Vision and rhetoric in Shakespeare: looking through language

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Vision and Rhetoric in Shakespeare Looking through Language

Alison Thorne

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-19

Vision and Rhetoric in Shakespeare

10.1057/9780230597266 - Vision and Rhetoric in Shakespeare, Alison Thorne



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Looking through Language Alison Thorne




First published in Great Britain 2000 by

MACMILLAN PRESS LTD

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0–333–65939–2 First published in the United States of America 2000 by ST. MARTIN’S PRESS, LLC, Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 0–312–22657–8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Thorne, Alison, 1959– Vision and rhetoric in Shakespeare : looking through language / Alison Thorne. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–312–22657–8 (cloth) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Technique. 2. English language—Early modern, 1500–1700—Rhetoric. 3. Art and literature—England—History—16th century. 4. Art and literature—England—History—17th century. 5. English drama—Italian influences. 6. Visual perception in literature. 7. Ut pictura poesis (Aesthetics) 8. Point of view (Literature) 9. Perspective in literature. 10. Vision in literature. 11. Aesthetics, Italian. 12. Aesthetics, British. I. Title. PR2995 .T55 2000 822'.3'3—dc21 99–055927 © Alison Thorne 2000 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10 09

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire



Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world


In memory of my father Christopher Guy Thorne, 1934–92




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List of Plates

viii

Acknowledgements

x

Bibliographical Note

xi

Preface 1

xii

Alberti, As You Like It, and the Process of Invention

1

2 English Beholders and the Art of Perspective

32

3 Ut Pictura Poesis and the Rhetoric of Perspective

57

4 Hamlet and the Art of Looking Diversely on the Self

104

5 Troilus and Cressida, ‘Imagin’d Worth’ and the ‘Bifold Authority’ of Anamorphosis

134

6 Antony and Cleopatra and the Art of Dislimning

166

7 The Tempest and the Art of Masque

198

Notes

226

Select Bibliography

273

Index

285

vii



Contents

01 Diagram of visual rays traversing the intersection from Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola, Le Due regole della prospettiva pratica (Rome, 1583), British Library, London 02 Diagram of the ‘velo’ from Albrecht Dürer, Underweyssung der Messung, 2nd edition (Nuremberg, 1538), British Library, London 03 Albrecht Dürer, St Jerome in his Study (1514), British Library, London 04 Francesco Parmigianino, Madonna del Collo Luongo (1534 –6), Uffizi, Florence 05 Vitruvius’s ‘tragic scene’ from Sebastiano Serlio, Il Primo libro d’architettura (Paris, 1545), British Library, London 06 Nicholas Hilliard, Sir Anthony Mildmay (1585), Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio 07 Isaac Oliver, The Browne Brothers (1598), Burghley House Collection, Lincolnshire 08 Robert Peake, Henry, Prince of Wales and His Friend John, 2nd Lord Harington of Exton (1603), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Purchase, Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, 1944 (44.27) 09 Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, Captain Thomas Lee (1594), Tate Gallery, London 10 Engraving of The Dioscuri (otherwise known as Alexander and Bucephalus), from Antoni Lafreri, Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae (1573–77?), photograph from Warburg Institute, London 11 Roman copy of Myron’s Discobolos (c.450 BC), Museo Nazionale delle Terme, Rome 12 Engraving of the proportions of the human body after Dürer from Richard Haydocke, A Tracte containing the Artes of curious Paintinge, Carvinge & Buildinge (Oxford, 1598), British Library, London 13 Francesco Parmigianino, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1524), Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

viii



List of Plates

14 Erhard Schön, Aus, du alter Tor! (1530s), Albertina Museum, Vienna 15 Michelangelo, The Prophet Daniel (1511–12), Sistine Chapel, Vatican 16 Inigo Jones’s perspective scenery for Prince Henry’s Barriers (1610), showing St George’s Portico, Duke of Devonshire’s Collection, Chatsworth



List of Plates ix

It is a pleasure to record my gratitude to those who have helped to bring this project to fruition. Some of the ideas investigated here began to germinate in a PhD thesis completed at University College London under the careful tutelage of Professor David Daniell. My first tentative excursions into the field of art history were given direction by Dr Patricia Rubin, who supplied a reading list on the literature of ut pictura poesis, and by Dr Nigel Llewellyn, who saved me a from a number of pitfalls into which I would otherwise have strayed through ignorance of the subject, and whose comments on Chapter 3 were particularly constructive. Professor René Weis and Dr Michael Bath worked their way painstakingly through many drafts of the book, and gave much-needed advice and encouragement throughout its long gestation. For any remaining deficiencies I am, of course, alone responsible. Special thanks must also go to Joanne King for lending her skills as a picture researcher, and to Dottoressa Marinella Salari, who not only helped me get to grips with some difficult sixteenth-century Italian texts, but over several summers generously made available her flat in Perugia, that ‘little City of the Infinite View’ as Henry James so aptly called it, thus providing an ideal environment in which to mull over the issues discussed in this book. During the writing of it I have also been sustained in incalculable ways by family and friends. My greatest debt, however, is to my husband, George Biddlecombe. Always willing to act as a sounding-board for ideas or to hunt down obscure references in farflung libraries, in the final months he gave me the time and space I needed to complete revisions to the book by putting aside his own research to assume the care of our small daughter.

x



Acknowledgements

Unless otherwise stated, all citations of Shakespeare’s work are taken from the second edition of The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston, 1997) edited by G. Blakemore Evans. The following abbreviations of periodical titles have also been used: EC ELH JWCI PMLA PQ RORD SEL Sh. Studs SQ SS

Essays in Criticism English Literary History Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes Publications of the Modern Language Association Philological Quarterly Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama Studies in English Literature Shakespeare Studies Shakespeare Quarterly Shakespeare Survey

xi



Bibliographical Note

This book examines how visual and verbal modes of figuring the world, ways of seeing and ways of talking, are brought into productive relationship in Shakespeare’s work. In its double emphasis on vision and rhetoric, it engages with two main areas of intellectual inquiry: comparative criticism of the arts and studies of dramatic viewpoint. It is well documented that the interconnectedness of the arts was taken to be an axiomatic and unquestionable truth across much of Western Europe from the fifteenth through to the eighteenth century. Historians of both literature and the visual arts have demonstrated just how relentlessly the implications of the Horatian dictum ut pictura poesis or Simonides’s assertion that ‘Painting is a dumme Poesie, and Poesie a speaking picture’ were explored and codified during this period. And thanks to their scholarly labours, it is now generally accepted that attitudes to literature and painting were deeply informed by the belief in an essential commonality between the arts. Attempts by modern critics to retrieve this cultural outlook by mimicking the comparative habits of mind it once nurtured have not always produced happy results, however. Indeed they have too often led to the kind of arbitrary, overgeneralized and facile analogizing whose excesses Gotthold Lessing and René Wellek among others tried at various times to curb, but which continue, to some extent, to give interarts criticism a bad name.1 Admittedly, the last two decades have seen a general shift away from the ambitious system-building which characterized the work of cultural historians such as Wylie Sypher and Arnold Hauser, from the breathtaking assurance that allowed them to sweep everything from cathedrals to epic poems into the maw of their preferred definition of a style or period.2 The totalizing approach they espoused has been largely displaced by studies on a smaller, more modest or more local scale which take a less cavalier attitude to the problems of corroborating shared influences upon or borrowings between different types of artefact. An increased sensitivity to cultural difference has simultaneously challenged the concept of the Zeitgeist, previously supposed to guarantee the underlying homogeneity of any given historical period and its multifarious cultural products. We are thus being compelled to rethink, among other things, the long-held assumption that the English Renaissance, especially where it touched the visual arts, was xii



