The uses of this world: thinking space in Shakespeare, Marlowe, Cary and Jonson

THE USES OF THIS WORLD

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THE USES OF THIS WORLD Thinking Space in Shakespeare, Marlowe, Cary and Jonson

ANDREW HISCOCK

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS CARDIFF 2004

© Andrew Hiscock, 2004

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without clearance from the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff, CF10 4UP. Website: www.wales.ac.uk/press British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0-7083-1888-6

The right of Andrew Hiscock to be identified as author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Printed in Great Britain by Cromwell Press Ltd Trowbridge, Wiltshire

For Siân With much love and gratitude

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Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction I: Sounding Strange Introduction II: Thinking Space for Hamlet

ix 1 18

1 ‘What’s Hecuba to him?’: Diegetic Space and Myths of Belonging in Shakespeare’s Hamlet

32

2 Enclosing ‘infinite riches in a little room’: The Question of Cultural Marginality in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta

52

3 ‘Here is my space’: The Politics of Appropriation in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra

83

4 ‘The hateful cuckoo’: Elizabeth Cary’s Tragedie of Mariam and the Collapse of Domestic Space

114

5 Urban Dystopia: The Colonizing of Jonson’s Venice in Volpone

142

6 ‘A kind of modern happiness’: The Alchemist and the Exploitation of Provisional Space

171

Notes Bibliography Index

198 228

245

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Acknowledgements

There are a very great many people who I would like to thank for their encouragement and support in the completion of this book. I would like to thank colleagues at the Department of English, University of Wales, Bangor for their questions and observations regarding this project. Most especially, thanks go to Ceri Sullivan and Sharon Ruston for their willingness to give some detailed feedback and to Tom Corns, Jerome de Groot and Michael Whitworth for their helpful suggestions and comments. The department’s research administrator, Linda Jones, deserves my especial thanks for her endless patience in discussing presentational and bibliographic issues with me. Thanks also for the constructive input of Michael Pincombe, Richard Dutton, Katherine Duncan-Jones and Andrew Hadfield who all read parts of the manuscript at different points in its gestation, and to Philip Schwyzer for his detailed analysis of the whole project. The late Gareth Roberts at Exeter University also read early versions of the Jonson chapters and provided some invaluable advice on researching alchemical material. I would like to thank the library staff at University of Wales, Bangor and the Shakespeare Institute for their hard work on my behalf in securing items. I have been grateful for the opportunities to present parts of the research contained in this book at academic conferences at the universities of Bristol, Warwick, Stafford, Central Lancashire, Groningen, Oporto, New Brunswick and Toronto. I would like to thank the British Academy for the funding received to attend the Elizabethan conference in Oporto and University of Wales, Bangor for the award of sabbatical leave which allowed me to pursue this project. Earlier and shortened versions of chapters have appeared in a number of academic publications: chapter 1 appeared in Alan Shepard’s edited collection Fantasies of Troy: Classical Tales and the Social Imaginary in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, University of Toronto, 2004); chapters 2 and 4 appeared in Forum (1999 and 1997 respectively); chapter 3 in English (1998) and chapter 5 in the University of New

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Brunswick’s Literature of Region and Nation (1998). I would like to thank the editorial boards in each case for allowing reproduction of material in this book. The team of University of Wales Press have been a real pleasure to work with and I have enormously appreciated their support, most especially that of Duncan Campbell, Claire Powell, Sarah Lewis, Ceinwen Jones and Elin Lewis. Lastly, but most importantly, this book would not have been possible without the love and support of my family, Siân, Bronwen and Huw. To them I give my greatest thanks.

Introduction I Sounding Strange

Not so many years ago, the word ‘space’ had a strictly geometrical meaning: the idea it evoked was simply that of an empty area. In scholarly use it was generally accompanied by some such epithet as ‘Euclidean’, ‘isotropic’, or ‘infinite’, and the general feeling was that the concept of space was ultimately a mathematical one. To speak of ‘social space’, therefore, would have sounded strange.1

The uncomfortable possibility of sounding strange, however, did not deter Henri Lefebvre along with a number of other thinkers in the latter decades of the twentieth century from seizing the opportunity to reflect upon discourses of space for modern readers; and their work has proved enormously influential for a whole host of very different intellectual disciplines. Repeatedly during the post-war period, cultural theorists and critical geographers have stressed the need to view space as socially produced – as the consequence of a vibrant and changing encounter between the forces of human perception, ideological pressures and experiences of the material environment. Nonetheless Georges Benko and Ulf Strohmeyer, for example, have emphasized that only recently has ‘the constitutive role of space in the construction of individual and group identities [become] theoretically acknowledged’ and that this state of affairs has been brought about by ‘a largely unreflected prioritization of time over space’.2 In his earlier meditations upon cultural space, Michel Foucault had been keen to underline the underlying tension between these two strategic cultural discourses (‘Space was treated as the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile. Time, on the other hand, was richness, fecundity, life dialectic’) and he spelled out what he felt the implications were of this privileging of chronology: The use of spatial terms seems to have the air of anti-history. If one started to talk in terms of space that meant that one was hostile to time. It meant, as the fools say, that one ‘denied history’ . . . They didn’t understand that [these spatial terms] . . . meant the throwing into relief of processes – historical ones, needless to say – of power.3

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Introduction I

In a similar vein, like many other theoretical geographers, Edward W. Soja has lamented that the whole field of geography has suffered hitherto from the popularity of transhistorical notions of space: with its Kantian cogito mummified in neo-Kantian historicism, Modern Geography was reduced primarily to the accumulation, classification, and theoretically innocent representation of factual material describing the areal differentiation of the earth’s surface – to the study of outcomes, the end products of dynamic processes best understood by others. Geography thus also treated space as the domain of the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile – a world of passivity and measurement rather than action and meaning.4

The present study also aims to depart from such a moribund consideration of space in its exploration of topographical, dramatic and narrative spaces deployed in a selection of early modern plays. Most recently, when a concept of space has been invoked in early modern literary studies, it has frequently been with reference to the cultural geography of Elizabethan and Jacobean London – particular emphasis being given to its spaces of economic transformation, to remarkable narratives in this period of social mobility, and to new practices of ownership and social privilege.5 From a critical perspective, a number of voices such as that of Michael D. Bristol, for example, have drawn attention to the ways in which early modern audiences found themselves in, an ambiguous temporal situation outside the schedules of work and religious devotion . . . The time of performance is a festive time in which play and mimesis replace productive labour . . . In the playhouse the audience has an experience that provides an alternative to regular social discipline: between periods of authorized activity an ‘interlude’ provides an escape from supervision and surveillance of attitude, feeling, and expression . . . Narrative time contradicts the authority of the calendar and brings the past into immediate juxtaposition with the present.6

Moreover, Douglas Bruster has argued that we should view the theatre industry in this period as a nexus of conversion and exchange: ‘London’s playhouses can best be understood in terms of commerce, as centres for the productions and consumption of an aesthetic product . . . London’s playhouses were, of course, actual markets’.7 It should also be noted that the workforce supporting the theatre was clearly not isolated

Introduction I

3

from sources of public anxiety in the early modern period itself. In the same decade that purpose-built theatres were being erected on the outskirts of the city, the 1572 ‘Act for the Punishing of Vagabonds’ stressed: All and everye persone and persones whatsoever they beyng whole and mightye in Body and able to labour, havinge not Land or Maister, nor using any lawfull Marchaundize Crafte or Mysterye whereby hee or shee might get his or her Lyvinge, and can gyve no reckninge how he or shee dothe lawfully get his or her Lyvinge; & all Fencers Bearewardes Comon Players in Enterludes & Minstrels, not belonging to any Baron of this Realme or towardes any other honorable Personage of greater Degree [who] shall wander abroade and have not Lycense of two Justices of the Peace at the leaste, whereof one to be of the Quorum, when and in what Shier they shall happen to wander . . . shalbee taken adjudged and deemed Roges Vacaboundes and Sturdy Beggers.8

It is clear that at least one Elizabethan commentator, William Harrison, appears to have had no doubts about which kind of conclusions to draw from the growth of the theatrical industry in the burgeoning capital: ‘It is an evident token of a wicked time when players wax so rich that they can build such houses.’9 However, early modern preoccupations which linked the formation of subjectivity to place and placelessness have clear analogues in modern movements in critical thinking and Benno Werlen, for example, is persuasive in his emphasis that the immediate point is that space is neither an object nor an a priori, but a frame of reference for actions . . . It is a frame of reference for the physical components of actions and a grammalogue for problems and possibilities related to the performance of action in the physical world . . . The framework cannot be empirical because there is no such thing as ‘space’. ‘Space’ is a formal frame of reference because it does not refer to any specific concept of material objects . . . But the fact that the social world is produced and reproduced by social actions means that it is these actions, rather than ‘space’, that is constitutive of that world.10

It is all too easy to conceive of what critical geographers have come to think of in terms of imaginary geographies in the context of early modern theatre in which locale is gestured towards in terms of speech, costume and performance. Sites of imaginary geography inside and outside the theatre may be associated with particular cultural codes or

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mythologies, historical events and precedents, sacred ritual, or with processes of commodification as Henri Lefebvre underlined in his study The Production of Space, or with human emotional engagements as Gaston Bachelard argued in The Poetics of Space, for example.11 In whatever ways space may be constructed, moulded and/or fetishized, it becomes all too apparent, as Garrett A. Sullivan contends, that ‘landscape is profoundly ideological, for it simultaneously reflects and instantiates attitudes not only toward the land but to a whole range of social phenomena that are indivisible from the land.’12 Moreover, rather than being viewed simply as an inert container, space may be considered conceptually in a variety of different ways: for example as a medium of cultural interaction; as a matrix denoting ownership, appropriation and wealth; as a site describing economic and labour hierarchies; as a necessary function for individual and collective commemoration and commitment to the past; as the imaginative product of social (and political) action . . . And it is clearly wise not to lose sight of the fact that the delineation and control of space had very evident consequences in the day-to-day life of early modern communities as well as dynamizing theoretical debate in modern times. In Sundry Errours Committed by Land Meaters (1582), one Edward Worsop, a surveyor, was clearly aware of the energies which were being devoted to the control of the landscape and explored the question in dialogue form: Steuen

The chieffest peece of arte in the description of countries, is the taking of heightes, lengthes, and distances. The knowledge of them are incident to many other necessarie artes.

Peter

Call you these pretie feates, and fine sleightes, and such instrumentes, knackes, and jigges? Mee thinketh hee that can doe these thinges, performeth matters of great weight in the common weale . . .

Steuen

When the lande were parted betweene my Maistres, and her three sisters, M. Morgane was a whole moneth with my maister, and measured for him. There were then certain lawyeres, surueyors, and countrye measurers, and for three or foure dayes great controuersie was among them, and such a stur as I never sawe amongst wise men. Some would have the lande measured one way, some another: some brought long poles, some lines that had a knot at the ende of euerie perche, some lines that were sodden in rosen and waxe . . . There was such lustie barganing on all sides, that crownes, and angelles were but tryfling layes.13

Introduction I

5

The philosophical interest in the taxonomy of space (whether it be, for example, of space as essence, as receptacle, as existing only in terms of the physical forms which occupy it, as geometric field, as architectural division, as necessary representation acknowledged by the human psyche and so on) has been in evidence since the writings of Plato at least.14 Most recently, the theoretical writings of Gaston Bachelard, Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey and Edward W. Soja, amongst others, have concentrated attentions once again on discourses of space. Notably, in The Production of Space Lefebvre offered his readers a conceptual paradigm for a line of attack upon the subject: Spatial practice The study of the relations between daily practices of human experience and the perceptions of the physical environments upon which they are staged. These relations are underpinned by organising principles of production, reproduction and consumption. Representations of space This is mental, conceptualised space formulated through operations of coercion and assent by the planning projects of various cultural elites. Lefebvre proposes that these ‘conceptions of space tend, with certain exceptions . . . towards a system of verbal (and therefore intellectually worked out) signs’. Representational spaces A flexible and imaginative category which concentrates upon symbolic appropriations (e.g. racial, gendered, juridical, theological) of space in social existence. In Lefebvre’s words, this is the ‘space as directly lived through its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of “inhabitants” and “users”, but also of some artists and perhaps of those, such as a few writers and philosophers, who describe and aspire to do no more than describe. This is the dominated – and hence passively experienced – space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate.’15

More economically, Lefebvre telescoped these thoughts into a lived– perceived–conceived spatial paradigm within which to consider this field of inquiry. In his seminal study he accentuated his dissatisfaction with (post-structuralist) theoretical models which had hitherto refrained from reflecting upon liaisons between linguistic space, mental space, the spaces of social practices and those of ‘conceived essences’, underlining (and lamenting) the post-structuralist preference for privileging the first over and above the others.16 From Lefebvre’s perspective, rather than being viewed as a ‘blank page’, space emerges as an ‘over-inscribed’ matrix in which ‘everything therein resembles a rough draft, jumbled

Introduction I

6

and self-contradictory. Rather than signs, what one encounters here are directions – multifarious and overlapping instructions.’17 From his committed Marxist angle of vision, he endeavoured to expose how certain cultural forces have sought to maintain hegemony in the past through the promotion of a fractured, hierarchically organized systematization of space. In its stead, Lefebvre asks his reader to attend to a concept of cultural space produced through relations between differing levels of signification (the perceived, the conceived and the lived), thus positing a dynamic and cross-fertilized form of space, ‘more reminiscent of flaky mille-feuille pastry than of the homogeneous and isotropic space of classical (Euclidean/Cartesian) mathematics’.18

Ophelia

Great God of heauen, what a quicke change is this? The Courtier, Scholler, Souldier, all in him, All dasht and splintered thence, O woe is me, To a seene what I haue seene, see what I see. (FQ VII.184–719)

Of course, such great anxieties surrounding the radical rescripting of cultural space were not unknown to Shakespeare’s contemporaries. The fellow poet Samuel Daniel, for example, was clearly sensitive to the crises of interpretation being produced by new forms and representations in his own culture. He submitted: it is but the clowds gathered about our owne iudgement that makes vs thinke all other ages wrapt vp in mists, and the great distance betwixt vs, that causes vs to imagine men so farre off, to be so little in respect of our selves. We must not looke vpon the immense course of times past as men ouer-looke spacious and wide countries, from off high Mountaines, and are neuer the neere to iudge of the true Nature of the soyle, or the particular syte and face of those territories they see. Nor must we thinke, viewing the superficiall figure of a region in a Mappe that wee knowe straight the fashion and place as it is. Or reading an Historie (which is but a Mappe of men . . .) that presently wee know all the world, and can distinctly iudge of times, men and maners, iust as they were.20

In his account of conceptual changes in the production of cultural space across history, Steve Pile stresses that the Renaissance city developed along the lines and coordinates set by a (perspectival, linear, geometric) conception of space which was embedded in political power,

Introduction I

7

where political power was not only reproduced and maintained through this social space but also did so by excluding other (for example, cosmological) concepts of space.21

There is increasing critical interest in the ways in which the growth of proto-capitalist economic practices, for example in the early modern period, led to a reappraisal of London’s spatial organization, yielding increasing privileges to financial and mercantile operations and placing pressure on spaces hitherto valued by memorial tradition, historical precedent and/or concerns of social hierarchy. Amongst a growing number of critics, Andrew McRae has recently proposed: at the outset of the seventeenth century the predominant conceptions of space in London were torn between tradition and nascent modernity. The demands of the former constructed spatiality upon accretions of memory and localized mythologies, while the latter suggested rather the abstract and homogeneous space which would become characteristic of the modern capitalist city.22

Moreover, whilst the map of the capital was frequently being redrawn in response to the prospering fortunes of those involved in trade and speculative enterprises, it is apparent that some Elizabethans, like William Harrison in his Description of England (1577), were also focusing upon other cultural developments whereby ‘[Merchants] often change estate with gentlemen, as gentlemen do with them, by a mutual conversion of the one into the other.’23 In her landmark study Renaissance Man, Agnes Heller drew attention to the fact that Hegel in his Logic makes a neat distinction between space (Raum) and position (Ort). During the Renaissance both conceptions of space were to be found . . . Space was a basic category of the philosophy of nature . . . Everyday life was affected . . . fundamentally by the change in notions about terrestrial space. That was a direct consequence of the great discoveries. Before science had changed the earth’s position (and, by derivation, man’s position) in the universe, a new conception had already evolved of man’s place in his own, terrestrial world. The change in ideas of ‘large’ and ‘small’ became a matter of everyday experience: it became a commonplace that the hitherto known ‘world’ was only a tiny part of the earth.24

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Introduction I

Such distinctions have remained relevant to modern theoretical debates of cultural space. Michel de Certeau, for example, in The Practice of Everyday Life gave particular emphasis to the concepts of lieu and espace: the former relating to, ‘the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence. It thus excludes the possibility of two things being in the same location’; whereas espace, ‘exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables. Thus space is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it.’25 Moreover, there is certainly every evidence that changing modes of spatial representation presented significant cultural challenges to the intellectual elites across Europe in the early modern period – challenges which were responded to in a host of different ways. Unlike Samuel Daniel, Sir Thomas Elyot earlier in the sixteenth century had written excitedly about recent innovations in cartography: For what pleasure is it, in one houre to beholde those realmes, cities, sees, ryuers, and mountaynes, that unneth in an old mannes life can nat be iournaide and pursued: what incredible delite is taken in beholding the diuersities of people, beastis, fouls, fishes, trees, frutes, and herbes: to knowe the sondry maners & conditions of people, and the varietie of their natures, and that in a warme studie or perler, without perill of the see, or daunger of longe and paynfull iournayes: I can nat tell, what more pleasure shulde happen to a gentil witte, than to beholde in his owne house euery thynge that with in all the worlde is contained.26

In their recent historical collection The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture 1550–1850, Gerald Maclean, Donna Landry and Joseph P. Ward have suggested that ‘however resonant the term “place” may be of rootedness and fixity, no place can ever be wholly abstracted from the social relationships, capital flows, cultural representations, and global forces that late twentieth-century theorists have come to call “space” ’.27 Conceptually, of course, any discourse of space must be evaluated in relation to the energies that traverse it and to a chronological axis. Ricardo Quinones, Agnes Heller and Achsah Guibbory, for example, amongst other early modern critics have focused upon the competing cultural formulations associated with time during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and have drawn particular attention to prevailing narratives of continuity, cyclical or

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rhythmic experience, decay, progress and so on.28 Moreover, in the early modern period itself, quite apart from acknowledging narratives of time in linear or cyclical, destructive or redemptive, scientific or mystical terms, figures like Sir Thomas Browne clearly chose to value its indeterminacy: Time hath endlesse rarities, and shows of all varieties; which reveals old things in heaven, makes new discoveries in earth, and even earth itself a discovery. That great Antiquity America lay buried for thousands of years; and a large part of the earth is still in the Urne unto us.29

From another cultural point of view, the transformative energies being expressed during this period which Kiernan Ryan has viewed as ‘early capitalist society coalescing with a moribund feudal world’ are legion. We may wish to concentrate, for example, upon the strategic redirection in scientific thought from geocentrism to heliocentrism, from humoral medicine to the more familiar practices of modern anatomy, from theological to geographical cartography. The enormous implications of religious schism in the period inevitably had a huge influence upon: the formulation of political allegiances (both on an individual and collective basis); narratives of communal identity, history and belonging; concepts of social hierarchy; the direction of scholarship; and, of course, the daily experience of faith for whole populations. Russell West has recently stressed that with the loss of fixed, a priori structures of knowledge, it consequently became increasingly difficult to hierarchize apparently contradictory versions of experience. The doctrinal unity of Christendom had been shattered by the Reformation, and from that point on, it was possible for quite opposing beliefs to be held, without anyone definitively being able to say which practices and ideologies were right and which were wrong.30

The profound and continual experience of cultural change and trauma and the dilemmas which these posed for early modern subjects across the social hierarchy are widely apparent in the textual remains from the period. Shakespeare’s contemporary Thomas Nashe, for example, bears witness in his prose narrative The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) to the ongoing difficulties surrounding the question of religious allegiance despite the huge political pressures being exerted at the time to mould cultural opinion:

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Introduction I

At my first coming to Rome, I, being a youth of the English cut, ware my hair long, went apparelled in light colours, and imitated four or five sundry nations in my attire at once . . . To tell you of the rare pleasures of their gardens, their baths, their vineyards, their galleries, were to write a second part of The Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Devices . . . O Rome, if thou has in thee such soul-exalting objects, what a thing is heaven in comparison of thee, of which Mercator’s globe is a perfecter model than thou art? Yet this I must say to the shame of us Protestants: if good works may merit heaven, they do them, we talk of them. Whether superstition or no makes them unprofitable servants, that let pulpits decide.31

Changing ideological promotions of religious confession were not the only challenges to human epistemology in this period. Emergent and often contradictory systems of knowledge and experience were being stimulated by new areas of economic exploitation, bringing with them new developments in banking and credit transfer, greater urban and civic developments, changing labour structures, the creation of new social elites and the resulting problems of law enforcement amongst growing populations. As a consequence of trading projects (and, in the last case, settlement) in the Baltic, the Levant and the Virginia Plantation, for example, the increased intellectual engagement with cultures beyond the ‘known world’ provoked not only an appetite for information amongst Europeans, it also communicated the sobering awareness of European ignorance. In 1597 one Abraham Hartwell published his Reporte of the Kingdome of Congo, it appears, explicitly with the intention, ‘to help our English Nation, that they might knowe and understand many things, which are common in other languages, but utterly concealed from this poore Island’.32 A generation later, Thomas Morton penned his New English Canaan or New Canaan Containing an Abstract of New England (1637), declaring: to use this abstract as an instrument, to bee the meanes, to communicate the knowledge which I have gathered, by my many yeares residence in those parts, unto my Countrymen, to the end, that they may the better perceive their error, who cannot imagine, that there is any Country in the universall world, which may be compared unto our native soyle.33

And whilst these enormous shifts in cultural understanding were being stimulated, it should not be forgotten that the very expanse of Europe was having to be rescripted for early modern minds. Daniel Vitkus has underlined strategically that

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while Spanish, Portuguese, English, and Dutch ships sailed to the New World and beyond, beginning the exploration and conquest of foreign lands, the Ottoman Turks were rapidly colonizing European territory. Thus, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Europeans were both colonizers and colonized, and even the English felt the power of the Turkish threat to Christendom.34

The loss of unifying cognitive structures for this society placed unfamiliar lenses upon the material and spiritual world enabling hitherto unknown landscapes to emerge. Interestingly, when Raphael Holinshed brings his Irish Chronicle (1577) to a close, he falls short of giving an account of the modern period, fearing his authority and indeed safety as a historian may come into question if he advances any further: Thus farre (gentle reader) as mine instructions directed me, and my leysure serued mee, haue I continued a parcell of the Irish historie, and haue stretched it to the raigne of Edward the sixth . . . And albeit I might with some enquirie, iumble vp these latter yeares . . . yet notwithstanding, I am so precisely set upon so tickle a taske, and so fickle a grounde, that rather concerneth the liuing than apperteyneth to the deade, as I would be lothe to be taken in anye part thereof, not onely to stumble, but also once to trippe.35

In the midst of such cultural uncertainty and debate, early modern drama emerged as a commercial as well as an artistic practice which interrogated (and continues to interrogate) models of social organization and cultural cohesion. Thus, in this period for which it has been proposed there was a fundamental change in the formulation of narratives of social order and cultural belonging, it is perhaps unsurprising that the contemporary writing, and in particular the drama, should have engaged with these developments. The theatre in London played a significant part in this revision of the capital’s spatial practice: prior to 1575–6, play-acting had no purpose-built dwelling place. After this year, the theatre begins to occupy defined spaces in the urban environment and it continued to have an interest through performance in how a society chooses to organize its living spaces. On another occasion, I also was after dinner at a comedy, not far from our inn, in the suburb; if I remember right, in Bishopsgate. Here they represented various nations, with whom on each occasion an Englishman fought for his daughter, and overcame them all except the German, who

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Introduction I

won the daughter in fight. He then sat down with him, and gave him and his servant strong drink, so that they both got drunk, and the servant threw his shoe at this master’s head and they both fell asleep. Meanwhile the Englishman went into the tent, robbed the German of his gains, and thus he outwitted the German also . . . With such and many other pastimes besides the English spend their time; in the comedies they learn what is going on in other lands, and this happens without alarm, husband and wife together in a familiar place, since for the most part the English do not much use to travel, but are content ever to learn of foreign maters at home, and ever to take their pastime.36 (Thomas Platter of Basle, visit to England in 1599)

By the closing years of the sixteenth century, this newly conceived and popular presence of the theatre trading on the south bank of the Thames was clearly prompting a whole host of inquiries from different sections of the community relating to individual and collective processes of identityconstruction. In A Second and Third Blast of Retrait from Plaies and Theaters (1581), Anthony Munday, for example, carped that, ‘As for those stagers themselues, are they not commonlie such kind of men in their conuersation as they are in profession? Are they not variable in hart, as they are in their partes?’37 By 1628, Richard Rawlidge in his A monster late found out and discovered. Or The scourging of tiplers, the ruine of Bacchus, and the bane of tapsters was alleging that this peerelesse Citty, this London, hath within the memory of man lost much of hir pristine lustre . . . by being . . . filled with many great and crying sinnes, which . . . are . . . maintained, in Play-houses, Ale-houses, Bawdyhouses, Dising-houses . . . All which houses, and traps for Gentlemen, and others, of such Receipt, were formerly taken notice of by many Citizens, and well disposed graue Gentlemen . . . wherevpon some of the pious magistrates made humble suit to the late Queene Elizabeth of ever-liuing memorie, and her priuy Counsaile, and obteined leaue from her Majesty to thrust those Players out of the Citty and to pull downe the Dicing houses: which accordingly was affected, and the Play-houses in Gracious street, Bishops-gate-street, nigh Paules, that on Ludgate hill, the White-Friars were put down, and other lewd houses quite supprest within the Liberties, by the care of those religious Senators . . . and surely had all their successors followed their worthy stepps, sinne would not at this day haue beene so powerfull, and raigning as it is.38

Clearly, the proliferation of hermeneutic paradigms available during the early modern period led to a profound sense of uncertainty in some

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cases. Donne’s poetic voice, for example, found that ‘[the] new philosophy calls all in doubt . . . ’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone’; while Nashe’s Pierce Penniless raged, ‘I heare say there be Mathematitions abroad that will prooue men before Adam; and they are harboured in high places, who will maintaine it to the death, that there are no diuels.’39 Such emphases upon acute philosophical anxieties, liminal subjectivities and insecure narratives of history prompted a widespread interrogation of ideological codes and it is evident that voices such as those of Walter Ralegh greeted the onslaught of such unsettling cultural developments with a mixture of unremitting melancholia and enfeebled spiritual faith: Even such is Time, which takes in trust Our youth, our joys and all we have And pays us but with age and dust; Who in the dark and silent grave, When we have wandered all our ways Shuts up the story of our days. But from which earth and grave and dust The Lord shall raise me up, I trust.40

Nonetheless, as has been appreciated above, such cultural challenges also appear to have excited at least some early modern minds as textual encouragements were increasingly being provided for them to confront the new, the alien and the forbidden. Thomas Cartelli underlines that Elizabethan playgoers probably approached the occasion of playgoing as a release from the constraints of ordinary experience, and came to the theatre prepared to suspend their inhibitions against provocative or potentially threatening fantasy material. It is also likely that the regular playgoer maintained a normative persuasion that was at once more morally and psychically permissive than that of his or her fellow Elizabethan who consciously decided not to attend plays.41

Elsewhere, the playful and intriguing fascination with discourses of space exercised the mind of another of Ralegh’s and Shakespeare’s contemporaries, Stephen Gosson, who submitted in the prefatory material ‘to the right noble Gentleman, Master Philip Sidney, Esquire’ for his The Schoole of Abuse (1579):

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Introduction I

The Schoole which I build, is narrowe, & at the first blushe appeareth but a doggehole; yet small Cloudes carrie water; slender threedes sowe sure stitches; little heares haue their shadowes; blunt stones whette kniues; from hard rockes, flow softe springes; the whole world is drawen in a mappe; Homers Iliades in a nutte shel; a kings picture in a pennie; little Chestes may holde great treasure; a few Cyphers contayne the substance of a rich Merchant.42

The whole of Mary Wroth’s prose romance Urania: Book One (1621), for example, was to be based on unpicking the Aristotelian oppositions of male/female, active/passive, reason/passion, mind/body and so on, in order to reconstruct conventional cultural narratives in challenging formations. In this case, Wroth chose to produce a textual space for staging female potential in terms of endless creativity, rather than rooted in the more familiar discourses of lack and unruliness: ‘Alas Urania’, said she, ‘the true servant of misfortune! Of any misery that can befall woman, is not this the most and greatest which thou art fallen into? Can there be any near the unhappiness of being ignorant, and that in the highest kind, not being certain of mine own estate or birth? Why was I not still continued in the belief I was, as I appear, a shepherdess, and daughter to a shepherd? My ambition then went no higher than this estate, now flies it to a knowledge.’43

In each of the analyses of the early modern dramas which follow, the emphasis will be upon the fact that space is not a neutral, fixed, passive container, but socially constructed and constantly in process. For readers of early modern literature, Hamlet is an obvious text to choose when contemplating models of philosophical interrogation, and the opening discussions concentrate upon this late Elizabethan tragedy. A work such as Hamlet expresses repeatedly how the spaces of human experience may be constituted through narrativized relationships and performative practices before they are styled ‘geographical’. Again and again, Shakespeare’s text directs attention to the very diverse ways in which we may experience even our most immediate human environments. Of course, any visitation from purgatory would make most people rethink the dimensions of their living space. Nevertheless, the play’s preoccupation with divergent human engagements with representations of space points up its significance as one of the primary axes through which we attempt modes of self-definition.

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Chapter 2 draws attention to the ways in which Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta compels its audiences to reflect upon Tudor ideological codes which associated geographical rootedness with social harmony. In a cultural vision which coupled together notions of travel and displacement with all manner of violence and rebellion, it is all too comprehensible why political forces at work within early modern society would view innovative spatial practices (prompted by new flows of capital and labour practices) as potentially threatening operations of cultural revision and fragmentation. Marlowe’s frantic play also clearly delineates the psychic and social traumas associated with the subject’s inability to integrate into the wider community and, equally importantly, invites audiences to ponder competing discourses of place along the way. This text is particularly thought-provoking in its evocation of the ways in which the social and spatial structures of urban environments can challenge, and indeed corrode, practices of cultural interaction. Most disturbingly, The Jew of Malta also focuses upon the ways in which marginals (objects of cultural loathing formulated in relation to racial, gendered, and/or religious expectations) are demonized in social, somatic and spatial terms. Chapter 3 problematizes this discussion of communal and individual identity-construction by unpacking the political aspirations articulated in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Here, the cultural frictions generated between alternative spatial discourses of belonging are vigorous and vividly dramatized. Shakespeare’s tragedy reflects upon how gendered and collective political identities are produced through the rewriting of cultural narratives, most especially that of space. Erasmus informed his readers at the beginning of the sixteenth century that ‘kings have many ears and many eyes . . . They have eyes that espy out more things than men could think.’ However, the proliferation of competing models of sovereignty in Antony and Cleopatra generates a global crisis of interpretation which leads to the cultural rescripting of the known world into an imperial space with its own political, military (and erotic) theories of power. In Chapter 4, the cultural anxiety surrounding the political female once again emerges as a prime dramatic site through which to probe discourses of cultural purity and power transferral in Elizabeth Cary’s Tragedie of Mariam. Here, the promotion of a triumphant political project is intimately concerned with the repression of unruly women. Cary’s narrative engages tightly with Lefebvre’s evocation of mourning for lost spatialities, nostalgia for lost origins, for what he terms ‘an absolute space’ where knowledge and social practice

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were harmoniously engaged. The autocratic regime of Herod has squandered the political resources of the nation and his absence in Rome allows hitherto silenced voices to slip the chains of fugitive or deceitful lives and to respond energetically to the violence which has hitherto characterized cultural life in Palestine. When news of Herod’s death circulates, the distinction between the national space of political decision-making and repressed and/or domesticated planes of human experience collapses and a vigorous dramatic debate takes shape on the very nature of (mis)government and the (im)possibility of political heroism. Chapter 5 concentrates upon the ways in which the formulation of the city as a cultural entity with designated spatial practices becomes a consuming source of interest in Jonson’s bitter comedy Volpone. Here, in a dramatic narrative which focuses amongst other things upon the implications of civic identity and commitment, the city of Venice ceases to be viewed as a congested space occupied by human bodies; instead it is experienced in terms of revised spatial practices centring upon selfaggrandizement. The morally and physically sick in Jonson’s Venice (a world governed by the distorting power of greed) are unable or unwilling to acknowledge legitimate acts of citizenship or the ethical responsibilities of ownership. As the frenzy of speculation, investment and profiteering manifests itself across the city, fetishized possessions supplant spaces conventionally invested with human and moral significance. In the final chapter, discussion remains within this Jonsonian vision of urban decay. The ideological division of human environments into the metropolitan and the provincial dominates The Alchemist. Here, the encounter with a fantasied Other, which penetrates the familiar landscape of plague-ridden Blackfriars, leads to a radical interrogation of the identities on offer in this dramatic world. The extravagant desire to trade, plunder, perform and deceive now characterizes this enticing, but polluted space which is being exploited by cultural outsiders. The Alchemist reflects upon how changing economic and demographic relationships (in this play, as a result of plague conditions) caused communities to reinvent themselves in order to ensure their cultural survival. Jonson’s play returns obsessively to the anxiety and fascination generated by a criminal subculture in its appropriations of space and its subversive mimicking of normative visions of protected domesticity. This situation is rendered all the more biting with the knaves’ parody of hospitality. In the plague-ridden London of Jonson’s comedy, creative crooks are able to make space for

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themselves by securing temporary access to the imaginative and economic resources of the depleted population. Throughout the whole sequence of discussions organized in this study, the movement is away from the idea of space as a mathematical, quantifiable extension with a given number of dimensions (Euclidean space): space is not a physical donnée, but constantly developing through social and political action. I concentrate upon the ways in which all the chosen texts variously view human subjects as producing meaning through the occupation of mental and geographical spaces. One by one, each of the dramas is seen to sustain complex textual visions whereby environments and landscapes are ‘produced’ by those who occupy them and the subjectivities of those occupants are in turn ‘produced’ by the spaces they inhabit. All of these plays chronicle the endeavours of dramatic subjects to locate themselves through spatial productions and practices with myths of belonging, promoting various physical, cultural and psychological ‘homes’. The difficulties emerge when it becomes evident that these homes, or ‘eulogized spaces’ as Bachelard would have it, prove only to be provisional in nature.44

Introduction II Thinking Space for Hamlet

Hamlet

Gertrude Hamlet Gertrude

On him, on him: look you how pale he glares, His forme and cause conioyn’d, preaching to stones, Would make them capeable. Do not looke vpon me, Least with this pitteous action you conuert My sterne effects: then what I haue to do, Will want true colour; teares perchance for blood. To who do you speake this? Do you see nothing there? Nothing at all; yet all that is I see. (F III.iv.125–321)

It is in this way that we are presented with yet another trauma in the family saga of the Hamlets. In this celebrated scene, the anxiety-ridden prince fears to look upon the vengeful spirit and yet is equally fearful of his mother’s gaze. Profoundly disturbed by the possible motivations of both figures, he refuses to meet the eyes of his mother who is now become this seeming Gorgon. However, Shakespeare’s hero does not fear that he will be turned to stone on this occasion, rather that he will be unmann’d – that he will have a debilitating state of pity compelled upon him. When Hamlet arrives in his mother’s chamber, he quickly improvises a game of ‘know thine enemy’ with Gertrude, crossquestioning her upon her decision to share his uncle’s bed. However, this ‘game’ becomes rather more complex and more terrifying when the ghost joins the company. Gertrude scans the room in response to her son’s frenzied appeals, but the intensity of the dramatic action focuses at this point upon failed or foiled acts of looking. Mourning recent developments in his mother’s erotic career, his election by the ghost as an instrument of revenge and, of course, a dead father, Hamlet is driven to obsess about his own mortality and his impermanent place in the affections of others. He appears unable or unwilling to translate the examples from the past, proposed by his father’s (rather ineffectual) warriorship, into satisfactory interventions in the present. To compensate for the lengthening periods of aborted

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revenge, Hamlet internalizes the brutal physicality of the warrior father into mental torments for himself. Only after this process is fully under way is he able to think about being a scourge to others in this world – a world newly governed not by a soldier, but by a Renaissance prince . . . diplomat and sensualist. Hamlet’s multiple and agonized experience of violent dispossession and thwarted desire constitutes the governing context for his formulation of identities throughout the course of the play. If, as Gaston Bachelard has argued, ‘we live fixations, fixations of happiness. We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection’, Hamlet’s inability to sustain such fixations leads him (like other notable figures related to royalty in the play, Claudius and Lucianus) to vent his spleen and to try to subjugate those around him.2 Indeed, ultimately, the prince decides to make amends for his overwhelming experience of loss and frustration by inflicting violence upon the inhabitants of Elsinore in a number of different ways. For if the officers be good, the people can not be yll. Thus the goodnes or badnes of any realme lyeth in the goodnes or badnes of the rulers. And therefore not without great cause do the holy Apostels so earnestly charge vs to pray for the magistrates. For in deede the welth of everye common weale, the disorder also and miseries of the same, cum specially through them. (‘Dedication: To the Nobilitie and all other in office God graunt wisedome and all thinges nedeful for the preseruacion of theyr Estates. Amen’, in William Baldwin, Mirror for Magistrates (1559))3

Nonetheless, if Hamlet tries to displace his feelings of revulsion, marginality and insufficiency on to those around him (most especially Gertrude and Ophelia), in the end he is enraged by his failure to accomplish this task successfully. Arriving in his mother’s chamber as a would-be confessor, he is driven to the conclusion that if the queen cannot identify emissaries from the spirit world (who ‘usurp . . . this time of night’ (I.i.49) and disappear at the crowing of a cock), then she must bear witness to her sinful past: ‘Oh speake to me, no more, / These words like Daggers enter in mine eares’ (F III.iv.94–6). In this critical encounter where the ghost appears only to a ‘select’ audience, Hamlet is confronted with the sobering knowledge that even fundamental epistemological categories (such as those of sight/blindness, loyalty/infidelity and indeed absence/presence) have collapsed in this dramatic world and rendered all forms of knowledge at Elsinore radically unstable. In the queen’s chamber, the prince responds frantically to an erring

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spirit from ‘an undiscovered country’ in what Gertrude perceives as being little more than a hysterical engagement with empty space . . . Whether space ever can be empty is going to be a major preoccupation of this study. Indeed, the critical geographer Edward W. Soja has argued: space in itself may be primordially given, but the organization, and meaning of space is a product of social translation, transformation and experience. Socially produced space is a created structure comparable to other social constructions resulting from the transformation of given conditions inherent to being alive, in much the same way that human history represents a social transformation of time.4

Clearly, in this scene unfolding in Gertrude’s chamber, Shakespeare is drawing attention explicitly to a discrepancy of perception relating to the mental, cultural and physical organization of the world which these characters (and we, at one remove) inhabit. The dramatic space of human experience being constructed in this scene is not primarily related to the particular locale or physical details of a royal chamber; it is being formulated and endowed with significance on stage by a dynamic set of anguished human relationships. Thus the space of human performance and interaction must be seen as being established here in social and psychological rather than predominantly geographical terms.5 If Hamlet’s world has been rendered for ever uncertain by the trespasser in the shape of his father, critics down the generations have stressed that this visitor constitutes a notoriously contradictory text which could be deciphered in a host of different ways. After the staging of The Murther of Gonzago is brought to an abrupt halt with Claudius’ departure, Hamlet is convinced that the ghost speaks the truth and is determined to prove that he remembers the ghost in his subsequent actions. However, as Ben Jonson lamented in his commonplace book Discoveries, ‘Memory of all the powers of the mind, is the most delicate and fraile . . .’6 In Shakespeare’s dramatic world where even the past is a vigorous site of contestation, what is Hamlet remembering? Is it his ‘Father’s Spirit, / Doom’d for a certaine terme to walke the night’? (F I.v.9–10), the directives of ‘a Spirit of health, or Goblin damn’d’? (F I.iv.40). This visitor is apparently ‘forbid[den] to tell the secrets of [his] PrisonHouse’, yet does not refrain from describing in some detail his lot ‘confin’d to fast in Fiers’ (F I.v.11–14). Unrepentant, despite his experience of purgatorial flames, the ghost urges alternately revenge,

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forbearance and caution. Like the hero, the audience also has to determine what to make of this vexed communication. If the prince with these contradictory instructions has been nominated as a scourge of God, rather than a dupe of a devilish spirit, then Graham Bradshaw is persuasive in his contention that ‘Divine justice would appear to have the morals of a fruit machine.’7 We may arrive at various judgements in this instance, but it becomes increasingly clear that this ghostly visitation does excite a number of the prince’s appetites. With its talk of violation and dispossession, the apparition produces paradoxically what (again) Bachelard might propose as a ‘felicitous space’, an alter-image of desire, on which Hamlet’s morbidity can thrive – ‘the sorts of space that may be grasped, that may be defended against adverse forces, the space we love . . . this is eulogized space.’8 It appears that both ghostly patriarch and anguished son are tormented by the remarriage of the widow Gertrude, reminding them not only of their own displacement and but also of their own mortality. The ‘eulogized’, desired, other-worldly presence supposedly from purgatory, with its grand exhortations towards duty and revenge, magnifies Hamlet’s sense of his own inadequacies, of his antagonisms towards Claudius and towards the estranging world in which he believes he has been variously supplanted. As the play unfolds, it is also clearly left up to the audience to decide whether it is the prince’s encounters with the unrepentant vagrant from purgatory or those with Claudius’ ‘warlike state’ which most torment him. Whatever our conclusions, in his reported encounter with Ophelia, for example, it is evident that the performances of the ghost have become a rich source of stimulation for the traumatized prince: Ophelia

He rais’d a sigh, so pittous and profound, That it did seeme to shatter all his bulke, And end his being. That done, he lets me goe, And with his head ouer his shoulders turn’d, He seem’d to finde his way without his eyes, For out adores he went without their helpe; And to the last, bended their light on me. (F II.i.991–7)

In the end, what the irrepressible ‘fellow in the cellarage’ may offer Hamlet is the possibility through violence of making a seemingly chaotic world more amenable to control. The ghost proposes amongst other things an alternative interpretation of space, an alternative organization

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of power. Michel Foucault famously submitted that ‘discipline produces subjected and practised bodies, “docile” bodies.’ He elaborated further by underlining that Discipline sometimes requires enclosure, the specification of a place heterogenous to all others and closed in upon itself. It is the protected place of disciplinary monotony . . . Discipline is an art of rank, a technique for the transformation of arrangements . . . Discipline ‘makes’ individuals; it is a specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of its exercise.9

Such a theory of power appears all too familiar in a world where, for example, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are summoned, Laertes is given leave to depart, Ophelia is ‘loose[d]’ under surveillance to the Danish prince, and Hamlet is detained and then released (albeit for execution) to England. It should also be remembered that Shakespeare complicates even further the sophisticated construction of this particular dramatic space unfolding in Gertrude’s chamber with Polonius stashed behind the arras. When Sir Thomas Hoby published his translation of Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano in 1561, his Elizabethan readers were asked to attend to the fact that ‘the prince [ought] not only to be good, but also to make others good, like the Carpenters square, that is not only straight and just it self, but also maketh straight & just whatsoever it is occupied about.’10 Instead of being greeted on his return to Denmark with a well-ordered realm governed by moral and spiritual leadership, Hamlet comes to identify an vnweeded Garden . . . Things rank, and grosse in Nature Possesse it meerely. (F I.ii.135–7)

However, in direct contrast to the metaphysical speculations of his adopted son, Claudius’ concern is with the management of subject communities. Like the new Danish king, Jonson concludes that ‘The vulgar are commonly ill-natur’d; and alwayes grudging against their Governours: which makes, that a Prince has more busines, and trouble with them, then ever Hercules had with the Bull, or any other beast.’11 As a consequence, Claudius is very involved in the control of others’ mobility, most especially the social mobility of contenders to the throne

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like the ‘supposedly’ popular heroes Laertes, Hamlet and the Norwegian Fortinbras, who Hath in the skirts of Norway, heere and there, Shark’d vp a List of Landlesse Resolutes, For Foode and Diet, to some Enterprize That hath a stomacke in’t. (F I.i.97–100)

Hamlet, on the other hand, inhabits a very different environment shaped by emotional and philosophical trauma. The ghost tantalizes him with possibilities of forbidden knowledge: tales of the final moments of his dying father and of worlds beyond the grave – tales ‘whose lightest word / Would harrow vp thy soule, freeze thy young blood’ (F I.v.700–1). Indeed, the very presence of the ghost loitering around the ramparts of Elsinore indicates that the temporal boundaries of ownership and cultural authority in Claudius’ realm are leaky, and the king’s dominant response to any possible political threat appears to be one of surveillance and brutality. In this instance, the hero’s newly adopted father clearly does not subscribe to Jonson’s belief expressed in Discoveries that The mercifull Prince is safe in love, not feare. Hee needs no Emissaries, spies, Intelligencers, to intrap true Subjects. Hee feares no Libels, no Treasons. His people speake, what they thinke; and talke openly, what they doe in secret. They have nothing in their brests, that they need a Cipher for.12

From a larger perspective, the dramatic emphasis upon spying, prohibition and violence exposes the constructedness and fragility of the ideological discourses of power through which this culture is seeking to reproduce itself. Instead of reinforcing the hierarchic organization of the palace, the ghost offers the opportunity to Hamlet, to the soldiers on the ramparts and indeed to the audience in the theatre, to experience relations of power according to a radically different record of space – a world in which palace defences present no obstacles to unearthly forces and courtiers lodged behind arrases offer no threat. Inevitably, such ‘opportunities’ serve to challenge the very integrity of Claudius’ court culture.

As figures be the instruments of ornament in euery language, so be they also in a sorte abuses or rather trespasses in speach, because they passe

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the ordinary limits of common vtterance, and be occupied of purpose to deceiue the eare and also the minde, drawing it from plainnesse and simplicitie to a certain doublenesse whereby our talke is the more guilefull & abusing.13 (George Puttenham The Arte of English Poesie (1589))

Robert E. Wood has argued that ‘Elsinore . . . has more hidden observers than a French farce’; and indeed the play never allows us to forget, as Ophelia rightly points out, that Hamlet is in a number of ways, ‘th’obserued of all obseruers’ (F III.i.157).14 Within the confines of Elsinore, the abstract theories of Claudius’ kingship, to which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern pay such eloquent lip-service, are brutally condensed into disciplinary spaces of social control and performances of surveillance. In this context, we might be mindful of Henri Lefebvre’s rhetorical inquiry: Is it conceivable that the exercise of hegemony might leave space untouched? Could space be nothing more than the passive locus of social relations, the milieu in which their combination takes on body, or the aggregate of the procedures employed in their removal? The answer must be no.15

With the to-ing and fro-ing of Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Voltimand, Cornelius, Polonius, Ophelia and indeed Gertrude to her chamber, Claudius seeks to express his power by monitoring all the dark corners of his palace and beyond, rendering them knowable, organized and ruled spaces. In A Godlie Forme of Householde Government (1612) John Dod and Robert Cleaver insisted that ‘it is impossible for a man to understand how to govern the commonwealth, that doth not know how to rule his own house.’16 Claudius’ urgent need to penetrate the mental, personal and communal living spaces of his courtiers is expressed under the guise of creating a transparent, shared project of sovereignty. On closer examination, however, the king is found to have rather cruder appetites for political self-assertion. Nonetheless, when Hamlet meets with the ghost, he discovers the possibility of a counter-space which not only transforms his understanding of the matrix of power organizing Elsinore but also draws attention to a fundamental dialectic: that between the competing cultural discourses seeking to shape the physical terrain and social

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existence, and human subjects engaging with these discourses – potentially as creative agents of revision, resistance or assent.17 The fact that the ghost straddles or violates the boundary between the earthly and the realm of ‘whose bourn no traveller [should] return’, concentrates the prince’s mind on a larger subject of limits, boundaries and prohibitions, and this may account for his obsessive interest in control – perhaps the basis for all discourses of space.

Yea, and it is better to haue a tyraunte unto thy kinge than a shadow, a passive kinge that doth nought hiself but sofre other to doo with him what they will and to leade him whither they list. For a tyraunte, though he do wronge unto the good, yet he punissheth the evil, and maketh all men obeye, nether sofereth any man to polle but him self only. A kinge that is soft as sylke and effeminate, that is to saye turned unto the nature of a woman, what with his owne lustes, which are the longing of a woman with childe, so that he can not resist them, and what with the wyly tyranye of them that ever rule him, shalbe moch moare grevous unto the realme than a right tyraunte. Reade the cronycles & thou shalt finde it ever so.18 (William Tyndale)

Of all the dilemmas which Hamlet is forced to endure, surely one of the most important is the crisis in his personal myths of belonging: one being rooted in the ‘rotten’ state of Denmark, in the physical world; and the other in the mental, metaphysical realm where he comes to believe that ‘there’s a speciall Prouidence in the fall of a sparrow’ (F V.ii.219–21). Both serve to shape the protagonist’s self-knowledge and both generate their own particular contrary motions as the play unfolds. Moreover, nowhere is this meeting between the material and the spiritual more keenly felt than in the encounter between Hamlet and his mother in her chamber. Here, as has been appreciated above, Shakespeare concentrates attention upon conflicting angles of vision. But he furnishes his audience with no single, linear viewpoint on the stage action such as those afforded by perspectival court theatres of the period, no idealized, controlling image of a perfectly structured setting reflecting a perfectly structured organization of political power. Nor is an aesthetic engagement or rationalization of space made available to us such as Alberti and Brunelleschi had proposed for painting in the fifteenth century – a perspective or ordering of planes designed to offer a clear

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view on a given scene, implying narrative order, objectivity and lucidity. Alberti had submitted in his De Pictura (1435) that the painted canvas should operate as a transparent glass through which we penetrate an identifiable, if fictive, space giving the impression of a coherent and shared perception of that space. In fact, Elsinore offers no such vantage points of uninhibited vision such as those envisaged by Alberti, for Gertrude or any other occupant of the royal castle. Marcellus

Why such impresse of Ship-wrights, whose sore Taske Do’s not diuide the Sunday from the weeke, What might be toward, that this sweaty hast Doth make the Night ioynt-Labourer with the day. (F I.i.91–4)

Interestingly, the commotion of war-making which renders Marcellus so anxious would serve to console Barnabe Rich in his Roome for a Gentleman (1609) where he claimed: Peace breedes Cowards, it effeminates our mindes, it pampers our wanton wils, and it runs headlong into all sorts of sinne . . . The Souldiour, who in the time of warre savoreth of sweat, (the true testimony of exercise and labour) in the time of Peace, is all to bee spiced with perfumes (the witnes of effeminate and womanish nicite).19

In an analogous manner, throughout Shakespeare’s tragedy the audience, like Hamlet himself, is constantly challenged to privilege one narrative of human testimony over another. Indeed, the crisis explored throughout the play over the determining of legitimate models of organization, sequence and measurement engages closely with a much larger early modern cultural debate in which Gertrude’s ‘too much changed sonne’ is a notable participant (F II.ii.1057). Hamlet warns that ‘There are more things in heauen and earth Horatio / Then are dream’t of in your [F ‘our’] philosophie’ (SQ I.v.166–7). This sense of epistemological strain was echoed earlier in the sixteenth century by Ralph Lever who signalled growing crises of understanding for the age in his Art of Reason (1573): ‘I see and confesse, that there be Plura rerum, quam verborum genera, (that is, more things, then there are words to expresse things by).’20 Hamlet returns obsessively to the re-viewing of spatial and chronological narratives in his quest for order and control. Summoned to the

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seemingly private (yet monitored) space of Gertrude’s chamber, Hamlet endeavours to produce for his mother a new relationship with her immediate surroundings and indeed with her past, as he proceeds to conjure up a fantasy of dispossession – a Claudius-less world. However, ultimately in this tragic universe, Hamlet is only able to realize this fantasy through violence which extends beyond Claudius to those he wishes to redeem. It is surely significant at the close of the play that when Hamlet does decide to kill Claudius it would appear to have more to do with his mother’s murder than that of his father: Heere thou incestuous, murdrous, Damned Dane, Drinke off this Potion: Is thy Vnion heere? Follow my Mother. (F V.ii.325–7)

Nonetheless, in the arresting scene between Hamlet, Gertrude and the ghost, Shakespeare’s tragedy discloses a key insight into the nature of human existence: our constantly changing relations with cultural discourses of space. At this strategic moment in the play, we are asked to reflect upon how we experience the material environment around us, how competing ideological discourses seek to organize this same environment and how our complex relationships with these may be expressed – relationships which are so crucial to the understanding of our daily lives and selves.21 In this (non-)encounter with the ghost (and indeed with Polonius) in Gertrude’s chamber, it becomes all too apparent that human understanding of space cannot be asserted empirically, simply in terms of the contours and angles of the material environment. Rather we are asked to attend to the mental and social forces at work in this scene and to the fact, as Steve Pile has underlined in his study of critical attitudes to cultural space, that ‘the construction, maintenance and policing of spatial boundaries is not just a question of political economy, it relates to the ways in which people develop boundaries between self and other.’22 If this study addresses some of the ways in which such cultural pressures aim to construct human space, it will also reflect upon the ways in which the experience of rituals and practices of daily human existence (as dramatized in early modern theatre) contribute to highly political questions of identity-construction. Epistemological, social and physical understandings of space may be seen to be central to the drama’s more general questioning of the status of the human subject: ‘O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count my selfe a King of infinite space; were it not that I haue bad dreames’ (F1 II.ii.1300–2).

