledge that cannot be had, judgments that must be made, and actions that need to be taken. At the turn of the seventeenth century this suppositional world was supported by two kinds of belief. One might be called ontological and was perhaps best known from Aristotle’s description of the matters treated in rhetoric, ethics, and politics. “Most of the things about which we make decisions,” he observes, “and into which we inquire, present us with alternative possibilities. For it is about our actions that we deliberate or inquire and all our actions have a contingent character; hardly any of them are determined by necessity.” Thus we never deliberate about things that have a predetermined course or that happen by chance; rather, we investigate “matters that hold good as a general rule, but whose outcome is unpredictable and . . . in which an indeterminate element is involved.”2 It is into this world of contingency that we insert ourselves when we reason an act, and the materials of our reasoning are of the same stuff as the world we enter . When we consider taking a course of action whose end is unknown, or attempt to reconstruct an event whose causes are obscure, we work primarily with probabilities—and a probability, according to Aristotle, “is a thing that usually happens; not, however, as some definitions would suggest, anything whatever that usually happens, but only if it belongs to the class of the ‘contingent’ or ‘variable.’ It bears the same relation to that in respect of which it is probable as the universal bears to the particular” (Rhet. 1357a).3 Cicero, defending his belief that a true perception cannot be distinguished from a false one against the Stoic claim that such an attitude will subvert the normal conduct of life, argues that “it is contrary to nature for nothing to be probable” even though there is no way to determine whether a given perception is true, and he shows how one can perfectly well take an ordinary excursion on the basis of probabilities—reliable crew, good helmsman, fair weather—and expect to arrive at Puteoli on the opposite shore quite safely (Acad. 2.99–100). In a rhetorical handbook popular in sixteenth-century England, he avoids both the epistemological and ontological refinements that accord the probable a place somewhere between the true and existent, on the one hand, and the false and illusory, on the other, and observes: “Let us for the sake of conveying our meaning define the term ‘probable’ as ‘that which usually occurs in such and such a way’—for example, that youth is prone to self-indulgence.”4 In this instance, a commonplace of moral philosophy that may have originated as an inductive generalization has become an acceptable statement of the way things are. Both the Aristotelian and Ciceronian descriptions are symptomatic of

Problematics of Shakespearean Probability / 

the belief that probability has a certain objective status, and this was reinforced by the Christian teaching, exemplified in De instrumento probabilitatis of Juan Luis Vives, that God has placed in the human mind certain seeds or anticipationes of knowledge that can lead us, through the intermediate stages of probability, to truth.5 The second coordinate of the suppositional world was psychological. From this perspective, probability lay in the eyes of the beholder, though nearly always a generalized beholder. “The theory of rhetoric,” Aristotle declares, “is not concerned with what seems probable to a given individual like Socrates or Hippias, but with what seems probable to men of a given type” (Rhet. 1356b). In this context a probability is something a certain group collectively believes likely to be a true statement—hence the common synonym for the word probabilis in the Latin tradition: verisimilis, “like the truth.”6 In the Topics, a work devoted to dialectical reasoning, Aristotle broadens and refines the range of possible believers. Probable reasoning, he remarks, is argument “from opinions that are generally accepted”; he then adds, “those opinions are ‘generally accepted’ which are accepted by everyone or by the majority or by the philosophers.”7 At the low end of this range, probability is simply what “is thought abroad,” to use Iago’s own phrase: mere vulgar opinion. At the highest level, it is what the experts think—that form of probability commonly found in medieval disputation and in much Renaissance casuistry: argument from authority.8 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there existed a wide middle ground between these extremes, marked out in different ways by dialecticians, rhetoricians, practical theologians both Catholic and Protestant, historians, jurists, and natural and moral philosophers—not to mention poetic theorists, who knew that Aristotle had said that tragedy imitates the actions of men according to probability and necessity (Poet. 51a–b). In their respective disciplines they described the degrees of assent that might be accorded to testimony and evidence of varying weight, as well as the kinds of arguments and representations that would be accepted as probable by different groups of inquirers, auditors, and spectators.9 Reasoning with oneself and others in any situation that is only probable is always a matter of persuasion not demonstration, and this is effected through a variety of instruments. The most useful are signs, testimonies, and examples. Testimony may be drawn from the collective wisdom of the culture in the form of proverbs, sententiae, apothegms, and opinions, which lend authority to the construction of an interpretation that renders a past action intelligible and a future event relatively predictable and morally acceptable. Examples are precedents, whose resemblances to current concerns

 / Prologue

suggest the likelihood of history repeating itself and therefore offer critical purchase on the issue at hand. Signs are the circumstances that accompany and qualify a matter open to investigation, capable of giving it a distinctive shape rich with meaning. These last consist, as Cicero remarks, of “persons, places, times, actions, occurrences,” those incidental and sometimes essential features that constitute the “natures of the facts and transactions” (De part. orat. 35). Such “natures” may be comprehended by considering the physical qualities of the persons involved—their health, appearance, strength, age, and sex; their intellectual capacity, moral character, and emotional predispositions— and the accidental details of their lives, such as social status, education, occupation, friends, connections, power, and wealth. The place where an incident occurs may be suggestive: is it “on the coast or inland,” on land “flat or mountainous, smooth or rugged, salubrious or unhealthy, shady or sunny”? And its human significance must be scanned—is it cultivated, inhabited, fortified, famous, obscure, or sacred? The time of the action should be studied with regard to the hour of day or season of the year, whether it falls in peacetime or wartime, on a workday or holiday, and on what specific festival or solemnity. One also must decide whether calculation or chance is more likely to have brought it about. Significance may lurk in tell-tale traces—“for instance a weapon, blood, a cry, a stumble, change of colour, stammering, trembling, or anything else that can be perceived by the senses; also some sign of preparation or of communication with somebody, or something seen or heard or hinted at later on.” By carefully reviewing all those elements that circumstance an action, one may discover its true “nature”—probably.10

I Such are the ways in which human beings “do, as if for surety” in the twilight world of probability—some more, some less self-consciously. Iago, as we have seen, is quite open about his behavior, but that does not mean the others in the play are not doing much the same thing in their own characteristic idioms. Once alert to this possibility, we find that the world represented by Shakespeare in Othello is permeated by language and behavior of precisely the sort I have been describing. “ ‘Tis probable and palpable to thinking,” Brabantio declares, having reviewed the signs of Desdemona’s nature and condition, that the Moor has practiced “arts inhibited, and out of warrant” upon her. Referring himself to “all things of sense,” he asks

Problematics of Shakespearean Probability /  Whether a maid so tender, fair and happy, So opposite to marriage that she shunned The wealthy, curled darlings of our nation, Would ever have, t’incur a general mock, Run from her guardage to the sooty bosom Of such a thing as thou? to fear, not to delight. . . . (1.2.64–71)

“If she in chains of magic were not bound.” And he proposes to have the question disputed on. His argument, drawing upon the “common sense” of Venice, adduces the various topics of person, gender, fortune, and class, as well as the racialized moral antithesis of white and black—so fraught with Christian eschatalogical associations—and it is framed within the traditional rhetorical categories of praise and blame, here seen as an inducement to good behavior. His old-fashioned faith in the power of disputation to find out truth is intended to be risible, for his topics are dismissed by the Duke in the next scene as “thin habits, and poor likelihoods of modern seemings”—the threadworn assumptions and impoverished probabilities of common inferences that stand at too speculative a distance from the particulars of Othello’s elopement.11 The Duke, of course, is pluming himself on his humanist concern with res rather than mere verba. Yet Brabantio’s argument is not different in kind from the collection of inferences drawn from the familiar topics of place only moments earlier by the First Senator, as the Duke’s council attempts to discover whether the Turks are heading toward Cyprus or Rhodes: When we consider Th’ importancy of Cyprus to the Turk, And let ourselves again but understand That as it more concerns the Turk than Rhodes So may he with more facile question bear it, For that it stands not in such warlike brace But altogether lacks th’abilities That Rhodes is dressed in. (1.3.20–27)

Nor is the Senator’s topical argument unlike Emilia’s outraged response in Act IV, after she has heard Desdemona reviled and herself addressed as a bawd:

 / Prologue Why should he call her whore? who keeps her company? What place, what time, what form, what likelihood? (4.2.139–40)

Othello himself had earlier adduced the topics of person to persuade himself that his wife was honest: ‘ Tis not to make me jealous To say my wife is fair, feeds well, loves company, Is free of speech, sings, plays and dances well: Where virtue is, these are more virtuous. (3.3.186–89)

And Cassio, in language reminiscent of Cicero’s proposed excursion to Puteoli, had explained on his arrival at Cyprus the circumstances that led him to believe Othello had survived the storm at sea: His bark is stoutly timbered, and his pilot Of very expert and approved allowance, Therefore my hopes, not surfeited to death, Stand in bold cure. (2.1.48–51)

These are the means of finding one’s way in the world of probability. The accents may differ, and there will be those who stand upon refinements, but everyone participates in the discourse. “Let me speak like yourself,” says the Duke to Brabantio, “and lay a sentence / Which as a grise or step may help these lovers / Into your favour” (1.3.200–202). And he proceeds to apply to Brabantio’s wound a series of rhymed sententious couplets, which sixteenth-century critics, perhaps recalling Aristotle, believed were peculiarly appropriate to old men likely to possess such nuggets of wisdom.12 This old man will have none of them; his pain being absolute, he is momen­ tarily in the grip of grim necessity, where probable maxims cannot reach. He can only question the reality of the connection between the Duke’s gno­ mic consolations and his own anguish: “words are words: I never yet did hear / That the bruised heart was pierced through the ear” (1.3.219–20). Lodovico’s retrospective encomium of a distraught Othello is made of the same stuff. Earlier the Duke had ordered Othello to Cyprus, explaining that though the present governor was competent enough, “yet opinion, a

Problematics of Shakespearean Probability / 

sovereign mistress of effects, throws a more safer voice on you” (1.3.225– 26). Now that voice becomes fully audible, as it expresses astonishment at Othello’s transformation: Is this the noble Moor whom our full senate Call all in all sufficient? This the nature Whom passion could not shake? whose solid virtue The shot of accident nor dart of chance Could neither graze nor pierce? (4.1.264–68)

Whatever else he may be, Othello is a collective opinion on which the council had acted. “He is much changed,” Iago quietly replies, without pausing to explain how a gathering of opinions can be undone and re-formed when its own first premise is obscured and altered. Yet this is precisely what has happened in Act III when Othello, through Iago’s marshaling of probabilities, loses sight of “where Virtue is” and with it his vision of Desdemona and himself.13 Iago, of course, is the connoisseur of probabilities, slipping gracefully among them as though they were so many beckoning sirens, eyeing their potential charms, and yielding to their solicitations as the occasion warrants. In the first act an aphorism of the variety “Once a thief, always a thief” had dropped as second nature from Brabantio’s lips: “Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see: / She has deceived her father, and may thee” (1.3.293–94). Having heard the old man lay this sentence upon Othello, Iago revives it in Act III to draw Desdemona within the ambit of the generalization he has just made about the infidelity of Venetian wives: “She did deceive her father, marrying you. . . .” Then he strengthens the probability of repeated deception by reminding Othello of the sensible signs that had accompanied her first act: “And when she seemed to shake, and fear your looks, / She loved them most” (3.3.209–11). Signs, then, may be equivocal, so one must not be too sanguine about a cheerfully attentive wife. But they are very useful in directing attention away from oneself and ensuring instead that a frightened courtesan is arrested on suspicion of murder: —Stay you, good gentlewoman.—Look you pale, mistress? —Do you perceive the gastness of her eye? —Nay, if you stare we shall hear more anon. (5.1.105–7)

 / Prologue

Still, signs must not be trusted too far. One could get the wrong idea watching a trusted friend infer meanings from ambiguous circumstances—that is, by watching an (en)sign interpreting signs. So one must entreat one’s friend: that your wisdom From one that so imperfectly conceits, Would take no notice, nor build yourself a trouble Out of his scattering and unsure observance. (3.3.151–54)

In this instance, of course, the disclaimer itself is an equivocal sign, calculated to effect the opposite of what it pretends, and thereby further to disorient the observer. Perhaps Iago’s most masterful exploitation of the sign’s capacity to equivo­ cate is his proof that one can conduct an inquiry into an action before two different audiences at the same time and elicit from the same questions two distinct meanings. This he manages to accomplish by playing Prince Hal to Cassio’s Francis the drawer, as the courtly lieutenant stands unwittingly within two dialogues—responding in truth to Iago’s questions in one of them, and in the likeness of truth to Iago’s apparent questions in the other. “Do but encave yourself,” the ensign directs Othello: And mark the fleers, the gibes and notable scorns That dwell in every region of his face; For I will make him tell the tale anew Where, how, how oft, how long ago, and when He hath, and is again to cope your wife. I say, but mark his gesture. . . . (4.1.82–88)

Having provided the outline of the narrative, complete with slots for circumstances, Iago can be assured that Cassio’s tale of Bianca, beheld as significant pantomime, will be appropriately filled in by Othello as a tale of Desdemona. Such is the power of probable inference and the value of paradigmatic plots.14 If the tale of the loose woman functions as a commonplace unwittingly shared by Cassio and Othello, the striking dramatization of the interchangeable nature of its content suggests how such paradigms may be used upon all emergent occasions. A commonplace can, for example, be adduced as a

Problematics of Shakespearean Probability / 

precedent when one suffers an inexplicable withdrawal of love and needs to make desolation intelligible. Then one locates a similar event in relation to oneself—“Sing willow, willow, willow”—in order to enjoy the cold comfort that passes for understanding: My mother had a maid called Barbary, She was in love, and he she loved proved mad And did forsake her. . . . (4.3.24–26)15

And in the extreme situation—which is not a “situation” at all, for chaos is come again and there is no “where”—the power that resists annihilation can reconstruct a shattered self, piece by piece, by filling in the outline and supplying qualities to an action that is, in all other respects, irrevocable: Then must you speak Of one that loved not wisely, . . . Of one not easily jealous, . . . . . . of one whose hand, .......................... . . . of one whose subdued eyes, .......................... (5.2.341–46)

Little by little, in neither malice nor extenuation, the topics of person are assembled to shape a character, a place, and an action, and as the plot draws to a conclusion, the indefinite third-person “one” again becomes a firstperson “I” who took by th’throat the circumcised dog And smote him—thus! (5.2.353–54)

Bloody period, yes—but coherent, circumstanced, well motivated, and satisfying to the teller.

II If the language and behavior of the dramatis personae who inhabit the world of Othello are permeated by notions of probability, it follows that Othello is a

10 / Prologue

tragedy of probability. It is so in two respects. First, it would appear to be a tragedy of culture. For it is a theatrical representation of human beings who fashion their understandings and sanction their actions in accordance with canons of probability that are assumed by the audience watching the play, and in so doing they come to disaster. The performance resonates with verbal references to those very instruments of thought, argument, and action that were foundational in Elizabethan education and that had come to inform so many intellectual, aesthetic, religious, social, and political practices in Shakespeare’s England, to say nothing of the unreflective acts governing everyday behavior.16 Othello is also a tragedy of probability in a radically psychological sense. For it is a tragedy of self-representation and of the self ’s representation of others, and the medium in which the persons of the play dwell is not only the material cause of their suffering, it is the efficient cause. That is to say, each of the main characters—including the apparent exception of Iago, the most self-aware manipulator of probabilities—can understand himself, herself, and other selves only probably.17 This asks for some explanation. The probable, as we have seen, is in one sense an ontological category, consisting of the contingent, the variable, the ever-becoming. Human behavior falling within the purview of the probable, probability is therefore the material cause of understanding. It is a psychological category insofar as things are probable to persons. This makes it the efficient cause of understanding. For probability is established by experience, which is gathered directly or through the reports of others. If we examine the notion of experience in an early seventeenth-century context, we find that it is the middle term in a cognitive process that, in its classic formulation in Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, progresses from particular percept to universal concept. The process originates in a discrete perception that lingers in the individual as a phantasmatic memory. When similar (not identical) perceptions occur, an empeira, or experience, is formed in the mind, which is a first-level generalization that renders perceptions A, B, and C analogues of one another. These experiences, in turn, are retained and collated, and when there are enough of them, they are intuited in their aggregate as a universal. Aristotle does not give a rational explanation of this moment but resorts to a simile that suggests that some kind of emotional cathexis is involved: the universal is achieved “as in a battle when a rout occurs, if one man makes a stand another does, and then another, until a position of strength is reached” (Post. Anal. 100a10). Such a cognitive pro­ cess, which traces the psychological axis of the probable from the merely contingent to the heuristically commonplace to the conceptually identical,

Problematics of Shakespearean Probability / 11

offers us a model for grasping the nature of human understanding as Shakespeare represents it in Othello.18 For Desdemona may see Othello’s visage in his mind, but that intuition is informed by his narrative of trial and redemption, which is itself a familiar paradigm of epic heroism and Christian soteriology to which she must adequate the person she sees before her in order to recognize him as other than the exotic black stranger he appears to be. Desdemona’s father understands her by means of the accumulated Venetian commonplaces that compose her in his eyes, and which are assembled, as we have seen, in an induction of her ethos that reflects his experience and ideals more accurately than it describes her. Cassio appears to know Desdemona through his own and Othello’s sublimations, which are themselves informed, respectively, by courtly and Christian commonplaces, and Othello—whose senses ache at the sweet, fleshly innocence he had initially distinguished in her—comes to reject his original perception of the divine Desdemona when it is no longer mediated by the satisfying cognitive structure in which he had experienced her, and has been replaced by the new structure provided by Iago. This new structure responds to the same need for justification that he had expressed earlier when he told of wooing her: “She lov’d me for the dangers I had passed, / And I lov’d her that she did pity them” (1.3.168–69); but now it is fashioned of the circumstances Iago has adduced to effect his revenge: her affection for Cassio, her deception of her father, Cassio’s dream, her handkerchief in Bianca’s hands. Recognizing Othello’s need to be a man of untainted probity, the ensign suggests a way to satisfy that need: oth: Get me some poison, Iago, this night. I’ll not expostulate with her, lest her body and beauty unprovide my mind again. This night, Iago. iago: Do it not with poison, strangle her in her bed—even the bed she hath contaminated. oth: Good, good, the justice of it pleases; very good. (4.1.201–6)

Body and beauty, once purified by the saintly acknowledgment that Othello had perceived in Desdemona, are now the instruments of a debasing temptation, which must be accorded condign punishment. There is a formal cogency in the structure of probability that is virtually irresistible; when the circumstances invoked correspond to the perceiver’s need, they lead to a “foregone conclusion” that exists not in the realm of fact but in that of probable human discourse.19

12 / Prologue

Othello is therefore constructed upon a series of paradoxes. First, it represents an action conducted by dramatis personae who follow culturally ingrained habits of probable behavior shared by members of its audience, yet it persistently exposes the dubious credentials of the discursive system it represents. This might describe a satiric intent—thus resolving the paradox—were it not for the serious psychological dimension of the tragedy, which obviates all but local satiric effects (Brabantio’s superstitiousness, Roderigo’s gullibility), and which insists, in its own behalf, on the formal reductiveness of probable understanding even as it suggests that there may be no other way to know.20 That is its second paradox. Beyond this lies a third: not only does Othello overturn its own rehearsal of probability on the thematic level and disclose, on the psychological level, the incipient tragedy of an epistemology rooted in probability; it also violates the system of poetics that generates it. Let me elucidate. In its historical manifestation, the probable may be defined as a cultural system of accepted rhetorical paradigms. The content of a given paradigm may be ethical, concerned to explain and evaluate a motivation, action, or relationship with reference to shared standards of good and evil; it may be aesthetic—a gathering of literary conventions that offer exemplary forms of plot, character, argument, and diction that are taken as referential and that in turn can be imitated and reproduced in actual life; it may be historiographical, proposing an intelligible syntax of past events; it may even be grammatical, providing that standard of verbal utterance which we have come to call linguistic competence. Whatever its purview, the paradigm functions as a suasive structure that has gained ascendancy in the thought of a given culture, and is received as a guide to the way things happen.21 The power of this armature of probabilities over the mind is demonstrated repeatedly in the play—from Brabantio’s recourse to the topics of encomiastic oratory when describing his daughter’s maidenly ethos to the Senate’s conjectures regarding the Turkish design on Cyprus to Iago’s deliberate misconstruction of Bianca’s fear and trembling. Sometimes this commonsense deployment of commonplaces coincides with truth, as in Emilia’s “What place, what time, what form, what likelihood?” when defending Desdemona against Othello’s accusation. But more often than not, it is shown to be off the mark because it is only probable and, more important, probable to someone who is historically invested in the cognitive structure through which he or she is situated in the world. Iago’s exploitation of Othello’s precarious sense of self—as black man and stranger in white Venetian society—is only the most explicit demonstration of the mind’s at-

Problematics of Shakespearean Probability / 13

traction to and its potentially fatal dependence on culturally inflected proba­ bilities.22 Coinciding with representations of speech and action that proceed according to the probable in the mimetic world of Othello are some remarkable violations of probability in the dramaturgy of Othello. These were first noticed by Thomas Rymer in 1692, when he declared that “Nothing is more odious in nature than an improbable lye; And certainly never was any Play fraught like this of Othello with improbabilities.”23 They begin with the idealized love of the black Moor and the sequestered Senator’s daughter, which—despite the Duke’s assurances to her father in the third scene—remains for an early seventeenth-century English audience the unassimilable postulate of the plot upon which the tragic event depends.24 But they also include Iago’s inconsistent, apparently improvised reasons for revenge; his cryptic, involuted language, with its ambiguous modal and temporal referents; the uncanny speed of Desdemona’s arrival in Cyprus; the handkerchief, both lost and found with an expedition that savors more strongly of co­ incidence than likelihood; the remarkable amnesia of Othello, Desdemona, and Emilia concerning its whereabouts; the bizarre “double time scheme,” by means of which the action, which takes place during little more than a week, is described in words that suggest that several years have elapsed; and the play’s stubborn refusal to make more than a gesture toward explication at the end. What motivates Iago is even more problematic in the last scene than it had been in the third. His final words, thrown out as a challenge to both onstage and offstage audiences, might well serve as an epigraph to the whole: “Demand me nothing. What you know, you know” (5.2.300). Each element eludes the aesthetics of probability that informed the representational system of early seventeenth-century England. How might we explain their inclusion in Shakespeare’s play? One possibility is to invoke the concept of the marvelous, ostensibly the antithesis of the probable. Many Italian critics and dramatists of the sixteenth century— and some French and English intellectuals—were familiar with Aristotle’s Poetics and its recent commentaries, which theorized the function of the marvelous in relation to the probable and necessary. The marvelous, however, is not simply improbable; it is an aesthetic concept specifically associated with the emotions of wonder and astonishment, as J. V. Cunningham showed many years ago.25 The dramaturgic features I have specified are not productive of wonder; indeed, they are too readily assimilated by theater audiences, as Rymer himself admitted. This suggests that Shakespeare was playing a double game in Othello. He was exposing his audience’s potentially

14 / Prologue

tragic dependency on probable discourse even as he exploited their predisposition to probabilize the anomalies they experienced. This inference gains credence when we recall that English playwrights in Shakespeare’s youth and adulthood had been educated not in the tradition of Aristotle’s Poetics but in the rhetorical poetics of Horace, Cicero, and Quintilian, through whose critical lenses Plautus, Terence, and Seneca were analyzed by humanist editors and taught by humanist-trained schoolmasters. As a result, mature English Renaissance drama, though drawing syncretically on native homiletic, chronicle, and morality traditions, was largely articulated in forms transmitted by classical rhetoric. Its antithetical structures were built on debate models; its scenes were composed of the larger verbal units taught in the progymnasmata and more advanced rhetorical handbooks used to expound Latin drama in the schools; its themes were varied in accordance with the ideal of copia and enriched with all the resources of elocutio. Most important, its characters behaved in ways that reveal their deep familiarity with the methods of oratory. They inquired, argued, speculated, narrated, described, threatened, bantered, and lamented as though classical rhetoric was their lingua franca, which indeed it was. The presupposition of all this speech and action was probability, and proba­ bility had never been as extensively thematized, critiqued, and violated as Shakespeare was now thematizing, critiquing, and violating it.26 Hence the most intriguing paradox emerging from Othello concerns its author. If Shakespeare’s play absorbs in its representation—indeed reproduces—the analytic, descriptive, and persuasive languages of probability that have come to inform actual behavior in the world outside the theater as well as represented behavior inside the theater; and if Shakespeare interrogates this very representation by means of a poetics that is itself embedded in the phenomenon he seeks to examine and whose decorums he so frequently violates, where is the practitioner of this poetics, of this representation, to be located? It is evident that Shakespeare himself is steeped in the probable ways of thinking, knowing, and representing that make him an acculturated subject of his society and that enable him to write theatrically persuasive plays for the public theater—yet he is not consumed by them. Indeed, he seems to have had considerable purchase upon a probabilism that was beginning to acquire the features of an ideology in his time. If this is the case, what is to be said about the status of his own selfhood, situated as it must be within the matrix of this ideology? How was it possible for him both to assume as his medium the practices he represented and also to deracinate them—to perform an internal critique of a way of being in which he himself participated?

Problematics of Shakespearean Probability / 15

The answer to this last set of questions, I believe, is to be found in Shakespeare’s daily experience as a player and writer in the Elizabethan theater, which was capable of actualizing in its practitioners the hidden phenome­ nology of the self that lurked within the rhetorical poetics out of which its plays were constructed. For the very process of developing specific characters from generic dramatis personae must have drawn his attention to the way thoughts and emotions were elicited by scenic particulars and thence probabilized so as to give the experiencer cognitive and affective stability, which would last until another set of scenic particulars altered that state—and yet did not utterly efface the original dramatis persona, the vehicle of its being. This gave him an insight into the double nature of human identity—his own as well as that of his dramatis personae—enabling him to fashion both an unconscious probabilizer such as Othello and a manipulator of proba­ bility such as Iago, who cannot himself escape the contagion he exploits. I shall develop this argument later in this chapter, but before doing so I want to consider two other approaches to the questions posed in the previous paragraph to show how radical Shakespeare’s insight was. One way to respond to the matter of how Shakespeare could subject an ideology of probability to an internal critique is to render his action less unusual by pointing to Sir Francis Bacon and to ask if Bacon could do it, why not Shakespeare? Bacon, too, was critical of the way sixteenth-century Englishmen had developed the habit of paying more attention to conventional thought and language than to things themselves, and had no trouble saying so. He blamed the legacy of the schoolmen for this state of affairs, but he was thinking as well of the humanists, who had also wished to return to the study of res—matters of actual experience—from a preoccupation with verba, which they considered the great scholastic vice. The humanists more than any other intellectuals were responsible for the promotion of eloquence as the essential skill of the ambitious man and for the contemporaneous efflorescence of poetry, which, Bacon believed, submitted the shows of things to desires of the mind.27 Though, like Shakespeare, he was the beneficiary of humanism and scholasticism, he sought to counteract their more baneful effects on the literary level by advocating an aphoristic style of presentation that would provoke inquiry, in place of the formal magisterial style that commanded assent.28 Correlatively, he criticized the investigative procedures of contemporaries, whose thought flew from the perception of particulars in the visible world to the formulation of general principles, without rigorous comparison of facts or induction of middlelevel axioms.29 He might, like Shakespeare, have had in mind such a man as Brabantio, who referred himself to “all things of sense”—when in fact

16 / Prologue

he had named but a few particulars—to prove that Desdemona had been enchanted by Othello.30 But Bacon wasn’t writing plays (or so most of us believe), and was not in Shakespeare’s unique situation—earning his living in a medium whose success depended on his ability to deploy the powers of probability and vivid speech to attract and hold an audience’s imagination. Nor did he engage in Shakespeare’s peculiar project of subverting the very instruments of the medium he worked in even as he used them. He shared with Shakespeare a profound concern for what we might call the problem of “the ligature,” of accurately connecting perceived facts to valid interpretations of them—the issue which for Shakespeare lay at the heart of representation (recall Cleopa­ tra’s horror of the young Roman actor who would “boy my greatness” [Ant. 5.2.220]).31 But his aim was to fashion an exact, demonstrative science of nature, while Shakespeare was more concerned to show how variable human nature was and how inherently problematic were the very acts of interpreting and fixing the meaning of human behavior, and of passing judgment on it. There is a cultural concern even closer to hand that we might bear in mind as we consider the possibility of Shakespeare’s critique: the notorious abuse of probability in practical divinity in the late sixteenth century. As is well known, the casuistic doctrine of “probabilism,” promulgated by the Dominican priest Bartolomeo de Medina in 1577 and subjected to a scathing assault by Pascal in his Sixth Provincial Letter of 1656, permitted a man seeking to resolve a moral dilemma to follow the opinion of a respected spiritual authority if it seemed probable to him, even though he found other opinions that seemed more probable but that would not sanction the action he preferred to take. (A range of meanings of probable coalesced in this doctrine: “approved,” “provable,” “morally certain,” “likely to be true,” “plausible.”) Due to the cynical exploitation of Medina’s teaching, a second doctrine, called “probabiliorism”—the choice of the more probable opinion, sometimes called “tutiorism”—was adopted by many Catholic and Protestant clerics, which curbed the growing laxism of moral theology. But Shakespeare’s plays—all of them constructed to trace the consequences of moral choice—are not concerned with “probabilism” or “probabiliorism” in the casuistic sense. As I will argue in my epilogue, his theatrical career leads him instead toward a renunciation of probability altogether. Shakespeare went beyond mere criticism of probability, penetrating the region of the mind where epistemology, psychology, and ethics are joined. While he shared Bacon’s interest in what the latter called “the

Problematics of Shakespearean Probability / 17

Idols of the Tribe”—that endemic condition wherein “all perceptions as well of the sense as of the mind are according to the measure of the individual and not according to the measure of the universe”—he held a more skeptical and tragic view of this condition. 32 He seems to have understood that the very means by which human beings represent the world to themselves, themselves to others, and themselves to themselves involves the double movement that Jacques Derrida, in his meditation on logocentrism, would call “protention and retention”—a reflex action that occludes its own origin—or, in the lexicon we have been following, a double act of translation whereby the irreducibly improbable perception silently becomes a probable paradigm that grounds the self even as its formation is lost to the self.33 For that is the act Shakespeare repeatedly thematizes in Othello. The implication of such self-instantiation is that the self is a self by virtue of its not being present to itself—a condition clearly announced by Iago when he confides to Roderigo, “I am not what I am” (1.1.64). While the context of this declaration prepares us to hear it as “I am not what I seem,” Iago’s careful choice of diction demands that we take him at his word. He is asserting his nonidentity. His sentence has been rightly heard as the negation of God’s words to Moses in Exodus 3:14—“I am that I am”—as, that is to say, Iago’s unembarrassed confession of inherent wickedness, in the Augustinian and Thomistic tradition that defines evil as the privation of being. But this emphasis does not take us far enough, for Iago most certainly exists—and as a human being, not a cloven-footed devil. The question, then, is what kind of human being he is. Given the play’s recurrent concern with the ontology of the self and the rhetorical stylization of that self, it might be more useful to hear his words as “I am not (radically) what I am (constructively)”—where “what I am” refers to that aspect of the self that is historical, stabilized, identifiable, and hence probable, and “I am not” refers to that aspect of the self in flux, in potentia, improbable insofar as it is not yet any of those things. Heard this way, the assertion is Iago’s condensed and self-conscious version of Othello’s gradual, unconscious reconstruction of a deconstructed self that I described earlier—when the Moor begins, from some as yet unspecified place, to speak in the third person of “one who . . . one who . . . whose hands . . . whose subdued eyes . . .” and then ends enacting in history the revenge of the reconstituted first-person self upon the nonself—“I took by the throat the circumcised dog / And smote him thus” (5.2.353–54)—denying all that the constructed self despises in its inchoate other. That is to say, the Othello who kills himself “is” only

18 / Prologue

because the self he kills “is not,” though in actuality the one cannot survive without the other. From the perspective of Othello’s Christian thematics, however, Iago’s words bear a different valence. We may hear them as “I am not (constructively) what I am (essentially),” where “what I am” refers to man’s “glassy essence,” as Isabella puts it in Measure for Measure (2.2.120)—the divine image in his soul—and “I am not” refers to the self-alienating defections of that self as it departs from itself and constructs an identity that binds it to the world.34 In which case, Iago’s perverse and unregenerate pleasure in not being what he is represents a frightening if tempting alternative to Othello’s penitential retreat to a self that acknowledges that its truant other, in seeking substantiation outside itself, “lov’d not wisely but too well.” Such an alternative is frightening because opportunistic, unstable, and evil; tempting because labile, objectifiable, and thus replete with self-aware satisfaction. As we shall see, both the religious and rhetorical understandings are at play in Iago’s words. They could not but be present. For Shakespeare, writing at the intersection of an old and venerable religious path to identity and of a modern itinerary of secular callings with roots in a still more ancient model of rhetorical self-fashioning, was historically positioned to experience the importunings of each and to mediate his own ambivalence in the language of his protagonists. Hence the attractiveness of Iago’s venturings, the sympathetic resonance of Othello’s longing for stasis.

III Whether we hear his words in the rhetorical or religious register—or attend their interplay—it is evident that in declaring his nonidentity Iago speaks two kinds of “I,” which we may now distinguish as the “I” of the self—an unbounded entity that perceives, feels, and generates meaning out of its feelings and perceptions—and the “I” of the subject—a discrete part of the self in which those generated meanings “mean” and repose, where the self is objectified, where it has a gendered, social, and historical position, and possesses the capacity to perceive, feel, and reflect. While the subject emerges as a possibility of the self and appears to supersede the self, it actually coexists with the self, as Iago informs us. But his remark also suggests that in Shakespeare the self is not only the unconscious substratum of the subject; it is a subject itself—a residual subject that subtends all other subjectivities.35 This residual subject-self functions as a source upon which the emergent subject can draw, consciously or otherwise; from which it can further depart, and into which it can subside. In Shakespeare’s drama, it is the home to which

Problematics of Shakespearean Probability / 19

a prodigal subject may return, adding its newly acquired experience to the repertory of the self as yet another subject is called into play. When, for example, a newly Providentialized Hamlet apologizes to Laertes in the last scene of his tragedy and calls his vanished madness “poor Hamlet’s enemy” (Ham. 5.2.239), he is consigning that former comportment to the storehouse of the self, to take up residence with all the other subjects Hamlet has become in the course of the action.36 In Othello’s case, the residual subjectself would seem to be “this rash and most unfortunate man,” the epithet to which he responds as he murmurs, “That’s he that was Othello,” then adds in the adversative, “Here I am,” as he feels himself standing outside the narrative identity attached to his name (5.2.280–81, emphasis mine). For Iago the residual subject-self is that “glassy essence” implied in his “what I am”—a primordial subject interpellated by God, which he renounces as he speaks his “I am not” and to which he never returns, but which nonetheless grounds his continuity. His declared apostasy, articulated through performative nonidentical doublespeak in the present tense (recall Aquinas’s impossibile of logical contradiction), makes Iago a unique dramatic representation. In him Shakespeare has created an elided self who is unmistakably yet impossibly aware of his own subject formation—a figure unimaginable from a Derridean, Lacanian, or Althusserian point of view. How might Shakespeare have come by such an idea? What enabled him to express it?37 These questions have a critical bearing not only on our understanding of the cultural work that was performed by Shakespeare’s play in its interrogation of the canons of probability, but also on our assessment of that form of early modern subjectivity that I call Shakespearean selfhood. In this term I mean to include both the ways in which Shakespeare thought about the self and was a self—the ways in which it was possible for him to represent to himself and to others the ideas of self and subject. This capacity to produce what is best described as psychogenetic representation can be understood more clearly—in both its cultural and personal dimensions—if we examine the coordinates of the very discourse that provided the elements of plot, thought, and diction for the plays he wrote: the rhetorical discourse of Renaissance humanism. For rhetoric fostered just such a double sense of the self as we have noticed in both Othello and Iago—the assumption of a stable human identity that possesses the capacity for self-reflection and self-projection, and also the intimation of human multiplicity and that of the world—of the immanence of the human in the world and the world in the human— that challenges the idea of such stability.38 More specifically, as I have suggested, rhetorical humanism underwrote a poetics that, as it was practiced

20 / Prologue

on the London stage in the activities of dramatic writing and theatrical performing, led Shakespeare to perceive and articulate a distinction between the self—a continually replenishing reservoir of subject-possibilities— and the subject—the instantiation of those possibilities—and to locate them, respectively, in the categories of dramatis persona and character. By dramatis persona I mean literally the “person” or role required by the play (prince, Jew, lover, tyrant); by character, what the rhetoricians called ethos and pathos, the sense of self that emerges, as Hamlet might say, “with th’occurrents more and less / Which have solicited” (Ham. 5.2.357–58)— that is, as each dramatized situation demands.39 What we may recognize in Othello as a precursor of the postmodern condition, then, is rather a fundamentally rhetorical sense of self that is a condition of Renaissance humanism as it is inscribed, thematized, and enacted in the theater. How might such a self be described? A rhetorical self is one determined by its address to the world. It is defined by its attitude, literally its poise, in relation to both natural and human phenomena that demand continuous interpretation, decision, and action—and to those human psyches upon which a response to these phenomena depends and which must be drawn into complicity with the addressing self if the latter is to realize itself in the world. Thus a rhetorical self is ineluctably occasional and social—a congeries of subjectivities undergoing continuous modification. But a contradiction is immediately discernible in such an experience of selfhood; for if it is acknowledged that one is incident to time and circumstance—the medium, so to speak, of both—it is apparent that one also functions as if one actually transcends time and circumstance as one orchestrates one’s attitude, one’s poise, so as to interpret, persuade, act, and realize oneself. That is to say, the ability to perceive the contingency of the self, to exploit its power, and to acknowledge its successive, discontinuous realizations depends, paradoxically, upon the residual, conscious continuity of an enduring, accretive self.40 Both versions of the self are deeply inscribed in the theory and practice of rhetorical anthropology—an ancient account of human behavior that is itself a form of behavior and that freshly appears with the advent of humanism in the early Renaissance.41 This anthropology is rhetorical in that it regards human thought, judgment, and action as functions of an intercommunicative circuit of mutual persuasion. It is an account of behavior in that it is a repository of lore and practices concerning human motives, conditions of reception, techniques of self-presentation, logical formulas and fallacies graspable by the mind—hence instrumental in securing intellectual conviction—and, in conformity with its understanding of the psyche, linguistic fig-

Problematics of Shakespearean Probability / 21

ures believed to induce emotional adhesion to the persuader’s position. It is a form of behavior in that its teachings and practices are marked by a tension between the “ingenious” nature of rhetoric’s interpretive power—dependent on the inference of the moment and thus felt to be extemporary (outside any teleological trajectory, though it is influenced by past and present, and shapes the future)—and the “apodeictic” character which that power assumes over time within individuals, disciplines, and cultures. I use the term ingenious, following the philosopher Ernesto Grassi, to describe a radically metaphorical activity in which the psyche, regarding the matter before it in its sensuous plenitude, cognizes it affectively and tropes it, creating meaning out of mere res by transferring to it a significance—configured from an already interested subject position—and declaring, in effect, “this is (like) that,” thereby expanding the semantic field of its world. The term apodeictic refers to the occlusion of that making, which has the effect of arresting its activity and referencing as a self-evident datum what is in fact the result of an antecedent transaction between world and psyche.42 These dialectically structured psychological movements have individual and collective dimensions. In the individual, there would seem to be an abiding dialectic between the impulse freely to invent one’s stance in the world, enabling one to perceive the world afresh and value it anew, and the reflex to reference that stance—to render it repeatable, applicable, transmissible.43 As this reciprocal process is inflected by temporal events both personal and public, the relations between its complementary forces undergo continuous adjustment. In this way rhetorical anthropology yields an account of psychological development—of the successive perceptions, experiences, and conceptualizations that historicize and qualify the self. In its collective dimension, the dialectic describes the more gradual movement of cultural history, as rhetorical paradigms are formed, deployed, modified or broken apart, and reconstituted, under the pressure of human and natural events. Since their relationship is both structural and dynamic, at no time does one mode eradicate the other; but as we reconstruct the past from the detritus of its cultural monuments, there do seem to be historical periods and, within them, intellectual and artistic disciplines, in which the “ingenious” mode has dominated the “apodeictic,” by which it is gradually overtaken and then, as it were, colonized.44 One such cultural phase can be seen in the transformation of the sophistic style of intellectual inquiry in early fifth-century Athens into the scientific style of the late fourth century b.c.—the passage, we might say, from Gorgias, Protagoras, and Isocrates to Plato and Aristotle. Another may be distinguished in the revival of classical rhetoric, with its emphasis on ingenium, in late fourteenth-century

22 / Prologue

Italy, through its programmatic transformations in France and England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. During this time the probable—an idea signifying the contingent, strictly unknowable quality of human behavior—gradually becomes conflated with the true, as the disciplines of logic and rhetoric coalesce in literary education. Correlatively, it evolves into a finely calibrated measure of credibility in a neoclassical poetics that favors the representation of general nature over that of individual natures and—in the hands of the Royal Society and Port-Royal—serves an epistemological project that seeks to incorporate probable reasoning into a rigorous program of scientific inquiry. It is athwart these transitions that Shakespeare is found questioning the reification of merely heuristic rhetorical paradigms.45

IV Shakespeare’s representation and critique of probability is therefore an event of more than theatrical significance. The studies in this book are attempts to understand what informs it, by examining its manifestations in Othello and other plays in relation to the rich rhetorical heritage to which Shakespeare was legitimate heir and upstart will-breaker. Each section approaches the problematics of Shakespearean probability from a different perspective, and each successive chapter builds on what has been argued previously. In Part One, “Toward a Rhetorical Genealogy of Othello,” I ask the reader to heed the voices of Shakespeare’s ensign and Moor, each caught in a characteristic trick of speech, and to consider where these voices come from. For it is in Iago and Othello that Shakespeare seems to have set in motion most intimately the complementary energies of rhetorical anthropology. In the one, we find a radical mind dwelling almost exclusively in the element of contingency, ingeniously converting mere res—raw matter—into evidence, as it tries to realize itself by creating meanings metaphorically and substantiating them in the world; in the other, a post-hoc imagination unaware of its own engenderings attaches itself unconsciously to received rhetorical paradigms and plays out the consequences of such “unauthored” determinacy. Iago’s uncanny ability to function in the interstices between paradigms has made him appear less than human to generations of readers and spectators. But neither is the paradigmatic man fully human. Humanity, Shakespeare suggests, occurs as the result of the impact of Iago on Othello, when the man who so urgently desires epistemological and ontological repose becomes aware of the historical, improvisatory nature of identity, suffers its uncertainty, and then—in tragic refusal—denies and ends his anguish. In these contiguously constructive, deconstructive, and reconstitutive

Problematics of Shakespearean Probability / 23

movements, we witness the awakening of modern consciousness—born, strangely enough, of ancient parents. To foreground the quality of their mentalities, I first show how the work of the Greek sophists Protagoras, Gorgias, and Isocrates yields the distinct outlines of an Iagian psychology. In Protagoras, for whom knowledge is only probable, we see a primitive rhetorical subject called into being through the fortuitous conjunctions of mind and world—one in which disparate perceptions can nonetheless be stored up in a residual self whose accumulated experiences lead it from a “weaker argument” to a “stronger argument” that defeats sheer relativism. In Gorgias’s conviction that logos (speech) can convey only logos, not things, there emerges the rhetorical premise that human beings exist within an interpsychic circuit of language, influence by peitho and apate (the persuasive force of words and the deceptive shape given them by speakers) and by kairos (the fit, the opportune), the apprehension of which enables one to impinge on another’s mind at exactly the moment when it is disposed to heed what one says. Isocrates asserts that one can develop practical wisdom by studying, performing, hearing, and imitating vivid political oratory that celebrates great heroes and public events. Above all, he stresses the importance of the speaker’s projected ethos as a persuasive instrument. It is in the apodeictic transformations of these ingenious beginnings, in the work of Plato—to whom probability was anathema—that we find the outlines of an Othello mentality, along with its recognizable fissures. Plato’s insistence on a “scientific” approach to ethos in the Charmides and the Phaedrus results in a taxonomy of the self through the dialectical procedures of definition and division, which he believed articulated the true nature of things. But his critique of writing in the latter dialogue—which he opposes to interanimate dialectical reasoning—casts doubt on the truthfulness of dialectic, as Derrida has forcefully argued, because it assumes a continuum of perception, conception, and speech act, the impossibility of which is evident in writing but is obscured in dialectic, whose default mode turns out to be but another probability. With Derrida’s provocative concept of an “arche-writing” as placeholder, I proceed in chapter 2 to trace the historical transvaluation of ethos from ingenuity to apodeixis, which begins even in Aristotle, who transforms a contingent empirical practice into a social science. Ethos is an important instrument of persuasion in the Rhetoric, where Aristotle offers a schema to recognize the ethos of auditors and to elicit desired responses from them, and it is the subject of a nuanced analysis in the Nicomachean Ethics, where virtuous action is a mean of responsiveness relative to the agent. Yet the

24 / Prologue

potential of Aristotelian ethos to become a retrievable template was realized almost immediately in the reductive Characters of his student Theophrastus, and may be seen in its subsequent transformations into rhetorical figures of thought and topics of invention in such Latin rhetorics as the Rhetorica ad Herennium, Cicero’s youthful De inventione, and Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria. Although these sources of self-representation were available to Shakespeare—some directly, some only through the accounts of later writers—it was in the complex oratory of the mature Cicero—whose philosophical outlook was informed by strains of Stoic orthodoxy, Peripatetic decorum, and Academic skepticism, and who lived in a society where ethos was often inherited and ascribed, not invented—that Shakespeare, I argue, found the model for the ethos of Othello, as it was inflected by the emerging neostoicism of his own contemporaries. After these introductory transhistorical chapters, which foreground the salient features of rhetorical anthropology, I concentrate on early modern cultural phenomena. Part Two, “The Logic of Renaissance Rhetoric,” approaches the interplay of opposing mentalities by studying an important development in early modern linguistic training and its effects in Othello. This is the conflation of dialectic and rhetoric in sixteenth-century education. Chapter 3 picks up from the curious yoking of the terms “apt and true,” which trip lightly from Iago’s tongue in the last scene, emblematic of the text’s recurrent slippage from conjecture to certainty, probability to necessity, thinking to knowing, putative to actual. These enunciations all exhibit a blurring of the distinction between what is inside the mind and what is outside it. On the hypothesis that Shakespeare was registering a linguistic tic symptomatic of an intellectual shift in his culture’s discourse, I set out to look closely at some key elements in the rhetoricization of dialectic that began with the work of Rudolph Agricola in the late fifteenth century, powerfully affected grammar school and university education in England and Europe during the sixteenth, and culminated in the reforms of Peter Ramus later in the century. In Agricola this involved a virtual redefinition of the criteria of dialectical argument, which was nominally probabilistic in the tradition of Aristotle, but was in fact concerned with both truthful and probable discourse, and emphasized demonstration through formal proofs rather than probable arguments. Agricola’s De inventione dialectica is especially alive to the psychology of probability, and he finds it at work in the most improbable situations, enlarging his readers’ sense of why something seems probable to individuals or groups. Agricola, however, occupied himself with only one-half of dialectic’s task—the invention of arguments. The second half, known as “judgment,”

Problematics of Shakespearean Probability / 25

involved the relation of words to one another, analysis of propositions, and construction of formal proofs, which he touched on but lightly. His work was therefore supplemented in sixteenth-century pedagogy by a dialectic that gave lip-service to the criterion of probability but emphasized rigorous proof and inculcated the idea that the structure of language mirrored the structure of the world. Recondite though these subjects may seem, they were taught to English youth at school and university side by side and, perhaps more significant, their ambiguities were reproduced in vernacular dialectics aimed at a reading public that possessed small Latin and less Greek. It is thus not surprising that there is an ambivalent dialectical imagination at work in Shakespeare’s tragedy that tends to conflate likelihood and truth. Chapter 4 focuses specifically on the spatial implications of dialectical predicaments and rhetorical topics, showing how Shakespeare’s deployment of these analytical tools, coordinated with an oscillation between conditional and indicative grammatical moods, effects a dramatization of acoustic effects that gradually erode distinctions between mental and exterior space and are responsible for the play’s claustrophobic eeriness as it draws to a close. Both chapters address the “ingenious” and “apodeictic” aspects of rhetorical anthropology through contemporary understandings of the way language situates the self in the world. Part Three, “Willful Words, Christian Anxieties, and Shakespearean Dramaturgy,” turns to the relationship of speech, will, and image. Prompted by Iago’s hyperbolical encomium of the will as he tries to cheer up Roderigo at the end of the third scene of Act I, I attempt in chapter 5 to discover what connections there may be among his desire to “plume up” his will “in double knavery” (1.3.392–93), his alacrity of invention, and his nearly endless volubility. The first part of the chapter reconsiders Iago’s status as “hybrid vice,” the descriptive term coined by Bernard Spivack in his landmark study, Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil, which discouraged critical attempts to interpret Iago psychologically: in Spivack’s reading, Iago has no psyche. Placing his theatrical explanation beside Coleridge’s view of Iago’s activity as “the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity,” I ask whether motivehunting might not be precisely the metatheatrical inquiry an allegory of evil that found itself turning into a human being might undertake, and if so, what kind of human being Iago is meant to represent. This leads me to reflect on his evident ill will, his self-ishness, his extraordinary capacity to cathect images and objects around him—Cassio’s face, Roderigo’s purse, Othello’s handkerchief—and his assertion, quoted earlier, that “I am not what I am.” In Christian terms, this is a declaration of apostasy, a turning from the divinity that fashioned you to claim yourself as your own, and its

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model is Pauline man, unredeemed and without faith, who lives his life κατὰ σὰρκα—according to the flesh—and attaches himself to things of the world so that he may “plume up” his will. Feeling both godlike and disprized, Iago seeks motives for his malignity, sees “reasons” out there, and assimilates them to his own obscure “purpose” in a series of eroticized “conceptions” that are delivered still-born on Othello’s marriage bed in Act V. Iago thus represents the Christian reading of Protagorean anthropology. To develop this argument, I enlist the pagan rhetorician turned bishop, St. Augustine, who anxiously describes the continuous struggle of two wills within him as a conflict between the unitary, godlike self he is striving to be and the worldly, dispersed self he had become—and may yet be again—by habitually fornicating with the material goods he had mistaken for objects of self-completion. Augustine supplies the experience and the vocabulary that links errant will, self-love, worldly ambition, and speech to the dissipation of the self in barren erotic transactions that result in the work of death—a concatenation that is proleptic of Iago. His heir in the early modern period was Petrarch, poised between Augustine and Cicero. Troubled by the self-fragmentation fostered by humanist rhetoric, Petrarch is torn between desires to retreat to solitary, healing contemplation and to participate actively in a social discourse that addresses the urgent matter of salvation in language that strikes the senses, penetrates the soul, and moves the will to embrace the good. This is language imbued with enargeia—a vivid “thingness” that renders issues of life and death present to the imagination—yet in its very luminescence threatens to impassion and materialize the soul of the practitioner. His unease persists into sixteenth-century sacred rheto­ rics, which aim to root out evil habits of thought and implant good will and sound doctrine in listeners’ hearts, and which inoculate the speaker by insisting that such persuasiveness stems not from his will but from divine grace. It is within this configuration, I believe, that we can best understand the work of Iago’s ill will, as it refashions Othello’s “sound doctrine” into what the Moor comes to regard as his own apostasy. For it is through this very discourse of res (“thingness”) that Iago persuades Othello that events have occurred that could not possibly have occurred, leading him to form “preposterous conclusions.” This is the subject of chapter 6, where I show how the rhetorical figure hysteron proteron, in which (against all probability) last things come first, dominates the action of the play and, when combined with the device of enargeia, fools even the audience into believing the action represents a longer time than careful scrutiny of the text reveals to be true—as Rymer was the first to notice. In chapter 7, I argue that there exists in the play a complementary rhetoric

Problematics of Shakespearean Probability / 27

of lack, through which Shakespeare enlists the audience’s desire to fashion a coherent whole “out of his scattering and unsure observance” and leads them to imitate his own process of composing—as he stitches together elements of Cinthio, Ariosto, and Virgil through ingenious acts of metaphormaking. Shakespeare, it turns out, is himself a “king of shreds and patches” whose audience become unwitting collaborators.46 Part Four, “Tropings of the Self in Shakespeare’s Scripts,” explores the psychological implications of well-known playhouse practices to learn how rhetorical anthropology, with its occasional and residual selves, was installed in Shakespeare’s theater. I begin by focusing on a recurrent event in many plays: the conscious act of self-departure and the assumption of a new ethos or several of them, which often results in adhesions that last beyond the ostensible motive for change. I then relate this representational phenomenon to procedures followed in putting new playscripts together. As Philip Henslowe’s account books reveal, the common routine was to hire an author or authors to fashion a plot and, if approved, to develop it into appropriate scenes. In the process, I argue, generic dramatis personae became specific characters responding to time, place, and circumstances. Analysis of existing author plots and of plays both familiar and obscure corroborates this reading. That is the subject of chapter 8. In chapter 9, I juxtapose this analysis to evidence that has accrued about the function of variant speech prefixes in both Quarto and Folio versions of Shakespeare’s plays. Comparison strengthens the presumption that Shakespeare fashioned characters from dramatis personae who assume an ethos as occasion demands, drawn by the social, emotional, or intellectual functions they must perform. I then select some dramatis personae who are actors or feel like actors—Flute, Richard III, Hamlet, Coriolanus—and ask what, if anything, lies behind their metatheatrical allusions. Flute, who reluctantly plays Thisbe, has a beard coming, and Hamlet famously distinguishes his grief from “actions that a man might play,” insisting that unlike an actor he has “that within which passes show.” Though persons in a drama, they are meant to be heard as real people. The question is, do they know the content of “that within which passes show”? In many instances the answer seems to be no. This leads me to explore the possibility that Shakespeare’s familiarity with acting opened a distinction for him between self and subject, entities roughly homologous with dramatis persona and character, and in the remainder of the chapter I show that this can be discerned in many of his stage figures. I conclude that Shakespeare recognized, like Augustine before him, that a self has many subject-possibilities—some concealed until solicited by circumstances, some never rising to consciousness at all.

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I reserve until Part Five, “Performing the Improbable Other on Shakespeare’s Stage,” the crucial question of race in Othello. I do so because it is first necessary to establish the theme of self-departure, the practice of scripting dramatis persona and character, and the likelihood that Shakespeare represented self and subject in forms not unfamiliar to us. In these closing chapters, I try to reconstruct what it might have been like for a white, Christian, Elizabethan (or Jacobean) actor to play a Moor, a Jew, or an Amerindian—utilizing the dialectical structure of rhetorical anthropology, concurrent social discourses, and cues provided by the language of the texts. By these means I hope to catch a glimpse of the actor’s experience performing his racial other. In chapter 10, I discuss the popular discourse of blackness in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England to contextualize the playing of Shakespeare’s first Moor, Aaron in Titus Andronicus. I then move forward in time to the acting of Caliban in The Tempest at the end of Shakespeare’s career, with its environing New World discourse, and return to the middleperiod Merchant of Venice and the playing of Shylock within the discursive surround of the Roderigo Lopez trial. Adapting Anthony Pagden’s “principle of attachment,” Robert Weimann’s Figurenposition, and M. M. Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism to the reading of playscripts, I show how Shakespeare’s scripts help the actor negotiate the distance between his English self and his improbable other. Chapter 11 studies Richard Burbage, the first Othello, and what we know of his second calling as limner, to reconstruct the promptings of the text and his multivalent actings as the Moor of Venice. Building on the preceding chapter, it approaches the issue of race in Shakespeare from a perspective that, as far as I know, has never been attempted. In the course of its argument, my book offers a coherent and, I believe, a fresh response to Thomas Rymer’s outraged charge that Othello is “fraught with improbabilities,” against which the play is still being defended. For probability itself is “fraught with improbabilities.” Yet, as I hope to have shown, it is crucial to the structure of selfhood, its conceptualizations providing an early modern lexicon for talking about “ego,” “self- image,” “subject”—even “virtual reality.” It is an element “always already” there, a constitutional feature without which human beings cannot understand their places in the world—and nonetheless it is an Iagian deceiver. Its very exis­ tence as a necessary indweller is a matter that Shakespeare urgently wished to bring to consciousness in his audiences, for he unfailingly foregrounds the paradox that lies within the apparent fastness of probability—its inessential improbability, arising from the fortuitous conjunction of desire and object, and its hidden “madeness.” Not surprisingly, even as he acknowledges its

Problematics of Shakespearean Probability / 29

foundational role in cognition and self-awareness, he is also alive to the need to transcend its traps and limits by denying its ostensible all-knowingness. This is the issue he addresses in his transition to romance, which renounces probability altogether. And it is the issue I address in my epilogue, in the light of early Protestant casuistry. Hence, “Make not impossible / That which but seems unlike” (MM 5.1.51–52). In this epilogue, I explore the vistas that open in Shakespeare on acknowledging the failure of probability. They appear as early in his career as The Comedy of Errors, may be glimpsed in Henry V and Hamlet, and become more evident in All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure, before they reach full disclosure in the romances, most notably in The Winter’s Tale. What they share is a surrender of confidence in the efficaciousness of doing “as if for surety” in accordance with everyday notions of probability, and a yielding of agency to divine power. “It is requir’d / You do awake your faith,” Paulina tells Leontes in the last scene of The Winter’s Tale (5.3.94–95). In this demand we can hear Shakespeare’s Christian correction of Aristotle’s remark that in tragedy “a likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility” (Poet. 1460a)—where “impossibility” is something that is not known to have happened but is likely to happen, and “possi­ bility” is a historical but anomalous, thus “unconvincing,” event. So far as we can tell, Shakespeare knew no historical precedent for Hermione’s statue coming to life, and his audience certainly had no reason to expect a Galatean metamorphosis on his stage.47 In the event, of course, it is not a miracle, but Shakespeare’s cunning dramaturgy has drawn his audience, who desire to believe Hermione lives nearly as much as Leontes does, to join him vicariously in a declaration of faith in the unlikely impossibility that enables her to step down from the pedestal. It is the most surprising event in all of Shakespeare’s plays, since the audience, uncharacteristically, has not been let in on the secret of Hermione’s self-preservation—and his boldest venture into the marvelous. Probability returns, as it must if ordinary life is to resume, when the king asks that “Each one demand, and answer to his part / Perform’d in this wide gap of time”—thereby to piece out an intelligible and convincing plot satisfying to all—but for one extant moment audiences onstage and offstage have transcended the probable, and with the suspension of probability the impossible has become true. This event and its antecedents in other plays, I argue, are linked to early Protestant practical divinity, associated with William Perkins, which renounced the weighing of probabilities in resolving moral questions and advocated a fideistic recourse to Scripture. Paradoxically, we find this reflected even in plays where the setting is ostensibly Catholic, such as All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure

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for Measure. Shakespeare foregrounds in these tragicomedies the new kind of knowing he had hinted at in the earlier plays and with it develops a corresponding rhetoric of the improbable that seeks to circumvent the habitual lapse into probability. In doing so he radically expands the experience of his characters and his audience, for whom the unlike and even the marvelous must henceforth be included in the scope of expectation. Shakespeare’s dramaturgy, it would seem, is nothing if not improbable.

Part I

Toward a Rhetorical Genealogy of Othello

One

“My Parts, My Title, and My Perfect Soul”: Ingenuity, Apodeixis, and the Origins of Rhetorical Anthropology In Act I, Scene 2, as Iago urges Othello to conceal himself in the Sagittar, where he has taken Desdemona after marrying her, the Moor replies: Not I. I must be found. My parts, my title, and my perfect soul Shall manifest me rightly. (1.2.30–32)

This is a voice confident of its merit, and it describes that merit in terms of self-evident proofs. Othello is committed to public intelligibility and convinced that his relationship to the world need not be negotiated. A man may be known by signs that are transparent and stable—immediately and identically meaningful to everyone. To find Othello is, in effect, to define him, by recognizing his natural components of substance (soul) and accident (parts and title).1 By way of contrast, let us listen to the voice of Iago as he begins to plot his revenge: Cassio’s a proper man: let me see now, To get his place, and to plume up my will In double knavery. How? How? let’s see, After some time to abuse Othello’s ear That he is too familiar with his wife. He has a person and a smooth dispose To be suspected, framed to make women false. . . . (1.3.391–97)

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This voice takes up an image—handsome Cassio—and wonders what it can make of it. For Iago, a man is not so much a stable essence qualified by accidents as he is an aggregate of accidents that can suggest any number of imputed essences. Cassio’s smooth dispose may indeed be framed to make women false or, as Iago later remarks, his daily beauty can become a diacritical sign of one’s own ugliness (5.1.18–20). Where do these voices come from? In this and the following chapter, I shall trace the rhetorical genealogies of the Moor and his ensign, the better to understand their distinctive ways of apprehending the early seventeenthcentury world they inhabit and of situating themselves in that world. We will find, I believe, that Shakespeare’s early modern imagination draws upon an ancient anthropological tradition tensed between ingenuity and apodeixis that is very much alive in his day and readily available for theatrical transvaluation.2

I In the history of speech theory, these two voices may be traced to the early fathers of rhetoric. In Iago, we can hear the notorious side of Protagoras—a figure well known in the Renaissance—who argued not only that human understanding is limited to the world of appearances, but that things are capable of appearing in many different ways and of being as they appear.3 In turning away from the speculations of the Eleatic philosophers on the nature of being, Protagoras confined his inquiries to the perceptible world of becoming, declaring a limit to what man could know. “As to the gods,” he wrote, “I have no means of knowing either that they exist or that they do not exist. For many are the obstacles that impede knowledge, both the obscurity of the question and the shortness of human life.”4 His vision of the phenomenal world was Heraclitean. He taught that “matter is in a state of flux, and as it flows additions are made continuously in the place of the effluxions.” In the distinctly human sphere, “the senses are transformed and altered according to the times of life and to all the other conditions of the bodies.”5 What happens, then, in what we call the objective world has its counterpart in the subjective, though Protagoras makes no clear distinction between the two. Indeed, the two realms impinge upon one another, and cognition results from the fortuitous conjunction of the perceiver and that which he perceives, in the peculiar state each happens to be at the time. Since this is never the same, a man never encounters the world in quite the same way twice. Identities must always be negotiated.

Origins of Rhetorical Anthropology / 35

Protagoras’s epistemology was derived from an ontology that held that there are no pure essences in the world but that all things are composed of opposing principles, or logoi. This means, writes Sextus Empiricus, that “the ‘reasons’ [logoi] of all the appearances subsist in the matter, so that matter, so far as depends on itself, is capable of being all those things which appear to all” (1.218).6 That is, since all “objects” are composed of dissoi logoi, two opposing principles, each of these principles is immanent in visible phenomena, though at a particular moment they may be harmonized in such a way that one or the other is dominant and therefore more evident.7 Reality is then susceptible of opposing descriptions—verbal dissoi logoi—because it is itself able to appear in two opposing ways. Thus the utility of arguing in utramque partem (on one side of the question or the other), which becomes a staple of rhetorical inquiry, draws its power and justification from the matter itself. But the human situation is more fluid still: men, he says, apprehend different things at different times owing to their differing dispositions; for he who is in a natural state apprehends those things subsisting in matter which are able to appear to those in a natural state, and those who are in a non-natural state the things which can appear to those in a non-natural state. Moreover, precisely the same account applies to the variations due to age, and to the sleeping or waking state, and to each several kind of condition. Thus, according to him, Man becomes the criterion of real existences. (1.218)

Such is the basis of the famous Protagorean dictum, “Man is the measure of all things.” Or, in the more ontological formulation of Mario Untersteiner, man is the “master of all his experiences,” since “Nature, in order to exist, must manifest itself, reveal itself . . . conform to the conditions of cognition” (Untersteiner, 47). In respect to things that concern him, then, man is in one sense all-powerful, since the configuration of the world depends ultimately on his particular disposition at the moment of cognition. From a wider perspective, though, both he and his world are creatures of chance, since his apprehensions are triply fortuitous—the incalculable result of the conjunction of an internal and an external harmonia. This would suggest a radically contingent mode of cognition, indeed, since both man and the things he encounters are never disposed to one another in exactly the same way. That is the burden of Socrates’ wry exposition of Protagoras’s doctrine in Plato’s Theatetus (159–160a). It is also contingent in a broader sense, in that man’s grasp of the world never escapes

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the limitation inherent in an immanent interpretation of appearances. But he may better his cognitive condition, Protagoras suggests, by realizing the constructive possibilities of these limitations. If experiences are apprehended in diverse ways, through many experiences a man can multiply his apprehensions and by reflecting upon them “universalize” his understanding, as Aristotle will later claim when he explains epagoge, or induction, in the Posterior Analytics. Protagoras insists, however, that this larger understanding is no “truer” than his earlier one, only better—comparing them to the differing perceptions of healthy and unhealthy men: “To the sick man food appears sour and is so; to the healthy man it is and appears the opposite. Now there is no call to represent either of the two as wiser—that cannot be—nor is the sick man to be pronounced unwise because he thinks as he does, or the healthy man wise because he thinks differently. What is wanted is a change to the opposite condition because the other state is better” (Thea. 166e–167a). In the realm of practical and ethical thought, to change to the opposite condition is to change “the lesser possibility of knowledge into a greater possibility of knowledge,” as Untersteiner translates the Protagorean claim to make the weaker argument seem the stronger.8 This metaboly, according to Protagoras, is not a work of crafty subversion on the part of the sophist, but a process of enlightenment that involves a change in the subject’s cognitive disposition: So too in education one must bring about a change from one state to that which is better: the doctor effects a change with medicines, the sophist with arguments. Actually, no one has ever caused another who holds false opinions to change them for true ones: it is not, indeed, possible to think what does not exist, nor anything other than what is experienced: this is always true. But, I think, the man who because of an inferior state of mind holds opinions of similar inferiority is led by an improved condition to hold opinions correspondingly improved. Some through ignorance call these notions true, I however call the one kind better than the other, but in no way truer. (Thea. 167a–b, trans. Untersteiner, 52)

It can be seen that Protagoras’s view of education is in many respects like that of Socrates: the teacher aims not to impose ideas but to bring about a new condition of responsiveness in his student. He accomplishes this by questioning him about his own beliefs, offering him opposing views, and allowing him to compare and examine their implications. As a result, the soul of the student is, in a measure, “redisposed,” and accordingly he has a “better idea” of the subject under discussion. The crucial difference, of

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course, is that Protagoras’s student does not desire, nor is he encouraged, to transcend the world of appearances in order to apprehend intelligible being. His “greater possibility of knowledge” grows out of his own collective experiences and those of his fellow citizens—marshaled for his examination by the skillful arguments of the sophist who, as Protagoras’s medical analogy suggests, undertakes a kind of therapy. His new understanding is described as the acquisition of political wisdom or prudence, which Protagoras claims to teach in Plato’s dialogue bearing his name. Even though the individual remains divorced from absolutes and restricted to subjective encounters with phenomena, he may, by experiencing his own multiplicity and that of others, learn “prudence in his own affairs, so that he may manage his own household in the best way, and prudence in the affairs of the city, so that he may be most effective in action and speech in matters concerning the city” (Protag. 318e).9 For a fuller understanding of Iago (and, as we shall see, of Shakespeare’s language of theatrical potentiality),10 the teaching of Gorgias, the younger contemporary of Protagoras, is even more important. If Protagoras proposed that opposing aspects of things can be equally true because they represent the inherently conflicting logoi or “reasons” of things, and explained how one’s differing experiences could be argued, gathered, and compared so as to better one’s grasp of reality, Gorgias emphasized logos in its function as speech and at the same time insisted that spoken words are incapable of representing the logoi inherent in things. For Gorgias, the fact that human understanding is confined to the phenomenal world meant that speech could neither communicate being nor convey from speaker to listener even the perceptibles of the lower realm of appearances. In his treatise On NotBeing, he asks if any “thing” can be revealed by one person to another, and replies negatively: For that by which we reveal is logos, but logos is not substances and existing things. Therefore, we do not reveal existing things to our neighbors, but logos, which is something other than substances.11

In this view, speech is absolutely nonreferential. It is provoked when external things impinge on our psyches and thus may be said to be stimulated by things, but it cannot accurately name or describe them. Human beings communicate within a circuit that is divorced not only from the intelligible world but also from the phenomenal world of nature. This means that logos, freed from correspondence to metaphysical reality and from mimesis of physical reality, is the instrument of an autonomous psychic reality—

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governed by peitho, the compelling power of persuasion, and apate, a form of deception that links disparate words and thoughts together in a “logical sequency” that induces the listener to forge meaning out of what had been only meaning-possibilities. Without these two auxiliary forces, logos is mere power (dynamis) confronting static opinion (doxa), which has lost its etiological itinerary and is capable only of repetition.12 This intellectual incapacitation, however, can be “overcome by the irrational power of logos, which deceives, persuades and transforms a disconnected knowledge into a knowledge that creates or discloses links and relationships” with the aid of peitho and apate (Untersteiner, 116). It does so, however, through a force only vaguely articulated by Protagoras, who was the first “to emphasize the importance of seizing the right moment” (Diog. Laert. 9.52). This is the force of kairos, which has ontological and psychological dimensions. In the Pythagorean doctrine of the unity of opposites, it is kairos that harmonizes opposing logoi so that at one moment they appear in one manifestation, at another in a different one. In Gorgias’s teaching, kairos is also the opportune conjunction between the logoi at play in the perceiver and at play in what he or she perceives—as exemplified in his Encomium of Helen by Helen’s sudden passion for Paris, who appeared irresistible because of the fortuitous conjunction of their dissoi logoi. Extended into the activity of oratory, it is the speaker’s mastery of kairos—his skill in exploiting that moment in which his words, his subject, and the receptive disposition of his audience coincide harmoniously—that marks his expertise. Charles White describes such mastery as “a process of continuous interpretation in which the speaker seeks to inflect the given ‘text’ to his or her own ends at the same time that the speaker’s ‘text’ is ‘interpreted’ in turn by the context surrounding it.”13 As a result of this momentary capture of the interplay of ontological and psychological forces, Gorgias offers—in lieu of a speaking that conveys enduring cosmic reality—a factitious verbal heterocosm, shaped by aural figuration, founded in the instant. Which means, as White observes, that “the authority of the truth derives from the particular context of rhetorical persuasion, from the always provisional persuasive artifice of the speaker, who plunges into the swarming continuum of experience in order to retrieve from it a knowable world that is, in the last analysis, purely a verbal figment able to persist so long as thinking goes on” (36). In such tendentious reciprocity we can discern the operational, and perhaps the voluntarist, roots of the motive-seeking of a motiveless malignity.14 To appreciate the social implications of Gorgias’s view that speech operates within an enclosed interpsychic circuit through the power of persuasion and of Protagoras’s claim that one may better one’s condition through

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logotherapy, we must turn to Isocrates, a student of Gorgias and Socrates, and a slightly older contemporary of Plato. Isocrates shared with Gorgias an awareness of the psychagogic powers of artfully constructed speech operating in a world of appearances, and with Socrates and Plato the conviction that education must in the first instance possess an ethical character. For these reasons he abjured both abstract speculation about the nature of being, as practiced by the presocratic philosophers, and the training in eristic disputation offered by contemporary sophists. His moral concern allied him to Plato and his school, but his disdain for the exact sciences and his exaltation of public speaking set him apart from them. He believed politics to be the most meaningful human activity, and recognized that it was conducted in the world of eikos—probability—where experience was the best, if a necessarily imprecise, teacher. In his Antidosis, or self-defense, he claims that what he teaches, though neither abstruse nor exact, is truly philosophical: “For since it is not in the nature of man to attain a science by the possession of which we can know positively what we should do or what we should say, in the next resort I hold that man to be wise who is able by his powers of conjecture to arrive generally at the best course, and I hold that man to be a philosopher who occupies himself with the studies from which he will most quickly gain that kind of insight” (271). Such studies focus upon the work of the political orator. He is the man who can move a people to action because he can command the occasion, perceiving and exploiting its kairos; whose themes are lofty and inspiring; and whose well-crafted speeches are “more akin to works composed in rhythm and set to music than to the speeches which are made in court. For they set forth facts in a style more imaginative and more ornate; they employ thoughts which are more lofty and more original and besides, they use throughout figures of speech in greater number and of a more striking character” (47). Chiefly, he is the man who persuades by means of his own ethical uprightness, for “probabilities and proofs . . . support only the points in a case to which they are severally applied, whereas an honorable reputation not only lends greater persuasiveness to the works of the man who possesses it, but adds greater luster to his deeds” (280). This moral and technical education is circular. Men wish to win fame and reverence in life, and they can achieve this by choosing to speak of matters “which are great and honorable and devoted to the welfare of man and the common good” (276). Those who hear such thoughts, set forth in the imaginative and ornate style characteristic of great political oratory, wish to learn the art, “believing that those who excel in this field are wiser and better and of more use to the world than men who speak well in court” (47). And once

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they begin to practice speaking themselves, they actually become better, because the orator “will select from all the actions of men which bear upon his subject those examples which are the most illustrious and edifying; and habituating himself to contemplate and appraise such examples, he will feel their influence not only in the preparation of a given discourse but in all the actions of his life” (277). It is a vision in which men can become good and draw others to goodness without once stepping out of the realm of speech, which, operating on speaker and listener as an artfully induced ethical contagion, is both the cause and effect of their actions. As one might expect from this empirical bias, there is no set path to mastery of the art of speaking. The chief requisite is natural ability and the second, experience; fixed rules are the least useful: “Oratory is only good if it has the quality of fitness for the occasion, propriety of style, and originality of treatment” (Against the Sophists 13). This means it is a demanding and creative activity: “to choose from these elements those which should be employed for each subject, to join them together, to arrange them properly, and also, not to miss what the occasion demands but appropriately to adorn the whole speech with striking thoughts and to clothe it in flowing and melodious phrase—these things, I hold require much study and are the task of a vigorous and imaginative mind” (ibid., 17).15 Several themes essential for our understanding of Iago emerge from the surviving texts of Protagoras, Gorgias, and Isocrates. Most important is the idea of kairos itself as the basis of both cognition and persuasion. From its perspective, intellectual apprehension is neither pure nor stable, nor even repeatable. All cognition and persuasion is occasional, figurative, and saturated with pathos, the effect of a unique intellectual and sensory interaction between self and world, and is always changing because both the condition of the self and that of the world are ever in flux. Subtending the discontinuous subject of kairos, however, is a continuity of self that enables reflection on experience, hence a kind of primitive induction toward a universal that seeks similarities and recognizes near-repetitions, and so also supplies the platform from which the persuading subject can offer his own ethos as proof and draw upon his own experience to present for the occasion appropriate probabilities to his audience. In so doing he never escapes the realm of appearance, depending upon the internal coherence of speech—governed by peitho and apate—to win his audience and thus to impose his desire on the world. Clearly, we are deep within Iago’s psyche here, where a man may say: But pardon me, I do not in position Distinctly speak of her, though I may fear

Origins of Rhetorical Anthropology / 41 Her will, recoiling to her better judgment, May fail to match you with her country forms, And happily repent. (3.3.238–42)

Although he cannot prove Desdemona false scientifically (id autem ex positione, necessarium dicitur, cum uno posito, necesse est aliquid sequi), honest Iago, secure in his public ethos, draws upon the common doxa of woman’s wandering will, deploys the reasonable eikos that once sated, her will shall be ruled once again by reason, thence the enthymeme that her will shall fit itself, prepontos, to “one of the wealthy curled darlings of our nation,” for like will to like.16 And his modest proposal works. Alone, Othello expresses the conviction that This fellow’s of exceeding honesty, And knows all qualities, with a learned spirit, Of human dealings. . . . (3.3.262–64)

Iago had begun with diffident boldness, enjoying a kairotic recognition, then admitting: I know not if ’t be true . . . Yet I, for mere suspicion in that kind, Will do, as if for surety. . . . (1.3.387–89)

Feeling resentment toward Othello for having demeaned him in choosing his lieutenant, poised in an attitude of jealousy toward his wife after hearing what “ ‘tis thought abroad,” he had cast his regard into the space of appearance, discovered the face of Cassio there, deemed it framed to make woman false, and passed the discourse on: “Ha, I like not that” (3.3.34). Never stepping outside the charmed verbal circle he inhabits, he then begins to change the world substantively.

II Historically, Othello’s voice picks up where Iago’s leaves off. It was largely in reaction to the irreducible uncertainty of such inferential activity that Plato

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attacked probable argument and conceived his program of philosophical rhetoric based on the more rigorous dialectical procedures of definition and division. For Isocrates, probability is an ontological and epistemological idea that is essentially self-contained. Its limitations are acknowledged: it denotes a world of changing appearances, fallible opinions, and temporary emotions, which achieve only a relative stability in the common sense born of collective experience. There is no repose in being. It is in its very divorce from the absolute that probability commands authority. In Plato, however, the probable—eikos—is construed as that which resembles truth, and its validity is undermined by the orator’s candid admission that he does not know the truth. “The intending orator,” observes Phaedrus, “is under no necessity of understanding what is truly just, but only what is likely to be thought just by the body of men who are to give judgment; nor need he know what is truly good or noble, but what will be thought so, since it is on the latter, not the former, that persuasion depends.” To which Socrates quite reasonably rejoins, “[I]f he doesn’t know the truth about a given thing, how is he going to discern the degree of resemblance between that unknown thing and other things?” (Phaedrus 260a, 262a). How, that is, can he determine the verisimilar if he cannot recognize the verum? This is the first consequence of Plato’s attempt to reform rhetoric on the model of dialectic: the autonomous probable is seen as the referential probable in disguise. This shift calls into question not only the epistemic reliability of the orator but also his power to effect the ethical and political betterment to which he aspires. In the Gorgias Socrates observes, “Orators and tyrants have the very least power of any in our cities . . . for they do practically nothing they will, but only what seems best to them.” The explanation of this apparent logic-chopping lies in the fact that “when we act, we do not will the act, but the purpose of the act.” All purposes being the achievement of real, not apparent good, a man who does not know the real good but who “does what seems good to him in the state has no power and does not do what he wills” (Gorgias 466d, 468c–e, my italics). So much for the orator’s claim to social beneficence or even to self-aggrandizement.17 But the law of probability has yet another hold upon him. If his power to realize his will is hindered by his nescience, it is also defeated by his dependence on his public. For the speaker who is committed to use as his materials the opinions of the demos is not its ruler but its imitator. The very need to argue within the circuit of opinion shackles the politician, making him not the leader of his people but a fellow prisoner of those who inhabit Plato’s cave. Socrates illustrates the impact of this constraining social force

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by citing with derision the example of common legal procedure. There is, he says, absolutely no need for the budding orator to concern himself with the truth about what is just or good conduct, nor indeed about who are just and good men, whether by nature or education. In the law courts nobody gives a rap for the truth about these matters, but only about what is plausible. And that is the same as what is probable, and is what must occupy the attention of the would-be master of the art of speech. Even actual facts ought sometimes not be stated, if they don’t tally with probability; they should be replaced by what is probable, whether in prosecution or defense; whatever you say, you simply must pursue this probability they talk of, and can say goodbye to the truth forever. (Phaedrus 272d–e)

However hyperbolical, there can be detected behind Socrates’ words the disturbing vision of an autonomous speech that yet possesses its own cogency—the Gorgianic logos, working through persuasion and deception to impress a significance on the mind in the light of which a man might act. Socrates’ specification of the conjunction between peitho and eikos—the psychological and ontological modes of probability—signals his awareness of this “logical sequency,” and it is in resistance to its threat that he constructs the outlines of a positive and truthful psychagogia. Not surprisingly he utilizes goetic and pharmaceutical metaphors to do so. We find the most explicit confluence of the epode, or magic incantation, medicine, and persuasive speech in the Charmides. Here Socrates, having been introduced to the young man so admired for his beauty and character, professes to be able to cure him of a chronic headache. But following the holistic practice of Greek and Thracian physicians, he insists that he cannot cure Charmides’ physical ailment without also ministering to his soul, for “all good and evil, whether in the body or in the whole man,” originates there. To accomplish this, he will give Charmides a medicinal leaf (pharmakon) and utter certain charms: “These charms,” he says, “are fair words and by them temperance is implanted in the soul, and where temperance comes and stays, there health is speedily imparted, not only to the head, but to the whole body” (Charmides 157a–b). As Pedro Lain-Entralgo has shown, Socrates’ psychosomatic prescription comports with the doctrines of Hippocratic medicine in the fourth century (160–70). Socrates, however, goes further in his application of these theories than their practitioners. He practices extensive psychotherapy that is

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both diagnostic and purgative. This is his dialectic, which begins when the interlocutor, confident of the ethos of his logotherapist, submits himself to questioning and thereupon enters into a mutual inquiry. In the case of Charmides, the procedure has an added witty complexity: since he is widely acknowledged to be temperate already, the question arises as to whether he needs the cure. But before this can be determined, he and Socrates must agree on what temperance is—and from this anterior doubt the therapy proceeds. It becomes evident in the course of the dialogue that the charm is the conversation itself, even though an acceptable definition of temperance— and therefore the knowledge of whether Charmides possesses it—is never achieved. By offering tentative definitions and examining their applicability, implications, and consequences, however, Socrates disabuses Charmides of his preconceptions, and the youth comes to know himself better. Indeed, one might say that he is shown to be temperate even though he is not known to be so, and evidence of this is his desire at the end of the conversation for more of Socrates’ “magic incantations.” In the Charmides, the epode, which in Gorgias’s Encomium of Helen had been a species of the irrational logos, is well on its way to becoming ratio­ nalized. That is the burden of Lain-Entralgo’s analysis. But the word has not lost its ambiguity or ambivalence. Plato will still refer from time to time to goetic midwives, medical practitioners, and superstitious conjurors who recite epodai with dubious, if not harmful results;18 his tendency, however, is to assimilate the charm either to dialectical inquiry or to mythical persuasion in support of dialectical argument. Such is the function of the myth of the soul in the Phaedo and the Phaedrus, and the elaborate myth of Er that majestically concludes the Republic. These myths are concessions to Gorgianic thinking, because myth does not prove by rational means; it appeals to the psyche and convinces it by means of images, narrative links, and verbal rhythms. While Plato, in his understanding of the psyche, gives an important place to such nonrational proof, it clearly functions as an ancilla to reasoning. Even without the theory, rhetoric has become subordinated to dialectic.19 An even more important inference that we may draw from the Charmides concerns the relationship established between therapist and patient. Here the magician loses his identity in the physician, and it is under his aspect that the dialectician speaks. Socrates asks if Charmides is willing to enter into colloquy with him, and Charmides agrees. At the end of the conversation he expresses interest in further communication: “I am sure, Socrates, that I do need the charm, and as far as I am concerned, I shall be willing

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to be charmed by you daily, until you say that I have had enough” (176b). Confidences have been exchanged: the reputation of the physician-charmerspeaker had preceded him, and he has reinforced it by his gentle and reasonable manner. For his part, the patient-auditor-respondent has revealed his own nature by expressing his opinions and reasoning about them. We see the implications of this therapeutic relationship more clearly in the fourth book of the Laws when, discussing the ways in which legislation may be promulgated, the Athenian compares the practices of two kinds of physician. The first, often an assistant attending slaves, simply prescribes by formula—giving his patient “some empirical injunction with an air of finished knowledge”—and then dashes off to the next customer (Laws 720c). But the practitioner attending freemen “treats their diseases by going into things thoroughly from the beginning in a scientific way, and takes the patient and his family into his confidence. Thus he learns something from the sufferers, and at the same time instructs the invalid to the best of his powers. He does not offer a prescription until he has won his patient’s support, and when he has done so, he aims at producing complete restoration to health by persuading the sufferer into compliance” (720d–e). Here it becomes evident that to treat his patient effectively, the physician must “exchange confidences.” He tells the sick man and his family what he knows about the disease and its cure, while they provide him with an intimate knowledge of the patient’s physis and the pathema that is disordering it. Not until this psychological and intellectual understanding is reached can the treatment for the physical ailment begin. What is expressed now in a medical situation is comparable to Isocrates’ emphasis upon the importance of the speaker’s ethos in political oratory—he must get his audience to trust him before he can persuade them to a course of action—and upon his kairotic understanding (he must say what is appropriate for this audience on this particular occasion). We find even his scorn of a crude empiricism—of the notion that “such and such a treatment worked once, so let’s try again”—echoed in the Athenian’s dismissal of the slave physician’s technique. What is new, however, is the emphasis upon scientific method—the insistence that one must go “into things thoroughly from the beginning,” tracing the causes, aitiae—and the implication that words can be matched precisely to the auditor’s physis and pathema. This attitude distinguishes Plato from even so timely a practitioner as Isocrates, who would deny that such a science is possible. Its implications are spelled out in the prescription for a therapeutic rhetoric developed near the end of the Phaedrus. In this most seminal of dialogues, Socrates is subjecting Lysias’s brand of oratory to a lengthy critique, following his attempt to improve on the

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sophist’s speech and his Stesichorian palinode on even that. Developing Phaedrus’s observation that orators need not know the truth about anything if only they know what people commonly believe (260a), Socrates concludes that such a doctrine can easily lead both speakers and audiences into evil through the mistaken opinion that what they are contemplating is actually good. Equally pernicious is the ability of orators to “make the same thing appear to the same people now just, now unjust, at will” (261d). This stems from an unwarranted faith in variable opinion or, it is implied, from a disingenuous exploitation of the belief in kairos. Without pursuing this possibility, Socrates fixes the blame more neutrally on the orator’s use of ambiguous language. Lysias had begun his speech by assuming a simple identity between love and cupidity, and from that initial assumption had assembled his array of arguments against love. Even more symptomatic of his “opinionated” mind, his arguments were arranged in haphazard fashion, whereas “any discourse ought to be constructed like a living creature, with its own body, as it were; it must not lack either head or feet; it must have a middle and extremities so composed as to suit each other and the whole work” (264c). This correct procedure—that of a knower—Socrates himself has followed, inspired by the Muses’ chirping witnesses, the cicadas. Having recognized that “love” signifies many things, he had begun his speeches by collecting these under one heading, “madness”; then he had differentiated between human and divinely inspired madness, and finally distinguished among the latter until it was quite clear that he was speaking of the highest form, that imposed by Aphrodite and Eros (265b). He is describing, without yet naming it, the twofold process of dialectic—definition and division—whose cognitive and formal dimensions logically interlock. Still more significant, they are coterminous with the biological, as Socrates’ critique of Lysias’s composition has already hinted. In order to understand what one is talking about, one must go “into things thoroughly from the beginning in a scientific way” (Laws 720d), which means that “we bring a dispersed plurality under a single form, seeing it all together”—and then follow the reverse procedure, “whereby we are enabled to divide into forms, following the objective articulation” (Phaedrus 265d–e, my italics). Notice that here, not only is the cognitive integrated with the formal; both are implicated in the natural. The dialectical word is correlative to the biological world, as Socrates’ further explanation of his own practice suggests. Describing his antithetical speeches on love, he says: The single general form which they postulated was irrationality; next, on the analogy of a single natural body with its pairs of like-named members, right

Origins of Rhetorical Anthropology / 47 arm or leg, as we say, and left, they conceived of madness as a single objective form existing in human beings. Wherefore the first speech divided off a part on the left, and continued to make divisions, never desisting until it discovered one particular part bearing the name of “sinister” love, on which it very properly poured abuse. The other speech conducted us to the forms of madness which lay on the right-hand side, and upon discovering a type of love that shared its name with the other but was divine, displayed it to our view and extolled it as the source of the greatest goods that can befall us. (265e–266a)

Dialectical exposition, then, conforms to the structure of a living nature, and Socrates is not slow to reveal what this implies for the art of persuasion. Just as the individual speech itself must adhere to the contours of its subject matter—“following the objective articulation”—so the theory of speech must provide an accurate description of that with which it is most intimately concerned, the soul. The model for such an art is Hippocratic medicine. In both medicine and rhetoric, “there is a nature that we have to determine, the nature of the body in the one, and of soul in the other, if we mean to be scientific and not content with mere empirical routine when we apply medicine and diet to induce health and strength, or words and rules of conduct to implant such convictions and virtues as we desire” (270b). Thus, in the manner of the Aesclepiads, who must first decide whether the physis they wish to treat is simple or complex, and then discover its capacities for acting and being acted upon, the scientific rhetorician will, in the first place, describe the soul very precisely, and let us see whether it is single and uniform in nature, or, analogously to the body, complex. . . . And secondly he will describe what natural capacity it has to act upon what, and through what means, or by what it can be acted upon. . . . Thirdly, he will classify the types of discourse and the types of soul, and the various ways in which souls are affected, explaining the reasons in each case, suggesting the type of speech appropriate to each type of soul, and showing what kind of speech can be relied on to create belief in one soul and disbelief in another, and why. (271a–b)

In the thought of philosophically minded rhetoricians, the power of oratory had always seemed profoundly irrational, and though, as the writings of Isocrates testify, it could be exploited in the interest of rational political goals and in a measure harnessed by the individual through practical experience, it fundamentally resisted formulation. Those who attempted to reduce

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it to formularies, the followers of Tisias and Corax, were scorned as much by Isocrates as by Plato. Ironically, Plato is reacting not to Isocrates (who is praised by Socrates at the end of the Phaedrus) but to this shallow band of sophists—“empirics” who practice not a kairotic but a mechanical, routine empiricism—when he promulgates a theory that is intended to conform to the natural outlines of the human psyche but becomes, in effect, a new kind of formulation—the typology of souls. That both the theory and the result are influenced by Plato’s idealism may be seen in the way Socrates proceeds to elaborate the art. He states that of the types of soul there are “a determinate number,” and to these there correspond “a determinate number of types of discourse. Hence a certain type of hearer will be easy to persuade by a certain type of speech to take such and such action, for such and such reason, while another type will be hard to persuade” (271d). Having been indoctrinated in this taxonomy of the soul, the rhetorician will then seek to confirm it in his experience: “he must watch it actually occurring, exemplified in men’s conduct, and must cultivate a keenness of perception in following it if he is to get any advantage out of the previous instruction given in the school” (271d–e). Once he has learned to recognize the type, then he can, “on catching sight of so-and-so, tell himself, ‘That is the man, that character now actually before me is the one I heard about in school, and in order to persuade him of so-and-so I have to apply these arguments in this fashion’ ” (272a). Only after this does he summon what remains of his kairotic sensibility in the fitting deployment of speech and silence, emotional passages, and rhetorical figures. Plato’s “formulation” is, of course, not on a par with those of the superficial sophists he opposes. His is scientific—that is to say, dialectical—and is based on a theory of the psyche, the impact of language on that, and the proper relationship of speech to nature. Nonetheless, it is clear that his priorities reverse those of Protagoras and his followers: what had been an ingenious activity becomes in Plato an apodeictic activity, proceeding from principles concerning the nature of the psyche and leading to applications of specific words to specific kinds of listeners. All, it nearly goes without saying, in the service of truth, not probability. If this typological rhetoric does not bother him, he does seem to have realized another danger lurking even in so scientific a formulation. He devotes the last section of the Phaedrus to a lengthy critique of written composition that is, in effect, a medicine or remedy against the very systematization he has just advocated. The burden of Socrates’ argument against writing is that written words, being fixed, suffer, as it were, an ontological inflexion; they are no longer of the same order as the author’s living thought, but are rather

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the dead images of it. As such they are alienated from the animating spirit present in the spoken words of his speech—a spirit informed by the correspondence between the matter being discussed, the words chosen by the speaker to express that matter, and the receptive capacity of the auditor’s psyche to grasp and respond to it. Words on paper have irrevocably lost contact with these constituting moments. Hence they cannot teach, since education consists in the interinanimation, to use Donne’s apt coinage, that takes place between two interlocutors as they purge one another’s souls of misconceptions and implant in their place true beliefs. Written words, by contrast, “seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you just the same thing forever” (275d). And this has a further consequence. Once a speech gets written down, it “drifts all over the place, getting into the hands not only of those who understand it, but equally of those who have no business with it; it doesn’t know how to address the right people, and not address the wrong. And when it is ill-treated and unfairly abused it always needs its parent to come to its help, being unable to defend or help itself” (275e). In sum, writing is the opposite of the good rhetorician described by Socrates because it preserves a triumphant instance of scientific speech beyond its installation in time, and in doing so causes the speech to lose its scientific character. With a truly Socratic irony, it thereby engenders the need for the very rhetorician whose demise Plato was attempting to bring about: the man who, confronted by the stubborn silence of writing, must attack the text “ingeniously” and wrest an understanding from it by negotiating between its historical moment and his own in the realm of eikos—probability.

III In his richly suggestive essay “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Jacques Derrida studies Plato’s view of writing in relation to the pharmaceutical terminology with which it is associated in the dialogue. The connection appears quite early, when Socrates refers to Lysias’s speech as a drug that has lured him from his haunts in the city; it is personified in the myth of Pharmacia, who has given her name to the spring that is the setting of the colloquy; and it is repeated several times in the critique just described. In recounting the myth of the origin of writing, Socrates tells Phaedrus that the god Theuth offered King Thamus this invention as a cure for human ills, claiming that “both memory (mneme) and instruction (sophia) have found their remedy (pharmakon).”20 The king rejects the powerful medicine, declaring that it will produce

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precisely the opposite effect. It will implant forgetfulness in men, since they will come to rely on external signs for knowledge instead of drawing it from within themselves; writing, he concludes, is a remedy not for memory but for commemoration. Such knowledge as it does supply cannot be instructive, since true learning consists in the mutual ethical formation practiced only by those engaged in dialectic. Writing will produce not wise men, but only men “filled with the conceit of wisdom” (275a–b). Derrida argues that Plato uses this myth as a subterfuge. Through its own unquestionable persuasiveness (myth, we recall, is a charm that does not prove), he is able to reassert his theory of true speech and also mask its inadequacy by foisting its insufficiencies upon something he chooses to call writing. The major difference between dialectic and writing, as Plato explains it, is their respective dependency upon memory, mneme, and commemoration, hypomnesis. Memory is described as a continuous “presence of mind”—what has been perceived, is being conceived, and shall be uttered, are all one. Commemoration, in contrast, is subsequent and exterior to living thought, and begins, as Derrida observes, “at a point where the mneme, instead of being present to itself in its life as a movement of truth, is supplanted by the archive, evicted by a sign of re-memoration or commemoration” (109). But, he contends, “the outside is already within the work of memory,” because memory, as a living thing, is finite and cannot register continuous self-presence. “Memory always therefore already needs signs in order to recall the non-present, with which it is necessarily in relation” (109). That is to say, memory is naturally contaminated by its alleged antithesis, hypomnesis—by what Plato rejects as subsequent, exterior, inferior. Even dialectic is writing. The disturbing reality that Plato would seem to be covering over, then, is the unavoidable fissure that exists between speech and its mental referents—between what we might call its “thought objects” and its “objects thought.” An even wider gap, between speech and thing, had already been acknowledged in Gorgias’s insistence that logos conveys only logos, not substances; even if existing things could be apprehended, he had argued, they could not be revealed by one person to another because perceptions and, by implication, conceptions were of a different ontological order from logos. This is also assumed in the sophists’ general claim that they argued probabilities, likely conjectures, not truths. Such was the gap that Plato’s scientific rhetoric had sought to close by claiming that an “objective articulation” of every matter was possible and that speech could keep pace with mind through one-on-one dialectic. The failure of his endeavor, Derrida suggests, is projected in the image of the fatherless book, blown about the world,

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falling into the wrong hands, and being subjected to infinite interpretation. What this Platonic nightmare figures, he says, is a haunting awareness of the inevitable autonomy of the sign, which exists both inside and outside the author’s mind, though Plato refuses to recognize the former possibility. And if this is so, all language, whether spoken or written, is irreducibly improper, since the sign cannot present but only represent the thought of one man to another—or even of one man to himself—and is thus by its nature out of synchrony with its putative origin. Indeed, Theuth, the father of writing, is in his various mythological incarnations the personification of impropriety—now the eloquent son of thought, now his supplement, replacement, mimic—“a god of the absolute passage between opposites” (93). Derrida’s analysis has a direct bearing on the anthropology of rhetoric. If Plato is translating a genuinely ambiguous phenomenon—the simultaneous interiority and exteriority of the sign—into a series of oppositions (outer-inner, earlier-later, present-absent, living-dead) because of an intuitive fear of such ambiguity, then Plato has seen something that Shakespeare also saw. Mere probability had not been good enough for the philosopher; it was, literally, too informal. It was an instrument not sufficiently sensitive to mold speech to the shape of its subject matter, on the one hand, and to the condition of the auditor’s psyche, on the other. To put it a different way, it was not probable enough. And how could it be, since it possessed no criterion by which to judge the degree of resemblance between the speech, its subject matter, and its object, the soul? The remedy for this was a rhetoric modeled on a referential, truthful dialectic. But if dialectic, for all its scientific pretensions, was also seen to be not probable enough, because the word could never present but only represent its speaker, subject matter, and object, then what Plato discovered was nothing less than the probability of truth and the improbability of probability. That is to say, there is neither probability nor truth in speech at all, because there is no fit either between what exists outside and inside the mind or between what is inside the mind and what the tongue utters; there is only figuration, shaped by peitho and apate. And when that is discovered, the subject suffers a collapse and scapegoats something called writing as its own pharmakon. A similar evasion is revealed in Shakespeare’s play. When Othello asks, “Will you, I pray, demand that demi-devil / Why he hath thus ensnared my soul and body?” (5.2.298–99), he not only points to the malignant agent who lured him into believing unlikely probabilities but also finds a scapegoat for his own self-alienation. For if Iago is an evil Protagoras disguised as an honest Socrates attempting to “better” the condition of his patient—“Work on, / My medicine, work!” (4.1.44–45)—by helping him

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gain a truer vision of Desdemona, in Shakespeare’s psychology more than sophistry is involved in redisposing Othello’s sightlines by manipulating kairotic appearances. In the case of the early modern patient, the change in attitude is elicited from possibilities of the self that lodge deep within him, out of sight, so to speak, but susceptible to—and sometimes identifiable with—what Shakespeare’s contemporaries called a fallen will. Othello, that is to say, is a man composed not only of dissoi logoi in the sophistic sense but, more profoundly, of a split psyche, a concept unknown to Protagoras or Gorgias, perhaps dimly foreshadowed in Plato’s theory of knowledge as anagnorisis—a remembering—yet fully intuited by St. Augustine well before it was articulated by Freud in his theory of repression.21 Therefore Iago’s logotherapy, a discourse applied from the outside, functions to release what exists unacknowledged on the inside—the European discourses of blackness and sexuality from which Othello has retreated. This means that Othello’s conscious subject—that which tells him who he is—is a kind of internal “writing,” in Derrida’s sense: its radical self-alienation is invisible, and so Othello projects onto Iago the role of alienating agent responsible for the aberrations of “one that loved not wisely, but too well” (5.2.342). To adapt the sophistic terminology of our earlier discussion to a more familiar psychoanalytic model, we might say that dissoi logoi were already present within Othello’s psyche, but partially under erasure. They needed the insistent prompting of an Iago to acquire a new disposition, or harmonia, in which the hitherto weaker argument of sexual desire and its accompanying self-abasement would overcome the “[noble] nature, / Whom passion could not shake” (4.1.265–66) and emerge as the stronger. Othello glancingly acknowledges this when he refers to “one not easily jealous, but being wrought, / Perplexed in the extreme” (5.2.343–44), but his dominant strategy is to take cover under the internal “writing” that is represented in his final apology. By means of this speech he not only scapegoats Iago as the writer of his self-alienation but also tries to ward off the possibility that an inauthentic, unfathered tale may circulate about him in Venice. Literally recomposing himself as he glosses the “unlucky deeds” to be related abroad, he plays his own interpreter, ingeniously assembling the appropriate attributes, assuming the first-person pronoun, and then denying the improbable other whom Iago had charmed out of him—the “circumcised dog,” enemy to those publicly acknowledged Venetian probabilities to which he has aspired. In so doing, he enacts the slippery truth of Theuth, god of absolute passage. Thus Othello, as his words suggest, retains the dialectical bias of Platonic rhetoric—“My parts, my title, and my perfect soul, / Shall manifest me

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rightly”—though Shakespeare has made it clear that he is deeply susceptible to Plato’s intimation that dialectic, too, is only probable—and that to live a merely probable existence of sustained skepticism—“not jealous nor secure” (3.3.201)—is virtually impossible once one has doubts. For even as Iago makes the weaker case appear to be the stronger, persuading Othello that the woman he loves is the opposite of what he has believed her to be—a whore who aroused his lust, not a saint who recognized his heroism—Othello briefly glimpses the dissoi logoi in their ambiguous interplay: “I think my wife be honest, and think she is not, / I think that thou art just, and think thou art not” (3.3.387–88). But the new kairos prevails and he begins referring all his perceptions to Iago’s logos, interpreting everything Desdemona says and does as evidence of her perfidy, past, present, and future. In the same way that he reasserts his own identity at the end of the play, he assumes one for her in Act III because he cannot dwell in a probability that exhibits its constructedness and hence its primordial incoherence. Such a vision can lead one to suffer an epileptic fit and—when the fit is over—to perform a sacrificial rewriting of the self.

Two

“Against My Estimation”: Ciceronian Decorum, Stoic Constancy, and the Production of Ethos In returning to the origins of Shakespeare’s rhetorical anthropology, I have asked the reader to step behind the early seventeenth-century scene of his theatrical activities to consider the ideas and practices of men who lived some two thousand years before Othello and Iago were ever dreamed of. My reason for doing so is my conviction that the writings on rhetoric we have been examining not only reveal the lineage of the two antagonists but also foreground the salient features of the medium in which Shakespeare thought about the self and crafted his plays. In this chapter, I shall pursue the historical development of ethos and track the interlocking destinies of Iago and Othello to the site where Shakespeare is most likely to have encountered them in their most complex form—the writings of Cicero, which combined elements of Peripatetic, Stoic, and Academic philosophy, and were part of the sixteenth-century English grammar school curriculum. More particularly, I shall suggest that Shakespeare was also influenced by the neostoic writings of his contemporaries. By following this itinerary we will come to a new insight into why Iago could seem “a man that’s just”— and why “Othello’s occupation’s gone” when he answers “yes” to his own rhetorical question, “false to me?” (3.3.125, 360, 337).

I If Platonic in its dialectical bias, Othello’s anthropology also gives voice to the apodeictic transformations of ethos in Aristotle’s rhetoric and ethics. Plato’s prescription for a scientific oratory in the Phaedrus had provided the stimulus for Aristotle’s analysis of the psyche and the moral virtues in the Nicomachean Ethics and, in the Rhetoric, of the speaker’s ethos, the emotions he might arouse in himself, and the various types of auditors in whom such

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emotions could also be provoked—though Aristotle obviated the quest of certainty in these areas by insisting that only the probable knowledge of opinion is possible in the world of human action.1 Both the Ethics and Rhetoric are conceived as the heuristic instruments of an active negotiator, and in this respect they follow the more liberal strains in Plato’s renunciation of writing in the Phaedrus and his concern about the relationship between the law and the individual in the Statesman. In this latter dialogue, the Stranger reflects on the universal nature of public laws, noting that the legislator fashions them “for the generality of his subjects under average circumstances,” and though he legislates for each individual citizen, he does so by “what may be called a ‘bulk’ method rather than an individual treatment.” For how could any lawmaker “be capable of prescribing every act of a particular individual and sit at his side, so to speak, all through his life and tell him what to do?” (Statesman 295a). Aristotle’s answer to this problem of fitting a fixed and general formula to the fluid particulars of human behavior is the doctrine of the mean in matters of ethics—a mean not rigidly arithmetical but relative to the kind of person involved in a given act—and the doctrine of equity in ethics and rhetoric. If the mean relative to us is the standard by which an individual’s virtue is to be measured, equity is the principle invoked in determining the justice of an individual’s act in relation to the law. “Equity bids us be merciful to the weakness of human nature,” Aristotle explains, “to think less about the laws than about the man who framed them, and less about what he said than about what he meant; not to consider the actions of the accused so much as his intentions; nor this or that detail so much as the whole story; to ask not what a man is now but what he has always or usually been” (Rhet. 1374b ). It can be seen that both the doctrines of the mean and of equity attempt to negotiate between a fixed, inflexible standard of judgment and the potentially idiosyncratic behavior of a given individual, in each case regarding the person as someone with a history and an interiority that must be taken into consideration. Nonetheless, as Aristotle is fond of saying, art deals not with particulars but with kinds, and this principle is manifested in the Rhetoric and the Ethics in his extensive descriptions of the emotions and the virtues; their cognates and opposites; their causes, objects, and effects; and the kinds of persons in whom they inhere. In sum, he provides precisely those psychological details that Plato had called for in the Phaedrus, but in the form of what James Baumlin styles a “group psychology” that “demystifies the soul or psyche, rendering it subject to a range of physiological processes and

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social/ideological pressures.”2 This begins with the speaker himself, who must establish his credentials as a man of good sense (phronesis), virtue (arete), and good will (eunoia). He does this by choosing arguments and language designed to appeal to his auditory. To bring about a receptive attitude in his listeners, he must know not only what people generally believe to be good and hence desirable, but also something about the specific social practices and values that have informed their attitudes under the political constitution in which they live, and the different emotional states to which they are subject. Thus ethos, the analysis and representation of character (one’s own and that of one’s audience), is intimately connected to pathos, the emotions people feel under certain conditions, and to logos, or rational argument, which is deployed in the form of the rhetorical syllogism known as enthymeme, and of the example, or paradeigma, the rhetorical counterpart of logical induction. These are the chief instruments of persuasion, and the speaker’s ethos is revealed in his coordination of all three. Aristotle’s dialectical method of definition and division is best demonstrated in his discussion of pathos. “Take, for instance, the emotion of anger,” he remarks: “here we must discover (1) what the state of mind of angry people is, (2) who the people are with whom they usually get angry, and (3) on what grounds they get angry with them” (1378a). He defines anger as a “conspicuous revenge for a conspicuous slight, directed towards what concerns oneself or towards what concerns one’s friends.” He then divides slight into three kinds—contempt, spite, and insolence—describes the actions in which these attitudes are revealed, and explains why we feel different degrees of anger toward people who behave in these offensive ways, taking into consideration their relationship to us, our expectations of them, and the situations in which they act. What emerges from this discussion is a proliferating heuristic that can be used to induce anger in an audience when needed and also to justify or infer anger in the behavior of any individual under scrutiny, so as to shape an audience’s apprehension of him. Many of the emotions that serve as means of persuasion in the Rhetoric are found as constituents of the virtues and vices in the Ethics. Anger is an extreme that is designated “short temper” in contrast to its opposite, apathy, but it is also part of the mean called “gentleness” when it is felt “under the right circumstances and with the right people, and also in the right manner, at the right time, and for the right length of time” (N.E. 1125b). Short-tempered people, we learn, are quick to anger for inappropriate reasons and manifest their vice either in brief outbreaks of choler or in chronic sullenness. “Sullen people are hard to appease and their anger lasts for a

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long time, since they repress their passion. But once they retaliate, they are relieved; for revenge puts an end to their anger and engenders pleasure in place of the pain” (1126a). It is easy to see that such rhetorical and ethical analyses, however cautiously delineated (Aristotle reminds us that those who are merely apathetic are often praised for being gentle, just as those who are merely angry are praised for manliness), can come to function as normative descriptions. The doctrine of equity, with its aversion to judging particular acts and its emphasis on a man’s intention and “what he has always or usually been,” lends itself to the fashioning of such a norm. Even more accommodating in this regard is the doctrine of the mean. For Aristotle’s notion that moral virtue is an acquired habit developed from corresponding activities ( 1103b) offers a principle for stabilizing the self even as it engages the varied solicitings of the world. Since virtue is a hexis (Latin, habitus), or firm disposition to respond with the right proportion of emotion and the appropriate course of action to any situation, the virtuous man is the one in whom kairos, the fitting, has become installed as a habit. Far from denying the infinite variety of human situations that call forth an infinite variety of responses, Aristotle suggests that in determining the just mean in each situation, a human being can, as it were, exercise multiplicity and in doing so corroborate his continuous identity. Thus, through many different actions one can become more and more the same. Though “we can experience fear, confidence, desire, anger, pity, and generally any kind of pleasure and pain either too much or too little,” he insists, “to experience all this at the right time, toward the right objects, toward the right people, for the right reason, and in the right manner—that is the median and the best course, the course that is a mark of virtue” (1106b). In this scheme, the sophron, that man of practical wisdom celebrated by Protagoras and Isocrates, becomes a living mean since he chooses appropriately every time.3 In the vicious man, too, repeated practices gradually constitute an ethical norm. Although Aristotle denies that there can be a mean in extremes and therefore such a thing as “appropriate” though vicious behavior, the notion that repeated choices and actions of a man who is disposed in a certain way will develop in him a hexis that is not a virtue but a vice is built into his conception of ethical formation. Its longevity is attested by Hamlet’s advice to his mother to “assume a virtue if you have it not,” which is based on his understanding that Aristotelian self-fashioning can work both ways:  That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat, Of habits evil, is angel yet in this,

Ciceronian Decorum and Stoic Constancy / 59 That to the use of actions fair and good He likewise gives a frock or livery That aptly is put on. (Ham. 3.4.161–65)

Custom or habit, that is, can make a person better or worse, depending upon her practice, for “use almost can change the stamp of nature” (3.4.168). Such was the meaning conveyed by the popular Renaissance emblem of consuetudo, whose motto was vires acquirit eundo.4 The normative tendency of such behavioral concepts is of great importance to our understanding of Othello’s style of thought. In the cultural transmission of Aristotle’s ethical analyses of the emotions associated with the virtues and vices, and in his rhetorical analyses of the emotions associated with persuasion—corroborated by descriptions of the characters of youths, elders, men in their prime, rich men, and powerful men in the Rhetoric (1388b–1391a)—these guides to active, nuanced judgments of probable behavior become retrievable and applicable resources of literary characterization and rhetorical proof. Within a few years of Aristotle’s death, his pupil and intellectual heir, the polymath Theophrastus, produced a book called Ethical Characters (Diog. Laert. 5.47)—literally, “marks of ethos”—which set forth the traits of thirty common types of men.5 Though clearly the creations of a literary wit, they draw on the materials of the Ethics and the Rhetoric, and offer satirical portraits of such figures as the boaster, the coward, the surly man, the ironist, and the man of petty ambition, each of whom is fashioned so as to give the illusion that the reader has actually encountered him on one occasion or another. In effect, they answer to Plato’s hope that a student of rhetoric might exit from the classroom, meet his subject of study, and say, “That is the man, that character now actually before me is the one I heard about in school, and in order to persuade him of so-and-so I have to apply these arguments in this fashion” (Phaedrus 272a)—but they are no longer subjects to be persuaded, merely to be recognized and savored for their familiarity.6 Any one of these Characters reveals how Aristotle’s analysis lent itself to normative description, but the Character of the eiron is especially suggestive. In the Rhetoric, the eiron appears in the discussion of those who make us angry, as the kind “who reply with humorous levity when we are speaking seriously, for such behavior indicates contempt” (1379b). But he is also included among those we fear, as the man who has suffered an injury from us and is not passionate about it but is “quiet, dissembling, unscrupulous” (1382b). Later, in Book III, the eiron is associated with the aristocracy, for

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“[i]rony better befits a gentleman than buffoonery; the ironical man jokes to amuse himself, the buffoon to amuse other people” (1419b). When he appears in the Ethics, the eiron is the man deficient in truthfulness who pretends to be less than he is, the opposite of the excessive boaster (N.E. 1127a). Still, Aristotle observes, the extreme represented by such self-deprecators is closer to the mean of truthfulness than the lying of boasters, “for their speech is not motivated by profit but by [the concern] to avoid bombast. They disclaim especially those qualities which are highly valued by others, as Socrates used to do” (1127b). In Theophrastus, these various manifestations of the eiron are reduced to that of the mere cynical dissembler. The description starts out somewhat ambiguously—“Irony, roughly defined, would seem to be an affectation of the worse in word or deed”—but immediately afterward the eiron becomes one who goes up to his enemies, and volunteers to chat with them, instead of showing hatred. He will praise to their faces those whom he attacked behind their backs, and will sympathize with them in their defeats. . . . He will never confess to anything that he is doing, but will always say that he is thinking about it. . . . Hearing, he will affect not to have heard, seeing, not to have seen. . . . Or he will say that he has heard it from some one else: “This, however, was not the story that he told me.” “The thing surprises me”; “Don’t tell me”; “I do not know how I am to disbelieve you, or to condemn him”; “Take care that you are not too credulous.” (Theophrastus, ed. Jebb and Sandys, 53–55)

It will be immediately apparent that Theophrastus’s eiron is a fit description of Iago, and it may be that Shakespeare (but not, unfortunately, Othello) encountered him in Isaac Casaubon’s Latin translation of the Characters, published in 1592 and 1599. Even more evident, however, is the reduction of the eiron from his polysemous counterparts in Plato and Aristotle. Noting the trickle-down effect of Theophrastus’s adaptations of Aristotle, R. C. Jebb observes that “the characters of Theophrastus are essentially popular, interpreting the notions currently attached in society to certain epithets.” In this instance, “a word most flexibly and delicately expressive, a word contrived to include, without confounding, innumerable shades of grave or playful tone, had scarcely passed into currency when it was debased. Already in the time of Aristotle’s pupil ‘irony’ is popularly understood in a sense almost wholly bad, and the fine precision of the term has been lost” (Theophrastus, ed. Jebb and Sandys, 52–53). The semantic narrowing of eiron is a reminder that ethos, like many preconceptual practices, is liable to conceptual hardening as a creature of place, time, and social usage, yet even in this process

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can acquire different connotations and emerge from its demotic haunts in freshly signifying shapes.7 Theophrastus’s ethical transformations enjoyed a peculiar afterlife. Benjamin Boyce, still the most comprehensive biographer of the Character as literary form, remarks that “the fate of the Theophrastian character was to be moved out of the psychological training of the orator and out of the inventio (that is, the investigation of material) of his speech into the department of style, there to be treated with the figures of speech” (22). This is a fair if not wholly accurate description. To put a finer point on it, devices resembling the Character appear in the figures of thought, which are stylistic elements, while the raw materials for the construction of character are found in the topics of persons and actions, which are included among the materials of invention. The latter are to be fashioned into a probable character in the course of ingenious inference—as we’ve seen Iago do—while the former offer ready supplies for exemplary arguments. The apodeictic uses of ethos—and by this I mean literally the producing of character for illustration and persuasion—become apparent soon after Theophrastus’s death. In a manual of rhetoric written toward the end of the second century b.c.e., P. Rutilius Lupus comments that just as painters describe persons by appearance, so may orators describe vices and virtues through the figure of χαρακτηρισμόϚ (characterismos). That he has moral reform in mind becomes evident when he illustrates his point with a passage from Lycon, a follower of Theophrastus, which begins, “What hope remains for him who spends all his life in a single, despicable habit?” and portrays at length a typical day in the life of a gluttonous drunkard (Boyce, 22, citing Halm, 16). In the first century c.e. the younger Seneca advocates the use of such descriptions to illustrate precepts of moral philosophy, citing Cicero’s Stoic mentor: this science Posidonius calls ethology [ethologian], while others call it characterization [characterismon]. It gives the signs and marks which belong to each virtue and vice, so that by them distinction may be drawn between like things. Its function is the same as that of precept. For he who utters precepts says: “If you would have self-control, act thus and so!” He who illustrates, says: “The man who acts thus and so, and refrains from certain other things possesses self-control.” If you ask what the difference there is, I say that the one gives the precepts of virtue, the other its embodiment. (Epis. Mor. 95.65–66)8

Earlier, the author of the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium had included such descriptions among the figures of thought, which were held to

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be of great power in persuasion. The notatio “consists in describing a person’s character by the definite signs which, like distinctive marks, are attributes of that character [naturae]” (4.50.63). The example he offers—of a “man who is not actually rich but parades as a moneyed man”—draws on Theophrastus and similar sources to describe vividly a typical day in the life of a person alleged to be like the accused. “Character delineations of this kind,” observes the author, “which describe the qualities proper to each man’s nature carry very great charm, for they set before our eyes a person’s whole character [totam enim naturam cuiuspiam ponunt ante oculos], of the boastful man, as I undertook to illustrate, or the envious or pompous man, or the miser, the climber, the lover, the voluptuary, the thief, the public informer—in short, by such delineation any one’s ruling passion [cuiusvis studium] can be brought into the open” (4.51.65). Evidently by the first century b.c.e. Aristotle’s analysis of various kinds of ethical behavior in the Ethics, demanding active discretionary judgment on the part of the beholder, and rendered for persuasive purposes in the Rhetoric, has been packaged for ready use. In the epistle already cited, Seneca offers a sardonic allusion to this development: These illustrations, or, to use a commercial term, these samples [ut publicanorum utar verbo, iconismos], have, I confess, a certain utility; just put them up for exhibition well recommended, and you will find men to copy them. Would you, for instance, deem it a useful thing to have evidence given you by which you may recognize a thorough-bred horse, and not be cheated in your purchase or waste your time over a low-bred animal? But how much more useful it is to know the marks of a surpassingly fine soul—marks which one may appropriate from another for oneself! (Epis. Mor. 95.66–67)

For less edifying if equally persuasive purposes, Seneca’s contemporary, the rhetorician Quintilian, recommends the figures ethopoeia and prosopopoeia. Ethopoiea is a mimetic device to arouse what Quintilian called “the gentler emotions” (9.2.58). Prosopopoeia is the most difficult element in the suasoria, or deliberative theme that was practiced by the student declaimer, for the would-be orator not only composed an exhortation or dehortation on a given theme but also impersonated different kinds of speakers. Sometimes they were such historical figures as Caesar, Cicero, or Cato, and the student had to adapt his thought and language to their minds and manners. But “as a rule they impersonate sons, parents, rich men, old men, gentle or harsh of temper, misers, superstitious persons, cowards and mockers, so that hardly even comic actors have to assume more numerous roles in their performances on the stage than these in their declamations” (3.8.51).