Preface

merely an inferior and belated offshoot of its Italian predecessor. Despite these welcome developments, however, the field of interarts criticism still has to be entered cautiously and with a commitment to specificity, and I have tried to be mindful of this when writing the present book. In exploring questions of vision in Shakespeare, I have also had to negotiate some well-trodden critical terrain. No student of literature nowadays would be likely to dissent from the proposition that this dramatist, more than any other perhaps, was profoundly concerned with problems of viewpoint. Norman Rabkin’s Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (1967), which influenced a whole generation of Shakespearean critics writing in the 1970s and 1980s, did much to increase our awareness that the plays are typically structured in terms of opposing perspectives in such a fashion as to resist or preclude any simple resolution of the issues raised. Rabkin argued that these playtexts share a ‘characteristic mode of vision’, which, borrowing a term from modern physics, he called ‘complementarity’; by this he meant that they set up conflicting value-systems, each of which offers a ‘total way of seeing which excludes the other’, yet each of which, paradoxically, ‘makes equally compelling claims on us’.3 What I have to say on the subject is in broad agreement with Rabkin’s approach. At the same time, it needs to be emphasized that plays are primarily verbal constructs that may be said to embody a ‘mode of vision’ not in any strict or literal sense, but only by virtue of a process of rhetorical suggestion and inference. When Rabkin and like-minded critics talk of Shakespeare’s plays presenting different ‘ways of seeing’, or when they admire his ‘poetic-dramatic perspectivism’, they are relying, explicitly or implicitly, upon a metaphor that has been casually appropriated from art historical discourse without giving sufficient thought to its visual (or pictorial) origins.4 With the sole but stimulating exception of Ernest Gilman’s The Curious Perspective: Literary and Pictorial Wit in the Seventeenth Century (1978), which deals mostly with anamorphosis as a form of witty conceit, little attempt has been made to open up to scrutiny the visual and verbal interconnections encoded within such critical discourse. This omission is especially odd given Shakespeare’s many allusions to pictorial perspective, which attest not only to his abiding interest in the device, but also to his habit of using this as a means of reflecting upon his own handling of dramatic viewpoint. Accordingly this book seeks to bring a new precision, a greater sharpness, to our use of such metaphors as analytical tools. It endeavours to explain how certain kinds of visual experience might be reproduced in



Preface xiii

a verbal medium, by referring to the methods and assumptions that governed such transactions between the arts. One way it does this is by focusing on classical rhetoric as the main discursive agency through which the visual and verbal arts were welded together and which thereby facilitated the translation of particular effects from one type of language to another. Apart from providing a common denominator between poetry and painting, rhetorical theory proposed a model of persuasive discourse in which language could be understood to operate as if it were a mode of perception. This possibility was implicit in the visual and spatial tropes employed by classical and Renaissance rhetoricians as a means of describing particular linguistic functions, just as it underpinned the development of rhetorical techniques of invention (inventio) and expression (elocutio) that were specifically designed to enable the speaker (and his/her listeners) to frame different viewpoints on a given subject. On the evidence of the plays it seems clear that Shakespeare was aware of, and indeed at times consciously exploited, these visual tropes when employing the rhetorical procedures associated with them. Hence I shall argue that within his plays language has the capacity to function as a rhetorical equivalent or analogue for perspective that can be manipulated to achieve similar effects or work upon an audience in similar ways. As well as attending to the more ‘literary’ aspects of perspective, I have been concerned to locate its significance as an artistic technique. Thus the second and third chapters draw upon art history in order to show how the meanings and values attached to this spatial concept altered according to the context in which it was interpreted. Particular emphasis is given to the ways in which the principles of linear perspective, and the associated theories, rules and aesthetic canons transmitted with them from Italy to England, were adapted to fit a visual culture founded upon largely alien premises. This is also the place to alert the reader to what the book does not attempt to address. In choosing to focus on perspective as a function of poetic-pictorial relationships, I have set aside other, non-artistic applications of this device, most notably the so-called ‘perspective glass’. A term that encompassed a range of optical instruments, by the early seventeenth century it was used primarily to designate various types of refracting lens developed by the new experimental science, particularly the microscope and the telescope. As Gilman has shown, the possibility of exploiting these inventions as a figurative resource was not lost on English writers of the period, yet Shakespeare makes no direct reference to them. And although there is a significant connotative overlap



xiv Preface

between the painter’s perspectiva artificialis and the natural philosopher’s ‘perspective glass’, arising chiefly from their shared distortive and deceitful properties, the latter constitutes a topic in its own right, one that lies beyond the parameters of this study. The decision to refrain from any detailed analysis of questions of staging when discussing individual plays calls perhaps for a fuller explanation. I would certainly not wish to deny that the way a certain scene was or might be staged, or where the actors are situated in relation to each other or the theatre audience, has a direct bearing on what the dramatic language invites us to ‘see’ at any moment and may have helped to foreground the perspectival analogy, though such matters are notoriously difficult to pin down. Consideration of these questions is, however, largely excluded by the discursive emphasis of the book. On the other hand, I do think it is important to bear in mind – and have assumed throughout – that we relate to these play-texts as members of an audience, in that they implicitly position or define us as such whether we read them or see them performed. Moreover, our consciousness of that fact and of what it entails is continually revitalized by the presence of spectators on stage. My reading of the plays therefore takes account of the participatory role imposed on us as witnesses in the real or imaginary sense to the dramatic action. The following chapters do not pursue a single linear argument, nor are they intended to suggest any clear chronological development in the Shakespearean oeuvre. Instead each chapter, or in some cases group of chapters, is organized around a different aspect of perspective or a particular topos with which it was closely identified in ut pictura discourse. Chapter 1 seeks to establish the relevance of visual/linguistic parallels to Shakespeare by analysing the ways in which the spatial implications of the loci communes, or commonplaces, are explored in As You Like It. Both in this text and in Leon Battista Alberti’s De Pictura, I argue, such rhetorical methods of invention are presented as having an equal capacity to generate a unity or diversity of viewpoints. Chapters 2 and 3 trace the adoption of linear perspective into English culture, firstly as a revolutionary artistic technique, and secondly as a mode of spatial representation which, through the intervention of ut pictura analogizing, could be assimilated to a rhetorical model. Here the key issue is not simply how perspective was creatively transformed in order to accommodate it to a different cultural milieu, but how it became intimately bound up with certain concepts such as illusion and decorum, and with specific values including rationality, propriety, regulated order and their imaginative obverse, in ways that would