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Produced on stage during the final years of Elizabeth’s reign and looking forward to the achievements of Shakespeare’s cycle of tragedies under James I, Hamlet occupies a pivotal point in Shakespeare’s career and responds in a variety of ways to the competing appreciations of how cultural space may be produced. Within a context of increasing evidence of geographical and social mobility in response to changing economic circumstances, political thinking under the Tudors had repeatedly sought to link rootlessness, placelessness with sedition. Famously, the state-commissioned homily An Exhortation Concerning Good Order and Obedience to Rulers and Magistrates (1559) had stressed: Almighty GOD hath created and appointed all things, in heaven, earth, and waters, in a most excellent and perfect order. In Heaven hee hath appointed distinct and severall orders and states of Archangels and Angels. In earth hee hath assigned and appointed kings, princes, with other gouernours under them, all in good and necessary order . . . every degree of people, in their vocation, calling and office, hath appointed to them their duty and order: some are in high degree, some in low, some kings and princes, some inferiours and subiects, priests and laymen, masters and servants, fathers, and children, husbands and wives, rich and poore, and every one haue need of other, so that in all things is to bee lauded and praised the goodly order of GOD, without the which no house, no citie, no Commonwealth can continue and endure or last, for where there is no right order, there reigneth all abuse, carnall liberty, enormitie, sin and Babylonicall confusion. Take away kings, Princes, Rulers, Magistrates, Judges, and such estates of GOD’S order, no man shall ride or goe by the high way unrobbed, no man shall sleepe in his own house or bedde unkilled, no man shall keepe his wife, children, and possession in quietnesse, all things shall bee common, and there must needes follow all mischiefe and utter destruction both of soules, bodies, goods, and commonwealthes.23

However, in 1559 at the very beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, the Venetian envoy to London was much less convinced about the ability of her subjects to remain within their designated places. He wrote back to the republic that The English are universally partial to novelty, hostile to foreigners, and not very friendly amongst themselves: they attempt to do everything that comes into their heads, just as if all that imagination suggests could be easily executed; hence, a greater number of insurrections have broken out in this country than in all the rest of the world.24

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29

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, James was to share similar anxieties to those of the previous dynasty as the influx of people pushed the population of the English capital to 200,000 with a comparable rise in the population of the criminal subculture. In 1616, he lamented in a speech to the Star Chamber: It is the fashion of Italy, especially of Naples (which is one of the richest parts of it) that all gentry dwell in the principall Townes, and so the whole countrey is emptie: Euen so now in England, all the countrey is gotten into London; so as with time, England will onely be London, and the whole country be left waste.25

The radical reorganization of human patterns of experience in the capital occasioned by the advent of playhouses also came under the attention of the polemicist Phillip Stubbes as he railed in his Anatomie of Abuses (1583): but marke the flocking and running to Theaters & curtens, daylie and hourely, night and daye, tyme and tyde to see Playes and Enterludes, where such wanton gestures, such bawdie speaches: such laughing and fleering: such kissing and bussing: such clipping and culling: Suche winckinge and glancinge of wanton eyes, and the like is used, as is wonderfull to beehold. Than these goodly pageants being done, every mate sorts to his mate, every one bringes another homeward of their way verye freendly, and in their secret conclaves (covertly) they play the Sodomits, or worse.26

However, considerations relating to the geographies of early modern London or the presentation of dramatic loci on stage, for example, are combined in the chapters which follow with a focus upon the textual configuration of planes of cultural experience – upon diegetic spaces. Such spaces may engage with single acts of perception by an individual psyche or relate to collective mythologies, but they are examined in the belief that human action in these texts is being dramatized in part through interpolated narratives of cultural experience.27 Community, like topography, may be constructed discursively as well as materially, and collective cultural narratives play a key role in this process. Inevitably, embedded within any dramatic text will be spatial indices to extra-stage locations, such as those referring to Norway, England and France, for example, in Hamlet. Such imaginary geographies often serve

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a multitude of different purposes in a drama: yielding ironic frames on the main intrigue; offering a location from which to offer an ethical angle of vision; exciting allegorical interpretations; providing vantage points from which to express social critique; constituting strategic sites in which to expedite necessary but costly stage business (battles, processions, coronations) and so on. If integrated carefully, such sites can serve to clarify the cycles, divisions and privileges of human experience being dramatized. Nevertheless, in addition to these sites, there are also symbolic, textual realms which can create supplementary spaces of cultural signification. In a play such as Hamlet, such a mediated realm might be scriptural in nature, evoked by a community which engages with unusual phenomena remembering the circumstances of ‘our Saviour’s birth’ and that the murder of a brother has ‘the primal, eldest curse upon’t’ (F I.i.159, III.iii.37). (Interestingly, such narratives yield yet another perspective on the ghost who rejects the Lord’s decrees and addresses the corrupt nature of Hamlet, demanding that he share his lust for revenge.) Another significant cultural narrative which informs the play, like so many others by Shakespeare, is that of Roman history. Elsinore is a world in which not only Polonius, for example, remembers playing Caesar on the Capitol, but one in which the unsettled Horatio reviews his present political landscape in terms of ‘the most high and palmy state of Rome, / A little ere the mightiest Iulius fell’ (SQ I.i.113–4). Whereas Laertes’ France or Fortinbras’ Norway may be seen to have a synecdochic relationship with Claudius’ realm (functioning in part as emblems of a larger reality in which they participate), the textual relations between Denmark and Caesar’s Rome, for example, may be viewed as predominantly metonymic in nature whereby, as the Elizabethan rhetor Dudley Fenner underlined, ‘the subject or that which hath anything adjoined, is put for the thing adjoined or adjoynt.’28 As will become increasingly apparent, such planes of interest enormously enrich the stages on which the dramatic narrative can be seen to unfold. Nonetheless, in both the cases of extra-stage loci and interpolated diegetic space, the audience may witness dramatic tensions of competition being generated as rival sites of signification serve to interrogate notions of primacy and legitimacy. In these introductory discussions, I have allowed recent theoretical formulations to rub shoulders with early modern engagements with spatial evaluation, limitation and extension in order to indicate the parallel narratives of such discourses in both periods. In a whole host of

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areas, whether it be aesthetic or architectural, rhetorical or poetic, cartographic or surveying, astronomical or anatomical, numerological or musical, financial or mercantile, the age, like our own, was fixated with issues of quantification. This study seeks to underline Thomas Healy’s point that Renaissance texts may be viewed not only as ‘repositories of vanished cultural practices [but also] as empowered writing which can help us to clarify and more clearly address our own cultural needs’.29 In this initial analysis, I have endeavoured to dispel preconceptions of space as a backdrop. In a multitude of different guises, the early modern age, like our own, was confronting important questions of scale, measurement and control. But God knoweth (hitherto) in these Realmes of England and Ireland (whether through ignorance or fraude; I can not tell, in euery particular) how great wrong and iniurie hath (in my time) bene committed by vntrue measuring and surueying . . . And, this I am sure: that the Value of the difference, betwene the truth and such Surueyes, would haue bene able to haue found (foreuer) in eche of our two Vniuersities, an excellent Mathematicall Reader.30

John Dee

Chapter One ‘What’s Hecuba to him?’: Diegetic Space and Myths of Belonging in Shakespeare’s Hamlet First the scholler shal learne the precepts concerning the divers sorts of arguments in the first part of Logike, (for without them Rhetorike cannot be well understood) then shall followe the tropes and figures in the first part of Rhetorike, wherein he shall employ the sixth part of his studie, and all the rest in learning and handling good authors: as are Tullies Offices, his Orations, Caesars Commentaries, Virgils Aeneid, Ovids Metamorphosis, and Horace . . . And by this time he must observe in authors all the use of the Artes, as not only the words and phrases, not only the examples of the arguments; but also the axiome, wherein every argument is disposed; the syllogisme, whereby it is concluded; the method of the whole treatise, and the passages, whereby the parts are joyned together . . . And so let him take in hand the exercise of all these three Artes at once in making somewhat of his owne, first by imitation; . . .1

The pre-eminent status of classical writing in both the theory and the practice of early modern education has long been appreciated. Here, in The Education of Children (1588) the schoolmaster William Kempe illustrated how study programmes for Elizabethan pupils should be organized in the first instance around the work of Roman writers (Greek being reserved for the older and/or more able boys). Under this fairly typical educational regime, pupils were to be drilled in translation exercises, recitation and rhetorical analysis for six days a week, thirty-six weeks of the year. The identification of rhetorical topoi, a facility for translation of classical scenes and passages into the vernacular, the performative skills of declamation, these were all familiar, formative practices learned in the Tudor school environment and would have been understood as such by a large proportion of the educated members of audiences in early modern playhouses. When the pupil had gone some way to mastering the foundations of the arts of grammar, logic and rhetoric, Kempe advises, ‘then let him have a like theame to prosecute with the same artificiall instruments, that he findeth in his author.’ In other words, let him exploit the skills and knowledge learned intensively in the company of classical writers and translate them according to the demands of the present.

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Such ‘artificiall instruments’ gained as a result of continual cycles of translation, paraphrase, analysis and rote-learning clearly did not distress early modern teachers in the same way that they have appalled some modern educationists. In The Arte of Englishe Poesie (1589), George Puttenham argued: Man also in all his actions that be not altogether naturall, but are gotten by study and discipline or exercise, as to daunce by measures, to sing by note, to play on the lute, and such like, it is a praise to be said an artificiall dauncer, singer, & player on instruments, because they be not exactly knowne or done, but by rules & precepts or teaching of schoolemasters.2

Naturally, this raises a question regarding how the necessary stored knowledge was to be retrieved when the occasion demanded. One solution for the business of public speaking was proposed by the classical exponents of rhetoric. Roman writers such as Cicero, Quintilian and the author of the Rhetorica ad Herennium, for example, had advocated the exercise of memory through the mental imaging of a complex architectural structure in which every room would contain a piece of relevant information: For our whole education depends upon memory, and we shall receive instruction all in vain if all we hear slips from us . . . Indeed it is not without good reason that memory has been called the treasure-house of eloquence . . . Some place is chosen of the largest possible extent and characterised by the utmost possible variety, such as a spacious house divided into a number of rooms . . . The first thought is placed, as it were, in the forecourt; the second, let us say, in the living room; the remainder are placed in due order . . . as soon as the memory of the facts requires to be revived, all these places are visited in turn and the various deposits are demanded from their custodians . . . We require, therefore, places, real or imaginary, and images or symbols, which we must, of course, invent for ourselves.3

The orator would thus allow his (and it would be his – the gender expectations surrounding rhetorical expertise are widely in evidence throughout classical and early modern writing) mind’s eye to navigate through the house as his argument unfolded, visiting each chamber in sequence.4 Such spatial theories were to prove enormously influential across Europe throughout the early modern period. However, if Roman theorists concentrated upon the oratorical experience requisite for

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success in the civitas, Christian theologians, at least as far back as St Augustine, had recognized the significance of memory and the skills of public performance in coming to understand some of the mysteries of spiritual interiority. Augustine is often seen to conceive of memory in spatial terms: ‘Great is the power of memory . . . See the broad plains and caves and caverns of my memory.’5 From the perspective of this Church Father, memory is frequently linked to the gaining of self-knowledge and ethical understanding, and indeed to spiritual commitment. In De Trinitate, for example, Augustine envisaged an analogue to the Holy Trinity in memory, understanding and will – ‘these three are one, one life, one mind, one essence.’6 However, throughout the development of all these various philosophical traditions, the stress returns regularly to the notion of translating learned knowledge into significant human action and this emphasis continued throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Indeed, in a marginal note to his reading matter, for example, Gabriel Harvey recorded: ‘He that woold be thowght A Man, or seeme anything worth; must be A great Dooer, or A Great Speaker: He is a Cipher, & but a peakegoose, that is nether of both.’7 In his Practice, Proceedings, and Lawes of Armes (1593), Matthew Sutcliffe was of a similar opinion in matters of war: in general, we should look to ‘the great commaunder[s]’ for guidance, ‘for of all men they deserue most credite that are both writers, and doers themselues, in which respect I do aboue all honor Caesar among the Romanes and Xenophon among the Greekes; and of late writers Francis Guicciardini, a man employed in great matters.’8 In the early modern period there is evidence of a renewed interest, most especially in humanist circles, in the faculty of memory as a creative resource, a necessary attribute for successful civic service and also as a strategic power which might underpin the human endeavour to bridge the gap with a heroic, classical past. Erasmus, for example, placed great value on the training of memory as a crucial activity for the aspiring scholar.9 In the Pandectae Locorum Communium, John Foxe inquired: ‘what can poets, what can historians, what can rhetoricians, and orators . . . provide by their art without memory, or by their memory without noting the places?’10 Moreover, George Puttenham is once again notable in his contention that ‘There is nothing in man of all the potential parts of his mind (reason and will except) more noble or more necessary to the active life then memory’11 In a host of different ways the cultural fascination with rhetorical prowess which dated back centuries had a considerable influence on early modern concepts of

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35

artistic creativity, civic and spiritual undertakings and, indeed, the image of the intellectual for contemporaries.12 Unsurprisingly, this cultural climate encouraged expectations that the well-exercised memory would be indispensable for successful social intervention. Hamlet is, of course, a play which returns obsessively to the subject of memory and this is true whether we consider the 1603 First Quarto: The Tragicall Historie of HAMLET Prince of Denmarke. As it hath beene diuerse times acted by his Highnesse seruants in the Cittie of London: as also in the two Vniuersities of Cambridge and Oxford, and else-where at London

the 1604 Second Quarto: The Tragicall Historie of HAMLET, Prince of Denmarke. Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much againe as it was, according to the true and perfect Coppie

or the version in the 1623 Folio where we are presented with a text entitled simply THE TRAGEDIE OF HAMLET, Prince of Denmarke.

In all of these versions, the Danish court culture at Elsinore is finely attuned to the political and psychological dangers which acts of memory may pose. It is all too apparent to the new political ascendancy that to re-member is to reconnect with an alternative matrix of political power, an alternative existential space of legitimacy. In the First Quarto, for example, the recently crowned Claudius remonstrates with the fatherless hero for, what he deems to be, his disproportionate grief: Therefore cease laments, It is a fault gainst heauen, fault gainst the dead, A fault against nature. (2.44–5)13

In the Second Quarto and 1623 Folio, Gertrude is even more energetic in her rejection of the fruits of memory, viewing them as having destructive, corrosive effects: ‘Do not for euer with they veyled lids / Seeke for thy Noble Father in the dust’ (SQ and F I.ii.70–1). Hamlet’s decision through word, deed and, it should be noted, attire to stage

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public rituals of memory is a direct threat to the regime in the way that it constantly reminds the assembled company of the contrasting authority of Old Hamlet’s governance. At the beginning of the early modern period, despite an enduring sense of isolation both from his contemporary culture and from the classical past, Petrarch had confided in his letters: ‘I am happier with the dead than the living.’14 In this sentiment, Petrarch is not unrepresentative of succeeding generations of early modern intellectuals across Europe. Interestingly, by the beginning of the seventeenth century, Ben Jonson was envisaging a dynamic engagement with the classical heritage whereby the literary forefathers of Rome and Greece were still viewed as an inevitable point de départ but should not be seen as having exhausted all forms of textual creativity. He confided in Discoveries: I Know Nothing can conduce more to letters, then to examine the writings of the Ancients, and not to rest in their sole Authority, to take all upon trust from them . . . For to all the observations of the Ancients, wee have our owne experience, which, if wee will use, and apply, wee have better means to pronounce. It is true they open’d the gates, and made the way that went before us; but as Guides, not Commanders.15

The mind of Shakespeare’s prince is also exercised by this cultural drive to re-engage with the textual landscapes of classical writing and to exploit them for present demands. Rendered profoundly anxious by the doings of Danish patriarchs, both past and present, Hamlet turns back almost effortlessly in his first encounter with the players to a locus amoenus for the intellectual elite of early modern Europe: the sack of Troy. Virgil’s epic dealing with this theme had been a source of consuming interest for British scholars throughout the preceding century.16 Gavin Douglas had translated the Aeneid into ‘Scottis’ at the turn of the sixteenth century (Eneados, published 1553); and, conversant with this earlier endeavour, Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, had ‘englished’ books II and IV of Virgil’s epic into blank verse (published for the first time together in 1557). In this latter translation, Surrey offers his reader a Pyrrhus, ‘rejoysing in his dartes, with glittering armes; / Like to the adder with venimous herbes fed’ (ll. 607–8). Another notable translation in the second half of the sixteenth century is that by Thomas Phaer – and this would appear to have been known to Christopher Marlowe.17 However, it is interesting that the figure of Pyrrhus, seeking to avenge the death of his father Achilles, is not given extensive emphasis in

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37

Virgil’s epic or the work of subsequent translators. It is only as the century draws to a close that such an image appears to hold particular attractions for Shakespeare and his contemporaries. In his early narrative poem, The Rape of Lucrece (1594), Shakespeare had given his reader a foretaste of a central character deciphering the Fall of Troy, deploying it as a narrative space for exploring personal and political trauma. Gabriel Harvey was inclined to bring both Shakespeare’s Hamlet and The Rape of Lucrece together, finding that they both contained that which might, ‘please the wiser sort’.18 Certainly both texts share some important thematic interests, such as unwarranted usurpation (‘Why should the worm intrude the maiden bud? / Or hateful cuckoos hatch in sparrows’ nests?’ (848–9)), human degeneracy (‘But no perfection is so absolute / That some impurity doth not pollute’ (853–4)), and resistance to what are perceived as the forces of destiny (‘O this dread night, wouldst thou one hour come back, / I could prevent this storm, and shun my wrack’ (965–6)). When the violated Lucrece scans a ‘skilful painting’ of the Trojan siege (‘To find a face where all distress is stelled’ (1444)), she, like Hamlet, finds kinship with the anguish of Hecuba. Rather than concerning herself primarily with the wounded Priam, ‘bleeding under Pyrrhus’ proud foot’ (1449), she ‘shaped her sorrow to the beldam’s woe’ (1458). This Roman matron, whom Colin Burrow has recently found (like so many readers before him), to be ‘astonishingly, unstoppably, all-but endlessly eloquent’, finds consolation through giving voice to the silenced Hecuba: I’ll tune thy woes with my lamenting tongue, And drop sweet balm in Priam’s painted wound, And rail on Pyrrhus that hath done him wrong. (1468–70)19

Here, in a poem which has already compared Tarquin to the duplicitous Synon (1534–40), we discover the heroine struggling to formulate a form of interiority through selective readings of the Fall of Troy – a narrative which for generations of European intellectuals had stood as a secular pendant text to that of the Fall from Grace in Eden.20 The Tale of Troy (published 1589) is one of George Peele’s earliest known texts and it is in this poem that we discover the Greek prince whose bloodie mind and murdring rage, Nor awe of Gods, nor reverence of age, Coulde temper from a deede so tyrannous.

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A little further on, the reader learns that Pyrrhus Hath hent this aged Priam by the hake, Like Butcher bent to sley, . . . the mightie king of Troy, With cruell yron this cursed Greekish boy Rids of his life. (see ll. 440–52)

One of Marlowe’s earliest dramas, Dido, Queen of Carthage, also offers in Aeneas’ narration a stirring image of Pyrrhus (Neoptolemus) emerging from the ‘entrails’ of the wooden horse followed by ‘a thousand Grecians more’: ‘Kill! Kill!’ they cried.’; At last came Pyrrhus, fell and full of ire, His harness dropping blood, and on his spear The mangled head of Priam’s youngest son. (see II.i.183–215)

At this key moment in the narrative, Marlowe appears keen to embellish his sources, providing graphic details of physical torments which will ultimately serve to counterbalance the psychological traumas which are being prepared for the denouement. In this extended evocation of the Priam’s death, Polites’ head is now speared, Hecuba becomes witch-like21 and the king is butchered in a seemingly improvised and gruesome ritual:

Dido Aeneas

‘O, let me live, great Neoptolemus!’ Not mov’d at all, but smiling at his tears, This butcher, whilst his hands were yet held up, Treading upon his breast, strook off his hands. O, end, Æneas! I can hear no more. At which the frantic queen leap’d on his face, And in his eyelids hanging by the nails, A little while prolong’d her husband’s life. At last the soldiers pull’d her by the heels, And swung her howling in the empty air. (II.i.239–48)

It is also worthy of note that in The Second Part of the Iron Age (published 1632), for example, Thomas Heywood (unlike his predecessors) chooses to bring the whole scene on to a crowded stage: ‘King Priam discovered kneeling at the Altar, with him. Hecuba, Polixena, Andromache, Astianax: to them enter Pyrrhus, and all the Greeks, Pyrrhus killing

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Polytes Priams sonne before the Altar’ (III.i.).22 Indeed, Heywood’s audience is left in no doubt that a grand spectacle awaits them: Pyrrhus All the Ladies

Still let your voyces to hye Heauen aspire For Pyrhus vengeance, murdring steele and fire. Oh, oh. (III.i)

After carefully matching each of the Trojan women with their executioners in the shapes of various Greek princes, Pyrrhus allows the theatrical fireworks to continue as he turns his attention to the remaining victims: Astianax Pyrrhus

Synon

Pyrrhus

Where shall I hide me? So nimble Hectors bastard? My father slew thy father, I the sonne: Thus will I tosse thy carkas upon hie, The brat aboue his fathers fame shall flie, He tosseth him about his head and kills him. No, somewhat doth remayne, Alarum still, the people’s not all slaine, Let not one soule survive. Then Trumpets Sound Till burning Troy in Troian blood be drown’d. (III.i)

On turning to Elsinore, the mental reflex on Hamlet’s part to repeat (quite literally on this occasion) an account of the bloodlust of the revenging Pyrrhus should not surprise the audience, for Shakespeare’s dramatic world appears wholly given over to cycles of repetition of one kind or another. Gertrude, the failed Hecuba in her son’s eyes, has ‘sinned’ in marrying twice; Claudius tries to kill two different members of the royal family; Hamlet himself kills two patriarchs; there are two grief-stricken revengers eventually in Elsinore in Laertes and Hamlet himself; and, of course, we find the visiting company offering two entertainments to the court in the dumbshow and the play proper. This proliferation of duplicating narratives may link to a wider sense of this culture’s dissatisfaction in its relations with the past. Indeed, it is tempting to conjecture that we are being presented with a society locked into a relentless cycle of human experience, mourning for a lost integrity. When the players arrive in Elsinore, Hamlet’s powers of recollection are racing. His creative collaboration with the company regarding new

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entertainment for the new court yields not only the possibility of baiting Claudius but also, most importantly, of verifying the tidings of the ghost. Throughout the play, the prince is always shown to be more ready for a bout of textual duelling than he is to imitate the father who, ‘smot the sledded Pollax on the Ice’ (F I.i.63). Once surrounded by the familiar faces of the players, he relishes the opportunity to give a fine account of himself in performance: ‘If it liue in your memory, begin at this Line, let me see, let me see: The rugged Pyrrhus like th’Hyrcanian Beast. It is not so: it begins with Pyrrhus’ (F II.ii.448–52). In his agitation, Hamlet fumbles mentally for a favourite speech from a play which we learn in the Folio was, ‘neuer Acted: or if it was, not aboue once’ (F II.ii.435). If theatricality is one of the dominant ways in which Hamlet wishes to renew his culture’s links with the past (both political and textual), the performative spaces he generates are constantly being destabilized here in this scene by the interventions of the Player, Polonius, but most often by Hamlet himself in the role of eager and hypersensitive stage director. Whilst the prince is excited by the imperatives of making a good beginning (at least in his theatrical performance!), the audience beyond the stage is left to ponder the discrepancies between the courses of Danish and Greek vengeance.23 If Hamlet greets the account of bloodshed at the Trojan altar with terrified awe, he is also nauseated by the ethical collapse of his native society which is thoroughly acquainted with the practices of subterfuge, disguise and killing. As has been appreciated above, at the very beginning of the play, the prince is urged energetically by the royal couple to mask his grief if he cannot control it within seemly bounds. This forceful invitation to perform, to counterfeit, is in fact ever present for the inhabitants of Elsinore as a whole. Hamlet notably takes up this challenge when he explores the possibilities of an ‘antic disposition’. If, in the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson insisted that this caper caused ‘much mirth’ for the audience, it may also constitute a plausible strategy for survival in a world where ‘one may smile and smile and be a villain.’24 Shakespeare’s rival playwright, Ben Jonson, confided in Discoveries: ‘I have considered our whole life is like a Play: Wherein every man, forgetfull of himselfe, is in travaile with expression of another. Nay, wee so insist in imitating others, as wee cannot (when it is necessary) returne to our selves.’25 Seemingly spurred on by such conclusions, Hamlet revels in generating performative spaces in his interactions with the court. If the post-colonial critic Homi Bhabha is right in his contention that mimicry in all its manifestations should not

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necessarily be viewed as an act of homage but rather as a tactic for eluding control, we should not be too surprised that Hamlet loses no time in renewing his bond with the company of players fleeing the ‘inhibition’.26 On their arrival, Hamlet quickly seizes yet another opportunity to perform, perhaps even to compete, with the players in conjuring up the scene of Priam’s death. Interestingly, this initial experience of collaborative play-making whets his appetite for further textual experiments. The well-read revenger decides to revise The Murther of Gonzago for the company as part of his investigations into the governing principles of power under the new political regime in Elsinore – and, in the process, sets the audience thinking about the genesis and functions of dramatic performance. In the ensuing and dynamic mêlée of theatrical recitation, the fragile distinctions between audience and stage experience become increasingly blurred. Shakespeare’s tragedy never represses the sobering knowledge that both on and off stage we all become spectators to violence in one form or another, that political regimes often construct their authority through premeditated violence, and indeed that our horror of violence may be a seductive fiction. Andrew Mousley has recently proposed that ‘Tragedy . . . may make us hungry for knowledge and explanation, but that is only because it has succeeded in disturbing our cognitive maps, our assumptions, our usual ways of making sense.’27 In Hamlet, audience and protagonist may find themselves disturbed not only by their hunger for knowledge, but also by the revelation of their appetite for brutality. As this scene with the players unfolds, the narration is begun and rebegun, interrupted and revised; and it becomes increasingly apparent at this famously metatheatrical moment that Hamlet, as a seasoned theatregoer, has a profound knowledge of dramatic production and repeatedly conceives of his own personae as revenger according to modes of theatricality. Rosencrantz quips that the dour prince will give but ‘lenten entertainment’ to the players when they arrive; in the event, Hamlet certainly resolves upon grim festivities for the man whom he considers to be the newly instituted mock king. If The Murther of Gonzago is concerned with the mimesis of revenge, explicitly creating in the darker purpose of Lucianus (nephew to the Player King) a lens through which to consider recent actions at Elsinore, in the staging of Troy the audience is given an intimation of this in the diegesis of revenge. Both are invitations to interrogate the ethical base of this culture. The frictional energies generated between these two modes excites the mind of the prince. William Hazlitt famously proposed at the

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turn of the nineteenth century that Hamlet’s ‘ruling passion is to think, not to act: and any vague pretext that flatters this propensity instantly diverts him from his previous purposes.’28 If we choose in this way to discount any performative dimension to Hamlet’s speech acts and to liken them to displacement exercises, such a scene with the players could be viewed as apotropaic, a way of keeping death at bay. However, Shakespeare’s tragedy in general may be encouraging us to collapse the boundaries between doing and telling in order to diversify our understanding of cultural intervention. Rather than seeing the prince as luxuriating in possibilities of performance in response to the death of his father and the remarriage of his mother, Hamlet (in his advice to the players) may be taking pains to avoid ‘split[ting] the eares of the groundlings’, in order to sharpen his aim at one who may have poured ‘the leaperous Distilment’ into the ‘porches’ of his father’s ear.29 Hamlet’s determination to investigate royal crimes with the aid of an acting company should come as no surprise in an age where both of Shakespeare’s royal masters recognized the theatricality of politics and the politics of theatre. Elizabeth famously acknowledged to her Parliament in 1586: we Princes, I tell you, are set on stages, in the sight and view of all the world duly observed. The eyes of many behold our actions; a spot is soon spied in our garments, a blemish quickly noted in our doings. It behoveth us, therefore, to be careful that our proceedings be just and honourable.

Her successor, James I, was equally conscious of this fact and stated to his son in the Basilikon Doron: Kings being publike persons, by reason of their office and authority, are as it were set (as it was said of old) vpon a publike stage, in sight of all the people; where all the beholders eyes are attentiuely bent to looke and pry in the least circumstance of their secretest drifts.30

In this context of political spectacle, Edward Said’s theorizing of ‘the power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging’ is clearly of relevance.31 Whatever the evocation of Troy offers, for example, it clearly offers the prince the possibility of empowerment. Through the power to narrate, or to govern the narration of others, Hamlet secures (albeit provisionally) a mode of control and interrogation. From the perspective of the audience, the narrative of Troy

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which Hamlet summons up from his memory becomes the most recent in a sequence of meditations on possible courses of action. Whether Hamlet is reflecting upon the conflicting cultural identities of Fortinbras, Horatio, Laertes, Osric or Pyrrhus, these must be seen as experiments in narrative spaces from which possible selves may be recuperated: Examples gross as earth exhort me: Witness this army of such mass and charge, Led by a delicate and tender prince. (4.4.47)

Temporarily thwarted in his search for role models in the present, in Troy Hamlet is exploring textual personae which cannot be remembered, only recited. Moreover, whatever translations Hamlet accomplishes in his movements back and forth from biological to textual fathers in the murders of Priam and Gonzago, such acts should be studied with early modern expectations of translation in mind: being viewed not as examples of slavish replication, but as creative acts of self-definition – fresh narratives which convert and extend the source material, engaging fully with their new cultural home and offering the audience the opportunity to take the measure of the translator himself.32 Hamlet’s appetite for play-making consoles (at least initially) the anxiety-ridden court. In the Folio and Second Quarto, Claudius is ‘much content[ed] . . . / To heare him so inclin’d’ (SQ III.i.24–5; F III.i.24–6). In the First Quarto, the new king is even more excited by the prospect of his nephew reintegrating into the court culture. He tells Rossencraft and Gilderstone: Gentlemen, seeke still to increase his mirth, Spare for no cost, our coffers shall be open, And we vnto your selues will still be thankefull. (FQ 8.14–6)

The stylized theatrics focusing upon the murders of Priam and Gonzago are clearly anticipated warmly by a culture which cherishes rituals of all kinds as reassuring practices for its daily existence. Indeed, Claudius is keen to multiply such performative spaces under his regime, as can be seen when he decrees: No iocund health that Denmarke drinkes to day, But the great Cannon to the Clowds shall tell,

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Diegetic Space and Belonging in Hamlet And the Kings Rouce, the Heauens shall bruite againe, Respeaking earthly Thunder. (F I.ii.125–8)

Whether it be the changing of the guard on the ramparts, court ceremonial at Claudius’ first audience, rhetorical performances, cannons bruiting, Ophelia’s ‘maimed funeral rites’, duelling etiquettes, or the final black mass of the play, we find the inhabitants of Elsinore attempting to connect their individual narratives of human experience through ritual to some higher principle of truth or legitimacy. As far as the playmaking is concerned, from one aspect it matters little whether Hamlet is drawing our attention to Priam or Gonzago, he is clearly not aiming to offer up chronicle history. The audience is in fact being presented with highly emotionally charged theatrical spaces meditating on remembered loss and present lack. Henri Lefebvre has argued: ‘any space implies, contains and dissimulates social relationships.’33 In the prince’s first encounter with the players at Elsinore, the audience witnesses the competing ambitions of those present to perform. Putting to one side Polonius’ claims to theatre experience, it is Hamlet who seizes the opportunity to prove his credentials as an actor. However, the prince does not bring even this act of narration to a close and so the audience is left to consider once again his potential for action rather than his powers of closure. The rugged Pyrrhus, he whose Sable Armes Blacke as his purpose, did the night resemble When he lay couched in the Ominous Horse, Hath now this dread and blacke Complexion smear’d With Heraldry more dismall: Head to foote Now is he to take Geulles, horridly Trick’d With blood of Fathers, Mothers, Daughters, Sonnes. (F II.ii.452–8)

At this point, with the memorial recovery of Troy by Hamlet, Shakespeare’s play offers an arresting opposition between the pursuit of the vita activa and the vita contemplativa. The tremendous image of Pyrrhus’ ruthless dynamism renders him the most frightening of all the avengers in this play, exposed as an indiscriminate killer in a manner contrasting keenly with Laertes, Hamlet and indeed Fortinbras. Whether this black, infernal Pyrrhus emerges as a version of Claudius for the audience or a would-be Hamlet with an inky cloak, clearly the awe-inspiring demonic figure of the murdering Greek prince is being controlled in this dramatic fragment through reduction to a stereotype

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of evil. The relentless demonization of the ‘dread’, ‘blacke’, ‘hellish’ Pyrrhus in Hamlet’s speech serves to diminish any Virgilian notion of heroic rage relating to the killing of Achilles, his father. Instead, the emphasis falls upon responses of alarm and disgust, but these are responses which Hamlet himself must master if he is to adopt effectively the role of revenger, whether it be as stage performer: ’Tis now the verie witching time of night, When Churchyards yawne, and Hell it selfe breaths out Contagion to this world. Now could I drink hot blood, And do such bitter businesse as the day Would quake to looke on (F III.ii.388–92)

or as man of action: This man shall set me packing: Ile lugge the Guts into the Neighbour roome, Mother goodnight. (F III.iv.211–13)

The succeeding cycles of violence at the siege of Troy, whether in terms of Hector’s murder by Achilles, Achilles’ by Paris, Polites’ and Priam’s by Pyrrhus and so on, are mirrored darkly in Shakespeare’s northern world in the dealings of Old Hamlet with Old Norway, those of Claudius with his brother and nephew, Hamlet’s killing of Polonius and so on. In both cultural narratives, the violation of sacred ties of kinship, political allegiance and divine observance is stressed – ties which serve as the organizing principles for a whole spectrum of cultural relationships and which affirm continuity with the value systems of the past. In a host of different guises the prince is attempting to appropriate narrative models of the revenger and, most particularly, that proposed by the butchering Pyrrhus; yet, in every direction, he finds the fulfilment of revenge associated with killing. Despite the fact that G. Wilson Knight famously insisted that Hamlet finally becomes a ‘death-force’ in Elsinore, the prince expends much energy on questioning how to respond to the violence of the past and, indeed, how to die well in the present.34 If this tragic hero (like his scholarly contemporaries) interrogates the past as Cicero had encouraged (looking for that which, ‘sheds light upon reality, gives life to recollection and guidance to human existence’), then, he is labouring under great difficulties in taking up the challenge which the example of Pyrrhus sets before him.35

46 1st Player

Diegetic Space and Belonging in Hamlet For loe, his Sword Which was declining on the Milkie head Of Reverend Priam, seem’d i’th’Ayre to sticke: So as a painted Tyrant Pyrrhus stood, And like a Newtrall to his will and matter, did nothing. (F II.ii.477–82)

Of course, it is difficult in retrospect not to view the Greek prince hovering momentarily with his sword over the ageing king as a foretaste of Hamlet’s indecision before the praying Claudius later in the play. However, in more general terms, how might we respond to this complex dramatic sequence which Barbara Hardy nominates as ‘the most technically self-conscious piece of narration in the play’?36 This version of the scene from the 1623 Folio is comparable in length and detail to that from the Second Quarto in its extended concern with Pyrrhus and substantial intervention from the Player. The First Quarto telescopes this whole scene to concentrate primarily upon an account of Hecuba. In each case, however, at least three spatial indices are being stressed and elided for the audience in the surroundings of Troy, Elsinore and the theatre itself. Moreover, audiences themselves are multiplying as we move from the horrified Trojan one, to the variously pedantic and rather curmudgeonly one on stage, to the theatre audience – and ultimately to an awareness of the future audience of the court for which a spectacle is being prepared.37 Faced with the grandiloquent account of the imperious Greek prince and the tirade against ‘Strumpet-Fortune’, we are also asked to attend to Polonius’ appetite for decorum, textual control and choric intervention as well as Hamlet’s ambitions for theatre direction. These competing bids for stage attention are linked to the larger analysis of power sustained throughout the drama, concerning government of the polis, government by supernatural forces and government of the self. In the destabilizing world that the cross-dressing, cross-classing players bring with them, we examine afresh through their defamiliarizing, highly stylized performative spaces the forces of violence and retribution and how these may be expressed within a Danish setting. Having fully digested the collapse of Trojan patriarchy as the blade of the ‘painted tyrant’ strikes at ‘the milkie head of the Reuerend Priam’, Hamlet is now eager to turn to an angle of vision other than that of victim and aggressor: ‘Say on; come to Hecuba.’ Identifying all too closely with the ‘inobled’ (F II.ii.502) or ‘mobled’ (SQ II.ii.524) queen,

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the prince hungers for an account of her emotional trauma – a trauma which subsequently he is determined to compel upon his mother when he decides to ‘speake Daggers to her, but vse none’ (F III.ii.396). What is significant in this context is Hamlet’s irrepressible and, from the point of view of speedy revenge, debilitating drive to narrativize his situation. It may be that in the competition for attention on stage between onlookers and performers, ‘Th’obseru’d of all Obseruers’ (F III.i.154), as Ophelia frames him, is losing control of his own self-representations. Nonetheless, in his quest for viable identities might not the prince be stimulated most of all in this scene by the role of the Senecan nuntius in the form of Aeneas? The attractions of such a figure are experienced by characters elsewhere in the Shakespearean canon, most notably in a play which directly precedes Hamlet. In Julius Caesar, Cassius aspires to heroic stature by comparing his endeavours with those of the Trojan prince: I, as Aeneas, our great ancestor, Did from the flames of Troy upon his shoulder The old Anchises bear, so from the wave of Tiber Did I the tired Caesar. (I.ii.112–5)

Both Cassius and Hamlet are concerned in their different ways to equal, indeed to surpass, the achievements of those who have gone before them (both historically and textually). In the ‘rotten state’ of Denmark, Hamlet also feels himself challenged to re-create political heroism in spite of the violence which is his inheritance. Are Hamlet’s strategic powers of memory excited by the situation of the fugitive prince in Carthage who is trapped within the narrative space of others? Alternatively, in this scene does the audience remember the classical icon of filial piety (a sentiment articulated mostly through violence in Shakespeare’s tragedy) who, as we learn in Henry VI Part 2, ‘did . . . old Anchises bear’ out of burning Troy? (V.ii.62). At this point, should we not also be mindful of the false Aeneas who abandons Queen Dido? Whatever the case, as this scene progresses Hamlet finds himself displaced on stage by the Player’s interventions and compelled to assume the role of auditor, like the Carthaginian queen, and spectator, like the Trojan one. Inevitably, in attending to the performances of Troy in Hamlet, it is timely to consider that this scene often appears in foreshortened form on stage or is cut altogether. When it is played in full, it is often as a prelude to the subsequent soliloquy whether it be as in the First Quarto:

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Diegetic Space and Belonging in Hamlet Why what a dunghill idiote slaue am I? Why these Players here draw water from eyes: For Hecuba, why what is Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba? (FQ 7.355–7)

or the more familiar version in the 1623 Folio, for example: Oh what a Rogue and Pesant slaue am I? Is it not monstrous that this Player heere, But in a Fixion, in a dreame of Passion, Could force his soule so to his whole conceit, That from her working, all his visage warm’d; Teares in his eyes, distraction in’s Aspect, A broken voyce, and his whole Function suiting With Formes, to his Conceit? And all for nothing? For Hecuba? What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, That he should weepe for her? (II.ii.550–60)

Unsurprisingly perhaps, it is the latter version which always predominates in modern editions, and the stress frequently falls in theatre performance upon our appetite for insights into the disturbed mind of the alienated prince, a figure so highly prized since the Romantics focused attention upon him. Ultimately, what does this ‘rogue and peasant slave’ remember from the Player’s speech? Rather than being a discerning humanist reader, finding himself mirrored in the text, Hamlet concentrates upon the discrepancy in affective engagement between himself and the Player: ‘had he the Motiue and the Cue for passion / That I haue? He would . . . cleaue the generall eare with horrid speech.’ He finds the Player’s counterfeiting ‘monstrous’ and is clearly reminded that no one has the monopoly on theatrical subterfuge. But the endlessly thought-provoking narrative of Troy not only profoundly exercises the mind of the prince, it also presents a daunting challenge for the audience. In whichever way we may encode Pyrrhus as an inhabitant of Elsinore, the spectacle of his revenge does not excite the prince’s or the audience’s admiration. Moreover, Hamlet certainly has no tears for the milky-headed Priam either – a pitiful image of Old Hamlet or his brother Claudius? The interpretative crises which this short scene presents give an insight into the difficulty of Hamlet’s endeavours with diegetic spaces, his endeavour to endow the past with superior meaning and authority. As we move from Pyrrhus to Priam and then to Hecuba,

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back and forth from Hamlet, to Polonius and then to the Player, the competing narratives force Hamlet to acknowledge that any given tale may be amended and retold by the interested parties and that loss can be understood in a multitude of ways, especially by those who subsequently seek to legitimize their cultural power. With limited and partial knowledge, Hamlet, the Player and Polonius try to summon up the myths of an ancient city. With limited and partial knowledge, Pyrrhus, Priam and Hecuba reformulate the burden which the past places upon them. And with limited and partial knowledge, Shakespeare’s audience is endeavouring to reconstitute imaginatively the power struggles that unfolded during the reign of Old Hamlet. In this context, it is sobering to be reminded by Augustine in the Confessions that the past does not exist, there is only our strategic re-membering of it: When a true narrative of the past is related, the memory produces not the actual events which have passed away but words conceived from images of them, which they fixed in the mind like imprints as they passed through the senses. Thus my boyhood, which is no longer, lies in past time which is no longer . . . neither future nor past exists . . . The present considering the past is the memory, the present considering the present is immediate awareness, the present considering the future is expectation.38

Having been haunted throughout the play by a painful awareness of human impermanence, the dying Hamlet insists once again upon another’s powers of closure, upon another’s ability to re-member the past: But let it be: Horatio, I am dead, Thou liu’st, report me and my causes right To the vnsatisfied. (F V.ii.338–40)

In The Second Part of the Iron Age, Heywood turns attention away from the ransacked Troy in the second half of his drama towards Mycenae where the Greeks are finally consumed in internal strife and slaughter. However, neither his audience nor Aeneas are allowed to leave the fallen city without a reminder from Heywood’s Cassandra that ‘We are all doom’d, faire Troy must perish here, / But thou art borne a greater Troy to reare’ (III.i.). In fact, throughout the medieval and early modern periods many British scholars did not content themselves with the

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celebration of the mission impériale of Aeneas as the founding father of Rome. Narratives were also generated regarding Aeneas’ descendant Brutus, who supposedly fled Rome to found the empire of Brutayne or Britain, thus foregrounding the Fall of Troy as a narrative locus for British origination. Indeed, Geoffrey of Monmouth in his History of the Kings of England asked his readers to attend to a heroic lineage encompassing Adam, Noah, Priam, Aeneas, Ascanius, Silvius and Brutus. Despite the scepticism of some sixteenth-century humanist historians regarding the notion of a Trojan birthing narrative for the British nation, the Tudors were not adverse to the political legitimation derived from such myth-making (linking Brutus with Cadwalldr) from their capital in London, or Troynovant. Perhaps the ongoing debate and repetition of such mythologies surrounding the Matter of Britain reinforced the convictions of at least some contemporaries. Sir Thomas Elyot, for example, contended in The Boke Named the Governour (1531): if by reading the sage counsel of Nestor, the subtle persuasions of Ulysses, the compendious gravity of Menelaus, the imperial majesty of Agamemnon, the prowess of Achilles, and valiant courage of Hector, we may apprehend anything whereby our wits may be amended and our personages be more apt to serve our public weal and our prince, what forceth it us though Homer write leasings?39

At the end of Norton and Sackville’s Gorboduc (1561), we are asked to witness, ‘the end of Brutus’ royal line’ (V.ii.180); and in Book III of The Faerie Queene, for example, Spenser fashions a Trojan lineage for Britomart, another Venus armata like Elizabeth herself. If, however, in A View of the Present State of Ireland, Spenser found it ‘impossible to prove thet there euer was anie such Brutus of Albanye’,40 by the beginning of the seventeenth century, John Speed would urge his readership: ‘let BRITAINES . . . disclaime their BRUTE, that bringeth no honour to so renowned a Nation, but rather cloudeth their glorie in the murders of his parents, and imbaseth their descents, as sprung from Venus that lasciuious Adulteresse.’41 Whatever the disbelief or otherwise amongst British intellectuals regarding Trojan fictions of descent, it becomes increasingly clear that this diegetic space forms a key element in the culture’s discourses of belonging. This nation, which Virgil had presented in his First Eclogue as ‘Britain – that place cut off at the very world’s end’, required founding myths to legitimize itself and secured one of them in the consecrated space of classical textuality.42

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The remembering of Troy throughout the literature of the English Renaissance is intimately linked to cultural ideals of military heroism, political legitimacy, male descent and inheritance, and national identityconstruction: the concept of the political nation being realized in this period at least in part through textual productions of nationhood. Apparently mindful of Hamlet’s intellectual vocabulary, Homi Bhabha has argued that, ‘[n]ations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only realize their horizon in the mind’s eye.’43 In Shakespeare’s tragedy such re-membering and imagining ultimately brings with it an understanding of the transience of all cultural ascendancies. Frederic Jameson has argued: ‘it is not we who sit in judgement on the past, but rather the past . . . which judges us, imposing the painful knowledge of what we are not, what we are no longer, what we are not yet.’44 In this brief scene from Hamlet the representational space of Troy is more than a fantasied setting – ‘a Fixion . . . a dreame of Passion’. This scene of the Trojan defeat is not a surplus, dispensable diegetic space as some dramatic productions have considered it; rather this evocation diversifies and enriches the stages on which Shakespeare’s action may be seen to be played out. This additional site of signification is conjured up amidst the practices and rituals of daily court existence. It directs us to re-examine Claudius’ political ascendancy and, more generally, it should make us rethink the ways in which we are continually appropriating textual and cultural geographies in order to construct our own psychic and political horizons. Captain

Hamlet Captain

Truly to speake, and with no addition, We goe to gaine a little patche of ground That hath in it no profit but the name To pay fiue duckets, fiue I would not farme it; Nor will it yeeld to Norway or the Pole A rancker rate, should it be sold in fee. Why then the Pollacke neuer will defend it. Yes, it is already garisond. (SQ IV.iv.17–24)

Chapter Two Enclosing ‘infinite riches in a little room’: The Question of Cultural Marginality in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta This is the ware wherein consists my wealth: And thus methinks should men of judgement frame Their means of traffic from the vulgar trade, And as their wealth increaseth, so inclose Infinite riches in a little room. (I.i.33–7)

In many ways, The Jew of Malta is obsessively preoccupied with the business of enclosing. From a critical point of view, the drive has frequently been in the direction of ‘enclosing’ Marlowe’s deviant text within an all-encompassing theory of interpretation: Marjorie Garber, for example, has contended: ‘much of the dramatic tension in Marlowe’s plays derives from the dialectic between aspiration and limitation.’ Her chosen emphases on mythic referencing, archetypal characterization and ‘a rhetoric of expansiveness’ number amongst a host of critical endeavours to resolve (or ‘limit’) perceived problems of cultural agenda and uneven dramatic texture in what appears, nevertheless, to have been a most popular play with early modern audiences.1 In recent years, however, some lone critical voices have registered an unwillingness to impose consistency and conformity upon this challenging dramatization of urban life.2 The famous line of enclosing ‘infinite riches in a little room’, perhaps the most famous in the play, is one in which Barabas not only exposes the hunger to acquire, but also implicates himself in a most ungodly form of appropriation: he is shown to exploit for his own ends a conventional theological conceit in which the Virgin’s womb was said to contain priceless treasures for humanity.3 In early modern debates, critics of the business of trade and, in particular, of usury often insisted upon the degree of impiety involved in such dealings. In the later English Usurer; Or; Usury Condemned (1634), for example, John Blaxton railed that the usurer sits at home, and spends his time in a devillish Arithmeticke, in numeration of houres, dayes, and moneys, in Subtraction from other mens estates, and

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multiplication of his owne, untill he have made a division betweene his soule and Heaven, and divided the earth to himselfe, and himselfe to hell.4

At the very beginning of Marlowe’s play, audiences are invited to associate the exercise of power in this walled city with the desire to amass, to compress, to contain and to circumscribe space: Whole chests of gold, in bullion and in coin, Besides I know not how much weight in pearl, Orient and round, have I within my house. (IV.i.65–7)

For Marjorie Garber such ‘images of compression’ expressed in the counting house have a definitive, rather than a volatile, character; and thus they become Barabas’ ‘equivalent to Tamburlaine’s map – the emblem of ultimate conquest’.5 However, whilst grandiose gestures of ownership are being enacted in both instances, The Jew of Malta surely asks its audiences to attend to the marked differences between political imperialist ventures and those of mercantilism in their chosen spheres of influence, individual commitment and cultural status. More generally, as the play unfolds, the human impulse to limit and to withhold may be viewed as something of a daunting enterprise in the profoundly unstable landscape of Malta’s capital – a place in which we discover, as Emily Bartels has proposed, that ‘the Jew, like Malta, emerges . . . as a representational space without a circumscribable identity.’6 In the prologue to his contemporary play Midas (1589), John Lyly contended: ‘Traffic and travel have woven the nature of all nations into ours.’ Clearly sensitive to the economic pressures transforming Elizabethan society, Marlowe’s play concentrates upon the ways in which a trading society endeavours to define itself and engage with the larger world beyond its borders. The counting house, with which we are presented at the play’s opening, is the place in which Barabas’ power is reified: this chamber exists in the midst of an arbitrary dramatic world whose cultural potential has been short-circuited by an insatiable appetite for gold. The merchant’s evocations of the lands of pearls, silks, spices and costly oils repeatedly serve to proliferate the spaces in which his economic authority and identity may be articulated. Moreover, such evocations of exotic climes also feed the text’s larger analysis of the motivations for the binding and loosening of human relations and the ways in which perceivedly ‘foreign’ worlds become convenient screens on which to project given cultural values.

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Nonetheless, in the congested and volatile city environment of Malta, Barabas expresses the need for a site of permanence and economic security which, in another context, Gaston Bachelard termed ‘felicitous space’ – a zone of ‘maternalizing’ protection constructed within the house: ‘In short, in the most interminable of dialectics, the sheltered being gives perceptible limits to his shelter . . . the corner is a haven that ensures us one of the things we prize most highly – immobility.’7 In Marlowe’s play, the demonized alien seeks refuge from the marginal identities he is compelled to adopt on the streets of Malta, where he fulfils the needs of the island population for a therapeutic object of cultural loathing. In the counting house (a polluted space or fantasied setting depending upon which Maltese resident you happen to be) Barabas can secrete countless funds, celebrate his seaborne empire and conspire to exploit the racial, gendered and/or religious expectations of the society which surrounds him.8 Henri Lefebvre contended: ‘any space implies, contains and dissimulates social relationships – and this despite the fact that a space is not a thing but rather a set of relations between things (objects and products).’9 In this chamber lined with riches, Barabas establishes many of the economic and dramatic relations which subsequently define him in the city. His yearning for ‘felicitous’ space is all the more understandable as we learn that in the labyrinth of Malta’s streets, a wrong turning may cost you your life: Barabas advises Lodowick, ‘Well, but for me, as you went in at doors / You had been stabbed, but not a word on’t now’ (II.iii.339–40); subsequently, Ithamore points out, ‘. . . here’s a royal monastery hard by, / Good master let me poison all the monks’ (IV.i.13–4). Through the endeavour to demarcate living areas, to establish valuable intervals in the urban experience, Barabas may be seen to be involving himself in the processes of social definition and self-authorizing familiar to city dwellers from all ages. The initial projection of dramatic space in the counting house reveals Barabas attempting to individuate himself in the very midst of an interdependent yet painfully antagonistic urban environment. As the play unfolds, Barabas’ house itself appears to sustain a maze-like structure: it encloses a host of recesses designed as forms of resistance against the outside world. When confronted with the government’s decision to confiscate his fortune (which, for the protagonist, is a dominant resource for identity-construction), he confides to his daughter: Ten thousand portagues, besides great pearls, Rich costly jewels, and stones infinite,

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Fearing the worst of this before it fell, I closely hid. (I.ii.246–9)

In a tract directly contemporary with Marlowe’s play, The Merchant’s Avizo: Verie Necessarie for their Sonnes and Seruants when they First Send them beyond the Seas, as to Spayne and Portingale & other Countryes (1590), J. Browne warned his reader very early on ‘[to] deale closelie and secretlie in all your affaires and business . . . be earnest in noting and marking euery thing that you may, but be your selfe as secret and silent as is possible.’10 With the revelation that his home is to be converted into a Catholic convent, Barabas finds himself being dispossessed of an economic, religious and gendered sphere of influence: Abigail explains: of thy house they mean To make a nunnery, where none but their own sect Must enter in; men generally barred. (I.ii.255–7)11

But the homeless Barabas confides to his daughter that his world contains spaces of which no one suspects: [I have hid] close underneath the plank That runs along the upper chamber floor, The gold and jewels which I kept for thee. (I.ii.296–8)

Nonetheless, in a world governed by the maxim ‘desidero ergo sum’ (I desire therefore I am), such devious precautions are of little avail: every faction is engaged in exactly the same business of reinterpreting the civic geography of the Maltese capital. From a wider perspective, it is everywhere apparent in this play that the island space named Malta is intensely coveted by its greedy neighbours. Ga¯mini Salga¯do is clearly just in his emphasis upon ‘a tight little island in a land-locked sea’ with its ‘mean and narrow world’; and within the play itself, Calymath acknowledges the strategic location of Malta: now I see the situation, And how secure this conquered island stands Environed with the Mediterranean Sea, Strong countermured with other petty isles. (V.iii.5–8)12

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At the centre of this complex map, the audience is directed to locate a culture which is incapable of expressing emotional or civic commitment: ‘(Nay, let ’em combat, conquer, and kill all, / So they spare me, my daughter, and my wealth)’ (I.i.151–2). The representation of a community rejecting all moral constraints made Wilbur Sanders baulk in the 1960s when he protested: ‘part of the difficulty of living in society stems from the fact that men are neither uniformly moral nor uniformly immoral. The total contempt for principle which prevails in Marlowe’s Malta is simply not to be found in nature.’13 However, distinctly more convincing is M. M. Mahood’s contention: ‘there is something strangely prophetic of the mercantile society of later times in this Mammon-worshipping world of Marlowe’s invention.’14 By continuing to withhold information about private places and secret forms of ownership, Barabas never fails to impress upon his fellow city dwellers, and at one remove the audience, his determination to control his own economic destiny. Indeed, a large part of the hero’s spellbinding dramatic presence is focused on his inexhaustible creativity to redefine: ‘Think me to be a senseless lump of clay / That will with every water wash to dirt’ (I.ii.218–9). He is able to revoke at will the authority of any cultural legacy (religious, racial or political) in order to endure within the city. Constantly confronted with vigorous prejudice, Barabas can never shed his alien status, even if he wanted to. However, with the resources of his counting house he can at least emerge before his accusers as le mal nécessaire. Unlike some other Marlovian heroes, the merchant does not aspire to political power or forbidden knowledge, but rather to the personal comforts afforded by his capitalist creed. Indeed, at the end of play, Barabas is destroyed by his refusal to assume the responsibilities of civic power. His overriding ambition is to safeguard a privatized zone from which his funds can go forth and multiply; and his energy for doing so is indomitable. After enduring one confiscation of his estate in the first act, we hear the hero declaring in Act II: I have bought a house As great and fair as is the Governor’s; And there in spite of Malta will I dwell. (II.iii.13–5)

Ultimately, however, Marlowe envisages a bleak, urban environment in The Jew of Malta in which all commodities are subject to predation: Barabas Pilia-Borza

I cannot do it, I have lost my keys. Oh, if that be all, I can pick ope your locks. (IV.iii.32–3)

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Despite the fact that critical research has identified some possible narratives which may have influenced the composition of this play, it has been frequently reiterated that ‘the antecedents of The Jew of Malta constitute a rather special case in that the piece appears to stand independent of any known originals.’15 Marlowe chose to represent an embittered urban culture on stage with no prompting from a Holinshed or a Stow. Malta is a community of strangers determined to survive through quick-witted strategies of commerce and politicking: Tush, take not from me then, For that is theft; and if you rob me thus, I must be forced to steal, and compass more. (I.ii.126–8)

The realities of congested urban existence shape the lives of the inhabitants as they fight both to preserve and to increase their living space. Equally significantly, Marlowe’s audience is constantly being reminded that none of the characters is indigenous to the island, having travelled from Italy, Rhodes, Spain, Turkey, Arabia and so on. Indeed, Marlowe’s island-state is shown to exploit its own cultural tendency towards violent fragmentation. In his wide-ranging survey of the period, the urban historian Christopher Friedrichs stresses: most people who were marginalized in the early modern city were victims of economic circumstances: either their own resources were too limited or the city’s economic capacity was too narrow to make it possible for them to be absorbed into the mainstream of the community. But some people were condemned to marginalization by an accident of birth or a personal attribute which made it virtually impossible for them even to aspire to be fully integrated into the ranks of urban society.16

Nevertheless, Barabas does endear himself at various stages to those around him by introducing the redeeming force of capital into their lives.17 This power to encroach into the lives of others through financial exchange, of course, is nowhere more apparent than in the theatre itself, governed like Malta, by the will-to-profit, by the need to excite interest in narratives and investment. Burton Pike has suggested that the evocation of ‘the city’ in literature frequently reveals ‘a deep-seated anxiety about man’s relation to the created world’.18 In the theatre, the audience (recently ‘relieved’ of its money) is tempted by the spectacle of

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the culturally dispossessed Barabas. In the sixteenth century, paying customers squeezed inside the enclosure of the London theatre to see Marlowe’s drama of forbidden desires unavailable elsewhere in the capital. The foreign, the strange and the demonic are tantalizingly on display in his Malta; indeed, audiences, like the contrite Abigail, could come to view ‘the difference of things’ (III.iii.64). One form of enclosure which is immediately apparent as this play opens is the partial framing device of Machevill himself. This figure departs radically from the prologue tradition of the polite master of ceremonies who endeavours to dissolve affective distances in the theatre by introducing characters who might warrant our sympathies. In The Jew of Malta, this undertaking is expressed within the context of Machevill’s destructive creed, and thus must provoke unease and hinder emotional engagement on the part of the audience: Admired I am of those that hate me most . . . I crave but this, grace him as he deserves, And let him not be entertained the worse Because he favours me. (Prol. 9, 33–5)