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In preparing and performing such speeches, the most important thing is to consider what is suitable to each person [quid cuique personae conveniat], and the examples suggest that Theophrastian—or, as we shall see, Ciceronian— propriety is the referent. Boyce makes a useful point in this regard. The idea of propriety is bifocal in these treatises, he suggests, since on the near view they emphasize close attention to circumstances (Quintilian mentions fortunam, dignitatem, res gestas), while on the long view they are content with the general notion of decorum (Boyce, 29–30). And decorum, in one of its loci classici, Cicero’s mature discourse, Orator, turns out to be a cross between the Socratic “nothing too much” and the Aristotelian mean: “In an oration, as in life, nothing is harder than to determine what is appropriate [quid deceat videre]. The Greeks call it πρέπον; let us call it decorum or ‘propriety.’ . . . The universal rule, in oratory as in life, is to consider propriety [quid deceat]. This depends on the subject under discussion and the character [personis] of both the speaker and the audience. . . . Moreover, in all cases the question must be, ‘How far [quatenus]?’ For although the limits of propriety differ for each subject, yet in general too much is more offensive than too little [magis offendit nimium quam parum]” (70–73). Aristotle’s mean relative to the agent may be seen lingering behind this statement of propriety, but when Cicero offers illustrative examples from other disciplines, it becomes apparent that the term includes both a broad notion of appropriateness and a more refined notion of the attunement of emotion to person and circumstance: “the poet avoids impropriety as the greatest fault which he can commit,” erring “if he puts the speech of a good man in the mouth of a villain, or that of a wise man in the mouth of a fool; so, also, the painter in portraying the sacrifice of Iphigenia, after representing Calchas as sad, Ulysses as still more so, Menelaus as in grief [all obeying decorum], felt that Agamemnon’s head must be veiled, because the supreme sorrow could not be portrayed by his brush; even the actor seeks for propriety; what, then, think you, should the orator do?” (74) Cicero’s bifocal approach to quid decet is seen here in his banal reproof of the poet who makes a villain speak virtuously and in his more subtle praise of the painter who reveals the ineffability of Agamemnon’s grief by veiling his face. But there is a further complication.

II For Cicero, the problem vexing quid decet, or propriety, is that it confronts a version of the Platonic ideal of truth in the Stoic ideal of right—de recto ipso—which “is one and unchanging” (Orat. 72) and tends to exert a centripetal pull on the notion of decorum. Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean

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had suffered a virtual eclipse among the earlier Stoics, for whom virtue was defined as rational behavior in accordance with rational nature, not as appropriate choices in accordance with one’s constitution, training, and circumstances. The virtuous man was o´ mologoume´ nhn, consistent; literally, he behaved in accordance with one and the same logos because, as J. M. Rist observes, “for the early Stoics there is no valid distinction to be drawn between self-consistency and consistency with nature, for the microcosm represents the macrocosm and vice-versa” (16). While the later Stoics with whom Cicero studied had readmitted decorum as an acceptable standard of behavior, the orthodox notion of right persisted and demanded acknowledgment. This may be seen in the way Cicero incorporates the earlier ideal when defending the consul-elect Lucius Murena, accused of bribery in 63 b.c.e. His opponent in this case was the widely respected Cato the Younger, known for the strict Stoic ethics he derived from his grandfather, Cato the Censor. In defending Murena, Cicero turned Cato’s potentially disabling ethical reputation to his own advantage by praising his moral stature, yet at the same time wittily rehearsing the rigorous maxims the old Stoics were thought to embrace: “the wise man is never moved by favour, never forgives anyone’s misdeed; only the fool or the trifler feels pity; a real man does not yield to entreaty or appeasement. . . . The wise man never ‘supposes’ anything, never regrets anything, is never wrong, never changes his mind” (Pro Mur. 61).9 Noting that such rectitude wields great influence over a jury, he urges his hearers not to give the prosecutor’s moral reputation undue weight in judging the behavior of his client, the would-be consul.10 In Orator, Cicero almost apologetically carves out a space for the ideal of propriety against this more severe standard, explaining that “by ‘right’ we indicate the perfect line of duty which everyone must follow everywhere, but ‘propriety’ is what is fitting and agreeable to an occasion or person” (74).11 His bifocal answer to quid decet is therefore complicated by a less nuanced criterion, originating in early Stoic ethics, that had to be accommodated. Faced with a rigorous canon of right, one does not easily entertain such a concept as the mean relative to the agent, and under its pressure even propriety can lose a certain degree of flexibility. Propriety, as Cicero explains in De officiis, the book on moral duties he adapted from a treatise by the late Stoic Panaetius, is essentially twofold. It is identified with moral goodness as a whole, “for what is proper [quod decet] is morally right [honestum est], and what is morally right is proper” (1.94). Since moral goodness is identified with the exercise of the four cardinal virtues, it is our moral duty to observe propriety in our actions as just, wise, temperate, and brave men (1.100). However, we must also consider that we

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are endowed by nature with two “characters.” One is universal, and from this our moral sensibility arises; the other is individual, and just as human beings differ in physical attributes, they also differ in mind and spirit. Some men have been known for their wit, seriousness, wisdom, shrewdness, or cruelty. Some are “straightforward and open, who think that nothing should be done by underhand means or treachery. They are lovers of truth, haters of fraud. There are others still who will stoop to anything, truckle to anybody, if only they may gain their ends” (1.109). So individual “character” (in De officiis, the Latin noun is variously anima, persona, ingenium) is also a natural endowment, and Cicero insists that everyone “must resolutely hold fast to his own peculiar gifts, in so far as they are peculiar only and not vicious, in order that propriety . . . may the more easily be secured” (1.110). And this means that constantia is a condition of decorum: “If there is any such thing as propriety at all, it can be nothing more than uniform consistency in the course of our life as a whole and all its individual actions. . . . If we take this into consideration, we shall see that it is each man’s duty to weigh well what are his own peculiar traits of character, to regulate these properly and not to wish to try how another man’s would suit him. For the more peculiarly his own a man’s character is, the better it fits him [id enim maxime quemque decet, quod est cuiusque maxime suum]” (1.111–13). Propriety in ethics, poetry, and oratory follows the same principle.12 Cicero frequently attributes his rhetorical practice of arguing any case in utramque partem (on both sides of the question) to the skeptical philosophy of the later Academy, and so in De officiis he raises the possible objection that he himself is not being consistent in promulgating a Stoic ethics that emphasizes constancy. To this he replies, “What then, is to hinder me from accepting what seems to me probable, while rejecting what seems to be improbable, and from shunning the presumption of dogmatism, while keeping clear of that recklessness of assertion which is as far as possible removed from true wisdom?” (2.2.7).13 That is, he is fully consistent in promoting the wisdom of Stoic ethics (although he disagrees with Stoic epistemology) even as he behaves like a Peripatetic or Academician, since that can yield grounds for action. Strongly attracted to the Stoic principles of natural “character” and self-consistency, he translated these ethical principles into sources of persuasive power in oratory. James May has shown in detail the care Cicero takes to establish a consistent ethos for both defendant and accused early in his speeches and to develop probable arguments based on the propriety of the alleged action to that postulated ethos.14 In his earliest extant oration, the defense of Publius Quinctius against Sextus Naevius on an issue of alleged debt that had

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become so legally entangled that Quinctius was threatened with infamia (the loss of his civil rights), much of the case turned on Cicero’s derisive characterization of Naevius as a nefarious praecor (public crier or auctioneer), whose only gift is a loud voice he places at the disposal of any employer. Quinctius, in contrast, is characterized as a simple country fellow who could never have engaged in the legal evasions of which he is accused and was in fact duped by his accuser and kinsman: “Because Naevius spoke of what an honest man ought to do, Quinctius believed that one who imitated the language of honest men would also imitate their actions” (Pro Publio Quinctio 16). Naevius is a deceitful performer who acts in a manner wholly contrary to that of an honorable man—a thesis Cicero pursues as he examines “both the fact itself and the behaviour of Sextus Naevius in the light of the principles of duty and the custom of all men,” and proves that Naevius’s violation of decorum in his treatment of a partner, a relative, and a friend reveals the improbability of his accusation (48).15 One year later, in the case of the accused parricide Sextus Roscius of Ameria, whose father died mysteriously in Rome and whose patrimony was subsequently confiscated in a conspiracy by henchmen of the dictator Sulla, Cicero developed the defendant’s character as rusticus even more fully. Showing that the prosecution has not been able to establish Roscius’s motive or opportunity, since he was treated well by his father and rarely left tending the paternal fields in the country, he offers in praeteritio “what might have been a very strong argument for his innocence—that rustic manners, frugal living, a rough and uncivilized life are not generally the birthplace of such crimes. As you could not find every kind of crop or tree on every soil, so every kind of life does not produce every evil deed” (Pro Sexto Roscio Amerino 77). Here the circumstances of his client’s life are joined to an environmental typology to reinforce the Roman belief that “character was for the most part permanent and unchanging and that it was very difficult, if not impossible, for a man to perform actions inconsis­ tent with his previously manifested ethos” (May, 26). This practice appears repeatedly in Cicero’s work. Twenty years later, Cicero defended the grandson of Sulla against charges of joining with his former associate Publius Autronius Paetus in leading an insurrection against the Senate after the two had been convicted of bribery in their bid for the consulship, and of subsequently allying himself with the Catilinarian conspiracy. Much of this speech is devoted to his self-justification for defending a man who had already been convicted of ambitus (electoral manipulation) and who is accused of aiding Catiline. He uses the occasion to remind the judges of his own role in detecting and prosecuting the conspirators, thus confirming his own ethos and showing that as consul he knew as much as

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anyone about who was involved in the conspiracy and had never come across any evidence that Publius Sulla was among them. Late in the speech, he turns from his own authority as witness and addresses the characters of Sulla and the men with whom he allegedly conspired. Of the latter he says, “I only ask you to recollect in silence all those known to have been in the conspiracy. You will find that every single one of them stood condemned by his own life before your suspicion pronounced its verdict” (Pro Sulla 71). That is to say, their vitae et mores had already established their ethos and damned them. By way of contrast, he asks the judges to compare the life of Publius Sulla: “Place it before your eyes. Is there any act of his, any deed, that was—I shall not say over-rash—but that might be thought rather injudicious?” (72), and he answers his own question by recalling praiseworthy events in Sulla’s life that anyone might remember. He plainly states his principle for arguing in this manner: “In any matter more serious or important than usual, gentlemen, a man’s intentions, plans and acts must be judged by his character, not by the charges [non ex crimine, sed ex moribus eius] against him. No one of us can be moulded in an instant nor can his way of life be suddenly changed or his nature altered” (69). Again, character comes first, and all actions are judged in its light. The rigorous analysis of souls we found in Plato, which was more subtly modulated in Aristotle’s ethics as the mean relative to the agent, then rendered as “marks” of ethos by Theophrastus and later rhetoricians, has gradually coalesced in the ethical and rhetorical ideal of constantia through the hybridization of Peripatetic, Academic, and Stoic influences in Ciceronian rhetoric.16 If the representation of the ethos of defendant and accuser was an important part of the orator’s work, the example of Pro Sulla reminds us that the main subject of ethical representation was the speaker himself, as it had been since Aristotle, for whom the speaker’s ethos was one of the three main lines of persuasion.17 The Roman civic ideal of individual and family character (mos maiorum), however, contributed to the belief that ethos was natural, not invented by art. Unlike the entechnic ideal of Aristotle, which emphasized the fashioning of the speaker’s ethos through his choices of argument, arrangement, and diction, the conditions of Roman culture encouraged the orator to draw on his own social reputation and that of his family to establish his ethos.18 “Since character does not evolve or develop, but rather is bestowed or inherited by nature, an individual cannot suddenly, or at will, change or disguise for any lengthy period his ethos or his own way of life” (May, 6), and these are often determined by his family’s character.19 While indications of ethos were distributed throughout a speech in Roman oratory, as in the Peripatetic model, the Romans also unashamedly included

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recitation of the speaker’s deeds and those of his ancestors, which publicly promulgated his dignitas (worthiness), existimatio (repute), and auctoritas (power) in a society where one’s own social credit often carried greater weight than the justice of the litigant’s case. It was correspondingly more difficult for the novus homo without a family history of service to the state to win his case. Like Cicero (who came of an equestrian, not a senatorial family) in his preconsular cases, a novus homo would emphasize his industria and diligentia, his disadvantages facing an advocate of the nobilitas, and his courage in taking on an opponent armed with gratia, or influence. Indeed, the Roman legal system expanded opportunities for deploying ethos as the first premise of argumentation, for the advocate—whose role was virtually unknown in Greek judicial oratory, where the litigant spoke in his own behalf even if he paid a logographer for his speech—now had the opportunity to represent the ethos of his client, himself, his client’s opponent, the opposing advocate, and their auditors, playing one off another to advantage.20 “Conditioned by both the sociopolitical and the judicial climate in Rome,” May remarks, “ethos in Roman oratory can only be expected to have taken on a greater significance, played a larger role, and admitted more artistic applications than its counterpart in Greek oratory” (10). As ethos was fashioned from actual deeds, words, and reputations familiar to the community, rather than from the artful construction of the orator alone, its power was more fully apodeictic, proceeding as it did from acknowledged historical data, such as Cicero’s role in defeating Catiline, which he exploited by identifying such clients as P. Sestius, L. Flaccus, and T. Annius Milo, who were instrumental in recalling him from exile, and his own role in the salvation of the republic. He may have recounted history selectively—amplifying useful details, suppressing undesirable facts—but his verisimilar speeches always retained a vital persuasive link to the verum.

III I want now to extrapolate from Cicero to Shakespeare, for reasons which I hope will appear justified. When Iago complains to Roderigo that he has been “be-leed, and calmed / By debitor and creditor. This counter-caster,” Cassio—even after Othello’s “eyes had seen the proof” of his own abilities “at Rhodes, at Cyprus, and on other grounds” (1.1.27–30)—he is invoking the industria and diligentia of a Jacobean novus homo who has been disadvantaged in gaining “th’election” (26) by a gentleman who ostentatiously exhibits his “breeding” (2.1.98) and who, Iago invidiously (if ignorantly) claims, knows “the division of a battle” no better than “the toged consuls”

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(1.1.22, 24). Yet, as in the Roman model, it is Iago’s (eironically) reiterated reputation for honesty that persuades Othello of his probity in the matter of Desdemona: Therefore these stops of thine fright me the more. For such things in a false disloyal knave Are tricks of custom, but in a man that’s just They are close delations, working from the heart, That passion cannot rule. (3.3.123–27)

If Iago is disabled by the early modern incarnation of Roman family values, he also benefits from the Ciceronian existimatio of a received social ethos. “A man that’s just,” whose every outward act must be measured by his reputation, is interpreted very differently than a man known to be a “false disloyal knave,” whose “stop[s],” or “halfe telling of the tale,” as Thomas Wilson describes them, are merely “tricks of custom” (Arte of Rhetorique 180).21 He is assisted in his deception by the “free and open nature” of his listener, “that thinks men honest that but seems to be so” (1.3.398–99), because he knows that some men “are straightforward and open, who think that nothing should be done by underhand means or treachery” (De officiis 109). The Ciceronian typology—even in its more liberal form that answers to quid decet—left a rich and exploitable legacy that could be used in many ways, in this instance by an Iago who recognizes not only Othello’s ethos but also his understanding of ethos, and deploys it as a means of influencing Othello’s judgment. Ciceronian notions of character come down to Shakespeare’s culture not only as a set of rhetorical devices but also as instruments of ethical understanding that can be adapted in varying degrees of self-awareness to one’s own circumstances—more or less self-consciously, as Iago does, or as an uncritical personal ideology, as Othello the exotic stranger and Brabantio the patrician father do. Whether we prefer to think of Iago as a Protagorean relativist or as an immoral Academic skeptic, to whom one explanation of selfhood is as probable as another and who is thus open to argument in utramque partem, he commands an armature of beliefs that Othello seems rather to be possessed by. Shakespeare is the perceptive heir to Cicero.22 The connection I have drawn between Shakespeare’s representation of Othello’s ethos and Ciceronian oratory is more than adventitious. The play begins and ends with the threat of a trial in which Othello is both defen­ dant and advocate. In between, other trials of character unfold—Cassio’s first, then Desdemona’s—with Iago functioning as prosecutor and Othello

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as judge. As the initial trial opens, Othello uses neither pathos nor logos to defend himself, but offers instead only ethical arguments. When Iago warns him that the esteem and power Brabantio enjoys in Venice are sufficient to divorce him from Desdemona and place him under other legal constraints, he insists that “My services, which I have done the signory, / Shall out-tongue his complaints,” and alludes to his noble breeding: “I fetch my life and being / From men of royal siege” (1.2.18–22). In the event, this will turn out to be the compensatory gesture of an outsider who wants desperately to be considered an honorable member of the governing class, but it is nonetheless a claim to parity of social esteem, joined to the self-characterizing strategy of recalling public service repeatedly employed by Cicero. When Iago advises Othello to conceal himself from Brabantio, he replies: Not I, I must be found. My parts, my title, and my perfect soul Shall manifest me rightly. (1.2.30–32)

We noticed this response at the beginning of the previous chapter, and are now in a position to understand it more precisely. If Othello confidently articulates his merit in terms of self-evident attributes, it is because he is defending himself in the high Roman fashion. Though at the moment he suggests more of Coriolanus’s modesty than of Cicero’s self-appreciation,23 there is much in his language and conduct throughout the play to indicate that Shakespeare has endowed this man, who believes that character is given, with a Ciceronian notion of ethos. It is evident in the judicial defense that begins, “Rude am I in my speech /  And little blest with the soft phrase of peace” (1.3.82–83), goes on to substitute an ethical narrative for the rational arguments one might expect of a man accused of practicing magic and dispensing illicit drugs, and concludes that “This only is the witchcraft I have used” (170)—that is, my ethos. The Duke himself is persuaded by this thrice-told tale, and moments later its effectiveness in securing conviction is attested by Desdemona, who says, “I saw Othello’s visage in his mind” (1.3.253), which can only mean “in his words about himself.” But Othello’s belief in fixed character is heard not only in his descriptions of himself and Iago; it is also sounded in his early insistence that Desdemona’s actions are above reproach: ’ Tis not to make me jealous To say my wife is fair, feeds well, loves company,

Ciceronian Decorum and Stoic Constancy / 71 Is free of speech, sings, plays and dances well: Where virtue is, these are more virtuous. (3.3.186–89)

As in the Ciceronian defense, a lady’s ethos is the first premise that governs the meaning of all her apparent actions, and Othello never wholly relinquishes his belief in Desdemona’s. Nor does Shakespeare represent him as false in his self-representation when he wagers that when light-winged toys Of feathered Cupid seel with wanton dullness My speculative and officed instrument, That my disports corrupt and taint my business, Let houswives make a skillet of my helm And all indign and base adversities Make head against my estimation. (1.3.269–75)

Based on his sense of a perdurable ethos, this is a safe bet. For in the event it is not his “disports” that corrupt his business, but rather the corrosion of his faith in that ethos by a sophistic Greekling disguised as an honest Roman. He is not mistaken when he describes himself in his final apologia as “one not easily jealous, but being wrought, / Perplexed in the extreme” (5.2.343–44). He has had to be “wrought” from his customary way of thinking about ethos—not only Desdemona’s but his own—and as a result has experienced jealousy in both its narrow and broad Jacobean senses: as a covetous fear of sexual rivalry and as a general suspiciousness, doubt, and mistrust that we might call a dreadful intimation of anomie, but that Jacobeans would recognize as the unraveling fabric of a man’s constancy. The 1598 translation of Guillaume Du Vair’s La Philosophie Morale des Stoiques by Thomas James, an Oxford scholar and Sir Thomas Bodley’s first librarian, offers an illuminating gloss on the growing diffidence induced in Othello by Iago, with some verbal resonances that suggest Shakespeare may have known the text. Jealousy, he writes, is a sottish and irksome passion, it is the gall which maketh bitter the honeysweet of our life: for it is ordinarily seene in our pleasantest & sweetest actions which it maketh so bitter and sharpe, as nothing can bee more: for it chaungeth love into hatred, respect into disdaine, and certaintie into distrust. Make this account with your selfe, that whosoever meanes to leade a jelous

72 / Toward a Rhetorical Genealogy of Othello life, must leade a miserable life. The only meanes of shunning and avoyding it, is to make a man worthie of that which is desired: for jealousie is nothing els but a distrust of a mans selfe, and a bearing witnes of himselfe against himselfe of his small deservings.24

Chaos is indeed come again when Iago persuades Othello that Desdemona is unworthy of his devotion, not only because this vitiates his love for her but also because it calls in question the source of his success in winning her—his existimatio (the Latin for F’s “estimation,” quoted above, and Q’s “reputation”). It was his represented nobility to which she had responded, the character by which he knows himself. But, as Du Vair suggests, one’s existimatio can genuinely originate within and, when projected outward, be acknowledged in the reflecting eyes of witnesses—or it can be a false imposition, impressing others sufficiently that it is corroborated in their returning glances, but nonetheless remains a lie. Here he explains true existimatio: “Indeede true honour is the glittering & beaming brightnes of a good and vertuous action, which rebounds from our consciences unto the sight of them with whom wee live, and so by a reflexion in our selves, brings us a testimonie from others of the good opinion which they have of us, which makes us to enjoy great comfort of minde” (78). This goodness, emanating from the self and reflected back to it by others, is an apt description of Othello’s sense of the reiterated story of his life and its rhetorical effect. Its source is the virtuous man himself, and its unification of the private and public person enables him to function in the world. But what if the woman he has won by setting forth “his honours and his valiant parts” (1.3.254) appears to have defected to another? We may expect a certain diffidence to set in, but for the Stoic Moor something larger is at stake. Othello may deny that “mine own weak merits” are the causes of her revolt and comfort himself that “she had eyes and chose me” (3.3.190, 192); nonetheless a weakening in the tissue connecting the outer and inner self has occurred, and further pressure may cause a rent that urgently needs repair. For once he grants those eyes independent agency, his existimatio, believed to be the public extension of his inward self, may no longer be a function of his goodness but, on the contrary, of his desire—and hers. He may discover he has been playing to the crowd, like Socrates’ orator, who wins his case by presenting not what is true but what is merely plausible, and thus loses his liberty to the demos (Phaedrus 272d–e). For our goodness, observes Du Vair, if wee once forsake it, wee doe but embrace a shadowe instead of a bodie, and fasten the rest of our minds upon the opinion of the vulgar sort of people,

Ciceronian Decorum and Stoic Constancy / 73 and so voluntarily renounce our liberties, to serve the humours and passions of other men, and are compelled to displease our selves to please them which doe behold us: So that our affections are hanged upon the eyes of other men: and wee love not vertue, but as the common people doe love and favour it: if wee chance to attempt or doe any good thing, it is not done for the love of good, but for desire of honour. (78–79)

Du Vair is speaking here of the loss of a man’s integrity, which occurs when he provulgates his selfhood not simply through actions that are selfdeclarative (Othello’s and Coriolanus’s preferred mode of subject formation), but by actively seeking public approbation, and thereby succumbs to his desire for another’s desire and subjugates himself. This possibility is always present for a man who aspires to Stoic self-sufficiency. We hear a hint of the anxiety attending it when Othello first defends his marriage and suggests the potential self-loss this might entail: For know, Iago, But that I love the gentle Desdemona I would not my unhoused free condition Put into circumscription and confine For the sea’s worth. (1.2. 24–28)

“Unhoused free condition” refers not only to his life as a soldier of fortune but also to the Stoic belief that the virtuous man is a free man—and, in the more rigorous construction of this liberty, owes allegiance to no country, finding his home anywhere under the heavens.25 As we shall see in a later chapter, Othello is beholden to Desdemona in many ways; the conclusion to his tale—“She lov’d me for the dangers I had pass’d, / And I lov’d her that she did pity them” (1.3.168–69)—says as much. But the possibility that he has deployed his ethos for any motive other than rightful self-declaration— that he himself is the novus homo inveigling his way into the ranks of the patriciate through one of its daughters—seems never to occur to him until Iago reminds him how unnatural Desdemona’s preference for him over her own countrymen has appeared to her father (3.3.232–43). It is only then that his blackness, want of courtliness, and declining years press into his consciousness. The psychological strategy that he may have practiced and fears acknowledging is voiced by Iago, who in so many ways represents Othello’s unconscious, when he tells Roderigo, “Mark me, with what violence she first lov’d the Moor, but for bragging, and telling her fantastical

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lies; and will she love him still for prating?” (2.1.220–22). Had he indeed wooed her as though “boasting is an honour”? Iago opens such a possibility when he plants doubts in Othello’s mind about Desdemona’s honesty, and it is a dangerous possibility, for Othello will feel the need to rehabilitate his existimatio by performing an act of justice upon a whore. His loss of ethos is rehearsed through Cassio, who—unlike Othello—has confessed his weakness and—like Othello—allows himself to be manipulated by Iago, who first arranges that he commit a trespass and then prosecutes him for it. If Othello is a would-be Venetian, styling himself in the Roman manner, Cassio is the genuine article, who, anticipating the Moor, bemoans the loss of estimation so valued by his class: “Reputation, reputation, reputation! O, I have lost my reputation, I have lost the immortal part of myself—and what remains is bestial. My reputation, Iago, my reputation!” (2.3.258–61). Iago, an outsider to the system of inherent ethos but an adept at exploiting it, dismisses the essentialist implications expressed by Cassio—“Reputation is an idle and most false imposition, oft got without merit, and lost without deserving”—and substitutes a more autonomous version of estimation, which contains a grain of Stoic truth: “You have lost no reputation at all, unless you repute yourself such a loser” (2.3.264–67). But this is no consolation to Cassio, who has lost self-control and knows it: “It hath pleased the devil drunkenness to give place to the devil wrath; one unperfectness shows me another, to make me frankly despise myself” (2.3.291–93). Iago’s abrupt about-face (“By Janus!”) three scenes later, as he argues the intrinsic nature of reputation even as he slanders Cassio, is then more than a sign of hypocrisy. It is precisely because he shares with Othello the position of outsider to the Venetian power establishment—his alienation based on class, Othello’s on race—that he recognizes the Moor’s yearning to participate in the patrician value system that so prizes reputation. But it is his self-conscious vantage-point outside that system—a selfconsciousness not shared by Othello—that enables him to observe its often false impositions and releases his perception of its dissoi logoi and an argument in utramque partem: Who steals my purse, steals trash—’tis something—nothing, ‘Twas mine, ‘tis his, and has been slave to thousands— But he that filches from me my good name Robs me of that which not enriches him, And makes me poor indeed. (3.3.160–64)

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As his own interaction with Roderigo reveals, a purse is a fungible asset, easily alienated to the benefit of another, whereas a good name is the public notice of one’s human nature and if lost, as Cassio laments, “what remains is bestial.” This proves prophetic, for even before Iago has fully administered his pharmakon, Othello has concluded that “My name, that was as fresh / As Dian’s visage, is now begrim’d and black / As mine own face” (3.3.389–91). The novus homo suddenly feels himself exposed as less than human, and his need to restore his good name and cover over his ineligibility leads him by the end of this scene to vow “black vengeance”(3.3.450).26

IV It is not just reputation that Othello loses, however; it is the basis of that reputation, his constantia, which is his means of self-definition. When he asks Iago just a few minutes earlier, “Think’st thou I’d make a life of jealousy / To follow still the changes of the moon / With fresh suspicions?” (3.3.180–82), he is disavowing (if unwittingly) the Protagorean life of his ensign for the steady life of propriety, whose essence, we will recall, is consistency. Why is this so important to him? We will examine its racial significance in chapter 11, but in the present context the answer is that the centripetal impulses of Ciceronian Stoicism provide him with a coherence of being that insulates him from the shifting contingencies of the world beyond the self. In a penetrating study of Senecan tragedy, Gordon Braden has offered the provocative thesis that what Plato calls the spirited part of the tripartite soul—the thymos, thought to account for the aggressive self-assertiveness of the epic hero and, in fifth-century Greece, the lust for leadership exhibited by such statesmen as Themistocles and Pericles—turned inward after the decline of public life in Athens, manifesting itself in the autarchia advocated by the newly risen philosophical school of the Stoics (5–27). It became the source of an internal imperialism, stirring the bearer to exert powerful selfcontrol and to feel contempt for an outside world that he could no longer influence, yet at the same time it provided protection against that world’s contingencies. Stoicism substituted a moral aristocracy for a military or civic aristocracy, and the unpredictability of fortune for that of human adversaries. In late republican and imperial Rome, in the divided papacy of fourteenth-century Italy, and again in Reformation Europe, Stoicism offered a comforting perspective on the uncertain turbulence of public life even when one participated in it as a social and political being, for it drew boundaries around a self that would, in theory, be less vulnerable to physical

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and material goods and evils. As early as Seneca, however, a powerful outward striving reasserted itself in Stoic reinterpretations of Greek myths whose heroes—Hercules, Thyestes, Medea—imposed their pent-up wrath upon the world in excessive ways that would seem the antithesis of Stoic self-containment, and in the early Renaissance the same Petrarch who wrote a Senecan De remediis fortuitorum also produced the first modern epic, Africa, in which a Stoic sense of self-worth is joined to military virtus. Its hero Scipio, weighing his famous military successes against his inward imperialism, says: Certainly—if my glory is not debased in saying so myself—I am not as proud of any other virtue as I am that I am seen to hold firm the reigns of enticing pleasure. . . . It is a great glory to have conquered Syphax; but believe me, it is a greater one to have tamed the heavy tumult of the heart & to have put a rein on the furious spirit.” (5.395–98, 418–20, cited in Braden, 74)

Observing the potentially contradictory juxtaposition of apatheia and violence here, Braden notes that “self-control is widely exalted as a proper object of untroubled pride and an important source of the warrior’s inner confidence and serenity, and the alliance between Stoicism and combative aspiration lodges deep in the Renaissance mind.” That alliance, he remarks, “is philosophically distracting, but it is of a piece with other salient features of the Renaissance imagination. The same humanist culture that embraces the philosophy of apatheia also finds itself promulgating a newly Homeric valorization of anger” (74, 75). While Braden’s aim is to account for the paradoxical manifestation of “noble anger” in the Stoic spirit, his emphasis on the interdependence of military virtue and moral self-control in the Renaissance is helpful in understanding the dual unraveling of Othello—as husband and as warrior.27 Before examining this phenomenon, I shall call in one more witness to help us understand the Stoic inflections of Renaissance heroism, though not from the perspective of Senecan tragedy. Reuben Brower argued that Othello should be considered among Shakespeare’s “Roman” plays, insofar as it participates in the sixteenth-century humanist (Italian and English) reinterpretations of classical epic and draws its vocabulary from Stoic and neostoic understandings of that tradition (1–28, 142–49). In this reading, Othello’s “perfect soul” is the complement of Chapman’s “complete man,” and his anguished outcry, “Farewell the tranquil mind” (3.3.351) is, in effect, a farewell to “Learning,” the term Chapman uses to designate “the skill to throwe / Reignes on your bodies powres, that nothing knowe” (Euthemiae Raptus 504–5, cited in Brower, 59)—to manage, that is, the domain of the

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senses, which cause perturbations in the soul. For Chapman, as for many others who were attracted to the Stoic ethical ideal, such as Du Vair, Justus Lipsius, and Joseph Hall, achieving and maintaining tranquility of mind against the solicitation of the passions involved a continual struggle. Lipsius’s English translator, Sir John Stradling, uses the word repressed in virtually a Freudian sense to describe the psychic energy required to keep down the affective responses to the body’s sensory messages.28 He defines constancy as “a right and immoveable strength of the minde, neither lifted up, nor pressed down with external or casuall accidents,” and—important for an understanding of Othello—writes that inconstancy is the result of sensory incursions upon the soul that make us vulnerable to opinion: For though the bodie be sencelesse and immooveable of it selfe, yet it taketh life and motion from the soule: And on the other side, it representeth to the soule the shapes and formes of things thorough the windowes of the senses. Thus there groweth a communion and society betwixt the soule and the bodie, but a societie (if you respect the ende) not good for the soule. For she is therby by litle and little deprived of her dignity, addicted and coupled unto the senses, and of this impure commixtion opinion is ingendred in us, Which is nought els but a vaine image and shadow of reason: whose seat is the Sences: whose birth is the earth. (79, 82)29

Opinion, we may remember, is the bugbear of Platonic and Stoic epistemology—it is the doxa, based on probability, that Plato scorns, and it informs the empty acataleptic visiones the Stoics deride the Academics for accepting so complacently. Opinion is specifically related to moral and psychological flux: “It is vain, uncertaine, deceitfull, evill in counsell, evill in judgment,” Stradling declares. “Today it desireth a thing, to morrowe it defieth the same. It commendeth this, it condemneth that . . . And as the eye that beholdeth a thing thorough water, or thorough a myst, mistaketh it: So doth the mind which discerneth by the clouds of opinions” (82). Thus sense perception, infiltrating the soul, breeds opinion there, and by means of opinion “we are troubled with cares, distracted with perturbations, over-ruled by vices” (82), and rendered inconstant. This casts a revealing light on Iago’s deconstruction of Othello in Acts III and IV. Iago’s self-assigned task is to lay bare Othello’s Stoic struggle for rational hegemony and reverse it by stimulating Othello’s senses to the point where he is compelled to declare: “My blood begins my safer guides to rule / And passion, having my best judgment collied, / Assays to lead the way” (2.3.201–3). That is, if “Our general’s wife is now the general,” as he

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tells Cassio (2.3.309–10), then Othello must be made to know it. His aim, then, is not only to incite Othello’s passions but to make him aware that he has become passionate, is filled with repressed “opinions.” After inducing Othello to release the “opinions” in his soul—by means of suspicious questions, withheld surmises, warnings regarding jealousy, aphorisms concerning Venetian wives, reminders of Desdemona’s earlier behavior and her father’s view of what that meant—Iago tells him, “I see this hath a little dash’d your spirits” and, twice again, “I do see you are moved,” “I see you are mov’d” (3.3.218, 221, 228). Thus Othello is forced to acknowledge that, as Stradling puts it, he feels himself to be “continuallie floting on the waves of doubtfulness, without any certain resolution” (83). And since “to be once in doubt, / Is once to be resolved” (3.3.182–83), he tries to regain his lost equanimity by concluding, in Stoic fashion, “‘ Tis destiny, unshunnable, like death: / Even then this forked plague is fated to us, / When we do quicken” (3.3.279–81). But he is far too “troubled with cares, distracted with perturbations” to be consoled by the idea of destiny. His discomposure marks the end of the heroic life that is his ethos. Why? This brings us back to Braden’s point about the relationship of the warrior’s wrath and the Stoic ethos. It seems strange that doubt of Desdemona’s fidelity should lead Othello to renounce his soldiership and all that is associated with it. One might think that, on the contrary, he would acknowledge the old humanist topos that the lives of the warrior and the lover are incompatible and, like Alexander in Lyly’s Campaspe, yield the lady to a more suitable lover. But he doesn’t. Having begun to suspect that a passionate drive for glory lay behind his wooing of Desdemona and—as I shall argue in chapter 11—having been forced by Iago to recognize the sexual passion she released in him on their nuptial night, he seems also to believe that desire for glory has informed his heroism. This is why the valedictory beginning “Farewell the tranquil mind, farewell content” and ending with “Othello’s occupation’s gone” (3.3.351–60) should be heard as the subtext to the “story of my life” that he “ran through” when wooing Desdemona, as well as its palinode. For only when he renounces his profession does he reveal that his tranquility has been bound up in “the big wars, / That makes ambition virtue” (3.352–53). In this phrase, the struggle to convert sense-induced passions into rationally controlled heroic deeds becomes evident. For ambition must be made ceremonious if it is to be thought a virtue. Observes Du Vair: They which would smooth and flatter ambition, would faine make men beleeve that she is in stead of a staire for vertue to mount up to the top of honour: for, they say, for ambition sake men leave al other vices, and in fine

Ciceronian Decorum and Stoic Constancy / 79 forsake ambition too for the love of vertue. But stay, this is not true: if ambition cover and hide all other vices, yet she doth not take them away for all that, but suffers them to lurke for a time under the craftie ashes of a malicious and fained dissimulation, hoping that they shall have the opportunitie hereafter to break foorth into a flame, when they shall get credit enough to raigne & rage publikely where they will with impunitie. (79)

Ambition—“a most gentle passion, which dives most gently downe into the most gentle manlike and heroical spirits” (81)—is a cover for more pernicious passions that seek outlets under its allegedly heroic aegis. It cannot be expunged but, as Othello’s language reveals, it can be displaced onto ornamental sublimations of passion that make an honorable life possible. These sublimations pass in review as Othello bids farewell to “the plumed troops,” “the neighing steed,” “the shrill trump,” “the spirit-stirring drum,” “th’ear-piercing fife,” “the royal banner,” and “all quality, / Of pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war!” Each element in this litany is a circumlocution that avoids naming violent passion yet specifies the sensory pleasures to be had in “the big wars, / That makes ambition virtue.” Othello’s occupation’s gone because he discovers something that Iago finds words for only a few minutes later: “I see, sir, you are eaten up with passion” (3.3.394). Unlike Scipio Africanus, whose conquests were justified by reining in his passions, Othello seems to have discovered that his engagement in the big wars and his conquest of Desdemona were both both driven by the appetite for glory, and he is shattered. In these conditions, his attempts to regain equanimity may be seen as desperate efforts to remain integral. The word patience appears fourteen times in Othello—more frequently than in any other play besides Henry VIII, where it is frequently associated with Queen Catherine, for whom Sir Thomas Wyatt translated Plutarch’s essay De tranquilitate. It is first heard in such phrases of courtesy as “By your patience,” a polite request for sufferance of speech or action; but it becomes an increasingly pressured term as the Moor feels the departure of his constantia. “Patience,” Iago urges when Othello cries “O, blood, blood, blood,” and calls up the relentless Pontic Sea as an apt illustration of his steady motion toward revenge (3.3.454–63). He urges it again when preparing Othello to eavesdrop on Cassio’s alleged confession of “coping” his wife, to which the Moor replies, “I will be found most cunning in my patience / But—dost thou hear? most bloody”—a perverse version of the violence-and-serenity formulation of Scipio (4.1.88, 91–92). It is in the brothel scene, however, as Othello attempts to explain his anguish to Desdemona, that his loss of patience is most fully heard. He “should

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have found in some part of my soul / A drop of patience” (4.2.53–54), he says, had he suffered the physical afflictions of Job. But he has had to endure lingering public scorn—the ruin of his existimatio. And even that might have been bearable, had his wife not turned the place where he garnered up his heart—“the fountain from the which my current runs / Or else dries up”— into “a cistern for foul toads / To knot and gender in” (4.2.60–63). The lines conflate Stoic and Christian references (Job was a neostoic hero, while the garner alludes to Acts 17:28 and the cistern, to Proverbs 5:15–18), but the most telling note is his admission that his heart is in another human being, neither in heaven nor in his own breast. What is a romantic commonplace of Renaissance erotic poetry is, on the lips of a would-be Stoic hero, a selfnegating statement of failure. Patience herself will change when she gazes on him to witness this failure: Turn thy complexion there, Patience, thou young and rose-lipped cherubin, Ay, here look, grim as hell! (4.2.63–65)

The transformation that has come over Othello is described most explicitly in Act IV when Lodovico sees him strike and vilify Desdemona: Is this the noble Moor whom our full senate Call all in all sufficient? This the nature Whom passion could not shake? whose solid virtue The shot of accident nor dart of chance Could neither graze nor pierce? (4.1.264–68)

This string of Stoic commonplaces suggests why Othello’s ethos has seemed unassailable not only to himself but also to the Venetian senate, which had made him their general. Lodovico names apatheia as the salient feature of that ethos, the total freedom from disturbance of mind that is usually ascribed to the Stoic wise man, who has learned to control passionate responses to external good and evil.30 What Lodovico seems not to know is the internal struggle that lies behind the Stoic mask of calm, and this is what Shakespeare has been at pains to reveal through Othello’s implicit denials early in the play and through the sensory incitements of the skeptical Iago. This adds yet another facet to Shakespeare’s Moor, who is not only a black African and

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a Roman orator of Ciceronian habits of speech, but also a Stoic of Cato’s school. Cicero’s Stoic ethos, as we have seen, was of the moderate variety he learned from Posidonius, which admitted quid decet as a guide to behavior, but it coexisted with a more severe notion of “right.” The man whom Lodovico describes and whom Othello believes himself to be hearkens back to an older ideal of the “good man,” of whose existence Cicero himself was skeptical, and who, even Seneca declared, “springs into existence, like the phoenix only once in five hundred years” (Ep. Mor. 42.1). What better mask for a black African entering European ideological territory? If the first four acts of the play test the viability of that ideal of Stoic integrity and reveal that it may be a brittle persona concealing passion rather than unshakable virtue, the final act suggests the facility with which one may resume that persona in a gesture of existential necessity that may disguise, as Du Vair warns his readers, other, more vicious motives. Not only does the “justice” of strangling Desdemona “even in the bed she hath contaminated” “please” Othello (4.1.205), but on entering his bedchamber he is once again the Ciceronian advocate reassuring his soul that it is a just case that moves him, and declaring his respect for the modesty of the jury: “It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul, / Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars: / It is the cause. . . .” (5.2.1–3). We can hear a self-serving denial in these words which refuse to name the crime, but it is through such evasions that Othello’s ethos functions. Repression is the price of constancy. Which is also why he insists he’ll not shed her blood nor scar her alabaster skin: her death must not betray his or her sensuality—death, too, must be pure. Constant to his purpose, he can even kiss her and inhale the fragrance of her breath once, twice, three times without faltering, and rename the grief that rises in his eyes “cruel tears”—until, that is, she awakens, protests, denies, resists, and incites the revenge underlying his resumption of ethos, making him call what he thought a sacrifice a murder. Yet old habits die hard. Like the Cicero returning from exile who attempted to recuperate his tarnished reputation and gloss his disgrace by recalling his earlier triumphs over Catiline, Othello opens his final defense with the line, “I have done the state some service, and they know’t” (5.2.337). The ambitious Cicero succeeded for several years in winning cases by commemorating past public service, but Othello the tragic man suddenly feels the inanity of the gesture—“No more of that”—and offers a final, and deeply personal, ethical narrative in its place to explain his horrible act (5.2.338–49), marking the difference between the canny politician and the sentient hero. At the last, however, it is as an esteemed civic hero that he takes his leave, reenacting his service to the state to memorialize

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his statesmanship and through its publicity to punish himself for betraying Venice and his Venetian love. Thus does he prove his case.

V What is the explanatory value of reading Othello against the ethical assumptions and techniques of Ciceronian oratory? I think it has several benefits. First, it helps us to understand Shakespeare’s conception of the Moor if we can locate a deeply rooted cultural precedent for embracing a given, fixed ethos with which one identifies personally, which is recognized publicly, and for which one is willing to suffer. That is to say, Ciceronian oratory offers us a concrete historical instance of what we might otherwise be inclined to describe, in the more abstract terms of psychoanalysis, Derridean deconstruction, or marxism, as a certain mode of subject formation, whether through induction into the symbolic order, “arche-writing,” or the political apparatuses of interpellation. These are important ways of accounting for the representation of Othello, and they underlie my sense of what it meant for the Moor to assume the Stoic mask, but my aim here is to locate a specifically historical model of the self that was available to Shakespeare in the early 1600s. In the continuous interplay of ingenious and apodeictic ethical discourse that we have examined—from the itinerant fifth-century sophists Protagoras, Gorgias, and Isocrates to the place-bound fourth-century schools of Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastus, and their followers, late republican Rome turns out to be the temporal space where probability and truth, propriety and right, Academic skepticism, Peripatetic moderation, and Stoic rationalism contend to produce a persuasive ethos for a conservative aristocratic culture in which ascribed identities are cherished. While in a sense always already there, this ethos must still be shaped and enhanced by the talented orator through ingenuity and art. But such identities are also sought, as Cicero’s own example attests, and can be achieved after a prescribed cursus of service and self-advocacy, resulting in a perfectly oxymoronic ethos—the achieved ascribed identity.31 But that is precisely the effect of social mobility in prerevolutionary conditions. It brings with it the anxieties that a novus homo must experience on the way up as well as the jealousies that haunt the man whose confirmed existimatio seems unassailable but isn’t, since he is a creature fashioned by passion, time, and circumstance. Such are the conditions in which Shakespeare also wrote, and they infuse his plays. But more than analogy is at work here. If the historical dialectic of rhetorical anthropology is useful in the long term for understanding the relationship of ingenious Iago and apodeictic Othello, in the short term we

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must remember that history tends to repeat itself, with both expected and unanticipated strangenesses. When intentional, it may result from the practice of discriminating interpreters like those fifteenth- and sixteenth-century humanists who attempted to apply the monuments of the past to the needs of the present. Among the chief legacies of their renovatio were Cicero’s rhetorical treatises and orations. Which means that Ciceronian oratory offers not only historical precedent but also a contemporary context for Othello’s ethos. If its more controversial features are seen in the debates about Ciceronian imitation immortalized in Erasmus’s Ciceronianus, its more routine purposes are documented in T. W. Baldwin’s meticulous survey of English grammar school curricula in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Baldwin finds that Cicero’s orations were regularly studied for their rhetorical features in the upper forms, and though his own view of Shakespeare’s familiarity with the orations is agnostic, there is verbal and formal evidence that he did know some of them. In the Pro Sulla, for example, as Cicero establishes the defendant’s ethos, he asks the jury to “review his life unfolded from its beginning to the present day [vitam ab initio usque ad hoc tempus explicatam . . . recognoscite]” (74), a line not only reminiscent of Othello’s “I ran it through, even from my boyish days, / To the very moment that he bade me tell it” (1.3.132–33), but even more precisely echoed in the Duke’s address to Angelo in Measure for Measure: “There is a kind of character in thy life / That to th’observer doth thy history / Fully unfold” (1.1.26–29). In Pro Sexto Roscio Amerino, there is a passage that reads like the mise-en-scène for the murder of Duncan in Macbeth: Not many years ago . . . a certain Titus Caelius, a well-known citizen of Tarracina, went to bed after supper in the same room as his two grown-up sons, and was found dead in the morning with his throat cut. As no slave nor free man could be found, on whom suspicion might have fallen, while the two grown-up sons who slept near their father declared that they had not noticed anything, they were indicted for parricide. What could be so suspicious? that neither of them had observed anything? that someone had dared to venture into that room, at the very same time when the two sons were there, who could easily have seen the crime and offered resistance? Moreover, there was no one who might have been reasonably suspected. However, the judges having been convinced that the young men had been found asleep when the door was opened, they were acquitted and cleared of all suspicion. (64–65)

The reason behind the acquittal, Cicero notes, was that the judges thought no man could sleep peacefully after commiting such an impious crime: not

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only was carefree repose impossible, one could not even breathe without fear. He concludes: For the truth is this, gentlemen: the blood of a father and mother has great power, restraining force, and sanctity; a single drop of this blood produces a stain, which not only cannot be washed out, but penetrates even to the heart [ex quo si qua macula concepta est, non modo elui non potest, verum usque eo permanat ad animum], to be succeeded by the height of frenzy and madness. (66–67)

The contiguity of the description of the old man and his sons chambered together (not mentioned in Holinshed) and the psychological reasoning behind their acquittal, so evocative of Macbeth’s condition after the murder and Lady Macbeth’s obsessive washing of her hands and subsequent madness, offers strong presumptive evidence of Shakespeare’s familiarity with the speech.32 My concern, however, is less Shakespeare’s immediate sources than the ways of thinking about ethos that were available to him when he conceived Othello and other classical dramatis personae such as Julius Caesar, Horatio, Brutus, Troilus, Kent, Antony, Octavius Caesar, and Coriolanus—all of whom have distinctively Stoic “marks of character.” Clearly, Cicero was an important influence, through his oratory and his rhetorical and philosophical treatises. So, too, were Seneca and Plutarch, whose ethical ideas appealed to Christian sensibilities and were incorporated in the neostoic reflections of such writers as Du Vair, Montaigne, Lipsius, and Joseph Hall. It is useful to recall that the first English literary Characters were written by Hall, an Anglican bishop and a serious disseminator of Stoic teachings, whose Characters of Virtues and Vices appeared in 1608. The Characters of virtue all seem to be versions of Stoic rectitude—the Wise Man, Honest Man, Faithful Man—while the Characters of vice are in different ways examples of inconstancy. They are also written in a more figurative style, as if their very inconsistency defies simple description and logical definition and division.33 Only two years later, in a play featuring a Stoic Moor—this time a palpably fake Stoic—Cardinal Monticelso tries to prove in court that the ambiguous heroine Vittoria Corombona is a whore. He does so by reciting a lengthy figurative invective in which he heaps metaphor upon metaphor, in a hopeless attempt to capture Vittoria’s quality: Shall I expound whore to you? Sure, I shall; I’ll give their perfect character. They are, first,

Ciceronian Decorum and Stoic Constancy / 85 Sweetmeats which rot the eater; in man’s nostril, Poisoned perfumes. They are coz’ning alchemy, Shipwrecks in calmest weather. What are whores! Cold Russian winters, that appear so barren As if that nature had forgot the spring. They are the true material fire of hell, Worse than those tributes i’th’Low countries paid. . . .

and so on. After twenty-three lines of such proliferating metaphors, Vittoria calmly replies, “This character scapes me” (3.2.78–101). Whatever else the renaissance of the Greek literary Character at the end of the sixteenth century may represent, it witnesses this turbulent culture’s desire to classify and describe the different kinds of soul one might meet on the street, and also—if we take the depositions of Shakespeare and Webster seriously—its Stoic fear that human beings are actually far too Protean ever to be captured in a single register of words. Dissoi logoi prevail.

Part II

The Logic of Renaissance Rhetoric

Three

“Apt and True”: Speech, World, and Thought in Shakespeare’s Humanist Dialectic I now make a lateral move in my attempt to reconstruct the psycholinguistic environment in which Shakespeare wrote his plays. From the ancient traditions of representing ethos that we have studied, in which the antithetical impulses of rhetorical anthropology may be discerned struggling for mastery until they assumed the complexly tensed form in Ciceronian oratory that found a niche in Elizabethan education and resonated in contemporary neostoic writings, I turn to a contiguous sixteenth-century linguistic phenomenon.This is the incursion of rhetorical values into dialectical training. The peculiar syncretism that resulted, I shall argue, filters into the world of Othello, affecting diction, grammar, and—most important—the apprehension of fact, suggesting that Shakespeare was alive to its hazards. As in previous chapters, I shall begin by asking the reader to attend closely to a distinctive bit of speech.

I Just moments after the murder of Desdemona—her dead body still in full view of the theater audience and of those onstage—Emilia challenges Iago to clear himself of the charge that he told Othello his wife was false. Exhibiting only the slightest trace of defensiveness, Iago replies with his usual aplomb: “I told him what I thought, and told no more / Than what he found himself was apt and true” (5.2.172–73). The contrast between the solidity of the inert form on the bed and Iago’s diffident language at this moment is overwhelming. It was mere thought, we suddenly remember, that initiated the unholy transubstantiation we see before us, and mere words that effected its accomplishment. To tell what one thinks can turn a sentient, reflective, mobile young woman into an inert mass of dead matter.

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We may also notice a familiar peculiarity in Iago’s choice of words. His answer to Emilia is the latest in a series of remarks that reveal a persistent mental reflex: the tendency to assimilate the apt to the true. Although they may well coincide, the apt and the true were distinguishable categories in the early seventeenth century, as they are today. To find that something is apt is to find that it fits into a perceived set of circumstances, which means in turn that something is apt because it suits or matches or “works” within a configuration generated by the experience of a perceiver. Derived from the Latin verb apo (to fasten, tie, or bind), apt does not purport to describe the thing as it is in itself but rather as it is in relation to other things and, more important, as it is in relation to us, since it is we who deem something apt or not. When the Ghost of Hamlet’s father says, “I find thee apt,” on hearing Hamlet’s eager desire to “sweep to my revenge” (Ham. 1.5.31), he is voicing satisfaction at a double “finding”: Hamlet’s hasty conception of himself as filial revenger and his own mistaken assessment of the prince’s style of action. Apt tends to be a functional and a psychologistic adjective; while something may prove in fact to be apt—to work well in actuality—the primary orientation of the word is to a set of circumstances envisioned by a person.1 To find that something is true, on the other hand, is to find that our thought about that thing matches its actual state. This means that “finding” has a stronger extramentalist cast in the case of true than in the case of apt. When we find that something we think is true, we discover that the object of our thought is really out there. It can be “found,” of course, in different ways: it can be determined empirically that there is gold in the ground where we thought it was, or we may hear a suspect driven by his conscience confess he is a murderer, or—especially for the early modern period—it may be inferred syllogistically that the smoke we see is caused by burning. All these “findings”—even those revealed through the procedures of formal inference—are oriented to the world outside ourselves. That is, true thoughts tend to verification and, once verified, are replaced by “facts” that provide the ground on which we must act. This is not always an easy transposition because of the dipolar attractions of apt and true. If our thought is true (it must first be apt, else we couldn’t think it), then we have correctly configured the real state of affairs and there are no surprises. But the true may not be apt at all; that is, it may not accommodate the circumstances as we have configured them, in which case the true may seem not only alien to us but incapable of being, as Isabella warns Duke Vincentio when she pleads, “Make not impossible / That which but seems unlike” (MM 5.1.51–52). Apt and true often make uncomfortable headfellows.2

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Iago’s use of these terms is remarkable not simply because he so casually appears to conflate them, but also because he identifies them with both his own thought and what Othello found. However apt Desdemona’s infidelity may have seemed to either of them, it was not true, nor did Othello find it to be so. Unless, that is, the true has become assimilated to what is relative to us and has lost its external orientation. Or unless the apt has somehow become externalized as the true. That both alternatives are very real possibilities in the world of Othello may be seen from a number of statements scattered through the play. The most explicit of these is heard when Iago says that he hates Othello because it is thought abroad, that ‘twixt my sheets He’s done my office. I know not if ’t be true, But I, for mere suspicion in that kind Will do as if for surety. (1.3.386–89)

Here, Iago makes a conscious decision to treat the psychological and the ontological as one. Released by this enabling act, he then proceeds to do just that. Reflecting on the use to which he may put Cassio’s good looks in pursuing revenge, he observes: “He has a person and a smooth dispose, / To be suspected, framed to make women false” (1.3.396–97, emphasis mine). In a twinkling, the adventitious character of Cassio’s appeal, which makes him vulnerable to dangerous construction, slides without mediation into the intentionality of a final cause: Cassio was created for the purpose of seducing women. Iago’s speculative conjecture has translated suspicion into fact. In the next act, after persuading Cassio to seek Desdemona’s intercession with Othello, Iago turns to the audience and makes a similar categorical slip: And what’s he then that says I play the villain? When this advice is free I give and honest, Probal to thinking, and indeed the course To win the Moor again? (2.3.331–34, emphasis mine)

Probal is a nonce-word, the Oxford English Dictionary informs us, meaning “Such as approves itself to reason or acceptance”—for which we may read credible, probable, or approvable. What is “probal to thinking,” then, is as far

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from what is “indeed the course” as apt is from true. Yet it glides just as smoothly into easy apposition with its antithesis. Iago is not alone in assimilating the two norms of judgment. When Brabantio accuses Othello of using witchcraft to win his daughter, he declares, “‘ Tis probable and palpable to thinking” (1.2.76), ringing yet another ominous variation on the pairing of the putative and the actual, in this case specifically attaching substance to thought. And Othello himself makes a similar shift when Iago voices his concern for Othello’s well-being. “My lord, you know I love you,” the ensign protests. To which Othello replies: I think thou dost. And for I know thou’rt full of love and honesty And weigh’st thy words before thou giv’st them breath, Therefore these stops of thine fright me the more. (3.3.120–23)

Here, one might notice that what Iago does self-consciously when he says, “I know not if ’t be true,” in the first passage quoted above, Othello seems to do unconsciously when he slips from “I think” to “I know.” This suggests that Iago may be articulating a psychological or practical need that is expressed elsewhere only indirectly. This is the need to “do, as if for surety.” Indeed, the closer one looks at the discourse of Othello, the more apparent it becomes that there is a kind of linguistic epidemic raging through the world of the play that is characterized by the collapse of the putative into the actual. The vocabulary of appropriateness is contaminated by that of truthfulness, terms of probability tainted by those of necessity, the language of thinking corrupted by the language of knowing, and the subjunctive mode describing mental events confused psychotically with indicative references to objects belonging to the world outside the mind. If discourse is both the symptom and the agent of our apprehension of ourselves in the world, and tragedy the medium in which we realize present fears, then the discourse of Othello indicates that some crisis is at hand involving the answerability of the self to the evidence the world affords. A responsible self, we might reasonably assume, knows something about the way we perceive and about the relationship of desire, perception, and cognition; it possesses an ability to judge and act on the basis of circumscribed and historically configured information; and it reveals a capacity to be both humble and bold—retaining an awareness of the fragile foundation of our knowledge even as it willingly undertakes to do “as if for surety.”

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Such a profile might describe Iago, were it not that he, too, exhibits the same symptom of illness when he complains of his own jealousy, “the thought whereof / Doth like a poisonous mineral gnaw my inwards” (2.1.294–95). If the manipulative Iago succumbs to the cognitive temptation of the hypothetical discourse that he of all people appears to have mastered, then we must suspect that it is the discourse itself that is infected. In this chapter I shall explore precisely such a possibility by examining the language of Othello in relation to the way people talked about discourse and learned about it in the sixteenth century. By contextualizing the play’s language in this way, we may be better able to grasp the nature of the psychological phenomenon signaled by the conflation of apt and true in Shakespeare’s play and of the deeper cultural strains it may be thought to instantiate.

II When Iago decides to “do, as if for surety,” even though he doesn’t know the truth, he is rehearsing an eminently practical formula of classical origin. In the philosophical work called the Academica, Cicero offers just this solution when explaining the controversy between the Stoics and the later Academy over the relationship of truth and action. Zeno the Stoic had claimed that real objects impress upon the mind sense presentations that are distinct from those presented by illusions and are grasped by the mind as incontrovertible truths. The Academics, in contrast, denied that there are any perceptible differences between the signs presented by real and by illusory objects. For that reason they insisted that truth could not be grasped. When the Stoics objected that if this were the case, human activity would cease, since appetition depends on the conviction that the objects one desires are at least potentially attainable, Carneades argued that common experience shows us that one can and does act simply on the probability that an object exists and may be attained. The wise man, without actually assenting to the truth of anything, “will make use of whatever apparently probable presentation he encounters, if nothing presents itself that is contrary to that probability, and his whole plan of life will be charted out in this manner” (Acad. 2.99). Cicero then offers that example of the man who decides to take an excursion by water that we glanced at in the prologue: “when a wise man is going on board a ship surely he has not got the knowledge already grasped in his mind and perceived that he will make the voyage as he intends? how can he

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have it?” But if the circumstances are favorable, “it would appear probable that he would get there safe. He will therefore be guided by presentations of this sort to adopt plans of action and inaction” (2.100). A bit further on he suggests that sowing a crop, getting married, and begetting a family are undertaken according to similar criteria (2.109). In almost everything we go about, we are guided by probability but “do, as if for surety.” Cicero would seem a far cry from Iago had we not already noticed the recurrence of the Roman novus homo in the Italian ensign.3 In this instance, it is not the Stoic but rather the Peripatetic or Academic Cicero who concerns us. For in their attempt to reform the art of discourse in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Italian and Northern humanists frequently referred to Cicero’s criterion of probability as the correct basis for investigating whatever we need to know in human affairs. When I use the phrase “art of discourse,” I am adopting the most common translation of the Latin ars or ratio disserendi, the terms usually employed to define dialectic in this period. The full definition of dialectic, if we follow the De inventione dialectica of Rudolph Agricola, the most popular authority on the subject in the sixteenth century, is ars probabiliter de qualibet re proposita disserendi, prout cuiusque natura capax esse fidei poterit (the art of discussing—exploring, debating, expounding, judging—in probable terms any proposed matter whatever, so far as the nature of each subject is capable of attracting conviction).4 One might legitimately ask what a scholarly discipline like dialectic has to do with a popular discursive form like public theater drama, but this was exactly the point of the humanists’ reform. As it was taught in the schools and universities in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, scholastic logic or dialectic (the names were, and remained, interchangeable) had a decidedly hermetic cast. Though nominally concerned with both truthful and probable discourse, the discipline emphasized demonstration of unvarying truths by means of formal proofs, rather than argument from probabilities, and thus seemed divorced from the affairs of everyday life. Moreover, it was a sermocinalis scientia—a science of language informed by a sophisticated system of describing syntactical implications of signs within propositions and of distinguishing syntactical from semantic relationships—that had become the province of linguistic specialists.5 In a propaganda war that raged over two centuries and enlisted such humanist polemicists as Petrarch, Leonardo Bruni, Lorenzo Valla, Agricola, Juan Luis Vives, Erasmus, Philip Melanchthon, Johann Sturm, and Peter Ramus, scholastic dialectic was attacked for its disengagement from mundane concerns and its dogmatic and abstruse methodological emphases.

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The flavor of this public indignation may be caught in De causis corruptionarum artium (The Causes of Corruption in the Arts), where Juan Luis Vives, the mentor of Henry VIII’s first queen, writes to an imagined scholastic: What does this long dissertation of yours concerning demonstration do for me? I do not understand for the sake of comprehending nature (nor, indeed do you) but rather for the purpose of apprehending myself. We are men. That is, exposed by our minds to error, and not strong. Nature possesses an unerring understanding. Do I know those things which are first, which are without intermediaries . . . which are necessary to nature? I scarcely know such things as pertain to me, much less might I know those innermost parts of nature, before the evidence of which, as you yourself will confess, we are in the dark. Therefore the whole teaching of demonstration is empty and without use.6

Vives criticizes demonstration not only for its irrelevance to ordinary life but for its ineptitude as well, given the varied capacities of those whom it is designed to serve: But even if you teach me, you can’t have one single and unchanging demonstration. To some people there are certain immediate and first premises; others are rather taken by probabilities; some do not credit the most evident things nor those which the senses witness, such as the Academics; some believe the senses in everything, as the Epicureans; for others the authority of the speaker suffices; still others demand that things be set forth before their eyes. Therefore you will need a demonstration that is like the Lesbian rule, which fits itself to the edifice, not the edifice to itself. (Ibid.)7

What is wanted is a flexible mode of inquiry, argument, and exposition that is both philosophically sound and also relevant to the moral and practical issues that ordinary people confront. Rudolph Agricola supplied it in a dialectic derived not from Aristotle’s formal logic or the terminists’ suppositional logic, but from the topical logic of Aristotle, Cicero, and Boethius— with a generous admixture of rhetorical material from Cicero, Quintilian, and other rhetoricians—whereby one could understand any subject matter by “taking it through the places.” He taught how subjects might be examined with reference to such topics as definition, genus and species, property, whole and parts, final cause, time, place, person, and circumstances. Some of these topics traditionally belonged to the discipline of logic, some to that of rhetoric; in medieval texts they were usually treated separately,

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but in the interest of providing materials for use in any kind of discourse, Agricola raided disciplinary boundaries and appropriated the topics for his dialectic.8 In Book I of De inventione dialectica, he introduced the concept “topic”and explained its varieties. In Book II he taught the reader how to analyze discourse into general and particular questions concerning issues of fact, definition, and quality; described what is needed for exposition, which is normally accorded conviction of itself—unlike argumentation, which must create it; and discussed the means of securing conviction, through selfrepresentation (ethos) and different kinds of arguments—syllogism, induction, and example. Much of Book III is devoted to the passions, whence they arise, and how they can be stirred or calmed by discourse, since Agricola believed that persuading and teaching are related enterprises. Here he also discussed the sources of pleasure in auditors, the uses of brevity and copiousness in speech, and the various ways discourse is arranged by poets, historians, and teachers. What becomes evident as one reads even casually in the chapters of this rich syncretic work is that Agricola produced a guide to discourse broadly conceived, which includes inquiry, exposition, argument, teaching, and conversation about matters of general interest. All these modes of discourse are united, in his view, by their need to secure fides (conviction) concerning the subject matter under consideration, and by their shared criterion of belief—probability. This accounts for the two most striking features of this work on “logic”: it reveals a strongly psychological orientation, since Agricola is concerned with what goes on in people’s heads when they are convinced; and it continually recurs to literature for examples of character, argument, and psychology, because the processes of the mind becoming convinced are the same whether the matter is drawn from fiction or history, and because Agricola believes that fiction, in representing the way conviction comes about, is a useful model for real-life discourse. The humanist renovation of dialectic has been the subject of intense study for many years, beginning with the important work of Walter Ong in 1958. Lisa Jardine has emphasized the skeptical foundations of the reforms initiated by Lorenzo Valla in his Dialectical Disputations (composed between 1439 and 1457) and institutionalized by Agricola in the De inventione (completed in 1479 and first published in 1515).9 She has shown that a subtle intertextuality connects Valla’s polemical treatise to those parts of Cicero’s philosophical and rhetorical works that provide epistemological justification for probable inquiry and argument in utramque partem, the method shared by Academic philosophers and orators. She has also shown how Alardus of Amsterdam, who supplied detailed scholia for the authoritative

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1539 edition of Agricola’s De inventione, draws the reader repeatedly back to Cicero, Quintilian, and Erasmus to explain and amplify Agricola’s text. In her view, the Ciceronian link to the Academy and also to the Aristotle of the topical tradition gave the new humanist art of discourse its philosophical respectability. Jardine’s penetrating analysis of the skeptical underpinnings of the humanist reform of dialectic notwithstanding, the reputation of Academic skepticism in the sixteenth century would seem to have been an unenviable foundation for educational renovation. This is suggested by the research of Charles Schmitt and Richard Popkin. While differing in emphasis and in certain of their conclusions, both scholars argue that Cicero’s Academica was itself not well known in the period and that knowledge of the later Academy—derived from Cicero’s other philosophical and rhetorical works, Diogenes Laertius, and St. Augustine—was such that, with a few exceptions, those who wrote of Academic philosophy were either uneasy about its implications for secular knowledge and religious faith or condemned it outright. Erasmus, as usual, was ambiguous on the subject. His Folly refers to the adherents of Carneades as “my Academics” and describes them as “the least insolent among the philosophers,” though elsewhere Erasmus was careful to insist that he was not a skeptic in matters of religion.10 In defense of the heretic Michael Servetus, Sebastian Castillio marshaled academic proofs to argue that no one was so certain of religious tenets as to be justified in burning another man for heresy, and was attacked by Theodore Beza as a nouveau académicien who was trying to substitute opinions for the certainties of faith. Guillaume Budé lamented the threat the Academy posed to Revelation, even though its doctrines could be and were used in the service of fideism.11 In a secular context, the Ciceronian Mario Nizolius (he whose “Nizolian paper books of figures and phrases” provoked Sir Philip Sidney’s scorn)12 registered uneasiness at his master’s rejection of traditional philosophical values while advocating the reunion of rhetoric and philosophy. Comments Schmitt: “Here, as elsewhere, we see the roots of a basic problem, which really didn’t seem to emerge in any very significant way in the minds of most Renaissance thinkers. How can Cicero’s excellent writings concerning oratory and eloquence be from the same pen which produced the philosophical works espousing a variety of philosophical traditions—e.g., skepticism, and in the De officiis, for example, Stoicism—not always found to be acceptable by Christians of the Renaissance?” (Cicero, 72–73).13 Perhaps more to the point is that Nizolius didn’t see any inconsistency in his promoting Ciceronian rhetoric while disapproving of Ciceronian skepticism. That is,

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he must have assumed that one could argue according to probability without giving much thought to the epistemological or ontological bases of that practice. A similarly unperceived dilemma appears to have governed Ramus’s attitude toward Cicero. Although he expressed sympathy toward Academic philosophy, he, too, did not attend to its skeptical implications. “Academic philosophy is a model for the Ciceronianus to emulate,” remarks Schmitt, “but only for stylistic reasons, and the potent intellectual weapons hidden there are in no wise exploited” (Cicero, 81). This did not save Ramus from being named the leader of a novam academiam by Pierre Galland, who accused him and his disciple Omer Talon of aiming to overthrow religion after they had destroyed philosophy (Popkin, 28–30). The new ratio disserendi, then, however it may have been inspired in the fifteenth century and redacted in the sixteenth with reference to works informed by Ciceronian skepticism, was disseminated in an atmosphere that was not especially receptive to Academic philosophy. Agricola’s work itself—as was the case of other texts that had infiltrated the grammar school and university curricula by mid-century—was filled with the ambiguities and contradictions one might expect when competing academic traditions and philosophical systems enter into a new syncretic relationship. This is why it is difficult to grasp the mindset that produced the humanist dialectic and which, in turn, it must have reproduced. For example, though Agricola recurs to the authority of Cicero and Aristotle to provide his work with philosophical credentials, he himself comes up with a more inclusive definition of probability than either of his supposed mentors: Probability in discourse is not only that which Aristotle says it is: what either appears probable to everyone, or to most people, or to the educated—and, of the latter, either to all, to most, or to the contemplative. As, for example, it might seem to everyone that God should be worshipped religiously, or that filial duty should be observed toward parents; it might seem to most people that riches should be esteemed, public honors sought; to wise men that knowledge is preferable to wealth; to the greater number of those, that virtue should chiefly be pursued; to the contemplative, what Plato, what Aristotle, what Theophrastus said. But (to speak advisedly) because such matters are sometimes the subject of speaking which are accommodated with difficulty to themes of this kind, I am satisfied that the probable be defined as “whatever will be said about a proposed subject that is apt and fitting” [quod apte consentaneaque de re proposita dicetur]. In this way many things are spoken of a given subject that otherwise would be utterly impossible to say: what the poets relate in their fictitious fables—among the Latins, for example, Apuleius

Speech, World, and Thought / 99 in his twelve books of Metamorphoses or, among the Greeks, in those books of Lucian called “true history,” in which he says that he is going to take up matters that neither he himself nor anyone else has seen, nor anyone will believe. I know full well that probable things can be said even about matters of this kind, which challenge not only conviction concerning their likelihood but even our sense of their possibility. For example, the same Lucian has it that men can be transformed into birds—and in Macrobius, that he was first an egg or a chicken—either of which ideas will seem incredible; nonetheless one may discourse about both in a way that makes them believable. Similarly, according to Heraclitus and many others after him, good and evil are the same thing, and there’s that idea that nothing can really be known, which the New Academy maintained. They not only expounded very many other ideas of the same ilk in a wholly credible manner but believed themselves that the greatest authors actually held such convictions. It is in this sense that dialectic must be deemed probable, and to speak probably, to say whatever, given the limits and nature of the subject, is most apt for creating conviction. (Agricola 192–93)14

It is evident that Agricola has departed not only from the Aristotelian canons of probability, which he cites from Topics 100b, but also from the epistemological and ontological concerns of Cicero in the Academica, to which he refers with a certain levity. His definition is closer to, yet exceeds, that of Cicero in his rhetorical handbook De inventione, which is quoted in the accompanying scholium by Alardus: “The probable is that which usually happens, or what is believed by opinion to happen, or what has a similarity to that opinion, whether it is false or true” (Agricola 193). In providing this “definition” Agricola is certainly furnishing the Lesbian rule that Vives was to demand in his polemic against the scholastics, for he is concerned with the “fit” of auditor, matter, and genre. One can discuss even a fantastic subject in terms of its probability if one heeds the immediate context. But he goes still further. His concern with that which is apta consentaneaque takes an inward turn in his account of why the Trojans believe Sinon in Book II of the Aeneid. Agricola finds nothing in Sinon’s arguments per se to create conviction about what has happened to him or why the wooden horse is being offered to the city. Where, then, does conviction come from? In the words of Peter Mack, who carefully analyzes the discussion: Agricola begins to answer his question by considering the circumstances. Because they think the Greeks have gone, the Trojans feel more secure and less suspicious. That Sinon has been left behind suggests that he was an enemy

100 / Logic of Renaissance Rhetoric to the Greeks and provokes pity for him. The Trojans want to believe in the truth of the treacherous attack he attributes to Ulysses and they do not see what Sinon has to gain from lying. Moreover the seizure of the Palladium, the wooden horse (an animal sacred to the gods), and also the sea monsters seizing Laocoon when he violated the horse, all seem to fit. (“Agricola’s Reading,” 32)

This fitting, Agricola goes on to explain, is actually a function of the auditor’s mind: “Because everything that is narrated fits together, even though there is nothing in the speech by which the ‘truths’ that are spoken may be proved, nevertheless the auditor himself, through his collection and collation of the materials, and through the arrangement and congruency he finds among them, persuades himself that things are as they seem” (Agricola 262). For Agricola, the ground of probability is located inside the head of the auditor. Probability may be assisted by the astute relation of a speaker, but the place where things are apta consentaneaque lies within. This is a far cry from the epistemological issue of whether truth can be grasped or the ontological argument that we must grant some things the status of being neither true nor false but probable, which we find in the Academica. It is different even from Aristotle’s classification of probability according to social type in the Topics and the Rhetoric, and from Cicero’s extension of these definitions. Epistemological, ontological, and rhetorical concerns have slid into specifically psychological ones.15 What we find in Agricola, then, is a ratio disserendi that traces its descent from Aristotle, the philosophical Cicero, Boethius, and the classical rhetoricians, and that purports to replace the logic of the scholastics, but is actually a rhetoric, a psychology, and a poetics. What are the consequences for thought when a philosophical discipline, normally considered the instrument to distinguish truth from falsehood, takes probability as its criterion and includes within the purview of that criterion all the written traditions of the West—pagan, Christian, and Hebrew, secular and religious, historical and fictitious? One result, as we have seen, is that you can find in your discipline vestiges of its skeptical origins and at the same time scorn them, talk seriously about the probable as embracing nearly all human endeavors and yet attend not at all to such important issues as determining its relationship to what truly is, was, and will be. This appears to have been the result of Agricola’s attempt to provide a Lesbian rule for securing conviction. If we relate these phenomena to his lack of interest in the traditional subjects of logic other than the topics—such as the predicables, the predicaments, truthful demonstration through formal proofs, the distinctions made by

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the scholastics between terms that refer to things and terms that refer to other terms (the so-called terms of first and second intention)—it looks as though language is being treated less as an existential phenomenon that must be investigated in its own right than as a medium of transportation through which configurations of ideas pass out of and into porous minds in the guise of perceptions. “It is not words that shake me thus,” cries Othello, observing in his passionate shuddering the onset of his epileptic seizure (4.1.41). But of course it is words that shake him thus as he reacts psychologically, under the influence of Iago, to that very loss of distinction between syntactic and semantic linguistic relationships—the intersecting axes of inner and outer—that is the cultural effect of Agricolan humanism. When the probable becomes reduced to the internal criterion of apta consentaneaque, the words that secure fides acquire a certain invisibility as words and truth inevitably suffers. We are encountering, then, a dual phenomenon. First, we find a dialectical discourse based on a very elastic notion of probability, which assumes that just about anything can be made to appear probable if one fine-tunes it to the circumstances of an auditor’s expectations and allows him to configure the proffered elements according to his need. In this way, it supplies a theoretical ground for satisfying his desire for “circumscription and confine” (1.2.27)—that is, for intelligibility. Second, linguisticity as an entity unto itself tends to fade. This does not mean that the thingness of language is not experienced, but rather that it is experienced not as language but as that which language seems to convey—goats, monkeys, handkerchiefs spotted with strawberries. In this form it is enjoyed for its enargeia—its brightness and vividness—as it slips past the bracketing function of the mind that would note its wordiness.16 Although by the mid-sixteenth century, Agricola’s text appears far more frequently on university book inventories in England than any other dialectic (we have prescriptions but not evidence of purchases for the grammar schools), this does not mean that the De inventione was considered sufficient for teaching the ars disserendi.17 Agricola had, after all, largely ignored the other traditional division of dialectic known as judicium, or judgment. It was in this division that the relationship of words, propositions, and proofs were discussed, and while Agricola did include chapters on the ordering of discourse in his second book, he was concerned with exposition generally and with probable proofs, such as enthymeme, induction, and example, rather than with syllogistic demonstration of the true. Nor was he interested in teaching the doctrine of the predicables and of the predicaments, which classified words, respectively, according to their “largeness” (genus, species,

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difference, property, accident) and according to the way they modify one another in a proposition (as substance, quality, quantity, relation, and so forth). This accounts for the occurrence in humanist pedagogy of one of those ideological marriages characteristic of early modern institutions that appears anomalous to us, though it must have seemed reasonable to contemporaries. While Agricola’s teachings on dialectical invention, along with his translation of the Progymnasmata of the fourth-century rhetorician Aphthonius, became an integral part of the Erasmian pedagogical program of bonae litterae that swept England and Northern Europe in the first half of the century, a humanist version of the old Aristotelian logic was developed to complete the twofold teaching of dialectic. In this way, Agricola’s strongly antischolastic work was assimilated to the more traditional Aristotelian curriculum. The situation grew still more complex later in the century when the work of Ramus, in some respects combining the two, was added to the curricula of many institutions alongside these earlier texts. This electicism is one of the main reasons why it is not easy to distinguish a strict position on the ontology of language in the educational program of sixteenth-century pedagogues: texts that appear to be written from different theoretical viewpoints regarding the relationship of speech to concept and thing were apparently used side by side without concern. Most likely this was because fine theoretical points did not count for much when teaching students, ranging in age from ten to twenty, what they must know about words, propositions, proofs, and the topics of argument. Teachability was the primary concern, and this is why—as Ong and, more recently, Grafton and Jardine have argued—first the humanist system of Agricola and then the more compendious system of Ramus, which offered in addition universal applicability, was so readily adapted by schoolmasters and university lecturers. These facts of sixteenth-century educational life pose in a different form the question of methodology raised earlier when I asked what a scholarly discipline such as dialectic has to do with popular theater. In this case, the question is twofold. First, if the teaching of dialectic was as eclectic as it appears to have been, how valid is any conclusion we can draw about the ideas that were inculcated? Second, how seriously can we take the philosophical content of texts written to the level of understanding possessed by preadolescents and teenagers? While it is true that a consistent or even a fully articulated point of view on “language and reality” cannot be extracted from these school texts, there are various manifestations of a widespread assumption that the logical structure of language mirrors the structure of the world. This is also true of discussions of the topics. Sometimes, as in

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Philip Melanchthon’s explanation of universals in his Erotemata dialectices, care is taken taken to separate verbal from mental and external phenomena, but there is a recurring tendency to slur the differences. And even though Melanchthon shows a nominal interest in both probable and necessary reasoning, probability is submerged in the pursuit of truth, and predicable and predicate are not often distinguished from mind and world. In the work of Ramus, these tendencies are still more visible, especially in the treatment of topical invention and method. The second question raised here is more easily answered. Words like ontology and metaphysics did not enter the domain of Elizabethan schoolboys and university lower-classmen with any more frequency than that of their contemporary American counterparts, yet we ought not to dismiss the ways in which ideas about language, mind, and world implicitly assumed or directly expounded in these texts entered the minds of students and remained as forms and pressures past that youth and observation copied there. If we put together the tendency of Agricolan dialectic to foster psychological probability as the standard of belief; of logical discourse in the revised humanist Aristotelian texts to reflect the structure of reality; of the places where one finds arguments to be increasingly rendered metaphorically as seats, lairs, burrows, dens—ultimately to emerge in Ramus and his followers as artificial “arguments” that are not clearly distinguished from the “natural” arguments that may exist in the world itself, we find the intellectual stage being fitted out for the coming psychological drama in which anxiety and desire impel one to embrace the putative for the actual and to “do, as if for surety”—with “as if” under erasure. That these were pedagogical texts makes their connection to popular theater all the stronger since they are more likely to indicate the assumptions about language and argument held by most literate people, whether they had acquired only a grammar school education or had studied some logic at a university. The connection, then, between ideas derived from dialectic and ideas at play in public theater is not tenuous. We are concerned with similar and frequently overlapping constituencies, as we may infer from the comical pedantries of Love’s Labour’s Lost, at one end of the scale, and from the easy references in the Cambridge Parnassus plays at the other, where the names of Shakespeare, Jonson, Spenser, Daniel, and Marston casually jostle those of genus and species, predicables, and the logicians Seton, Carter, and Ramus. As for Shakespeare himself, it was long ago shown by Hardin Craig that he was well acquainted with the new humanist dialectic whose language appears in many places in the plays. My argument here is less concerned with Shakespeare’s familiarity with logical terminology—clearly he was familiar

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with it—than with his sense of how dialectical practices influence persuasion and self-persuasion in both conscious and unconscious ways. A selective but not unrepresentative examination of such popular texts as Melanchthon’s Erotemata dialectices, written for grammar school and entering university students; Thomas Wilson’s Rule of Reason, a widely read English “logic” written for socially mobile members of the gentry, professionals, and tradesmen not proficient in Latin; and Ramus’s Dialectique, versions of which became the rage in schools, the universities, churches, and private homes during the last quarter of the century, will suggest how the teaching of dialectic might have fostered a conflation of language and referent, apt and true, in the En­ glish speech community from which Othello emerges. To render this account more reader-friendly, I propose to introduce the perhaps less-than-familiar terms of judgment—the other part of dialectic—in this chapter through Melanchthon’s grammar school text, and then discuss Wilson’s vernacular popularization and Ramus’s reification of dialectical topics in the following chapter. In treating all three logics, I will indicate their relationship to the text of Othello.

III The Erotemata dialectices of Philip Melanchthon, Luther’s colleague who became known as the preceptor of Germany, went through three versions and some twenty-five reprints in the period between 1520 and 1584, mostly in inexpensive octavo editions. Although we have little evidence of exactly which logic text was used in Elizabethan grammar schools, T. W. Baldwin infers from references to Melanchthon by the Cambridge scholar John Seton and by Alexander Nowell of Oxford, and from the relative availability of sixteenth-century copies of this text in England in the mid-twentieth century, that it is likely his book was used in the upper school curriculum to teach judgment. There is hard evidence that it was widely used among firstyear university students.18 When we open the 1547 text, we find a striking instance of that puzzling promiscuity of viewpoints I have described. On the very first page the reader encounters a definition of dialectic that makes one wonder if the venerable Agricola (whom Melanchthon repeatedly praises) had ever lived. “Dialectic,” he tells us, “is the art or way of teaching correctly, clearly, and in good order, which comes about by rightly defining, dividing, and connecting true arguments, and unraveling and refuting arguments badly put together or false.”19 Not a word about probability here. He goes on to say that once the cause of falsity is shown, dialectic will “lead the errant thinker

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back to the norms of certainty which are called krith´ria . . . where, having once been vanquished, he hears himself condemned as by a divine voice.” Yet just two paragraphs later, under the rubric “Whence comes the name of dialectic,” Melanchthon traces the Latin verbs disputo and dissero to the Greek diale´gomai, which he defines as conversing with another by means of gathered opinions [collocatis opinionibus], and sees no need to point out that discourse conducted by means of opinions is not what he had just defined as dialectic, which operates according to the norms of certainty. There are similar ambiguities, which appear to modern eyes as philosophically casual, throughout the text. The work consists of four books. The first defines dialectic in the manner described here and compares it to rhetoric, again without introducing the notion of probability, so that it appears that the only difference between dialectic and rhetoric is the copiousness and ornamentation of the latter. Melanchthon then goes on to discuss the predicables, predicaments, and method. The second book concerns propositions, opposition and conversion, and modals. Book III treats argumentation, setting forth syllogisms and their reductions, enthymeme, induction, example, sorities, and the rules of consequence. In the fourth book the author expounds the topics and logical fallacies. Melanchthon offers some important distinctions that alert young students (referred to as juniores) to the fact that dialectic is concerned with the three elements of speech, mind, and world, yet his expositions often make their domains appear contiguous. When he explains why we study the five predicables (genus, species, difference, property, and accident), he says that we clarify words by defining them in terms of larger words, as “when we see someone approaching us at a distance, in the beginning we recognize that he is a man and, afterward, when he has come nearer, we discern whether he is someone known or unknown to us” (518). Thus the definition, “A man is an animal endowed with reason able to walk on two feet,” enables us progressively to distinguish the species “man” through the genus “animal,” the difference “endowed with reason,” which constitutes the species, and the property of walking upright. Were we to define “Socrates the man” (an individual) we would add an accident like “having a pug nose.” If the individual were Cassio instead, he might have “a person and a smooth dispose, / To be suspected” (1.3.396). The increasing particularization of a substance as it is defined according to the doctrine of the predicables is thus explained by means of an analogy to the gradual clarification of an object in space as it moves toward an observer on an ocular plane, thereby assimilating the doctrine to a visual and material model in which logical concepts are

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likened to receding focal lengths. The likely result is to be conditioned to “see” one’s predicables as existing out there in space, which must inevitably blur the distinction between concept and world. We find an even more explicit identification of the domains of world and logical speech in Melanchthon’s extended discussion of the predicables. Though they are indeed five common words, the predicables are also steps or levels (gradus) comprising “all the words in this whole world,” and when “they are put together according to the common order of nature, they are so joined by necessity that some word of the five grades is spoken of an individual and others are spoken of the species” (518). Here the sense that predication has a material component is reinforced by the suggestion that the relationship of the predicables is founded on the immutable and hierarchical order of nature itself. Melanchthon, however, takes care to show that predicables—and, later, the predicaments—also have mental references. He explains the etymology of both words from the Greek kathgore´   �, which signifies “I accuse.” “Nevertheless,” he adds, when we use the words now, “they more generally mean ‘something I call to mind’ [commemoro] about something else.” He explains that when such an accusation as “Verres is a thief ” was carried over from the courtroom to dialectic and became a proposition, the word “thief” in the proposition came to be regarded as “something brought to mind about Verres. Thus,” he concludes, “predicables may be understood as things said or remembered about other things,” each of which will be drawn from one of the ranks of common words (518).20 In presenting this historical translatio, Melanchthon is not suggesting a subjective recollection in the modern sense. While commemoration is an act of the mind, that act is anchored in the natural ontology of the predicables. Mind recalls, and issues that recollection in words, according to the order of nature inscribed in the doctrine. The role of the mind in linguistic analysis and speech is given greater autonomy, however, when Melanchthon defines “species,” which is “the common word closest to individuals,” and explains why this word or label (titulus) for a kind of word is “species,” whose primary meaning is “appearance.” It is called “species,” he writes, “because from the individuals it perceives, the mind draws an image, to which, as it carries it about, it accommodates other perceived individuals; for example, whoever sees a deer carries a picture with him, the contemplation of which, whenever he sees another deer, enables him to recognize that object as a deer” (519). Individuals are known only through the mental picture or “species” to which

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they are referred. The potency of “species” notwithstanding, Melanchthon is careful to inform his readers that nothing but individuals exist in the world. “Whatever distinct thing is truly and positively in nature outside of the mind,” he writes, “is singular in itself. Particular things are outside the mind—this servant, this man, this house. But that common image of a deer, which we call ‘species,’ is not. . . . On the contrary, it is an act of the understanding, painting that image on the mind which (for this reason) is called common: that it can be applied to many individuals” (520). When Melanchthon identifies species not as an existent but as an act of the understanding, he reveals that the doctrine of the predicables involves not only the comparative generality and particularity of words, their relationship to one another in a proposition, or even the way commemoration reflects the structure of the actual world; it also involves a psychological process. Predicables may refer to one another in accordance with the ontological model of the universe, but they may also refer to acts of the mind. This distinction is often lost in Othello, for one of the recurring speech moves in the play is the rapid shift from the individual to the species— as, for example, when Iago tells Othello, “I know our country disposition well” (3.3.204), assimilating Desdemona to a model of Venetian infidelity on which Othello then broods: “This fellow’s of exceeding honesty, / And knows all qualities, with a learned spirit, / Of human dealing” (3.3.262–64). More significant, this specifying power of the mind is what Iago engages by the very odd remark he makes when reminding Othello of the spotted handkerchief with which, he alleges, Cassio wiped his beard: “If it be that, or any that was hers, / It speaks against her” (3.3.443–44, my emphasis). That singular handkerchief, hurriedly assimilated to the species “any that was hers,” takes on a powerful new valence, so strong that its betrayal seems to be a yielding of what is intimacy itself—what is most “hers”—although it is just a species of the mind, filled up by the illustrious thingness of Iago’s language, that has been apparently given away. I stress this point because if dialectic and rhetoric are of interest at all in Shakespeare and other dramatists, it is not simply because these disciplines show us how to do things with words. We need to notice why we do things with words, and the processes through which they become effective. Since understanding depends on mentalist species to which individuals must be accommodated in order to be cognized at all, from a dialectical point of view it can be said that Othello’s problem is knowing the species to which Desdemona should be assigned so that he may recognize who she is. (That is a lesson Melanchthon repeats to his boys.) But this very process of

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specification involves a double trap. First, the psychological mechanism of species formation is neither disinterested nor merely intellectual, as the dialectician implies, but is grounded in an individual’s experience. One may encounter one’s first deer in any number of circumstances, peacefully sylvan or otherwise, and in any emotional state, which will certainly color the species painted in the mind to which other deer will be accommodated and which, one supposes, will be accommodated to them. Hence species are not abstract categories but historically conditioned ones infused with passion. Second, in the process of transferring an individual to a species in order to recognize who that individual is, one inevitably must be content with knowing only what she is. For that is what it means to know by species. The action of Shakespeare’s play may be described as Othello’s translation of Desdemona from the company of saints, to which she never belonged, to the company of whores, to which she belongs even less—and, in the interim, struggling to reconcile his immediate perception of her individuality with either category: “Desdemona comes, / If she be false, O, then heaven mocks itself, / I’ll not believe it” (3.3.281–83). Whatever else the play teaches us, it is the terrible irony that the individual can know himself and others only as a member of a species, and in the instant that knowledge is acquired, the sense of who one is gets lost. “I do but say what she is,” an anguished Othello insists to Iago, who has already proved his love a whore: “O, the world has not a sweeter creature” (4.1.183, 180–81, emphasis mine). It is this sweetness, of a “fine woman, a fair woman, a sweet woman” (4.1.175–76), that lingers in his senses until the very moment he prepares to kill Desdemona: “O balmy breath, that doth almost persuade / Justice herself to break her sword. . . . So sweet was ne’er so fatal” (5.2.16–20). But that sweetness is only an accident, which has no cognitive value outside the species into which Othello has been culturally conditioned and is now circumstantially compelled to place her. This is how “logic” participates in tragedy. To pursue this point further, I turn to Melanchthon’s discussion of accidents to explicate Iago’s strategy. The predicables, as we have learned, are kinds of words used to define other words (or ideas or things) in an order of increasing particularity. Genus, species, and difference are joined by necessity: species lies within genus and is constituted by its differentiating principle. Property is less firmly bound to the substance. It is described as an “inclination, or a certain contiguity, propinquity, or adjacency” that is always in a species as a capacity but not necessarily as an actuality. In man, the capacity to walk, laugh, become a hero, and grow gray exists potentially but is not always actualized in every individual. The predicable accident, however, is literally contingent. It neither exists by itself nor is part of any

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substance, but attaches itself to a substance in a mutable way and may even depart from it. In explaining accident, Melanchthon uses a verb reminiscent of one Shakespeare employs when he refers to certain ephemera that affect judgment and feeling. Melanchthon informs us that while “no created substances are deprived of all accidents, nevertheless all things usually throw off [abiiciunt] accidents and take on others from time to time, as water can be made hot or cooled off or frozen by throwing off the accidents ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ ” (522). Some accidents are not separable from substances, such as moisture from water and heat from fire, but are nonetheless mutable in quantity and magnitude. This is how one distinguishes accident from substance. Accidents include not only physical attributes but intellectual and moral ones as well; indeed, they comprise all predicates save substance. The soul, for example, is a substance within which the fear of God is an accident. “Let all youths know,” Melanchthon declares, “that the soul is one thing and the fear of God another. For the fear God can be thrown away [Potest enim abiici timor Dei]” (523). At several points in Othello, dramatis personae use this dialectical verb to indicate the incidence of accident. It is heard first when Iago identifies himself with those servants who, “throwing but shows of service on their lords, / Do well thrive by them” (1.1.51–52), and again when he urges Roderigo to plague Othello with flies: Though that his joy be joy Yet throw such changes [F: chances] of vexation on’t, As it may lose some colour. (1.1.70–72)

Unlike the first phrase, this one is metaphorically dense. “Joy” is Othello’s pleasure, but it is also Desdemona; “changes” may well be the “chances,” that is, “accidents,” recorded in F, in which case “throwing chances” onto something means to apply qualifying particulars to a substance that will change its appearance or “colour.” However one interprets these lines, Iago is wittingly deploying the language of dialectical accident here, as he admits that even though they cannot alter the substance of Othello’s joy (for it is joy, he says), they can change its outward look. As dialecticians like Melanchthon tell us, however, this can put a man in a double bind. For one can only perceive a substance through its accidents, yet must distinguish the substance from its accidents in order to know it. “We do not discern substances covered by accidents [substantias tectas

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accidentibus] through the eyes,” Melanchthon warns, “but only recognize them in the mind” (528). How do we do this? “When we observe that water remains the same whether it is hot or cold, we reason that those departing appearances are one thing and that which sustains them another.” Well enough. Yet even this uncircumstanced, passionless analysis is complicated by Melanchthon’s awareness that theory is one thing, practice another. He exhorts his reader to “think how dull is the keenness of the human wit, which looks upon things, as it were, from a far distance in space, but cannot penetrate into their interiors.” His remedy to this epistemological impasse is to fall back on fideism, recommending that we consider not how little but how much is yielded us by such accidents as quantity, quality, effect, and passion, and that we give thanks to God that He reveals as much as He does of himself and the nature of things through such contingencies. When all is said, it still remains true that “Her honour is an essence that’s not seen, / They have it very oft that have it not” (4.1.16–17).21 In an ironic rehearsal of the linguistic, psychological, and metaphysical implications of Iago’s project, the delegate from Venice who hears of Othello’s strange behavior later in the play, exclaims: Is this the noble Moor whom our full senate Call all in all sufficient? This the nature Whom passion could not shake? whose solid virtue The shot of accident, nor dart of chance Could neither graze, nor pierce? (4.1.264–68)

As we saw in the previous chapter, Lodovico is referring to Othello’s Stoic imperviousness to the violent contingencies of war, and he conveys his meaning through military metaphors. What he may have forgotten is that accidents occur to sufficient substances and noble natures through verbal projectiles as well. His own language reveals this, since Othello is “all in all sufficient” through the calling or predication of the senate. Moreover, that full senate had even earlier cast a colorable accident upon Othello when commissioning him for Cyprus. In the Duke’s words: “though we have there a substitute of most allowed sufficiency, yet opinion, a sovereign mistress of effects, throws a more safer voice on you” (1.3.224–26, my emphasis). Again metaphorically complex, the statement reveals that a (literally) accidental judgment, opinion, has been applied to the substance of Othello. That this process of throwing accidents on people was alive in Shakespeare’s

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imagination is suggested by the Duke’s next words: “You must therefore be content to slubber [muddy, stain, discolor] the gloss of your new fortunes, with this more stubborn and boisterous expedition” (1.3.227–29). Haste, noise, and resistance in affairs of state—to say nothing of Iago’s prospective throwings—will sully Othello’s romantic union and make it appear other than it is. No wonder the ensign replies to Lodovico’s three-piled question (“Is this the noble Moor . . . ? This the nature . . . ? whose solid virtue . . . ?”) with all the pregnant copia Erasmus had claimed for brevity: “He is much changed” (4.1.268).22 Let us now look more closely at the nature of accidents, the manipulation of which lies at the heart of Iago’s activities. Accidents constitute nine of the ten predicaments, which are types of words used in propositions that students learn after they learn the predicables. Predicaments are distinguished from predicables in that the five predicables are categories indicating the comparative largeness of words and the degree of necessity by which they (and, as it sometimes appears, things and ideas) are joined, while the predicates are types of words spoken about—and thus modifying—other words. For example, in the sentence, “The garden wall lying along the bottom of the hill is painted white,” the word “wall” is the substance (substantia), while its modifier “garden” corresponds to the predicament “where” (ubi); “lying” is found in the predicament passio (undergoing or “suffering,” as opposed to actio, acting); “along” is a word from the predicament relatio (relation), and “bottom” is found in the predicament quantitas (quantity) under the species “parts,” for it is a part of the hill; “hill” belongs to the predicament situs (situation or position), while “painted” is a habitus (clothing or covering), and “white” is a qualitas (quality). Strictly speaking, the terms refer to words; again, however, in exposition it is not always clear that they do not also refer to creatures and thoughts. In defining the predicament quality, for example, Melanchthon says it is the “medium [forma] through which substances are efficacious and move the senses.” He then offers an etiology of quality: “In the beginning is substance. Later [through quantity], substance is distinguished by number and clothed in magnitude. Now when we speak of qualities, weapons are furnished it, as substances are not lazy. For the present,” he concludes, “we will review the instruments through which substances are efficacious; later we will speak of the actions themselves” (referring to the predicate actio) (534). This extended metaphor, limning the progressive anthropomorphosis of substance, slides into a virtual identity when he informs us that “the sources ‚ of all human actions, e‘ ξειϚ, δυνᾳ΄ µειϚ, καὶ πάθη [habits, natural capacities,

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and passions], are to be discerned in the predicament of quality.” What follows is a brief account of human ethics and action, correlated with the three species of quality named, in which references to language disappear in the concern to explicate behavior. That is to say, it is not words but the things of experience that are described.23 Drawing upon traditional Aristotelian concepts, Melanchthon tells his reader that habit (hexis) is a formed intellectual, moral, or artistic capacity—a “certain agility”—brought about by repeated actions of such a kind as to inculcate and strengthen the corresponding quality in an individual. In contrast, natural capacity (dynamis) or incapacity is that which is innate, and includes the impotence we know as original sin, which depraves the will from following right reason and the laws of God (542). We must distinguish habits from native powers so “we may know what things may be furnished by human diligence and what may not” (541)—an allusion to the vanity of good works. Among native capacities is that form of benevolence the Greeks called storgh` jusikh` , natural benevolence, and its exemplar is parental love. “For in parents who are not monsters, there dwells deep within the recesses of the heart a certain wondrous love toward their children, which is not brought about by growing familiarity, as is love toward other people, but is a natural burning that God wished to inflame in us as a forcible reminder of his love for his son and for us. There is also a natural benevolence in children toward their parents, brothers, and sisters” (541). Here Melanchthon not only departs from the realm of language to enter that of human relations, but also roots filial affection in Christian belief. Later, this article of faith circles back to become a necessary proof in a rhetorical syllogism proving the Judgment of Solomon to be correct (618). The third fount of human behavior is passion (passio) or the quality of being able to feel or suffer, and it encompasses not only the senses but also objects perceived by the senses—light and color; sounds, voices, speeches, and single words; odor, flavor, heat, cold, dryness, wetness, and the qualities arising from these, such as roughness and smoothness. This capacity to feel produces the outward sensory affects of pleasure and pain, which accompany touch and are communicated by nerves throughout the body. More peremptory than either habit or innate capacity, passion also effects strong motions in the heart. Affects of the heart, such as hope and fear, are motions arising from cognition, and excite the heart either to pursue or flee those objects that will cause it to feel the outward affects of pleasure or pain. Some affects are long-lasting, such as the qualities of mercy, love, hatred, and envy, which are rather like habits. Others are sudden motions “working from the heart, / That passion cannot rule” (3.3.126–27).

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This last idea is clearly the basis of Othello’s response to Iago’s stammering display in Act III, scene 3, to which I briefly referred at the beginning of this chapter: And for I know thou’rt full of love and honesty And weigh’st thy words, before thou giv’st them breath, Therefore these stops of thine fright me the more. For such things in a false disloyal knave Are tricks of custom, but in a man that’s just, They’re close delations, working from the heart, That passion cannot rule. (3.3.121–27)24

Whether we accept the “close denotements” of Q’s reading or the “close dilations” of F’s (which is nearer the verberatio to which Melanchthon likens the beating of the heart by a ruling passion), it is the quality of the affects, those magis rapidi gubernatores that will not themselves be ruled, that Othello is perceiving in Iago’s performance. His problem, as ever, is to learn whether Iago’s close dilations/denotements are qualities of “a false disloyal knave” or of “a man that’s just”—two quite different species—since one can know a substance only by its accidents. The wavering we detected earlier between Othello’s hesitant “I think thou dost [love me]” and his confident “And for I know thou’rt full of love” registers only a moment later that instant of cognitive blankness which accompanies a perception that has not yet been specified—and records its fatal location in the species “a man that’s just.”25 If Othello’s doubt about what to make of the accidents thrown off by Iago surfaces only briefly in the play, those he perceives in Desdemona begin almost immediately after this moment to appear problematic to him. At first he protests, in the confidence of his Stoic belief in ethos, ‘ Tis not to make me jealous To say my wife is fair, feeds well, loves company, Is free of speech, sings, plays and dances well: Where virtue is, these are more virtuous. . . . (3.3.186–89)

The condition he stipulates is logical, both in the general and technical sense, and it is Iago’s project to attach the accidents he enumerates to another implied substance. He begins to do this, as I have suggested, by assimilating

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Desdemona to the species “our country disposition,” whose difference is “not to leave undone, but to keep unknown” (207). He then emphasizes the detachability of accident by reminding Othello of how Desdemona had concealed her love of him from her father, rehearsing the qualities through which she had appeared to Brabantio’s eyes. These had seemed to him so unbefitting an intended elopement that he could only conclude that she had been enchanted. Moving very cautiously, Iago then backs away from conclusively identifying Desdemona with the new species he refers to: “But pardon me, I do not in position / Distinctly speak of her. . . .” (3.3.238–39). The phrase “in position,” as we noticed in chapter 1, is a term of art.26 Iago assures Othello that he is not speaking of Desdemona ex positione—where a stated premise is followed by necessary consequences. But he proceeds as though he were. By alternately noting perceived accidents and inferring new species, he is able to shake loose the connections between the underlying “essences” of Cassio’s honor, Desdemona’s virtue, and the qualities that revealed them to Othello’s eyes: Yet if you please to hold him off a while You shall by that perceive him, and his means: Note if your lady strain his entertainment With any strong or vehement importunity, Much will be seen in that. (3.3.252–56)

Convinced that Iago “knows all qualities, with a learned spirit, / Of human dealing,” Othello only a few moments later persuades himself that cuckoldry is “destiny unshunnable, like death” (279). Psychological warfare, conducted with the weapons of humanist dialectic, has accomplished the first phase of its work. Again, my aim in this chapter is not to provide a dialectical analysis of Othello. It should be evident by now that this can be done, and far more thoroughly than I have in these exemplary instances. Rather, I wish to show that dialectical thinking has influenced the way Shakespeare represents both speech and behavior on the stage. Dramatis personae emerge from Shakespeare’s imagination using the language and concepts of dialectic because it is part of their mental equipment—or, to speak more precisely, his, and he is using them critically. Once we have recognized that the linguistic and conceptual habits formed by dialectical training constitute part of the psychological furnishings of Shakespeare’s generation—and have distinguished the characteristic conflations and contiguities of speech, mind,

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and world in that training as elements of a distinctive ideology fostered by sixteenth-century humanist education—we are better able to account historically for the subject formations we see emerging in early modern English culture as they are produced on Shakespeare’s stage. As represented persons, Shakespeare’s characters may be said to objectify these subjectivities in two ways: as instantiations of what he understood was happening to people’s language and thought in his time—perhaps made possible because he gave them words—and also as embodiments of what he may not have always been able to grasp reflectively, since he, too, participated in the discourse he represented. In this regard, Iago’s complaint that overheard rumor “doth like a poisonous mineral gnaw my inwards” (2.1.295)—a suspicion sufficiently serious for Emilia to have taken notice of it (4.2.147–49)—may signify that inability fully to transcend one’s cultural discourse we may assume to have been Shakespeare’s. If Iago is pathologically jealous, so is the discourse in which he moves, where outside and inside, speech, mind, and actuality are always overflowing their shared boundaries. The important point is that person and discourse mutually inform one another. If Iago is paranoid, introjecting jealousy from what “is thought abroad” (1.3.386), then casting it upon Othello, or projecting it upon him because, as Lewis Theobald conjectured, Iago is himself “a fellow almost damned in a fair wife” (1.1.20),27 or if he comes to “fear Cassio with my nightcap, too” (2.1.305) because he is “framed to make women false” (1.3.397)—this jealousy could go on and on—it is because for everyone the putative and the actual have, to a greater or lesser degree, coalesced. In a sense not intended, Brabantio’s charge that necromantic charms seduced his daughter is correct: when intentions, words, and things are indistinguishable, merely probable discourse becomes magical. There is one more relevant matter to be discussed before we leave the humanists’ revision of Aristotelian dialectic. If Melanchthon’s familiar schoolmasterly style blurred the lines between the fields of speech, mind, and world, and thus indirectly fostered the conflation of apt and true, his explicit treatment of probability and necessity further obscured these distinctions. Probability, which was glanced at in his etymology of dialectic from the Greek practice of debating according to opinion, briefly reenters Book I in his discussion of intellectual habits within the predicate quality. The habits of human substances are divided into those of body and mind, and of the mind into those of intellect and will. The intellectual habitus is called noticia, a notion or idea, and we are told noticia is either certa or incerta, the latter being called opinio, which is the last we hear of opinion until, in a discussion of the noticia vera astonishingly called prudentia, from which

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legal studies are born, we learn that legal doctrine is part science, and part probable teaching (536–38).28 Nothing more is then said about probability. It is symptomatic of the work as a whole, which exhibits a curious mental tic whereby probability is glancingly acknowledged to be a part of dialectic but is swept aside in the interest of truthful demonstration. The ideological imperative behind all this becomes evident following a surprising distinction that appears at the beginning of Book IV on topical invention. After arguing the usefulness of the topics in investigating and elaborating matters, Melanchthon distinguishes among three kinds of syllogism (in Book III only the demonstrative was discussed), based on propositions that are true, probable, and either plainly false or having only the appearance of truth. His exposition quickly turns into a diatribe against skepticism: Those propositions are surely true, to which the mind that cognizes them is forced to assent, either through evidence, demonstration, universal experience, or infallible testimony. For although human minds cannot see through everything and there are many ambiguous opinions, neverthless God wishes there to be certain, firm, and immutable ideas as guides to life. He wants to be acknowledged in some way. He wants there to be strong and clear ideas of numbers and figures. He wants certain unchanging moral laws. One must not assent to Pyrrhonists or Academics, the destroyers of certitude, and to those contentious men who think that everything is uncertain and ambiguous. This madness annhilates the greatest gift of God, namely Truth, and overturns the arts, which preside over life, and obscures the recognition of God’s existence, however little of which that is found in man’s nature should be illuminated and strengthened, not extinguished. (646)

Following this exhortation, he devotes several pages to explaining the three norms of certainty—universal experience, innate ideas, and the reasonings of the intellect in forming necessary syllogisms—before he arrives at a critical survey of the major ideas of the four classical schools of philosophy. He takes this occasion to urge his reader to select that school “which for the most part teaches true things and builds arts from true principles and holds the least errors. Such is the Aristotelian school,” he concludes, “if we wish to judge truly” (655). Melanchthon reveals a conservative pedagogue’s concern for what happens when young students learn unorthodox ideas, and he worries about their response to the ancient philosophical innovators. “It is useful to teach these things concerning the schools to youths,” he writes,

Speech, World, and Thought / 117 lest they disdain the true and received beliefs that common Aristotelian learning teaches, and through the love of novelty admire and embrace prodigious opinions. For there is such mobility in their spirits that they easily grow disgusted with the commonplace and seek out new and unnatural ideas, as Thucydides blamed his fellow citizens for doing, calling them slaves of absurd opinions and contemners of the tried and true. . . . These are vices and vulgarisms, and the causes of great calamities in life. Nor was there any other cause of innovation, when earlier philosophy had been correctly established, by Epicurus, Zeno, Arcesilas, and others, than this lightness of witty men [levitas ingeniorum], incited by ambition, envy, and jiloneici´a or pride. Indeed when we read what horribly audacious opinions concerning God these four schools have disseminated, we shudder with fear to think how the devil drives minds that are not ruled by divine light, and we should oppose to these views the testimony through which God reveals himself, fortifying our hearts with true beliefs not only against the mad Epicureans but also against stoic deliria and ˘

˘

academic epochn or wavering opinion, and pray that the true recognition of God be kindled and confirmed in us. (658)

With this fervent peroration Melanchthon sums up his belief that all humanist learning depends upon God’s enacted intention that there be truth in the world, the seeds of which are planted in men to develop into arts and thence into orderly societies. Skepticism threatens to overturn this divinely instituted structure. Therefore truth is to be sought in all instances, which accounts for his emphasis on demonstration within this elementary dialectic; for his metaphoric assimilation of language, thought, and actuality; and for his evident lack of interest in discussing probability, even though he includes rhetorical forms of argument that originate in philosophical skepticism. This was the dialectic that entered the mainstream of English pedagogy side by side with Agricola’s dialectic of probability—designed to take up where Agricola left off. Apodeixis—literally—has trumped ingenuity.

Four

“Yonder’s Foul Murders Done”: Place, Predicament, and Grammatical Space on Cyprus Sometime after 1567, Gabriel Harvey noted in his copy of Quintilian’s Institutes that Thomas Wilson’s Rule of Reason and Art of Rhetoric were “the dailie bread of owr common pleaders & discoursers.”1 These books were the first full treatments of logic and rhetoric to be written in English. Wilson, who had taken his B.A. at King’s College, Cambridge, in 1545–46, and his M.A. in 1549, published the logic in 1551 and the rhetoric in 1553. Both were issued at the behest of Richard Grafton, the King’s Printer, who was also responsible for the printing of the first Book of Common Prayer in 1549 and played an important role in printing the English Bible and the English chronicles. Wilson’s works on logic and rhetoric were thus part of a wider effort to disseminate religious and secular learning to an un-Latined but influential Protestant readership. Though Harvey was given to hyperbole, Wilson’s Rule of Reason ran through six editions between 1551 and 1580, by which time the phenomenon that Walter Ong terms the “pedagogical juggernaut” of Ramism had brought the older humanist version of scholastic dialectic into disfavor (Ong, 149). It remained the only Aristotelian logic in English widely available for the remainder of the century; Ralph Lever’s Witcraft saw only one edition in 1573, while Thomas Blundeville’s Logic, published in 1599, was not reprinted until 1619.2 As a Cambridge scholar associated with John Cheke, Roger Ascham, Sir Thomas Smith, and Walter Haddon; as protégé of the Earl of Leicester; a near-martyr to the Roman Inquisition in the late 1550s; a holder of the degree of L.L.D. from Padua, Cambridge, and Oxford; and a man who later served as advocate, diplomat, and secretary of state under Queen Elizabeth, Wilson played a significant role in the political, religious, and educational life of England during the third quarter of the sixteenth century.3 His work in logic and rhetoric is therefore especially

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meaningful as evidence of what a strong intellect, motivated by deep moral and religious fervor, could accomplish as popularizer of the learned art of discourse. More important, his work reveals what he himself apparently did not discern—his participation in the growing ideological conflation of the probable and the necessary, the apt and the true, in common thought and speech. In the present chapter, I will argue that this vernacular conflation of the predicables, predicaments, and places—and the complementary development in dialectic and rhetoric that transformed invention into a kind of physical topography—found a local habitation and a name in Shakespeare’s tragedy of Othello.