Preface xv

condition and enrich Shakespeare’s treatment of dramatic viewpoint. His growing preoccupation in the early years of the seventeenth century with disjunctive perspectives and with the consequences of this fracturing of perception for subjectivity and epistemology is the main theme of Chapters 4 and 5. In Chapter 4 these issues are examined in the context of Hamlet’s obsessive interest in self-reflection, his desire to bring the invisible ‘inmost part’ of himself into view, and the correspondences between his introspective strategies and those deployed in Renaissance self-portraiture. Chapter 5 compares the modes of seeing/ praising adopted by both Greeks and Trojans in Troilus and Cressida to anamorphic images in their power to perplex, and shows how they become the vehicle for a sceptical inquiry into the relativity of perception and evaluation. The remaining chapters consider two later plays in which the contending impulses towards an integration or proliferation of viewpoints are reformulated in terms of a politicized struggle between a neoclassical aesthetic and other, more fantastical ways of seeing and imaging the world excluded or suppressed by that aesthetic. In Antony and Cleopatra, a Roman hegemony predicated on the values of ‘measure’ and ‘rule’ is radically undermined by the lovers’ imaginative productions and their use of rhetorical amplification to construct an alternative kind of space not subject to these restrictive laws. Similarly, Prospero’s attempt to recreate the centralized (and overtly autocratic) perspective of the court masque in The Tempest founders, as a result of coming up against what to him are the barbarous modes of perceiving and representing reality embodied in Caliban’s grotesquely misshapen form.



xvi Preface

Alberti, As You Like It, and the Process of Invention

As part of his bid to transform the status of painting from that of lowly craft into an exalted intellectual discipline, Leon Battista Alberti urges the painter, in his pioneering treatise on the subject, to become acquainted with all the liberal arts. A working knowledge of geometry must first be acquired, for without this the painter will fail to master the technicalities of Alberti’s demonstration of Euclidean optics and how this may be applied to the problem of constructing pictorial space. But he is also advised to cultivate the company of poets and orators, ‘for these have many ornaments in common with the painter’, among which Alberti singles out for particular emphasis the capacity for invention, that is, for finding apt and striking subject matter.1 It is to these men of letters, to their imaginative conceits and methods of elaborating them, that the painter is directed to look for assistance when devising his own historia, whose chief ‘virtue’ is similarly said to reside in the quality of its invention.2 Alberti’s assertion that painting has much to learn both from the scientific analysis of vision inaugurated by the great mathematicians of late antiquity and from the arts of rhetoric and poetry marked the beginning of a new chapter in the history of Western art. On a more modest level, it offers a convenient point of entry into the concerns of this book, which, in their own way, also revolve around the creative techniques or ‘ornaments’ common to poets and painters and their mutual, if differently manifested, engagement with the perceptual processes codified in the pages of De Pictura. There are several reasons why Alberti’s treatise, the Latin text of which was completed in 1435 to be followed by an Italian translation a year later, may serve as a fitting introduction to a study of the intricate relationships forged between the visual and verbal arts during the Renaissance. The earliest attempt 1



1


to formulate a theoretical rationale for painting, it was also the first text to expound the geometrical methods for producing an illusion of three dimensions on a flat surface and the first to undertake a radical overhaul of pictorial composition in the light of the humanists’ rhetorical interests. The organization of the treatise, which comprises three books, reflects these multiple aims. Book I deals with the principles of linear perspective, the second with the making of the historia (a term that eludes precise translation, but corresponds broadly to narrative or history painting), while the third has to do with artistic training. Its historical status as a foundational text in more than one sense means that we shall often have occasion to refer back to De Pictura. If the mathematical rules for depicting spatial forms set out in Book I provided the basis for all subsequent refinements of perspective technique down to the eighteenth century at least, Book II, with its strong literary orientation, established the main terms and parameters within which the discourse of ut pictura poesis – the habit of fabricating analogies between the ‘sister arts’ of poetry and painting – evolved over the same period.3 In both areas, the ideas propagated by Alberti had a decisive impact on the theory and practice of painting. From the standpoint of this book, however, the most significant aspect of De Pictura is its bringing together of vision and rhetoric, whose interactions in Shakespeare’s writings and in the aesthetic thought of his cultural milieu are the central issue I propose to explore. Ostensibly, these twin elements are handled entirely separately in the treatise, each being assigned its own book, but closer examination reveals that they are bound up in a complex relationship. Not only does Alberti clearly intend his perspective scheme to subserve the expressive requirements of the historia, but they are drawn into a more subtle dialogue with one another owing to a continual cross-referencing between his optical and rhetorical interests. Moreover, his handling of the mathematical and literary portions of the treatise is, as we shall see, informed by a consistent set of priorities and goals. What seems to me so peculiarly suggestive about Alberti’s approach to painting, in other words, is that it juxtaposes a scientific inquiry into the nature of vision with a model of composition capable, by virtue of its linguistic provenance, of mediating between poetry and painting, in ways that invite the reader to make connections between spatial and rhetorical modes of representation. In this sense, De Pictura provides an important context for the argument that will be developed here and in ensuing chapters: the proposition that rhetorical devices acquired the ability to function within the literary text – and, more specifically,



2

in Shakespeare’s plays – as a recognizable substitute for pictorial perspective. The first chapter is intended as an initial case-study in which this same proposition is put to the test by comparing the productive overlappings and substitutions of rhetorical and visual forms in Alberti’s De Pictura and Shakespeare’s As You Like It, written over a hundred and fifty years later. The details of Alberti’s perspective construction will not directly concern us here. Instead the focus will be on the rhetorically inflected model of composition formulated in Book II of De Pictura and its self-conscious affinities with methods of invention available to writers like Shakespeare. It may be helpful, however, to cast a preliminary glance over certain features of Alberti’s handling of perspective that adumbrate some key aesthetic and moral principles more fully worked out in Book II. By far the most salient of these is the overriding preoccupation with unity. The geometrical rules expounded in Book I provided a formula for achieving a completely coherent spatial field in which, for the first time in the history of painting, all perpendicular lines would converge to a single vanishing point. Heavy emphasis was placed on the beholder’s role in the production of this unified space; the location of the viewing eye served as the main point of reference when determining the relative size and distance of objects in the painting. Yet, despite its scientific credentials, the resulting spatial configuration can be thought of as an imaginary construct, in that, as will be shown below, it diverges in various ways from the optical processes it claimed to reproduce.4 The priority given to achieving spatial uniformity in Book I is echoed in Book II, though couched now in the language of classical rhetoric, since painting is no longer being viewed in the context of a ‘Euclidean’, but of a ‘Ciceronian’ paradigm.5 Accordingly, perspective is replaced as the instrument with which the painting’s ideal unity is realized by the historia and the morally edifying image of human actions it seeks to project. But here too the beholder’s participation (suitably reformulated to fit the new, more literary context) is seen as a pivotal factor in generating the harmonious relationships of which the painting is ideally composed. Alberti’s programme for the integration of every element within the historia, secured not through the intervention of mathematics but by an array of linguistic devices, takes up most of Book II. The processes involved in the making of the historia are analysed by Alberti in terms of three distinct stages: circumscriptio, or sketching the outline of objects and figures in the painting; compositio, the putting together of the surfaces depicted; and receptio luminum, describing the effects of colour