It has become a conventional feature of criticism of this play to differentiate between the political counsel proposed in Machiavelli’s writings and Machevill’s interests in appropriation, atheism and villainy in general.19 It emerges finally that whereas Machevill wishes to present ‘the tragedy of a Jew’, Marlowe also offers up the destruction of a self-made urban capitalist who fails ultimately to become a fully fledged disciple of the Florentine.20 Nonetheless our introduction proper to Malta is to a trading station; and Barabas’ counting house is represented as but one in a whole host of sites in which the inhabitants are attempting to generate inviolate space for themselves. Such a movement towards the limitation of municipal authority was clearly mirrored in many European cities of the period. Friedrichs underlines that: for many inhabitants of an early modern city, the most important form of spatial differentiation was not functional but was instead jurisdictional. Even within the walls, many cities had specific zones which did not fall under the control of the city government. Many of these ‘enclaves’ ‘liberties’ and ‘immunities’ belonged to . . . [an] ecclesiastical institution . . . Other enclaves were purely secular . . . these privileged areas were a constant irritant to municipal authorities.21

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In terms of ethnicity, social aspiration and, clearly, of cultural space, Marlowe communicates on stage a symbolic early modern locus in which the exercise of power is associated with fragmentation and division. Indeed, both beyond the island’s shores and within its urban confines, Barabas determines to create his own status based upon the commodification of resources. He, like the rest of the island residents, expresses no yearning for in-corporation. There is, however, no cause for concern as the city-state is too devoted to self-indulgence to worry about any social policies of integration. As Barabas’ self-seeking strategies become more ambitious and convoluted, so they become more vicious and rapacious: consequently, his desired, privatized space becomes thoroughly protean as it evolves from a giant coffer to a prison for his lovesick daughter: Barabas Ithamore

go put her in. Ay, I’ll put her in. (II.iii.364–5)

and then, for example, to an executioner’s chamber for a friar: ‘So now the fear is past, and I am safe: / For he that shrived her is within my house’ (IV.i.114–5). The Jewish merchant even tries to excite and titillate his auditors with tales of captivity and surveillance. For the suitor Mathias he conjures up the disturbing image of the chaste but captive female: when [Lodowick] comes, she locks herself up fast; Yet through the keyhole will he talk to her, While she runs to the window looking out When you should come and hale him from the door. (II.iii.264–7)

Barabas’ aim is to maintain his authoritative difference through acquisition. Moreover, he needs to ensure his liminal status in order to avoid the dangers of allegiance to any one ruling caste: ‘Are strangers with your tribute to be taxed?’ (I.ii.59). The fact that Barabas is able to defy cultural systems of obligation and taxonomy points to Malta’s unscrupulousness rather than its enlightened government. Both Simon Shepherd and Lisa Hopkins have persuasively proposed that Elizabethan audiences may have been minded to align the perfidious governor Ferneze with the contemporary prince of Parma, Alessandro Farnese, the Spanish commander in the Netherlands.22 Whatever the case, in this dramatic world where Ferneze’s regime had decided to default on the

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payment of its tribute to the Turks for ten years, all subsequent political and economic transactions are shown to contribute to the gangland atmosphere which reigns there. Ultimately, Barabas’ destruction at the end of the play is not that of the alien who fails to integrate, but rather that of a player who has misplaced the rules of the game. In its faltering progress towards civic maturity, Malta is unable to discipline or to negotiate successfully with its citizens, because it is unwilling to eradicate any possible source of income. It must be remembered that Barabas can only betray his city after he has been tolerated by it. In addition, the violence of Ferneze’s arbitrary regime is repeatedly shown to be more unnerving than the hero’s villainy, given the absolute terms in which it expresses its appetite to devour: the Officer, for example, proclaims: we have seized upon the goods And wares of Barabas, which being valued Amount to more than all the wealth in Malta. (I.ii.133–5)

Convincingly in this context, J. B. Steane emphasized: ‘Barabas is monstrous in a comic or melodramatic context; the Establishment’s monstrosity has a context much closer to reality. Moreover, Barabas has the wit to amuse us; the Establishment has not.’23 In Act V, Barabas-the-corpse is honoured by the municipality as he is duly catapulted over the city walls into a no man’s land: Ferneze – ‘For the Jew’s body, throw that o’er the walls, / To be a prey for vultures and wild beasts’ (V.i.58–9). In this gesture, the protagonist finds not only that his bid to lay claim to a privileged urban space is ceremonially rubbished, but also that his citizenship has been annulled. In reality, the city of Malta is a space in which operations of dis-location are constantly being enacted. Increasingly, the physical structures of urban living seem merely to provide targets for cannons in The Jew of Malta. When Barabas emerges from a drugged slumber, he resolves to interpret yet again perceptions of what is marginal, eccentric and Other. He turns upon the society in a gesture reminiscent of Coriolanus’ creative act of self-definition when he rages against Shakespeare’s hostile Roman populus with the defiant declaration: ‘I banish you!’ (III.iii.123). Barabas swiftly defects to the Turkish side and declares: ‘I’ll help to slay their children and their wives, / To fire the churches, pull their houses down’ (V.i.64–5). In direct comparison with other Marlovian heroes, Barabas’ inexhaustible capacity to assert himself

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against all the odds enhances his charisma: here outside the city walls, he redefines hitherto uncharted space in order to assist his regeneration. Unhampered by the physical reality of the landscape, he affirms a geography of the mind to create an environment conducive to his needs – as Bachelard pointed out, ‘to give an object poetic space is to give it more space than it has objectivity; or, better still, it is following the expansion of intimate space.’24 The area beyond the city walls, thus, no longer becomes an exclusion zone, but an empowering one in which the hero can realign his identity according to his changed circumstances. The audience becomes irresistibly mesmerized by the extravagant motivations and stratagems of the indomitable merchant and the ways in which he chooses to produce a marketable self. However, this experience may prevent us from acknowledging that whilst Barabas’ cultural experience is riddled with excesses, it is nonetheless an emblematic version of that which is widely available in this embittered, arbitrary and profoundly volatile society. Having miraculously sprung back into life, Barabas parleys with the Turks and articulates with disarming ease a scheme to penetrate an urban underworld: Barabas

Fear not, my lord, for here against the sluice, The rock is hollow, and of purpose digged, To make a passage for the running streams And common channels of the city. Now whilst you give assault unto the walls, I’ll lead five hundred soldiers through the vault, And rise with them i’ th’ middle of the town, Open the gates for you to enter in, And by this means the city is your own. (V.i.86–94)

At this point in the dramatic narrative, the geography of the city is again remodelled – here to the advantage of the invaders. However, this text is also simultaneously probing the proverbial early modern projection of the Jew as culturally uncertain. Famous for his accounts of Elizabethan play-making in the 1590s, the Swiss visitor Thomas Platter also contended in his writings: ‘Has it ever been known, in the memory of man, that a Jew hath been converted?’25 In his landmark study Shakespeare and the Jews, James Shapiro has underlined: ‘the Jew as irredeemable alien and the Jew as bogeyman into whom the Englishmen could be mysteriously “turned” coexisted at deep linguistic

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and psychological levels’; and he later draws attention to the fact that in a bid to integrate Jews fully as a taxable resource for the British nation Sir Thomas Shirley proposed to James I in 1607 that they should be settled in Ireland.26 Marlowe’s play fully explores the prejudices surrounding the Jewish enemy within who is privy to all the dark mysteries and passages of the city. Equipped with expert information, Barabas is able to confide to his accomplice Ithamore that in the city convent: There’s a dark entry where they take [alms] in, Where they must neither see the messenger Nor make enquiry who hath sent it them.27 (III.iv.79–81)

The detailed knowledge of Malta’s urban spaces leads to increasingly creative formulations by the merchant of both his intimate and social space. Marlowe’s play interrogates, for example, the prejudices circulating in the early modern period that Jews might be known by the smell which emanated from them, the supposed foetor judaicus. He does this by having Barabas reverse expectations relating to European rituals establishing spatial boundaries: the merchant declares to Lodowick: ’tis a custom held with us, That when we speak with Gentiles like to you, We turn into the air to purge ourselves: For unto us the promise doth belong.’ (II.iii.45–8)

This defiant self-assertion should be placed in context with the play’s finale where Barabas refashions familiar environments to offer an equally arresting welcome: he conspires to send the Turkish army into a Maltese monastery where, ‘underneath / In several places are fieldpieces pitched, / Bombards, whole barrels full of gunpowder’ (V.v.26–8). For the Turkish elite, however, he reserves: a dainty gallery, The floor whereof, this cable being cut, Doth fall asunder, so that it doth sink Into a deep pit past recovery. (V.v.33–6)

Nonetheless, in his initial negotiations with the Turks outside the city, Marlowe’s hero demonstrates the very instability of the civic organism

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itself as sewers turn into points of entry and fortified walls are shown to afford little immunity from penetration by foreign bodies. From a wider perspective, it becomes evident that Barabas understands fully the values of his fellow creatures who have set foot on the island; yet ultimately he fails to be as supple in his role-playing as his detractors. As has been appreciated above, everybody on stage is an alien of one kind or another.28 Most interestingly, we are asked to attend to the creativity which each subject generates in order to exploit that alien status. Bernardine Barabas

Thou hast committed – Fornication? But that was in another country: And besides, the wench is dead. (IV.i.40–2)

These exchanges attracted the attention of T. S. Eliot as he composed Portrait of a Lady: both he and Marlowe were stimulated by the evocation of a culture which prefers to dispense with the inconveniences of conscience and memory. Significantly, Marlowe refuses to indulge in a dramatic play of structural ‘foils’ which might have assisted the audience – there is no reassuring textual opposition on offer here which envisages heroic individualism against a backdrop of shared values. When the potential for heroism is allowed to figure in this world, it does so in surprising ways: as, for example, when Barabas defends his rights against theft by the state, whilst his fellow Jews submit unhesitatingly: Why did you yield to their extortion? You were a multitude, and I but one, And of me only have they taken all. (I.ii.178–80)

Simon Shepherd is persuasive in his contention that the confiscation of Jewish merchant property at the beginning of the play may have reminded Elizabethan audiences of moneys demanded (most recently in 1586) of ‘merchant strangers’ in London to prepare for hostilities with Spain.29 Whilst Barabas may be allowed some semblance of heroism at this point in standing up to Ferneze’s regime, contemporary writing clearly did question the best policy to adopt when confronted with opposition. In The Practice, Proceedings, and Lawes of Armes (1593), Matthew Sutcliffe is quite clear how to respond to any display of hostility:

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Suppose we should yeeld vnto our enemies any thing, which in reason they can desire: yet is that no meanes for vs to obteine peace. For those that endure one iniurie, doe but giue courage vnto their enemies to offer another and oftentimes the enemie desireth somewhat to be yelden to him, that the same may be a steppe to further matters, the bitch that desired of the shepheard . . . a couch where to litter; when her whelpes were growen great, began not onely to defend that place as her owne, but also to encroche more, and to offer diuers iniuries vnto the shepheard. The best therefore is to resist betime.30

However, in the case of the trader, Browne’s The Merchant’s Avizo (1590) counsels greater circumspection: shew your selfe lowly, curteous, and seruiceable vnto euerie person: for though you and many of vs else may think, that too much lowlinesse bringeth contempt and disgrace vnto vs: yet assuredly (it is well knowne by experience) that there springeth of no one vertue so great fruite vnto us, as of gentlenesse and humilitie: for it will both appease the anger and ill will of our enemies, and increase the good will of our friends.31

More generally, however, in his rejection of any system of moral checks and balances, Barabas gives expression to a survivalist instinct which frequently comes to be viewed as synonymous with duplicity. Most disruptive to unscrupulous Malta is Barabas’ affirmation of cultural autonomy through the authority of material gain: ‘Give us a peaceful rule, make Christians kings, / That thirst so much for principality’ (I.i.133–4). The play begins with him having seemingly achieved this cherished state of existence: through his energetic commitment to compete in an antagonistic environment, Barabas’ commercial ventures have succeeded in shrinking the globe. His seaborne empire exploits the discrepancy between purchase at source and sale in the Mediterranean market. His fleets, transporting the fruit of others’ labour, travel with such good fortune that they appear to defy the elements, to diminish distance and, indeed, to outstrip rivals. This merchant has grown strong on his own society’s disinclination to produce and irrepressible inclination to consume. Nonetheless it is abundantly clear that Barabas’ particular mechanism for wealth creation through trade is but one aspect of this whole culture’s willingness to thrive on imbalanced power relations – one of the most striking examples of this is, of course, Ferneze’s government itself. Despite this fact, Marlowe denies audiences on and off stage the privilege of moral reservations: he stimulates desire in the shape of an

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irresistible fascination with the merchant’s ventures in exotic lands. The risks of investment, demand and transportation (the latter are to thwart Antonio, for example, in The Merchant of Venice) are forgotten as merchant shipping queues up to arrive in Malta’s port awaiting calmer political seas: ‘A fleet of warlike galleys, Barabas, / Are come from Turkey, and lie in our road’ (I.i.145–6). In her survey of early modern merchant literature, Ceri Sullivan stresses: ‘it is in the merchant’s interest to make much of commercial risk – and even more of his ability to control it.’32 And in our introduction to Marlowe’s apparently charmed world, even a ‘craz’d vessel’ accomplishes its sea voyage successfully and thus makes its offering to the counting house: Ha, to the east? Yes: see how stands the vanes? East and by south: why then I hope my ships I sent for Egypt and the bordering isles Are gotten up by Nilus’ winding banks: Mine argosy from Alexandria, Loaden with spice and silks, now under sail, Are smoothly gliding down by Candy shore To Malta, through our Mediterranean sea. (I.i.40–7)

Such a sonorous and hypnotic narrative of places, states and luxurious cargoes, familiar from Tamburlaine and closely associated with the Miltonic epic voice in English, operates in this play to impress upon the ear and the mind of the audience the authority of capital in a degenerate world. It becomes increasingly evident that these faraway places have no particular significance for Barabas. He chimes their names together in order to poeticize his own power. Indeed, as Emily Bartels underlines, Marlovian space is, in some ways, shapeless, but the lack of differentiation between its worlds functions on a less abstract level to suggest the meaninglessness not of space but of the bounds imposed upon it. The point is not that space is meaningless, but that the differences assigned to it are empty, overdetermined, or arbitrary, at best.33

The merchant’s empire of exchange scorns political and moral boundaries. Given the multiple comforts of his trading lifestyle, it is unsurprising that Barabas belittles questions of political faction and warfare: he seeks to maintain peace and liberty of movement in order to further his business interests. Lefebvre stresses:

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nationhood implies the existence of a market gradually built up over a historical period of varying length . . . nationhood implies violence – the violence of a military state, be it feudal, bourgeois, imperialist, or some other variety. It implies, in other words, a political power controlling and exploiting the resources of the market or the growth of the productive forces in order to maintain and further its rule.34

It becomes increasingly clear in The Jew of Malta that if the ability to inflict violence may enhance the status of the political players, it can only serve to threaten those of the merchant. Ferneze informs Barabas: To what this ten years’ tribute will amount, That we have cast, but cannot compass it By reason of the wars, that robbed our store; And therefore are we to request your aid. (I.ii.46–9)35

Interestingly, such an experience of privation is carefully counterpointed in the drama with that of the prostitute Bellamira: Since this town was besieged, my gain grows cold. The time has been that but for one bare night A hundred ducats have been freely given; But now against my will I must be chaste. (III.i.1–8)

However, it cannot be disguised that the trading city renders itself politically and militarily vulnerable in the welcome it extends to all voyagers. Moreover, both soldiers and merchants arrive in Malta driven by the same appetite: Ferneze Bashaw

Welcome great Bashaw, how fares Calymath, What wind drives you thus unto Malta road? The wind that bloweth all the world besides, Desire of gold. (III.v.1–4)

Covetousness animates this dramatic world, whether in terms of cargoladen vessels, tribute money, annexation of land or the purchase of slaves. At the beginning of the play, messages arrive one after the other informing the hero that his merchant fleets have been sighted. As his investments come to mature, he is seen to trade in the lives and fortunes of all those around him: he consigns sailors to defective vessels,

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attributes no status to his followers and disdains any concept of civic allegiance. Barabas’ extravagant maritime imperialism generates its own exotic spectacle as visions of silks and spices are conjured up; and, when confronted with this foreign world of abundance, the audience is invited to respond with the rhetoric of wonder. In Marlowe’s Malta, power relations are forged through buying and selling in the governor’s apartments, the market streets or the merchants’ courtyards. Despite the unfamiliar geographical setting of Malta, the stage’s vision of commercial affluence was one with which the London audience could identify without having to draw too deeply on its imaginative powers: As for those Samnites, and the men of Uz, That bought my Spanish oils, and wines of Greece, Here have I pursed their paltry silverlings. Fie; what a trouble, ’tis to count this trash. (I.i.4–7)

The vision of a society greedy for foreign purchases was summoned up admirably in A Discourse of the Commonweal of This Realm of England (attributed to Sir Thomas Smith, 1549), in which the character of the doctor complains, There is no man can be contented now with any other gloves than is made in France or in Spain; no kersey, but it must be of Flanders dye; no cloth, but French or frizado . . . I have seen within these twenty years when there were of these haberdashers that sell French or Milan caps, glasses, daggers, swords, girdles, and such like, not a dozen in all London. And now, from the Tower to Westminster along, every street is full of them.36

However, if, like Caliban’s companions, audiences become entirely distracted by the ‘trash’ of material possessions, we will fail to acknowledge a major thematic thrust in Marlowe’s play which focuses upon the degeneration of a vast human habitat brought about by ruthless predation. As Barabas effaces boundaries and limitations in order to facilitate exchange and profit, he whets the appetite of the political and military imperialists who wish to redefine these trading lands: Ferneze, Del Bosco and Calymath choose to identify in Malta an empty space devoid of cultural memory – thus locating an ‘ideal’ place in which to express their influence. Malta is constantly being redrawn, remapped in the play and absorbed into the various schemes of empire-builders. From every perspective, the walled capital and, indeed, the whole island

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is presented as a cultural outpost, a marginalized territory which gathers together an unstable mix of diaspora and which is well within the sights of a host of imperializing regimes.37 It perhaps should not come as a surprise in the newly minted postArmada society which received Marlowe’s text for the first time that we find a manipulation of historical and military narratives to suit particular needs.38 In 1565 (the most likely moment for Marlowe’s dramatic action), the Knights Hospitallers of St John did not relinquish their command of the capital or submit to the Turkish siege. Marlowe chooses to deflate Christian achievement by reversing the outcome of the great siege of Malta. Moreover, historically, there never was any question of a Maltese tribute to the Islamic empire.39 Marlowe’s Malta may have only tenuous links with its historical counterpart, but, as Burton Pike has stressed, ‘the many links between the real city and the word-city are indirect and complex, and not, as they might at first appear, simple references from one to the other.’40 It is, however, abundantly clear that historically the knights in Malta were known throughout the Mediterranean by the mid-sixteenth century as notorious pirates who raided any vessels they encountered and enslaved the occupants. In his survey of Jewish settlements on Malta, Cecil Roth stressed that ‘the Knights . . . professed to regard the Jews as more dangerous enemies even than the Turks, accusing them of espionage and worse: and they did not scruple to violate a neutral flag in order to make Jewish captives.’41 Ferneze

Bosco

Now Captain tell us whither thou art bound? Whence is thy ship that anchors in our road? And why thou cam’st ashore without our leave? . . . Our fraught is Grecians, Turks, and Afric Moors . . . Of whom we would make sale in Malta here. (II.ii.1ff.)

Simon Shepherd has indicated that the dialectics of Marlowe’s play connect with an animated cultural debate of the late 1580s centring upon the question of the merchant’s allegiances.42 Barabas draws attention to the issue through the vigorous assertion of his own creed: ‘If any thing shall there concern our state / Assure yourselves I’ll look (unto myself)’ (I.i.171–2). The Elizabethan polity was acutely aware of the political implications of overseas commercial ventures, whether they were across the oceans challenging Iberian powers or on the European mainland itself. Such activities not only served to disrupt balances of power

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between imperializing forces, but also they were of domestic import – challenging existing civic hierarchies. Marlowe’s protagonist has no hesitation in reminding his opponents within the city of his power to disrupt: ‘Half of my substance is a city’s wealth’ (I.ii.86). Nobody who sets foot on this island can hope to affirm any cultural status without deploying a financial marker of some kind. This point was taken up from a historical perspective by Lewis Mumford in his landmark study of the city: he underlined that from the late Middle Ages liquid capital proved to be a chemical solvent: it cut through the cracked varnish that had long protected the medieval town and ate down to the raw wood . . . Thus capitalism, by its very nature, . . . introduced an element of instability, indeed of active corrosion into existing cities.43

However, such expectations need increasingly to be offset against the growing body of scholarship which is shedding light upon the fact, as Ceri Sullivan has demonstrated, that early modern society, ‘was more skilled in the techniques and receptive to the utility of borrowing and lending than literary commentators have often allowed . . . Recently . . . historians have suggested that credit creates a social bond rather than fragments a community.’44 Barabas exploits many other resources in order to safeguard his profit-making schemes. The facility with which the merchant, bereft of the political power at the disposal of the Christians, is able to transform the world of Malta is easily exemplified in terms of linguistic space. Formulating an overarching theory of human aspiration and punishment for Marlowe’s drama, Marjorie Garber has insisted that ‘however great its power, language is ultimately an enclosure’ in these texts.45 With its selective foregrounding of acts of betrayal and judgement, such a line of inquiry circumscribes too narrowly the cultural potential of language in this play. If we wish to inscribe The Jew of Malta within a deterministic dramatic universe, it should be noted that it is only the devious Ferneze who is allowed to give credence, or at least expression, to the idea that ‘Heaven’ has been waiting to respond punitively to the whole phase of human experience encapsulated in Marlowe’s play. The actions and words of the characters in this frenzied drama are more likely to generate awe, bewilderment and disbelief, than a condemnation of villainy or faith in a vengeful God. The Jew of Malta continues to invite its audiences to attend to the diverse ways in which language may transform and indeed construct new versions of cultural engagement.

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Bellamira Barabas Bellamira Ithamore Pilia-Borza Barabas

A French musician, come let’s hear your skill? Must tuna my lute for sound, twang twang first . . . How sweet, my Ithamore, the flowers smell. Like thy breath, sweetheart, no violet like ’em. Foh, methinks they stink like a hollyhock. (So, now I am reveng’d upon ’em all. The scent thereof was death, I poisoned it.) Play, fiddler, or I’ll cut your cats’ guts into chitterlings. Pardonnez-moi, be no in tune yet; so now, now all be in. (IV.iv.28–9, 37–43)

Ithamore Barabas

All the major players in Marlowe’s play seek to mould a body politic conducive to their own ambitions through what they hope to be definitive speech acts. From a textual perspective, Barabas is allowed to dominate the stage – approximately half the play text is devoted to him, principally his soliloquies and asides to the audience. By the end of the play, the governor may be acknowledging that Barabas is a barely repressed version of himself (if not the whole of Maltese population as it is depicted in Marlowe’s play). When Ferneze finally refrains from displacing images of danger and shame on to the Jewish merchant, he is shown to adopt a counter-narrative of duplicitous silence in order to triumph: Roger Sales contends that ‘Ferneze, like Queen Elizabeth, maintains power by suppressing dialogue.’46 Nevertheless, one of the difficulties which Marlowe’s audience encounters is that Barabas as the protagonist and the most voluble of dramatic subjects made available by Marlowe does not become transparent to us at any point in the play: we remain instead spellbound by his sleights of hand and constant metamorphoses. In addition, in this vicious dramatic world, Marlowe never gives us any encouragement to exercise our powers to trust. Indeed, it is Barabas’ final decision ‘to trust’ Ithamore which finally undoes him. It is his deluded act of negotiation with Ferneze that confirms his execution: Barabas is so accustomed to stressing others’ need of him that he magnificently fails to look to his own interests in the denouement of the narrative. The constant dramatic emphasis upon trickery in the dark and menacing environment of Malta has inevitably encouraged critics, from T. S. Eliot onwards, to draw comparisons with the Venice of Jonson’s Volpone.47 In general, when a Renaissance playwright wants to suggest anarchy in an urban society, a narrative of criminal activities is frequently foregrounded. This is clearly the case in both of these plays. Ithamore, for example, is dynamized by his master’s carefully planned

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double murder of Mathias and Lodowick: ‘Oh, master, that I might have a hand in this’ (II.iii.370). In direct comparison to Jonson’s dramatic world, Marlowe’s is sustained by the inexhaustible human energy to enact an unending repetition of vicious acts. Barabas and Volpone maintain their sense of purpose and cultural direction by constantly reiterating the same joyful ritual of exploitation: Ithamore Barabas Ithamore

No, none can hear him, cry he ne’er so loud. Why, true, therefore did I place him there: The other chambers open towards the street. You loiter, master. Wherefore stay we thus? Oh, how I long to see him shake his heels! (IV.i.137–40)

Such crooks lay claim to their possessions (material, spatial or human) and, indeed, renew themselves through feverish schemes of violence which, for the most part, unfold in the diegetic spaces of Marlowe’s drama. In those rare moments of leisure in Malta, Barabas and his recently recruited sidekick amuse themselves by fathering new narratives and demonic, fantasied identities for themselves in nightmarish communities: Barabas

Ithamore

As for myself, I walk abroad a-nights And kill sick people groaning under walls: Sometimes I go about and poison wells; . . . how hast thou spent thy time? Faith, master, In setting Christian villages on fire, Chaining of eunuchs, binding galley-slaves. (II.iii.176–8, 203–6)

Tellingly, Garber underlines that such men are ‘averse alike to capitivity and sociability . . . [and seem] always to be outside walls rather than within them’.48 However, by the end of The Jew of Malta, it has become acutely problematic how to distinguish between the cultural profiles of any of the communities in terms of violence, subterfuge and rapaciousness. Marlowe’s drama has frequently been located within a transitional phase in the development of British drama which describes the movement from medieval play-making to the early modern stage environment with its distinctive social emphasis. Moreover, it is a

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familiar reflex of criticism on this play to draw analogies between Barabas and the medieval Vice figure.49 Nonetheless Marlowe’s text notoriously refuses to reassure his audience with a psychomachic morality-play struggle between vice and virtue; nor, in this play, are we encouraged to contemplate a spiritual world to come – even Abigail’s conversion and sacrifice are given no credible frame of reference.50 Audiences must endeavour to formulate their own moral and spiritual value systems in opposition to those on display in Malta. Here is a world in which Marlowe interrogates early modern religious prejudices and unfixes racial stereotypes: conventional expectations disintegrate as Turks, for example, attract a measure of respect rather than horror at their violent mores.51 Moreover, the Christian governor is made to adopt the position of the high priest Caiaphas, with the Jewish villain becoming a parody of Christ in his persecution: Ferneze, more persuasive as the Machiavellian villain of the play, insists, ‘better one want for a common good, / Than many perish for a private man’ (I.ii.99–100).52 The dispossessed Barabas asks for mercy and is repaid by the Knight with unyielding contempt: If your first curse fall heavy on thy head, And make thee poor and scorned of all the world, ’Tis not our fault, but thy inherent sin. (I.ii.108–10)

However, in reality, neither party can convincingly lay claim to any system of spiritual values; as Barabas shrewdly observes for audiences on and off stage: ‘Will you then steal my goods? / Is theft the ground of your religion?’ (I.ii.95–6). A number of critics have returned to the point that with a name such as Barabas, the protagonist would have been likened to the Antichrist.53 However, it is not so much that the corruption of Barabas’ mercantile world contaminates the world of faith, but that these two spheres of influence share the same exploitative outlook: Jacomo informs the audience: This is the hour wherein I shall proceed; Oh happy hour, wherein I shall convert An infidel, and bring his gold into our treasury. (IV.i.160–2)

The merchant notoriously makes an appeal to the ‘Primus Motor’ – but rather than a moment of spiritual contemplation this would appear to

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be an internal dialogue with his own ego.54 We must remember that at the beginning of the play Machevill, rather than Machiavelli, regards religion as a ‘toy’. However, Barabas does not trivialize this cultural marker, but deploys it carefully on stage as a strategic resource for identity construction: Oh thou that with a fiery pillar led’st The sons of Israel through the dismal shades, Light Abraham’s offspring; and direct the hand Of Abigail this night; or let the day Turn to eternal darkness after this. (II.i.12–16)

Interestingly, Barabas propounds the view that ‘his people’ would not have had to worry about the politics of multiracial relations if it were not for the historical legacy of imperialism. Within this line of thinking, the Jews had no need of the ‘never circumcised’ until ‘Titus and Vespasien conquered us’ and the fall of Jerusalem took place in AD 70 (II.iii.8–10). In such short insights, Marlowe’s drama indicates once again that subjectivity in this dramatic world is rooted in the interminable dialectic between material and symbolic planes of signification. Equally importantly, in its unswerving devotion to temporal gain, Malta may become for its audience a symbolic city of damnation where, in general, any experience of loss is avenged rather than mourned. Such a city stands as yet another to add to the list of antitheses to Augustine’s City of God.55 As Abigail expires at his feet, Friar Bernardine can only lament that she dies, ‘a virgin too, that grieves me most’ (III.vi.41). Whilst Bellamira reminisces over the extent of her trading empire across the seas (‘From Venice merchants, and from Padua / Were wont to come rare-witted gentlemen’ (III.i.6–7)), Barabas excites the imaginations of the rival friars with tales of Florence, Venice, Antwerp, London, Seville, Frankfurt, Lubeck, Moscow, and where not Have I debts owing; and in most of these, Great sums of money lying in the banco. (IV.i.71–4)

The friars’ responses are all too predictable in this city: Jacomo Bernardine

Oh good Barabas come to our house. Oh no, good Barabas come to our house. (IV.i.77–8)

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The monastic orders of the Catholic Church depicted in this play are as fond of appropriation as any other faction and they welcome the acquisition of the hero’s house for their own uses.56 Nevertheless, in order to acquire the ‘new-made nunnery’, the nuns must forsake the ‘infinite riches’ of their own ‘little room’ to pass through a crowded city: First Nun

for we love not to be seen: ’Tis thirty winters long since some of us Did stray so far amongst the multitude. (I.ii.305–7)

With characteristic alacrity, Barabas shows himself more than able to transform the potential of his confiscated living space: Hoping ere long to set the house afire; For though they do awhile increase and multiply, I’ll have a saying to that nunnery. (II.iii.89–91)

Clearly, a profoundly significant cultural marker in Marlowe’s dramatic landscape, which Clare Harraway has proposed as ‘an Ellis Island writ large’, is that of race.57 Friedrichs has emphasized: Taking Europe as a whole, however, the most openly and conspicuously marginalized town-dwellers were certainly the Jews . . . the distinctness of the Jewish way of life and the historically embittered relationship between Judaism and Christianity made the Jews into objects of intense curiosity and powerful emotions even in places where none of them actually lived.58

Jews had been officially expelled under the reign of Edward I in 1290 from England and were only formally welcomed back during the Commonwealth period in 1656. Nor, it should be added, were such expulsions and racial tensions unknown as the sixteenth century drew to a close in Elizabethan London. Popular anxieties surrounding what was seen as economic exploitation by foreign merchants led to what have been called the anti-alien riots in the streets of the capital in the 1590s. Moreover, by 1601, Elizabeth’s government itself was apparently concentrating upon a quite different community for deportation: ‘the Queen’s Majesty is discontented at the great number of negars and blackamoores which are crept into the realm since the troubles between

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her Highness and the King of Spain, and are fostered here to the annoyance of her own people.’59 However, in the period 1290–1656 when the Jews were formally denied access to the kingdom, it has been estimated that there were no more than eighty to a hundred Jews in London at any one time; and, if they remained within the Hebrew faith, it would have had to be practised in the utmost secrecy.60 Pursuing the Volpone analogy, it is notable that Marlowe’s Malta accommodates its Jewish members in a markedly different fashion from that of Renaissance Venice. The republic attracted much attention across Europe for its treatment of a community of Jews numbering in the region of 1,500. In Venice, the city’s spatial lexicon extended to neologisms such as the word ‘ghetto’: here, Jews were forced to wear special clothing and live within a stipulated area, and were locked in every night. Their livelihoods were regulated so that they might only lend money, practise medicine and pawn objects, for example; and they were required to pay heavy taxes for those ‘privileges’.61 Nevertheless, compared with their treatment elsewhere in Europe, this may be deemed enlightened. In Marlowe’s Malta, it becomes increasingly evident that the urban environment is rendered as a brutal condensation of competitive social relations in evidence across the known world. From a historical perspective, Friedrichs stresses: ‘the positive role played by the Jews in the perpetually cash-poor economic system of early modern Europe was often appreciated more readily by political and social elites than by the poorer Christians who perceived Jews only as usurers.’62 Hitherto it would appear that a magnificent narrative of ownership has enabled Barabas to challenge strategically the persecution which would have been his due in this racist but more profoundly materialist society. As the play unfolds, Barabas seeks to elude control of disciplinary cultural elites by concealing the locations of his wealth. However, the defensive cultural spaces he produces in quick succession are shown to be appropriated by the very enemies who are trying to manage him by reducing him to a stereotyped object of revulsion. It cannot be stressed often enough that The Jew of Malta is a study in prejudice of many different kinds. The text repeatedly draws attention to received thinking and animosities and interrogates them through dramatic provocation. Repeatedly, critics of this play have observed that Edward Alleyn interpreted this role dressed in gabardine with a long nose and red hair. Thus, in addition to partially fulfilling some expectations of the Vice figure and red-wigged Judas of medieval drama,

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Barabas’ dramatic presence is clearly built on the availability of vigorous prejudices inherited from gospel interpretations and proverbial traditions of thinking towards a community which, in Ferneze’s words, ‘. . . stand[s] accursed in the sight of heaven’ (I.ii.64).63 At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Charles Lamb condemned Marlowe’s hero as ‘a mere monster, brought in with a large painted nose, to please the rabble’.64 Indeed, more recently in his discussion of the play in the context of Marx’s On the Jewish Question, Stephen Greenblatt has confided: ‘there is something unsavoury, inexcusable, about both works . . . they are, I would insist, defiled by the dark forces they are trying to exploit, used by what they are trying to use.’65 It is undeniable that Marlowe is being deliberately confrontational in his dramatization of an urban environment whose vicious mores are so extreme that they represented for Eliot a diet of ‘terribly serious, even savage comic humour’.66 Nevertheless, rather than the play being ‘defiled’ by the ‘dark forces’ it offers for our consideration, I would contend that it is the spectators who may indeed feel soiled as we are asked to bear witness to gross human failings of all kinds and to the terrifying prospect that Marlowe’s audiences down the centuries are being counted and may be found wanting: Marlowe does not, however, ask us to identify with Barabas, who is deftly presented so as to give the unpleasant impression such as is made by members of any minority group, appearing at one time servile, at another arrogant, at one time secretive, at another demonstrative, and constantly discomfiting us with reminders that we do not know all the same things, or think of those we do in the same way. At a deeper level, we perceive that, like Machevill of the Prologue, he weighs not men. He does not need us personally and does not like us; and, in common with the Christians of Malta, we feel much the same about him.67

Marlowe’s play leaves us in no doubt not only how appalling persecution and racism are, but also how degrading, and indeed inadequate, they are as a means of proceeding for humanity. Nonetheless such habits of thinking beleaguered early modern society as much as they do our own: Luther famously contended in a marginal note to his commentary on Galatians that ‘the Papistes are our Iewes which molest vs no lesse, than the Iewes did Paule.’68 Ultimately, Marlowe’s ‘savage’ humour renders this dramatic spectacle all the more sobering because it probes the ways in which humanity negotiates with the unfamiliar space

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of the Other, be it religious, sexual, political or, as in this case, racial.69 However, at no point does The Jew of Malta allow us to indulge in any sentimental reflexes towards the protagonist who finds himself amongst ‘swine-eating Christians, / Unchosen nation, never circumcised’ (II.iii.7–8). In the exposure of his flaws, Barabas may be a representative human being but, as the presence of Abigail and the ‘three Jews’ indicates, he is not necessarily representative of Jewry itself. Wilbur Sanders argues: ‘It is fairly easy to show that [Barabas’] “Jewishness” actually defines nothing at all – it is, in fact, a subject the play investigates . . . Neither did the existence of a Jew stereotype prevent individual Elizabethans from adapting, modifying or simply rejecting the stereotype.’70 Clare Harraway has proposed: ‘Barabas creates a curriculum vitae which any Elizabethan Vice would be proud to call his own.’71 However, Marlowe’s play carefully investigates the irrepressible cultural appetite for stereotypes variously deployed by audiences on and off stage: to justify excessive behaviours; to control negated identities; and to promote fantasies of power by insisting that the cultural Other become ossified in a fixed symbolic space. As the denouement of the play indicates, such demonized identities and spaces are necessary in a society which is failing to distinguish between its Self and Other. It is interesting to note that on the eve of the readmission of the Jews in 1656, such anxiety-ridden debates were still clearly unfolding in Cromwellian England: in A Short Demurrer to the Jewes (1656), William Prynne ranted at his readers: ‘the Jews themselves in all ages [have] been principle firebrands of sedition both in their own land and all places where they have dispersed.’72 Whatever the generic confusion surrounding Marlowe’s play, its hero can never be dismissed as some clown shipped in from the world of the commedia dell’arte, as Richard Sennett would have us believe: ‘Marlowe forms Barabas, the Maltese Jew, into a figure of fun, made merely contemptible because of his greed.’73 We are repeatedly prevented from inscribing Barabas with any facility into a discourse of persecution reserved for God’s chosen people: when the hero does attempt to promote a Jewish community with any conviction, it is as a gathering of plutocrats, fissured by geographical distance and by responses to the doctrine of civic obedience in Malta. They say we are a scattered nation: I cannot tell, but we have scambled up

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Cultural Marginality in The Jew of Malta More wealth by far than those that brag of faith. There’s Kirriah Jairim, the great Jew of Greece, Obed in Bairseth, Nones in Portugal, Myself in Malta, some in Italy, Many in France, and wealthy every one: Ay, wealthier far than any Christian. (I.i.120–7)

Any community (ethnic, religious, urban or otherwise) which Barabas is able to envisage draws its meaning from the accumulation of wealth. Moreover, unlike Jonson’s Venetian magnifico who delights in deceit, Barabas attributes points of significance on his world map in accordance with the distribution of saleable resources. He is keenly aware of his exclusion from many of the determining power relations of Malta, and this fires his hatred for the world in general; and as Ithamore acknowledges, this liminal experience has led to the merchant creating a secret topography for the city: ‘he hides and buries [his riches] up as partridges do their eggs, under the earth’ (IV.ii.60–1). Whilst race is clearly a primary marker which the Maltese deploy in the representation of themselves and others, it is not Marlowe’s sole means of introducing his audience to the complexities of the crowded space in this cosmopolitan city. It should not be surprising, for example, given the tradition of pastoral writing by urban dwellers that, in the midst of this degenerate culture, Bellamira should endeavour to seduce Ithamore and fashion romance in terms of pastoral retreat. Assisted by Pilia-Borza (pigbeast/pickpurse), the down-at-heel prostitute envisages contentment in the play in the same way as the protagonist by creating a privatized and unviolated habitat – here, a rural refuge from a settlement whose ambitious inhabitants are always interrogating the authority of space and ownership: Pilia-Borza

Faith, walking the back lanes through the gardens I chanced to cast mine eye up to the Jew’s counting-house, where I saw some bags of money, and in the night I clambered up with my hooks, and as I was taking my choice, I heard a rumbling in the house; so I took only this, and run my way: but here’s the Jew’s man. (III.i.17–22)

In yet another of the play’s defections, Ithamore transfers the allegiances of his body as well as the care of his master’s fortune to this new group of scavengers. He even rifles through Marlowe’s own lyrics to ‘live with me and be my love’ in order to attract the affections of Bellamira:

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Content, but we will leave this paltry land, And sail from hence to Greece, to lovely Greece, I’ll be thy Jason, thou my golden fleece; Where painted carpets o’er the meads are hurled, And Bacchus’ vineyards o’er-spread the world . . . Thou in those groves, by Dis above, Shalt live with me and be my love. (IV.ii.91–5, 100–1)

Like Marlowe’s Shepherd, Ithamore is keenly aware of the economic realities of human existence in any given setting. Indeed, in this reversed voyage (leading to Greece rather than Colchis) into the golden age of eternal spring, we are presented with a locus of seemingly inexhaustible space, uninhibited proprietorialism, and one governed by Dis instead of the Olympian ruler. Astraea’s justice and Jove’s legitimacy of power have no place here. The energetic intrigue centring upon Ithamore, Bellamira and PiliaBorza is, of course, keenly contextualized by that centring on the thwarted Abigail. However, even in this latter narrative of virtue beset, the audience has to move carefully in the attribution of its sympathy as even the loved one, Don Mathias, does not appear to much advantage in his first meeting with the hero’s daughter. Clearly at ease in the community of predators, he confides: better would she far become a bed Embracèd in a friendly lover’s arms, Than rise at midnight to a solemn mass.’ (I.ii.368–70).

Abigail, whose name means ‘father’s joy’, is bullied into behaving ‘like a cunning Jew’ by this same father; but she eventually attempts to define herself through her affective potential in direct opposition to his desires; and she pays for it with her life. Subsequently, the narcissistic Barabas disarmingly transfers his attention to a more accommodating apprentice: First be thou void of these affections, Compassion, love, vain hope, and heartless fear, Be moved at nothing, see thou pity none, But to thyself smile when the Christians moan. (II.iii.171–4)

Subsequently, Abigail is forced to acknowledge her father as the effective murderer of Lodowick and Mathias. However, as has been appreciated

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above, her flight from villainy to the convent is no escape at all for the same appetites are apparent there as in the streets and counting houses outside. If Barabas believes himself to be empowered, if not emancipated, later by the death of his daughter, it should be remembered, as Greenblatt has justly underlined, that ‘the family is at the centre of most Elizabethan and Jacobean drama as it is at the centre of the period’s economic and social structure; in Marlowe, it is something to be neglected, despised, or violated.’74 Barabas never really convinces the audience of his capacity to feel tenderness for his daughter: ‘Oh girl, oh gold, oh beauty, oh my bliss!’ (II.i.55); he confesses in a carefully engineered moment of dramatic irony that he values Abigail ‘as Agamemmon did his Iphigen’ (I.i.137). For her father, Abigail’s duty is to retain her value in this cosmopolitan culture: Barabas reminds her above all to ‘keep your maidenhead’ (II.iii.229). This lone woman, whose virtue renders her vulnerable, can find no way of formulating an identity independent of patriarchal value systems. Ultimately reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Richard III in his courtship of the Lady Anne, in an outrageous violation of human kinship Barabas makes a gift of her murder to his new-adopted heir, Ithamore: And for thy sake, whom I so dearly love, Now shalt thou see the death of Abigail, That thou mayst freely live to be my heir. (III.iv.61–3)75

Unsurprisingly, Marlowe’s play draws to a close in an orgy of violence. The Turkish leader, Calymath, delights in having viewed the city, seen the sack, And caused the ruins to be new repaired, Which with our bombards’ shot and basilisks’, We rent in sunder at our entry. (V.iii.1–4)

In fact, the audience is constantly asked to bear witness to the major characters’ appetite for annihilated or imploding spaces. Calymath’s sentiments should be placed alongside those of Ferneze who suggested earlier to the Bashaw that rather than submit to him, ‘First will we raze the city walls ourselves, / Lay waste the island, hew the temples down’ (III.v.13–14); and indeed the vengeful Barabas himself resolves in the final act, ‘I’ll help to slay their children and their wives, / To fire the churches, pull their houses down’ (V.i.64–5). Barabas’ mind is superla-

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tively exercised by his power to prey on others and to secure an outlet, albeit hubristic, for his venom: ‘Now tell me, worldlings, underneath the sun, / If greater falsehood ever has been done’ (V.v.49–50). However, the merchant’s downfall is brought about by his failure to maintain his inhumanity, to stifle his capacity to trust: perhaps, as Pendry suggests, ‘for Marlowe, tragedy is the lot of those whose wits have deserted them.’76 In his Breffe Instruction, and Manner; How to Kepe, Marchantes Bokes, of Accomptes (1567), John Weddington argued that merchants, ‘ought to be diligent and verri surcumspect in all ther dowingis and writtingis and to se them selvez well to it, that thei be nat deceavid by to miche trustinge of other.’77 But Marlowe’s Barabas is unwilling to act like the lion and the fox as the true Machiavelli advised. Fearing the dangers and responsibilities of the vigorous government which Malta would require, Barabas becomes agitated: the possibility that he may become distracted from the business of private wealth creation is an overwhelming source of anxiety. He negotiates with Ferneze, who replies deviously, ‘I trust thy word’ (V.v.43). In her analysis of the play, Catherine Minshull is persuasive in promoting Ferneze as the text’s true Machiavellian.78 Nonetheless, whilst this line of approach may be illuminating up to a point, such an analysis fails to account for the text’s strategic distinction between the merchant who poisons his child and the governor who grieves for his murdered offspring. Whatever the case, it is to such a figure that Barabas foolishly declares, ‘I enlarge thee’ (V.ii.91). Ferneze’s victory and evocation of ‘Heaven’ at the end of the play are, of course, in no way reassuring; and the society of Malta remains as terrifyingly vicious and unequal as it was in the beginning.79 This is still a community in which ‘Every one’s price is written on his back’ (II.iii.3). Burton Pike argues: ‘the Renaissance ideal of the city is presented in terms of fixed spatial relationships embodying an ideal cosmic order.’80 However, the only awareness of perspective and proportion, so beloved of Renaissance architects, which is made available at Ferneze’s victory is focused on the ‘craz’d vessel’ of the cauldron – a torment which Barabas himself had thought up. This is the vessel in which Barabas finds himself being cooked at the end of the play in Marlowe’s deservedly celebrated coup de théâtre.81 Marjorie Garber concludes that each of Marlowe’s plays ‘finds its closure in enclosure: the inner stage, or discovery space, becomes a version of hell, and a place of final entrapment.’82 However, The Jew of Malta may not necessarily be striking such a sonorous note of moral solemnity in its final scene. There is no reason to believe at the

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end of the play that Marlowe has chosen to relax the tensions of complex ironies which have been operating throughout. Perhaps, in this choking city environment, the Jew of Malta has at last found in this deadly, collapsible space, what Bachelard termed, ‘intimate space, space that is not open to just anybody’.83

Chapter Three ‘Here is my space’: The Politics of Appropriation in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra All those persons whose lyues haue beene such as are to bee followed for their excellencie in vertue, or else to be fledde for their excellencie in vice, are meete to be chronicled.1 Thomas Blundeville The True Order and Methode of Wryting and Reading Hystories (1574) Man is a rope stretched betwixt beast and Superman – a rope over an abyss . . . Man is great in that he is a bridge and not a goal: man can be loved in that he is a transition and a perishing.2 Nietzsche Thus Spake Zarathustra

The rich diversity of interests contained within Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra offers its audiences seemingly endless interpretations regarding human experience. Most importantly, this text rapidly impresses upon us how multiple versions of human experience may be seen to dwell within one cultural locus – and indeed, how human subjects can generate a host of varied planes of meaning for themselves simultaneously. Most importantly for the purposes of the present study, this Jacobean tragedy makes available for detailed scrutiny the social construction of place. Here, the political drive towards self-affirmation is shown to be intimately linked to the continuing narrativization of the physical reality. Such endeavours to endow the environment with psychological and cultural significance engage closely with Edward W. Soja’s contention: ‘space in itself may be primordially given, but the organization, and meaning of space is a product of social translation, transformation and experience.’3 The complexity of such fields of inquiry is compounded by the increasing awareness, stimulated as Shakespeare’s play unfolds, that all forms of cultural space are condemned to a continual state of flux. Such a conclusion was to become irresistible, for example, for the melancholy Walter Ralegh imprisoned in the Tower and it clearly underpins the dialectic of his cornucopian text The History of the World (1614):

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as there is a continuance of motion in natural liuing things, and as the sap and iuyce, wherein the life of Plants is preserued, doth euermore ascend and descend; so is it with the life of man, which is alwayes either increasing towards ripenesse and perfection, or declining and decreasing towards rottennesse and dissolution.4

More generally, the Elizabethan and Jacobean obsession with mutability and its all-pervading influence in this lower, sublunary realm is everywhere in evidence from writing of the period. Most famously, Spenser lamented: ‘the ever-whirling wheel of Change . . . wrong of right and bad of good did make.’5 Of equal note, however, is the striking fascination amongst early modern writers (e.g. Marlowe, Lodge, Spenser, Shakespeare, Chapman, Drayton) with the Ovidian discourse of metamorphosis which was excited in large measure in response to Arthur Golding’s fluent translation of Ovid’s text in the 1560s. From a wider perspective, it becomes increasingly apparent from the study of early modern texts that the abiding cultural anxiety surrounding the mutable all too often became a dominant lens through which the age came to formulate ideas of cultural space per se. Victor G. Kiernan, amongst others, has proposed that in this period ‘consciousness of time was stimulated by widening consciousness of space, thanks to the explorers and the finding of unknown lands and seas.’6 The cartographic emphasis in a wide range of recent scholarship has demonstrated the vital currency of such speculations at the turn of the Elizabethan century in addition to our own.7 Of particular interest in this context are the capacities of supple early modern minds to be exercised at a given point by contrary discourses mapping cultural space (e.g. absence/presence; movement/stasis; knowledge/ignorance; ownership/dispossession). This is witnessed not only in the dynamic conceits of Donne’s lyrics, but surfaces in a multitude of Renaissance texts: Robert Burton was to confess, for example, in his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621): ‘I never travelled but in map or card, in which my unconfined thoughts have freely expatiated.’8 Alternatively, in Religio Medici (1642), Browne chose to invert these geographical spaces of discovery and find undiscovered countries within: ‘we carry with us the wonders that we seek without us; there is all Africa and her prodigies in us.’9 In such epistemological inquiries, the rescripting of one experiential space allows for the emergence of previously subjugated knowledges and desires. Indeed, in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, the interplay between the generation and diminishment of arenas in which

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to play out narratives of self-promotion remains a central focus of attention and is initiated early on in the text when Antony stresses that the repercussions of Fulvia’s warmongering ‘cannot endure my absence’, whilst Enobarbus underlines the anxieties surrounding Antony’s Egyptian ‘business’ which ‘wholly depends on [his] abode’ (I.ii.170–3) Here, as so often in this play, the unpicking of conventional systems of difference allows the subject to explore the availability of diversified cultural spaces for identity. Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch Of the ranged empire fall! Here is my space. Kingdoms are clay: our dungy earth alike Feeds beast as man; the nobleness of life Is to do thus. (I.i.33–7)

The very fluidity of Shakespeare’s dramatic environment excites human creativity and leads to, what L. Grossberg has termed in another context, ‘the proliferation of spatial vocabularies: . . . vocabularies in which images of margins, boundaries, positions, etc. abound’.10 These spatial interrogations are, of course, not only being enacted in textual worlds of experience. We need also to keep in mind the altering spaces engendered by early modern playhouses themselves as they transformed already suspect physical venues on the capital’s margins with a constantly changing spectacle of social and symbolic statement. No wonder then that they were rounded upon at regular intervals by the city authorities with accusations of misrule, provocation and excess. Kiernan contends: ‘for Londoners the theatres were a collective Stock Exchange of ideas of all sorts, a running commentary on life. Inevitably they were held in doubtful esteem, all the more because so popular.’11 Whilst Antony bemoans the volatile nature of an existence where the common people are slippery and kingdoms are clay, many lines of modern critical inquiry have concentrated upon the ‘corrosive’ effects of such ‘masterless men’ enacting the experiences of their social superiors. In Antony and Cleopatra, the emphasis upon competition, creativity and process is made apparent at the outset. Shakespeare’s protagonists (the ‘triple-turned whore’ and ‘the triple pillar of the world transformed into a strumpet’s fool’) are clearly demonstrated to be in a transitional state: it remains a moot point critically whether to term this state one of evolution, decline or a complex hybrid of the two. In the much-cited speech above, Antony determines to devalue the myths of belonging

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centred upon imperial Rome in favour of a newly adopted and newly converted homeland established in the Nile kingdom. Significantly, the Roman chooses not only to reassert a new context for the construction of his identity but, in addition, to appropriate the apparently vacant space of Egypt – ‘here is my space.’ R. Malcolm Smuts has argued: ‘rather than picturing Elizabethan and early Stuart cultural history as being pulled towards a revolutionary transformation, it is often more instructive to regard it as being pushed from behind by the unfinished business of the Reformation and European religious wars.’12 Certainly, such a paradigm of early modern cultural experience governed by unresolved historical pressures is persuasive; and interestingly, it clearly underpins the developments of the dramatic world in Shakespeare’s tragedy with its vigorous engagement with an unfinished Roman past: Pompey

To you all three, The senators alone of this great world, Chief factors for the gods: I do not know Wherefore my father should revengers want, Having a son and friends; since Julius Caesar, Who at Philippi the good Brutus ghosted, There saw you labouring for him. (II.vi.8–14)

The possible topicality of heroic lovers from the Roman histories for an Elizabethan audience made J. W. Lever surmise that Shakespeare delayed the performance of the play until the reign of James I.13 D. R. Woolf has stressed: ‘examples from Roman history had greater currency all across Europe than national ones’ during the early modern period; and it is notable that theatrical interest in the Antony-and-Cleopatra narrative was not in any way limited to Shakespeare’s production.14 Just within the parameters of so-called closet drama can be counted, for example, Mary Sidney’s Tragedy of Antonie (1590), Samuel Daniel’s Cleopatra (1594) and Samuel Brandon’s Tragicomoedie of the vertuous Octavia (1598). Also numbered within the Sidney coterie, Fulke Greville was to burn his manuscript dealing with the same subject while Elizabeth was alive because many members in that creature (by the opinion of those few eyes which saw it) having some childish wantonness in them apt enough to be construed or strained to a personating of vices in the present governors

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and government . . . in the practice of the world, seeing the like instance not poetically, but really, fashioned in the Earl of Essex then falling (and ever till then worthily beloved both of Queen and people) – this sudden descent of such a greatness, together with the quality of the actors in every scene, stirred up the author’s second thoughts to be careful, in his own case.15

When Daniel penned another classicized drama, Philotas (1604), it was condemned by the Privy Council, being thought to be a commentary on the fortunes of Essex. The consequences led to Daniel’s loss of favour.16 Nonetheless Shakespeare’s Roman world is ‘stirred’ by the collapse of limits, conventions and proprieties. Philo draws attention to ‘this dotage of our general’s’ which ‘o’erflows the measure’ (I.i.1–2). The surplus or excessiveness of Egyptian culture (for example the Nile breaking its banks, the East’s penetration of supernatural realms of knowledge, its rejection of existence articulated solely in terms of realpolitik) constitutes its power of dérèglement; and, as much modern criticism has emphasized, such power in part serves to interrogate and problematize the phallocentrism of Rome.17 Indeed, more generally, the sustained counter-distinction of Rome and Egypt throughout the course of the play enables the two cultures to become theatrically persuasive for Shakespeare’s audiences and, in turn, encourages these same audiences to ponder the possibilities of alternative cultural orders. Sir Thomas Smith concluded in his Common-Wealth of England, and Maner of Government Thereof (1594) that whereas the good ruler ‘by equitie doth seeke the profite of the people as much as his own’, a tyrant may be identified in a leader who by force commeth to the monarchy against the wil of the people, breaketh lawes already made, at his pleasure, maketh other without the advise and consent of the people, and regardeth not the wealth of his Commons, but the aduancement of himself, his faction and his kindred.18

As Antony and Cleopatra unfolds, it emerges that neither Rome nor Egypt monopolizes early modern expectations of tyranny. The flexing of Caesar’s might is counterpointed throughout with Cleopatra’s deployment of her powers in deliberately disruptive, transgressive and, on occasions, contradictory formations in order to safeguard her cultural and/or erotic ambitions: ‘let it be, I am quickly ill, and well. / So Antony loves’ (I.iii.72–3). Like Tamora queen of the Goths in the earlier

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Titus Andronicus, Cleopatra comes to fulfil Rome’s worst fears of female cultural power in the shape of a high-born ‘foreign’ woman pitted against exclusively masculinist programmes of history-making. Indeed, the abiding wish of both Antony and Cleopatra to have an antagonistic political environment remapped is unsurprisingly decoded by their Roman spectators in terms of subversion, inconsistency and weakness. In one of his incursions into the print culture of Jacobean society, Shakespeare’s contemporary Francis Bacon was keen to remind his readers of the risks involved in such undertakings: To speake now of the true Temper of Empire: It is a Thing rare, and hard to keep: For both Temper and Distemper consist of Contraries. But it is one thing to mingle Contraries, another to enterchange them . . . And certaine it is, that Nothing destroieth Authority so much, as the unequall and untimely Enterchange of Power Pressed too farre, and Relaxed too much.19