I If Wilson’s books were the food upon which lawyers and discoursers dined daily, it is disconcerting to consider what the unwary reader of his Rule of Reason, be he country gentleman, professional, or tradesman, would immediately chew upon as introductory remarks. First, under the rubric, “The Definition of Logique,” he would read, “Logique is an Arte to reason probably, on both partes, of al matiers that be putte foorth, so ferre as the nature of every thing can bear,” which we will recognize as Rudolph Agricola’s definition of the discipline.4 Then, in “A brief declaration in Metre, of the seven liberal Artes, wherin Logique is comprehended as one of theim,” one would read these verses: Logique by Arte, settes foorth the trueth, And dooeth tel what is vain. Rhethorique at large paintes wel the cause, And makes that seme right gaie, Which Logique spake but at a woorde, And taught as by the waie. (10)

The last four lines are conventional rephrasings of the often repeated comparison of the two disciplines and not incompatible with Wilson’s Agricolan definition of dialectic. The first two lines, however, emphasizing “trueth,” seem to be lifted from Philip Melanchthon, and contradict that definition. The contradiction is repeated a few pages later when, under the rubric “The Office of Logique,” Wilson writes, “Logique professeth to teache truely, orderely, and plainly,” adding that its task is fourfold: “To define the nature of every thing, to devide, to knit true arguments, and unknit false” (12). This

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is pure Melanchthon, as is the accompanying claim: “And here wee maie see, how universall this commoditie is, and how largely it extendeth, not onely to knowe worldely affairs, but also to knowe God and all his heavenly woorkes, so farre as nature maie comprehende.” To a reader holding Agricola in one hand and Melanchthon in the other, these contrary descriptions might be intelligible, but it is not likely that such a posture was assumed by many of Wilson’s consumers. We may infer, therefore, that a reader would either be puzzled by the contradictions or, more often than not, simply assent to his author’s bifold authority and swallow the two descriptions without paying much heed to their difference. Wilson is symptomatic, however, not only because he conveys contradictory theses concerning the nature of dialectic to his readers, but because he further obscures the boundaries among words, concepts, and things. When, for example, he distinguishes the predicaments (the “mooste generall woordes”) from the predicables (“the five commune wordes”), he asserts that in analyzing a proposition, “if one will bestowe a litle diligence herein, searchyng where every woorde is settled, and knowyng to whiche of all these moste general woordes he maie best referre it: he shall faiethfully knowe the Nature of all thinges, no man better, then the whiche, nothing is more necessarie, and this difference is betwixt the five commune woordes, otherwise called the Predicables, and these mooste generall woordes, called Predicamentes, that the Predicables, set foorth the largenesse of woordes, the Predicamentes dooe name the very nature of thinges, declarying (and that Substauntially) what thei are in very dede” (22–23). Here Wilson’s language unselfconsciously performs the task Sidney will allocate to the poet: it buildeth substantially, for it suggests to the reader that knowing the word is knowing the thing and that there is a one-to-one correspondence between them. If knowledge is power, the study of dialectic holds out the promise that a world of profit and delight awaits the studious artisan.5 This hint is corroborated as Wilson refers the reader to the table he had provided earlier to show the usefulness of the predicables (figure 1; Rule, 16). He had introduced his schema illustrating the substances of genus and species in the following manner: “This Table sheweth the ordre of every Substaunce, and kinde, as thei are appoincted by Nature, what the chief generall words are, what the middle generall are, what the lowest kindes in every thing are, and what the kindes betwixte both are” (15).6 Now, in explaining the predicament substance, he suggests that the reader go back and “marke the ordre of Substaunces, sette foorth in a Table a litle before: for we maie by the same, divide severally every Substaunce of al things in this world the which, when we knowe, and remembre in our mindes, we

122 / Logic of Renaissance Rhetoric This Table sheweth the ordre of euery Substaunce, and kinde, as thei are appoincted by Nature, what the chiefe generall woordes are, what the middle generall are, what the lowest kindes in euery thing are, and what the kindes betwixte bothe are: with bodie.

A Substaunce.

without bodie: As

God. Aungelles. Spirites. The soulle is of man. The.iiii.elementes Fire. Aire. Water. Earth. Heauen and all the Planetes.

Compounded of diuerse Elementes.

A bodie.

without mixture, as

Beeyng a liuyng thing

A bodie liuyng.

without life, as

Stones. Metalles. Liquores.

Hauyng the sence of felyng

A bodie liuyng.

without sence or felyng at all, as

a Tree. a Shrubbe. an Herbe.

Endued with reason.

A liuyng creature.

without the gifte of reason: as beastes, birdes, or fish some liuyng.

Vpon the land. In the water. In the aire, or in them bothe.

A manne: as

Scipio. Socrates. Alexander, and euery seueral manne liuyng.

Figure 1. “This Table sheweth the order of every substance . . .” from Thomas Wilson’s Rule of Reason (1553).

perceive evidently, the difference, betwene God and his creatures, and seyng the thing created of God, and the propreties therewithall, we rest upon the same, and learne the use and propre commoditie of many thinges here in yearth. We maie define many thinges by the same table, as we maie define Godde, manne, heaven, yearth, beaste, stone: and any thing els that is a Substaunce” (25–26). This is more than a claim that rote memorization of classes of substance helps one form correct propositions: to “perceive evidently” means to see luminously, and he promises that once seen in their hierarchical ranking, the things of the world will become available for the

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reader’s needs and comforts. The table atop the page, as recorded in the mind, becomes part of a user’s guide to the fundamentals of existence. Perhaps the most telling feature of The Rule of Reason, however, is Wilson’s conflation of the predicables, predicaments, and logical topics or places. It has often been noticed that these three systems, which were widely believed to mirror the structure of God’s creation, tend to be redundant in humanist dialectic because the same aspects of that creation necessarily recur in discussions of words, propositions, and arguments. We have already seen that predicables are words used to classify other words hierarchically, most frequently in definitions—and predicables include the class called accident.7 Accidents also constitute nine of the ten predicaments, entities that indicate the relationship between words in propositions. In turn, an accidental predicament like quality includes intellectual and moral habits, natural dispositions, and fleeting passions, which modify the substance in a proposition, but also qualify a matter examined in dialectical discourse and ornament a matter expounded in an oration, and are therefore found among the places as well.8 Other predicaments, such as Quantitas (quantity), Ubi (where), Quando (when), and Habitus (which Wilson Englishes as “the apparailyng”) add further circumstantial detail to a proposition, yet also furnish data for qualifying or embellishing a subject matter. In Wilson, this redundancy becomes all the more problematic because he has joined in one volume Agricola’s dialectic of probability, in his treatment of the topics, and Melanchthon’s dialectic of truth, in his treatment of the predicables and predicaments, thereby creating the impression of a double crossreference: the predicables and predicaments are somehow like the topics, and the truth value of the first two systems is somehow like the analytic value, based on probability, of the third. Why are these conflations potentially so troublesome? Because theoretically, at least, the predicables and predicaments describe the relations of words, while the places describe aspects of things (res), ambiguously subject matter or existents. Their intermingling contributed to that loss of distinction between res and verba that Bacon believed lay at the heart of humanist culture.9 These topics or places are more usefully thought of as “commonplaces” for, as Agricola puts it: there is in all things, although each of them is distinct in its characteristics, a certain shared likeness, and they all incline to likeness of nature; each thing, for instance, has a substance, all arise from certain causes, and all achieve something. And so the most ingenious of men, out of that diversity spread out over all, have singled out those common headings such as substance,

124 / Logic of Renaissance Rhetoric cause, effect, and the others. . . . Hence, when we turn to consider any matter in our minds, by following these we may survey the entire nature, parts, compatibilities and incompatibilities of a thing, and may draw thence an argument suitable to the matters proposed.10

The system followed a pattern similar to those of the predicables and predicaments in that its members also consisted of substances and accidents, although they were greater in number. Cicero’s Topica, used widely in the sixteenth century for both dialectical and rhetorical discourse, describes seventeen places; Agricola’s De inventione names twenty-four; Melanchthon’s Erotemata dialectices specifies eleven topics of persons and twenty-eight of things; Wilson, following Agricola, offers twenty-four. They are often presented in a table, where the most general topics are ramified, by means of brackets, into more specific topics, and these, in turn, exfoliate into particular topics, as indicated in Wilson’s table, shown here. It is assumed that all three systems—predicables, predicaments, and places—mirror the structure of reality (figure 2). When, therefore, Wilson uses language that conflates a predicament with a place, he does not simply blur the distinction between res and verba, he erases it. This phenomenon is often accompanied by the introduction of a rhetorical term into the discussion of dialectic, further suggesting that persuasion (which relies on the transformation of language into mental image) and demonstration (which relies on clear, abstract distinctions within language) are similar operations. For example, in his discussion of the predicament Quando (when), Wilson writes: “This predicament quando, conteineth the diffrence and diversitie of times, as nunc, now, heri, yesterday, noctu, in the night time, interdiu, in the daie time. This place also giveth light to confirm causes. As to prove that one is peinfull, I maie saie soche a one studieth daie and night, so moche as nature can beare: therefore he is a peinfull man” (36). Here, “predicament” is equated with “place,” and is therefore useful in proving “causes,” that is, in arguing cases, as Wilson slips from expounding the relationship of words in a sentence to suggesting how a topical circumstance can prove something about the character of a man. He does this again and again. In explaining the predicament Ubi (where), he writes: “Ubi is an ordre, or predicament, whiche comprehendeth the descripcion of places, wherin some thing is reported, either to be dooen, to have been dooen, or els hereafter to be dooen. As to be at London, to bee at Cambrige, to be at home, to be in a chambre, to bee above, beneth, on right hande, left hande, before, or behinde, and whatsoever is aunswered to this question, when I aske where any thing is, or where any thing is dooen.

Place, Predicament, and Grammatical Space / 125 The diuision of the places, whiche are xxiiii. in numbre.

Some are inwarde places, called Loci interni, and thei are.

Some are outward places, called Externi, that is not in the substaunce, or nature of the thing but without it, and these are,

{

{ {

Partelie in the very substaunce, As

And partelie incident to the substaunce, As Either knitte with a nighe affinitie, called Cognata, of the whiche Either applied to the thing, not being the cause thereof, but onely geuing a name therunto, called Applicita, As

{

The definition. The general woorde. The kinde. The propretie. The whole. The partes. The yoked woorde.

{

Woordes adioined. The maner of dooing. The thing conteining.

{

Some are causes, As

The efficient cause. The ende.

Some are those whiche spring of the causes, called, Euenta, as

{

The place. The time. Thinges annexed.

Or elles thei be Accidentes, wherof there be .v.

{

Thinges chauncing. Sentences of the sage. The name of a thing. Thinges compared. Thinges like.

Or elles thei are repugnauncies, As

Discordantes. Thinges differing.

The effect. The thing appoincted for some ende

Figure 2. “The diuision of the places, whiche are xxiii, in nomber . . .” from Thomas Wilson’s Rule of Reason (1553).

This place serveth for coniectures, either in praisyng or dispraisyng” (35). Here, the predicament ubi begins as a qualifier in a proposition; then, as a “place,” it is associated with conjectural speeches in rhetoric, which concern “whether any such thing bee, or no,” argued on the basis of probability,11 and finally with encomium and invective. Indeed, in the second part of Rule, when Wilson explains the topics of invention and comes to those called “time,” “place,” and “things annexed,” he confesses that “these three are nothing els, then the three predicaments, or most generall places, which I rehearsed before. Ubi. Where. Quando. When. Habitus. The araiyng” (115). If his remark reveals a teacherly impulse to reinforce learning, it also obliterates the distinction between verbal predication and the topical analysis of

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subject matter. Verba and res fall toward each other and seem to inhabit the same territory. There is a moment in Othello when something similar seems to happen. It is when Emilia cries out, after the brothel scene, “Why should he call her whore? who keeps her company? / What place, what time, what form, what likelihood?” (4.2.139–40). Her outrage is focused on Othello’s predication of Desdemona as “whore.” And her discourse, too, shifts from predicate to topic: whore, company, place, time, form, likelihood. But in her demands we hear an attempt to restore the distinction between speech and world that has been lost by Othello, as she tries to negotiate the grounds that justify the name he has called his wife. So tenuous is the distinction between word and thing, however, so “sticky” the application, that even Desdemona is apt to acquiesce in the characterization, which as Emilia remarks, was “thrown in such despite, and heavy terms upon her”: des: Am I that name, Iago? iago: What name, fair lady? des: Such as she said my lord did say I was. emil: He call’d her whore. A beggar in his drink Could not have laid such terms upon his callat. (4.2.120–23)

We have seen earlier how accidents are “thrown” about in this play. But they are also applied, “laid on,” and this increases the complexity of an accident’s relationship to a substance. For within the table of places is a class called “Applicita . . . things outwardly applied to a matier, whiche are not the cause of thesame matier, and yet geve a certain denominacion to it” (115). The three subtopics in this class—“time,” “place,” and “thinges annexed, or knitte together”—are the very ones that Wilson tells us correspond to the predicaments quando, ubi, and habitus. The last of these—“thynges [or “woordes”] annexed,” otherwise called connexa (116)—is most critical because it lies logically, if not ontologically, between the topic “woordes adioined,” which belongs to the class of “inwarde places” that are not “in the very substance” but “incident to the substance,” and the topic “thinges chauncing,” or contingentia, which belongs to the class of “outward places,” described as follows: “Those accidents are called thinges chauncyng, whiche chaunce aboute a thing so, that whether these thinges chaunce, or no, the thing it self maie bee, or though the thing be not, these maie so chaunce to be” (118; see figure 2 for visual locations).

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In a play like Othello, where what one is called has mortal implications, the distinctions among these three topics, and the uncertainty as to whether they represent words or things, can be crucial. The one most closely incident to a substance is “woordes adioigned.” These are accidental words, Wilson tells us, that “happen” to a substance and are different from the word denoting the substance—“as unto Cato (which of his substaunce is a man) wisedome dooth happen, whereby he is called wise” (100–101). To unify his teaching (thereby reinforcing the conflation of predication and subject analysis), he notes that “all quantities, qualities, and those that are comprehended, in the predicament of relacion, are referred to this place, when thei are considered to be comprehended in a substaunce” (101). “Wordes adioigned” may be perceived by the senses or by the understanding, for sometimes an accident is not visible, as when a man known for his swiftness is sleeping, but we remember having seen him run, and recognize the accidental nature of the “word adioined” by the fact that the quality is not manifested at present. “Woordes [or “thynges”] annexed,” however, which are “knit to the substance, [and] called Connexa . . . are ioigned outwardly to the subject, and geve a name unto him, according as thei are” (117). An example is Crassus, who is called a man according to his substance, but a rich man insofar as he is rich; similarly, a married man is a man by substance but a husband because he has a wife, just as he who has a master is called a servant and he who has a father is called a son. If the topic “words adioined” is like the predicaments quantity, quality, and relation, this topic connexa is a version of the predicament habitus, what a substance holds or contains and what covers it. Following Agricola’s lead, Wilson subdivides connexa into those which are said to be placed close to or nearly touching the substance and those which survey the res as if from a distance. Characteristically he reifies the topic in his translation: Woordes knitte, are divided diversly, for some are called soche as are nigh, and touching the substaunce. As to bee full of fishe, is agreyng to the water, to bee full of grasse, is annexed or agreyng to the yearth, to bee cloudie is annexed or agreyng to the aire. Again woordes knit, are called those thinges, that a man weareth, as to weare a coate, a jacke, a harneis, to have shoen, to be merie, to be dustie, and al soche as are casuall to man. Some are called annexed or agreyng, whiche are knit to man, and yet not thinges worne upon his backe, but farther of, and rather perceived by understandyng, then knowen by yie sight. As nobilitie, powre, fame, aucthoritie. (117)

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The difference between “woordes knit” or “annexed” and “woordes adioigned” is that the latter accidents cannot exist without the subjects in which they inhere: when a wise man like Cato dies, wisdom dies with him. Should a wife die, however, “the housebande maie be onlive still, savyng that he loseth his name, to be called housbande,” because husband is only a “woorde annexed” (117). As we shall see in a moment, the ontological distinction between these two terms becomes crucial in the final scenes of Othello. The topic most loosely linked to a substance is “thinges chauncyng, called contingentia.” These accidents “chaunce about a thing” in such a way that when they are present the thing itself may be absent, and when they are absent the thing itself may be present. For example, the “thinge chauncyng” called pallor sometimes appears before a sickness, but it often appears without any sickness about to occur. Correlatively, a man may be falling ill yet is not at all pale (118). Iago exploits this uncertain connection between accident and substance when he spies Bianca quaking beside the wounded Cassio: iago: What, look you pale?—O, bear him out o’the air. —Stay you, good gentlemen.—Look you pale, mistress? ..................................... Go know of Cassio where he supp’d tonight: What, do you shake at that? bian: He supp’d at my house, but I therefore shake not. (5.1.104–5, 117–19)

Iago would like to infer a guilty conscience from Bianca’s pallor and trembling, though they are contingentia that may be present in the absence of such a substance or may indicate a different substance, in this case an innocent conscience fearful for Cassio and herself. She argues stoutly that her appearance is not a sign of criminal wrongdoing, but is arrested anyway, because the contingency “sticks” in the minds of the onlookers. All three topics are called accidents by Wilson, though it is clear that in relation to their respective substances they reveal subtle differences. Quid ergo? Would anyone but a sixteenth-century logician or his ambitious merchant reader give these any heed? The differences Wilson points out are more than mere logical quibbles if, as I have been suggesting, dialectical thinking informs one’s sense of being, in Shakespeare’s play. Let me demonstrate by focusing on three important moments of Othello’s self-representation.

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As noted in chapter 1, when we first meet Othello listening to Iago’s selective tale of how Roderigo accused him to Brabantio, he refuses to hide on hearing the voices of men who presumably approach to arrest him because he believes his ethos is self-evident: iago: You were best go in. oth:

Not I, I must be found.

My parts, my title, and my perfect soul Shall manifest me rightly. . . . (1.1.30–32)

Othello speaks of himself here as the theme of a discourse whose main topics, which he readily supplies, will reveal him truly. This is appropriate, since he is soon to be precisely that—a matter of debate between Brabantio and the Duke. But see what happens if we take him as seriously as he seems to take himself. If he thinks of himself as a subject matter, the substance Othello may be known only by his accidents—we know that much from the doctrine of the predicables. And these accidents are conceived by him as topics: we can read “parts” literally as those places that are “in the very substaunce,” or figuratively as his achievements, in which case they fall in the predicament of quality or among the “inwarde places” that are “partelie incident to the substaunce”: the “maner of dooing” (91). By title he may mean his legal right to Desdemona, which we may locate in the predicament habitus—the having or holding of something—and among the “outward places . . . that is not in the substaunce, or nature of the thing but without it”: namely, the topic connexa, “things annexed.” Or he may mean his title of Captain or General, which, as a style of power, is dependent on another substance, for “to be an Officer, a Maior, a Sherief, Lorde Chauncelour, Comptroller, or any other officer in the common weale, al these are annexed to their inferiour, over whom they have aucthoritie” (117). Othello’s perfect soul, by which he presumably means his moral integrity, is a more difficult argument to sustain, for “perfect” is a “woorde adioined.” Like Cato’s wisdom, it may be perceived by the senses or the understanding and, under the circumstances, is not likely to be perceived at all by Desdemona’s father, though in the event, for reasons of expediency, it does linger in the memories of the Duke and his Council. The question is, how stable is the self thus invented? Othello speaks of himself as though these accidents are both self-evident and permanent, but it is in the nature of accidents that they befall a substance, chaunce to it or about it, and may be thrown off, augmented, or diminished. And if

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one conceives of oneself as a theme enriched by topics, one should also be aware that he may be argued in utramque partem—that is, his matter yields a wide variety of places that may be applied to him with quite contrary results. This may be thought of as the discursive vulnerability of a self subjected to dialectical construction. But there is also another vulnerability, one that results not from being talked about in an unwanted manner but from feeling that one’s selfhood depends upon accidental acquisitions. We find this moment when Othello is suddenly convinced that Desdemona has been unfaithful to him, and feels the qualities of his life departing from him: I had been happy if the general camp, Pioneers and all, had tasted her sweet body, So I had nothing known. O now for ever Farewell the tranquil mind, farewell content! Farewell the plumed troops, and the big wars That makes ambition virtue! O farewell, Farewell the neighing steed and the shrill trump, The spirit-stirring drum, th’ ear-piercing fife, The royal banner, and all quality, Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war! And, O you mortal engines whose rude throats Th’ immortal Jove’s dread clamours counterfeit, Farewell: Othello’s occupation’s gone. (3.3.348–60)

This valedictory—similar to Richard II’s abdication, save that Richard proposes to assume spiritual attributes as he gives up those of royalty—is rhetorically a painfully moving speech, made vivid by Othello’s amplification of the accoutrements of war. As we noticed in chapter 2, it marks his fear that his pursuit of a heroic life has masked less honorable passions. Dialectically, however, it is a peeling-away of the accidents of a heroic military life that leaves the self a nullity, or at least an essence that’s not seen.12 Why is Othello’s occupation gone? And what does it mean that it is gone? Is it that housewives now can make a skillet of his helm, as he had vowed when he asked the Duke to allow Desdemona to accompany him to Cyprus and promised that feathered Cupid would not foil his speculative and active instruments? Not likely, since he has performed his duties well. Rather, it must be because he has most fully experienced his occupation in the tale he told to Desdemona, who confirmed it in her sighs, her pity, and her admiration, which now have fallen into taint.13

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But if it is gone, what does it mean for the substance of Othello? In the brothel scene, he provides a clue, when he tries to express the pain he feels by comparing it to Job’s plagues and to public scorn, both of which would be more bearable: But there where I have garnered up my heart, Where either I must live or bear no life, The fountain from the which my current runs Or else dries up—to be discarded thence! Or keep it as a cistern for foul toads To knot and gender in! (4.2.58–63)

The first two lines blend two biblical sources: Matthew 6:20–21, “But lay up treasures for your selves in heaven . . . For where your treasure is, there wil your heart be also”; and Acts 17:28, “For in him we live, and move, and have our being.” The last four lines recall Proverbs 5:15–18: “Drinke the water of thy cisterne, and of the rivers out of the middes of thy owne well. Let thy fountaines flowe forthe, and the rivers of waters in the stretes. But let them be thine, even thine ownely, and not the strangers with thee. Let thy fountaine be blessed, & rejoice with the wife of thy youth.” Othello conceives of Desdemona as the repository of his faith and the source of his being. But the deification suggested in the first lines is absorbed into images of sexual thirst, satisfaction, and disgust. We find here that ambivalence Othello feels about Desdemona in its most condensed form—marriage is spiritual, refreshing, debased. But what is faith in one’s wife, her infidelity, and sexual disgust to one who feels himself to be a theme? They are accidents that may be cast away, as Othello realizes when Emilia knocks on the door after the murder: If she come in, she’ll sure speak to my wife. My wife, my wife! what wife? I have no wife. O, insupportable, O heavy hour! Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse Of sun and moon, and that th’ affrighted globe Should yawn at alteration. (5.2.95–100)

Here chaos is come again, for as Theobald noted, the last three lines refer to the darkening of the earth and Christ’s descent into hell during the Crucifixion:14

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when one sheds a deity, what remains? A substance without a name or, more accurately, a man without qualities. His occupation’s gone and his wife is gone. And this is why, when Lodovico enters and asks, “Where is this rash and most unfortunate man?” Othello can only reply, “That’s he that was Othello; here I am” (5.2.284–85). What remains is a bare substance that is alienated even from his proper name.15 Or is he even that? The dialectical ontology we have been studying suggests that something more foundational has occurred. For if Desdemona is the source of Othello’s being and he has felt “discarded thence” (4.2.61); and if, in his casting her away he has destroyed his source of being, then he must feel that he is an accident without a substance, for as Wilson tells us, “it is propre to every Accident, to be in some one thing conteinyng him. If there be nothing conteinyng, then the accident cannot bee” (117). In his dialectical imagination, Othello has seen his own substance reduced to invisibility and then to an adjunct of Desdemona. This is why, nameless, he attempts to restore the substance that was Othello by demanding new predications from those who, in their report to Venice, will these unlucky deeds relate: lod: O thou Othello, that wert once so good, Fall’n in the practice of a cursed slave, What should be said to thee? oth:

Why, anything;

An honourable murderer, if you will. . . . (5.2.288–91)

As Othello’s reply indicates, Lodovico’s “to thee” means “of thee”—that is, what should be said about thee? And a few moments later Othello fleshes out the substance that had been lost, as he instructs the Venetian to report his actions aright: Speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate, Nor set down aught in malice. Then must you speak Of one that loved . . . Of one not easily jealous . . . of one whose hand . . . of one whose subdued eyes. . . . (5.2.340–46)

Recent critics have observed that Othello, a man who seems to understand himself best within a narrative, is here reinscribing that self within a story.

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I make a similar argument, even more radically, later in this book. But prior to narrative comes predication, and it is this dialectical act of self-resuscitation that Othello undertakes in the first instance.

II Thus far, I have been suggesting that to read Othello with a sixteenth-century dialectical cast of mind may help us to account for some peculiar discursive phenomena in the play: why the probable tends to collapse into the necessary, words become confused with things, and beings as substantial as Othello and Desdemona come to appear “much changed” both to themselves and to those who encounter them. In doing so, I have tried to discover a specific cultural ground that might foster the psychological events Shakespeare dramatizes. I shall now take this a step further by exploring a related phenomenon: the way in which the boundaries between mind and world are permeated and rendered indistinct through a grammatical ambiguity associated with a spatial or locative ambiguity. This occurs in the play chiefly by means of a shift in which the indicative mood slips into the conditional or the subjunctive and those into the indicative, thereby conflating a statement of fact with a statement of possibility or expectation or desire. These utterances, coming from different places, as it were, within an individual speaker, have dialogic counterparts in encounters where wish, conviction, and likehood seem interchangeable and thought is reified, as well as topographical counterparts in voices and sounds whose places of origin onstage are uncertain. Such ambiguous verbal and acoustic phenomena contribute to that odd threshhold experience we recognize as characteristic of the world of Othello. Many years ago Madeleine Doran remarked that in this play, perhaps even more than in others, Shakespeare uses conditional sentences to inform dramatic structure. She offers this description of the way they introduce the realm of possibility into that of the given: “The conditionals of possibility are verticals coming up from below, first touching, then penetrating, the horizontal movement, distorting and disrupting it. They are like molten rock which, thrusting itself up from below into old sedimentary beds, heaves up, twists, cracks, and dislimns their level plains’ (Dramatic Language, 64). In designating what is disrupted as horizontal, she is referring to both sentence and plot—the metonymic movement that proceeds laterally, but always “under” a certain metaphoric register of meaning and expectation that informs the linear progress of an action. Although she does not pursue the point, her language suggests a certain locative component in the contrast between the indicative, in which a person expresses what

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he believes are the facts of his situation, and the conditional, in which he entertains the possibility of another situation in a counter-factual world. Whether that difference is conceived in terms of time, will, or chance, the world in which the envisioned action takes place is a hypothetical “as if” domain located in a mind that is entertaining an alternative to what is. It is this movement between actual and suppositional moods—and their physical counterparts—that I will explore here. As Doran observed, the irruption of the conditional into the indicative is epidemic in the play. It is chiefly associated with Iago at first, then gradually spreads in various forms to the other characters. It is most intense in that portion of the play where Othello’s certainties are breaking down, the third and fourth acts. The most striking early example, however, is in the first scene, when Iago is distinguishing for Roderigo two kinds of servants—selfless followers and self-serving followers—and professes himself one of the latter: For, sir, It is as sure as you are Roderigo, Were I the Moor, I would not be Iago. In following him I follow but myself: (1.1.54–57)

The tenor of this remark is intelligible because of its context, but its language is unsettling. We expect the lines following “Roderigo” to conclude the dependent clause with an asseveration in the indicative like “the only way for a man to thrive in this world is to pursue his own good.” Instead, we hear a detour into a hypothetical identity that introduces a conditional assertion of nonidentity, which is followed by an assertion in the indicative that collapses the two separated identities into one, effectively destabilizing the identity of Roderigo that was invoked originally. Can we articulate the oddity we feel about this turn of the argument? Iago has begun by staking Roderigo’s identity—a fact expressed in the indicative mood—against the truth of a claim he is about to make. But when that claim is heard, it is logically self-evident: were I the Moor, I would not be Iago. So why stake the truth of Roderigo’s identity against it at all? The stake can only be needed if Iago isn’t simply stating his non-identity with Othello but is saying something like, “As sure as you are who you are, if I had Othello’s fortunes, which I don’t, I would not act like the subservient fellow I appear to be.” This statement is different from the logically self-evident one because Iago is posing against a fact (“It is as sure as you are Roderigo”) a contrary-to-fact condition (“Were I the Moor”) that, once proposed, functions

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as a new reality or fact that allows him to envision a new way of being (“I would not be Iago”). But this new way of being is itself ambiguous, since the word would can signify both being and willing—that is, “Under these (new) conditions I would not be the Iago you see” or “I would not choose to be the Iago you see.” He then goes on to use this bivalent conclusion, couched in a doubly conditional clause, to confirm a proposition in the indicative that engages in the same kind of double-speak: one that makes no sense logically, because as a simple declarative sentence it violates the rule of identity—in following him I follow me—but that also does make sense because it expresses a choice—in following him I follow my secret advantage, that is, to “serve my turn upon him” (1.1.41).16 Heard one way, then, Iago affirms Roderigo’s identity, distinguishes between Othello’s identity and his own, and claims Othello’s identity for himself. In so doing he unmoors all three identities, for the “surety” of Roderigo’s identity must be contaminated by the time Iago collapses himself into Othello. Heard another way, Iago stakes a present fact against a contrary-to-fact condition, then uses this “would-be-but-isn’t” situation to explain his actual behavior. In effect, he moves from the world of “what is” to the world of “what isn’t” in search of an argument and, having found it, returns to the first world to corroborate “what is” by means of “what isn’t,” the latter residing only in his head. The domains of fact and imagination are thus mutually implicated. By contrast, Othello’s early use of the conditional does not conflate the hypothetical and actual worlds: But that I love the gentle Desdemona I would not my unhoused free condition Put into circumscription and confine For the sea’s worth. (1.2.25–28)

The skeletal form of this sentence reads, “If not for the fact that I love, I would not put.” By making the condition positive, Doran has remarked, Othello stresses the fact of his love and does not entertain the possibility of not loving Desdemona. That love is the given of his life (Doran, 74). But his sentence also permits him to glance at the lost alternative—“my unhoused free condition”—as if it were desirable, yet at the same time to keep it a distanced fiction, for the uncircumscribed, unconfined life, we are to learn, is not all it’s made out to be when it lacks the shape and teleology given to it by Desdemona. That is, he wants circumscription and confine. Othello’s

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conditional, then, is not only positive; it is also a form of psychological containment. Iago’s cryptic intermingling of moods, however, is a characteristic trick of speech. In the third act we hear another provocative exchange, this time between the two principals: iago: For Michael Cassio, I dare be sworn, I think[,] that he is honest. oth: I think so too. iago: Men should be what they seem, Or those that be not, would they might seem none. oth: Certain, men should be what they seem. iago: Why then I think Cassio’s an honest man. (3.3.127–32, brackets mine)

Against Othello’s growing anxiety, Iago places a series of wordy obstacles to knowing Cassio’s mind. Cassio’s honesty is presented not as a fact, nor even as what Iago thinks, but (in the F text quoted above) a thought that might be hazarded in an oath but isn’t.17 In the Q text (“I dare presume, I think that he is honest”) Iago offers not an oath, which he might hazard yet does not, but only a presumption that he thinks a thought. Which is to say that Iago creates a series of verbs in the subjunctive—“I dare be sworn / presume I think”—that postpones and weakens the indicative “is honest” until the actual is absorbed into the putative. When Othello, evidently mystified by such verbal circumstancing, concurs (“I think so too”), Iago offers an aphorism of general application that throws his presumption into still greater uncertainty, for it is a statement in the subjunctive, governed by an ambivalent “should”: a “should” of obligation (“Men ought to be what they seem”) and a “should” of probability (“Men are likely to be what they seem”). Othello apparently picks up the first “should” in his reply, which Iago accepts as sufficient ground for declaring—in the indicative—that he thinks Cassio’s an honest man. Othello is not comforted. How can a “should” from the world of moral ideals confirm what a man is in the world of actuality? Especially if we already suspect his stability because he’s proved to be a drunkard? And what of the cryptic hypothetical proposition that follows “Men should be what they seem,” which Othello ignores? Again, we hear a combination of indicative and subjunctive—“Or those that be not, would they”— what? Might seem not to be what they seem to be? Might seem not to be at all? Iago is flirting with that dialectical ontology that is to have such a devastating effect on Othello, if he is wishing that men who are not what they

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seem might not seem at all—that is, might lose their accidents and become invisible. In the event, his wish becomes a curse. Later in this scene, when Iago has done much to destabilize Othello’s assumptions, the Moor’s own conditional has changed: “If I do prove her haggard, / Though that her jesses were my dear heart-strings, / I’d whistle her off and let her down the wind / To prey at fortune” (3.3.264–67). By this time the possibility of Desdemona’s infidelity has become a future-more-vivid condition in the indicative, but its consequence—that he cast her off if she proves haggard—is expressed as a subjunctive “would,” as though he were trying to stave off what must follow. He gets there, it would seem, through a mediating “though” clause, whose counter-factual condition contaminates and thus mitigates the consequence. Othello’s faith has been broken and he is aware of the cost to his life, but that mortal possibility is yet contained. Indeed, the whole metaphor of hawking is a defensive, self-ennobling figure, whose tenor is developed only a few lines later when Othello concludes that ‘tis the plague of great ones to be destined from birth to be cuckolded. The fall from faith to suspicion, to what Iago would call a healthy skepticism—“Wear your eyes thus, not jealous nor secure” (3.3.201)—to flat dogmatism recapitulates in small the history of humanist inquiry we have been following and which has one more relevant episode that we shall notice shortly. For the present, however, I shall pursue the fortunes of conditionals and their ramifications in Othello. One moment after Othello proclaims that cuckoldry is destiny, Desdemona enters, and we hear a new note: “Look where she comes: / If she be false, O then heaven mocks itself, / I’ll not believe’t” (3.3.281–83). Here the condition is Desdemona’s falsity, but its conclusion is projected as a cosmic impossibility so incredible that it temporarily restores Othello’s equilibrium. He can now say to Iago: If thou dost slander her and torture me Never pray more, abandon all remorse; ............................... ............................... For nothing canst thou to damnation add Greater than that! (3.3.371–76)

His stake in Desdemona is clear: she is his absolute, the source from which his current runs. Divorcing him from her is effecting apostasy. When Iago pretends to be frightened by this attack on his candor and vows never again

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to speak honestly and directly to a friend, he once again calls into play that ambiguous miscellany of “shoulds”: iago: I thank you for this profit, and from hence I’ll love no friend, sith love breeds such offence. oth: Nay, stay, thou should be honest. iago: I should be wise, for honesty’s a fool And loses that it works for. (3.3.382–86)

Othello’s is a moral “should,” Iago’s a prudent, self-regarding “should,” though they sound alike, and this clash of optatives leads Othello to a double aporia: “By the world, / I think my wife be honest, and think she is not, / I think that thou art just, and think thou art not” (3.3.386–88). At this point the alternative possibility that is normally offered by the subjunctive within a hierarchical structure has invaded the domain of the indicative, which now holds both possibilities simultaneously in contradiction. Here Iago’s influence is fully heard for the first time, for it is Iago’s manner of entertaining contrary assumptions, of mingling would with is, that marks his ability to speak fluently from different regions of his mind.18 From here it is not a far distance to what we have earlier described as a contradiction between what Othello thinks Desdemona “is” and what she has been “proved” to be: “A fine woman, a fair woman, a sweet woman. . . . Ay, let her rot and perish and be damned tonight, for she shall not live” (4.1.175–79). What has happened, and what continues to happen virtually to the end of the play, is that Iago’s capacity literally to influence the indicative with the subjunctive results in an overflow, whereby Othello’s awareness is flooded with parallel possibilities, sometimes causing him anguish, sometimes causing him to repress the pain, as in his contemplation of the sleeping Desdemona: “It is the cause. Yet I’ll not shed her blood / Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow / And smooth as monumental alabaster: / Yet she must die, else she’ll betray more men” (5.2.3–6). This strange speech, in which Desdemona both is and is not chaste, has elicited a powerful psychoanalytic reading from Stanley Cavell, and in chapter 7 I will offer a complementary “magical” reading. In the context, however, of the apt and true, which we are following here, it is clear that the apt, in the guise of the conditional if, has coalesced with the true, in the form of the indicative is.19 This isomorphism is not absolute in Othello or permanent. It slowly undoes itself under the pressure of Emilia’s tongue following the murder: “O, I were damned beneath all depth in hell / But that I did proceed upon

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just grounds / To this extremity” (5.2.135–37). Though the order is inverted, Othello’s just proceeding is the condition, one that is stated positively as a fact, while the ominous consequence is safely confined in a contrary-tofact presumption. His next assertion is less sure and gives the impression of greater defensiveness because he fortifies the conclusion with a double condition: “Had she been true, / If heaven would make me such another world / Of one entire and perfect chrysolite, / I’d not have sold her for it” (5.2.139–42). He is saying, “If she had been true and, in addition, if heaven,” in order to emphasize his own fidelity and probity. As the evidence of his error comes pouring in, however, this kind of verbal bulwarking ceases, and Othello’s conditionals are no longer contrary to fact. He is back, arguably to the very end, in the world of actuality. Now the immediate result of this invasion of the indicative by the subjunctive is to focus Othello’s attention on something called thought. For as Iago proceeds to undermine Othello’s assumptions about Cassio and Desdemona, he not only introduces possibility into the given, as Doran suggests; he brings to Othello’s consciousness the mediated nature of his understanding, a fact that the Moor in his self-certainty seems hardly to have considered. This begins to occur in the sequence that precedes the “I dare be sworn, I think, that he is honest” passage in Act III. In this sequence, Iago asks Othello whether Cassio knew of his wooing, and their dialogue produces a series of echoes that begins as follows: iago: Did Michael Cassio, when you wooed my lady, Know of your love? oth:        He did, from first to last. Why dost thou ask? iago: But for a satisfaction of my thought, No further harm. oth:     Why of thy thought, Iago? (3.3.94–98)

The dialogue continues, the two of them repeating one another’s words until Othello exclaims: “By heaven, thou echo’st me, / As if there were some monster in thy thought / Too hideous to be shown” (3.3.109–11). The effect of these reverberations is to make Othello aware of—or more accurately, to make him construct—Iago’s interiority. Iago says Cassio is honest “for aught I know,” but that is not enough for Othello; he wants to hear what he thinks, and from then on the prying loose, the opening-up of Iago’s thought is Othello’s object. I say “construct,” because it is not clear that what Iago

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utters when Othello asks him to “give thy worst of thoughts / The worst of words” (135–36) is really thought in the usual sense. What Othello wants to hear are Iago’s convictions or at least his strong suspicions, but Iago doesn’t have any. What Iago has, or rather generates, are verbal probabilities—commonplaces that are only thought-possibilities. Othello, however, construes these topics as thoughts issuing from a truly proairetic psyche, one that weighs, balances, and chooses the evidence it presents to another as serious judgments (3.3.114–23).20 This has some important consequences. As a result of the persistent catechism Othello imposes on an apparently reluctant Iago, the truth about Cassio changes its character and venue. It is no longer a simple intuition—the unexamined result of Othello’s engagement with Cassio—but neither is it seen as a belief produced from the presentations Cassio offers to Othello’s eye and ear to be negotiated by his judgment. Instead, it is a thing that is identified with thought—at first Iago’s thought, conceived of as a kind of transitory resident: “As where’s that palace whereinto foul things / Sometimes intrude not” (140–41)? Alternatively, thought can be a thing one can lock up (116–18) or hold in one’s hand (165–66). Thus, even as Iago makes Othello aware that his presumptions about Desdemona and Cassio are only that, his cunning recalcitrance provokes Othello to relocate the truth from one kind of res—the object itself—to another: the thought itself. Instinctively Othello resorts to the immediate, realistic, and locative, rather than to the mediate, intellective, and processual. Thought is thing. This transformation lies behind one of the great paradoxes in the play— that experiential apprehension is supplanted by thinking, but thinking is really not a dianoetic activity that develops along a continuous line of metaphoric and metonymic interaction to produce new apprehensions. It is a thing of circumscription and confine, a kind of holding place for a specific content. For all that we hear Othello say, “speak to me, as to thy thinkings,” what he really means is, “Show me thy thought” (3.3.134, 119). Which is why his later remark, “I think my wife be honest, and I think she is not,” is so poignant. True, he is expressing a dilemma, but what he is saying is that he possesses think-units, for it is not thinking that has brought him to this pass, if we mean by that the activity of comparing evidence that might lead one to subordinate one thought to another, even if one must then “act as if for surety.” It is thought as product, as acquired content. This locative instinct is further exploited by Iago just a few moments later when he offers his own perception as a mirror in which Othello may view himself beginning to decompose:

Place, Predicament, and Grammatical Space / 141 iago: I see this hath a little dashed your spirits. oth: Not a jot, not a jot. iago:    I’faith I fear it has. ........................... But I do see you’re moved; ....................... My lord, I see you are moved. oth:    

No, not much moved.

I do not think but Desdemona’s honest. iago. Long live she so; and long live you to think so. (3.3.218–30)

First it was Iago’s unspoken thought, now it is his spoken observation, that becomes the constituted source of knowledge. Othello’s last line registers the weakness of what he now acknowledges is his thought, and Iago’s rejoinder emphasizes the potential distance between that thought and what Desdemona is. But Iago reassures him that what he can do, Othello can do; it’s simply a matter of looking: “Note if your lady strain his entertainment / With any strong or vehement importunity, / Much will be seen in that” (3.3.254–56). And he exits once more to follow Othello’s previous instructions: oth:   

Farewell, farewell.

If more thou dost perceive, let me know more: Set on thy wife to observe. Leave me, Iago. (3.3.242–44)

The hunt is up; but what is the game they are looking for?

III The answer is topics, commonplaces; or rather, arguments of Desdemona’s infidelity. And here we must switch from text to context in order to make the proper historical link. Topics, as we have seen, were considered aspects of matter—and, as described by the dialecticians, they mirrored the structure of reality. By the early seventeenth century, however, they had acquired a more explicitly amphibious nature. On the one hand they were concepts, ways of analyzing and expounding matters; on the other hand, they were sometimes thought of as having a real existence: were one to describe the world, one might literally write a topography.

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The origins of this conceptual ambiguity are found in Cicero. In his Topica, a common Elizabethan school text, purportedly modeled on Aristotle’s work of the same name, a spatial metaphor already colors Cicero’s account of the topics: “It is easy to find things that are hidden if the hiding place is pointed out and marked; similarly if we wish to track down some argument we ought to know the places or topics: for that is the name given by Aristotle to the ‘regions’ [quasi sedes], as it were from which arguments are drawn. Accordingly, we may define a topic as the region of an argument [argumenti sedem], and an argument as a course of reasoning which produces conviction about some doubtful matter.”21 Agricola, we may recall, admiring the fecundity and amplitude of nature, had praised those ingenious men who “cut out from this profuse variety of things these common headings” called loci. He added that since the loci are themselves “things” that “contain whatever can be said on any matter, they therefore contain all arguments, and were called by these men places because all the instruments of establishing conviction are located within them as in a receptacle or a treasure chest” (Ong, 117–18, translation modified). By the time Wilson’s Rule of Reason came along, the securing of a topic had become a more homely and familiar activity: A Place is, the restyng corner of an argumente, or else a marke whiche gev­ eth warning to our memorie what wee maie speake probably, either in the one parte, or the other, upon all causes that fal in question. Those that bee good harefinders will soone finde the hare by her fourme. For when thei see the ground beaten flatte round about, and faire to the sighte: they have a narrowe gesse by al likelihode that the hare was there a litle before. Likewise the Huntesman in huntyng the foxe, wil soone espie when he seeth a hole, whether it be a foxe borough, or not. So he that will take profeicte in this parte of Logique, must bee like a hunter, and learne by labour to knowe the boroughes. For these places bee nothing elles, but covertes or boroughes wherin if any one searche diligently, he maie finde game at pleasure. And although perhappes one place faile him, yet shal he finde a dousen other places, to accoumplishe his purpose. Therefore if any one will dooe good in this kinde, he must goe from place to place, and by searchyng every boroughe he shall have his purpose undoubtedly in most parte of them, if not in al. (Wilson, 90)

Wilson gives his reader the impression that inventing (coming upon, discovering, finding) a topic is like sharply observing the habits of small game in the English countryside: you must track your prey to the natural

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burrows where they are hidden, waiting to be flushed out by the skilled sportsman. And what do you have when you catch your prey? The resting place of a probable argument, which can be used on either side of an issue. Places are thus constituent parts of a geography in which nature and intellect mutually participate. This lends them a certain givenness and the construction of an argument, a certain inevitability, since cause, effect, whole, parts, adjuncts, and circumstances are there for the inventing and adaptable to any cause, pro or contra, that may be argued probably. Though Wilson makes this last point clearly enough, we have already seen that there is a presumption in the dialectics of the period that commonplaces are a means of discovering the true, not simply the apt. For it was commonly believed that probabilities depend upon a priori truths. In his De instrumento probabilitatis, for example, Vives describes certain inborn anticipationes or informationes, which he associates with Platonic ideas, in accordance with which truth may be actualized by collecting and judging verisimilitudes and probabilities (3.82–86). Melanchthon takes a similar position in the Erotemata dialectices when he describes the power of inference as a divine gift. Wilson himself makes explicit use of these ideas in the sample exordium he offers to readers of his own popular Arte of Rhetorique: As Nature hath ever abhorred Murder, and God in all ages most terribly hath plagued bloodshedding, so I trust your wisdoms (most worthy Judges) will speedily seek the execution of this most hateful sin. And where as God revealeth to the sight of men the knowledge of such offenses by diverse likelihoods and probable conjectures: I doubt not, but you being called of God to hear such causes, will doe herin as reason shall require, and as this detestable offence shall move you, upon rehearsall of the matter. (92, emphasis mine)

Here even in a rhetoric, where we do not expect to find the veridical bias of dialectic, Wilson suggests that probabilities may be used in the discovery of truth. It should therefore come as no surprise to hear Iago repeating precisely the same idea to Othello: “If imputation and strong circumstances /  Which lead directly to the door of truth / Will give you satisfaction, you may have’t” (3.3.409–11, emphasis mine). Outrageous though this may sound, it is simply an extreme version of the paradigmatic conflation of apt and true that is pervasive in the discourse of the period. That Iago is able to make good on his word is due to his skillful exploitation of the rhetorical force of enargeia in the service of Othello’s desire for res, as we shall see in chapter 6.

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There is, then, not only an essentialist bias and a logical bias, but what we may call a locative bias complicit in the decline of the moderate skepticism that had inspired humanist dialectic and rhetoric in the previous century, and it is registered in Shakespeare’s text. This trend to reification has been well documented by Ong and his student, Sister Joan Marie Lechner. In her study of Renaissance commonplaces, Lechner notes two important developments in the way topics are described: a tendency for them to be conceived of as “locations” of arguments in some sort of spatial field, and for the places themselves to be thought of as “containers” for arguments. “The orator,” she writes, “must be a hunter . . . who looks for places and, when he has discovered them, explores their ‘content’ for any possible trea­ sure he might find there” (131–32). What seems to have developed in the course of the sixteenth century is a “realist” view of the topics of argument. Not only are they instruments for the analysis of a subject matter or for the enrichment of a discourse, describing aspects of things, as in the Ciceronian tradition, or philosophical “standpoints” used for debate, as in the Aristotelian tradition; they come to be regarded as things themselves, which either furnish arguments or contain arguments. But how does a topic become a real thing? The conceptual seeds were planted by Agricola. So great is the variety of res ipsae, he writes, that it is impossible for the human mind to embrace them all. But “there are certain dispositions present in all things and they all tend to a certain similarity in their natures”; this is why common headings could be “excerpted” from the dense fabric of natural things. Peter Mack suggests that Agricola’s notion of a topic results from the convergence of two desiderata: “The arguer needs to discover connections between things; the things in the world need to have some common ways of being related. Agricola,” he observes, “keeps in mind Cicero’s picture of the spaces marked and labeled but he makes a more sweeping claim for similar connections in the nature of reality. All that can be said about something and all that something is, must emerge from a consideration of the topics” (“Agricola’s Topics,” 262). With such ideas in circulation early in the century, it is not surprising that Lechner finds topics localized as resting corners (Wilson), storerooms or pockets (Lever), vexilla (Neuheusius), a quiver containing arrows (Melanchthon), or a refuge from an opponent (Blundeville), and reposing in such localities as forests, gardens, military camps, and plains of battle (137). From here it is but a short way to Ramus’s claim that the doctrine of discovering the places of invention is itself an imitation of nature. When the student of dialectic “has before his eyes the art of inventing by means

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of these universal kinds [the places], like some mirror representing to him the general and universal images of all things, it will be much easier for him to recognize the singular species by this means, and consequently to find what he is looking for. But he must by many examples, by great exercise, by long usage shine and polish this mirror, before he can cause these images to gleam and be restored.”22 Just as the discipline of dialectic itself is an imitation of natural dialectic, as it has been practiced by the greatest poets and philosophers, so its first part, invention, maps the topography of the natural world which those authors perceived (Ramus, 53). And what they saw were arguments, not merely “restyng corners of arguments.” That collapse of distinction among ideas, words, and things that had begun in Agricola has come to completion in Ramus. This is immediately apparent in the way he has absorbed predication into invention. At the beginning of his Dialectique, Ramus declares that “invention treats the separate parts of sentences, which were first named by the Euclideans, then by the other philosophers, ‘categories,’ and the precepts of these categories were thenceforth called ‘topics,’ or, as one might say, ‘locales,’ because such precepts are like ‘seats’ and ‘locations’ where all categories lie” (63). Absent from this brief history is any reference to the fact that “category” is a human “calling,” “accusation,” or “something I call to mind,” as Melanchthon had reported.23 It is the same as a topic and has become physical enough to lie down in a seat. Correlatively, the elements in a sentence are thought of not as being predicaments but as fitting into a hierarchy of topics. But topic is not the word used by Ramists; rather it is argument, conceived of as the individual word in a proposition: what today we would call the subject of a sentence “argues” what we would call the predicate, just as the latter part “argues” the former. And these arguments, if properly disposed in an axiom, which is the preferred Ramist term for proposition, possess an innate power to produce conviction. In the words of Roland MacIlmaine, who introduced Ramus to English readers in 1574, “An argument is that which is naturally bent to prove or disprove any thing, suche as be single reasons separately and by themselves considered” (MacIlmaine, 10). Only if the arguments in an axiom seem to be doubtfully joined does one engage in syllogistic proof. This native power of arguments is illustrated by Abraham Fraunce, the friend of Sir Philip Sidney who produced The Lawiers Logike, a Ramist dialectic using examples from classical and contemporary poetry and from law. What MacIlmaine terms the natural “natural bent” of an argument, Fraunce calls an “affection.” “As all the force of consequence is in syllo­gismes,” he writes, “so all the vertue of arguing is in the several affection of every

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argument to the thing argued: which affection is truely and artificially put down in Invention.”24 What he means by this is shown in the chart he provides of the different affections of the argument “man” as it argues other things:

è

æ

í

í

ç ç

ç ç

As Man referred Unto

God his maker, Body, his matter, Reason his forme, Gods glory, his end, Actions, his effects, Body, his part, World, his whole, Living creature, general, Paul, special Earth, subject, Riches, adjuncts, Tree, his disparate, Beast, contrary, Homo ab humo, the   notation. Reasonable, living, Creature, definition, Angell, equall, Blub [sic], like

è

æ

æ Effect procreated.

ç ç

Effect material. Effect formed. Effect final. Cause. Whole. Part. Special hath the General affecí Adjunct. tion of Subject. Disparate. Contrary. Name inter  preted. The thing de  fined. Equall. è Like.

This looks not unlike Wilson’s scheme of how one might analyze “magistrate” by reference to the topics (Rule, 135–38). The difference is in the emphasis on the affection, or what Alexander Richardson, a Cambridge lecturer in the 1590s, called the “disposition naturall” and “the glue to be affectioned” that is in arguments (58–59). The parts of the world are inclined to stick together, whether they are instantiated as verba or res, and since the doctrine of invention is an imitation of the actual world, putting axioms together so that their arguments agree is to clarify the structure of the world. As Fraunce remarks, echoing Sidney (and anticipating Hamlet), “Art, which first was but the scholler of nature, is now become the maystres of nature, and as it were a Glasse wherin shee seeing and viewing herselfe, may washe out those spottes and blemishes of natural imperfection” (Bii). Ramist dialectic, therefore, is a realistic and hylozoic philosophy, in which arguments are as much “out there” as on a person’s tongue or in his mind. An expositor like Richardson takes pains to explain that an argument

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is not really a thing but the reason or Logismos in the thing, and Fraunce insisted that logic explicates not the nature of things but the relationship of things. The impression conveyed by the popular Ramist texts, however, was not so subtle. As Perry Miller remarked, “The argument was the thing, or the name of the thing, or the mental conception of the thing, all at once. The charm of the system . . . was that it annihilated the distance from the object to the brain, or made possible an epistemological leap across the gap in the twinkling of an eye, with an assurance of footing beyond the possibility of a metaphysical slip” (149). Sixteenth-century dialectic, especially its later forms, is not a source but a component of the discourse in which Othello participates. We need not trace Shakespeare to Melanchthon or Wilson or Ramus to find similar habits of thought at work in his play. Sometimes they are manifested in linguistic sediments that have been deposited from the popular learning of the day and their signifying power as terms of art may go unnoticed; often they appear in more overt forms, such as Iago’s bold proposal to follow circumstances to the door of truth. But they also take specifically theatrical forms, as Shakespeare exploits the resources of ensemble acting and stage space to register the confusion of mind, word, and world that becomes the tragedy of Othello. In the “echo” sequence we discussed earlier, for example, we might consider what psychological implications those rebounding words may represent. Clearly, Othello feels them as evasions on the part of Iago, who is returning his own words to him instead of revealing his thoughts. But the echoes have a deeper effect: they tend to disconnect words from their sources in persons and relocate them in the common space shared by their interlocutors. As in some verbal tennis match, Iago’s “thought” (3.3.97) is returned in Othello’s “thought” (98), his “indeed” (101) in Othello’s “indeed” (102), and so on for twelve lines. A similar phenomenon occurs at the beginning of the fourth act, where Iago’s “think so” (4.1.1) is echoed by Othello’s “think so” (2), his “kiss” by Othello’s “kiss,” his “harm” by Othello’s “harm” (2, 4, 5). And we hear it again in the last scene of the play, where the word “husband” is exchanged for some fifteen lines (5.2.137–49) by Othello and Emilia. Though in this instance it refers to Iago, it has become an acoustic commonplace, which, in the circumstances of Othello’s sudden recognition that he has no wife, assumes the eerie status of a floating signifier, or at least a polyvocal one temporarily unattached. These sound effects cannot be fortuitous or coincidental. In a play in which the only “truth” available is intuitive and as such is dependent upon the history that informs one’s needs, the words a person uses, just as the

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truth he assumes he holds, may indeed escape his possession and turn into a commonplace for anyone’s use. So it is that Iago can place Cassio in such a way that Othello, concealed, may temporarily appropriate the late lieutenant’s words and gestures according to his own conceit (4.1.108–42). Later in the scene, he is able to do the same with Desdemona’s words, as she informs Lodovico of the unkind breach that has fallen between Cassio and her lord (4.1.224–32). Shakespeare is representing on his stage the communization of speech as a “thing heard.” It suggests both that loss of boundary between mind and world and the reification of thought and speech that we have noticed in sixteenth-century discussions of discourse—now represented theatrically in the verbal exchanges of actors on a stage. But that stage is also a space, and Shakespeare uses its spatial dimensions to further reveal the confluence of mind, word, and world in the tragedy. We noted earlier that conditional clauses normally signify alternative mental worlds but that in Iago from the outset, and then gradually in Othello, these mental worlds interfuse. What we did not remark is that “world” is frequently thematized in the speeches of nearly everyone in the play, usually as a given, stable presence to which they may refer. Brabantio submits himself to the world’s judgment that Othello is “an abuser of the world” (1.2.72, 78); Othello tells the Senators Desdemona “gave me for my pains a world of sighs” (1.3.159), and later swears “By the world” that he thinks his wife is honest and is not (3.3.386); Iago has “look’d upon the world for four times seven years” (1.3.311–12) and asks, “Take note, take note, O world , /  To be direct and honest, is not safe” (3.3.381); the Clown will “catechize the world” for Cassio upon Desdemona’s request (3.4.16); and Desdemona allows her “downright violence and scorn of fortunes” to “trumpet to the world” her love of the Moor (1.3.251). Somewhere in the fourth act, though, the world becomes a hypothetical place. Othello cries, “the world hath not a sweeter creature,” even as he prepares to let her rot and perish in the actual world (4.1.178–81), and Emilia prays that heaven would unfold such men as the one who abused Othello, so honest men might “lash the rascals naked through the world” (4.2.145). In the same mood Desdemona wonders, “Wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world?” (4.3.63) and Emilia replies, “for all the whole world? . . . I should venture purgatory for it” (4.3.73–76). This last scene, where for once the two women speak their minds freely to one another, functions as a conditional preserve of time and place in the play, before the indicative action moves to its expected end. It is here that the memory of Barbary returns to Desdemona, and she retreats into a contraryto-fact past to measure her situation, expressing her loss in Barbary’s song

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about yet another lovelorn maid. She even seems to quote herself when she sings, “Let nobody blame him, his scorn I approve” (4.3.51), recalling the words, “my love doth so approve him / That even his stubbornness, his checks, his frowns . . . have grace and favor in them” (17–19). If one part of her mind has merged the present with what has passed, another part is able to observe that “Lodovico is a proper man” while denying its implication by demanding whether “there be women do abuse their husbands” (35, 61). This introduces the softly bantering debate about doing the deed for all the world. Emilia, showing more of Iago in her than of Desdemona, pursues the implication of this challenge by pointing out that if you gain the world by doing a wrong, “ ‘tis a wrong in your own world, and you might quickly make it right” (80–81)—rousing Desdemona from her hypothetical inquiry, if not from her optative mood. It is in the final scene, though, that physical spaces on the stage actually seem to merge. Throughout his confrontation with Desdemona we see Othello imposing the hypothetical upon the actual, the apt upon the true— every sign of fear and resistance from Desdemona interpreted as evidence of her guilt. As he stifles her and she cries, “O Lord! Lord! Lord!” Emilia’s voice outside the door echoes Desdemona’s within: “My lord, my lord! what ho, my lord, my lord!” (5.2.83–84). Othello, hearing the echo as Desdemona’s voice, mistakes what is outside for what is inside, and tries to hasten her death so she won’t suffer. But the voice persists. This time he recognizes it as a call from without, and when Emilia says she’d like to speak with him, he answers he’ll be with her presently. But his mind has not sorted out place or person yet: Yes. ‘ Tis Emilia. [to Emilia] By and by.—She’s dead. ‘ Tis like she comes to speak of Cassio’s death, The noise was high. Ha, no more moving? Still as the grave. Shall she come in? were’t good? I think she stirs again. No—what’s best to do? If she come in, she’ll sure speak to my wife. My wife, my wife! what wife? I have no wife. O insupportable, O heavy hour! (5.2.90–97)

Although Othello hears the last call as Emilia’s, her previous cry, upon which he acted, is still attributed to Desdemona. His confusion is expressed in the deictic shifts undergone by the pronoun “she”—first indicating Desdemona, then Emilia, Emilia again, then Desdemona, then Emilia. But it is

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also heard in the literally extemporal fear that if he lets Emilia in she’ll tell his wife about Cassio’s death. His customary speech is suddenly contraryto-fact, indeed trails behind the fact, which suddenly overtakes him, as he echoes Desdemona’s early concern that in her husband’s absence she will “a heavy interim support” (1.3.259). The locative ambiguity of the scene only gradually dissipates. When Emilia says, “yonder’s foul murders done!” (5.2.105), it isn’t clear whether “yonder” refers to outside the room or just beyond the bed curtains. For when he learns that Cassio has not been killed, Othello declares, “then murder’s out of tune,” only to be echoed by Desdemona inside the curtains, “O, falsely, falsely murder’d!” It is Emilia who locates the voice in its own space and then begins the lengthy separation of apt from true that culminates in Lodovico’s charge to Iago: “Look on the tragic loading of this bed: / This is thy work” (5.2.361–62). What Iago is asked to look on is the work of thoughts turned words and words turned things on Cyprus—a casualty of the dialectical epidemic of the sixteenth century.

Part III

Willful Words, Christian Anxieties, and Shakespearean Dramaturgy

Five

“’Tis in Ourselves That We Are Thus, or Thus”: Will, Habit, and the Discourse of Res I now turn to a subject we have only glanced at in studying the sources of Shakespeare’s rhetorical anthropology and the peculiar conflation of rhetoric and dialectic in Othello that results in a too-ready assimilation of the apt and true; the probable and certain; and mind, speech, and world. It is the role of will in rhetorical address. This is a distinctly Christian development, since a concept of will independent of reason was not clearly articulated in classical antiquity. The recognition of will added a crucial spiritual inflection to that interplay of dispositions Protagorean and Platonic, Academic and Stoic that we have noticed in the classical period and in the Renaissance. It fostered a new tension between the labile and fragmented self, attracted to shifting worldly phenomena, and the self ’s desire for inward repose and definition. Moreover, will came to be linked to vivid speech—a speech of “thingness” that drew both speaker and hearer into a potentially threatening communion with res (signifying both “subject matter” and “thing”), whose materiality might literally damage the soul. The importance of such a development for Shakespeare will become apparent in this and the following two chapters. In the present chapter I provide the historical and theoretical context for what is best described as a theocentric linguistic psychology. In chapters 6 and 7 I explore the rhetoric of this psychology as it manifests itself in diverging modes in Othello, though each mode caters to the same desire for union. Once again, I shall begin by taking my cue from Iago.

I “Virtue? a fig!” Iago declares, when Roderigo confesses his shame in being “so fond” of Desdemona and insists “it is not in my virtue to amend it”

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(1.3.319–20). What follows is a brief, vivid sermon on self-help that begins with an apparent non sequitur: ’tis in ourselves, that we are thus, or thus. Our bodies are gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners. So that if we will plant nettles or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up thyme, supply it with one gender of herbs or distract it with many, either to have it sterile with idleness or manured with industry—why, the power and corrigible authority of this lies in our wills. (1.3.320–27, emphases mine)

Immediately noticeable in Iago’s retort is his dismissal of Roderigo’s appeal to that entity he calls his “virtue”—which Roderigo clearly regards as something that is part of his constitution, though there is in that “virtue” insufficient motive force—and his replacement of what is already inside Roderigo with something that is already inside Roderigo. That is to say, Iago must hear Roderigo’s reference to what is “in” his “virtue” as an appeal to something that is outside him, and he rejects it in favor of an internal vires, or strength. What we hear next is perhaps even more startling. In replacing what he takes to be a hypostasized external “virtue” with a power that exists “in ourselves,” Iago locates that power in the will, to which he accords extraordinary scope. This is not a Stoic appeal to self-government—indeed, the dismissal of “virtue” would ensure that—but something of a different order. To Iago, will not only controls the direction and intensity of the affects but rivals nature in determining a man’s humorous complexion, which is literally the ground of his passions. One can grow choleric by planting nettles, or phlegmatic by sowing lettuce; be singly or multiply humored, indolent or diligent—literally, what you will. Metaphoric, perhaps, but also dietetic, as contemporary health manuals attest—and a function of will.1 And that is not the extent of will’s hegemony. The context of Roderigo’s words suggests that his “virtue” is a rational power; Iago’s dismissal seems to deny the residence of such a power in Roderigo. But this turns out not to be the case. “If the balance of our lives had not one scale of reason to poise another of sensuality,” Iago observes, “the blood and baseness of our natures would conduct us to most preposterous conclusions” (1.3.327–30). In this psychosomatic economy reason is there to balance sensuality, but it acts as will’s factor to “cool our raging motions [distempered thoughts], our carnal stings [fleshly sensations], our unbitted lusts [unrestrained appetites]” (1.3.331–32), which is all that Roderigo’s love for Desdemona amounts to: “It is merely a lust of the blood and a permission of the will” (1.3.335–36).

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“Virtue” may be an outsider, but rationality is an indweller, part of our nature after all, and serves at the command of will, which has nothing to do with “virtue.”2 Iago’s division of will and virtue into internal and extrinsic powers suggests that for him virtue is something that cannot be said to constitute the self but is rather imputed to the self—an accidental quality, so to speak— making a claim upon it that is contested by will, its true denizen. In Roderigo’s usage, virtue seems to be a property—an internal moral power, albeit vitiated—not unlike what St. Paul referred to when he confessed that “to will is present with me: but I find no means to performe that which is good” (Rom. 7:18). While Roderigo doesn’t use the word will to describe this power—that is reserved to Iago—he clearly feels a conflict between what Shakespeare elsewhere calls “grace and rude will” (Rom. 2.3.26), twin impulses leading respectively to health and self-destruction. For Iago, however, virtue, like honor, is “an essence that’s not seen, / They have it very oft that have it not” (4.1.17–18).3 This means that he can treat virtue as he wills. He can deny its significance to Roderigo, yet speak of Cassio’s drinking as a vice that is “to his virtue a just equinox” (2.3.120), whether or not he believes in the reality of Cassio’s virtue (or his vice), and he can admit Desdemona’s goodness, yet plot to “turn her virtue into pitch” (2.3.355), as though her virtue is an appearance that may “lose some colour” should he but “throw some changes [F: chances] of vexation on’t” (1.1.71–72). Will, however, is not just apparent but existent, because Iago experiences will. Only moments after he has persuaded Roderigo to defeat his favor with a usurped beard and follow Desdemona to Cyprus, he summons Cassio’s face before his imagination, contemplates it, and begins inventing a way “to get his place, and to plume up my will” (1.3.392). Here he expresses both a particular end—obtaining Cassio’s lieutenancy—and a less clearly defined activity. His second phrase suggests a stroking, pampering, enlarging, and gratifying of libido through a “double knavery” (1.3.393) against Cassio and Othello, though its form is yet unknown—“a deed without a name” that remains obscure even to him. He has affirmed that the Moor “holds me well, / The better shall my purpose work on him” (1.3.389–90). But like his will, Iago’s purpose also seems vague. What will, what purpose? Other bits of Iago’s language can help us understand what he means by pluming up his will.4 He has told Roderigo that he follows Othello “to serve my turn upon him” . . . “for my peculiar end” (1.1.41, 59), and complained that “since I could distinguish between a benefit and an injury, I never found a man that knew how to love himself” (1.3.313–15). This suggests that for Iago will is the desire, the power, the instrument, and also the

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site of a love that embraces itself. Thus to “plume up/make up my will” is to induce/collect, arouse/augment, excite/cement the elements that will effect the consummation of self-love in a psycho-sensuous self-composition. Under a careful marshaling of procreants, his will will become an autoerotic version of the “large and spacious” Will of the Dark Lady in Sonnet 135, crowded with entrants who will “make thy large Will more” until the moment when all “fair beseechers” achieve climax together. That this is not a prurient fancy is indicated a few moments later when, after reviewing in his mind’s eye the seminal materials of Othello’s credulousness, Cassio’s good looks, and Desdemona’s easygoing familiarity, Iago cries out: “I have’t, it is engendered! Hell and night  / Must bring this monstrous birth to the world’s light” (1.3.402–3). Multiple acts of copulation, stimulated by the will and experienced in the eroticized imagination, have joined together these recollected images of actuality, and their conjunctions have resulted in conception. What he has conceived is a fetus that will gradually come to resemble himself. But its birth must wait till wit, dependent on dilatory time, has completed its work; for, as he says in Act II, “Knavery’s plain face is never seen, till used” (2.1.310). Birthing time occurs in Act V, scene 2, when Iago sees an image of himself in the three dead bodies delivered on Othello’s bed and is told, “Look upon the tragic loading of this bed: / This is thy work” (5.2.361–62).5 But why is Iago’s progeny a monstrous birth, ushered into the world by the midwifery of Hell and night? The conventional answer, to which we’ll turn in a moment, is that this is Vice talk, to which Iago reverts from time to time, indicating his theatrical genealogy. However, given the absence from the play of any reference to Iago’s physical sexuality (unlike the other two male principals), it sounds as though Shakespeare is putting this language into Iago’s mouth to signify the self-love, autoerotic activity, and refusal of fruitful engagement with the world that can only yield a stillbirth—a body or bodies to be buried—just as he had warned the youth “contracted to thine own bright eyes” that “Within thine own bud [thou] buriest thy content” (Sonnet 1). For all his talk of sex, in these passages and elsewhere, Iago doesn’t engage sexually with others—least of all with his wife—except in his mind.6 He imagines Othello and Desdemona making the beast with two backs, envisions Cassio and Desdemona “as prime as goats, as hot as monkeys,” and describes himself in bed with Cassio as Cassio dreams that Iago is Desdemona, kisses him, lays his leg over his thigh, and sighs. These are masturbatory fantasies. Shakespeare seems to be filling Iago’s imagination with them to emphasize the barren, narcissistic, and perverse sexuality that characterizes his self-love.7

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But let us ask again why Iago’s progeny is figured as a heap of smothered and stabbed bodies, and why it is ushered into the world by Hell and night. We have seen that in the classical tradition of rhetorical anthropology the self is constituted, for better or worse, by its successive engagements with material circumstances—the who, what, why, where, and when of public life; in this sense, it can be said to become “worldly” and “objectified,” insofar as it is manifested in the material changes it brings about through its external engagements. This is precisely what Iago’s imaginative encounters with actual and recollected images effect: he realizes himself in the substantive changes he works in the human world he inhabits. Thus his work is himself. Othello, however, is a play saturated with Christian ontology, psychology, and eschatology, and from these perspectives the materialization of the self is a risky business at best and at worst the result of a perverse love in which the self turns outward, attracted to the world, rather than inward toward its glassy essence, and is contaminated. Only “big wars” against the infidel make “ambition virtue.”8 Iago’s delight in enlisting Hell and night as helpers of his ambition sounds his defiance of this Christian ambivalence toward rhetorical selfhood even as he embodies its ethical ontology and draws on Christian paradigms to explicate his behavior. Just after he has succeeded in getting Cassio cashiered and has advised him to ply Desdemona for help in regaining Othello’s favor, he gleefully explicates his behavior to the audience: Divinity of hell! When devils will the blackest sins put on They do suggest at first with heavenly shows As I do now. (2.3.345–48)

This assertion has been heard as a cue that revealed to Shakespeare’s original audiences Iago’s theatrical genealogy and his status as “hybrid Vice”—an allegorical personification of evil who has by now acquired a distinct historical identity and whose role conflates the parts of devil’s agent, human sin, audience confidant, self-applauding trickster, and Othello’s ensign. Some fifty years ago Bernard Spivack argued persuasively for this interpretation of Iago, and his analysis remains forceful.9 It depends, however, on accepting a simple bifurcation in the representation of Iago. As personification he is inherently evil and, in the strict sense, motiveless, however human he may appear; he is also homiletic in speech and comical in performance, informing beholders of his modus operandi as he shows how he entraps the hero

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and (potentially) his audience, should they not heed his cautionary antics. As historical representation, however, he offers recognizably human reasons for what he does, though these are intermittent and often discontinuous, for he remains essentially a metaphysical black hole. Spivack explains this split in Iago’s dramatis persona as a transitional phenomenon—the effect of a popular stage convention lingering on, even as its original signifying power has become obscured in a theater that caters increasingly to a growing taste for the verisimilar representation of social types and historical individuals. As empirically attractive as this dualistic account of Iago remains—especially since, as we saw in the previous chapter, it was possible for contradictory accounts of the art of discourse to coexist and also to coalesce within the covers of a single book—it is less satisfying today because it doesn’t take up as an object of critical inquiry the very phenomenon it calls to our attention. Two main questions suggest themselves: what is a dramatist doing when he attributes motives to what was originally a nonhuman representation possessing nothing but an allegorical identity that dictates its behavior? The short answer is that he is constructing a self—more specifically, he is representing a stage figure constructing his own intelligibility. Second, what functions might verbal and visual Vice-references serve in the construction of such a self? A clever dramatist working in a moribund stage tradition might find that such a figure, referring to his theatrical past, could evince a self-consciousness useful to both himself and his audience. Hamlet, for example, reveals a self-savoring savagery when he draws on his acquaintance with Senecan stage revengers to exclaim, “Now could I drink hot blood” (Ham. 3.2.390), and alerts his audience to measure him against other such figures they may have seen or heard about; Falstaff displays his literary sophistication and also tells us what to make of Henry IV’s when, assuming the father’s role, he rebukes Hal in the idiom of John Lyly’s aesthetic casuistry (1H4 2.4.398–419). Similarly, there is much that is Vice-like in Iago—as there is in Aaron, Richard III, and Falstaff before him (to say nothing of Shylock, whom Spivack excludes from his genealogy). But just as the metatheatrical resonances of these earlier figures evoke explanatory contexts yet do not fully explain their actions—since Shakespeare fashions particular histories and distinctive presences that attach themselves in different ways to the legacy of the morality Vice—so in the case of Iago he uses the convention for a specific purpose: to foreground the human psychology into which the Vice-as-ensign is emerging.10 For Othello, written in the middle of Shakespeare’s career, is a new kind of psychogenetic drama in which Shakespeare seems deliberately to have returned to the Vice tradition so that he might trace the evolution of a human

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self out of an allegory of evil while retaining the negative valence of that allegory—now transmogrified into the pluming-up/making-up of human will. Thus conceived and informed by both classical and Christian understandings of rhetorical anthropology, Cinthio’s nameless alfiero becomes the villain of a play set in a Venice and a Cyprus patched with London coney-catching and English metatheatricality. From deep inside this new drama, Iago not only reveals his Vice origins but takes special pleasure in behaving like a Vice, for through such self-conscious gestures he can supply himself and his audience with the connective tissue that makes his behavior intelligible. He and they experience cognitive joy in the similitude—especially if, tempted with Othello to “look down towards his feet” to see if he really is a devil, the audience concludes, “but that’s a fable” (5.2.283). No, they will decide, it is not an identity but only a metaphor—the site of similarity and difference.11 And in this case, the metaphor is a conception—in precisely the erotically inflected cognitive sense we have just noticed—that connects Iago’s actions to a cultural memory, and as such it is another phase in the process of self-realization that will be consummated at the end of the play, for both Iago and the audience. In Shakespeare’s hands, then, the Vice becomes historicized, not because a contemporary figure is “draped” over him, as Spivack argues, but rather because metaphysical evil is actually morphing into a historical psyche that is using a shared cultural history to set itself apart from that history. Moreover, in transforming allegorical behavior into psychological behavior in his representation of Iago, Shakespeare is exploiting the ontological implications of that convention. In the stage tradition, the Vice was a composite of many transgressive vices who offered those “extravagant” temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil to a human soul born to trace an undeviating path to reunion with God or Wisdom.12 In his cunning, the Vice tried to make erring from that path seem like virtue. He embodied and performed “ambition” in its early Latin senses—“going about . . . soliciting individual citizens for their vote,” “striving for one’s favor or good will,” revealing a “desire for honor, popularity, power, display”—all in the interest of luring Everyman from the straight and narrow so that he would make worldly claims for a self that, unlike the Vice, bore the image and likeness of God.13 As the Vice’s stage descendant, Iago is heir not only to his histrionic features but also his infectious ambitio, whose instrument is a flexible rhetoricity that enables him to appear as all things to all men. In adverting to the behavior of homiletic devils, then, Iago is doing more than alerting his audience to the deceitfulness of his avatars; he is drawing their ambitio into a relation with the spiritual danger that he embodies. In the context of

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morality theater, protean multiformity is demonic, and when a hero is persuaded to turn to the world, he undergoes a scandalous proliferation of self and a potentially fatal materialization of spirit that might well earn him the epithets “erring barbarian” and “extravagant and wheeling stranger.” Iago’s privileging of the restless power that resides “in ourselves” over the power that reposes “in virtue”—to naturalize aberrancy and to assert, in effect, that “reason panders will”—humanizes this demonic ambitio, even as he invokes Hell and night to indicate its origins.14 Coleridge sensed this when, reflecting on Iago’s soliloquy at the end of Act I, scene 3, he was moved to describe the ensign as “being next to devil, only not quite devil,” and characterized his speech as “the motive hunting of a motiveless malignity” (1.44). In this memorable phrase he justly caught the note of Iago’s invention of motives through much of the play. A quick review of these will be useful. At the beginning of the action, when Roderigo virtually accuses him of deception in aiding and abetting Desdemona’s elopement with Othello—“Never tell me?” (1.1.1, italics and interrogative mine)—Iago avers that he hates the Moor. The reason he gives is that, after all the skill he’s shown in war, Othello has passed over him and made Cassio his second in command—someone who knows the theory but not the practice—while he has been made a mere standard-bearer. He speaks the language of the common soldier here, who hopes to move up in the ranks through merit but is thwarted by an officer who went to military academy. In revenge, he’ll spoil Othello’s clandestine marriage by alerting Desdemona’s father. By the end of the third scene this attempt has failed, but Iago is not discouraged. After persuading Roderigo to follow Desdemona to Venice in the expectation that she will grow weary of the match, he begins to plot afresh and offers a new reason for hating Othello—“it is thought abroad that ‘twixt my sheets / He’s done my office” (1.3.386–87)—and implicates Cassio in his scheme. At the end of Act II, scene 1, we hear yet more reasons for revenge. He has convinced Roderigo that Desdemona is in love with Cassio, and that Cassio must be removed from office if Roderigo is to be successful in his suit. Then he confides to the audience that he really believes Cassio loves Desdemona and that it’s “apt and of great credit” that she loves him in return. In fact, he loves her, too—not with unqualified lust (though maybe he does), but rather because his suspicion that Othello has cuckolded him “doth like a poisonous mineral gnaw my inwards,” and he must be “even with him, wife for wife.” And he will accuse Cassio to the Moor not just to get back at him for his promotion, but because “I fear Cassio with my nightcap, too” (2.1.285–305).

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Either Shakespeare has fashioned a crazy man in Iago or a very explicit representation of a man intently trying to make sense of why he is behaving as he does—that is, of a Vice morphing into a human. Iago has told Roderigo, “I know my price” (1.1.10) and has declared that he serves Othello but for “my peculiar end,” but, as we have seen, he neither says what that end is nor has any steady idea of why he wants to achieve it. What is evident is how he goes about it, which is to motive-hunt. But this means to assimilate the world to himself in order to shape his inchoate desire. He observes people and things, and thinks what he can make of them: reviewing Cassio’s good looks, he says, “Cassio’s a proper man: let me see now” (1.3.391); noting his hasty departure from Desdemona, he mutters, “Ha, I like not that” (3.3.34); observing the handkerchief, he thinks, “Trifles light as air / Are to the jealous confirmations strong / As proofs of holy writ. This may do something” (3.3.325–27). In effect, he eyes (and, we might say, “ears”) the world about him and makes it over in the image of his invisible will, thereby fabricating himself out of worldly materials. This makes him a highly contingent construction, self-appreciative in a double sense and also vulnerable to his own motive-hunting, which is why he first hears a rumor about himself (“ ‘tis thought abroad”), uses it to explain his hatred of Othello, then finds himself contaminated by it, fashioning paranoid phantasms of possible cuckoldings that gnaw his inwards. As late as the fifth act, he is still adding a motive for revenging himself on Cassio: “He hath a daily beauty in his life / That makes me ugly” (5.1.19–20). Iago’s motive-hunting, then, is literally his instrument of self-edification, in the service of an unseen, inarticulate, but relentless will. In the course of adducing motives, he fashions the course of his life as it is represented in the play. This means that he is many Iagos—if we may be said to be what we think we are doing—an aggregate of his fortuitous encounters with the world who takes on the various shapes of those encounters. In this sense, he is very much an heir to the Protagorean subject we studied in chapter 1. But why is his the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity? Here, clearly, there has been a change in moral register. One answer can be drawn from the Spivack model: Iago is malignity itself, and his motive-mongering merely an adventitious result of an evolving theatrical tradition. Or if, as I have argued, Shakespeare is “motivating” a quondam Vice, why wouldn’t those motives be malign? Both answers preclude dramaturgic choice, however, so Coleridge’s word merits further consideration. “Malignity,” of course, means “ill will”—exactly what Malvolio means. In the steward of Twelfth Night, it is evident that the name signifies self-appreciation based on the depreciation of others, for that is how Malvolio is shown to sustain his

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self-love (TN 1.5.90). In Iago, whom Shakespeare seems to have conceived on the departing heels of Malvolio—a steward-cum-ensign-cum-Vice, now returned to “be revenged on the whole pack of you”—ill will is shown to have an etiology, an itinerary, and a teleology more erotic and mysterious than those of Malvolio’s puritan fantasies.15 In Iago, Shakespeare burrows beneath the desire for social aggrandizement ostensibly shared by steward and ensign to get at something more foundational in ill will and, in Christian thought, far more frightening. It is expressed in Iago’s brilliant negation of the Jahwist assertion “I am that I am” (Exod. 3:14) when he declares, “I am not what I am” (1.1.64). That “not,” inserted between subject and complement, splits a human identity understood to be an imitation of God, in whose image and likeness we are made, by denying the self-sameness and ultimate union on which that identity is predicated. This denial is not only grammatical. The “not” challenges the assumption of self-sameness by vocalizing the refractory will that, by its very existence, calls that identity in question. In doing so, it fictionalizes the Jahwist ideal of self-sameness, claiming—through what is paradoxically a derivative self-consciousness—an originary ideal of nonidentity, of noncoincidence that pursues “my peculiar end” to “make up my will.”16 This is the primordial apostasy, enacted by Adam when he disobeyed God’s command and explored by St. Paul when he pondered the mystery that the law, which is holy, good, and just, is the occasion of sin even in an ostensibly good man. What both Adam and Paul seem to have experienced is an alienating self-awareness contingent upon God’s manifesting his will. This ontological change is explicated by Satan’s response to God’s exaltation of the Son in Paradise Lost: “new Laws thou see’st imposed,” he tells Beelzebub; “New Laws from him who reigns, new minds may raise / In us who serve” (Milton, 5.679–81). Satan speaks out of this “new mind,” this new selfawareness, just as Paul, speaking as a newly awakened Christian—heir not only to Adam’s fall but also to the Mosaic Law—rehearses the predicament of the unredeemed post-Covenant Jew in his Letter to the Romans: “I knew not what sin meant but by the law. . . . For without the law, sin was dead. . . . But when the commandment came, sin revived, and I was dead” (Rom. 7:7– 9).17 That is, before the Mosaic Law was promulgated, man was not aware of his sinfulness (“sin was dead”), but after the institution of the law—which, as William Tyndale observes, “doeth no more but utter sin”—man dies as an integrated “I.”18 For (to cite Paul again) “I delight in the law of God, concerning the inner man. But I see another [law] in my members, rebelling against the law of my mind, and leading me captive unto the law of sin,

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which is in my members” (Rom. 7:22–23). The postlapsarian expression of God’s will makes it possible for a man to will the good, desiring thereby to fulfill the law, yet do the evil he wills not. Hence it reveals his sinfulness. It is not just a matter of disobeying God, as Adam did, but rather of asserting one’s capacity to be lawful and acting unlawfully in that belief. To put it another way, it is a matter of asserting one’s own will. As Rudolf Bultmann remarks of Romans 7, “the ‘law’ encounters man as the claim of God, ‘Thou shouldst (not)!’ i.e., it wants to take from man the disposition of his own existence. Therefore, sin is man’s wanting to dispose of his existence, to raise claims for himself, to be like God.”19 He then leads his life, in Paul’s words, “after the flesh”—enslaved to his own needs, dependent upon his own faculties to supply his deficiencies, and incapable of love—“unable to think, to speak, and to act with regard not for himself but only for the sake of his brother.”20 In this light, Iago’s “I am not what I am” announces the ontology of unredeemed man, who by asserting his self-awareness must go the way of fear, envy, and, eventually, death. Deprived of the charitable and nurturing love of God in pursuing his autonomy, he feels both godlike and disprized as he turns to the human world of res—Paul’s “flesh.” To plume up his will, he pursues the goods he observes out there, envies those who have them, and in what he perceives to be a finite economy despoils others in order to appreciate himself. In a perverse form of imitation, he assimilates his victims to his desire for what he lacks, instrumentalizing and, in the process, transforming and annihilating them, so that their daily beauty comes to bear his own stamp. As such imitation is self-serving, exploitative, and violent, it can only be figured as a heap of injured bodies. This is its work.21 If Iago is heir to a Protagorean anthropology, then, he embodies the Christian reading of that anthropology, which fears the apostasy of selfdisposition and the consequences of willfully turning from a unitary imitation of God to multiple imitations of the world that result in killing adhesions.22 And if, as suggested in the prologue to this book, Othello is a tragedy of probability that explores the existential limitation of “probable” understanding from a subject position that is itself a fragment that occludes one’s own probable construction, Iago figures the Christian sense of that tragedy: it is not the illusion of a unified, transcendent identity that is threatening, but the intimation that it is an illusion. Shakespeare’s ostensibly secular love tragedy is thus deeply inflected by a distinctly spiritual anxiety. It suggests what appears to be a modern nostalgia for an integral self not yet possessed of a psychoanalytic vocabulary to express that lack, but its nostalgia

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antedates ours. It is articulated by means of a human personality whose ambition and envy originate in—are signs of—his existential self-estrangement. He comes by it through a long and a short history, the former beginning with the eschatalogical revolt of Satan, who successfully tempted man to join him in the outcast state of disobedience, and the latter originating in a theatrical tradition of allegorical evil from which his personality emerges seeking reasons for his enmity. If this hypothesis is acceptable, we will want to know how ill will does its work and how it relates to the experience of rhetorical selfhood in the Renaissance. Further, we will want to know how humanism, the movement through which rhetorical anthropology found its way into the early modern period, helped transmit Paul’s vision of unredeemed man to the Tudor stage, and why that man’s activity reveals an antirhetorical bias that informs the rhetorical representation of Iago. To pursue these questions, I shall first consult an early Christian humanist who, addressing the contingencies of rhetorical life, faced the possibility that he might become an Iago avant la lettre, and then explore the issues he raises—concerning will, habit, and the discourse of res—in the work of the pagan rhetorician turned Christian saint with whom he identified.

II When he was in his middle forties, Petrarch began to collect his miscellaneous papers for publication. Recalling how he came upon the idea, he wrote to the friend he called “Socrates” that he had asked himself, “What is to keep me from looking back, like a weary traveler from a height at the end of a long journey, and reviewing the stages of my early progress?” He had anticipated a pleasurable prospect. But making a random sampling of his papers, he reports, “I was amazed to find how altered, how blurred the face of things appeared, so that I hardly recognized some of them—not that the things themselves had changed, but my own point of view had indeed.”23 His first response was to burn “a thousand or more scattered poems and familiar letters of every sort,” because to make them consistent and comprehensible from where he now stood “would require more work than pleasure.” While they were burning, however, he noticed some others lying in the corner, which he preserved from the fire because “Socrates” and their mutual friend Barbata da Sulmona appeared to him in a vision requesting that he save those for them. This he was willing to do because he knew they would be judged with the eyes of friends and because the letters “did not demand any revision” (Letters 17).

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The potential embarrassment of these letters lay in their many points of view and styles: “How can I suppose that any friend, unless he is my alter ego, can read through without boredom all these diverse and contradictory remarks, with no common style or purpose, since a great variety of subjects are treated in a variety of moods, usually melancholy, rarely gay?” Epicurus, Cicero, and Seneca, he observes, had an easier time of it because they wrote only to a small circle of friends and it is not difficult, “if one knows the character of one’s correspondent, to get used to his individual mind, to know what he will gladly hear and what one may properly say to him.” But this has not been his lot, since his life has been spent among many acquain­ tances but few true friends. As a result he has had to assume a great number of different postures in his letters: The first thought of a letter writer must be the person he is writing to; then he will know what to say, how to say it, and all the rest. We should write one way to a strong man, another to a sluggard; one way to a green youth, another to an elder who has fulfilled his life; one way to a proud, successful man, another to a victim of adversity; one way to an enlightened literary scholar, another to one who can’t grasp any high thoughts. The varieties of men are infinite; there is no more similitude of minds than of faces. As the palate of one man—let alone those of many men—does not always relish the same food, so one mind is not always to be fed on the same literary style. So the writer has a double task: to envision the person he is writing to, and then the state of mind in which the recipient will read what he proposes to write. In the face of these difficulties, I have been forced into many contradictions with myself. (Letters 19–20)

Petrarch’s account of his predicament reveals his familiarity with the canons of decorum in the Aristotelian and Ciceronian traditions, as it also reveals his Platonic and Stoic discomfort with their ontological implications. The demands of decorum have led him repeatedly to represent himself differently, and he has a sense that he has not only contradicted himself but actually departed from himself in doing so (quibus ego difficultatibus multum a me ipso differre compulsus sum).24 Moreover, though he initially contrasts the ease of writing to one person with the difficulty of writing to many, as the description of multiple decorums proceeds, he admits that not even a single reader can be addressed in the same style: one must envision not only the recipient of one’s letter but also the distinct state of mind he will be in at the time he reads it (qualiter ve tunc affectus, cum ea que scribere instituis lecturus est [Epistole 56]). So the writer is not only forced into modes of address that

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are not self-identical; he cannot assume the continuous identity of his addressee, either, and must write to him not as he is at present but as he may be conjectured to be at another moment in time. As if recoiling from this vertiginous prospect, Petrarch then contradicts what he had written only a few moments before—that he won’t revise the letters—and asks “Socrates” to beg their mutual friends to destroy whatever originals they still possess “so that they won’t be upset by any changes in the matter or form” when they read the letters as published. For “I would sometimes repeat in one letter what I had already said in another,” and “expressions that were very apt once in one letter become tiresome when often repeated in the entire work.” Having previously announced that the letters needed no revision, he now confesses he has indeed revised them. “Also,” he adds, “I cut out much about everyday concerns, which was worth while when it was written, but would now bore the most curious reader” (Letters 20). As editor, then, Petrarch is again a different person from the man or men who composed the embarrassingly discontinuous letters, for he now obeys a decorum appropriate to the strategy of the conspectus. In justifying the original form and content of the letters he had revealed an awareness of that interpenetration of matter, mind, and occasion in which Protagoras and Gorgias had situated cognition and persuasion, even as he confessed that he had recycled certain pleasing expressions that were undetected when scattered among his addressees. In his desire to eliminate repetitious phrases and adventitious details, he now exhibits a proprietary interest in transforming occasional essays into a work which, though it will reveal temporal change and will have been produced in time, will also bear a design that is formally timeless—no repetitions will mar the scene and no mention of the ephemeral circumstances influencing the composition of a given letter will lessen its value.25 Thus the lability of identity reflected in the letters, as Petrarch slips from one self-representation to another in time and space, is to be arrested and the self reshaped “from a height” so as to appear, if not fully consistent, at least less the subject of circumstances. The result will be “a sort of effigy of my mind, a simulacrum of my character [qua­ lemcunque animi mei effigiem atque ingenii simulacrum], contrived with great labor” (Epistole I.i.60). Activities of mind, soul, spirit, and talent, that is to say, will yield to the fixity of portraiture as the author prepares to transform himself into something like a literary Character. But alert to the kairotic sensibility of even an editor, he adds, “if I ever do put the last touches to it” (Letters 21).26 If Petrarch is the father of Renaissance humanism, as is often stated, it is clear that from its renaissance the humanist self was deeply fractured. He is

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the bearer of what Charles Trinkaus has termed the “double consciousness” inherited from Protagoras and Plato, and transmitted principally by Cicero, Seneca, and St. Augustine (Poet, 27–51). Although the coordinates of this “double consciousness” have undergone modification over time, their orientations relative to one another remain clearly discernible, suggesting that what the Renaissance most signally recovered from classical antiquity was a rhetorical anthropology marked by an abiding dialectical tension between a multiply kairotic, ingenious self constituted again and again by its worldly encounters and an accretive, apodeictic self capable of explaining, classifying, and consoling its ubiquitous other, and of reflecting upon itself as the stable repository of knowledge. What distinguishes this early modern self from its classical antecedents is the prominence of will. The concept of will as a psychological element that determines the direction of an action independently of cognition and emotion was not fully developed in the Greek intellectualist tradition that was inherited by Roman moralists.27 Although the notion of will is implicit in both Protagoras and Gorgias, it remains unarticulated in Plato, where it is repeatedly argued that to know the good is to embrace the good and that wrongdoing can be attributed to lack of knowledge. This assumption finds expression in the familiar Socratic maxim, “Nobody errs knowingly.”28 While Aristotle modified the Platonic insistence on knowledge as the necessary component of moral action by distinguishing between theoretical and practical knowledge, in his ethical system, too, intention is linked to intellectual perception, specifically that of the practical reason as it grasps the means and ends of a given act. The disparity between knowledge and action in the absence of compulsion can be attributed, as Arendt and Saarinen have pointed out, to a cognitive breakdown in the process of proairesis, or deliberation.29 In Cicero and Seneca, though not among the older Stoics, will is recognized as a distinct power of the soul, but it is subject to the hegemony of reason, which defines the self and functions largely as the application of cognition to action.30 The distinction between an act of will as such and of will as a function of cognition is evident in Seneca’s remark, Non pareo deo sed assentior (“I do not obey God; rather, I agree with him”), which, as Dihle observes, “results from, or rather is identical with a full and rational recognition of the divine order of nature, and leads man to agree, freely and voluntarily, with what nature or God has ordered him to be and to do” (Epistle 96.2, quoted 18). It was St. Augustine who, elaborating upon St. Paul’s notion of the “two laws” that governed fallen man, conceived of the self in terms of will—indeed, of a radical schism within the will producing, in effect, two wills. One will is drawn by the senses and affections to love, use, and enjoy the

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multiple pleasures of earthly existence—Paul’s “life according to the flesh,” which “comprehensively denotes the whole of man’s personality,” as Dihle observes: “So all kinds of intellectual activity, knowledge, wisdom, and the like, provided they share man’s being restricted to himself, belong to the realm of flesh” (85). The other will, acting through the “interior man,” works to diminish its subjection to man’s empirical condition in order that, gathered into itself, it might love and enjoy Truth alone (Paul’s life of the spirit) or, at least, use the pleasures of the earthly city only as a means of ultimately enjoying the city of God. Petrarch’s affinity to both Augustine and Cicero is well known.31 As we saw in chapter 2, Cicero exercised the skepticism of the Academic school in which he was trained and also spoke on behalf of the Stoics—whom he admired as the most consistent of philosophers—as well as of the Peripatetics, whose teachings were better accommodated to the experience of ordinary men. The older Stoics held that virtue was the only good, and believed that honestas (moral worth) was the only quality to be cultivated. The Peripatetics recognized three kinds of good—moral goodness, goods of the body, goods of circumstances—and valued the emotions in human life, following Aristotle’s account of them in the Nicomachean Ethics. Petrarch expressed his own self-division in Ciceronian terms. “Just as my reason is often Stoic,” he writes, “so are my feelings always Peripatetic.”32 But in Petrarch’s search for self-integration the Ciceronian capacity for skeptical duplicity and personal multiplicity became a moral, psychological, and spiritual issue. He seems to have relived Augustine’s agon of the two wills, described in the Confessions. On the brink of conversion, Augustine marveled at the refractory nature of his will. He can will his arm to move and it moves; willing and acting are indistinguishable. Yet when he wills his mind to conform to the will of God, nothing happens: “Mind commands mind to will: there is no difference here, but it does not do so. Whence comes this monstrous state? Why should it be? I say that it commands itself to will a thing: it would not give this command unless it willed it, and yet it does not do what it wills.”33 His explanation is that the mind does not will its conformity to God in its entirety; part does not will and that part escapes the command, resists it rather, intent on other ends: “Therefore, it is no monstrous thing partly to will a thing and partly not to will it, but it is a sickness in the mind. Although it is supported by truth, it does not wholly rise up, since it is heavily encumbered by habit [consuetudine praegravatus]. Therefore there are two wills, since one of them is not complete, and what is lacking in one of them is present in the other” (8.9.21).

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What is lacking in the refractory will, Augustine observes, is lacking because of habit or custom. But what is habit? Habit turns out to be the accretive selfhood constituted by one’s kairotic forays into the world’s plea­ sures—the self, so to speak, as an acquired taste.34 In the Confessions, the words for “habit” and “custom” appear with great frequency and are always associated with the fleeting, external life of human institutions—“O torrent of men’s ways!” (1.16.25)—which disperses the self, in contrast with the life of the “inner man,” in whom God’s image abides, which integrates the self: “O sweetness happy and enduring, which gathers me together again from that disordered state in which I lay in shattered pieces, wherein, turned away from you, the one, I spent myself upon the many” (2.1.1). How does it come about that one “spends oneself” and proliferates so as to lie in “shattered pieces”? Augustinian psychology, like its classical forbears, is based on a correspondence theory of knowledge. In contrast to the Platonists, Aristotelians, and Stoics, however, Augustine predicates intention not on the perception of known objects but rather on a preexisting will, which functions as a continuous governing force, whether directed to external objects, its own understanding, or the interior light in which God exists in the mind. He defines will as “a movement of the soul, with no compulsion, toward something that is not to be given up, or that is to be attained.”35 In the mind of a human being, which is modeled on the divine trinity, will is the member of the triad that binds memory and intellect together. Although the three elements are interfused, will tells memory what to remember and intellect what to understand. Similarly, in sensory life the mind’s will binds the senses to objects so that passive “seeing” or “hearing” is activated into perception. Augustine describes this directing of will as an act of “attention,” and it results in what he calls an “invention.” As in the case of the mind’s inventing ideas from within, so “what is sought for with the eyes or with any of the other senses, is sought by the mind itself, for it is the mind that directs the attention of the sense, and discovers (‘invents’) when the sense concerned ‘comes upon’ what is being sought for.”36 Once the mind’s attention is directed to itself or to an external object, the will affects, strives after, and causes the mind to bond with that entity and become a likeness—imitation—of what it beholds and now knows: The mind therefore will possess a certain likeness to the object known, whether this object pleases or its absence displeases. And accordingly so far as we know God, we are like him—though not of course to the degree of equality, since our knowledge of him is not equal to his knowledge of himself.

170 / Willful Words, Christian Anxieties When sense perception makes us acquainted with bodies, a likeness of them appears in our mind, which is the memory-image: it is not the bodies themselves which are in our mind when we think of them but their likenesses. If we accept one for the other we are mistaken. (De Trin. IX.16.xi)

If the will is directed toward God, the self assimilates itself to God. But if it is directed to the inferior things transmitted by the senses, then the self is in danger of identifying itself with those parts of creation lower than itself and departing from its center: “Now the mind goes astray through uniting itself to these images by a love so intense as to make it suppose its own nature to be like theirs. It has become as it were conformed to them, not in reality but in supposition: supposing itself to be not an image, but the actual thing of which it carries the image in itself. . . . Thus the mind, supposing itself to resemble its own images, supposes itself to be a bodily thing” (De Trin. X.8.vi). The danger here is treble: in its love for things perceived by the senses, the mind is not only drawn to what is lesser than itself but thinks it has actually bonded with and is “in” them materially, while it only “possesses” a likeness belonging to the realm of phantasms. Thus the mind forgets itself—forgets, that is, in whose image it is created—and adheres to what is extrinsic, for “the power of love is such that what the mind has long and lovingly thought over will stick to it like glue, and accompany it even when it comes back (as it were) to the thought of itself” (X.7.v). So there is not only an ontological declension of the self in the mind’s love of the world’s attractive beauties—be they bodies, honors, wealth, or power—but a misunderstanding of what constitutes it. That is, the mind’s perverted apprehensions of phantasmatized external goods make it what it is, and the mind so (mis)apprehended finds it difficult to apprehend itself in any other way. It has, so to speak, a variety of false subject positions. What we see, then, in Augustine’s account of the coalescence of the mind with images of the world is the Protagorean belief that man is the measure of all things, as filtered through Aristotle, the Stoics, and St. Paul. Like Protagoras before him, Augustine is aware of the intermingling of mind and world in which each is assimilated to the other; but these encounters take place in the phantasms or images, which, Aristotle informs us, the senses deposit in the imagination and to which the mind, according to Stoic psychology, assents; they do not occur in some indiscriminate space where external and internal logoi intersect.37 Nor are they simply fortuitous encounters but the directed fabrications of a sinful, perverted will attracted to the flesh, which denotes all human activities that are, wittingly or not,

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self-appreciative. That is, as directed by the will, the mind looks empirically to human interests and achievements rather than spiritually to the divine source of human activity. The language Augustine uses to characterize these encounters is erotic. Will is actually coterminous with love, will representing its conative aspect as the mind struggles toward its object of desire, love representing the repose in and enjoyment of that object—whether internal or external. Within the mind, will or love is the agent of copulation between memory and intellect: Memory supplied the source from which the thinker’s [intellectual] view receives its form, the conformation itself being a kind of image imprinted by the memory, and the agency by which the two are joined being love or will. Thus when the mind regards itself in the act of thought, it understands and takes knowledge of itself: we may say that it begets this self-understanding and self-knowledge. For an object that is incorporeal is seen when it is understood, and is known by the act of understanding. . . . And to these two, the begetter and the begotten, we have to add the love which joins them together, and is simply the will, pursuing or embracing an object of enjoyment. (De Trin. XIV.8.vi)

When, however, through many acts of attention directed toward external objects, the mind has become familiarized by love with “things sensible or corporeal, it has no power to be itself apart from their images” and becomes disfigured because of “its inability to separate itself from the images of objects perceived by the senses and see itself in isolation” (De Trin. X.11. viii). This is the work of an ill will, a fornicating will. As the mind forsakes God, “through loves it cannot quell and errors out of which it sees no way of return, it falls miserably away from itself into things which are alien and inferior to itself,” and becomes a deluded lover. “Thus the soul commits fornication when it is turned away from you,” writes Augustine, addressing God in The Confessions, “and, apart from you, seeks such pure clean things as it does not find except when it returns to you” (2.6.14). Students of rhetoric, wedded to profitable, illusory words instead of truth, are especially prone to unclean lusts: “They fornicate against you out of love for passing, temporary trifles and filthy lucre, which defiles the hand that seizes it, and by embracing a fleeting world, and by despising you who abide forever, who call back to yourself and forgive the human soul, which though once sunk in harlotries has now returned to you” (5.12.22). Augustine the rhetorician speaks from his own experience here, having “withdrawn the service of my

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tongue from the language marts” and now determined “not to put myself up for sale again” (9.2.2). This fornicating self, its attention turned outward toward the world, actually hates itself. But, Augustine writes, “its ill will to itself is unconscious, because it does not suppose that what it wants is injurious: yet in wanting what is injurious, it is willing evil to itself. So it is written: ‘He that loveth iniquity hateth his own soul’ [Ps. 11.5]. Therefore the man who knows how to love himself, loves God; while the man who does not love God, though he retains the love of self which belongs to his nature, may yet properly be said to hate himself when he does what is contrary to his own good and behaves to himself as an enemy” (De Trin. XIV.18.xiv). Iago’s impatient rebuke to the forlorn Roderigo—“I never found a man that knew how to love himself” (1.3.314–15)—is an ironic echo of Augustine, since he is himself the victim of self-hate as he goes about “to plume up my will” by cathecting to the world of the flesh. And his language of sexual generation, as he plumes up that will by “inventing” ideas, is the language of will cogitating—that is, compelling the union of sensory images, memory, and intellect to produce thought, whether by configuring disparate elements into an intimation of action or simply engaging in witplay: des: Come, how wouldst thou praise me? iago: I am about it, but indeed my invention Comes from my pate as birdlime does from frieze, It plucks out brain and all; but my muse labours And thus she is delivered. . . . (2.1.124–28)38

Thus we begin to discover an Augustinian Iago inhabiting a world of Aristotelian/Ciceronian rhetoric, exercising his will in ways that Augustine himself had learned to despise. Another image Augustine often uses in describing his subjective state is dissolution. The self turned away from the inward mind, he suggests, experiences “a kind of outgoing from itself, when the passion of love is directed upon those images which are a sort of vestige left behind by many acts of attention”; it is often described in the Confessions as an outpouring, spilling, or flowing, in accordance with the pervasive imagery of fornication. The opposite condition is continence, which signifies an immuring of the self against the concupiscence of the flesh, concupiscence of the eye, and ambition of the world (10.30.41). By continence, “we are gathered together and brought back to the one, from whom we have dissipated our being into many things” (10.29.40). It is achieved only by reposing in God’s Word:

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“All in you that has rotted away will flourish again; all your diseases will be healed; all in you that flows and fades away will be restored, and made anew, and bound around you” (4.11.16). Augustine discovers, however, that the material solicitings of the world are virtually impossible to ignore, even in one who has heard the Word of God. This is because he remains subject to the “tyranny of habit,” which presides even in his judgment when he discriminates among “the throngs of contradictory phantasms” that dwell there (7.17.23). Habit is formed, he explains, by the lusts of a perverse will, for “when lust is served, it becomes habit, and when habit is not resisted, it becomes necessity [dum servitur libidini, facta est consuetudo, et dum consuetudini non resistitur, facta est neces­ sitas]” (8.5.10). In these words, we hear echoes of the Aristotelian hexis, but now repeated practice strengthens a perverse will. Even when he feels a new will growing in him, which desires to worship God, it is not able to do so because it cannot overcome “that prior will, grown strong with age” (ibid.). In experiencing the conflict of these two wills he most explicitly identifies the split “I,” of which part desires to repose in the unity and certainty of God’s truth, part in the proliferating images of earthly experience: I was in both camps, but I was more in that which I approved within myself than in that other which I disapproved within me. For now, in the latter, it was not so much myself, since in large part I suffered it against my will rather than did it voluntarily. Yet it was by me that this habit had been made so warlike against me, since I had come willingly to this point where I now willed not. (8.5.11)

He had made himself by repeated acts of a perverse will. What he is trying to do now is separate the new “I” of the godly will, where he locates approval and disapproval, from the older “I” of the perverted will, by distancing the latter as “habit,” an aggregate of passionate engagements that must be shed by the self if it is truly to know itself and God in itself. Yet even as he does so, he is forced to admit the residual existence and responsibility of the older “I,” which willed what the newer “I” wills not. What the mind now wills itself to do it cannot do on its own, even when it has no arguments against God’s Word left in its arsenal. “There remained,” he writes, “only speechless dread and my soul was fearful, as if of death itself, of being kept back from that flow of habit by which it was wasting away unto death” (8.7.18). The ontological conflict of two selves is here most clearly expressed: the multiplex self informed by its repeated encounters with the world resists with all its will any separation from the sources of its identity, and in so doing

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continues to drain away the life of the unified self now being born anew, whose viability depends upon the death of its elder other. Even after his conversion Augustine is haunted by habit, for in his memory “there still live images of such things as my former habits implanted there.” When he is awake they assail him but weakly, but when he is asleep they succeed in arousing old feelings of pleasure and “even consent to something very like the deed itself.” Thus there remains in memory a subconscious past, and when their images arise: “At such times,” he asks, “am I not myself, O Lord my God?” (10.30.41). Still more discomfiting, he has grown aware that there lies inside him a vast unconscious with incalculable subject possibilities: Within me are those lamentable dark areas wherein my own capacities lie hidden from me. Hence, when my mind questions itself about its own powers, it is not easy for it to decide what should be believed. For even what is within it is for the most part hidden away unless brought to light by some experience. In this life, the whole of which is termed a trial, no man should be sure whether one who can pass from worse to better might not also pass from better to worse. One hope, one trust, one firm promise—your mercy! (10.32.48)

Not only does a rejected, known past threaten to return and disorient the self now positioned toward God, but a frightening, not-yet-realized potentiality that may be contained in the depths of the self, which the subject cannot grasp, may unexpectedly appear. For any chance encounter may make actual that which is not yet realized, thereby redisposing the self in a new subject position that, in language recalling Protagoras, may find a man in the worse condition, not the better. The only recourse against this potential insurgency is faith in God’s mercy.

III The concerns of the pagan rhetorician turned Christian saint—so painfully mediating an ancient anthropology to its legatees of the first stirrings of modernity in the Renaissance—reappear in Petrarch’s dialogue the Secretum, composed within a few years of his letter to “Socrates.” Here, the Christian poet nurtured on pagan classics envisions an encounter between his present and future selves—Franciscus and Augustinus—during which he vividly reveals his own experience of two wills. Complaining of the misery by which he feels himself encumbered, Franciscus is told that no one “can become or can be unhappy against his will.”39 Human beings are not simply victims

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of external forces, Augustinus insists; they are victims of the very persons whom they love and trust the most: themselves. This is because “there is in the souls of men a certain perverse and dangerous lust for deceiving themselves,” and unconsciously they desire the vices that they also abhor (15). When Franciscus protests that, on the contrary, he has tried fervently to escape his wretchedness, Augustinus tells him that he has not exercised sufficient will, for his will is divided between the highest good and lesser goods of the world: “When all these passions are distinguished, then, and not till then, will desire be full and free. For when the soul is uplifted on one side to heaven by its own nobility, and on the other dragged down to earth by the weight of the flesh and the seductions of the world, so that it both desires to rise and also to sink at one and the same time, then, drawn contrary ways, you find you arrive nowhere” (25). The remedy he proposes seems curious at first, given the suspicion of physical images Augustine had expressed in the Confessions and De Trinitate, but when we recall Augustine’s (and Petrarch’s) devotion to Cicero, it becomes understandable. To wean Franciscus from engagement with mortal pleasures, he proposes a meditation on death. Again, Franciscus protests that he has thought of this and fortified his reason against worldly vanities, but Augustinus replies, “Although a host of little pin-pricks play upon the surface of your mind, nothing yet has penetrated the centre. The miserable heart is hardened by long habit” (29). Not the reason but the heart must be convinced, and this must happen by experiencing death vicariously: “We must picture to ourselves the effect of death on each several part of our bodily frame, the cold extremities, the breast in the sweat of fever, the side throbbing with pain, the vital spirits running slower and slower as death draws near, the eyes sunken and weeping, every look filled with tears, the forehead pale and drawn, the cheeks hanging and hollow, the teeth staring and discoloured, the nostrils shrunk and sharpened, the lips foaming” (32). With each successive image, the meaning of death will sink more deeply into Franciscus’s soul, and in this way he can escape from “the custom of the time”—the heedless pursuit of worldly goods—but only if he acts out, indeed becomes, what he meditates upon: “if in the act of meditation you find yourself suddenly grow stiff, if you tremble, turn pale, and feel as if already you endured its pains; if at the same time you seem to yourself as if you were leaving the body behind . . . then you may be assured you have not meditated in vain” (34–35). Just as the mind assimilates itself to external beauties and becomes what it knows, so it can be mortified and readied for its turn to God by contemplating the death of its body and the “thousand forms of punishment and pain“ awaiting it in hell.

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Augustinus is urging upon Franciscus a Franciscan meditation exercise unknown to the speaker’s namesake, which is itself a form of vivid rhetorical amplification fashioned to exploit the mind’s vulnerability to physical images. To convert the soul one must fill the imagination with repulsive sights from which the will shall detach itself in disgust. Yet Franciscus has tried this, too, and continues to be the same man after the horrors of meditation have passed. His problem, it seems, is an integral part of the solution. “What stands in the way of your purpose of heart,” Augustinus tells him, “is the habituation of your soul to its body and its susceptibility to sensory attractions” (43). Franciscus cannot concentrate on images of death for the very reason that such concentration would be effective: the soul is porous, soft, and impressionable, and the images of mortification he has retrieved from his memory of such sights are obscured, overloaded, and imposed upon by images of pleasure that press together in a heap (conglobantur) and, disrupting and mutilating thought (discerpens laceransque cogitatus), draw the will to love them in their polymorphous variety. He suffers literally from an “overcrowded mind,” in which “you are tossed now here now there in strange fluctuation, and can never put your whole strength to anything” (45). Phantasms fight phantasms. In fourteenth-century Italy, where Franciscus is fashioning a literary career for himself, the temporal pleasures to which he responds in debilitating self-dispersal are associated with urban life. “Ever since you grew tired of your leafy trees, of your simple way of life, and society of country people,” Augustinus tells him, “egged on by cupidity, you have plunged once more into the midst of the tumultuous life of cities” (65). Petrarch’s identification of the early modern city as the locus of his accidia historically locates the milieu in which rhetorical anthropology was reborn and connects that birth with previous times during which active civic and political life gave rise to serious inquiry concerning the relationship of word, psyche, and action.40 Renaissance towns, William Bouwsma has observed, “produced a set of conditions that made parts of Europe more and more like the hellenistic world in which both the Stoics and Augustine had been reared,” thus reproducing in a new form the antinomies of these complementary systems of thought that were so influential in the early modern period (30). This milieu was marked by “an economy increasingly more dependent on commerce than agriculture; a political structure composed of assertive particular powers; and a society dominated by educated laymen who were increasingly restive under clerical direction and increasingly aggressive in pressing their own claims to dignity and self determination.” Most notably, “the life of a merchant community and the ambitious operation of independent rulers made

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all experience contingent on the interaction between unpredictable forces and the practical ingenuity and energies of men” (227). In the Secretum, the self-scattering life of public affairs is identified with Avignon, “the most melancholy and disorderly of towns.” Described through the same copious amplification with which Petrarch had rendered the proposed meditation on death, it is a scene of noise, filth, distraction, contrast, and diversity that “destroys the soul accustomed to any better kind of life, banishes all serenity from a generous heart, and quite upsets the student’s habit of mind” (97). In De vita solitaria, Petrarch compares with Juvenalian intensity the frenetic daily routine of the city man obsessed by his many interests and that of the man who enjoys the self-composure afforded by devout leisure, and he provides further insight into the ways in which humanism fostered a disturbing proliferation of self. This busy man, full of profit-making schemes and scapes of wit for ensnaring others and enriching himself and his clients, is identified as the orator who, with so many different ideas in his head, is never at peace with himself but is continually beset by fear and guilt. The daily distractions experienced by such men produce a fundamental loss: “They . . . are ruled by the power of another man’s nod and learn what they must do from another man’s look. They can claim nothing as their own. Their house, their sleep, their food, is not their own, and what is even more serious, their mind is not their own. They do not weep and laugh at the promptings of their own nature but discard their own emotions to put on those of another. In sum, they transact another man’s business, think another man’s thoughts, live by another man’s grace” (Life of Solitude, 22). In sum, they obey a decorum run wild. While Petrarch does not deny that a beneficent public life—that of the legendary Hercules or the historical Christ—is preferable to contemplation, he knows that few men can pursue pious ends by worldly means. Most will succumb to the insubstantial attractions of money, power, or reputation, assimilating themselves to what they serve. Under these circumstances, how does one return to the inner self? In De vita solitaria, no compromise is possible: one leaves the city for the countryside with no idea of ever looking back (312). But in his late prose work, De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia, Petrarch finds another means, whose efficacy Augustinus had urged on him in the Secretum. There, heaping scorn on dialecticians who substitute analysis, definition, and summary of the human condition for moral action, Augustinus had exclaimed, “Why in total oblivion of the real basis of things, will you grow old simply conversant with words, and with whitening hair and wrinkled brow, spend all your time in babyish babble?” (“Secret” 30, emphasis mine). It was in reaction against

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the scholastics’ intellectualist approach to human evil—their rational appeal to the internal hierarchy of reason, will, and passion that was believed to mirror an intelligible hierarchical cosmos—that Augustinus had proposed, as a remedy for Franciscus’s accidia, a meditation on death composed of images that would engage the affections and the will. The scholastic universe was a graduated hierarchy in which human beings could read the rational design of God and repeat that design in themselves by submitting the passions and will to the rule of reason. The Augustinian universe was not so immediately intelligible. It was presumed to be rational, the creation of a reasonable God, but the distance between God and man was too great to read God’s intentions except as they were revealed in Scripture and through the illumination of faith. Augustine’s own experience had shown him that the hierarchy of reason, will, and passion in man was an ideal rather than an operational reality. “Augustinian humanism,” Bouwsma notes, “saw man, not as a system of objectively distinguishable, discrete faculties reflecting ontological distinctions in the cosmos, but as a mysterious and organic unity. . . . The will, in this view, is seen to take its direction not from reason but from the affections, which are in turn not merely the disorderly impulses of the treacherous body but expressions of the energy and quality of the heart, that mysterious organ which is the center of the personality, the source of its unity and ultimate worth” (45, 47). For this reason it avails less to prove the truth of God’s promise of salvation to the intellect than to lead the passions and will to embrace its goodness. This is the position Petrarch maintains in De ignorantia: It is safer to strive for a good and pious will than for a capable and clear intellect. The object of the will, as it pleases the wise, is to be good; that of the intellect is truth. It is better to will the good than to know the truth. The first is never without merit; the latter can be polluted with crime and then admits no excuse. Therefore, those are far wrong who consume their time in learning to know virtue instead of acquiring it, and, in a still higher degree, those whose time is spent in learning to know God instead of loving Him. In this life it is impossible to know God in his fullness; piously and ardently to love Him is possible.41

In order for love to be felt, however, one must be aware of God’s goodness, for one cannot love what one has never heard of. For Augustine and Petrarch, it is hearing God’s word through preaching that stimulates apprehension of God’s image in the soul. Thus the proposed retreat into silence, offered at the end of De vita solitaria, is an inadequate solution for a

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Christian who believes that there is “nothing more blessed, more worthy of a man, and more like divine goodness than to serve and assist as many as require help” (Solitude 125). Those who study humane letters, however, can become both learned and good, and can share their condition with others. Petrarch finds the “true moral philosophers and useful teachers of the virtues” among the Latin orators, moralists, and poets, such as Cicero, Seneca, and Horace, whose eloquence has the power to convert the whole man: “they stamp and drive deep into the heart the sharpest and most ardent stings of speech, by which the lazy are startled, the ailing are kindled, and the sleepy aroused, the sick healed, and the prostrate raised, and those who stick to the ground lifted up to the highest thoughts and to honest desire. Then earthly things become vile; the aspect of vice stirs up an enormous hatred of vicious life; virtue and ‘the shape, as it were, the face of honesty,’ are held by the inmost eye ‘and inspire miraculous love’ of wisdom and of themselves, ‘as Plato says’ ” (104). Petrarch’s praise of vivid rhetoric, like Augustine’s before him, reveals the contradictory position of the Christian orator, who must descend, as it were, into the sensible world for images and arguments that stimulate appetite, in order to change the condition of his hearer from the worse to the better. Strictly speaking, these are the very materials of which the mind must strip itself, as Augustine insists, if it is to view the nonmaterial image of God within (De trin. IX.11.8). Ignored is the earlier warning of De vita solitaria, where Petrarch reluctantly acknowledges the holy vocation of those who “go about the cities and deliver long harangues in public about vices and virtues.” These earnest persons say many things that are helpful to their listeners, he concedes, “but the physician is not necessarily in good health when he helps the patient with his advice; he often dies of the very ailment which he has cured in others.” His position there is explicitly antirhetorical. “I do not disdain the careful choice of artful composition of words contrived for the salvation of man,” he says, “and I honor the useful work regardless of the character of the workman, but this is a school of life not of rhetoric, and our thoughts are now fixed not on the vain-glory of eloquence but on the secure repose of the soul” (126). These last words reveal his deepest concern. There is something about even sacred rhetoric that threatens the self with ambition, contamination, agitation, proliferation, and desubstantiation. Some years ago Joseph Mazzeo, in a sensitive explication of Augustine’s wonder at coming upon Ambrose reading silently to himself, demonstrated how Augustine, in his conversion, made a transition from an acoustic oratory to a rhetoric of silence, “listening to the instruction of the inner

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teacher” and thereby passing through the materiality of audible signs to an immediate apprehension of their inaudible referent (22). Citing later witnesses to this ideal of silent rhetoric, he quotes Richard of Schontal, a late medieval scribe who complained that “[o]ftentimes when I am reading straight from the book and in thought only . . . [the devils] make me read aloud word by word, that they may deprive me so much the more of the inward understanding thereof, and that I may less penetrate into the interior force of the reading, the more I pour myself out in exterior speech” (20). Richard expresses that familiar Augustinian fear of incontinence associated with an overflowing of the self as it bonds with sensory objects, but here audible speech is the medium of that dispersal as he literally pours himself out “word by word.” St. Ignatius Martyr, also quoted by Mazzeo, had interpreted this experience in ontological terms: “It is better to be silent and be real than to talk and be unreal” (22). Truth is inaudible and lies within the interior substance of the self; when uttered, speech and speaker become spectral. A remark in one of Petrarch’s letters links him directly to this tradition. “For truly,” he writes, “unless we care more about what we seem than about what we are [nisi videri magis quam esse], the applause of the foolish crowd will not please us so much as truth in silence [veritas in silentio].”42 Though he is referring to oratory in general, the same ontological concern about the status of speaker and speech is evident, and is even more clearly specified. The comparison is not between what is real and (simply) unreal, but between what “seems” and what “is.” Petrarch explicitly draws the contrast between the verisimilar or probable, the medium of spoken rhetoric, and the interior, silent realm of truth that lies at the heart of both the Platonic and Augustinian attempts to reduce rhetoric to referential discourse—in Plato, a discourse of the good that exists in the transcendent realm of ideas; in Augustine, a discourse of divine revelation. Thus the Christian moralist feels a deep ambivalence about uttering the self. It has to do with the medium of utterance—verisimilitude or probability—through which the self undergoes an ontological mutation by entering the uncertain sphere of material images and conventional signs that are unsupported by the absolute referents of Aristotelian metaphysics or Christian theology, and with the distantiation of utterance, whereby the self wilfully departs from itself and negotiates with the things and minds with which it shares phenomenal space. So he faces a dilemma. He can cultivate the self by leading a continent and pious life of solitary devotion or, loving God by loving his fellows, put that self at risk by actively engaging the lives of others in their mutual pursuit of the good within a worldly, active life.