Alberti, As You Like It, and the Process of Invention 3


modified by light on these surfaces. As several commentators have noted, this tripartite procedure bears more than a passing resemblance to the first three stages of rhetorical composition, which traditionally entailed the searching out of subject matter (inventio), the suitable arrangement of this matter (dispositio), and its enhancement through the application of tropes and figures, commonly referred to as colores rhetorici (elocutio).6 With a tact notably lacking in later theorists who laboriously hammered out these correspondences, Alberti refrains from pressing the parallel. Yet, for all its oblique understatement, his policy of grafting rhetorical techniques onto painting signals a new rapprochement between these disciplines, lending weight and precision to his claim that poets and painters have much in common, especially when it comes to invention. In Book II, however, Alberti is less interested in invention as such – whether we take this to mean the selection of a particular narrative subject or the drawing in which this idea is worked out – than with the second stage of the creative process: namely, compositio or the method ‘whereby the parts are composed together in the picture’ (p.71). Starting from a detailed analysis of the constitutive elements of the historia, Alberti describes how these should be assembled into a coherent totality directed towards a single didactic and expressive end: ‘The principal parts of the work are the surfaces, because from these come the members, from the members the bodies, from the bodies the “historia”, and finally the finished work of the painter’ (p.71). That this hierarchical ordering of parts also had its source in humanist rhetoric was first pointed out by Michael Baxandall, who showed it to involve the ingenious transposition onto painting of the four-level organization of the Ciceronian periodic sentence, in which ‘words go to make up phrases, phrases to make clauses, clauses to make sentences’.7 But this is by no means the last of the imaginative transactions which Alberti conducts with the arts of language. He supplements this syntactical model by bringing in another and still more powerful rhetorical principle to underpin the structural coherence of the historia. Painters, he observes, must take care when composing the members of the body that these ‘accord well with one another’ in terms of their ‘size, function, kind, colour, and other similar respects’, for it would be ridiculous if the hands of Helen or Iphigenia looked old and rustic, or if Nestor had a youthful breast and soft neck, or Ganymede a wrinkled brow and the legs of a prize-fighter … Therefore, every part should agree in kind. (p.74)



4

Similarly, at a higher level, ‘all the bodies should conform in size and function to the subject of the action’, as depicted in the historia (p.75). The law of correspondence that is being invoked here is decorum: that form of judgement which determines what is appropriate in a given context, and which was deemed, on Horace’s authority, to be an indispensable means of ensuring the internal consistency of a work of art for poets and painters alike.8 This tightly wrought unity appears to be put at risk, however, when Alberti proceeds in accordance with rhetorical prescription to advise the painter to embellish his composition with a pleasurable variety.9 In language reminiscent of Cicero and Quintilian, he affirms that The first thing that gives pleasure in a ‘historia’ is plentiful variety. Just as with food and music, novel and extraordinary things delight us for various reasons but especially because they are different from the old ones we are used to, so with everything the mind takes great pleasure in variety and abundance. (p.75) According to Alberti, such variety is best attained by juxtaposing contrasting forms (human and animal) or colours. Alternatively, the painter may choose to depict a diversity of figures in dissimilar attitudes or movements, so that some are ‘visible full-face, with their hands turned upwards and fingers raised, and resting on one foot’, while ‘others should be seated, or resting on bended knee, or almost lying down’ (p.76). This passage could be said to epitomize the assimilation of optical and rhetorical values that is being quietly but purposefully enacted in De Pictura. For if, on one level, it offers itself as a simple description of the repertoire of postures available to painters of the human figure, on another level, the reader is expected to register an allusion to figurative discourse, which Quintilian had famously compared to corporeal movement. Thus, in Book IX of his Institutio Oratoria, he states that figures may be used for the sake of variety and ‘with a view to the avoidance of monotony’, because they ‘produce alterations in language’ by giving it a ‘conformation other than the obvious and ordinary’, a change Quintilian likens to ‘that involved by sitting, lying down on something or looking back’.10 Whether we are dealing with rhetorical or with human figures, Alberti suggests, the pleasure they excite depends on artful deviations from our customary modes of expression. The other main property ascribed to rhetorical figures, ethopoeia or the projection of emotion in a manner designed to elicit a sympathetic





response from the listener, is similarly appropriated for painting.11 Remarking that ‘feelings are known from movements of the body’, Alberti urges the painter to master the difficult art of ‘vary[ing] the movements of the body in accordance with the almost infinite movements of the heart’ (p.77). Apart from extending the painter’s expressive range (as illustrated, for Alberti, by the gestural richness of Giotto’s Navicella, the one contemporary painting he mentions by name), he sees this as having the added benefit of encouraging the beholder’s affective involvement with the image. Indeed, he recommends the inclusion of a choric figure in order to channel this emotional identification and so consolidate the relationships created not only within the picture itself, but between it and the beholder: I like there to be someone in the ‘historia’ who tells the spectators what is going on, and either beckons them with his hand to look … or points to some danger or remarkable thing in the picture, or by his gestures invites you to laugh or weep with them. (pp.77–8) What requires noting here, over and beyond the rhetorical bias that allows Alberti to redefine corporeal movement as a subcategory of elocutio, capable of imparting a graceful and expressive variety to a work of art, is the effect this has in modifying the type of connections he seeks to forge between the painting and those who view it. Whereas in Book I these connections were mathematically produced, a purely spatial relationship, in Book II they have become primarily affective in nature, rooted in the ‘sense of pleasure and emotion’ with which the historia captivates the spectator’s eye (p.75). Taking its underlying didactic thrust into account, it is clear that the historia has, in effect, been charged with the task of manipulating the beholder’s response in line with the established rhetorical aims of teaching, moving and pleasing. This shift from a visual to a predominantly verbal frame of reference has the further crucial consequence – whose implications I shall attempt to unpack at various stages of my argument – of eliding the beholder posited by Alberti’s perspective scheme with the addressee of rhetorical discourse. In each case the aim is to elicit a certain response from the beholder/listener by positioning him in similar ways. Alberti’s attitude to copious variety is one of guarded ambivalence. Despite extolling its delightful qualities, he is quick to condemn what