In Shakespeare’s text, the cultural tensions involved in frantic ‘enterchange’, the continual ‘pressing’ and ‘relaxing’ of political power, are recorded in detailed and diverse ways – this may be seen, for example, when the protagonists decide to rescript the experience of defeat with the celebration of ‘one other gaudy night’: Antony

Cleopatra

Call to me All my sad captains; fill our bowls once more; Let’s mock the midnight bell. It is my birthday. I had thought t’have held it poor. But since my lord Is Antony again, I will be Cleopatra. (III.xiii.183–7)

During this same gaudy night, a contemplative Antony pays poignant tribute to his followers; and, as a consequence, Enobarbus is rendered ‘an ass . . . onion-eyed’ and begs his general, ‘transform us not to women’ (IV.ii.35–6). Even when Montaigne turned his meditations to the school of Love, he inquired, ‘Qui ne sçait, en son eschole, combien on procede au rebours de tout ordre?’20 Nonetheless, in an increasingly hostile world, the protagonists’ irresistible desires to affirm their cultural authority and status compel them to insist upon their creative power to transform the importance of political place (in terms of both status and locus) through subterfuge, innovative ritual and arresting

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performances of nostalgia. Even at the end of the play, when the tragic heroine is promoted by the imperial Roman regime as captive queen, she wishes to retain at least a remnant of her former power (expressed at this point in economic terms) in order to reinterpret and to undermine Caesar’s triumph. Cleopatra Seleucus Caesar

What have I kept back? Enough to purchase what you have made known. Nay, blush not, Cleopatra; I approve Your wisdom in the deed. (V.ii.146–9)

Like Stephen Greenblatt’s greedy ‘New World voyagers’, Caesar finds himself ‘on foreign shores’ but does not allow himself to be ‘infantilized’ by the queen’s stratagems: ‘it is rather the natives whom [the voyagers] see as children in relation to European languages.’21 The forces of transformation are frequently lauded in the terra incognita of the Nile kingdom, whereas the Roman mind characteristically draws reassurance from permanence. The western emperor resents the protagonists’ attempts to blur the distinctions between private/public; politic/erotic; government/festivity; duty/pleasure. Unsurprisingly, the shrill-tongued Fulvia and the scarce-bearded Caesar are derided by Cleopatra and exploited as symbols of uncreativity by a queen whose power is articulated through its protean qualities: If you find him sad, Say I am dancing: if in mirth, report That I am sudden sick. (I.iii.3–5)

Caesar’s inability to promote knowledge of the protagonists in reliable terms will remain a persistent anxiety for him throughout the play. Indeed, the volatile organization of cultural space emerges as a leitmotif in Antony and Cleopatra and serves ultimately to enrich audience understanding of human potential. Shakespeare’s dramatic narrative draws attention to the chaotic multifariousness of human experience by highlighting the protagonists’ ability to affirm alternative and unexpected value-systems which may coexist and contradict prevailing ideological assumptions at work in this dramatic world. Once again in such a debate, Bacon’s textual inquiries become an interesting referent – most especially in his eagerness to alert his reader to the dangers of wrongly assessing cultural potential based on inhibiting schemes of received thinking:

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The Population may appeare by Musters: And the Number and Greatnesse of Cities and Townes, by Cards and Maps. But yet there is not any Thing amongst Civill Affaires, more subject to Errour, than the right valuation, and true Judgement, concerning the Power and Forces of an Estate. The Kingdome of Heaven is compared, not to any great Kernell or Nut, but to a Graine of Mustard-seed; which is one of the least Graines, but hath in it a Propertie and Spirit, hastily to get up and spread. So are there States, great in Territorie, and yet not apt to Enlarge, or Command; And some, that have but a small Dimension of Stemme, and yet apt to be the Foundations of Great Monarchies.22

Shakespeare’s play opens at a moment of cultural schizophrenia in which Antony is confronted with a multiplicity of different ways to redefine his own authority and sense of belonging. This is made evident, for example, with regard to Antony’s response to the death of his wife Fulvia: The present pleasure, By revolution lowering, does become The opposite of itself: she’s good, being gone; The hand could pluck her back that shoved her on. (I.ii.121–4)

In response, Enobarbus advises his lord that ‘the tears live in an onion, that should water this sorrow’ (I.ii.167–8). However, neither the protagonists nor Shakespeare’s audiences are allowed to resolve their understanding of human experience in such absolute terms. As soon becomes apparent, Enobarbus can only find solace in such unnuanced declarations because of his inadequate appreciation of the dramatic environment. The more finely textured mind of Antony acknowledges the cultural dilemmas compelled upon him by the morally and emotionally chequered world of the play. Subsequently, Cleopatra also comes to understand how mutable the stage is upon which human experience is played out. Moreover, like the other major political players, she acknowledges that the precarious power relationships which operate as organizing principles for her world usually result in the promotion and/or aggravation of inequalities: It were for me To throw my sceptre at the injurious gods, To tell them that this world did equal theirs Till they had stol’n our jewel. (IV.xv.75–8)

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In the ‘Proclamation for the Uniting of England and Scotland’ (1603), the new English sovereign James I determined utterlie to extinguishe as well the name as substance of the bordouris, I mean the difference between them and other parts of the Kingdome. For doing quhairof it is necessarie that all querrellis amongst thaim be reconcyled and alls straingeness between the nations quyte removed.23

Such a rescripting of political space, an erasing of territorial borders and ‘a time of universal peace’ was to be envisaged just a few years later on stage by Shakespeare’s Caesar. With an analogous critical concern with dramatic peripheries, Roland Barthes famously declared in his study of Racinian tragedy: ‘l’Extérieur est en effet l’étendue de la non-tragédie.’24 In the case of Shakespearean dramaturgy however, the delineation of borders and indeed the alienness of such an ‘exterior’ in Antony and Cleopatra is unsettled and problematized as the textual centre of gravity moves with such rapidity across the known world. The very ownership of such ‘boundaries’ is repeatedly challenged in the play in material, cultural and symbolic terms. Operations of cultural appropriation and silencing may of course be expressed at a territorial, imperializing level, but this text encourages us to adopt a whole range of lines of vision on the subject matter, directing attention to such fields of inquiry as those of time, myth, gender, language, history and so on. Egypt clearly constitutes the orientalizing space of Shakespeare’s text in which fantasies of possession may be conjured up in the minds of the colonizers. Catherine Belsey stresses: ‘the primary Orientalism of this play consists in locating the East beyond the reach of Law, a realm of pleasure where everything is permitted, where waiting women talk frankly about sex, and even eunuchs think what Venus adulterously did with Mars.’25 Roman fascination with the difference articulated by and through the Nile kingdom may initially appear to communicate the inadequacy of the imperializers’ world and establish parameters within which its proposed acts of territorial claims must be viewed. However, rather than linking the foreignness of Egypt to its unpossessability, irrepressible Roman interest in this distant land appears to be preparatory to the violent expression of its imperial ambitions. In addition, it becomes apparent that Caesar’s destructive urges with regard to the protagonists are intimately linked to his desire to enjoy a great measure of the awe which they have excited across the known world. However, instead of being associated with the infinite

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variety of the protagonists, as the play opens Caesar is frequently inscribed within the demeaning operations of loss and gain by his detractors (Pompey: ‘Caesar gets money where / He loses hearts’ (II.i.13–14)). Caesar’s most particular staging of contempt for Egyptian mores points to his remorseless attempts at power assertion as well as his meagre imaginative command. More generally, the customary Roman mode of disdain when confronted with the inhabitual must be closely juxtaposed with its energetic commitment to empire-building: in this way, the affirmation of Egyptian cultural vacancy leads inevitably to the legitimation of its annexation. In direct comparison with the rhetoric of a host of encounter narratives from the early modern period, Caesar’s imperial ambitions determine to ‘empty’ the desired territory of cultural meaning in order to eradicate any strategy for contradiction. As Shakespeare’s tragedy develops, Antony and Cleopatra’s ‘slippery’ engagement with Rome’s mission civilisatrice is in part expressed through the comic energies of language. The Egyptian proliferation of cultural space and meaning is recorded textually, for example, through linguistic comedy – most frequently, through the subversive pun. Roman humour is notable in general by its absence: Caesar is found to ‘frown’ at the ‘levity’ on Pompey’s boat, for example, which from a wider perspective may be viewed as an uninspiring Roman version of Egyptian revelry: ‘This is not yet an Alexandrian feast’ (II.vii.94). However, in Egypt even the expatriated Enobarbus finds the ability to quip with his general (I.ii.128ff.). When viewed within the larger context of the play, his unsettling ‘light answers’ can be seen to disorder further Roman perceptions of acquisition.26 Indeed, Antony and Cleopatra becomes a striking example of how language is constitutive rather than expressive of relations between cultural narrators and narratees. However, Shakespeare’s text does not allow his audience to embrace Egyptian cultural perspectives in an uncomplicated way and to evaluate Roman cultural codes simply as destructive, inhibiting and repressive. William Camden was far from unrepresentative for the period in his contention: This yoke of the Romanes although it were grievous, yet comfortable it proved and a saving health unto them: for that healthsome light of Iesus Christ shone withal upon the Britans . . . and the brightnesse of that most glorious Empire, chased away all savage barbarisme from the Britans mind, like as from other nations whom it had subdued.27

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Clearly, for many early modern minds, Rome was seen to have its own value-systems which excited their own pleasures and dynamized human desire in a variety of ways. At this point, it would seem as well to be mindful of Foucault’s assertion: power would be a fragile thing if its only function were to repress, if it worked only through the mode of censorship, exclusion, blockage and repression, in the manner of a great Superego, exercising itself only in a negative way. If, on the contrary, power is strong, this is because . . . it produces the effects at the level of desire – and also at the level of knowledge.’28

Sustained emphasis upon the Word and its power to legitimize, to signify presence, to record power and to map new concepts of authority is of continual interest in the play. Language is demonstrated as being a creative resource which all the main political players deploy in order to (re)formulate speaking positions within this culture. However, equally notable are the ways in which the antagonist Caesar wishes to articulate his newly acquired authority through the written word: Go with me to my tent, where you shall see How hardly I was drawn into this war, How calm and gently I proceeded still In all my writings. Go with me, and see What I can show in this. (V.i.73–7)

Before being able to express his generative potential for the future, Caesar turns to the past and its chronicles of the ‘doings’ of others. Paul Ricoeur has emphasized: ‘To do history is to produce something.’ and that we should not underestimate the fictive nature of that ‘something’.29 Caesar’s desire to reconfigure received ideas of Roman history (and, in the process, to initiate a bout of social amnesia) is animated by the need to reinterpret his perceived marginality in the march of history. Philip Sidney warned at the beginning of The Apology for Poetry (1595) that ‘self-love is better than any gilding to make that seem gorgeous wherein ourselves be parties.’30 In Shakespeare’s tragedy all of the main political players reveal their obsessive need to fulfil themselves through the pleasures of self-gratification and retrospection. In putting pen to paper, Caesar may be betraying not only his self-love but also the derivative nature of his political career whose narrative will,

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he hopes, be inscribed within and cited from the existing corpus of heroic Roman lives. In order to ensure this, he (like his adoptive father Julius Caesar) must become his own mythologizer. Like this murdered predecessor, he is endeavouring to mould the empire into an inherited dynastic space and, perhaps, to compensate for his future absence with textual plenitude. The vanity of Antony’s attempt to secure meaning in this way is made explicit throughout the play: ‘I and my sword will earn our chronicle’ (III.xiii.175). Indeed, Shakespeare’s protagonists increasingly try to block the powerful Roman discourse of triumphant imperialism with their own rhetoric of immortal longings: ‘I would they’d fight i’th’fire, or i’th’air; / We’d fight there too’ (IV.x.3–4). Nonetheless the narrative drive on Caesar’s part at the close of Shakespeare’s play may initially appear (at least in part) as a textual attempt at political exculpation, but it may also constitute a labour to codify the providential superiority of his ascendant order. With tales of military triumph over ‘underdeveloped’ lands and ‘improper’ Romans (such as Lepidus, Pompey and Antony), Caesar will seek to provide a mirror for future ages. Certainly, at this late stage in the play the new emperor in his every word and deed wishes to seal the gaps of time, repair the ravages of human experience and establish a continuity of heroic rule with Julius Caesar. Marsilio Ficino insisted in his Platonic Theology (1474): ‘in order for the mind’s attainment of its goal to be safe and undisturbed, it must be convinced that the possession of its ultimate goal will be everlasting.’31 The currency of Caesar’s ambitions, the yearning for fixity through the Logos, was widely in evidence in early modern texts which energetically circulated, negotiated and contested such claims. In Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrimes (1624), for example, Samuel Purchas was to stipulate: by writing Man seemes immortall, conferreth and consulteth with the Patriarks, Prophets, Apostles, Fathers, Philosophers, Historians, and learnes the wisdome of the Sages which have been in all times before him . . . and lastly, by his owne writings surviveth himself, remaines (litera scripta manet) thorow all ages a Teacher and Counsellor to the last of men: yea hereby God holds conference with men, and in his sacred Scriptures, as at first in the Tables of Stone, speakes to all.32

In Shakespeare’s play, Caesar needs to reinvent himself so that he too may outlast his age and become part of the Roman narratives of heroic lineage which are greeted with awe by the city-state. The boy-emperor

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wishes to triumph over time through the manipulation of the textual remains of the past, to re-create history and to delimit its meaning, but his endeavours to become legible, intelligible to the wider public, are in fact an exercise in political control. In the event, Rome’s privileged historical narratives are no more fixed or finalized than any other forms of discourse and will be absorbed into a cultural economy of remorseless appropriation, revision and exchange – resulting in what Gayatri Spivak has termed in another context ‘a future epoch of difference’.33 In spite of all this, the rising leader wishes to stress definitively his creative introduction of ‘redemptive’ time for the empire: The time of universal peace is near. Prove this a prosperous day, the three-nooked world Shall bear the olive freely. (IV.vi.5–7)

Demetrius, the sombre Roman spectator at the Alexandrian court, marvels that ‘Caesar with Antonius (is) priz’d so slight’ and confesses he is full sorry That he approves the common liar, who Thus speaks of him at Rome. (I.i.59–61)

In Rome, as soon becomes evident, Caesar has tried to impose a descending theory of power in which the word is mightier than the sword: Antony’s cultural status may thus be eroded by insult, rumour and propaganda before it is finally destroyed with armies and fleets. Nevertheless, the eastern emperor can never hope to destroy Rome as at least part-author of his meaning and, as a result, he repeatedly finds himself listening to the political achievements of other Romans. At the beginning of the play, he is compelled to attend to the ‘garboils’ (I.iii.61) awakened by Fulvia and Lucius and to the military successes of Labienus. Thus, at the very outset, Antony is forced to witness his political displacement through language. He soon comes to the conclusion that his authority and aspirations have been debased through the speech of those he despises – the Roman plebeians and his wife: Speak to me home, mince not the general tongue: Name Cleopatra as she is call’d in Rome; Rail thou in Fulvia’s phrase. (I.ii.102–4)

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Shakespeare’s text asks us to focus upon the ways in which language itself emerges as an integral part of the cultural inhumanity of Rome in its attacks upon the hero. The linguistic violence wrought upon Antony is intimately associated with the geographical violence at work in the empire as one cultural identity or space is reinvented in terms of another. The protagonists’ attempts to define spatial boundaries and practices are linked throughout the text to the fact that they have already been violated by Roman imperial drives. Gradually, the narrative of Antony, and indeed of Egypt, is being rewritten with the imperializers’ vocabulary. In Caesar’s eyes, this is a land whose political future will fall under the sway of ‘all the unlawful issue that their lust / . . . hath made between them’, if not redeemed at Roman hands (III.vi.7–8). At the beginning of the play, the beleaguered Antony determines to inscribe himself once again in the political discourse of empire through responses to ‘business . . . broached in the state’ (I.ii.169). Indeed, it is through the public act of speech that he first articulates this will-topower, this will to redefine himself in terms other than those of imperial subjugation. However, in keeping with the familiar paradigm of colonial aspiration, Caesar is intent upon trivializing the regime of the eastern empire that he is about to challenge: Let’s grant it is not Amiss to tumble on the bed of Ptolemy, To give a kingdom for a mirth, to sit And keep the turn of tippling with a slave, To reel the streets at noon, and stand the buffet With knaves that smell of sweat: say, this becomes him. (I.iv.16–21)

As the play unfolds, it becomes evident that Caesar’s resolve to trespass upon and ultimately to occupy the variously fetishized, sacralized and/or monumentalized spaces of the Nile kingdom is an endeavour to erase Egyptian pretensions to inviolability and transcendence. Nonetheless, in reality, the competition between both realms is concentrated upon a strikingly similar absolute desire for heroic narrative. The boyemperor’s various needs for propaganda and legitimation mean that Egypt must be characterized with a counter-discourse of hedonistic performances – a production of prohibited space. From this perspective, Antony has been undone by his amorous pursuits in the eastern empire and must be made to conclude, like the earlier Shakespearean hero Romeo in respect of his mistress, ‘Thy beauty has made me effeminate’

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(III.i.116). Edward Said has stressed: ‘all cultures tend to make representations of foreign cultures the better to master or in some way control them’; and at regular intervals the cultural space of Egypt and all its power relations are belittled thus on the scornful lips of the western emperor.34 The dramatic intrigue at this point exposes clearly that the Roman drive towards empire-building is not solely about political economy; its surveillance and rescripting of ‘foreign’ borders betrays an awareness of how subjects construct limits between themselves and the Other. Caesar’s systematic representation of Egypt for the domestic market constitutes a crucial element of his project of government: a commitment to polarize the political environment and thus, from his perspective, to eradicate illegitimacy and to extinguish indeterminacy. In short, Antony must be made to look like Lepidus, ‘called into a huge sphere, and not be seen to move in’t’ (II.vii.14–15): Caesar

No, my most wrongèd sister. Cleopatra Hath nodded him to her. He hath given his empire Up to a whore. (III.vi.65–7)

As Michel de Certeau has underlined at length, ‘official historiography . . . tries to make everyone believe in the existence of a national space.’35 We should note also at this point that the regime in Egypt is fully cognizant of how valuable such Roman techniques of prosopopoeia may be in the political battle for survival: Cleopatra

who knows If the scarce-bearded Caesar have not sent His powerful mandate to you: ‘Do this, or this; Take in that kingdom, and enfranchise that. Perform’t, or else we damn thee.’ (I.i.20–4)

In his discussion of Freudian theorizing, Steve Pile has proposed a conceptual lens through which to consider human experience whereby ‘space and place cease to be external to the individual but become the condition of the existence of subjectivity, where the subject is placed within multiple, interacting geographies of meaning, identity and power.’36 It is clear that constructions of geographic space can be closely aligned with processes of identity-formation; however, Shakespeare’s play also chronicles ways in which material reality may be seen to impact upon social and symbolic planes of signification and interrogates

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how political attempts at the mastering of space may inform our understanding of cultural existence: ‘Let his shames quickly / Drive him to Rome’ (I.iv.72–3). The cultural decisions to racialize and, indeed, to moralize geographic spaces such as those of Shakespeare’s Egypt where the eyes of Antony, once the ‘plated Mars’, now bend to ‘a tawny front’ have their analogues elsewhere in early modern writing. George Abbot’s Brief Description of the Whole World . . . Newly Augmented and Enlarged (1605), for example, puts before the reader a ‘countrie of Egypt’ where the inhabitants there, are not black, but rather dunne, or tawnie. Of which colour, Cleopatra was obserued to be . . . And of that colour do those runnagates (by deuices make themselues to be) who goe vp and downe the world vnder the name of Egyptians; being in deed, but counterfaites, and the refuse, or rascalitie of many nations.37

Geraldo de Sousa, for example, has mapped out illuminatingly the genealogy of textual influence from classical times onwards which may have served to place the Egyptian/gypsy in a derogatory light.38 It is clearly true that in the case of Thomas Dekker’s The Bell-Man of London (1608) with its evocation of a Kentish criminal underworld, such expectations are indeed borne out. Here, the gang leader rallies his fraternity in the following manner: ‘let vs my braue Tawny-faces, not giue vp our patched cloakes, nor change our coppies, but as we came begers out of our mothers bellies, so resolue and set vp your staues upon this, to returne like beggers into the bowels of the earth.’39 At the close of his life, even the embittered Antony is willing to conclude, This foul Egyptian hath betrayèd me . . . Like a right gypsy hath at fast and loose Beguiled me to the very heart of loss. (IV.xii.10, 28–9)

Nonetheless, confronted with the burgeoning cult of Caesarism, the resistant Cleopatra continues to register a subversive voice on the question of origins, most particularly in her own interpretation of the recent past. As anarchic cultural narrator, Cleopatra’s past becomes a space where dignity, rather than survival, may be realized and cherished – and, as a result, it acts corrosively on Caesar’s present. It is clear that in the period after Antony’s death, Cleopatra wishes to exercise a power for her lover that was denied him during his life. The queen remains for her

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audiences on and off stage an increasingly creative force in her challenges to Rome: she determines to interrogate Roman hegemonic discourses through her insistent determination to praise the dead. Such dangerous imaginative powers cannot be circumscribed or silenced in any conclusive fashion, as had already been demonstrated in the earlier play, Julius Caesar. Cleopatra’s resolve to contextualize the impoverishing world which she believes Caesar offers not only undermines Roman narratives of heroism, progress and civilization, but also problematizes the gendering of such narratives. Caesar attempts to construct a grand imperial narrative, but his desire to limit its meaning is fraught with difficulties. Such meaning is no sooner inscribed in language than it is exceeded, overtaken by new narratives formulated by interpreting subjects across the empire – and those subjects are unreliable narrators of imperial ambitions. Recognizing the situation, the ‘boy-emperor’ must continually strive through violence, seduction or obligation to create, and/or to subjugate, listeners to his self-narratives – and this course of action is prompted by the realization that his own political imperialism, like Antony’s heroism, is provisional and may soon represent a conflicted cultural legacy. As has been appreciated above, both of Shakespeare’s protagonists seek to reconfigure prevailing narratives of experience and/or history in order to generate new spaces for cultural meaning: the tragedy draws attention, for example, to the ways in which they inflect mythic referencing strategically in order to secure a range of superlative cultural loci for themselves: Where souls do couch on flowers, we’ll hand in hand, And with our sprightly port make the ghosts gaze. Dido and her Aeneas shall want troops, And all the haunt be ours. (IV.xiv.51–4)

Such practices frequently lead to more thorny questions surrounding the very sourcing of authority in this lower world. In addition, these operations can also have a disruptive effect on existing perceptions of chronology, interrogate the implications of political ambition and illustrate the cultural traumas produced when contradictory discourses regarding human need and desire are articulated by political elites. Cleopatra is not only able to disrupt narratives of historical progress and male heroism so reassuring to Rome, but also to question and to reconfigure widely differing, but privileged fragments of the imperial

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past. Through a constant process of cultural rescripting, Cleopatra believes she can maintain, or at least preserve a measure of, her residual power and authority. As a consequence, the previous age of Julius Caesar for example, a defining moment in Roman self-narration, may be in an instant transformed into her ‘salad days, / When I was green in judgement, cold in blood’ (I.v.73–4). Elsewhere, the dejected queen may initially articulate her marginality with the cultural markers of race and time – and then immediately proceed to transform this discourse of selfabnegation into heroic/erotic self-assertion: with Phoebus’ amorous pinches black, And wrinkled deep in time. Broad-fronted Caesar, When thou wast here above the ground, I was A morsel for a monarch. (I.v.28–31)

Significantly, later in the play, Antony does not hesitate to rescript her memories: ‘I found you as a morsel, cold upon / Dead Caesar’s trencher’ (III.xiii.116–17). Most importantly, it is as myth-maker that Cleopatra determines to amplify perceptions of cultural fragmentation at work in this dramatic world so as to interrogate the allegedly ‘finished’ nature of the Roman past. At the very end of her life, she destabilizes the way in which Rome is bent upon resolving the problem of Antony’s cultural commitment through acts of public grief by radically questioning Roman narratorial skills regarding her dead emperor: ‘Think you there was, or might be, such a man / As this I dreamt of?’ (V.ii.93–4). At this critical moment in the tragic denouement, Cleopatra is much more representative of this dramatic world than she believes; she, like a host of others in the drama, mourns for a time when lack did not constitute subjectivity. Antony himself, for example, prosecutes a series of condemnations against his queen by proclaiming her to be a negating, sterilizing, emasculating, indeed absence-provoking agent: Have I my pillow left unpressed in Rome, Forborne the getting of a lawful race, And by a gem of women, to be abused, By one that looks on feeders?’ (III.xiii.106–9)

The protagonists’ performances of yearning and nostalgia are inevitably rejected by the ascendant order of Rome:

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Be a child o’th’time. Possess it, I’ll make answer. (II.vii.98–9)

Throughout Antony and Cleopatra, the forces of transition are being widely articulated across the known world in terms of confrontation and exploitation. Despite his gross political naïveté and the obsolete character of his value systems, Pompey is shown to be at least perceptive enough to acknowledge: ‘whiles we are suitors to their throne, decays / The thing we sue for’ (II.i.4–5). In the final phases of the dramatic narrative when audience attentions are liable to be monopolized by the protagonists’ staging of their own deaths, Shakespeare’s text insists upon a more comprehensive angle of vision. Antony’s demise, for example, is quickly re-expressed through the stunted mind of the turncoat Decretas; and, as a result, the text strategically secures yet another alternative record of the protagonists’ undertaking at a time of radical cultural division: Decretas

Thy death and fortunes bid thy followers fly. This sword but shown to Caesar, with this tidings, Shall enter me with him. (IV.xiv.111–13)

The deserting Enobarbus, visited with profound melancholy at the margins of this dramatic world, also chronicles the brutal collapse of Antony’s political order in Caesar’s camp: Alexas did revolt, and went to Jewry on Affairs of Antony; there did dissuade Great Herod to incline himself to Caesar, And leave his master Antony. For this pains Caesar hath hanged him. Canidius and the rest That fell away have entertainment, but No honourable trust. I have done ill, Of which I do accuse myself so sorely That I will joy no more. (IV.vi.12–20)

In the course of his career as a dramatist from Titus Andronicus to Cymbeline, Shakespeare revised his dramatic representations of ancient Rome regularly. Indeed, in such plays as Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra the expanding city-state is given a multitude of differing identities which coexist and are played off against each other in complex

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ways. However, in Antony and Cleopatra dramatic emphasis returns repeatedly to the imperializing energies of Rome, the undoing of its political opposition and the erratic nature of agency at work in this environment. As Enobarbus appreciates above, Caesar prepares a range of ritualistic humiliations for his enemies. In attempting to stage captivity-as-performance for Cleopatra, Caesar wishes to create a coup de théâtre before the very eyes of his imperial subjects. The containment of her body indicates not only the ultimate violation of her political status, but the decay of her grotesque cultural identity in Roman eyes. Caesar’s inhuman creativity seeks not only to repress, conceal and censure; it also wants to re-present the Egyptian queen ceremonially as mistress of politically and erotically deviant space. The artful Roman leader wishes to celebrate the diminution of his new-found subject with the carnival violence of the cage and the circus. The tragic heroine is lucid enough to foresee this: Cleopatra

Nay, ’tis most certain, Iras. Saucy lictors Will catch at us like strumpets, and scald rhymers Ballad us out o’tune. The quick comedians Extemporally will stage us, and present Our Alexandrian revels: Antony Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness I’ the posture of a whore. (V.ii.213–20)

Cleopatra’s retreat to the monument in the final phases of the play may be viewed as her last production of Egyptian space in defiance of Roman attempts at domination and appropriation. Antony had earlier been at pains to stress that such edifices are deeply inscribed in Egyptian cultural life. Even in the midst of this mysterious culture riddled with narratives of transcendence, Shakespeare’s audience is left in no doubt that the Nile kingdom knows how to measure its own resources and potential: they take the flow o’th’Nile By certain scales i’th’pyramid; they know By th’height, the lowness, or the mean, if dearth Or foison follow. (II.vii.17–20)

Cleopatra’s last bid to generate inviolable space in ‘her’ monument discloses yet another spatial power relation and inevitably indicates an

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attempt to heroize the final site of her court – to close off alternative, Roman readings.40 The endless repetition of spaces of refuge and humiliation produced in response to the expansionist tactics of Rome maintains an ongoing critique of the regime. Unsurprisingly, Cleopatra is unwilling to be ‘dressed’ for public consumption, to become a dancing bear at Caesar’s triumphal entry into Rome. The metadramatic irony of her contemptuous vision of the doings of the ‘quick comedians’ is lightly limned. However, the identification of the vox populi as a powerful yet volatile political force feeds the vigorous textual debate regarding the volatility of cultural organization in this dramatic world as a whole. The disaffected Antony can only lament the nature of our slippery people, Whose love is never linked to the deserver Till his deserts are past. (I.ii.183–5)

A more embittered Caesar derides ‘this common body’ which like to a vagabond flag upon the stream, Goes to and back, lackeying the varying tide, To rot itself with motion. (I.iv.44–7)

Inevitably, all the rulers in this play are most resentful when they think they identify a distorting, de-heroizing effect in popular narratives of government. Acknowledging the direst fate for a governor, the wrathful Antony threatens his anarchic lover with the verbal violence of the plebeian world she despises: Let [Caesar] take thee, And hoist thee up to the shouting plebeians, Follow his chariot, like the greatest spot Of all thy sex. (IV.xii.33–6)

These metadramatic places in which the future of the protagonists is remorselessly narrated in terms of tasteless performance must inevitably rouse Shakespeare’s audiences to ponder their own theatrical appetites and, indeed, their own cultural commitment. Antony can summon up such vehemence in his threats to his queen because it is painfully clear that he fears a similar fate:

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From a wider perspective, it is evident that the cultural Other of the populace continually redefines the violent potential of the non-heroic in this dramatic world. The interplay between the populace’s energies of contempt and admiration is constantly foregrounded in Antony and Cleopatra and indeed forms an organizing principle for political success within the text. However, Shakespeare’s interrogations of power, frequently communicated in this play in terms of the heroic and the counter-heroic, clearly interconnect with more general discourses of virtus and governance available within early modern ideological codes. Antony’s ‘unmanly’ decision not to prosecute his authority and ambitions adequately in military terms is seen in the end to invalidate his political claims to the eastern empire. In Shakespeare’s play, the larger world of imperial communities is constituted necessarily through diegetic spaces. Such populations are perceived as being profoundly aware of their own vulnerability. Moreover, given the cultural silencing of their voices, their possibilities of political activism appear to be limited to acts of violence. At the beginning of the play, the audience learns that Italy ‘shines o’er with civil swords’ (I.iii.45). Subsequently the oscillating loyalties of Antony’s armies, for example, reaffirm his painful awareness of the fragility of his own status: Antony Is valiant, and dejected, and by starts His fretted fortunes give him hope and fear Of what he has, and has not. (IV.xii.6–9)

More generally, the slippery peoples of the Roman empire in this dramatic world are also being communicated as an unreliable but irremovable force in the game of politics and thus become at least one permanent marker in a world given over to flux. Inevitably, in the discussion of the ways in which cultural space is organized in Shakespeare’s play the question of spatial indices must be

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taken into account. Nigel Wood gives a timely reminder that the ‘mapping’ by generations of readers of Shakespeare’s text is one of the first acts of appropriation which must be considered: ‘The Folio text showed no act divisions, which were probably first formulated for the play by Nicholas Rowe in his 1709 edition, together with geographical locations.’41 Thus, it may have taken up to a hundred years after the first performance of the play, but eventually Shakespeare’s editors decided to ‘reassure’ his readership by furnishing the text with the ‘security’ of geographic referents. More generally, Antony and Cleopatra is clearly probing the ways in which certain societies choose to formulate their cultural superiority through the hierarchization of geographical space: in this play, Rome portrays itself as extending the boundaries of its ‘civilizing’ influence by affirming its military power and symbolic authority of ownership. Sympathetic to such reasoning later in the seventeenth century, James Harrington would argue in his Commonwealth of Oceana (1656): If we [English] have given over running up and down naked and with dappled hides, learned to write and read, to be instructed with good arts, for all these we are beholding to the Romans . . . wherefore it seemeth unto me that we ought not to detract from the memory of the Romans, by whose means we are as it were of beasts become men, and by whose means we might yet of obscure and ignorant men (if we thought not too well of ourselves) become a wise, and a great people.42

Clearly, the government of Caesar strives to promote the justness of its imperial order, seeks to generate a prevailing sense of kairos – a recognition of a predetermined master narrative of human events. In addition, with the combination of propaganda and military violence, for example, Rome hopes to construct its own supple versions of cultural space: Canidius Soldier

This speed of Caesar’s Carries beyond belief. While he was yet in Rome, His power went out in such distractions as Beguiled all spies. (III.vii.74–7)

The forces of Roman imperialization are seeking to endow the Nile kingdom with a validating, comprehensible ‘Roman’ meaning, and thus render it worthy to be located on the ‘Roman’ map. However, Mary

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Floyd-Wilson has argued that whereas there was much early modern veneration across Europe for the imperial achievement of Rome, there may also have been some cultural sympathy amongst theatre goers for Egypt as a ‘fellow’ peripheral kingdom in the Roman empire.43 Certainly, such a hostile current of feeling to the Roman political project was being articulated at the time by one G.B.A.F. in A Discovery of the Great Subtilitie and Wonderful Wisedom of the Italians . . . (1591): here the reader is transported back to the verie time that Iulius Caesar an Italian, pillaged and ruined, not only France, but also all other parts of Europe. Therefore we should deserue to be commanded and gnawen to the bare bone, for euer hereafter, as wel as in time past, that could looke to these matters no sooner. The cause of all, haue been but our blinde affections which peruert vs in true iudgement, the which now we must needes cut off.44

In Shakespeare’s drama, one of the reasons why Egypt is found so enticing by the Roman mind is precisely because it does not limit its meaning to the visible, the martial or even the cartographic. However, successful acts of territorial appropriation allow Rome to interpret cultural privilege according to its own value-systems: this is frequently translated in terms of the success of subject peoples to emulate Romanness. Nonetheless, even for the Roman elite, the Nile kingdom emerges as a tempting vista of distant space. Antony

Lepidus Antony Lepidus Antony

[The crocodile] is shaped, sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it hath breadth. It is just so high as it is, and moves with it own organs. It lives by that which nourisheth it, and the elements once out of it, it transmigrates. What colour is it of? Of it own colour too. ’Tis a strange serpent. ’Tis so, and the tears of it are wet. (II.vii.41–8)

Michel de Certeau has emphasized that the foreign is an endlessly exploitable resource for many cultural discourses, that ‘other regions give us back what our culture has excluded from its discourse.’45 Such inquisitive desires surely constitute one of the greatest threats to Caesar’s regime and testify to wavering allegiances at the very heart of his Rome.

Appropriation in Antony and Cleopatra Enobarbus Maecenas Enobarbus

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Ay, sir, we did sleep day out of countenance, and made the night light with drinking. Eight wild boars roasted whole at a breakfast, and but twelve persons there. Is this true? This was but as a fly by an eagle: we had much more monstrous matter of feast, which worthily deserved noting. She’s a most triumphant lady, if report be square to her. (II.ii.177–85)

Fascination with the fantasies of Egypt’s difference must in no small part be attributed to its promotion of feminocentric networks of power: The city cast Her people out upon her, and Antony, Enthroned i’th’market-place, did sit alone, Whistling to th’air, which, but for vacancy, Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too, And made a gap in nature. (II.ii.213–18)

Such accounts are intimately linked to Egyptian performances of hierarchy and legitimacy through ritual. In addition, Shakespeare’s Egypt refuses to observe defining early modern patriarchal perceptions governing femaleness expressed through the normative discourses of silence, obedience, piety and chastity. As a consequence, in Cleopatra’s realm, Antony finds the opportunities to discover some unwonted liberties of sovereignty: all alone Tonight we’ll wander through the streets, and note The qualities of people. (I.i.54–6)

This naturally represents an invigorating change from life endured ‘under the shroud [of one] who is / The universal landlord’ (III.xiii.71–2). Accustomed to cultural marginalization by Roman colonial aspirations, Cleopatra decides to perform a little bit of alchemy herself and transmute alienation into emancipating difference. Her final performance of suicide, for example, provides an unexpected and challenging re-evaluation of Roman cultural space: ‘Let’s do it after the high Roman fashion, / And make death proud to take us’ (IV.xv.87–8). Whilst the preparations for this spectacle are under way, the queen offers the possibility that she

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may be a non-compliant captive. However, if Cleopatra refuses to be signified, to specularize Roman glory, it is made abundantly clear to her that she will pay the price for it. Caesar has no hesitation, for example, in proposing the violent loss of her mothering status: if you seek To lay on me a cruelty by taking Antony’s course, you shall bereave yourself Of my good purposes, and put your children To that destruction which I’ll guard them from If thereon you rely. I’ll take my leave. (V.ii.127–32)

Interestingly, this is not an identity which the queen was ever keen to deploy in dominant ways. However, as would-be pater patriae, Caesar is ruthlessly determined to discredit any rival claims to be the custodian of the political patrimony. This is amply demonstrated by some welltimed expressions of misgiving by the emperor at strategic points throughout the play: ‘Caesarion, whom they call my father’s son’ (III.vi.6). Mary Hamer stresses that historically the remaining triumvir, Caesar, as he is called in the play, made his defeat of Cleopatra the symbolic basis of his own authority. He dated his rule from the day that Cleopatra died . . . The famous pax Augusta, the universal peace of Augustus, claimed that it was founded on the death and defeat of Cleopatra.46

If the power to transform is celebrated at the Egyptian court, it is primarily expressed in relation to the ruler of the Nile herself: this power is viewed as generative, festive notably because it expands the possibilities for cultural experiment: I laughed him out of patience; and that night I laughed him into patience; and next morn, Ere the ninth hour, I drunk him to his bed, Then put my tires and mantles on him, whilst I wore his sword Philippan. (II.v.19–23)

In his account of Rabelaisian laughter in The Dialogic Imagination, Mikhail Bakhtin drew attention to this startlingly revisionary force which ‘destroys traditional connections and abolishes idealized strata; it

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also brings out the crude, unmediated connections between things that people otherwise seek to keep separate, in pharasaical error.’47 Caesar’s Rome abhors such dangerous equivocation and views the disorderly realm of Egypt in terms of tasteless theatrics stage-managed by women and non-men (eunuchs). Sustained Roman involvement in Egyptian power networks is represented in Roman eyes in terms of emasculation: Enobarbus, for example, bewails the fact that ’tis said in Rome That Photinus, an eunuch, and your maids Manage this war. (III.vii.13–15)

Rome condemns and fears the radical insecurity of Egypt’s valuesystems in which Antony becomes, not more manlike Than Cleopatra, nor the queen of Ptolemy More womanly than he. (I.iv.5–7)

In the early modern period, the atrabilious Phillip Stubbes had no doubt in the second edition of his Anatomy of Abuses (1584) what kind of domestic space might be produced by women: some of them lye in bed (I will not saie with whome) till nine or tenne of the clocke euery mornyng, then being rouzed forthe of their dennes, they are two or three howers in putting on their Robes, which being done, they goe to dinner, where no delicates eyther of wines or meates are wanting. Then their bodyes being satisfied, and their heades pretely mizzeled with wine, they walke abroad for a time, or els confer with their familiars (as women you know are talkative enough, & can chat like Pies.) all the world knoweth it. Thus some spend the daie till supper time, and then the night, as before. Other some spende the greatest parte of the daie, in sittyng at the doore, to shewe their braueries, to make knowne their beauties, to behold the passengers by, to viewe the coast, to see fashions, and to acquaynt themselues with the brauest fellowes: for if not for these causes, I see no other causes why they shoulde sit at their doores, from Morning till Noone (as many doe) from Noone to Night; thus vainly spending their golden dayes in filthie idlenesse and sin.48

Back in Shakespeare’s Rome, Caesar is profoundly disturbed by the saturnalian character of Egypt where the protagonists are seen to be

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unwilling to take responsibility for their actions and embrace a course of political and moral, if not erotic, evasion. Linda Bamber points out: ‘to Caesar and Rome, relationships with women are a leisure-time activity, something to fill up “vacancy”.’49 Ultimately, even Enobarbus can only greet with melancholy his general’s ability to render his followers ‘onion-ey’d’ at the ‘gaudy night’; and other Romans in Egypt, such as the indignant Canidius, find themselves denied their rightful claim to virtus in the aggressive business of empire-building: ‘so our leader’s led. / And we are women’s men’ (III.vii.69–70). Barbara Baines has argued that from the very beginning of the play Cleopatra has defined ‘Antony’s masculinity as under erasure through his submission to a boy and a woman, Octavius and Fulvia, both of whom appropriate the role of a man’.50 In response to this, it might also be observed that Antony himself participates in this prevailing perception of his conduct: Antony

You did know How much you were my conqueror, and that My sword, made weak by my affection, would Obey it on all cause. (III.xi.65–8)

Interestingly, scorn for a man such as the passionate Antony was not reserved in the early modern period for dramatizations of Romans. Despite the thoughtful consideration invested in his meditative journeys, Shakespeare’s European contemporary Michel de Montaigne found that he also could not restrain his disdain for an ageing man suffering from lovesickness: ‘En la virilité, je . . . trouve [l’amour] desjà hors de son siege. Non qu’en la vieillesse.’51 Whatever the complex nature of Roman, and indeed audience, engagement with the dramatic culture of Shakespeare’s Egypt, Caesar wishes to inscribe the uncolonized Nile kingdom within a narrative of absence and/or excess. From this perspective, the only way in which it can gain meaning and status is through its introduction in the political exchanges engineered by Roman potentates: in short, it must be reduced to the same textual and political interest as Armenia, Parthia and Greece. If the invading forces of Caesar affirm their power in terms of the newly acquired property of Egypt, at the close of the play the dramatic emphasis nevertheless returns to the ways in which Rome is denied the fullest indulgence of triumphalism. Indeed, the narrative arc of the play is resolved in moving from the vain spectacle of mourning for the ‘shrew’ Fulvia to another equally questionable performance by

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Caesar for his adversary: ‘it is tidings / To wash the eyes of kings’ (V.i.27–8). Antony and Cleopatra come to realize, as the melancholic Caesar does eventually, that human achievement must be constantly renewed with heroic actions in order to prevent it from becoming opaque: ‘The breaking of so great a thing should make / A greater crack’ (V.i.14–15). Equally interestingly, the ‘lack’ which Caesar had wished to associate with Egypt is now textually being attributed to him. The protagonists are still capable of exerting their power to withhold in order to frustrate the Roman’s mission civilisatrice: Dolabella

Caesar, thy thoughts Touch their effects in this: thyself art coming To see performed the dreaded act which thou So sought’st to hinder. (V.ii.328–31)

It is evident that Shakespeare does not hesitate at this late stage in the drama to stress the painfully prosaic and uncreative regime which is about to assume power over the known world: Caesar inquires into ‘the manner of their deaths? / I do not see them bleed’ (V.ii.335–6). Such impoverishing responses are intimately involved with his attempted ‘lenten revenge’ upon a transgressive culture and are starkly contrasted with the parallel narrative regarding Cleopatra’s imaginative powers: her physician tells me [Cleopatra] hath pursued conclusions infinite Of easy ways to die. (V.ii.352–4)

At the close of this discussion, it may seem timely to revoice Spivak’s important question: ‘What can criticism do? – but name frontier concepts (with more or less sophistication) and thus grant itself a little more elbow room to write intelligibly.’52 Clearly Antony and Cleopatra engages closely with modern critical obsessions with frontiers: the dynamic energy of this particular Shakespearean play is at least in part located in an intricate textual debate focused upon changing perceptions of cultural space – how it may be affirmed, converted, appropriated but never resolved. This chapter began with some propositions that ideas on space with regard to Antony and Cleopatra might be radically re-evaluated and diversified. Shakespeare’s Caesar for one is determined to resist such an invitation. Unwilling to countenance, at least in public,

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that planes of cultural meaning might be of an infinite variety, he chooses instead to decode his world in wilfully univocal terms: as a consequence, he is able effortlessly to promote Antony as a rival who ‘filled / His vacancy with his voluptuousness’ (I.iv.25–6). In his account of this play, Nigel Wood has drawn attention appositely to Derrida’s ‘scapegoat or pharmakos’ which, ‘is always chosen from within the polis, not from the ranks of the enemy’ – he reminds his reader of Derrida’s formulation that as ‘origin of difference and division, the pharmakos represents evil both introjected and projected.’53 All the principal agents at work within this play are indeed found at points to polarize and to moralize space in one way or another in order to secure stronger speaking positions for themselves. Pompey in the earlier stages of the intrigue is keen to insist upon the eastern emperor as a vulgar squatter: At land indeed Thou dost o’ercount me of my father’s house – But since the cuckoo builds not for himself, Remain in’t as thou mayst. (II.vi.26–9)

Subsequently, Antony himself is only too willing to measure out his past and future doings as an architect might construct an edifice: ‘I have not kept my square, but that to come / Shall all be done by th’rule’ (II.iii.6–7). Finally, as death approaches, the fallen emperor questions his very claim to living space: ‘Hark, the land bids me tread no more upon’t / It is ashamed to bear me’ (III.xi.1–2). In provoking anxiety and self-scrutiny across the known world, Antony and Cleopatra’s political and erotic undertakings are shown to catalyse a whole host of cultural reactions, but equally to pose urgent questions regarding the very insecurity of dominated space per se. Cleopatra

See Caesar! O, behold How pomp is followed! Mine will now be yours, And should we shift estates, yours would be mine. (V.ii.149–51)

At the beginning of this chapter, I briefly drew attention to Nietzsche’s formulation that man [sic] is both ‘a transition and a perishing’. It is clear that such a premise would not have been wholly unfamiliar to early modern minds, especially one such as Thomas Browne’s, for example, who submitted that

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we are only that amphibious piece between a corporal and spiritual essence; that middle form that links those two together, and makes good the method of God and nature . . . Thus is man that great and true amphibium whose nature is disposed to live, not only like other creatures in divers elements, but in divided and distinguished worlds.54

In a play in which even the protagonists recognize that they ‘must . . . needs find out new heaven, new earth’ to realize their cultural potentials, critical inquiries into the metamorphoses of cultural space must clearly be denied the indulgence of a reassuring zone of closure. Antony

Eros Antony

Eros Antony

Sometime we see a cloud that’s dragonish, A vapour sometime like a bear or lion, A towered citadel, a pendant rock, A forkèd mountain, or blue promontory With trees upon’t that nod unto the world And mock our eyes with air. Thou hast seen these signs: They are black vesper’s pageants. Ay, my lord. That which is now a horse, even with a thought The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct As water is in water. It does, my lord. My good knave Eros, now thy captain is Even such a body. Here I am, Antony, Yet cannot hold this visible shape, my knave. (IV.xiv.2–14)

Chapter Four ‘The hateful cuckoo’: Elizabeth Cary’s Tragedie of Mariam and the Collapse of Domestic Space Her mother-in-law having [Cary], and being one that loved much to be humored, and finding [Cary] not to apply herself to it, used her very hardly, so far, as at last, to confine her to her chamber; which seeing she little cared for, but entertained herself with reading, the mother-in-law took away all her books, with command to have no more brought her; then she set herself to make verses.1

Whatever its tendencies towards hagiography, The Lady Falkland, Her Life clearly establishes that Elizabeth Cary tried in a variety of ways to construct textual relationships with the larger society in which she lived, and the extract above illustrates amply Michel de Certeau’s contention that ‘many everyday practices . . . are tactical in character.’2 Equally apparent in this narrative are the sustained operations of her mother-inlaw, husband and, indeed, the wider pressures of early Stuart patriarchy to deny this female subject access to a textual culture and, therefore, to the authority of a potential speaking position. The development of this biographical récit, written by one of Cary’s daughters, chronicles the movement of attrition between the female quest for expression and the cultural silencing of it. It is therefore unsurprising that Cary’s Tragedie of Mariam, the Faire Queene of Jewry should record and interrogate so vigorously cultural schemas of appropriation and control. Constabarus

Babas’ 2nd Son

The sons of Babus have it by descent: In all their thoughts each action to excel, Boldly to act, and wisely to invent. Had it not like the hateful cuckoo been, Whose riper age his infant nurse doth kill: So long we had not kept ourselves unseen, But Constabarus safely cross’d our will. (II.ii.128–34)

Laurie J. Shannon has lamented that criticism of Cary’s text ‘starts from the sex of Elizabeth Cary the writer, rather than from a consideration of

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the text and of the debates to which Mariam is a provocative contribution’.3 And it is certainly true that The Tragedie of Mariam offers a multitude of routes for entry into its narrative. The image of the hateful cuckoo, which usurps the space and status of others, constitutes but one facet of the all-consuming dramatic interest in diverse forms of dispossession (for example, disempowerment, incarceration, bereavement, disinheritance, alienation) which builds to a crescendo as the play unfolds. As Pompey pointed out to his imperial opponents in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, ‘the cuckoo builds not for himself’ (II.vi.28); and the relentless textual emphasis upon displacement and appropriation feeds the central paradox in Cary’s text of how the same space (physical, social, symbolic) may be occupied by contrary forces. This dynamic struggle forms a fundamental constituent for the shaping of meaning and identity in this dramatic world. The situation where ‘one object yields both grief and joy’ (I.i.10) triggers the dramatic narrative in both Shakespeare’s and Cary’s tragedies. In her opening speech, Mariam recalls how Julius Caesar, ‘wept when Pompey’s life was gone, / Yet when he liv’d, he thought his name too great’ (I.i.3–4). This energetic vying for position leads, as the drama unfolds, to an extremely volatile production of diversified space. Alvin Vos has insisted: ‘spatial practices are intrinsically contestatory . . . The human experience of place, particularly in postmodern times, is thus dialectical, and the social landscape is inscribed by social struggle.’4 In this respect, the postmodern may be seen to rub shoulders with the early modern in addressing the agonistic nature of spatial experience. In her very first speech, Mariam stresses, for example, the precarious delineation of space in this world: ‘[Herod] by barring me from liberty / To shun my ranging, taught me first to range’ (I.i.25–6). Meanwhile, whilst Herod’s sister Salome imaginatively revises her past with talk of divorce later in the play (‘[I wish when my eyes] on Constabarus first did gaze, / Silleus had been object to mine eye’ (I.iv.273–4)); her new-found love Silleus, in turn, asks her to be mindful of how wider political geographies may be reconceived: ‘The weakness of Arabia’s king is such, / The kingdom is not his so much as mine’ (I.iv.351–2). The constant tensions involved in the appropriation of dominated spaces for identity-construction in this dramatic world are illustrated equally in the revolt of Pheroras against the inequities of his brother’s, Herod’s, regime:

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Elizabeth Cary’s Tragedie of Mariam What booted it that he did raise my head, To be his realm’s copartner, kingdom’s mate? Withal, he kept Graphina from my bed? (II.i.25–7)

Later, the returning patriarch will berate his kin, in the same way that Hamlet does, lamenting that the news of one brother’s death led to the other making ‘[the] burial time [his] bridal hour’ (IV.ii.59–60) Critical geographers such as Stephen Daniels and Roger Lee have asked readers to consider, ‘the two-way influence between the geographies in which we participate on the ground and the geographies that we construct in our minds’.5 Ever conscious of the links between political and erotic boundaries which may have been transgressed, Herod cannot free himself from this bifocal cultural vision. Directly after a stinging reproach to Pheroras, Herod’s thoughts turn to ‘gentle Mariam-Salom, I mean’ (IV.ii.84). Moreover, in the final phase of the drama, the traumatized king agonizes over the decision to take the life of the heroine: Love and hate do fight: And now hath love acquir’d the greater part, Yet now hath hate affection conquer’d quite. (IV.iv.244–6)

As such conflicted spaces are repeatedly produced in Cary’s text, they clearly serve to disrupt or at least reinflect the organization of existing power structures and communicate desires which envisage tactically a way of inhabiting these newly forged spaces. Ultimately, this linkage between conceptual space modelled upon physical or somatic space is made most starkly apparent in Constabarus’ condemnation of women in Act IV: You were the angels cast from Heav’n for pride, And still do keep your angels’ outward show, But none of you are inly beautified, For still your Heav’n-depriving pride doth grow. (IV.vi.321–4)

More generally, in the case of Mariam, experiences of familial and political alienation are intimately related to the stunted political vocabulary of Herod, a monarch who seeks to articulate his power through verbal and physical violence.