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When Petrarch insists that “it is better to will the good than to know the truth,” and that “in this life it is impossible to know God in his fullness; piously and ardently to love Him is possible,” he expresses in Augustinian terms the ancient sophistic demurral that reduced the sphere of cognition and persuasion to the phenomenal world, and he renews the Protagorean ethical promise to “bring about a change from one state to that which is better” without, however, making his client wiser. But this means entering the realm of public utterance, which from the perspective of a referential linguistics is merely probable and, if probable, then common, changeable, and therefore illusory. From the perspective of Christian ontology, it marks a potentially degenerative motion of the soul. Uneasiness about the power of vivid language to arouse unwanted passions lingers even in the sacred rhetorics that begin to appear in the sixteenth century. As Debora Shuger has shown, most repeat Petrarch’s call for a transformative speech that destroys old habits of thinking and feeling, and instills new ones. Erasmus’s preacher “first tears out of his listeners’ souls the roots of evil thoughts and the wicked seeds of impious doctrine from whence sprout bitter fruits,” and “demolishes the building erected on a bad foundation.” Then, “in place of what has been torn down and destroyed, he plants good seedlings and erects a building that will not yield to the tempest.”43 But anxiety persists about the source of this rhetorical power. Writers of sacred rhetorics locate it not in the speaker’s will but in the Holy Spirit working within him. Among Protestants this uneasiness is heightened by the concern that human art may usurp the work of the spirit. Echoing Augustine’s identification of will and affect, Melanchthon initially rejects eloquence, comparing emotional appeal to flattery that reinforces bad habits. Only in later work does he argue that “all preaching should arouse the emotions,” because spiritual renovation is attained by “inserting better emotions into the soul” (68). William Perkins, the Puritan divine, eschews linguistic emotional appeal, preferring a plain style of preaching. But this does not preclude passionate expressivity. “The passionate plain style emerges,” Shuger observes, “when the Holy Spirit replaces language as the ‘prime mover’ of the emotions” (69). Thus even among writers who urge their readers to use all the resources of elocution, there is need to feel sure that passionate speech is the effect of grace, not errant will. Which brings us back to Iago. If, in the Augustinian tradition, Iago behaves like fallen man fornicating with the world as he turns from God, the source of all good, and the world is a place where habit inures men to adulterous apostasy, what conclusions may we draw about his ostentatious declaration of silence at the end of the play? A man loquacious for five acts ends

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up saying, “From this time forth, I never will speak word” (5.2.301). Having encountered soliciting images at every turn and instrumentalized each occasion to effect his will through working words, has he so poured himself into the discourse of things that he has virtually dissipated his “gathered self,” as Augustine terms it, in his attempt to make himself coextensive with the world—the result of his work now visible in the tragic loading of Othello’s bed? Is this what the Pauline fear of the flesh has come to signify in the theater of the early seventeenth-century—a demi-devil rhetoric that enables a global takeover by an ill will that fuses itself to objects, fashions meanings out of them in accordance with self-interest, and transmits those meanings to others as if they are the things they signify? Assuredly, this is only one of its many possible transvaluations, but it is a hypothesis worth testing in the case of Othello, where Shakespeare syncretizes the humanist insight into the erotics of cognition, the psychagogic potential of a revived classical rhetoric, and the wayward spiritual itinerary of the late English morality play in an internal critique of the affective theatrical medium in which he himself works. The test I propose is duplicitous. It will involve examining the means by which Iago persuades Othello that Desdemona is false and also the means by which Shakespeare persuades his audiences not only to believe—against their better judgments—what they know to be untrue, but to be complicit in filling in the silences of his script by pluming up their own wills to be satisfied. To these complementary verbal enchantments we now turn.

Six

“Preposterous Conclusions”: Eros, Enargeia, and Composition in Othello

Two rhetorics of composition inform Othello. One is dominated by a rhetorical figure that instantiates a way of speaking, thinking, acting, and composing that puts last things first—thus disordering reality—and that entails the relationships of the dramatis personae, of Shakespeare to his play, and of the play to its audience. As in the Augustinian tradition examined in the previous chapter, this rhetoric induces a cathexis of the will to objects and ideas presented to it. It engages the worst fears of that tradition insofar as it foregrounds the “thingness” of speech and entraps listeners in the discourse of res, making them believe that things have happened that did not happen or could not possibly have happened. Operating alongside this Christian antirhetoric is a more ancient rhetoric of enchantment also grounded in the acknowledgment that words are not things, that while they produce powerful effects on the psyche they are inessential appearances that possess a merely theatrical efficacy. If the rhetoric of “thingness”—which, to call it by its technical name, is a rhetoric imbued with enargeia—entraps the auditory of Othello through verbal sensuousness, this second, incantatory rhetoric charms it by leaving lacunae—“nothingnesses”—that the auditory is tempted to supplement by piecing together ambient verbal fragments, thus reduplicating what seems to have occurred in Shakespeare’s own process of composition. Within this rhetoric, however, there lurks an antidote that warns us against the tendentious fabricating we employ to fashion an intelligible imaginative world for ourselves. It reminds us that we are only hearing “words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart,” as Troilus says of Cressida’s discarded letter (TC 5.3.108)—reminds us, that is, that there is no world out there but only audible and visible signs—simulacra, not symptoms—of an underlying reality. Through this double movement of supplying needs and materials

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for audience composition and suggesting the factitiousness of such wordworlds, Shakespeare reveals the psychagogic power of theatrical language and performs an internal critique of his own enterprise. Not surprisingly, both these rhetorics trail magical filiations, and I shall examine them, in this and the following chapter, in their order of appearance.

I One of Thomas Rymer’s chief complaints when he declared Othello a play “fraught with improbabilities” is what we might call a master improbability, since it has several dimensions—formal, cognitive, affective, ontological—one might even say eschatological, given the stakes involved. It is the phenomenon of “preposterous conclusions.” I take the phrase (though Rymer did not) from Iago’s advice to Roderigo in Act I, scene 3, which we noticed briefly in the last chapter. As is often the case, the ensign at this moment seems to be saying less than he means: “If the balance of our lives had not one scale of reason to poise another of sensuality, the blood and baseness of our natures would conduct us to most preposterous conclusions” (1.3.327–30). What he seems to be saying is plain enough: “were it not that reason counterpoised sense, our passions would lead us to absurd ends.” It would be perfectly legitimate to rest content with this commonsense reading if the events of the play did not lead us right back to the passage and make us wonder if he isn’t being more literal than we thought. Heard more attentively, Iago’s words say, “were it not for the counterpoise of reason, our senses would arouse our passions in such a way that we would arrive at the ends of our actions before beginning them.” That sounds crazy, but in terms of Elizabethan psychology it is by no means impossible. It is simply to say that under the sway of passion, effects will precede causes (ratio­nally construed) and ends precede means. It is what happens when reason panders will.1 There is a rhetorical figure that enacts this behavioral topsy-turvydom. It is called hysteron proteron, which means “the latter part put before the former.” It is usually classified as a grammatical figure that alters normal syntax, and among the English is sometimes glossed by the proverb “to set the cart before the horse.” Henry Peacham includes it among those figures which “by bearing or removing of words from their proper places do make the oration very dark and obscure,” while George Puttenham, somewhat more cheerfully, names it “the Preposterous” and places it among the permissible “figures auricular working by disorder.” It occurs, for example,

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when we say, “I kist her cherry lip and tooke my leave” for “I tooke my leave and kist her,” or, less innocuously, “When we had climbde the clifs, and were a shore” for “When we were come a shore and clymed had the cliffs”—since “one must be on land ere one can clime.”2 Hysteron proteron borders on linguistic viciousness because it effects a dislocation between the natural order of things and their representation in speech. That there is a natural order in speech is a fact to which Richard Sherry alerts his readers: “men and women, daye and night, easte and weste, rather then backwards. . . . When that that is done afterwards, is set in speaking in the former place,” then you have hysteron proteron.3 The figure’s ambiguous status among the beauties of language, however, also stems from its persuasiveness. Puttenham classifies hysteron proteron among the auricular figures because for him these figures possess the quality of enargeia, that vividness or luminosity usually associated with figures of amplification that offer circumstantial evidence to the eyes of the mind. Puttenham is more sensitive than most to the synaesthetic effects of figurative language, for he describes enargeia, which “geveth a glorious lustre and light,” as the “goodly outward shew set upon the matter with words, and speeches smothly and tunably running” (155). This attribution of visual and virtually tactile qualities to aural phenomena is not accidental. He elaborates the idea later in his book when speaking once again of auricular figures: For the eare is properly but an instrument of conveyance for the mind, to apprehend the sence by the sound. And our speech is made melodious or harmonical, not only by strayned tunes, as those of Musick, but also by choise of smoothe words: and thus, or thus, marshalling them in their comeliest construction and order, as well by sometimes sparing, sometimes spending them more or less liberally, and carrying or transporting them farther off or neerer, setting them with sundry relations, and variable formes, in the ministery and use of words, doe breede no little alteration in man. (207)

Here, Puttenham’s sense of the variable “surfaces” of words, the ways in which they may be arranged, numbered, and moved about to form different configurations within a kind of aural space that may be perceived tactilely, is even more pronounced. He is aware not only of the logical displacements that can be effected by such auricular figures, but also of their psychagogic power, which arises from their multiple appeal to the senses. Hysteron proteron is effective because sounds have a shaping influence on the mind, and “to say truely, what els is man but his minde? which, whosoever have skil

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to compasse, and make yeelding and flexible, what may not he commaund the body to perfourme?” (207). Caveat auditor. If we study Othello closely, we will find that hysteron proteron dominates the play in several particulars. Initially it appears as a kind of verbal tic— simply the way people talk, putting conclusions before their reasons. But it soon becomes apparent that hysteron proteron is also a way of thinking, knowing, behaving, and representing that operates within the play and even between play and audience. It is driven by an economy of desire that, as Rymer sensed but could not articulate, is fundamentally improbable, but that pursues its end of intelligibility by displacing its cathexes onto probabilities empowered by enargeia. This enables Iago to seduce Othello from adherence to Desdemona in scenes 3 and 4 of Act III to adherence to himself, for both his wit and Othello’s are informed by the worldly eros so vividly described by St. Paul, St. Augustine, and Petrarch. Even more interesting, so is Shakespeare’s. He not only understands and is able to represent the way Iago’s psychology penetrates and reveals Othello’s; he also recognizes that a theater audience is similarly susceptible to such seduction. This would explain how he is able to win audiences to what we now call the “double time scheme” of Othello—a scheme (here, a figure of words writ large) in which things appear to have happened that could not have happened. He engages in similar derangements in other plays, but nowhere as extensively as in this one. We will begin to appreciate the role of hysteron proteron in the play if we listen to its first formal manifestations in the opening exchange between Roderigo and Iago. Roderigo speaks: Tush, never tell me, I take it much unkindly That thou, Iago, who hast had my purse   As if the strings were thine, shouldst know of this. (1.1.1–3)

The most appropriate words with which to finish this sentence are, “And never tell me”—but they have been spoken already, in what must sound like an incredulous interrogative: “Tush, never tell me?” What Roderigo is astonished to learn is that Othello has eloped with Desdemona, whom he himself has been courting while employing Iago as his go-between. Obliged to reassure Roderigo that his first loyalty abides with him and that he does indeed hold Othello in his hate, Iago then tells why. Three great ones of the city intervened with the Moor to make him his lieutenant,

Eros, Enargeia, and Composition / 187 But he, as loving his own pride and purposes, Evades them, with a bombast circumstance Horribly stuffed with epithets of war, And in conclusion Nonsuits by mediators. For ‘Certes,’ says he, ‘I have already chose my officer.’ (1.1.11–16)

Another non-sequitur—this time behavioral. Whatever explanation Othello may have offered Iago’s intercessors for turning them down, he had already made the appointment. Angered by such peremptory foreclosure—especially by the Moor’s refusal to heed “the proof / At Rhodes, at Cyprus and on other grounds,” of his own soldiership—Iago laments the preposterousness of modern-day promotion: Preferment goes by letter and affection Not by old gradation, where each second Stood heir to th’ first . . .

And he challenges Roderigo to find for his original assertion: Now sir, be judge yourself Whether I in any just term am affined To love the Moor. (35–39)

This little amble contains in miniature several of the features mentioned earlier—the verbal tic (Roderigo’s preposterous conclusion), the inverted order of action (Othello’s evasions followed by disclosure of his own preposterous conclusion), its apparent source in a cognition of affection, and the mimesis on a characterological level of precisely the kind of behavior that is being described: Iago asserts a conviction—“Despise me / If I do not” (6–7) and then rapidly adduces evidence to show cause. The ensuing conversation reveals more bizarre figurative implications. When Roderigo wonders, understandably enough, why Iago serves Othello if he hates him, the ensign replies, “I follow him to serve my turn upon him. . . . In following him I follow but myself” (41, 57). Here, Iago has verbally become hysteron proteron—that is, if a scheme can become a trope, for when the follower becomes the followed he speaks metaleptically.4 He

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begins as that which comes after, but ends as that which comes before. This suggests that from the outset of the play there is an obsession with figures of reversal. Although they are concentrated in Iago, who is the archimago in these proceedings, they are by no means confined to him.5 Other instances indicate that what at first appears to be a mere verbal tic is actually a mode of thought. Brabantio, for example, is convinced that Desdemona has been bewitched by Othello because he needs to believe his adolescent daughter is loyal, obedient, and untouched by sexual desire. That this may not be so is indicated by his dream (1.1.140–41), which anticipates Iago’s report of her elopement, and his attempt to make it so is demonstrated by his argument before the Signory. Here he begins with the conclusion that “She is abused, stolen from me and corrupted / By spells and medicines, bought of mountebanks” (1.3.61–62), and then he explains, in preposterous syntax, For nature so preposterously to err Being not deficient, blind, or lame of sense, Sans witchcraft could not. (1.3.63–65)

Formally the passage consists of a conclusion (“She is abused”), followed by a reason whose burden is the preposterousness of her act, a parenthetical noun clause (“Being not deficient”) that modifies the subject (“Nature”) of the explanatory sentence, a deferred adverbial phrase (“Sans witchcraft”) that modifies its verb (“to err”), and the verb’s complement (“could not”). The “natural order” of the speech is “For nature could not err so preposterously sans witchcraft, being not deficient, blind, or lame of sense.” Brabantio wishes to say that Desdemona could not have reversed the “natural order” of white before black without being bewitched, unless she were innately defective herself (like Othello) or sensorily impaired, which is why she must be abused. But that is not what his disordered sentence says. Having stated his conclusion, he deranges his subsequent argument by offering a hyperbolical phrase ending in an infinitive, amplifies it, then sputters out his major premise in a form that leaves his infinitive dangling. The more precise term for this derangement is hyperbaton, the generic figure of which hysteron proteron is a species. But the point is clear enough. Conclusion comes first, reasoning (here, disordered reasoning) follows. A similar pattern of affective cognition appears as Brabantio reasons backward from his sense of who Desdemona is (“A maiden never bold”)

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and argues that her elopement occurred “in spite of nature, / Of years, of country, credit, everything,” which leads him to the only cause conceivable to him: That with some mixtures powerful o’er the blood, Or with some dram conjured to this effect, He wrought upon her. (1.3.95–98, 105–7)

Brabantio’s induction is actually a description of himself and his world, and his urgent desire to hold those together is heard in his leap from the four rhetorical topics of person to “everything” and, beyond that, in his conflation of these probable arguments with natural law: It is a judgment maimed and most imperfect That will confess perfection so could err Against all rules of nature . . . (100–102)

His language reveals a psychic drive toward the very perfection he attri­ butes to his daughter: mere commonplaces become facts, incomplete enu­ meration becomes exhaustive demonstration, the probable becomes the natural, and consequently what is improbable becomes unnatural, so that judgment must be driven To find out practices of cunning hell, Why this should be. (102–4)

It would be easy enough to dismiss Brabantio’s proofs as “thin habits, and poor likelihoods / Of modern seemings,” as does the Duke, were it not that he is repeating, at a higher emotional pitch, Iago’s earlier pattern and, perhaps more significant, the Duke’s as well. Shakespeare devotes the first forty-four lines of Act I, scene 3 to an extended inference about the strength and intentions of the Turkish fleet. “There’s no composition in these news / That gives them credit,” the Duke complains as the scene opens. Whereupon he and the two Senators compare figures—one reporting 107 galleys, the other 200, while his own letter speaks of 140—and they prudently conclude that whatever the numerical discrepancy, the evidence

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suggests that a Turkish fleet is heading toward Cyprus. Their news having been tentatively composed, a messenger arrives to report that the Turks are making for Rhodes, not Cyprus, and the reasoning starts all over again. The First Senator is convinced the report is but “a pageant / To keep us in false gaze,” and adduces his reasons: Cyprus is more important to the Turks than Rhodes; it is more easily assailable; and We must not think the Turk is so unskilful To leave that latest which concerns him first, Neglecting an attempt of ease and gain To wake and wage a danger profitless. (1.3.28–31, italics mine)

Persuading themselves the enemy would not behave so preposterously, they disregard this latest news and immediately afterward are confirmed in their opinion: yes, a Turkish fleet was bound for Rhodes, but there it joined a second fleet, and both are now sailing toward Cyprus. There is no theatrical need for this episode; the “law of re-entry” requires ten lines, not forty-four, so Shakespeare must have had some other reason to develop it at such length. The only action it contains is the action of “composition”—discomfiture at the prospect of conflicting evidence, desire to find similitudes among differences, the actual movement of inference that creates coherence. What the Duke and his counselors compose is a rhetorical heterocosm that makes sense to them and gives them grounds for action. It is implemented by the unspoken need to believe that Turks—in this instance, at least—behave like Venetians, and in respect of this strategic impulse it is essentially no different than those fictive worlds woven by Iago and Brabantio, though its discursive process is laid open for our inspection.6 This suggests that in this episode Shakespeare was concerned to anatomize composition—specifically, the way the mind composes an acceptable simulacrum of reality—and display it to his audience. It begins with a presumption passionately grounded in some relational notion of identity (“I hate the Moor”; “A maiden never bold”; “We must not think the Turk”), and on this foundation it layers successive bits of evidence in inductive fashion, which either confirms a thesis already postulated (“Whether I am in any just term affined / To love the Moor”) or leads to an inference that extends the original thesis (“judgment . . . must be driven / To find out practices of cunning hell”; “Nay, in all confidence, he’s not for Rhodes”). In none of these situations do we find a process of logical implication. It is not syllogism that is at work but invention, induction, and ingenuity—the

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power that “sees into” things and fashions them into evidence that supports preposterous conclusions. Such discourse may be said to set the cart before the horse in several ways. First, it is anchored in sensory particulars that are not reviewed in the light of universals, from which, in the rationalist tradition, true reasoning was expected to proceed. This was so in the case not only of scientific explanation but also of practical judgment, whose proper route was thought to be the moral syllogism.7 Second, discourse of this kind depends on a presumption about the perceived object—acknowledged or unconscious—that determines all the inferences that follow, even though it does not logically imply them. This suggests that the discourse of preposterous conclusions develops reasons from its premise rather in the way a metaphor is created— by means of a passion for connection that is both intellectual and sensual. Making a metaphor, Aristotle tells us, is a natural activity whereby we intuit similarity in dissimilar things and “get hold of something fresh. When the poet calls old age ‘a withered stalk,’ he conveys a new idea, a new fact, to us, by means of the general notion of ‘lost bloom’ which is common to both things” (Rhet. 1401b). This general notion, as Paul Ricoeur points out, is the new idea produced within dissimilars—a site of coalescence that is unforeseen, unexpected, and hence quite improbable (198). In such a fashion do the discrepant reports about the Turkish fleet become evidence of the Turks’ presumed deceit. In the preposterous conclusions that Shakespeare represents in Othello, however, metaphor-making draws more evidently on a cognition of affection and is for that reason far more interested than Aristotle suggests. It is generated by an encounter with res that is personal and ethnocentric, and for that reason the metaphorization of res wears the history of its subject’s emotions on its sleeve. Functionally, this means that one’s intellective insights are more heavily saturated by the pathos of situation—whether one is speaking of one’s general, one’s daughter, or one’s Turkish enemy. For vision—external or internal—stimulates appetite, appetite solicits will, and will acts to unite itself in an interested way with the particular that appears satisfying to the imagination, and in doing so experiences joy, as Augustinian psychology teaches us. Echoing Augustine in the early sixteenth century, Philip Melanchthon defines joy as “a motion of the soul by means of which the heart reposes in a present good—an expansion whereby it receives within itself, as it were, the object of its desire and embraces it—just as a lover enfolding his mistress in his arms rejoices and attempts, in some measure, to yoke her to his heart and enclose her within it.”8 Thus will binds itself to the world. But this can only follow cognition, which is itself an act

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of copulation. For, as we have learned from Melanchthon’s epistemology of the predicables, cognition—the discovery that “that is so-and-so”—is a matter of specification, whereby a particular acquires significance.9 Operationally, metaphor-making is the work of ingenium, that faculty of the rational soul which, according to Juan Luis Vives, invents and composes. It is found preeminently in dialecticians, who quickly run through the materials presented to the interior senses, make apt connections among them, marshal them into effective arguments, and conjecture sagaciously from previous experience.10 Although intellectual, this activity is also visual, for cognition is always described as the forming and the judging of images—noticiae, in Melanchthon’s and Vives’s scholastic terminology.11 And it is passionate. Vives remarks that the ingenium is driven by its own internal ardor, suggesting a parallel between the sensual appetite impelled by will, which seeks union with desirable images, and the ingenious impulse that sifts noticiae, discovers resemblances among them, and composes new unities. This matchmaking imperative, which circumvents the hierarchical economy of the soul, may be said to energize all predication and hence all composition. This leads us directly into Act III, scene 3 of Othello, where it becomes clear that Shakespeare’s adumbrations of the psychology of composition in the first three scenes were rehearsals for the major action of the play—the decomposition and recomposition of Othello himself. Here a life grounded in the rhetorical discourse of res is seen as matter for tragedy. What appears to exercise Shakespeare’s imagination most profoundly is the way Iago is able, through spoken words alone, to disturb the pattern of inferences that constitutes Othello’s identity, describes his orientation in the world, and determines his behavior—substituting a new set of inferences that conducts him, in every conceivable sense, to most preposterous conclusions.12 Iago can accomplish this because, unlike the others, he is aware of the rhetorical character of human apprehensions—in particular, of that idea or noticia of Desdemona that organizes Othello’s heterocosm. This idea, he senses, was born of a historical encounter and satisfies a historical need. Therefore it may undergo alteration, provided that the need it signifies is satisfied in some other way. We might call this need “justification”—bearing in mind the racial, ethical, and religious overtones sounded in the play—for that seems to be the import of Othello’s explanation of their union: “She loved me for the dangers I had passed, / And I loved her that she did pity them” (1.3.168–69).13 To bring about the alteration he desires, Iago must break into the chain of longing through which Othello’s need finds joyfulness in Desdemona—

Eros, Enargeia, and Composition / 193 there, where I have garnered up my heart, Where either I must live or bear no life (4.2.58–59)

—and press apart the fabric of beliefs that is the content of that chain: “I think my wife be honest, and think she is not, / I think that thou art just, and think thou art not” (3.3.387–88). Not knowing what to think, for the rhetorically generated self, is not knowing what to be: Farewell the plumed troop, and the big wars That makes ambition virtue! ....................... Othello’s occupation’s gone. (352–53, 360)

It is to experience an ontological rent that demands suture: “would I were satisfied!” (393).14 Such satisfaction may be had only when one is no longer in doubt that one’s wife is a whore. With knowledge like this, a man is whole again and may demonstrate his justification, as Iago suggests, in an entirely new way: No, let me know, And, knowing what I am, I know what she shall be. (4.1.72–73)

Iago, that is to say, exploits the eros of knowing, the drive to conclude, in a particularly cunning way. He does not attempt to obliterate the image that is so powerfully cathected in Othello’s mind but rather obscures its content, gradually attributing to the image a different significance, thereby bringing about a new binary relationship in which the ligature of justification remains intact, though its poles are reversed. Hysteron proteron: who’s the sinner, who’s the saint? For despite his “marriage” to Iago at the end of Act III, scene 3, Othello’s fixation on Desdemona never ceases: one or the other must be guilty and in need of pity.15 Something the Preceptor of Germany tells us about the psychology of such intense relationships is relevant here. In distinguishing the intellect, which is coupled with the interior senses, from the will, which is connected to the emotions, Melanchthon notes that the lumen in the intellect is permanent while the appetition of the will is variable: “We must recognize that there are, on the one hand, ideas [noticias] and, on the other, successive appetites

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[serias appetitiones]. For example, there was an idea of Caesar in Pompey. And this remained the same before the war and during the war. But before the war there was benevolence in Pompey’s will, while afterward hatred burned. Noticia and adfectus are thus different in nature” (De anima 139). What historical events brought about in Pompey, Iago’s language brings about in Othello. In both cases, an idea infixed in the intellect and interior senses undergoes passionate qualification in the will. Iago’s vague remark early in the play is proleptic of this process: Though that his joy be joy Yet throw such changes [F: chances] of vexation on’t, As it may lose some colour. (1.1.70–72)

We have already seen that in the play’s dialectical vocabulary, “changes” or “chances” denote accidents, and what Iago proposes to do is to “throw” a new set of accidents onto the unseen substance of Desdemona, since he cannot affect her essence. But his manner of doing so is rhetorical. And the word colour has a special meaning in the lexicon of rhetoric. It is attached to the technique, frequently discussed in the context of narratio, whereby one sticks to the facts of the case but gives them a certain “gloss” by suggesting that the facts relate to one another in a manner quite different from what has been supposed.16 This, of course, is precisely what Iago does with the fact of Cassio’s visit to Desdemona, her advocacy in his behalf, and her loss of the handkerchief. He is aware, though—as is Othello—that circumstances alone cannot change the meaning a lover finds in his beloved: ’ Tis not to make me jealous To say my wife is fair, feeds well, loves company, Is free of speech, sings, plays and dances well: Where virtue is, these are more virtuous. (3.3.186–89)

Here the bright noticia of Desdemona’s virtue installed in Othello’s imagination illuminates its attendant circumstances. For circumstances to cast shadows upon the noticia, they must be implicated in a different affective field and charged with imagery more vivid than the noticia. This Iago brings about, first, by disrupting Othello’s already weakened hold upon the image of Cassio—thereby opening gaps along the axis of his understanding that

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demand linkage—and then by qualifying his understanding by supplying new links—words that “geveth a glorious lustre and light.” We may trace this process briefly. oth.: Was not that Cassio parted from my wife? iago: Cassio, my lord? no, sure, I cannot think it That he would steal away so guilty-like Seeing you coming. (3.3.37–40)

The familiar image is denied so that Iago may introduce, as characteristic of no one in particular, two negative glosses: “steal away” and “guilty-like.” Yet Othello replies, “I do believe ’twas he,” and Desdemona confirms his impression a moment later: “Why, your lieutenant, Cassio” (3.3.45). The process of making strange has begun. Then Iago tries another approach, supplying not a gloss but a gap: iago: Did Michael Cassio, when you wooed my lady, Know of your love? oth.:

  

He did, from first to last.

Why dost thou ask? iago: But for a satisfaction of my thought, No further harm. (94–98)

Predication withheld. Only Iago may know the satisfaction of a full noticia of Cassio. His words, moreover, suggest that the thought in which this idea resides is a cave whose entrance is blocked from view by sounds that are also opaque substances: oth.: Is he not honest? iago: Honest, my lord? oth.: Honest? Ay, honest. iago: My lord, for aught I know. oth.: What dost thou think? iago: Think, my lord? oth.: Think, my lord! By heaven, thou echo’st me, As if there were some monster in thy thought Too hideous to be shown. (103–11)

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And shortly the thought itself is given a container that one might touch and hold: oth.:

By heaven, I’ll know thy thoughts!

iago: You cannot, if my heart were in your hand, Nor shall not whilst ’tis in my custody. (164–67)

This is how a new idea of Cassio emerges, far more strongly figured than the old. It is a negative figure of presence—to adapt Chaim Perelman’s useful expression17—by virtue of its identification with Iago’s obscurely embodied thought, and one charged with energy that strives toward full structuration, even as Iago urges Othello not to infect his noticia of Cassio: I do beseech you, . . . that your wisdom From one that so imperfectly conceits [Q: coniects] Would take no notice, nor build yourself a trouble Out of his scattering and unsure observance . . . (147, 151–54, italics mine)

But the figure possesses enargeia rather in Puttenham’s sense than, say, Quintilian’s, for while it has shape and substance, it is largely auricular—indeed, acoustic, as we observed in chapter 4—and hardly pictorial. Not until this new shape has assumed its doubly negative semblance in Othello’s imagination—it is not quite there and it is bad—does Iago dare to implicate Desdemona through positive visual means. Following Othello’s assertion that he’ll see before he doubts and when he doubts, prove, Iago begins to ply him with Brabantian probabilities and ingenious inferences of his own. Linked to the newly colored noticia of Cassio, these inferences effectively begin to obscure the virtuous image of Desdemona in a web of discourse that Iago carefully keeps this side of proof: “I do not in position / Distinctly speak of her” (238–39). But its generalizations progressively enmesh her particularity in a highly colored field within which Iago invites Othello to release his empirical urgings—“Look to your wife. . . . Note if your lady strain his entertainment . . . Much will be seen in that”—while offering him the illusion that such visions can be neutral and the appetite for closure suspended.

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In the end, Othello sees what has not happened: “That she with Cassio hath the act of shame / A thousand times committed” (5.2.209–10). Improbable as it may be, these sexual acts have “taken place” in an imaginative space that has become indistinguishable—or perhaps never was fully distinguishable—from exterior space. Let us return for a moment to Melanchthon and the psychology of cognition: “Noticia is called intuitive when the cognition of a thing that is present is received at the same time by the senses and the mind—which happens, for the most part, with particulars, as when the eyes and the mind simultaneously behold a painting on a wall. And since this degree of noticia is especially bright, the ancients said that intuitive noticiae were similar to definitions—for what more perspicuous definition might be given of absinthe than to discern with the eyes its color and with the tongue the savor of its taste?” (De anima 145). Most intriguing about this passage is how it emphasizes that while cognition may depend on real things, the place in which these things are experienced is the internal syn­ aesthetic noticia. Here is the locus of their reality. Noticiae will be more or less vivid accordingly as their cognitive sources are actually present or recalled from memory, but in either case it is in the noticia that the object “lies” and from which it stimulates the emotions.18 This is why rhetorical figures of presence are so notoriously effective. It seems that the mind whose passions are strongly aroused by a vivid speaker does not know the difference between things and words. Flacius Illyricus, a Lutheran professor of theology and a contemporary of Melanchthon, makes this point when discussing the virtues of enargeia: “Because all speech aims at instructing and moving the hearer or reader, that work which depicts things as if we beheld them with our own eyes is more praiseworthy than that which only makes us hear them, as if from a distance. Nor does such a work only move the hearers but also finely illustrates the things themselves. . . . Thus it creates what, in the language of the schoolmen, is called an intuitive noticia.”19 Both present things and words of presence, then, are transformed into those “especially bright” images that summon us to powerful responses. If this is so, it is not difficult to understand why Othello sees something before it has happened. To satisfy his craving for consummation, Iago offers him not actuality but the language of actuality: how satisfied, my lord? Would you, the supervisor, grossly gape on? Behold her topped? (3.3.397–99)

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This provocative prospect being impossible, he indulges the license of praeteritio, of saying what one won’t say, showing what one can’t show, in a succession of conditional clauses—“It were a tedious difficulty, I think, / To bring ’em to that prospect. . . . If ever mortal eyes did see them bolster / More than their own. . . . It is impossible you should see this, / Were they as prime as goats, as hot as monkeys”—whose counter-factual mood is eclipsed by the powerful images of lust they convey. He follows this with what Puttenham calls a “counterfait action”—the technical term is pragmatographia—which recedes progressively from actuality into the scene where Cassio sleeps with Iago, clasps and kisses him because he dreams he is making love to Desdemona, then curses Fate for giving her to the Moor. Othello is so strongly drawn into this fictive vortex that when Iago cynically reminds him it was only a dream, he supplies the preposterous inference: “But this denoted a foregone conclusion” (430). It is with the handkerchief, though, that Iago performs his most extraordinary epistemological shell game, shamelessly conflating intuitive and abstractive noticiae, their sources and agencies, with astonishing success. He begins by cautioning Othello, whose blood is up, to “be wise, yet we see nothing done,” casually identifying Othello’s vision with his own. Then he asks if Othello “has not sometimes seen a handkerchief / Spotted with strawberries,” in his wife’s hand. This vision affirmed, he draws it into alignment with his own: “such a handkerchief . . . did I today / See Cassio wipe his beard with.” When Othello bites—“if it be that”—Iago takes the final, outrageous step from the collation of appearances to a Brabantian generalization—“If it be that, or any that was hers, / It speaks against her with the other proofs”—to which Othello wondrously accedes: “Now do I see ’tis true” (443–44, 447; italics mine). His vision, which was at first given an empty field (“we see nothing done”), synaesthetically fills that space with his own memory, Iago’s vivid lie, and a particular, a specific, and a generic handkerchief—all of which have come together, to “thicken other proofs / That do demonstrate thinly,” in a glaring intuitive noticia of Desdemona’s infidelity. The internal consequences of this preposterous conclusion do not become fully evident until Act IV, scene 1. When reminded again of the handkerchief, and having heard that Cassio has actually confessed lying with Desdemona, Othello falls into an epilepsy. What might this lapsus, this seizure mean? It would seem to be the figural gesture of the mental involution he has undergone, for it is accompanied by the maddened discourse of hysteron proteron, as Othello struggles with the images Iago has planted in his soul and then scans his own somatic response to those images in a desperate effort to find inverse testimony to their truth:

Eros, Enargeia, and Composition / 199 Handkerchief! confessions! handkerchief!—To confess, and be hanged for his labour! First, to be hanged, and then to confess: I tremble at it. Nature would not invest herself in such shadowing passion without some instruction. It is not words that shakes me thus. (37–42)

But the “ministery and use of words, do breed no little alteration in man.”20

II If Othello himself becomes a figure of hysteron proteron, what is to be said of the world he inhabits, which is the play experienced by Shakespeare’s audience? I now take up a vexed issue that gains new significance in the light of the preceding discussion. Beyond the improbability that Othello would believe Iago’s insinuations, since there simply wasn’t time or opportunity for the alleged infidelity, Rymer had noted with considerable distaste an even greater oddity in the conduct of the action. When Iago suggests to Cassio, at the end of Act II, that Desdemona intercede for him because “our general’s wife is now the general,” there creeps into the language of the play a temporal confusion in which everyone participates. This grows progressively more evident with Emilia’s remark, upon recovering the handkerchief, that “My wayward husband hath a hundred times / Wooed me to steal it” (3.3.296– 97); with her later observation, after seeing Othello rage at its loss, that “ ’Tis not a year or two shows us a man” (3.4.104); and with Bianca’s rebuke to an apparently truant Cassio: “What, keep a week away? seven days and nights?” (3.4.173). All this, understandably, was too much for the orderly Rymer: “Our poet is at this plunge, that whether the Act contains the compass of one day, of seven days, or of seven years, or of all together, the repugnance and absurdity would be the same” (154). Dr. Johnson was more temperate about the anachronism. Nonetheless, he, too, was puzzled by the apparent inconsistency of the action, and thought it could be improved.21 It was not until the next century, in a series of articles in Blackwood’s Magazine by John Wilson, that the compositional flaw first discerned by Rymer was turned into the virtue we now know as “double time.” Shakespeare recognized, Wilson argued, that “extended time is required for the probability,” and that it had to be placed either between Othello’s betrothal and his marriage (that is, before the parties embarked separately for Cyprus) or after the marriage, but before Othello comes upon Cassio in conversation with Desdemona. The latter was obviously the stronger choice, and nothing would have been easier than to have indicated the required lapse of time to the audience and then to have

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dra­matized “in one day distinctly, the first suspicion sown and the murder done.” But Shakespeare, Wilson asserts, “exempted himself from the obligation of walking by the Calendar. He knew, or he felt, that the fair proportionate structure of the Action required liberal time in Cyprus. He took it; for there it is, recognized in the consciousness of every sitting or standing spectator. He knew, or felt, that the passionate expectation to be sustained in the bosoms of his audience required a rapidity of movement in his Murder-Plot, and it moves on feet of fire” (Othello [1886], 361). This admirable insight has been accepted by most modern critics and editors. It satisfies the need for two kinds of probability: long time is needed to convince the audience that what Othello imagines has taken place could have taken place; short time is needed to make Othello’s gullibility credible. Were there leisure for reflection or further inquiry, he would appear, as Granville-Barker observes, precisely the dolt Emilia describes (Prefaces, 4.163). A. C. Bradley found the junction of time schemes both unsatisfactory and uncharacteristic of Shakespeare, and he could only conjecture that the text had been tampered with by the players at some time and a dramatized interval excised, or that Shakespeare had originally intended to supply a transitional scene but eventually found it inconvenient and decided to obfuscate instead. “ ‘No one in the theatre will notice that all this makes an impossible position,’ he said to himself, ‘and I can make all safe by using language that implies that Othello has after all been married for some time.’ ” Bradley regarded both possibilities as highly improbable, especially the latter, since Shakespeare “appears to have imagined the action in Othello with even more than his usual intensity.” No theory of cosmetically inserted “long time” references can account satisfactorily for this (Shakespearean Tragedy, 361). More recently, Ned B. Allen, developing the implications of Bradley’s observation, has offered a persuasive, if unglamorous, explanation of the phenomenon. “All the references to a longer time can be explained,” he argues, “if we assume that when he wrote this part of the play Shakespeare thought of all the characters, not as having arrived in Cyprus on the previous day, but as having long been there—as in Cinthio.”22 We believe in long time, that is to say, because Shakespeare believed in long time. And Shakespeare believed in long time, Allen continues, because he was following Cinthio closely in composing Acts III–V of his play. Scholars had often observed that there is little of Cinthio in Acts I–II, and Allen’s theory has the virtue of putting this critical datum together with that of “double time” to arrive at the reasonable proposition that if Acts I–II reveal little dependence on Cinthio and follow a “short” domestic time scheme, while Acts III–V ex-

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hibit heavy indebtedness to Cinthio and include his longer time span, then the two parts were probably written at different times, or at least in different frames of mind. All fancy theories that attribute the two time schemes to conscious art or happy instinct are thus exposed as the unexamined legacies of nineteenth-century bardolatry. Allen’s conclusion is not, however, without its own brand of preposterousness, since it assumes that Shakespeare wrote Acts III–V first, and then, at some unspecified future time, composed Acts I–II. Given the piecework character of much playmaking in the period, this is not inconceivable; but as we have seen, the deployment of hysteron proteron that develops at such a pitch in Acts III–V is rehearsed in situations earlier in the play and presupposes these rehearsals. Yet even if we grant the possibility of a reverse order of composition, which is rather piquant under the circumstances, Allen’s theory still fails to satisfy. First, when he suggests how such different compositions came to be joined, he falls right in line behind the “double-time” critics and their apologists by proposing that Shakespeare planned, as he introduced discrepancies into Acts I and II, that he would rewrite the rest of the play later, but then decided that no one in the theater would notice its temporal disparity and so he let things stand (20). Ultimately, the only explanation offered for the shape of the play is wearied opportunism. Disappointing as it is, there is nothing intrinsically objectionable in this view of Shakespeare’s practice except that it rests on an insufficient apprehension of his careful preparation for the transition into Acts III–V. Whether composed preposterously or in the normal order of things, this preparation is extensive, and it includes hints of temporal instability, suggestions of proleptic occurrences, and the dramatization of an important and paradoxical event. As will be apparent, these foreshadowings cannot be described as exhibiting a concern for the probability of the action; rather, they reveal a deliberate effort to disorient the audience and make it incapable of distinguishing the probable from the improbable. To make it, in other words, like Othello. Shakespeare begins his work quite early in Act I with the disruptive energies of Iago and Roderigo sounding the alarm and rousing Brabantio from his dream. He follows this with the rapid scattering of the figures onstage and Cassio’s arrival at Othello’s lodging with news that the Duke “requires your haste post-haste appearance, / Even on the instant,” because the galleys “have sent a dozen sequent messengers / This very night, at one another’s heels” (1.2.37–38, 41–42). Before Othello can depart, Brabantio turns up, and before they and their followers reach the Signory, the Duke and his counselors have come to their conclusions about the Turks and sent for

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Marcus Luccicos to hurry from Florence “post-post-haste” (1.3.47). Then, having heard Brabantio’s accusation, Othello’s defense, and Desdemona’s confirmation, the Duke asks them to settle the question of staying or going privately, for “th’ affair cries haste” (1.3.277). This impression of the rapidity of events, created by words and stage movement, is accompanied by an impression that time is not flowing in the normal way, that effects are preceding causes. In part this is due to the emphasis on “present” business, on employing someone “straight,” which suggests that past and future are collapsing, without deliberation, in the instant. But it is more specific than that. “This accident is not unlike my dream,” Brabantio mutters when he is told Desdemona has run away: “Belief of it oppresses me already.” The elopement, that is, has happened before. In the third scene, he tells Othello, “I here do give thee that with all my heart / Which, but thou hast already, with all my heart / I would keep from thee” (194–96). Here, event has outpaced intention and affected volition retroactively. By the time Othello places Desdemona in the conveyance of Iago, to “bring them [her: Q] after in the best advantage,” the language of temporality has taken on loaded meaning, or perhaps unmeaning, if, as I have suggested, Iago is the presiding minister of hysteron proteron. For in the event, Left in the conduct of the bold Iago, Whose footing here anticipates our thoughts A se’nnight’s speed (2.1.75–77)

Desdemona arrives on Cyprus far too early. Cassio, in his extravagant courtliness, attributes this phenomenon to the preternatural obsequiousness of rocks and sands, which recognize the divinity of Othello’s wife. But it is considered no less a miracle by Othello himself, who exclaims: It gives me wonder great as my content To see you here before me! (2.1.181–82)

At this point in the play, Othello utters not simply a prepositional phrase, but an adverbial phrase. Or, rather, both-- since futurity is collapsing into presence in its spatial and temporal senses. One final example of dramatized prolepsis will confirm this impression. Left onstage with Roderigo following this reunion, Iago plots the next phase

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of his revenge. “List me,” he says to him, “the lieutenant tonight watches on the court of guard. First I must tell thee this: Desdemona is directly in love with him.” Iago’s speech is striking not so much for the numerical reversal of informations with which it begins, nor even for his conclusion, which is yet to be proved, but for the odd drift of verbal tenses and moods through which that proof is steered. He begins by referring to a definite past indicative (“with what violence she first loved the Moor, but for bragging”), shifts into a future interrogative (“will she love him still for prating?”), to an indefinite mood of obligation (“Her eye must be fed”), to a simple conditional (“When the blood is made dull with the act of sport, there should be, again to inflame it . . . loveliness in favour, sympathy in years”), which turns out to be a contrary-to-fact condition that demands a future conditional (“for want of these required conveniences, her delicate tenderness will find itself abused, begin to heave the gorge”), and, this granted, a return to the present (“who stands so eminent in the degree of this fortune as Cassio does? . . . the knave is handsome, young, and hath all those requisites in him that folly and green minds look after. A pestilent complete knave, and”)—in conclusion, present perfect—(“the woman hath found him already”) (2.1.220–46). The modulations in tense and mood heard in this speech are the grammatical counterparts of those conflations of times and actions we have already observed in the first two acts, and they are prognostic of things to come. We might say that Act II itself is a figure of metalepsis: within it hysteron proteron is given verbal and substantive presence; through it, Shakespeare takes us from the scheme of short time to the scheme of long time. If, then, we are confronted by art and not simply expediency, what kind of art is it? To put it precisely, it is the art of the sophist. Plato had warned his students about tricks of this kind in his dialogue of the same name, when he distinguished between icastic and fantastic images. Icastic imagemaking “consists in creating a copy that conforms to the proportions of the original in all three dimensions and giving moreover the proper color to every part.” It is an imitation of the thing itself as it appears absolutely. Fantastic image-making, in contrast, is imitation conceived from a particular point of view, and Plato’s example is the colossal statue whose upper extremities are made larger than truth warrants because they are more distant from the observer and will seem proportionately smaller. This kind of imitation “only appears to be a likeness of a well-made figure because it is not seen from a satisfactory point of view, but to a spectator with eyes that could fully take in so large an object would not be even like the original it professes to resemble” (Sophist 235e, 236b ). It is called fantastic because it

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is fashioned with an eye to the compensatory powers of the imagination. It is potentially dangerous, as Wesley Trimpi observes, because “a sophist such as Plato describes might try to make his listeners take his fantastic images, presented to their inner eye by verbal accounts of heightened emotional power, as eicastically true.”23 This is exactly what Shakespeare does in Othello. We can gain some appreciation of Renaissance attitudes toward this legacy of the old sophistic by comparing Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s delightful invective of oratory with Melanchthon’s pious defense of the figures in the next century. Pico is writing to Ermolao Barbaro in 1485, and in this passage he aims his shafts directly against rhetorical coloring, amplification, and diminution: “You say it is your business to be able at will to turn black into white, white into black; to be able to elevate, degrade, enlarge, and reduce, by speaking whatever you will; at length you do this to the things themselves by magical arts as it were, for by the power of eloquence you build them up in such a way that they change to whatever face and costume you please, so that they are not what their own natures, but what your will has made them.”24 Pico, though a Platonist, is being playful here; nonetheless, he places human will in opposition to the natural order of things. Melanchthon, in contrast, offers a sober academic defense of the figures along traditional Aristotelian and Ciceronian lines: Often necessity demands that something be exaggerated and amplified so that those whom we teach may understand that the thing must especially be done. When one is teaching the unlearned about religious matters or the value of laws and the dignity of magistrates, will he not try to bring it about, through the great sound of speech, that these matters of such great moment may seem to be to others as important as they actually are? Painters arrange it that some things appear more humble, some more prominent and exciting. By so much the more ought this be done in discourse, since a good part of life is governed by speech and men often must be indoctrinated in the most profound affairs.25

The question to be asked, of course, is whether Shakespeare is the rhetorician described by Pico or by Melanchthon. That is to say, what “truth” is he serving through his exploitation of the imagination’s susceptibility to fantastic imitation? The peculiar composition of this play, whereby the audience’s perception of time is progressively distorted in a manner that parallels Iago’s disorientation of Othello, seems to be related to his larger attitude toward probability. For if we take Wilson’s “double time” hypoth-

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esis seriously—and I would argue that we should—he is saying something of historical importance about Shakespeare’s practice. He is saying, in effect, that Shakespeare is using words that seem referential but are actually referenceless—that they are merely substancelike appearances conveying nothing, as the sophist Gorgias observed, but logos: “For that which we reveal is logos, but logos is not substances and existing things. Therefore we do not reveal existing things to our neighbors, but logos, which is something other than substances.”26 One might reply that such is the case with all fictions, but clearly in Othello Shakespeare is cracking open this comfortable convention of thought to reveal the distinctly uncomfortable, inessential absurdity it has domesticated. Words can signify nothing. Yet they are as powerful as things. Their power resides, however, not in their likelihood, which is the traditional domain of probability, but in their capacity to constitute vivid noticiae in the imagination that become the materials of composition in the mind’s drive toward conclusions. This is Shakespeare’s response to the complex humanist legacy of the discourse of res. He reveals, for all who care to reflect on it, that the canon of one’s compositions is not to be found in the way things are likely to happen—“what is agreeable to common Opinion”27—but in the historically positioned psyche as it perceives audiovisual phenomena that solicit the erotic and improbable energies of will, reason, and imagination. Here is where probability is forged and where working words have their referents.

Seven

“Prophetic Fury”: The Language of Theatrical Potentiality and the Economy of Shakespearean Reception

There is a complementary rhetoric at work in Othello. It appeals to the same psycho-sensuous faculty wherein desire finds satisfaction, though it functions according to a principle not of abundance but of lack. For alongside the language of thingness we find another language that I shall call the language of theatrical potentiality. It is potential insofar as it is incomplete in itself and must coalesce with labile thought- and feeling-structures in an auditor’s mind to produce the powerful, temporary satisfactions we call meaning. In the theatrical experience of Shakespeare’s audience, this tendentious, interactive process often gave shape to a dramatic action that might, if scanned analytically, actually resist intelligibility.1 Shakespeare habitually engaged the capacities of this language of theatrical potentiality in his scripts and problematized it for his audiences. He deployed the psychagogic force of scattered words—their power to marshal the intellectual and emotional energies that produce coherence—yet also deconstructed that coherence, and thematized its deconstruction. He made the factitiousness of such language a principle of the composition and a condition of the reception of his plays. In this chapter, I explore the essentialist impulses urged into action by this inessential medium and Shakespeare’s exploitation of those impulses in audiences both real and staged. I further suggest that the interior collocation of speech fragments in an auditor adumbrates his own experience of composition. Finally, I propose that he recognized dramatic performance and reception as the exemplary model of the communicative factitiousness that governs lives outside the theater. His interest in these phenomena is widely evident, and is at its most revealing, I believe, in Othello.2

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I It is instructive to begin by looking briefly at this language of theatrical potentiality in a few plays other than Othello. One example is the colloquy in Richard II that follows immediately on Richard’s departure for Ireland— a passage of some seventy-five lines in which Northumberland, Ross, and Willoughby discuss first the commons’ grievances against the king, then his latest injury to the banished Duke of Hereford (accomplished only moments before), and finally Hereford’s imminent arrival in England to redress these wrongs (2.1.224–300). The impossible conjunction of these events— which are expounded consecutively by the trio—has inspired speculation about Bolingbroke’s character and motive, and has especially cast doubt on his claim to have returned “But for his own,” as Northumberland tells York (2.3.148–49). Indeed, from the perspective afforded by subsequent events, Bolingbroke’s unauthorized landing at Ravenspurgh appears to have been planned before Richard’s seizure of his inheritance, an act that was then appropriated retroactively as the justification for invasion. But this construction is made possible—even probable—by Shakespeare’s releasing into the air at a crucial moment in the action certain fragments of speech joined together by their synchronic function as dialogue, yet sundered by the diachronic nature of the news being imparted. The chorus thus provides crazed information that contains, depending on how you piece together its intelligence, various meaning-possibilities. An audience’s disagreement over the actualization of these meaning-possibilities is bound to follow as a structural necessity. By inserting such linguistic material at this time, Shakespeare artificially induces the kind of skepticism we entertain in actual life regarding actions that we only hear about, for we often acquire our information piecemeal and are not in a position to calculate the temporal relationship of information to event. This gives rise to just such questions as gather about Bolingbroke’s premature return to England and his acquisition of the crown: was it propter hoc or post hoc? does post have a way of turning into propter in the normal course of events? or does propter turn into something else entirely, something anticipated by neither the agent nor his supporters, as is claimed on different occasions by both Henry IV and the Percies in the two subsequent plays of the Henriad during reflective, explanatory moments?3 Given their origin in the language of the choral trio, these questions suggest that it is part of Shakespeare’s craft to solicit the meaning-making faculties of his audience by simulating the incomplete, anachronistic evidentiary offerings present in actual life, thereby leading that audience inevitably into

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controversial compositions that contest the meaning of his dramatized action. A somewhat different issue is opened by Shylock’s revenge. Here we are not offered information on what has passed, what is happening now, and what is anticipated by the allies of an exile. Instead, we witness the behavior of the exile himself—an internal exile, in this instance—as we meet Shylock expressing his hatred for Antonio. It seems he hates him because he is a Christian; more so, because he brings down the usury rate in Venice. We hear, too, his desire to catch Antonio “once upon the hip” to “feed fat the ancient grudge I bear him” (1.3.42–47). But we also notice more ambiguous gestures: the sharing of an ancient family story (“When Jacob graz’d his uncle Laban’s sheep”); an attempt to make Antonio aware of the human dimension of the financial transaction he seeks (“it now appears you need my help”); a self-demeaning protestation (“I would be friends with you. . . . This is kind I offer”) (1.3.71–90, 114, 142). These contradictory strands may represent tactical variations on a fixed ground of antipathy or a series of free communicative openings enabled by Shylock’s perception of Antonio’s sudden vulnerability. It is hard to say. But they all lead to the merry bond that concludes the scene and that turns out to be the trap in which Shylock himself is caught. Although the dark, comic release of the action depends on an audience feeling that the purpose of the plotter has been defeated by one who can outwit him at his own device (“This bond doth give thee here no jot of blood,” 4.1.306), that very darkness may make us wonder if the merry bond was undertaken purposefully. That is, does it represent Shylock’s intention to kill Antonio? Or is it rather a receptacle for the aggregate of meaningpossibilities issuing from Shylock’s ambiguous representation of himself, an outrageous improvisation whose outcome cannot be foreseen distinctly— by Shylock, Shakespeare’s audience, or perhaps, in its particularity, even by Shakespeare? To put it another way, Shakespeare allows Shylock’s mixed signals to pose the problem of how individuals (dramatis personae and real persons) behave in a future-oriented way without deliberately planning to perform a specific act and how that originating promise, which is void of intention in the usual sense, holds the possibility of doing the things such persons do. There is something sporting in this merry bond because it is a verbal bundle whose meanings, not yet unpacked, can only be realized in the future circumstances that elicit them.4 A more radical example of the language of theatrical potentiality will introduce its workings in Othello. In this instance Shakespeare does not demand that his auditors configure data to establish evidence of motive and

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character or ponder the contingent relations of pact and act; rather, he allows them to believe in an event that never takes place. I refer not to any alleged assignation of Desdemona and Cassio, but simply to Iago’s promise in Act IV that he will devise a means to bring Cassio within range of Roderigo’s revenge at a specified hour: “He sups tonight with a harlotry, and thither will I go to him. He knows not yet of his honourable fortune: if you will watch his going thence—which I will fashion to fall out between twelve and one—you may take him at your pleasure” (4.2.235–39). Now Iago knows Cassio will be with Bianca because he overheard her invite him there after she testily returned the handkerchief he had asked her to copy. He himself had urged Cassio to make up to her: “After her, after her” (4.1.159). When Cassio then tells him he plans to dine with Bianca, Iago plainly says, “Well, I may chance to see you, for I would very fain speak with you”—to which Cassio replies, “Prithee come, will you?” (4.1.163–65), and Iago assures him he will. Within a few lines Shakespeare creates the impression that Iago will be on hand when Cassio sups with Bianca. Iago’s subsequent promise to Rodigero confirms this impression and further suggests that he will actually be present at the supper and in a position to make sure that Cassio leaves Bianca at the right time to walk into Roderigo’s ambush. But of course this doesn’t happen. Cassio leaves Bianca’s house when he is supposed to, but not because Iago is there to usher him out. When Iago seizes Bianca as a suspect in the attack on Cassio and tells Emilia to find out where Cassio had taken supper, he observes Bianca shaking and extracts from her the confession that Cassio had supped at her house. There is no hint in this exchange that Bianca recognizes Iago as Cassio’s supper companion. He simply wasn’t there. Rather, his expressed intention put Cassio in the right place at the right time so that Roderigo could stab him. That is, a piece of speech has taken on agency and made the assassination attempt possible, for that is all the audience needed in order to understand how a certain action could come about.5 Shakespeare parodies this propensity to substitute the word for the action in Elbow’s comical arraignment of Pompey and Froth before Angelo and Escalus in Act II of Measure for Measure. Doing his best to bring “two notorious benefactors” to justice, Elbow characterizes Pompey as a “parcelbawd” and Mistress Overdone’s bathhouse as a “naughty house,” and darkly hints of a lewd overture made to his wife in that place by Froth. Pompey denies any impropriety, takes over the narrative from Elbow, and packs it with a mass of detail about Mistress Elbow’s pregnancy, her longing for prunes, Froth’s consumption of and payment for all but two of the prunes, his preference for the room called “the Bunch of Grapes,” their gossip about

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a venereal acquaintance, the death of Froth’s father, and so on—until the action that his narrative had presumed to relate literally disappears in a welter of circumstantial description. As a result, the answer to Escalus’s repeated question, “What was done to Elbow’s wife?” (2.1.116, 139, 146) is indefinitely postponed. Pompey concludes his defense by presenting Froth’s face as proof of his innocence, and the irate Constable corroborates his charge by rehearsing his circumstances: “the house is a respected house; next, this is a respected fellow; and his mistress is a respected woman” (2.1.162–64). The alleged misdeed having been lost in these verbal ambages, Escalus’s only possible judgment is to offer some prudent advice: “Truly, officer, because he hath some offenses in him that thou wouldst discover if thou couldst, let him continue in his courses till thou know’st what they are” (2.1.185–88). Now it is not at all clear from the language of this scene that anything was done to Elbow’s wife. All we know is that this “respected person” was in Mistress Overdone’s house and that she encountered Froth and Pompey. It is all Elbow himself seems to know, though he transforms the facts of place and person into evidence of wrongdoing, just as Pompey employs Froth’s face as evidence of harmlessness. What is Shakespeare up to here? Clearly, he is dramatizing, in a farcical register, the problematic of inference that concerns him from the Duke’s opening charge to Angelo—“There is a kind of character in thy life / That to th’observer doth thy history / Fully unfold” (1.1.27); but written into that remark and, even more pointedly, into Escalus’s bemused audition of Elbow’s and Pompey’s testimonies, is a directive that calls attention to precisely the task imposed upon the audience—of constructing the fact and quality of events and persons from words and images. In this instance, Shakespeare makes us feel that within the vivid presence of these spoken words there lies a hollow space in which meaning is being formed by fumbling desire; something must have happened, but what it is, of what nature and what name, is yet to be determined. The strange impression that testimony is antecedent to event is strengthened by Escalus’s final advice, which is taken by Elbow as tantamount to a conviction. “Thou art to continue,” he triumphantly tells Pompey, as if the tapster’s subsequent action will surely reveal the answer to Escalus’s reiterated question. I have been suggesting in these examples that Shakespeare is often a dramatist of shreds and patches, providing for his audience disparate strands of verbal and visual material that they must then weave into an intelligible fabric. This process is not only internal to his dramaturgy but is often the object of his dramatic representation. It actualizes an epistemology and an ontology that can only be described as theatrical: what you see

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and what you hear are nothing but images and words. Their meaning is to be found in the soul of the auditor: there lies the substance. He seems to have known, objectively and intuitively, that fragmentary, promissory, and even contradictory utterances are the raw materials of collaborating minds, which shape them into intelligible and coherent accounts of observed actions that are not always in agreement with one another—tot homines, quot sententiae—but are always derived from that combination of idiosyncratic and communal appropriation of exteriority that constitutes individual experience. And he knew this, I shall argue, not only from his observation of how theater works but also from his own practice of composition, which depended on a theater of the mind in which meanings came together in often unexpected ways.

II One of the most haunting sentences in the Shakespeare canon is the one Othello utters when describing the lost handkerchief: “there’s magic in the web of it” (3.4.71). From the first inklings of Othello criticism this small handkerchief, with which Desdemona attempts to cure Othello’s headache by binding his brow, has been felt to carry a significance beyond its function as plot device, even one so emotionally invested. “So much ado, so much stress, so much passion and repetition about an Handkerchief!” wrote the scornful Rymer. “Why was not this call’d the Tragedy of the Handkerchief? What can be more absurd than (as Quintilian expresses it) in parvis litibus has Tragoedias movere?” (Rymer, 160). Rymer is answered proleptically, of course, by Othello himself, when he describes the history of the handkerchief to Desdemona: A sibyl that had numbered in the world The sun to course two hundred compasses, In her prophetic fury sewed the work; The worms were hallowed that did breed the silk, And it was dyed in mummy, which the skilful Conserved of maidens’ hearts. (3.4.72–77)

The handkerchief possesses not only a sacred origin but also an intimate human genealogy. It was given Othello’s mother by an Egyptian charmer, who “could almost read / The thoughts of people,” and who told her that it would subdue Othello’s father entirely to her love while she kept

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it, but if she lost it, “my father’s eye / Should hold her loathed.” Dying, Othello’s mother gave it him and he, on marrying, passed the talisman to Desdemona: Make it a darling, like your precious eye!— To lose’t, or give’t away, were such perdition As nothing else could match (3.4.59–60, 63–64, 68–70)

So much for Rymer’s complaint. In a sense he could not appreciate, Othello is indeed the Tragedy of the Handkerchief.6 But why is it so? Whence this mantic handkerchief and its extraordinary history and power? In Cinthio, Shakespeare’s primary source, we find only that il qual pannicello era lavorato alla moresca sottilissimamente, & era carissimo alla Donna & parimente al Moro (this handkerchief was made ever so subtly in the Moorish fashion and was most dear to the lady and equally to the Moor).7 The Moor frequently asked to see it, Cinthio implies, because it was his wedding gift to his wife. The handkerchief is a memento not to be idly given away, but hardly the charismatic token of Othello’s imagining. From the phrase “prophetic fury,” however, we learn that Shakespeare may have conflated Cinthio’s little handkerchief alla moresca with a much larger fabrication, the extraordinary pavilion provided by the magician Melissa for the nuptial celebration of Ruggiero and Bradamante in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso.8 This elaborate tent was sewn by none other than Homer’s Cassandra, who presented it as a gift of her own hand to her brother Hector: Una donzella de la terra d’Ilia ch’avea il furor profetico congiunto, con studio di gran tempo e con vigilia lo fece di sua man di tutto punto. (XLVI, 80, 2–5) A damsel of the city of Ilium, in whom prophetic fury was joined with toil long practised and with sleepless nights, made every whit of it with her own hand.9

Though not the work of a seamstress who had counted “two hundred compasses” of the sun, this tent had been embroidered nearly two thousand years ago (anni appresso . . . duo milia), and was taken from Hector at his death by Menelaus who carried it to Egypt in his train, where he traded

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the pavilion to the Egyptian king Proteus in exchange for Helen, whence it passed down through the Ptolomies to Cleopatra, who lost it to the Romans at the Battle of Actium.10 The later history of the pavilion does not concern us; what should be noted is that it serves as the maritale albergo (nuptial chamber) of Ruggiero and Bradamante, in the midst of which il genial letto fecondo (the fertile genitive bed) is placed on the wedding night, and that an epic tradition carried it to Egypt where it remained long domiciled before it returned to circulation in the West. Now if it is at all important that Shakespeare borrowed a phrase from Ariosto (nothing like it appears in Harington’s translation), that importance lies in the imaginative process such borrowing suggests. Two different textual fragments came together momentarily in his mind’s eye and solicited him: Cinthio’s little handkerchief appeared to him the vehicle for the tenor of Ariosto’s pavilion, which underwent in his imagination a metonymic transformation from primal scene to fetishistic object. The pannicello . . . lavorato alla moresca was impregnated, as it were, by the genial letto fecondo and emerged from the obscure encounter as the handkerchief “spotted with strawberries” that denotes a foregone conclusion.11 Lest this sound utterly fanciful, it should be observed that the handkerchief is not even mentioned in the play until after Othello and Desdemona have consummated their marriage, if we may infer that act from Othello’s words at 2.3.10 (“That profit’s yet to come ’tween me and you”) and from Iago’s voyeuristic account at 2.3.175–80 of the brawl between Cassio and Montano that roused the lovers from their bed.12 It follows that if Shakespeare has introduced the handkerchief postcoitally, as it were, at 3.3.290, revealed its spots at 3.3.438, and explicitly identified the conjunction of two texts at 3.4.74—then his own practice of composition foreshadows the meaning-making activity of his audience. That is to say, he and they fabricate significances as their play of interests construes them, and then explain their readings post hoc. This suggests that meaning, though it appears to coalesce presently in the mind’s eye, has a retroactive dimension. It exists potentially before it is fashioned and is acknowledged only after fashioning has occurred.13 This cognitive process is represented in the action of the play itself. Desdemona loses the handkerchief by accident as the result of a loving act. “Your napkin is too little,” Othello tells her, as he pushes it from his brow, and at his injunction it remains on the ground as they depart for dinner. At this moment the handkerchief ’s “deep history” begins, for Emilia finds it and informs the audience that Iago has “a hundred times / Wooed me to steal it,” adding that Desdemona not only has sworn to keep it but treats

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it as a fetish, kissing and talking to it as though reenacting her lovemaking with Othello. In Cinthio the handkerchief is lost not by accident but as the result of the ensign’s theft, while Desdemona holds his child: it is literally his “plot device.” Shakespeare, who is more interested in the way futureoriented behavior void of intention and plot issues in particular acts, supplies Iago’s desire for revenge with its instrument retroactively. When Emilia offers it to him, its existence seems to come as a complete surprise: emil:   What will you give me now For that same handkerchief? iago:  What handkerchief? emil:   

What handkerchief?

Why, that the Moor first gave to Desdemona, That which so often you did bid me steal. (3.3.309–13)

Useful news indeed. Once persuaded that Emilia has the long-sought handkerchief that only a moment ago he couldn’t recall, Iago assimilates it to his latent design: I will in Cassio’s lodging lose this napkin And let him find it. Trifles light as air Are to the jealous confirmations strong As proofs of holy writ. This may do something. (3.3.324–27)

The handkerchief, that is to say, is released as a datum that retroactively becomes the object of Iago’s intention, just as he will “lose” it in Cassio’s lodging so that it may “do something” in the future. This is part of a repeated gesture in the play whereby inchoate “tendencies” are expressed (“’ Tis here, but yet confused,” 2.1.309), particular things noted before their relevance is recognized ( “Cassio’s a proper man: let me see now,” 1.3.391), and then hazarded in the expectation that they will be found to signify. This is most explicitly thematized as first Emilia, then Cassio, expresses the desire to “have the work ta’en out” of the handkerchief (3.3.300, 3.4.180, 4.1.149–50). If there is a design in these actions, it is to undesign—to provide supplies for recirculation and recontextualization in which a new meaning may be found. Emilia puts it well when she describes the indeterminacy of her passing the handkerchief to Iago. “Heaven knows, not I,” she says, “I nothing, but to please his fantasy” (3.3.302–3). She surrenders a known meaning for

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a design-to-be, and in so doing rehearses the continuous reconfiguration of meaning that is the work of both characters and audience.14 We must now seek the person who underlies this impulse to deconstruct and retexture. Cassandra may have been a prophetess, but how did she become a sibyl? Behind the wedding pavilion of Ruggiero and Bradamante stands the wondrous tent of Brandimarte in Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato, which he is carrying on his ship when he encounters a tempest and is forced to debark on the coast of North Africa near the site of ancient Carthage with his wife Fiordelisa. This tent, too, is prophetic, in that it reveals the heroic deeds of the twelve Alphonsos of Aragon and Castile: Una Sibilla, come aggio sentito, Gia stette a Cuma, al mar napolitano, E questa aveva il pavaglione ordito E tutto lavorato di sua mano. Poi fo portato in strane regione, E venne al fine in man de Dolistone. (II, xxvii, 51, 3–6) I understand a Sibyl in Cumae, upon the Bay of Naples, Had fabricated it by hand— She had embroidered it herself— Then it was brought to foreign lands. King Dolistone owned it last.15

Ariosto’s padiglione is an imitation of Boiardo’s pavaglione, and it would be exciting to discover that this imitation was duly noted in the elaborate 1584 edition of the Furioso published by Francesco dei Francesci in Venice and consulted by Harington, for then we would seem to have caught Shakespeare at his standish, assimilating the stitchery of the ancient prophetess to that of Hector’s mad sister, whose work had already been woven into Cinthio’s handkerchief. I can offer no such evidence, though the substitution suggests that Shakespeare read Boiardo as well as Ariosto. But even if we had proof that Shakespeare was conflating Cinthio and Ariosto, then checking both against Boiardo, that fact would not explain what imaginative imperative determined this singular handkerchief to be the handiwork of a sibyl. By a more obvious logic Cassandra, lovelorn and without credit, would appear to be the more suitable seamstress of the gift destined for Desdemona. There are indications, however, that Shakespeare was already thinking of

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the Cumaean sibyl before composing the scene in which Cinthio’s handkerchief assumes the symbolism and history of Ariosto’s pavilion. To discern these signs, we have to revisit the opening exchange between Iago and Othello in Act III, scene 3. As they enter, they are shown to be engaged in close dialogue, Iago’s every remark attracting Othello’s sharp attention: iago:

Ha, I like not that.

oth: What dost thou say? iago: Nothing, my lord; or if—I know not what. oth: Was not that Cassio parted from my wife? (3.3.34–37)

We usually read this as the opening shot in Iago’s plan to decompose Othello—described at the end of Act II, scene 3—introduced into an ongoing conversation between general and ensign. It is possible, however, that what we are seeing and hearing is not conversation at all but rather an attentive, dialectical consultation, begun in the unseen, unheard time between scenes 2 and 3, when Iago meets Othello on the “works” (3.2.1–4). That is, behind the speech genre we think we are observing, there may lie another, more arcane genre. For the silent referent of Iago’s “that” is picked up instantly by Othello, and Iago’s reply, “Cassio, my lord?”—echoing Othello’s word—releases a signifier that becomes associated, by negation, with the idea of subterfuge and crime, and thus demands a new resolution (3.3.38–40). In this instance it is Desdemona who finds a home for the signifier by echoing once more Cassio’s name and confirming that it was indeed he who “went . . . hence now.” Together with “I like not that” and “steal away so guilty like,” the name so lodges in Othello’s troubled spirit that he will not engage the issue of appointing a time for Cassio’s recall, as Desdemona urges, but recasts his refusal as an index of his devotion to her: “I will deny thee nothing” (3.3.76, 83). Immediately Iago arrests the words just released by Desdemona: “Did Michael Cassio, when you wooed my lady, / Know of your love?” (3.3.94–95). He wants this information, he says, “But for a satisfaction of my thought,” as though he were absorbing intelligence in order to bring an idea to fullness. This initiates the series of verbal echoes (Indeed/Indeed, Honest/Honest, Think/Think) that Othello hears as reverberations upon doors barring him from the contents of Iago’s mind (“As if there were some monster in his thought, / Too hideous to be shown”), and

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as he rehearses the exchange just completed, he imagines Iago’s thoughts as mental hoardings (“And didst contract and purse thy brow together, / As if thou hadst shut up in thy brain / Some horrible conceit”)—Iago’s brain having become a room or treasury that must be laid open. “Show me thy thought,” he demands (3.3.110–11, 117–18, 119). The direction of my argument may be growing apparent. Iago is functioning in this scene as a desacralized sibyl, the sibyl-cum-ensign who distributes ambiguous words and signs from an evacuated interior that only appears to be full of knowledge. But in doing so he actually imitates Virgil’s sibyl, that fearsome prophetess whose cryptic, disordered words the inspired Helenus warns Aeneas to circumvent: huc ibi delatus Cumaeam accesseris urbem divinosque lacus et Averna sonantia silvis, insanam vatem aspicies, quae rupe sub ima fata canit foliisque notas et nomina mandat. quaecumque in foliis descripsit carmina virgo, digerit in numerum atque antro seclusa relinquit. illa manent immota locis neque ab ordine cedunt; verum eadem, verso tenuis cum cardine ventus impulit et teneras turbavit ianua frondes, numquam deinde cavo volitantia prendere saxo ne revocare situs aut iungere carmina curat; inconsulti abeunt sedemque odere Sibyllae. And when, thither borne, thou drawest near to the town of Cumae, the haunted lakes, and Avernus with its rustling woods, thou shalt look on an inspired prophetess, who deep in a rocky cave sings the Fates and entrusts to leaves signs and symbols. Whatever verses the maid has traced on leaves she arranges in order and stores away in the cave. These remain unmoved in their places and quit not their rank; but when at the turn of the hinge a light breeze has stirred them, and the open door scattered the tender foliage, never does she thereafter care to catch them, as they flutter in the rocky cave, nor to recover their places, nor to unite the verses; uncounselled, men depart, and loathe the Sibyl’s seat. (III.441–52)

A modern authority on the Cumaean sibyl, H. W. Parke, writes that “the general picture of the Sibyl’s procedure is that her responses were frustrating and difficult to grasp. Even the Vergilian picture of her voice booming out of a hundred mouths from an inner cavern certainly suggested to an-

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cient commentators that different words came out of different openings and were hard to combine. Similarly, but much worse, the fluttering leaves each carrying a separate word baffled the enquirer. All this was part of the popular notion that the Sibylline prophetess’s utterances were teasing and evasive” (83). As if attempting to avoid the odium the sibyl incurs as a result of the incoherent intelligence fluttering from her cave, Iago issues a disclaimer for his “close dilations, working from the heart, / That passion cannot rule,” in a passage that rewards recontextualization. “I do beseech you,” he says, that your wisdom From one that so imperfectly conceits [Q: coniects] Would take no notice, nor build yourself a trouble Out of his scattering and unsure observance: It were not for your quiet nor your good Nor for my manhood, honesty and wisdom To let you know my thoughts. (3.3.147, 151–57)

Othello’s response is instantaneous—“Zounds!”—and, rather than be placated, he again insists, “By heaven, I’ll know thy thoughts!” In this dialectic of scattered inferences and demands for direct disclosure, Shakespeare seems to be recasting the scene of anticipated obscurity and hard-won revelation described in Virgil. For, knowing the sibyl’s disinclination to reunite her disordered verses, Helenus warns Aeneas not to be satisfied with the prophetess’s fluttering leaves but to “plead that she herself chant the oracles, and graciously open her lips in speech.” Aeneas does precisely this when he meets the sibyl: “foliis tantum ne carmina manda, ne turbata volent rapidis ludibria ventis; ipsa canas oro” “Only trust not thy verses to leaves, lest they fly in disorder, the sport of rushing winds; chant them thyself, I pray.” (6.74–77)

Shakespeare’s scene is different, of course, since Iago is no divine prophetess, but he, too, resists Othello’s desire to know his thought: “You cannot, if my heart were in your hand, / Nor shall not whilst ’tis in my custody”

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(3.3.165–67). And Othello seems to have caught the Virgilian note even as he rejects Iago’s cryptic warning against jealousy: Exchange me for a goat When I shall turn the business of my soul To such exsufflicate and blown surmises Matching thy inference. (3.3.183–86)

The editors of Arden 2, Arden 3, and New Cambridge editions identify “exsufflicate” as a nonce-word and assimilate it to “blown.” To Ridley, it suggests “fly-blown”; to Sanders “rumored,” “puffed up,” “inflated”; to Honigmann, these and “improbable.” In the context of sibylline leaves, however, the doublet has a more literal meaning: Iago’s surmises are “blown forth,” and for the moment Othello rejects such scattered inferences as grounds for jealousy. Whither has this light breeze stirred us? It would appear that yet another literary element has been mingled with Cinthio’s original. As far back as 1694 Charles Gildon perceived a likeness between Aeneas’s tale to Dido and Othello’s to Desdemona,16 and others have from time to time concurred. It should come as no surprise, then, that Shakespeare’s “extravagant and wheeling stranger” should owe something to the perfidus (“faithless pirate”), the externus (“stranger”) (7.362, 424) whom Lavinia’s mother tries to keep from marrying her daughter.17 What concerns us, though, is less the discovery of another possible model than what is implied by its presence in Shakespeare’s play. This Virgilian reminiscence suggests several related hypotheses: that in the sibyl Shakespeare found a figure for the source of wisdom his hero seeks; that in Othello’s world, this figure has been emptied of wisdom and only “imperfectly coniects” (Q); that the fluttering sibylline leaves, with their cryptic signs and symbols, represent the crazed information from which the inhabitants of this world must infer meaning; that in so adapting Virgil Shakespeare was registering his own practice of composing disparate pieces of language; that his composition adumbrated his audience’s reception. If this reticulation of ideas is plausible, then it holds important thematic consequences for the play that bear a relation to the magic in the web with which we began our inquiry. That magic is there, Othello tells Desdemona, because the sibyl put it there in her prophetic fury, when she sewed the work of silk bred from hallowed worms and dyed in maiden mummy. In thus explaining the significance of the handkerchief, he insists

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upon a pristine wisdom with transhistorical powers in a play whose internal and external filiations all indicate that only historical, ingenious inferences are available. This is what makes Othello the hero so vulnerable and, correlatively, what gives the play its distinct feeling of nostalgia.18

III Othello, then, is a tragedy of lost origins and of compensatory substitutions. Lost origins because there is no pristine wisdom to be had, just historically constituted experience, desire, and anxiety. Compensatory substitutions because stable origins are wanted and must be fabricated. This accounts for that “hunger for narrative” some critics have detected in the play.19 The sibyl without a secret casts her shadow many times in the action, through narratives that appear to have deep histories but are actually psychagogic instruments enabling present acts. Their historic resonances function like those scenes in Renaissance narrative paintings, where often the same figures, painted on a flat surface, will appear repeatedly, receding in space toward a hypothetical vanishing point.20 In Othello, time is the illusory dimension and the beginning of an action the putative point of origin. The primal history is that of the handkerchief, transmuted for the occasion from marriage token to object of sacred manufacture. But there are three other occasions on which Othello seems to reach into time past to satisfy present needs. The first is when he defends his right to marry Desdemona: ’ Tis yet to know— Which, when I know that boasting is an honour, I shall promulgate—I fetch my life and being From men of royal siege. . . . (1.2.19–22)

This is a claim that is forever yet to know—literally a piece of speech presented as evidence of Othello’s marital eligibility. By means of this verbal matter the hero “thickens other proofs,” to adopt Iago’s words, “That do demonstrate thinly” (3.3.432–33). He shows cause to himself for confidence in his own merit and to his audiences to build their confidence in him. Indeed, the lines serve the same rhetorical function for both dramatis persona and audience, for they are never verified and have no more authority than Iago’s “scattering and unsure observances.” They function as disem-

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bodied figures of presence, “pageant[s] to keep us in false gaze,” creating the illusion of authenticity but having no depth.21 The second instance of Othello’s reach into history is the “round, unvarnished tale” he tells the Senators in Act I, scene 3, when, by means of indirect speech, he retells the tale told first to Brabantio and then to Desdemona. This thrice-told tale clearly has multiple origins, its matter encompassing not only the heroic events in Othello’s life but the rhetorical occasions on which he recounted them. That it is capable of profoundly affecting audiences is attested by its reception in the play itself and by the subsequent reception history of Othello. Its structure, however (I refer specifically to the version given the Senators), is much like the grammatical deferral of Iago’s “I dare be sworn [Q: presume], I think, that he is honest” (3.3.128), where the indicative “is” lies weakened behind the qualifying hypothetical forces of “dare,” “be sworn,” and “think.” Which is to say that Othello’s life and being lies not in the events described but in its performative moments, as Othello himself suggests when he says, “I ran it through, even from my boyish days / To th’ very moment that he bade me tell it” (1.3.133–34). In each of those moments Othello is reborn as verbal matter that is subject to further redaction. Its materiality is felt as Othello recalls how Desdemona would “with a greedy ear / Devour up my discourse,” a hunger linked to the cognitive temptation of the fluttering sibylline leaves. For Othello adds that he drew Desdemona, who had been only an intermittent listener to his tale, to ask “That I would all my pilgrimage dilate, / Whereof by parcels she had something heard / But not intentively. . . .” (1.3.154–56).22 “Intentively,” usually glossed as a synonym for “attentively,” is cognate with “intention” and “intending,” and refers not only to Desdemona but also to the “tendency” of these pieces of sibylline speech—the trajectory whereby they are shaped into meaning by Othello—of which Desdemona pleads ignorance. In Othel­ lo’s mind, it seems, these bits of speech have already assumed a shape, for he describes the events he represented to Desdemona as elements in a pilgrimage—his word, chosen now—for such a shape is not likely to have been discerned by one hearing “not intentively.” As elsewhere in the play, meaning is shown to be retroactive, fashioned in the telling. Othello’s life acquires a teleology as he recapitulates it, first to Brabantio, then to Desdemona, and finally to the Council. We don’t know its initial ending, but we do know its second and third. From Desdemona he learns that it was “wondrous pitiful,” the adjectives applied to the experience of a tragic hero; before the Council, the random incidents of an adventurous life—disas-

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trous chances, moving accidents, hair-breadth scapes, captivity, slavery, and redemption—are shaped as a pilgrimage to a saint’s shrine.23 The third instance of apparent historical research by Othello is heard at the end of his final speech. Again he fashions himself in narrative, but this time the performative origin of that self is explicit. For he directs Lodovico to “relate . . . these unlucky deeds” in such a way that the acts constituting them are enunciated in a series of character references: Then must you speak Of one that loved not wisely, but too well: Of one not easily jealous . . . of one whose hand . . . of one whose subdued eyes . . . (5.2.341 and following)

As always, Othello is addressing multiple audiences here. For himself, he reconstructs the “he that was Othello” whom he has lost (5.2.281). For his stage and theater audiences, he attempts to explain the quality of his actions by reference to a third person against whom these audiences might bear no animus.24 To all audiences, he is presenting evidentiary fragments of a moral nature that are then “collected” in an apparent afterthought— “And say besides, that in Aleppo once”—that is offered as a confirmation of the predicated character references. Did he kill a turbanned Turk? We don’t know. What is important about this “remembrance” of an allegedly historical act is that the inference to be drawn from the spoken character references is not only rehearsed in a narrative that Lodovico is asked to repeat, it is performed—performed, that is, in the dramatic present where the inference most urgently needs to be believed. This is the salient moment when the apparently historical, that which reaches back into time, bleeds onto the surface of the present, as if a flat canvas on which we saw the heroic encounter at Aleppo in the middle distance were suddenly to ooze from that spot. But is it blood or paint that flows? For the stage audience it is blood; for the theater audience it is paint, made to appear blood by such presencing words as “All that’s spoke is marred” (5.2.355), which lend substance to the rhetorical gesture being performed before our eyes. What are we to make of this double displacement in which words that seemed to refer to the past are revealed to coincide with the present, as historical origin is translated into current performance, and performance assumes the substance of history?

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For Othello, the recitation-turned-performative enunciation reattaches a life story to one “that was Othello,” thus allowing him to regain his narrative identity and make manifest his moral credentials. For the audience onstage, it produces a vertiginous threshold moment, like the one in The Winter’s Tale when the statue comes to life, though in this instance the response is horror. The theater audience shares that moment, but also may note the epideictic character of the act. That is, it may be absorbed by, yet retroactively admire, the tour de force it is witnessing, for its response is shaped by an awareness that it is in a theater, where one can encounter such irruptions into illusion. Othello’s is the latest version of that dizzying trick, by means of which playing kills, that Thomas Kyd had introduced to the London stage. Logos may convey logos, not substances, but the word can appear to be made flesh by abruptly traversing the distance between an apparent past and an apparent present, an apparent playing and an apparent doing. The result is to collapse any absolute distinction between representation and actuality.

IV I have been arguing thus far that Othello is a tragedy of lost origins and compensatory substitution, of sibylline speech detached from its mantic center and displaced onto reception, as its scattered leaves take root in the soil of an auditor’s mind and once there develop intellectual coherence, historical depth, and moral complexity. This process of mental substantiation results from a rhetoric of fragmentation that complements the rhetoric of enargeia we examined in the previous chapter. Both satisfy the mind’s need to fashion an imaginative heterocosm that is only probable, but sufficient to make one’s way in the world—whether one is in a play or watching one in a theater. And both rhetorics project Shakespeare’s understanding of how minds create intelligible stories out of discrete—and always interested— perceptions. I want now to address the issue of agency in this process and its representation in the play. The initiating agent is, of course, Shakespeare, as he lays out his plot. But as he improvises in the manner suggested here, he becomes the instrumental agent of a power greater than himself. How may we describe this power? To do so, I shall make what will at first appear to be an unconscionable historical leap. “Speech is a powerful lord,” declared Gorgias, in his Encomium of Helen, “which by means of the finest and most invisible body, effects the divinest works.” The sophist illustrates this claim by referring to the effects of tragic

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poetry: “Fearful shuddering and tearful pity and grievous longing come upon its hearers, and at the actions and physical sufferings of others in good fortunes and evil fortunes, through the agency of words, the soul is wont to experience a suffering of its own.”25 Gorgias touches here on the ethical dimension of dramatic response, for an auditor experiencing the suffering of another becomes philanthropic; but it is the psychic economy by which this interpersonal circuit is completed that is of special interest. For the companions to lordly speech that effect its closure are apate (deception) and peitho (persuasion).26 The word apate, Thomas Rosenmeyer has explained, refers not to something objectively false (pseudos) but rather to two kinds of falsification involved in human communication. One is a linguistic falsification best described as incompleteness, which may be contrasted with the divine communication characterized in the Heraclitean fragment, “The Lord of Delphi neither speaks out nor conceals, but gives a sign.” There is a mysterious fullness in such communication—it is ambiguous, metaphoric, potentially contradictory—that cannot be conveyed by ordinary human speech (Rosenmayer, 230). In its second, more positive sense, apate refers to a “trick” imposed on an audience by a skillful composer of discourse in order to convey a meaning of his own. This is suggested by an anecdote in Plutarch, where Gorgias is said to have observed that tragedy produces a “deception . . . in which the deceiver is more justly esteemed than the non-deceiver, and the deceived is wiser than the undeceived.”27 Here, the worker of deception is the man who imposes his own configuration on disparate logoi (“external” principles and “internal” opinions or attitudes), linking them in har­ mony and forging meaning out of what hitherto had only been meaningpossibilities. In Mario Untersteiner’s words, the poet “must set before himself as his aim the knowledge of the right moment (kairos), that is, of the instant in which the intimate connection between things is realized,” and through this artful reticulation “arrange the things he knows in the right place and in accordance with their significance” (111). A postsocratic way of putting this is that the poet arranges speeches and actions according to the rules of decorum, conjoining his matter, his audience’s mental disposition, and the moment of performance in such a way as to enable the public to “see things his way.” This passage from Plutarch was familiar in Shakespeare’s England. It supplied the text for one of the gratulatory sonnets printed in the 1605 quarto edition of Jonson’s Sejanus, a play acted by the King’s Men—among them Shakespeare—in 1603:

226 / Willful Words, Christian Anxieties Thy Poeme (pardon me) is meere deceat. Yet such deceate, as thou that dost beguile, Are juster farre then they who use no wile: And they who are deceaved by this feat, More wise, then such who can eschewe thy cheat. For thou hast given each parte so just a stile, That Men suppose the Action now on file; (And Men suppose, who are of best conceat.) Yet some there be, that are not moov’d hereby, And others are so quick, that they will spy Where later Times are in some speech enweav’d; Those wary Simples, and these simple Elfes: They are so dull, they cannot be deceav’d, These so unjust, they will deceave themselves. (Jonson, Sejanus, 7)

The writer of the poem is clearly aware of the Gorgianic themes that the poetic deceiver edifies the deceived by shaping the random thoughts of his auditor in relation to his matter and that artful dramatic speech induces the illusion of presence in the imagination. For the dull-conceited, the deception doesn’t work; for the overly quick-witted, it works too well, since representation of the past invites expropriation by the logoi of the present.28 If apate (deception) is the means by which undetermined opinions acquire significance through the imposition of kairos in artful speech, then peitho (persuasion) is the force or violence that empowers this work. Peitho has the “form of necessity,” according to Gorgias, and is wont to “impress the soul as it wishes” (B11.12–13). It has this form, Charles Segal explains, not only because it imposes on human beings from outside but because of its voluntarist complexion. As it is absorbed by the psyche, it stimulates a powerful internal impulse of organization that has its own dynamic. It works like a fearsome spectacle that can upset the normal disposition of the soul and produce unexpected behavior: an external sense-datum—a visual one acting upon the opsis [sight] or logos [speech] having metron [aural figuration] upon the hearing . . . creates an impression upon the psyche which in turn results in a physical action. It is thus implied that the psyche itself responds to the physical structure of the word or vision with emotional impulses which, if strong enough, result in a total ekplexis [sudden yielding] and a concrete action of the unexpected, nonrational type. The logos, therefore, if properly calculated, can through its “impression”

The Language of Theatrical Potentiality / 227 on the psyche lead the hearer into lines of action hitherto not considered or beyond or in violation of its “habituation” or “nomos.” (Segal, 107–8)

In the case of Helen of Troy, either verbal persuasion or visual demonstration may have constrained her to act the way she did, for both work in the same way. Gorgias illustrates this process with reference to the emotional response we have to the formal qualities of works of art: “Whenever pictures perfectly create a single figure from many colors and figures, they delight the sight. . . . If, therefore, the eye of Helen, pleased by the figure of Alexander, presented to her soul eager desire and contest of love, what wonder?” (B11.18–19). Alexander’s kairos—the single configuration he assumed at the moment—appeared to Helen’s opsis in such a way that it was eroticized and presented its desire to her psyche, which yielded, just as it would have responded to painterly or rhetorically organized colors and figures. Peitho was a figure affiliated with Aphrodite in fifth- and sixth-century Greek thought, sometimes as her daughter, sometimes as her handmaiden. She is associated with Eros in Aeschylus and Pindar, and in her accession to political persuasion she never loses her older connotation as goddess of amorous seduction.29 In Gorgias’s view, then, the schemes and tropes of rhythmic speech must have possessed an erotic capability that stimulated the disconnected “opinions” of the psyche to a powerful cathexis in which the meaning-configuration imposed by the speaker was apperceived by the auditor with a discharge of pleasure in the process of his being “convinced.” It is not surprising, therefore, to find that peitho is also associated with magic. Gorgias offers as an example of verbal persuasion the epode, or magic charm: “Sacred incantations sung with words are bearers of pleasure and banishers of pain, for merging with opinion in the soul, the power of incantation is wont to beguile it and persuade it and alter it by witchcraft” (B11.10). In the early sixteenth century Erasmus repeats the association of peitho and magic charm in his Paraclesis. As he exhorts his readers to study scripture, he prays for “an eloquence which not only captivates the ear with its fleeting delight, but which leaves a lasting sting in the minds of its hearers, which grips, which transforms, which sends away a far different listener than it had received.” He commends “the entreaties which the Greeks called epodes,” and says “if there were any such kind of incantation anywhere, if there were any power of song which could truly inspire, if any Pytho [sic] truly swayed the heart, I would desire that it might be at hand for me.”30 But he is also alert to the potential mendacity of such power. In his Ciceronianus, Peitho is the goddess with whom the foolish Nosoponus has

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fallen helplessly in love, seduced by her erotic charms to become the perfect Ciceronian. And his spokesman Bulephorus complains in Pico’s vein that “your rhetoricians permit the orator to lie not infrequently, to elevate humble matters [res] with words, and to deject eminent matters, which is indeed a kind of magic [praestigii], stealing insidiously into the mind of the listener.”31 This linking of persuasion and magic charm is widespread in the Renaissance; Spenser, Chapman, Donne, and Milton make the connection, so it is not surprising to find it in Shakespeare as well.32 “Is there not charms, / By which the property of youth and maidhood / May be abused?” cries Brabantio, on discovering Desdemona’s escape (1.1.169–71). At the Sagittar he insists his daughter would never have run away with Othello “If she in chains of magic were not bound” (1.2.65), and though the charge of black magic is dismissed, the chains that bound Desdemona turn out to have been the discursive links of Othello’s narrative history. When Iago tells Roderigo, “Thou know’st we work by wit and not by witchcraft” (2.3.367), he is phrasing as antithesis what is in actuality an apposition.33 Peitho has yet another hold on Othello. Historically it is also likened to medical therapy. “The effect of speech upon the condition of the soul is comparable to the power of drugs over the nature of bodies,” remarks Gorgias. “For just as different drugs dispel different secretions from the body, and some bring an end to disease and others to life, so also in the case of speeches, some distress, others delight, some cause fear, others make the hearers bold, and some drug and bewitch the soul with a kind of evil persuasion” (B11.14). Lain-Entralgo has shown how ideas about goeteia and pharmacia come together in the fifth and fourth centuries in writers discussing persuasive speech. During this period the word epode takes on a metaphoric significance, just as drug therapy becomes associated, among the presocratics, but also in Plato and Aristotle, with a kind of discursive psychotherapy (Lain-Entralgo, 69). Again the connection persists, and we find Erasmus prescribing a course of logotherapy for Christians in the sixteenth century.34 When Iago murmurs, “Work on, / My medicine, work!” (4.1.44–45), he taps an ancient tradition in which the irrationality of linguistic cogency is explicated as occult empirical physic. Thus the Egyptian charmer who “could almost read / The thoughts of people” is a deeply overdetermined figure in Othello. She is probably associated with Cleopatra, the last Eastern possessor of the pavilioncum-handerkerchief, and consequently with eros, the charm, and the drug. But her function is that of the poetic deceiver who shapes her words, engaging the power of peitho, to the just meridian of the listener. Her work

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complements that of the sibyl. While the sibyl scatters and allows the hearer to compose, the charmer binds and imposes. These activities proceed reciprocally in the play and inform its rhythm, just as the design of the handkerchief is “ta’en out” and reworked on the level of theme and plot. Often the roles of sibyl and charmer are associated with the same person. The central sibylline scene at the beginning of Act III, scene 3, where Othello plays Aeneas to Iago’s prophetess, is recast in the brothel scene when Desdemona, bewildered by Othello’s cryptic irony, implores: “Upon my knees, what does your speech import? / I understand a fury in your words / But not the words” (4.2.31–33). Similarly, Othello’s account of his tale to Desdemona, “Whereof by parcels she had something heard, / But not intentively,” casts him as charmer to the young girl’s curiosity, while his role is reversed as Iago repeats and corroborates Brabantio’s inferences about Desdemona’s apparent perversity before his rapidly weakening resistance (3.3.209–45). The net, the web, the handkerchief in which magic reposes—each is a reticulation in which the charmer’s toil is realized. But there is also an actual reticule associated with Iago. Let us recall the opening lines of the play: Tush, never tell me. I take it much unkindly That thou, Iago, who hast had my purse As if the strings were thine, shouldst know of this (1.1.1–3)

From the beginning, Shakespeare represents Iago as one who holds the purse-strings. If the purse is initially a symbol of Roderigo’s generous if imprudent friendship, it soon becomes apparent that it figures far more. It is both a source of profit for Iago and a repository of meanings that can be filled, emptied, and replenished. When Roderigo voices despair at Desdemona’s departure for Cyprus, Iago gives him new purpose—accompanied by a refrain: Put money in thy purse, follow thou the wars, defeat thy favour with an usurped beard; I say, put money in thy purse. It cannot be that Desdemona should long continue her love to the Moor—put money in thy purse—nor he his to her. It was a violent commencement in her, and thou shalt see an answerable sequestration—put but money in thy purse. These Moors are changeable in their wills—fill thy purse with money. (1.3.340–48)

It is a strange speech. The rhythmic, repetitive command alternates with information and advice, as though Iago himself were filling the purse with

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currency. This is perhaps the most sustained incantation we see him perform, and it is immediately effective. “I am changed,” declares Roderigo, and (in the Folio) “I’ll sell all my land” (380). Roderigo is a different man—the man Erasmus had hoped to create through his epode—now that he is filled with Iago’s charming prognostication. “Thus do I ever make my fool my purse,” Iago confesses a moment later, instantly turning London coneycatcher. But if Roderigo’s purse holds potential wealth for Iago, that wealth will be expended not on commodities but on interpretations—choral commentaries of ostensible value to him. As burses tend to be, it is a site of exchange, and what is purchased is poetic deception. If this were Jonson’s play, not Shakespeare’s, we might be disposed to hear in Iago’s “Put money in thy purse” a perverse exhortation to the audience to pay and be gulled, and to discern in Iago a refraction of the avaricious author or player. But we never see, as we do in Volpone or Bartholomew Fair, gold, jewels, or coins change hands. Something less material and perhaps more interesting is going on here. In this play Roderigo’s purse is the metaphoric source of the activities of gathering, collating, and imparting verbal intelligence. Iago is the chief dispenser of poetic deception, and the audience is privileged to observe how he distributes and fashions his goods. When his deceits are finally revealed to his victims and he is punished, Shakespeare’s auditors are confirmed in their belief that they have all along—unlike most of the persons in the play—enjoyed an untampered vision of reality. They have witnessed the factitiousness of Iago’s apate and the force of peitho in Othello, “unshunnable, like death” (3.3.279). Yet somewhere along the way Shakespeare has surreptitiously entered this scene of lucidity and meddled with the time frame. He has scattered pieces of speech that indicate “long time” into the “se’nnight’s speed” of the action without anyone noticing it—silently conflating the roles of sibyl and charmer even as Iago was thematizing these roles and being scapegoated for practicing arts inhibited. Roderigo’s purse, it seems, was the audience’s as well—used sometimes, if we may paraphrase Othello, to “unlace . . . and spend [one’s] rich opinion,” sometimes to “contract and purse . . . together” some horrible conceit, according to the cognitive laws of supply and demand. The question of “long time” versus “short time” is a vexed one in Shakespeare criticism. It creates an interpretative problem, as we have noticed, in Richard II; it deprives Hamlet of his youth in the graveyard scene; and it takes an even more bizarre form in Measure for Measure.35 Its presence in Othello, however, should now be intelligible enough. In formal terms, as we saw in the last chapter, it mimics the rhetorical figure hysteron proteron with the aid of enargeia. In terms of reception, however, it is an extension of Shake-

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speare’s own dramaturgic process of responding to scattered fragments of text and of the practice of scattering and charming that he projects onto the play itself: “This only is the witchcraft I have used” (1.3.170). If, on the basis of this practice, one may venture an opinion of Shakespeare’s “world view,” it is that all the world is indeed a stage—not simply in the sense that all human beings play roles or that, as Jaques has it, human life may be formulated as seven acts; rather, it is so in the sense that human beings understand one another and the events in which they mutually engage in much the way one writes, acts out, and auditions a theatrical manuscript. The magic in the web is our own desire for coherence, and it is this libidinal energy that Shakespeare engages to his scattering and (un)sure observance.

Part IV

Tropings of the Self in Shakespeare’s Scripts

Eight

“I Am Not What I Am”: Shakespeare’s Scripted Subject

In the last two chapters I’ve been concerned with Shakespeare’s representation of the psychological effects of a speech that solicits the will to join itself to its wordiness as if to things or to piece it together so as to fashion a substantive rhetorical heterocosm in which one may “do, as if for surety.” More particularly, I have argued that in creating a rhetoric of lack that functions as a language of theatrical potentiality, he seems to have projected the psychological process that he himself experienced in composing, and consequently passed it on to his auditors. Thus his dramaturgy begins and ends in figuration, in the collocations, intuitions, and tropes by means of which he composed his plays—and, in so doing, himself—out of the fragments of text to which he responded ingeniously, as Vives would say, and seduced his audience to do the same.1 We are now in a position to step back from this transformative conjugation of speech, will, and world to take a middle-of-the-yard look at the way Shakespeare’s dramatis personae adjust themselves to their various scripted environments on his stage—in particular, at how they become what we now call dramatic characters and what that might tell us about how Shakespeare thought people offstage become what we now call subjects.2 To put ourselves in the right frame of mind, let us return to Jaques’s assertion, alluded to in the last chapter, that “all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” When he adds that “each man in his time plays many parts,” he is using the theatrical metaphor to emphasize the different conditions to which individuals adapt in the course of their growth and decline. He elaborates this conceit by describing seven “acts” or “scenes” a man is scripted to play from infancy to second childishness as he metabolizes physical, social, and psychological change. It is a tour de force

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of literary characterization and, when performed well, of ethopoetic enactment (AYLI 2.7.139–66). But what if the reverse were also true? That each part plays many men? By this I don’t mean that a single role might “make a child now swadled to proceed / Man, and then shoote up, in one beard, and weede / Past threescore yeeres”—a dramatic practice Ben Jonson viewed with disdain.3 I mean something more troped—in the sense of both “turned” and “metaphorized.” If, as we have seen, Shakespeare experienced, represented, and exploited the psychological effects of the discourse of res endemic to his culture, why might he not also have fashioned dramatic parts that were informed by swift rhetorical turns of the self as it assumed an ethos inducted by time, place, and occasion? This may seem a question not to be asked, since I have already shown that the role of Iago bears precisely such inflections. But I want to extend the argument by insisting that radical rhetorical turnings are pervasive in Shakespeare’s dramaturgy and central to it. Such turnings enable him to portray complexity and inconsistency in his dramatis personae and, more important, to explore the problematic results of troping the self. Admittedly, he was not the first to do so. Petrarch had complained in his letter to “Socrates” that in addressing many people in varying situations, “I have often been compelled to differ from myself.”4 He voiced in an anxious, existential register a very personal response to the common demand for decorum that was to be repeated by humanist educators in the sixteenth century, as they trained their students to write and speak.5 Decorum, however, governed more than letter writing and public speaking; it informed ethics, courtly behavior and preferment, lovemaking, diplomacy, trade negotiations, and many other ordinary activities. It was the silent law observed to gain advantage.6 Shakespeare must have been drawn to its psychological implications, for he interiorized its consequences in his dramatic representations to reveal performatively how adherence to decorum could issue in a multiplex self sometimes bewildering to others and often deeply troubling to the participating agent. In the course of his career, he thus transformed an ancient mode of rhetorical proof—the assumption of an appropriate ethos—into the instrument of an early modern psychoanalysis. In this chapter, I argue that decorum was installed in Shakespearean representation with far greater refinement than Jaques indicates. I begin by tracing its micro-tunings in Othello and then show its effects in other plays. In heeding the changing demands of decorum, we find, many of Shakespeare’s major dramatis personae (and some lesser ones) exhibit both residual and occasional selves—those

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unidentical twins of rhetorical anthropology—in acutely self-conscious forms. I follow this argument by suggesting that Shakespeare’s fashioning of a rhetorical selfhood minutely governed by decorum was nurtured in the routine practices of theater companies commissioning new work. The representation of a “tropical self” is the result of a process that begins in the drafting of a plot with dramatis personae, and then proceeds to elicit from those personae specific characters to fit the scenes into which the plot is developed. This process is evident in surviving theatrical documents and can be discerned in the metatheatrical representations of finished plays. Finally, I pose a perhaps unanswerable question: what did it feel like to become a character? Antitheatrical critics thought it was like playing yourself—that in performance one’s “natural disposition” was revealed. I take up the question by summoning the mechanicals of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to a brief interrogation, and then pursue the matter more closely in the following chapter, where I show how Shakespeare frequently elicits a subject from the interplay of character and situation, before I return to its tragic instantiation in Desdemona. We discover, I believe, that if rhetorical practices were confirmed by playwriting practices, it was Shakespeare’s understanding of acting that led him to think out an early modern subject that is not unlike our own. It springs from rhetorical, legal, and theatrical sources, and is described in their terminology, but it is ever apt, as Petrarch put it, to “differ from myself.”