6


I would praise any great variety, provided it is appropriate to what is going on in the picture … But I would have this abundance not only furnished with variety, but restrained and full of dignity and modesty. I disapprove of those painters who, in their desire to appear rich or to leave no space empty, follow no system of composition, but scatter everything about in random confusion with the result that their ‘historia’ does not appear to be doing anything but merely to be in a turmoil. (p.75) Varying is seen as admissible only where it serves the narrative ends of the historia, or on condition that it does not violate the rule of decorum which, while it respects the natural diversity of things, subordinates this to the larger totality. Alberti is determined, that is, to bring such pictorial embellishment under the same discipline as had long been applied to the more lavish forms of verbal ornamentation.12 Without these curbs, he fears that the pursuit of copiousness may all too easily degenerate into ‘random confusion’. Given the wider associations invested in the historia, such ‘chaos’ is evidently regarded as presenting as great a threat to the moral and social order as to any aesthetic ideal. The ‘turmoil’ let loose by uncontrolled copia is, by implication, an affront to a divinely given harmony and its reflection in civil society. Unity (as manifested across these different registers) is thus privileged over diversity in Alberti’s analysis of pictorial composition, as it was in his perspective construction. Yet the anxiety concerning the potential risks of varying which momentarily ruffles the urbane surface of Alberti’s text, along with the battery of rules he introduces to hold its dispersive tendencies in check, tells a more complex story. It betrays the precariousness of this unity, its involvement with centrifugal forces it can barely contain. Viewed in this light, the ordered harmony of the historia is not the foregone conclusion it appears, but rather the product of a dynamic and thus unstable interaction between contending principles. Alberti’s assumption that poets and painters employ the same creative vocabulary gains in substance when we compare the principles informing Book II of De Pictura with those at stake in As You Like It. In putting Shakespeare’s comedy alongside Alberti’s treatise I do not wish to imply any specific debt to the latter, with which the dramatist is



he sees as the licentious propensities inherent in such compositional methods:


unlikely to have been familiar. My purpose is simply to draw attention to the shared concerns and compositional techniques animating these texts, a commonality that must ultimately be seen as the product of a trans-European rhetorical culture which subsumed poetry and painting along with a whole plethora of arts. Like Alberti’s historia, As You Like It is involved in the construction of an imaginary harmony, capable of absorbing and resolving into a single focus an extraordinarily diverse treatment of its themes. Although accomplished by formal means, this harmony takes on specific moral and social resonances in that it is formulated in response to the socio-political disintegration outlined in the play’s opening scenes, as well as to the more oblique threat of hedonistic individualism. And, as a utopian and finally unrealizable ideal, it proves vulnerable to being undermined from within in much the same fashion as the historia. Another, less obtrusive way in which Shakespeare’s comedy invites comparison with De Pictura is in its interweaving of optical and rhetorical ideas. Where Alberti had invoked a set of linguistic analogues for the unitary space of his perspective scheme, the play, as we shall see, foregrounds some key visual (or spatial) tropes within rhetorical theory in the process of enlisting these in the production of its complex unity. *

*

*

Of all Shakespeare’s plays As You Like It comes closest to fulfilling the Albertian ideal of compositio, in which a regulated variety is successfully accommodated within an overall unity of design. The play’s movement towards a social concord ratified by Hymen’s blessing and the harmonious measures of the wedding dance has been reflected in what amounts to a critical consensus that a rare harmony is achieved here, an ‘inclusive poise’ or ‘equilibrium’, whereby apparent antinomies are miraculously made to ‘atone together’.13 At the same time, this unity is recognized as being forged, paradoxically, out of the ‘numerous shifts in angle, alternating valuations, and variations in mood’ that spring from the play’s technique of juxtaposing different characters, or sets of characters, and their contrasting views on a range of topics.14 It is on the contrapuntal relationship between these tendencies – the one conducive to unity, and the other to dispersal – that the following reading of the play focuses. It will attempt to identify the rhetorical strategies involved in generating this plurality of viewpoints and, on the other hand, in ensuring that the play’s multiple perspectives collaborate in its teleological drive towards integration, instead of becoming a recipe



8

for ‘random confusion’ or moral chaos. What emerges from such an analysis is that the same linguistic devices that help to create this multivalent harmony also threaten to undo it. One way of approaching the play’s negotiation of its opposing impulses towards unity and variety, cohesion and dissolution, is in terms of its sustained reflection on the processes of its own composition. Like Book II of De Pictura, the play is profoundly concerned with the nature of invention and, in particular, with the methods whereby the old and customary may be varied, reworked or transmuted into something at once familiar and arrestingly new. For an Englishman writing at the turn of the sixteenth century, the obvious authority to consult as to how this might be done was Erasmus’s De duplici copia verborum ac rerum, where alternative techniques for varying one’s subject matter and the received topoi in which this was grounded were conveniently assembled. Written in 1512 for the recently founded St Paul’s School in London, Erasmus’s textbook rapidly became a staple component of the Tudor grammar school curriculum.15 Its influence was felt far beyond the classroom, however; the indelible traces left by the expressive methodology it propounded in the mature creative habits of writers like Shakespeare who were the beneficiaries of this humanistic educational system have been widely remarked.16 Indeed, as Neil Rhodes states, ‘it is no exaggeration to say that sixteenth-century rhetoric in England is dominated by the Erasmian ideal of copia’. As You Like It is by no means exceptional, then, in attesting to the formative effects of De Copia on the literary production of the period. But, like the earlier Love’s Labours’ Lost, it does bring a playful yet peculiarly rigorous attention to bear on the sorts of basic rhetorical skills that were drilled into every grammar school pupil.17 Erasmus’s subject, as his title implies, is the ‘abundant style’ and how it may be acquired. The basic trick, as he sees it, lies in knowing how to express one’s meaning in as many different ways as possible; a technique that he explains, significantly, by recourse to visual analogy as requiring an ability to ‘clothe our thought in other colours or other forms’, and so ‘turn one idea into more shapes than Proteus himself is supposed to have turned into’.18 Such transformations, he says, may be performed with the help of ‘words’ and ‘things’; that is, by calling on the resources of both inventio and elocutio. One might set about elaborating a proposition by altering its grammatical structure, for example, by substituting synonyms amassed for the purpose, reshaping it into a variety of figurative forms or employing it in different argumentative contexts. Among the many benefits of cultivating these compositional