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Cary’s closet drama, entered in the Stationers’ Register for December 1612 and probably written at some point during the preceding ten years, has been hailed as the first original dramatic work by a woman to be published in England.6 It constitutes a valuable example of a femaleauthored engagement with early modern cultural debate, most particularly because it is in dramatic form, which, as Margaret Ferguson points out, was ‘a genre socially coded as off-bounds to women, authors and actresses alike’.7 The Renaissance debate upon the status of female cultural activity had attracted some of the most eminent scholars such as Tasso, Castiglione, Erasmus, More, Vives and Elyot, to name but a few.8 This is quite apart from the more extremist polemic sustained by figures such as John Knox with his First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558) and Joseph Swetnam’s later Arraignment of Lewde, Idle, Froward and Unconstant Women (1615). Recent scholarship has focused increasingly upon the rhetorical and largely formulaic nature of this debate conducted principally by male voices. By the early decades of the seventeenth century, Swetnam’s pamphlet, for example, had generated a number of responses, some of which are signed by women. Cary’s play does not engage in close argument with such writing, but it clearly acknowledges the broad framework of this cultural debate in its thematic interests.9 Given the paucity of female role models constructing a speaking position for themselves through original dramatic composition, it was perhaps inevitable that her play should inscribe itself within this cultural field of inquiry: the widespread early modern concern surrounding the potential autonomy of the female voice, mind and body. Apart from some semi-dramatic writing in a life of Edward II and a lost play set in Sicily, The Tragedie of Mariam constitutes the principal intervention into the realm of dramatic writing by a woman who, according to her daughter’s account, loved plays ‘extremely’.10 Critical responses to the play, where they exist, have often varied from dismissal (‘The play as a whole is singularly uninspired, and deficient in interest. The verse is without distinction, and becomes at times very tawdry’) to grudging praise (‘Cary has, however, infused this dramatically awkward mixture of verse forms with emotional intensity at key points’).11 Most recently, there have been expressions of critical dissatisfaction with the play on feminist grounds: Through its characterization of Mariam, the play offers two different models, neither very satisfactory from a modern feminist perspective, for

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a woman’s ability to exercise her will: according to both models, which might be called the domestic and the religious respectively, the will is exercised with the ultimate aim of losing it or, rather, of adopting, as an object of desire, the effacement of personal desire.12

The condemnation of The Tragedie of Mariam as politically conservative or even reactionary must superimpose an overdetermined framework of closure on a text which energetically resists any such violence and appears to rejoice in its slippery engagement with cultural debate. This chapter will explore some of the ways in which Cary challenges her reader to withdraw from the more reassuring foci of character and symbolism and towards what Catherine Belsey has termed ‘a third possibility . . . moving between the two modes, producing for the spectator a place of uncertainty or of unresolved debate’.13 There is no evidence that Mariam was ever publicly staged in early modern England, and the fact that the play was composed within the conventions of closet drama makes this possibility all the more unlikely.14 This kind of composition, influenced by Senecan and French Renaissance tragic modes of writing, was espoused by members of the Pembroke circle, such as Samuel Daniel, Fulke Greville and Mary Sidney herself with her translation of Garnier’s Marc Antoine. This dramatic mode overtly foregrounded intellectual and cultural debate, stressing the exploration of political doctrine and dissent. It was seen primarily as a reading experience which privileged discussion over dramatization, the word over the deed. Given the cultural marginalizing and silencing of female voices in evidence in early modern society, it may have been that the more literary or culturally excentric composition of closet drama offered itself more readily as a means of social statement to a female subject denied access to the thriving market of male creativity in the public playhouse – a milieu already ‘sullied’ by accusations of transvestism, riotous behaviour and inciting ‘sodomy’. Cary clearly exploits the dynamic, multivocal nature of dramatic discourse in order to probe in particular the irresolvable inconsistencies in cultural expectations of female experience. Rather than the more available early modern female discourses of moralizing prose, diaries, letters and conduct books, Cary selected in closet drama a discursive space whose conventions of political interrogation were established. In the daughter’s biography, there is a cryptic reference to a text by Cary which was stolen ‘out of that sister-in-law’s (her friend’s) chamber and

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printed, but by her own procurement was called in’.15 This may refer to Mariam and indicate a familiar Renaissance topos of female writing stating the reluctance of the author to enter the public domain of the printed word. In whatever way this reference is deciphered, it clearly points to the cultural equation of transgression with the recording of the autonomous female voice. Later in life, Cary would distance herself from the ‘worne-out form of saying I printed it against my will, mooved by the importunitie of Friends’ in a text which she ‘procured . . . to be printed’.16 Nevertheless, like the Jacobean dramatists of the more public arena of the playhouse, Cary foregrounds the cultural anxiety surrounding female agency. Her principal source material was Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews, which the French Renaissance dramatist Garnier also drew upon for his masterpiece Les Juifves. The narrative of the English play unfolds in the aftermath of the battle of Actium and Marc Antony’s defeat, a classical récit which clearly held a special interest for the dramatists of the Pembroke circle. However, as soon becomes clear from a comparison between Cary and Josephus, the author of Mariam focuses much more prominently on Christian perspectives and the cultural experience and psychology of the female. Scholars have on occasions schematized the history of ‘the Mariam play’ into a minor subgenre, and common denominators have emerged: for example, a man loves a woman excessively; he does or has done something which causes her to turn cold toward him; this coldness he is incapable of separating in his mind from the suspicion of infidelity, every circumstance works upon this suspicion, and he is driven to kill the woman he loves.17

The vast majority of such plays privilege the authoritative experience of Herod. In opposition to those expectations, Cary refuses to define her heroine by a cultural space limited solely to the demands of male desire. She does not submit to a society which moulds the female subject into an erotic object for the male gaze, but neither does she compose a culturally untenable narrative of female autonomy. As Catherine Belsey has justly underlined, ‘the subject of liberal humanism claims to be the unified, autonomous author of his or her own choices (moral, electoral and consumer), and the source and origin of speech. Women in Britain for most of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were not fully any of these things.’18 Mariam is compelled to

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pioneer a venture of cultural self-creativity. This anguished process means that Mariam’s subjectivity is communicated in terms of the fragmentation of allegiances, the stifling of desires and the socially anarchic challenge to expectations of female subjugation. The heroine attempts during the course of the play to revise the cultural mapping of her body and mind with her voice. The fact that Mariam’s dramatic meaning is found to be indivisible from her status as a wife again allows the text as a whole to contribute to a debate sustained in the early modern period on the nature of sovereignty and female autonomy within marriage. There was throughout this period the relentless lifting of proofs from the Bible and classical texts designating wife- and motherhood as the only goal of female existence and indicating the legitimacy of female subordination to the male: in his Brief & Pleasant Discourse of Duties in Mariage (1568), Edmund Tilney, for example, advised: ‘[the husband] by little and little must gently procure that he maye also steale away hir private will and appetite, so that of two bodies there may be made one onelye hart.’19 Later, in the Jacobean period, William Whately affirmed in A Bride Bush (1617): the whole duty of the wife is referred to two heads: the first is, to acknowledge her inferiority; the next, to carry herself as inferior . . . The wife’s tongue towards her husband must be neither keen, nor loose; her countenance neither swelling nor deriding; her behaviour not flinging, nor puffing, nor discontented, but savouring of all lowliness and quietness of affection.20

However, there is no evidence that the adoption of gendered models was as self-evident as such manuals supposed or desired. It is clear, nonetheless, that the Protestant Reformers focused widely upon analogies between the organization of the polity and that of the family and, to varying degrees, insisted upon the defining (and delimiting) of wifely duties in the same way that political theorists did upon the obligations of the subject in response to the sovereignty of the monarch.

As has been appreciated above, at the beginning of the play, the heroine immediately draws attention to her public voice as a source of cultural anxiety and fragmentation:

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How oft have I with public voice run on To censure Rome’s last hero for deceit: Because he wept when Pompey’s life was gone, Yet when he liv’d, he thought his name too great. (I.i.1–4)

At the beginning of this narrative, habitual cultural expectations and patriarchal structures are shown to have collapsed in the absence of the monarch. Mariam, no longer defined by domesticated space, has given free rein to a ‘public voice’ in the past and now as the play opens is forced to leave this fantasied space of empowerment and face the implications of her transgression. Indeed, Mariam gives clear evidence at the opening of the play that she has fully internalized the patriarchal systems of repression by engaging in testimonies of repentance for her ‘deviant’ behaviour. Nancy Gutierrez points out that ‘First, by comparing her relationship with Herod to that of Caesar with Pompey, Mariam conflates the normally distinct private and public worlds of sexual and state politics.’21 This interrogation of the Roman past of male heroism is denigrated even by the heroine herself as she attacks her former penetration of the exclusive male world of politics. Nevertheless, her recourse to self-expression in stage present is shown to magnify the confusion being experienced across this society in the absence of the patriarch Herod. The assumption of speaking positions by women in early modern writing is frequently associated with cultural disorder. It is seen to disrupt the categories of experience designated by the patriarchy: male/female; public/private; past/present/future; vita activa/vita contemplativa. Mariam acknowledges the criminalizing of her public voice and performs the first rite of dispossession on stage as she withdraws into the inferior cultural space conventionally attributed to the female: Mistaking is with us but too too common. Now do I find, by self-experience taught, One object yields both grief and joy. (I.i.8–10)22

However, rather than colluding with the heroine in her self-deprecation, the reader is asked primarily to attend to the heightened sensibilities of the anguished Mariam unable to disengage familial and political obligations from a quest for moral integrity. Karen L. Raber argues: ‘Mariam has two “teachers”, her self and her husband, who compete for dominion, but only succeed in making the interior space she seeks to

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defend uninhabitable.’ 23 Indeed, we are never allowed to devalue Mariam’s increasingly complex appreciations of a culturally and morally unstable environment constantly shaped by changing patterns of information. Unable to establish to her satisfaction the parameters of her emotional and political status, for much of the play Mariam is effectively shown to be paralysed by crises of conscience. Nonetheless, the complexity of the subsequent narrative prevents Cary’s reader from polarizing Mariam and Herod in moral terms and thus reproducing her simply as an enfeebled victim of patriarchy. Contradiction is shown to be the dominant focus for female experience, and Mariam’s conscious decision to engage vocally in the culture which is shaping her only serves to amplify the perceived deviancy of her conduct. Indeed, in the emblem book The Theater of Fine Devices (1614), the reader is reminded that the ideal wife is fashioned in terms of both space and sound: She must not gad, but learne at home to shrowd; Her finger to her lip is vpward bent, To signifie she should not be too lowd.24

Mary Beth Rose contends: ‘In a hierarchical, patriarchal society like that of Renaissance England, female power could not be conceptualized without destabilizing contradictions; and . . . the test case for that power is motherhood.’25 St Paul had promoted maternity as a raison d’être for women and, before him, Aristotle had posited the female as a defective and passive vessel for the fathering creativity of the male.26 During the Reformation, Protestant thinkers had chosen to reformulate and affirm the status of motherhood and wifehood in opposition to the previous medieval promotion of the conventual virgin. Thus motherhood allowed the female to claim an acceptable, albeit confined, place in patriarchal history as a biological agent of transmission. The concentration upon the loss and possible renewal of a cherished past characterizes Cary’s dramatic narrative (and, one might argue, the early modern period as a whole). In the case of the female characters, the stress falls upon the endeavours to secure a legitimate place in the cultural hierarchy. Doris, Herod’s first wife, attempts this through the body of her son Antipater: With thee, sweet boy, I came, and came to try If thou before his bastards might be plac’d In Herod’s royal seat and dignity. (II.iii.255–7)

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Mariam herself is also clearly determined to lay claim to this territory and revalidates herself culturally by insisting upon her matron status: [Herod] not a whit his first-born son esteem’d, Because as well as his he was not mine: My children only for his own he deem’d, These boys that did descend from royal line. These did he style his heirs to David’s throne; My Alexander, if he live, shall sit In the majestic seat of Solomon; To will it so, did Herod think it fit. (I.ii.135–42)

Mariam tries in this way to secure her place in society by foregrounding the fertility of her body. This declaration on the heroine’s part represents just one aspect of the play’s consuming interest in women’s conflicted attempts to resist their subjectivity being defined in terms of subjugation. In order to probe the complexities of the female struggle against cultural dispossession, Cary strategically constructs a character not found in her source material, Graphina. Her very name concentrates attention on the female relationship to the written word and, as an agent in this dramatic narrative, she constitutes a valuable referent of female submission. Given the patriarchal pressures at work in Cary’s Palestine and early Stuart society, it is not surprising that this rather servile figure is seen to displace Mariam in the erotic hierarchy established in Pheroras’, Herod’s brother’s, eyes: never Herod’s heart Hath held his prince-born beauty-famed wife In nearer place than thou, fair virgin, art (II.i.77–9)

Graphina, like the other female characters, symbolizes one of the many available cultural modes of female behaviour which the heroine denies herself; and, as Margaret Ferguson points out, ‘If the figure of Graphina represents for Cary both the possibility of a non-transgressive mode of discourse (like private writing?) and the possibility of a mutually satisfying love relation, neither of those possibilities is available to the play’s heroine.’27 Equally significant in this debate is the fact that the male gaze for the male during the play can operate to destabilize the female’s status even further and rob her of erotic meaning. Alexandra, for example, recalls that she once sent portraits of Mariam and her

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brother to the emperor Marc Antony and once again draws attention to the remorseless competition for desired space in the narrative: The boy’s large forehead first did fairest seem, Then glanc’d his eye upon my Mariam’s cheek: And that without comparison did deem, What was in either but he most did like. And, thus distracted, either’s beauty’s might Within the other’s excellence was drown’d: Too much delight did bare him from delight, For either’s love the other’s did confound. (I.ii.179–86)

Ultimately, homoerotic desire is seen here to neutralize the power of the heroine and, as a result, Mariam is forced into a more conventional discursive context where she is left to do contest with the wanton ‘brown Egyptian’ Cleopatra for the emperor’s affections. In a familiar cultural topos of female expectation, Alexandra leads her auditor to believe that if Mariam has sought to capture the heart of Marc Antony, her capacity for love and self-sacrifice would have meant that ‘great Anthonius’ fall we had not seen.’ Therefore, Mariam (rather than the perceived racially inferior queen of the Nile) would have been able to secure a pre-eminent place in the sexual market, for ‘a mart of beauties in her visage met, / And part in this, that they were all her own.’28 However, like Shakespeare’s Isabella, Mariam promotes her worth in terms of chastity and resolves ‘with purest body will I press my tomb’ (I.ii.190ff.). There is now increasing evidence that women participated more conspicuously in the legal and economic systems of exchange in early modern Britain than had hitherto been imagined. The ill-paid contribution of women to this proto-capitalist economy might take the form of agricultural labour or (un)skilled work in an urban context. In spite of analogous constraints amongst the urban bourgeoisie, wives, mothers and daughters could clearly not have divorced themselves from the commercial focus of the family. However, amongst the nobility, the female appears to have been primarily recognized as an agent of dynastic interests, and it is in this social echelon that Cary locates her drama.29 The reader is never allowed to underestimate the ways in which gendered and geographical identities interrelate in the play in the political struggles of Palestine’s warring social castes. The female’s power of intervention, frequently construed in terms of agency,

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generates cultural anxiety. In the absence of Herod, Cary’s play focuses on a period of political interregnum occasioned by a rupture in the maleauthored circuits of power. As so often in early modern drama, it is at these moments of patriarchal fissure that the female’s stature is enhanced. However, during ‘less disruptive’ periods of patriarchal rule, female cultural activity would be articulated conventionally in decorative terms: ‘Our wisest prince did say, and true he said, / A virtuous woman crowns her husband’s head’ (I.vi.395–6). Whether it be in the context of civic obedience or resistance, the potential of the female is never considered outside a male frame of reference. The wrathful Constabarus, for example, exclaims to his adulterous wife: Are Hebrew women now transformed to men? Why do you not as well our battles fight, And wear our armour?

Salome’s vigorous attempt at legal agency in promoting a femaleauthored ‘separating bill’ of divorce is viewed by her estranged husband Constabarus as a frightening form of cultural corruption and as an attempt to ‘un-man’ men: ‘Let thistles grow on vines, and grapes on briars, / Set us to spin or sew’ (I.vi.421ff.). The violence of male disorientation articulated here is in many ways but a shadow drawing of that in print during the Jacobean debate on appropriate female behaviour. The ranting Swetnam, for example, insisted in his pamphlet of 1615 that it is said that an old dog and a hungry flea bite sore, but in my mind a froward woman biteth more sorer. And if thou go about to master a woman in hope to bring her to humility, there is no way to make her good with stripes except thou beat her to death.30

As the play unfolds, the rejected Constabarus moves increasingly towards Swetnam’s extreme invective when opposed by a woman who wishes to revise her cultural profile dynamically by entering the realm of words and actions. Whatever encouragement the reader may feel to view Salome’s expression of her erotic appetites in terms of anarchic self-gratification, Cary’s text never allows us to belittle the force of this woman’s potential for assertiveness and creativity. It is worth noting that despite the depiction of Salome’s unfettered egoism, the play still attends to her dynastic origins as an important resource for her identityconstruction and indeed draws attention to the ways in which she

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conceptualizes the geography of her homeland as an important medium of self-legitimation: Judea yields me honours worthy store . . . Were not Silleus he with whom I go I would not change my Palestine for Rome: Much less would I a glorious state to show Go far to purchase an Arabian tomb. (I.v.358–64)

Her attempts to construct a measure of gynocracy have their desired effect and enfeeble the men around her. Josephus, Constabarus and Silleus become staging posts in her quest for sensual gratification, as Constabarus himself concedes: ‘I was Silleus, and not long ago / Josephus then was Constabarus now’ (I.vi.461–2). In the same way that Mariam inscribes herself through martyrdom into a historical continuum of female persecution, Salome is promoted irresistibly as a dramatic model of future female cultural commitment. Indeed, she casts herself unhesitatingly as a prophetess of such an engagement: Hold on your talk, till it be time to end, For me, I am resolv’d it shall be so: Though I be first that to this course do bend, I shall not be the last, full well I know. (I.vi.433–6)

The burden of extreme moral and cultural sensitivity appears to prevent the heroine from emulating her sister-in-law’s disruptive selfassertion. It is interesting to note, for example, that when Mariam does turn her attention to ‘separating bills’ like Salome, it is in order to justify Herod’s decision to discard Doris (IV.viii.387–90). Like the patriarchy which is trying to contain her, Mariam can attribute to herself no defining space of authority independent of those of royal mother, wife, daughter and, reluctantly, as an object of male desire. She is a political dependant marginally empowered by the absence of Herod, but the little domestic authority to which she can lay claim quickly dissolves on the return of the patriarch (‘Sohemus cannot now your will obey’ (III.iii.140)). Cary’s text constantly underlines the relationship in this world between space and power: Herod’s absence in Rome has led to the degeneration of his power to exclude dissent – linguistic, social and symbolic. The emergence of outsiders (alienated individuals such as Babas’ sons, Graphina and Silleus) and hostile declarations such as those by

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Alexandra, Mariam, Constabarus and Sohemus expose clearly the decay of this ‘dominated’ space. The result is a fragmented dramatic locus characterized by racial, dynastic and gender divisions. Indeed, Herod’s re-entry into Palestinian political life returns this culture to its antagonistic attitude towards the possibility of female power. The butler Sohemus, for example, insists that the heroine should view him henceforth as an adversary, for his allegiances must now lie elsewhere: ‘Reject and slight my speeches, mock my faith, / Scorn my observance, call my counsel nought’ (III.iii.143–4). As so often in early modern drama, the absence of the patriarch is seen to have a dismantling effect on the realm’s power structures and to liberate (male) subjects. This is represented in positive terms with reference to Constabarus’ relations to Babas’ sons: as Constabarus declares, ‘Now may you from your living tomb depart’ (II.ii.117). Clearly, the dramatic energy of Cary’s text is derived in part from the fact that different characters offer different narratives through which the death of the king may be read. This again demonstrates the fragility and the volatility of the cultural space which Herod seeks to dominate and to produce as a locus of cultural belonging. In direct comparison with Antony and Cleopatra, The Tragedie of Mariam often details this yearning for cultural belonging and legitimacy in terms of dynastic, geographical but also monumentalized space. Constabarus presses Salome to accept his devotion as permanent and inviolable as ‘the stately carvèd edifice / That on Mount Sion makes so fair a show’ (I.vi.383–4). Subsequently, he enforces its substance by calling upon the ‘holy Ark’, ‘the earth’, ‘Palestine’ and ‘David’s City’ to bear witness to his affection (I.vi.440–2). In fact, the cultural reflex to image human experience in spatial, architectural terms is widely in evidence throughout the text. Constabarus, for example, later views his faithless wife as ‘merely . . . a painted sepulchre’ (II.iv.325). Babas’ second son views his precarious plight in terms of a ‘house on pillars set’ (II.vii.140). When Doris returns to Jerusalem, her first appeal is to revise the political space of the capital: ‘[You] royal buildings, bow your lofty side, / And [stoop] to her that is by right your queen’ (II.iii.215–16). The relation between political and domestic space has already been spelled out at the beginning of the play when the heroine regrets having betrayed her political and marital vows of allegiance. Indeed, the liaison between the violation of domestic space and Mariam’s accession is underlined by Doris when she protests that her and Herod’s first-born, Antipater, was, ‘thrust from forth [his] father’s door!’ (II.iii.230). When Herod returns from ‘the statue-fillèd

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place’ Rome, the ‘world-commanding city, Europe’s grace’, he turns like so many of the other characters to the monumentalized space of the city to confirm his political and emotional belonging: Hail, happy city, happy in thy store, And happy that thy buildings such we see: More happy in the Temple where w’adore, But most of all that Mariam lives in thee. (IV.i.1–4)

However, in the power vacuum created by Herod’s supposed death, new matrices of male authority have been generated (Babas’ first son: ‘Command and you shall see yourself esteem’d’ (II.ii.89). The cultural ideal of male comradeship was widely in evidence across Europe in writing and the visual arts of the early modern period. Florio’s Montaigne is not unrepresentative in his contention that such friends, entermixe and confound themselves in the other, with so vniuersall a commixture, that they weare out, and can no more finde the seame that hath conjoyned them together. If a man vrge me to tell wherefore I loved him, I feele it cannot be expressed, but by answering; Because it was he, because it was my selfe.31

With Cary’s text, such comradeship is constantly being referenced through a sequence of speech acts. Constabarus stresses, for example, ‘With friends there is not such a word as “debt”’ (II.ii.100); and Silleus: ‘Had not my heart and tongue engag’d me so, / I would from thee no foe, but friend depart’ (II.iv.391–2). The result of this Renaissance promotion of male friendship is to disempower and commodify the female: with the celebrated male virtue of ‘sprezzatura’, Constabarus concedes his wife to his ‘chivalrous’ rival and draws the conflict to a close: ‘I willingly to thee resign my right’ (II.iv.361). As Constance Jordan points out, in his Generation of Animals Aristotle gave rise to a whole western tradition of male-authored writing focused on the implications of the physical weakness of the female compared to the male. Unwilling, like Plato, to differentiate between the discourses of gender and sex, Aristotle elaborated upon his analysis of imbalanced physical strength between the sexes by superimposing it on to a backdrop of cultural, political and moral frames of reference. These relations of superior to inferior became a paradigm for discussions in all fields of inquiry regarding the female. Interestingly, for example, in

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Erasmus’ colloquy The New Mother, his feminist character Fabulla contends that woman obeys man ‘not as a superior but as a more aggressive person’.32 Cary’s Salome appropriates this hitherto male preserve of aggression and then rescripts her cultural engagement as a consequence. In contrast, the heroine, when denied political authority, dispossesses herself of erotic power: I know I could enchain him with a smile: And lead him captive with a gentle word, I scorn my look should ever man beguile, Or other speech than meaning to afford. (III.iii.163–6)

Mariam thus tries to avoid participation in a courtly love narrative now being imposed upon her. Nevertheless this impulse on her part is articulated in terms of passivity and/or non-engagement, rather than dynamic self-assertion. Hitherto, Mariam believed that her chastity was to be enough to safeguard her life and to compensate for her lack of humility (IV.viii.559ff.); and should desperate circumstances present themselves, she had other beliefs with which to console herself: Ay, I it was that thought my beauty such, As it alone could countermand my death. Now death will teach me: he can pale as well A cheek of roses as a cheek less bright. (IV.viii.527–30)

However, the passivity of male characters is inflected quite differently in the dramatic debate. Interestingly, Constabarus’ concealment of Babas’ sons as a form of political disobedience is valued morally in the play as an act of compassion rather than sedition. As a consequence, these rather ‘docile’ male resistants are allowed to construct a heroic narrative of martyrdom for themselves virtually unchallenged: ‘Farewell, of Jewish men the worthy store, / But no farewell to any female wight’ (IV.vi.310–12). Catherine Belsey views The Tragedie of Mariam as a site where such cultural expectations are neutralized and promotes Cary’s heroine as a woman who, speaks from a definite position, even when this is one of inner conflict . . . Meaning and speech, she says, are to be unified, and meaning is located in a consciousness united with the utterance which is its outward

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expression. The play finds for its heroine a specified place in a modern world where language is transparent to subjectivity.33

In this way, Cary is found to create a textual space in which the female can embark on a quest, like Shakespeare’s criminal hero Macbeth, whereby ‘the very firstlings of my heart shall be / The firstlings of my hand’ (IV.i.147–8). Nevertheless, Cary’s play surely chronicles the anguished attempts to construct, rather than the triumphant achievement of, a speaking position for its heroine. The outlet for Mariam’s public voice is diminishing even as the play begins and, intermittently, she colludes in this operation, censuring her own impulse to speak. Mariam’s will-to-power through speech never really sheds its criminal status, even in the heroine’s eyes. The martyrdom of Mariam may lead to a dramatic tribute to female potential as the female body is absorbed into Christological symbolism, but it also effectively silences her voice. The liaison between female speech and cultural systems of meaning was readily established in early modern textual debates, especially where writers believed that control of the female depended on the fact that the female language should be transparent to subjectivity.34 The relentless emphasis in early modern conduct books upon chastity, silence, piety and obedience for the female may draw attention to the possible presence of a resisting female public, but it also clearly indicates, as Angéline Goreau points out, that from the governing perspective of early modern patriarchy, ‘the central characteristic of femininity becomes powerlessness – or impotence. By the same token, the expression of sexuality itself is equated with the exercise of power and will, or aggression.’35 The tormented attempts of the heroine to link meaning to speech are condemned by her society because, in addition, she wishes (unlike Salome) to preserve her moral inheritance. Nevertheless, the concern with the cultural invalidation of the female speech act feeds a much more widespread consideration of the discrepancy between the power of the word and the deed in this dramatic world. As has been appreciated above, the heroine’s power of self-expression can only manifest itself by dismantling the patriarch’s architecture of power: Then why grieves Mariam Herod’s death to hear? Why joy I not the tongue no more shall speak, That yielded forth my brother’s latest doom. (I.i.38–40)

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The demonizing of female speech is starkly contrasted with the authority of male-authored language: ‘My words were all intended for thy good’ (I.vi.411). This latter point made by Constabarus allows him provisionally to secure some moral high ground, which is never made available to women in a culture which values female silence. Salome, for example, discards any claim to moral status and restricts her cultural ambitions to the gratification of appetite: Why stand I now On honourable points? ’Tis long ago Since shame was written on my tainted brow. (I.vi.281–3)

Given the early modern fear of female eloquence, this articulate woman inevitably becomes an object of nervous surveillance for many. Judging astutely the perceived requirements of her culture, Salome condemns the seemingly ‘beauteous language’ of the heroine whose ‘tongue doth but allure the auditors to sin’ (IV.vii.429–31). In general, little attention in Cary’s play is devoted to the positive achievements of any speech act. Frequently, language is either seen as a source of cultural disquiet or a measure of the speaker’s impotence – the ability to speak rather than to act. This is as true of Herod as it is of his subjects. Most characters are found to implore in vain at some point in stage past or present. However, if Graphina withdraws into silence, like Shakespeare’s Virgilia in Coriolanus, this is seen in Cary’s play to enable her suitor to superimpose the erotic narrative of courtly love upon her: For though the diadem on Mariam’s head Corrupt the vulgar judgments, I will boast Graphina’s brow’s as white, her cheeks as red. Why speaks thou not, fair creature? (II.i.38–41)

The ‘gracious silence’ of Virgilia has been seen by critics to be culturally equivocal, denoting an ill-defined participation in the bloodthirsty Roman polity; and equally significant is Pheroras’ anxious concern over Graphina’s conduct: ‘Move thy tongue, / For silence is a sign of discontent’ (II.i.41–2). Here, paradoxically, the male licenses female speech, but only for a confirmation of assent. Whereas Graphina is elevated in conventional Petrarchan terms above the heroine as an erotic trophy, neither Mariam nor Salome are

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content to have themselves limited in this way. Apart from Graphina, all the other female characters in the play engage in more spectacular acts of cultural violence and, interestingly, these are principally channelled against each other. By continuing to probe this trope of dispossession in Cary’s play, it becomes evident that the devaluing of female cultural activity is linked to the political impoverishment of the realm. Salome’s energetic self-assertion is seen by Constabarus as a power which serves to ‘wrong your name, / Your race, your country, and your husband most!’ (I.vi.375–6). This exceptionally voluble husband is, however, more disturbed by his wife’s power of intervention through speech than he was by the widespread condemnation of her in the past: ‘Oft with a silent sorrow have I heard/How ill Judea’s mouth doth censure thee’ (I.vi.387–8).36 Cary’s text clearly wishes the reader to attend to the political relations between patrician and populace. The construction of subjectivity in this play cannot be divorced from the public sphere of governance; and, in one of the most valuable studies of the play to date, Dympna Callaghan rightly draws attention to the fact that ‘Palestine is the locus of complex racial and religious co-ordinates, at once the displaced centre of Christianity and the home of the infidel.’37 This violence attains an increasingly racialized character as the play develops: the operations of racial demonization (in which all the major figures in Cary’s play indulge) indicate the culture’s determination to appropriate dominant identities by associating racialized myths of cultural Others with absence, lack and vacancy. The interpretation of race, for example, is found to be intimately involved with the claims of the patrician protagonists to political status. Indeed, Alexandra and her daughter Mariam construct their public identities forcefully by relying on arguments of racial hierarchy and political spaces of domination. This is most markedly felt in the women’s verbal attacks upon Salome in Act I when Alexandra initially turns upon her hated son-in-law Herod as a ‘base Edomite, the damned Esau’s heir’ (I.ii.84). This kind of violence is then taken up by the heroine herself as she deploys language as a weapon against Salome: ‘Thou parti-Jew, and parti-Edomite, / Thou mongrel’ (I.iii.235–6). Critical geographers Duncan James and David Ley have underlined that ‘the boundaries of race provide particularly conducive conditions for the construction of distorted cultural representations.’38 Indeed, Mariam’s declaration constitutes one of the most violent bids for cultural legitimacy with the markers of race and place, unmasking a vigorous and widespread desire for fixity in this volatile dramatic world.

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Mariam’s embittered assertion of myths of racial purity are clearly linked to a wish to collapse Salome’s political identity, to puncture the integrity of her dynastic claims upon Palestine – a space Mariam desires to preserve from future change. George Puttenham insisted: ‘no kind of argument in all the Oratorie craft doth better perswade and more vniversally satisfie then example, which is but the representation of old memories, and like successes happened in times past.’39 Like Hamlet’s, Mariam’s survival at this point rests on her ability to renew constantly (through performances of disgust and outrage) the memory of the previous occupants of the throne, namely her kindred. Cary’s text explores how Mariam seeks to justify herself in terms of both lineage and virtue: You scarce have ever my superiors seen For Mariam’s servants were as good as you, Before she came to be Judea’s queen.

In response, Salome remarks significantly: ‘Now stirs the tongue that is so quickly mov’d’ (I.iii.227ff.). Alexandra draws this energetic exchange of abuse to a close with ‘come, Mariam, let us go: it is no boot / To let the head contend against the foot’ (I.iii.259–60). By the end of the play, this violent denigration of Salome is reformulated as Herod compares his sister to his wife and finds the former to be ‘a sun-burnt blackamoor’ whom he ‘hath often ta’en . . . for an ape’ (IV.vii.460ff.). Callaghan is clearly right to link part of the widespread early modern debate on the parameters of authority and subordination to ‘the racialization of demonized femininity and the de-racialization of sanctified femininity, as well as the preoccupation with moral difference as analogous to racial difference . . . In a culture where femininity is polarized as black or white, women are still unstable signifiers.’40 At the end of the play, the dramatic culture is intent upon destroying the cultural meaning as well as the body of the heroine. Mariam is not only silenced with an axe, but the significance of the cultural challenge she represents is counteracted and re-expressed by the succession of verbal attacks upon her by Doris (Herod’s first wife), Herod himself and Alexandra in the final moments of her life. Doris’ curse upon the heroine’s offspring is viewed by Mariam as a desacramentalizing of her precious status as mother and, at this point, it becomes for her the ‘cause that guiltless Mariam dies’ (IV.viii.608). Frustrated in his ambitions to lay claim to his wife’s mind and body, Herod determines to signal his re-

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entry into the political order of Palestine by destroying the heroine. She has come to symbolize the most important point of resistance to his regime of fear. The reader is asked to chart a complete transformation in Mariam’s cultural status: from Act I, when she meditates nostalgically (but lucidly?) on a time when her ‘virgin freedom left (her) unrestrain’d’ (I.i.72), to her final situation where she is asked to contemplate her identity in terms of the needs of others (Herod: ‘My mouth from speech of her I cannot wean’ (IV.ii.86)). It becomes increasingly evident that the verbal violence of Doris, Herod and Alexandra towards Mariam anticipates the physical violence she is about to endure. Herod himself acknowledges that, ‘my word, though not my sword, made Mariam bleed’ (V.i.189). If Margaret Ferguson is right to contend that the heroine ultimately ‘censors the wrong thing: (Herod’s) phallus rather than her tongue’, it is clear that the threat of violence, which Herod represents, should not be underestimated.41 Herod’s predatory nature is widely acknowledged throughout this dramatic world and, as has been appreciated above, the heroine believes her dilemma to be an inevitable outcome of her husband’s incarcerating tendencies: And blame me not, for Herod’s jealousy Had power even constancy itself to change: For he, by barring me from liberty, To shun my ranging, taught me first to range. (I.i.23–6)

Whilst Mariam wishes to view the kingdom as a seat of dynastic legitimacy, Herod repeatedly sees it as a domain of consumption, a privately controlled public space existing simply to satisfy his desires: Or if thou think Judea’s narrow bound Too strict a limit for thy great command: Thou shalt be empress of Arabia crown’d . . . I’ll rob the holy David’s sepulchre To give thee wealth. (IV.iii.101ff.)

The relationship between liberty and government constitutes a focus of consuming interest for Renaissance writers of all disciplines and, in Cary’s play, it is explored in complex terms: the frame of reference for debate changes frequently as we are asked to move from one gendered speaking position to the next. It is not so much that Herod’s arbitrary

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exercise of power in both the public and the private sphere has allowed revolution to ferment, but rather that his regime has systematically eroded the cultural and emotional pattern of allegiances. This is most baldly made apparent in Act III where Cary indulges in a mode of Senecan stichomythia: Salome Pheroras

How can my joy sufficiently appear? A heavier tale did never pierce mine ear. (III.ii.51–2)

The complexity of the play is rooted in the fact that, unlike other cultural rebels such as Salome, Pheroras or Constabarus, for example, Mariam is unable to adopt this kind of univocal response to Herod’s power. She denies herself the indulgence of forswearing cultural expectations of obligation and emotional engagement: ‘Yet cannot this repulse some falling tear, / That will against my will some grief unfold’ (I.i.54–5). Nevertheless, the intensity of Mariam’s tragic anguish does not allow her to be inscribed unequivocally within a dynamic space of heroism. She earns her place in the dramatic frame of history through the Christian symbolism of martyrdom, rather than through that of classical heroism. Indeed, the reality of classical heroism (Pompey, Caesar, Marc Antony and Augustus) is never reproduced on stage. It may appear in its most primitive form with Babas’ sons in their resistance to tyranny, but this is too briefly dramatized to constitute satisfactorily a positive value. When Mariam is allowed to emerge briefly in this discursive context, it is purely in terms of a trophy to be won: For on the brow of Mariam hangs a fleece Whose slenderest twine is strong enough to bind The hearts of kings; the pride and shame of Greece, Troy-flaming Helen’s not so fairly shin’d. (IV.vii.413–16)

The moral and heroic status of the other male characters is left in doubt. Constabarus and Silleus, for example, lack sufficient moral insight, tragic sensibility or textual importance to attain this stature. They are shown to have disrupted existing patriarchal power structures in order to satisfy personal ambitions of self-gratification, and Pheroras follows their lead. When instances of male (self-) dispossession do surface in the dramatic narrative, they are deployed strategically as culturally discordant in opposition to the culturally acceptable model of female

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self-sacrifice. Male sacrifice, whether it be in the shape of the political victimization of Constabarus and Babas’ sons in the present or in the acts of Mariam’s forefathers, for example, is thought to indicate a monstrous reversal in the natural order and sets the whole society’s nerves jangling: Alexandra

And say my father and my son he slew To royalize by right your prince-born breath. (I.i.119–20)

The complex narrative of operations to disempower Herod, in which a variety of his subjects is implicated, grows to form the principal focus for Cary’s dramatic exploration of patriarchy in crisis. Critically, Herod has become a source of unease and dissatisfaction. Barry Weller and Margaret W. Ferguson, for example, draw attention to anxieties which are widely felt amongst critics: Clearly Herod, as represented in Cary’s tragedy, does not escape the rhetorical and gestural excess against which Hamlet advises . . . it may be questionable whether the figure of Herod ever moves entirely beyond the sphere of comedy . . . Cary’s Herod is a Petrarchan ranter . . . Herod’s madness has more of degradation than of pathos.42

The ruler’s emotional excesses of desire and disgust towards the unpossessable Mariam in the final stages of the play clearly exacerbate the chaotic nature of imbalanced power relations in evidence throughout the dramatic narrative and would appear to be designed to incur reader disapproval. Whilst enhancing the status of the married woman, Protestant reformers had been anxious not to devalue the husband’s authority. St Jerome had previously likened disproportionate adoration of the wife by the husband to adultery; and male early modern writers were, in general, unwilling to challenge the gendered terms in which cultural perceptions of sovereignty were formulated. At the beginning of the early modern period, Juan Luis Vives, in his Instruction of a Christian Woman (1523), affirmed: the woman is nat rekened the more worshipful amonge men that presumeth to have mastrye above her husbande: but the more folisshe and the more worthy to be mocked: yea and moreover than that cursed and unhappy: the whiche tourneth backewarde the lawes of nature, lyke as though a soldioure wolde rule his capitayne.43

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From a wider perspective, it becomes clear that Herod’s emotional turmoil undermines rather than consolidates his status: ‘Here, take her to her death. Come back, come back’ (IV.iv.235). Nevertheless, this should not lead the reader to minimize the potential of his political regime. Everyone on stage is aware of his hold over life and death in Palestine. His repeated performances of threatened or realized violence are clearly an endeavour to reconstruct and maintain a particular sense of dominated political space in order to mask alternative representations of political rule. However, as Henri Lefebvre underlines, no attempts to claim and secure a dominant space meet with lasting success; and Herod is linked to the fragmentation of power structures through his failure to suppress his own appetites. The very insecurity of the personal monarch’s will is the most arresting aspect of his dramatic power of intervention: Herod

You dwellers in the now deprived land, Wherein the matchless Mariam was bred: Why grasp not each of you a sword in hand, To aim at me your cruel sovereign’s head? (V.i.171–4)

The patriarch’s fixation with self-gratification and his resulting moral vacancy serve as a model for the power-hungry. Like her brother, Salome does not hesitate to debase the currency of kinship, duty and allegiance: But he is dead: and though he were my brother, His death such store of cinders cannot cast My coals of love to quench. (I.iv.265–7)

As has been appreciated above, Salome’s dynamism is contrasted with the inaction imposed upon Mariam by her heightened sensibilities; nonetheless, if the former’s mental agility is ultimately shown to be morally unacceptable, it is culturally successful in a way that Mariam’s demeanour is not: I’ll be the custom-breaker: and begin To show my sex the way to freedom’s door, And with an off’ring will I purge my sin. (I.iv.309–11)

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Once again like her brother, Salome attempts to empower herself by moving from one sexual partner to the next. However, she is censured in the way that Herod is not because of this society’s emphasis on female chastity: as a safeguard on the woman’s Christian virtue, her civic obedience and the legitimacy of her children. Despite the intermittent recording of resistant voices in Renaissance writing, Vives is, for example, representative in his assertion that the wife is to excuse her husband’s adultery as he is not compelled to chastity in the same way as she is.44 From Constabarus’ point of view, the adulterous Salome has ‘ever liv’d so void of awe’ and her abandonment of him is to ‘reverse all order’ (I.vi.456ff.): Salome

Silleus

blame not thou The ill I do, since what I do’s for thee, Though others blame, Silleus should allow. Thinks Salome, Silleus hath a tongue To censure her fair actions? (I.v.338–42)

In the final phases of Cary’s text, the dramatic emphasis is upon the destruction of Mariam, rather than the animating force of the destroyer. Nonetheless the play leads its reader to believe that Herod is no longer husband, ruler or vicious magistrate, but finally a weakened and lovesick mourner. At the beginning of the play, the heroine indicates that her husband’s exercise of power has done little to generate a cohesive cultural realm based on networks of sympathy or obedience: ‘Might Herod’s life a trusty servant find, / My death to his had been unseparate’ (I.i.49–50). By the end of the play, in order to ingratiate himself with his recalcitrant wife, Herod offers to ‘rob the holy David’s sepulchre’ (IV.iii.105). However, he fails to superimpose his morally degraded value systems on to the heroine and, as a result, dispossesses the nation as a whole of its politically legitimate heiress: ‘’Tis I have overthrown your royal line’ (V.i.178). Finally, it is clear that the reader increasingly becomes deprived of a conventionally soothing narrative of patriarchal restoration and closure in The Tragedie of Mariam. Weller and Ferguson point out: as in many classical tragedies – and as in another seventeenth-century instance of neoclassical tragedy, Milton’s Samson Agonistes – [the chorus’s] gnomic, conventional utterances seem somewhat off the mark, not only capricious and volatile in the application of general precepts but

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also inadequate to the psychological, spiritual, or even practical situation of the protagonist.45

The chorus has a strategic role to play throughout Cary’s play as it proceeds to contradict itself, misread and misrepresent situations: it constantly modifies the moral vision of the reader. At the end of Act I, it reflects upon, Those minds that wholly dote upon delight, Except they only joy in inward good, Still hope at last to hop upon the right, And so from sand they leap in loathsome mud. (I.vi.493–6)

Its reductive moral consciousness homes in upon a woman in ‘expectation of variety’ and asks, Who can those vast imaginations feed, Where in a property contempt doth breed? Were Herod now perchance to live again, She would again as much be grieved at that . . . Her wishes guide her to she knows not what. (I.vi.518ff.)

The ludic implications of the choric voice clearly remind us that To hear a tale with ears prejudicate, It spoils the judgment, and corrupts the sense . . . Our ears and hearts are apt to hold for good That we ourselves do most desire to be. (II.iv.401–2, 413–14)

Nevertheless, it speaks in absolute moral terms untinctured by the complexities of cultural experience; and it constantly antagonizes readers’ emotional engagement with the heroine as it reminds them strategically of early modern doctrine on unbridled speech: ‘When to their husbands [wives] themselves do bind, / Do they not wholly give themselves away?’ (III.iii.233–4). A proverb current during the Renaissance specified that ‘an eloquent woman is never chaste.’46 Ultimately, the chorus, like Jacobean society itself, points to a liaison between linguistic and sexual non-control and equates in the woman ‘a common mind’ with ‘a common body’. After the bathetic representation of Herod hoping that the beheaded Mariam might be brought back to life (V.i.91–3), we are asked to attend

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at the end of the play to an Othello-like Herod who wishes to ‘muffle up . . . in endless night’ and enter a world where ‘all the stars be dark.’ Naturally, there have been critical attempts to impose closure on Cary’s narrative: for example, It is noteworthy that the author sides throughout with Herod . . . E. C. goes somewhat beyond Josephus; she has a low opinion of women in general. None of her female characters are praiseworthy, and the entire sex is apostrophized bitterly in the farewell remarks of Constabarus . . . If the play then has a general moral, it seems to be that even a tyrant is entitled to a humble, patient, and loving wife; in any case, it is a woman’s duty to preserve appearances.47

Conversely, the resistance of Cary’s play to such endeavours has exasperated other critics: The reader of this closet drama is left puzzled and unsatisfied at the end . . . We are left with the image of the silent, sacrificial daughter being hounded to her grave by the rowdy, dissatisfied mother, who is, in contrast, both speaking and surviving. What is the reader to think? The ending is incoherent, impossible to evaluate and absorb;

‘The result is contradiction, uneasiness, and tension.’48 Cary’s refusal to allow the critic to construct comfortably any narrative schema, whether it be, for example, of a stalwart patriarchal or feminist nature, is the greatest challenge of dispossession which the text offers. The play retains its interrogative mood even in its final dramatic exchanges with its competing versions of Mariam’s death – and this should excite, rather than irritate, the imagination of the reader. Interestingly, Cary does not organize the trauma of Mariam’s demise unequivocally into a consecrated space of cathartic coherence. Ultimately, the intrigue must be seen to be played out between the two loci of endless narrativization: Herod’s and Mariam’s deaths. The ranting of Alexandra, the Christological symbolism of Mariam’s death (‘By three days hence, if wishes could revive, / I know himself would make me oft alive’ (V.i.77–8)), the final foregrounding of Herod’s penitence and the sustained subversive nature of choric interventions must serve to accentuate, rather than resolve, the magnitude of the cultural problems surrounding the attempts of early modern women to construct an autonomous public voice.

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the same iust God who liueth and gouerneth all things for euer, doeth in these our times giue victorie, courage and discourage, raise, and throw downe Kings, Estates, Cities, and Nations, for the same offences which were committed of old, and are committed in the present: for which reason, in these and other the afflictions of Israel, alwayes the causes are set downe, that they might bee as precedents to succeeding ages.49 Walter Ralegh, The History of the World (1614)

Chapter Five Urban Dystopia: The Colonizing of Jonson’s Venice in Volpone it is verie hard to knowe, who is noble, who is worshipfull, who is a gentleman, who is not: for you shall haue those, which are neither of the nobilitie, nor yeomanry, no, nor yet anie Magistrat or Officer in the common welth, go daylie in silkes, veluets, satens, damasks, teffeties, and such like, not withstanding that they be both base by byrthe, meane by estate, & seruyle by calling. This is a great confusion & a general disorder, God be mercyfull vnto vs.1 Phillip Stubbes, An Anatomie of Abuses (1583) Mosca

and to make So rare a music out of discords. (V.ii.18–19)

Whatever anxieties audiences may experience with relation to Jonson’s tricksters, they cannot fail to be touched by the spellbinding power of these egotists to draw comic order from chaos. The power relations which such figures construct may be morally and politically disturbing, but every dimension of Volpone’s complex intrigue invites us to reflect upon the larger question of cultural organization itself. Moreover, in its unfolding, Volpone confounds us by systematically unpicking the utopian/dystopian opposition which modern criticism has often found so reassuring. This is not to suggest that Jonson inscribes his play formally within the conventions of utopian or, for that matter, dystopian writing. Nevertheless, it is evident that he engages centrally with some of its dominant concerns which Lyman Tower Sargent has interpreted in terms of ‘social dreaming’: ‘the dreams and nightmares that concern the ways in which groups of people arrange their lives and which usually envision a radically different society from the one in which the dreamers live’ – although Sargent subsequently concedes: ‘not all are radical, for some people at any time dream of something basically familiar.’2 In a play such as Volpone, which may often appear to operate within a symbolic or allegorical frame of reference, Jonson’s ‘social dreaming’ is neither soothing nor wholly fantastical: ‘Good morning to the day; and,

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next, my gold! / Open the shrine, that I may see my saint’ (I.i.1–2). His weapons of satire, irony and farce are deployed carefully in order to impress upon his audiences the all-too-seductive powers of dystopian desires: Mosca

And, gentle sir, When you do come to swim, in golden lard, Up to the arms, in honey, that your chin Is born up stiff, with fatness of the flood, Think on your vassal; but remember me. (I.iii.69–73)

The critical geographer David Harvey has stressed that whereas, ‘the figures of “the city” and of “Utopia” have long been intertwined’, we should also remember that, ‘the figure of the city as a fulcrum of social disorder, moral breakdown, and unmitigated evil – from Babylon and Sodom and Gomorrah to Gotham – also has its place in the freight of metaphorical meanings that the word “city” carries across our cultural universe.’3 In the frenetic and sinister world of Jonson’s Venice, the terrifying vision of urban and moral flux is gradually conjured up as the principal player proceeds to exult in his dissociation from any cultural or, more importantly perhaps, human commitment: ‘I have no wife, no parent, child, ally / To give my substance to’ (I.i.73–4). Thomas More had given the sixteenth century ‘no-place’ in the shape of Utopia; however, the more jaundiced vision of recent times has created dystopia or ‘bad place’ to enrich the lexicon and to extend it in the direction of the social nightmare. In the case of Volpone, it may be felt that Jonson shares the same cultural vision that Donne was promoting in his ‘Sermon of Commemoration of the Lady Danvers’ (1627) whereby, ‘God hath imprinted in every naturall man . . . an endlesse, and Undeterminable desire of more, then this life can minister unto him.’4 Nonetheless utopian/dystopian writing is not necessarily limited to extreme or absolute social options. It may have affinities with idealizings or jeremiads, but it can be viewed as a mode of writing concentrating on social projections which plausibly connect in a variety of ways with aspects of the subject’s cultural experience. It has, of course, preoccupied Jonson critics down the generations to establish the degree to which his wide-eyed audiences may look on with both disgust and desire at the capers being enacted just beyond the pale of their lives on the stage before them. However, Robert O. Evans has pointed to a leitmotif in dystopian writing whereby an appeal is made to the

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reader/audience to respond to and protest against the projection in order to prevent it being realized beyond the page.5 In fact, all these kinds of textual operations are clearly at work in Volpone. Our imaginations and those of the characters are excited by a concatenation of convoluted intrigues (‘I could skip / Out of my skin, now, like a subtle snake, / I am so limber’ (III.i.5–7)); but, simultaneously, we are encouraged to attend to the facility with which the early modern city and its systems of government can be infiltrated and colonized by morally deviant forces.6 Jonson’s presentation of Venice with its Grand Guignol theatricality and irrepressible materialism goes some way to satisfy the conventions of dystopian writing in that it conjures up a detailed vision of a fully realized locus which the audience would acknowledge is significantly worse than its own – given the rapid succession of improbabilities within one revolution of the sun. Moreover, Jonson seasons this sophisticated concoction with mordant social critique, stressing what Gail Kern Paster has termed ‘the unattractive solidity of the city and the animal-like behaviour of its people [which fix] human nature in the city firmly in the bottom half of the chain of being’.7 Whilst Jonson scholars have repeatedly demonstrated that Venice is realized on stage with geographical and political detail, the city-republic is also like Said’s Orient in that [it is] less a place than a topos, a set of references, a congeries of characteristics, that seems to have its origin in a quotation, or a fragment of a text, or a citation from someone’s work . . . or some bit of previous imagining, or an amalgam of all these.8

The dramatization of Venice may be underpinned to an extent by precise historical and geographical referencing, but it also suggests a general line of vision on the dynamic, but volatile, nature of existence in early modern cities where even the most disturbing forms of wishfulfilment may be played out: but whom I make Must be my heir: and this makes men observe me. This draws new clients, daily, to my house. (I.i.74–6)

Positioned beside the partially decomposing body of the magnifico, the hypocritical Corvino, for example, instructs the ostensibly compliant Mosca, ‘I pray you use no violence’ in the treatment of Volpone.

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Unsurprisingly, the servant wonders, ‘why should you be thus scrupulous, pray you, sir?’ Corvino responds with, ‘Nay, at your discretion’ (I.v.72–4). Even the fantastical Sir Politic Would-Be is stimulated by the morally chequered environment of the city-republic in which he can note, and thus in some modest way contribute to, the sinister events of his everyday life: I will tell you, sir . . . Some few particulars I have set down Only for this meridian, fit to be known Of your crude traveller. (IV.i.3–7)

It is this very emphasis upon daily experience which renders Jonson’s critique all the more alarming; as the critical geographer Cindi Katz has stressed, ‘everyday life is significant as a critical concept, not as a descriptive notion for the mundane and unspectacular practices by which we construct ourselves and reproduce society, but because inherent in these is the potential for rupture, breakdown and transformation.’9 Jonson evokes an all too credible scene in which multiple forms of scavenging and parasitism are at work; and Jonathan Crewe is surely just in asserting that ‘the play successfully evokes that Hobbesian world in which, sanctions removed, “men like ravenous fishes / Feed on one another”.’10 Such a threatening vision of surveillance, predation and incarceration becomes all the more plausible when it connects with the pervasive Renaissance myth of Venice itself. This multifaceted body of thought gained currency particularly from the fifteenth century onwards; and, as E. O. G. Haitsma Mulier has demonstrated, it was to have especial influence on seventeenth-century England and the Dutch Republic.11 Venice’s apparently Aristotelian mix of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy was admired in certain quarters amongst Elizabethans and Jacobeans who felt that their commerce, and indeed their collective identity, was in part similarly expressed through maritime relations and resistance to the papacy.12 However, despite the promotion of common interests, the republican character of the city was an influential, yet dangerous, cultural referent for those who chose to resist the early Stuarts’ aspirations towards absolutism.13 In addition, there was the disquieting Venetian insistence upon secrecy with regard to political matters which was notorious in Europe: regarding his visit in the 1580s, for example, Montaigne was to note that the inhabitants were prevented from fraternizing with visitors, and those who did came under

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suspicion.14 Having partially digested such data, Would-Be contends: ‘this three weeks, all my advices, all my letters, / They have been intercepted’ (II.iii.13–14). The truth of the remark is left open to speculation and he is dismissed by Peregrine, the pilgrim hawk, as a buffoon. Nevertheless, Would-Be loiters in the city and wishes to remain a spectator, a voyeur and to enjoy the scopic pleasures of would-be vice: I do love To note and to observe; though I live out, Free from the active torrent, yet I’d mark The currents and the passages of things For mine own private use; and know the ebbs And flows of state. (II.i.100–5)

In his survey of utopian writing, Sargent turns his attention to two separate tropes within this discursive field: ‘body utopias or utopias of sensual gratification and city utopias or utopias of human contrivance’.15 Elsewhere Richard Sennett has placed great stress on the fact that sensuality was a crucial element in the image of Venice in Europe, and in the Venetians’ sense of themselves . . . The spice trade also contributed to the image of a sensual city, since spices like saffron and turmeric were thought to be aphrodisiacs for the human body . . . Most of all, prostitution flourished in the ports.16

Such body utopias are constantly being envisaged by Jonson’s protagonist – and, filtered through the prism of his misformed mind, they become both extravagant and destructive in ambition: Prepare Me music, dances, banquets, all delights; The Turk is not more sensual in his pleasures Than will Volpone. (I.v.86–9)

Bored by the ease with which he dupes the wealthy of the city, Volpone has his Mosca search for a sexual partner – a woman ‘lusty, full of juice’ (II.vi.35). However, the attempted seductions of the magnifico’s ailing body by Corvino and those of Celia with the antics of a would-be

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voluptuary clearly demonstrate in Jonson’s text how specific and indeed contradictory modes of performance may promote alternative forms of social space within the same conflicted locus. In keeping with the broader traditions of Jacobean city comedy, Jonson subordinates romantic intrigue to the dramatic struggle for cultural power as the formerly sacred ties of charity, obligation, hospitality, reciprocity and so on, are overturned in favour of the lust for ownership: Yet, I glory More in the cunning purchase of my wealth, Than in the glad possession. (I.i.30–2)

The fascinating, but vicious regime promoted by Volpone and Mosca remains in textual terms firmly aligned with the deviant, the unnatural, the city. Volpone is excited by the potential of the city because it offers, he believes, an alternative value-system to that in operation elsewhere – this city ethic has been summarized more generally by Sennett in terms of ‘difference, complexity, strangeness’.17 The city constitutes both a refuge from normative moral pressures and a tribute to the human ability to transcend and metamorphose existing forms of cultural organization. The deviousness of the criminals uncovers at least as much vice as it generates in Venice. However, the play constantly encourages us to view the labyrinthine stratagems hatched by rogues as a mirror-reflection of the maze-like complexity of their physical habitat. Lefebvre noted: ‘it is worth asking ourselves en passant why spaces devoted to sensual pleasures seem so much rarer than places of power, knowledge or wisdom, and exchange.’18 Nonetheless Jonson’s Volpone encourages its audiences to integrate cultural and erotic desires associated with the body firmly into this society’s sites of power and exchange: Thy baths shall be the juice of July-flowers, Spirit of roses, and of violets. The milk of unicorns and panthers’ breath. (III.vii.213–5)

The play’s dominant body utopia is proposed in terms of the attempted seduction of the virtuous Celia, and it is important to stress that the cultural signification of this Venetian wife evolves radically in the course of the play in order to reflect the frantic desires of her would-be masters. Alternately, the idealization and vilification of Celia’s body represent the manner in which the tricksters and their gulls wish to measure their

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most immediate achievements: ‘Cannot we delude the eyes / Of a few poor household spies?’ (III.vii.176–7). Her constant introduction into enclosed spaces (both symbolic and material) during the play indicates the desperation of the Venetian patriarchs to complete this unfinished project: such men labour to control space, to express their power to contain and to exclude. Moreover, Volpone, now waxing lyrical in Celia’s company as her seducer, confesses that, if time permitted, ‘In varying figures [I] would have contended / With the blue Proteus, or the hornèd flood’ (III.vii.152–3). The magnifico’s hedonist vocation can only be realized by exploiting the volatility of his urban environment and by disrupting the existing moral and cultural signifying systems of identity. Celia’s body becomes yet another form of capital which he wishes to entice into his own disorientating criminal economy: my dwarf shall dance, My eunuch sing, my fool make up the antic, Whilst we, in changed shapes, act Ovid’s tales: Thou like Europa now and I like Jove, Then I like Mars and thou like Erycine. (III.vii.219–23).