I While anxiously waiting for Othello to arrive on Cyprus, Desdemona finds herself lured into passing the time in a kind of game. She has seen Cassio kiss Emilia in a “bold show of courtesy,” and protested at Iago’s suggestion that in private Emilia is a scold: “Alas! she has no speech” (2.1.99, 102). Iago insists, however, that though demure in the presence of her mistress, she behaves quite differently with him, and offers a list of wise saws to prove his modern instance: Come on, come on, you are pictures out of doors, Bells in your parlours, wild-cats in your kitchens, Saints in your injuries, devils being offended, Players in your housewifery, and housewives in . . . Your beds! (2.1.109–13)

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Early seventeenth-century auditors may have wondered whether this hearty misogyny applies to Emilia, who has just made her appearance in the play, but Iago’s point that wives act according to a decorum that depends on what they’re doing and whom they’re doing it with is confirmed only a moment later by Desdemona herself. Piqued by Emilia’s angry retort, “You shall not write my praise,” she asks Iago how he would write her praise, and when he balks, urges him to assay it. In a compunctious aside she assures herself (and the theater audience), “I am not merry, but I do beguile / The thing I am by seeming otherwise” (2.1.122–123), then merrily pursues her challenge. What we hear and see during the next fifty-two lines is a very different Desdemona from the one who heroically defended her elopement in the Signory—indeed, from any Desdemona who appears subsequently. Once she has cleared space for play, she is gamesome—if not quite in Iago’s sense when, standing watch with Cassio, he says, “I’ll warrant her full of game” (2.3.19).7 Here she is a witty, sophisticated court lady having fun with a showoff Iago playing the tavern clown. “These are old paradoxes,” she tells him, “to make fools laugh i’th’ alehouse” (2.1.138–39). Her verbal playfulness with Iago modulates into inaudible courtliness with Cassio as the ensign observes them holding hands and exchanging confidences, then turns to earnest again when Othello enters and greets her as “my fair warrior.” To his passionate declaration that his content is absolute, she replies in equal passion, “The heavens forbid / But that our loves and comforts should increase / Even as our days do grow” (2.1.191–93), and so retrieves her serious ardor of Act I. Desdemona’s self-conscious shift to a new decorum, signaled by a single ligature of explanation, has been noted by critics from the time of Thomas Rymer. Rymer found it disgusting and laid it to Shakespeare’s catering to the groundlings: “Now follows a long rabble of Jack-pudden farce betwixt Jago and Desdemona, that runs on with all the little plays, jingle, and trash below the patience of any Countrey Kitchin-maid with her Sweet-heart. The Venetian Donna is hard put to’t for pastime!” (144). More enlightened critics have found the moment difficult, too. The editor of Arden 2, M. R. Ridley, commented that it is “one of the most unsatisfactory passages in Shakespeare. To begin with it is unnatural. Desdemona’s natural instinct must surely be to go herself to the harbour, instead of asking parenthetically whether someone has gone. Then it is distasteful to watch her engaged in a long piece of cheap backchat with Iago, and so adept at it that one wonders how much time on the voyage was spent in the same way.”8 The key words are “unnatural” and “distasteful,” explicated a few lines later by the remark

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that “this is just the sort of interchange that might occur between the great lady and the professional jester.” That is, Desdemona and Iago have become other people: they are not what they are.9 The same, however, might be said of the woman indirectly responsible for the disruption. Though she is an indignant wit-baiter in this scene, Emilia is the soother of Cassio’s anxiety at the beginning of the third act, an urger-on of Desdemona two scenes later, convinced that Cassio’s dismissal “grieves my husband / As if the case were his” (3.3.3–4), and, notoriously, the finder and transmitter of the lost handkerchief: I am glad I have found this napkin, This was her first remembrance from the Moor. My wayward husband hath a hundred times Wooed me to steal it, but she so loves the token —For he conjured her she should ever keep it— That she reserves it evermore about her To kiss and talk to. (3.3.294–300)

The odd structure of her speech signals a transition between two decorums: the first two lines suggest pleasure at being able to retrieve something of value to her mistress, but the next line and a half introduce a new reason for her gladness that makes the old reason—the handkerchief ’s symbolic value—the reason she has not been able to steal it before. Her loyalty to Desdemona gives way before her desire to please her husband, though she seems to have no intention of delivering up the handkerchief: “I’ll have the work ta’en out / And give’t Iago” (3.3.300–301).10 Immediately that he enters, however, she resumes her baiting mood with a show of the handkerchief, which has taken on a new personal value for her, and only when Iago has it in his possession (lack of a stage direction leaves it unclear whether she turns it over to him or he snatches it) does she think of Desdemona again: “Give me’t again. Poor lady, she’ll run mad / When she shall lack it” (3.3.321–22). It is another brief moment of compunction. Although she is soon a witness to Othello’s rage at its loss—and Desdemona’s obvious fright (“Then would to God that I had never seen’t!” 3.4.79)—she does nothing to alleviate their passions. She is not only remiss but plainly untruthful, denying that she knows anything about the handkerchief when asked by Desdemona where she might have lost it (3.4.24). Puzzled by Emilia’s inconsistency, Malone commented, “It is remarkable that when she perceives Othello’s fury on the loss of this token, though she is represented

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as affectionate to her mistress, she never attempts to relieve her of her distress, which she might easily have done.” He ascribes this peculiarity to the author’s own truancy: “Shakespeare fell into this incongruity by departing from Cinthio’s novel.”11 His remark is telling, for in Shakespeare’s adaptation of Cinthio Emilia has several opportunities to take the pressure off the situation, once it becomes clear that Othello’s manner toward Desdemona changes after she reveals to him—in Emilia’s presence—that she has lost the handkerchief. One possible moment occurs when she is maneuvered into playing the bawd as Othello bewhores Desdemona, but she is simply mystified: “Here’s a change indeed!” (4.2.108). When she returns with Iago—showing no sign they have discussed the handkerchief—she falls back on the conjecture that “some cogging, cozening slave, to get some office,” has slandered her mistress (4.2.134). An even more likely moment occurs when she helps Desdemona prepare for bed, alarmed by Othello’s order that she be dismissed, then shares some idle second thoughts on Desdemona’s part (“This Lodovico is a proper man”), and playfully replies to the question whether she would wrong her husband for all the world: “Why, the wrong is but a wrong i’th’ world; and having the world for your labour, ’tis a wrong in your own world, and you might quickly make it right” (4.3.79–81). On none of these occasions does Emilia say a word about the handkerchief because, it would seem, her comportment on each doesn’t call for the matter to be discussed. In the first instance, she is being hustled through a role suddenly imposed on her by Othello, in the second she is bringing Othello’s presumed confidant to her mistress for consolation, in the third she is participating in a colloquy where two unhappy women share confidences in a sequestered feminine space—which releases in Desdemona the memory of her mother’s maid Barbary and fleeting thoughts of an alternative lover, and in Emilia the utopian vision of female authority, a denunciation of the double standard, and a blunt vindication of deceiving wives. Only when Emilia finds Desdemona dead and Iago admits he told Othello his wife was false does she recall her earlier vacillation over the handkerchief: Villainy, villainy, villainy! I think upon’t, I think I smell’t, O villainy! I thought so then: I’ll kill myself for grief! O villainy, villainy! (5.2.187–90)

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At this moment we realize Emilia has not lost her mind or been intentionally disloyal to her mistress, but (literally) has been otherwise occupied.12 It is as though Iago’s words, “Be not acknown on’t” (F 3.3.322) were heard literally by her as an injunction not “to be (self )-recognized or avowed in relation to [the handkerchief]”13—to lose, that is to say, her link to the handkerchief as she renders it up in service to him. Like Desdemona (and Iago the jester), Emilia is subject to the different decorums demanded by the situations in which she finds herself. But she also has a kind of self that resides with her, similar to the self speaking in Desdemona’s apologetic ligature when she insists she is not merry but enters the game of wit “to beguile the thing I am, in seeming otherwise”—then seems otherwise indeed.14 “Otherwise” means “other ways”—alternative ways of seeming or, as Desdemona’s words imply, of beguiling one self in becoming another: not simply to dissimulate before others but to hoodwink a “host self,” to leave it (so to speak) in the dark, and to generate a different one more appropriate to the circumstances.15 As my allusion to Cressida suggests, the idea is not confined to Othello. Cressida is the model of a circumstantial self, inhabiting a multiplicity of decorums according to the needs of the moment. To Pandarus she reveals the wards—what we may call, adapting a term from Robert Weimann, the Figurenpositionen16—by means of which she maintains the comportments of that self: “Upon my back, to defend my belly; upon my wit, to defend my wiles; upon my secrecy, to defend mine honesty; my mask, to defend my beauty; and you, to defend all these; and at all these wards I lie, at a thousand watches” (Tro. 1.2.260–64). When she warily gives herself to Troilus, she gives “an unkind self, that itself will leave / To be another’s fool” (3.2.149–50)—voicing at once the ligature that signals departure, fear of self-betrayal, and anticipation of expropriation. It is an ambiguous moment, for she has just heard herself confess her love and then ask Troilus to stop her mouth, and she wonders aloud whether her candor is sincere or actually a seductive gesture. Pandarus’s appreciative “Pretty, i’ faith” registers his unambiguous answer, yet the matter is not so simple. Even before she yields an “unkind self” to Troilus, she suggests that self-control has begun to elude her. Although her reluctant desire plays upon the premonition that she will be abandoned by Troilus once his own desire is satisfied, the ransom of Deiphobus turns out to be the event that destabilizes her position with regard to Troilus, forcing her to fashion a new relation to her captor Diomed. As Troilus watches in disbelief, she negotiates this new position using his sleeve to rehearse Emilia’s

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handkerchief trick—now you have it, now you don’t—and for Troilus, “This is, and is not, Cressid” (5.2.144): a contradiction that the law of identity makes impossible, although the play, and indeed Cressida herself, insists upon its reality. Succumbing to an ineluctable doubleness, “Troilus, farewell!” she declares, and signals her new Figurenposition: “One eye yet looks on thee, / But with my heart the other eye doth see” (5.2.107–8). Nor is this the last turn, for in the letter that Troilus tears up in disgust her heart is apparently directing her eye back to him once more. It is Cressida’s bad luck to be trapped in one of her wards by such would-be essentialists as Ulysses and Troilus.17 “Is and is not” is a common mode of being in Shakespeare. The very words, “I am not what I am,” which we most frequently associate with Iago, originate, of course, in Viola a year or so earlier, as the dramatist explores the way an androgynous “bidentity” can generate homosexual desire that sponsors heterosexual love. On her first encounter with Olivia, Viola, disguised as Cesario, mischievously hints that “I am not that I play” (TN 1.5.184). But as her ardent account of how she might woo Olivia were she Orsino enters her aural imagination (“Make me a willow cabin at your gate. . . .”) and her audible voice is replenished with her own female responsiveness to the wooing she listens to inwardly, she touches Olivia with recognition, and it is on the field of her male-garbed body that Olivia joins her in what is literally a homoerotic response—one woman responding to another woman’s responsiveness—and falls in love with the androgynous figure she sees and hears.18 Viola understands this; hence her radical shift at their next encounter to the inessential “I am not what I am” (3.1.141). Whether the assertion is heard as Viola’s or Cesario’s, the speaker is not who s/he is because s/he is so situated as to partake of the other in awakening and sustaining Olivia’s desire—just as s/he does in relation to Orsino, who instantly makes a confidant of the boy with the rubious lips and small pipe. What had seemed an easy assumption of ethos as Viola approached Orsino’s court—“I can sing / And speak to him in many sorts of music” (1.1.57–58)—has turned out to be a disposition of self not in the control of the disposer but rather at the disposal of others’ erotic interests. Thus, in her own way, Viola finds herself trapped in her chosen rhetorical comportment and becomes another’s fool.19 Iago’s appropriation of Viola’s claim suggests that it is not just woman’s perquisite to be other than she is, although this capacity is often used against her by men ignorant of their own opportunistic selves: “Sir, she can turn, and turn, and yet go on” (Oth. 4.1.253); “You have been a boggler ever” (Ant. 3.13.110). Henry V, for example, exists in multiple registers:

Shakespeare’s Scripted Subject / 243 Hear him but reason in divinity, And all-admiring, with an inward wish You would desire the King were made a prelate; Hear him debate of commonwealth affairs, You would say it hath been all in all his study; List his discourse of war, and you shall hear A fearful battle rend’red you in music; Turn him to any cause of policy, The Gordian knot of it he will unloose, Familiar as his garter. . . . (H5 1.1.38–47)

In this instance, multiplicity of self is the celebrated quality of an enigmatic king. As each office requires a certain kind of knowledge, speech, and manner, so Henry is able to fit himself to the demand and supply it. The bishops reason that the King must have acquired these skills in secret study, and indeed the play shows him exhibiting an admirable sprezzatura—discovering traitors, admitting his father’s guilt in compassing the crown, then praying God not to revenge it on his soldiers, promising the meanest of his followers they will gentle their condition on St. Crispin’s day, wooing the French princess in gallant but homely macaronic prose. He is changeable yet apt at what he does, and we sense a directing intelligence behind his mercurial lability. Shakespeare mystifies the Machiavellian implications of Castiglione in Henry by suggesting that this is not a king who studied first and then wrought; from his initial appearance as Prince Hal, his claim to “know you all” rests upon the supposition that he is a unique autodidact: He made a blushing cital of himself, And chid his truant youth with such a grace As if he mast’red there a double spirit Of teaching and of learning instantly. (1H4 5.2.61–64)

Thus Vernon, as he reports Hal’s response to Hotspur’s challenge. Standing in the here and now, as well as in the there and then, Hal enjoys a simultaneity of being that enables him to behave as both prodigal and redeemer, student and master, prince and king, practicing a multipositionality that confers absolute political power. Vernon’s account complicates proleptically the bishops’ learned speculation in Henry V that in the young king’s case, “the art and practic part of life / Must be the mistress to this theoric”

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(1.1.52–53)—that, in effect, Hal acts before he knows how to act and converts his practice into theory—for Hal’s mystery is that in him practice and theory congrue: being and coming-to-be are peculiarly self-coincidental.20 More often, though, Shakespeare’s male figures depart from a residual self upon compulsion. Hearing himself proclaimed a traitor, Gloucester’s son declares, “Edgar, I nothing am” (Lr. 2.3.21), and assumes the person of a lunatic beggar. Poor Tom is not merely a protective disguise; it is the role Edgar chooses to enact his outcast state—he who, unlike his brother, was always at the center of things—and is thus an attempt to fit himself to the decorum of his new circumstances. Complicating our sense that Edgar is brilliantly adaptive in selecting the role, however, there is in Tom’s pseudoautobiographical babble more than the naive Edgar of Acts I and II may be supposed to know. Tom is a man “whom the foul fiend hath led through fire and through flame, through ford and whirpool, o’er bog and quagmire . . . that curl’d my hair; wore gloves in my cap; serv’d the lust of my mistress’ heart, and did the act of darkness with her . . . who is whipt from tithing to tithing, and stock-punish’d and imprison’d” (3.4.51–53, 86–88, 134–35). Though Edgar claims “The country gives me proof and president / Of Bedlam beggars” who curse, mortify their flesh, and extort charity from horrified observers, is he merely drawing on such “proof” when he miserably cries upon Flibbertigibbet, Swithold, Smulkin, Modo, and Mahu? What knows he of “one that slept in the contriving of lust, and wak’d to do it”? While Edgar never forgets who he was before he assumed Poor Tom’s ethos (he speaks many asides to remind us of his residual self ), his acting draws upon a range of experience that was never his but that he seems to be reexperiencing. He becomes Poor Tom, speaking out of a broad cultural discourse that enables him to displace the anguish he feels at paternal betrayal and political outlawry onto the language of anticourtliness, sexual disgust, and demonic possession.21 Moreover, once “in character” he is loath to relinquish the power the role confers, even when his blinded father cries, “O dear son Edgar . . . / Might I but live to see thee in my touch, / I’ld say I had eyes again” (4.1.21–24). As he leads Gloucester to what the old man believes is the edge of Dover cliff, he suddenly confides (to the audience, to himself ), “Why I do trifle thus with his despair / Is done to cure it” (4.6.33–34). It is another moment of compunction, in which the voice of an anterior self apologizes for the elaborate salvation drama that the assumed self is staging. But it is never clear that one self understands why the other is behaving as it does, for to the chivalric Edgar of Act V, Poor Tom’s failure to reveal himself is a flaw—“O fault!”—to say nothing of the silence of the poor peasant Edgar had become

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in order to signal the departure of Poor Tom after the fall. We can only assume that the multiple Edgar has realized some advantage in remaining in alterior comportments for so long, not revealing who he is until, paradoxically, he is armed for combat. Perhaps, as Stanley Cavell has suggested, he has avoided shaming both his father and himself by not unconcealing until he is more fully concealed (55–57). If so, then Shakespeare is registering the “interestedness” of such self-comportments—that while the circumstances of our lives may compel or solicit us to generate more appropriate selves for the occasion, those selves then become loci of power—which, functioning at first as epicycles of that centered self Jonson so anxiously celebrates, threaten to and do become decentered positions in which behavior occurs that is never fully under the control of, yet never permanently severed from, a “host self.”22 A glance at Hamlet further illuminates this point. Hamlet’s rejection of “all trivial fond records, / All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past, / That youth and observation copied there” (Ham. 1.5.99–101) is an explicit disavowal of those cultural paradigms available to the young man who has lived as the “observed of all observers” and in accordance with which he has fashioned his understanding of himself and his world.23 We may suppose that he thinks meet to put an antic disposition on after hearing the Ghost’s revelation because, like Edgar after him, he must assume a new psychic armature to replace the one he has been forced to cast off, and that of the natural is an apt mimesis of the indeterminacy he now feels. It is a newly improvised version of the “inky cloak,” which, by his own admission, does not denote him truly but only represents him within a system of probable signs that does not catch the particularity of his intellectual and affective disorientation. In which case, the aged critical quest to determine whether Hamlet really becomes mad and, if so, in what scenes and for how long, is fundamentally misguided because the antic disposition itself is a polysemous covering for a range of potential comportments that cannot be actualized until solicited.24 Correlatively, to describe Hamlet’s predicament as a question of how, and whether, to revenge, and to ask why his revenge takes so long, is to beg the initial question of how and who Hamlet is to be in order for him to act appropriately or at all. Thus regarded, the antic disposition casts fresh light on the issue of Hamlet’s (and Hamlet’s) inconsistency. For the murder of Hamlet’s father, his mother’s incest, and his uncle’s usurpation have released into solution the elements in his historical constitution that had been shaped into those social comportments of son, student, suitor, and heir apparent through which he has mediated his life. Feeling contaminated by his mother’s

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incest and called upon to perform the duty of filial revenge by a ghost whose qualities both distance him from and approximate him to his murderer, he has no station from which to enact the fate that cries out to him.25 So, from within the folds of the antic disposition he emerges to fit himself to the ineluctably ambiguating task to which he has been solicited, and like the chameleon to whom he compares himself, he not only eats the air, “promise-crammed,” but also changes colors to accommodate the uncertainties of his environment—turning from melancholic mourner to spectral inquisitor to mordant satirist to cryptic school chum to theatrical amateur to occasional playwright to speculative philosopher to savage misogynist to blood revenger to moral homilist to resolute strategist to bombastic lover to Christian fatalist—changing again and again, as he attempts, in Wallace Stevens’s phrase, “to find what will suffice.”26 In each of his positions Hamlet is not what he is, insofar as he seems “lapsed in time and passion”—caught, as Dover Wilson interpreted that phrase, in a moment of suffering that tends to disconnect itself from his intended trajectory.27 It is notorious, for example, that Hamlet, having resolved to catch the conscience of the king by means of the players—“If a do blench, / I’ll know my course” (2.2.597–98)—speaks in the next scene of “The undiscovered country, from whose bourn / No traveler returns” (3.1.78–79), as if he had never seen a ghost. Yet in the very next scene he is instructing the players on the best way to create guilty recognition in an audience, dividing the task of observing the King with Horatio, and congratulating himself on the play’s success and the Ghost’s veracity—though in between exchanges with Horatio his mousetrap has been rendered of dubious evidential value because of his own interpellation by the events of the play he presented. Clearly, there is a kind of self that resides with Hamlet, but others are attracted into being by the occasion. Ostensibly The Murder of Gonzago is devised to convict the King, but Hamlet cannot resist the temptations offered by the Player Queen’s speech to bait his mother, nor, as Lucianus enters, to identify him—against all expectation—as the Player King’s nephew, nor, as Lucianus wastes time in horrific grimacing, to cry out for him to revenge— a task not in Lucianus’s part. Such lapses may be best described as traps, though in actuality they manifest conflicting and overweening comportments, which often run athwart one another and raise questions in both play and audience about anyone’s ability to carry out an expressed intention. In Hamlet Shakespeare interrogates the relationship of residual and occasional selves by thematizing it in terms of will, purpose, and memory.28 The phenomenon of the takeover by the occasional self is most evident in Hamlet’s scenes with Ophelia and his mother. In the nunnery scene he tells

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Ophelia, “I did love you once,” then, “I loved you not,” revising himself on the spot as he recalls his own contamination, which retrospectively invalidates the love letter in which he had vowed, “I love thee best, O most best, believe it” (2.2.121–22). Later, however, when she is dead, he claims that “Forty thousand brothers / Could not with all their quantity of love / Make up my sum” (5.1.268–71). Is this madness speaking—or, rather, positionality? If the latter, Hamlet’s voices speak out of a perceived set of relations that undergo reconfigurations that must be continually mastered. Hamlet’s attack on Ophelia in the nunnery scene—which, the text suggests, has its origins in his conviction that “Frailty, thy name is woman” and the skeptical examination to which he has subjected Ophelia in her chamber—is a sustained demonstration of such mastery. It exploits the power to hurt that he acquires upon her return of his gifts and her inexplicable accusation of unkindness on his part. That is to say, the conjunction of Ophelia’s “test” and Hamlet’s deep intimations of self-departure (“be all my sins remember’d,” “I never gave you aught”) is swiftly converted from an experience of victimization to one of domination, in which Hamlet does not so much exculpate himself as metonynically return his guilt to its cause in women and marriage. But what makes the scene a “scene” is that he cannot relinquish the moment, prolonging it to transfix Ophelia as the emblem of both suspect and real female infidelity, thereby driving her to the distraction signaled by her Kydian lament. Dead, she no longer threatens and is safe to love.29 Something similar happens in his mother’s closet after the play. Having sat her down to exhibit the counterfeit presentment of two brothers, Hamlet has succeeded in turning her eyes, as she says, into her very soul, yet cannot give up the attack—“Nay, but to live / In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed” (3.4.91–92)—and by his persistence causes the Ghost to return to remind him that savaging his mother is not what he was supposed to do: “This visitation / Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose” (3.4.110–11). Invited to his mother’s chamber, provoked by her rebuke and protest of innocence, he has again savored the deep pleasure of shifting the blame and has installed himself as master in excess of what the situation demands, just as Edgar was to do. Hamlet’s behavior in the closet scene as a whole is a study in the transitive habitation of comportments, for each incident elicits a kind of self. The cry behind the arras draws out the wretched, rash, intruding fool in Hamlet—“O me, what hast thou done? Nay, I know not. / Is it the King?” (3.4.25–26)—which he immediately retorts onto Polonius. His aggression against Gertrude having triangulated his father’s spirit onto the scene, he feels himself softening at the Ghost’s plea that he calm his mother:

248 / Tropings of the Self Do not look upon me, Lest with this piteous action you convert My stern effects, then what I have to do Will want true color—tears perchance for blood. (3.4. 127–29)

And, sure enough, on the Ghost’s departure Hamlet ministers to Gertrude’s soul, urging her to confess herself to heaven, repent, and make amends. Yet even within this pastoral mood an aperture is found, through which an anterior voice speaks daggers to his mother again: Forgive me this my virtue For in the fatness of these pursy times Virtue itself of vice must pardon beg, Yea, curb and woo for leave to do him good. (3.4.152–55)

Hamlet cannot resist exploiting his momentarily superior moral position, not only pointing it out to Gertrude but supplying the choral commentary that grounds it historically. That breaks his mother’s heart, and Hamlet then issues the first of five goodnights, each of which punctuates a different phase of his address to her. First he exhorts her to “assume a virtue if you have it not,” and lectures her on how use almost can change the stamp of nature. After the second goodnight, he repents the slaughter of Polonius, whose body he had earlier reviled, and assumes the role of God’s scourge. A third goodnight and then—in a ligature of compunction that reveals a residual “I” (but which?)—he tells the audience, tells himself, “I must be cruel only to be kind” (3.4.178), and viciously baits his mother again, spewing forth, as a warning of what not to do, an imagined Claudius making love to a Gertrude who reveals that Hamlet is not essentially mad but only mad in craft. Threatening her with death, he so terrifies her that she is apparently convinced that he is “mad as the wind and sea” (4.1.7). But before he departs, he recalls (in the Second Quarto) his forthcoming voyage with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and (in both Quarto and Folio) the body of Polonius. The first will be hoist with their own petard, the guts of the second will be lugged into the neighbor room. Nasty Hamlet. A fourth goodnight, a sarcastic epitaph for Polonius, a final goodnight to mother. Such are Hamlet’s “fits”—in 219 lines. Given such instability of address, emanating from so many voices throughout the play, it is difficult to interpret Hamlet’s apology to Laertes

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in the last scene. He disclaims a “purpos’d evil,” absolving himself of the intention to hurt, and lays the guilt on his madness, described as not only Laertes’s enemy but his own. This is a not unfamiliar gesture, yet positioned just before the climax of the action, the disclaimer demands to be credited. Was Hamlet mad after all? When? When he stabbed Polonius? When he attacked Laertes in Ophelia’s grave? More important, which Hamlet is making this claim? It sounds as improvised as anything else he has said, even if generous and noble. Shakespeare seems to be giving him a temporary staging-ground, on which a “gathered self” can speak of its alienations as it stands on the edge of its accomplishment. Perhaps madness is the only word to describe these alienations, since they elude the control of the host self, even when entered into voluntarily. But as Hamlet’s words make plain, this residual or host self—what I have termed a “gathered self”—is not originary but accretive, continually shifting position as it accommodates those other selves it has yielded up to occasion.30 Which means that Hamlet’s accomplishment—his self-fulfillment— will not occur until after this brief staging, through opportunistic responses to unforeseen circumstances (Laertes’s unbated and poisoned sword, Gertrude’s warning, Claudius’s poisoned chalice). Nor will it, in the event, ever be actually his, since he will have to alienate it to Horatio for delivery to the onstage audience and leave it to be gathered by Shakespeare’s offstage audience, for whom Hamlet can never be more than an aggregate, a sequence of positions in which a single figure continuously adapts himself to estranged conditions and struggles to collect himself—however much audiences and critics try to capture him in one of his wards. In more theatrical terms, he is a dramatis persona who generates “characters.”31 If character thus described seems improvised, perhaps that is what Shakespeare the playwright has discovered character is: an attitude, a poise, through which the self fashions a fit between the world and it, expresses the qualities of that fit in words and actions, and which is durable as long as the circumstances that support it remain stable.32

II This insight into the precarious, ongoing adjustment between self and world that we find in the plays positions Shakespeare as the preeminent mediator of rhetorical anthropology to the popular culture of his day. Yet it is precisely the insight that the Elizabethan theater afforded playwrights who were engaged in its making. The very routine of composing plays involved a series of practices that engaged Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the

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historical process of thinking out and representing subject formation. Such evidence as we have from Philip Henslowe’s diaries, surviving author plots and stage plots, actors’ parts, bits of dramatic dialogue, and obiter dicta from nondramatic sources indicates that it was a common procedure for a dramatist to begin by writing a plot with designated dramatis personae, presenting it to the company, then “fitting” it with scenes and characters, either singlehandedly or in collaboration.33 As an outline of “what happens,” the plot functioned as a ghostly rendering of subject and situation, which were spectrally present as dramatis persona and action, but lacked the sequence of “fits” between self and circumstance that would constitute character and scene, and render the play an action enriched by the particularities of personal engagement. In their scraps of communication, Henslowe’s diaries yield tantalizing glimpses of the phases of this process. There is, for example, the wellknown entry, “Lent unto Bengemen Johnsone the [2]3 of desember / 1597 upon a Bocke which he was to write for us / befor crysmas next after the date herof which he / showed the plotte unto the company I saye / lente in Redy money unto hime the some of / xxs.”34 The ‘Bocke’ on which Henslowe has given Jonson an advance refers to the playbook or script that Jonson was to have generated in three weeks from the plot the company had already seen. Nearly a year later Henslowe records that he “Lent unto Robart shawe & [Edward?] Jewbey the 23 of October / 1598 to lend unto mr Chapmane one his playe boocke & ii ectes of A tragedie of bengemens plotte / the some of. . . . / iii li” (100). Whether or not this entry refers to the 1597 plot by Jonson (Jonson’s book never having materialized), two possible practices are indicated: the author composing a script upon his own plot and another author being called upon to do so. In 1601 Henslowe made a series of payments to John Day and William Haughton for a play called The Conquest of the West Indies, at the request of Samuel Rowley, acting as representative of the Admiral’s Men. In the course of composing the book, Day apparently left the plot in Henslowe’s possession, perhaps with “papers” of the finished scenes for which he had already received money. “About the plott of the Indyes,” he wrote, “I have occasion to be absent therfre pray delyver it to will hauton fidler” (295). Presumably Day needed the plot to continue his work of development. Sometimes the plot was the result of a collaboration between the author and the leading player, as Nathan Field suggests when he writes to Henslowe in 1613 that “Mr. Daborne and I have spent a great deal of time in conference about this plot which will make as beneficial a play as has come these seven years,” and asks him to send Robert Daborne a down payment on the book of ten pounds, lest he offer it to another

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company.35 Certain writers were apparently known for their skill at com­ posing plots. Remarking on a passage from Have With You To SaffronWalden, Greg suggests that “the drawing up of such plots, as a recognized branch of the playwright’s profession, may be implied in Nashe’s claim of Greene ‘subscribing to me in any thing but plotting Plaies, wherein he was his craft’s master’ ” (Greg, Documents, 1.1). So, too, Anthony Munday was described by Francis Meres in Palladis Tamia as “our best plotter,” a reputation that seems to have been confirmed in Jonson’s The Case Is Altered, when Onion remarks to Anthony Balladino, “You are in print already for our best plotter.”36 What was an author’s plot like? Though the evidence is scant, at the very minimum it might consist of a list of the dramatis personae to be assembled in each scene, as suggested by a scribbled fragment among Henslowe’s correspondence. Greg prints a facsimile and transcription of this document, which appears to describe scenes from The Second Part of Henry Richmond, written by author-actor Robert Wilson. It consists of the following account of the action: 1 Sce. Wm Wor: & Ansell & to them ye plowghmen ———————————————————————— 2 Sce: Richard [then, inserted above] Q. & Eliza: [then, on the same line] Catesbie, Lovell, Rice ap Tho: Blunt, Banester. ———————————————————————— 3. Sce: Ansell Davye Denys Hen: Oxf: Courtney Bou’chier & Grace to them Rice ap Tho: & his Soldiors 4. Sce:————————————————————— Mitton Ban: his wyfe & children [6 Sce:] [sic]—————————————— 5. Sce: K Rich: Catesb: Lovell. Norf: Northumb: Percye (Greg, Documents, 1.5)

Greg, who is concerned not with authors’ plots but with stage plots, suggests that the fragment may have been drawn from an author’s plot and used to fashion a stage plot.37 In a note, he also refers to a manuscript copy of Fletcher’s Bonduca dating from the 1630s, apparently in the hand of a playhouse scribe, which contains this comment: “Here should A Scaene be betwene Junius and petillius (Junius mocking petillius for being in love with Bonduca’s daughter that Killd her Selfe: to them Entered Suetonius (blameing petilius for the Death of penius).” The scribe goes on to explain that the beginning of the scene is missing because the original playbook

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has been lost (Greg, Documents, 1.6). What the scribe seems to be supplying is both less and more than what is usually offered in a stage plot; while he describes who is onstage and who enters, nothing is said about stage furniture, which one would expect in a stage plot; but there is, however brief, an indication of the verbal content of the scene—rendered as rhetorical mode and genre—which is more likely to belong to an author’s plot. Both documents suggest that the author’s plot consisted of a sequence of scenes indicating which persons engaged one another and the nature of their action. The broadside advertising a play called England’s Joy, “to be played at the Swan this 6 of November, 1602,” confirms this impression. It describes an induction and six scenes, in each of which the characters, their actions, and their speeches are sketched, apparently aping the manner of an author’s plot (Greg, Documents, 1.2, pl. 8).38 The fullest extant example of an author’s plot is a fragment known as Philander King of Thrace that dates from around 1627. It suggests what may have been the larger function of an author’s plot presented to a company. In addition to the sketch of scenes and dramatis personae that we might expect, it offers a conspectus of the two sites of the action, Thrace and Macedon, with a list of mountains, rivers, cities, and towns, and their geographical locations, as well as a brief account of the “National propriety’s” (customs and beliefs) of Thrace. These may have been the author’s notes to himself, for reference as he developed scenes and dialogue or, given the evidence of collaboration between author and company, these may have been provided to enable the company, as the author presented the plot, to envision its heroic scope. Following this information, the plot outlines the contents of three acts, containing five, eight, and eight scenes respectively, and the beginnings of a fourth act with two scenes. These unmistakably show the dramatis personae and the business of the scene. Act I, scene 1, for example, specifies that “Philander and his sister Suavina walke and conferre: she greives [sic] for the warre,” which is followed by “Philander telleth Euphrastes the cause why he will not marry Suavina to any but a present K” in scene 2, and “Aristocles and Suavina discover theire passions and are discovered by Phonops” in scene 3. By Act III, scene 5, the lovers having been long parted, the plot has thickened: “Aristocles and Suavina exceed for joy, att meeting. Recounting theire weale and wo. Corintha [a rival princess] weepes to sympathize with theire free passions.”39 The brief descriptions emphasize genres of discourse—conversation, lament, argument, confession, narration. But they also point to significant movement and gesture, providing something like a preliminary blocking plan. Brother and sister walk together, Aristocles sits between the two ladies and the two kings, Phonops begs for mercy on

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his knees, Aristocles kicks him away (Adams, 26–27). They indicate a taxonomy of generic stage actions. These bits of evidence suggest that the author may have conceived his plot less in terms of linear action than in terms of successive encounters of dramatis personae for whom speeches had to be written. Nashe’s sarcastic allusion to sons of Noverints who write “whole Hamlets, I should say handfulls of tragical speaches” (Greg, Essays, 1.312), implies that there is a place to deposit them, namely, the author’s plot. Indeed, there is evidence that the plot may have been thought of as resembling a two-dimensional layout on which the remaining dimensions of speech and gesture were to be erected—not unlike the floorplan of a blueprint that provides the basis for subsequent elevations. The common etymology of “plat” and “plot” encouraged the notion of literally situating a scene along an action as one would situate a building in a landscape. That this was seen as a preliminary procedure common even in nondramatic composition is suggested by George Puttenham when he writes that “our maker or Poet is to play many parts and not alone one, as first to devise his plat or subject, then to fashion his poeme, thirdly to use his metricall proportions, and last of all to utter with pleasure and delight, which rests in his manner of language and style” (Arte, 312). Sidney draws on similar imagery in An Apology for Poetry when he describes a poetic fiction as “an imaginative ground-plot of a profitable invention” (124), which is to say that the action is the basis of ingenious conjunctions of wit made upon the subjectum specified by Puttenham. In Discoveries, Jonson explicitly connects the epic and dramatic plot to physical space: “if a man would build a house, he would first appoint a place to build it in, which he would define within certaine bounds: So in the Constitution of a Poeme, the Action is aym’d at by the Poet, which answers Place in a building; and that Action hath his largeness, compasse, and proportion.” Upon this “action,” which corresponds to “place” in architecture, the substance of the play or poem, which Jonson calls the fable, is erected in the following ratio: “As Place to the building, that is rais’d,” so “Action to the fable, that is form’d.”40 We also find such a spatial implication in Marston’s Antonio and Mellida when Feliche says, “Here might be made a rare scene of folly, if the plot could bear it” (3.2.118–19). Similarly, “Here were even a plot to make a play on,” says the Wise Woman in Heywood’s play of the same name.41 In The Faithful Friends, a play probably dating from the 1620s and extant in manuscript, we may actually be able to compare the plot of a scene to its realization. The scribe who prepared the bulk of the manuscript supplied “The Plott of a Scene of mirth. to conclude this fourth Acte” on folio 36b,

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in a space that seems to have been first reserved for the actual scene. Apparently the scribe inserted the plot there because the scene itself had been temporarily mislaid or, as the editor G. M. Pinciss suggests, because the author had not yet himself provided the dialogue. In any case, he was left “with no choice but to substitute a mere summary of it, from whatever source was available, perhaps an ‘author’s plot’ drawn up as a guide to composition for the author or authors.”42 Subsequently, a different hand did provide the scene itself, which is found on a single leaf, folio 37, immediately joining. The “Plott” reads as follows: Enter Sr Pergamus the foolish knight like a Bridegroome leading Flavia his Bride, Bellario the singing souldier, Black Snout the Smith, Snipp Snapp the Tayler and Cauleskin the Shomaker. An altar to be sett forth with the Image of Mars. Dindimus the Dwarfe bearing Sr Per: launce and sheild wch are hung up for trophees, and Sr Perg. Vowes for the love of Flavia never to beare Armes agen, the like dos Bla: Snout who hangs up his sword and takes his hammer vowing to God Vulcan never to Use other Weapon, the Taylor and the Shoomaker to vowe the like to God Mercury. Then Bellario [to] sings a songe how they will fall to there old Trades, a clapp of Thunder and run of. (93–94)

These lines, excessive for a stage plot, resemble the description of a dumb show, such as we find in The Revenger’s Tragedy (5.3.SD) or The Duchess of Malfi (3.4.6.SD), but they turn out to be the limnings of a scene of speech and action. One would never guess from the scribe’s deadpan description that the scene might indeed be one of mirth in the realization. Yet on the very next page one can savor the delicious folly that emerges as the principal figure becomes a character through the speech and gesture that constitute the actual scene: per: there hange thou fatal engine of my wroth. thou great divorcer of the soule & bodie wch threescore Princes, Emperors, & Kinges beside some 1000 Lords Captains sanz number one lanspresado and [a] subtilers wife has sent to Erebus & dismal Lake hang there I say and this the world shal Grant: None ere shall use the like but John of Gaunt. omnes: o rare rare Pergamus (94)43

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III The class-conscious mock heroic attitude that governs this scene testifies to the longevity of the kind of humor we find earlier in The Knight of the Burning Pestle, which also offers glimpses of plot becoming actualized as a series of encounters. Improvised though it may be, the play that the grocer George and his wife Nell demand suggests the development of script from idea and plot. The scenes materialize from their desire to see their trade ennobled: “I will have a grocer, and he shall do admirable things” (Ind. 35–36). To accomplish this desire, Rafe their apprentice must master a new language and appear heroic as the occasion warrants: “Let Rafe come in and fight with Jasper. . . . George, let Rafe travel over great hills, and let him be very weary, and come to the King of Cracovia’s house, covered with velvet” (2.278–79, 4.34–36). In each of his scenes, Rafe is heroic in a different way: fighting Jasper he is grocer rampant; aiding Mrs. Merrythought he is grocer courtant; wooing Princess Pompiona he is grocer protestant; and in his subsequent appearances as May Lord, Captain of the London Militia, and Senecan ghost, he assumes the comportments desired by his patrons—in each case uttering a different form of prosody (ballad meter, prose, and blank verse, respectively) and cutting across the presumably well-made gentry play, The London Merchant. In the composite Knight of the Burning Pestle, Beaumont may be sending up not only the merchants but the practices of public theater dramatists as well, less design-conscious in his view than the makers of intrigue comedies, and more concerned with providing characters upon emergent occasions. Yet even in the most tightly fashioned plays one can discern traces of the emergence of character and scene from dramatis persona and plot. Volpone, metadramatic in so many ways, offers a glimpse of this process as well. Jonson seems to have conceived of Mosca’s parasitic relationship to his patron as that of metteur-en-scène to plotter.44 It is Mosca’s task to give formal shape to Volpone’s three-year gulling plot, and in the course of doing so he evokes from the selected dramatis personae their latent characterpossibilities. This is most evident in the figure of Corbaccio, the old man whom Mosca solicits to disinherit his son as a means of ensuring his nomination as Volpone’s heir, and in the jealous husband Corvino, whose fantasies of cuckoldry are both aggravated and assuaged as Mosca gulls him into prostituting his wife to his apparently impotent master. Standing at Volpone’s bedside, Mosca suggests Corbaccio’s heedless paternity into being, even as the old man claims the emergent impulses as his own—“This plot / Did I think on before”; “Mine own project”; “Still, my invention”

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(1.1.409–10, 411, 419)—and he effects a like actualization in Corvino when he reports that Volpone’s physician has offered his daughter as a cure for the dying man. Volpone’s delight at Mosca’s success specifies Mosca’s achievement, and though the parasite modestly demurs, he supplements the specification: volpone: Oh, but thy working, and thy placing it! I cannot hold; good rascal, let me kiss thee. I never knew thee in so rare a humor. mosca: Alas, sir, I but do as I am taught: Follow your grave instructions, give ’em words, Pour oil into their ears, and send them hence. (1.1.436–41)

“Working,” “placing,” and “giving words” are Mosca’s chief tasks. It is Mosca who “works” Volpone into his disguise as Scoto of Mantua and “places” him beneath Celia’s window, perhaps even provides the pitch, just as he “works” Corvino and, riskily, Bonario into the plot. When the carefully “placed” encounters of Volpone, Celia, and Bonario prove to be literally catastrophic, he “works” Voltore’s professional talents into the service of the lawyer’s interests and “places” him in a courtroom scene. Even when Volpone wants to extend his theater of torment into the streets, Mosca promises, “Sir, I can fit you” (5.1.241), and provides the habit of commandadore in which Volpone vexes his former advocate into the crisis of conscience that nearly unravels the plot. Given Jonson’s refractions of himself in virtually all his dramatic work, it is not surprising to find him obliquely representing his comportments as plotter, playwright, and actor in Volpone, both assuming and distributing the parts that Puttenham insists a poet should play. In a somewhat loftier vein, Shakespeare’s Theseus claims that the poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling between earth and heaven, “gives to aery nothing / A local habitation and a name” (MND 5.1.16–17). Whatever its Platonic resonance, it is an accurate enough description of the dramatist’s movement from idea to plot to script. Peter Quince, Bottom, and company, however, do not have to start from scratch; they have a play to hand, though they are still compelled to be site-specific in fitting it out, and in their awkward attempts at mise-en-scène Shakespeare may be revealing how it is often done—if not in London, then surely on the road. This suggests a certain kinship between A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Volpone. In the latter play, Jonson obliquely represents a collaborative development from plot and

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dramatis persona to scene and character in the activities of Volpone and Mosca, while Shakespeare explicitly represents a group of would-be actors self-consciously botching together a performance from materials already made from the plot and fitting it to their capacities.45 Thus, we would seem to be coming in on a later and ostensibly more “professional” phase of play production. Already in existence are actors’ parts, a promptbook held by Quince at the first rehearsal, and a versified author’s plot—delivered as the second part of the prologue in Act V. What is fashioned in the course of production is a “bill of properties”—Quince’s version of a stage plot—the costumes and props, the supererogatory prologues the players think they need to explain themselves to their audience, and—most important—the performances. What is of common interest in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Volpone, then, is the way the mechanicals, on the one hand—“hardhanded men that work in Athens here”—and the Venetian gulls, on the other, actualize the parts they play. But there is an important difference: Jonson is concerned to show how Mosca’s dramatis personae realize themselves in parts that seem destined for them, while Shakespeare directs our attention to the disparities between the parts and the men who play them. Because Shakespeare’s figures are consciously acting, he makes the metadramatic question more explicit: do the actors, as they assume the characters of The Most Lamentable Comedy, become subjects from their reservoirs of subject possibilities? To talk about the “subject formation” of Flute, Bottom, and Snug the Joiner may tinkle of absurdity, but we must not forget that they enter into the theatrical enterprise with firm self-conceptions that will be severely challenged. It is appropriate to ask, then, whether they undergo subjective modification in the course of their theatrical project. Flute has a beard coming and is embarrassed to play a woman, and though Quince assures him he can play in a mask, this practical solution does not address Flute’s concern. Manfully, however, he gives his all and tries to portray Thisby, and with “her passion ends the play.” Snug, timid and slow of study, is recognized after his apologetic speech as “a very gentle beast, and of good conscience. . . . The very best of a beast, my lord, that ever I saw” (5.1.227–30), and once “in character” does manage to roar and shake Thisby’s mantle. In both cases, however, we are aware of a gap between actor and role, and the stage audience casts further doubt on the persuasiveness of the performances. Of Flute’s woman, Demetrius remarks, “A mote will turn the balance, which Pyramus, which Thisby, is the better: he for a man, God warr’nt us, she for a woman, God bless us” (5.1.318–20). Snug’s ferocity also elicits a condescending skepticism: “Well roared, Lion,” “Well mous’d, Lion” (5.1.265, 268). Yet is an audience’s response an index to the subjective

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experience of the two actors? Earlier Theseus had made a distinction when he insisted that in all theater the auditor’s imagination must “amend” the “shadows” presented by players, and in the case of poor players, “If we imag­ ine no worse of them than they of themselves, they may pass for excellent men” (5.1.211–16). The theory, if not the empirical evidence, allows for the interpellation of the actor by the part, and we may suppose that such is the experience of the mechanicals in their desire to act well. Bottom would at first glance appear to be the exception. Like the adaptive orator, he feels naturally inclined to certain roles—in his case, a lover and a tyrant, though “my chief humor is for a tyrant”—and he has a set of techniques and set speeches at the ready, though he is more than willing to take on the roles of lady and lion as well. What he has not prepared for is the role temporarily imposed on him by Oberon’s charm, to which he seems even more naturally inclined, since he succeeds effortlessly in being both himself and an ass at the same time. Shakespeare suggests that in this role Bottom emblematizes what he has already hinted at in his clamor for multiple self-exhibition, a suggestion that is confirmed when he awakens from the spell and is determined, against his better judgment, to commission a ballad of his dream and “sing it in the latter end of a play, before the Duke” (4.1.217). If we feel that Bottom remains Bottom in whatever role he tries out for or performs—be it lady, lion, ass, or Pyramus—we may not be fully appreciating the rich depths of his folly, its capacity to appropriate the world in a variety of foolish comportments, and the capaciousness of the roles he chooses or that choose him, soliciting and giving form to what otherwise might pass show.46 That is to say, A Midsummer Night’s Dream reveals that acting can seduce men whose potentialities lie within (Flute, Snug) to imagine themselves in new and unaccustomed comportments but also, in some men (Bottom), to perfect and manifest fully their customary mode of being.47 This view of playing lies at the heart of much antitheatrical criticism in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. If theaters are markets of bawdry, as Stephen Gosson claimed, it is not only because they exhibit immoral behavior but because that behavior is contagious. It is contagious because convincing, and convincing because actors either become what they play or find seductive means to express publicly what they already are. This is apparently the view of Anthony Munday: As for those stagers themselves, are they not commonly such kind of men in their conversation as they are in profession? Are they not as variable in heart, as they are in their parts? Are they not good practicers of bawdry as enactors?

Shakespeare’s Scripted Subject / 259 Live they not in such sort themselves, as they give precepts unto others? Doth not their talk on the stage declare the nature of their disposition? Doth not every one take that part which is proper to his kind? . . . Ask them, if in their laying out of their parts, they choose not those parts which is most agreeing to their inclination, and that they can best discharge? And look what every of them doth most delight in, that he can best handle to the contentment of others. If it be a roisting, bawdy, and lascivious part, wherein are unseemly speeches, and that they make choice of them as best answering, and proper to their manner of play: may we not say, by how much he exceeds in his gesture he delights himself in his part? And by so much it is pleasing to his disposition and nature?48

Though for polemical purposes Munday emphasizes the assumption of lewd parts, his argument is based on the widespread belief that the role attracts into it the latent predisposition or active disposition of the man who performs it, and once “in character” that inclination only gains strength through the opportunity to act it out. In a more meditative context, Jonson the player, plotter, and poet records a similar fear in his commonplace book, though it is not the reinforcing of natural inclination by acting that makes him anxious but the subreption of nature by deliberate imitation that becomes habit: “I have considered our whole life is like a play: wherein every man, forgetful of himself, is in travail with expression of another. Nay, we so insist in imitating others, as we cannot, when it is necessary, return to ourselves: like children that imitate the vices of stammerers so long, till at last they have become such, and make the habit to another nature, as it is never forgotten” (Jonson 8.597).49 Shakespeare himself exploits this antitheatrical prejudice in Sonnet 111, the third in a sequence attempting to explain the poet’s “truant disposition” to his friend. Shifting the blame for his delinquency onto Fortune, which has caused him to seek his living through “public means which public manners breeds,” the poet justifies his disaffection as an occupational hazard: “Thence comes it that my name receives a brand, / And almost thence my nature is subdued / To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand” (111.5–7). Though “public manners” seems to refer to the admission in Sonnet 110 that he has made himself “a motley to the view” and “gored [opened a wound in, embellished?] mine own thoughts [made privacy public?], sold cheap what is most dear [performed, vented his passion?],” in these three lines he tries to excuse his infidelity as the psychological consequence of being an actor. The “blenches” described in Sonnet 110 stem from his ability to play many roles—and play them so well that, to extend his simile,

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they are “in grain.” As Munday would have it, he has become as variable in his heart as in his parts. However disingenuous as an attempt at selfexoneration, the explanation is clearly one ready to hand. In yet a different mood—drawing upon the same topos—Shakespeare has Hamlet advise his mother, “Assume a virtue if you have it not . . . for use almost can change the stamp of nature” (Ham. 3.4.160–68). From antitheatrical tirade to the anxious inscription of a man deeply suspicious of the disintegrating contamination fostered by imitation to the tragic hero’s rehearsal of Aristotle’s concept of ethical development—via the special pleading of a philandering poet-actor—there is an insistence that playing results in behavior and behavior belongs to what we would now call a subject.50

Nine

“Nobody. I Myself”: Discovering What Passes Show

Shakespeare’s comic reflections on the psychology of mise-en-scène in A Midsummer Night’s Dream open the way to think freshly about the function of rhetorical anthropology in his plays. The roles of Pyramus the lover, Thisby the lady, Thisby’s mother, Pyramus’s father, and Lion come ready-made in the actors’ parts as originally represented in Quince’s description. They are dramatis personae rather than characters. They become characters only when they are performed alongside Wall or before Ninny’s tomb—that is, when time, place, and position hail them forth (qualify them, in the language of dialectical specification),1 for only in these particular circumstances do the actors find themselves situated and called upon to answer according to their capacities. In such represented situatings, can we find refractions of Shakespeare’s practice of eliciting subject from self in the course of transforming plot to playbook?

I While no Shakespeare plots survive, it is reasonable to assume that he began his work as his fellow dramatists did, by composing a plot as he dramatized a narrative or adapted an older play, and then fashioned upon this plot the succession of scenic encounters that constitute its significant actions—what Jonson styles the fable.2 In support of such a view, David Wiles has argued that “Shakespeare constitutes character as a set of functions or relationships. The dynamics of the stage situation are more important to him than the internal consistency of a single character.”3 Hence, in the 1599 quarto of Romeo and Juliet, which is believed to derive from Shakespeare’s holograph, Lady Capulet’s speeches are designated by prefixes that differ in accor­ dance with her function in a given situation: “She is Capu(let’s) Wi(fe) when

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Tybalt is slain and family is in question, Old La(dy) when telling Juliet to marry as she herself did, La(dy) when preaching stoicism in face of bereavement, Mo(ther) when she talks joyfully of marriage and when she has lost her daughter. This yields the notorious outcome that she is simultaneously ‘old’ and under thirty” (Wiles, 92–93). We might amplify Wiles’s observation by recalling that Hamlet is both ‘young’ and thirty—a university student (aged fifteen to twenty) within the cluster of relationships that allies him to Horatio, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern, and man of thirty in the moment that demands the generation of a character to meet with wry detachment the long view of mortality opened by the Gravedigger in the fifth act. The question of rhetorically situated dramatis personae taken up by Wiles has been a matter of interest to textual critics for some time. That variants in speech prefixes might indicate the compositional practices of the writer, “who is perfectly familiar with his characters, and who from moment to moment sees them in different aspects,” was suggested over seventy years ago by R. B. McKerrow in an influential article on the manuscripts underlying Shakespeare’s printed texts (“A Suggestion”). Recent scholarship has disproved McKerrow’s larger thesis that texts with variations in speech headings are likelier to be derived from foul papers than from promptbooks (bookkeepers, he believed, could not do their jobs properly without regularized speech headings),4 but it has also shown that many such variants probably do have theatrical significance. In analyzing Romeo and Juliet, George W. Williams observes that the speech prefixes for the role of Lady Capulet denote five different functions, which appear as some form of Mother, Lady, Old Lady, Wife, and Capulet’s Wife—the first three designations generally occurring in domestic scenes, the last two in public scenes.5 A closer look at the domestic scenes reveals still finer discriminations than Wiles indicates. At 3.5.67, for example, the stage direction shows Lady Capulet’s entrance as Mother (67.SD), but she is Lady in the prefixes to speeches in which she speaks of Tybalt’s death, philosophically comforts Juliet’s apparent grief for her cousin, and plans revenge on Romeo. She becomes Mo. and addresses Juliet as “Gyrle,” when she turns to the forthcoming marriage that Juliet’s “careful father” has arranged, and remains M. until Capulet enters to observe Juliet’s “tempest tossed body.” Then, in response to his asking if she has delivered his “decree,” which hastens the marriage, she becomes La. as she tells him of Juliet’s ingratitude. She is still La. when she chides him for threatening Juliet with violence for resisting the marriage (“Fie, fie, what are you mad?”), but becomes Wi. when Capulet abuses her domestic the Nurse, who has intervened on Juliet’s behalf (“You are too hot”). She is designated Mo. a final time when Capulet has threatened to disown Juliet

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and the girl appeals to her as “sweet my mother” (198). She then expresses her own disgust to her daughter (202–3). The prefixes appear to be attuned to addressee, attitude, and content, as though each new comportment demanded its own ethos. Even Capulet’s unanticipated entanglement in his daughter’s passion is signaled by a prefix change. Following Juliet’s plea, “Good father, I beseech you on my knees, / Hear me with patience but to speak a word” (158–59), he is no longer Ca. but Fa., drawn into an exposition of his thankless role as parent of an ungrateful child. These shifts in a speaker’s designation, apparently solicited by his or her interlocutor, indicate Shakespeare’s interest in the ethos of situation and in intersubjective interpellation, even if they are not wholly consistent. The Countess in All’s Well that Ends Well undergoes a less extensive but similar change of character. In the first scene of the play, the stage direction registers her entrance as Mother, and as much of her dialogue is taken up with the imminent loss of her son, her speech prefix is Mo. In 1.3, however, she enters as Countesse and remains so till Helena appears, abject at Bertram’s scornful departure. As the Countess observes her and reflects on her own earlier experience of love, she becomes Old. Count., just as Juliet’s mother had become Old La. when recalling her own youth to Juliet. Randall McLeod has suggested that from the audience’s point of view, “Helen’s entrance on to a silent stage occupied only by the Countess would, without a word being spoken, offer us an emblem of Youth vs Age,” so that even before the Countess spoke she would be perceived as an Old Countess in contrast to Helena. When she does speak (“Even so it was with me when I was young,” 1.3.128), the speech tag, he remarks, represents the author’s voice attesting to her age.6 We find yet another example of this practice in the fifth act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, though it has been traditionally cast as a textual rather than a character issue. In1.1, 4.1, and 5.1.1–105, Theseus and Hippolyta are given speech prefixes according to their proper names, but at 5.1.106 Philostrate tells him, “So please your Grace, the Prologue is address’d,” and Theseus, now tagged Duke, replies, “Let him approach.” He then resumes his original speech prefix until Thisby enters a second time to address Wall and (through it) Pyramus (5.1.263), after which he and Hippolyta respond as variants of Duke and Duchess. Textually it would appear that they are pulling rank as the mechanicals’ play draws toward its increasingly absurd end, Hippolyta quite fed up (“This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard”), Theseus regally forbearing (“The best in this kind are but shadows”); since there is no convincing evidence that the change is not Shakespeare’s, we may assume that what is happening textually is also happening characterologically.7

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II Variations in speech prefixes, then, may well indicate changes in character. But such fashioning of character from what we might call the “potential repertory” of the dramatis persona has psychogenetic as well as dramaturgic implications. If the routine conditions of Elizabethan playwriting led Shakespeare to fashion character rhetorically—character as ethos in the technical sense that it represents the self as a kind of self per occasionem—his experience with actors and acting would have led him to register the existence of the self as a surplus beyond the limits of role that is not fully represented in role. This is less obvious than it sounds. When Flute as would-be actor complains, “I have a beard coming,” he is dismayed that his onset of manhood will be concealed behind a lady’s mask. He can’t be fully himself playing a lady. More disquieting, when Hamlet tells his mother, “I have that within which passes show, / These but the trappings and the suits of woe,” he, too, hints at something concealed, something he possesses that is more than he can represent in sighs, tears, and clothes of mourning, which are “actions that a man might play.” According to Hamlet, a theatrical role is the instrument by which the man who acts it distills from that he has within those elements that are appropriate to the various situations in the play he must address “in character.” The ostensible meaning of his remark is: “I have that within that exceeds what I am able to show and that I do not choose to show.” He implies that the portion of himself that does not issue in a public court performance is in surplus of his part—indecorous, at best, and surely impolitic—so full of grief, disgust, and hatred as to be virtually unrepresentable. He is already a dramatis persona: the mourning prince. Should he create a character to fit his actual circumstances, he would have to select, arrange, and express certain “character traits” drawn from the many “character possibilities” experience has placed at his disposal—and this he cannot, or will not, do. Lest this seem a post-Stanislavsky distortion of Hamlet’s words, let us remember that the Elizabethan and Jacobean actor, as Joseph Roach has shown, fashioned in his imagination a visio of the man or woman he was playing from his experience of such persons, to which his passions responded, summoning the humors and spirits that produced the outward signs of that passion—“actions that a man might play.” Psychosomatic in nature, it was a form of method acting that stressed rational control, though it was also acknowledged that this control might sometimes be lost.8 Hamlet himself warns the players of this when coaching them for his Mousetrap. “In the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind of your passion,”

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he tells them, “you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness” (3.2.5–8). Like Aristotle’s virtuous man, the actor must observe the mean when representing emotions and exhibit the skill “of teaching and of learning instantly.”9 Yet through the figure of Hamlet, Shakespeare suggests that what the actor has within may be more than he thinks he has, may in fact be inaccessible to him and not in his control, though it may infiltrate the deliberate expression of character that is his art. That, in effect, the actor is himself a “character.” This becomes evident in Hamlet’s first soliloquy, when he is no longer performing for the court and is presumably “himself.” Alone, he releases “that within which passes show,” and what he shows seems to be more than he is aware he has within. He not only expresses profound disgust at his mother’s hasty and incestuous marriage, as we might expect, and compares his father and uncle to Hyperion and a satyr, but he couples chiasmically with his uncle and compares uncle and father to himself and Hercules. He describes his mother following his father’s body, but the simile he uses—“Like Niobe, all tears”—invokes a mother famous for weeping at the death of her children, not a wife weeping for her husband. The conflation of family identities noted by many critics is clear in the text but by no means clear in the mind of Hamlet, who quite late in the play reflects in anguish upon his own inaccessibility to himself: “I do not know / Why yet I live to say this thing’s to do, / Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means / To do’t” (4.4.43–46). This person, whether speaking to himself, the theater audience, or both, is surely Shakespeare’s representation of a subject who believes that he is or should be fully present to himself and cannot fathom why someone who possesses the motive, will, capacity, and opportunity he has is yet one who has not acted. That is to say, even the private self is for Shakespeare a “character”—no less a selection of “character possibilities” than the part the intending actor prepares to play.10 That theater provided the means of discovering this is suggested as early as The Taming of the Shrew, where Katherine comes upon the psychic resources of her self through acting. At the outset, she is a figure in whom social role, self, and subject coincide: the very model of Althusserian interpellation. She is called a shrew, behaves like a shrew, and thinks of herself as a shrew.11 Petruchio may intend to reduce her to obedience, but his taming cracks apart her monolithic identity because he knows how to perform himself and inadvertently passes on the skill to her. His unpredictable, outrageous changes of character—Petruchio the flatterer, the quick wit, the boor, the wife-protector, the ascetic, the brute, the gamester—compel her to abandon her habitual responses of sarcasm, railing, and violence to invent

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new wards from which to cope with his varied assaults. This begins as early as the flyting in Act II, scene 1, where the two wrest one another’s words into new meanings, but becomes increasingly evident when they retire to Petruchio’s “taming school” in the country. Deprived of sustenance and sleep, instructed in continence on her wedding night, she “knows not which way to stand, to look, to speak, / And sits as one new risen from a dream” (4.1.185–86)—experiencing the disorientation of Christopher Sly, who is similarly unhinged by a peremptory theatrical host. Although Petruchio boasts he will “curb her mad and headstrong humor” and “make her come and know her keeper’s call” (4.1.188–211), it is by no means clear that this is the result he achieves. Rather, her disorientation seems to have opened a reflective space that hitherto she gave no evidence of possessing.12 As she ponders in perplexity Petruchio’s claim to be tormenting her out of “perfect love” (4.3.12), she speaks of herself for the first time as a “who” with a history, complaining that “I, who never knew how to entreat, / Nor never needed that I should entreat” must now endure such oxymoronic teasing (4.3.2–14). And she reveals a new capacity literally to articulate her self when Petruchio arbitrarily dismisses the fashionable cap she admires: My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, Or else my heart concealing it will break And rather than it shall, I will be free, Even to the uttermost, as I please, in words. (4.3.77–80)

It is certainly not the case that she has been unable to speak before, but here she explicates her speech act as she had not before, acknowledging the anger in her heart, its ligature in the tongue, and the tongue’s capacity pleasurably to relieve the anger that has nowhere else to go.13 Even more important, this articulation of the loci of anger enables her to separate her feelings from particular words: words do not have to tell the anger of her heart directly. After initially denying Petruchio his time of day, she has apparently acceded to it when they reappear on the road to Padua, and is able not only to accept Hortensio’s plea—“Say as he says, or we shall never go” (4.5.11)—but to embellish it: “And if you please to call it a rush-candle, / Henceforth I vow it shall be so for me” (4.5.14–15). When Petruchio, keen to test her, first insists the moon is shining and then the sun, her reply is ambiguous: “But sun it is not, when you say it is not; / And the moon changes even as your mind” (4.5.19–20). Is she saying, “Your time is my time” or is she saying, “I know you to be as arbitrary and inconstant as the moon, and though I must

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accept your version of reality to get back to town, I am not doing it mindlessly; I am playing the part of obedient wife that is demanded of me”? That is, I will to will. The difference is that between a tamed falcon with verbal skills and a woman as conscious as her tamer—maybe more so, since she plays with an ambiguity he may not know she possesses.14 When old Vincentio appears a moment later and Petruchio greets him as “gentle mistress,” Katherine outdoes him in fulsome praise: “Happy the parents of so fair a child! / Happier the man whom favorable stars / Allots thee for his lovely bedfellow” (4.5.39–41). Critics and performers have noted that her subsequent apology includes a glance at her husband’s celestial uncertainties as she claims to have been bedazzled by the sun; but, more telling, she seems to have discovered the pleasure of performing before an audience and, along with it, Petruchio’s secret of wielding power by manipulating that audience. With this easing of the anger of her heart through displacement onto personated words, she can become more socially powerful as Petruchio’s loyal wife and psychologically more powerful as Katherine’s concealed subject. This latter entity is the subject controlling the new role of tamed shrew she has decided to play before Petruchio and others, which was elicited by Petruchio’s arbitrary taming practices. It marks a distinct departure from the monolithic figure she was at the beginning of the play— simultaneously self, subject, and role. It is this new subject who subtly ventriloquizes the final oration—preferably with its stitches just visible—and wins gratitude from her relieved and joyful husband, who may not know how protean a future lies within the loving smile of his partner.15 Katherine, on this reading, has a kind of self that resides with her, and not “an unkind self, that itself will leave / To be another’s fool” (Tro. 3.2.149– 50). She is no Cressida. But if, like Hamlet, she has a private self that can hide itself within her required role, that self, like Hamlet’s, is itself a “character” insofar as it now thinks it possesses its own secret and is self-possessed. Katherine, that is to say, is the Hamlet who speaks to his mother in Act I, not the Hamlet of the soliloquies who reveals, both indirectly and directly, his inaccessibility to himself. It is in Richard III that Shakespeare comes closest in an early play to the representation of a split subject, again through his interest in the hero’s theatricality. As Bernard Spivack taught us long ago, much in Richard derives from the late morality Vice. But Shakespeare uses the theatrical conventions of the Vice in a distinctive way so as to lay open Richard’s psyche to our view. The presenter of his own play, he is wholly self-possessed as he describes the glorious summer of his Yorkist brother and how ill suited he is to it. In the manner of the hybrid Vice, he identifies himself candidly, tells us what he is

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going to do, does it, then comments on his achievement, making an admiring audience complicit in his evil.16 Although his role demands that he generate many characters from his dramatis persona of crafty Richard—brother, wooer, worldly innocent, loyal friend, holy penitent—psychologically he is at the outset what Katherine only later becomes: a subject assured that his boundaries of self are what he thinks they are. This subject, however, is shown to harbor unsuspected indwellers, denizens from a subtending self whose existence Shakespeare gradually reveals by means of soliloquies and asides. Through their directionality, we can hear the gradual opening of Richard’s monolithic subject as it reacts to newly pressing circumstances.17 Both Richard’s soliloquies and his asides are directed to the audience up to the time of Edward’s death, for there is no evidence that Richard has anyone else to whom he would impart his secret thoughts. This is the man, after all, who had declared, “I have no brother, I am like no brother . . . I am myself alone” (3H6, 5.6.80–83). But once plans are made to conduct the young Prince to London, he surprises us by responding in the following words to Buckingham’s remark that the two of them had best be part of that entourage: “My other self, my counsel’s consistory, / My oracle, my prophet, my dear cousin” (2.2.151–52). In language reminiscent of the sonnets to the youth, Shakespeare springs on us that we are not Richard’s best friend, that actually he has been conniving with a better friend behind the scenes, one in whom he sees himself.18 He seems to have fashioned such a surprise for two reasons: first, the audience is not likely to feel easy about imprisoning and disinheriting the little princes, and must be given a way gradually to disassociate itself from Richard’s assault on innocence; second, Richard’s isolation and opening to himself will be far more powerful if has had a second self, playing Mosca to his Volpone, who abandons him. From the beginning of Act III, when the Prince is welcomed to London, until Richard ascends the throne, Buckingham is this “other self,” collaborator in a political theater designed to usurp the crown.19 His refusal to assent to the murder of the children early in Act IV leaves Richard without a confidant for the first time in the play, and Richard’s progressive self-enclosure can be traced in the way Shakespeare fashions his soliloquies and asides. After he has identified Buckingham as his “counsel’s consistory,” we find only a few more asides of direct address to the audience: when the Prince chats with Buckingham about Julius Caesar and the Tower (3.1.75–83) and when he boasts he’ll win back France if he lives to be a man (3.1.91–94). There are no asides at Richard’s next appearance in the council scene (3.4), and none in the Tower scene (3.5), where he and Buckingham appear in armor to enact a fictional fear of conspiracy before the Mayor, or in the Baynard’s Castle

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scene (3.7), where Richard appears between two bishops to perform his reluctance to accept the crown. These scenes are devised to put Richard on display, not only for the onstage audience but also for the theater audience, who now can enjoy Richard’s histrionic skill without fear of contamination since Buckingham has taken over the role of confidant. Richard’s next aside is heard in the coronation scene, when he is seated on the throne and Buckingham has declined to venture an opinion on the proposed murder of the princes. Catesby notices that Richard “gnaws his lip,” and Richard says, “I will converse with iron-witted fools / And unrespective boys; none are for me / That look into me with considerate eyes” (4.2.28–30). To whom is he speaking? Apparently to himself, since Catesby and others are watching him intently, and his words are hardly likely to please a theater audience so described. But more significantly, with these words Richard is rejecting the relationship of confidence itself: what he has wanted, first in the audience, then in Buckingham, is admiration and approval—reduplication—not examination by eyes that analyze, deliberate, and judge. This new, self-directed aside is repeated a few lines later when he says, “The deep-revolving witty Buckingham / No more shall be the neighbor to my counsels” (4.2.42–43), and may be heard amid his instructions to Catesby to spread the rumor that Anne is sick and to find some poor gentleman to marry Clarence’s daughter—“The boy is foolish, and I fear not him” (55)—an admission of anxiety not likely to be made to Catesby.20 In talking to himself, Richard is dividing his subject into speaker and hearer. And once the monolithic self so subdivides, critique becomes possible. We can see this developing in Richard’s soliloquies. He speaks one soliloquy directed to the audience after Buckingham defects, when he informs us that he has imprisoned Clarence’s son and meanly matched his daughter, killed Anne and the royal children, and is about to court Edward’s daughter Elizabeth (4.3.36–43). But his final soliloquy, like his later asides, is directed to himself and only overheard by the audience. We now witness a virtual explosion of his subject. Beginning as an internal monologue, the speech becomes an internal dialogue, and then a report of “a thousand several tongues” thronging to the bar of Richard’s conscience to accuse and condemn him of perjury and murder (5.3.178–99). Not only is the speech self-addressed—subject as speaker and hearer—and overheard by the audience, but it is multiply voiced by Richards whose very possibility of exis­ tence has hitherto not been entertained. Richard III is literally dispossessed at this moment, in that the “I” through which he has always spoken is no longer in his control. In psychological terms, the single subject of the glorious summer has been fragmented by the victims who appeared in his

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intrusive dream, and another possibility of self—the subject called “conscience”—has emerged from his hitherto identical self as his secret sharer to afflict and challenge the self-possessing “I.” This emergence is voiced in familiar language: “What do I fear? Myself? There’s none else by. / Richard loves Richard, that is, I am I” (5.3.182–83). But it quickly becomes evident that the opposite is true—I am not I—as the two Richards controvert that identity: Is there a Murtherer heere? No;  // Yes, I am: // Then flye; What from my Selfe? // Great reason: // why? // Lest I Revenge. // What? my Selfe upon my Selfe? Alack I love myself. // Wherefore? For any good That I myself have done unto myself? // (5.3.184–88)21

The actor who plays this part must virtually learn to throw his voice to indicate that the accuser is coming from somewhere else inside Richard to contest the hegemony of the sound of the Vice. Both voices speak of the self as “I” or “myself,” but gradually the first begins to cower before the unremitting, cumulative depositions of the second: My Conscience hath a thousand severall Tongues, And every Tongue brings in a severall Tale, And every Tale condemnes me for a Villain. . . . (5.3.193–95)

The Vice is no longer arguing, but backing down, citing the accusations he hears, accepting the sentences of his own sins: “Guilty, guilty!” He is now composed not only of his original “I” and the newly discovered subtending “I” of conscience, but of every single sin he has enacted—and they finally convince him that “I my Selfe / Find in my Selfe no pittie to my Selfe” (5.3.202–3). If Shakespeare conceived of Richard as a consummate actor, it is clear that this actor, like Hamlet, has that within which (up to a point) passes show. That is, he has repressed knowledge of himself that is in excess of what he needs in order to be the man he wants to be. The difference between them is that Richard’s comes to consciousness, through the mutually informing agencies of bad dreams and bad conscience, while Hamlet’s does not.22 Hamlet, too, reports “bad dreams,” and he worries that his imaginations may be “as foul / As Vulcan’s stithy” (2.2.256, 3.2.83–84), but we are

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never privy to the content of those dreams and imaginations except as they bleed through language directed to other ends.23 This is because in representing psychic life Shakespeare, like Marlowe, Webster, and other contemporaries, is himself a subject in transition. In Richard III, he draws upon an older tradition that recognizes the “ayenbite of inwyt”—the gnawing of conscience, believed to be the voice of divine and natural law implanted in human beings by God to measure the acts of the self, which silently compiles evidence against the acting subject and releases it to awareness in moments of uncertainty or fear. In Hamlet, where the incursion of the divine into the human is itself a matter of urgent inquiry, he seems more concerned by the hero’s struggle with an inchoate interiority, a struggle intensified by the melancholy skepticism onto which his religious belief is often displaced. In both cases, however, actoral consciousnesses reveal that beyond the borders of the “characters” they have fashioned for themselves is a surplus of self with powerful autonomous impulses.24 This creates a problem for such character-actors, which Richard illustrates most clearly. As a figure who has done as much he can to ensure that others will leave the world for him to bustle in, he has never seemed to possess a conscience or to be permeable by the consciences of others. The Second Murderer worries about his, and Margaret has prophesied that the worm of conscience will gnaw Richard, but such a troubling “other self” has seemed remote from a man who is like no other. Yet within Richard’s actoral subject, his false heart’s history has lurked in recesses of the self to rise against him when he is most vulnerable—and it nearly destroys his act. Nearly—for though he has a conscience, he will not keep it long. By morning he is telling his soldiers that “Conscience is but a word that cowards use / Devis’d at first to keep the strong in awe” (5.3.309–10), and he goes to his heroic death with that rich interior covered over once more. This act is (literally) characteristic of Shakespeare’s dramatis personae. The impulse to revert to “character” is overwhelming, for Shakespeare seems to have recognized that only when acting “in character” can one act at all—else how could Richard go on to fight Richmond?—and hence, that action (in drama as in life) is coterminous with subjectivity.25

III This has a twofold implication. First, it suggests that action is the normal mode of our existence—and by “action” I mean a purposeful directionality that comes out of a sense of one’s calling, however narrowly or broadly that term is construed. This directionality is a form of intention, insofar as

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it “tends” toward some end. Second, only a subject or character can be said to have such an intention. A self in dialogue is by definition undetermined, as is a self in conflict with itself or in transit from one subject position to another. Shakespeare reveals this condition in Brutus’s reflection that “Between the acting of a dreadful thing / And the first motion, all the interim is / Like a phantasma or a hideous dream” (JC 2.1.63–65). He recognizes it in Macbeth’s remark that the imagined murder of Duncan “Shakes so my single state of man that function / Is smothered in surmise, and nothing is / But what is not” (Mac. 1.3.140–42). Though their capacity for interior discursiveness is precisely what we value in these figures, it literally doesn’t get them anywhere; Brutus acts on the strength of his ability to foreclose discourse, translating the voluntaristic and unpredictable behavior of Caesar into the involuntary destiny of a serpent’s egg (2.1.10–34), and Macbeth restores his single state of man by imagining his unresolved self as the personification of “wither’d Murther,” in which identity he goes to kill Duncan (2.1.49–61). For Shakespeare the plotter and maker of character per occasionem, drama is doing, and doing demands reducing the multifarious self to a subject.26 Inward fantasies and deliberations are therefore privileged moments in which the trajectory of the subject is temporarily interrupted and flooded by the self, only to be closed over again, as the subject—sometimes mollified, sometimes stiffened by the incursions of the self—resumes the action. The interruption occurs because new circumstances destabilize character and tap as yet unactualized possibilities of the self, which may coalesce in a new subject with new intentionality. We can hear this happen in Richard III, Brutus, Macbeth, Hamlet, and Hector as they voice their solvent inwardness. But sometimes this incursion of the self, by means of which a new subject is born, is represented negatively—silently—as in Shakespeare’s portrayal of Henry Bolingbroke in Richard II. The question of how Bolingbroke came to the crown vexes the Second Tetralogy from the moment Richard observes him courting the common people “as were our England in reversion his” (R2 1.4.35). His motive in returning from exile is made especially problematic because Shakespeare shifts from dramatic to narrative time as Northumberland tells Ross and Willoughby that Bolingbroke is “making hither with due expedience” (2.1.287) before—in dramatic time—he can possibly know he has been disinherited.27 On the face of it, he is returning with three thousand men of war, eight tall ships, and a full roster of noblemen in rebellion. Yet when he appears in Gloucestershire, he says he comes only to lay claim to his in-

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heritance (2.3.135). Greeted by allies, he promises rewards as his “fortune ripens with your love” (2.3.48), which may refer to gaining his patrimony or something more. Shakespeare complicates the question of his intention by showing him initially as a man who does not live in his imagination but is rooted in the here and now, for he refuses to be comforted by Gaunt’s exhortations to invoke mind over matter while he is in exile (1.3.265–303). Yet he certainly is aware that the here and now is different from the there and then, and that his self-comportments should differ accordingly. When he meets his uncle York at Berkeley Castle, he insists on being distinguished from the man who was exiled from England: “As I was banish’d, I was banish’d Herford, / But as I come, I come for Lancaster” (2.3.113–14). This is—literally—pure sophistry. He is, in the political sense, a different subject, and this means that he is empowered in a way other than he had been formerly, for this new subject is called into being by the inheritance of new rights and royalties that, with the aid of Northumberland, he has sworn to possess as his own (2.3.148–51). Shortly afterward, however, he reveals he has sworn a different oath—to weed and pluck away the “caterpillars of the commonwealth” (2.3.166), which he then proceeds to do, thereby pressing further the question of whether a subject can challenge his prince at all without implicitly undermining the prince’s power and (if successful) becoming de facto prince, from which point it is but a few short steps to eliminating the de jure prince entirely. By the time he displays his augmented power to an unnerved Richard at Flint Castle, the King is ready to supply the subtext for his cousin’s claim that he comes but for his own: “Your own is yours, and I am yours, and all” (3.3.197). The content of Bolingbroke’s “own” has changed in the course of his progress through the country, as it will again when he ascends the throne and when he indirectly solicits Richard’s assassination. How does this happen—and why? In The First Part of Henry IV and The Second Part of Henry IV the former Bolingbroke both mystifies and seems genuinely mystified about his agency in the usurpation and murder of Richard and its relation to intention. Though in rebuking Hal’s delinquency, he remarks that he “stole all courtesy from heaven, / And dressed myself in such humility / That I did pluck allegiance from men’s hearts,” he yet wonders if Hal is God’s scourge for “some displeasing service I have done” and ascribes his acquisition of power to “Opinion, that did help me to the crown” (1H4 3.2.50–52, 5, 42). Later, when recalling that Richard had predicted that Northumberland would betray him, too, he remarks parenthetically, “Though then, God knows, I had no such intent, / But that necessity so bowed the state / That

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I and greatness were compelled to kiss” (2H4 3.1.72–74).28 This might be construed as mere disingenuousness if both plays weren’t deeply concerned about the relationship of intention and agency.29 Even on his deathbed, Henry IV mystifies his accession to kingship: God knows, my son, By what by-paths and indirect crook’d ways I met this crown, and I myself know well How troublesome it sate upon my head. (4.5.183–86)

He names two subjects here and two kinds of knowledge—God, who alone knows how he came to the throne, and Henry, who knows what the consequences were. As he had formerly drained his regal ascendancy of desire by speaking of a compelled “kiss,” now he seems to have been on a country ramble when he “met” the crown. By the time Henry V prays God, “Not today, O Lord, / O not today, think not upon the fault / My father made in compassing the crown” (H5 4.1.292–94), Shakespeare has still not demystified that complex intersection of self and circumstances that has resulted in Henry IV’s kingship. We find an illuminating gloss on the question of intentionality, how­ ever, in a document that bears an unanticipated relation to the process Shakespeare represents in Richard II. At the trial of Sir Christopher Blunt, Sir Gilly Merrick, and others who participated in the Earl of Essex’s later attempt to weed the caterpillars of his commonwealth and capture his Queen—after sponsoring a revival of Shakespeare’s play on the subject—Lord Chief Justice Sir John Popham observed: “Wherever the subject rebelleth, or riseth in a forcible manner to over-rule the royal will and power of the king, the wisdom and foresight of the laws of this land maketh this construction of his actions, that he intendeth to deprive the king both of crown and life; for the law judgeth not of the fact by the intent, but of the intent by the fact.”30 Lest the presumption appear arbitrary, Francis Bacon, Queen’s Counsel, then assured the court that “this construction is no mystery or quiddity of law, but an infallible conclusion warranted by reason and experience,” and cited the example of Richard III, “who (though he were king in possession, and the rightful inheritors but infants) could never sleep quiet in his bed till they were made away” (1411). The Essex conspirators, of course, insisted they had no such intention. But Bacon took this as no warrant of their future actions, construing their subjectivity in much the same fashion as Shakespeare seems to have imagined Bolingbroke’s in the Second Tetralogy:

Discovering What Passes Show / 275 Admitting that the Protestation of the prisoners was so far true, that they had not at that time in their minds a formed and distinct cogitation to have destroyed the queen’s person, yet nothing is more variable and mutable than the mind of man; and especially Honores mutant mores; when they were once aloft, and had the queen in their hands, and were peers in my lord of Essex’s parliament, who could promise of what mind they would then be? (1411)

For Bacon, too, “I am not what I am” is an intelligible statement, though in this particular context he emphasizes its temporal dimension. Honores mutant mores: literally, “honors, titles, public offices change the holder’s character, mind, intention—ethos.” Shakespeare knew the aphorism, for in Measure for Measure he translated it as the Duke’s test of Angelo: “hence shall we see / If power change purpose: what our seemers be ” (1.3.53–54). He also gave voice to the subject undergoing such change of circumstance, as Angelo expresses wonder at the crisis of agency he experiences after his use of new power leads Isabella to deploy her “prone and speechless dialect” upon him and to “play with reason and discourse” in such a way that his lust is aroused: What’s this? what’s this? Is this her fault, or mine? The tempter, or the tempted, who sins most, ha? (2.2.162–63)

Though he concludes that it is not her fault, but “it is I, / That . . . does as the carrion does, not as the flower, / Corrupt with the virtuous season,” Shakespeare’s dialogue suggests that the encounter of Angelo and Isabella is more complex than that. It is indeed the power of Isabella’s form and speech, conjoined with her actual physical and political powerlessness before Angelo’s actual power, that constitute the conditions that arouse Angelo’s lust. Throughout the scene she struggles against his irrevocable condemnation of her brother by proposing alternate attitudes and intentions—of thought and desire—that might lead him to pardon Claudio. “But can you if you would?” she asks, pushing him into a hypothetical mood that would act as a solvent on his fixed subjectivity. Then she renders that subjectivity porous by imaging forth contrary-to-fact ways of being: If he had been as you, and you as he, You would have slipp’d like him, but he, like you, Would not have been so stern. (2.2.64–66)

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Not only does she compel him to entertain a fantasy of himself as the fornicating Claudio, but she pursues this sliding of identity by imaginatively making him change places with her, foregrounding their disproportionate strengths by translating her position as that of a prisoner—not a petitioner—in a judge’s power, which breeds desire in his dissolving subject: I would to heaven I had your potency, And you were Isabel! Should I then be thus? No; I would tell what ’twere to be a judge And what a prisoner. (2.2.67–70)31

Isabel’s own slippage here reveals that same excess of feeling that bleeds through her first words in the play—“And have you nuns no farther privileges?”—which are misunderstood by Francisca the nun and must be explicated for her: “I speak not as desiring more, / But wishing a more strict restraint” (1.4.1, 3–4). In searching the fault lines in Angelo’s character, that is to say, she puts stress on her own, and as a result the surplus of self, whose repression has led her to seek institutional assistance, leaks through. Even as she plays with reason and discourse, an inner voice is telling her she is not an artful petitioner for her brother but a prisoner to her brother’s lust—an intimation realized when Claudio asks her to yield her body to Angelo for his sake and she replies, “Is’t not a kind of incest, to take life / From thine own sister’s shame?” (3.1.138–39). But incest is simply a local formulation for the sexual obsessiveness that seems to underlie Isabella’s actions from the beginning and infuses her language with such grotesque puns as the “fond sickles of the tested gold, / Or stones” (2.2.149–50) with which she will not bribe Angelo, and the sadomasochistic narrative in which she describes what she would not do to save her brother’s life: That is, were I under the terms of death, Th’impression of keen whips I’ld wear as rubies, And strip myself to death, as to a bed That longing have been sick for, ere I’ld yield My body up to shame (2.4.100–4)

This is a voice that denies its susceptibility to sexual corruption by exulting in the punishment that its refusal must exact through a hypothetical gram-

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mar in which that punishment is fantasized as sexually pleasurable. Far more explicitly than Bolingbroke’s compelled kiss, even more egregiously than Hamlet’s weeping Niobe following the corpse of her son/husband, Isabella’s excess seeps through her character as self overflows subject. “If power change purpose,” then, is an intersubjective concept—the legacy of a rhetorical anthropology that acknowledges the incidental solicitation of mores (character, intention) by circumstantial encounters. It underlies the practice of both dramatic and judicial construction. The government’s arguments in the trial of the Essex conspirators supply the principle of fluid selfhood that informs the remarks of Worcester, Westmorland, and the Archbishop of York in the two parts of Henry IV and also explicate by proxy what Henry IV is unable to articulate even to himself. But they also suggest a striking difference between disciplines. For the plays do not judge the intention by the fact but are rather absorbed by the question of the knowability of the intention in relation to the fact—whether, as in Bolingbroke’s case, intention remains occluded even after the fact or, as in Hamlet’s, it takes so many detours before the fact that the very continuity of the hero’s self is in doubt. In its insistence on the circumstantiality of mores and hence on the inescapable lability of the self, Shakespeare’s drama performs an ethical analysis more nuanced than Bacon’s legal reasoning and even than the equitable principle of judging a man according to “what he has always or usually been,” which in its normative functioning tends to dismiss anomalous behavior and in the pursuit of fairness seeks to establish longstanding character.32 Moreover, since the drama is not in the strict sense a trial, Shakespeare presses the issue of changing intention beyond its local situatings to question the degree to which his dramatis personae have that within which passes show—that which is unclear or inaccessible and therefore not directly expressible. Surely, Bolingbroke has the potential, though it is unexpressed, to be what he becomes since he becomes it, however inconsistent are his claims on given occasions. He acts, in the theatrical sense, according to the decorum of the scene in which he finds himself, even if he is not aware of the agency of his own desire in the transaction. Ironically, it is Richard II who, in his vocal, gestural, and material interaction with circumstances, best explicates Bolingbroke’s becoming. For Richard is palpably self-seeking. By this I mean not only that he heedlessly appropriates time and materials for his own aggrandizement as king, but that once his kingly subjectivity is threatened, he continually attempts to objectify his feelings so that he can become visible to himself in the world. He makes manifest, in other words, the new subjects he fashions in changing circumstances, as

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Bolingbroke does not. These acts reach their self-explicating climax when he breaks the mirror at the time of his deposition. Disappointed not to see in the glass a reflection that reveals an external transformation commensurate with the loss he feels inside, he smashes the mirror in a symbolic act that simultaneously punishes it as a flatterer, demonstrates the brittleness of kingship, and assists nature in fashioning an objective correlative to his inward grief. Then, before a skeptical Bolingbroke, he speaks as his own chorus: Mark, silent king, the moral of this sport, How soon my sorrow hath destroy’d my face.

But Bolingbroke is unimpressed by what he views as a merely histrionic performance: The shadow of your sorrow hath destroy’d The shadow of your face.

Your play-acting, he corrects him, has destroyed your looking-glass. Richard ignores the sarcasm and weighs Henry’s words: Say that again. The shadow of my sorrow! Ha, let’s see. ’Tis very true, my grief lies all within, And these external manners of laments Are merely shadows to the unseen grief That swells with silence in the tortur’d soul. There lies the substance. (4.1.290–99)

Some five years before Hamlet distinguishes “actions that a man might play” from “that within which passes show,” Richard discovers the gap between feeling and its representation. Feeling, he learns, is ineffable—as, later, Lear will cry that “true need” is beyond articulation (2.4.270)—and if it cannot rise to representation it cannot truly be known. It can only be that which “swells with silence”: tautologically, feeling can only be felt. Having made this discovery, he thanks his cousin for both giving him cause to lament and teaching him how to lament the cause: silently. But like Shakespeare’s other tragic figures, Richard II cannot remain a dramatis persona long. He must become an articulate character, and this happens when he asks his Queen to tell the “lamentable tale of me” by a winter’s fire—as earlier he had asked

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to sit upon the ground and tell sad tales of the death of kings—and when, alone in Pomfret Castle, his soul begets upon his brain a “generation of stillbreeding thoughts,” all of them verbal Richards and none of them content. Richard’s reputation as player-king therefore merits further consideration. That he bears the appearance of a king without the substance is not what makes him a player-king, but rather that he lays open the question of the articulability of that substance. Like a player suiting forms to his own conceit, he projects his feelings upon both external and imagined objects so as literally to realize himself—as when he conjures his earth not to feed its sovereign’s foe, or traces his tears and Aumerle’s into their imagined grave, or sees in his proffer of the crown to a downreaching Bolingbroke a well with two buckets—only to end up discovering that he cannot make these gestures quite fit their felt referents. If kingship embodies ultimate human power in Shakespeare’s world, the king provides the exemplary instance of the space that must be negotiated between an ineffable self and its selfknowing word and act. Politically and practically speaking, of course, it makes a difference that Richard is not a good king, insofar as he subordinates the obligations of the body politic to the demands of the body natural and thereby loses the support of his subjects. But the deeper ontological mystery that Shakespeare probes here, as he does later in Lear and Macbeth, is that the king is a shadow—the most powerful shadow—of a substance that cannot be seen. If, while Richard’s royal subject is yet unchallenged, his cousin is impressed by his power to stretch and contract time at will—“such is the breath of kings”(1.3.215)—Richard’s vision, on hearing the defection of his followers, of Death holding court within the hollow crown and allowing kings “a breath, a little scene, / To monarchize, be fear’d, and kill with looks” (3.2.164–65), rehearses the insubstantiality of that royal subject. It is this same frail subject that the Fool describes as “Lear’s shadow” when the old man, now king-in-name-only, asks who can tell him who he is (1.4.231), and that gradually dissolves into madness. In Macbeth’s final soliloquy, the language flares up again as the King, speaking from within that residuary self which often appears toward the end of Shakespeare’s tragedies, says, “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And then is heard no more” (5.5.24–26). Macbeth makes explicit the apposition of king, shadow, and player that has been developing since the Henriad—indeed, since Richard III—and though he uses the terms as predicates for “life,” he means by “life” the expectant subjectivity we fashion as we position ourselves teleologically along the ostensible trajectory of our lives. When that future selfhood proves insubstantial, then tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow collapse in an undifferentiated

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sequentiality along with the expectant subject. In Macbeth’s apocalyptic vision, it is Life itself that has lived to mock the expectation of the world, To frustrate prophecies, and to rase out Rotten opinion, who hath writ me down After my seeming (2H4 5.2.126–29)

—to destroy, that is to say, the probabilities by which subjects constitute themselves, and plan and act upon their anticipations.

IV And so we come back, as we should, to Desdemona, who licenses a departure from her customary self when she says, “I do beguile / The thing I am, by seeming otherwise” (2.1.122–23). If for Othello the discovery of an improbable self, uncontrolled by the self-knowing subject, is the beginning of a tragic experience that is violently consummated by the restoration of that subject,33 what is to be said about the tragic experience of Desdemona, who seems to move so easily among comportments? The first thing to say is that Desdemona’s customary self, like Othello’s, is itself a beguiling self—a subject not unlike those “customary suits of solemn black” that Hamlet refers to (1.2.78), insofar as it is a conventional disposition unreflectively put on as Desdemona is interpellated into the role of a senator’s daughter. It is in the course of dutifully performing this role that she encounters Othello: though she would “seriously incline” to his tales, “still the house affairs would draw her thence” (1.3.147–48). But soon she becomes less the good housekeeper and more the avid Dido, devouring the stranger’s discourse with a greedy ear. The Duke promises her father that he’ll throw the bloody book of law at whoever “hath thus beguiled your daughter of herself, / And you of her” (1.3.67–68), yet Brabantio’s own description of Desdemona’s chastity unwittingly reveals the restive otherness lurking in her psyche that is all too ready to beguile her of herself. She is “a maiden never bold, / Of spirit so still and quiet that her motion / Blushed at her self” (1.3.95–97). Whether we construe “motion” as action or thought, the line suggests unruly self-division, and the impulse that hitherto had blushed at herself becomes actualized in the presence of Othello, as the process of his life solicits its attention and excites it into manifest rebellion. Desdemona’s line late in the play—“This Lodovico is a proper man” (4.3.35)—testifies to

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the persistence of the sexual alacrity aroused by Othello and, for his own self-informing motives, duly punished by him. While Othello’s exoticism actualizes Desdemona’s sexuality, however, that actualization does not bring her to a crisis of selfhood. It becomes one of her modes of being, as is her love for Othello, friendship for Cassio, respect for Iago, and easy confidence in Emilia. What brings her to crisis is Othello’s violent disintegration, which is first manifest to her when he strikes her in front of the delegation from Venice at 4.1.239, and still more evident when he reviles her as a common whore in the brothel scene: “I understand a fury in your words / But not the words” (4.2.32–33). Here she becomes frighteningly aware that Othello is speaking a language from within a discursive space that she does not share, and her first instinct is to re-create the private venue in which they spoke—she thinks—the same language. So she orders Emilia to lay out her wedding sheets. Intending to draw him back to the scene of intimacy in which he played the lover and not the tyrant, with hideous irony she sets the scene in which he will find her “even [on] the bed she hath contaminated” (4.1.205)—aware neither of his intention to strangle her for contaminating it nor of his intimation of self-contamination on their bridal night that was coaxed into recognition by Iago and then displaced onto her supposed adultery.34 Alone with Emilia in the next scene, she no longer seems to have faith in this expedient and instead falls back for consolation on the memory of her mother’s maid Barbary, whose lover “proved mad, / And did forsake her” (4.3.25–26). It is an oddly chiasmic simile that she fashions: as was Barbary, presumably a North African, to her unnamed love, so to her Moor is Desdemona—perhaps suggesting the universality of her predicament, perhaps hinting that she dimly discerns an erring barbarian in herself. This latter possibility is strengthened by the fact that it is not just Barbary she remembers, but the song she sang to comfort herself—“An old thing ’twas, but it express’d her fortune” (4.3.27)—in which the lover suffers a familiar “madness,” for the voice of the abandoned female says, “I called my love false love,” and her lover retorts, “If I court moe women, you’ll couch with moe men” (4.3.54, 56), implying that he believes their deceit was mutual. Why should Desdemona inscribe herself in this traditional song of slandered, forsaken women and wandering men? The song is part of her personal history, much as Othello’s genealogy of the handkerchief is part of his, and in evoking it now she gives the impression that she is responding to that other history by accepting the hereditary threat that the Egyptian charmer first presented to Othello’s mother if she lost the handkerchief: “my father’s eye / Should hold her loathed and his spirits should hunt / After new

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fancies” (3.4.63–65). This is what the singing of Barbary’s song imports. If one part of Desdemona believes that she is innocent, another part feels herself infected by Othello’s (dis)enchanted eye. She is not what she is because she dwells in his gaze as well as her own.35 Shakespeare had made use of this insight in an earlier play. In Much Ado About Nothing, Hero knows something of what Desdemona knows because, unknown to her, Claudio and Don Pedro have dimly beheld Borachio wooing Margaret in Hero’s name as the maid appeared in her mistress’s window at midnight. When Claudio, his vision of her literally darkened, denounces her at their wedding the following morning, she first protests incredulously, then sinks into a swoon as she hears her name divided by her erring bridegroom: “Hero itself can blot out Hero’s virtue” . . . “O Hero! what a Hero hadst thou been, / If half thy outward graces had been placed / About thy thoughts and counsels of thy heart!” (MA 4.1.82, 100–102). Hero’s precipitous faint foreshadows Desdemona’s instant torpor after being taken “for that cunning whore of Venice” (4.2.91): “How do you madam? how do you, my good lady? / Faith, half asleep” (4.2.98–99). Both experience a kind of vertigo brought on by the sudden fracturing of their personal and social identities. Hero can revive because the Friar devises a deception that slander has killed her. He predicts that when Claudio hears that “she died upon his words, / Th’idea of her life shall sweetly creep into his study of imagination” and she shall come “into the eye and prospect of his soul” more lovely than when she liv’d (4.1.223–30). In the event, when the shadow is lifted from Claudio’s eye, Hero indeed lives again—“She died, my lord, but whiles her slander lived” (MA 5.4.66)—but Desdemona, with no one to enlighten Othello, continues to dwell in his darkened eye—whore of the “strong conception / That I do groan withal” (5.2.55–56).36 This helps to explain her cryptic dying words. When Emilia hears her cry out, “O falsely, falsely murder’d! . . . A guiltless death I die,” and finds her gasping on her freshly contaminated bed, she demands, “O, who hath done this deed?” Desdemona replies, “Nobody; I myself. Farewell. / Commend me to my kind lord—O, farewell!” (5.2. 121–23). Her first words, accusing an unnamed murderer and declaring her own innocence, are patently contradicted by her final words, and the shift is usually accounted for as a last protective gesture toward the man she still loves despite his brutal attack on her. This is a probable interpretation, given her remark to Emilia, “my love doth so approve him / That even his stubbornness, his checks, his frowns / . . . have grace and favour” (4.3.17–19)—a sentiment she repeats in Barbary’s song: “Let nobody blame him, his scorn I approve” (4.3.51). But why does she so approve him? Why is he still a “kind lord”? The answer, I believe,

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is to be found in her response to Emilia’s question: “Nobody. I myself.” Since she cannot possibly mean she is self-smothered, and since “nobody” means either “no person,” as in the song, or literally “no body,” she must be referring to something immaterial, interior, unseen: “I myself.” Her final intimation of what lies within acknowledges her own disruptive potentiality—not something she can muster for herself, as when she told the senators of her “downright violence and scorn of fortunes” (1.3.250)—but an energy beyond her grasp that has been appropriated, actualized, and given a “character” by her “kind lord.” It is the eros intuited by Iago, sublimated by Cassio, and glimpsed in shock by Othello when making love to her.37 The self that is the surplus of subject, she discovers, can be one’s own and another’s at the same time. For Desdemona, too, “I am not what I am” is a tragic recognition.

Part V

Performing the Improbable Other on Shakespeare’s Stage

Ten

“Were I the Moor, I Would Not Be Iago”: Ligatures of Self and Stranger

It is possible, then, that the self can harbor an unexpected stranger from a foreign land, who is introjected through the gaze of another. It is further possible that this stranger can be called to awareness when the appropriate circumstance solicits. From this an intriguing set of questions arises concerning the relationship of actor to role. If Shakespeare thought of dramatis personae as actors entering a play, possessed of a reservoir of subject-possibilities that they might fit scene by scene and sometimes moment by moment to the characters they are called up to personate—and if the antitheatrical criticism of the period imagined actors as incipient characters just waiting for the chance to indulge their true natures as they assumed their preferred parts—what may we infer about the experience of those early modern subjects who actually performed the roles of aliens on the stage? Certainly, the circumstances of speech, action, and scene solicited their internal strangers to emerge. But how did the stranger get there in the first place, and what did it mean to act him out? This is a complex issue, informed by the environing cultural discourse, the social and performative positions of the actor, and the densely interwoven rhetoric of his playscript. However thickly textured, it is a matter worth investigating. In this chapter and the next, I explore the situation of Elizabethan and Jacobean actors in extremis as they play figures from the eschatia of European experience, in order to understand what made playing them possible, pleasurable, and safe—even, perhaps, edifying.

I As the Venetian Council ends its meeting shortly before Othello’s departure for Cyprus, the Duke bids all goodnight and tells Brabantio, “If virtue

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no delighted beauty lack / Your son-in-law is far more fair than black.” To which the more skeptical First Senator feels it necessary to add, “Adieu, brave Moor, use Desdemona well” (1.3.290–92). The Duke’s courteous attempt to “wash the Ethiope white,” followed by the Senator’s words leavening praise with admonition, leaves no doubt that the racial attitudes heard earlier in the coarse epithets of Iago and Roderigo, and in forms just slightly less fulsome from Brabantio, permeate the highest reaches of Venetian society. Despite attempts to bracket such prejudices—which seem to be more accessible at times of personal self-doubt and less so when one is concerned with public affairs—this is not a discreet form of racism; it is the Elizabethan kind, outspoken and unembarrassed, even in the presence of its ostensible victim, though it can be expressed, as here, in the politic language of statesmen.1 The audible ambience of Act I, scene 3 signifies that the Venetian Council regards Othello as exotic, admirable, eloquent, indispensable, and also suspect—and that he knows it. Even more problematically, the actor playing him knows it. And that is a matter of more than passing interest. For as we have become increasingly aware in recent years, late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Englishmen made use of the alien cultures they had begun to encounter with greater frequency—through exploration, expanding trade, and inter-European rivalry—as means of redefining, characterizing, and representing themselves. In Elizabethan and Jacobean plays featuring roles for foreigners, dramatists staged the range of attitudes toward cultural others that were currently available, and often revealed the unconscious strategies by means of which beliefs about race, ethnicity, and religion were interanimated and inscribed in texts that fashioned and corroborated a developing national identity that was communicated through perfor­ mance to the same audiences from whom, in many instances, they had been received.2 Given this ongoing cultural process, the experience of acting such plays, with their often multiple, even contradictory, views of significant foreigners, could become both a testing of cultural boundaries and the limiting case of acting itself: a probing of “that within” which an Englishman might not be supposed to have, but which an actor had somehow to have—if only as a visio in his imagination—in order to perform his role effectively.3 It provided the occasion, in other words, to explore one’s own cultural formation through an acting that risked radical self-alienation.4 By “self-alienation” I mean not just the playing another, common to all theatrical performance, but literally playing The Other and thereby experiencing what it might be

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like to be an “alien.” Hence, the resonance of Iago’s assertion in the title of this chapter: it assumes an absolute difference between the Italian ensign and the Moorish general—as though, should the denizen be the alien, he would not be himself. While that “would” contains a volitional element that ostensibly refers to the power differential between master and follower (“If I could be Othello, I would never be Iago”), it may also connote the desire, in a contrary-to-fact conditional sentence, to enjoy Othello’s cultural condition—all that imaginatively accrues to his “Moorishness”—and that is what I wish to investigate in the case of the actor. If it is true that early modern English subjects tended to constitute themselves, upon emergent occasions, in contradistinction to their cultural others, what happened to that subject when he was an actor and occasion called on him to personate not simply what he was not, but—as we have gradually come to understand—someone whose motives were believed to be often unreadable, whose behavior was inconsistent, and whose outlines were not even distinct? I arrive at this question from the thesis argued in the previous chapter—that Shakespeare entered the discourse of the early modern subject by means of a theatrical practice permeated by rhetorical notions of selfhood. The rhetorical self is opportunistic, adapting its ethos to the demands of present circumstances. Although the tradition generally assumes a centered self that directs its own entrance into and exit from the decorum of the moment, it also acknowledges a mysterious loss of control, in which the speaker yields himself to the occasion and often finds difficulty returning to the host self, so rapt is he by his cause. This appears most famously in Quintilian’s comparison of the orator to an actor exiting from the theater “drowned in tears” after having performed a grave part, and in his own confession that “I have frequently been so much moved while speaking, that I have not merely been wrought upon to tears [ut me non lacrimae solum deprehenderent], but have turned pale and shown all the symptoms of genuine grief” when pleading a client’s case. I say “famously” because, as noted earlier, the passage was adapted by Shakespeare to express Hamlet’s astonishment at the First Player’s metamorphosis as he describes the grief of Hecuba, no mother of his but merely “a fiction,” “a dream of passion” (2.2.552).5 Elsewhere in the play it is apparent that the model applies to Hamlet himself, often caught “laps’d in time and passion” (3.4.107). As I have argued, it also applies to many of Shakespeare’s major figures, who are induced by circumstances to seek an appropriate decorum and become different persons for the nonce, sometimes finding it difficult to resume the men—and women—they were. The self thus represented is

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discontinuously “circumstantial” and also residual or “gathered” (to adopt Jonson’s contemporary honorific), and is formulated in variants of the expression “I am not what I am.”6 This rhetorical notion of selfhood is reinforced by the routine practice of developing script from plot and of regarding character as something that emerges situationally, for the occasion, in a given scene. But Shakespeare’s experience of acting and observing actors seems to have raised the more complicated issue of the relation between the two kinds of self. It led him to think beyond the vaunted flexibility of orator, courtier, and machiavel, and to query the power of a host self to fit itself deliberately to an action, retain control of the shape it assumes, and know the content of that shape. As a result, he represented persons who variously model actors learning to act or playing their parts, some of whom believe they have mastered their roles, some who find the roles have mastered them, some whose actoral consciousnesses discover in varying degrees that they are behaving in ways unclear to themselves, having that within which passes show. This dialectic of self (the overplus of subject) and subject (the intending self ) seems to be at play in many a Shakespearean dramatis-persona-cum-character. When we ask how the professional actor might have experienced such psychic excurses, however, the evidence is virtually all indirect. That they do occur, sonnets 109–111 attest: despite the speaker’s insistence to his friend, “As easy might I from myself depart / As from my soul, which in thy breast doth lie” (109), he soon admits that while away he’s “made my self ” (an act of agency) “a motley to the view” (110), and as a result, “Almost thence my nature is subdued / To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand” (111). That is to say, he has lost agency by playing—almost. However disingenuous an excuse for infidelity, it does echo the few accounts we have of Elizabethan and Jacobean acting, though these are not offered by actors themselves. An exception is Thomas Heywood’s Apology for Actors, which is generally silent about the internal experience of the player. In stressing the importance of an actor’s conceit, however, Heywood writes that Julius Caesar, when performing Hercules Furens, actually killed a servant assigned the part of Lichas because he was “so carried away with the violence of his practised fury, and by the perfect shape of the madnesse of Hercules, to which he had fashioned all his active spirits” (E3v). This offers some hint as to what he thought was going on within when he described Edward Alleyn as a “Proteus for shapes and Roscius for a tongue, / So could he speak, so vary”—praise echoed by Thomas Fuller, who characterizes Alleyn as one “so acting to the life, that he made any part (especially a majestick one) to become him” (Nungezer, 8, 11). Although neither description tells us what being a Proteus felt like,

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each implies that Alleyn not only assumed a role but also assimilated himself to it or it to himself. Identical language is used to describe Burbage. An elegist at his death lamented that he would see “No more young Hamlett, ould Heironymoe /  Kind Leer, the Greved Moore, and more beside, / That lived in him,” punningly conflating the life of the actor and those of the persons he played. Later in the century, Flecknoe combined the themes of varying and straying when he reported him “a delightful Proteus, so wholly transforming himself into his Part, and putting off himself with his Cloathes, as he never (not so much as in the Tyring-house) assum’d himself again until the Play was done” (Nungezer, 74, 78). Edmund Gayton, reminiscing in 1654 about Caroline actors, remarks, “I have known my selfe, a Tyrant comming from the Scene, not able to reduce himselfe, into the knowledge of himselfe, till Sack made him (which was his present physick) forget he was an Emperour, and renew’d all his old acquaintance to him; and it is not out of most mens observation, that one most admirable Mimicke in our late Stage, so lively and corporally personated a Changeling, that he could never compose his Face to the figure it had, before he undertook that part.”7 In Shakespeare’s own work the clearest expression of this possibility of subjective loss is uttered by Coriolanus, when Volumnia urges him to solicit the voices of the plebeians and “perform a part / Thou hast not done before” (3.2.109–10). After envisioning the physical transformations he will undergo—his throat turned “into a pipe small as a eunuch,” the “smiles of knaves” camping in his cheeks, “schoolboys tears in his eyes,” knees bent “like his / That hath received an alms,” he refuses to play the part, “Lest I surcease to honor mine own truth, / And by my body’s action teach my mind / A most inherent baseness” (3.2.113–23). A behaviorist of the Aristotelian strain, Coriolanus goes even further than Hamlet, who had told his mother that “use almost can change the stamp of nature” (3.4.168). Such impressions, along with the reproaches of antitheatrical critics, corroborate evidence from the plays that actors became absorbed in the otherness of their roles and sometimes found it difficult to recede from these occasional selves and resume the men they were. Exaggerated as these comments seem, a venerable psychology, with roots in Latin rhetorical theory and Galenic medicine, authorized them. Joseph Roach has shown that the process of personation was thought to begin when the actor, as initiating agent, summons a visio to his imagination of the person he is to play. This image then stimulates his passions, activating animal spirits that radiate to the exterior (as Caesar’s do in Heywood’s anecdote) and stir correspon­ dent humors, which, being slower to flow and to ebb, prevail long after the

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cause of the effect is past. Hence the actor who begins as an intentional agent becomes the instrumental agent of his own passion, exhibiting that decentering of self and apparent loss of rational control noted by censors and appreciators alike, as he affects his audience in whom the process is repeated (Roach, 23–41).8 If acting, then, is not self-alienating in an absolute sense, it is subjectalienating—and by “subject” I mean that part of the self that consciously occupies a “probable” psychic position and suffers a departure from itself.9 So much was to be expected in the profession. But what of its extreme form, when it might take the actor into the terra incognita of the non-European alien? Specifically, what might it have meant for an actor to play Othello the Moor of Venice—though performing Shylock, Aaron, Morocco, and Caliban would have raised similar issues?10 While playing a woman might be demeaning to Flute (“I have a beard coming”) and an abomination to antitheatrical critics, there was no doubt that the actor was personating a member of his own species, as frequent references to “the woman in me” testify. Yet we hear nothing at all of “the Moor in me” or “the Jew in me,” which tends to confirm both dramatic and nondramatic evidence that the Moor—along with his Turkish, African, Amerindian, and Jewish kinsmen— was widely fashioned as the antipodal other to the white Christian Englishman, regardless of where he might come from.11 This was not just because of his color, his association with Mahomet, his alleged pride, cruelty, infidelity, or sensuality but—more significant—his incoherence. Since I want to press this concept in thinking about performing the alien, I shall briefly rehearse its ramifications. In the case of the Moor (especially the Shakespearean blackamoor), incoherence made itself manifest in two major ways. First, as a kind of “monstrosity.” In reference to scripture, the Moor’s darkness was literally a spectacle of God’s chastisement borne by the descendants of Ham, Noah’s disobedient and lascivious son, condemned to serve his brothers Shem and Japeth.12 A genealogical Canaanite, he was also a displaced and promiscuous person. “As Christians,” John Gillies observes, “sixteenth-century ethnographers had little choice but to adopt a monogenetic theory of cultural difference, in which ‘exotic’ cultures were thought to have been ‘diffused’ from a primitive ur-culture. As in the Old Testament, moreover, ‘diffusion’ implied ‘confusion’ or degeneration; a progressive loss of cultural, moral, and linguistic integrity” (32). This scriptural and exegetical tradition of the Canaanite’s cultural promiscuity mingled with contemporary travel accounts of sexual promiscuity among dark-skinned peoples, whose indiscriminate couplings and oversized sexual organs were reported with decorous pruri-

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ency. Their apparent violation of the boundaries of consanguinity and tribal identity made them bestial in European eyes, and it was no wonder that such deformities as men with heads beneath their shoulders and abhorrent practices like anthropophagy—anciently reported by Pliny and Diodorus Siculus, in more recent times by Mandeville, and now preserved in Hakluyt and his redactors—were found among them.13 Moreover, when such a person had intercourse with a white European, the child was likely to be black, as is Aaron’s in Titus Andronicus. George Best’s “A True Discourse,” appended to the histories of Frobisher’s three voyages to find the Northwest Passage to China, offers an eyewitness account of an Ethiopian who married a fair Englishwoman and “begat a sonne in all aspects as blacke as the father was, although England were his native countrey, and an English woman his mother: whereby it seemeth this blacknes proceedeth rather of some natural infection of that man, which was so strong, that neither the nature of the Clime, neither the good complexion of the mother concurring, coulde any thing alter, and therefore, wee cannot impute it to the nature of the Clime” (Hakluyt, 7.262).14 As Frobisher’s lieutenant, Best made it his aim to prove that all parts of the world, including the torrid zone, are habitable, and thus open to exploration and trade. Contending that heat in this region is not as great as is widely believed, he contested the popular climatic explanation, originating in Pliny, that the peoples of Africa, especially the Ethiopians, are black and woolly-haired because of the sun, pointing out that other peoples who live in similar latitudes exhibit a wide range of skin color. His empiricism, however, left him with no satisfactory explanation of African blackness, and he was compelled to accept the biblical curse as the only available cause (Hakluyt, 7.262–64).15 His example of racial intermarriage made it clear that the curse of Ham might easily contaminate the “fair English” and turn them into monsters as well through sexual congress. Best explains his inclusion of the biblical account of blackness, but Hakluyt’s narratives, which tend toward the encyclopedic, often juxtapose practical log entries on navigation, trade items, and tribal language; firsthand observations of the appearance, behavior, and customs of Moors and Negroes; and classical, medieval, and biblical accounts, which seem to be inflected by the writer’s self-interest. It is not unusual to find pragmatic and skeptical concerns expressed alongside descriptions that depend upon the miraculous and fantastic.16 Monstrosity, however—as moral spectacle, physical deformity, sexual promiscuity, or communicable disease—was not the only thing that made Moorishness seem incoherent. The Moor had no stable identity. He was sometimes a Negro, sometimes an African, sometimes an Ethiopian,

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sometimes a Moslem, sometimes a pagan, sometimes an admirer of Christianity. John Lok reports that “the people which now inhabite the regions of the coast of Guinea, and the middle parts of Africa, as Libya the inner, and Nubia, with divers other great & large regions about the same, were in old time called Aethiopes and Nigritae, which we now call Moores, Moorens, or Negroes, a people of beastly living, without a God, lawe, religion, or common wealthe, and so scorched and vexed with the heat of the sunne, that in many places they curse it when it riseth” (Hakluyt, 6.167). He then incorporates the observation of Gemma Phrysius, the Dutch geographer, who noted that the inhabitants on one side of the River Niger “are of high stature and black, and on the other side, of browne or tawnie colour, and low stature, which thing [Lok adds] also our men confirm to be true” (6.168). As Emily Bartels remarks, “Not only are the native peoples identified by broad categories (Africans, Negroes, Moors, Black Moors, ‘Ethiopes,’ and even Indians), but also how these categories are constituted and differentiated is neither stable nor clear” (“Imperialist Beginnings,” 520)—which is why trying to determine whether Shakespeare intended Othello to be black, brown, or tawny is a losing game. This characteristic conflation of biblical, classical, late classical, medieval, and early modern fantastic and empirical writing, Gillies argues, accounts for “what we might think of as the promiscuous or ‘pandemic’ quality of Othello’s exoticism, the way in which his Africanness is constantly being telescoped into other notorious forms of exoticism: Turkish, Egyptian, and Indian” (32). Daniel Vitkus extends the filiations: Othello “is not to be identified with a specific, historically accurate racial category; rather he is a hybrid who might be associated, in the minds of Shakespeare’s audience, with a whole set of related terms—Moor, Turk, Ottomite, Saracen, Mahometan, Egyptian, Judean, Indian—all constructed and positioned in opposition to Christian faith and virtue. More than being identified with any specific ethnic label, Othello is a theatrical embodiment of the dark, threatening powers at the edge of Christendom.” He is, to put it briefly, a miscellany.17 To some wits this might have made Othello the ideal actor’s role since Elizabethan critics—Hamlet among them—were inclined in their more hyperbolical moments to consider acting itself “monstrous” and the actor a monstrous hybrid.18 But from the perspective of the serious player, what sort of undertaking was it to perform a dramatis persona whose real-life counterparts trailed rumors of monstrosity and miscellany after them, traces of which are echoed in the play, and who is rather the structural effect of the oikumene of Venice (Gillies, 27) than a person with qualities of his own?19 Which brings us back to the question of why we never hear about “the Moor

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in me,” when many Moors and their imagined kin strut upon the London stage, and were not unfamiliar in London streets.20 The part seems to involve identifying not just with alien darkness (pride, sexuality, brutality, impiety) but—more inessentially—with promiscuity, errancy, extravagance, exorbitance. With “that within which passes show”—a nonentity that eludes representation in a double sense, being that which is both inchoate (“Chaos is come again”) and repressed (“Haply for I am black”). That a figure like Othello also exhibits nobility, continence, and generosity might make him not less but rather more threatening than the self-serving, lustful, and palpably cruel Aaron. For if early modern descriptions of exotic aliens served to affirm an antithetical English identity, then signs of similarity between an exotic and an Englishman might induce denial and still more urgent othering. “If we are like you in the rest,” Shylock tells an increasingly discomfited Salerio and Solanio, as he assimilates Jewish to Christian revenge, “we will resemble you in that”—only to intensify Venetian Jew-baiting for his pains (MV 3.1.67–68). The question of what Burbage might have experienced playing Othello, then, expands to one that asks, “How do you enact the improbable flux of Shakespeare’s stranger if that is precisely what you are defending against in yourself ?” The question has behavioral, discursive, and dramaturgic dimensions. For one answer, we might heed the suspicious hermeneutics of the anti­ theatricalists, who argued that players are naturally disposed to the roles they perform. In their conviction that acting subverts the divinely ordained hierarchies of microcosm and macrocosm, these critics are more intuitive about the potential unruliness of desire and the existence of an importunate unconscious than are the defenders of theater. They call it “nature,” “inclination,” or “disposition,” detecting forbidden polymorphous pleasures in the manipulation of “Playhouse Vizards, vestments, images and disguises, which during their usage in outward appearance offer a kinde of violence to Gods owne image and mens humane shapes, metamorphosing them into those idolatrous, those brutish formes, in which God never made them” (William Prynne, quoted in Worthen, 21). In using disguise, the critics suggest, actors press beyond the forms that constrain otherwise uninhibited energies and discover, to themselves and others, what their creation and their culture have determined they shall not know—what it is to be a woman, most notoriously, but also such alien beings as Moors, Turks, and Jews. There is a transgressive joy to be experienced in resolving yourself so radically into what you are not.21 But how, specifically, is this joy released, experienced, and repented? The discursive answer, suggested by Shakespeare’s texts, is that the actor enters

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the cultural epiphenomenon of flux by playing out, against a litany of monster-language that reminds him (and his audience) who he must be, the contradictory strains the dramatist has written into his part in a functional heteroglossia that articulates the inessentiality of his dramatis persona.22 Thus the idea of the monstrous is registered thematically in a language that emerges from the cultural discourse of otherness and formally represents the alien as a miscellany—a “fardle of facions,” in the words of the early anthropologist Jacob Boemus—that exceeds in its density of contradictory qualities the pluralities that often emerge in the representation of nonalien figures. Among its contradictions is an assimilationist strain that familiarizes the outsider, makes him playable, sympathetic, and at times even admirable. This is the ligature that enables an actor tacitly to acknowledge “the Moor (or Jew) in me” and to compel his audiences to acknowledge the presence of Moors and Jews in themselves. It is the dramatist’s counterpart of what Anthony Pagden has termed “the principle of attachment”—a manifestation of the European’s need to familiarize the strange human and natural phenomena he has encountered in his travels and relate them to his own experience, or to recognize in them the practices of Western culture, whether contemporary or ancient.23 But such moments are doubly charged. According to the binary logic of the cultural self-construction we have been examining (I = not he), an acknowledgment of this kind would be an uncomfortable, destabilizing experience that demanded reversal (Hall, 25–61 and passim). The performer would therefore be subject to a kind of psychological paroxysm. Acting Shakespeare’s alien, he would find himself initially released into demonic philautia—an oceanic, autoerotic sense of unconstraint as he identifies with the other, which would oscillate with a reassuring sense of familiarity as the other identifies with him, drawing him to an embracing philanthropy—this man is like me, after all—that the text would ultimately force him to renounce and for which he would undergo punishment so that he might repossess his circumscribed English self.24 The dramaturgic tradition that enabled this experience may be found in what Robert Weimann has termed Figurenposition. In Shakespeare’s theater, it refers in the first instance to a distinction between “locus” and “platea” performance—the one belonging to the mimetic world of the play, the second to the transactional space between actor and audience.25 In this second space—more social and psychological than physical—the actor expresses words that are “impertinent” to the mimetic world of the play, which is sustained by dialogue among the figures of dramatic illusion. Thus varieties of monologue—soliloquy, aside, prophecy, satiric gibe, and proverb—arrive in his speech from venues external to that world of illusion, as verbaliza-

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tions of those planes of experience that he shares with minds beyond those of the persons in the play. Although Weimann distinguishes the “locus” as the space representing hierarchical power from the “platea” as the space embodying popular values, his terms enable many discriminations among speeches, in accordance with style, content, and illocutionary force, which need not be reduced to binaries of power. They are therefore useful in locating—socially, culturally, and psychologically—the different strains of discourse that inform the actor’s subject.26

II Before utilizing the insights offered by these mutually implicating perspectives to learn what it might have been like for Richard Burbage to play Othello, I shall test the method by showing how such an approach might illuminate the playing of cultural others in an early, late, and middle Shakespeare play in which aliens are given important roles. In Titus Andronicus Aaron bears all the epithets we might expect of a late sixteenth-century Moorish stage villain fashioned from the discourses of travel, humanism, and native morality drama. He is first heard, self-described, as a sexually charged overreacher, rising to power virtually by clinging to the skirts of the Queen, who is “fett’red in amorous chains, / And faster bound to Aaron’s charming eyes / Than is Prometheus tied to Caucasus” (2.1.15–17). His visible blackness speaks from a soliloquizing space that he shares with the audience—Weimann’s platea, outside the mimetic world of the play—suggesting their unacknowledged Moorish kinship. His words rehearse the contemporary discourse of African otherness and the ancient discourse of classical myth they also share, signaling his potentially miscegenous invasion of the Roman world and theirs, and, on the linguistic level, that hybridizing of styles Bakhtin terms “dialogization.”27 From his opening statement, then, Aaron is an ambiguous role to play. Though his villainy is never in doubt, to the ears of his theater audiences he is not fully distinguishable culturally from his Roman conquerors. This does not, however, prevent those Romans from strenuously othering him. While Tamora, besotted by lust, calls him “my lovely Aaron. . . . my sweet Moor” (2.3.10, 51), to the noble Bassianus he is a “swart Cimmerian . . . Spotted, detested, and abominable. . . . a barbarous Moor” (2.3.72, 74, 78). And Bassianus is not shown to be wrong. Aaron is the author of Bassianus’s death, and he contrives the false conviction of Martius and Quintus, the rape and mutilation of Lavinia, and indulges in the supererogatory cruelty of tricking Titus into sending his right hand to Saturninus in vain ransom for his

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sons. When Marcus, killing a fly, explains to an outraged Titus that “it was a black ill-favored fly, / Like to the Empress’ Moor” (3.2.66–67), Titus—with what must by this time be audience approval—is consoled that at least “we can kill a fly / That comes in likeness of a coal-black Moor” ( 3.2.78). Aaron acknowledges the darkness of his own desire when he declares, “Aaron will have his soul black like his face” (3.1.205), revealing that he participates in that perversion of will exhibited by his ancestor Ham.28 The litany of otherness, which resounds with such epithets as “hellish dog,” “tawny slave,” “incarnate devil,” “fiendlike face,” thus encompasses and penetrates him, extending an open invitation to the actor to enjoy vicariously the transgressive pleasures attributed to Aaron. More than willing to be the man others take him for, he is the “chief architect and plotter of these woes,” as Marcus affirms at the end of the play (5.3.122).29 The question then arises, what is it to personate this man? Is it to lend oneself to the discourse and indulge one’s lawless fantasies under the mask of blackness shown in Peacham’s drawing? The answer, it would seem, is yes and no, and the yes is not a simple one. For Aaron’s defense of his color in the fourth act—“Is black so base a hue?”(4.2.71)—legitimates the impulse to play him according to his dramatis persona—“Aron the More”—by which he is initially designated in the 1594 quarto. Although the defense opens on a note of resistance to racial denigration, it actually confirms the racial commonplace surrounding Aaron as he pursues two different arguments. Chiron and Demetrius, he declares, are “white-lim’d walls,” “alehouse painted signs,” able to take on other colors and thus to be potentially and actually artificial and duplicitous, while his blackness “scorns to bear another hue” (4.2.98–100). His own person is thus essential and pristine, incapable of simulation. But there is a flip side to the argument, for when Chiron, foreseeing his mother’s shame in giving birth to a black bastard, says, “I blush to think upon this ignomy,” Aaron triumphantly replies, “Fie, treacherous hue, that will betray with blushing / The close enacts and counsels of thy heart” (4.2.115–18). If Chiron and Demetrius are capable of simulation, they are apparently not capable of dissimulation, which, it would seem, is Aaron’s prerogative, since he is not subject to the physiological signs of Galenic organicism that are manifested in white people. Aaron is deploying the ancient rhetorical genre of the paradoxical encomium here in a particularly insidious way. On the one hand, he insists that he is genuine—“all the water in the ocean / Can never turn the swan’s black legs to white” (4.2.102); so as far as his skin goes, he is a constant signifier. But that signifier remains permanently detached from its signified—the “enacts and counsels” of his heart—which makes him unintelligible to others unless

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he confesses his thoughts. His vaunt of opacity is thus simply a verbalization of what his blackness signifies in the first place. This puts his actor in a piquant situation. It renders the stage villain’s bag of tricks—so aptly described in Richard III (3.5.1–11)—of no use to him, for he must somehow “out” his darkest, most secret self before an audience without histrionic mediation. Ostensibly, it would be a more rewarding task to perform Chiron and Demetrius, who can invoke all the physical symptoms of Hamlet’s Player, than to play Aaron. But Aaron is the more challenging and empowering part, for the actor is guaranteed a secret refuge in the heart of his role to which no one can penetrate, where he can be all that he seems or less, or—not to crack the wind of the poor phrase—even more the Moor. Yet this is not always the case, for Shakespeare writes in a “principle of attachment” for the actor of Aaron in Act II, scene 3. When Tamora tries to seduce him into imitating Aeneas seeking an intimate hour with Dido in a secluded forest cave, Aaron replies: Madame, though Venus govern your desires, Saturn is dominator over mine: What signifies my deadly-standing eye, My silence, an’ my cloudy melancholy, My fleece of woolly hair that now uncurls, Even as an adder when she doth unroll To do some fatal execution? No, madam, these are no venereal signs. Vengeance is in my heart, death in my hand, Blood and revenge are hammering in my head. (2.3.30–39)

He offers her an inventory of rhetorical Galenic signifiers, all of which indicate the “close enacts and counsels” of his heart. It is Shakespeare’s way of making Aaron playable and, paradoxically, less threatening, since he avers that he exhibits the body’s outward language that makes the mind intelligible. Thus, for all the emotional and theoretical othering he hears onstage from himself and others, the actor of Aaron feels from time to time that the man he plays is, physiologically at least, a man like himself.30 At other times, however, Aaron’s black unreadability is an index of an uncanny signifying power. Not only are his motives largely illegible, as Bartels points out (“Making More,” 445), but by his own account he has committed a miscellany of evils that more closely resembles a catalogue of English bugbears (“kill a man,” “ravish a maid,” “forswear myself,”

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“make poor men’s cattle break their necks,” “set fire on barns,” “digged up dead men from the graves” [5.1.128–35]) than the history of any individual. Here the role not only licenses the player vicariously to release his own latent savagery by enacting Aaron’s onstage, but also invites him extravagantly to enter the shadowy places in the English imaginary landscape where frightful things are done by other frightening creatures—elves, goblins, werewolves—now subsumed in the single man he personates. Aaron’s catalogue resembles that of Marlowe’s Barabas, though the Jew’s list has a more urban flavor—including a varied career as well-poisoner, physician, engineer, and usurer—that is complemented by that of his Moorish slave Ithamore, who has set fire to Christian villages, chained galley slaves, cut throats as an hostler at an inn, and crippled pilgrims in Jerusalem (Jew of Malta 2.3.177–215). Personating Aaron (like personating Barabas and Ithamore) is clearly not to “get into character,” if by that we mean identifying with the deep history of an individual. Nor is it to “become a character” in the way Hamlet or Cressida does, solicited thereto by new circumstances. It is rather to engage imaginatively in a collective nightmare in which one catches sightings of events that have been evoked by gossip, rumors, folk legends, broadsides, and woodcuts, and to savor each textual moment as one speaks it as though it had actually occurred.31 If the critics who accused the players of libidinal self-indulgence were to seek a single theatrical role to match their own fervid imaginings, they would find it in Aaron, whose actor must dwell exclusively in wantoning, dismembering, murdering, betraying, and destroying—almost. This “almost,” if cold comfort to the critics, is also problematic for the player. For Aaron participates, as we noticed above, in the Ovidian and Virgilian language of the Romans (as do the Goths), which is the language of the mimetic world of the play. This suggests, as does his visible change of garments from “slavish weeds” to “pearl and gold” during his first speech (2.1.18–20), that he is disconcertingly allied to the performer of this Ovidian tragedy, insofar as he imitates the language of high European art and this language is itself one of metamorphosis and violence. If the actor has found inward pleasure in playing villainous Aaron, he is never far from remembering that he is playing himself. But an even more explicit link exists. It is the dark baby—“my first-born son and heir” (4.2.91)—who, in diction curiously “attaching” for a Moorish slave of a Gothic barbarian, elicits unexpected paternal tenderness from Aaron and yanks our hypothetical player out of “that within which [but for his acting] passeth show” to reconnect him recuperatively to his own firstborn son and heir and, by pneumatic transfer, to those English fathers in his audience who emerge from the dark-

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nesses of their souls to recognize their own links to Aaron, before vicariously burying him waist-deep in the earth to starve.32 Aaron has become a man with whom a white Christian actor (and auditor) can consciously identify, defending his baby son as “the vigor and picture of my youth” whom “maugre all the world will I keep safe” (4.2.108, 110). And after a feint in which he tells Chiron and Demetrius that he’ll exchange babes with his countryman Muliteus, whose wife has delivered a white child (thereby destabilizing the belief that blackamoors always father black offspring), he decides to bring his child to the Goths and breed him in a primitive, even pastoral manner that anticipates the hard primitivism that Shakespeare later associates with Caliban’s, Arviragus’s, and Guiderius’s childhoods: I’ll make you feed on berries and on roots, And feed on curds and whey, and suck the goat, And cabin in a cave, and bring you up To be a warrior and command a camp. (4.2.177–80)

Though never more than a few lines away from reminders that he is a barbarian, Aaron speaks strains and behaves in such a way that he is domesticated, partaking in a common humanity that provides for the player the ligature of “I am” to the “not what I am” of his racial otherness. To act his role, then, is to indulge one’s fantasies of sexual freedom and potency, social manipulation and antisocial violence; outspokenly to glory in that transgressive behavior; then, to share with the public a brief identification with, and, afterward, a self-protective scapegoating of an unabashedly black villain. To be and (thanks to Shakespeare) not to be a Moor.