skills is being able to avoid the tedium of simple repetition (no small asset, given that ‘just as the eyes fasten themselves on some new spectacle, so the mind is always looking round for some fresh object of interest’) and improving one’s fluency in speaking and writing. For Erasmus, such fullness and versatility of expression is eminently desirable, providing it is exercised responsibly, with judgement and due caution, since he is no less conscious than Alberti that ‘the pursuit of speech like this involves considerable risk’.19 There is always a danger that verbal abundance will become an end in itself, the pretext for a display of empty verbosity or facile dexterity where words are no longer guaranteed, as they should be, by intellectual substance or ‘matter’. It is in precisely the kind of rhetorical Proteanism advocated by Erasmus that the courtly exiles in the forest of Arden find their chief recreation. Seeking to exploit the rich discursive possibilities presented by their experience of love and country living, they constantly rework these themes by visiting all the sources of eloquence mapped in De Copia (a process parodied by Touchstone’s comic display of varying at V.1.45–57). As they do so, the perceptual implications towards which Erasmus’s descriptive metaphors gestured are consciously explored and brought to light. But we are, of course, not dealing here with some academic exercise conducted in isolation from any particular topographical or social context. On the contrary, the nature of the play’s investment in copious invention cannot be properly grasped without reference to its dramatic setting. It is therefore as well to begin by asking what sort of place Arden is and why it should be so hospitable to this sort of rhetorical activity. Like Navarre’s park or the woods outside Athens, the forest operates on the most accessible level as a version of the so-called ‘green’ world of Shakespearean comedy, where the characters, temporarily released from normal cares, are free to indulge their ‘holiday humour’ in verbal combat and display. As we have come to expect of such milieux, reality proves to be much more fluid and accommodating in Arden than in the law-bound, ‘workaday’ conditions of Duke Frederick’s court or the de Boys estate. The ‘liberty’ it offers the fugitives from these harsh environments is primarily of an imaginative or linguistic order; the leisure to redress the injustices of fortune by exercising their wits about inventing alternative versions of reality in sympathy with their own desires. However, as I shall try to show, the play goes beyond such typical generic functions to establish a more precise connection between such witty behaviour and its physical location.



10


Who laid him down, and bask’d him in the sun, And rail’d on lady Fortune in good terms, In good set terms, and yet a motley fool … And then he drew a dial from his poke, And, looking on it, with lack-lustre eye, Says very wisely, “It is ten a’clock. Thus we may see,” quoth he “how the world wags. ‘Tis but an hour ago since it was nine, And after one hour more ‘twill be eleven, And so from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, And then from hour to hour, we rot and rot; And thereby hangs a tale.” (II.7.15) The Fool, Jaques goes on to explain, was once a courtier, and in his brain, Which is as dry as the remainder biscuit After a voyage, he hath strange places cramm’d With observation, the which he vents In mangled forms. (II.7.38) At this point, the Arden editor informs us that Jaques’s remark about ‘strange places cramm’d / With observation’ refers to the ‘commonplaces or stock topics of rhetoric’.20 It adverts, in other words, to those well-worn themes and modes of expression in which all texts of the period are saturated, and none more so than this play.21 The commonplaces (topoi, loci communes, both denoting ‘place’) were regarded as necessary props to invention in that they provided a rich repository of subject matter and of stylistic formulae for developing this. One might choose, like Touchstone, to store them in the memory or, as Erasmus and other humanist pedagogues recommended, in the pages of a commonplace book where excerpts from one’s reading of classical texts could be jotted down under the relevant subject-heading in preparation for their use in amplifying and enriching one’s own compositions.



One incident is especially revealing in this respect. In II.7, Jaques recounts how, on his rambles through the forest, he unexpectedly met a fool,

12


getting you into the habit of using the riches supplied by your reading … [so] that whatever the occasion demands, you will have the materials for a speech ready to hand, as you have all the pigeonholes duly arranged so that you can extract just what you want from them.22 Construed thus, Jaques’s intriguing description of the morphology of the Fool’s brain offers an illuminating gloss on the verbal antics emanating from it. A deceptively literate courtier and master of witty inventions, Touchstone has all the materials for a speech ready to hand, conveniently ‘pigeonholed’ in his mind. Moreover, as his railing on Lady Fortune and his moralizing on the time demonstrate, he knows precisely what kind of discourse the occasion demands, which themes have traditionally arranged themselves under the heading of the pastoral life.23 With characteristically iconoclastic wit, however, he reworks his commonplace matter, defamiliarising this, as it were, by giving it a sardonic twist or (in Jaques’s apt phrase) by venting it in ‘mangled forms’. The pastoral world, mythically immune from time’s depradations, becomes a place where man may ‘rot and rot’. Alternatively, Jaques’s suggestive remark can be taken to refer to the dialectical ‘places’ (topoi, loci), also known, somewhat confusingly, as the commonplaces. Since Aristotle these had been associated with modes of argument grounded not in scientifically verifiable premises, but in probabilities or ‘generally accepted opinions’.24 As such, their usage was properly confined to the treatment of controversial subjects that do not admit of strict certainty and therefore ‘require the encounter of disputants for clarification’.25 Jaques’s casual nod in the direction of these argumentative tools is less incongruous than it may seem, when we bear in mind the taste for debate that the play has inherited from the inveterately dialogic mode of pastoral, or the degree to which it is steeped in proverbial wisdom and hypothetical forms of reasoning (as evidenced by the pervasive use of ‘if’), all of which seem to signal that it too inhabits the realm of approximative or popularly conceived truth. Equally germane to the play’s concerns is the manner in which these topoi were put to work. The ‘places’ consisted of a series of labelled compartments into which arguments were classified and whence they could be drawn forth at need. One consulted the headings – which varied according to the writer, but usually included genus, species, property, difference, cause, effect, similarities, contraries, comparison – for proofs