Whilst Sargent finds the body utopia in evidence since 1750 BC, he distinguishes the city utopia/dystopia as being more recent in origin. Even so, it is clear that classical civilizations viewed the city as a basic building block for understanding cultural sophistication. Rather than entering the popular critical fray and privileging the cultural contexts of early modern Venice above Jacobean London in the analysis of this play, for example, it is surely more fruitful to concede that the cultural meanings of both cities coexist in a composite meditation on the nature of urban existence. Jonson has moralized Volpone’s city habitat: it emerges as a symbolic community desperate to satisfy its appetites for acquisition: ‘Why, this is better than rob churches, yet’ (I.v.91). Moreover, the dramatist carefully maintains our bifocal vision on Venice as criminal utopia and corrupt den of predators. As a consequence, audiences are left to formulate their own ideal community, their own personal City of God, and to oppose it to the dramatic narrative of unharnessed egoism. The myth of Venice appears to have attracted Jonson and Shakespeare alone amongst the early modern dramatists in England, and the cityrepublic is promoted by both men as a glamorous but culturally ambivalent backdrop on which to organize their intrigues. The opulent, ostentatious and frequently menacing city was thought to be wedded to corrupt

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practices and hard-bitten mercantilism in addition to impartial but severe justice and political sophistication. In all areas, it displayed an irrepressible desire to compete as it focused its maritime influence back and forth from east to west. Clearly, its imperial, commercial and political complexities made it a fascinating place for travellers who came to witness its ceremonials, cultural activity and moral slackness. In his study of early modern cities, Christopher Friedrichs has pointed out: ‘[Venice] was regarded by educated Europeans as the ultimate embodiment of what a city could or should be.’19 As has been appreciated above, it was a place which maintained some independence from the papacy and was naturally valued in England as a result – despite its reputation for extreme sexual indulgence. This cosmopolitan, saturnalian site emerges in Jonson’s play as an enticing counter-culture for its resistance to moral boundaries. Jonson parades a multitude of characters on stage and each one proffers a fragmentary glimpse into the cultural ethos of the republic. Even the absurd consciousness of WouldBe provides a lens, albeit distorting, upon the fear and intrigue which are common currency in the Venetian maze of streets. One of the reasons Would-Be sustains dramatic interest is that his ramblings are not wholly divorced from contemporaneous beliefs, even if they do engage prominently with his own personal narratives of wishfulfilment. R. Malcolm Smuts notes: ‘The gathering of intelligence and probing of arcana imperii soon became a cultural fashion, giving rise, in the early seventeenth century, to the practice among gentlemen of gathering daily to exchange news in St. Paul’s Cathedral.’20 Nonetheless, if Would-Be is a clown, Peregrine appears unduly naïve as he disembarks in the city of Volpone. Would-Be’s new-found companion wishes to experience his world only in terms of the vita civile and scoffs at the suggestion that life in society may admit of a whole host of seemingly implausible alternatives. To the audience, it becomes increasingly apparent, as the sixteenth-century commentator Gasparo Contarini suggested, that Venice was a place ‘so unspeakeablie strange’ as to make ‘the straungest impossibilities not seeme altogether incredible’.21 God hath giuen vs a world of our owne, wherein there is nothing wanting to earthly contentment. Whither goe yee then, worthly Country-men, or what seeke yee? Heere growes that wealth, which yee go but to spend abroad; Heere is that sweet peace which the rest of world admires and enuies . . . Lastly, heere Heauen stands open, which to many other parts is barred on the out-side with ignorance or mis-beleefe. (Joseph Hall,

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Quo Vadis? A Just Censure of Travell as it is Commonly Undertaken by Gentlemen of our Nation (1617))22

Ultimately, audiences may choose to endorse Would-Be’s advice that Venice is a place where one must ‘never speak a truth’. However, we may be disquieted by the alarming community of feeling which we gradually experience in the company of Would-Be as he confesses with relish his fascination for the spectacle of human decay organized by villains. As the would-be seasoned traveller, Politic warns his fellow countryman: You shall have tricks else passed upon you hourly. And then, for your religion, profess none, But wonder at the diversity of all. (IV.i.21–3)

In our willingness to dismiss him as morally vacant, we implicate ourselves in an unnerving process of self-interrogation regarding the wider discussion of voyeurism and human motivation. This English sage had apparently armed himself with textual advice before setting foot in la Serenissima: ‘I had read Contarene, took me a house, / Dealt with my Jews to furnish it with movables’ (IV.i.40–1).23 Like Mosca in the streets of Venice and Voltore in the courtroom, Politic conjures up fantastical vistas and improbable places with the dubious authority of eye-witness testimony: through the words of all these characters, we are drawn into a world where transvestite prostitutes converse with Politic on a gondola; where Bonario the parricide breaks into Volpone’s house accompanied by his ‘paramour’ Celia; and where there are taverns in which messages may be conveyed between intelligencers in toothpicks: these are all strategic textual spaces deployed by the rhetors in order to control the minds of others. However, Would-Be never becomes an ‘understander’ of his world as Jonson challenges his reader to be in the prefatory epistle to The Alchemist. He amasses notes and observations, but fails to construct any body of knowledge, any intellectual capital, which might enhance his status or value in the corrupt city state – and to Contarini Venice seemed as if it ‘onely were a common and generall market to the whole world’.24 In the play’s dedicatory text to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, Jonson’s slippery persona laments the fact that it is widely held that

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now, especially in dramatic or . . . stage poetry, nothing but ribaldry, profanation, blasphemy, all licence of offence to God and man is practised . . . For my particular I can, and from a most clear conscience, affirm that I have ever trembled to think toward the least profaneness; have loathed the use of such foul and unwashed bawdry as is now made the food of the scene. (ll. 36–46)

To what extent Jonson was sincerely governed by such an agenda has been debated from generation to generation, but it is evident that, like the Restoration dramatists who were his successors, Jonson attempts to generate moral responses in his audience by dramatizing a world which has lost all ability to do so. The corrupt communities of his frenzied comedies appear determined to efface any moral inheritance they may have been bequeathed from the past and to expose the fraudulence of any value-system which does not accord with their constantly fluctuating appetites. The grasping Corvino informs his wife that honour! tut, a breath: There’s no such thing in nature; a mere term Invented to awe fools. (III.vii.38–40)

In a similar vein Celia, a woman who is only allowed to exit the house to attend mass, is advised that her fame, ‘that’s such a jig’ (III.vii.48). Terrified by the moral void and the shifting relations of ‘patronage’ which her husband-turned-pimp is summoning up and by the prospect that her own violation will not only be countenanced but encouraged by him, the doleful Celia laments, ‘Are heaven and saints then nothing? / Will they be blind and stupid?’ (III.vii.53–4). The intelligence of such men as Corvino is more cankered and repellent than any boil or haemorrhaging he may wish to identify on Volpone’s seemingly putrefying trunk. His desire to control through incarceration is nothing but a microcosmic version of the city’s appetite to define itself in terms of alienation and repression. The warped cast of Corvino’s mind is indeed excited by the attempted negation of his wife through her very denial of space: some two or three yards off I’ll chalk a line, o’er which if thou but chance To set thy desperate foot, more, more horror, More wild, remorseless rage shall seize on thee

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In this way, he insists upon his control of domestic space by designating prohibitive zones and specified practices. Celia’s earlier receptive responses to some seductive marketing by Scoto of Mantua has clearly problematized Corvino’s powers of enclosure. However, when confronted with the possibility of herself as a token of exchange between Volpone and her husband, she yearns to return to the repressive regime of her marital home: if you doubt My chastity, why lock me up, for ever: Make me the heir to darkness. (III.vii.24–6)

Here, once again early modern theatre invites us to establish an intimate link between conceptual space and physical or somatic space. Each of the characters is affirming an identity in part based upon the existence of a symbolic map defining the parameters of their existence. Interestingly, an emergent interest at the beginning of the seventeenth century in the public and private distribution of rooms in the dwellings of the gentry often insisted upon the pervasive authority of the owner throughout: in The English Secretorie, or, Methode of writing of epistles and letters (1625), for example, Angel Day specifies: whereas into each other place of the house it is ordinary for euery neare attendant about vs to haue accesse: in this place we doe solitarily and alone shut vp our selves . . . The Closet in euery house, as it is a reposement of Secrets, so is it onely . . . at the owners, and no others commaundement.25

When Celia compounds her ‘crimes’ at home with a public refusal to submit in Volpone’s house, Corvino ‘fantasizes’ yet more spaces of violation in which to stage the collapse of her defining moral identity both without and within the family home: Heart, I will drag thee hence, home, by the hair; Cry thee strumpet, through the streets; rip up Thy mouth, unto thine ears; and slit thy nose, Like a raw rotchet – Do not tempt me, come.

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Yield, I am loath – Death, I will buy some slave, Whom I will kill, and bind thee to him, alive; And at my window, hang you forth: devising Some monstrous crime, which I, in capital letters, Will eat into thy flesh, with aquafortis, And burning corsives, on this stubborn breast. (III.vii.96–105)

When it is no longer desirable that she should be prized as a faithful feme covert, Corvino invests his appetites in her in another way as a private gift to a potential Maecenas. He is willing to sacrifice the sacred patriarchal rights of the marriage bed and to effect the transmission of his property, Celia’s body, because he can no longer control his own greed. His very vices have caused him to redefine the sexual availability of Celia and to convert her in the courtroom into her own antithesis – ‘a whore / Of most hot exercise, more than a partridge’ (IV.v.117–18). Jonson’s grotesque vision of the city is, in fact, a comic distortion of early modern society where rank and moral discipline have been displaced in favour of a cultural hierarchy organized in terms of ownership. Corvino, Corbaccio and Voltore have through their vicious practices had their identity reduced to remorseless avarice. In such a city, the majority of inhabitants are stimulated by the exhibition of knavery around them; and those who pretend to virtue are scorned for their dullness. Corvino

Mosca

Death to my hopes! This is my villainous fortune! Best to hire Some common courtesan? Ay, I thought on that, sir. But they are all so subtle, full of art, And age again doting, and flexible, So as – I cannot tell – we may perchance Light on a quean, may cheat us all. (II.vi.49–55)

The diseased body of Volpone stimulates endless creativity in the diseased minds surrounding it. The imaging of the dying becomes a perverse representation of de Certeau’s ‘utopian space’ for Corvino, Voltore and Corbaccio – this ‘space’ is normally formulated through religious stories, yet its narratives ‘frequently reverse the relationships of power and, like the stories of miracles, [ensure] the victory of the unfortunate in a fabulous, utopian space’.26 Neither the morally nor the physically sick in Jonson’s Venice are able to distinguish adequately a

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plane of human experience beyond their own needs. The legacy-hunters feast their eyes upon the decaying body of the magnifico, taking pleasure in the sick-room with the prospect of future economic empowerment. In the corrupt world of Venice to remove what a person has is to remove what that person is; and the cultural drive towards renewal through the degradation of others is in evidence throughout the dramatic narrative. Volpone, Bonario and Celia, for example, are all ultimately reduced in the words of their exploiters to the level of impure flesh, a kind of symbolic filth which must be suppressed for the existing order to survive: Voltore

This lewd woman (That wants no artificial looks, or tears, To help the visor, she has now put on) Hath long been known a close adulteress, To that lascivious youth there; not suspected, I say, but known; and taken, in the act, With him; and by this man, the easy husband, Pardoned. (IV.v.34–41)

A restless mind is inevitably fascinated by change and prohibition, and Volpone is seduced by the intellectual challenge rather than the erotic allure of Celia, who is withheld from common gaze within Corvino’s private panopticon: She’s kept as warily as is your gold Never does come abroad, never takes air But at a window. (I.v.118–19)

Rather than rehearse any empty gestures in the direction of morality or heroism, the magnifico’s immediate response is ‘I must see her’ – and his pulse is quickened by the difficulties posed: There is a guard of ten spies thick upon her, All this whole household; each of which is set Upon his fellow, and have all their charge, When he goes out, when he comes in, examined. (I.v.123–6)

Jonson’s depiction of the irrepressible human need to exploit and to violate in this restless metropolis led S. L. Goldberg to point out: ‘[the tricksters’] deceptions are a symbol of moral delusions, including their

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own, and Jonson’s plot points to the self-frustrating, suicidal instability of a world based on such values.’27 When Celia is presented to the protagonist as a sacrificial victim at the temple of Mammon (‘flesh that melteth, in the touch, to blood!’ (I.v.113)), she has been finally deprived of any degree of cultural autonomy. She is now completely framed within the grids of meaning which Venetian men wish to impose upon her – whether it be in Volpone’s palace, the courtroom or her own house. Most significantly, she is invited by her host and prospective seducer to acquiesce in the moral decay of the city. Like so many beleaguered female characters in early modern drama, she is encouraged to triumph over the restraining forces of hostile patriarchs by assenting to the sexual needs of her present companion. Her desperation is, of course, dramatically counterpointed with that of the trapped Volpone penned in by the remorselessly voluble Lady Would-Be in an earlier scene (Volpone: ‘Some power, some fate, some fortune rescue me!’ (III.iv.126)). In a further attempt to extinguish her moral integrity, Celia is informed by Volpone, this professional tempter, that her husband, would sell thee Only for hope of gain, and that uncertain, He would have sold his part of Paradise For ready money, had he met a copeman. (III.vii.141–4)

Such mercantile discourse with its emphasis on commodification and exchange is potentially more enlightening to this threatened woman than her husband’s moral babble. Confusing his wife with his wallet, Corvino promotes the loss of her sexual virtue as ‘A pious work, mere charity for physic, / And honest polity to assure mine own’ (III.vii.65–6). Subsequently, Volpone endeavours to conjure up a ‘magical’ world which disguises the commodification of the female and endows all investment, sexual or financial, with the power to metamorphose and even to invert existing signifying systems – he urges her to enter the dynamic Venetian world of exchange. In reality, Volpone wishes to claim ownership of Celia’s body and to deploy it as a marker of his own power. Hemmed in by the sea and the inhabitants’ fear of poverty, Venice becomes an overcrowded space in which a deadly battle for survival inevitably unfolds. The violence which characterizes this battle ranges in scale from the attempted rape and imprisonment of Celia to the playacting of the persecution of Sir Politic. When Celia’s resistance is maintained in the name of an obsolete moral code, the protagonist

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resolves: ‘I should have done the act, and then have parleyed. / Yield, or I’ll force thee’ (III.vii.265–6). Such acts of ‘carnival concupiscence’ are expressed through an absurd lens within the sub-plot where the mind of the eccentric/excentric Lady Would-Be is exercised by the prospect of encountering a transvestite prostitute attempting to inveigle her oafish husband: ‘a lewd harlot, a base fricatrice, / A female devil in a male outside’ (IV.ii.55–6). The situation turns to the advantage of this amateur scavenger when she finds this former rival to be a potential prey: Lady Would-Be (to Peregrine) If you stay In Venice here, please you to use me, sir – Mosca Will you go, madam? Lady Would-Be Pray you, sir, use me. In faith, The more you see me, the more I shall conceive You have forgot our quarrel. (IV.iii.15–19)

Edward Said has reminded us that, in part at least, ‘the colonial territories are realms of possibility . . . to colonize meant at first the identification – indeed, the creation – of interests; these could be commercial, communicational, religious, military, cultural.’28 Whilst this text is very far from describing the appropriation of New Worlds across the oceans, it does engage with many of the conventions of the encounter narrative with its tropes of appropriation, confiscation, exploitation, imposition and creation of subcultures. In Jonson’s play, the audience is asked to attend to the complex operations of urban colonization as the morally deviant and criminal strategies of masterless men, ‘fine, elegant rascals’ in Mosca’s words, gradually reorganize the power relations of Venice and reinterpret them to their own advantage. Jonson’s dramatic narrative relates the terrifying effectiveness of the expansionist policies of a criminal underworld which expose the rich fund of self-interest underpinning the republic. The members of this anarchic subculture systematically seek to revise the political and moral geography of Venice. Like triumphant colonists, they celebrate their power to transform a barren land: ‘your parasite / Is a most precious thing, dropped from above’ (III.i.7–8). Volpone’s undertaking is repeatedly shown to express that of la Serenissima itself in its promotion of a materialist culture which exploits any demonstration of human weakness formerly represented as virtue. However, instead of being the heroic founder of a city endowed with a mission civilisatrice, Volpone preys upon a sophisticated culture and

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facilitates its decline. He appropriates the fruits of others’ labours and attempts to enforce an imperializing vision in which all forms of ownership are subjected to the sanction of his own self-styled authority. Indeed, Volpone is offered as a parody of collective experience in Venice. Jonathan Crewe dismisses Mosca as ‘a piece of Venetian flotsam’ but, as Christopher Pye has underlined more generally, ‘how better discern a culture than looking to the phenomena that occupy its margins?’29 Mosca famously declares that, ‘Almost / All the wise world is little else, in nature, / But parasites or sub-parasites’ (III.i.12–13). The magnifico’s ambitions are often breathtaking in their dimensions. Nonetheless, in the final phases of the play, he is traumatized by the implications of his own creativity as he is compelled to exchange private space for the public one of the courtroom in order to safeguard his stratagems: Well, I am here, and all this brunt is past . . . here ’twas good, in private; But in your public – cave whilst I breathe. Fore God, my left leg ’gan to have the cramp. (V.i.1–5)

This is yet another episode in Jonson’s disquieting drama which challenges the Renaissance celebration of city existence: for, as Gail Kern Paster has underlined, ‘In the Renaissance, most urban theorists, holding optimistic views of the by-products of human collectivity, chose to ignore the scriptural tradition that Cain had founded the first city.’30 Volpone

I’ll get up, Behind a curtain, on a stool, and hearken; Sometime peep over; see, how they do look; With what degrees, their blood doth leave their faces! O, ’twill afford me a rare meal of laughter. (V.ii.83–7)

The emergent regime of the magnifico thrives on the destruction of others and the procuring of their worldly goods. Such a credo is unsurprisingly sympathetic to the grasping Venetians; and, as a consequence, both Volpone’s and Mosca’s evangelical work goes unhindered: [gold] dries up All those offensive savours; it transforms The most deformed, and restores them lovely,

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Corvino, Corbaccio and Voltore are easily drawn one by one into the master’s flock at the beginning of the play. Jonson employs repetition pre-eminently in his dramatic action as an organizing principle for a disorientating world. However, this device becomes integrated into an accelerated cycle of intrigue and serves to demonstrate the effortless manner with which the morally stunted Venetians may be ensnared. Volpone’s community is not promoted as an inverted social hierarchy solely for the purposes of critique. It is a microcosm of excess which apes, as much as it subverts, an anarchic macrocosm. Jonson’s text carefully resists the temptation to distinguish between the mores of the habitués of the magnifico’s palace and those of the public sphere of Venetian politics. Audiences are left to formulate their own alternative reality of sanity, restraint and compassion with which to contextualize the intrigues being played out. Such fugitive moral values are shown to be particularly at risk in the volatile environs of the city where, ‘fools, they are the only nation / Worth men’s envy or admiration’ (I.ii.66–7). Volpone’s hedonism seduces and enlivens a disaffecting urban setting, but his motivations are merely the comic extension of those everywhere in evidence amongst the inhabitants – as Jonas A. Barish pointed out in his account of the play, ‘With the loss of clear-cut division between man and beast, between beast and beast, between male and female, all creatures become monsters.’31 Nevertheless Jonson’s criminal capital disdains any affective response which audiences may proffer and so, once again, we are compelled to adopt an attitude of intelligent repugnance with which to scourge the tricksters. Castrato, Nano and Androgyno provide the tasteless entertainment for this world, but their devotion to change, notably demonstrated in the doggerel performance expounding Pythagoras’ theorem of the transmigration of the soul, is yet another source of unease at the heart of the magnifico’s regime. In this entertainment, Pythagoras (‘that juggler divine’) and his theory are parodied; and, in this way, audiences on stage and in the pit are treated to a significant insight into a world where all human things are touched by the gravitational pull towards the circus of ruthless egotism. Mosca stresses:

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’Tis the common fable The dwarf, the fool, the eunuch, are all his; He’s the true father of his family, In all save me – but he has given them nothing. (I.v.46–9)

Such confidences serve as a necessary reminder of the vicious nature of Volpone’s patriarchy. The performances which his creatures provide not only act as penetrating critiques of their master’s world, but their very physicality is interpreted on stage in symbolic terms communicating the cultural deviancy of this community.

vice oft times acts it part alone upon the Stage with great applause, whereas Virtue seldome comes upon it but accompanied with a cloud of sundry spredding vice . . . As therefore dead Flies corrupt the oyntment of the Apothecary, or as poyson vitiates holsome food; so the contempering of some inferior Virtues with more transcendent Vices in our Stageplayes, doth turne either these Virtues into poyson, or else deprive them of their efficacie. (William Prynne, Histrio-Mastix The Players Scourge, or Actors Tragedie (1633)32)

Saint-Didier was to comment later in the seventeenth century: the Liberty of Venice makes every thing Authentick, for whatsoever the Life is, or Religion one Professes, provided, you do not Talk, or Attempt any thing against the State, or the Nobility, one may be sure to Live unmolested, for no Body will go about to Censure their Conduct, or to oppose the Disorders of their Neighbours.33

Such liberty, which Volpone’s regime generates, degrades every manifestation of civic duty or moral allegiance it encounters – and, as a result, the ‘delights’ of acquisition and vice are found to be as attractive to the corrupt legislators of Venice as they are to the villains proper. A city in flux serves as an excellent backdrop for the success of a man who celebrates the fact that he fails to make any investment in his own society. He devours its resources, exploits its few remaining, and rather insipid, virtues (in the shape of Celia and Bonario) and is excited by its flaws. His cultural persona is not to be soiled by the vulgar practices of trade so much in evidence in the republic; instead he wields the weapon

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of his wit in order to convert a rather mediocre reality into a stimulating one. Characteristically, he attempts to destroy all cultural models of civic commitment with his grand power to negate: Volpone

I blow no subtle glass; expose no ships To threatenings of the furrow-faced sea; I turn no monies in the public bank, Nor usure private. (I.i.38–40)

In a community where moral value systems are esteemed to be a sign of weakness, Volpone unsurprisingly rejoices in his refusal to invest in the collective through wealth creation. In this play, Venice is both the stimulus and medium for self-aggrandizement, and we are repeatedly reminded that, in this society bereft of honour and compassion, the speech act constructs or may deconstruct cultural status – most frequently, it is the latter operation which predominates. Rhetorical expertise is not only linked to the careers of the socially mobile in Jonson’s drama; in keeping with the thrust of humanist political thinking it is also shown to confer the power to control. Henry Peacham insisted in his Garden of Eloquence (1593): ‘the man which is well furnished with both: I meane with ample knowledge and excellent speech, hath bene iudged able, and esteemed fit to rule the world with counsell, prouinces with lawes, cities with pollicy, & multitudes with persuasion.’34 Not only, for example, would the grateful Mosca have the eloquent Voltore’s ‘tongue . . . tipped with gold’ (IV.vi.64), but he would reinvent the cultural hierarchy of Venice itself so that it might celebrate converts to his creed: I’d have you be the heir to the whole city; The earth I’d have want men ere you want living: They’re bound to erect your statue in St.Mark’s. (IV.vi.65–7)

At an earlier point, Voltore had been the recipient of Volpone’s admiration because Men of [his] large profession . . . could speak To every cause, and things mere contraries, Till they were hoarse again, yet all be law; That, with most quick agility, could turn, And re-turn; make knots, and undo them; Give forked counsel; take provoking gold

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On either hand, and put it up: these men, He knew, would thrive with their humility. (I.iii.53–60)

The uncontrollable energies of language in Venice are a force to be tapped by the tricksters and to be profoundly feared by the gulls. Christopher Friedrichs has stressed: ‘the Early Modern city was, even at the best of times, a highly fragile community’; and in Jonson’s play the social order is in a continual state of revision in response to the volatile and potentially destructive nature of public speech acts.35 In Act II, it is the public knowledge of his cuckold status, rather than the act itself of being cuckolded, which terrifies Corvino: Heart! ere tomorrow I shall be new christened And called the Pantalone di Besogniosi, About the town. (II.iii.7–9)

Fearing the grotesque rendering of his civic identity in the eyes of his fellow Venetians, Corvino returns to the final resource in his vocabulary of terror, the spaces of the body and the house: here’s a lock, which I will hang upon thee; And, now I think on’t, I will keep thee backwards; Thy lodging shall be backwards; thy walks backwards; . . . Away, and be not seen, pain of thy life; Not look toward the window; if thou dost –. (II.v.57–9, 67–8)

Susan Dwyer Amussen has underlined in her study of the cultural politics of masculinity in this period that ‘violence was a way of asserting one’s place in society, an affirmation of independence. Violence was common in part because it was the easiest way to claim such independence, especially for those whose position in society was not entirely independent.’36 However, later in the same act, the degenerate husband acknowledges the provisionality of all spaces of domination and thus the parameters of his own repressive regime: Do not I know, if women have a will, They’ll do ’gainst all the watches o’ the world? And that the fiercest spies, are tamed with gold? (II.vii.8–10)

The anxiety generated by the implications of the speech act resound

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absurdly in the sub-plot where the vain Lady Would-Be, for example, notes: ‘what a curious nation / The Italians are, what will they say of me?’ (III.iv.32–3). This shallow-minded tourist can rely on no resources for formulating her identity independent of the publicly expressed sentiments of those around her. Indeed, by the end of the play, her husband, who has spent his life transcribing the confidences of others, now envisages a doom in which he becomes the perpetual victim of them: O, I shall be the fable of all feasts; The freight of the gazetti; ship-boys’ tale; And, which is worst, even talk for ordinaries. (V.iv.82–4)

Since Jonas A. Barish’s sensitive appraisal of the sub-plot in this play, it has become a truism of Jonson criticism that the Would-Bes are carefully crafted parodies of the main players in Venice. Even earlier in Volpone criticism, it was noted that the English in this play should be understood as ‘foreign bodies’, but that they should not be isolated from the play’s community of scavengers as a result.37 Sir Politic Would-Be is clearly shown to be a ridiculous shadow-drawing on many occasions of the quickwitted magnifico who deploys his mental resources in order to gain insight into and exploit the world around him. The convoluted yet ultimately aimless mind of Politic is constantly configuring places of surveillance and subterfuge around him, and yet is unable to identify the comic spaces he inhabits: Would-Be

He has received weekly intelligence, Upon my knowledge, out of the Low Countries, For all parts of the world in cabbages; And those dispensed, again, t’ambassadors, In oranges, musk-melons, apricots, Lemons, pome-citrons, and such-like: sometimes In Colchester oysters, and your Selsey cockles. (II.i.68–74)

J. R. Hale stressed that in this period, ‘Without the habit of conceptualizing space, a traveller going to war or work could not link his separate impressions to the nature of his route as a whole . . . [A] man could not visualize his country to which he belonged.’38 In The Anatomy of Melancholy Robert Burton advised:

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[there is] no better Physicke for a melancholy man then change of ayre and variety of places, to travel abroad and see fashions . . . For peregrination charmes our senses with such unspeakable and sweet variety, that some account him unhappy that never travelled, a kinde of prisoner, and pitty his case that from his cradle to his old age beholds the same still; still, still the same, the same.39

However, in the context of Jonson’s play, Thomas Nashe would seem the most timely voice in his reminder: ‘Some alledge they trauell to learne wit, but I am of this opinion, that . . . [it is] not possible for anie great man to attain anie great wit by trauell, except he haue the grounds of it rooted in him before.’40 Like Volpone, this English pretender to politic knowledge wants, in his own way, to possess the environment in which he finds himself. Unlike Volpone, he does not construct any self independent of the city’s wishes; and his determination to emulate the manners of his new-found culture effectively denies him any avenue for psychological growth. As a comic tourist-knight, Would-Be seeks to reinterpret the community through which he travels in terms of his own absurd prejudices: Sir, to a wise man, all the world’s his soil. It is not Italy, nor France, nor Europe That must bound me, if my fates call me forth. (II.i.1–3)

Such pretensions to be a heroic voyager of mythic proportions is but one in a whole host of fantastical projections in which Would-Be indulges. The farcical dimensions of his tourist imperialism may not be as unnerving as that of Volpone, but he is surely far from being the ‘quaintly refreshing personage’ that one of Jonson’s editors, C. H. Herford, would have him believed to be.41 We should not underestimate the fact that his manner of proceeding renders the subject vulnerable in a vicious world of predators. Would-Be has been fourteen months malingering in the republic and yet he confides to Peregrine: ‘within the first week of my landing here / All took me for a citizen of Venice’ (IV.i.37–8). John Creaser stresses that the early modern traveller was instructed by manuals of the time to keep on the move, neither wasting time relaxing among his fellow countrymen, nor staying long in one place. The dangers of travel were real; hence the traveller was to be friendly but reserved . . . as far as

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possible adopting local dress and customs, and never speaking out critically or boldly.42

Moreover, G. B. A. F. warned in A Discovery of the Great Subtilitie and Wonderful Wisedom of the Italians (1591): [Italians] are of themselues verie wittie & subtill headed, all cunning slightes, crafty conueyances, and deceitfull cosinages, are so proper and common to them, whereby they can fetch under other people, and are so cunning to finger from them their money, and can moreouer, so closely couer their actions, that of a thousand hardly one could euer come within them to perceiue their iugling.43

The heroes of both intrigues in Jonson’s play envisage themselves as restless conquerors, but Would-Be collapses into a hen-pecked city buffoon when his motives are further interrogated. His (mock-)heroic tirade is quickly deflated as Jonson details the small-mindedness and paltry ambitions of this would-be nomad: Yet, I protest, it is no salt desire Of seeing countries, shifting a religion, Nor any disaffection to the state Where I was bred, and unto which I owe My dearest plots, hath brought me out; much less That idle, antique, stale, grey-headed project Of knowing men’s minds and manners, with Ulysses; But a peculiar humour of my wife’s, Laid for this height of Venice, to observe, To quote, to learn the language, and so forth. (II.i.4–13)

Having thus punctured all possible noble motivations for travel on the part of ‘the gentleman’, Would-Be is shown to subordinate himself to the comic virago, Lady Would-Be. Politic has surrendered to a female order of desire and compliantly, as Peregrine observes, has allowed his lady to take counsel ‘of tires and fashions, and behaviour, / Among the courtesans’ (II.i.28–9). The contempt, which such a self-conscious act of male dispossession would attract, could only be compounded by the contemporaneous perception that a travelling woman, like a loquacious one, necessarily sacrificed her reputation. Having virtually presented himself as a wittol, Sir Politic consoles himself with the

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thought that ‘the spider and the bee oftimes / Suck from one flower’ (II.i.30–1). As the play develops, the colonization of Venice therefore takes place as both Volpone and Would-Be seek to reshape the cultural and economic space in which they find themselves in accordance with their own desires for acquisition and socially disruptive forms of subjectivity. In the celebrated aubade to gold which opens the play, Volpone not only indicates the spiritual corruption at work in Venice as he turns to a shrine dedicated to Mammon, but more significantly he promotes acquisition as the sole significant force of creativity in his world: Hail, the world’s soul, and mine! More glad than is The teeming earth to see the longed-for sun Peep through the horns of the celestial Ram. (I.i.3–5)

This ‘dear saint’ is viewed as that which giv’st all men tongues That canst do nought and yet mak’st men do all things; The price of souls; even hell, with thee to boot, Is made worth heaven! (I.i.21–5)

The private desires of the magnifico voice with poetic extravagance the enfeebled civic commitment in evidence in the republic as a whole. What Philip Brockbank was to term these ‘profane matins’ at the beginning of the play are both an inversion of cultural conventions which associated greed with human decay and a signal of the hero’s personal dedication to exploit what is Venice’s only resource, its inhabitants.44 Volpone clearly wishes to unpick (or to enrich, depending on your point of view) the existing signifying systems of his culture by magnifying its potential for disorder. In the sub-plot, such cultural ambitions are similarly in evidence as the clownish legacy-hunter, Lady Would-Be, confides in her dangerous host that, There’s nothing more doth overwhelm the judgement And cloud the understanding, than too much Settling and fixing. (III.iv.105–7).

Volpone indulges in personal myth-making and, in keeping with Said’s vision, expresses the colonizer’s belief that ‘the important thing [is] to

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dignify simple conquest into an idea.’45 He attributes a sacred character to his commitment to crime and vice in order to reinvigorate what he views as an unappealing, stagnant environment. He has chosen to endow his existence with meaning by promoting covetousness as its defining principle, drawing upon the magnificence of his spoils and the status of his victims as the supreme cultural expression of his greatness. Like Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, Volpone asks its audience to interrogate the liaison made in the Renaissance between magnificent consumption and public virtue. However, as has been shown above, Celia would rather remain a caged animal, than become violated by such a tainted world. This frantic movement towards fugitive existences and confined spaces is being widely expressed by the end of play. The cowering Would-Be, for example, unveils his ‘engine’ of the giant tortoise shell and is grateful to shun this place and clime for ever, Creeping with house on back, and think it well To shrink my poor head in my politic shell. (V.iv.87–9)

When Mosca flourishes the keys of the magnifico’s palace in the audience’s face, it is called upon to witness the violation of the last remaining instance of sustained cooperation in this dramatic world. Previously, he had declared to Voltore that his only wish was ‘to dig [him] a fortune / Out of these two, old rotten sepulchres’ (III.ix.38–9); now he proclaims himself ‘possessed’ and thus wholly discredits any trace of the extravagant celebration of friendship and patronage which his culture still nourished. Mosca’s grand gesture in the direction of uninhibited self-gain highlights the play’s dominant thematic interest in the liaison between desire, materialist appetite and the coveting of space. This finds its fullest expression in the cultural destruction of his erstwhile master: ‘Since he will needs be dead afore his time, / I’ll bury him, or gain by him’ (V.v.13–4). The protagonist is finally made aware of the residual nature of his power when he sees his menagerie of circus entertainers, the physical evidence of his moral transgressions, being dispersed; and he is thus compelled to view a chaos authored by another figure, his protégé: Volpone Nano

How now! Who let you loose? Whither go you now? What, to buy gingerbread, or to drown kitlings? Sir, Master Mosca called us out of doors, And bid us all to go play, and took the keys.

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Yes. Did Master Mosca take the keys? Why, so! I am farther in. (V.xi.8–13)

The magnifico cares little whether his creatures are buying or killing; however, he is rendered anxious by their liberty and their entry into an unstable metropolis where his powers are being tested and found wanting. Volpone has now lost any hope of refuge from the antagonistic forces gathering around him and so he determines to fight viciously: My ruins shall not come alone . . . my substance shall not glue you, Nor screw you into a family. (V.xii.86–8)

His living space has been confiscated and he is being summoned to the Scrutineo to see his past and very identity being traded by his former confidant. The unending carnival world of disruption and self-indulgence which Volpone had sought to maintain with a constant stream of riches and dullards takes on another appearance now that he is dispossessed. This would-be invalid is finally condemned as diseased and monstrous by the Venetian magistrates and he is expelled to the hospice for the Incurabili. However, in a characteristically Jonsonian manner, the audience fails to be reassured by any meaningful demonstration of integrity from the Bench; the Fourth Judge even goes as far as to confide with regard to the parvenu Mosca, ‘a proper man, and, were Volpone dead, / A fit match for my daughter’ (V.xii.50–1). The implementation of Venetian justice, which comes increasingly to occupy stage business, fails to establish any pause in the human cycle of transgression in evidence throughout the play. The Venetian status quo is symbolized by its judicial representatives who should implement its codes of law and set down the acceptable modes of conduct in the republic. However, the avocatori, or city magistrates, are given little chance to secure audience esteem when they eventually gain access to the stage. The promotion of their corrupt values merely serves to act as another form of moral pollution in the city. They exercise the power to reward conformity, but repeatedly fail to impress the audience with any display of probity. They discredit Volpone’s civic status, but significantly fail to criticize his manner of proceeding with which they clearly identify. In destroying his powers of ownership, the judges allow Volpone’s belongings to be recycled in the larger market-place of the

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city in which they are principal actors – as J. J. Enck has stressed, ‘there can be no correction because no standard exists in the city.’46 Initially in the play, the audience was made uneasy in its gradual identification of a community of interest with Politic Would-Be. It is now radically disquieted at the end of the play as it is invited to join the ranks with court officials and to pass sentence on the proceedings played out before it. Nonetheless Jonson’s play persuades us to consider the case in an alternative manner to our flawed counterparts – both because of the fuller knowledge of the case to which we are privy and because the city magistrates repeatedly betray themselves in our company as they disclose their corrupt motivations and want of intellectual competence. Ultimately, their mindless ramblings disclose the disorderly nature of their minds: First Avoc. The like of this the Senate never heard of. Second Avoc. ’Twill come most strange to them when we report it. (IV.v.1–2)

The famous absoluteness of the Venetian judges is unnerving as they unhesitatingly condemn the malefactors whom they resemble rather uncannily. Owing to their partiality, these figures are compelled to impose inhuman laws in order to disguise their own imperfect government. The grimly comic denouement, in which one sentence follows another, operates inevitably as a sobering critique of the city’s powers to organize itself appropriately. The outrage of the Avocatori is easily summoned and they are pacified with equal speed by cunning rhetoric. However, the only force which appears to be able to impress itself on their facile minds is that of wealth – and, to this, they respond with ingratiating humility and awe: Fourth Avoc. We have done ill, by a public officer To send for him, if he be heir. Second Avoc. For whom? Fourth Avoc. Him that they call the parasite. Third Avoc. ’Tis true; He is a man of great estate, now left. Fourth Avoc. Go you and learn his name, and say the court Entreats his presence here, but to the clearing Of some few doubts. (V.x.36–43)

Jonson’s play is not so naïve as to suggest that life in society would be morally redeemed if only role-playing might be discarded. Instead, the

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text repeatedly reminds its consumers of the theatrical nature of all human interaction. Self-conscious performance, even of the virtuoso variety exhibited by Volpone, may tend to solipsism, but it also appears to constitute an indispensable element in fostering social cohesion. Christopher Friedrichs has underlined that Venice was like ‘nowhere else in Europe’ for only in this city ‘were power, prestige and wealth so completely and so visibly united in the hands of a single group of urban families’. The imbalanced power relations which such a situation generated should be set in context with his welcome reminder: any economic system is a framework to organize the exploitation of resources and the production and distribution of commodities. The character of the system is normally determined by social and political elites, who have an interest both in maximizing output and in perpetuating inequality – goals which, though not entirely compatible, can often be effectively reconciled.47

At the end of the play, with its mortifying of the fox, both victimizer and victim (a particularly unstable and easily reversible relationship in Jonson’s Venice) understand the overriding system of exploitation and inequality which organizes their lives in the city. Indeed, the competitive interaction between the players in the courtroom becomes a metaphor of Venice’s social relations as a whole. Volpone

Why, the whole world were but as an Empire, that empire as a province, that province as a bank, That bank as a private purse, to the purchase of [this poulder]. (II.iii.233–5)

The torment and exclusion which is visited upon the deviant bodies of Volpone and his entourage at the end of the play is the only power which the state can exercise in this vicious world. The Avocatori proclaim imperiously their authority over such marginalized figures with detailed narratives of the suffering which awaits them. The various distribution of the criminals to monasteries, hospices, galleys (and in a parody of their fates, under a tortoise shell) is the act of an administration which has confused government with brutality. Whilst Volpone acknowledges the ways in which the corrupt court implements its power, he refuses to be inhibited by them; and, in his final unmasking, he expresses his ultimate allegiance to self-aggrandizement. Characteristically, he

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determines to re-energize the court’s insipid culture with an astonishing attempt to heroize himself as the Keeper of final knowledge. In this, however, he again shows himself subject to the imaginative inspiration of Mosca who had earlier declared: ‘Let’s die like Romans, / Since we have lived like Grecians’ (III.ii.14–15).

Chapter Six ‘A kind of modern happiness’: The Alchemist and the Exploitation of Provisional Space Lalus

Just as you say, but no mortal is wise at all times or perfect in every respect. Along with many brilliant gifts, the gentleman has this slight blemish: that for a long while he’s been mad about the art called alchemy. Philecous What you refer to is not a blemish, surely, but a notorious disease.1 Erasmus Alcumista (1524) Subtle

Son, I doubt You’re covetous, that thus you meet your time I’ the just point: prevent your day at morning. This argues something worthy of a fear Of importune and carnal appetite. Take heed, you do not cause the blessing leave you With your ungoverned haste. (II.iii.4–10)

The dramatic world of The Alchemist (1610) is one in which criminal subcultures and human vices proliferate. This volatile theatrical culture is excited by the supposed practitioners of an art which Chaucer had termed some two hundred years before as ‘that slyding science’, and which Jonson’s contemporary Francis Bacon dismissed as ‘a philosophy [made] out of a few experiments of the furnace’.2 However, the spellbinding performances of comic deceit and distortion enacted by Subtle, Dol and Face allow Jonson’s text to reflect upon the arbitrary ways in which cultural experience may be manipulated: the ways in which violence may be done to geographical spaces as well as chronological narratives with the conjurings of crooks. The Alchemist is able to do this precisely by focusing on a plagueridden city in which the customary operations of government (and significantly, self-government) are absent. The consequent migrations from the capital engender new identities for travellers and remaining defined spaces creates new, provisional and mostly parodic sites of

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consumerism and hospitality, and signals the presence of unruly desires which have not been subdued in the London populace, just held temporarily in check. Lefebvre stressed: ‘physical space has no “reality” without the energy that is deployed within it’; and Ian Donaldson has justly underlined: ‘In Jonson’s dramatic world, time, like territory, is strictly limited, fiercely competed for, precisely calibrated.’3 It becomes increasingly apparent that Jonson’s play requires that its audiences attend to this very question: the perceived deployment of the planes of time and space within a given narrative of intense human experience. It is clear that we must do this in order to understand fully the nature of the cultural subversion at work in the Blackfriars house. Mammon Surly Mammon

In eight and twenty days I’ll make an old man of fourscore a child. No doubt he’s that already. Nay, I mean Restore his years, renew him like an eagle To the fifth age, make him get sons and daughters, Young giants, as our philosophers have done (The ancient patriarchs afore the flood) . . . A month’s grief in a day, a year’s in twelve, And of what age soever, in a month; Past all the doses of your drugging doctors. I’ll undertake, withal, to fright the plague Out o’ the kingdom in three months. (II.i.52–8, 66–70)

The ‘ungovern’d haste’ of Jonson’s fraudsters is, of course, a nervous response to the very uncertainty of the houseowner’s, Lovewit’s, continued absence (Subtle: ‘Who’s that? One rings. To the window, Dol. Pray heaven / The master do not trouble us this quarter’ (I.i.180–1)). However, the accelerating momentum with which the temporary residents are compelled to bring off their performances not only generates comic frenzy on stage, but also encourages audiences to engage with their swift and increasingly improbable interventions with an unnerving sense of awe. As the comedy develops, the prevailing ideological division of human environments into the metropolitan and the provincial becomes a consuming source of interest for everyone:

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a man himself Of some three thousand a year, and is come up To learn to quarrel, and to live by his wits, And will go down again, and die i’the country. (II.vi.59–62)

Nonetheless Jonson’s audiences are at pains to define the parameters of performance spaces in the theatre where masterless men in Blackfriars dress up their bodies and their language to con Londoners out of their money. Moreover, as Heather Dubrow has underlined in her study of Shakespeare and the criminal violation of the house, the undermining of domestic space frequently looks forward to a whole panorama of cultural collapse: ‘This erosion of spatial, social, and syntactical boundaries anticipates the destruction of sexual boundaries.’4 In The Alchemist, the servant Jeremy has invited Subtle and Dol to leave the city’s outlawed spaces and to trespass within the city walls – to hold court with him in Lovewit’s house. At the point when the play opens, the crooks do not need to cross the river Thames in order to enjoy the empowerment afforded by the ‘liberties’ – the demonized zone on London’s south bank organized around bear pits, brothels and theatres. Jonson’s play chronicles a period in which the forces of the criminal underworld have mobilized and entered the city itself. The reorganization of space in this play inevitably draws attention to Jonson’s reconfiguration of textual space. Robert Wilson has argued persuasively that Jonson’s comedies are ‘acts of theatrical imperialism’ in which ‘through an ingenious system of parody, Jonson fights for artistic Lebensraum.’5 This is but one occasion, amongst many, in which Jonson’s dialogue with classical texts has been justly formulated as a dominant trope for critical interest; however, a host of Jonson’s plays, and most particularly The Alchemist, give rise to a multiplicity of forms of imperialism which do not focus solely upon colonizing classical textualities. The Alchemist articulates a wide-ranging examination of the cultural processes of production, exchange and appropriation (Face: ‘Keep nothing that is transitory, about you’ (III.v.30)). Dol, Subtle and Face market themselves as well as their wares to those who cross Lovewit’s threshold: their object is to persuade that the dwelling exists simply to satisfy the customers’ wants and needs. But in this house, to buy is to be controlled. In her study of the merchant of early modern texts, Ceri Sullivan has stressed that for this figure

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The possibility of loss, the necessity to play oneself, the ceaseless bargaining are present but seen as openings for profit. Performed secrecy is, in commerce, a social occupatio where the interior space – implied, not spoken of – is used to guarantee the sincerity of the public image circulating.6

Clearly, Lovewit’s house emerges as the site par excellence in this international trading capital for the performance of risk and secrecy. Riddled with strategies for transmutation and asset-stripping, Jonson’s play envisages many different and extravagant routes for securing positions of power and sovereignty. Both trader and client in the Blackfriars house are seen to resort to various kinds of empire-building; and as Theodore Leinwand observes in his study of city comedy, ‘we may begin to recognize that gulling, or intrigue, is but a vain instance of self-assertion and the will to mastery.’7 It is evident that if the circus environment of The Alchemist seduces the audience, it remains profoundly volatile – volatile to such a degree that only the continued attempts at, rather than the achievement of, empire-building can ever be enacted. Alchemical tracts (a body of writing compulsively concerned with spatial transformation) were enjoying a revival of interest at the turn of the seventeenth century and were being printed and reprinted for readers across Europe. An imperializing discourse is frequently sustained in these writings, and nowhere is this more clearly exemplified than in the Subtilis Allegoria super Secreta Chymiae of the alchemist Michael Maier (1568–1622). Here, the author is found to embark on a symbolic alchemical voyage to the known continents of the world on account of his being ‘seized with an irresistible longing to become possessed of at least one of [the phoenix’s] smallest feathers; and for this unspeakable privilege I was prepared to spend all my substance, to travel far and wide, and to endure every hardship.’ The first phase of his journey takes him to America (symbolic of the element water): a continent, Maier informs us, in which ‘commerce has opened up, as it were, a highroad across the seas.’8 In Jonson’s dramatic world of alchemical fantasy, we should remember that Sir Epicure Mammon also invites Surly, [to] set . . . foot on shore In nove orbe; here the rich Peru, And there within, sir, are the golden mines, Great Solomon’s Ophir! (II.i.1–4)

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Ultimately, however, in The Alchemist, Epicure emerges as one character, amongst a whole host, whose acquisitive mind leads him on into colonial fantasizing across great expanses of time and space. Sukanta Chaudhuri has argued: ‘the vast process of textual and historical discovery necessarily involved the Renaissance in a pervasive shift, reversal and multiplicity of time-scales.’9 It might be proposed that such concertina-ing of Renaissance perceptions of these very axes of time and space is explored in microcosm in Jonson’s comedy of 1610 where stage time, genealogical time, apocalyptic time, alchemical time, imperial history and criminal ‘ungovern’d haste’ slip and slide upon each other like transparencies to create a profoundly unstable environment. In such a process, textual emphasis reverts increasingly to the discrepancies and, indeed, parities between the conventional operations of cultural power in the capital and its newly minted formations in Blackfriars. Jonson’s criminal syndicate attempts to edit given narratives of history in order to privilege fragments of possible experience which may meet the desires of its respective customers and, most importantly, of the felons themselves: Tribulation

But how long time, Sir, must the saints expect, yet?

Subtle

Ananias Subtle

Let me see, How’s the moon, now? Eight, nine, ten days hence He will be silver potate; then three days Before he citronize; some fifteen days, The magisterium will be perfected. About the second day of the third week In the ninth month? Yes, my good Ananias. (III.ii.125–32)

In such situations, fantastical, subversive or deviant desires are recuperated from the margins of cultural discourse and magically authorized by the conjuring performances of Subtle, Face and Dol. Lefebvre emphasized: ‘as for magic and sorcery, they too have their own spaces, opposed to (but presupposing) religio-political space . . . By contrast, certain ludic spaces . . . were always felt to be beneficent rather than baleful.’10 The Alchemist explores the contradictory cultural responses that may be felt to the violation of the prohibited social space of Lovewit’s house enacted by the conjurings of the indenture tripartite. Their clients’ pleasure principles cannot be expressed within the conventional, licit

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operations of the body politic, but they may obtain a voice in the Blackfriars house when plague gnaws away at the society’s infrastructure and empowers its marginals and malcontents. The growing wave of early modern fears and fascinations surrounding the criminal underworld is amply demonstrated in the pamphleteering of the period. In Richard West’s The Court of Conscience, or Dick Whippers Sessions (1607), for example, ‘cheating theeues & cutpurses’ are addressed, accused of [walking] in shape, Of a good gentleman with glorious tongue: Though for a prey you altogether gape, Trauersing the Citty all the streets along. Besiedging euery crowd in euery place, And will vndoe a man before his face.11

In the earlier The Terrors of the Night, or A Discourse of Apparitions (1594), the sterner voice of Thomas Nashe observed: [noted augurers and soothsayers] may very well pick men’s purses, like the unskilfuller cozening kind of alchemists, with their artificial and ceremonial magic, but no effect shall they achieve thereby, though they would hang themselves. The reason is, the devil of late is grown a puritan and cannot away with any ceremonies.12

Nevertheless, in the polluted world of Jonson’s capital, where ‘the sickness hot, a master quit, for fear’, Subtle is able with his confederates to deploy a persuasively detailed alchemical babble in order to perform acts of self-aggrandizement and to create cultural space and time conducive to a new erotic and commercial hegemony: Subtle

the holy Brethren Of Amsterdam, the exiled Saints: that hope To raise their discipline by [the stone]. I must use [Ananias] In some strange fashion now, to make him admire me. (II.iv.29–32)

Interestingly, even alchemical publications available in the early modern period acknowledged the dangers of deception associated with their art. In his The Ordinall of Alchemy (1477), the alchemist Thomas Norton drew attention to the power of fraudsters in the very first chapter:

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The fals man walketh from Towne to Towne For the most parte in a threed-bare-Gowne; Ever searching with diligent awaite To winn his praye with some fals deceit Of swearing and leasing; such will not cease, To say how they can Silver plate increase. And ever they rayle with perjury; Saying how they can Multiplie Gold and Silver, and in such wise With promise thei please the Covetise, And Causeth his minde to be on him sett, Then Falsehood and Covetise be well mett.13

By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the author of the alchemical tract Via Veritatis Unicae was still asking his reader [to] consider . . . how many ignorant persons, such as cobblers, tailors, bankrupt merchants, and tavern keepers, pretend to a knowledge of this Art, and, after a few years’ unsuccessful experimenting in the laboratory, call themselves great doctors, announce in boastful and sesquipedalian language their power to cure many diseases, and promise mountains of gold. Those promises are empty wind, and their medicines rank poison, with which they fill the churchyards, and for the impudent abuse of which God will one day visit them with heavy punishment. But I will leave the magistrates and the jailers to deal with these swindling charlatans. I speak of them only to put you on your guard.14

It becomes increasingly evident that The Alchemist engages in many ways with modern critical expectations of what has come to be known as city comedy: drawing upon a clearly delineated set of typed players in an urban setting leading to a dramatized commentary on the cultural implications of commercial competition. In Jonson’s proto-capitalist environment, the fraudsters’ schemes for exploitation are suitably diversified and, it appears, no sum is too small to be pocketed as they attempt to convert their charlatan knowledge into capital. In his study of the play, Jonathan Haynes justly stresses that Jonson ‘professionalizes criminality without hypostasizing it; he is finally less interested in criminality per se than in the society that produces it. Subtle and Face and Dol represent new social possibilities, are figures of and for new spaces, fissures, and energies in London society.’15

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The companion of a Theefe is commonly a Whore; it is not amisse therefore, to pinneon them together: for what the theefe gets the strumpet spends. The trade of these Tale-bearers goes under the name of the sacking law; and rightly may it be called sacking, for as in the sacking of a City, all the villanies in the world are set abroach, so when a Harlot comes to the sacking of a mans wealth and reputation (for she besiegeth both together) she leaues no stratagem vnpractised to bring him to confusion.16 (Thomas Dekker, The Bell-Man of London (1608))

Clearly, the plague of masterless men and women is seen to thrive in Jonson’s comic world where a ‘crisis of order’ is being related in terms of nascent capitalism and social competition.17 In addition, as Ga¯mini Salga¯do underlines, ‘The fact that in Jonson’s play London is the centre of operations is evidence enough that the lure of alchemy was not felt merely by gullible peasants in small villages.’18 Dol and Subtle certainly appear to fulfil A. L. Beier’s criteria for the early modern vagrant, in that they have no regular income, are able-bodied, unemployed, rootless and lawless.19 The identities of Face-Lungs-Jeremy fully engage with all of these categories at various junctures throughout the play. In effect, such individuals are viewed as dangerous threats because the early modern city had no satisfactory policy with which to integrate them into the polity. As a consequence, the ever-voluble Robert Greene, for example, warned in 1591: ‘these cony-catchers, these vultures, these fatal harpies . . . putrify with their infections this flourishing estate of England’.20 London at the turn of the century acknowledged and demonized the liminality of this migrant population without attempting to resolve its problems – except on occasions through violence: such a mode of proceeding unsurprisingly served to exacerbate the situation. Beier reports an incident from an Essex parish in 1611 in which a woman was threatened by three vagrants, who informed her that ‘if she would not open the door and give them beer, they would have beer and something else.’ Beier stresses: ‘[this] was an unpleasant, but by no means unique, encounter.’21 Jonson was to confide to his commonplace book Discoveries: ‘I have seene, that Poverty makes men doe unfit things; but honest men should not doe them; they should gaine otherwise. Though a man bee hungry, hee should not play the Parasite.’22 Indeed, it is clear that Jonson’s tricksters do not confine their operations to fraudulent alchemy; elsewhere in the play, they involve themselves in conjuring feats involving the Queen of Faery, for example; in the art of ‘quarrelling’ and duelling;

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and in fortune-telling. The latter was a practice forbidden in the vagrancy laws going back to 1531 and concerned those ‘feigning themselves to have knowledge in . . . physiognomy, palmistry, or other crafty sciences whereby they bear the people in hand, that they can tell their destinies, deceases and fortunes, and such other like fantastical imaginations to the great deceipt of the King’s subjects.’23 Moreover, London in Jonson’s comedy has done little to deserve the Renaissance veneration for urban sophistication; instead it is seen to undergo a form of cultural death as well as an epidemic of plague. It becomes a metropolis under occupation, with its history and power networks re-scripted by the venture tripartite. The tricksters endeavour to generate authority and space for themselves in the emptying city. Lefebvre stressed: ‘sovereignty implies “space”, and what is more it implies a space against which violence, whether latent or overt, is directed – a space established and constituted by violence.’24 As Jonson’s dramatic narrative unfolds, the emergent criminal culture comes to be characterized by vicious predation, deviant appetites and imperial fantasizing. The culture which Subtle, Dol and Face generate in their quest for capital inevitably points to a radical insecurity in the city’s sexual and caste system, but also to the equally disquieting nature of social identity as it is formulated in this grotesquely materialist world: as Burton Pike observes, ‘the subterranean view of the city is closer to the realms of myth and instinct. To see the city from below is to demonize it.’25 Such a state of civic insecurity makes available to the stage inhabitants a whole range of financial, erotic, geographic, linguistic, chronological and cognitive territories to appropriate. Indeed, the magic of alchemy is allowed by Jonson to penetrate the most absurd cultural spaces: Drugger

I would know by art, sir, of your worship, Which was I should make my door, by necromancy, And where my shelves, and which should be for boxes, And which for pots. I would be glad to thrive, sir. (I.iii.10–13)

The ability to invest a space with status and meaning denotes a measure of cultural power and control. During the course of the play, each participant in this spectacle is ostensibly being offered new planes of experience for self-magnification, and Jonson’s text is keen to highlight the glamorous appeal of the fraudulent alchemist. Indeed, this is a point which had been made evident earlier in the sixteenth century by Erasmus in his colloquy on alchemy (Alcumistica, 1524) – a text which Jonson is

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thought to have known.26 Later, in his De Utilitate Colloquiorum (1526), Erasmus views alchemy as ‘a disorder so intoxicating, once it strikes a man, that it beguiles even the learned and prudent’.27 The primary undertakings of the ‘true’ alchemist were promoted in writings amassed over the centuries as exalted in nature: to uncover the potential of primary matter present in all created forms: Subtle

‘Ay, for’, ’twere absurd To think that nature in the earth bred gold Perfect, i’the instant. Something went before. There must be remote matter. (II.iii.137–40)

The first elements of earth, air, fire and water were envisaged as being constituted in their most harmonious mixture in gold; and the confection of gold from base metal became the dominant quest associated with this discipline. However, such a mission to render matter to its most exquisite proportions also led to the search for an elixir of life which would maintain the perfect constitution of the body. Increasingly in the medieval and early modern periods, practitioners of this art felt compelled to state the Christian piety of their ambitions – one suspects for political as much as alchemical reasons: He who masters this Art, must have asked and obtained the wisdom of God, since he has not only gold, silver, and all the riches of this world, but also perfect health, length of days, and, what is better still, the comfort to be derived from a reassuring type of bitter passion and death of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.28