III Caliban, at the other end of Shakespeare’s career, is a more ambiguous and sympathetic figure, but trails a similar aura of miscellany. In Prospero’s catechism of Ariel, we hear that he is the son of a North African witch and a devil, which makes him doubly “other”—an abhorred slave, as Miranda insists, “Which any print of goodness wilt not take” (1.2.352). Among “The Names of the Actors” in the 1623 Folio, he is “a salvage and deformed slave.” The term “salvage” links him to the wild woodman of the older European tradition, “deformed” to monstrosity, signifying his half-human, half-demonic nature—and perhaps an actual physical deformity—and “slave” to a social and moral condition marked by lack of rational

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self-mastery. Caliban is also implicated in the contemporary discourse of discovery, exploration, and colonization. Ariel’s reference to the “still-vexed Bermudas” aurally links him to the New World, although geographically he inhabits a Mediterranean island, and Trinculo’s speculation that he could make money exhibiting him in Naples as Englishmen do dead Indians reinforces his kinship with the Amerindian, as does Gonzalo’s rehearsal of Montaigne’s description of Brazilian society in the essay “Of Cannibals.” The generic similarity of the shipwreck to that of the “Sea Venture” in 1609 would further stimulate many in the audience to imagine Caliban as a denizen of the New World.33 But Caliban is not only a gallimaufry of identities; the valences of these identities are themselves conflicted. When he first appears, he voices the bitterness of a native who has welcomed a kind, inquisitive visitor to his shores, pleased to be adopted, petted, nourished, taught the names of things—in return for which he has revealed the resources of the island, only to find it taken from him and himself confined to a rocky cave. Thus far the excursus into the Other. But then he reminds Prospero that he was once his own king and is now the sole subject of a foreign usurper. At this point, the just complaint of a natural man, born free of subjection, shades into the claim of a rival European pretender, for he says he has inherited the island from his mother and demands sovereignty. Caliban is no unspoiled Brazilian, who knows “no name of magistrate” nor the word “succession” (2.1.150, 152), and the actor playing him is safely back on home territory without leaving his imaginary island. But in The Tempest, the familiarization of the exotic through language that we noticed in Titus Andronicus has become more complicated, for it is a theme of the play and one of its objects of representation. In his classic essay on European linguistic colonialism, Stephen Greenblatt points up the dark ironies that resulted from assuming either that the Indians were by nature servile brutes—thereby denying them significant languages of their own—or that they were capable of absorbing, when they learned European words and sentences, the cultural understandings in which those utterances were steeped (“Learning to Curse”). He rightly observes that in Caliban Shakespeare represents likeness and difference, avoiding the dichotomizing of many of his contemporaries. I suspect, though, that there is also something in Shakespeare’s treatment that makes it theatrically significant. For his representation of Caliban both embraces and exceeds the common alternatives in a distinctive way. When Caliban tells Prospero, “I am all the subjects that you have, / Which first was mine own king” (1.2.341–42), he seems to be using European speech only too well,

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for he retroactively defines his position in European political terms—as though he fully understood the import of such notorious documents as the Spanish Requerimiento, that compendium of political theory by means of which unknowing Indians were legally subjugated by their colonizers.34 And he replies to Prospero’s justification for thus subjecting him—“thou didst seek to violate / The honor of my child”—with easy recognition of his euphemism for rape: “O ho, O ho, would’t have been done!” (1.2.349). Caliban, we might say, is too uncritically European and Prospero too successful in educating him. Moreover, as Miranda responds in fury to his levity and explains the civilizing process responsible for this transformation, her account reveals a telling omission: When thou didst not, savage, Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like A thing most brutish, I endow’d thy purposes With words that made them known. (1.2.355–58)

She is bitterly rehearsing that side of the contemporary debate about Amerindians that insisted that Indians did not possess language, but inhering in her own words is an irony perceived neither by her nor by Caliban. For the words she taught him that made his purposes known must also have shaped those purposes, given them a specific coloring and resonance, as is indicated by his claim to prior sovereignty and his sniggery response to the charge of rape. He is, that is to say, his education’s creature. While it is possible that Shakespeare intended theater audiences to catch this irony and realize— unlike Miranda, Caliban, or Prospero—that Caliban has been contaminated by his teachers, it is just as likely that he has “attached” him to the Old World discourse of power that is otherwise dominant in the play, thereby making him both intelligible and actable.35 In his own way, then, he would have participated in the process of familiarization that almost always resulted in the suppression of exotic subjectivities. But if an actor can only empathize with what he can understand, and in so doing lead an audience to share his empathy, then Shakespeare’s represention of Caliban enables an act of philanthropy. For the curiously liberating effect of ascribing the language of dynastic succession to Caliban is to make his resistance not only intelligible but also justifiable—especially in view of Antonio’s earlier usurpation of Prospero’s dukedom, which the play so clearly condemns. Thus the actor finds himself playing what is literally a self-contradictory role. He must, in one of its aspects, fit himself to match the language

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of alienation that is spoken of him: in this register, Caliban is unalterably other, as Miranda first declares (“thy vild race . . . had that in’t which good natures / Could not abide to be with,” 1.2.358–60) and as Prospero corroborates late in the play (“A devil, a born devil, on whose nature / Nurture can never stick,” 4.1.188–89). In this Caliban, the actor finds a screen onto which he can project his darkest and most compelling fantasies of the wild man within himself, capable, among other acts, of sexually violating his adoptive sister.36 In another of its aspects, he hears himself speaking and hearing a language that familiarizes the other, in which both Caliban and his antagonists participate. This part of his role functions as a porous ideological membrane through which the language of alienation is filtered and dialogized, in the Bakhtinian sense, with that of familiarization. It embraces the strange, and it reassuringly circumscribes the actor’s risky psychological voyage into the nil plus ultra of the other’s alluring inessentiality by making his villainy a familiar companion. Within these psycholinguistic oscillations between the negative poles of alienation and familiarization are more subtle turns in Caliban’s words. He is naive to worship the drunken butler Stefano and the displaced court fool Trinculo—though in doing so he is only a shade away from Miranda’s “O brave new world, that has such people in’t” (5.1.183–84), as she greets the moral mingle-mangle of Neapolitans and Milanese assembled before her—and he seems to exhibit a slave mentality in his eagerness to serve them, which evokes the contemporary discourse of “natural slavery,” if not the biblical reading of the sons of Ham. Yet he knows trash from value, as his European companions, seeing Prospero’s glistering robes hanging on a line, do not, and he is quite capable of learning from experience: “What a thrice-double ass / Was I to take this drunkard for a god, / And worship this dull fool” (5.1.296–98). Most strikingly, in assuring his new-found allies that Ariel’s invisible music will not harm them, he reveals a sensibility his actor might not have hitherto suspected: Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices, That if I then had wak’d after long sleep, Will make me sleep again, and then in dreaming, The clouds methoughts would open, and show riches Ready to drop upon me, that when I wak’d I cried to dream again. (3.2.137–43)

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The sudden emergence of character upon occasion is familiar enough (we have already heard from an uncharacteristically vituperative Miranda), but what is important about this particular instance is its radical spiritualization of a demi-devil incapable of goodness. It inducts Caliban into the privileged psychological and spiritual milieu of Bassanio and Lorenzo in The Merchant of Venice—the one drawn out of himself through music as he chooses the right casket by hazarding all he has (unlike the “deliberative fools” Morocco and Aragon, whose choices are based on estimates of their own value), the second indirectly explicating his friend’s act as he tutors Jessica on the power of music to suspend one’s historical identity.37 Caliban is not merely astonished by the music, as brute beasts were supposed to be; he experiences heavenly dreams, and his language suggests that what the clouds reveal ripe to drop on him is heavenly grace.38 At this moment, the actor playing Caliban becomes someone capable of Christian redemption, no more the “salvage and deformed slave” on the cast list, the African-Amerindian demidevil who prays to the idol Setebos, or the clown who worships the drunkard and the fool. At this moment the actor can share a spiritual fellowship with the stranger whom he is asked to love as himself.39 The transformation does not last, of course. When harried into his master’s presence by the invisible Ariel, Caliban is once again “as disproportion’d in his manners / As in his shape” (5.1.291–92). But a hint of the possibility of redemption lingers. “I’ll be wise hereafter, / And seek for grace,” he mutters as he goes to trim Prospero’s cell. He may mean simply that he hopes for Prospero’s pardon, which has been offered if he resumes obedience. But he may mean something more—a Christian turn to repentance—just as Prospero’s own words of identification (“This thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine,” 5.1.275–76) may simply admit his responsibility for the disgusting thing he owns or signal a recognition of the darkness that is his. In each case, the permeable membrane of ideology may allow the actors to defamiliarize and familiarize, to familiarize and defamiliarize their parts— to pass beyond the customary bounds of identity to unanticipated philanthropy or to recuperate their ideological selves with reassurance. What is important is that in this late work of Shakepeare, acting the alien enables either outcome.40

IV In Caliban’s cousin Shylock (the only figure in the canon who shares his wearing of the gaberdine),41 the job of playing the alien has moved center

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stage—the Jewish moneylender sharing equal billing with the Venetian merchant, according to the 1598 Stationer’s Register entry and the title page of the First Quarto. Why Shakespeare should have chosen to dramatize the ancient tale of the pound of flesh at this time must be a matter of speculation, but its performance, probably in late 1596, came at the end of several years of unusually strong agitation concerning the presence of foreigners in London, which seems to have engaged him more than once. During 1592–93, merchants and apprentices created disturbances over their alleged loss of employment and trade to resident aliens. A bill was introduced in Parliament at the behest of London shopkeepers and freemen to prohibit the retail sale of imported commodities by foreigners, and after it failed, libels were circulated threatening Flemish, French, Belgian, and other foreigners with violence and expulsion, among them the notorious Dutch Churchyard libel, involving Kyd and Marlowe.42 During this time Munday, Chettle, Dekker, Heywood, and Shakespeare composed Sir Thomas More— presumably on Munday’s plot—in response to what seemed an ominous replay of the Evil May Day disturbances of 1517.43 The addition in Hand D, generally recognized as Shakespeare’s, is of particular interest because it supplies More’s speech to the London rebels, which deals not only with the religious implications and political consequences of disobedience and insurrection, but also with what it feels like to be an outsider in a hostile society. The play is peppered with the opprobrious terms stranger and alien, and in the portion attributed to Shakespeare, More asks the rebellious tradesmen and artisans to imagine themselves exiled by the king (as might be the case if they continue their insurrection) to France, Flanders, Germany, Spain, or Portugal, and exposed to the treatment they are offering foreigners in London: Would you be pleased To find a nation of such barbarous temper That breaking out in hideous violence Would not afford you an abode on earth, Whet their detested knives against your throats Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God Owed not nor made not you, nor that the elements Were not all appropriate to your comforts, But chartered unto them? What would you think To be thus used? This is the strangers’ case, And this your mountanish inhumanity. (2.3.141–51)

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This sounds so like an early rehearsal of Shylock’s speeches to Antonio, Salerio, and Solanio that we can, without sentimentality, conclude that Shakespeare had begun to give serious thought to the predicament of the alien resident by 1593—even granting that the strangers in question were European Christians, not Jews, Moors, or Indians.44 During the next year, though, he had the opportunity to widen his experience. On January 23, 1594, Sussex’s Men performed Titus Andronicus at the Rose, apparently for the first time (Henslowe records it as “ne”). This was a month after the Rose had been reopened, following a nearly year-long closure due to plague, and one day before Dr. Roderigo Lopez was examined on suspicion of treason by Essex and Cecil. Five days later Titus was acted again, and on February 4 it was joined in the Sussex repertory by The Jew of Malta. Marlowe’s play had not been seen in London since February 1, 1593, when it was probably performed by Strange’s Men, the same company that had previously acted Titus. Its new production came too early to have been motivated by what was to be the very public issue of Dr. Lopez, but news of the play’s revival may have caught the attention of the Privy Council, for on February 3—the day before its revival—the Rose was ordered closed on account of plague, though there is no evidence that plague deaths were on the rise.45 Henslowe evidently ignored the order since the play was acted, and Titus was performed a third time on February 6, after which the Rose shut down until April, when The Jew was performed twice by a combination of Queen’s and Sussex’s players, and then closed again. The theater reopened for three days in May, when a resuscitated Admiral’s company performed The Jew before yet another closure, and in June the Admiral’s Men, sharing the stage of Newington Butts, played The Jew back-to-back with Chamberlain’s performances of Titus on June 4–5 and 12–13. Then Titus disappears from Henslowe’s records; presumably it went off with the Chamberlain’s Men to a Burbage venue, while The Jew ran for the remainder of the year under Henslowe’s auspices to gradually diminishing revenue. What is intriguing about this paper trail is that Shakespeare is likely to have had direct experience of the public response to the alien question through his own theatrical activity at this time. The title page of the 1594 quarto of Titus indicates that the play may have originally belonged to Strange’s Men (which joined forces with the Admiral’s Men in 1590), then passed to Pembroke’s Men when the Burbage faction split from the amalgamated Admiral’s-Strange’s Company in 1592, and then passed again to Sussex’s company when Pembroke’s Men broke in 1593 (Gurr, 34–40). If Shakespeare went along with his play and acted for Sussex’s Men, he would have seen at first hand his audiences’ responses to both Moor and Jew, and

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could not have missed the groundswell of anti-Jewish feeling in London when Lopez’s confession and retraction became known and his guilty verdict was greeted “with the applause of all the world”; his hanging, drawing, and quartering delayed to the “general discontent of the people, who much expected this execution”; and his protestation that “he loved the Queen as he loved Christ” greeted with derision on the day of his execution.46 Although Lopez died on June 7, The Jew was performed twice later that month, twice in July, twice in August, and twice in September before it fell out of the repertoire after performances in October and December netted low returns. The Stationers’ Register entry on May 17 of “The famouse tragedie of the Riche Jewe of Malta”—the day after the Rose was closed for the third time—suggests that the exasperated Sussex’s Men decided that if they could not earn a living performing the play, they might at least capitalize on public interest by selling the book for publication, and that Ling and Millington, who purchased the right to publish, thought they, too, would profit from selling copies of the old but now newly controversial play.47 That publication did not follow may indicate government concern that printing might also be inflammatory. Later in the year, however, A True Report of Sundry Horrible Conspiracies of late time detected to have (by barbarous murders) taken away the life of the Queen’s most excellent Majesty reported the notorious Jewish-Spanish conspiracy aimed at taking the Queen’s life, and there is evidence that further publication on the subject continued into 1595 (Hotine, 38). In 1596 The Jew was revived by the Admiral’s Men for eight performances between January and June, and Shakespeare’s company may have decided to take advantage of this continued interest in the Jewish alien with a new play that would cut in on the Admiral’s monopoly of the subject—Lopez’s presence is heard at 4.1.133–37 in the metempsychosis of the “currish spirit” that governed a wolf and “infused itself” in Shylock. Moreover, it would give the Jew an interior life that Marlowe’s play did not give its Jew, nor the London public its Jew when he tried to explain his role in international politics and protested loyalty to the Queen.48 By the end of the third scene of The Merchant of Venice, most of the ideological baggage Shylock carries with him—secrecy, hatred of Christians, bloodthirstiness, vengefulness, avarice—has given the actor performing his dramatis persona of Jew ample opportunity to satisfy audience expectations and self-indulgently to transgress the bounds of God’s image through enactment in both locus and platea.49 But within this same scene are anomalous, highly charged glimpses of “character” not anticipated in Shylock’s dramatis persona. The first is the family anecdote, issuing forth from an unanticipated mental space in the actor—“This Jacob from our holy Abram was / (As his

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wise mother wrought in his behalf ) / The third possessor”—whereby Shylock attempts to share a story in which the ingenious pursuit of self-interest becomes thrift, “and thrift is blessing if men steal it not” (1.3.90). This is not just any story; it is the kind a father tells his son, a part of his heritage, in which he learns about God’s continuous support of his ancestor and his apparent blessing of the way Jacob (and, implicitly, Shylock, the current possessor) acquired his wealth. In telling this story, the actor is called upon to enter into the Jew’s historical memory and sense its emotional temperature, to accept his interpretation of Jacob, and to savor the paradoxical mingling of theft and blessedness that marked Jacob’s life. Shylock’s reminiscence has none of the satiric, self-reflexive witplay heard in Barabas’s remarks about Jews in The Jew of Malta or in Aaron’s praise of blackness. It must be spoken with conviction in an acting that is more transgressive than theirs insofar as it is self-alienating from the actor’s point of view and occupies a manifestly deep psychic space in the alien.50 Shylock, that is to say, overflows his original boundaries, demanding a new texture and shape different from the villainous stage Jew he started out to be, who, living an internal exile within the Jewish pale of the Venetian oikumene, is the mere negation of the host culture. His appreciation of Jacob’s cleverness is seductive, appealing to an Elizabethan love of wit, and also reassuring, as it is apparently endorsed by God. Immediately, though, his narrative is challenged by Antonio, whose reading of the same scripture deprecates human agency and emphasizes Jacob’s service, not his wit—and the actor of Shylock falls back on the uneasy comedy of the chastened alien: “I cannot tell, I make it breed as fast.” In so saying, the player acquiesces in the discourse of otherness.51 Shakespeare invents two other characters for Shylock in this same scene. When Antonio rejects Shylock’s invitation to enjoy the family story and wants to get on with the loan, the Jew tries another approach. He recalls recent history, which he has shared with Antonio—how the merchant rebuked and reviled him, and spat upon his “Jewish gaberdine,” all because he used his own as he pleased. And he asks a logical question: how ought he now respond to Antonio’s request? It is hard to know what Shylock is up to here. Is he taking advantage of Antonio’s new vulnerability by making him squirm at the irony of the situation? Is he suggesting he won’t lend him money because of the insults he has borne? Shakespeare’s actor might sense both these motives and also that he is trying to place the impending business deal in the context of ordinary human relations—to make Antonio understand how he has felt under Antonio’s abuse, to get him to see himself through Shylock’s eyes.52 So once again the actor will enter the place occupied by the cultural other, but this time find himself rehearsing a familiar

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logic in an unfamiliar register. Shall a man who has been spurned, spat upon, and called a dog for his usury return such favors by humbly offering his persecutor money? According to Jesus, it is precisely what he ought to do: “Give to him that asketh, and from him that wolde borow of thee, turne not away”—not even from those “which hurt you, and persecute you” (Mat. 5: 42, 44). Shylock’s question, then, is one that the actor is likely to have heard before, but the answer implied by the Venetian mise-en-scène is not, and the actor finds himself playing the anti-Christ asking Christ’s questions. Or is he really the anti-Christ? In his unyielding contempt for the Jew, Antonio passes up the chance to point out the difference in their spirits and simply tells Shylock to lend him money as to an enemy, so “thou mayst with better face / Exact the penalty” (1.3.136–37)—and this gesture stirs Shylock to a Christ-like conclusion: I would be friends with you, and have your love, Forget the shames that you have stained me with, Supply your present wants, and take no doit Of usance for my moneys. . . . (1.3.138–41)

It was just a test after all. Shylock’s apparent embrace of Christian teaching induces Bassanio to say, “This were kindness,” and Shylock to promise he will show “kindness” as he proposes the bond “in a merry sport” and leaves it to Antonio to instruct the notary on the details. In a single exchange, the actor enters into the place of the other, to find that the other has appropriated a Christian language but seems to be giving its spiritual content a Jewish twist, which is then twisted again, in apparent conformity with New Testament teaching. It is possible that Shylock is the devil citing scripture here, considering what he told the audience on Antonio’s entrance, but the actor may also find himself in a kind of psychic limbo, the possibility of reformation tantalizingly opened. This is an exquisitely refined instance of Bakhtinian dialogizing, in which the brutal modern history of Jewish-Christian relations becomes infused with the idealizing language of the Gospel that is briefly transvalued by modernity and then transvalues the modern. Shylock’s third characterization in this scene is his emergence as a gamester. Because it is crucial to understanding Shakespeare’s realization of his own plot, a question must arise about its relation to Shylock’s other two characters—nostalgic Hebrew and ambiguous Jesus—and to the dramatis persona in which he first appears. One way of looking at this relationship

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is to see the figure who says, “I hate him, for he is a Christian” as the real Shylock, and his subsequent addresses as tactics in the service of a longterm strategy of self-justification and revenge. This is to regard him pretty much as Antonio and Bassanio do.53 An approach more consonant with Shakespeare’s dramaturgy would find Shylock’s dramatis persona—the Jew of Elizabethan ideology—as the repository of his residual or gathered self, and each conversational gambit or characterization as the trying-out of a new subject position to meet the occasion, not unrelated to that self but not wholly instrumental to it, either—among them the proposing of a “merry bond” with an apparently absurd condition. While this gesture is linked to his initial threat to “feed fat the ancient grudge I bear him” and to Antonio’s corrosive hostility, neither is a sufficient condition for the emergence of the obdurate killer Shylock has become by the time he appears in the Duke’s court. It is in continuously responding to aggravating circumstances— Jessica’s elopement, Bassanio’s apparent collusion with Lorenzo, the mockery of Salerio and Solanio, the loss of Leah’s ring, the failure of Antonio’s ventures—that Shylock gathers into the ideological self those bits of latebreaking news that make him the obdurate monster of Act IV.54 But what might this mean to the actor? It means that the script will lead him not only into further opportunistic discoveries of the character- (hence, subject-) possibilities latent within the dramatis persona, but also, more paradoxically, into a self-alienation best described as love for a would-be murderer or, more precisely, philautia in both its etymological and moral meanings—since he must identify with that figure. As the play progresses, the script is increasingly seeded with references to the diabolical and bestial nature of Shylock and the Jews: he is “the very devil incarnation” (2.2.27); his “house is hell” (2.3.2); he is “villain Jew” and “dog Jew” (2.8.5, 14), “the devil . . . in the likeness of a Jew” (3.1.20), a “stony adversary,” an “inhuman wretch,” who is driven by—“than which what’s harder?— / His Jewish heart” (4.1.4, 79–80). It is from within this anti-Jewish liturgy that the actor of Shylock senses the accretive shaping of his role. As Shylock is bid forth to supper at Bassanio’s home, entrusting Jessica with his keys, his ominous dream of money-bags identifies him as the miser Jew. In his detestation of masquing and music, however, and his fear of contaminating his house through its ears, the actor finds himself more surprisingly allied. Suddenly, he is playing one of the antitheatrical London critics who, like Stephen Gosson, worry that “the sweete numbers of Poetrie, flowing in verse, do wonderfully tickle the hearers eares,” and with the devil’s assistance “slippe downe in suger by this intisement” into the soul.55 Here, the alien Jew merges with the Puritan shopkeeper, both inimical to the performer who must imagine

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and empathetically act out what it is like to hate what he is even now engaged in doing.56 Shylock’s most radical change takes place offstage, however, as Salerio and Solanio report that the cool, suspicious, ironic dramatis persona of earlier scenes has ruptured the bonds of his customary mode of being in pouring forth his anguish at the flight of Jessica: “I never heard a passion so confus’d, / So strange, outrageous, and so variable / As the dog Jew did utter in the streets” (2.8.12–14). The refrain, “My daughter! O my ducats!” reveals the mingled sense of betrayal and material loss that makes up that passion, but Solanio’s words also cue the actor who enters two scenes later, appearing agitated and dissheveled.57 Having been unable to obtain satisfaction from the Duke, Shylock understandably accuses Antonio’s two friends of assisting in Jessica’s defection. Earlier he had controlled the semantic shifts in the conversation with Bassanio; now the two Venetians play with his words as he remains obsessively monologic: shy: My own flesh and blood to rebel! sol: Out upon it, old carrion, rebels it at these years? shy: I say, my daughter is my flesh and my blood! (3.1.34–38)

Further, they control the subject matter, as Salerio shifts to the rumor of Antonio’s loss, a foolish move unless he thinks the news will further aggravate Shylock as he contemplates 3,000 more ducats gone. It does: “There I have another bad match” (3.1.44). But it also evokes the threat, “Let him look to his bond,” which seems genuinely to surprise Salerio, who rehearses to Shylock his own deprecation of human flesh (1.3.165–67). What he had not counted on is its nonmaterial value: “if it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge” (3.1.53–54). The very word unlooses an inventory of injuries Antonio has inflicted on Shylock: he has disgraced, hindered, laughed, mocked, scorned, thwarted, cooled, heated him—historical, not merely textual moments like Aaron’s, which the actor must recall with mounting pain until he identifies himself with Antonio’s reason: “I am a Jew.” The series of questions that follow (“Hath not a Jew eyes?” and so on) must be heard against this enveloping litany of othering in order for us to apprehend the emergence, first, of philanthropy in the actor’s imagination—for his initial questions assimilate the Jew to common humanity, then specifically to Christianity—and second, of philautia, as the actor in his new identification with the outsider condemns the hypocrisy of the self he has left behind, and justifies his assumed villainy on the basis of his own former example.

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Shakespeare’s actor is now far past simply indulging the illicit desire to breach the constraints of his God-given identity, as he did when deliciously pronouncing Shylock’s first monologue. Then, he was simply devil-portering it in a conventional cultural enactment; now he is the devil himself, filled with self-understanding and love. For he has discovered that we are all devils beneath our moral visors. The entrance of Tubal immediately after with news from Genoa elicits another change in Shylock. From a position of vengeful mastery, he feels himself the sole bearer of the world’s abuse of the Jews: “The curse never fell upon our nation till now, I never felt it till now” (3.1.85–86). In this state he envisions his daughter dead and coffined at his foot with jewels in her ear and ducats over her body. Tubal says nothing in response, but in recent productions he reflects the horror audiences must feel at this wish. Here, Shylock partly resembles Desdemona’s father whose daughter is “Dead? / Aye, to me” (Oth. 1.3.59) after eloping with a Moor, but also fulfills what must be an early modern fantasy of Jewish avarice—the desire to bury what is most precious rather than share it—at which even his fellow Jew cringes. His continued plunge to the nadir of abjection as the world’s unique victim— no ill luck, no sighs, no tears but his—gives the actor further occasion to tap a familiar repertory, as he finds himself sounding the despairing note of Kyd’s Hieronimo or Shakespeare’s own Titus, unable to find either revenge or satisfaction, and fashioning Shylock on the model of the isolated revenge hero dwelling in a region beyond conventional morality. Then Tubal reminds him that Antonio, too, is having ill luck. And Shylock begins playing the fool. That is, he is fooled, up to his bent, by Tubal, whose own role changes to that of friend-as-tormenter, as he alternately dispenses news of Antonio’s losses, at which Shylock rejoices, and of Jessica’s profligacy, at which Shylock rages, until he mentions Leah’s turquoise. For minutes he has been the subject of derision, then this last insult hits him. It elicits not the expected cry at a supreme material loss, but the revelation of an emotional vulnerability the actor has not yet been called upon to play. (It functions in a way similar to Caliban’s description of his dream.) Though the aperture closes quickly, it instantly recalls the player from his hysterical clownage, asking him to howl Shylock’s wound and, having vented it, to return, in new determination, to the scheming Jew of Act I who presently bespeaks him an officer. Almost. For by the time Shylock enters the Duke’s court, the Jew’s subtending self has become accretively hardened by the experiences of the last three acts. Jessica reports that he has told his countrymen, Tubal and Chus, that he’d rather have Antonio’s flesh than 60,000 ducats. And we have heard him

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declare that he’ll “not be made a soft and dull-ey’d fool . . . and yield / To Christian intercessors” (3.3.14–16). On her part, Portia, or the actor of her role, having experienced none of Shylock’s inner torment, comes to court resolved to perform Christ’s mission and rescue “the semblance of my soul / From out the state of hellish cruelty”—that is, save Antonio from the wrath of the devil Jew (3.4.20–21). Type, it would seem, faces type. But the Duke pretends otherwise. After condoling with Antonio for facing an adversary “uncapable of pity,” he addresses Shylock as one of themselves, who in pity for the merchant will remit the penalty and a moiety of the principal—unlike “stubborn Turks, and Tartars never train’d / In offices of tender courtesy” (4.1.32–33). For strategic purposes he tries to assimilate Shylock, but Shylock stands firm, and in doing so his actor further estranges himself, refusing to give a reason for his suit other than “a lodged hate and a certain loathing / I bear Antonio” (4.1.60–61). This is a curious response, since Shylock has plenty of reasons for following a profitless suit against Antonio. He deliberately omits his history of mistreatment, both past and recent past, perhaps because he feels the futility of repeating it or, more likely, because through history he has transcended history, and become simply The Jew. As such, he substitutes for history a series of references to involuntary aversions offered as analogues to his own irrational antipathy. Only at one point does he seem about to reveal his humanity—when, in response to Bassanio’s remark, “Every offense is not a hate at first,” he asks, “What, wouldst thou have a serpent sting thee twice?” (4.1.68–69). Yet even in that gesture he turns his enemy into an involuntary creature, and Antonio forecloses further possibility of disclosure by responding in kind: “You may as well use question with a wolf.” This places Shylock firmly beyond the influence of the Lord’s Prayer, as first the Duke and then Portia soon discover, and his Christian actor at the greatest distance from himself. In the closing moments of the trial, however, as Portia pleads with Shylock for mercy, an unanticipated connection emerges for the actor. Though morally no better for it, the Jew becomes increasingly the man of oath and law—bound to the word, unwilling to perjure himself, demanding literal justice. Earlier, Antonio had reported that the Duke could not deny the course of law lest he endanger the justice and profit of the city, and this principle has been upheld in the court. Now, as attention shifts to the reading of both bond and law, and it is revealed that the flesh in question is nearest the merchant’s heart, the Jew stands firmly on his right.58 He refuses to depart from the letter of each, despite Portia’s plea and Bassanio’s offers

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of still more money, resigning his agency to the written word: “I crave the law, / The penalty, and the forfeit of my bond” (206–7). Where is the actor in this? What does he know of surrendering agency and becoming a function of the written word? Of repeating certain lines by rote—“I stay here on my bond,” “Is it so nominated in the bond?,” “I cannot find it, ’tis not in the bond”? Does the Jew, bound to the law, and finding in it a license to release his frustration and rage, resemble the actor bound to his role, from within which he, too, can play out his own demonic fantasies? Antonio, at the beginning of the play, had likened the world to a stage, “where every man must play a part, / And mine a sad one” (1.1.78–79). Throughout the text there are suggestions that Antonio’s decision to hazard martyrdom—his acquiescence in Shylock’s choice of the words “flesh nearest the heart” may be the give-away—then actually to play the martyr, is a perverse Christological strategy to express his love for Bassanio while binding the younger man that much more closely to him.59 For the actor playing out Shylock’s historical bondage to the law in the court scene, sticking to the text may perform a similar function. He may be surprised to discover that one of the many identities of the Jew is actor. Not actor as improvisatory Vice or clown, as Shylock had first appeared to be, but as one who speaks no more than is set down for him—who by­ sticking to the text is licensed freely to transgress the expressive boundaries that must be observed by ordinary citizens. The more devoutly the actor does so, the greater his alienation from his customary self and the more confirmed his role as outsider in his own society, fulfilling the suspicions of Gosson, Stubbes, Munday, and their antitheatrical tribe.60 Perversely, it would seem, the more obdurate and hateful the actor becomes as Shylock, the more Jew he, enacting what he loves and hates—his own liberating sense of bondage.61

Eleven

“It Is Not Words That Shakes Me Thus”: Burbage, as if Othello

So far I have been talking about “an actor” or “the player” as though he were a fungible commodity and not a distinct person with his own history named Richard Burbage. I’ve done so because we have no evidence that Burbage ever played the roles of Aaron, Shylock, or Caliban. We do know, however, that he played “the Greved Moore.” This places him closer to us in one respect. We know that he, like many a Shakespearean dramatispersona-cum-character, was informed by the various discourses of his culture in which he occupied, as occasion hailed him, different socially inflected subject positions: joiner’s son, backstage bully, common-law litigant, theatrical entrepreneur, actor, company sharer, liveried servant, housekeeper, painter and limner—not to mention the multiple decorums he must have entered in the course of daily life, where he may have been caught “lapsed in time and passion.” (Or almost—if we can believe John Manningham’s anecdote about “Richard III” and “William the Conqueror.”)1 One such image of Burbage in action—not altogether unrelated to his later appearance as Richard III at Bosworth—comes to us from a legal report of 1590. In a suit and counter-suit waged in Chancery, James Burbage, his wife, and sons opposed James’s sister, Margaret Brayne, widow of his former partner in the Theatre, who was attempting to collect half the gallery takings on the basis of a disputed agreement between James and her late husband. John Alleyn, brother of Edward, testified that on entering the Theatre on November 16 he came upon James, his wife, and elder son reviling Mrs. Brayne and her agent Robert Miles, and found “Ry. Burbage the youngest son of the said James Burbage there, with a broom staff in his hand, of whom when this deponent asked what stir was there, he answered in laughing phrase how they came for a moytie. But quod he (holding up the said broom’s staff ), I have, I think delivered him a moytie with this and

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sent them packing.” Nicholas Bishop, another Brayne ally in attendance, testified that “the said Ry. Burbage scornfully and disdainfully playing with this deponent’s nose, said that if he dealt in the matter he would beat him also, and did challenge the field of him at that time.”2 Whatever bias these depositions register—James had an independent reputation for fractiousness—they leave us the picture of a Richard gleefully entering the fray as dynastic defender of Burbage interests, taking up in action what the others have merely been putting into words, and, sally concluded, descanting wittily upon his own deformity. There is, however, other evidence of Burbage’s ability to assume different comportments as occasion demanded, and though it is less direct, its relation to the actoral experience of shaping a character from a dramatis persona and making love to one’s employment is sufficiently striking as to warrant close examination. I refer to Burbage’s reputation as painter and limner.

I We have no idea how much time he spent in this capacity, but several contemporaries refer to him as visual artist as well as actor. His best known elegy suggests that he was equally adept at both: Some skilful lemner helpe mee, yf not soe Some sad tragedian, to expresse my woe: But (oh) hee’s gon, that could the best both limne And act my greife, and onely tis for him— That I invoke this strange Assistance to’t And in the point call for himselfe to doe it: For none but Tully Tully’s praise could tell, And as hee could, no man could act so well This point of sorrow, for him no man drawe So truely to the lyfe, this map of woe; This greifes true picture, which his losse has bred, Hee’s gone and with him what a world are dead. . . .3

A triple threat, only Burbage working in three dimensions onstage or in two dimensions on a flat planar surface could render “to the lyfe” the grief that his real death has brought his fans: “Others he plaide but now hee acts his owne.” His reputation as limning and stage portraitist preceded his death by many years. In 1603, John Davies of Hereford coupled him with

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Shakespeare among players he loved “for painting, poesie,” and he is probably the “Excellent Actor” that John Webster described in 1615 as “much affected to painting,” noting that “ ’tis a question whether that make him an excellent player, or his playing an exquisite painter.”4 This, as we shall see, is a question to be asked. Burbage was well enough known as an artist that in 1613 he and Shakespeare were commissioned by Francis Manners, the sixth Earl of Rutland, to fashion regalia for the Accession Day Tilt. They probably both knew Manners, who was “perhaps the wealthiest nobleman in England,”5 from earlier days, for he and his older brother Roger, the fifth Earl, had been members of the Essex-Southampton circle and played minor roles in the Essex conspiracy of 1601. Rutland’s steward entered in the household accounts, “Item, 31 Martii, To Mr. Shakspeare in gold, about my Lorde’s impreso, xliiijs. To Richard Burbage for paynting and making yt, in gold, xliiijs.”6 An impreso or impresa, as William Camden describes it, was “a device in picture with his motto or word, borne by noble and learned personages, to notify some particular conceit of their own.” It required “a correspon­ dency of the picture, which is as the body, and the motto, which as the soul giveth it life. That is, the body must be of fair representation, and the word in some different language, witty, short, and answerable thereunto; neither too obscure, nor too plain, and most commended when it is an hemistich or parcel of a verse”7 Shakespeare was probably paid to invent the motto and Burbage to perfect the device by designing the picture and rendering both picture and motto in colors. On March 25, 1616, shortly before Shakespeare’s death, Rutland hired Burbage again, this time to do the whole job himself: “ Paid . . . Richard Burbidg for my Lorde’s shelde and for the embleance, 4l 18s” (Rutland Mss., iv.508). In the same year Francis Manners was inducted into the Order of the Garter, and there is an anonymous engraving of him in his Garter regalia that may also be connected to Burbage, who leaves evidence that he was a perceptive portraitist. A small portrait now in the Dulwich College Picture Gallery, and described in the original bequest as “Mr. burbig his head, a smal closit pece,” has been attributed to him. It shows a man with a brooding, world-weary expression, strong nose, slightly pursed but full lips, and deep-set, penetrating slate blue eyes that stare directly back at the viewer. A second portrait, of a woman, described in the same inventory as “a woman’s head on a bord dun by Mr. Burbige ye actor” was also given to the Dulwich Gallery in the late seventeenth century.8 What we know of limning in the sixteenth and early seventeenthcentury­—­a word that means designing, drawing, illuminating, painting, and is often synonymous with miniatures—indicates that Webster’s question,

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whether painting made Burbage an excellent player or playing made him an exquisite painter, was not merely rhetorical. A limner, like an actor/ sharer/housekeeper in a company, had more than one calling. Practitioners of limning, writes Roy Strong, “were artist-craftsmen who could paint panel portraits, design and often make jewels and plate, execute designs for tapestries and stained glass, supervise the decor and costumes for court fetes, provide drawings for engravers or illuminate official documents. Virtually all of them turned their hands to a wide range of activities” (8). Moreover, limning, like acting, was a “mystery” handed down from one generation to another, as Hamlet observes when he learns that boy actors are berattling the common stages, exclaiming against their own succession (2.2.339–51)—and compares their success to the current vogue for miniatures of Claudius.9 This is evident in the careers of Lucas Hornebolt, Hans Holbein, and Levina Teerlinc, artists whom Henry VIII had attracted to his court from the Netherlands, and their English successors, Nicholas Hilliard and his pupils Lawrence Hilliard, Rowland Lockey, and Isaac Oliver, who taught his own son, Peter. “Limning emerges,” observes Strong, “as a technical skill and craft full of covert tricks and recipes passed secretly from master to pupil” (9). But most important—and this is especially suggestive in considering limning among the occasional comportments of Richard Burbage—the limner as portraitist works at his craft in ways that resemble those of the Elizabethan actor working at his.10 A portraitist established a special analytic and empathetic relationship with his subject. Writers on the mystery, such as Hilliard (1599), Edward Norgate (1628), and Richard Haydocke, who translated Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s Trattato dell’arte della pittura (1584) in 1598, offered advice on such technical matters as preparing the surface for paint; choosing, arranging, and mixing pigments; selecting a ground; finding the best light; and maintaining the position of one’s model; but they were also concerned about capturing the individual qualities of the subject by negotiating between what the limner saw before him and what he knew about human psychology and its manifestations in facial expression and bodily gesture.11 Norgate, apparently like Hilliard before him, limned his miniature portraits in three sittings. It was exacting work because of the transparency of the colors, and it began with the choice of a card covered by sized vellum or “abortive parchment,” on which the limner had already brushed a “carnation” or flesh color. He had in store a variety of such cards, “laid of several complexions,” and would choose one as near the complexion of his subject as possible, “ever remenbering [sic] to choose one rather too faire, then too broune, for in this Art of Lymning, there is

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noe heightning in the face, but the ground itselfe serves for heightning” (Norgate, 20). In modeling, he would brush in darker colors, never lighter. During the first sitting, he drew the outlines of the face in a faint, but slightly darker mixture of white and lake (a red pigment) and, these accomplished, with the same shade he roughed in “the deeper and more remarkable shadowes,” then outlined the posture and proportions of the body. In each of the sittings, he examined the picture to make sure that there were no places void of color and filled in the spaces. The second sitting was longer than the first and third, for here the chief aim was to capture a resemblance. The limner went over the face “more curiously, observing what soever may conduce to the likenes (which is the principall) or to the judicious and fleshly colouring, and observation of the several grades, or deformities, as they appeare in the Life” (27). In the third sitting the limner attempted to capture not simply likeness but liveliness—the subject, so to speak, in process. He did this by engaging his model in conversation, becoming at once a participant in the repartee and a recorder of its effects upon his interlocutor. “The party sitting,” Norgate advises, “is by occasion of discourse to be sometimes in motion, and to regard you with a merry, Joviall, and frindly aspect, wherein you must bee ready and suddaine to catch at and steale your observations, and to express them with a quick and constant hand” (39). Norgate’s limner was thus a detached observer, at first fitting his subject into a repertory of standard complexions, then progressively qualifying that fit by adjusting it to the individual face and features; but he was also an intersubjective player, inducing in his subject different moods and attitudes, so that he could achieve, as it were, a painted life in motion, a life that bore hints of its plurality—and in this capacity he had to act with astonishing agility, entering into discourse, then trying to “catch,” “steale,” and “express” that discourse on a parchment now no longer abortive. Hilliard is even more explicit about how the limner engages his subject, and his description is frankly erotic. He stresses the need to set up a seductive ambiance for what will become an intimate relationship. After offering advice about the quality of light one should seek, and the kind of air—neither particulated nor pungent—he observes that “sweet odors comforteth the braine and openeth the understanding, augmenting the delight in Limning. Discret talke or reading, quiet merth or musike ofendeth not, but shortneth the time, and quickneth the sperit both in the drawer, and he which is drawn” (22). Like Norgate, he wants to express the potential variety of his subject and recommends that the limner not engage in portrait work until he has done history paintings, which train him in representing

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the multiplicity of human character. But the very task of exploring the variations in a subject’s face poses danger to the judgment of the limner and his necessary detachment, for to reveal implicit liveliness in a subject is to note the subject’s grace: Greatest of all is the grace in countenance, by which the afections apeare, which can neither be weel ussed nor well Juged of but of the wisser sort, and this princepall part of the beauty a good painter hath skill of and should diligently noet, wherfor it behoveth that he be in hart wisse, as it will hardly faill that he shalbe amorous. . . . we are all generally commanded to turne awaye ouer eyes frome beauty of humayne shape, least it inflame the mind how then the curious drawer wach, and as it [were] catch thosse lovely graces wittye smilings, and thosse stolne glances which sudainely like light[n]ing passe and another Countenance taketh place except hee behould, and very well noate, and Conceit to lyke, soe that he can hardly take them truly, and express them well, without an affectionate good Judgment, and without blasting his younge and simpel hart, although (in pleassing admiration) he be very serious, bussied, so hard a matter he hath in hand, calling thosse graces one by one to theire due places, noting howe in smilling howe the eye changeth and naroweth, houlding the sight just between the lides as a center, howe the mouth alittle extendeth, both ends of the line upwards, the Cheekes rayse themselvs to the eyewards, the nosterels play and are more open, the vaines in the tempel appeare moe and the cullour by degrees increaseth, the necke commonly erecteth itselfe, the eye browes make the straighter arches, and the forhead casteth itsselfe in to a plaine as it wear for peace and love to walke uppon, in like sort countenances of wroth, of feare, or of sorowe, have their severall alterance of the face, and fare according to the mind is affected. (24).12

Affections, Hilliard warns—that is, passions—must be judged and used wisely, yet the very act of studying a face begets desire. The most selfcontrolled limner will keep a wise heart and develop an “affectionate good judgment” as he looks upon his model. But he cannot watch the fleeting graces play over the face “without blasting his younge and simpel hart,” and this is because his professional curiosity leads him to dwell on the exterior manifestations of his subject’s passions. Their fascinating power becomes evident in the language that follows. What begins as advice about tracing the passions to “theire due places” becomes a loving blazon, different from the conventional blazon in the impression it conveys of the writer actually having been in the presence of his subject, studied her features, and having become captivated by what he observed.13 The limner’s occupational haz-

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ard, it would seem, is falling in love with his subject in her (or his) many moods, for graces show affections and there is no affection that does not attract the painter, who, as Hilliard’s prose attests, becomes enamored as he continues to “noate.” “Wroth,” “feare,” and “sorrow” are no less engaging to one intent upon seeing the mind’s construction in the face, and immediately after the passage just quoted, Hilliard refers his reader to Lomazzo’s “second bouck of actions and Jeastures” (actually the words used in Haydocke’s translation), where the critic describes characteristic expressions and gestures associated with the various passions and explains, in the manner of such treatises as Wright’s Passions of the Minde, how the passions are generated from imagines, humors, and spirits. Burbage may never have studied these texts, but his experience as limner portraying his subject—oscillating between engagement and disengagement, participation and observation as he addressed his task—may, as Webster suggests, have strengthened his acting skills when he practiced his mystery as player. Knowing something of his reputation as painter and what that discipline entailed may help us to understand how he might have negotiated the role of Othello—a task considerably more complicated than playing the other aliens we have considered.

II When Shakespeare came to write Othello, he fashioned an alien who, unlike Aaron, Caliban, or Shylock, is an ardent assimilationist. At the beginning of the play, Othello does not participate in the discourse of alienation, though it is evident from the racist talk we hear before he enters that he is attempting to integrate a Venice not substantially different from Shylock’s. The question that arises immediately upon his appearance, however, is whether he transcends the discourse of blackness surrounding him or whether it has penetrated him and he is simply defending against it, and as the play proceeds it becomes clear that the latter is more likely. In which case, the player’s enactment of his own improbable flux has an added dimension. It is no longer simply a matter of growing to identify with a publicly acknowledged devil who is proved to be (Aaron) or becomes (Shylock) the monster he is believed to be. The actor now must play a person who exists in the medium of vilification but, because he is honored by the state that needs him and admired by the woman who loves him, is encouraged to deny that vilification and assume that he is the man he is called upon to be by those he values most. The actor must perceive the fissures in that identity, respond to the pressures that pry them open, and reveal the inchoate self within.

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In a radical sense, he must perform the tragedy of his own subjectivity in the model of the alien—the putative container of what the white Christian Elizabethan wishes to repress in himself. Thus, performing Othello offers problems that performing Aaron—or even the Prince of Morocco—does not. At the beginning of the play, blackness ostensibly has no signifying power for him. Against a litany of “thick lips,” “old black ram,” “Barbary horse,” and “sooty bosom,” he opposes “men of royal siege,” “my parts, my title, and my perfect soul.” We can think of his words as ligatures to the native English actor playing a heroic role on the locus of illusion, and the racist epithets as wisps of the miasma filtering through both locus and platea, connecting Iago, Roderigo, and Brabantio to the anxiously demeaning contemporary discourse circulating within the world of their audiences. As Othello defends himself before the Duke and Senators, however, he moves to a slightly different Figurenposition, closer to that of the Prince of Morocco, who opens his courtship of Portia with the defensive disclaimer, “Mislike me not for my complexion” (MV 2.1.1). In Morocco’s words we hear the awareness of an alien entering a white society that has been talking about him, who feels the need to turn his color into the heroic “shadowed livery of the burnished sun,” and who even offers to incise his skin to prove his blood as red as the fairest denizen of the north. He claims there is virtue in his aspect, for it “hath feared the valiant,” and amiability, since “the best regarded virgins of our clime / Have loved it, too” (2.1.2, 9–11), and he worries lest fortune, not merit, prevail in his suit. Othello is not as self-aware as the boastful Morocco. Yet his speech in 1.3 performs, less explicitly, a similar function in disarming a potentially hostile enemy. In retelling “my Travellours history” [F], he is sharing (through Burbage) the Mandevillian knowledge of his London audience, but reverses the relationship of exotic object and European subject as if he, too, were the voyager and not the stranger in that history—experiencing “disastrous chances,” “moving accidents,” and “hair-breadth-scapes” as he encountered “the insolent foe,” “the cannibals, that each other eat,” and “men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders” (1.3.135–46). Burbage might begin to wonder about this Moor as he performs his sublimations, yet find himself participating in Othello’s Christian imaginings of being “sold to slavery” and “of my redemption thence,” as he tells how he acceded to Desdemona’s request that “I would all my pilgrimage dilate (1.3.139, 154). This was a not-uncommon trope of English adventurers’ tales; captivity, liberation, and conversion was in fact the experience of Leo Africanus, whose life story resembles Othello’s in so many ways, and in several of Hakluyt’s

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narratives analogous sublimations occur as commercial ambitions take on the language of religion.14 But pilgrimage? Would this not send a papistical frisson through actor and audience? I would stipulate “no” to that question, for Shakespeare frequently alludes to Catholic practices in a nonsectarian way.15 By the end of the tale, however, it will have become apparent that Othello is dangerously troping on the trope. For if Burbage has found that two familiar tongues are speaking through him—those of the merchant adventurer and religious pilgrim—he will now have to confront an idolatrous strain in that pilgrimage, ending as it does in Desdemona: “She gave me for my pains a world of sighs” (1.3.160). But then, in a brilliant instance of what Bakhtin will call heteroglossia, the religious response is conflated with the theatrical: “She swore, in faith ’twas strange, ’twas passing strange, / ’Twas pitiful, ’twas wondrous pitiful” (1.3.161–62). The actor, that is, will find himself speaking words that identify Othello as a tragic hero.16 And he will soon hear Desdemona testify to the success of this transvaluation, for she “saw Othello’s visage in his mind” (1.3.253), which confirms the Moor’s presumption that, unlike Aaron’s, his skin is not darkly opaque but a transparent window that lightens forth his heroic self. To Burbage, hearing, saying, and interpreting these speakings, there must have been special meaning in the lines that cap Othello’s tale—“She loved me for the dangers I had passed / And I loved her that she did pity them”—for the Duke gratifyingly replies, “I think this tale would win my daughter too” (1.3.168–69, 172). If in telling his tale, Othello’s “honours and his valiant parts” glowed through his black skin, even so Burbage whitens his as he performs the Moor in blackface and evokes admiration from onstage and offstage audiences. Specifically, he stands within the space of his hero’s subjectivity and performs it to perfection—just as he might had he played Aaron’s protective father—but at this moment in the personation of Othello, stage illusion is also the space of the Moor’s psychic delusion, and of defensive strategies that Aaron never seemed to need. Did Burbage recognize this? How would he have heard Desdemona’s confession that “My heart’s subdued / Even to the very quality of my lord” or her fear that if she is left behind, “The rites for which I love him are bereft me, / And I a heavy interim shall support / By his dear absence” (1.3.251– 52, 258–60)? How would he have thought Othello heard them? Again, we can only conjecture, and much depends on Burbage as a reader of roles. But whether following the part made from the transcript behind F or Q1, he would surely notice that Othello’s next speech is an apology in which he tries to divorce himself and Desdemona from her ambiguous diction:

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“I therefore beg it not / To please the palate of my appetite . . . but to be free and bounteous to her mind” (1.3.262–66). Lingering in his words are traces of the “world of kisses” F’s Othello claims she gave him for his story; “the utmost pleasure of my lord” to which Q1’s Desdemona says her heart is subdued; and the plea, “let her will have / A free way,” which Q1’s Othello offers for F’s “Let her have your voice.” Thus his apology to the Venetians contains both a residue and an anticipation—what Bakhtin calls the dialogic component of an utterance—and denies the mutual concern of speaker and audience that he has already contaminated and might further contaminate the Senator’s daughter.17 Which is to say that a reputation for concupiscence has, literally, preceded both versions of Othello, constituting his subtext and forcing him into a new speech genre that corresponds to a psychological position in which he has an intimation that his attempts to idealize his relationship to Desdemona are beginning to “demonstrate thinly.” Let me elucidate. In trying to tease out the likely experience of Richard Burbage as he performs Othello in the third scene of the play, I have made two basic assumptions. First, I have assumed that an actor like Burbage would be intrigued by the figure he is playing—a Moor with the dignity of Abd el-Ouahed, the ambassador of the King of Morocco, who had recently been the talk of London during protracted diplomatic and commercial negotiations, but with the skin of blackamoors who were more often than not described as savage. Othello’s dramatis persona is thus itself a composite.18 Correlatively Burbage, whose schooling in rhetoric was not unlike Shakespeare’s, would be alive to the Moor’s presentational strategies, and since his acting skills and experience were (presumably) far greater than Shakespeare’s, he would be especially interested in the degree to which he could see with his other’s eyes. His experience as player and critic would place him both inside and outside Othello, as participant and observer—his noticing or becoming the person he plays dependent on what Othello says and does, and the degree to which that touched him. To invoke Bakhtinian insights in these circumstances is useful because Bakhtin is so finely attuned on the level of speech to what I have called the “circumstantial” construction of character. While I have argued that Shakespeare’s “characters” are elicited from their dramatis personae by their changing situations, and explained their variant speeches as issuing from these different situatings, Bakhtin finds all utterances to originate in and be responsive to specific social interactions—and therefore hears in even a single sentence utterances emanating from different speaking subjects and poised in different rhetorical attitudes.19 He is particularly helpful when

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parsing a speech as densely packed as Othello’s explanation of how he won Desdemona’s love. Othello himself offers a clue as to the genre he has invoked when he refers to his “Travellours history” (1.3.140), but immediately after, his tongue responds to something else in his memory as he conflates travel narrative with epic and speaks of “antres vast,” a translation of the antrum immane where Aeneas seeks the Cumean Sibyl (Aen. 6.11)—then reverts to the Mandevillian idiom for a few lines, and again, more strongly now, turns epic hero as he remembers how Desdemona would, “with a greedy ear / Devour up my discourse” (1.3.150–51), conflating her with the Dido who “madly craves to hear the sorrows of Ilium and again hangs on the speaker’s lips” (Iliacosque iterum demens audire labores / exposcit pendetque iterum narrantis ab ore [Virgil, Aen. 4.78–79]). What Burbage hears in Othello’s speech is both literary imitation and what Bakhtin calls dialogism. More expansively than imitation, which takes pleasure in the punning transposition of the speaker’s implicitly devouring mouth (ore), from which the listener hangs, to the listener’s cannibalistic ear (aure) by which the speaker’s words are consumed, dialogism recognizes the incursion of one discourse into another, and the acknowledgment by the receptor that there is a certain fitness in the encounter, though both strains of speech retain traces of their origins. Dialogic analysis permits us to foreground the streams of strangeness that flow into one another, though it might take only an Elizabethan grammar school boy’s memory to detect the citations Shakespeare has woven into the Moor’s traveler’s history, and Burbage, a professional line-rememberer, could easily note—or inwardly sense—Othello’s conflations. Noting will move him “out of character,” sensing will keep him “in character” and newly empowered by his Moor’s epic imaginings. This is how Othello’s language could micro-manage Burbage’s self-alienations.20 My second assumption concerns the interplay of the two substantive texts of Othello and their influence on Burbage the performer as he acts either one of them. Since both F and Q1 versions are apparently by Shakespeare and both, arguably, were acted by Burbage, they belong to the same Shakespearean discourse, which is itself fashioned from that of his culture. It makes perfect sense, then, for the actor of Othello to be affected by both texts, whichever one he happens to be playing, provided he has played the other—especially since neither text in itself changes the valence of Desdemona’s sensuality or Othello’s reactive response. Considered dialogically, however, both texts together exert increased pressure on the Moor and his personator. The Q1 text offers “a world of sighs” for F’s “a world of kisses” (1.3.160), thus cooling Desdemona’s ardor; but Q1 offers “Your voices,

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Lords: beseech you, let her will / Have a free way” for F’s “Let her have your voice. / Vouch with me Heaven” (1.3.261–62), thus playing on the sexual undertones of “will” and heating up Desdemona’s desire again. Both versions are followed by “I therefore beg it not / To please the palate of my appetite” (1.3.262–63), but F’s intense “Vouch with me heaven” sounds more like a response to Q1’s “let her will / Have a free way” than to its own more neutral variant “Let her have your voice”—giving the impression that the texts have been talking to one another, as they may well have in Burbage’s retentive memory. So far we have examined small inflections of “character” caused by the various situatings of Othello’s dramatis persona in the third scene of the play and have posited Burbage’s task of situating himself within the changing subject positions of European traveler, religious pilgrim, epic hero, and unacknowledged blackamoor apologist that are assumed by the person he performs. The job (and perhaps the terror and the joy) of Burbage, as the action progresses, will be to descend from the original locus of illusion— that of idealistic Venetian discourse and bad faith21—which he shares with Othello, and enter ever more fully into the baser strains of discourse that the player of Iago shares (in whatever degree of consciousness) with the audience, allowing that discourse to enter him as he steers Othello through the crisis of subjectivity that culminates in his vow of revenge (3.3.450–65). In the course of this passage—“Haply, for I am black” (3.3.267); “My name, that was as fresh / As Dian’s visage, is now begrim’d and black / As mine own face” (3.3.389–91);22 “Arise, black vengeance” (3.3.450)— Othello and Burbage confront and embrace the discourse of blackness that has been circulating around them. Once caught in this embrace, and having wilfully undergone the convulsion of passions now unrestrained by a controlling identity—“Handkerchief—confessions—handkerchief!” (4.1.37)—it will be Burbage’s task to reshape them both, assisted by the actor of Iago, through the formal channels of revenge, discovery, and ethical recuperation. But what is “black vengeance?” In the performance of Othello, it is the return of the repressed in Venice and Southwark—the monster inhabiting that hollow cell (or [F] hell) that was earlier described as the “thought” of Iago (3.3.110), inchoate and ineffable except insofar as it finds fitful expression in the ensign’s motiveless malignity. Which brings us back to the title of the previous chapter. “Were I the Moor, I would not be Iago,” I suggested there, vocalizes Iago’s desire to enjoy all that imaginatively accrues to Othello’s “Moorishness.” We can now expand this hypothesis by adding that, given the epidemic nature of the discourse of monstrosity that we hear in the play, which seeps through the medium of Shakespeare’s art

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from his society, it is Iago who chiefly absorbs, mediates, and activates the theater audience’s—and, we must presume, the leading actor’s—fascination with blackness: “In following him, I follow but myself.” But his vicarious participation in Othello’s blackness—and their participation—is in inverse proportion to the Moor’s own presumption of whiteness, which is depen­ dent on Desdemona’s seeing Othello’s visage in his mind and, in turn, on Othello’s faith in her “white” seeing. This is why “blackening” Desdemona to Othello’s inward eye is so important to Iago: it simultaneously sullies the source of Othello’s identity, darkens him, estranges him from his wife, and opens the way for Iago to enjoy Othello’s liberated blackness in her stead. The notorious travesty of the Anglican marriage rite at the end of 3.3 therefore runs deeper than is usually assumed. Linguistically and emotionally “the rites for which I love him” (1.3.258) are transferred from Desdemona to Iago, as Iago assumes the position that enables him to yield himself to the utmost pleasure (Q) of his lord. This, it turns out, is his chosen means of experiencing Othello’s blackness: Witness here that Iago doth give up The execution of his wit, hands, heart To wronged Othello’s service. Let him command And to obey shall be in me remorse What bloody business ever. (3.3.468–72)

Iago’s feudal act of homage echoes the wifely submission of Desdemona (“Whate’er you be, I am obedient,” 3.3.89) and of Emilia (“I nothing, but to please his fantasy,” 3.3.303), but his submission will consist, paradoxically, in eliciting black deeds from the Moor that only he knows they both have within and that can be actualized only through the instrumentality of Moorishness, the portmanteau disposition of European invention that must wrought out of Othello. Iago’s means of enjoying Othello’s blackness is to seduce him and make him his surrogate, supplanting both male and female rivals in the Moor’s affections. In fantasy he has already done so, for in the erotic fiction he fashions, in which Cassio dreams he is making love to Desdemona, thrusts his leg over “her” thigh, and kisses “her” hard, the couple’s mutual lovemaking is displaced onto Iago’s body. Embraced by a Cassio whom he envisions as sexually supplanting Othello, Iago is both Desdemona and himself, enjoying the polymorphous pleasures of both kinds unavailable to him alone. But that, as Othello declares, is “monstrous! monstrous!” (3.3.428). Which

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is what Iago has been imagining since he described Othello as making “the beast with two backs.” Thus when the Moor announces at the end of the scene, “Now art thou my lieutenant” (3.3.481), he is only making official and public the fantasy of participating “His Moorship” that Iago has been inwardly nurturing all along. In fact, the ensign becomes not just his lieutenant but also his “Captain’s captain,” enjoying Othello’s cultural condition by offering himself as the factor of desires he has himself educed from the Moor—“My friend is dead”—and by ensuring that he will enjoy his new office exclusively, in a womanless world: “But let her live” (3.3.476–77).

III Thus much Iago. It would be fascinating to read the experience of the actor of his part against the perfervid imaginings of antitheatrical critics, given the convoluted fantasies his lines reveal. But I stated earlier that Iago mediated not only the audience’s fascination with blackness but also the leading actor’s, and that is where I turn now. Are Burbage’s anxieties and pleasures like those of Iago and the actor of Iago? This seems less than self-evident. Burbage needs the actor of Iago to “unmoor” him, as it were, from his En­ glish stabilities, so that he may enter more fully into the Moor’s loss of circumscription and confine, but the effect the Iago player has on him may in fact produce unanticipated fears. The process begins as early as Act II, scene 3. Iago’s suspicion that “the lusty Moor / Hath leaped into my seat” (2.1.293–94), which is later shown by Emilia to be more than a passing fancy (4.2.147–49), and his buddy-like elbowing of Cassio about Desdemona’s sexual potential, “I’ll warrant her full of game” (2.3.19), suggests that he has been imaginatively swapping partners with Othello in a fantasy of erotic reciprocity ever since discovering that he “hath boarded a land carrack” (1.2.50)—perhaps even earlier, given the vagueness of “double time.” It is this obsession that gives him the power to penetrate Othello’s ethical composure for the first time. To catch the precise quality of this moment, we must recur to the notion of speech genre and notice how the antagonists enter into a struggle of oppositional displacements written to reveal the Moor’s disturbance but that necessarily also affects his actor. As we saw in chapter 6, the rhetorical figure hysteron proteron is not only a verbal scheme but also a psychological trope that Shakespeare thematizes to show how Othello can be so swiftly persuaded of Desdemona’s adultery. It is also deployed tacitly, to persuade the theater audience that enough time has elapsed so that Othello can be persuaded. A figure of speech, then, is also a turn of mind—a way of thinking that can structure a single sentence, an ar-

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gument, or even what Bakhtin calls a secondary speech genre—a whole play (Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 60–63). But it can be a defensive strategy as well, taking the form of a dramatic dialogue. Othello enters into such a speech genre when he is roused from his nuptial bed by the brawl instigated by Iago and demands of his disarrayed soldiers, “Are we turned Turks? and to ourselves do that / Which heaven has forbid the Ottomites?”(2.3.167–68). This seems an innocent question until Iago discloses that the Moor has projected his own sexual violence onto the watch’s physical violence through the convening metaphor of the Turk.23 When asked how the fighting began, Iago silently notes Othello’s figural transference and, by virtue of his own obsession with sexual reciprocity, swiftly engages in counter-transference: I do not know, friends all, but now, even now, In quarter and in terms like bride and groom, Divesting them for bed; and then, but now, As if some planet had unwitted men, Swords out, and tilting one at other’s breasts In opposition bloody. (2.3.175–80)

Called back to his own primal scene by Iago’s uncanny participation in it, Othello casts off the image once more, this time projecting his morally charged sex act onto Montano: “What’s the matter / That you unlace your reputation thus / And spend your rich opinion, for the name / Of a nightbrawler?” (2.3.189–92). The dialogue continues to oscillate as Montano claims Iago knows more than he’s telling (which he does, in a double sense) and Othello responds, “Now, by heaven, / My blood begins my safer guides to rule” (2.3.200–201). The whole exchange is informed by hysteron proteron, for Othello thrice ascribes what happened earlier in private to what is happening now in public to ensure that the monstrosity of the beast with two backs is translated into the military indecorum of comrades-in-arms. Cassio is the scapegoat of this process: “he that is approved in this offence, / Though he had twinned with me, both at a birth, / Shall lose me” (2.3.207–9). Or, to hear it as the displacement it is, “I shall lose him.” And Iago is the midwife of this fraternal sacrifice.24 What might this exchange mean to the personator of Othello? Iago has driven Othello to defend even more actively against “the Moor in me” than he had felt compelled to do in the first act, and has driven Burbage, sharer in the discourse of blackness, into a new Figurenposition. At whatever moment Burbage discerns the figural interplay between Iago and Othello, it must at

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first catch him by surprise—not only because it takes Iago’s response to set in motion the analytic process that unveils retroactively the psychic strategy of Othello’s displacement, but also because he will not have discovered this until he is actually performing his part with the actor of Iago as his interlocutor. Working from a cue script alone, he will have had no access to the dynamics of the exchange. Once onstage, he might not quickly notice the figural strategy at play, but would hear himself responding to Iago by directing ostentatiously epideictic diction to Montano and perhaps stand apart, puzzled and critical, from Othello’s strenuous defense; to the extent that he unwittingly succumbs to that defense, he will have participated in it as his own. It is worth recalling, however, that there needs no Quintilian come from the grave to point out the figure to Burbage, whose own professionalism involves skilled rhetorical reading. Should he catch this one (not at the first staged rehearsal, perhaps, but at the second or third, or during a performance), he will find himself separating from Othello—feeling his anxiety but noting his trick of diffusing it; should he not, he will share that anxiety all the more, assimilating the defense mechanism to his own repertory, and the result will be a different performance and experience. He will be expressing his own fear of the sensual excess Montaigne warns about and that Othello dismisses when he offers to let “housewives make a skillet of my helm” should he give himself up to “wanton dullness” (1.3.269– 77). Once it is recognized, however, the mechanism will provide him with a powerful insight into Othello’s sense of self and how far he will go to preserve it.25 As Iago’s deconstruction of Othello proceeds apace, what is at stake for the actor is the possibility of his own deconstruction—to become reduced to the blackness he performs, as that is conceived by Englishness, and pushed toward the moment when “Chaos is come again” (3.3.92). This is a prospect terrifying but also alluring if, as he had been led to believe, Moorish blackness enjoys a license not permitted English whiteness. It also involves a practical difficulty almost impossible to conceive, for the actor must form an imago of the man he is personating, who is becoming in his own mind a figure of excess, incoherence, and indistinct outline. How does one imagine negation? Here the partnership of the two actors becomes critical. The actor of Iago helps the actor of Othello find his way by indulging in those “mops and mows” that Rymer so ridiculed (149). By contracting and pursing his brow (3.3.116), telling Othello to take no notice (3.3.153), refusing to show his thought (3.3.165), and mirroring the effect he has had on him—“I see this hath a little dashed your spirits. . . . I’faith I fear it has. . . . but I do see you are moved. . . . My lord, I see you’re moved (3.3.218–28)—Iago’s

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actor enables Othello’s actor to “see” the monster his man is becoming. Res­ponding to what he “sees,” Othello recalls Brabantio’s words—“And yet how nature erring from itself” (3.3.231)—and shortly afterward explicates their meaning, “Haply, for I am black” (3.3.267), which swiftly marshals the way to black vengeance. The point I wish to emphasize is that the textual lines of the dramatis persona Iago work on the dramatis persona Othello only if they are theatrically phenomenalized by the actor of Iago in such a way that the actor of Othello finds that “these stops of thine fright me the more” (3.3.123)—that is, when the actor of Iago blocks the image-making capacity of Burbage’s imagination with a “monstrous” sublime, indicating its content by his own histrionic stops and starts, literally discountenancing the actor of Othello by telling him what he looks like. If the theatrical question is “how do you overcome the practical difficulty of imagining negation?” the answer is you don’t: to imagine is a formal act. Your acting partner, deflecting your image-making capacity and substituting for your imagination, becomes the instrument of your negation. But the prospect of one’s negation, as I have suggested, is both terrifying and alluring. Here the issue for the white Elizabethan actor is not technical but psychological. As the actor finds himself falling into the blackness overcoming the Moor, what pleasures might he anticipate and what horrors? A threatening loss of subject position is textually evident in the words of uncertainty Shakespeare writes for Othello, where the speaking subject changes within single lines—“I think my wife be honest, and think she is not, / I think that thou art just, and think thou art not” (3.3.387–88). But satisfaction also looms into view, as Iago unwraps his fantasy of lying with Cassio, retails Cassio’s dream, and reconfects the vivid image of the spotted handkerchief that moves from Desdemona’s hand to Cassio’s beard. Here are pictures an actor can lay hold of when transmitted so luminously by his partner and that sufficiently enrage him so he can cry out, with the man he personates, “All my fond love thus do I blow to heaven” (3.3.448). The fear of self-loss, in other words, is lessened and obfuscated by the opportunity to be that is provided by a formal imago that arouses powerful emotions and becomes the sticking place on which to fasten them. It is the inability to “see” that is terrifying. But if seeing stabilizes the self, what one sees and how one responds to that vision determines what one is. In Othello’s case, it is the betrayed husband of a “fair devil” (3.3.481). This is a new subject position for him, and his response to it may have surprised Burbage and given him a strange kind of pleasure. For as he loses confidence in Desdemona, Othello inscribes himself in a genealogy imbued with and warranted by femininity.

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He becomes the son of a mother possessed of a love charm that was gifted to women by an ancient prophetess and is itself soaked in a conserve of virgins. Invoking an imagined protocol of holy women, devised to protect them against the infidelity of men, to which he is matrilinear heir, he purifies himself and gains a release to revenge himself upon his wife, sanctioned by an antique female tradition. The voluptuousness of this idea, enabling a man to assert his masculinity against a deceiving female under the aegis of his nurturing mother, may have filled not only Othello but also Burbage with the righteous relief of filial piety.26 But this subjective change is embedded in yet another. Perhaps the strongest internal evidence of Iago’s success in releasing the repressed exotic in Othello is found in the ethnic identity of the speaking subject who says, “That handkerchief / Did an Egyptian to my mother give” (3.4.57–58). Though an audience will have already learned that the handkerchief is a fe­ tish Desdemona uses “to kiss and talk to” because Othello “conjured her she should ever keep it” (3.3.300, 298), its genealogy is revealed only after Iago has collapsed the distance between Othello’s hard-pressed subject and his material body and turned him into Aaron (“My name, that was as fresh / As Dian’s visage, is now begrimed and black / As mine own face” [3.3.389– 91]). The old Othello had scoffed at the magic Brabantio attributed to him, and later a partly recuperated, self-justifying Othello will rationally describe the same handkerchief as “an antique token / My father gave my mother,” thus reversing its gendered lineage (5.2.214–15).27 Only in Act III, scene 4 is it a talisman passed from sibyl to Egyptian charmer to mother to son to wife, with power to make the possessor “amiable” or, if lost or given away, to provoke “such perdition / As nothing else could match” (3.4.61, 69–70). The genre is once again the anecdote reported in the traveler’s tale, the kind of exotic belief found in the ethnographies of Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, but this time Othello is the exotic who shares the belief, not the European reporter of it, and it is up to Burbage to negotiate this self-enchanting regression to the superstitious condition attributed to Moors.28 It would be understandable to him how Othello arrived there if he assumed, as is likely, that there was cultural truth in the ascription of magical thinking to Moors and Negroes; but even so, where did that leave him? Perhaps the first thing to notice is that Othello’s embrace of magic is an act of self-empowerment; rather than be the victim of the unseen powers of courtly Venice, where “they do let God see the pranks / They dare not show their husbands” (3.3.205–6), he calls up his own occult knowledge and reverses the power relationship with Desdemona by invoking the dark powers of exotic peoples. By means of this gesture, Burbage is invited to enter

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the mind of a true believer in the magic that outsiders like Brabantio know only as devils’ work. Would he have accepted? To infer that he would simply have noted the change in Othello’s subject position and stood apart from it does not sufficiently honor the stage situation in which he tells Othello’s tale. It is not just that there is something so seductive in this “Othello music” that it is difficult to imagine Burbage not yielding, as he performs it, to Othel­lo’s own belief; it is that he is telling the tale to Desdemona and watching actor Desdemona’s uneasiness change to wonder, to fear, and then to panic as s/he listens: “Then would to God that I had never seen’t!” (3.4.79). His telling makes his onstage audience believe, and that audience’s response makes him believe—just as it had done earlier when he had delivered his “round, unvarnish’d tale” and won the Duke’s gratifying praise: “I think this tale would win my daughter too” (1.3.172). We find once again that built into the script of Othello is a metatheatrical phenomenon that not only explicates the action and response of a dramatis persona but also informs the actor’s experience.29 At one moment in the psychic process of hero-turning-monster, Shakespeare gives Othello lines that seem equally intended for the actor who plays his part. Their function appears to be to enable him to get a grip on himself as actor at a critical juncture—as though it were essential for him at this moment to step back from his role because he is in imminent danger of losing himself in it. This is when an epileptic seizure begins to come over the Moor and he observes his own body begin to convulse: Handkerchief! confessions! handkerchief!—To confess, and be hanged for his labour! First to be hanged, and then to confess: I tremble at it. Nature would not invest herself in such shadowing passion without some instruction. It is not words that shakes me thus. (4.1.37–41)

Iago has been evoking images of private kisses, naked lovemaking, and the betrayed handkerchief—repellent, flitting, but securing images. It is when he mutteringly implies that Cassio has actually admitted his improprieties that Othello utters these words. He hears his own sounds, arranges them, klang-like, in an incriminating sentence, then reverses the order of the sentence, as hysteron proteron invades his speech. Then, hearing an objective correlative to his fragmenting reason, he watches his limbs shake, unable to believe that he is simply reacting to sounds—“With her, on her, what you will” (4.1.34)—and insists that sinew and muscle are responding sympathetically to insight, not words. Though he is staring at his body, that body actually belongs to the actor who, in the first instance, is asked

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to observe the apparent autonomy of his shaking limbs. That is, to watch his own acting. One is reminded of Hamlet observing the pallor, tears, and gestures of the First Player, but in this case it is not one dramatis persona watching and commenting on another, but one and the same actor observing his own body parts imitating the coming-on of an epileptic seizure. Somewhere in the head of Richard Burbage, the script reserves an aesthetic space for self-criticism and self-appreciation, to save him even as the man he personates succumbs to a fit. The fall into abject loss is thus carefully framed by a stabilizing, actoral moment of self-regard.

IV This is (probably) what it might have been like for Burbage to play the Moor of Venice, a more threatening assignment than playing Aaron, Caliban, or Shylock—aliens who are not led to experience subjective loss and whose actors remain, to that extent, unexposed to total negation even as they enjoy the transgressive and philanthropic pleasures the roles afford.30 In Othello, transgressive pleasures are largely the prerogative of the actor of Iago—since his dramatis persona projects his sexual obsessions, scorn of women, and sociopathic violence onto the Moor and realizes them through the actions he induces him (and through him, licenses himself ) to commit—and he never feels philanthropic about anyone. Burbage must have felt differently—playing out, through Othello’s anxious, then hysterical, descent into blackness, his fascination with and fear of succumbing to his own “blackness,” while protected by a script that intermittently calls him back to himself. Even lines like “A fine woman, a fair woman, a sweet woman!” (4.1.175–76), in which Othello expresses his initial perception of Desdemona, work to stabilize the idealizing Elizabethan in Burbage before he falls into the alternative vision, “Ay, let her rot, and perish and be damned tonight, for she shall not live” (4.1.178–79). To the extent that he shared the schizoid misogyny of his culture—at once exalting and degrading the female—the satisfactions of declaring, “O, the world hath not a sweeter creature: she might lie by an emperor’s side and command him tasks” (4.1.180–82)—followed by “I will chop her into messes” (4.1.196)—must have been actual and not simply actoral for him, corresponding to his own deeply bred intimations. To weep cruel tears when killing the woman you love may be the act of black Othello, but it is the participatory fantasy of white Burbage. This is simply to say that the actor succumbs, with the beguiled Moor he plays, to feelings about women that his own society has induced in both of them—and in the playwright. Given Desdemona’s innocence, however—

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not the fact of her innocence but Othello’s discovery of her innocence in Act V—how would performing the role affect Burbage’s understanding of Moors? In more familiar terms, to what extent would his experience of playing Othello have led him to anticipate literally Prospero’s cryptic words, “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine”? That is a harder question to answer. Emilia’s words, “O gull, O dolt, / As ignorant as dirt!” (5.2.159– 60), give the actor a chance to slip out from under the black dupe he plays and to reidentify with the truth that the good people of Venice have always believed: “She was too fond of her most filthy bargain” (5.2.153). Yet performing Othello’s recovery—especially his attempt to recollect himself through the tragic imago in which he not only describes the perpetrator of his act but witnesses his remorse through tears, then actually kills the self he has just described because there is no other way to expunge “the circumcised dog” within—must give a perceptive actor pause. For Othello the reassembled Venetian hero—the man standing in the plane of theatrical and psychological illusion—is using his body as the actor uses his. That is to say, he is and is not the “noble Moor”—is and is not the “turbanned Turk.” But unlike the actor, who has experienced his inward alienation vicariously, Othello has experienced it substantially and cannot benefit from the saving knowledge an actor possesses that, whatever its transgressive pleasures and horrors, he can return to his probable self from what is, after all, only an improbable fiction: his irrational fantasy. Hence Burbage’s final perfor­ mance involves three persons and cannot escape self-irony. One person is himself—the actor who plays the alien. The second is the gathered Moor, himself pretending to reenact an action past that was a real, historical gesture of loyalty to the state. The third is the victim the second recollects in a new, improvised imago, identifies with, yet cannot assimilate to his gathered self, and so destroys him in the only body through which he can reach him. Can an actor learn anything from sharing such a layered and fatally flawed performance? One need not sentimentalize the effects on a white Elizabethan actor of playing a black Moor to conjecture that the demonic philautia Burbage experienced while performing Othello might have given him insights that Shakespeare did not afford his tragic hero. As a performer attacking his body feignedly in order that the Moor could attack his body effectually, he might find the metatheatrical situation once again leading to a saving afterthought: here am I acting what he is truly doing—what is the difference between us? I can see—as he cannot—that sometimes demonic self-love must be embraced and not destroyed, because a man tends to become what he is called—“thicklips,” perhaps—and in the struggle to recover a name

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now as black as his maligned face, he may commit an atrocity in the name of justice, which merits forgiveness if repented. Burbage’s audiences seem to have had a glimmer of such an insight, for his Othello is remembered not as a “murd’rous coxcomb” but as “the Greved Moore.” In this play especially, it would seem that performing the alien is to channel, however fleetingly, one’s descent into darkness and one’s expansion into philanthropy to the crowd in the theater. I say “fleetingly” because it is, after all, a recuperated Burbage who supplies the agency that allows Othello to kill—for him—“that within which passes show.” Cryptically he, above others, can tell the critics that we never let villains and tyrants leave our stage unpunished—for such punishment is the price of his reentry to the plane of their shared illusion where the actor, who was once “an extravagant and wheeling stranger,” too—“of here and every where”—maintains his own social, cultural, psychological, and professional respectability.31

Epilogue

“Make Not Impossible /  That Which But Seems Unlike”: The Twilight of Probability and the Dawn of Shakespearean Romance

“If it be true that good wine needs no bush,” says Rosalind at the end of As You Like It, “ ’tis true that a good play needs no epilogue. Yet to good wine they do use good bushes, and good plays prove the better by the help of good epilogues” (AYLI Ep.3–7). I don’t know whether this truth also applies to Shakespeare criticism. Nonetheless, there is an after-tale to be told about Shakespeare’s response to the epistemological, psychological, and moral aporiae engendered by probability in Othello, and a prehistory, too. Although they merit a fuller investigation than I can offer here, I would like to make a gesture in their direction. It will involve examining two plays written at about the same time as Othello, contextualizing them by glancing at certain salutary, improbable moments in a few earlier plays, then casting ahead to see how Shakespeare transcribed the tragedy of probability that was Othello as the improbable tragicomic romance of The Winter’s Tale. I hope my story may prove the better for its epilogue.

I In 1604 or 1605, Shakespeare adapted a well-made tale of a witty young woman who falls in love with a man who scorns her, devises a means to secure him as her husband by curing the king whose ward he is and demanding him in payment—only to find herself publicly spurned and challenged to fulfill two apparently impossible conditions if she means to hold him. She duly proceeds to fulfill these conditions, is embraced by her nowadmiring husband, and restored to her place as Countess of Rossiglione, all being well that ends well. Such is William Painter’s version (or as some have

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it, Antoine le Mac¸on’s version)1 of the ninth novel of the third day in Boccaccio’s Decameron. Among the many changes Shakespeare wrought in his source, none is so striking as his emphasis on the improbable. This appears quite early, as a glimmer of how to catch Bertram appears to Helen’s inward eye: Impossible be strange attempts to those That weigh their pains in sense, and do suppose What hath been cannot be. (1.1.224–26)

She uses a distinctly antirhetorical lexicon here—“impossible,” “strange,” “sense” or empirical reason negatively construed—and what she says is that uncommon ventures seem impossible to those who deliberate in the balance of probability, believing miracles are past. Like Iago contemplating an inchoate plan to plume up his will, she then murmurs, “The King’s disease—my project may deceive me, / But my intents are fix’d, and will not leave me” (1.1. 228–29). But Helen’s “intents”—unlike Iago’s—are enfolded in beneficent mystery from the outset. Unlike Painter’s heroine—who “made a pouder of certaine herbes, which she thought meete for that disease, and rode to Paris”2—she is the inheritor of “a remedy, approv’d, set down, / To cure the desperate languishings whereof / The King is render’d lost.” This prescription has something in’t More than my father’s skill, which was the great’st Of his profession, that his good receipt Shall for my legacy be sanctified By the luckiest stars in heaven. . . . (1.3.228–30, 242–46)

What the prescription contains is grace, a gift beyond the confections of an empiric doctor. And grace begets wonder. When Helen arrives at court with her supernatural remedy, she is so highly praised by Lafew that the King responds facetiously, “Bring in the admiration, that we with thee / May spend our wonder too” (2.1.87–88). Against his rational skepticism, she wages an earnest war of words, as Shakespeare amplifies the arguments of Painter’s heroine, who had also insisted that her ability is divinely warranted. “He that of greatest works is finisher,” Helen reminds the King, “Oft

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does them by the weakest minister,” and she declares that “Oft expectation fails, and most oft there / Where most it promises; and oft it hits / Where hope is coldest, and despair most [fits]” (2.1.142–44). Still the King denies her. She can crack his wilfullness only by comparing divine and human knowledge: Inspired merit so by breath is barr’d. It is not so with Him that all things knows As ’tis with us that square our guess by shows; But most it is presumption in us when The help of heaven we count the act of men. (2.1.148–52)

Unlike God who knows, humans at best “guess” at truth and measure the validity of their guesses by appearances; worse, they attribute to their own resourcefulness “the divinity that shapes our ends” (Ham. 5.2.10).3 This is the cognitive framework in which Shakespeare develops the intrigues of All’s Well that Ends Well. It is as if the tragic depths of probability that he had glimpsed while working on Othello had sent him reeling, and he was now in search of a remedy. In truth, that remedy had always been close at hand, and he had invoked it before—but never had he so thoroughly examined its implications as in All’s Well and its companion piece, Measure for Measure, both plays composed within a year or so of Othello.4 As early as The Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare put together three elements to resolve apparently intractable issues: a probable mind-set in the characters generated by his dramatis personae; a sudden self-abnegation or, in terms familiar to us now, a disruptive incursion into the characters’ subjectivities; and an encounter with the divine. This third element occurs late in the play when Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse—despite their continual efforts to explicate the cognitive toils in which they are struggling and to escape from Ephesus with their known, carefully-guarded selves intact—are set upon by Angelo, the Second Merchant, Adriana, Luciana, and the Courtesan, who once again mistake them for their Ephesian twins. Literally at his (considerable) wit’s end, Dromio of Syracuse cries out: “Run, master, run, for God’s sake take a house! / This is some priory, in, or we are spoil’d” (5.1.36–37). By means of this uncalculated entrance into a holy house (unremarked by anyone before) and their submission to the Abbess who commands there, the twins are reborn into knowledge of their full identities, the scattered family is reunited, and Egeon’s penalty, demanded

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by the law, is abrogated by the Duke, who finds an apt remission in himself. For in this play even a benevolent ruler cannot bring about an equitable solution through rational means. “Why, what an intricate impeach is this!” he exclaims, hearing contradictory, irreconcilable accounts of the day’s events (5.1.270). A higher power must be evoked from “some priory.” The Comedy of Errors is perhaps the extreme case of the probable subject confined in his default mode of self-understanding,5 for Shakespeare has infused Plautus’s farce with St. Paul’s warning to the Ephesians: “henceforthe walke not as other Gentiles walke, in vanitie of their minde, / Having their cogitation darkened, and being strangers from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardenes of their heart” (Eph. 4: 17–18). Indeed, nearly all the persons in this play (Syracusans included) exhibit in the comic register the pride, anger, violence, and even a touch of the lasciviousness Paul ascribes to the citizens of Ephesus, who do not know that Christ “hathe made of both [Jew and gentile] one, & and hath broken the stoppe of the particion wall” (Eph. 2:14). That is, the senseless strife between Syracusans and Ephesians need not be, for they are of one family. They only discover this when they “take a house . . . for God’s sake” and become new men. Repeatedly in Shakespeare, insuperable tasks become possible when probable thinking is laid by. On the eve of Agincourt, Henry V prays God to bring rational oblivion upon his troops lest they weigh the odds between themselves and the French: O God of battles, steel my soldiers’ hearts, Possess them not with fear! Take from them now The sense of reckoning, [if] th’opposed numbers Pluck their hearts from them. (4.1.289–92)

He goes further. He asks God to forbear revenging his father’s crime, and enumerates the good works he has effected to pay recompense, only to collapse under the weight of numbers and admit the worthlessness of such material embodiments of the repentant spirit: More will I do; Though all that I can do is nothing worth, Since that my penitence comes after all, Imploring pardon. (4.1.302–5)

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Comparison and quantification characterize Henry’s prayer as he tries to be more than a cipher to a great accompt, but at the end he realizes that all his acts amount to nothing weighed against the the crime of fratricide and regicide to which he is heir. Cipher he must be, and when he accepts this, Agincourt is his—and he is wise enough to understand “That God fought for us” (4.8.120).6 Some ten years later Posthumus, consumed by remorse toward the end of Cymbeline, is granted a vision of his dead family and a prophecy of redemption when he admits he is “nothing worth.” He had ventured his wife in a wager that she would remain faithful whatever Iachimo’s solicitations, but on the Italian’s return from Britain, he accepts his enargeia-filled description of Imogen’s body and bedchamber as his eroticized will, holding his judgment in thrall, fastens on the lively probabilities offered by Iachimo, and fashions a preposterous conclusion. Now, having plotted Imogen’s death, he believes he is a murderer and contritely prays the gods to take his life in exchange for hers, for though less worthy it is made in their image and may pass current: For Imogen’s dear life, take mine, and though ’Tis not so dear, yet ’tis a life; you coin’d it. ’Tween man and man they weigh not every stamp; Though light, take pieces for the figure’s sake; You rather, mine being yours; and so, great pow’rs, If you will take this audit, take this life, And cancel these cold bonds. (5.4.22–28)

The “matter” of his life is lightweight; it is the divine stamp that gives it equipoise. With this acknowledgment, he falls into a sleep and dreams of the parents and brothers he never knew, who importune Jupiter to redeem him from his sorrows. And the gruff-tempered god responds. On awakening, Posthumus finds a tablet containing the riddle that will end his miseries.7 The pattern I have begun to sketch here suggests that there lurks in the plays another way of knowing, which I shall call the epistemology of Shakespearean romance. It transcends the limitations of empirical understanding, with its inclination to act “as if for surety” on grounds of mere probability, and bears traces of the Pauline distinction between a will that is cathected to the world and one that turns inward to God. Hence it also articulates the two kinds of self we have studied—the probable subject that fashions

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itself empirically, led by will, and the residual self, repository of past and future subjects, to which the subject can return and issue again to dwell in parameters once deemed impossible. This epistemology is romantic insofar as it embraces the impossible—or at least the unlike—whether or not it happens in plays that we designate romances. The adventures in the Athenian woods, under the influence of Cupid’s flower and Dian’s bud, are romantic in this sense, for they enable Hermia and Helena to see the world through one another’s eyes—the littler rejected by both Demetrius and Lysander, the taller (forsooth) pursued by both. As a result, each girl’s vision is mysteriously enhanced: her: Methinks I see these things with parted eye, When everything seems double. hel:

So methinks;

And I have found Demetrius like a jewel, Mine own, and not mine own. (MND 4.1.189–92)

Even in this play, so seemingly secure in its paganism, St. Paul’s influence is at work, for Bottom, the most materialist imagination in the Athenian woods, is granted a “rare vision” that, if marred in the telling, unmistakably echoes Paul’s letter to the Corinthians (MND 4.1.211–14).8 In a quite different register, there is an episode in Hamlet that has long been recognized as reminiscent of romance: the recounted sea voyage, during which Hamlet sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths and is captured by pirates. After four acts of analyzing, plotting, rehearsing, debating, satirizing, and self-questioning—“I do not know / Why yet I live to say, ‘This thing’s to do,’ / Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means / To do’t” (4.4.43–46)—the most rationalizing of Shakespeare’s heroes tells Horatio how he had acted without premeditation in the middle of the night and saved his life—yet he instantly enfolds his improvisation in a providential script: Rashly— And prais’d be rashness for it—let us know Our indiscretion sometime serves us well When our deep plots do pall, and that should learn us There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will. . . . (5.2.6–11)

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The first three-plus lines do not logically implicate the sentiment of the following two. Yet in recounting the incident on shipboard, Hamlet speaks like Henry V after Agincourt, yielding his agency to heaven. He does so again, just before the invitational duel, even as he admits to Horatio, “Thou wouldst not think how ill all’s here about my heart” (5.2.212–13). “If your mind dislike anything,” Horatio prudently advises him, “obey it,” and promises to forestall the duel. But Hamlet defies augury. “There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow,” he replies—“let be” (5.2.217–224). It is a heroic assertion, bespeaking a specifically Christian heroism, and minutes later it is no longer true that “this thing’s to do.” It is done—through a clutter of rash acts that succeed because “there’s a divinity that shapes our ends.”9 It seems, then, that what Locke was to call the twilight of probability was for Shakespeare both a condition of knowing and a transitional temporality. It was a condition insofar as there is no escaping the instanta­neous probabilization of perception that governs subject formation. It was a temporality because, while one cannot escape this cognitive reflex, one can mitigate its psychological and ethical effects by confessing one’s limitations in an act of faith that expands cognition beyond the native reductiveness of its epistemology. From early in his career he had explored these limitations and how they might be transcended. In every instance it involved abjuring the probable inferencing by means of which the mind and will cathected to noticiae—those images of ideas and words whose origins lay outside the self and which were transformed, through the power of peitho and apate, into a world that a man could “bustle in,” to quote King Richard III (1.1.152). This was a self-sufficient world in which a man knew what he was, and “knowing what I am, I know what she shall be” (Oth. 4.1.73). Surrendering this worldly self is not to lose the ability to think and act, but rather to release those capacities to function on a larger stage, with the result that the parameters of anticipating, knowing, and doing expand from the probable to the possible—to what Isabella, describing behavior that exceeds rhetorical measure, calls the “unlike” (MM 5.1.52). This suggests that Shakespeare was attracted early to the genres of tragicomedy and romance, which do not put much stake in probability.10 These genres enabled him to enlarge the psychological scope of his dramatis personae and—perhaps more important to a patently rhetorical dramatist—to enlarge the cognitive, emotional, and spiritual range of his audiences. If in writing for the theater he was influenced, however indirectly, by the Aristotelian principle that dramatic mimesis should proceed according to standards of probability and necessity—and by the explicitly rhetorical

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Horatian dictum that tradition and audience expectation must govern representation—he seems also to have recognized that probable theater reflects conventional thinking and that conventional thinking, if reassuring, is delimiting. He wanted more for his staged persons and his audiences, and therefore violated the Aristotelian dictum that “a likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility” (Poetics 1460a25). This is why a different concept, also in Aristotle—to thauma, translated into Latin as admiratio, into English as “the wonderful,” and transmitted through the syncretic rhetorical poetics of Renaissance critics—came to play an increasingly important role in his drama.11 Sometimes it was manifest in a ruler like Henry V, who seems to transcend ordinary ways of knowing and on whose beneficence his subjects must rely—but even he is subject to an encompassing providence that awaits the acknowledgment of all men and women who come up against the limit of their own abilities to realize their desires—or to recall their errors—through ordinary prudential means, and confess their helplessness. When these situations occur, such men and women—and their audiences—participate in the epistemology of romance. In the sections that follow, I shall demonstrate the emergence of this epistemology in the rhetoric of All’s Well and Measure for Measure—plays not usually thought of as romances—and suggest that these dramatic experiments, infused with a distinctly Protestant attitude toward probability, herald Shakespeare’s later turn to romance and especially to his recuperation of Othello in The Winter’s Tale.

II They say miracles are past, and we have our philosophical persons, to make modern and familiar, things supernatural and causeless. Hence it is that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge, when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear. (2.3.1–6)

Thus Lafew, after Helen has succeeded in curing the King. Parolles, ever quick to agree, calls it “the rarest argument of wonder that hath shot out in our latter times,” and Lafew, “a novelty to the world”—for the news has apparently reached the ballad vendors: “A showing of a heavenly effect in an earthly actor” (2.3.7–8, 20, 23–24). What next ensues is a conflict of wills—heaven’s will, as revealed in Helen’s success as physician, and Bertram’s, like that of St. Paul’s worldly man, to retain the disposition of his own existence.12 The result is that Bertram becomes the inglorious fu-

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gitive hero of a satiric tragicomedy grafted to the stock of a providential romance. This grafting provides a dramaturgic way to fix what is wrong in the romance: the deep reluctance of a self-directed subject to relinquish his projects when he thinks he knows what he desires, but does not know the difference between thinking and knowing, and must be purged of his presumption. I use the two cognitive verbs that Helen herself uses when she is trying to convince the King to accept her remedy: I am not an imposture that proclaim Myself against the level of mine aim, But know I think, and think I know most sure, My art is not past power, nor you past cure. (2.1.155–58)

This is a modest, startlingly Cartesian grammar. All she claims is that she knows that she thinks, and what she thinks is that she has certain knowledge. This is quite different from the exchange we noticed earlier between Iago and Othello, where there is an inadvertent slippage from thinking to knowing that blurs the distinction between the two kinds of awareness: iago: My lord, you know I love you. oth: I think thou dost. And for I know thou’rt full of love and honesty. . . . (Oth. 3.3.119–21)

A similar blurring is suggested by Mariana in the last scene of Measure for Measure, when she identifies as her husband the astonished Angelo, “Who thinks he knows that he ne’er knew my body, / But knows he thinks that he knows Isabel’s” (MM 5.1.203–4). “This is a strange abuse,” we might say of such logic-chopping, echoing Angelo’s response to her claim that they have had sexual intercourse, but in all three instances Shakespeare is taking pains to distinguish knowledge from thought and to show how easily the one is mistaken for the other. The lack of such a distinction wrought horrors in Othello, as Iago belatedly admits: “I told him what I thought, and told no more / Than what he found himself was apt and true” (5.2.172–73).13 There is a companion text to All’s Well that states even more explicitly what is at stake in the play. It is by Shakespeare’s older contemporary Fulke

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Greville, like Lafew a courtier and statesman. It is from his sonnet cycle Caelica: O false and treacherous Probability, Enemy of truth, and friend to wickednesse; With whose bleare eyes opinion learnes to see Truth’s feeble party here, and barrennesse. When thou hath thus misled Humanity, And lost obedience in the pride of wit, With reason dar’st thou judge the Deity, And in thy flesh make bold to fashion it. Vaine thought, the word of Power a riddle is, And till the vayles be rent, the flesh newborne, Reveals no wonders of that inward blisse, Which but where faith is, every where findes scorne; “Who therfore censures God with fleshly sprite, “As well in time may wrap up infinite. (Sonnet CIII)14

Greville’s Protestant skepticism, with its peremptory rejection of probability, glosses with uncanny clarity Lafew’s bracing reflection that “we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge, when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear.” As in his Treatie of Humane Learning, he is concerned in the sonnet with the epistemological frailty of fallen humanity and its consequent anthropomorphosis of the deity. In the poem preceding this one, he asks a related question: how was mankind tempted to sin, since “above, within, without us all was pure”? (CII.44). His answer is that the fallen angels, exploiting the “middle spheares, / Of Probable, and Possibility, / Which no one constant demonstration beares,” persuaded us that because our will was free, “all was to it free, / Since where no sinne was, there no law could be” (55–57, 65–66). For Greville, both probability and possibility are fallible “middle spheares,” with no connection to the absolute. But for Shakespeare, possibility is the sphere to which human beings, breaking through the “vayles” of probability, escape as they open themselves to faith. Caelica CIII is relevant to All’s Well in yet another way. Greville’s words, “Which but where faith is, every where findes scorne,” echo the foundational text of Protestant practical divinity, Romans 14:23, which in William Perkins’s rendering reads: “Whatsoever is not of faith, that is, whatsoever is not done of a setled persuasion in judgment and conscience out of Gods

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word, however men judge of it, is sinne.15 Perkins quotes and glosses the text in the course of explaining the function of conscience in determining whether a given action is pleasing to God. In developing their own form of practical theology, Protestant divines were at pains to distinguish their approach from that of the Papists. Catholic priests who assisted the faithful to order their consciences relied on the probable opinions of learned men to determine what was right or wrong in the eyes of God. In the words of the Dominican priest Bartolomeo de Medina, who had promulgated the casuistic doctrine of probabilism in 1577, an opinion is probable “if it is stated by wise men and confirmed by very good arguments.” Even more disturbing to Protestants was the view that “if an opinion is probable . . . it is permissible to adopt it, even if the opposite be more probable.”16 Perkins, the father of English Protestant casuistry, made it clear in his treatises of conscience that when in doubt one must order one’s conscience not on the basis of probability but according to the written word of God. In his dedication to Perkins’s Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience, Thomas Pickering asserts that this teaching is of all other Doctrines, (beeing rightly used) the most comfortable. For it is not founded in the opinions, and variable conceits of men, neither does it consist, of conclusions and Positions, which are onely probable and conjecturall: (for the Conscience of the doubting or distressed partie, can not be established and rectifed by them:) but it resteth upon most sufficient and certaine Grounds, collected and drawne out of the very Word of God, which, as it is mightie in operation, pearcing the heart, and discerning the thoughts and intents thereof, so is it alone availeable and effectuall to pacifie the minde, and to give full satisfaction to the Conscience.17

This principle of Protestant casuistry, rooted in a deeply skeptical view of the ability of fallen human beings to make practical decisions that are ethically responsive to one another and morally conformable to God’s will, provides a link between the two coincident phenomena often seen in Shakespeare’s plays—the crisis of probability and the embrace of faith. As we have noticed, probability does not fare well in All’s Well; indeed, it is associated with lying and liars, and—in one instance, at least—with casuistry. When Parolles conveys Bertram’s order to Helen that she leave the King’s court immediately, he counsels her to “make this haste as your own good proceeding, / Strength’ned with what apology you think / May make it probable need” (2.4.49–51). Later, having vowed to retrieve the drum he lost in disgrace or die in the attempt, he determines to order his own conscience

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casuistically: “I’ll about it this evening, and I will presently pen down my dilemmas, encourage myself in my certainty, put myself into my mortal preparation; and by midnight look to hear further from me” (3.6.77).18 Here he rehearses, in parodic fashion, the advice given to the Christian facing doubts about the moral (and mortal) consequences of the action he is about to undertake. When confronted by such doubts, a Catholic would encourage himself in his certainty by invoking the doctrine of probabilism. Though we don’t hear Parolles quoting the opinions of learned men, given his easy morality and association with probability, we may suspect that he is going to employ Catholic probabilism to resolve his doubt.19 At his departure, Bertram asks the French lords if after all his brave words, Parolles won’t make even an attempt to retrieve the drum, and the Second Lord replies, “None in the world, but return with an invention, and clap upon you two or three probable lies” (3.6.97–98). True to form, Parolles wonders what he can tell the Lords after the supposed skirmish: “What shall I say I have done? / It must be a very plausive invention that carries it” (4.1.25–27), and then proceeds to rehearse several of them. Parolles is awash in probabilities.20 What is remarkable about All’s Well is its decisive shift into a tragicomedy of satirical intrigue in the third act after its romantic and improbable beginnings.21 It would seem that this is the genre in which probability must be purged. Satirical intrigue gathers chiefly about the figure of Parolles, who is increasingly made the scapegoat and object lesson for the delinquent Bertram. Intrigue also engages Helen, but it is neither satirical nor deeply plotted. Indeed, her lapse into intrigue is fortuitous, unlike the case of Painter’s Giletta who, learning of the impossible conditions her husband has set for acknowledging her, “purposed to find means to attaine the two thinges, that thereby she might recover her husbande” (Bullough, 392). Then, having published the subterfuge of a pilgrimage to her people, she departed, “telling no man whither shee wente, and never rested till shee came to Florence.” There Giletta, hearing that her husband was importuning the favors of a poor young virgin, “well noting these words and by litle and litle debating every particular point thereof, comprehending the effecte of those newes, concluded what to do” (Bullough, 393). This abandoned wife is a very scheming lady. Helen, reading the same conditions in as cruel a letter, feels only remorse for driving her beloved into the dangers of war, determines to remove herself from Rossillion so he may return home, and writes to the old Countess that she has undertaken a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. James Compostella to have her faults

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amended (3.4.4–7). Lest the audience wonder why she ends up in Florence en route to a Spanish shrine, Shakespeare’s Widow observes to her daughter, “Look here comes a pilgrim. I know she will lie at my house; thither they send one another,” and invites Helen to meet fellow-pilgrims at her home: “Of enjoin’d penitents / There’s four or five, to great Saint Jacques bound, / Already at my house” (3.5.30–32, 94–96). Pilgrimage, not plotting, leads Helen to Florence. Only when she learns that Bertram is pursuing Diana does she begin to plot, and Shakespeare devotes no space to her deliberations.22 At this juncture a rhetoric of contradictory synonymy, indicative of two disparate wills or knowledges—analogous to the contrapuntal friction of “think” and “know” that we heard earlier from Helen—enters the play. “Why then to-night,” she tells the Widow, Let us assay our plot, which if it speed, Is wicked meaning in a lawful deed, And lawful meaning in a lawful act, Where both not sin, and yet a sinful fact (3.7.43–47)

“Deed,” “act,” and “fact” are roughly synonymous, yet are evidently meant to be heard as distinct, possessing the oracular multiple meaning of sibylline speech.23 “Wicked” and “lawful” are clearly antonyms, as are “not sin” and “sinful.” There is something priestess-like in Helen’s cryptic pronouncements, and one can imagine the Widow’s puzzled expression as she listens , then dutifully follows her offstage. But that, I think, is Shakespeare’s point. Helen is reconciling two intentionalities sub specie aeternitatis. The second line describes Bertram’s meaning as he “fleshes his will” in the body he thinks is Diana’s but is in truth one to which he holds a lawful deed. The third line describes Helen’s meaning as she presents her body to Bertram and physically becomes one with him in the sexual act. The fourth line registers her awareness of the holy transformation of sinful doing (faciens) through the ceremony of marriage. Counterpointing Helen’s superior spiritual understanding, then, is a powerful strain that runs through this play, reminding its audience that fallen man is both limited in self-awareness and naturally evil, and that, unassisted by grace, he will actualize his nature. It is made explicit when the First Lord, hearing that Bertram is pursuing Diana unrepentantly even after receiving news of Helen’s death, exclaims, “Now God delay our rebellion! As we are ourselves, what things are we!”

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(4.3.19–20). The sentiment is echoed in Helen’s couplets, which place two understandings side by side, the greater one supplementing and correcting the lesser. This suggests that a still more nuanced layering of Protestant moral theology informs the play. In his Discourse of Conscience, Perkins carefully distinguishes between conscience and ordinary thought in a manner that may be relevant to the sybilline qualities of Helen’s speech: “For there be two actions of the understanding, the one is simple, which barely conceiveth or thinketh this or that: the other is a reflecting or doubting of the former, whereby a man conceives or thinks with himself what he thinkes. And this action properly pertains to the conscience. The mind thinkes a thought, now conscience goes beyond another person within him, shall discover all [sic]. By means of this second action, conscience may beare witnes even of thoughts, and from hence also it seems to borrow his name, because conscience is a science or knowledge joyned with another knowledge: for by it I conceive and know what I know” (William Perkins, 7–8). Helen, it would seem, speaks as conscience speaks, correcting the unreflective thought of Bertram like “another person within him”—a surrogate voice, as it were, supplying what he himself lacks.24 Priestess-like or not, her management of their marital redemption does not run smooth.25 She arrives too late in Marseilles to appeal to the King, whose court has moved on to Rossillion, and her improvisation on Giletta’s device to obtain her husband’s ring—which is to place her own ring on his finger in exchange—brings out Bertram’s natural penchant for lying, nearly lands him in prison, and transforms Diana into a double-talking sibyl, a role that almost costs her her life. The self-generated account of her death, which has no counterpart in Painter, also provides Bertram with the opportunity publicly to express contrition in the last scene and gain the King’s approval. But Shakespeare’s conception is evident. It is to create another “Why, what an intricate impeach is this!” scene (CE 5.1.270), in which contradictory testimony, put forth by refractory wills and different knowledges, baffles the secular judge and must be reconciled by a figure of prevenient grace—in this case, Helen. It begins when the King, having received Bertram back in favor, asks him to send a token to a new bride, and Lafew identifies the ring Bertram offers as Helen’s. It is, of course, the ring Helen put on his finger when she had assumed the person of Diana in the darkness of her bed in Florence. Bertram, not knowing this, denies it is Helen’s, and to conceal his adultery pretends it is an unsolicited gift from a Florentine lady. The King, who had

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presented the ring to Helen himself, now begins to experience “conjectural fears” that Bertram has used violence on her—that is, he begins to think “probably”—and accordingly rehearses supporting proofs: If it should prove That thou art so inhuman—’twill not prove so; And yet I know not: thou didst hate her deadly, And she is dead, which nothing but to close Her eyes myself could win me to believe, More than this ring. (5.3.115–20)

Rehearsing his “fore-past proofs”—signs of his impotence before contradictory testimony—the King is next confronted by Diana, who complains that Bertram vowed to marry her when his wife was dead, and therefore she is now his wife: “For I by vow am so embodied yours, / That she which marries you must marry me, / Either both or none” (5.3.173–75). When Bertram denies his former vow, she bids the King, “Good my lord, / Ask him upon his oath, if he does think / He had not my virginity” (5.3.184–86), which pushes Bertram into yet another lie: “She’s impudent, my lord, / And was a common gamester to the camp” (5.3.187–88). Whereupon Diana displays Bertram’s family ring to prove he slanders her. Bertram then tells the truth: he had bribed her to satisfy his lust. Exonerated, Diana offers to return Bertram’s ring if he’ll return hers. This second ring is news to the King: “What ring was yours, I pray you?” (5.3.225). When she identifies it as the ring on his finger, a perplexed new round of questioning ensues. “This was it I gave him, being a-bed,” she says, falsifying Bertram’s earlier story that a lady threw it to him from her casement. Then, lying outright, “I have spoke the truth,” she insists. After Parolles, dubious witness that he is, corroborates her story, the King returns to Diana and a strange examination commences: king: This ring you say was yours? diana:

Ay, my good lord.

king: Where did you buy it? Or who gave it you? diana: It was not given me, nor I did not buy it. king: Who lent it you? diana:    It was not lent me neither. king: Where did you find it then?