This system, writes Erasmus, has the advantage of

that would enable one to carry a point or simply to find out what might be said about a given subject. ‘A place’, declares Thomas Wilson in his Rule of Reason, the first English textbook on dialectic (or logic, as he calls it), is a ‘restyng corner of an argumente, or els a marke whiche geveth warnyng to our memorie what wee maie speake probably, either in the one parte, or the other, upon all causes that fal in question’, and he expands on its function with a vivid exemplum: the Huntesman in huntyng the foxe, wil soone espie when he seeth a hole, whether it be a foxe borough, or not. So he that will take profeicte in this parte of Logique, must bee like a hunter, and learne by labour to knowe the boroughes. For these places bee nothing elles, but covertes or boroughes, wherin if any one searche diligently, he maie finde game at pleasure … Therefore if any one will dooe good in this kinde, he must goe from place to place, & by searchyng every borough he shal have his purpose undoubtedly in moste parte of them, if not in al.26 By diligently searching the ‘places’ one might thus discover or invent (invenire meaning to ‘come upon’ or ‘find’) suitable arguments to confirm or refute the point in question, and, by the same token, a plentiful supply of matter. It has become something of a truism that Renaissance theorists tended to blur the distinction between dialectical and rhetorical invention, valuing the topoi less as instruments of formal (i.e. syllogistic) reasoning than as an additional source of copious eloquence.27 Erasmus himself lists the ‘accumulation of proofs and arguments’ among the means of obtaining an abundance of subject matter.28 Consistent with this trend, Wilson notes that with the help of the ‘places’, ‘not onely shal any one be hable [sic] to speake right, aptely, and very wel to the purpose … but also he shal largelie set out his matier, with moche delite’.29 On both counts, the ‘places’ would be likely to hold a special allure for a disputatiously inclined ‘material fool’ such as Touchstone. What his meeting with Jaques highlights, in short, is the play’s reflexive preoccupation with the process of invention; it shows us pastoral discourse in the making. In pursuing the rhetorical implications of Jaques’s speech, however, we should not overlook its more superficial meanings. The spatial connotations of ‘place’, developed in ‘voyage’, ‘observation’ and ‘forms’, generate a semantic confusion between the rhetorical and topographical senses of that word – and, more broadly, between the verbal and visual domains – which, I would argue, is crucial to our understanding




14


it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and, indeed, the sundry contemplation of my travels, in which [my] often rumination wraps me in a most humorous sadness. (IV.1.15) Jaques presents his sombre wisdom as the fruit of having travelled widely and ‘seen much’; we may suspect it to be the product of his commonplace book.30 That his inexhaustible stock of platitudes derives, like Touchstone’s moralizings, from such rhetorical aids rather than from direct observation is all the more plausible in view of the fact that voyages – inescapably associated with exploration in this period, as Rosalind’s ‘South-sea of discovery’ (III.2.197) reminds us – were available as a metaphor for the acquisition of literary and scientific knowledge; witness Ben Jonson’s motto: ‘ex libris: Tanquam explorator’. All this talk of travels and voyaging, put into the mouths of characters whose own geographical peregrinations are central to the plot, helps to sustain the aporia over whether that which is ‘observed’ or ‘discovered’ in the course of such wanderings belongs primarily to the visual or the verbal order of knowledge.31 These ambiguities invite us to take a more critical look at the visual tropes embedded in rhetorical (or dialectical) theory and the imaginative uses to which they are put in As You Like It. Apart from topos itself, always potentially a ‘live metaphor’ for Aristotle, according to Lane Cooper,32 the development of topical logic and commonplace anthologies in the sixteenth century produced its own vigorous crop of supplementary analogies. Woods, forests and gardens, in particular, became associated with the inventive process, being used interchangeably to designate the field in which the stuff of discourse could be gathered from a range of ‘places’.33 The elaborate treatment which these tropes often received, along with Wilson’s equally conventional and equally resonant hunting analogy, indicates just how easily they might be revivified, made concrete.34 In this context, Shakespeare’s interest in Lodge’s narrative, with its motif of exile, sylvan setting and hunting references, begins to look distinctly overdetermined. His choice of source-text allowed him to invest its already highly developed sense of place with the rhetorical significations of that word, or, to put it another way, to actualize topographical metaphor without entirely



of the play’s overall effect. A related cluster of images is used by Jaques to describe his own peculiar brand of melancholy:

shedding its figurative status. Indeed, it may be argued that Arden is not fully comprehensible except when read as a discursive space that can only be properly explored on a rhetorical rather than physical plane. Significantly, the play’s critics have struggled to make sense of Arden as an actual location, owing to a lack of descriptive detail and the blatant inconsistencies in its flora and fauna; but the problem vanishes as soon as it is identified with the pastoral common-place itself, where oaks and palm trees, deer and lions, might happily consort together.35 Such a reading would also help to account for the structuring of the forest scenes, which, as has frequently been remarked, are organized around a series of encounters issuing in discussion and debate. In moving from one part of the forest to another, the characters discover a fresh supply of ‘matter’ as well as new partners in dialogue. Just as Jaques, coming across Touchstone, finds in him a rich vein of wit that spurs his own, so Duke Senior seeks out Jaques: Show me the place. I love to cope him in these sullen fits, For then he’s full of matter. (II.1.66) In each case, we are encouraged to make the connection between the characters’ displacement through the ‘purlieus’ of the greenwood and their rhetorical inventiveness. Like Wilson’s huntsman who knows which ‘places’ will yield him game, Touchstone and his fellow courtiers know what types of argument have their ‘assign’d and native dwellingplace’ in Arden and where to look for them. The play’s welding together of the rhetorical and topographical senses of topos may also owe something to the art of memory and the emphasis this gave to visualizing places as an aid to recollecting information.36 Traditionally, this branch of rhetoric required one to imagine a series of real or fictive localities, assigning to each an image that was used to designate a specific idea, as though ‘inscribing letters on wax’; by moving (in thought or actuality) from one place to another while ‘reading’ the images they contained, it was thus possible to recall the concepts associated with them.37 Something similar transpires in Shakespeare’s forest. In II.2, one of Duke Senior’s attendants relates how he and ‘my Lord of Amiens’ spied on Jaques as he lay Under an oak, whose antique root peeps out Upon the brook that brawls along this wood, To the which place a poor sequest’red stag,




16


That from the hunter’s aim had ta’en a hurt, Did come to languish.

He goes on to describe how Jaques succeeded in extracting an abundance of doleful matter from this image of creatural distress. The emblematic details of this scene, the weeping stag and the recumbent posture adopted by his observer, have been shown to derive from the standard iconography of melancholy.38 Not content with this single received meaning, however, Jaques proceeds, in Erasmian fashion, to ‘moralize [the] spectacle’ into a ‘thousand similes’ – by likening the deer’s weeping into the ‘needless stream’ to the legacies bestowed on those who already possess ‘too [much]’, his ostracization by the herd to that inflicted on the ‘poor and broken bankrupt’ by ‘fat and greasy citizens’, and so on.39 The sight of the wounded stag standing beside the brook functions, so to speak, as a mnemonic trigger to his invention, releasing a flood of sententious discourse. A residual oddness about this moment confirms its indeterminate status; for while the presence of spectators sets this up as one of the play’s many interpolated ‘pageants’, as something to be looked at, the fact that the ‘spectacle’ is merely reported and that its meaning depends on rhetorical manipulation emphasizes the primarily argumentative nature of the occasion. This sort of interpenetration of the visual and the verbal occurs everywhere in Arden’s iconic landscape. The play asks us to imagine a world where objects, some of them (like the trees in whose barks Orlando carves his love poems) literally inscribed with messages, can be made to bear an infinite variety of glosses, where the observant eye is capable of finding ‘tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, / Sermons in stones, and good in every thing’ (II.1.16).40 By projecting rhetorical processes in objectified forms, the play thus activates a number of visual and spatial tropes that were routinely used to describe the art of eloquence. We may find it helpful to examine the use of place here as a kind of shorthand for rhetorical (or dialectical) invention in the light of the thesis put forward by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their book, Metaphors We Live By. According to this, our conceptual systems tend to be structured by metaphors that dictate how we perceive, experience and relate to the world at the most basic level, metaphors that typically translate mental activities into concrete or sensory forms.41 The visual tropes deployed in As You Like It substantiate this argument on two fronts. Not only did these tropes condition the way that language was understood to function in classical and