Jonson is at pains to satirize such blasphemous arrogance when he has Subtle question the purity of Mammon’s and Surly’s inquiries: If you, my son, should now prevaricate, And to your own particular lusts employ So great and catholic a bliss, be sure A curse will follow. (II.iii.19–22)

Moreover, Jonson appears to have had no hesitation in interrogating the alchemists’ adoption of pseudo-Franciscan ideals of poverty: in his epigram To Alchemists, he mockingly informs the practitioners that, ‘If all you boast of your great art be true; / Sure, willing poverty lives most in you.’29

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Why, this is covetise! No, I assure you, I shall employ it all, in pious uses, Founding of colleges, and grammar schools, Marrying young virgins, building hospitals, And now, and then, a church. (II.iii.48–52)

Inevitably, the ‘sublime’ character of the original alchemical quests was interpreted by excited human minds for the rather more ignoble pursuits of personal wealth and power, desires with which the parsimonious Elizabeth I was surely visited in 1564 when she made funds available for the alchemist John Dee – a figure to whom Jonson refers in his comedy (II.vi.20).30 (Indeed, Subtle fears that if their activities become known, they will be ‘locked up, in the Tower, forever, / To make gold there (for th’state) never come out’ (IV.vii.81–2).) However, as the centuries passed, alchemical writers appear to have been willing to countenance the desire for financial gain if suitably couched in elevated diction. The English alchemist Thomas Norton confides: this Book shews to the initiated knowledge, but intensifies the ignorance of the vulgar. It is the book of honouring, increasing riches, and the book of the needy, putting to flight poverty . . . a book useful for sainted men, who wish to live unspotted of sin; a secret book, the Book of the Gift of God, to chosen men a pathway of true hope, a strength to those constant in firm faith, and who unwaveringly believe in my words.31

Karl Frick points out: ‘early in the seventeenth century a renaissance of alchemical works occurred . . . The public interest in alchemical and theosophic-pansophic treatises of the educated classes existed not only in the German-speaking countries but also in western Europe and even in the British isles’32 (italics mine). However, by the mid-seventeenth century, Elias Ashmole was to propose that Britain should be seen a prime seat of alchemical learning; and it is with such a patriotic emphasis in mind that he undertook to edit the Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum: ‘As for the whole Worke it selfe, it is sheav’d up from a few gleanings in part of our English Fields.’33 Interestingly, given what has been viewed as the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, alchemy appears to have continued to attract interest at least in part through its continued stress upon experiment and

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analysis: the author of the Via Veritatis Unicae declares: ‘I must exhort you again and again to trust your own observations rather than the writings of others, and to let the Book of Nature be the most favoured volume of your library.’34 Whilst disdainful of its fantastical ambitions, even Bacon was to find alchemy useful at points in his writing for its lexical resources. He notes in The Advancement of Learning: as for the facility of credit which is yielded to arts and opinions, it is likewise of two kinds; either when too much belief is attributed to the arts themselves, or to certain authors in any art. The sciences themselves, which have had better intelligence and confederacy with the imagination of man than with his reason, are three in number; astrology, natural magic, and alchemy: of which sciences, nevertheless, the ends of pretences are noble.35

Nonetheless if, as critics have claimed, Jonson’s acquaintance with alchemical literature was far from superficial, in The Alchemist he wields such knowledge solely for the purposes of remorseless ridicule. Moreover, if the conversations with Drummond of Hawthornden are to be believed, it appears that he was capable of seemingly alchemical transmutations himself: [Jonson] can set Horoscopes, but trusts not in ym, he with ye consent of a friend Cozened a lady, with whom he had made ane apointment to meet ane old Astrologer in the suburbs, which she Keeped & it was himself disguysed in a Longe Gowne & whyte beard at the light of a Dimm burning Candle up in a litle Cabjnet reached into be a Ledder.36

Clearly, the need to distance oneself from a plague-ridden capital was something with which both Jonson’s characters and audiences could empathize. The claustrophobic interior setting of The Alchemist generates anxiety in characters and audiences alike: the resulting tension is explicitly linked to the threat of invasions from an exterior and equally morally ambivalent environment populated, as Dol would have it, by ‘sober, scurvy, precise neighbours, / (That scarce have smiled twice sin’ the king came in)’ (I.i.164–5). Occupied by rogues and dolts, the spaces of Lovewit’s house become in different contexts a lair, a citadel, a colony, a theatrical dressing room, a refuge and a time warp; however, the house itself only assumes its full meaning in the audience’s mind when fully integrated into the disaffected cultural reality beyond the

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immediate experience of the residents’ fugitive society. The exhilarating spectacle of cozening is an embittered struggle for wider cultural supremacy in which the body, economic space and verbal formations all become strategic battlefields: the discursive fireworks of alchemy (‘What’s the proper passion of metals?’; ‘Malleation.’; ‘What’s your ultimum supplicium auri?’; ‘Antimonium.’ II.v.29–30) are in fact enabling devices for all the various self-seeking visions of Jonson’s subjects. As Anne Barton has pointed out, unlike Shakespeare’s comic protagonists, those of Jonson ‘actively yearn to be changed. They are not content with the paltry dimensions of their habitual lives and selves.’37 Transmutation has traditionally been identified as a, if not the, dominant trope of The Alchemist. Subtle, Face and Dol are seen to hold sway provisionally over a gathering of the dispossessed and disenchanted who wish to metamorphose into a more potent form. Appropriately, the crooks turn their attention to a cult devoted to the idea of transforming; in the process, they provide illuminating insights into their own psyches as well as those of their clients. The aspiring rulers of this play’s underworld labour to transport themselves from the survivalist street culture where even Face was no more than a plain livery-three-pound-thrum that kept (His) master’s worship’s house here in the Friars For the vacations

and Subtle lingered at Pie Corner ‘like the father of hunger’ (I.i.16–18,27). Dol, Subtle and Face use their creativity, which is an abuse of nature, to explain the ways of the heavens. It comes therefore as no surprise to the audience that they practise initially upon each other: Subtle berates his accomplice, Face, with Thou vermin, have I ta’en thee out of the dung . . . Sublimed thee, and exalted thee, and fixed thee I’the third region, called our state of grace? (I.i.64–9)

In this travesty of Genesis, the human image is fashioned only to become yet another space to colonize and to subjugate. Whatever the alchemical languages and authorities that these rogues deploy, the wrongness of their undertaking is never placed in doubt by Jonson’s text. Viral strains and moral decay have combined to make available for the remaining residents of the emptying city a provisional time and

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space in which a new empire of imbalanced power relations can be generated. The necessary, but seemingly inexhaustible, energy of the participants in this urban encounter narrative between cozeners and cozened can only serve to impress upon the audience how far these characters are from realizing their ideals. Audience sympathies are clearly forged on occasions with these crazed and socially displaced subjects, but not to the extent that they are allowed to give credence to the magical powers which the tricksters promote – nor, indeed, to accredit the flawed value systems which they express. Jonson’s text invites us to acknowledge the vigour, albeit provisional, of the republic which Subtle, Dol and Face wish to establish; nevertheless we are not encouraged to reinvent ourselves as submissive or willing citizens of this new city-state. The organization of this realm excites debate in the audience’s mind regarding practices which attempt the construction of new identities with the habitat and, indeed, the bodies of others. Even in the most euphoric vision of these republican masters, the Queen of Faery is reproduced and celebrated as ‘our castle, our Cinque Port, / Our Dover pier, our what thou wilt’ (III.iii.18–19). It is noteworthy that when John Stubbs wished to voice his opposition to the Alençon match in The Discouerie of a Gaping Gulf whereinto England is like to be Swallowed by Another French Mariage (1579), Elizabeth herself was celebrated as, ‘our Queene, the chiefe officer in England, our most precious rych treasure, our Elizabeth IONAH and ship of good speede, the royall ship of our ayde, the hyghest tower, the strongest hold, and castle in the land’.38 Whether it be in the shape of the terrorized Dame Pliant or that of ‘Dol Common’, ‘Dol Proper’, ‘Dol Singular’, ‘Dol Particular’ or ‘my Dousabell’ (I.ii.177–9, III.iii.41), the female body thus becomes a cultural marker for the dominion of others and is indeed seen to attain a liminal status, operating as a prime site of resistance and attack against antagonistic forces. Dol’s identity, like that of Lovewit’s house, is rewritten by the male empire-builders around her and their new-found vocabulary of desire. Face declares to Dapper with reference to his ‘aunt of Faery’: Her Grace is a lone woman, And very rich, and if she take a fancy, She will do strange things. (I.ii.155–7)

Dol is reproduced variously as Queen of Bantam, Queen of Faery, our cinque port and Dover pier by male fantasies of appropriation.39 In a

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familiar sexualized trope of the carnivalesque, the protean potential of Dol’s body is stressed not only to produce spectacle but to disrupt prevailing cultural codes. The various projections of her identities relate clearly to the unfulfilled desires of masculinity in her male admirers: she must complete them.40 Indeed, not satisfied with this one territory of her body, Sir Epicure Mammon subsequently intends to buy off with £1,000 any ‘wealthy citizen or rich lawyer’ who has ‘sublimed a pure wife’ so that he may agree to be a cuckold (II.ii.54–6). In the Blackfriars temple of financial and sensual temptation it is unsurprising that the body is incorporated into the greedy impulses of every guest in Lovewit’s house. The body comes to symbolize a rich, uncultivated site for colonization in a disorientated society; and, by Act IV, the audience is accustomed to associating it with negotiations for cultural territory and ownership when Kastril is openly welcomed by Subtle as ‘my worshipful body, my terrae fili, / That is, my boy of land’ (IV.ii.13–14). Unlike Lovewit, this particular comic victim Kastril has performed a dangerously deviant migration into the plague-ridden capital in order to secure the knowledge he believes to be in the gift of the alchemist. The audience is constantly reminded of external realms of cultural reference which enable or validate stage business. In the Blackfriars market-place, identities are purchased and exchanged in the hope of accessing a broader space for self-affirmation. Peter Bement points out: the vivid substance which permeates the play – the sense of the great city in its teeming life, and beyond it the towns and counties of England, the countryside of Kastril’s estates and Lovewit’s hopyards – acts not simply as a background or addition to the characters, but as the very material from which they are formed, investing them with a convincing fullness.41

In a dramatic world where there can be no fixity, because even the status and reign of the masters is provisional, it is unsurprising that all characters indulge in fantasies of possession. This may simply be the vision of ‘a ship now coming from Ormus’ (I.iii.59), of a power which will bring into being the main of hiring forces Abroad, drawing the Hollanders, your friends, From th’Indies to serve you with all their fleet’ (III.ii.22–4),

or of a power to prise ‘the King of France out of his realms, or Spain’ (III.ii.48).42 Audiences in this play are left to register a furious movement

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from one imperializing stratagem to the next as the confederates and their clients endeavour to secure sovereignty over their unstable environments. The self-instated capitalist Messiah, Sir Epicure Mammon, undertakes, for example, to cure his land and ‘fright the plague / Out o’the kingdom in three months’ (II.i.69–70). It later becomes apparent that, ‘this town will not half serve’ his Midas touch (II.ii.13). Unwilling to embark on the knightly quest to heal society’s divisions (a role which belongs now to an obsolete feudal order), Epicure fixes his sights on being ‘king of Bantam’ with Dol as his empress (II.iii.320). At Face’s prompting, this new mission may lead him, it seems, to penetrate the spiritual and economic spaces occupied by the dominant culture as he ruminates upon the prospect of ‘[buying] the covering off o’ churches’ (II.ii.14). The secure cultural opposition between town and country identified in the Restoration comedy of Etherege and Wycherley later in the century, for example, is not in evidence in The Alchemist. Reflecting upon the fate of Dol, Mammon considers: This nook here of the Friars is no climate For her to live obscurely in, to learn Physic, and surgery, for the constable’s wife Of some odd Hundred in Essex;

instead of this, she should leave this urban wasteland and come forth And taste the air of palaces; eat, drink, The toils of emp’rics, and their boasted practice. (IV.i.131–6)

In Jonson’s play, the country and the city have comparable systems of exploitation which govern them – indeed, as Raymond Williams insisted, ‘There is . . . no simple contrast between wicked town and innocent country, for what happens in the town is generated by the needs of the dominant rural class.’43 There is no morally redeemed cultural Other to be located geographically. In a plague-stricken world where there are no refuges, only refugees, Jonson’s play repeatedly reminds us that there is never any possible escape from systems of exploitation. Face explains:

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While there dies one a week O’the plague, [Lovewit]’s safe from thinking toward London. Beside, he’s busy at his hop-yards now. (I.i.182–4)

Gail Kern Paster has emphasized: ‘What seems contradictory about Jonson’s rhetorical strategy is that it proceeds by a recitation of vivid details, and yet the cumulative effect of such details is undifference, the collapse of individuation back into chaotic urban environment.’44 In a city characterized by disease, death and flight, Dol, Subtle and Face determine to re-endow their habitat with meaning through the activity of civic reconstruction, albeit of a most fraudulent nature. Most significantly, the crooks frequently promote their new-found authority through an obsession with their republican titles; like all empirebuilders they have become absorbed by the business of naming, and thus of owning. Their stratagems transform the city from a community focused on its own fear and inadequacy to one which wishes to realize its own ideals, however morally threadbare they might be. In reality, Dol, Subtle and Face visit their rich, but depopulating, world with a systematic policy of dispossession. An apparently exhilarating environment, a pseudo-imaginary order, is brought into being for the Blackfriars clients in which all crises of desire, appetite and identity are to be resolved. These formerly marginalized dwellers in the capital wish to control momentarily the chaos of their world through new practices of ownership. Ultimately, Jonson’s narrative indicates that the possibilities of prosperity, which Subtle ostensibly makes available, are more the creation of his clients than himself. The ambitions of these clients are recorded and acknowledged in the Blackfriars house but they are never satisfied by the syndicate’s conjuring tricks: there is no reassurance to be found for them or the audience in the physical, geographic, linguistic and chronological exchanges which cony-catchers enact. The play as a whole manages to maintain its comic momentum by stressing the regressive potential of all the characters on stage. By attempting to displace the patterns of cultural experience operational beyond the four walls of the house, the confederacy makes available cultural space which is subsequently articulated through the apparently authoritative voice of alchemy. Mammon

Pertinax, Surly, Will you believe antiquity? Records? I’ll show you a book where Moses and his sister

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Surly Mammon Surly Mammon

How! O’the philosopher’s stone, and in High Dutch. Did Adam write, sir, in High Dutch? He did. (II.i.79–85)

In The Alchemist, audience imaginations are irresistibly invaded and stimulated by the energetic vision of a society in flux: a Jonsonian chronicle of the destruction of innocence and virtue, the loss of identity and the proliferation of criminality so frequently associated in literature with entry into the urban. Raymond Williams reminded his reader that the city was once considered as ‘the idea of an achieved centre: of learning, communication, light’ and gradually emerges as an urban environment in which ‘fraud and its luxury seem almost, as in Rome, to feed on themselves; to belong in the city, and to breed there, as if on their own.’45 London is seen as an emblematic community in Jonson’s text, one in which social rupture and moral decay are accentuated but representative of the society at large. Dol points out that any frictions in the syndicate will lead to the return of its members to the ranks of the culturally impotent. As a consequence, she demands that her confederates will ‘Leave off (their) barking, and grow one again, / Or, by the light that shines, I’ll cut your throats’ (I.i.118–19). It soon becomes clear that this dramatic world is ‘rounded’ by violence both within and without: Kastril informs his sister with regard to her prospective suitor: God’s lid, you shall love him, or I’ll kick you . . . Go kuss him, as the cunning man would ha’ you; I’ll thrust a pin i’ your buttocks else. (IV.iv.35, 74–5)

As the play unfolds, the audience is asked to bear witness to a culture (ultimately a distorted version of its own) which has lost contact with its history and moral inheritance, and which chooses to limit cultural interaction to competitive acquisition. The colonizing analogy is reaffirmed throughout Jonson’s comic narrative. The Alchemist focuses not only upon subjects who wish to acquire material objects, but those who would also ‘make Devonshire and Cornwall, / And make them perfect Indies!’ (II.i.35–6). Ananias’ and Tribulation’s vision of an empire governed by Puritan rigour is

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inevitably debased by their flawed spirituality, but the audience is never allowed to forget their territorial ambitions. In an analogous manner, the arena in which Mammon intends to display his knightly magnanimity is constantly eroded by his faulty philanthropy. The knight and the Dissenters lack the necessary Jonsonian restraint to enrich the cultural environment; and once exposed to scrutiny, their ambitions emerge as socially anarchic for they can only flourish in the counter-culture engendered by criminals: ‘Good brother, we must bend unto all means / That may give furtherance to the holy cause’ (III.i.11–12). As quickly becomes evident, the plague has encouraged the marginalized and the corrupt to show themselves and to congregate in the Blackfriars house. The Golden Age which Jonson’s creations wish to restore, far from being morally redemptive, has a specifically financial frame of reference. Sir Epicure would be as Jove to Danaë and, indeed, ‘show the god a miser / Compared with Mammon.’; in such a world, he shall have his beloved Dol ‘feel gold, taste gold, hear gold, sleep gold; / Nay, we will concumbere gold’ (IV.i.27–30). However, in the midst of the comic frenzy, Jonson’s audiences must find themselves confronted with the moral choices which the Blackfriars clients should be making if only they could free themselves from their incurable self-obsessions. Subtle

O, I did look for [Mammon] With the sun’s rising: ‘marvel he could sleep! This is the day I am to perfect for him The magisterium, our great work, the stone, And yield it, made, into his hands; of which He has this month talked as he were possessed. (I.iv.11–16)

In this play, the clients, colonists, cultural pioneers, or what you will, misread their own destinies in their search for profit and exploit the lexis of philanthropy in doing so. Unlike Shakespeare, Jonson maintains a hard focus on the geographical contours of his metropolis, despite the fact that every stage inhabitant is keen to withdraw from it into the realms of promise conjured up in the Blackfriars house. This fugitive movement inevitably suggests a wish to escape from an antagonistic reality, but it also indicates a realization on the part of everyone concerned that the mechanism of power in Jacobean London both inhibits and enfeebles them. The cozeners are shown repeatedly to express disquiet at the potential of the world beyond the four walls and are excited into action by it: ‘Will you have / The neighbours hear you?’, Dol

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exclaims, ‘Will you betray all?’ (I.i.7–8). Indeed, throughout Jonson’s comedy this fear of the society’s status quo is almost fetishized by the confederates as they endeavour to seduce and to control their clients once and for all. Anne Barton has pointed out that ‘the true alchemy of The Alchemist is linguistic.’46 Indeed, in this regressive theatre of Babel where alchemical babble is blended with apocalytic prophecy, thieving cant, genealogical ranting and quarrelling discourse, for example, language is found to be the most effective weapon at the disposal of the mind with an acquiring taste. In tune with Wittgenstein’s assumption that ‘the limits of my language mean the limits of my world’, all Jonson’s characters luxuriate in exotic self-narratives. The protagonists follow alchemical precedents and appropriate, for example, the textual authorities of Moses, Cadmus Hercules and Pythagoras. Apocalyptic discourse had become almost a trope of alchemical writing. Thomas Norton, for example, confided to his reader: this knowledge would often have been the glory of England’s Kings, if their hope had been firmly placed upon God . . . One who shall have obtained his honours by means of this Art, will mend old manners, and change them for the better. When he comes, he will reform the kingdom, and by his goodness and virtue he will set an everlasting example to rulers. In his time the common people will rejoice, and render praise to God in mutual neighbourly love. O King, who art to accomplish all this, pray to God the King, and implore His aid in the matter! So the glory of thy mind will be crowned with the glory of a golden age, which shall not then be hoped for as future.47

As we reel from our travels with Dol across the wastes of ‘Gog-North’ and ‘Gog-Dust’, audiences are invited to attend to Henry Broughton’s genealogies as imperializing narratives: in this scheme of things, voices will come from Salem and from Athens, And teach the people of Great Britain . . . And so we may arrive by Talmud skill And profane Greek to raise the building up Of Helen’s house against the Ismaelite. (IV.v.14–15, 25–7)

In the case of Jonson’s comedy, the cultural shift from the worlds of

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grand imperial schemata to sordid greed is amply demonstrated by Ga¯mini Salga¯do’s reminder that Broughton ‘made repeated inquiries [to the alchemist/seer Simon Forman] as to whether or not he would be translated to a bishopric’.48 Interestingly, such labyrinthine genealogical discourse was widely in evidence in alchemical writing as the authors are found to engage in similarly furious and foolish attempts to validate the uncovering of divine mysteries. In the Hydrolithus Sophicus seu Aquarium Sapientum (The Sophic Hydrolith; or, Water Stone of the Wise) for example, first published in 1619, the unknown author stipulates: lest anyone should doubt the existence of this secret Art, or, after the manner of this wicked world, look upon it as a mere figment, I will enumerate some of the true Sages (besides those named in Holy Scripture) who really knew this Art, in the natural order of their succession. They are Hermes Trismegistus, Pythagoras, Alexander the Great, Plato, Theophrastus, Avicenna, Galen, Hippocrates, Lucian, Longanus, Rasis, Archelaus, Rupescissa, the Author of the Great Rosary, Mary the Prophetess, Dionysus, Zachaire, Haly, Morienus, Calid, Constantius, Serapion, Albertus Magnus, Estrod, Arnold de Villa Nova, Geber, Raymond Lully, Roger Bacon, Alan, Thomas Aquinas, Marcellus Palingenius; and, among moderns, Bernard of Trevisa, Frater Basil Valentinus, Phillip Theophrastus (i.e., Paracelsus) and many others.49

Significantly, Jonson chooses to reiterate his mockery of such patrilinear obsessions a few years later in his masque Mercury Vindicated from the Alchemists at Court (1615). In this entertainment, Mercury confides to his audience that ‘[alchemists] may pretend under the specious names of Geber, Arnold, Lully, Bombast of Hohenheim to commit miracles in art and treason against nature.’50 In The Alchemist, such genealogical offerings from ‘Madam Rabbi’ (V.v.20), the mesmerized Dol, not only serve to stress the patriotic and dynastic interests of arcane scholarship being circulated in early modern Europe, but also to highlight significant dimensions of imperial aspiration at work within this body of writing. In a contemporary essay, the alchemist Michael Maier, for example, promotes Europe [as] the mother of the whole world, and though smaller than other continents, [it] is vastly superior to them through the courage, energy, and mental strength of its inhabitants . . . Europe has produced the bravest warriors, and the most distinguished conquerors; and though she has subdued other continents, she has never been subjugated by them.

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Of the four great world empires, only one was founded by an Asiatic prince; the Macedonian, the Roman, and the Teutonic Empires, have all had their centres in Europe. Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar were among her sons.51

The language and authority of genealogy in Jonson’s play, like that of alchemical discourse, hyperbole, mythic and classical allusion, generate the dimensions of both time and space for expansionist ambitions. Armed with such weapons, the temporary masters in Blackfriars record and celebrate their clients’ anarchic desires for self-advertisement and nurture accommodating subjects, like Kastril, who [have] come up To learn to quarrel and to live by his wits, And will go down again and die i’the country. (II.vi.60–2)

Like Molière’s charlatans in Le Malade imaginaire, Jonson’s rogues affirm a growing matrix of power mediated through carnival, mythic knowledge and macaronic language. Mammon laments beside the ranting Dol, Alas I talked Of a fifth monarchy I would erect, With the philosopher’s stone (by chance) and she Falls on the other four, straight. (IV.v.25–8)

So desperate is each character’s appetite to privilege a personal narrative of power which places him- or herself as emperor that a creature like Surly is systematically destroyed on stage in his quaint attempts to introduce a moral order into Lovewit’s house. Surly refuses to be incorporated into the pax alchemica of Blackfriars and so he is strategically denied word and action by both practitioners and clients on stage. As enticing promises of sensual satisfaction are offered in Blackfriars, the clients begin to find themselves divested, one by one, of their identities as social competitors, and their attempts to be authors of their own meaning are destroyed. In this context, Lovewit’s house becomes a laboratory in which specimens are experimented upon and the innards of their minds and purses are exposed to the light. However, the selffashioning which does occur in this play is mediated and shaped by the nature of the potential environments which are being offered: if the

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clients are to be seduced by amplified representations of themselves, then they must be furnished with irresistible stages on which to assume these new roles. E. B. Partridge suggested that the confederates’ claims to alchemize and re-create the body’s meaning are impious.52 Clearly, the confederacy desacramentalizes its environment and debases the spiritual dimensions of human experience by privileging the discourse of bodily functions and appetites. Subtle insists that he took Face ‘out of the dung’ (I.i.64); and Surly refuses to see Face’s empire as anything else but one in which the captain is the superintendent To all the quainter traffickers in town. He is their visitor, and does appoint Who lies with whom, and at what hour, what price, Which gown; and in what smock, what fall, what tire. (II.iii.302–6)

Losing touch with the social environment outside the Blackfriars house of ‘deeds and language such as men do use’, clients like Dapper are even willing to see the privy as their stepping stone to prosperity, sexual or otherwise.53 It must be remembered, however, that he has already begun the play in a state of disorientation and dispossession: I lent my watch last night to one That dines today at the sheriff’s, and so was robbed Of my pass-time. (I.ii.6–8)

By the end of the play, the body of Dame Pliant has been sublimed into a sexual elixir as Face seduces the returning patriarch Lovewit with the promise that I’ll help you to a widow In recompense, that you shall gi’me thanks for, Will make you seven years younger, and a rich one. (V.iii.84–6)

Judd Arnold contends: ‘Lovewit’s triumph is the triumph of the cavalier-gallant – in this case, a somewhat over-age gallant – over fools, knaves and sour moralists’; and John Mebane similarly observes that, at this point, ‘Lovewit quite logically appears on the scene as a man whose clearsightedness, good nature, and common sense contrast sharply with the credulity and wild imagination of Mammon or the Puritans. Lovewit

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is not perfect, but at least he suffers from no delusions.54 It seems doubtful that Jonson’s play appears so unreservedly jubilant at the implication of Lovewit in the scheming of his servant Jeremy. Surely, audiences are drawn into making unnerving comparisons between two such men who understand each other fully, rather than into celebrating the canniness of the master. Jonson’s relentless account of a chaotic world in which patterns of social obligation and compassion have collapsed may not produce many, if any, foci for audience approbation, but it can animate this same audience to reinquire into its own cultural undertakings. At the end of the play, in securing the culturally infantilized (that is, pliant) woman for Blackfriars domesticity, Lovewit comes to occupy the territory of erotic, financial and intellectual power reminiscent of that envisaged by Mammon at the beginning of the play. Instead of reinstating the conventional regime of power operational before the plague, the returning patriarch appropriates the empire being forged by his squatters. As a result, the play’s finale may be seen as a series of regressive acts harking back to an older feudal society or as one stimulated by yet another patriarchal fantasy of appropriation: le droit de seigneur. E. B. Partridge viewed the end of the play as one in which the participants, ‘endure the most comic of all punishments; they remain themselves, a deadly retribution if one is a fool.’55 However, Jonson’s increasingly complex text surely inhibits his audiences from arriving at such absolute conclusions regarding the nature of foolishness by this stage in the proceedings. Lovewit’s return does not herald an eagerly awaited spectacle of harmonious order; it serves to dynamize, if anything, the conniving and frustration which characterize the whole of the play. All the sleights of hand at the close of the play remorselessly point to humanity’s irrevocably stunted appreciation of its cultural and moral environment. Subtle Face Subtle Face

You said he would not come While there died one a week within the liberties. No: ’twas within the walls. Was’t so? Cry you mercy: I thought the liberties. What shall we do now, Face? Be silent: not a word, if he call or knock. I’ll into mine old shape again and meet him, Of Jeremy the butler. (IV.vii.115–21)

As the confederates endeavour to carve up their empire and say,

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‘This’s mine and thine, and thine, and mine’ (V.iv.91), we find ourselves irresistibly fascinated by the antimasque which they have orchestrated. However, there is little to reassure audiences at the end of this narrative of moral chaos. The final colonization to take place is that of the audience’s past as it is made to realize that the Blackfriars clients visited Lovewit’s house as it has visited the theatre on previous occasions – wishing to be gulled. Jonson remorselessly reminds us that the act of perceiving, even that on the part of the audience, betrays the desires and appetites of the perceiver. We are now invited to indulge in what Jonson termed later, in The Magnetic Lady (1632), as ‘the solemn vice of interpretation’: this allows us to shape and appropriate Jonson’s text as our own. However, as our perceptions penetrate and colonize areas of the text, it is as well to be reminded by Jonson that this vice of interpretation ‘deforms the figure of many a fair scene, by drawing it awry; and, indeed, is the civil murder of most good plays.’56 Lisa Jardine has raised the point that ‘It is curious how reluctant we are to include acquisitiveness among the defining characteristics of the age which formed our aesthetic heritage.’57 Such inhibitions were clearly not at work as early modern eyes scrutinized the workings of their own society. In 1600, for example, Nicholas Breton’s pamphlet Pasquil’s Madcap insisted: The market doth not serve to look on minds, ’Tis money makes the way with everything; Coin alters natures in a thousand kinds.58

In The Alchemist, the commercial lexis of the very ‘Induction’ to the play focuses audience attention on a situation where a ‘House to set up, with him they here contract / Each for a share, and all begin to act’ (7–8). Ultimately, it becomes evident that if the plague provides a hothouse atmosphere for the flourishing of the syndicate’s ambitions, it is deceit rather than bacteria which creates the victims. In his masque Mercury Vindicated from the Alchemists at Court, Jonson populates his stage with ‘a troop of threadbare Alchemists’. In the tarnished world of the antimasque, his Mercury declares that such men, ‘profess familiarly to melt down all the old sinners of the suburbs once in half a year into fresh gamesters again – get all the cracked maidenheads and cast ’em into new ingots; half the wenches of the town are Alchemy.’59

196 Face

The Exploitation of Space in The Alchemist (Why, this is yet A kind of modern happiness, to have Dol Common for a great lady.) (IV.i.22–4)

The endlessly protean potential of Jonson’s protagonists in The Alchemist results in a breathtaking spectacle, but also points to a world condemned to an endless cycle of competition and decay. Indeed, in this play which at points teeters on the edge of Grand Guignol, the audience may be encouraged to believe that Jonson proposes, as did Walter Benjamin (from a rather different cultural perspective) for more modern readers, that ‘ “the state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a concept of history that is in keeping with this insight.’60 The return of Lovewit in fact indicates the collapse of all claims to ownership in this dramatic world and underlines the provisionality of all dominated spaces. The Alchemist comes to a close in a comic apocalypse as Mammon resolves to ‘go mount a turnip-cart, and preach / The end o’ the world within these two months’ (V.v.81–3); and Jeremy-Lungs-Captain Face withdraws into a baroque commentary on human life in which ‘ ’tis all deceptio visus’ (V.iii.62). Jonson was forever encouraging his audiences to draw liaisons between cultural experience and theatrical representation. In The Magnetic Lady, in the last phase of his career as a dramatist, Mother Chair warns: ‘wee shall marre all, if once we ope the mysteries / O’ the Tyring-house, and tell what’s done within’ (IV.vii.42–3). However, Jonson’s plays, and most especially The Alchemist, contain metadramatic elements and stress the backstage nerves and theatrical frenzy which attend the communal performance of life in society. Individuals are not censured for adopting guises – this is a prerequisite for cultural interaction (if not survival) in this world. However, there is profound unease surrounding the choices of costumes and voices which are made on stage. The tempting fantasies played out in word and deed by Subtle, Face and Dol create utopian worlds of influence for their clients in which their appetite for possession goes unchallenged – until, that is, there is a ‘great crack and noise within’ (IV.v.55) and then gradually everyone’s hopes get exploded. The beguiling Lovewit insists that only ‘a few cracked pots, and glasses, and a furnace, / The ceiling filled with poesies of the candle’ remain in his house (V.v.40–1). In this frenzied city comedy, the audience is presented with a whole host of subjects who are effectively versions of our former selves; and

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the recognition of their deludedness and ignorance should create new cognitive spaces for our knowledge and judgement. However, it becomes increasingly clear that our worlds of experience can never match the ideal cultural environment that Jonson invites us to formulate in response to the dramatic narrative – and perhaps such conclusions underpin much of the deliberative mood at the end of the play. The republic of the criminal syndicate can never be destroyed. The empirebuilding in the play is expressed as an unending ritual of exploitation of which Jonson assumes the audience will not be the last victim: that is, the final subject to be gulled of its money by surrendering to a fantasy life. In Playes Confuted in Fiue Actions, Prouing that they are not to be Suffred in a Christian Common Weale (1582), Stephen Gosson argued that ‘Comedyes make our delight exceede, for at them many times wee laugh so extreemely, that striuing to bridle our selues, wee cannot; therefore Plato affirmeth that great laughter breedeth a great change.’61 The Alchemist is vigorously concerned with the human need for selfgovernment and reform. Ultimately, it seems that it is the fear of being baited by Jonson himself which may prevent the audience from surrendering its space to the fantasies of the Blackfriars magicians. Neighbour 3 Neighbour 1 Neighbour 2 Neighbour 3

Is Jeremy come? O, yes, you may leave your tools; We were deceived, he says. He has had the keys, And the door has been shut these three weeks. Like enough. (V.ii.41–4)

Notes

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Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 1. See Georges Benko and Ulf Strohmeyer (eds), Space and Social Theory: Interpreting Modernity and Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p. 115. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge (Brighton: Harvester, 1980), p. 149. Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), pp. 36–7. There are of course some important critical exceptions to this and I cannot be exhaustive in my examples, but I would wish to draw attention to Jerzy Limon, for example, with his illuminating systematization of spaces of performance in ‘From Liturgy to the Globe: The Changing Concept of Space’, Shakespeare Survey, 52 (1999), 46–53. I would also note the following examples, for instance, on the gendering of space: Georgianna Ziegler, ‘My Lady’s Chamber: Female Space, Female Chastity in Shakespeare’, Textual Practice, 4, 1 (Spring 1990), 73–90; L. S. Haslem, ‘Riddles, Female Space and Closure in All’s Well That Ends Well’, English Language Notes, 38, 4 (2001), 19–33; and Susanne Scholz, Body Narratives: Writing the Nation and Fashioning the Subject in Early Modern England (London: Macmillan, 2000). Michael D. Bristol, Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (London: Routledge, 1989 reprint), pp. 111–12. In ‘Civic Rites, City Sites: The Place of the Stage’, Steven Mullaney also observes: Such an examination, concerned as it is with the social definition of space – with the recreation of place as significant space, the translation of physical topography into a cultural topology – must begin with the recognition that the late Medieval and Renaissance city was shaped not by the dictates of urban planning and population control but by the varied rites of initiation, celebration, and exclusion through which a ceremonial social order defined, maintained, and manifested itself, in time and in space. See David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass (eds), Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 18.

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Douglas Bruster, Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 3, 9. Cited in E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, vol. IV (Oxford: Clarendon, 1945 reprint), p. 270. Cited in Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, vol. IV, p. 269 from Harrison’s unpublished Chronologie. Entry dated at 1572. Benno Werlen, Society, Action and Space (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 2–3. See also Rob Shields’s contention: Sites are never simply locations. Rather, they are sites for someone and of something. The cultural context of images and myths adds a socially constructed level of meaning to the genus loci, the classics’ ‘unique sense of place’, said to derive from the forms of the physical environment in a given site . . . This means fully locating it in the different emotional geographies of people as different as tourists and city-dwellers. See his Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 6. Lefebvre, The Production of Space; Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. M. Jolas (Boston: Beacon, 1994). Garratt A. Sullivan, The Drama of Landscape: Land, Property, and Social Relations on the Early Modern Stage (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 2. Edward Worsop, Sundry Errours and Faults Daily Committed by Land Meaters, Ignorant of Arithmetike and Geometrie, to the Damage, and Prejudice of Many of her Maiestie’s Subiects . . . (London, 1582), sig. C2r. In a brief review of major philosophical engagements with notions of space, Benno Werlen draws attention to what he terms as the following constructs: the ‘absolute/substantive idea’ demonstrated in the writings of Descartes and Newton in which space has its own independent identity and reality; the ‘relational’ idea associated with Leibniz in which space is defined through the entities it occupies; and the ‘epistemological’ idea (Kantian) in which space is not an empirical concept but a necessary representation for the human psyche. See his Society, Action and Space, pp. 1–2. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, pp. 38–9. Ibid., p. 36. Ibid., p. 142. Ibid., p. 86. FQ: Hamlet, First Quarto. Textual referencing taken from Kathleen O. Irace (ed.), The First Quarto of Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Samuel Daniel, A Panegyrike Congratulatory Deliuered to the Kings Most Excellent Maiesty at Burleigh Harrington in Rutlandshire. Also certaine Epistles. With a Defence of Ryme, Heeretofore Written, and now Published by the Author (London, 1603), sig. H2r. Steve Pile, The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space and Subjectivity (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 174.

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Notes ‘ “On the Famous Voyage”: Ben Jonson and Civic Space’, Early Modern Literary Studies (September 1998), 3, para. 5. William Harrison, The Description of England, ed. Georges Edelen (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), p. 115. Agnes Heller, Renaissance Man (London: Routledge, 1978), pp. 170–2. In this context, see also Paola Bottalla and Michela Calderaro (eds), Counting and Recounting: Measuring Inner and Outer Space in the Renaissance (Trieste: Edizioni La Mongolfiera, 1995). Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), p. 117. Sir Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named the Gouernour (London, 1531), sig. E5v. Gerald Maclean, Donna Landry and Joseph P. Ward, The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture, 1550–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 1. Ricardo Quinones, The Renaissance Discovery of Time (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972); Heller, Renaissance Man; Achsah Guibbory, The Map of Time: Seventeenth-Century English Literature and Ideas of Pattern in History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986). Also in this context, see John Spencer Hill, Infinity, Faith and Time: Christian Humanism and Renaissance Literature (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1997); David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare and the Shape of Time (London: Macmillan, 1982). Sir Thomas Browne, Hydrotaphia Urne-Buriall, or, A Discourse of the Sepulchrall Urnes Lately Found in Norfolk. Together with The Garden of Cyrus, or the Quincunciall Lozenge, or Net-Work Plantations of the Ancients, Artificially, Naturally, Mystically Considered, with Sundry Observations, chapter 1 (London, 1658), sig. B1v. Russell West, Spatial Representations and the Jacobean Stage: From Shakespeare to Webster (London: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 223–4. Paul Salzman (ed.), An Anthology of Elizabethan Prose Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 269, 270, 273. ‘Translator to the Reader’, in A Reporte of the Kingdome of Congo, a Region of Africa. And the Countries that Border rounde about the same . . . Drawen out of the Writings and Discourses of Odoardo Lopes, by Phillipo Pigasetta, Translated out of Italian by Abraham Hartwell (London, 1597). Thomas Morton, The New English Canaan or New Canaan Containing an Abstract of New England (London, 1637), Book 2, chapter 1, pp. 60–1. Vitkus continues: By the beginning of the seventeenth century, at the same time they were developing the trade in African slaves, the English faced the problem of British subjects – men, women, and children – being captured and enslaved by “Turkish” privateers operating in the Mediterranean and the northeastern Atlantic. See ‘Turning Turk in Othello: The Conversion and Damnation of the Moor’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 48 (1997), p. 146.

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Holinshed’s Irish Chronicle, ed. Liam Miller and Eileen Power (New York: Humanities Press Inc., 1979), pp. 310–11. Cited in Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, vol. II, pp. 365–6. Anthony Munday, A Second and Third Blast of Retrait from Plaies and Theaters (London, 1580), p. 111. Richard Rawlidge, A Monster Late Found out and Discovered. Or The Scourging of Tiplers, the Ruine of Bacchus, and the Bane of Tapsters (Amsterdam, 1628), pp. 2–3. John Donne ‘An Anatomy of the World: The First Anniversary’, ll. 205, 213; Thomas Nashe, Pierce Penilesse his Supplication to the Diuell (1592), in Ronald B. Mckerrow (ed.), The Works of Thomas Nashe, vol. I (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), p. 172. This poem is thought to have been written on the night preceding his execution. See Sir Walter Ralegh, Selected Writings, ed. Gerald Hammond (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), p. 61. Thomas Cartelli, Marlowe, Shakespeare and the Economy of Theatrical Experience (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), p. 61. Stephen Gosson, The Schoole of Abuse, Contayning a Pleasant Inuective against Poets, Pipers, Players, Iesters, and such like Caterpillars of a Common Wealth . . ., second edn (London, 1587), sig. A2v. Paul Salzman (ed.), An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 3. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p. xxxv.

Notes to Introduction II 1

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The following editions are referred to throughout: FQ Hamlet First Quarto Kathleen O. Irace (ed.), The First Quarto of Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998). SQ Hamlet Second Quarto Hamlet Second Quarto 1604–5, Shakespeare Quarto Facsimiles no. 4 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964). F Hamlet in 1623 Folio Paul Bertram and Bernice W. Kliman (eds), The Three-Text Hamlet (New York: AMS Press, 1991). Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. M. Jolas (Boston: Beacon, 1994), p. 6. See Lily B. Campbell (ed.), The Mirror for Magistrates (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), p. 64. Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), pp. 79–80.

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Notes Interestingly in this context, Christine Richardson and Jackie Johnston draw attention to the ‘dynamic spatial aspect of dramatic action, the constantly changing cluster of relations among actors, props and sets, the patterns of space relations throughout the play’. See their Medieval Drama (London: Macmillan, 1991), p. 117. Section 56. See Maurice Castelain (ed.), Ben Jonson, Discoveries: A Critical Edition (Paris: Hachette, 1906), p. 27. Graham Bradshaw, Shakespeare’s Scepticism (Brighton: Harvester, 1987), p. 121. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p. xxxv. Michel Foucault Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated from French by Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979), pp. 138, 145, 170. See also Foucault’s contention: In discipline, the elements are interchangeable, since each is defined by the place it occupies in a series, and by a gap that separates it from the others. The unit is, therefore, neither the territory (unit of domination), nor the place (unit of residence), but the rank: the place one occupies in a classification. (p. 141) The courtyer of Count Baldessar Castilio divided into foure bookes (London 1561), sig. PP2r. Castelain, Discoveries, pp. 50–1. Section 76. See Castelain, Discoveries, pp. 50–1. ‘Of Figures and Figurative Speaches’, Book III, chapter VII. See George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Edward Arber (Westminster: A. Constable and Co., 1895), p. 166. Robert E. Wood, ‘Space and Scrutiny in Hamlet’, South Atlantic Review, 52, 1 (1987) p. 29. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 11. John Dod and Robert Cleaver, A Godlie Forme of Householde Government (London, 1612), p. 16. Interestingly, in this context, Gilles Fauconnier invites his reader to envisage mental spaces as ‘constructs distinct from linguistic structures but built up in any discourse according to guidelines provided by the linguistic expressions’. See his Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), p. 16. William Tyndale, The Obediéce of a Christen Man (Antwerp, 1528), sig. E1v–EIIv. Barnabe Rich, Roome for a Gentleman, or The Second Part of Favltes Collected and Gatherd for the True Meridian of Dublin in Ireland, and may serue Fitly else where about London, and in many other Partes of England, by Barnabe Rych, Souldier (London, 1609), sig. B1r, B1v. Ralph Lever, The Arte of Reason, rightly termed, Witcraft, Teaching a Pefect Way to Argue and Dispute. Made by Ralph Lever (London, 1573), sig. *4v.

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With reference to this discussion in a specifically performance environment, see Patrice Pavis, ‘Performance Analysis: Space, Time, Action’, Gestos 11, 22 (1996), pp. 11–32. Steve Pile, The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space and Subjectivity (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 89. In Certaine Sermons or Homilies Appointed to be Read in Churches In the Time of Queen Elizabeth I (1547–71), facsimile of 1623 edition, intro. Mary Ellen Rickey and Thomas B. Stroup (Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1968), pp. 69–70. Cited in J. Hurstfield and Alan G. R. Smith, Elizabethan People (London: Edward Arnold, 1972), p. 32. James I, ‘A Speach in the Starre-Chamber, the XX. of Jvne. Anno 1616’. Cited in Johann P. Sommerville, King James VI and I: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 226. Phillip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses (London, 1583), sig. L8r–v. Christine Richardson and Jackie Johnston underline that ‘diegetic space depends on discourse only and is space which exists through description. When dramatic discourse refers to non-visible diegetic space, its function is to replace space verbally.’ See their Medieval Drama, p. 117. Dudley Fenner, The Artes of Logick and Rhetorike (Middelburg, 1584), sig. D1r. Thomas Healy, New Latitudes: Theory and English Renaissance Literature (London: Edward Arnold, 1992), p. 4. John Dee, ‘His Mathematicall Preface’, in The Elements of Geometrie of the most Auncient Philosopher EUCLIDE of Megara. Faithfully (now first) translated into the Englishe Toung, by H. Billingsley, Citizen of London (London 1570), sig. A3v–A4r.

Notes to Chapter 1 The following editions are referred to throughout: FQ Hamlet First Quarto Kathleen O. Irace (ed.), The First Quarto of Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). SQ Hamlet Second Quarto Hamlet Second Quarto 1604–5, Shakespeare Quarto Facsimiles no. 4 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964). F Hamlet in 1623 Folio Paul Bertram and Bernice W. Kliman (eds), The Three-Text Hamlet (New York: AMS, 1991). Marlowe’s Dido of Carthage J. B. Steane (ed.), Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Plays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980 reprint).

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Notes William Kempe, The Education of Children (London, 1588), sig. G2v–G3r. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Edward Arber (Westminster: A. Constable & Co., 1895), p. 310. See Quintilian, The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, with trans. by H. E. Butler (London and Cambridge, Mass.: William Heinemann and Harvard University Press, 1936), Book XI, pp. 213, 221, 223. Also of interest with reference to classical theories of pedagogy and translation is, for example, Pliny the Younger’s letter to Fuscus Salinator. Pliny, Letters and Panegyricus in Two Volumes, with trans. by Betty Radice (London and Cambridge, Mass.: William Heinemann and Harvard University Press, 1969), I, Book XI, ix, pp. 501–7. With reference to gender expectations, see for example Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria: What use is it if we employ a lofty tone in cases of trivial import, a slight and refined style in cases of great moment . . .? Such incongruities are as unbecoming as it is for men to wear necklaces and pearls and flowing raiment which are the natural adornments of women, or for women to robe themselves in the garb of triumph, than which there can be conceived no more majestic raiment. (Butler translation, Book XI, pp. 155–7) Augustine, Confessions, Book X, xvii (26) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, World’s Classics, 1998), p. 194. See, On The Holy Trinity, Book X, chapter 11, in Philip Schaff (ed.), A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, vol. III (Edinburgh and Grand Rapids, Mich.: T. & T. Clark and Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1993), p. 143. Marginal comment by Harvey in a volume by Ramus. Cited in Eugene R. Kintgern, Reading in Tudor England (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1996), pp. 75–6. Matthew Sutcliffe, ‘The Epistle Dedicatorie’, in The Practice, Proceedings, and Lawes of Armes (London, 1593), sig. B1r. Erasmus focuses attention upon the productive use of memory whereby memorized data were deployed by the student to convince his audience of the legitimacy of the argument or action. In an independent letter in De Conscribendis Epistolis, Erasmus offers advice to the older student: Some people’s primary and almost sole anxiety is to learn things by heart, word for word. I do not approve of this as it involves much work and is practically useless . . . But if there is some saying, maxim, old proverb, anecdote, story, apt comparison, or anything that strikes you as being phrased with brevity, point, or in some other clever way, consider it a treasure to be stored carefully in the mind for use and imitation. (cited in Kintgern, Reading in Tudor England, pp. 24–5) fo. A3v. Cited in John G. Rechtien, ‘John Foxe’s Comprehensive Collection of Commonplaces: A Renaissance Memory System for Students and Theologians’, Sixteenth Century Journal, IX, 1 (1978), 86.

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Opening of chapter xix of ‘The First Booke’. See George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Edward Arber (Westminster: A. Constable and Co., 1895), p. 54. Significantly, at the beginning of Book X of the Confessions, Augustine discusses memory, distinguishing between memory as a place and memory as a divinely informed activity (see X.8). It is the latter, converted memory that collects and orders the fragments of past experience into a coherent self, that is, a coherent narrative. In the Second Quarto (I.ii.87–117) and the 1623 Folio (I.ii.87–117), Claudius is much more prolix and combines his advice with the announcement of Hamlet as heir to the Danish throne. Cited in Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 8. Maurice Castelain (ed.), Ben Jonson, Discoveries: A Critical Edition (Paris: Hachette, 1906), pp. 10–11. Interestingly, Mark Lewis Richardson finds the decisive change in British cultural responses to the Trojan narrative to be marked in Caxton’s Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (1474) in its departure from earlier medieval celebrations of virtue and chivalry during the siege to Caxton’s emphasis upon human loss and moral conclusions. See The Legends of Troy in the English Renaissance: A Study in Decadent Literature (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Emory University, 1980), p. 26. For discussion of Marlowe’s acquaintance with Phaer’s translation, see Vivien Thomas and William Tydeman (eds), Christopher Marlowe: The Plays and their Sources (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 18. Phaer finished translating the first nine books in 1560. This task was completed by Thomas Twyne in 1573. See John Munro (ed.), The Shakespeare Allusion-Book (London: Humphrey Milford/Oxford University Press, 1932), vol. I, p. 56. Colin Burrow (ed.), The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Sonnets and Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 51. See also John Kerrigan’s restrained comment that ‘the complaint against Time and Opportunity which Lucrece utters on Tarquin’s departure is by any measure remarkable’ (‘Shakespeare Poems’, in Margreta de Grazia and Stanley Wells (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 71). Burrow argues: A single book would have given Shakespeare a grasp of all these variant versions of the story. This was Paulus Marsus’s edition of Ovid’s Fasti, which was frequently reprinted in the sixteenth century. There are strong grounds for believing Shakespeare knew this version. Before the rape of Lucretia, Ovid’s Tarquin pretends to the Gabii that he has been cast out by his family. He then betrays the tribe who have taken him in. At this point both Marsus and his fellow commentator Constantius compare Tarquin to Sinon. (Marsus 142). See Burrow (ed.), The Complete Sonnets and Poems, pp. 48–9.

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Notes It is in Ovid’s Metamorphoses that Hecuba attacks King Polymestor who has murdered her youngest and last son. I am indebted to Vivien Thomas and William Tydeman for this detail: see their Christopher Marlowe: The Plays and their Sources, p. 58. The edition of The Second Part of the Iron Age (printed 1632) to which I refer is in Thomas Heywood, The Dramatic Works of Thomas Heywood now first collected with Illustrative Notes and a Memoir of the Author in Six Volumes, vol. 3 (London: John Pearson, 1874). More generally, Eugene R. Kintgern notes that early modern reading strategies stressed the importance of intertextual concerns: whatever the reader finds in the text, are related to their uses elsewhere. Even individual words are not seen simply as parts of a text, but rather as independent entities and grammatical characteristics the reader takes care to review. Any given text is thus radically intertextual, and reading becomes inherently comparative . . . Authors may be appreciated – even perhaps venerated – but it is because they have produced something that the reader can use and not simply contemplate and enjoy; it was expected that the words of a dead man would be modified in the guts of the living. (see Reading in Tudor England, pp. 26, 45) See The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. A. Sherbo (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1968), vol. VIII, p. 1011. See Castelain, Discoveries, p. 56. See Homi Bhahba, ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’, October, 28 (Spring 1984), 125–33. Andrew Mousley, Renaissance Drama and Contemporary Literary Theory (London: Macmillan, 2000), p. 82. See The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe (London and Toronto: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1930), p. 235. It should be noted that ears are often being ‘assailed’ in this play: Barnardo Sit down a-while And let vs once againe assaile your eares, That are so fortified against our story, What we two Nights haue seene. (FQ I.i.40–3) Cited respectively from: J. E. Neale, Elizabeth I and her Parliaments 1584–1601, vol. II (London: J. Cape, 1965), p. 119; ‘To the Reader’, in Basilicon Doron. See James VI and I, King James VI & I: Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 4. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), p. xiii. See, for example, Ben Jonson’s observations in his commonplace book Discoveries: Indeed, things, wrote with labour, deserve to be so read, and will last their Age. The third requisite in our Poet, or Maker, is Imitation, to be able to convert substance or Riches of another Poet, to his owne use. To make choise of one excellent man above the rest, and so to follow him, till

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he grow very Hee; or so like him, as the Copie may be mistaken for the Principall. Not, as a Creature, that swallowes, what it takes in, crude, raw, or undigested; but, that feeds with an Appetite, and hath a Stomacke to concoct, devide, and turne all into nourishment. Not, to imitate servilely, as Horace saith, and catch at vices, for vertue, but to draw forth out of the best, and choisest flowers, with the Bee, and turne all into Honey, worke it into one relish, and savour: make our imitation sweet: observe, how the best writers have imitated, and follow them. (see fragment 130, Poesis, in Castelain, Discoveries, pp. 124–5) Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 82–3. G. Wilson Knight, The Imperial Theme (London: Methuen, 1975 reprint), p. 123. See Cicero, De Oratore, trans. E. W. Sutton, Loeb Classical Library, no. 348 (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1942), II. 36, p. 225. Interestingly in this context, in his The True Order and Methode of Writing and Reading Hystories (London, 1574), Thomas Blundeville emphasizes: we seeke by reading Hystories, to make our selues more wyse, as well to direct our owne actions, as also to counsell others, to sturre them to vertue, and to withdrawe them from vice, and to beautyfie our own speache with graue examples, when we discourse of anye matters, that therby it may haue the more aucthoritie, waight, and credite. (sig. H2v–3r) Barbara Hardy, ‘The Figure of Narration in Hamlet’, in Robert Druce (ed.), A Centre of Excellence: Essays Presented to Seymour Betsky (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1987), p. 4. Jerzy Limon invites us to diversify our considerations of theatrical spaces even further: In an attempt to bring some order into the area of theatre history called Elizabethan theatre studies, which as such has always had problems in deciding whether it is a part of the history of architecture or a part of theatrology, we should first distinguish at least four theatre spaces: first is the space of the theatre as a building, or, more generally, an architectual edifice; second is the space of the stage in its physical appearance; the third is the fictitious space that is created by multi-media theatre signs, such as the stage set, lighting, music, acting, and, of course, the spoken world; and the fourth is the space of the auditorium, often neglected in scholarship. (‘From Liturgy to the Globe: The Changing Concept of Space’, Shakespeare Survey, 52, 1999, p. 47.) Augustine Confessions, Book XI, xviii(23), xx (26), respectively pp. 234, 235. Sir Thomas Elyot, The Book Named the Governour (London: Everyman, 1962), p. 231 (‘leasings’ meaning ‘lies’). The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, vol. 10 of Spenser’s Prose Works, ed. Rudolf Gottfried (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1949), p. 86. John Speed, The History of Great Britaine under the Conquests of ye

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Notes Romans, Saxons, Danes and Normans (London, 1611), p. 166. Virgil, The Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid of Virgil, trans. C. Day-Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 6. See Homi Bhabha, Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 1. Frederic Jameson, ‘Marxism and Historicism’, in The Ideologies of Theory: Essays, 1971–1986, vol. 2: The Syntax of History (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 175.