354 / Epilogue diana:    I found it not. king: If it were yours by none of all these ways, How could you give it him? diana: I never gave it him. (5.3.269–76)

Something has happened between the moment she said, “And this was it I gave him, being abed” (228) and “I never gave it him” (276). That something was the appearance of equivocal Parolles, who confessed the truth via praeteritio, the rhetorical figure through which one says what one would say if one were able to say it but in the present circumstances cannot. It is simultaneously a saying and a not-saying.26 In the interim Diana has shifted interiorities—speaking at first as Helen and now in her own person—an egregious embodiment of “I am not what I am.” It is therefore not surprising that when the King demands, “Wherefore hast thou accus’d him all this while?” she, too, equivocates: Because he’s guilty, and he is not guilty. He knows I am no maid, and he’ll swear to’t; I’ll swear I am a maid, and he knows not. (5.3.289–91)

As in Helen’s earlier statement to the Widow, a subjective and an absolute truth ambiguously mingle. We may translate: “He’s guilty in thought, but not guilty in deed. In thought, he knows he’s known me sexually, and will swear it. In deed, I’ll swear I am a virgin, and that he knows it not.” Despite her name, Diana is no goddess, but she shares Helen’s knowledge, and is the spokesperson for its double truth. Which is why she can pronounce its final oracular riddle: The jeweler that owes the ring is sent for, And he shall surety me. But for this lord, Who hath abus’d me, as he knows himself, Though yet he never harm’d me, here I quit him. He knows himself my bed he hath defil’d, And at that time he got his wife with child. Dead though she be, she feels her young one kick, So there’s my riddle: one that’s dead is quick— And now behold the meaning. (5.3.296–304)

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“As he knows himself,” which is but slenderly, Bertram has abused Diana. Though never harmed by him, she forgives the injury. He knows he defiled Diana’s bed. But what he doesn’t know—and what Diana does—is that at that time he impregnated his actual, not his would-be wife. The two persons of Diana and Helen oscillate in her speech, and continue to do so as “knowledge” and “deed” converge in the living riddle that appears onstage when Helen enters and replies to the King’s amazed question, “Is’t real that I see?” with the half-truth, “No, my good lord, / ’Tis but the shadow of a wife you see, / The name, and not the thing” (5.3.306–8). Her words suggest that she remains a ghostly shade as long as Bertram “knows” he had intercourse with Diana and not with her, as though his belief has substantive influence on her being.27 She tries to mend the situation by reminding him of the sexual pleasure he knew with her when he merely thought he was making love to Diana: “O my good lord, when I was like this maid, I found you wondrous kind” (5.3.309–10). To which the delighted if disconcerted Bertram replies (I shall paraphrase in tetrameter): “Wow! If she can prove this clearly, / Will I ever love her dearly!” And the parameters of probability, within which Shakespeare’s human beings, like the rest of us, must live their lives, promise to expand as the King proposes that the young people fill in the blanks: “Let us from point to point this story know, / To make the even truth in pleasure flow” (325–26). “Even” means “just,” “equal,” and “smooth” here, and those “in the know” are invited to show—by recounting the improbable episodes of their story—how accepting the “unlike” as true will bring new pleasure.28

III The last scene of All’s Well plays like a rehearsal for the last scene of Measure for Measure, a more psychologically complex drama.29 I discussed in chapter 9 Shakespeare’s explicit invocation of the legal maxim honores mutant mores to explore the shifting subject positions of Angelo, whose “I” becomes “not I” as circumstances change—and how Isabella’s exploitation of the hypothetical mode to loosen Angelo’s imagination from the probable fixity in which it is anchored, so as to enable him to envision alternative paths of action, leads to an unanticipated result. Measure for Measure also reveals, with similar irony, that probable argument can be a double-edged sword. For when the topics of person, place, and action are added up, they may form, as the Duke remarks, “a kind of character in thy life / That to th’ observer doth thy history / Fully unfold” (1.1.27). This is a principle of equitable judgment, where we must ask “not what a man is now but what he has

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always or usually been” (Aristotle, Rhet. 1374b15), but it is a misleading index when intention is unknown and only public behavior may be scanned. It may also be used deceptively, as a weapon of exculpation, as when Angelo threatens to turn Isabella’s accusation against her: Who will believe thee, Isabel? My unsoil’d name, th’austereness of my life, My vouch against you, and my place i’ th’ state, Will so your accusation overweigh, That you shall stifle in your own report, And smell of calumny. (2.4.154–59)

Hence the need of a judge who transcends such reasoning through quasidivine cognition. In Measure for Measure, there is no such figure, though the Duke acts “like pow’r divine” (5.1.369) as he secretly observes events in Vienna. The closest approximation to such a power is Isabella, for whom Shakepeare invents a new, radically improbable rhetoric in her encounters with Angelo and, later, with the Duke himself. One of the striking features of her attempt to get Angelo to pardon Claudio early in the play is her adaptation of God’s own improbable fiction about fallen man. Angelo declares, “Your brother is a forfeit of the law, / And you but waste your words.” She replies: Alas, alas! Why, all the souls that were were forfeit once, And He that might the vantage best have took Found out the remedy. How would you be If He, which is the top of judgment, should But judge you as you are? (MM 2.2.72–77)

It is a strange legal argument. She is calling on Angelo to reenact on Claudio’s behalf the preeminent fiction of Christian theology, which is inscribed in the Protestant doctrine of imputed righteousness. Calvin expresses it succinctly: “A man is said to be justified in the sight of God when in the judgment of God he is deemed righteous, and is accepted on account of his righteousness; for as iniquity is abominable to God, so neither can the sinner find grace in his sight, so far as he is and so long as he is regarded as a sinner. . . . Thus we simply interpret justification, as the acceptance with which God

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receives us into his favor as if we were righteous; and we say that this justification consists in the forgiveness of sins and the imputation of the righteousness of Christ.”30 The would-be nun is reminding the secular judge that he is not what he is: his own innocence is an “as if” fiction fashioned by a divine judge.31 Each person is in himself sinful and would be denied salvation were he so regarded in the sight of God; only by being “imputed” righteous can he be saved. She seems to be thinking especially of Calvin’s description of justification by faith, for the man who is justified by faith “lays hold of the righteousness of Christ and clothed in it appears in the sight of God not as a sinner but as righteous” (ibid.). He is not what he is; nor is any of us, for “as we are ourselves,” the French Lord reminds us, “what things are we!” (AWW 4.3.19–20). Pursuing this paradox, she asks Angelo to probe his own apparently innocent self hood: Go to your bosom, Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know That’s like my brother’s fault. If it confess A natural guiltiness such as is his, Let it not sound a thought upon your tongue Against my brother’s life. (MM 2.2.136–41)

Ironically, Isabella is asking a counter-factual man to inquire into his own factuality and to acknowledge his kinship with her all-too-factual brother. As a result, Angelo’s sinfulness stares back at her with newly activated lust: her appeal has worked too well. Invoking his imputed righteousness has called up his “natural guiltiness,” which had been suppressed by a politic will. Once aroused, “I have begun,” he proclaims at their next meeting, “And now I give my sensual race the rein” (2.4.159–60). Not for him the doctrine of imputed righteousness.32 But she does not relinquish the model. She calls upon it again in the last scene, when Angelo’s life is at stake and it is the Duke who will not spare the malefactor. This scene is virtually a watershed of all those invocations of probable argument, judgment, and behavior that Shakespeare has been critiquing on his stages up till now. The play itself, of course, begins with its own antidote to probable inquiry—the contrary-to-fact fiction that the Duke has left Vienna. This releases the citizens, who believe that they are no longer under his surveillance, to enact their fantasies, and enables the Duke to watch “corruption boil and bubble, / Till it o’errun the stew” (5.1.318–19).33 On the expectation of his return, his shadow, Friar Lodowick,

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connives with Isabella and Mariana to accuse Angelo in the public street. Thus situated, Isabella first pleads with the Duke not to believe his deputy: isab: That Angelo’s foresworn, is it not strange? That Angelo is an adulterous thief, An hypocrite, a virgin-violator, Is it not strange? And strange? duke:

Nay, it is ten times strange.

isab: It is not truer he is Angelo Than this is all as true as it is strange. . . . (5.1.38–44)

Strange and true—not apt and true—is the claim of this Anti-Iago. When the Duke threatens to dismiss her as one who speaks “in th’infirmity of sense,” Isabella pleads: O Prince, I conjure thee, as thou believ’st There is another comfort than this world, That thou neglect me not, with that opinion That I am touched with madness. Make not impossible That which but seems unlike; ’tis not impossible But one the wicked’st caitiff on the ground, May seem as shy, as grave, as just, as absolute As Angelo. Even so may Angelo, In all his dressings, caracts, titles, forms, Be an arch-villain. Believe it, royal Prince, If he be less, he’s nothing, but he’s more, Had I more name for badness. (5.1.47–59)

Faced with an apparently implacable probabilist, she finds she must distinguish improbability from impossibility. It is not impossible for a despicable wretch to seem as pure as Angelo, and if that is so, Angelo himself may be “the wicked’st caitiff on the ground,” and if that is so, he is such a one, else he is nothing. If the “unlike” is “not impossible,” then Angelo’s “caracts”— his probable character signs—are “like” but untrue. Not surprisingly, Isabella’s attempt to persuade the duplicitous Duke by arguing against probability and asserting her knowledge fails. Even when she supplies details of her interviews with Angelo, his bribe, and her supposed yielding to him, the Duke won’t back off:

Twilight of Probability / 359 First, his integrity Stands without blemish; next, it imports no reason That with such vehemency he should pursue Faults proper to himself. If he had so offended, He would have weigh’d thy brother by himself, And not have cut him off. Some one hath set you on; Confess the truth, and say by whose advice Thou cam’st here to complain. (5.1.107–14)

Since the theater audience knows that the Duke knows the truth, his rehearsal of these probable arguments only serves to demonstrate their inanity. The Duke’s subsequent exit and return as Friar Lodowick, his maneuvering to be discovered by Lucio, his indictment of Angelo, and the marriage he forces on him need not concern us here. What is significant is the specific psychological situation in which he places Isabella and her response from within that space. He pardons her for “having employ’d and pain’d / Your unknown sovereignty” in her cause, on the stipulation that she pardon him for having allowed her brother to die—thereby prolonging both the pretense that Claudio is dead and Isabella’s unpretended grief. It is in this belief that she fashions her response to Angelo’s death sentence, which we must look at carefully in order to appreciate its strangeness. The Duke sees Angelo return with Mariana and Peter: For this new-married man approaching here, Whose salt imagination yet hath wrong’d Your well-defended honor, you must pardon For Mariana’s sake; but as he adjudg’d your brother— Being criminal, in double violation Of sacred chastity and of promise-breach, Thereon dependant, for your brother’s life— The very mercy of the law cries out Most audible, even from his proper tongue, “An Angelo for Claudio, death for death!” (5.1.400–409)

Mariana is horrified and pleads with Isabella to “take my part” and kneel with her before the Duke to beg for Angelo’s life. The Duke replies quite reasonably:

360 / Epilogue Against all sense you do importune her. Should she kneel down in mercy of this fact, Her brother’s ghost his paved bed would break, And take her hence in horror. (5.1.433–36)

But Isabella does just that. She rehearses for the Duke the disinterested doctrine of imputed righteousness, asking him to assume a hypothetical, contrary-to-fact condition that will function as a heuristic fiction in seeking a remedy: Most bounteous sir, Look, if it please you, on this man condemn’d As if my brother liv’d. I partly think A due sincerity governed his deed, Till he did look on me. Since it is so, Let him not die. (5.1.443–48)

She presents two unexpected ideas here. First, that a remedy can be found if the Duke will regard Angelo as though he were not guilty of executing Claudio. It is “against all sense” not only because she is trying to save the man she believes has killed her brother—and thus speaks against her own interest—but more radically because she knows she thinks that what she proposes is not true. In her mind, Claudio is dead. Stranger still, she is defending Angelo against the death penalty for judicial murder by stipulating that there was no murder. Entertaining the hypothesis, however, enables the second idea, which is to reclothe the defendant in the Duke’s eyes—for, as Norton’s Calvin writes, “as wickednesse is abhominable before God, so a sinner cannot finde favour in his eies, in respect that he is a sinner, or so long as he is accounted such a one.” If Angelo is regarded as though he has not killed Claudio, then it is possible to look upon him in a different manner, and to consider the possibility that his desire for her may have arisen partly because of her doing—that perhaps she inadvertently tempted him. The hypothesis not only loosens the hold of justice on Angelo, but also permits Isabella to acknowledge tacitly that her own “prone and speechless dialect” (1.2.182) may have been a factor in his moral lapse. Her adaptation of the doctrine of imputed righteousness is thus doubly liberating—casting not just Angelo but also herself in a new light.34

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In employing the doctrine of imputed righteousness as a rhetorical strategy to save Angelo, however, it is evident that she is adding something distinctly human not contained in the original doctrine and that she had not adduced earlier when trying to save Claudio from Angelo’s sentence—the circumstances surrounding the alleged crime. This is a traditional component of equity, and in the forensic register it would appear that she has used the theological doctrine of imputed righteousness to pry open the Duke’s common-law argument that Angelo must die on the basis of fact alone: he had executed Claudio after agreeing to free him in exchange for sex with Isabella, thus breaking the law against “violation of sacred chastity”; then, reneging on his word, he had become guilty of “promise-breach.”35 But more than one strain of cultural practice is represented here. Examining circumstances is also a feature of early Protestant casuistry, which, though it rejected arguments probabiles, the fundamental supports of Catholic casuistry, retained its requisite circumstantiae in deciding cases of conscience. In advocating for Angelo in the public forum, Isabella is speaking as the voice of her own conscience judging her own complicity—all the while remaining outside the precincts of probability.36 What follows seems to be a non-sequitur, but is actually an extension of the hypothetical framing with which she began her case. Now, she says, granted that Claudio is dead, there is yet a difference between his sexual misconduct and Angelo’s. Claudio did have intercourse with Juliet, for which he was punished, while Angelo only intended to have intercourse with Isabella, in exchange for which he promised to pardon Claudio. Since Angelo did not have intercourse with Isabella, therefore he is not “criminal, in double violation / Of sacred chastity and of promise-breach, / Thereon dependant, for your brother’s life”: For Angelo, His act did not o’er take his bad intent, And must be buried but as an intent That perish’d by the way. Thoughts are no subjects, Intents but merely thoughts. (5.1.450–54)

This is an ancient Stoic commonplace that Angelo himself had invoked earlier in the play, when Escalus had urged him to consider that he might have been tempted as was Claudio. “What’s open made to justice, / That justice seizes,” Angelo had replied with common-law matter-of-factness (2.1.21–22),

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echoing the principle followed by Lord Chief Justice Popham at the trial of the Essex conspirators: “for the law judgeth not of the fact by the intent, but of the intent by the fact.”37 On this principle, Angelo may not have had intercourse with Isabella as he intended, but he did have intercourse with her substitute, Mariana. The fact itself implies criminal intent. Moreover, since Claudio had intercourse with his betrothed and was executed for it, by the same standard Angelo should also be executed—“an Angelo for a Claudio”—regardless of what Isabella says. But neither that issue nor the legal maxim cited by Bacon arises. It seems that Shakespeare wishes to impress on his audience the intent and function of Isabella’s speech and not its legal validity. Isabella seeks a remedy and discovers the means of securing it. First, she imputes Angelo innocent of Claudio’s death, and when that is accomplished, she suggests that there are mitigating circumstances that should be taken into consideration in judging his behavior toward her—the circumstances of her own behavior—thereby enfolding equity and confession within the imputation of righteousness. She then brackets his stipulated innocence after it has done its work and insists that unlike Claudio, Angelo did not do what he intended—that he committed no crime against her—and if there is no crime, intention is irrelevant. Such is the intent of Isabella’s speech. Its function in the play is to reveal that she has herself transcended the epistemological and willful limitations of probability by framing her plea in a patently counter-factual hypothesis through which she defends Angelo and acknowledges her own accountability. She who had vowed never to bend down to save her own brother (3.1.143–46) kneels beside Mariana and miraculously pleads for Angelo, even though she thinks he has killed the brother for whom she now grieves. In effect, she uses the doctrine of imputed righteousness and its hypothetical register to achieve what Perkins, in his treatise Epieikeia, calls Christian equity. Perkins derives his concept of equity from Paul’s Letter to the Philippians (4:5). “Our English translations commonly read it thus,” he states: “Let your patient mind be known to all men, which though it be truly and well said, yet the words translated have a larger and fuller signification. Therefore, according to the nature and force of the words I rather choose to read it thus: let your equity or moderation of mind be known, etc.”38 Perkins describes equity as a “Christian moderation betwixt man and man” that is “a Christian virtue, so excellent as the careful practice thereof is the marrow and strength of a commonweal” (481). It is a virtue that is both public and private. In public life, it governs a magistrate’s choice of whether to exercise the extremity or the mitigation of the law. In private life, it teaches a man to bear with the natural infirmities of others, to interpret

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their actions in the best light, to yield one’s own right for the sake of peace, and to forgive personal wrongs. This call to forbearance is a distinctly Christian, not Aristotelian, view of equity, for it takes into account the potential failing of the equitable admonition to ask “not what a man is now but what he has always or usually been”: “Words and deeds are known to other men, but a man’s heart is known to himself alone. Therefore for thy own sayings and doings thou art also able to judge of thine own heart and of thy purpose and intent in so speaking and doing. But of another man thou canst say he spake or did thus or thus: but his heart, his purpose and intent in so doing thou canst not judge; and therefore thou mayest not judge so sharply of another man’s sayings or doings, as of thine own” (495). For Perkins, as for Shakespeare, “There’s no art / To find the mind’s construction in the face” (Mac. 1.4.11–12), and therefore one must exercise moderation and equity.39 Shakespeare, however, presses the implications of Perkins’s argument. If a man’s heart is known to himself alone, then simple forbearance isn’t sufficient. His repetition of the contrary-to-fact hypothesis to supplement Christian equity, drawn from the doctrine of justification, suggests that he is concerned not only to represent the Pauline principle, “Let your moderation of mind be known to all men,” but to pose a spiritual paradox. Since we are all sinners, we must measure others by ourselves—not by the selves we believe ourselves to be, but by the improbable selves lurking beneath our thoughts, the selves that, from a divine perspective, are “what we are,” but which according to our common self-understanding are “what we are not.”

IV In The Winter’s Tale, composed some six years later, Shakespeare offers an anatomy of that improbable self transforming itself into a probable subject. The play takes its cue from Iago’s advice to Othello, “Look to your wife, observe her well” (3.3.200)—but the ensign is nowhere in sight. He has been inscribed in the psyche of the Othello figure, where, in fact, he has been all along and in writing him there with invisible ink, Shakespeare represents the persuader and persuaded in one person, driven by irrational affect to probable inference unaided by any external human agency. Moreover, he shows us how it is done. Leontes and Polixenes enter, accompanied by a visibly pregnant Hermione and six-year-old Mamillius. Polixenes has been visiting Leontes’ court for nine months, leaving his own throne “without a burthen.” His language is full of innuendo to one listening for it: “filled up,” “debt,” “cipher,”

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“multiply,” “breed,” “tire,” until Leontes has to claim that he can’t be worn out by Polixenes: “We are tougher, brother, / Than you can put us to’t” (1.2.3–16). Why this hint of rivalry? From the previous scene we learned of the rooted childhood affection of these friends and how their maturity has been so “royally attorneyed . . . that they have seemed to be together, though absent” (1.1.21–29), to which Polixenes will add that they were “as twin lambs that did frisk i’th’sun, / And bleat the one at th’ other” (1.2.67– 68). Leontes is hearing from his “brother”—a man psychologically if not physically himself (though he has a matching son at home)—that trouble may breed on a throne left unattended (“I do suspect the lusty Moor / Hath leaped into my seat,” Oth. 2.1.294)—and sees in Hermione’s belly a possible sign of the result. What follows is a fast-forward version of Othello’s fall from arguing, “ ’Tis not to make me jealous / To say my wife is fair, feeds well, loves company, / Is free of speech, sings, plays and dances well” (3.3.186–88), to his preposterous conclusion, “Now do I see ’tis true” (3.3.447). It begins as Hermione tells Leontes that he’s not trying hard enough to make Polixenes stay, then playfully adds her own persuasion, asking Polixenes if he’ll force her to keep him her prisoner, not her guest—at which Polixenes demurs: he would rather be her guest, for “to be your prisoner should import offending” (1.2.57). Whereupon Hermione takes Polixenes’ arm and they stroll about the stage: “Come, I’ll question you / Of my lord’s tricks and yours when you were boys” (1.2.60–61). As they move out of earshot, Polixenes’ remark about committing offense lingers in Leontes’ mind as he watches them interact, and when the couple circles back he hears Hermione offer to answer herself for any offense Polixenes has committed “with us” (1.2.86). In this brief scene-within-a-scene Shakespeare has set up, through language and gestures of intimacy, the signs a man can use to make trouble for himself when he identifies with another man who was once his boyhood “twin” but is now grown, like himself, into sexual maturity. Polixenes has entered Leontes’ court, encountered the sign of their difference—Leontes’ wife—and become part of a threesome, his own sign of difference (his wife) invisible. What seems to have happened in the course of his nine-month stay is that from their original relationship of twinned lambs—sustained by proxy in their absence from one another—Leontes has propelled himself into an adult homosocial rivalry with Polixenes for his own wife. For if Leontes and Polixenes are mature men, but Leontes is still Polixenes, Polixenes still Leontes—and Hermione is pregnant—then in Leontes’ fantasy Polixenes must have impregnated her and cuckolded him. Through Polixenes’ extended presence, the relationships of Leontes’ maturity—wife

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and child—have been trapped inside the prime relationship of his youth, as Polixenes simultaneously plays twin “boy eternal” (1.2.65) and sexually fallen rival before Leontes’ inner eye. An improbable fiction? Indeed, but in Leontes’ head the cuckoldry becomes probable, and we are drawn to the inference because Shakespeare, though more obliquely than in 1603–4, solicits his audience to make meaning out of the meaning-possibilities offered by a language of theatrical potentiality. Set against this seductive audience exercise is again a display that deconstructs it. As it unfolds, the Iago within Leontes becomes explicit. Observing Desdemona and Cassio exchange courtesies while attending Othello’s arrival on Cyprus, Iago had murmured: “He takes her by the palm; ay, well said, whisper. With as little a web as this I will ensnare as great a fly as Cassio. Ay, smile upon her, do: I will gyve thee in thine own courtesies. You say true, ’tis so indeed” (2.1.167–71). Now, observing Hermione extend her hand to Polixenes in friendship, Leontes mutters: Too hot, too hot! To mingle friendship far is mingling bloods. I have tremor cordis on me; my heart dances, But not for joy. This entertainment May a free face put on, derive a liberty From heartiness, from bounty, fertile bosom, And well become the agent; ’t may—I grant. But to be paddling palms and pinching fingers, As they now are, and making practic’d smiles, As in a looking glass; and then to sigh, as ’twere The mort o’th’deer—O that is entertainment My bosom likes not, nor my brows! (1.2.109–19)

In echoing Othello’s enumeration of Desdemona’s social graces, which concludes, “Where virtue is, these are more virtuous” (3.3.189), Leontes’ observations collapse into Iago’s malign survey of the use he can make of the signs he perceives—but here the malignity issues from the victim himself. Still, we see nothing yet—or almost nothing. Leontes’ speech registers, in order of appearance, his emotional reaction to what he observes, an admission that what he sees may be innocent, and the sudden onset of Iagian interpretation—“paddling palms and pinching fingers,” “practic’d smiles,” a “sigh” loud as a huntsman’s horn, which leads him to think himself horned.

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The willful origin of this tendentious empirical exercise becomes audible just moments later: Affection! thy intention stabs the centre. Thou dost make possible things not so held, Communicat’st with dreams (how can this be?), With what’s unreal thou co-active art, And fellow’st nothing. Then ’tis very credent Thou mayst co-join with something, and thou dost (And that beyond commission), and I find it (And that to the infection of my brains And hardening of my brows). (1.2.138–46)

Passion has pierced the bull’s eye of truth, fashioning a preposterous conclusion.40 Leontes then proceeds to reason with a lucid recognition that affection can turn impossibility into possibility and that it may have nothing at all to stab at, that it is self-generated from a person’s own fantasy. But under the pressure of will, he fabricates a bizarre a fortiori argument: if passion can co-act with nothing, it is credible that it can collaborate with something, and it has, and he detects it, and this infects his (otherwise) uncontaminated brains and fleshly (unbullocked) brows. Or, as Iago told Roderigo, proving through shifting verbal tenses and moods that Desdemona is in love with Cassio, “A pestilent complete knave, and the woman hath found him already” (Oth. 2.1.245–46). In both cases the cogent force of probability in the service of an errant will turns that which is not into that which may be, then into that which is likely to be, then into that which is—making what is “unreal,” real—that is, res.41 Only a few minutes later, Leontes reveals what that res consists of—and his stake in it—as he corroborates his conclusion before Camillo: Is whispering nothing? Is leaning cheek to cheek? is meeting noses? Kissing with inside lip? stopping the career Of laughter with a sigh (a note infallible Of breaking honesty)? horsing foot on foot? Skulking in corners? wishing clocks more swift? Hours, minutes? noon, midnight? and all eyes Blind with the pin and web but theirs, theirs only,

Twilight of Probability / 367 That would unseen be wicked? Is this nothing? Why then the world and all that’s in’t is nothing, The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia nothing, My wife is nothing, nor nothing have these nothings, If this be nothing. (1.2.284–96)

An observed stroll about the stage, during which Hermione—out of Leon­ tes’ hearing—persuades Polixenes, through witty repartee and courtly gesture, to linger in Sicilia “the borrow of a week,” is transformed in Leontes’ imagination into a “long-time” practice. As he multiplies their intimacies and turns a probable sign into a “note infallible / Of breaking honesty,” he progressively substantiates his insight. Just as he had fashioned an argument from the capacity of affection to attach itself to “nothing” and, if so, to “something,” here he creates out of the merest shreds of perceptibles a seamless fabric of adultery so tangible to him that its reality—its res—is as dense and compelling as the objective world and, hence, of his own being. It is perhaps the most explicit representation in Shakespeare’s theater of the way probability, unurged, works as an unconscious psychological force to fashion a material heterocosm.42 But the mimetic world of The Winter’s Tale is not that of Othello. There are powerful representatives of truth in it greater than the self-deluded king— namely, Apollo and his unelected priestess—no longer a sibyl without a secret, but one significantly if syncretically named Paulina. Shakespeare rewrites the fates of Othello and Desdemona largely through their ministries, and he transfers Emilia’s claim, “Thou hast not half that power to do me harm / As I have to be hurt” (Oth. 5.2.158–59), to his new Desdemona, the maligned and injured queen who survives everything Leontes can put her through, even apparent reification into monumental alabaster that he can love (Oth. 5.2.18–19). Her survival marks an important change in his dramaturgy. Hero had fainted at her wedding-turned-trial and was proclaimed dead, yet the audience saw it was not so. Desdemona experienced an echoing torpor after being publicly denounced by Othello, yet she survived to be visibly killed by him. Hermione swoons after being pronounced innocent by Apollo’s oracle, and Paulina dares the king to “Look down / And see what death is doing,” carrying Hermione’s body from the court. She returns only moments later to declare, “The sweet’st, dear’st creature’s dead, and vengeance for’t / Not dropp’d down yet” (3.2.201–2). For onstage and offstage audi-

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ences alike, Hermione dies to the play. Paulina’s insistence that “she’s dead; I’ll swear it. If word nor oath / Prevail not, go and see” (3.2.203–4) and Leontes’ resigned acceptance, “Prithee bring me / To the dead bodies of my queen and son. / One grave shall be for both” (3.2.234–36) virtually guarantee that through the force of their language of theatrical potentiality (we do not see them see the bodies) everyone will believe that she has perished. Antigonus’s account of his dream in the next scene, in which Hermione appeared to him weeping “in pure white robes / Like very sanctity” (3.3.22– 23), strengthens this conviction. But a counter-movement had already begun even before this scene, in a little travelogue recited by two courtiers. Its note is sounded by Cleomines, returning to Leontes’ court from sacred Delphos, as he and Dion savor the wonders they had experienced at Apollo’s temple: But of all, the burst And ear-deaf ’ning voice o’ th’ oracle, Kin to Jove’s thunder, so surprised my sense, That I was nothing. (3.1.8–11)

Divine truth will first attack sense, then assail common sense, as “something rare”—not probable—“Even then will rush to knowledge” (3.1.20– 21) and reduce a willful, thinking man to nothing. Leontes undergoes such annihilation as first the oracle is read and willfully denied, and then his servant rushes in to announce Mamillius’s death. When this happens he cries out, “Apollo’s angry, and the heavens themselves / Do strike at my injustice,” admitting, “I have too much believ’d mine own suspicion” (3.2.146–47, 151). This probable subject has been so wedded to his certainty that he defies divinity before he realizes that “I know what I know” is insufficient.43 It is perhaps for this reason that, while Leontes prays for forgiveness, confesses plotting against Polixenes and Camillo, expresses contrition, and promises atonement, his gesture yields no evident result, unlike the Syracusan twins when they concede defeat and “take a house.” But it is also a mark of the turn from comedy to tragicomedy that the swift appearance of the Abbess, a synecdoche for the twins’ atonement, is translated into Paulina’s slower office, which is to lead Leontes through a process of tragic self-mortification so psychologically disabling as to ready him for the reception of grace. This begins with the verbal flagellation she administers on her

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return to the courtroom, daring him to torture her even as she tortures him by reciting his sins; as a result, he vows to visit daily “the chapel where they lie” and asks her to “lead me / to these sorrows” (3.2.239, 242–43). His long ascesis then disappears from view, though his words lead us to believe it occurs as we turn our attention to events in Bohemia. That belief is confirmed sixteen years later when Cleomines declares, “Sir, you have done enough, and have perform’d / A saint-like sorrow” (5.1.1–2). But has Leontes done enough? As he sorrowfully describes “the wrong I did myself,” in leaving the kingdom heirless by destroying “the sweet’st companion that e’er man / Bred his hopes out of” (5.1.11–12), Paulina amplifies the perfections of Hermione and bluntly names her “she you killed”—striking Leontes so sorely that he asks her to “say so but seldom” (20). Clearly, she is working to reduce him further. At this point we hear that familiar oscillation between indicative and conditional moods that destabilizes probable knowledge and signals a shift to new psychological possibility. It begins with Paulina’s response, noted above: If one by one, you wedded all the world, Or, from the all that are, took something good To make a perfect woman, she you kill’d Would be unparallel’d. (5.1.13–16)

Were you to marry every woman in the world, she says, or were you to construct from their varying goodness a perfect wife, you could not match Hermione’s perfection. Moved to consider this hypothesis, Leontes agrees. When Dion offers another possibility—that nothing “were more holy” than to rejoice that Hermione is in heaven or “holier” than Leontes to seek comfort for himself and the kingdom by remarrying—Paulina returns to the indicative to remind them that to do so is to oppose heaven’s will, for Apollo’s oracle had stated, “That King Leontes shall not have an heir / Till his lost child be found” (39–40)—adding, in a kind of Helenic doublespeak: Which that it shall, Is all as monstrous to our human reason As my Antigonous to break his grave, And come again to me; who, on my life Did perish with the infant. (5.1.40–44)

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Following Dion’s repeated invocation of holiness, “monstrous to our human reason” is both dismissive of the possibility and a call to faith—a scoff to worldly minds and, to those spiritually inclined, a reminder that the incursion of the oracle’s knowledge destroyed Leontes’ “surmises.” The use of the conditional then quickens, to draw the imagination even further from the indicative present into altenative scenarios. “O,” exclaims Leontes to Paulina, “that ever I / Had squared me to thy counsel,” and he envisions what would have ensued: then, even now, I might have looked upon my queen’s full eyes, Have taken treasure from her lips— paul:

    And left them

More rich for what they yielded. (5.1.52–55)

Leontes then moves from the contrary-to-fact mode of the conditional back to the factual mode of the indicative as he concludes: “No more such wives, therefore no wife” (56). But Paulina’s seduction into the consideration of “what might be” leads him to consider further consequences: One worse, And better us’d, would make her sainted spirit Again possess her corpse, and on this stage (Where we offenders now) appear soul-vex’d, And begin, “Why to me—?” paul:

Had she such power,

She had just cause. (5.1.56–61)

I shall not vex the soul of the reader who knows this scene well by quoting the rest of the exchange; I have quoted thus much to make it apparent that Shakespeare is writing three crucial movements into his text. The first is Paulina’s persistent mortification of Leontes; the second introduces the grammatical medium in which the minds of all the interlocutors—and the audience—are invited to enter a rhetorical heterocosm and contemplate the possibility that things might have been—or might be—different from the way they appear to be; the third develops the idea of a holy metamorphosis, wherein a “sainted spirit” might repossess her corpse and appear on

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this very stage. What is required for this to happen, however, is not named until the final scene.44 It takes passage through Paulina’s gallery to reach the stage on which improbability is transformed into impossibility and impossibility turns out to be true. That route leads in familiar Shakespearean fashion from the secular to the sacred. But crucially, it involves combining a real spiritual conversion with what is only a simulacrum of the sacred. For despite its aura of Catholic worship, the statue scene is Protestant.45 Paulina, as we have noted, has driven Leontes from Hermione’s trial through his own trial of selfmortification. She first assumes the role of Red Cross Knight’s tormenter: “Do not repent these things, for they are heavier / Than all thy woes can stir; therefore betake thee / To nothing but despair” (3.2.3.2.208–10). Then, repenting herself for having aggrieved him, “Take your patience to you,” she counsels, and he declares that he will publish on the grave of his wife and son the causes of their death “unto / Our shame perpetual”—humiliating himself and vowing that “Once a day I’ll visit / The chapel where they lie, and tears shed there / Shall be my recreation” (3.2.231, 236–40). Now, leading him through the Wunderkammer of her house, she brings him to a space only later named “the chapel” (5.3.86). But chapel it must have appeared to both onstage and offtage audiences, for it contains a painted statue of a woman on a pedestal, before whom the royal party stands in awe. Though saintly in aura, it is clearly a statue of Hermione, with her “natural posture” and even wrinkles, “as she liv’d now” (5.3.32). So poignantly true to life is the statue that Leontes weeps afresh at its stony forbearance, “which has / My evils conjur’d to remembrance,” and Perdita kneels to implore its blessing, with full Protestant awareness that her gesture might be seen as “superstition” (5.3.39–40, 43). When Leontes senses more than stoniness in the statue—that it breathes, its veins actually bear blood, “the “fixure of her eye has motion in’t” (64–67)—Paulina leads him to the final step of repentance. Confession, contrition, penitence, amendment of life: he had fullfilled the first condition at the trial in Act III before Paulina returned to the courtroom; under her afflicting tongue he had expressed contrition and, at her urging patience, had undergone penitence. Amendment, though, requires a change of heart manifested by a new mode of behavior. In Leontes’ case, this is fully to give over rational self-possession—no longer to think that “strange attempts” are “impossible,” like “those / That weigh their pains in sense” (AWW 1.1.224–25). As Paulina threatens to draw the curtain lest he think the statue lives indeed, he cries, “Make me to think so twenty years together! / No settled senses of the world can match / The pleasure of that

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madness!” (71–73)—abandoning all probability as he yearns to recover the time lost. When she announces that she “can make the statue move indeed,” he fully submits to the humanly impossible: What you can make her do, I am content to look on; what to speak, I am content to hear. For ’tis as easy To make her speak as move. (91–94)

Whereupon she declares, “It is required / You do awake your faith” (94–95), and warns that those who think she practices “unlawful business” should leave. Paulina’s words ought not surprise us, for it is the familiar Pauline distinction, from Romans 14:23, that Perkins had used as the basis of Protestant practical divinity: “Whatsoever is not of faith, that is, whatsoever is not done of a setled persuasion in judgment and conscience out of Gods word, however men judge of it, is sinne.” Leontes says, “Proceed,” acknowledging that he does awake his faith and that Paulina is acting in good faith herself. And the statue comes to life. But not really. We learn a few moments later, from the words spoken to Perdita, that Hermione, “Knowing by Paulina that the oracle / Gave hope thou wast in being,” has preserved herself “to see the issue” (126–28). She was neither dead nor a statue, but paradoxically a living simulacrum of a memorial sculpture. Does this vitiate Leontes’ act of faith? Not to an adherent of the Church of England, who experienced something similar every time he took communion. Mediating between the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, in which the priest’s consecration turned sacramental bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood, and the Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation, in which the sacred and profane commingled, the Anglican divine Richard Hooker explained that the fruit of the Eucharist is the worshiper’s “participation of the bodie and blood of Christ,” but added, “There is no sentence of holie scripture which saith that wee cannot by this sacrament be made pertakers of his bodie and bloode except they be first conteined in the sacrament or the sacrament converted into them. . . . The bread and cup are his bodie and blood because they are causes instrumentall upon the receipt whereof the participation of his boodie [sic] and bloode ensueth. . . . The reall presence of Christes most blessed bodie and bloode is not therefore to be sought for in the sacrament, but in the worthie receiver of the sacrament.” He concludes: “this hallowed foode, through concurrence of divine power, is in veritie and truth, unto faithfull receivers, instrumental-

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lie a cause of that mystical participation.46 It is the communicant’s faith that makes efficacious the divine instrument of the sacrament and enables him to participate of the body and blood of Christ. Shakespeare has put Leontes through an imitation of the Anglican communion by having him respond to a material image that has living force only if he has faith in its ability to live. In the event, his faith does enable him to participate of the body and blood of the statue, which, at Paulina’s request, steps down, takes his hand and hangs about his neck. But he has not actually brought it to life. Although Paulina commands it to “descend; be stone no more. . . . Bequeath to death your numbness; for from him / Dear life redeems you” (5.3.99–103), her words are stage directions, not conjurations, delivered on a scaffold that only seems to be a chapel. They acknowledge, however, that Leontes’ spiritual life has been renewed by the instrument of the simulated statue: no longer “more stone than it” (38), he has enabled his actor-wife to relax her model’s pose, approach, and—as once before she did—“open thy white hand, / And clap thyself my love” (1.2.103–4). And it happens because he has renounced improbable probability and embraced impossible truth. Cured of his pathology, he redeems Othello’s perverse vow to the still Desdemona: “Be thus when thou art dead, and I will kill thee, / And love thee after” (5.2.18–19).

Notes

Prologue

1. 2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, IV.xiv.ii. Rhet.1357a; Nicomachean Ethics 1112b. I should state at the outset that this book concerns not mathematical probability, which does not appear until the early 1660s, in the circle of the Port-Royal in France, but the older rhetorical, moral, and dialectical concepts that continued to flourish even as mathematical probability took hold in the natural and social sciences in the later seventeenth century. On these latter developments, see Hacking, 1–91. Notes Grimaldi: “είκος is not that which simply happens, for that equates it with sheer chance. Είκος possesses a note of stability and regularity which is intrinsic to the nature of the thing which is the ground for the είκος proposition derived from nature. . . . An example of such an είκος would be: children love their parents. As we experience and know the world of reality, this proposition represents what is generally the case, but not always so. From this είκος, one can conclude with some security that child X loves his parents” (Aristotle, Rhetoric I: A Commentary, 62). De partitione oratoria 34; cf. Aristotle, Rhet. 1389a. Vives, 3.82–86. The most complete account of this view is that of Thomas Aquinas, for whom opinions based on greater or lesser probabilities were parts of an intellectual itinerary measuring the degree to which one approached participation in divine knowledge or suffered deprivation thereof and fell into the sin of intellectual error. See Byrne, 55–96, especially 69–71. After the revival of the Poetics in the sixteenth century, Italian theorists rendered Aristotle’s eikos as verisimile or probabile, but most frequently followed medieval rhetoric in choosing the former. French classical critics preferred vraisemblance to probabilité. See Patey, 77–83. Topics 100b, trans. Pickard-Cambridge, in Basic Works. On the basis of this Aristotelian notion, Aquinas weighed the value of a probability according to the authority whose opinion was invoked, as well as the arguments set forth in its favor, with Christians enjoying an advantage over pagans, Jews, and Muslims, and saints above ordinary Christians (Byrne, 97–138). There is a growing and diverse literature on this subject. See Byrne, Hathaway, Patey, B. Shapiro, Van Leeuwen, Weinberg, and especially Hutson and Maus, whose

376 / Notes to Pages 4–12

10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

work on law and theater intersects so usefully with my interest in Shakespeare and probability. De part. orat. 35–40. Compare the more elaborate analysis in De inventione 1.34–43. By the sixteenth century these topics have acquired a quasi-ontological status since they are found among the intrinsic and extrinsic places of dialectical disputation, which purports to describe reality. The importance of this conflation of rhetoric and dialectic for Othello will be discussed in chapter 3. The Duke is, in fact, anticipating a caveat of the Port-Royal Logic, which cautions the reader that “we must not be carried away by the commonplaces, which, though they have general validity, are misleading in many specific instances, which is one of the greatest sources of human error” (quoted in Patey, 54). See my Tudor Play of Mind, 242–45. It is a signal instance of the phenomenon whereby a “character” is imputed to a person by observers who have noted the circumstances of his behavior and formed an opinion of him, yet are unaware that his own sense of self is formed reciprocally from the circumstances attending his reception. At this moment Othello strikes Desdemona in rage because the self he had fashioned, not just from the Senate’s honorific but, more crucially, from her saintly acceptance of him, has been altered by his new belief that she is promiscuous. One opinion has undone another. In what follows, I shall be using the nouns commonplace and paradigm interchangeably, though the former stresses the psychological aspect of the concept and the latter its formal aspect. This assimilative moment is analyzed in chapter 9. See Moss for the pervasive sixteenth-century habit of collecting commonplaces to clarify and enrich one’s understanding of particular facts; and Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, for the ways in which rhetorical education in schools and universities influenced letter writing; notekeeping; personal, legal, historical, and religious narratives; and political and parliamentary address. Hutson shows how probable inquiry, adopted from forensic rhetoric, informed juridical proceedings in which a wide lay constituency participated, and argues that this was one of the venues through which it reached contemporary drama. For the potentially contradictory nature of fact-finding through circumstantial inference, see Maus, 114–18. As will become evident, Iago, too, is subject to the probabilities he encounters and is not simply their manipulator. He participates in the recursive process whereby one’s sense of self is shaped by signs, testimony, and examples. I discuss this in detail in chapters 1 and 5. Though the Aristotelian account does not acknowledge that the particular percept is itself infused with cognitive affect, flowing from the circumstances of the encounter, Shakespeare’s does. For him there is no pristine psyche, and the improbable percept—which bears no signifying power in itself—is, in a sense, instantly probabilized as signifying something, as I suggest below. See the discussion of Isocrates’ circle of discourse and Gorgias’s “logical sequency” in chapter 1. On the principle of medieval and Renaissance dialectic that one can know only by means of a mentalist “species,” see chapter 3. Aquinas’s concept of the inopinabile can serve as a helpful negative indicator. It is the “unthinkable” proposition beyond the parameters of common sense, which contradicts the accepted premises of a given structure of thought and helps to define it—

Notes to Pages 13–16 / 377

22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

such as a proposition that denies the principle of noncontradiction (Byrne, 149–50, 162). Kuhn’s concept of shared scientific paradigms, which serve as bases of research into new applications of accepted principles, until an anomaly is met, is a useful analogue (43–65). Even closer is Williams’s definition of hegemony as “a lived system of meanings and values—constitutive and constituting—which as they are experienced as practices appear as reciprocally confirming. It thus constitutes a sense of reality for most people in the society, a sense of absolute because experienced reality beyond which it is very difficult for most members of the society to move, in most areas of their lives”—although every hegemony contains alternate or opposing formations to which it must respond (Marxism and Literature, 110, 108–20). The issue of race and probability in the play is taken up in chapter 11. Rymer, 134. Ironically, the probable discourse discussed in my text was not noticed by the dyspeptic Rymer, so immersed was he in its ideology. He focused instead on the anomalies of Shakespeare’s text, which makes him a useful guide to the provocative dramaturgic practices described later. Much ink has been spilled on the question of Othello’s color. In 1694 Charles Gildon scorned Rymer for allowing “nothing of Humanity to any but our own Acquaintance of the fairer hew,” but sixteen years later wrote that “Nature—or what is all one in this Case, Custom—having put such a Bar as so opposite a Colour it takes away our Pity from her, and only raises our Indignation against him” (Vickers, 2.260). Coleridge invoked public opinion to argue that Othello could not be black, for “as an English audience was disposed at the beginning of the seventeenth century, it would be something monstrous to conceive this beautiful Venetian girl falling in love with a veritable negro” (1:420). The issue grew increasingly complicated over the years, as may be gleaned from Furness’s Othello, 389–96; Ridley’s introduction to the Arden 2 Othello, 1–liv; and Honigmann’s in Arden 3, 14–17, 27–31. Cunningham, 142–231. See also Greenblatt, Marvelous; Hathaway; Platt, Reason Diminished, especially 1–65; and Weinberg. Wonder appears in this sense only twice in Othello (2.1.181, 3.4.102), and wondrous once (1.3.162), and though Othello’s story of his life contains marvels, it is not wonder that Shakespeare foregrounds in the play—though he knew the concept and invoked it elsewhere (see the epilogue)—but the unreliability of the probable. The phenomenon is egregious in Othello, but as we shall see it appears in other plays as well. For the influence of classical rhetoric on Shakespeare and Renaissance drama, see Altman, Tudor; Baldwin; Clemen; Desmet; Doran; Herrick, Comic Theory; Hutson; Joseph; McDonald; Plett, especially 455–75; and Trousdale. See The Proficience and Advancement of Learning, Book I, in Works, 3.282–85; The Dignity and Advancement of Learning, Book II, chap. xiii, in Works, 4.316. Proficience, 293; Dignity, Book VI, chap. ii (Works, 4.448–54). Novum Organum, Book I, Aphorisms xix–xxii (Works, 4.50). Indeed, Bacon considered it a deficiency in learned men that “they fail sometimes in applying themselves to particular persons,” one reason for which is that “the honest and just bounds of observation by one person upon another extend no farther but to understand him sufficiently, whereby not to give him offence, or whereby to be able to give him faithful counsel,” and—less honorably—to “know how to work him or wind him or govern him” (Proficience 3.279–80). He repeats this deficiency in “addressing individuals” in Dignity, Book VI, chap. iii (Works, 4.54).

378 / Notes to Pages 16–19 31. Cleopatra’s words are, of course, self-ironizing, since the speaker is a boy actor, but that is just the point: Shakespeare is calling attention to his own factitiousness. 32. Novum Organum, Book I, Aphorism xli (Works, 4.54). To remedy the situation, Bacon proposed his rationalist methodology of subjecting particulars to careful collection, scrutiny, and comparison, working back to mid-level axioms, and thence to first principles. His is a meliorist, not a tragic view of the human psyche. 33. The Derridean trace or gramme is an open-ended unit characterized by its differential structure of “protention” and “retention”—fashioned by its reserve of undetermined future possibilities and its capacity to make its present retroactively out of those possibilities, in a rehearsal, under the aspect of continuous time, of what Derrida considered primordial writing, the instantaneous cognitive takeover of perception. He develops this idea, first presented in Of Grammatology (6–93, especially 56–57, 61–62, 86, 84), in the essay “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, 61–171. I discuss this “arche-writing” in chapter 1; for its use in analyzing historical culture, see Goldberg. 34. This tension between divine and secular solicitations is examined in chapter 5. In a pagan context, where fame constitutes a man’s identity, the reverse valuation obtains. “I am not” becomes the inactive, private self that is literally a nonentity, while “what I am” is the public man of action who “is”—as Ulysses tells Achilles, insisting on the necessity of being continually active in the world before the eyes of men in order to possess any quality at all (Tro. 3.3.112–23). 35. I realize that by invoking an unconscious I am entering controversial terrain, where even the interiority of Renaissance selves has been contested. See, for example, Barker and Belsey. Their claims, however, have been amply refuted by such scholars as Maus and, more recently, Martin. That the idea of an unconscious was available to Shakespeare should come as no surprise, since it was known by other names as far back as St. Paul and was intimated by St. Augustine, as I show in chapter 5. In chapter 9, I will argue that the plays provide much evidence that Shakespeare knew and exploited the idea. 36. See chapter 8 for an account of Hamlet’s comportments. It is useful to think of the self in terms of the paradoxical Youth of sonnet 31: “the grave where buried love doth live, / Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone” (9–10). For in a profound sense all of Shakespeare’s subjects make love to their employment, as we shall see in chapter 5. 37. Readers may object that Viola uses the same words to Olivia (TN 3.1.141), but her irony has a different resonance, as I will show in chapter 8. Though the distinction I make between self and subject is one that none of these theorists would have endorsed—especially the consciousness of subject formation in Iago—their ideas have been important in shaping my own conception of what happens in Shakespeare. The layering of subjectivity suggested here seems to me not only true to Shakespeare’s representations but useful in analyzing the experience of orators, apostates, politicians, and actors. Paul Smith is helpful here. In distinguishing “individual,” “subject,” and “agent,” he argues that the individual is a fiction of cohesion “subject” to multiple interpellations, and that resistance arises at points of conflict along the interstices of these interpellations in the “agent,” thereby enabling the “discerning” or release of the subject from totalization (xxvii–xxxv). 38. Some thirty years ago, Richard Lanham identified as homo rhetoricus the aleatory side of the equation and the stable side as homo philosophicus. I shall argue that these are not separable mentalities, but rather a dialectically related dynamic that constitutes for Shakespeare what it means to be human.

Notes to Pages 20–34 / 379 39. For Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, ethos was a relatively stable disposition, pathos more transitory, but as persuasive devices both were linguistic self-representations that could be assumed and, theoretically at least, set aside as circumstances required. For a useful discussion with citations, see Doran, Endeavours, 232–39. For important qualifications, see my chapters 8 and 9. 40. Taylor distinguishes between such states in his discussion of “moral topography,” where he contrasts the Platonic ideal of self-mastery to the psychology of Homeric man (119–20). 41. The term anthropology, often thought to be a modern coinage, included psychology, physiology, and culture from early times. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it derives from Aristotle’s adjective anthropolygos (“treating of man”); its first English appearance was in Richard Harvey’s Philadelphus, or a defense of Brutes, and the Brutans History (1593). It was used until the mid-nineteenth century to denote “the science of man or of mankind, in the widest sense” (sub. 1). For its classical, medieval, and Renaissance forms, see Hodgen. 42. Grassi, Rhetoric, especially 7–21, 83–101. 43. Ricoeur approaches the phenomenon through his discussion of the cognitive function of metaphor, 197–99. Silverman offers suggestive remarks about the process on the individual level in her account of metaphor and metonymy, 109–22. 44. Again, Raymond Williams is helpful in his description of dominant, residual, and emergent elements in a given culture, found in the forms of traditions, institutions, and structures of feeling (115–35). 45. For the earlier periods, see Poulakos; Schiappa; Trinkaus, Poet, 27–51; and C. White. For the later periods, see Bouwsma, 19–73; Grafton and Jardine; Grassi, “Critical Philosophy” and Renaissance; Greene, Troy; Kahn; Logan; B. Shapiro; Sloane; Trinkaus, Image; and Trinkaus, “Themes.” 46. Maus has noted, as evidence of contemporary belief in an interiority that can only be gestured at, that “English Renaissance theatrical method is . . . radically synecdochic, endlessly referring the spectators to events, objects, situations, landscapes that cannot be shown them” (32). Hutson attributes this to the widespread cultivation of forensic narratio (121–45). 47. O’Connor, 370–74. C hap t e r On e

1.

2.

3. 4.

The cultural and psychological significance of the logical concepts “substance” and “accident” will be discussed in chapter 3, where I examine the ideological effects of the sixteenth-century conflation of dialectic and rhetoric in Othello. In Iago’s multiple views of Cassio, for example, we find a palimpsest of the wily Erasmus, showing readers of De copia how many meanings may be generated from the single image of Socrates facing death (Collected Works, 24.639–41). For Protagoras’s early modern fama, see Trinkaus, “Protagoras,” 190–213; and Trinkaus, Poet, 30–46. Diogenes Laertius, 9.51. Schiappa emphasizes the cultural significance of this choice. When Protagoras decided to set aside the issue of the existence of the gods, “he was both challenging the traditional status given to mythos and preparing the way for what now would be called an anthropological approach to theology. This called for arguing rather than merely telling. The substantive challenge to traditional ways of thinking brought a new humanistic rationalism of logos” (56; see also 141–50). For his agnosticism, Diogenes Laertius informs us, “the Athenians expelled him

380 / Notes to Pages 34–38

5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

[Protagoras]; and they burnt his works in the market place, after sending round a herald to collect them from all who had copies in their possession” (9.52). Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, 1.217–18. Further citations will appear in the text. R. G. Bury explains the paradox this way: “all ‘appearances’ (sensations, opinions, etc.) are due to inter-action between the matter of the percipient subject and the matter of the objective world, both of which are in constant flux. Thus ‘matter’ is potentially the ‘phenomenon’” (1.218, note a). Historically the “two logoi” are separated and sublimated in Plato’s transformation of what he took to be the “attributes” or “qualities” of things into distinct Ideas, then partially desublimated by Aristotle, for whom reality was immanent in nature, as the “potential versus actual attributes coming-to-be for a particular entity” (Schiappa, 95–96). Both theories resolve the uncomfortable Heraclitean vision that reality is constituted at every moment by conflicting and mutable pairs of opposites, and signal a paradigm shift from presocratic philosophy, in which “attributes” are not separable from the matter in which they inhere, to a belief in the separability of a “subject” and its “qualities.” Untersteiner, 53. In Untersteiner’s reading, the “weaker argument” is the individual perception, distinguished from the partly universalized “stronger argument” (κρείττων λόγος) . It is “a manifestation that prepares the ‘concept,’ the fruit of a superior experience, in contrast to the immediacy of material experience, which is the ᾔττων λόγος” (55). This “stronger argument” is also strengthened because it is socialized, arrived at in relation to the arguments of others; hence it is a condition of political organization. Within a relatively short period of time, the notion of making the weaker argument stronger was moralized and distorted—first by Aristophanes in The Clouds, whose personifications of traditional and sophistic logoi were associated with justice and injustice, respectively; this view then seems to have passed into the culture and is reflected in Aristotle’s remark (Rhet. 1402a23) that “people were right in objecting to the training Protagoras undertook to give them. It was a fraud; the probability it handled was not genuine, but spurious” (Schiappa, 111–14). Cf. Pericles’ Funeral Oration: “We Athenians decide public questions for ourselves, at least endeavor to arrive at a sound understanding of them, in the belief that it is not debate [logoi] that is a hindrance to action, but rather not to be instructed to debate before the time comes for action” (Thucydides 2.40.2, cited in Schiappa, 187.) The source of this capacity, in the Protagoras, is Hermes’s gift (at the direction of Zeus) of political understanding and a sense of justice (322–23). See chapter 7. Frag. B.3.84, trans. Kennedy, in Sprague. Doxa is thus equivalent to a reified metaphor, no longer the site of an interplay between sameness and difference, but reduced to a concept, as described by Ricoeur, 196–98. Kaironomia, 15. This psychagogic process is often compared to the work of drugs (pharmacia) on the body and of magic charms (goetia, epode) on the mind (see discussion of Plato later in this chapter). The curious reader is invited to skip ahead to chapter 7 for a discussion of the way Gorgias links these terms as the elements of irresistible persuasion in the Encomium of Helen and of their historical reappearance in Othello. Peitho is the goddess in Erasmus’s Ciceronianus with whom Nosoponus has fallen helplessly in love, seduced by her erotic charms to become the perfect Ciceronian (Collected Works, 28.343).

Notes to Pages 38–42 / 381 14. I make this distinction to signal to the reader that Iago’s behavior is sophistic in form but Christian in content, as will become clear in chapter 5. Before leaving Protagoras and Gorgias, however, we should note that their ideas represent a major cultural paradigm shift. According to Schiappa, Protagoras mediates between the cultures of poetic mythos and theoretical logos. He draws on Susan C. Jarratt’s argument that in the fifth century, nomos—the idea that laws arise out of common human agreement—represents a transitional stage in the scientific advance from the archaic belief in authoritative norms instituted by anthropomorphic gods to the fourth-century search for eternal norms through procedures of logic—whether Platonic dialectic or Aristotelian analytic. Poulakos argues correlatively that the “kairotic,” genuinely occasional basis of perception and persuasion embraced by the fifth-century sophists changed to the more conventional idea of the “appropriate” in the fourth century. Adapting Michel de Certeau’s distinction between the strategist, who is centrally attached to place, and the tactician, who is placeless and opportunistic, he offers a sociology of sophistic that sees this intellectual shift as a sign of the growing dominance of philosophical culture and its desire for resident truth: “Springing from one’s sense of placing a particular thing in a particular place, and the will to repeat, to prepon (the appropriate, the proper) alludes to the realization that speech exists in space and is altered both as a learned response to and a habitual linguistic imposition on a situation reminiscent of the past. . . . In this regard, to prepon represents a conventional principle according to which the production of meanings in language is historically determined; at the same time it posits that, in most respects, the present resembles, and therefore must be understood in terms provided by the past” (60). Compare Charles White on “kairotic” speech: “The improvisational readiness to chance the fortune of the moment entails a conception of temporality according to which the flow of time is understood as a succession of discrete occasions rather than as duration or historical continuity. . . . Kairos discovers in every new occasion a unique opportunity to confer meaning on the world” (14). What we find, then, in the passage from the sophists to Plato and Aristotle, is a “conventionalization” of discursive psychology and, in terms of this study, the first identifiable movement in the development of a rhetorical anthropology that is informed by a dialectic between what White calls “the will to invent” and what we may call the recourse to a retrievable and applicable repertory of cognitive and locutionary situations—to prepon, or the appropriate, decorous, and (in the psychological register) probable. 15. We can detect in Isocrates’ language the professionalization and rationalization that mark the shift from the kairotic to the theoretical, even as he uses Gorgianic diction; though he scorns “theory” and embraces kairos, he speaks of “appropriateness” (to prepon), “opinion” (doxa), and “probability” (to eikos), which herald the adoption of the conventional and commonplace that later become the antithesis of scientific knowledge. 16. Commenting in 1550 on Aristotle’s observation that tragic plots will be credible if they are constructed “according to probability or necessity,” Francesco Maggi distinguishes probable or verisimilar inference from “necessary inference ex positione,” which, he explains, occurs “when one thing having been stipulated, it is necessary that another should follow” (Weinberg, 1.413–14). Iago, conceding that he cannot speak “necessarily” ex positione, falls back on verisimilar rhetorical persuasion instead. True to his sobriquet, in this instance, at least, Iago is honest. 17. Dihle points out that in Plato generally, and in this passage specifically, intention or will is not directed at the action itself but to the object of the action, which is always,

382 / Notes to Pages 44–59

18. 19.

20. 21.

in the view of the acting individual, a good, though sometimes it is erroneously supposed to be so. The idea of will as distinct from cognition was not yet developed (38). Theat. 149c; Rep. 364b, 462b; Laws 909b, 933d. Edelstein argues that Plato used myths, especially those concerning the afterlife, to supplement rational argument by appealing to the emotions. Their emotional effects were good because “the ethical myth speaks to man’s passions; it rouses and confirms hopes; it enhances courage and allays fears” (474). I am indebted for this reference to Trimpi, Muses. Derrida, Dissemination, 97. This claim is elaborated in chapter 5. C hap t e r Tw o

1.

2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

The most detailed analysis of Aristotelian ethos is found in Wisse. For the contingency of the human sciences, see Aristotle, N.E. 1.3 (1094b12–27), 1.7 (1098a21–32); Rhet. 1357a12. Baumlin, 267. While accepting the tradition that Aristotle is responding to the Phaedrus in Rhet. 2.2–11 and 2.12–17, Wisse argues that the characterizations of men according to age and social status in the latter are closer to Plato’s prescription for a taxonomy of souls than is the analysis of emotions in the former, and may have been written earlier. The section on pathos may be Aristotle’s original contribution to the analysis of souls for purposes of persuasion (41–42). Aubenque, 40–41: “Voilà un homme qui, en dépit de toutes les atténuations, n’est pas seulement l’interprète de la droite règle, mais qui est la droite règle elle-même, le porteur vivant de la norme.” Ripa, fig. 66, pp. 17–18. The title Diogenes Laertius ascribes to Theophrastus’s Characters is a reminder that this Greek word was used to denote not inward disposition but an external sign—an impression or stamp on coins, a mark or token impressed on a person or thing, or even a likeness or representation (Liddell and Scott, 777). Rusten argues that the Characters lack ethical content, insofar as they offer nothing resembling Aristotle’s idea of the mean as an explanation of the traits described, nor a discussion of the motives behind the character’s actions (Theophrastus, 19–20). Gordon offers a useful observation concerning their social setting: The Characters “were written in the last quarter of the fourth century before Christ; one or two can be dated exactly to the year 319. It was not a year in which Athenians could be very proud of themselves, with a Macedonian garrison in the Peiraeus, and more than half of their 21,000 citizens transported out of Attica. This Athens . . . was no longer the seat of an empire; it was soon to be little more than a municipality with a past, famous for its buildings, its statues, its Greek, and its schools. Its citizens—such citizens as were left—took to minding their private concerns. . . . Denied the exhilarating study of national questions, they fell back on the narrower study of their neighbors. Denied the macrocosm, they turned instead to the microcosm of municipal man” (52). Thus the late fourth century was a time of consolidation in Athens, not of inventive expansion, similar to that transitional moment following the Peloponnesian Wars described by Poulakos (see my prologue), and to the period of foreign invasion when a rigid Ciceronianism flourished in fifteenth-century Italy (see Greene, Light, 175–76). Social diffidence seems to be a condition of character codification. It was,

Notes to Pages 61–65 / 383

7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

arguably, a factor in the thematization of probability in Shakespeare’s work, written during a time of unusual social mobility, when the Theophrastian character was revived. The early history of the term ethos is linked to its later fortunes. Originally attached to place, it was associated in Homer with the natural environment of animals, from which they were lured to be rehabituated to domestic use, and to which they often escaped with joy. In Hesiod and Theognis, the term was extended to humans, signifying a natural, sometimes deceptive self underlying the appearance of docility and friendliness, and in the fifth century ethos came to signify the way of life in places where humans were wont to dwell. In the next century, the term retained its earlier meanings but also found a new location, in the irrational part of the psyche, where, through early training and habituation, it could be modified: hence Aristotle’s emphasis on moral virtue as a habit resulting from practice, and the wry trace of ethical resistance in Hamlet’s words to Gertrude: “use almost can change the stamp of nature” (Ham. 3.4.168). On these mutations, see Chamberlain. In the early modern period, the term character, understood as a mark, seal, or stamp, became associated with printing typography, and was seen as a way of distributing human behavior into classes and, later, into the places where designated beings were to be found. See Van Delft, 101–10. The longevity of this idea is apparent in Sidney’s comparison of philosophical precept and poetic image (Apology, 107–8, 120). Rist notes that “Cicero’s portrait of Cato in the Pro Murena as a man who still holds the Old Stoic views is a caricature of antique virtue. It was drawn by a man who had been taught a Stoicism in which the reality of the wise man had been lost. What in the minds of Zeno and his immediate followers had been a striking moral theory, backed up by an unusual theory of the physical world, had by the time of Cicero become a merely pedantic, not to say perverse, piece of rigorism” (96). It was evidently, however, still a force to be reckoned with, and its influence needed to be neutralized. In the same speech, Cicero recalls Cato’s grandfather and the consul P. Africanus, “whose opponents, even though guilty of the charges, were spared by the Roman people, who thought it unfair for men to be crushed by the weight of such overwhelming influence, regardless of guilt or innocence” (Pro Mur. 58). For a useful account of the issue, see May, 59–69. [O]portere enim perfectionem declarat offici quo et semper utendum est et omnibus, decere quasi aptum esse consentaneumque tempori et personae. “Apt and harmonious,” as we shall see in chapter 3, become the sixteenth-century terms for fitness to circumstances. Cf. these additional passages from the same work: “It will rest with the poets to decide, according to the individual characters, what is proper for each; but to us Nature herself has assigned a character of surpassing excellence, far superior to that of all other living creatures, and in accordance with that we shall have to decide what propriety requires” (1.97); “Such orderliness of conduct is, therefore to be observed, that everything in the conduct of our life shall balance and harmonize, as in a finished speech” (1.144). He modifies Panaetius’s ethics to include problems that arise when one moral good conflicts with another and two expedient goods are in conflict. Panaetius did not admit of degree. On Cicero’s debt to Academic skepticism, see also Academica, es-

384 / Notes to Pages 65–70

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15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

23.

pecially 2.7, and De natura deorum, 1.12. For further citations and discussion, see Trimpi, 287–91. This strategy is not the same as the equitable argument that a man should be judged not on the basis of a single act but on the basis of his customary behavior (Aristotle, Rhet. 1374b). Here a perdurable ethos is established, based on both personal actions and social status, to show the probability or improbability that the defendant or accused committed such an act. In the following discussion, I am indebted to May’s analysis of Cicero’s representation of ethos. He is also drawing on the Stoic principle that the seriousness of a crime is measured by the number of relationships (numeri officii) it violates. See Rist, 82–85. A late trace of this hybridization may be seen in Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique (1561), where, in a discussion of the figure of thought he calls “Description of a mans nature or maners,” he follows his own notatio of a greedy man by referring his reader to Cicero’s speech In Pisonem: “Tullie describeth Piso for his naughtinesse of life, wonderfully to heare, yea, worse then have set forth this covetous man. Reade the Oration against Piso, such as be learned” (187–88). For the ethical description he has in mind, see In Pisonem 1.1, 6.13. Rhet. 1356a. In the rhetorical tradition ethos is a term of art, a mode of persuasion. But as we have seen, from the time of Plato and Aristotle, the study of a man’s nature in actual life shades imperceptibly into the representation of that nature in speech. Persuasion through ethos, Aristotle writes, “should be achieved by what the speaker says, not by what people think of this character before he begins to speak” (Rhet. 1356a). This does not mean that one cannot dissimulate character for a time, but one’s true character will ultimately emerge. May points out that Tacitus views Tiberius’s volteface (Ann. 6.51) “not as a change but rather a revelation of his true ethos, which he had disguised for so many years” (172n27). A similar “Roman” interpretation governs Brabantio’s warning to Othello: “Look to her, Moor, have a quick eye to see: / She has deceived her father, and may thee” (1.3.293–94). To Brabantio, Desdemona’s elopement suggests not that her ethos may be newly inflected by changed circumstances, but simply that she has deceitfully hidden her true nature. May, 9–11; Wisse, 100–103; Kennedy, New History, 103–4. “A stop, or halfe telling of the tale” is included among Wilson’s figures of speech: “A Stop is when we break off our tale, before we have told it. As thus. Thou that art a young man of such towardness, having such friends, to play me such a part, well I will say no more, god amend all that is amisse. Or thus, Doth it become thee to bee, shall I tell all: Nay I will not for very shame” (180). Though eironic Iago is simply using a rhetorical technique, Othello (in one authoritative text, at least) is applying Stoic and Galenic psychology to his behavior. While the Q text shows “close denotements of the heart,” the F text shows “close dilations,” the diastolic movements of the heart in the throes of passion. Arden 3 adopts Steevens’s 1773 emendation of F. Cicero the novus homo was a hero to Renaissance rhetoricians, Rebhorn points out, because of their own uncertain social status, and he shone among examples of men who rose to positions of power not through family influence but through their skill in rhetoric (113–14). Compare Othello’s preface to his genealogy, “’Tis yet to know— / Which when I know that boasting is an honour, / I shall promulgate” (1.2.19–21) to Coriolanus’s remark, “My mother, / Who has a charter to extol her blood, / When she does praise

Notes to Pages 72–82 / 385

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25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

me grieves me” (1.9.13–15). When gravely challenged, however, both men yield to the Roman penchant for ethical self-declaration. Du Vair, 88–89. Cf. “The food that to him now is as luscious as locusts shall be to him shortly as acerb as coloquintida” (1.3.348–50); “O misery!. . . . Thinkst thou I’d make a life of jealousy . . . ?”; “Nor from mine own weak merits will I draw / The smallest fear or doubt of her revolt, / For she had eyes and chose me” (3.3.173, 180, 190–92). This is not a Ciceronian tenet, for Cicero believes the relationship to one’s country takes precedence over all other relationships (De off. 1.57), but it is found in Seneca and Epictetus, and in such neostoic writers as Du Vair and Justus Lipsius. Arden 3 prints “Her name,” following Q2. “My name” is the F reading, which has a stronger claim to be Shakespearean than Q2’s, on the basis of chronology and complexity. It is metonymic—substituting effect for cause—the cause being “Her name,” so blackened by Iago’s inferences that it has blackened her husband’s. So, too, is his emphasis on the continuing aristocratic content of Stoicism: “The individual who satisfies himself with the impresa of non moveri aspires to aristocratic satisfactions without their social content: a disposition close to the center of classical Stoicism, which serves the needs of an honorific selfhood deprived of its referents. The skills entailed in that service are all but inevitably implicated in the origins of Renaissance high culture, where an appetite for classical dignitas continually seems to precede any concrete recreation of its meaning: not tied to anything so specific as a system of elective offices, it must begin life again as a metaphor. Stoicism enters Renaissance literature as part of the metaphorics of nobility” (77). Introducing the reader to “three affections that are restrained,” Stradling writes: “And of those three, particularly . . . is repressed a kind of vain glorious dissimulation, whereby men that lament their own private misfortunes, would seeme that they bewaile the common calamities.” In the guise of sharing public grief, that is, men often express private pain. Charles Langius, Lipsius’s interlocutor, then pursues this theme: “I speake in good earnest for that many of your crue doe beguile the physitians, making them beleeve that the publike evilles doe grieve them, when their private losses are the true cause.” When Lipsius denies engaging in such hypocrisy, Langius replies, “I demaund therefore againe, whether the care . . . which now doth boile and bubble in thy breast, be for thy countries sake, or for thy own? . . . But examine the matter to the quick, & you shall find many times great difference betwixt the tongue and the heart. Those wordes, My countries calamitie afflicts me, carry with them more vainglory than veritie” (Stradling, 88). Further references will appear in the text. Elsewhere he compares “reason,” “A true sense and judgement of thinges humane and divine,” to “opinion,” “A false and frivolous coniecture of those thinges” (79–80). Here he reiterates the ancient Stoic distinction between true and false perceptions, which is linked in turn to the distinction between truth and probability that Cicero describes in his Academica. His description is close to Hamlet’s characterization of the aptly named Horatio (Ham. 3.2.63–74), who seems more a Roman of the old Stoic stock than the more Ciceronian Brutus (JC 5.5.68–75). Horatio claims the legacy at the end of the play: “I am more the antique Roman than a Dane” (5.2.341). I adopt the terms “achieved identity” and “ascribed identity” from Whigham, Seizures, 211–23, whose work on the sociology of The Duchess of Malfi is pertinent to Othello.

386 / Notes to Pages 84–94 32. In the eighteenth century John Steevens believed he detected verbal parallels from Cicero’s In Catilinam, Pro Ligario, and Pro Murena. On this and the widespread use of Cicero’s orations in English grammar schools, see Baldwin, 1.342, 343, 349, 382, 417, 448, 513; 2.355, 372–73. 33. See Desmet, 35–42. C hap t e r Th r e e

1.

2.

3. 4.

5.

Hamlet, of course, does prove to be apt, but it takes the whole play to reveal the configuration in which he fulfills his appropriate function, his aptness lying not in the Ghost’s assessment of his aptitude for revenge but in Shakespeare’s imagination of the interplay between Hamlet and the circumstances that benet him round, which ultimately constitutes the tragedy of Hamlet. Apt may also suggest a “disposition” toward some action or thing, a “readiness”—nuances present in the Ghost’s assertion, but more apparent in Messala’s lament that Cassius’s fear that Titinius was captured by Antony’s soldiers led him to commit suicide: “O hateful error, melancholy’s child, / Why dost thou show to the apt thoughts of men / The things that are not?” (JC 5.3.67–69). Here it is Cassius’s love for Titinius that makes his thoughts “apt” for suicide, just as it is the “thoughts black” of Lucianus in Hamlet’s Mousetrap that make his “hands apt” for murder (Ham. 3.2.255). Apt was a common locution for the adequation of one thing to another, used to describe style when Ascham links the loss of “apt and good words” to the decline of public morality (115), and even God’s cosmic design, where aptness is assimilated to the “natural inclination” or “natural affection” of the elements in the divine plan. Here the term begins to exhibit that susceptibility to conflation with the true that we have observed in Iago’s remark. See chapter 4. This is the basis of Aristotle’s observation that “a likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility” in composing the incidents of a play—where “possibility” refers to an anomalous but historical fact, and “likely impossibility” to a probable fiction (Poet. 1460a). See chapter 2. Agricola, 193, translation mine. For the impact of Agricola’s work on the European pedagogical imagination, see Ong, 92–130; Jardine, Francis Bacon; Jardine, “Distinctive Discipline”; Jardine, “Inventing Rudolph Agricola”; Mack, “Rudolph Agricola’s Reading”; Mack, “Agricola’s Topics”; Mack, Renaissance Argument. Convenient accounts of medieval logic, based largely on Peter of Spain’s Summulae logicales, are provided by Ong, 53–91; and Moody, 1–26. Though Peter declares that “dialectic alone disputes with probability concerning the principles of all other arts,” he treats argumentation and the topics as though they were instruments of scientific certainty. Like other terminist logicians, in addition to tracts on propositions, predicables, predicaments, syllogisms, topics, and fallacies, largely derived from Aristotle, he includes a seventh treatise on the properties of terms—the so-called “suppositional logic.” It is concerned with the way one term in a proposition “supposes,” or stands for, another: for example, in the proposition “A man is an animal,” the term “man” is taken to stand for Socrates, Plato, and the rest of men. In this way, issues of extension, restriction, and qualification enter into consideration, all having to do with words, not things. The emphasis on demonstration and the metalanguage required to analyze linguistic relations became objects of humanist derision. Jardine suggests that the humanist reform of dialectic, which composed the major portion of the arts curriculum leading to the B.A. at Cambridge in the sixteenth century, was

Notes to Pages 95–100 / 387

6. 7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

conducted expressly to provide nonspecialist training in argument and in the selection and presentation of materials for discourse to serve the sons of the gentry and the professional classes, who had widely varied intellectual and practical interests (“Humanism,” 27–28). Vives, De causis, in Vives, 6.118, translation mine. The Lesbian rule was originally invoked by Aristotle in his discussion of justice in Book V of the Nicomachean Ethics, where he compares the necessary abstraction of written law and the infinite variety of human behavior to which it must be applied, and explains why equity must be practiced: “For where a thing is indefinite, the rule by which it is measured is also indefinite, as is, for example, the leaden rule used in Lesbian construction work. Just as this rule is not rigid but shifts with the contour of the stone, so a decree is adapted to a given situation” (N.E. 1137b). In Vives’s critique of scholastic discourse lies an ideal of communication modeled on equity. For a detailed discussion of the Agricolan appropriation of the topics, see Cogan, especially 183–89; for a fascinating account of the conflation of topics as seats of argument and as commonplaces for rhetorical amplification, quotation, and imitation, see Moss. Jardine, “Lorenzo Valla and the Intellectual Origins”; Jardine, “Lorenzo Valla: Academic Skepticism.” Schmitt, Cicero, 59. Luther, however, accused him of arguing like one in De servo arbitrio. Popkin, 10–13, 27–28. See the discussion of poor imitation in Apology, 138. In his later article he remarks, “Cicero’s speech [in the Lucullus] is largely devoted to arguing against traditional dogmatic philosophy—Platonic, Epicurean, Stoic, or Peripatetic. My contention is that the men of the Renaissance found this a bit disconcerting” (“Rediscovery,” 230). This flexible concept of the probable had a long life in criticism. Three centuries later Samuel Johnson would write that Shakespeare “approximates the remote and familiarizes the wonderful; the event which he represents will not happen, but if it were possible, its effects would probably be such as he has assigned” (William Shakespeare, 8.360). In the Rhetoric, Aristotle describes both an ontological and a psychological probability: “A Probability is a thing that usually happens; not, however, as some definitions would suggest, anything whatever that usually happens, but only if it belongs to the class of the ‘contingent’ or ‘variable.’ It bears the same relation to that in respect of which it is probable as the universal bears to the particular” (1357a). “The theory of rhetoric is concerned not with what seems probable to a given individual like Socrates or Hippias, but with what seems probable to men of a given type; and this is true of dialectic also” (1356b). We can see that Agricola is moving in precisely the direction of a “given individual” and that his dialectical probability is a considerable refinement upon Aristotle’s. Cicero’s definitions are varied; in addition to the one quoted by Alardus from De inventione, cited earlier, there is this one from the popular De partitione oratoriae 34: “Inference is based entirely on probabilities [in versimilibus] and on the essential characteristics of things [et in propriis rerum notis]. But let us for the sake of conveying our meaning define the term ‘probable’ [verisimile] as ‘that which usually occurs in such and such a way [quod plerumque ita fiat]’—for example that youth is more prone to self-indulgence; while an essential characteristic gives a

388 / Notes to Pages 100–119

16.

17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

proof that is never otherwise and that supplies an indication that is certain, as smoke is a certain indication of fire.” From this perspective rhetoric is antagonistic to traditional dialectic, which sought to distinguish speech from mind and world. The tendency of Agricolan dialectic to obviate these boundaries is one characteristic that makes it a “rhetoricized” dialectic. For the psycholinguistic function of enargeia, see chapter 6. Jardine notes that in the Cambridge book lists she examined, Agricola’s De inventione dialectica occurs “three times as often as any other dialectic text,” and she infers from Mark Curtis’s work on Oxford that a similar situation obtained there (“Place of Dialectic,” 46–47). Baldwin maintains that Shakespeare’s grammar school teacher, Thomas Jenkins, studied Agricola at St. Johns, Oxford, in the 1550s (1.106). On the Cambridge book lists Jardine examines, Melanchthon’s name appears second to Agricola’s in frequency. John Seton, a Cambridge lecturer in the 1540s, remarks in his own Dialectica that Melanchthon’s style was less appropriate to the learner than the teacher, but Baldwin finds traces of Melanchthon’s treatment of the predicables, predicaments, and fallacies in Love’s Labour’s Lost and Twelfth Night (Baldwin, 2.128–32). Melanchthon, Erotemata, in Corp. Ref., 13.col.513, translation mine. Subsequent references will appear in the text. The word res, which lies beneath my translation, is used to refer to existent things, spoken words, or subject matter. But is “honour” an essence at all? Isn’t it an accident like timor Dei? Iago seems to be engaged in a double play here, first transposing “honour” from the category of accident to that of substance, then calling attention to the ultimate invisibility of substance. Collected Works, 24.298. The fourth species of quality, figura, is literally the form a substance takes, and Melanchthon has geometrical rather than human form in mind. “Delations” is Steevens’s emendation of F’s “dilations,” accepted by Honigmann. We find a personal taunt about the meaningless impersonality of specification when Iago replies to Brabantio’s accusation, “Thou art a villain” with “You are a senator” (1.1.116). See note 16 in chapter 1. Works of Shakespeare, 7.373. Astonishing in two respects: first, prudence, as we saw in chapters 1 and 2, is associated with phronesis, or practical wisdom, and therefore with probable knowledge. Second, in the humanist tradition represented by Coluccio Salutati, it was precisely on the basis of its origin in practical wisdom that legal studies were distinguished from medicine, an acknowledged science. The word became associated with providence during the Middle Ages, however, and was thus associated with Christian wisdom, until the Italian humanists restored it to its Aristotelian meaning. Its theological connotation in Melanchthon reinforces our sense of his conservative bias. See Martin, 48–49. C hap t e r F o u r

1. 2.

Harvey, 122. Howell, 57–63, 285–91.

Notes to Pages 119–145 / 389 3. 4. 5.

6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

18.

On Wilson’s career, see A. J. Schmidt; Wilson, Rule, v–xii; and the full-length study by Medine. Subsequent citations to The Rule of Reason will appear in the text. See chapter 3. I echo Dr. Faustus’s rapturous contemplation of magic as an ironic reminder of his bathetic view of logic: “Bene disserere est finis logices. / Is to dispute well logic’s chiefest end? / Affords this art no greater miracle?” (1.7–9). Though he apostrophizes Aristotle’s Analytics, he is actually quoting Ramus’s Dialecticae, which begins modestly enough, like Wilson, but proceeds to locate arguments in the world. He should have read further. On this development, see below. In figure 1, the “chief generall words” are the most inclusive and belong in the predicable genus. The “middle generall” belong to the predicable genus in relation to the “kindes” or species below them, but are species in relation to the “commune wordes” above them. The illustration is based on the 1553 edition used by Sprague. See chapter 3. See chapter 3. “Here therefore [is] the first distemper of learning, when men study words and not matter . . . for words are but images of matter; and except they have life of reason and invention, to fall in love with them is all one as to fall in love with a picture” (Proficience, in Works, 3.284). Rodolphi Agricolae Phrisii De inventione dialectica libri omnes (1539), 1.2, in McNally. Wilson, Rhetorique, 89. Cf. R2 3.3.147–59, 4.1.203–215. For theatrical and racial analyses of this moment, see chapter 11. Works of Shakespeare, 7.485. Recall that “although his wife die, yet the housebande maie be onlive still, sauying that he loseth his name, to be called housbande” (Wilson, Rule, 117). If in addition, he can’t call himself general anymore, what is left is the bare “I” denoting a substance. Richard II is another instance of a substance feeling deprived of identity when the accident of his title is removed (R2 4.1.254–59). There is yet another important interpretation of these three lines, which is the theme of chapters 10 and 11, but I will not distract the reader with it now. Honigmann’s addition of a comma after “think” further weakens the link between the fact of Cassio’s honesty and Iago’s knowledge of it: now Iago only thinks he might be sworn to it. We need only think of his most notorious shift between indicative and subjunctive: lod: Are his wits safe? Is he not light of brain? iago: He’s that he is; I may not breathe my censure What he might be; if what he might, he is not, I would to heaven he were! (4.1.269–72)

19. See Cavell’s suggestive discussion of Othello’s stake in marriage and seventeenthcentury skepticism, 125–42. 20. The idea that Iago possesses an interior constructed by Othello is developed in chapter 7, where I discuss Shakespeare’s imitation of Virgil. 21. Cicero, Top. 1.7–8, translation modified. 22. Ramus, Dialectique, 100, translation mine. Further citations will appear in the text. 23. See chapter 3.

390 / Notes to Pages 146–159 24. Lawiers Logic, Ciii verso. The following chart appears on Ciiii verso. Further citations will appear in the text. C hap t e r F iv e

1.

2.

3. 4.

5.

6. 7. 8.

Among other facts in his Herball, surgeon John Gerarde records the temperature of plants and their virtues. Nettle, as we might guess, is “drie, a little hot,” but when “boiled with Perywinkles, it maketh the bodie soluble, and doth it by a kind of cleansing qualitie” (571). Lettuce “is a colde and moist potherbe,” and “cooleth a hot stomacke, called the hart burning; and helpeth it when it is troubled with choler.” Hedge hyssop, known as Gratia Dei, is “hot and drie,” and “boiled in wine and given to drinke, helpeth fevers of what sort soever, and is most excellent in dropsies, and such like diseases proceeding of colde and waterie causes.” Thyme is “hot and drie in the thirde degree,” though “boiled in water and honie and drunken, is good against the cough and shortnesse of the breath, it provoketh urine, expelleth the secondine of afterbirth, and the dead childe, and dissolveth clotted or congealed bloud in the bodie” (571, 241, 477, 459). On the role of will in gardening, Gerarde is silent. Nor with Machiavelli’s virtù, which closely corresponds to Iago’s “will” in its sense of “force” or “drive.” Iago’s faculty psychology inverts the traditional Thomistic hierarchy, expressed in Henry Medwall’s Nature (c. 1500), as Nature introduces Man to his mentors: “Lo here Reason to governe the in thy way / And sensualyte upon thy other syde / But Reason I depute to be thy chyef gyde” (Medwall, Part I, 101–3). In this Thomistic scheme derived from Aristotle, will is thought of as rational appetite, which normally follows the dictates of reason, but if it is strongly solicited by the passions, it can also subvert reason, as when “reason panders will” (Ham. 3.4.88). Recall Iago’s tricky substitution of “essence” for “accident,” observed in note 21 to chapter 3. Or as Q has it, less voluptuously, “to make up my will”—to patch together, perfect, or complete my will, or make my last will and testament. Which, indeed, it turns out he is doing. Critics have noted his language of gestation and birth: “There are many events in the womb of time, which will be deliver’d (1.3.370–71); “but my muse labors, / And thus she is deliver’d” (2.1.128). Self-reproduction is also a preoccupation of the early sonnets to the young man, where the youth at first is urged to reproduce himself biologically, and then is promised an image of himself produced by the poet’s verse. In Iago’s case, however, this “willful work” suggests self-rape, and is related to Emilia’s notion that jealousy “is a monster / Begot upon itself, born on itself” (3.4.161–62). In Cinthio, he and Emilia have a child. Shakespeare has chosen to make him without human issue. I will have more to say about this last fantasy, in relation to race, in chapter 11. We have already seen this in the case of neostoicism, without direct reference to Christianity; it is, a fortiori, an essential factor in the case of the Christian. Ideally, virtue has the power to transform acts that are neutral or morally suspect into objects of praise, as Othello remarks when reviewing Desdemona’s social talents: “Where virtue is, these are more virtuous” (3.3.186–89); but to a disillusioned Hamlet, “the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness. This was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof” (3.1.110–14). Passing attractions can pervert the soul.

Notes to Pages 157–162 / 391 9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

Spivack, especially the first and final chapters. References to the hybrid or “draped” figure of Iago may be found on 23, 437. I postulate Shakespeare’s exploitation of the morality tradition to develop selfhood because the aim of Spivack’s argument is to obviate the possibility that Iago, as a descendant of the Vice, can be thought to operate according to human psychology. As a result, critics who take Iago’s psychology seriously from psychoanalytic or sociological perspectives generally have to ignore his theatrical family tree and the actualities of theatrical representation. I think it is possible to accept Spivack’s argument that the Vice becomes increasingly secularized in the sixteenth century, resulting in a bifurcation that is both allegorical and “natural,” and to take Iago’s apparent psychologizing seriously by addressing the question of why Shakespeare should have resorted to an archaic figure in one of his most mature plays and, correlatively, by showing that he found that there was something latent in the Vice that, from a Christian point of view, he recognized as all too dangerously human. Ricoeur, 196. In one of the earliest extant morality plays, Wisdom (1465–70), Lucifer’s first act is to persuade Mind, Will, and Understanding, the three embodiments of the hero Anima, to abandon the solitary contemplation of God and take up the active life in imitation of Jesus, as more pleasing to God: “Lewe, lewe, suche syngler besynes. / Be in the world, use thyngys nesesse. / The comyn ys best expres” (Eccles, ll.:441–43). This near-fatal temptation, the humanists were aware (as we shall see presently), is the cross on which the pious Christian can die spiritually. Lewis and Short, s.v. ambitio. The OED emphasizes the Latin root ambire (to go around or about), noting that vote-canvassing was later entering into English than the other Latin definitions. Worldliness is crucial. “Erring” and “extravagance” might be said to constitute the itinerary of the morality hero misled by the Vice. In William Redford’s Wit and Science (1536–46), for example, the hero Wit, en route to Lady Science, is tempted by the Vice Idleness; after cavorting with her, he rises from a debilitating sleep with a blackened face, the coat of Ignorance on his back, and a cockscomb on his head, having been “Conjured from Wit into a stark fool” (Schell and Shuchter, 606). Wit’s vita offers a foretaste of Othello’s transformation from one who fetches his “life and being / From men of royal siege” to one who finds his name “begrimed and black / As mine own face,” and then becomes “gull,” “dolt,” “murderous coxcomb,” and “fool” (1.2.21–22; 3.3.390–91; 5.2.159, 231). Each figure, however, imaginatively fashions himself in a similar manner. Compare Iago’s “Let me see now,” with its subsequent inferences, and Malvolio’s interpretation of Maria’s letter: “And the end—what should that alphabetical position portend? If I could make that resemble something in me! . . . M.O.A.I. This simulation is not as the former; and yet, to crush this a little, it would bow to me, for every one of the letters are in my name . . .” (2.5.118–20, 139–41). There is a theatrical figure to whom both may be related—the Vice named “Ill Will” in the morality Wealth and Health: “For I am a chylde that is pas[t] grace / Ilwyll I am called that in every place / Doth much mischiefe this is a playne case / Vertue I doo utterly dispise” (quoted by Spivack, 181). “Paradoxically” because logically “I am” must precede “I am not,” yet existentially the voice that enunciates “I am not” cannot know the “I am” from which it is alienated, which thus remains only a postulate. In this respect, too, Othello seems to be a tragic meditation on Twelfth Night, for “I am not what I am” is also Viola’s cryptic

392 / Notes to Pages 162–167

17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

response to Olivia (3.1.141), expressing the new bifurcation of self she experiences. On her expression of noncoincidence, see chapter 8. I use Tyndale’s translation here, which is somewhat fuller than the Geneva version. “Prologue to the Romans,” 219. Bultmann, “Romans 7 and the Anthropology of St Paul,” in Existence and Faith, 156. Dihle, 85. Dihle stresses that “flesh” does not mean carnality in the narrower sense: “Men can deliberate, plan, and act κατἀ σἀρκα [according to the flesh] without much emotion or sensuality being involved, they can even be wise according to the flesh” (86). The Geneva Bible glosses “flesh” of Rom. 7:18, “I know that in me, that is in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing,” as “in my nature.” In the sixteenth century, Philip Melanchthon explicitly outlined this process for students in his Loci communes: “Now, after Adam fell, God opposed man so that the Spirit of God was not with him as a leader. Thus it happens that the soul, lacking heavenly light and life, is blinded, loves itself most passionately, and seeks its own ends; it desires and wishes for nothing but carnal things.” He, too, means by “carnal things” more than the physically satisfying, for he explains, “Thus it reads in Gen. 6:3: ‘My Spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh.’ And in Rom. 8:5, Paul writes: ‘For those who live according to the flesh’ (that is, who are without the Spirit of God) ‘set their minds on the things of the flesh’ (for it is evident from that passage in Genesis that the flesh consists of human power without the Spirit of God . . . ).” He then concludes: “Therefore, the dominant affection of man’s nature is love of self, by which he is swept along, so that he wishes and desires only those things which seem good, pleasant, sweet, and glorious to his own nature; he hates and dreads those things which seem against his nature, and he resists the one who keeps him from what he desires or who orders him to pursue what is unpleasant to seek.” See Melanchthon and Bucer, 31. Bultmann is of further interest here. “Sin,” he writes, “is falsely wanting to be oneself; and there is the deep connection between the flesh and sin that the man who thus wills to be himself can only do so by understanding his existence in terms of what is on hand, what has been accomplished, what can be grasped and proven—in short, in terms of the ‘flesh.’ And so also there is a connection between flesh and sin and ‘death’; for each man understands himself in terms of what is transitory, what is fallen under death, and so death is already at work in him” (134). To live according to what is on hand and transitory is to live circumstantially, rhetorically, as does Iago, who fulfills Paul’s dictum: “when we were in the flesh, the lusts of sin which were stirred up by the law, reigned in our members, to bring forth fruit unto death” (Rom. 7:5). Letters from Petrarch, 16. Subsequent page references will appear in the text. Epistole, I.i.56. Roman numerals refer to books and letters of the Familiarum rerum libri, and arabic numerals to pages in this edition. Further citations will appear in the text. We can detect Socrates’ anxiety about the fatherless letter of Phaedrus in Petrarch’s concern to remove all references that might make no sense to contemporary readers. Cf. Montaigne, “A Consideration upon Cicero,” in Complete Essays, 185–87. See Bourke; Arendt; Dihle; Saarinen. The issue is explored in the context of rhetorical persuasion in Gorgias 467 and following.

Notes to Pages 167–188 / 393 29. Arendt, Part II, 55–63; Saarinen, 36. 30. J. M. Rist has shown that even Seneca’s greater emphasis on will presupposes its natural inclination toward the good in conjunction with knowledge: “When Seneca talks about willing and the will, what he is really concerned with is our moral character. The man who has the right kind of moral character will want to do the right thing for the right reasons” (227). 31. See Seigel, 31–62. 32. Ad Fam. 23.12, cited in ibid., 54. 33. Confessions 8.9.21. Latin interpolations are from the Loeb Classical Library edition. Subsequent citations will appear in the text. 34. Augustine’s view of habit formation is essentially a negative mirror image of that described by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics. 35. Quae voluntas utique, sicut defiinita est, animi motus fuit, nollo cogente, ad aliquid vel non amittendum vel adipiscendum (Retractiones I.14.3, p. 66). 36. De Trinitate X.10.viii, in Later Works, 83. Subsequent references will appear in the text. In this passage, he uses the word mind (mens) to denote the seeking agent, in order to emphasize that it is not the sense that is active; in its cogency, mind functions as will. 37. On Protagoras, see chapter 1. 38. In the Confessions Augustine derives the etymology of cogitatio (thought) from cogo (to compel); thought is the result of will working on memory and intellect (10.11.18). See Arendt, Part II, 99–100; and Taylor, 141. 39. Petrarch’s “Secret,” 11. Subsequent references will appear in the text. 40. See Schiappa, 175–87; Poulakos, 25–35; Backman, 11–28; Struever, especially 40–63. 41. “On His Own Ignorance,” 105. Subsequent citations will appear in the text. 42. Ad fam. 1.8, cited in Seigel, 45. 43. Ecclesiastes, cited in Sacred Rhetoric, 130. Subsequent references will appear in the text. C hap t e r Six

1.

2. 3. 4.

5.

The phrase is Hamlet’s, at 3.4.88. It is the effect of will’s hegemonic project, as described in the previous chapter. Cunningham offers a useful analysis of its representation, 232–55. Its familiarity is suggested by Thomas Wright, counseling every good Christian, “who pretendeth to be ruled by reason, and not tyrannized by preposterous affection,” to read his treatise on the passions (5). Peacham, F4r; Puttenham, 181. A more flagrant example is “My dame that bred me up and bare me in her wombe.” Subsequent references will appear in the text. Sherry, 38, 31. See Parker, Margins, 20–55, for an illuminating account of the gender and class implications of the figure in Shakespeare. See Kahn’s stimulating discussion of the figure, 143–49. Metalepsis is an exaggerated metonymy, in which the relationship between antecedent and consequent is reversed; it is often used to yoke distant causes with present effects (Puttenham’s “far-fet”), and it is also a transitional figure connecting two different tropes. This has implications, as we will see, for Act II of Othello. An even more explicit example is heard at the opening of Iago’s first soliloquy in Act III: “I hate the Moor / And it is thought abroad, that ’twixt my sheets / He’s done my office” (1.3.385–87, italics mine). Iago begins with an assertion, then hastily adds

394 / Notes to Pages 190–193

6.

7.

8. 9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

evidence to give cause to the presumed effect—a case of post hoc rather than propter hoc reasoning if ever there was one. That the Duke’s composition turns out to correspond, in large part, to the shape of external events—the apt is true—does not lessen its fictive status; it is still a cognitive inference driven by the desire for intelligibility. It suggests that, confronted by Ottomite otherness, the Venetians are compelled to assimilate the foreigner to themselves, but even in this they credit the Turks with a trickiness they are not currently exercising. See chapter 10 on non-European inscrutability. On the moral syllogism, see St. German, 79–89. In this process, the interior senses receive and judge particulars, while the rational soul, informed by synteresis, evaluates these in the universal light of divine and natural law. A proper conclusion is reached when the reason, having been presented an apparent good by the imagination, offers that good to the notice of synteresis, and conscience, collocating the two knowledges, determines whether the good is a species of the genus known to synteresis and may be sought, or is merely specious and must be avoided. Liber de anima, in Corp. Ref., 13, 126. See chapter 3. Melanchthon’s dialectical psychology is, in effect, a more articulate version of Aristotle’s metaphoric explanation of how we arrive at a general premise from discrete particulars in Post. An. 100a10. According to Aristotle, the imagination, which belongs to the interior senses, identifies the percept, while opinion, which is part of the intellect, assigns it value (De anima 427b–428b). In his revision of De anima, St. Thomas Aquinas allows to the interior senses an estimative power that discerns the significance of the percept (Summa theologica Ia, 78, 4), and thus negotiates between the percept and its species. De anima et vita, in Vives, 3.372, 374. See Altman, “Practice,” 489–90. “The intellect is coupled with the interior senses,” Melanchthon writes. “After the exterior senses have received the sensible appearances, as the eye those of lions and deer, they transmit them to the interior. There, by a movement of the brain and spirit, cogitations are formed, which are pictures of the things looked upon or thought about” (De anima 145). Trousdale has shown that Iago follows techniques of conjectural proof recommended by Quintilian (162–68). She argues that Iago’s deception of Othello emphasizes the necessity of distinguishing res from verba; while we basically agree, I believe Shakespeare problematizes that distinction by revealing how res are always qualified by verba, as Melanchthon shows in his explanation of subtance and accident, discussed in chapter 3. As many critics have observed, there is a strong performative element in Othello’s wooing. Less often noted are the specifically tragic emotions that are exchanged: “She gave me for my pains a world of sighs; / She swore i’faith ’twas strange, ’twas passing strange; / ’Twas pitiful, ’twas wondrous pitiful” (1.3.160–62). As in Sidney, and elsewhere in Shakespeare, Aristotle’s pity and fear are rendered as admiration and commiseration, and a mutual catharsis takes place that informs Othello’s selfhood. See Cunningham, 142–231; and the discussion of performance in chapter 9 below. The word satisfy and its cognates, not uncommon in Shakespeare, appear nearly twice as often in Othello as in any other play, and most frequently in connection with ostensibly “intellectual” satisfactions. If, because of his blackness or, more broadly, because of his Christian need for penitential pilgrimage, Othello seeks and finds absolution in the pity and wonder of

Notes to Pages 194–205 / 395

16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

“divine Desdemona” at the beginning of the play, he gradually changes places with her. As judge and executioner of a virtue now turned “black as pitch,” his “sorrow’s heavenly, / It strikes where it doth love” (5.2.21–22). See Quintilian, IV.ii.88, 91; and Bornecque, 33–34, 52–53, 100–102. For the dialectical significance of “throwing changes of vexation” on substance, see chapter 3. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, 148, 174–77. Images remembered are less bright and are called abstractive noticiae. Through them “we think of absent things, as when we reflect upon friends who are not here. For memory in the brain is rather like a little chamber on whose walls are impressed images of those pictures which cognition has formed, and these may be reviewed by the mind as often as it wishes” (De anima 145). Quoted in Shuger, “Croll,” 277. Shakespeare is envisioning here something in the nature of jealousy itself. Consider how Spenser turns Malbecco into a reptilian form that feeds on poisonous toads and frogs, and wakes, sorrows, and shrinks until at last he “Gealousie is hight” (Faerie Queene III, x, 60, 9). This kind of figuration illuminates spiritual sickness by rendering it in vivid and disgusting physical images to the point where, as often in Spenser, vehicle threatens to escape tenor. Shakespeare imagines more concisely and, in the strict sense, more figuratively. Emilia has told Desdemona that jealousy is “a monster, / Begot upon itself, born on itself,” a preposterous creature that is present before its procreation—indeed, is a condition of it. “Heaven keep that monster from Othello’s mind!” prays Desdemona (3.4.161–63), but we now behold that monster of anticipation, epi-leptically—that is, preposterously—seizing upon itself. That Othello never recovers from Iago’s poison may be seen in his proposal to “kill thee, / And love thee after,” as he stands adoringly before the recumbent beauty of Desdemona in 5.2, and in his final metaleptic gesture as the “turban’d Turk” who suffers death at his own, Venetian hand. “It may be conjectured, that the author intended the action of this play to be considered as longer than is marked by any note of time. Since their arrival at Cyprus, to which they were hurried on their wedding-night, the fable seems to have been in one continual progress, nor can I see any vacuity into which a year or two, or even a month or two could be put. On the night of Othello’s arrival, a feast was proclaimed; at that feast Cassio was degraded, and immediately applies to Desdemona to get him restored. Iago indeed advises Othello to hold him off awhile, but there is no reason to think that he has been held off long. A little longer interval would increase the probability of the story, though it might violate the rules of drama” (Plays, 8.416). “Two Parts,” 16. Subsequent references appear in the text. Muses, 94. Trimpi’s 87–129, concerning the two archai of intelligibility in Plato and Aristotle, and 130–63, on the relationship of cognition and stylistic decorum, are both relevant to this analysis of Othello. Puttenham makes a similar distinction between poets who offer true imitations of reality and those who present distorted images: “this phantasie may be resembled to a glasse . . . wherof there be many tempers and manners of makings, as the perspectives do acknowledge, for some be false glasses and shew thinges otherwise than they be in deede, and others right as they be in deede, neither fairer, nor fouler, nor greater nor smaller” (34–35). Breen, 395. Elementa rhetorices, in Corp. Ref., 13. 459–60. Frag. B3.84, trans. Kennedy, in Sprague, 46. See chapter 1.

396 / Notes to Pages 205–213 27. Charles Gildon, “Some Reflections on Mr. Rymer’s Short View of Tragedy,” in Vickers, 2.72. C hap t e r S e v e n

1.

2.

3. 4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

This rhetoric is related to a principle observed by Aristotle that distinguishes oratorical styles according to their degree of “finish.” Since deliberative oratory is an “outdoor” art, it cultivates techniques of addressing large crowds across long distances, like scene painting: “The bigger the throng, the more distant is the point of view: so that, in the one and the other, high finish in detail is superfluous and seems better away.” But oratory also comes indoors, and here its representations must be more accurate: “The forensic style is more highly finished; still more so is the style of language addressed to a single judge, with whom there is very little room for rhetorical artifices, since he can take the whole thing in better, and judge of what is to the point and what is not.” Finally, “[i]t is ceremonial oratory that is most literary, for it is meant to be read” (Rhet. 1414a). We can discern in this approximation of discourse to audience the metamorphoses of Othello as it journeyed from the platform stage of the Globe to the proscenium arch, flats, and wings of the Drury Lane, and thence onto Thomas Rymer’s desk. Critics have noted that the problems of understanding shown in Shakespeare’s plays often mirror those of the audience listening and watching. See Rabkin; Booth; Cavell. Hirsh argues the case for Othello in terms of syllogistic reasoning in relation to the binary either/or mode Rabkin uses in his discussion of Henry V. 1H4, 3.2.39–84, 5.1.30–71; 2H4, 3.1.60–79, 4.1.183–212. In the Aristotelian tradition, one cannot act intentionally without the deliberation of the practical reason, and this entails filling in the steps between the desire to accomplish something and its enactment (Joachim, 100–105). Shylock does not do this, though the play itself provides the necessary circumstances in Lorenzo’s seduction of Jessica, the harrassment of Solanio and Solario, the trade of Leah’s ring for a monkey, and so forth, for an audience to understand how he arrives at the point where he attempts an actual homicide. A similar engagement to vague futurity guides Iago’s actions, and fortuitous circumstances (Othello’s brushing aside the handkerchief, Bianca’s returning to give it back to Cassio) solicit his ingenium, accompanied by will, to exploit them in such a way that his project assumes a teleology it did not fully possess at the outset. Malone supposed duplicity on Iago’s part, not Shakespeare’s: “In the last scene of the preceding act Iago informs Roderigo, that Cassio was to sup with Bianca; that he would accompany Cassio to her house, and would take care to bring him away from thence between twelve and one. Cassio too had himself informed Iago, in Act IV, sc. i that he would sup with Bianca, and Iago had promised to meet him at her house. Perhaps, however, here Iago chose to appear ignorant of this fact, conscious that he had way-laid Cassio, and therefore desirous of being thought ignorant of his motions during the evening” (Shakespeare, 9.618). A point frequently made by critics who confute Rymer by arguing that it is the handkerchief ’s spiritual, sentimental, romantic, exotic, or erotic significance that makes it so apt an instrument of Othello’s destruction. I risk belaboring the point once more to argue an ur-significance: that Shakespeare develops the handkerchief as the site of stable meaning for Othello. Giraldi, 182, my translation. Muir, 183; Smart, 183n1.

Notes to Pages 213–222 / 397 9. Ariosto (1976), 1227; Ariosto (1954), 2.826. 10. Stanzas 81–83. Ariosto draws on the story transmitted by Herodotus and others that Helen was taken from Paris by King Proteus and kept safe in Egypt, where Menelaus claimed her and his treasure at the end of the Trojan War. See Persian Wars 2.112–20. 11. This would be the literary genealogy of that cultural understanding of the handkerchief expounded by Boose, who relates the spots to the folk tradition of displaying nuptial sheets stained with hymeneal blood. 12. This exchange is discussed in detail in the context of its racial and performative implications in chapter 11. 13. I am presuming a “historical” process of composition here, wherein the writing of an episode begets inchoate ideas that could not have been engendered without that prior writing and whose possibilities are realized only as composition proceeds— much as Shylock’s merry bond holds possibilities of action that can only be elicited by subsequent events. When these events occur, they confer meaning on previous meaning-possibilities, which will then appear to have been motives or intentions all along. We are in the precincts of the Derridean gramme here, with its double movement of “protention” and “retention,” described in the prologue. 14. As we saw in chapters 1 and 2, Othello stands out in stark opposition to this pattern of open-endedness. He continually seeks “circumscription and confine,” as in his in­vocation of eschatological finality: “If it were now to die / ’twere now to be most happy” (2.1.187–88). 15. Boiardo, 705. 16. Gildon, “Some Reflections on Mr. Rymer’s Short View of Tragedy,” in Vickers, 2.75. 17. Shakespeare’s interest in Virgil has been studied at length by Brower, Bono, Miola, and Hamilton, but only Major sees any extensive connection between the Aeneid and Othello, and he limits his discussion to Dido and Desdemona. A more thorough study of Shakespearean imitation is needed to account for transformations such as these, along lines suggested by Pigman. 18. Cavell (1–37) argues that Shakespearean heroes come belatedly into a world in which Christian faith has ebbed and the fideist gamble of Cartesian skepticism is only dimly realized. This insight brilliantly illuminates Othello’s virtual apotheosis of Desdemona and Antony’s absolutist transformation of the riggish Cleopatra. It also explains the transvaluation of sibylline wisdom found in Othello and why the play is farced with theatrical, factitious histories. 19. Compare Greenblatt, Self-Fashioning, 234–39; Parker, “‘Dilation,’” 60; Maus, 123–24. 20. A visual representation of narrative is seen in the engravings made for Harington’s Orlando Furioso. In his “advertisement to the reader” Harington writes: “The use of the picture is evident, which is that (having read over the book) you may read it (as it were again) in the very picture, and one thing is to be noted which every one (haply) will not observe, namely the perspective in every figure. For the personages of men, the shapes of horses, and such like, are made large at the bottome and lesser upward, as if you were to behold all the same in a plaine, that which is nearest seems greatest and the fardest shews smallest, which is the chief art in picture.” In each book, the earliest events are shown in the foreground, as the engraver spatializes the chronology of reading (Ariosto [1954], 17). 21. Shakespeare inscribes an antidote to credulity in Iago’s nostrum for Roderigo: “Mark me with what violence she first loved the Moor, but for bragging and telling her fantastical lies—and will she love him still for prating?” (2.1.220–22).

398 / Notes to Pages 222–235 22. Parker has shown the importance of “dilation” in the play, especially regarding amplification by circumstances. I would emphasize the occasional and tendentious character of such dilation, as in the second version of the handkerchief story, which Othello fashions to parallel his own situation (5.2.214–15). Moisan is useful here: “To the extent . . . to which Othello’s ‘story’ draws our attention to the narrativity of the play, it also helps to inscribe the play as a discourse ever revising itself and improvising its own text” (66). I see such revisions and improvisations as continous attempts to fix meaning. 23. For the common translation of Aristotle’s “pity and fear” as “commiseration and admiration,” see chapter 6, note 13; for the “process” of Othello’s pilgrimage, note his arrival at Cyprus after the storm (2.1.187–91); perusal of Desdemona’s body, white and smooth as “monumental alabaster” (5.2.5); imagining “a huge eclipse of sun and moon” at her death, as at the Crucifixion (5.2.98–99); and their meeting “at count” (5.2.271–73), when he will be hurled from heaven. 24. He makes the same use of the rhetorical figure imago here as Astrophil when he asks Stella, “I am not I, pitie the tale of me” (“Astrophil and Stella,” 45, in Poems). For situations like these, Cicero tells the would-be orator, “there is no reason for not using an imaginary case for illustration [fictum exempli loco ponere] in order to make the problem more intelligible” (De inv. 2.118). 25. Frag. B.11.8–9, trans. Kennedy in Sprague, 52. 26. I defined these concepts briefly in chapter 1, but will now unpack them. 27. Frag. B23, “On the Fame of the Athenians,” in Sprague, 65. This is reported in “How the Young Man Should Study Poetry.” 28. One is tempted to suspect that the “Philos” who signed the piece was Jonson himself, so neatly does he adapt the fragment to Jonson’s obsessive interest in controlling his own material and to his fear that audiences will miscontrue him. 29. Lain-Entralgo, 64–67. 30. Olin, 98. 31. Erasmus, Il Ciceroniano, 124, my trans. 32. Spenser, F.Q. 3.2.15; Donne, Satyre II 17–20; Chapman, Bussy D’Ambois 4.2.84–88; Milton, P.L. 2.556, 566–69. 33. In this context, Brabantio’s “chains of magic” may allude to the popular image of the Gallican Hercules, whose driving eloquence was figuratively rendered as many chains linking the tongue of Hercules to the ears of those obediently drawing his chariot. It was known not only in France but also in England, where George Puttenham and Thomas Wilson refer to it. See Rebhorn, 66–79. 34. Boyle, 47–48. 35. Compare Mariana’s assertion that the Duke, just recently disguised as Friar Lodowick, “Hath often still’d my brawling discontent” (4.1.3). C hap t e r Ei g h t

1. 2.

On Vives, see chapter 6. I distinguish the dramatic character that is the focus of this chapter from the literary Character studied in chapter 2, to which it is related but by no means identical. The latter, as we saw, originated in Plato’s dialectical typology of the soul and Aristotle’s ethical analysis, suffered reduction in Theophrastus’s descriptions of social types and in such Latin rhetorical figures as notatio and ethopoeia, and funded the Ciceronian principle that ethos must observe propriety—quid decet—which though flexible in itself often yielded to a more rigid, Stoic reading. In the context of the drama, this

Notes to Pages 236–241 / 399

3. 4. 5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

conservative understanding of ethos, emphasizing consistency, passed into Horace’s dictum that “you must note the manners of each age, and give a befitting tone to shifting natures and their years” (Ars poetica 153–78), a lesson heeded by Jaques in his description of the seven ages of man in As You Like It. In terms of the present discussion this strict notion of ethos more closely resembles what I call the dramatis persona than it does the dramatic character, which is a specification of the former fitted to the circumstances in which he or she acts. Everyman in His Humour, Prol. 7–9. See chapter 5. A sample of this advice may be gleaned from Erasmus’s widely circulated De conscribendis epistolis: “I shall give this one piece of general advice to young students, that when they are going to write a letter they should not at once have recourse to rules nor take refuge in books from which they may borrow elegant little words and sententious expressions. Rather, they should first consider very carefully the topics on which they have decided to write, then be well acquainted with the nature, character and moods [naturam, mores, affectusque] of the person to whom the letter is being written and their own standing with him in favour, influence or services rendered. From the careful examination of these things they should derive, so to speak, the living model of the letter” (cited in Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, 41). The issue of decorous lovemaking is the basis of Castiglione’s account of neoplatonic love in Book IV of Il Cortegiano; for decorum in the English court, see Whigham, Ambition; for its role in business, see Agnew. Desdemona’s gamesomeness becomes a worrisome issue for Othello and subsequent critics. Compare 3.3.186–89 and note 8, below. Othello (1967), 54. The critic’s suspicion replicates Othello’s and contributes to the illusion of “double time” that Shakespeare’s dramaturgy has produced. For some critics as well as husbands, wives may not be merry and yet honest, too. See Neely, Broken Nuptials, 106–7, 231. Only a few years earlier Rosalind said something similar when exhorted to be merry—“Dear Celia—I show more more mirth than I am mistress of”—then yielded to Celia’s urging with the words, “Well, I will forget the condition of my estate, to rejoice in yours,” and finally agreed to be merry: “From henceforth I will, coz, and devise sports” (AYLI 1.2.3–4, 15–16, 24–25). Emilia’s description of Iago as “wayward” links him to Othello, the “erring barbarian” of 1.3.356, thus to the phenomenon of changing decorums of self prominent elsewhere in the play. Othello (1886), 194. He refers to the alfiero’s theft of the handkerchief without his wife’s knowledge. Cinthio, however, is ambiguous about whether she knows of its existence or absence. We are only told that she “knew the whole truth” of the plot against Desdemona’s life (ibid., 384). Shakespeare evidently wanted to emphasize Emilia’s complicity in its loss and the disjunction this complicity caused in her behavior, deliberately omitting her participation in Iago’s plot. A more articulate analogy to Emilia’s shift in comportment may be found in Claudio’s retrospective explanation to Don Pedro of his deferred love for Hero in MA (see note 23, below). OED., acknow, aknow 4. The witty ease in Emilia’s realization that if adultery resulted in her gaining the world, then “the wrong is but a wrong i’the world,” and the world being hers, she could “quickly make it right,” reflects her attunement to the variability, if not reversibility,

400 / Notes to Pages 241–244

15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

of such subjections. Yet even in this utopian world she sees herself as king-maker, not queen in her own right, revealing the depth and inner contradiction of her abiding patriarchal mindset, where there is nothing odd in making your husband a cuckold in order to make him king. The same term is used by the Duke when he tells Brabantio that whoever “beguiled your daughter of herself / And you of her” will be tried and judged by him (1.3.67– 68). Here the word implies theft or loss through another’s agency, as does Brabantio’s remark, “So let the Turk of Cyprus us beguile” (1.3.211), but the play reveals that to beguile is often a reflexive action in which the agent arises from the beguiled and loses sight of its origin in its beguilements. Weimann, Popular Tradition, 224–37. Troilus, Hector, and Ulysses are among Shakespeare’s unacknowledged multi­ positionalists. Hector’s instant turnabout in the Trojan Council debate indicates his wont to exist in distinguished decorums (the “way of truth,” the way of “our joint and several dignities” [2.2.189, 193]). For Troilus’s defense against his intimation of multiplicity and of his Othello-like claim of unity, see Altman, “Practice,” 481–82. Shakespeare treats Ulysses, the man of many ways, as crafty but self-consistent, yet he is the spokesman of a theory of labile, specular identity dependent upon the public eye (3.3.95–123). Not without irony, Cressida’s farewell to Troilus after Diomed departs contains a Ulyssean “character” reading of herself—as if she were contaminated by the eye watching her—that acquiesces in a misogyny that understands multiplicity only in terms of female frailty. This replenishment and its recognition is subtly realized in the BBC production of the play and is described with fine precision by Mallin, 204–7. Shakespeare rehearses the homoerotic transmission of feeling through an androgynous surface earlier in Julia/Sebastian’s account to Silvia of her/his performance of Ariadne’s woes in Madam Julia’s gown (TG 4.4.158–78). Belsey asks, “Who tells the blank history of Viola’s father’s pining daughter?” and answers that it is “neither Viola nor Cesario, but a speaker who at this moment occupies a place which is not precisely masculine or feminine, where the notion of identity itself is disrupted to display a difference within subjectivity, and the singularity which resides in this difference” (187). The agency that elicits this difference, however, is the lover’s gaze (both Olivia’s and Orsino’s), as we shall see in Desdemona’s case in chapter 9. In support of this, it is notable that while Nature may draw to her bias in the recuperative fifth act, Orsino will already have revealed his own bias by invoking youth-and-dark-lady language, threatening to “sacrifice the lamb that I do love / To spite a raven’s heart within a dove” (5.1.130–31). Indeed, his promise that once in woman’s weeds Cesario shall be “Orsino’s mistress and his fancy’s queen” suggests that Viola has permanently lost control of her identity and will remain in the androgynous mode, whose material cause was her disguise but whose efficient cause is Orsino’s enduring desire for it. Shakespeare offers a variation on this notion of teaching and learning instantly when Florizel tells Perdita, “Each your doing / (So singular in each particular) / Crowns what you are doing in the present deeds, / That all your acts are queens” (WT 4.4.143–46). Here, the royal factotum born in Prince Hal has become a princely capacity. It is seen in Guiderius and Arviragus in Cymbeline and later in the ubiquitous and omniscient Henry VIII. While it is Shakespeare and not Edgar who has read Samuel Harsnett, and who is rehearsing court satire here, it is important to notice that Edgar is literally lending

Notes to Pages 245–247 / 401

22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

27. 28.