Notes to Chapter 2

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All references of textual lineation are taken from J. R. Siemon (ed.), Christopher Marlowe: ‘The Jew of Malta’ (London: A. & C. Black, 1994). Marjorie Garber, ‘ “Infinite riches in a little room”: Closure and Enclosure in Marlowe’, in Alvin Kernan (ed.), Two Renaissance Mythmakers: Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson, Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1975–76 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), p. 3. Clifford Leech notes: ‘forty years passed between Marlowe’s death and the first known publication of this play. Henslowe records performances between 26 February 1592 and 21 June 1596; the extraordinary frequency of these performances indicates that the play was one of the most popular of its time.’ See his Christopher Marlowe: Poet for the Stage (New York: AMS Press, 1986), pp. 20–1. For further details of performance and transmission, see Vivien Thomas and William Tydeman (eds), Christopher Marlowe: The Plays and their Sources (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 295ff. On the question of the ‘deviancy’ of Marlowe’s play, Janet Clare is timely in her reminder that ‘despite the notoriety attached to Marlowe’s opinions, there is little suggestion that the drama was regarded officially as politically subversive.’ See ‘Marlowe’s “Theatre of Cruelty” ’, in J. A. Downie and J. T. Parnell (eds), Constructing Christopher Marlowe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 75. See, for example, Robert C. Jones, Engagement with Knavery (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1986), p. 23. Simon Shepherd expresses a similar desire with relation to Doctor Faustus. See his Marlowe and the Politics of Elizabethan Theatre (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester/Wheatsheaf, 1986), p. 98. For further discussion of the deployment of this conceit, see: G. K. Hunter, ‘The Theology of Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 27 (1964), 211–40; E. B. Asibong, Comic Sensibility in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe (Ilfracombe: Arthur H. Stockwell, 1979), p. 127; J. Tambling, ‘Abigail’s Party: “The Difference of Things” in The Jew of Malta’, in Dorothea Kehler and Susan Baker (eds), In Another Country: Feminist Perspectives on Renaissance Drama (Metuchen, N J: Scarecrow, 1991), p. 103; E. D. Pendry (ed.), Christopher Marlowe: Complete Plays and Poems (London: Dent/Everyman, 1976),

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p. xviii. For a linguistic analysis of this line, see Harry Levin, Christopher Marlowe: The Overreacher (London: Faber & Faber, 1967), p. 87. Pp. 47–51. Cited in Ceri Sullivan, The Rhetoric of Credit: Merchants in Early Modern Writing (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002), p. 50. In this context of the ‘demonic usurer’, see also Phillip Stubbes, An Anatomie of Abuses (London, 1583), sig. L1. See Garber, Closure and Enclosure in Marlowe, p. 9. Emily Bartels, Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation and Marlowe (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 1993), p. 100. For a valuable, concise survey of critical perceptions of Malta, see William Tydeman and Vivien Thomas, The State of the Art: Christopher Marlowe (Bristol: Bristol Press, 1989), p. 65. With reference an apparently ‘collapsible’ Marlovian space, see Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 195. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. M. Jolas (Boston: Beacon, 1994), pp. xxxv, 5, 137. For an account of the cultural threat of the alien perceived as ‘unformed’ and/or ‘chaotic’, see Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, pp. 9ff. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 82–3. (London, 1590), pp. 2–3. For an analysis of Reformist formulations of the importance of the home, see Heather Dubrow, Shakespeare and Domestic Loss: Forms of Deprivation, Mourning and Recuperation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), esp. pp. 56ff. Ga¯mini Salga¯do, ‘Christopher Marlowe’, in Christopher Ricks (ed.), English Drama to 1710 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), p. 126. For further discussion here, see Bartels, Spectacles of Strangeness, p. 83. Wilbur Sanders, The Dramatist and the Received Idea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), p. 54. M. M. Mahood Poetry and Humanism (Port Washington, N Y: Kennikat, 1967), p. 80: first published 1950. This point is taken up by J. R. Siemon in his edition of the play. See Christopher Marlowe: The Jew of Malta, p. xvi. Mahood, however, does concede: The Jew of Malta is a tragic farce, at once both terrifying and absurd. The world it exhibits, by its wide dissimilarity to life as we know it, is ludicrous beyond the bounds of comedy; yet it frightens by reason of a certain logical relationship with reality. If certain conditions governed the world as we know it, it would be exactly like the Malta ruled by Ferneze and terrorized by the Jew Barabas. Chief among these conditions would be the conviction, acknowledged or concealed, of all such a world’s inhabitants, that the material order comprised the whole existence. (p. 74) For discussion of possible influences, see for example: Thomas and Tydeman, Christopher Marlowe: The Plays and their Sources, pp. 12ff.;

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Notes Charles G. Masinton, Christopher Marlowe’s Tragic Vision (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1972), p. 63. Christopher Friedrichs, The Early Modern City 1450–1750 (London: Longman, 1995), p. 235. Lisa Jardine proposes: ‘like Jacob Fugger, Barabas functions structurally as more than a mere merchant. Barabas is the centre of a network of exchanges which, at the beginning of the play, mesh with the social and political fabric of Malta to make that “economy” on which the nation depends.’ See her Reading Shakespeare Historically (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 101. Burton Pike, The Image of the City in Modern Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 4. Jardine contends that ‘the figure in the drama of the diabolical merchant–usurer–intelligencer is, I shall suggest, a consolidated cultural manifestation of such an unease concerning mercantilism and deferred profit.’ See her Reading Shakespeare Historically, p. 103. On the differences between Machiavelli’s advice in his political writings and that of Marlowe’s Machevill (probably influenced by the representations made by Innocent Gentillet in the sixteenth century), see Catherine Minshull, ‘Marlowe’s “Sound Machevill”’, Renaissance Drama, xiii (1982), 35–53. For a more general discussion of the British reception of Machiavelli’s writings during this period, see Mario Praz, The Flaming Heart (New York: Doubleday, 1958), pp. 93ff. Friedrichs, The Early Modern City, p. 31. See Simon Shepherd, Marlowe and the Politics of Elizabethan Theatre (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester/Wheatsheaf, 1986), p. 171; Lisa Hopkins, Christopher Marlowe (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), p. 63. J. B. Steane, Marlowe: A Critical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), p. 189. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p. 202. Thomas Platter, Journal of a Younger Brother, trans and ed. Seàn Jennett (London: Frederick Muller, 1963), p. 75. James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 24. For a more detailed discussion of early modern perceptions of Jews, see for example: Friedrichs, The Early Modern City, pp. 239–41, 285. For further discussion of Malta as ‘multinational melting pot’, see Bartels, Spectacles of Strangeness, p. 91. Shepherd Marlowe and the Politics of Elizabethan Theatre, pp. 169ff. Matthew Sutcliffe, ‘The Epistle Dedicatorie’, in The Practice, Proceedings, and Lawes of Armes (London, 1593), sig. A3r. J. Browne, The Merchant’s Avizo (London, 1590), p. 3. Sullivan, The Rhetoric of Credit, p. 20. Bartels, Spectacles of Strangeness, p. 15. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 112.

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For a discussion of the influence of warfare on urban development in this period, see Friedrichs, The Early Modern City, p. 293; Lewis Mumford, The City in History (London: Secker & Warburg, 1963), pp. 361–4. Sir Thomas Smith (attr.), A Discourse of the Commonweal, ed. Mary Dewar (Charlottesville: Virginia University Press, 1969), p. 63. Jardine proposes: Barabas, in The Jew of Malta, stands for the bad faith elision of glamour and excessive profit. I think it is Marlowe’s genius to locate contemporary unease with such devastating accuracy within the figure of the merchant Jew . . . Whenever Barabas talks of his activities involving shipping and trade, which produce his immense wealth, it is in the orientalist, exotic terms of Hakluyt and his travellers’ tales . . . Wherever we encounter mercantile transactions within the action of the play, however, they are of an explicitly corrupt, sordid and morally dubious kind. (Reading Shakespeare Historically, p. 109) T. McAlindon, for example, views ‘Malta [as] a microcosm of the world viewed from the religious perspective, a place where Christian and nonChristian co-exist in a perpetual struggle for supremacy’. See English Renaissance Tragedy (London: Macmillan, 1986), pp. 99–100. For a detailed discussion of the historical and cultural context of perceiving ‘the Turk’ at this time, see Thomas and Tydeman, Christopher Marlowe: The Plays and their Sources, pp. 295–6. For fuller discussion of the roles played by merchant adventurers in this period see Alan Shepard’s Marlowe’s Soldiers (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), esp. pp. 113–14. For a fuller discussion of Marlowe as editor of historical narratives, see Thomas and Tydeman, Christopher Marlowe: The Plays and their Sources, pp. 297–301; and also, for a briefer account, Roger Sales, Christopher Marlowe (London: Macmillan, 1991), p. 84. Pike, The Image of the City, p. x. For an interesting appreciation of possible Elizabethan responses to the knights in Malta, see Emily C. Bartels, ‘Malta, the Jew, and the Fiction of Difference: Colonialist Discourse in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta’, English Literary Renaissance, 20, 1 (Winter 1990), 9ff. Cecil Roth, ‘The Jews of Malta’, in The Jewish Historical Society of England, Transactions (1928–31), xii (London: Spottiswoode, Ballantyne & Co., 1931), 187–251, esp. 206–16. Shepherd Marlowe and the Politics of Elizabethan Theatre, pp. 169–70. Mumford, The City in History, pp. 413, 416. Sullivan, The Rhetoric of Credit, p. 26. Garber, Closure and Enclosure in Marlowe, p. 13. Sales, Christopher Marlowe, p. 104. For comparisons between the two plays, see: T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (London: Faber & Faber, 1972), pp. 123, 153, 180; Brian Gibbons, Jacobean City Comedy (London: Methuen, 1980), pp. 94, 117; Levin, Christopher Marlowe: The Overreacher, p. 172; Tambling, ‘Abigail’s Party’, p. 97;

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Notes Robert N. Watson, Ben Jonson’s Parodic Strategy: Literary Imperialism in the Comedies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 86. Garber, Closure and Enclosure in Marlowe, p. 10. For a wider discussion here, see for example David M. Bevington, From ‘Mankind’ to Marlowe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), pp. 218, 230; Siemon, The Jew of Malta, p. xxx; Wilbur Sanders, ‘Dramatist as Realist: The Jew of Malta’, anthologized in Harold Bloom (ed.), Modern Critical Views: Christopher Marlowe (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), p. 56; Judith Weil, Christopher Marlowe: Merlin’s Prophet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 36. Fred B. Tromly argues: ‘The Jew of Malta can be seen as a kind of antimorality play, as it gives its audience an education not in faith but in cynicism and betrayal.’ See his Playing with Desire: Christopher Marlowe and the Art of Tantalization (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1998), p. 104. As Sales stresses, ‘The Jew of Malta nevertheless self-consciously refuses to demonize the Turkish warriors.’ See his Christopher Marlowe, p. 85. For further detailed discussion here concerning the dramatic representation of Turkey and Turks, see Shepherd, Marlowe and the Politics of Elizabethan Theatre, pp. 142–4. For critical views on Barabas’ Christ-like status, see Pendry, Christopher Marlowe: Complete Plays and Poems, pp. xviii–xix; Steane, Marlowe: A Critical Study, p. 179; Sanders, ‘Dramatist as Realist’, p. 65. McAlindon makes the analogy explicit between Barabas and the Antichrist, son of Satan. See English Renaissance Tragedy, p. 100. See also Masinton, Christopher Marlowe’s Tragic Vision, pp. 59, 74. Mahood’s comment that The Jew of Malta ‘depicts a world which has cut itself off entirely from the transcendent’ clearly feeds this debate. See Poetry and Humanism, p. 74. Of interest here is Pike’s contention that ‘from the beginning the image of the city served as the nexus of many things, all characterized by strongly ambivalent feelings: presumption (Babel), corruption (Babylon), perversion (Sodom and Gomorrah), power (Rome), destruction (Troy, Carthage), death, the plague (the City of Dis), and revelation (the heavenly Jerusalem)’. See his Image of the City in Modern Literature, pp. 6–7. With regard to the proprietorial interests of the monastic Church in urban areas, Friedrichs observes: ‘a European city of the late middle ages might thus be host to a number of different orders – Benedictines, Augustinians, Carmelites, Dominicans, Franciscans and more – each with its own house and gardens within the city and extensive landholdings without.’ See his Early Modern City, p. 65. Clare Harraway, Re-citing Marlowe: Approaches to the Drama (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), p. 192. Friedrichs, The Early Modern City, p. 239. For further discussion, see also p. 240.

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Casper van Senden was nominated to oversee the transportation of this community from Britain. See marquis of Salisbury, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquis of Salisbury, Hatfield House (London: HMSO, 1906), Part II: 569. Cited in Geraldo U. de Sousa, Shakespeare’s CrossCultural Encounters (London: Macmillan, 1999), p. 8. James Shapiro concludes that in a population of approximately 4,000,000, ‘there were Jews in Shakespeare’s England, though probably never more than a couple of hundred at any given time.’ See his Shakespeare and the Jews, p. 76. For discussion of the Venetian Jewry and perceptions of the Jewish community in general in this period, see Friedrichs, The Early Modern City, p. 241; Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (London: Faber & Faber, 1994), pp. 214–16; Mumford, The City in History, pp. 324–5. Friedrichs, The Early Modern City, p. 240. See also p. 62. For wider discussion here, see Glynne Wickham, ‘The Beginnings of English Drama: Stage and Drama till 1660’, in Ricks, English Drama to 1710, p. 44; John Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 96; Shepherd, Marlowe and the Politics of Elizabethan Theatre, p. 174; Sales, Christopher Marlowe, p. 97. Charles Lamb (1808), in Specimens of English Dramatic Poets who Lived about the Time of Shakespeare, 1835, I. Anthologized in M. Maclure (ed.), Marlowe: The Critical Heritage 1588–1896 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 69. Stephen Greenblatt, Learning to Curse (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 42. Eliot, Selected Essays, p. 123. Shepherd stresses that ‘[the] horrible attribution of all economic ills to the presence of aliens’ is ‘a viewpoint from which The Jew of Malta radically diverges’. See Marlowe and the Politics of Elizabethan Theatre, p. 127. For further discussion here, see Thomas and Tydeman, Christopher Marlowe: The Plays and their Sources, pp. 295–6. Pendry, Christopher Marlowe: Complete Plays and Poems, pp. xviii–xix. For more nuanced discussion here, see Sanders, ‘Dramatist as Realist’, p. 60. See A Commentarie of M. Doctor Martin Luther upon the Epistle of S. Paul to the Galatians (London 1575), sig. fol. 96v. In this discussion of social prejudice and Marlowe’s drama, see Bartels, Spectacles of Strangeness, p. 26. For further discussion here, see Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference, p. 32; Thomas Healy, Christopher Marlowe (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1994), p. 64; C. Freer, ‘Lies and Lying in The Jew of Malta’, in Kenneth Friedenreich et al. (eds), ‘A poet and a filthy play-maker’: New Essays on Christopher Marlowe (New York: AMS Press, 1988), p. 160; Bartels, Spectacles of Strangeness, p. xiii. Sanders, ‘Dramatist as Realist’, p. 57. Harraway, Re-citing Marlowe, p. 196. William Prynne, A Short Demurrer to the Jews (London, 1656), Part 1, p. 104.

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Notes Sennett, Flesh and Stone, p. 249. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p. 212. Interestingly, inquiring into the symbolism of enclosure, Garber points out: the cauldron itself is, of course, the play’s final and fitting enclosure: it is also the oversized counterpart of that poisoned pot of porridge Barabas has dispatched with such glee, as alms to the nunnery. In an ironical parody of Genesis, Ithamore steals, or thinks he steals, Abigail’s birthright for a mess of pottage, and reaps her legacy of death. (Closure and Enclosure in Marlowe, p. 10) Pendry, Christopher Marlowe: Complete Plays and Poems, p. xi. Whether the notion of tragedy is usefully applied to this play is a subject of heated controversy, most particularly with reference to the presence or absence of a dramatic movement of anagnorisis. See, for example Pendry, who insists that ‘[Marlowe’s heroes] do not learn, we do not learn’ (p. vi). For an opposing view of the play promoting ‘a kind of experience purchased with grief’, see Levin, Christopher Marlowe: The Overreacher, p. 125. John Weddington, Breffe Instruction (Antwerp: P. van Keerberghen, 1567), sig. 2r. Cited in Sullivan, The Rhetoric of Credit, p. 39. Minshull, ‘Marlowe’s “Sound Machevill” ’. Steane would appear particularly just in his conclusion: ‘The Jew of Malta, for all its inhumanity, is not a depressing play, whereas Edward II, for all its comparative warmth of feeling, is.’ See Marlowe: A Critical Study, p. 171. Pike, The Image of the City, p. 139. For discussion of the symbolism of the cauldron as hell’s mouth, ‘the city of abomination’ and as the destiny reserved for Antichrist, see Malcolm Kelsall, Christopher Marlowe (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1981), p. 3; Levin, Christopher Marlowe: The Overreacher, p. 98; Tydeman and Thomas, The State of the Art, p. 64; Erich Segal, ‘Marlowe’s “Schadenfreude”: Barabas as Comic Hero’, in Bloom, Modern Critical Views: Christopher Marlowe, p. 135; Pendry, Christopher Marlowe: Complete Plays and Poems, p. xx. Garber, Closure and Enclosure in Marlowe, p. 6. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p. 78.

Notes to Chapter 3

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All textual quotations are taken from M. R. Ridley (ed.), William Shakespeare: Antony and Cleopatra (London: Methuen/Arden, 1973). Thomas Blundeville, The True Order and Method (London, 1574), sig. C2r. ‘Introductory Discourse’, in Friedrich W. Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. A. Tille, trans. revised M. M. Bozman (London: Dent/Heron, n.d.), p. 7. Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), pp. 79–80.

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Sir Walter Ralegh, The History of the World (London, 1617, second edn), Book I, chapter II, section V, p. 32. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ‘Mutabilitie’, Canto 6, stanzas 1 and 6. Victor G. Kiernan, Eight Tragedies of Shakespeare: A Marxist Study (London: Verso, 1996), p. 4. See for example: John Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Stephen Greenblatt (ed.), Representing the English Renaissance (Berkeley: California University Press, 1988); Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); J. Knapp, An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from ‘Utopia’ to ‘The Tempest’ (Berkeley: California University Press, 1992). ‘Democritus Junior to the Reader’, in Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. T. C. Faulkner et al., vol. I (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), p. 4. Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (London, 1642), section 15. ‘The Space of Culture, the Power of Space’, in I. Chambers and L. Curti (eds), The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 178. Kiernan, Eight Tragedies of Shakespeare, p. 25. R. Malcolm Smuts, Culture and Power in England 1585–1685 (London: Macmillan, 1999), p. 5. J. W. Lever, The Tragedy of State (London: Methuen, 1971), p. 3. D. R. Woolf, The Idea of History in Early Modern England (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1990), p. 181. Fulke Greville ‘A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney’, chapter XIV, in The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, ed. John Gouws (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), p. 93. For evidence of Daniel’s attempts to regain favour with the earl of Devonshire, see Alexander B. Grosart (ed.), The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of Samuel Daniel, vol. I (1885; repr. New York, [1963]), p. xxiii. See, for example: Linda Bamber, Comic Women, Tragic Men (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991); Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays (London: Routledge, 1992); Coppelia Kahn, Roman Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1997). Sir Thomas Smith, Common-Wealth of England (London, 1594), p. 6. ‘Of Empire’, in Francis Bacon, The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall, ed. M. Kiernan (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), p. 59. Essais, Book III, chapter v, ‘Sur des vers de Virgile’. This is translated by M. A. Screech in the following manner: ‘Who is unaware that in Cupid’s school you do everything contrary to good order?’ See Michel de Montaigne: The Essays, A Selection, trans. and ed. M. A. Screech (Harmondsworth: Penguin), 1993: ‘Upon Some Verses by Virgil’. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), p. 105.

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Notes ‘Of the true Greatness of Kingdomes and Estates’, in Bacon, The Essayes or Counsels, p. 90. Bruce Galloway and Brian Levack (eds), The Jacobean Union: Six Tracts of 1604 (Edinburgh: Scottish Historical Society, 1985), p. xii. Roland Barthes, Sur Racine (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1963), pp. 17–18. Catherine Belsey, ‘Cleopatra’s Seduction’, in Terence Hawkes (ed.), Alternative Shakespeares, vol. 2 (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 53. For further discussion here, see Robert Wilcher, ‘Antony and Cleopatra and Genre Criticism’, in Nigel Wood (ed.), Antony and Cleopatra (Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1996), pp. 111ff. William Camden Britain, or A Chorographicall Description of the Most Flourishing Kingdomes, England, Scotland, and Ireland . . . Translated Newly into English by Philémon Holland (London, 1610), p. 63. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. C. Gordon (London: Harvester, 1980), p. 59. Paul Ricoeur The Reality of the Historical Past (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1984), p. 21. ‘Exordium’ ll. 26–7, in Sir Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry, edited J. A. Van Dorsten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, reprinted 1978), p. 17. Marsilio Ficino, Platonic Theology, Book 14, chapter 2. Cited in Jill Kraye (ed.), Cambridge Translations of Renaissance Philosophical Texts, vol. I: Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 152. ‘A Discourse of the Diversity of Letters used by the Divers Nations in the World; The Antiquity, Manifold Use and Variety thereof, with Exemplary Descriptions of the above Threescore Severall Alphabets, with Other Strange Writings’, in Hakluytus Posthumus, of Purchas His Pilgrimes, 20 vols (Glasgow: James MacLehose & Sons, 1905), vol.I, p. 486. Gayatri Spivak In Other Worlds (London: Methuen, 1987), p. 204. Edward Said, Imperialism and Culture (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 120. Michel de Certeau The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Randall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 125. Steve Pile, The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space and Subjectivity (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 108. George Abbot, Brief Description of the Whole World (London, 1605), sig. K4r–v. See Geraldo U. de Sousa, Shakespeare’s Cross-Cultural Encounters (London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 130ff. Thomas Dekker, The Bell-Man of London (London, 1608), sig. C3r. Lefebvre notes: ‘Small wonder that from time immemorial conquerors and revolutionaries eager to destroy a society should so often have sought to do so by burning or razing that society’s monuments . . . Monumentality transcends death, and hence also what is sometimes called the “death instinct” ’ (The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991)), p. 221. ‘Introduction’, in Wood, Antony and Cleopatra, p. 1.

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‘The Second Part of the Preliminaries’, in James Harrington: The Commonwealth of Oceana and A System of Politics, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 48. Mary Floyd-Wilson, ‘Transmigrations: Crossing Regional and Gender Boundaries in Antony and Cleopatra’, in Viviana Comensoli and Anne Russell (eds), Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), pp. 75ff. G.B.A.F., A Discovery of the Great Subtilitie (London, 1591), chapter 1, p. 2, sig. B1v. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 50. Ibid. p. 72. Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes towards a Historical Poetics’, in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, reprint 2000), p. 170. Phillip Stubbes, The Anatomy of Abuses (London, 1584), sig. 48r–v. Bamber, Comic Women, Tragic Men, p. 50. Barbara J. Baines, ‘Girard’s Doubles and Antony and Cleopatra’, in Wood, Antony and Cleopatra, p. 25. Montaigne, Essais, Book III, chapter v, ‘Sur des vers de Virgile’. This is translated by M.A. Screech in the following manner: ‘I find love already out of place in adult manhood, let alone in old age.’ See The Essays, A Selection. Spivak, In Other Worlds, p. 13. Wood, Antony and Cleopatra, p. 11. Browne, Religio Medici, section 34.

Notes to Chapter 4 1

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3

4

5

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Barry Weller and Margaret W. Ferguson (eds), Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland: The Tragedy of Mariam, The Fair Queen of Jewry with The Lady Falkland: Her Life (By One of Her Daughters) (Berkeley and Los Angeles: California University Press, 1994), pp. 188–9. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), p. xix. Laurie J. Shannon, ‘The Tragedie of Mariam: Cary’s Critique of the Terms of Founding Social Discourses’, English Literary Renaissance, 24 (1994), 140. See ‘Introduction’, in Alvin Vos (ed.), Place and Displacement in the Renaissance (New York: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies of New York at Binghamton, 1995), p. xi. Stephen Daniels and Roger Lee (eds), Exploring Human Geography: A Reader (London: Arnold, 1996), p. 153. Marta Straznicky argues that the evidence, such as it exists, points to a

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Notes 1602–5 dating for Cary’s play. See ‘ “Profane Stoical Paradoxes”: The Tragedie of Mariam and Sidnean Closet Drama’, English Literary Renaissance, 24 (1994), 106. Margaret Ferguson, ‘Running on with Almost Public Voice: The Case of E. C.’, in Florence Howe (ed.), Tradition and the Talents of Women (Urbana and Chicago: Illinois University Press, 1991), p. 37. Indeed, the subject matter of the Mariam narrative itself surfaces in Luigi Dardano’s Bella e dotta difesa delle donne in verso e prosa (1554). For discussion here, see Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 162ff. For an interesting discussion of the patristic influences upon this early modern debate, see Lyn Bennett, ‘ “Written on my tainted brow”: Woman and the Exegetical Tradition in The Tragedy of Mariam’, Christianity and Literature, 51, 1 (Autumn 2001), 5–28. Weller and Ferguson, Elizabeth Cary, p. 224. See respectively A. M. Witherspoon, The Influence of Robert Garnier on Elizabethan Drama (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1924), p. 154; Nancy Cotton, Women Playwrights in England (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1980), p. 34. Ferguson, ‘Running on with Almost Public Voice’, p. 57. Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy (London: Routledge, 1985), p. 33. Rosemary Kegl is however clearly just in her appeal for readers of Cary’s drama to broaden their notions of what performance might constitute for a closet drama. See ‘Theatres, Households, and a “Kind of History” in Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam’, in Viviana Comensoli and Anne Russell (eds), Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), p. 137. Weller and Ferguson, Elizabeth Cary, p. 190. See prefatory letter to The Reply of the Most Illustrious Cardinal of Perron, to the Answeare of the Most Excellent King of Britaine, trans. Elizabeth Cary (Douai: Martin Bogard, 1630); and Weller and Ferguson, Elizabeth Cary, p. 213. M. J. Valency, The Tragedies of Herod and Mariamne (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), p. 15. Belsey, Subject of Tragedy, p. 149. Sig. B6v. Cited in N. H. Keeble (ed.), The Cultural Identity of Seventeenth-Century Woman (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 151. Nancy Gutierrez, ‘Valuing Mariam: Genre Study and Feminist Analysis’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature (Autumn 1991), 10, 239. For fuller discussion here regarding the relationship of women to rhetoric, see Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987), esp. pp. 104ff. For early modern theorizing between speech and the ‘easing of the heart’, see Jane Donawerth, Shakespeare and the

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Sixteenth-Century Study of Language (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984). Karen L. Raber, ‘Gender and the Political Subject in The Tragedy of Mariam’, Studies in English Literature, 35 (1995), 330. The Theater of Fine Devices, Containing an Hundred Morall Emblemes. First Penned in French by Guillaume de la Perriere, and Translated into English by Thomas Combe (London: Richard Field, 1614), Emblem XVIII. Mary Beth Rose, ‘Where are the mothers in Shakespeare?’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 42, 3 (1991), 304. See Jordan, Renaissance Feminism, pp. 30ff. Margaret Ferguson, ‘The Spectre of Resistance: The Tragedy of Mariam (1613)’, in David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass (eds), Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 238. Indeed, Doris inscribes herself in the play’s mart of beauties and insists that, ‘Mariam’s purer cheek / Did rob from mine the glory’ (II.iii.223–4). For further discussion here, see, for example: Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977); Keeble, The Cultural Identity; Susan K. Cahn, Industry of Devotion: The Transformation of Women’s Work in England 1500–1600 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987); Jordan, Renaissance Feminism; Rose, ‘Where are the mothers in Shakespeare?’ Cited in Keeble, The Cultural Identity, p. 77. Essayes Written in French by Michael Lord of Montaigne . . . Done into English, according to the Last French Edition, by John Florio . . . (London, 1613), p. 92. Cited in Jordan, Renaissance Feminism, p. 56. For a consideration of Aristotle, see pp. 29ff. Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy, p. 172. For interesting discussion here of early modern sources, see Jordan, Renaissance Feminism, pp. 99ff. ‘Two English Women in the Seventeenth Century: Notes for an Anatomy of Feminine Desire’, in Philippe Ariès and André Béjin (eds), Western Sexuality, trans. Anthony Forster (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), p. 105. See also Graphina, ‘Though all but you alone do count me base’ (II.i.60). Dympna Callaghan, ‘Re-reading Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedie of Mariam Faire Queene of Jewry’, in Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (eds), Women, ‘Race,’ and Writing in the Early Modern Period (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 168. ‘Introduction: Representing the place of culture’, in Duncan James and David Ley (eds), Place/Culture/Representation (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 6. Book 1, chapter xix, in George Puttenham, The Arte of Englishe Poesie (1589). Ibid., p. 176. Ferguson, ‘Running on with Almost Public Voice’, p. 52.

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Notes See Weller and Ferguson, Elizabeth Cary, pp. 22, 40–1. Cited in Jordan, Renaissance Feminism, p. 118. For an accessible review of the question of male sovereignty in early modern writing, see Tina Krontiris, Oppositional Voices: Women as Writers and Translators in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge, 1992), esp. pp. 7ff. See Jordan, Renaissance Feminism, pp. 82ff., 118ff. Weller and Ferguson, Elizabeth Cary, p. 35. Cited in Margaret P. Hannay (ed.), Silent but for the Word (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1985), p. 4. Valency, The Tragedies of Herod and Mariamne, pp. 90–1. See respectively: Rose, ‘Where are the mothers in Shakespeare?’, p. 314; Krontiris, Oppositional Voices, p. 86. Walter Ralegh, The History of the World (London, 1617, second edn), II, xix, 3, pp. 508–9.

Notes to Chapter 5

1 2

3

4

5

6

7

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All textual citations from Volpone are taken from Philip Brockbank (ed.), Ben Jonson: Volpone (London: Ernest Benn, 1977). (London, 1584, second edn), sig. C2v. Lyman Tower Sargent, ‘The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited’, Utopian Studies, 5, 1 (1994), 1–3. David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), pp. 156–7. ‘Sermon of Commemoration of the Lady Danvers, Late Wife of Sir Iohn Danvers. Preach’d at Chilsey, where she was Lately Buried. By Iohn Donne Dean of St. Pauls, London I July 1627’. See Evelyn M. Simpson and George R. Potter (eds), The Sermons of John Donne, VIII (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1956), p. 75. See Robert O. Evans, ‘The Nouveau Roman, Russian Dystopias, and Anthony Burgess’, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 6 (Fall 1973), 27–38. For further historical discussion here, see for example, Christopher R. Friedrichs, The Early Modern City 1450–1750 (London: Longman, 1995); P. Clark and P. Slack, English Towns in Transition 1500–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). Gail Kern Paster, The Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare (Athens: Georgia University Press, 1985), p. 155. Edward Said, Orientalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 177. Cindi Katz, ‘Sow What You Know: The Struggle for Social Reproduction in Rural Sudan’, in Stephen Daniels and Roger Lee (eds), Exploring Human Geography: A Reader (London: Arnold, 1996), p. 51.

Notes 10

11

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Jonathan V. Crewe, ‘Death in Venice: A Study of Othello and Volpone’, University of Cape Town – Studies in English, 4 (1973), pp. 21–2. E. O. G. Haitsma Mulier, The Myth of Venice and Dutch Republican Thought in the Seventeenth Century, trans. G. T. Moran (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1980). For further discussion here, see John Stoye, English Travellers Abroad 1604–67 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 78ff.; David C. McPherson, Shakespeare, Jonson and the Myth of Venice (Newark: Delaware University Press, 1990), pp. 49–50. For further discussion of the disruptive influences of the Venetian model across Europe, see Haitsma Mulier, Myth of Venice and Dutch Republican Thought, pp. 28, 45. For further discussion here, see McPherson, Shakespeare, Jonson and the Myth of Venice, p. 36. Sargent, ‘Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited’, p. 4. Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (London: Faber & Faber, 1994), p. 223. For further discussion here, see W. H. McNeill, Venice: The Hinge of Europe 1081–1797 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), pp. 144ff., 176ff. Sennett, Flesh and Stone, p. 26. Henri Lefebvre The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 217. Friedrichs, The Early Modern City 1450–1750, p. 30. R. Malcolm Smuts, Culture and Power in England 1585–1685 (London: Macmillan, 1999), p. 39. Cited in John Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 123. Sig. G1r–v. Casparo Contarini had written his De Magistratibus et Republica Venetorum in the mid-1520s (published 1543) and focused his praise on the government and diplomacy of the republic. His tract was translated into English by Lewis Lewkenor in 1599. Also of influence in the European perception of Venice was Donato Giannotti’s Della repubblica de’ Viniziane which took the processes of justice and historical evolution as central themes of study. For a wideranging discussion here, see Haitsma Mulier, The Myth of Venice and Dutch Republican Thought in the Seventeenth Century, pp. 20ff. Cited in Paster, The Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare, p. 25. Angel Day, The English Secretorie (London, 1623), p. 103. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 16–23. S. L. Goldberg, ‘Folly into Crime: The Catastrophe of Volpone’, Modern Language Quarterly, xx, 3 (1959), p. 235. Said, Orientalism, pp. 75, 100. See respectively: Crewe, ‘Death in Venice’, p. 19; Christopher Pye, The

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Notes Vanishing: Shakespeare, the Subject and Early Modern Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), p. 38. Paster, The Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare, pp. 5, 9. Jonas A. Barish, ‘The Double Plot in Volpone’, Modern Philology, 51 (1953–4), 90. (London, 1633, second edn), Part I, p. 97. Alexandre Toussaint Limojon de Saint-Didier, La Ville et la république de Venise (Paris, 1680), Part 3, pp. 44–5. Cited in McPherson, Shakespeare, Jonson and the Myth of Venice, p. 45. Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (London, 1593; first edn 1577). See ‘Epistle Dedicatorie: To the Right Honorable Sir Iohn Puckering Knight, Lord Keeper of the Great Seale of England’, sig. AB3r–v. Friedrichs, The Early Modern City 1450–1750, p. 275. Susan Dwyer Amussen ‘ “The part of a Christian man”: the cultural politics of manhood in early modern England’, in Susan Dwyer Amussen and Mark A. Kishlansky (eds), Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 222. William Archer, The Old Drama and the New (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1926), p. 85. J. R. Hale, Renaissance Europe: Individual and Society 1480–1520 (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 52. Cited in Garrett A. Sullivan Jr, The Drama of Landscape: Land, Property, and Social Relations on the Early Modern Stage (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 32. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part 2, 2.3.1. See vol. II, ed. Nicolas K. Kiessling et al. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), pp. 64–5. Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller, in R. B. McKerrow (ed.), Works of Thomas Nashe, 5 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1958), II, p. 299. From ‘Introduction’ to Volpone, in C. H. Herford and P. Simpson (eds), Ben Jonson, vol. II (Oxford: Clarendon, 1925), p. 64. John Creaser, ‘A Vindication of Sir Politic Would-Be’, English Studies, 57 (1976), p. 505. G.B.A.F., A Discovery of the Great Subtilitie (London, 1591), chapter 1, p. 1. Brockbank, ‘Introduction’ to Volpone, p. xiii. Said, Orientalism, p. 216. J. J. Enck, Jonson and the Comic Truth (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 1957), p. 121. Friedrichs, The Early Modern City 1450–1750, pp. 182, 111.

Notes to Chapter 6 All textual citations from The Alchemist are taken from Elizabeth Cook (ed.), Ben Jonson: The Alchemist (London: A. & C. Black, 1991).

Notes 1

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3

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7

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Erasmus, The Colloquies, trans. Craig R. Thompson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), p. 239. See Chaucer, The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, Part 1, l. 13; Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning and New Atlantis, ed. Arthur Johnston (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), p. 34 (Book 1, Part V): ‘Other Errors of Learned Men which hinder the Progress and Credit of Learning’. See respectively Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 13; Ian Donaldson, Jonson’s Magic Houses: Essays in Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), p. 91. Donaldson highlights the ways in which Jonson’s play allows the audience to make precise chronological calculations (pp. 92–3, 94). For further discussion specifically upon the linking of ‘material’ and ‘psychic’ spaces in early modern London, see Janette Dillon, Theatre, Court and City, 1595–1610: Drama and Social Space in London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 32ff. Heather Dubrow, Shakespeare and Domestic Loss: Forms of Deprivation, Mourning and Recuperation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 81. Robert Wilson, Ben Jonson’s Parodic Strategy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 1. Ceri Sullivan, The Rhetoric of Credit: Merchants in Early Modern Writing (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002), pp. 20, 22. Theodore Leinward, The City Staged: Jacobean Comedy, 1603–1613 (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 1986), p. 53. Michael Maier, The Subtilis Allegoria, super Secreta Chymiae Perspicuae Utilitatis et Jucundae Meditationis existed in manuscript form in the early seventeenth century but was not published until the enlarged 1677 edition of the Musaeum Hermeticum Reformatum et Amplificatum. For the English translation cited in text, see The Hermetic Museum, Restored and Enlarged: Most Faithfully Instructing All Disciples of the Sopho-Spagyric Art how that Greatest and Truest Medicine of THE PHILOSOPHER’S STONE may be Found and Held. Now first done into English from the Latin Original published at Frankfort in the year 1678. Containing Twenty-Two most Celebrated Chemical Tracts in Two Volumes, ed. Arthur Edward Waite (New York: Samuel Weiser, 1974), II, pp. 201, 209. ‘The Rebirth of Time: Tradition, History and the Renaissance Mind’, in Sukanta Chaudhuri (ed.), Renaissance Essays for Kitty Scoular Datta (Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 33. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 35. Richard West, The Court of Conscience (London, 1607), sig. D1v. Thomas Nashe, The Terrors of the Night, or A Discourse of Apparitions [1594]. Collected in Thomas Nashe, ‘The Unfortunate Traveller’ and Other Works, ed. and intro. J. B. Steane (London: Penguin, 1985), p. 230. See Elias Ashmole (ed.), Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum: Containing

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16 17

18

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21 22

23 24 25

26

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Notes Severall Poetically Pieces of our Famous English Philosophers, who have Written the Hermetique Mysteries in their owne Ancient Language. Faithfully Collected into one Volume with Annotations thereon by Elias Ashmole, Esq. (London: Grismond, 1652). Reprinted with intro. by Allen G. Debus (New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1967), p. 17. See Maier, The Hermetic Museum, Restored and Enlarged, vol. 1, p. 160. Jonathan Haynes, The Social Relations of Jonson’s Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 99. (London, 1608), sig. H1r. Moreover, in this context, it should be remembered that the abusive term was also applied to the unpatronized theatre actor. For a historical discussion of this ‘crisis of order’ in early modern England, see D. E. Underdown, ‘The Taming of the Scold: The Enforcement of Patriarchal Authority in Early Modern England’, in A. Fletcher and J. Stevenson (eds), Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 116ff. With specific reference to the masterless status of some actors, see A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640 (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 96–7. Ga¯mini Salga¯do, The Elizabethan Underworld (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1992), p. 143. See Beier, Masterless Men, p. 4. Robert Greene, The Second Part of Cony-Catching (1591), anthologized in Ga¯mini Salga¯do (ed.), Cony-Catching and Bawdy Baskets (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 197. Beier, Masterless Men, p. 120. Section 84, ‘Adulatio.’ See Maurice Castelain (ed.), Ben Jonson, Discoveries: A Critical Edition (Paris: Hachette, 1906), p. 55. Cited in Beier, Masterless Men, p. 103. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 280. Burton Pike, The Image of the City in Modern Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 36. For a wide-ranging claim for Jonson’s reading knowledge of Renaissance magic, see John Mebane’s Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age: The Occult Tradition and Marlowe, Jonson, and Shakespeare (Lincoln Nebr.: Nebraska University Press, 1989), pp. 144–5. See Erasmus, The Colloquies, p. 631. See Gloria Mundi, sive Tabula Paradysi [The Glory of the World; or, Table of Paradise; that is to say, A True Account of the Ancient Science which Adam Learned from God Himself; which Noah, Abraham, and Solomon Held as one of the Greatest Gifts of God; which also all Sages, at all Times, Preferred to the Wealth of the Whole World, regarded as the Chief Treasure of the Whole World, and Bequeathed only to Good Men; namely, THE SCIENCE OF THE PHILOSOPHER’S STONE]. This can be dated to 1423, but its authorship is still in doubt. It appears in the 1625 edition of the

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Musaeum Hermeticum Reformatum et Amplificatum and is available in Waite’s English translation of The Hermetic Museum, Restored and Enlarged, vol. 1, p. 168. Jonson, Epigram VI. Another alchemist of this period, Edward Kelley, is also mentioned at IV.i. Thomas Norton, The Ordinall of Alchemy. See Waite’s translation of The Hermetic Museum, Enlarged and Restored, p. 3. Musaeum Hermeticum Reformatum et Amplificatum, intro. Karl R. H. Frick (Graz: Akademsiche Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1970), p. ix. In his introduction to the reprint of Ashmole’s edition of the Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum (1652), Allen G. Debus observes: If we may judge influence by the number of works published we could state that the high point of alchemy dates from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries and this corresponds with the most influential period of Paracelsian medicine. The English scene differs slightly from this continental picture. There were no traditional alchemical texts printed in England until 1591 when Ripley’s Compound of Alchemy appeared – and only after 1640 do such texts appear in any increasing quantity. Prior to this time alchemical texts authored by Englishmen such as John Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica (1568) and Robert Fludd’s monumental treatment of the macrocosm and the microcosm (1617–1638) were published abroad. See Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, p. xxiv.

33 34 35

36

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‘Prologomena’ in the Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum. Waite, The Hermetic Museum Enlarged and Restored, vol. 1, p. 159. See Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, Book 1, Part IV, section 11: ‘Discredits to Learning from the Follies of the Learned – Ciceronianism, Scholasticism, Alchemy, and Natural Magic’. See The Advancement of Learning and New Atlantis, ed. Arthur Johnston (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980 reprint), p. 31. Conversations 306–10. Cited in Robert M. Adams (ed.), Ben Jonson’s Plays and Masques (New York: Norton, 1979), p. 391. Anne Barton, Ben Jonson, Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 138. John Stubbs, The Discouerie of a Gaping Gulf (London, 1579), sig. C2r. Cheryl Lynn Ross also draws attention to the fact that in early modern society such con-tricks have been pulled off: The Several Notorious and Lewd Cosenages of John West and Alice West describes the fleecing of one Thomas Moore: “They brought him into a vault, where they showed him two attired like the King and Queen of Faeries, and by them little elves and goblins, and in the same place an infinite company of bags, and upon them written, this is for Thomas Moore, and this for his wife, but would not let him touch anything.” [Anon., The Several Notorious Cosenages of John West and Alice West, Falsely Called the King and Queen of Faeries, London, 1613, sig. B1]. See Ross, ‘The Plague of The Alchemist’, Renaissance Quarterly, 41 (1988), 452.

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55 56 57 58

59

Notes For further discussion here, see Kate Chedgzoy, ‘Impudent Women: Carnival and Gender in Early Modern Culture’, The Glasgow Review, 1 (Spring 1993), 9–23. See ‘Introduction’ to Peter Bement (ed.), Jonson: ‘The Alchemist’ (London: Routledge, 1987), p. 158. For discussion of Surly as Spanish grandee see A. J. Hoenselaars, Images of Englishmen and Foreigners in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: A Study of Stage Characters and National Identity in English Renaissance Drama, 1558–1642 (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992), pp. 135ff. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Hogarth, 1993), p. 53. Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed (Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 148. Williams, The Country and the City, pp. 1, 51. Barton, Ben Jonson, Dramatist, p. 150. For an interesting discussion on the possible differences between Jonsonian and Marlovian space, see Neil Rhodes, The Power of Eloquence and English Renaissance Literature (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester/Wheatsheaf, 1992), pp. 152ff. From Thomas Norton, The Ordinall of Alchemy, in Waite, The Hermetic Museum, vol. 2, pp. 3–4. Salga¯do, The Elizabethan Underworld, p. 101. The Hydrolithus Sophicus appeared in the 1625 edition of the Musaeum Hermeticum Reformatum et Amplificatum. For the English translation, see Waite, The Hermetic Museum, vol. 1, pp. 72–3. Further examples of such discourse occur, for example, in the ‘Proheme’ to Norton’s The Ordinall of Alchemy. Ben Jonson, Mercury Vindicated from the Alchemists at Court (1615) is anthologized in Adams, Ben Jonson’s Plays and Masques. The citation appears at page 357. See the Subtilis Allegoria super Secreta Chymiae (A Subtle Allegory concerning the Secrets of Alchemy), in Waite, The Hermetic Museum, vol. 2, p. 206. See also Ashmole’s ‘Prolegomena’ to the Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum. E. B. Partridge, The Broken Compass (London: Chatto & Windus, 1958), p. 126. ‘Preface’ to Ben Jonson, Every Man in His Humour. See respectively Judd Arnold, ‘Lovewit’s Triumph and Jonsonian Morality’, Criticism (1969), 11, p. 161; and Mebane, Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age, p. 154. Partridge, The Broken Compass, p. 156. Spoken by Master Probee at the close of Act II. Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods (London: Macmillan, 1996), p. 12. See The Works in Verse and Prose of Nicholas Breton, 2 vols, ed. A. B. Grosart (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1875–9), vol. I, Part e, p. 6. See Adams, Ben Jonson’s Plays and Masques, pp. 358–9.

Notes 60

61

227

Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, trans. H. Zohn (London: Pimlico, 1999), p. 248. Stephen Gosson, Playes Confuted in Fiue Actions (London, 1582), sig. F5v.

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Index

Abbot, George 98 Act for the Punishing of Vagabonds (1572) 3 Alberti, Leon Battista Degli 25–6 Alleyn, Edward 75 Amussen, Susan Dwyer 161 Aristotle 14, 122, 128, 145 Armada 68 Arnold, Judd 193 Ashmole, Elias 181 Augustine 34, 49, 73, 148, 205 n. 12 Bachelard, Gaston 4, 5, 17, 19, 54, 61, 82 Bacon, Francis 88, 89–90, 171, 182 Baines, Barbara 110 Bakhtin, Mikhail 108–9 Baldwin, William 19 Bamber, Linda 110 Barish, Jonas A. 158, 162 Bartels, Emily C. 53, 65 Barthes, Roland 91 Barton, Anne 183, 190 Beier, A. L. 178 Belsey, Catherine 91, 118, 119, 129–30 Bement, Peter 185 Benjamin, Walter 196 Benko, Georges 1 Bhabha, Homi 40–1, 51 Blaxton, John 52–3 Blundeville, Thomas 83, 207 n. 35 Bradshaw, Graham 21 Brandon, Samuel 86

Breton, Nicholas 195 Bristol, Michael D. 2 Brockbank, Philip 165 Broughton, Henry 190, 191 Browne, J. 55, 64 Browne, Thomas 9, 84, 112–13 Brunelleschi, Filippo 25 Bruster, Douglas 2 Burrow, Colin 37, 205 n. 20 Burton, Robert 84, 162–3 Caesar, Julius 94 Camden, William 92 Callaghan, Dympna 132, 133 Cartelli, Thomas 13 Cary, Elizabeth 119 Tragedie of Mariam, The 15–6, 114–41 Castiglione, Baldassare 117 Certeau, Michel de 8, 97, 106, 114, 153 Chapman, George 84 Chaucer, Geoffrey 171 Chaudhuri, Sukanta 175 Cicero 33, 45 Clare, Janet 208 n. 1 Cleaver, Robert 24 Contarini, Gasparo 149, 150, 221 n. 23 Cotton, Nancy 117 Creaser, John 163–4 Crewe, Jonathan 145, 157 Daniel, Samuel 6, 8, 86, 87, 118 Daniels, Stephen 116

246

Index

Day, Angel 152 Debus, Allen G. 225 n. 32 Dee, John 31, 181, 225 n. 32 Dekker, Thomas 98, 178 Derrida, Jacques 112 Devereux, Robert (Earl of Essex) 87 Dod, John 24 Donaldson, Ian 172 Donne, John 13, 84, 143 Douglas, Gavin 36 Drayton, Michael 84 Drummond, William (of Hawthornden) 182 Dubrow, Heather 173 Edward I 74 Eliot, T. S. 63, 70, 76 Elizabeth I 28, 42, 74, 86, 181 Elyot, Thomas 8, 50, 117 Enck, J. J. 168 Erasmus 34, 117, 129, 171, 179–80, 204 n. 9 Essex, Earl of see Devereux, Robert Etherege, George 186 Evans, Robert O. 143 Exhortation Concerning Good Order and Obedience to Rulers and Magistrates (1559) 28 Farnese, Alessandro 59 Fauconnier, Gilles 202 n. 17 Fenner, Dudley 30 Ferguson, Margaret W. 117–18, 123, 134, 136, 138–9 Ficino, Marsilio 94 Florio, John 128 Floyd-Wilson, Mary 105–6 Fludd, Robert 225 n. 32 Forman, Simon 191 Foucault, Michel 1, 5, 22, 93, 202 n. 9 Foxe, John 34 Freud, Sigmund 97 Frick, Karl 181

Friedrichs, Christopher 57, 58, 74, 149, 161, 169, 212 n. 56 Garber, Marjorie 52, 53, 69, 71, 81, 214 n. 75 Garnier, Robert 118, 119 G.B.A.F. 106, 164 Genesis 183 Giannotti, Donato 221 n. 23 Gloria Mundi, sive Tabula Paradysi 180 Goldberg, S. L. 154–5 Golding, Arthur 84 Goreau, Angéline 130 Gosson, Stephen 13–14, 197 Greenblatt, Stephen 76, 80, 89 Greene, Robert 178 Greville, Fulke 86–7, 118 Grossberg, L. 85 Guibbory, Achsah 8 Gutierrez, Nancy 121 Hale, J. R. 162 Hamer, Mary 108 Hardy, Barbara 46 Harraway, Clare 74, 77 Harrington, James 105 Harrison, William 3, 7 Hartwell, Abraham 10 Harvey, David 5, 143 Harvey, Gabriel 34, 37 Haynes, Jonathan 177 Hazlitt, William 41–2 Healy, Thomas 31 Heller, Agnes 7, 8 Herford, C. H. 163 Heywood, Thomas 38–9, 49 Hobbes, Thomas 145 Hoby, Thomas 22 Holinshed, Raphael 11, 57 Hopkins, Lisa 59 Howard, Henry (Earl of Surrey) 36 Hydrolithus Sophicus seu Aquarium Sapientum (1619) 191

Index James I (of England) VI (of Scotland) 28, 29, 42, 62, 86, 91 James, Duncan 132 Jameson, Frederic 51 Jardine, Lisa 195, 210 nn. 17, 19, 211 n. 36 Jerome see St Jerome Johnson, Samuel 40 Johnston, Jackie 202 n. 5, 203 n. 27 Jonson, Ben Alchemist, The 16–17, 150, 171–97 Magnetic Lady, The 195, 196 Mercury Vindicated from the Alchemists at Court 191, 195 Timber, or Discoveries 20, 22, 23, 36, 40, 178, 206–7 n. 32 ‘To Alchemists’ 180 Volpone 16, 70, 75, 78, 142–70 Jordan, Constance 128 Josephus 119 Katz, Cindi 145 Kegl, Rosemary 218 n. 14 Kempe, William 32 Kerrigan, John 205 n. 19 Kiernan, Victor G. 84, 85 Kintgern, Eugene R. 206 n. 23 Knight, G. Wilson 45 Knights Hospitallers of St John 68 Knox, John 117 Krontiris, Tina 140

Lady Falkland, Her Life, The 114 Lamb, Charles 76 Landry, Donna 8 Lee, Roger 116 Leech, Clifford 208 n. 1 Lefebvre, Henri 1, 4, 5–6, 24, 44, 54, 65–6, 137, 147, 172, 175, 179, 216 n. 40 Leinwand, Theodore 174 Lever, J. W. 86 Lever, Ralph 26

247

Levin, Harry 214 n. 76 Lewkenor, Lewis 221 n. 23 Ley, David 132 Limon, Jerzy 207 n. 37 Lodge, Thomas 84 Luther, Martin 76 Lyly, John 53 Machiavelli, Niccolò 58, 73, 81 McAlindon, Thomas 211 n. 37 Maclean, Gerald 8 McRae, Andrew 7 Maecenas 153 Mahood, M. M. 56, 212 n. 54 Maier, Michael 174, 191–2 Marlowe, Christopher 36, 84 Dido, Queen of Carthage 38 Jew of Malta, The 15, 52–82 Tamburlaine 65–4 Marx, Karl 76 Mebane, John 193–4 Milton, John 65 Minshull, Catherine 81 Molière 192 Monmouth, Geoffrey of 50 Montaigne, Michel de 88, 110, 128, 145 More, Thomas 117, 143 Morton, Thomas 10 Mousley, Andrew 41 Mulier, E. O. G. Haitsma 145 Mullaney, Steven 198 n. 6 Munday, Anthony 12 Mumford, Lewis 69 Nashe, Thomas 9–10, 13, 163, 176 Nietzsche, Friedrich Willhelm 83, 112 Norton, Thomas (?–1478) 176–7, 181, 190 Norton, Thomas (1532–84) 50 Ovid 84, 206 n. 21 Partridge, E. B. 193, 194

248

Index

Paster, Gail Kern 144, 157, 187 Paul see St Paul Peachum, Henry 160 Peele, George 37–8 Pendry, E. D. 81, 214 n. 76 Petrarch 36 Phaer, Thomas 36 Pike, Burton 57, 68, 81, 179, 212 n. 55 Pile, Steve 6–7, 27, 97 Plato 128, 197 Platter, Thomas 11–12, 61 Prynne, William 77, 159 Purchas, Samuel 94 Puttenham, George 23–4, 33, 34, 133 Pye, Christopher 157 Pythagoras 158 Quinones, Ricardo 8 Quintilian 33, 204 n. 4 Rabelais 108 Raber, Karen L. 121–2 Ralegh, Walter 13, 83–4, 141 Rawlidge, Richard 12 Rhetorica ad Herennium 33 Rich, Barnabe 26 Richardson, Christine 202 n. 5, 203 n. 27 Richardson, Mark Lewis 205 n. 16 Ricoeur, Paul 93 Ripley, George 225 n. 32 Rose, Mary Beth 122, 140 Ross, Cheryl Lynn 225 n. 39 Roth, Cecil 68 Rowe, Nicholas 105 Ryan, Kiernan 9 Sackville, Thomas 50 Said, Edward 42, 97, 144, 156, 165–6 St Jerome 136 St Paul 122 Saint-Didier, Alexandre Toussaint Limojon de 159 Sales, Roger 70, 212 n. 51

Salga¯do, Ga¯mini 55, 178, 191 Sanders, Wilbur 56, 77 Sargent, Lyman Tower 142, 146, 148 Seneca 47, 118, 135 Sennett, Richard 77, 146, 147 Several Notorious and Lewd Cosenages of John West and Alice West, The 225 n. 39 Shakespeare, William 9, 13, 84, 189 Antony and Cleopatra 15, 83–113, 115, 127 Coriolanus 60, 101, 131 Cymbeline 101 Hamlet 6, 14, 18–31, 32–51, 116, 133 Henry VI Part 2 47 Julius Caesar 47, 99 Macbeth 130 Measure for Measure 124 Merchant of Venice, The 65 Othello 140 Rape of Lucrece, The 37 Richard III 80 Romeo and Juliet 96 Tempest, The 67 Timon of Athens 166 Titus Andronicus 87–8, 101 Shannon, Laurie J. 114–15 Shapiro, James 61–2, 213 n. 60 Shepherd, Simon 59, 63, 68, 213 n. 66 Shields, Rob 199 n. 10 Shirley, Thomas 62 Sidney, Mary (Countess of Pembroke) 86, 118 Sidney, Philip 13, 93 Siemon, J. R. 209 n. 14 Smith, Thomas 67, 87 Smuts, R. Malcolm 86, 149 Soja, Edward W. 2, 5, 20, 83 Sousa, Geraldo da 98 Speed, John 50 Spenser, Edmund 50, 84 Spivak, Gayatri 95, 111

Index Steane, J. B. 60, 214 n. 79 Stow, John 57 Strohmeyer, Ulf 1 Stubbes, Phillip 29, 109, 142 Stubbs, John 184 Sullivan, Ceri 65, 69, 173–4 Sullivan, Garrett A. 4 Surrey, Earl of see Howard, Henry Sutcliffe, Matthew 34, 63–4 Swetnam, Joseph 117, 125 Tasso, Torquato 117 Theater of Fine Devices, The (1614) 122 Tilney, Edmund 120 Tromly, Fred B. 212 n. 50 Tyndale, William 25 Valency, M. J. 119, 140 Venetian envoy 28 Via Veritatis Unicae 177, 182 Virgil 36, 37, 45, 50

249

Vitkus, Daniel 10–11, 200 n. 34 Vives, Juan Luis 117, 136, 138 Vos, Alvin 115 Ward Joseph P. 8 Weddington, John 81 Weller, Barry 136, 138–9 Werlen, Benno 3, 199 n. 14 West, Richard 176 West, Russell 9 Whately, William 120 Williams, Raymond 186, 188 Wilson, Robert 173 Witherspoon, A. M. 117 Wittgenstein, Ludwig Josef Johann 190 Wood, Nigel 105, 112 Wood, Robert E. 24 Woolf, D. R. 86 Worsop, Edward 4 Wroth, Mary 14 Wycherley, William 186