29.

himself to this discourse. Its anarchic expressive function is brilliantly conveyed in the BBC production of the play, where it approaches the alien, obsessive babble of Beckett’s Lucky. Edgar is so deeply Poor Tom at this moment that we might add to Stephen Greenblatt’s argument that exorcism is emptied out by Shakespeare’s theatricalization of demonic possession (Negotiations, 126–27) that theatrical—or rhetorical—possession now seems in need of exorcism. The best treatments of this Jonsonian preoccupation are still those of Greene, “Centered Self”; and Barish, 80–154. B. L. Joseph suggested long ago that “the table of my memory,” from which Hamlet proposes to wipe away obsolete records, and “the book and volume of my brain,” in which he will inscribe the Ghost’s command (1.5.98, 103), refers to Hamlet’s rhetorical memory system. He quotes Thomas Wilson, who describes the “places of memory” as wax and paper on which images are placed, and from which they may be erased: “As we do reserve Paper, and yet chaunge our writing, putting out wordes as occasion shall serve, and setting others in their roume: so may we doe for the Images invented, chaunge our Picture oft, and reserve the Papers” (31, citing Wilson, Arte of Rhetorique, 214). In Much Ado About Nothing, Claudio describes his newly cognized love of Hero in similarly compartmental terms. At first, he had “looked upon her with a soldier’s eye, / That liked but had a rougher task in hand / Than to drive liking to the name of love.” Now that he has returned and “war-thoughts / Have left their places vacant, in their rooms / Come thronging soft and delicate desires” (1.1.298– 303). This is further evidence of how Shakespeare absorbed rhetorical means of describing subjectivity, in these instances accounting for residual and occasional selves through metaphors of paper, pressure, wax, book, and place. Although the question elicited various answers in the nineteenth century (Hamlet [1877], 2.195–233), the most elaborate response is that of John Dover Wilson, 205–17. Discussions of Hamlet’s vexed relationship to his father are legion. One of the best recent treatments of the conflation of family identities, from an object relations perspective, is that of Adelman, 11–37. “Of Modern Poetry,” 1.9. Hamlet is, within the deeper tragic mode that Shakespeare allows him, and the greater agency of his gender and social position, a male Cressida. Nonetheless, he, too, must discover his kairotic moments. Hamlet (1969), 214–15. The variations upon the theme (“his will is not his own,” 1.3.17; “Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own,” 3.2.213; “That we would do, / We should do when we would,” 4.7.118–19) urgently raise the issue of the proprietorship and lability of subjectivity and agency, especially in relation to Augustine’s notion of two wills, one of which ever fornicates in multiple cathexes. Hamlet’s early “Must I remember?” (1.2.143) adumbrates the related issue of “bestial oblivion” (4.4.40) that haunts the play, and suggests that while the Renaissance memory system may provide a ratio­ nale for the erasure of an “image”from its “place,” Shakespeare also sees something very much like the modern notion of repression at work in Hamlet and others. His way of accounting for it may be in terms of the “interested” supersession of selves, as I have described. The resemblance to Othello’s praise of the sleeping Desdemona is striking: “Be thus when thou art dead and I will kill thee / And love thee after” (Oth. 5.2.18–19). Antony’s obsequy upon the dead Fulvia is stated with more self-awareness: “She’s good, being gone; / The hand could pluck her back that shov’d her on” (Ant. 1.2.126–27).

402 / Notes to Pages 249–251 30. The term, though it harkens back to Augustine, differs from his in that the self retains its worldly experience without purging itself. It is more akin to Jonson’s term in the epigram “To Thomas Roe” (Epigrams, 98) and offers a useful refinement on “residuary self,” for it refers specifically to a potential collectivity of experiences that Jonson hopes will be assimilated and “turn’d to blood,” thus becoming naturalized within a unified identity. It is the psychological and biological analogue of the ideal of literary imitation cherished by Jonson, whereby an individual’s engagement with “other climes” paradoxically allows him to return “untouched.” Hamlet’s words, however, challenge Jonson’s idealism; not only is he not untouched, he feels self-alienated, much as an actor recovering from immersion in a role might speak of his experience. He is, in fact, echoing antitheatrical diatribe that analogizes acting, madness, and demonic possession because of the apparent loss of rational control in each instance. See Worthen, Actor, 19–24; and chapter 9, below. 31. It should be recalled that the word character is never used by Shakespeare or by any other Elizabethan or Jacobean dramatist to designate a person represented in a play. Its use in drama and English dramatic criticism seems to begin with Dryden, for whom the word also retains its older meaning of ethos, and who mingles it with the older term, person. The OED records its theatrical use as an eighteenth-century invention (OED, sub. 17). Earlier dramatists wrote of an actor “personating” and of the “man personated” (Gurr, 99–100). The seven Folio cast lists are headed by variants of “The names of all the actors,” and the lists themselves name the persons in the play and provide brief descriptions of their roles. 32. In an analysis following the principles of B. F. Skinner’s behaviorist psychology, Peter Murray explains the “circumstantiality” of Hamlet’s words and actions in terms of habit formation. Hamlet’s disjunctive behavior is the result of a sequence of positive and negative reinforcements from within and without, aversive responses (avoidances), and preponent (more powerful) impulses defeating weaker ones at given moments. This approach accounts for continuity in the hero without depending on an essentialist reading of his character, allows for unconscious motivation, and accepts departures from customary ways as incipient forms of custom. It complements the approach offered here, though it differs in its concern to treat Hamlet as a fully realized psychological entity rather than as a representation of a way of being in the world that derives from classical, Christian, and early modern ethical concepts and rhetorical and dramaturgic practices (Murray, 57–102). 33. Useful conjectural sketches of this process are offered by Thomson, Career, 82–93; King, 7–9; and David Bradley, 89–94. Carson provides more detail in his account of Henslowe’s relations with writers (54–79). 34. Foakes and Rickert, 73–74. Further citations will appear in the text. 35. Bentley, 70–71. 36. Greg, Essays, 2.451. 37. There is disagreement about the nature of these notes, for they appear on the back of an undated letter to Henslowe from Robert Shaw of the Admiral’s Company, in which he writes, “mr henshlowe we have heard their booke and lyke it / their pryce is eight pounds, wch I pray you pay now to mr wilson according to our promysse” (Greg, Henslowe, 49). Since the notes are written in the same hand as the letter and there is an acquittal for £8 in Henslowe’s diary, dated 8 November 1599 and signed by Wilson, Bradley believes they constitute the “doodle” of a stage plot written by Shaw when attending a reading of the book on the same day and not an author’s plot at all (David Bradley, 20, 90). King, in contrast, believes the fragment “is probably a

Notes to Pages 252–259 / 403

38.

39. 40.

41.

42. 43.

44.

45.

46.

47.

48.

scrap from a plot that Shaw had prepared with Wilson’s assistance when Wilson first proposed the play. When Wilson wrote the play, he probably followed this plot—or a copy of it—as his plan for the sequence of scenes” (King, 8). King tends to conflate author plots and stage plots, regarding the former as the origin of the latter, though the seven extant stage plots originally printed by Greg lack the scene content found in those fragmentary texts that are clearly identified as author plots. This broadside was evidently a scam by Richard Vennar, who had spent time in debtor’s prison and, impressed by the promise of ready cash from theatrical production, had advertised an elaborate patriotic play that never materialized. The customers who paid in advance were enraged to find there was no such production and tore down the furniture of the Swan, though some years later Vennar claimed that he had provided “diver Chorus to bee spoken by men of good birth.” See Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 3.500–503. Adams, “Author-Plot,” 24, 26. Subsequent citations will appear in the text. Ben Jonson, 8.645. The arguments to each of the three completed acts of The Sad Shepherd, the unfinished play found in Jonson’s papers, may offer us an inferential glimpse at “bengemans plott,” since they are far more detailed than the formal argumenta written in imitation of Terence that he provides for the printed editions of Volpone and The Alchemist. Each is as long as the single argument printed with Sejanus, which may have been his working model. Among the plays, only The New Inn includes an act-by-act argument like those written for The Sad Shepherd. Klein, 149. Lord Bardolph’s debate with Hastings in 2H4 1.3.34–62 over whether to proceed against the King without Northumberland’s participation draws upon the analogies of plot as political scheme, poetic subjectum, and architectural ground. Pinciss, xii. Subsequent page references will appear in the text. In a parallel argument, Clubb writes that audiences of commedia dell’arte scenarios published by Flaminio Scala “heard what no scenario can show: the language that the comici brought to the blueprints of action” (36). Elizabethan author plots are functionally related to commedia plots: the former are realized by dramatists, the latter by actors, but sometimes they too end up as through-written plays (ibid.). The First Avocatore says to Mosca, “You appear / T’have been the chiefest minister, if not plotter, / In all these lewd impostures” (5.12.107–9), suggesting his secondary function as réalisateur. Bottom’s plan to tell Quince his dream so he can write a ballad on it suggests that Quince is the writer-in-residence for the company and thus the author of The Lamentable Comedy. We should also bear in mind that Bottom was probably written for Will Kemp, the clown whose special skill it was to be everyone and anyone and at the same time himself. Even this may not do justice to Bottom’s infinite variety. Parker points out that Bottom, after all, is MND’s St. Paul (“I have had a most rare vision,” 4.1.204–5), whom Shakespeare has vouchsafed an insight into himself that is not granted to anyone else, least of all Theseus, who “never may believe / These antic fables, nor these fairy toys” (5.1.2–3). It is a master stroke, however, that after an initial recoil he displaces this insight onto self-appreciative art (Margins, 97–98; see also her valuable discussion of poetry and joinery, 88–96). Second and Third Blast, 148. The authorship of Munday is not certain but widely accepted. Skura addresses the apparently paradoxical position of theater writers who participated in antitheatrical polemic, 245n40. From my point of view, it is exactly

404 / Notes to Pages 259–263 what one would have expected from a generation who found such multipositionality a routine way of life. For discussion of the actor’s absorption in his roles from a psychoanalytic standpoint, see Skura, 9–28; and, from a behaviorist approach, Murray, 38–56. Worthen, Idea, and Roach provide the fullest historical accounts, drawing on early modern dramatic theory, antitheatrical polemic, and classical and renaissance psychology. For evidence that audiences might have been similarly absorbed, see Mann, 97, who cites Joseph Hall’s Virgidemiarum, where prurient theatergoers feel “guilty rage” after vicariously experiencing “th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame” onstage. As noted in chapter 2, Cicero’s De Officiis, a popular grammar-school text on human nature, is learnedly echoed in these criticisms, which suggests they are not merely hysterical outbursts. 49. Compare Petrarch on urban life, in chapter 5. Jonson’s remark is a variant of the topos totus mundus agit histrionem, originating in John of Salisbury’s Polycraticus, which ex­presses the vanity of human pretension before an audience of divine onlookers. Jonson develops this aspect of the topos in the passage that follows in Discoveries, and Shakespeare exploits its vanitas theme in Sonnet 15; AYLI 2.7.139–66; R2 3.2.160–70; and Mac. 5.5.19–26. For the history of the topos, see Curtius, 138–44; and Gillies, 76–79. 50. The appearance of almost in both Shakespeare passages indicates the belief in a residual “nature,” which is associated with natal formation, as in “mole of nature,” and is analogous, as in Munday, to “inclination” or “disposition,” as when Hamlet says “it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory” (Ham. 2.2.297–99) or suggests he may “put on an antic disposition.” The notion of “disposition” is present in Cicero (see chapter 2) and is a legacy of Galenic humors theory, but its meaning shades into “customary demeanor” or “mood” or even, as “inclination” suggests, “attitude.” It is similar to but distinguished from the concept of mores (Shakespeare’s “manners”), which is associated with habit formation, as when Hamlet speaks of “some habit that too much o’er-leavens / The form of plausive manners” (Ham. 1.4.29–30). The actor’s identification with or transformation into his role is a staple of antitheatrical literature (see Worthen, Actor, 236). The importance of almost in performance is explored in greater detail in chapter 9. C hap t e r N in e

1. 2. 3. 4.

5.

6.

See chapter 3. See chapter 8. Clubb suggests that the characters of Othello are adaptations of the dramatis personae of an Italian commedia scenario, though the plot is Cinthio’s (45). Wiles, 74. Subsequent references will appear in the text. Long, “Perspective.” A study of extant manuscript promptbooks, he argues, shows that bookkeepers apparently were accustomed to working with both variant speech headings and contradictory stage directions. This includes 41 of the 45 prefixes in the 10 scenes in which she appears, omitting 4 instances where Q2 prefixes appear to be contaminated by Q1 (George W. Williams, xiii). “What’s the Bastard’s Name?” in George W. Williams, 137. McLeod discusses other instances in which such transformations of ethos take place in All’s Well, and suggests that “the identity of a dramatic character need not be an internal affair; it can be externally relational and interactive—an interaction no less between one role and another on stage, than between a role and its scriptor” (139). That these functions need

Note to Page 263 / 405

7.

not be exclusive is indicated by the change in the Bastard’s speech prefix in King John, Act I, scene 1, from Phil. to Bast. immediately after Queen Eleanor asks whether he’d rather be a Faulconbridge and inherit Sir Robert’s land or reputed son of Cordelion. The tag certainly signals a new social relation, but along with it a changed sense of self. Though Q’s Philostrate becomes F’s Egeus in this scene, and Q’s Theseus shares reading and reacting to the “briefe” of sports with Lysander in F, the changes in speech prefixes are the same in both texts. Nothing in my argument, however, entails that scribal and compositor error are not responsible for some speech-heading variants found in the plays, nor do I claim that such variation is exclusively Shakespearean. Long offers the useful suggestion that changes in speech prefixes may indicate close coordination between authors and players, encoding scene blockings and attitudes that performers with busy repertory schedules can “plug into” a new script and subsequently refine. “Varying speech-heads may be a kind of vestigial remains of that planning, left by the playwright and used by the players,” he writes; “far from being an uncertainty or an almost quaint bit of evidence of playwrights’ compositorial technique . . . varying speech-heads are integral parts of the skeleton of the construction of plays which players found useful in creating performances” (Long, 26).   It might be objected that the actor’s roll, so far as we can tell from the extant specimen of Edward Alleyn’s Orlando, is likely to have had no sign of variance, since it is a cue script. The problem disappears, however, if we think of the roll as just that—a list of lines the actor has to memorize, following which, in rehearsal, stage directions are provided and “character” is elicited. An example of just such a distinction is found in the Induction to Marston’s Antonio and Mellida, where the actor who plays Piero says, “Faith, we can say our parts; but we are ignorant in what mold we must cast our actors” (Burns, 121); for other instances differentiating conning a part from learning correct accent and delivery, see Skura, 47–48. If, as some evidence suggests, actors’ parts were copied from authors’ papers before the complete book was delivered (King, 9), even in a tight rehearsal schedule there were different stages in the fashioning of dramatis personae into characters. In the case of MND, Quince informs Bottom what Pyramus is—“a lover, that kills himself most gallant for love”—and, in response, Bottom promises to “move storms” in the audience and “condole in some measure” (1.2.23–28). But he does not know he’ll be involved in a more delicate whispering scene with Thisby until Quince hits upon the problem of talking through a wall and Bottom solves it by suggesting they speak through a hole made by the fingers of the actor presenting Wall. In actual performance, he ominously apostrophizes night, coos to “courteous wall,” angrily curses “wicked wall,” then exchanges vows with Thisby before he is called upon to enact his condoling part and kill himself. The printed texts of MND, which vary his speech prefixes, may provide clues to what he found as he developed his part. According to both Q and F, the player of Bottom (likely Kemp) would have learned only in rehearsal that he is “Bottom, the Weaver” when he is with fellow craftsmen, “Piramus” during rehearsal and while performing, “Clowne” in the Fairy Queen’s retinue, and “Bot” when he steps out of character at the end of The Lamentable Comedy (Wiles, 74–75). The varying situations elicit different social identities and modes of address. The extant fragments of Alleyn’s role in Orlando Furioso provide clues to Orlando’s varying emotional dispositions. The marginal stage directions (presumably Alleyn’s) indicate that the player redisposed himself as he rehearsed. His notes include “here he harkens,” “he walketh up and downe,” “he sings,” “he whistles for him,” “he beates A[rgalus]” (Greg, Documents,

406 / Notes to Pages 264–267

8 9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

vol. 2, “The Part of Orlando,” strip 6, fol. 263). Though his name remains constant, his ethos is variable. From my point of view, this would be precisely the kind of practice by means of which the theater participated in fashioning the residual and occasional selves thematized by Shakespeare. Roach, 23–57. 1H4 5.2.60–64; compare Nicomachean Ethics 1103b, 1104a. In the Player’s speech and Hamlet’s reaction to it (2.2.468–580), Shakespeare distinguishes between an actor who can imaginatively project himself into a role, tap a reservoir of emotional resources, strike the appropriate attitude, and weep “for nothing”—and the man Hamlet is, whose subject possibilities are conflictually in excess of the task he is solicited to perform by a spectral figure whose very language calls up those conflicts. We are drawn to the idea of an unconscious by the overdetermination of the Ghost’s language, Hamlet’s multipositional response to it, and his lack of an explanation satisfying to himself of why he hasn’t acted, when of course he has, if indirectly. The answer to Hamlet’s question, “What would he do / Had he the motive and the cue for passion / That I have?” (2.2.560–62) is—though Hamlet doesn’t realize it—“Exactly what I am doing.” This points up the difference between the rhetorical texts that urge the orator to imagine himself in the position of his client or audience—to feel their emotions—and the dramatic script in which Hamlet is fashioned. The Quintilian text (Inst. Or. 6.2.35–36) that Hamlet paraphrases in his soliloquy compares the empathy a player feels for a fictive “nothing” to the greater empathy an orator ought to feel for his flesh-and-blood client, but there is no hint that the orator can or should attempt to draw upon feelings that lie beyond his control. Nor do early modern discussions of acting entertain such ideas about the relationship of actor and role. Both defenses of and attacks on the stage assume that the good actor will charge his own fantasy with images of the person he is to present, and thus arouse passions and stir humors that may elude his rational control, but for evidence that playing taps the unconscious, we have to look to the plays themselves—remembering that 1,200 years before Hamlet was written, Augustine wrote anxiously of “those lamentable dark areas where my capacities are hidden from me” (Confessions 10.32.48; and chapter 5, above). For “shrew” as social identity, see the references in Dolan, 8–14; for “interpellation,” see Althusser, “Ideology,” 160–65. Freedman offers an important account of the way Petruchio deploys self-conscious performance to deconstruct the sclerotic theatricality of Paduan society by parodically playing out its implicit values in his wooing and taming of Kate. In his repeated reframings of her behavior, she argues, he denies Kate a place of opposition, and thus further disempowers her (142–46). As insightful as her reading is, it ignores Kate’s capacity to catch onto the game and secretly profit by it through imitation, as I shall argue. On the enabling function of multiple interpellations, see Paul Smith. As a topos, this is not new. Edward IV’s Queen Elizabeth replies to the Duchess of York’s question, “Why should calamity be full of words?” with “Let them have scope! Though what they will impart / Help nothing else, yet they do ease the heart” (R3, 4.4.126–31). What is new is Kate’s awareness that she is displacing anger onto words, which she did not possess as a shrew. A third and happier possibility is that he hears the tone that Hortensio doesn’t hear, is pleased with what he hears, and remains anxious that she continue to perform her obedience publicly. Which would account for the next test and lend suspense and a fuller pleasure to the final scene.

Notes to Pages 267–269 / 407 15. This may be detected in her oration, composed of arguments drawn from different parts of the Elizabethan ideology of gender hierarchy. Its seams are playable: (1) sex is destiny (5.2.136–45); (2) gendered behavior generates obligation (146–54); (3) domestic relations is politics writ small (155–60); (4) argument from natural design (161–75); (5) peroration and offer of homage (176–79). But the irony must be only faintly detectable to Petruchio and the audience; indeed, her manner is rather “actoral” than ironic, since an actor playing a part doesn’t normally say to his audience (as an audible subtext) “I really don’t mean what I say—I mean otherwise.” This can be the message if one is Richard III, but Kate’s final situation is different. To call it actoral rather than ironic is to recognize that she has become cryptic—not readily readable through her words—and that her audience must consequently become decipherers, as Elizabethan audiences so frequently were. 16. Spivack, 395 and passim. As I argued in chapter 5, the concept of “hybrid Vice,” though useful, is merely a starting point in analyzing Shakespeare’s figures who exhibit Vice-like behavior and who seem to be emerging from the nonpsychological representation of blank evil into persons with recognizably conflicted—and sometimes split—psyches. 17. Even more explicitly than in Katherine’s case, Richard’s character/subject seems to be the result of his historical hailing. His reputation has, in effect, preceded him, since from his birth he has been regarded as an ill omen and his consciousness has been formed in accordance with that public identity. This public “characterization” has been both limiting and enabling, as he tells the audience on different occasions in The Third Part of Henry VI and at the beginning of Richard III. On the one hand, he is the pariah of the Lancasters and the shame of his own mother, on the other, the actualizer of his own stigmatization, who preys upon his natural kin and disrupts an already weakened social order in a conscious effort to fulfill his apparently predestined role. For a useful reading, see Charnes, 20–69. 18. The conceit is ubiquitous in sixteenth-century friendship literature, and is prominent in sonnets 3, 22, 24, 29–31, 73; CE 5.1.418–19; MV 3.4.11–15; WT 1.1.21–31, 1.2.67–68. 19. Buckingham is the one who insists the Duke of York be removed from sanctuary (3.1.44–56); instructs Catesby in sounding Hastings’s intentions (3.1.157–80); lures Hastings into speaking as Richard’s “other self” concerning the coronation (3.4.10–20); and virtually becomes that “other self” when he echoes Richard’s claim to “counterfeit the deep tragedian, / Speak and look back, and pry on every side” as the two prepare to perform fear of conspiracy before the Mayor (3.5.1–11). He is the one sent to the Guildhall to infer the bastardy of Edward’s children and augments his instructions with Ricardian boldness, insisting that his sly hunchbacked friend bears “the right idea of your father, / Both in your form and nobleness of mind” (3.7.13–14); subsequently he plays chorus and emissary for the City in persuading Richard to accept the crown (3.7.56–245). This intimacy comes to an abrupt end in Act IV, scene 2. 20. That this is not directed to Catesby is suggested by Catesby’s apparent stupefaction during the line, as though there were a hiatus in their communication: Richard’s next line is “Look how thou dream’st!” (4.2.56). The aside may be directed at the audience in a regressive attempt to confide in someone, though the scene’s pattern of asides suggests it is directed to himself. The following speech will be interpreted according to how one views this line. It sounds as though it is directed to himself, for it is a speech not of exposition but of excogitation in which we hear him thinking. Yet

408 / Notes to Pages 270–272

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

he voices a practical need in expository language—“I must be married to my brother’s daughter”—and reflects upon it in private confessional words: “But I am in / So far in blood that sin will pluck on sin.” Then, as if remembering where he is, he resumes his public persona and declares with customary bravado, “Tear-falling pity dwells not in this eye” (60–65). Folio spelling and punctuation, which emphasize the dialogic quality of this soliloquy. The F text appears to derive from a scribal copy of Shakespeare’s foul papers and thus may more closely represent Shakespeare’s conception than the First Quarto, which seems to be based on a widely collaborative redaction by members of Shakespeare’s company, perhaps while on the road (Wells and Taylor, 228–30). I have italicized the lines that Richard’s conscience speaks and added double slanted lines to further distinguish the voices. I say “mutually informing” because in Richard III dreams are not simply psychological phenomena, but manifestations of an existing spiritual reality that makes itself present to human beings through dreams. Therefore it cannot be said that bad conscience alone prompts Richard’s (or earlier, Clarence’s) bad dreams. It seems that the incursion of spirits prompts conscience, and the voice of conscience brings Richard’s spiritual voices to the bar. “Vulcan’s stithy,” for example, being a metonymic condensation of Vulcan’s own mousetrap—the net he forged to catch his wife Venus and his rival Mars making love—a figure apt enough for a Hamlet who sees Claudius as his rival as well as the murderer of his father. I use the term inchoate to suggest that the concept of an inaccessible unconscious is itself as imperfectly formed as the psychological phenomenon Shakespeare is trying to describe, which by its nature never can fully take shape. This description is more than “gestural,” as Barker would have it (36)—more, that is, than a proleptic glimpse of a later seventeenth-century phenomenon, for Shakespeare is rediscovering something new (Augustine had been there first) and articulating it through Hamlet. It is not the unconscious he is discovering, for manuals of conscience had long recognized the existence of that which we refuse to contemplate in ourselves and which we therefore repress; rather, it is the possibility that psychic material exists under erasure and is inaccessible to the subject, regardless of the workings of conscience. In the Aristotelian ethical tradition with which Shakespeare was familiar, every action is, strictly speaking, the action of a knowing subject, since it involves deliberation that measures the relationship between universals and particulars, and means and ends (Nic. Eth. 1112a–1114b). But there are also actions that occur with imperfect knowledge of these relationships as well as those that occur because, in Shakespeare’s Christian formulation, reason panders will. Actions do take place, then, without their subjects’ full awareness of their implications, but there is a clear distinction between boulesis (deliberation) and praxis (action). Shakespeare uses this distinction to mark the subject’s foreclosure of the self as it proceeds to act with counter-arguments under erasure. This is a useful way to think about the intermission in subjectivity provided by Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy, which so surprisingly follows his resolve to catch the conscience of the King, and both articulates and performs the phenomenon of unconscious association that reveals how “the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought” (3.1.83–84). Its dilation of the self finds its antidote in the speech beginning “’Tis now the very witching time of night,” in which Hamlet declares, “Now could I drink hot blood” (3.2.388–90)—his unsuccessful

Notes to Pages 272–277 / 409

27.

28.

29.

30. 31.

32.

version of Macbeth’s later self-transformation into “wither’d Murther,” for he immediately fails as a stage revenger. We find an explicit statement of the desire to suspend such tendentious and lethal subjectivity in Troilus and Cressida, when Hector and Agamemnon admire each other in a neutral, characterless “extant moment . . . / Strain’d purely from all hollow bias-drawing,” before taking up their deadly enmity again (Tr. 4.5.168–69). By “narrative time,” I mean purely descriptive time that escapes measurement. By “dramatic time” I mean the sequential time usually represented on the stage. Toward the end of Act I, scene 4, for example, Richard announces he is going to farm the realm to pay for the Irish war and if this isn’t enough, he’ll issue blank charters. Then he hears that John of Gaunt is ill, and says he’s going to seize his wealth, too. In the next scene, the incursion of narrative time upon dramatic time has already begun: Gaunt is ill (dramatic time) but laments Richard’s leasing out the realm (narrative time); then Richard visits him, and when Gaunt dies he declares seisin. At Richard’s departure, narrative time takes over again as the three lingering nobles complain of the farming, blanks, benevolences, and new exactions he is imposing. Sequential time has collapsed. See chapter 7 for the effect of this “language of theatrical potentiality” on audience response. He misremembers the occasion, however, which was after he had assumed the crown. The unreliability and power of memory complicates the question of agency for many in the play: compare the Hostess’s wandering from the point of her lawsuit (2.1.63–103), Lord Mowbray’s revision of his father’s trial at Coventry (4.1.111–38), and his debate with the Archbishop of York on how the remembrance of their uprising will affect their future freedom of action (4.1.181–212). See Worcester’s explanation of the Percy uprising (1H4 5.1.22–26, 30–71), Warwick’s revision of Henry IV’s simple determinism (2H4 3.1.75–93), Westmorland’s reply to Mowbray’s complaint of injury (2H4 4.1.95–104). Even Prince Hal, who has voluntarily sought to cultivate a public image of profligacy, feels himself growing inured to the part he has chosen when he realizes he desires small beer—the result of habituation—and can’t drop the part because he would prematurely arouse a poor opinion of himself among the populace (2H4 2.2.28–64). Cobbett’s State Trials, 1.co1.1410. Subsequent citations will appear in the text. Lucio records Angelo’s responsiveness to this fantasy that at once invokes his potency and potential impotence: “Ay, touch him; there’s the vein” (2.2.70). In seven lines, she has suggested he slip like Claudio, exchange power with her, and submit to a new conflated identity of Claudio-Angelo-Isabella. The polymorphous coalescence of lust, power, and abjection seduces him. For a fuller discussion of the psychology of the hypothetical mode in this play, see my epilogue. See Aristotle, Rhet. 1374b: “Equity bids us be merciful to the weakness of human nature; to think less about the laws than about the man who framed them, and less about what he said than about what he meant; not to consider the actions of the accused so much as his intentions; nor this or that detail so much as the whole story; to ask not what a man is now but what he has always or usually been.” Shakespeare recalls this principle in Measure for Measure when the Duke tells Angelo, “There is a kind of character in thy life, / That to th’observer doth thy history / Fully unfold” (1.1.27–29). Here “character” retains its old meaning of “mark” or “note,” as in the Theophrastian characters studied in chapter 2. It is precisely the trustworthiness of this concept that Shakespeare interrogates in this play and elsewhere. For a more positive version of its use in equitable argument, see CE 3.1.85–93.

410 / Notes to Pages 280–288 33. In fact, the self-knowing subject must be restored several times, for it continues to be eroded by the pressures of the unseen self that surrounds it. It occurs when Othello refashions himself as a magistrate punishing Desdemona’s crime (“Good, good; the justice of it pleases; very good,” 4.1.206); when his passion for her wells up and he weeps, then reasons that he is like God (“This sorrow’s heavenly, / It strikes where it doth love,” 5.2.21–22); and when he executes justice on himself (“I took by th’ throat the circumcised dog / And smote him—thus,” 5.2.353–54). 34. This earlier episode is analyzed in detail in chapter 11. 35. Not enough attention has been paid by critics to Desdemona’s response to Othello’s tale of the handkerchief—“Is’t possible? . . . Then would to God I had never seen’t!” (3.4.70, 79)—for they are usually concerned with the significance of the handkerchief to Othello. Even Carol Neely, in her illuminating account of the changing symbolism of the handkerchief as it passes from hand to hand, assumes that Desdemona rejects its significance (130), when her subsequent behavior in the scene seems, on the contrary, a desperate attempt to evade its significance. “Sure,” she tells Emilia, “there’s some wonder in this handkerchief; / I am most unhappy in the loss of it,” which is complemented by her remark to Cassio, “I have spoken for you, all my best / And stood within the blank of his displeasure” (3.4.100–3, 128–29). Together these lines suggest a growing awareness that she does not “eye well” to him any longer and that the power of the handkerchief has something to do with it. It is thus no surprise that she jumps to Cassio’s conjecture that what is bothering Othello is “something of moment” (3.4.139)—which she translates as an affair of state. 36. A Lacanian insight may be useful here. In discussing Lacan’s concept of the gaze, Freedman remarks that “the objectification of the self by an alien viewpoint enables, as it undermines, self-consciousness by calling into play an unconscious look.” She quotes Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, who observes that “the limitations of consciousness may be witnessed in what Lacan has described as a scotoma (obscuration of part of the field of vision). . . . The regard [read “gaze”] is not simply a glance [read “look”] cast from the eye, or a glance from reflective consciousness . . . because the regard has the power to activate within consciousness an awareness of unconscious motivation and intentionality” (64). This seems precisely what the hieratic power of the handkerchief to transvalue Othello’s vision has come to mean to Desdemona’s experience of herself. 37. On Othello’s flight from desire, see Greenblatt, Self-Fashioning, 238–52; on his frightened surprise at the desire he has elicited from Desdemona, see Cavell, 136. C hap t e r T e n

1.

2.

3.

Although the term racism is modern, not early modern, it is captures the complex mingling of xenophobia and xenophilia that we find in Shakespeare. I shall be using it and its cognates in this chapter. On the vocabularies of race in the period, see Loomba, 22–44. In echoing Stephen Greenblatt’s notion of the “circulation of social energy,” I am positing a reconfiguration of conventional values through theatrical use of materials encountered in reading, conversation, sermon, rumor, and other forms of current discourse. The list of studies treating cultural otherness is now extensive. I have drawn primarily on the work of Bartels, Barthelemy, D’Amico, Gillies, Greenblatt, Hall, Neill, Newman, Pagden, James Shapiro, and Tokson. See Roach, 24–57. Further citations will appear in the text.

Notes to Pages 288–292 / 411 4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

This matter has not been given sufficient attention. Callaghan discusses the perfor­ mance of cultural others in terms of spectacle, not acting; although she makes a distinc­ tion between being an exhibit and being an impersonator, she doesn’t pursue the implications of the latter. Ian Smith conceptualizes the performance of race by connecting a classical rhetoric of barbarism to the language and action of Othello and Iago, and has some brilliant things to say about Iago’s alien behavior; however, he doesn’t raise questions about the actors of their roles. Skura offers many ideas about what the experience of an Elizabethan actor might have been like, both onstage and off, and has an eminently sensible approach to the central question of the player’s relationship to his role (see especially 49–57), but she does not explore the experience of performing the alien. Inst. orat. 6.2.35–36 (for the Hamlet reference, see note 10 in chapter 9). Quintilian distinguishes between the premeditated speech and the “brilliant improvisation [extemporalis color] that can occur while speaking” (10.6.5), carrying the orator along with it. Observes Cave: “Although according to this account extemporization is a special instance of performance, occurring ‘inter dicendum,’ it is clearly also the paradigm of performance, the moment when discourse asserts its freedom to exercise intrinsic powers. Not only does this moment appear in Quintilian’s theory as the goal or fruition of all conscious preparation (X.vii.i); it also presupposes . . . the authenticity of a hidden nature” (127). All of Cave’s chapter 4 is germane to thinking about the relationship of actor as subject to actor as personator. Oth. 1.1.64. Compare Viola’s nearly contemporary remark to Olivia (TN 3.1.141); Richard III’s desperate attempt to reassert his fragmenting unity, “I am I” (R3 5.3.183); Troilus’s anguished cry, “This is, and is not, Cressid!” (Tro. 5.2.146); Desdemona’s lament “My lord is not my lord” (Oth. 3.4.125); the relief heard in “since my lord / Is Antony again, I will be Cleopatra” (AC 3.13.185–86). The phenomenon is pandemic in Shakespeare. Pleasant Notes upon Don Quixot (London, 1654), quoted in Roach, 48–49. That Proteus was associated not simply with shape-shifting but also with the assumption of ethos is suggested by Flaminius in Massinger’s Believe as You List (1631): “I am on the stage / And if now, in the scene imposed upon me, / So full of change. . . . / I show not myself / A protean actor varying every shape / With the occasion, it will hardly poise / The expectation” (3.1.12–18), quoted in Martin White, 60. The issue of absorption versus artistic control—what becomes known as “double consciousness”—was not fully articulated until the eighteenth century. But a century earlier Thomas Wright, Thomas Heywood, and John Bulwer warned actors and orators to use moderation in personating the passions, and distinguished them from those who are actually under the sway of passion. See Roach, 50–53; B. L. Joseph, 51–52; Dawson, 34. When we juxtapose Hamlet’s advice to the players (3.2.4–8) to his advice to his mother (3.4.160–65) and his praise of Horatio (3.2.63–74), it is apparent that Shakespeare linked theatrics and ethics as related modes of behavior modification that inform what we call subjectivity. As we saw in chapter 9, the term probable denotes a firm sense of self and expectations generated from that self—whether one is an upright Angelo discovering a new strain of lust that escapes his “character,” a puzzled Henry IV trying to account for his wayward intentionality, or a shattered Macbeth, who discovers that “that which should accompany old age, / As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends, / I must not look to have” (5.3.24–26).

412 / Notes to Pages 292–293 10. I deliberately omit Tamora and Cleopatra, foreigners and females, so as to keep the present argument manageable. For useful discussions, see Hall and Loomba. 11. We do hear contrary-to-fact clauses in Launcelot’s “I am a Jew if I serve the Jew any longer” (MV 2.2.112–13), Falstaff ’s “or I am a Jew else, an Ebrew Jew” (1H4 2.4.179), and Benedick’s “If I do not love her, I am a Jew” (MA 2.3.263), which only prove the point. On the ubiquity of Moors, G. K. Hunter notes that “Elizabethan authors describe ‘Moors’ as existing all over the globe” (40–41). In Mandeville, Jews can be found as far off as Cathay. Gillies illuminates this phenomenon, with reference to the Greek concept of oikumene, to distinguish between a culture’s perceived center and its exterior boundaries, the eschatia beyond which undifferentiated barbaric peoples live. In the case of the Jew, as of the Moor, conversion might attenuate this otherness, but its efficacy and permanence were suspect. On Jewish “blackness” and the suspicion of postconversion apostasy, see James Shapiro, 170–73, 131–51. 12. As far back as biblical times Jews, later joined by Christians and Muslims, justified the social practice of slavery by reference to the incident in which Ham looked upon the nakedness of the drunken Noah, for which his son Canaan was condemned to be the servant of Shem and Japeth (Gen. 9:21–27). As William Evans has shown, Canaanism was originally an ethnic, not a racial designation, and historically it was extended to cover newly available peoples who were designated “Canaanites” as the need for fresh sources of slaves arose. Not until the tenth century c.e., with the spread of Muslim power in North Africa, did black sub-Sahara slaves become Canaanites. In another tradition derived from scripture, Ham defied Noah’s command to abstain from sexual intercourse on the ark. His punishment for disobedience and lust was a dark-skinned progeny, the best known of whom were Cush and Canaan. Of the former George Best writes, “As an example for contempt of Almightie God, and dis­ obedience of parents, God would a sonne should bee borne whose name was Chus, who not onely it selfe, but all his posteritie after him should bee so blacke and lothsome, that it might remaine a spectacle of disobedience to all the world. And of this blacke and cursed Chus came all these blacke Moores which are in Africa” (“A True Discourse” [1578], in Hakluyt, 7.264). Chus (Cush) is a countryman of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, attesting to the Jews’ ancient kinship with black Moors. Of Cush and his brother Mizraim, observes the Geneva Bible, “came the Ethiopians and Egyptians” (gloss to Gen. 10:6). Thus it is not surprising to find Ethiopia sometimes called Cush or Cusis, as Mandeville notes in his description of Africa: “Ethiopie is clept Cusis. . . . [It] is departed in two parts principal, and that is in the east part and in the meridional part; the which part meridional is clept Mauritania; and the folk of that country be black enough and more black than in the other part, and they be clept Moors.” The eponymous founder of Cusis engendered Nimrod the giant who began building the Tower of Babel: “And at that time, the fiends of hell came many times and lay with the women of his generation and engendered on them diverse folk, as monsters and folk disfigured, some without heads, some with great ears, some with one eye, some giants, some with horses’ feet, and many other diverse shape against kind.” Disobedience, lechery, blackness, and monstrosity thus coalesce in Canaanites. See Mandeville, 105, 145. 13. For discussions of black men’s alleged sexual prowess and jealousy, see Tokson, 15–18; Barthelemy, 5–6, 120–22; Newman, 145–49; Hall, 25–61 and passim. In describing how some men are more prone to one passion than others, Thomas Wright quotes the English proverb, “To a Red man, reade thy read: / With a Browne man, breake thy bread: / At a pale man, draw thy knife: / From a black man keepe thy

Notes to Pages 293–295 / 413

14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

20.

wife” (43). A sixteenth-century conspectus of African “monstrosity,” with reports of “beastly living,” “lack of respect to chastitie,” “people without heads,” and “Anthropophagi, that are accustomed to eat mans flesh” can be found in John Lok’s “The Second Voyage to Guinea” (Hakluyt, 6.169–70). The phenomenon of infection is discussed by Hall, 11–14, as evidence of the moralization of the aesthetics of light and dark in the sixteenth century. Lok is equally puzzled: “This is also to be considered as secret worke of nature, that throughout all Africke, under the Aequinoctial line, and neere about the same on both sides, the regions are extreeme hote, and the people very blacke. Whereas contrarily such regions of the West Indies as are under the same line are very temperate, and the people neither blacke, nor with curlde and short wooll on their heads, as they of Africke have, but of the colour of an Olive, with long and blacke heare on their heads: the cause of which variety is declared in divers places in [Peter Martyr’s] the Decades” (Hakluyt, 6.176). On the narrative biases connected to the politics of commercial licensing, see D’Amico, 7–40; on Hakluyt’s concern to encourage and justify English imperial interests by carefully selecting the narratives to be included (apparently only onefourth of those available), see Bartels, “Imperialist,” 520–25. Vitkus, 160. It has not escaped the notice of scholars that in naming Aaron, Shakespeare crosses the Moor and the Jew, just as he names Shylock’s countryman Chus (MV 3.2.285) after the black son of Ham. Moreover, the biblical Aaron’s sons were Eleazar (the Moor of Dekker’s Lust’s Dominion) and Ithamar (the likely origin of the Moor Ithamore in Marlowe’s Jew of Malta). Noticing yet another kind of miscellaneous crossover, Julia Reinard Lupton argues that color is not primarily at issue in Othello but rather the Moor’s religious origins, alternatively pagan and Islamic. Both possibilities, she demonstrates, permeate the discourse of the play and are encapsulated in the Quarto and Folio variants of “Indian” and “Judean” in Othello’s last monologue. Her argument qualifies the emphasis of recent criticism on the issue of color, yet adds another aporia regarding Othello’s ability to assimilate that haunts the action of the play (see Lupton, “Circumcised”). In her analysis of the African reports in Principal Navigations, Bartels, “Imperialist,” argues that Hakluyt, concerned to distinguish Africans of all ethnicities from English imperialists, deliberately created an impression of undifferentiated otherness. Though his narratives are confusing about color, they generally distinguish the two groups by the reported savagery, physical grotesqueness, incomprehensible ritualism, and unpredictability of the Negroes, and the apparent courtesy, cultivation, and cunning of the Moors. Ultimately, however, the Moors’ appearances are as misleading as the Negroes’ appearances are incomprehensible, for Moors are both calculating and incalculable—thus equally beyond the grasp of English traders. See Worthen, Actor, 11–35. Beyond the discourse of race, Maus reminds us that the term monstrous was associated with the inscrutable and unspeakable in English common law trials. It was used as an omnibus term for crimes associated with impenetrable inward malice, “equally applicable to murder, theft, treason, witchcraft, heresy, sodomy, or whatever, so that an accusation of one particular crime tends to slide easily into an accusation of generalized criminality” (115). See her analysis of monstrosity in Othello, 122. On the rapid growth of political and trade relations between England and Morocco, see D’Amico, 7–40, especially 34–38, on the Moorish diplomatic mission to London in 1600; for the fullest detailed account, see Willan, 92–312.

414 / Notes to Pages 295–298 21. Jonas Barish offers the fullest account of this fear of the Protean pleasures of theatricality (80–131). 22. I am deliberately using Bakhtin’s term for “linguistic centrifugal forces and their products” to describe a dramatic role whose words suggest the inconsistency of personhood that must result when the dramatis persona is a screen or repository of a popular discourse of otherness. Its appropriateness will become clear in the examples of Aaron, Caliban, and Shylock that follow, and its usefulness will be even more evident in the subsequent analyses of Othello’s dialogue and the intertextual relations of Othello F and Q. For the purchase of this term, see Morson and Emerson, 10. 23. European Encounters, 21. This principle is usually manifested by a misrecognition on the basis of false analogy—for example, Columbus discovered that the Taíno Amerindians of Hispaniola fasted and abstained from sexual intercourse before panning for gold, and read the practice as analogous to Christian purification rites before taking communion, ordering his men to turn from sin and confess their errors so they, too, would be in a state of grace before seeking gold, which was a gift from God. The theatrical practice functioned similarly, though I shall argue that because it engaged the actor in mimetic identification, it became a medium of philanthropy rather than of exploitation. 24. The experience of philautia and philanthropy enjoyed in playing the cultural other differs, too, from those acts of assimilation and appropriation described by Pagden, insofar as the performer participates in that which he is defending against before experiencing the ensuing familiarization and its subsequent renunciation (compare also Greenblatt, Marvelous, especially 54–60, 88–98, 120–28). That is to say, he first “goes native,” an experience greatly feared by travelers to foreign lands. I propose that the actor slips into subjective estrangement as he participates in the otherness of the figure he personates and, in effect, loves the stranger he has become in all his strangeness, before finding him familiarized and once again demonized—and himself compelled rationally and socially to forswear his forbidden love. 25. This is first discussed in Weimann’s Popular Tradition, 215–37; it is elaborated in his “Mimesis in Hamlet,” especially 283–89, and in his “Bifold Authority.” 26. I find Weimann’s distinction between the two spaces unduly exclusive, since words and phrases from a variety of sources find their way into both. Nonetheless, his positing of their contrasting mimetic and antimimetic functions is historically sound and analytically useful. 27. Dialogic Imagination, 259–300; Morson and Emerson, 139–66. Although Bakhtin finds this feature of language primarily in the novel, it is also characteristic of the drama, especially in periods of transition. It may be heard in Aeschylus and Euripides, and certainly in Shakespeare, as Patricia Parker has shown in Margins, without reference to Bakhtin. It is especially to be noted in Titus, where distinctions between locus and platea speech become increasingly blurred as Roman virtue degenerates into barbarism; as we shall see, it takes different forms in The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice, and Othello. 28. Compare 5.1.141–44. Barthelemy argues that Aaron’s “willing” his soul to match his face indicates that Shakespeare does not represent him as a predetermined stereotype but as a voluntary being (95–96). This does not, however, mean that he is not a man of “ill will” like Iago, in the Augustinian sense of a will turned from God and sensually overflowing into the world (see chapter 5). Compare Othello’s very different estimate of his soul and comparison of his name and face (Oth. 1.2. 31, 3.3.389–91

Notes to Pages 298–303 / 415

29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

34. 35.

[F text]), which marks him, unlike Aaron, as an unwilling stereotype and an ardent assimilationist. This is not to dismiss the moral responsibility borne by Titus, who initiates the sequence of bloody events by sacrificing Tamora’s eldest son, Alarbus, but simply to register where the moral spokesman of the play locates the blame, which is explicitly borne out by the events themselves. Shakespeare’s inconsistency here may be ideological but is theatrically motivated, suggesting how theater overwrote binary opposites and performed empathetic mediations. James Shapiro has shown that, in the case of the Jew, standard representations of well-poisoning, child sacrifice, enforced circumcision, and the miracle of the sacrament were continuously circulated and adapted to new uses as occasion arose. Pneuma is the medium through which the animal spirits of actor and audience members were believed to be exchanged, enabling their intersubjective responses. See Roach, 27, 45–47. By the time Shakespeare composed The Tempest, a considerable literature on the nature of the Amerindian was available. In many ways Caliban embodies this controversial discourse. The words of Prospero and Miranda call to mind the political and psychological model of the “natural slave,” discussed in Aristotle’s Politics and transmitted to sixteenth-century apologists for New World conquest through the works of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. Unlike the “civil slave,” this kind of man, identified with the barbarian, was placed in the category of similitudines homines—creatures between man and beast—who were thought to be incapable of deliberative reasoning, although they could follow instructions, and were therefore made “more human” in captivity. The question of whether their civility was merely surface imitation or whether they could actually learn and improve their nature was widely debated. The concept of “natural slavery” was invoked to explain the intractability—and justify the enslavement—of Amerindians, whose real and imagined practices of human sacrifice, cannibalism, idolatry, onanism, communal heterosexuality, and homosexuality—especially in Caribbean islands—raised the issue of whether such “unnatural” customs were due to psychological makeup, environment, or evolutionary stage. Las Casas and Acosta, while recognizing certain practices as “barbarous,” denied that the Indians were “natural slaves” and argued that their advanced evolutionary stage made them apt for conversion to Christianity—an idea also suggested by Shakespeare. For detailed discussion of the debate, which casts light on Caliban’s multifarious representations, see Pagden, Fall; for the debate over the Indians’ capacity for language, see Greenblatt, “Learning”; a broad survey of the issues is in Hodgen. The most subtle account of the relations of The Tempest to the issues of power, freedom, anxiety, and subject formation raised by the Virginia settlement and the wreck of the Sea Venture is in Greenblatt (1988), 142–58. For excerpts and commentary on this document, see Greenblatt, Negotiations, 572–74. Many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century travelers were quite aware that learning another’s language meant learning to think like the other. Pagden, European Encounters, 40–41, cites a dialogue written by a secular Spanish priest in 1555, in which a European immigrant to Peru warns a new arrival, “Do not learn the language of this land. Nor even listen to it, for I tell you that if you do, one of two ends will befall you, for it will either drive you mad or you will wander restlessly for the rest of your

416 / Notes to Pages 304–307

36.

37.

38.

39.

40.

41. 42.

43.

44.

45.

life,” at home in neither culture. Greenblatt, Marvelous, 105–9, also cites evidence that the Spanish and the English became aware that they were harnessing more than the mimetic powers of their captives when they taught them their tongues and that their pupils’ new ability to perceive their subjection and articulate it could be used against them. I paraphrase Greenblatt, “Learning,” 567. He quotes from the earliest English tract on America, Of the new lands, which reports that “These folke lyven lyke bestes without any resonablenes and the wymen be also as comon. And the men hath conversacyon with the wymen / who that they ben or who they fyrst mete / is she his syster / his mother / his daughter or any other kyndred.” Compare MV 3.2.43–107, 5.1.66–88. By “historical identity” I mean that “probable” subject—the debtor and lover of Antonio, the amorous, materialistic suitor of Portia—who now, momentarily, stands arrested in his intentional trajectory by the sound of music. Morocco and Aragon do not escape their customary attitudes in the scenes where they are represented; as dramatic foils deprived of “the sweet power of music,” they suffer no incursions into their “probable” subjects. Compare Gonzalo’s prayer, “Look down, you gods, / And on this couple drop a blessed crown” (5.1.203); and Prospero, looking upon Miranda and Ferdinand: “Heavens rain grace / On that which breeds between them” (3.1.75). Hermione, too, asks the gods to “look down, / And from your sacred vials pour your graces / On my daughter’s head” (WT 5.3.123). Italics mine. The moment also marks the distinction between the Aristotelian notion of oikumene, which absolutely differentiates the Hellene from barbarians beyond his borders, and the Christian concept of the congregatio fidelium. Based on the belief in a mono­ genetic creation and dependent upon Christ’s second coming for the reunion of all humanity, it welcomes all those who are ready to receive Christ. Prospero’s recognition, attractive as it may be, is the less likely, since neither he nor his actor has experienced, as the actor of Caliban has, the islander’s wealth of characterological resources. Shakespeare, of course, has, and it may be his voice we are hearing. MV 1.3.112; Temp 2.3.111. James Shapiro, 184–85, offers an astute reading of the libelous poem and of the anti-alien climate in general; see also Melchiori, “Master of the Revels,” especially 165–67. The questions of date and authorship are circumspectly set forth, along with a painstaking reconstruction of the sequence of revision, by Gabrielli and Melchiori, 12–29. Textual citations refer to this edition. Shapiro, however, makes the point that the accusations leveled against resident Christian aliens were conflated with the common criticisms of Jews—they practiced usury, forestalled markets, lived in their own secret communities, and so forth. Marlowe, he suggests, displaces many of these “alien” features onto Barabas in The Jew of Malta. Hotine, 36. Essex’s examination of Lopez had come to the Queen’s attention, however, and he was rebuked for his meddling. The government was not eager to encourage the performance of a play that would create public support for Essex’s prosecution of the case against Lopez, and in the months that followed, the Queen was apparently a reluctant witness, going so far as to call Lopez from the Tower, where he was imprisoned following his conviction, so that he might treat her. For a full account, see Gwyer.

Notes to Pages 308–309 / 417 46. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic (1591–94), 444–48; Salisbury Papers, 4.512–13; William Camden, The History of . . . Princess Elizabeth, late Queen of England (London, 1625–29), 2.105, cited in Hotine, 37. 47. E. K. Chambers suggests that Henslowe actually owned the play, since it was performed by several companies under his auspices. If true, this strengthens the possibility that it was sold because of the closing of the Rose, which made performance prospects in the immediate future look dim. See Elizabethan Stage, 3.424–25. 48. As I noted earlier, Barabas does have a putative history, but it is a cultural miscellany, not a temporally inflected psychology. He manifests a new psychological “character” in response to his losses at the beginning of Act II, when imitating Hieronimo in The Spanish Tragedy—as does Shylock at the end of Act III, scene 1—but for the most part the variations in his behavior seem calculated to press familiar buttons in his offstage audience, which is less consistently so in Shylock’s case. As for Lopez, his attempts to comport himself according to the changing circumstances of his predicament, whatever their content, were treated by his offstage audience as performances like those of Barabas, which may be why the play and the prosecution reinforced each other. 49. Locus speech reveals these qualities indirectly. They are overheard (MV 1.3.1–38) in Shylock’s absorptive responses to Bassanio’s request for a loan (“Three thousand ducats, well. . . . For three months, well. . . . Antonio shall become bound, well”); his materialist transvaluations of Bassanio’s words (“good” becomes “sufficient”; “assured,” “insured”; “venture,” “squander”); his deconstruction of familiar concepts (“ships” are “boards”; “sailors,” “men”; “land rats” and “water rats,” epithets for pirates); and his refusal of conviviality (“I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you”). From the platea he reminds the audience why he speaks so strangely, rehearsing their shared understanding of what it means to be a Jew: to feel historical antipathy (“I hate him, for he is a Christian”); to be avaricious (“he . . . brings down / The rate of usance here with us in Venice”); to crave revenge (“If I can catch him once upon the hip”). This accomplished, he turns back to the locus, confident that his audience will savor his bloodthirsty greeting to Antonio (“Your worship was the last man in our mouths”) (1.3.42–60). For a full and complex discussion of Shylock’s ideological legacy, see James Shapiro, 13–111. Bakhtin’s account of the dialogic quality of single words is useful in assessing the transvaluations specified above: “The word, directed toward its object, enters a dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words, value judgments and accents, weaves in and out of complex interrelationships, merges with some, recoils from others . . . and all this may crucially shape discourse” (Bakhtin, Dialogic, 276). Thus, the encounter of Bassanio and Shylock puts into contestation Salerio and Solanio’s elevated description of Antonio’s fleet (1.1.8–40), as does Antonio’s godly “correction” of Shylock’s entrepreneurial version of Jacob’s trick on Laban (1.3.91–95). 50. As he told the story of Jacob and Laban, Edmund Kean had seemed “borne back to the olden time. . . . Shylock is in Venice, with his money-bags, his daughter, and his injuries; but his thoughts take wing to the east; his voice swells and deepens at the mention of his sacred tribe and ancient law” (F.W. Hawkins, The Life of Kean [London, 1869], quoted in Brown, 75). This description savors of nineteenth-century orientalist sentimentality and psychologizing but is consonant with the sixteenth-century invention of ethos demanded by the rhetorical turn of Shylock’s part. 51. Genesis provides opportunity for either reading (compare 30:37–43 and 31:8–12). For a useful account of the conflicting Jewish and Christian interpretations of Jacob, see Engle, 87–90.

418 / Notes to Pages 309–315 52. This theme is familiar from Hand D in Sir Thomas More and, in another key, from Hermia’s reply to Theseus in MND 1.1.56, from which point it is sounded throughout that play. 53. And the actor Patrick Stewart, who resists interpreting Shylock as either bloodthirsty villain or melancholic victim, but in an otherwise nuanced reading of his progressive representation falls back on his dramatis persona: “Shakespeare permits the audience to taste Shylock’s real feelings so that they will see through the play-acting that is to follow” (Brockbank, 20). Though alive to Shylock’s opportunism, Stewart seeks a continuity in him that embraces a model in which each action subserves a core mode of being. This may be due to what Worthen sees as the post-Stanislavskian actor’s need to determine the object of the character’s action and find the smaller actions taken to reach that end (Authority, 127–32). 54. See the discussion of the “merry bond” in chapter 7. 55. Playes Confuted in Five Actions (D8v), in Kinney, 172. 56. Quoting St. Epiphanus’s book on heresies, Thomas Wright provides an illuminating gloss on Shylock’s instruction to Jessica on learning that a masque is in preparation: “Lock up my doors, and when you hear the drum / And the vile squealing of the wryneck’d fife, / Clamber not you up to the casements then, / Nor thrust thy head into the public street / To gaze on Christian fools with varnish’d faces; / But stop my house’s ears, I mean my casements; / Let not the sound of shallow fopp’ry enter / My sober house” (2.5.29–36). The stiff-necked Jew sets himself against the wry-necked musician and his ilk in the same metaphors used by the Christian prosecutor of heretics: Si audieris vocem peccati, aut speciem delicti videris, claude oculos tuos a concupiscentia, & os a vanitate verborum, & aurum a pravo sono ut ne mortificetur tota domus, hoc est anima & corpus; in Wright’s translation, “If thou hear the voyce of sinne, or see the face of offense, shut thine eyes from concupiscence, and thy mouth from [the vanity of words, and thy ears from] sinful sounds, lest all thy house die, that is thy body and thy soule” (152). Wright’s book was published in 1604, and the author was in prison when he completed the manuscript in 1598, so it is unlikely to have been a source for Shakespeare. However, the parallel between Jew and ancient Puritan is striking. Though Shylock begins with a real event and a real house, once he allegorizes and explicates the house, it becomes a vehicle for body and soul, as in the saint’s allegory. He is an antitheatrical critic. 57. For the traditional theatrical interpretation of this moment, see Brown, 73, 76, 78, 86. 58. The location of the pound of flesh was unspecified in the proposed merry bond. Shylock had said it was to be taken “in what part of your body pleaseth me” (1.3.151), and charged Antonio to give the notary direction for drawing it up. At 3.1.127, he remarked, “I will have the heart of him if he forfeit,” but that sounded like a metaphorical, not a literal threat. Now that threat appears to have been prophetic, as Shylock realizes the savagery that was only latent in his words. I make this inference in accordance with the principle of theatrical potentiality described in chapter 7. 59. Antonio’s fantasies of martyrdom may be heard at 1.1.153–60, 180–82; 2.8.36–50; 3.2.315–22; 3.3.19–24; 4.1.10–13, 114–16. 60. The homology did not go unnoticed in the sixteenth century. Jews, like actors, were not only considered hypocrites but also classified as “continual vagabonds . . . never suffered long in any one place, neither entertained otherwise than as mere strangers” (cited in James Shapiro, 175).

Notes to Pages 315–322 / 419 61. Clearly, Shakespeare conceives of Shylock the dramatis persona as existing within what we today would call ideology. Such lines as “What judgment shall I dread, doing no wrong?” and “My deeds upon my head!” (4.1.89, 206) seem intended to express an Old Testament ethos to be heard against the Christian promise of release from a law in which all are sinners (Hunter, 60–102). As my allusion to Hamlet’s instructions to the players suggests and Antonio’s metatheatrical apology corroborates, a homology between Jewish and histrionic literalism slowly emerges in this play, and the actor’s identification with Shylock, a marginalized figure who follows his own script, invites their mutual revenge on those who would demean them. C hap t e r E l e v e n

1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

Chambers, William Shakespeare, 2.212. Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 2.307; for details see 391–94; also Stopes, 47–51, 154–65. Jones, 393–94. Jones prints the version originally published in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1825, allegedly derived from a seventeenth-century book of manuscript poems. It is believed to have been subsequently edited and expanded by John Payne Collier in 1836 and 1846. Nungezer, 72, 73. Akrigg, 220. HMC, Rutland Mss., iv. 494. Remains (1605 ed., rpt. 1870), 366–67, cited in Hotson, 19–20. Shakespeare’s familiarity with the impresa is discussed, in relation to the Rutland manuscripts, by Young, 453–56. The portrait of Burbage (30.3 x 26.2 cm) is numbered 395, and the portrait of a woman (50.8 x 41.6 cm) is numbered 380 in the Dulwich Picture Gallery Catalogue. Questions hover over both attributions. William Cartwright’s Inventory of 1686 does not say that the Burbage painting is a self-portrait, and the painting of the woman attributed to Burbage now in the collection is not on board but on canvas, and does not resemble the male portrait in style or technique. It is possible that Cartwright’s second portrait is another painting entirely that has been lost. He was, however, a bookseller and actor, son of William Cartwright the actor who had been a close associate of Alleyn, so his ascription of the portrait to Burbage may reflect a theatrical tradition. Burbage’s Hamlet, we should remember, still wears one of his father (3.4.53–65). Thomson, “Rogues and Rhetoricians,” 323–27; Long, 25–26. Both argue that actors began with an understanding that they would be playing recognizable types, and whatever refinements accrued to their roles would be introduced in the course of rehearsal and performance. This parallels the process of dramatic composition discussed in chapter 8, as well as the painting of miniatures, as we shall now see. Hilliard in particular spends several pages explaining the canonical proportions, then advises the practicing limner to modify these in relation to those of his actual subject. At the beginning of his treatise, he defers to the more scholarly account of the art in Lomazzo and repeatedly refers his reader to that work, presumably in the translation of Haydocke, who, he writes, has prevailed on him to produce a treatise of his own. Square brackets are the editors’, angle brackets are mine. Salamon reminds us that Shakespeare acknowledged this risk when Bassanio exclaims, on viewing Portia’s picture: “But her eyes— / How could he see to do them? Having made one, / Methinks it should have power to steal both his / And leave itself

420 / Notes to Pages 325–328

14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

unfurnish’d” (MV 3.2.123–26). The eyes, Hilliard remarks, are the features where liveliness is best perceived (25). Salamon also notes that “Renaissance viewers knew how to deduce personality from small variations in detail, which is why the poet in Timon of Athens can compliment the painter with an implied connoisseurship: ‘How this grace / Speaks his own standing! What a mental power / This eye shoots forth! How big imagination / Moves in this lip! To th’dumbness of the gesture / One might interpret’ (1.1.30–35)” (Hilliard, 82–84). Recall, too, Helena uses the language of limning as she describes drawing her observations of Bertram in “our heart’s table” (AW 1.1.92–96). The terms of art are ready to hand in Shakespeare’s dramatic discourse. On Leo, see Whitney; on Hakluyt, see Hall, 52–59, though the emphasis is greater in Mandeville, Raleigh, and Purchas. Of special relevance to Othello’s tale are Greenblatt’s remarks on Columbus’s invocation of the marvelous in describing natives of the New World: “In part, he may do so because the marvelous is closely linked in classical and Christian rhetoric to heroic enterprise. The voyages of Odysseus in particular were for centuries the occasion for aesthetic and philosophical speculations on the relation between heroism and the arousal of wonder through a representation of marvels. In part, he may do so to associate his discoveries with a specifically ‘Christian marvelous’ that, in opposition to all that is irregular and heterodox in the experience of wonder, identifies spiritual authenticity with the proper evocation of marvels” (Possessions, 74). This is discussed in the epilogue. Cunningham, 142–63. Bakhtin, “The Problem of Speech Genres,” in Speech Genres, 67–69. Subsequent references will appear in the text. He seems to be composed of the two rival kings in Peele’s Battle of Alcazar, the black­ amoor villain Muly Mahomet, based on the actual Black King Abd el-Mesloukh, who was vilified in England, and his uncle the “white” Moor, Muly Abd el-Melekh, a celebrated figure who was reputed to honor Christ and was aided by England during his civil war. Burbage was probably familiar with these dramatic figures through his connection to Alleyn and Henslowe. On Abd el-Melekh’s reputation as “Christian King” of the Moors, see D’Amico, 18–21; and Edmund Hogan, in Hakluyt, 4.156–62. I use the word rhetorical deliberately, even though rhetoric is often thought to be more monological than dialogical. But it is dialogical, in the way Bakhtin invites us to hear apparently monological utterances as the audible side of a two-way conversation. That is, orators respond to the “overheard” needs, desires, values of their audiences, and the standard procedure for persuasive speeches, whether in forum or in court, is to dialogize by interpolating the audience’s skepticism into one’s oration and speaking accordingly. It was one of the reasons that Plato scorned rhetoric: he thought it enslaved the speaker to the opinions of his listeners (Phaedrus 272d–e). On the way responsive speech genres are internalized in oratory, see Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 72–73, 91–94; for the “dialogic” nature of rhetoric generally, see his Dialogic Imagination, 268–69, 280–82. For other Virgilian reconfigurations in Othello, see chapter 7. Bad faith on both sides: Burbage would be identifying with a man acting in selfdenial who shares an illusory discourse of tolerance evident in his “I fetch my life and being / From men of royal siege” (1.2.21–22)—as if a pedigree would make him more acceptable—and in the Duke’s “If virtue no delighted beauty lack, / Your son-

Notes to Pages 328–335 / 421

22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

in-law is far more fair than black” (1.3.290–91). It is not clear whether Othello’s virtue is absolute in the eyes of the Venetians or relative to his military value; Brabantio’s view is obvious enough and his brother Gratiano, silent and perhaps unseen until 5.2, sympathizes with his judgment. Emilia, a gentlewoman otherwise untainted by Iago’s mind, dispels any doubt about her view of the marriage when she exclaims, “She was too fond of her most filthy bargain” (5.2.153). I retain F’s “My name” here for the reason stated in chapter 2, note 26. “Convening” because it is in the Turk that physical violence and sexual excessiveness conjoin (Vitkus, 155). Othello is displacing his private sexual activity onto the public brawl, shaming the watch through the mediating figure of the Turk, thus doubly projecting his own felt shame. Bakhtin defines the speech genre in terms of three elements: its relative exhaustiveness, that is, how fully it communicates its theme; the speaker’s speech plan or speech will, in which we imagine to ourselves what the speaker wishes to say; and the choice of a particular speech genre that enables the communication (Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 77–79). This is a useful heuristic for analyzing an exchange such as this one, where Othello’s initial projective outburst can be seen to exhaust itself in the dismissal of Cassio, who becomes the guilty perpetrator of Othello’s act; is enabled by Iago’s intuition of what he really wishes to say; and is conducted formally through the “hot potato” gestures of hysteron proteron dialogue. Montaigne, Essays 3.5, “On Some Verses of Vergil.” Compare Greenblatt, SelfFashioning, 246–52. I am aware that the historical Burbage may not have been a reader of Montaigne or secretly anxious about sexual relations with his wife Winifred, but I assume that he is susceptible to a concern that seems to have been widespread in the culture. See, for example, the apotropaic words of Freevill in The Dutch Courtesan (5.1.66–80), written by Marston about the same time Othello was performed. Janet Adelman finds little comfort for Othello in his genealogy of the handkerchief, which, she suggests, recalls the loss of his mother at the very time he fears losing his wife, and she argues forcefully that the earlier loss of a fantasied, impossibly perfect union makes the later loss inevitable (68–70). It may be that Othello’s threat is tinged with an old sadness; nonetheless, it is a threat, and it is warranted in Othello’s consciousness by a female purity that calls Desdemona’s into doubt. There is a new gender alliance registered in this speech and its effect is, at least temporarily, empowering. That the genealogy has changed from matrilinear to patrilinear as it has become demystified is a further sign that Othello has largely recuperated his “character” in the course of executing what he believes to be an act of justice on Desdemona. Even here, one must again be cautious about totalizing a speech genre. The “sibyl, that had numbered in the world / The sun to course two hundred compasses” (3.4.72–73), is not a figure of Hakluytian or Mandevillian imagination but, as we saw in chapter 7, speaks from the Western epic tradition of Virgil, Ariosto, and Boiardo. Othello is drawing from both sides of his imputed identity, finding in the irrational tradition of the sibyl an apt vehicle for “Moorish” supersitition. The experience of Patrick Tucker’s London-based Original Shakespeare Company, whose actors learn their parts from cue scripts and attempt to re-create the perfor­ mance conditions of Shakespeare’s players, is relevant to my argument. The actors work up their parts alone, meet as an ensemble to rehearse their cues only, and meet once more to tell the story to one another, so they haven’t heard or responded to one

422 / Notes to Pages 336–345 another’s lines before the actual performance. This gives their work an improvisatory quality, for even if they know many of the other lines, they don’t know their colleagues’ interpretations of them and respond freshly. See Tucker; Weingust. Tucker offers scripts and plots based on those described in chapter 8. 30. One might object that this is precisely what does happen to Shylock when he is condemned to convert, but that conversion is not dramatized onstage and therefore remains unacted. 31. That is to say, he resumes the man he was—almost. This would involve reaffirming his cultural identity and also his social standing in and around the City of London, but even more important, it would precipitate a retroactive theorizing of a “double consciousness” to which he had adhered only fitfully during the performance. Epi l o g u e

1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

All’s Well, ed. Hunter, xxv. Bullough, 2.390. Although in Painter the king is initially skeptical, he is quickly won over by Giletta’s claim to work with the help of God. It is Shakespeare who provides the critique of shallow probabilism. Wells and Taylor, 126–27. Dromio of Ephesus’s insistence that “I know what I know” (3.1.11) is the touchstone. Shakespeare makes explicit, suppressing evidence to the contrary in Holinshed, that the battle was won without human calculation: “When, without strategem, / But in plain shock and even play of battle, / Was ever known so great and little loss / On one part and on th’ other? Take it, God, / For it is none but thine!” (4.8.108–12). For the political context of his dramaturgy, see my “‘Vile Participation,’” 9–13. In Cymbeline Shakespeare rewrites more explicitly the wife of infinite worth that he fashioned in Othello. Posthumus’s dependence on Imogen for his own value (“By her election may be truly read, / What kind of man he is,” 1.1.53–54) aligns him with Othello, for their mutual belief that they have murdered the source of their own worth precipitates their extreme abjection. “Seeing with another’s eyes” might be said to be the endeavor of the entire play, and it is achieved or missed in direct proportion to the degree that the historically constituted worldly self infuses the eyes or relinquishes control. Hermia wishes her father “look’d but with my eyes,” but Theseus tells her, “your eyes must with his judgment look”; Helena thinks Hermia’s “eyes are lodestars” and wishes that, like a contagion, her eye could “catch” Hermia’s (1.1.56–57, 188). Oberon’s love juice changes the vision of Lysander and Demetrius so that each woman feels the other’s former plight, Bottom tries to see his play through the ladies’ eyes, and Theseus tells Hippolyta, “If we imagine no worse of them than they of themselves, they may pass for excellent men” (5.2.215–16). As so often in the case of Hamlet, there is no simple trajectory between his first renunciation of agency and his second; in between lies his renewed declaration of intent to kill Claudius, Horatio’s warning that “the issue of the business” in En­gland must soon be known in court, and his insistence that “the interim’s mine, / And a man’s life is no more than to say ‘one’” (5.2.67–74). Nonetheless, Hamlet does not act on his own initiative. He accepts Claudius’s invitation, declaring his faith in Matthew’s God the Father (Matt. 10:29–31), and “in this upshot,” through “purposes mistook, / Fall’n on th’ inventors’ heads” (5.2.384–85), fulfills the vow he made in

Notes to Pages 345–350 / 423

10.

11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

the fifth scene of the play. He even becomes his mother’s son again: “Here Hamlet, take my napkin, rub thy brows” (5.2.288). As we have seen, improbability also invades Shakespearean comedy and expands the limits of the probable. The clearest statement of this transformation is Hymen’s, at the wedding of the four couples in AYLI: “Whiles a wedlock-hymn we sing, / Feed yourselves with questioning; / That reason wonder may diminish / How thus we met, and these things finish” (5.4.137–40). Aristotle, like Shakespeare, incorporates the wonderful into the probable (Poetics 1452a1–10). For the range of interest in the marvelous during the Renaissance, see Herrick, “Admiratio”; Weinberg; Hathaway; Greenblatt, Marvelous; and Platt. See chapter 5. To parse the contrast between Helen’s awareness and Angelo’s more precisely, Helen knows that she thinks, not simply what she thinks. That what she thinks she knows is also true is due to divine inspiration: knowledge and thought coalesce in her. Angelo, according to Mariana, thinks what he knows and knows what he thinks. He makes no distinction between the two forms of cognition, she implies, and without inspiration he’s wrong on both counts. Greville, 1.148. A Discourse of Conscience (1596) in William Perkins, 41. Quoted in Mahoney, 136. Johnsen and Toulmin comment on this development: “By the time Medina proposed his thesis, the accepted theological interpretation [of probable] had drifted almost imperceptibly away from the medieval position. The ideas of ‘opinion’ and of ‘doubt’ had become confused: several propositions could be designated as probable in cases in which none of them could command unquestioning assent. The comparison of ‘more or less probable’ opinions that would have been inconceivable to medieval authors had become legitimate because ‘probable’ had come to mean ‘plausible’ or ‘possibly true.’ As a result, many opinions about a subject could be called ‘probable’—that is, capable of eliciting assent, albeit hesitant. Medina’s own definition of probability reveals this minimalist position, ‘an opinion is probable if it can be followed without reprehension or vituperation.’ He hastens to add, ‘Of course it is not probable, merely because it has proponents who state apparent reasons, but because wise men propose it and confirm it by excellent arguments’” (166). The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience, in William Perkins, 82. When Hamlet responds to Horatio’s warning not to accept Claudius’s invitation to duel Laertes if his heart misgives him, he frames his decision as Perkins counsels, by subsuming his predicament under Jesus’s reassurance to his disciples in Matthew 10:29–31: “Are not two sparrowes solde for a farthing, and one of them shal not fall on the ground without your Father? Ye, and all the heeres of your heade are nombred. Feare ye not therefore, ye are of more value then manie sparrowes.” The word dilemma appears only one other time in Shakespeare, when the Host in Merry Wives is told by Bardolph that he has been cozened of his horses by the three German guests who have run off without paying their tab, and is warned by Parson Evans to “have a care of your entertainments,” even as he is awaiting the German duke who has bespoke lodging. This puts the Host into moral uncertainty. When Dr. Caius enters and asks where he is, the Hostess answers, “Here, Master Doctor, in perplexity and doubtful dilemma” (MWW 4.5.84–85), a state of mind clearly demanding casuistic resolution.

424 / Notes to Pages 350–351 19. Here we enter through a back door the recent scholarly debate on Shakespeare’s religious allegiance. If, as Richard Wilson has argued, Shakespeare was a Catholic politique, or, as Stephen Greenblatt has speculated, he was caught between Catholic and Protestant solicitings, this would explain his familiarity with casuistic probabilism and his scapegoating of Parolles as a Jesuitical embodiment of deception and laxist casuistry. See R. Wilson; Greenblatt, Will. Though it would not sufficiently account for the cultural critique of probability that pervades nearly all his plays, it might explain his interest in early Protestant casuistry. The doctrine of probabiliorism—the use of the more probable opinion in settling moral doubt—prescribed by Catholic casuists as a remedy for the abuses of probabilism and adopted by Reformers as well—was not promulgated until after the plays were written, and we do not see this more acceptable practice endorsed anywhere in his work. Shakespeare, by and large, is an antiprobabilist or, at best, an exposer of the way probabiity misses the mark, despite Polonius’s claim to the contrary. Slights, in her otherwise informative treatment of Shakespeare and Protestant casuistry, does not mention the negative view of probabilism in his plays (67–132). 20. As critics have noted, Parolles’s name is associated with loquacity and duplicitous speech; as is perhaps now evident, it is more specifically associated with rhetoric and probable argument. Here, “plausive” is perhaps the most lax form of “probable,” which itself shades from “likely” to “arguable” (see note 16, above). The King is only slightly more discriminating. When he hears news that the Florentines and Sienese have had equal fortune in the war, he quickly turns what is “reported” into what is “most credible,” which he then receives as a “certainty” because it is “vouch’d from our cousin Austria.” That is, he accepts information based on the best authority, which in both the Aristotelian and casuistical canon is a very strong probability (1.2.1–5). Helen, in contrast, persuades the Widow to accept her story on faith. 21. I have used the term tragicomedy rather than comedy for this part of the play because of Helen’s reported death, a device she invents not to recapture her husband by subjecting him to guilt and remorse but rather to release him to return to France. The news brings sorrow to the Countess, Lafew, and the King—and perhaps fleetingly to Bertram, who nonetheless continues to lust after Diana and supposedly “fleshes his will in the soil of her honor” (4.3.1–17). 22. Why, we might ask, is a penitent, trudging barefoot on pilgrimage to the most popular shrine in Catholic Europe (3.4.4–7), also at the center of a Perkinsian refutation of probabilism? According to Beauregard, Helen’s outward actions and the play’s emphasis on “miracle and merit, pilgrimage and prayer,” which “shape the very substance of the action and characterization,” suggest that All’s Well emanates “from the mindset of a Roman Catholic” (222, 235). In an evenhanded essay on the same issue, Cynthia Lewis shows how Shakespeare equivocates throughout the play as to whether his dramatis personae are saved by unearned grace or by their own merit (147–70). My own view is that in its decisive rejection of probability the play embraces sola fide Protestantism. This need not mean that Shakespeare is unsympathetic to “the mindset of a Roman Catholic,” but rather that he finds in Reformist antiprobabilism a doctrine more compatible with the psychological, ethical, and spiritual transformation he wants to foster in the theater. He also invokes the Church of England’s conception of the Eucharist in Henry V (Altman, “‘Vile Participation,’” 19n50). For a meticulous argument that Shakespeare is deliberately nonsectarian and promotes a Christian ecumenicism in the English Church, see Knapp. 23. See chapter 7.

Notes to Pages 352–357 / 425 24. This definition of conscience also informs Helen’s assertion that she knows she thinks and that she thinks she knows “most sure” that she can cure the King. 25. In this, she resembles Duke Vincentio in Measure for Measure, for she, too, is only “like pow’r divine” (5.1.369), for which see below. 26. “Par. Yet I was in that credit with them at that time that I knew of their going to bed, and of other motions, as promising her marriage, and things which would derive me ill will to speak of; therefore I will not speak what I know. King. Thou hast spoke all already. . . .” (5.2.262–68). 27. She echoes the line near the end of Much Ado About Nothing, when Don Pedro exclaims at the sight of an apparently resurrected Hero, “The former Hero! Hero that is dead!”—and Hero replies, “She died, my lord, but whiles her slander liv’d” (MA 5.4.65–66). In both cases, the beloved and repentant husband has the power to revive the wife he has mistakenly rejected. 28. A few years earlier, a Friar took this role, as he told an onstage audience wondering at Hero’s revival: “All this amazement can I qualify, / When after that the holy rites are ended, / I’ll tell you largely of fair Hero’s death. / Mean time let wonder seem familiar, / And to the chapel let us presently” (MA 5.4.67–71). 29. It is not certain which play preceded the other; Wells and Taylor argue that Measure was first. 30. Calvin, Institutes III.xi.2, italics mine. Norton’s Elizabethan translation is more strongly forensic: “He is said to be justified afore God, that is pronounced by the judgement of God both just & accepted for his owne righteousnes sake. For as wickednesse is abhominable before God, so a sinner cannot finde favour in his eies, in respect that he is a sinner, or so long as he is accounted such a one. . . . So we simply expound justification to be an acceptation, whereby God receiving us into favour taketh us for righteous. And we say that the same consisteth in forgivenes of sins, and imputation of the righteousnes of Christ.” 31. We should note immediately that Calvin’s “as if” is different from Iago’s “as if” (Oth. 1.3.389). Calvin’s governs a contrary-to-fact condition, while Iago’s expresses a probable attitude in a situation where the fact is unavailable. 32. Here we encounter an instructive paradox. Just as Helen, a Catholic pilgrim, is a Grevillian antiprobabilist, so Shakespeare’s would-be nun invokes Protestant doctrine. Isabella’s reference to the doctrine of justification is insufficiently detailed to determine whether it is Lutheran or Calvinist, but it is not Catholic, since the Council of Trent reaffirmed the Augustinian teaching that God imparted—not imputed—the righteousness of Christ to the sinner, thereby lessening the ontological tension between “what you are” and what you are judged to be. In its Decree on Justification the Council of Trent declared: “What is called our justice, since we are justified by it inhering in us, is the justice of God, since it is poured into us by God through the merit of Christ [quia a Deo nobis infunditur per Christi meritum]’ (quoted and translated by Mahoney, 128). Protestants did not accept the idea of infused righteousness. Richard Hooker writes: “This grace they [the Church of Rome] will have to be applied by infusion; to thend, that as the bodye is warme by the heate which is in the bodye, so the soule mighte be rightuous by inherent grace. . . . But the rightuousness wherein we muste be found, if we wil be justefied, is not our own, therefore we cannott be justefied by any inherente quality. . . . Then, although in ourselves we be altogether synfull and unrightuous, yett even the man which in himself is ympious, full of inequity, full of synne, him beinge found in Christe through faith, and having his sin in hatred [remitted] through repentaunce; hym God beholdeth with a gratious eye,

426 / Notes to Pages 357–361 putteth awaie his syn by not ymputing it, taketh quite awaie the ponishemente due therunto by pardoninge it; and accepteth him in Jesus Christe, as perfectly rightuous as if he had fulfilled all that is comaunded him in the law” (“A Learned Discourse of Justification,” in Works, 5.110–13). Perkins is more categorical: “As Christ was made sin for us, so are we made the righteousnesse of God in him: but Christ was made sin, or, a sinner by imputation of our sins, hee being in himselfe most holy: therefore a sinner is made righteous before God, in that Christs righteousness is imputed and applied unto him. Now if any shall say that man is justified by righteousness infused: then by like reason I say Christ was made sin for us by infusion of sin, which to say, is blasphemy” (A Reformed Catholike, or, a Declaration Shewing How Neere Wee may come to the present Church of Rome in sundrie points of Religion: and wherein we must for ever depart from them, in Works, 1.568). Luther’s language seems closest to Isabella’s meaning: “The saints are always sinners in their own sight, and therefore always justified outwardly. But the hypocrites are always righteous in their own sight, and thus always sinners outwardly. I use the term ‘inwardly’ (intrinsice) to show how we are in ourselves, in our own eyes, in our own estimation; and the term ‘outwardly’ (extrinsice) to indicate how we are before God and in His reckoning. Therefore we are righteous outwardly when we are righteous solely by the imputation of God and not of ourselves or of our own works. For his imputation is not ours by reason of anything in us or in our own power. Thus our righteousness is not something in us or in our power” (Lecture on Romans 4.7, in Works, 25.257). For the distinctions among Lutheran, Reformist, and Catholic concepts of justification, see Alistair E.McGrath, “Justification,” in Hillebrand, ed., Oxford Encyclopedia. 33. These are false Friar Lodowick’s words, but a just, if hyperbolical, description of Vienna, where even the allegedly pure principals—Angelo, Isabella, and perhaps the Duke—expose through language or action their indecorous longings. In the case of the Duke, the obverse side of his laxity is his apparent voyeurism, in which Lucio, projecting his own preoccupations onto him, reads pruriency, though it may be his role as curer of souls leads him to pry (Shuger, Theologies, 108–37). The locus classicus of this contrary-to-fact fiction is Plato’s myth of the ring of Gyges (Rep. 2.359–60), in which a shepherd finds a ring that renders him invisible, enables him to seek power, and allows him to commit injustice with impunity. It is taken up by Cicero to show the usefulness of contrary-to-fact hypotheses to test the moral quality of individuals: “The condition, they say, is impossible. Of course it is. But my question is, if that were possible which they declare to be impossible, what, pray, would one do? . . . For when we ask what they would do, if they could escape detection, we are not asking whether they can escape detection; but we put them as it were upon the rack: should they answer that, if impunity were assured, they would do what was most to their selfish interest, that would be a confession that they are criminally minded; should they say that they would not do so, they would be granting that all things in and of themselves immoral should be avoided” (De off. 3.39). The Duke’s heuristic has a distinguished pedigree. 34. There is something wholly illogical in this procedure. She defends a man against the charge of murder by asking the judge to pretend that he didn’t commit the murder, then asks him to mitigate the penalty for the murder by examining the defendant’s motives for the murder she has just asked him to disregard. But there is method in Shakespeare’s madness, as we shall see. 35. To appeal to the sovereign for equity reflects actual practice. For a recent account of the English monarch’s dual role as defender of the law and as dispenser of equitable

Notes to Pages 361–371 / 427

36.

37. 38. 39.

40.

41.

42.

43. 44.

45.

judgment, notably through the courts of Chancery and Star Chamber, see Shuger, Theologies, 72–101. There is an important difference between adducing the circumstances of person, time, place, and so on in a probable argument devised to show whether a defendant was likely to have committed an act or whether a future act is likely to succeed—a question of an sit (did or should an act take place?) and adducing such circumstances in a question of qualis sit (what was or is the nature of the act?), which informs equitable construction. See, e.g., Cicero, Orat. xiv.45; and Trimpi, 245–75. See chapter 9. Epieikeia, 481. Subsequent citations will appear in the text. In perusing Perkins’s text, it is hard not to wonder whether Shakespeare read it while drafting Measure for Measure, so much of it easily paraphrases passages in the play. Compare Ep. 487, MM 2.2.34–41; Ep. 488, MM 1.3.19–21, 27–31, 2.2.80; Ep. 502, MM 1.1.33–35; Ep. 508–9, MM. 5.1.367–70. Folio punctuation makes the referent of “affection” ambiguous: is it Hermione’s lust for Polixenes that Leontes thinks he perceives, his own sudden jealousy, or both? The likelihood is conflation: “in talking about Hermione, Leontes is also talking about himself” (Orgel, 102n). We are reminded that the poet of the sonnets, Errors, Two Gentlemen, Dream, Merchant, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night, as well as Othello, wrote this. He has not lost his feeling for the comfort of male twinship or the way it can enhance the mature desire for female difference: “Thou dost love her because thou know’st I love her / And for my sake even so doth she abuse me” (Son. 42) is still the perverse logic of jealousy in Winter’s Tale. It is useful to compare these speeches to Isabella’s speech quoted earlier. Arguing from genus to species to particular that certain things are not “impossible” but merely “unlike,” she asks the Duke to believe that Angelo is an arch-villain. She uses an antiprobabilist, “possibilist” argument, and demands a leap of faith. Leontes’ first speech opens as a “possibilist” argument supporting his preposterous conclusion, then turns to a probabilist argument (“’tis very credent”) and leaps from that to conviction; his second speech corroborates the first through signs compounded and probabilized to infer wicked meaning. Though even here, as Orgel points out, Leontes is inferring causality (Winter’s Tale, 32). As I have suggested, there is no escaping the probabilizing cognitive reflex. Audience preparation, however, proceeds apace. Shakespeare records the reunion of Leontes and Polixenes, as well as the shepherds’ disclosure of Perdita’s identity and Antigonus’s death, in the conversation of the Gentlemen witnesses, whom he employs as audience surrogates. In doing so, he aestheticizes their experience, distancing it from the everyday while securing conviction, for the Gentlemen describe those wonderful events as though they had been seeing a play or gazing at a religious painting, and their amazed ekphrases are filled with the enargeia that makes all hearers viewers. Even the revelation that probable signs helped convince them of Perdita’s identity and Antigonus’s bizarre death only serves to corroborate audience belief in the improbable events they themselves had earlier witnessed. Thus primed to suspend disbelief, they enter the last scene. Greenblatt notes how the old cult of the dead is evoked as Leontes envisions a rev­ enant Hermione’s reaction to his remarrying, yet concludes that “there is nothing notably Catholic or purgatorial about this vision” (Hamlet, 204). In an exquisite interpretation of the statue scene, Lupton shows how a Catholic incarnational reading

428 / Note to Page 373 of its Pygmalion palimpsest gives way to an iconoclastic Protestant reading, then is undercut by its revealed theatricality (Afterlives, 211–18). For a nuanced account of the play’s Protestant flirtation with Catholic visual and verbal signs, see O’Connor, 375–81. In an argument that complements mine, Platt sees “the naturalistic and the marvelous participating in a tense, paradoxical dynamic, one that requires not the subordination of one to the other, but rather an ongoing dialectical exchange between the two” (Paradox, 200). My conviction that the scene is Protestant is based largely on the spiritual function of the statue. 46. Ecclesiastical Polity V.67, in Works, 3.334–49. For Shakespeare’s earlier adaptation of the Anglican concept of the Eucharist, see my “‘Vile Participation,’” 4–7, 19–20; and Knapp, 132–35.

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Index

Academy, later, 65, 93, 96–98, 99, 116, 117 accident (in dialectic), 105, 108–14, 123, 126–33, 194, 379n1, 388n21, 389n15 Acosta, José de, 415n33 Adelman, Janet, 401n25, 421n26 Aeschylus, 227, 414n27 Africanus, Leo, 324, 420n14 Agnew, Jean-Christophe, 399n6 Agricola, Rudolph, 24, 94, 95–96, 98–102, 120, 121, 123–24, 142, 144, 388nn16–18, 389n10 Albertus Magnus, 415n33 Allen, Ned B., 200–1 Alleyn, Edward, 290–91, 317, 405n7 All’s Well that Ends Well, 263, 340–41, 346–55, 357, 371, 404n6, 420n13, 424nn20–22, 425nn24–27 Altman, Joel B., 376n12, 377n26, 394n10, 400n17, 422n6, 424n22, 428n46 Althusser, Louis, 19, 265, 406n11 ambition, 59, 66, 78–79, 81, 157, 159, 391n13 antitheatrical criticism, 258–60, 287, 295, 403n48, 404n50 Antony and Cleopatra, 16, 242, 378n31, 397n18, 401n29, 411n6 apate, 23, 38, 40, 225–26, 230, 345 Aphthonius, Progymnasmata, 102 Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 19, 375n5, 376n21, 394n9, 415n33 Arendt, Hannah, 167, 392n27, 393n29, 393n38 Ariosto, Ludovico, 27, 213–14, 216, 397nn9–10, 421n28

Aristotle: De Anima, 394n9; Nichomachean Ethics, 23, 55–58, 168, 265, 387n7, 406n9, 408n25; Poetics, 3, 29, 345–46, 386n2, 423n11; Politics, 415n33; Posterior Analytics, 10; Rhetoric, 2, 3, 23, 55–57, 59, 191, 356, 380n8, 384nn17–18, 387n15, 396n1; Topics, 3, 99 Aristophanes, 380n8 As You Like It, 231, 235–36, 339, 399n2, 399n9, 404n49, 423n10, 427n41 Aubenque, Pierre, 382n3 Augustine of Hippo, Saint, 26, 167–74, 186, 378n35, 393n34–36, 393n38, 401n28, 402n30, 406n10, 408n24, 414n28, 425n32 Bacon, Sir Francis, 15–16, 123, 274–75, 277, 362, 377nn27–30, 389n9 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 28, 297, 304, 310, 325, 326, 327, 331, 414n27, 417n49, 420n17, 420n19, 421n24 Baldwin, Thomas W., 83, 104, 377n26, 386n32, 388n17 Barbaro, Ermolao, 204 Barish, Jonas, 401n22, 414n21 Barker, Francis, 378n35, 408n24 Bartels, Emily, 294, 299, 410n2, 413nn16–17 Barthelemy, Anthony, 410n2, 412n13, 414n28 Baumlin, James, 56, 382n2 Beckett, Samuel, 401n21 Beauregard, David N., 424n22 Belsey, Catherine, 378n35, 400n19

444 / Index Bentley, G. E., 402n35 Best, George, 293, 412n12 blackness, discourse of, 28, 292–96, 298–99, 331–35, 412nn12–13, 413nn14–17 Blundeville, Thomas, 119, 144 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 340 Boemus, Jacob, 296 Boiardo, Matteo, 216, 397n15, 421n28 Bono, Barbara, 397n17 Boose, Linda, 397n11 Booth, Stephen, 396n2 Bornecque, Henri, 395n16 Bouwsma, William, 176–77, 178, 379n45 Boyce, Benjamin, 61, 63 Braden, Gordon, 75–76, 78, 385n27 Bradley, A. C., 200 Bradley, David, 402n33, 402n37 Brower, Reuben, 76–77, 397n17 Bruni, Leonardo, 94 Bullough, Geoffrey, 350, 422n2 Bultmann, Rudolph, 163, 392n19, 392n22 Bulwer, John, 411n8 Burbage, James, 317–18 Burbage, Richard, 28, 291, 317–38 Bury, R. G., 380n6 Callahan, Dympna, 411n4 Calvin, John, 356–57, 360, 425nn30–31 Cambridge Parnassus plays, 103 Camden, William, 319, 419n7 Canaanism, 412n12 casuistry or practical divinity, 16, 29, 348–50, 361, 423nn15–17. See also probabiliorism, probabilism Castiglione, Baldesar, 399n6 Cave, Terence, 411n5 Cavell, Stanley, 138, 245, 389n19, 396n2, 397n18, 410n37 Certeau, Michel de, 381n14 Chambers, E. K., 403n38, 417n47, 419nn1–2 Chapman, George, 76–77, 228, 250, 398n32 Character, literary, 24, 59–61, 67, 84–85, 166, 236, 277, 358, 398n2, 409n32 character, dramatic, 20, 235, 249, 264, 265, 271, 272, 287, 290, 300, 305, 308–11, 328, 398n2, 402n31, 421n27 Charnes, Linda, 407n17 Chettle, Henry, 306 Cicero: decorum or propriety, 63–65; ethos, 65–68; will, 167; Academica, 2, 93–94,

97, 100; De inventione, 24, 99, 387n15, 398n24; De Officiis, 64–65, 385n25, 404n48, 426n33; De Partitione oratoria, 2, 387n15; Orator, 63, 64, 427n36; Pro Murena, 64; Pro Publio Quinctio, 65–66; Pro Sexto Roscio Amerino, 66, 83–84; Pro Sulla, 66–67, 83; Topica, 124 Clemen, Wolfgang, 377n26 Cleopatra, 16, 228, 412n10 Clubb, Louise George, 403n43, 404n2 Coleridge, Samuel T., 25, 160, 377n24 colour (rhetorical), 194 Comedy of Errors, The, 341–42, 352, 368, 407n18, 409n32, 422n5, 427n41 commonplace, 8, 103, 123–25, 144, 376n14. See also topic conditionals and subjunctives in dialogue, 133–39, 360, 362, 369–71 Coriolanus, 291, 384n23 cue script, 332, 405n7, 421n29 Cunningham, J. V., 13, 377n25, 394n13, 420n16 Curtius, Ernst, 404n49 Cymbeline, 301, 343, 400n20, 422n7 Daborne, Robert, 250 D’Amico, Jack, 410n2, 413n16, 413n20, 420n18 Davies, John of Hereford, 318 Dawson, Anthony, 411n8 Day, John, 250 decorum, 63, 165, 236. See also propriety Dekker, Thomas, 306, 413n17 Derrida, Jacques, 17, 19, 23, 49–51, 378n33, 397n13 Desmet, Christy, 377n26, 386n33 dialectic, Aristotelian and Platonic, 3, 44, 46–48, 57 dialectic, Renaissance. See Agricola, Melanchthon, Ramus, Wilson dialogism, 97, 297, 304, 310, 326–28. See also Bakhtin Dihle, Albrecht, 167–68, 381n17, 392n20 Diogenes Laertius, 38, 379n4, 382n5 dissoi logoi, 35, 38, 52, 53, 74, 85 Doctor Faustus, 389n5 Dolan, Fran, 406n11 Donne, John, 228, 398n32 Doran, Madeline, 133, 134, 135, 377n26, 379n39 dramatis persona, 20, 250, 264, 277, 287, 290, 308, 310–11, 333, 341, 404n2

Index / 445 Duchess of Malfi, The, 254 dynamis: as power of logos, 38; as natural human capacity, 112–13 Edelstein, Ludwig, 382n19 eikos, 39, 42, 43, 49, 375n3, 375n6 enargeia, 26, 101, 143, 183, 186, 196, 224, 230, 343, 427n44 Engle, Lars, 417n51 Epiphanus, Saint, 418n56 epistemology of Shakespearean romance, 343–44 epode, 43, 44, 227, 230 equity, Aristotelian, 56, 355, 361, 362, 363, 384n14, 426n35 equity, Christian, 362, 363, 427nn38–39 Erasmus, 83, 94, 97, 181, 227–28, 230, 379n2, 398nn30–31, 399n5 Essex conspiracy, 274–75, 319, 362 ethopoeia, 62–63 ethos, 20, 23–24, 39–41, 44, 45, 55, 57, 65–68, 236, 264, 275, 289, 383n7, 398n2, 402n31, 404n6; in Othello, 68–71, 75–82 Euripides, 414n27 example, rhetorical, 3 Faithful Friends, The, 253–54 Field, Nathan, 250–51 Figurenposition. See Weimann. Flacius Illyricus, 197 Flecknoe, Richard, 291 Fletcher, John, 251 Fraunce, Abraham, 145–46 Freedman, Barbara, 406n12, 410n36 Fuller, Thomas, 290 Gabrielli, Vittorio, 416n43 Galenic medicine, 291–92, 298, 299, 404n50 Gayton, Edmund, 291 Gerarde, John, 390n1 Gildon, Charles, 220, 377n24, 396n27 Gillies, John, 292, 294, 404n49, 410n2, 412n11 Giraldi, Cinthio, 159, 213–17 passim, 399n11 Gordon, G. S., 382n6 Gorgias of Leontini, 23, 37–38, 40, 166, 167, 205, 224–25, 227, 228, 380n13, 381n15 Gosson, Steven, 258, 311 Grafton, Anthony, 102, 379n45

Granville-Barker, Harley, 200 Grassi, Ernesto, 21, 379n42, 379n45 Greenblatt, Stephen, 302, 377n25, 397n19, 401n21, 410n37, 410n2, 414n24, 415nn33–34, 416nn35–36, 420n14, 421n25, 423n11, 424n19, 427n45 Greene, Robert, 251 Greene, Thomas, 379n45, 401n22 Greg, W. W., 251–52, 402n36, 403n37, 405n7 Greville, Fulke, 347–48, 425n32 Gurr, Andrew, 307, 402n31 Gwyer, John, 416n45 habit, 58–59, 111–12, 169, 173–74, 175, 181 Hakluyt, Richard, 293, 294, 324, 334, 412n 12, 421n28 Hall, Joseph, Bishop, 77, 84, 404n48 Hall, Kim, 296, 410n2, 412n10, 412n13, 413n14 Hamilton, Donna, 397n17 Hamlet, 20, 158, 184, 230, 245–49, 260, 262, 264–65, 267, 270, 271, 278, 289, 291, 294, 300, 320, 335, 341, 344–45, 383n7, 386n1, 390n8, 404n50, 406n10, 408nn23–24, 408n26, 411n8, 419n61, 422n9, 423n17 Harington, Sir John, 214, 216, 397n20 Harsnett, Samuel, 400n21 Harvey, Gabriel, 119 Hathaway, Baxter, 377n25, 423n11 Haughton, William, 250 Haydocke, Richard, 320, 419n11 Henry IV Part 1, 158, 273, 277, 396n3, 406n9, 409n29, 412n11 Henry IV Part 2, 273–74, 277, 280, 396n3, 403n41, 409n29, 411n9 Henry V, 243–44, 274, 342, 345, 346, 422n6 Henry VI Part 3, 268 Henslowe, Philip, 250, 307, 417n47 Hercules, Gallican, 398n33 Herodotus, 397n10 Herrick, Marvin T., 377n26, 423n11 Heywood, Thomas, 253, 290, 306, 411n8 Hilliard, Nicholas, 320, 321–23, 419n11, Hirsh, James, 396n2 Hodgen, Margaret T., 379n41, 415n33 Hogan, Edmund, 420n18 Holbein, Hans, 320 Holinshed, Raphael, 84, 422n6

446 / Index Honigmann, E. A. J., 220, 389n17 Hooker, Richard, 372–73, 425n32, 428n46 Horace, 14, 346, 399n2 Hornebolt, Lucas, 320 Hotine, Margaret, 416n45, 417n46 Howell, Wilbur Samuel, 388n2 Hunter, G. K., 412n11, 419n61, 422n1 Hutson, Lorna, 375n9, 376n16, 377n26, 379n46 hysteron proteron, 26, 184–99, 201, 230, 330–31, 335, 421n24 Ignatius Martyr, St., 180 imago, 398n24. See also visio imputed righteousness, doctrine of, 356–57, 360–62, 425n30, 425n32 ingenuity and apodeixis, 21–22, 48–49, 61–62, 68, 117, 167, 190 intention, 209, 210, 222, 273–77 passim, 396n4, 411n9 invention, in dialectic, 24, 95–101, 123–33 Isocrates, 23, 39–40 Jardine, Lisa, 96–97, 102, 379n45, 386nn4–5, 387n9, 388nn17–18 Jew of Malta, The, 307, 308, 309, 413n17, 417nn47–48 Joachim, H. H., 396n4 Job, 80 John of Salisbury, 404n49 Johnsen, Albert and Stephen Toulmin, 423n16 Johnson, Samuel, 199, 387n14, 395n21 Jones, G. P., 419n3 Jonson. Ben, 225–26, 230, 236, 250, 251, 253, 256, 259, 261, 290, 398n28, 402n30, 403n40, 404n49 Joseph, B. L., 377n26, 401n23, 411n8 Juby, Edward, 250 judgment, in dialectic, 24–25, 101–17, 120–26 Julius Caesar, 272, 386n1 Kahn, Victoria, 379n45, 393n4 kairos, 23, 38, 39, 40–41, 46, 52, 226–27, 381nn14–15 Kean, Edmund, 417n50 Kennedy, George, 380n11, 384n20 King, Thomas J., 402n33, 402n37, 405n7 King John, 405n6 King Lear, 244–45, 279, 400n21 Knapp, Jeffrey, 424n22, 428n46

Knight of the Burning Pestle, The, 255 Kuhn, Thomas, 377n21 Kyd, Thomas, 224, 247, 306, 313, 417n48 Lacan, Jacques, 19, 410n36 Lain-Entralgo, Pedro, 43–44, 228, 398n29 Lanham, Richard, 378n38 Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 415n33 Lechner, Sister Joan Marie, 144 Le Maçon, Antoine, 340 Lesbian rule, 95, 99, 387n7 Lever, Ralph, 119, 144 Lewis, Cynthia, 424n22 limning, 318–23 Lipsius, Justus, 77, 84, 385n28 Locke, John, 1, 345 Lockey, Rowland, 320 locus and platea. See Weimann Logan, George M., 379n45 logic, suppositional, 386n5 Lok, John, 294, 413n13, 413n15 Lomazzo, Giovanni Paolo, 320, 419n11 Long, William B., 404n4, 405n7, 419n10 Loomba, Ania, 410n1, 412n10 Lopez, Dr. Roderigo, 28, 307–8, 416n45, 417n48 Lupus, P. Rutilius, 61 Lupton, Julia Reinard, 413n17, 427n45 Luther, Martin, 387n10, 426n32 Lyly, John, 78, 158 Macbeth, 272, 279–80, 363, 404n49, 409n26, 411n9 MacIlmaine, Roland, 145 Mack, Peter, 99–100, 144, 376n16, 386n4 Maggi, Francesco, 381n16 Mahoney, John, 423n16, 425n32 Major, John, 397n17 Mallin, Eric, 400n18 Malone, Edmund, 239–40, 396n5, 399n11 Mandeville, John, 293, 324, 327, 412n12, 421n28 Mann, David, 404n48 Marlowe, Christopher, 271, 300, 306, 307, 308, 413n17, 416n44 Marston, John, 253, 405n7, 421n25 Martin, John Jeffries, 378n35, 388n28 marvelous, 13, 29–30, 202, 377n25, 420n14, 423n11, 428n45. See also wonder Massinger, Philip, 411n7 Maus, Katharine, 376n16, 378n35, 379n46, 397n19, 413n19

Index / 447 May, James, 65, 66, 67, 68, 384nn19–20 Mazzeo, Joseph, 179–80 McDonald, Charles O., 377n26 McGrath, Alistair E., 426n32 McKerrow, R. B., 262 McLeod, Randall, 263, 404n6 Measure for Measure, 18, 210–11, 230, 275–77, 341, 345, 347, 355–63, 409nn31–32, 411n9, 426nn33–34, 427n39, 427n42 Medina, Bartolomeo de, 16, 349, 423n16 Medwall, Henry, 390n2 Melanchthon, Philip, 94, 103, 104–17, 120, 121, 124, 181, 191–92, 193–94, 197, 204, 388n18, 388n23, 392n21, 394n9, 394n11 Melchiori, Giorgio, 416n42–43 Merchant of Venice, The, 28, 209, 292, 295, 305–15, 396n4, 407n18, 412n12, 413n17, 414n22, 414n27, 416n37, 416n41, 417nn48–50, 418nn53–54, 418n56–60, 419n61, 419n13, 422n30, 427n41 Meres, Francis, 251 Merry Wives of Windsor, The, 423n18 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A, 237, 256–58, 261, 263, 264, 344, 405n7, 418n52, 422n8, 427n41 Miller, Perry, 147 Miola, Robert S., 397n17 Milton, John, 162, 228, 398n32 Moisan, Thomas, 398n22 monstrosity, 292–96, 328–335 passim, 413n19 Montaigne, Michel de, 84, 302, 332, 421n25 Morson, Gary S. and Caryl Emerson, 414n22, 414n27 Moss, Ann, 376n16, 387n8 Much Ado about Nothing, 282, 367, 399n12, 401n23, 412n11, 425nn27–28. Muir, Kenneth, 396n8 Munday, Anthony, 251, 258–59, 260, 306, 315, 403n48 Murray, Peter B., 402n32, 404n48 Nashe, Thomas, 251, 253 Neely, Carol, 399n8, 410n35 Neill, Michael, 410n2 Newman, Karen, 410n2, 412n13 Nizolius, Mario, 97 Norgate, Edward, 320–21

Norton, Thomas, 360, 425n30 noticia, 192–94, 197–98, 345, 395n18 Nowell, Alexander, 104 O’Connor, Marion, 379n47, 428n45 Oliver, Isaac, 320 Ong, Walter J., 96, 102, 119 opinion, 3, 7, 38, 42, 46, 72, 77, 105, 115–17 Orgel, Stephen, 427n40, 427n43 Pagden, Anthony, 28, 296, 410n2, 414nn23–24, 415n33, 415n35 Painter, William, 339, 340, 350, 352 Parke, H. W., 218–19 Parker, Patricia, 393n3, 397n19, 398n22, 403n47, 414n27 passion (natural feeling), 57–58, 75–77, 108, 112–13, 289, 312, 331–33, 335, 366, 406n10, 410n33, 411n8, 412n13 Patey, Douglas, 375n6 pathos (rhetorical proof ), 20, 57, 70, 96, 379n39, 382n2 Paul, Saint, 26, 155, 162–63, 164, 167–68, 170, 182, 186, 342–46 passim, 362, 372, 378n35, 392nn21–22 Peacham, Henry, 184, 298 Peele, George, 420n18 peitho, 23, 38, 40, 43, 51, 225, 226–28, 230, 345, 380n13 Perelman, Chaim and L. Olbechts–Tyteca, 395n17 Perkins, William, 29, 181, 348–49, 352, 362–63, 372, 423n15, 423n17, 424n22, 426n32, 427n39 Peter of Spain, 386n5 Petrarch, 26, 76, 164–67, 168, 174–81, 186, 236, 392n25, 404n49 Philander, King of Thrace, 252–53 Pickering, Thomas, 349 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 204 Pigman, G. W., 397n17 Pinciss, G. M., 254 Plato, 23, 41–53, 167: Charmides, 43–45; Gorgias, 42, 381n17; Laws, 45 Phaedrus, 42, 43, 45–51, 420n19; Protagoras, 37; Republic, 426n33; Sophist, 203–4; Statesman, 56; Theatetus, 35–36 Platt, Peter G., 377n25, 423n11, 428n45 Plautus, 14 Plett, Heinrich, 377n26 plot, author’s, 27, 249–54, 290, 402n33, 402n37, 403n40–41

448 / Index plot, stage, 251–52, 402n37 Plutarch, 79, 225 pneuma, 300, 415n32 Popham, Sir John, 274, 362 Popkin, Richard, 97, 98, 387n11 Poulakos, George, 379n45, 381n14, 382n6, praeteritio, 66, 354, 425n26 predicables, 101–2, 103, 105–8, 113–14, 121–23 predicaments, 101–2, 103, 105, 106, 111–12, 121, 123–26 probabiliorism, 16, 424n19 probabilism, 16, 350, 423n16, 424nn19–20, 424n22 probability: in Agricolan dialectic, 98–99; in Aquinas, 375n5; in Aristotle, 2, 3, 375n3, 387n15; in Cicero, 2, 3, 65, 93–94, 99, 387n15; as cultural paradigm, 12; in English Renaissance drama, 14; as ontological concept, 2–3; as psychological concept, 3, 96, 103; in Melanchthon: 104, 115–17; in Wilson, 120 proposition, in dialectic, 102 propriety: as Aristototelian mean, 63; as Stoic ideal of right and consistency, 63–65, 398n2 prosopopoeia, 62–63 Protagoras of Abdera, 23, 34–37, 40, 161, 163, 166, 167, 168, 170, 174 Prynne, William, 295 Puttenham, George, 184–85, 253, 395n23 Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 14, 24, 62–63, 95, 97, 119, 196, 212, 289, 332, 379n39, 394n12, 395n16, 406n10, 411n5 Rabkin, Norman, 396n2 Ragland–Sullivan, Ellie, 410n36 Ramus, Peter, 24, 94, 98, 102, 103, 104, 144–45, 146–47, 389n5, 389n22 Rebhorn, Wayne, 384n22, 398n33 religious belief, representation of, 29, 348–49, 352, 356–57, 360–63, 371–73, 423n17, 424n19, 424n22, 425n30, 425n32 res, 15, 26, 123, 124, 126, 127, 140, 143, 146, 153, 163, 164, 183, 191–92, 228, 236, 366, 367, 388n20, 394n12 Revenger’s Tragedy, The, 254 rhetoric of contradictory synonymy, 351–52, 354

Rhetorica ad Herennium, 24, 61–62 rhetorical anthropology, defined and described, 20–22 Richard II, 208–9, 230, 272–73, 274, 277–79, 409n27 Richard III, 267–71, 299, 345, 406n13, 407n17, 407n19–20, 408n21–22, 411n6 Richard of Schontal, 180 Richardson, Alexander, 146 Ricoeur, Paul, 191, 379n43, 380n12 Ridley, M. R., 220, 238–39 Rist, J. M., 64, 383n9, 384n15, 393n30 Roach, Joseph, 264, 291–92, 404n48, 406n8, 410n3, 411nn7–8, 415n32 Romeo and Juliet, 155, 261–63 Rosenmayer, Thomas, 225 Rowley, Samuel, 250 Rusten, Jeffrey, 382n6 Rutland, Sixth Earl of, 319 Rymer, Thomas, 13, 26, 28, 184, 186, 199, 212, 238, 332, 377n23, 396n27, 396n1, 396n6, 397n16 Saarinen, Risto, 167, 392n27, 393n29 Saint German, Christopher, 394n7 Salamon, Linda Bradley, 419n13 Salutati, Coluccio, 388n28 Sanders, Norman, 220 Schiappa, Edward, 379n45, 379n4, 380n7, 381n14 Schmitt, Charles, 97, 98, 387n10, 387n13 Segal, Charles, 226–27 self, subtending and subject, 18–19, 27, 313, 343–44, 378n37 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (the Younger), 14, 61, 62, 76, 81, 84, 167, 385n25 Seton, John, 103, 104, 388n18 Shakespearean selfhood, 19–20 Shapiro, Barbara, 375n9, 379n45 Shapiro, James, 410n2, 412n11, 415n31, 416n42, 416n44, 417n49, 418n60 Shaw, Robert, 250, 402n37 Sherry, Richard, 185, 393n3 Shuger, Debora, 181, 393n43, 395n19, 426n33, 426n35 Sidney, Sir Philip, 97, 121, 145, 146, 253, 383n8, 398n24 signs, rhetorical, 4, 7–8, 358, 364, 365, 367 Sir Thomas More, 306–7, 418n52 Skura, Meredith, 403n48, 405n7, 411n4 Slights, Camilla Wells, 424n19

Index / 449 Sloane, Thomas O., 379n45 Smart, John, 396n8 Smith, Ian, 411n4 Smith, Paul, 378n37, 406n12 Socrates, 35, 36, 42–49 passim, 60, 72, 105, 379n2, 386n5, 387n15 Sonnets, 156, 259–60, 290, 378n36, 404n49, 407n18, 427n41 species, in dialectic, 101, 103, 106–8, 113–14, 388n25 speech prefixes, 27, 261–63 Spenser, Edmund, 228, 395n20, 398n32 Spivack, Bernard, 25, 157–58, 161, 267, 391nn9–10, 407n16 Stewart, Patrick, 418n53 stoicism, 63–85, 361. See also Braden, Brower, Cicero, Dihle, Du Vair, Rist Stevens, Wallace, 246, 401n26 Stradling, Sir John, 77, 78, 385n28 Strong, Roy, 320 Struever, Nancy, 393n40 Subject, subject position, 18–19, 170, 265, 267–72, 279–80, 283, 287, 292, 311–12, 315, 324–25, 328–35, 341–43, 345, 347, 363, 368, 408n26 Taming of the Shrew, The, 265–67, 406nn11–14, 407n15 Taylor, Charles, 379n40, 393n38 Teerlinc, Levina, 320 Tempest, The, 292, 301–5, 414n22, 416n33, 416n38, 416n41 Terence, 14 Testimony, 3 theatrical potentiality, language of, 207–11, 365, 368 Theobald, Lewis, 115, 131, 388n27, 389n14 Theophrastus, 24, 59–61, 382n6 Thomson, Peter, 402n33, 419n10 Thucidides, 380n9 Timon of Athens, 420n13 Titus Andronicus, 292, 293, 295, 297–301, 302, 307, 309, 313, 334, 413n17, 414n27–28, 415n29 Tokson, Elliott H., 410n2, 412n13 topics, 4–6, 95–96, 102, 105, 116, 123–30, 141–47 Trent, Council of, 425n32 Trimpi, Wesley, 204, 382n19, 384n13, 395n23, 427n36 Trinkaus, Charles, 167, 379n45, 379n3

Troilus and Cressida, 183, 241–42, 267, 300, 378n34, 409n26, 411n6 Trousdale, Marion, 377n26, 394n12 Tucker, Patrick, 421n29 Twelfth Night, 161–62, 242, 391nn15–16, 400nn18–19, 411n6, 427n41 Two Gentlemen of Verona, The, 400n18, 427n41 Tyndale, William, 162, 392n17–18 unconscious, 27, 52, 174, 265, 267, 378n35, 408n24 Untersteiner, Mario, 35, 36, 225, 380n8 Vair, Guillaume du, 71–73, 77, 78–79, 81, 84, 385n24 Valla, Lorenzo, 94, 96 Vennar, Richard, 403n38 Vice figure, 25–26, 156, 157–59, 267, 270, 391n10, 391n12, 391n14 Virgil, 27, 99–100, 218–19, 220, 327, 420n20, 421n28 visio or internal imago, 264, 291. 332, 333, 337 Vitkus, Daniel, 294, 413n17, 421n23 Vives, Juan Luis, 3, 94, 95, 143, 192, 235, 394n10 Volpone, 255–56, 403n44 Wealth and Health, 391n15 Webster, John, 84–85, 271, 319, 323 Weimann, Robert, 28, 241, 296–97, 308, 324, 328, 331, 400n16, 414nn25–26, 417n49 Weinberg, Bernard, 423n11 Weingust, Don, 422n29 Wells, Stanley and Gary Taylor, 408n21, 422n4, 425n29 Whigham, Frank, 385n31, 399n6 White, Charles, 38, 379n45, 381n14 White, Martin, 411n7 White Devil, The, 84–85 Whitney, Lois, 420n14 Wiles, David, 261–62, 405n7 will, 153–56, 161–63, 167–73, 178, 181, 366, 368, 390n2, 390n4, 393n30, 393nn35–36, 393n1 Willan, T.S., 413n20 Williams, George W., 262, 404n5 Williams, Raymond, 377n21, 379n44 Wilson, John, 199–200 Wilson, John Dover, 246, 401n24, 401n27

450 / Index Wilson, Richard, 424n19 Wilson, Robert, 251 Wilson, Thomas, 104, 119–28, 142–43, 144, 384n16, 384n21, 389n11, 389n15, 401n23 Winter’s Tale, The, 224, 363–73, 400n20, 407n18, 416n38, 427n40–45 Wisdom, 391n12 Wisse, Jakob, 382nn1–2

Wit and Science, 391n14 wonder, 340, 346, 394n13. See also marvelous Worthen, William B., 295, 402n30, 404n48, 404n50, 413n18, 418n53 Wright, Thomas, 323, 393n1, 411n8, 412n13, 418n56 Young, Alan R., 419n7