(II.1.31)

Renaissance culture, they also suggest that perception is so deeply informed by our linguistic habits that it is itself in some sense a product of discourse. This can certainly be said of Shakespeare’s characters, for whom the act of seeing is seldom a purely physiological event. Viewing tends to act as a stimulus to interpretation and invention, so that the object in view only comes into focus through a screen of verbal commentary. And, conversely, what the characters see is largely predetermined by the rhetorical positions they choose to adopt. The idea that language may embody a particular way of looking at things is already implicit in contemporary discussions of the ars disserendi. In his De Inventione Dialectica, for example, Rudolph Agricola appears to think of the topoi as a set of conceptual viewpoints enabling the mind’s eye to range freely over a given subject when he states that, since the places ‘contain within themselves each thing and every possible argument’, by following them the speaker may ‘survey the entire nature, parts, compatibilities and incompatibilities of a thing’.42 With the help of topical invention it was thus possible to acquire, in Joel Altman’s felicitous phrase, ‘virtually an Argus-eyed view of any subject of discourse’.43 In much the same way, each of Jaques’s thousand similes generates a different perspective through which the meaning of the weeping stag – its conceptual shape, as it were – may be endlessly reconfigured. Both topical and analogical arguments, that is, serve as a handy device for turning an idea into more shapes than Proteus himself. The opportunities for complex seeing afforded by such compositional methods are exploited to the full by Arden’s courtiers, especially the agile-minded Touchstone and Rosalind. In addition to replenishing their store of ‘matter’, their movements from place to place bring fresh ways of looking at things. By shifting their physical/rhetorical position, these witty observers ensure that every facet of the pastoral ideal will be kaleidoscopically explored. Despite the verbal resources at their command, however, the characters’ freedom to adjust their view of the world or reshape it to their measure is less absolute than might appear. Their pursuit of copious invention, like that of the Albertian painter, is subject to constraints which prevent it from succumbing to its inbuilt and potentially harmful tendencies to dissipation or fragmentation. Take, for example, Duke Senior’s address to his followers on the benefits of country living: Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile, Hath not old custom made this life more sweet Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods





More free from peril than the envious court? Here feel we not the penalty of Adam, The seasons’ difference, as the icy fang And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind, Which when it bites and blows upon my body Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say, “This is no flattery: these are counsellors That feelingly persuade me what I am”. Sweet are the uses of adversity, Which like the toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head; And this our life, exempt from public haunt, Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in every thing. (II.1.1) As a virtuosic display of the metamorphic powers of language this might have come straight out of De Copia. Devices recommended in that text are summoned here in order to vary and embellish a veritable anthology of pastoral topoi.44 Thus an initial proposition (‘Hath not old custom made this life more sweet / Than that of painted pomp?’) is first rephrased and then amplified by another (‘Here feel we not the penalty of Adam’), which is supported by a prosopopeia converting the icy blasts of winter into benevolent ‘counsellors’. This is clinched with a suitable maxim (‘Sweet are the uses of adversity’), enforced, in turn, by the simile of the toad. The whole performance has an unmistakable air of selfcongratulation about it; the Duke repeatedly, if obliquely, calls attention to his skill in drawing consoling morals from adversity and transmuting physical hardship into more palatable forms. Even his acknowledgment of the courtiers’ painful exposure to the ‘seasons’ difference’, through which an extra-textual reality intrudes threateningly on the theme of pastoral contentment, is gracefully absorbed into the verbal pattern (‘churlish chiding’, ‘winter’s wind’). This feat of eloquence finds a fitting response in Amiens, who applauds the Duke’s ability to ‘translate the stubbornness of fortune / Into so quiet and so sweet a style’ (II.1.19, my emphasis), his choice of diction (‘translatio’ being the Latin word for metaphor) deftly confirming the rhetorical basis of the amelioration in their condition. But while this ducal affirmation of the power of a fertile wit to override factual obstacles by making of them whatsoever it wishes goes unchallenged, it is subtly qualified: firstly, by Amiens’s tacit admission that his master is indulging in a verbal pastime



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whose exact relationship to and ability to act upon the real world are far from clear, and, secondly, by the speaker’s deference to ‘old custom’. In dramatic terms, the Duke and his followers (all decked out as foresters, according to the Folio direction) show their reverence for tradition by self-consciously re-enacting the myth of the ‘golden world’ associated with them from the very first scene (I.1.115–19), and, linguistically, by their continual recourse to commonplace. Critics have sometimes objected to what they take to be the pompous banality of Duke Senior’s speech.45 But this is to misconceive fundamentally the nature and scope of the play’s commitment to conventional modes of thought and expression. Predictable though it may be in one sense, the Duke’s address is not composed merely of empty verbal flourishes, nor is it purely self-regarding. Like all rhetorical games, it is intended to have a specific effect on its audience, one that in this instance serves a clear political agenda. By dint of his pastoral allusions and posturings, the Duke is implicitly positing an alternative society, capable of healing the fratricidal conflicts and incipient social fragmentation that characterizes existence at the usurper’s court or the de Boys estate.46 Commonplace has a crucial role in articulating – and helping to implement – this utopian fantasy inasmuch as it offers a way of reconnecting with a past that has been systematically repudiated by Oliver and Duke Frederic, whose disrespect for a father’s will in the one case, and the laws of primogeniture in the other, are seen as symptomatic of the degenerate ‘fashion of these times’. For the banished Duke, it is also a means of restoring his authority; under the ‘place’ usually known as pronunciata, but which he calls ‘aucthoritie’, Wilson lists as lending weight and credibility to one’s discourse, ‘quick saiynges, proverbes … the judgementes of learned men, the common opinion of the multitude, olde custome, auncient fashions, or any suche like’.47 Moreover, in all the manifold forms in which it is invoked in this play – from the dialectical topoi to those formulaic expressions which correspond more closely to our modern debased understanding of the term as mere cliché – commonplace emphasizes the beliefs people hold in common, the views they share. Hence it is a singularly appropriate vehicle for the Duke’s vision of a reformed community modelled on the values of the ‘antique world’, where, according to popular imagination, men acted on the basis of their mutual humanity, their ‘kindness’, where divisive social hierarchies were unknown and all things collectively enjoyed.48 It is no accident, then, that he should avail himself of such language in order to reaffirm the bonds between himself and his ‘co-mates and brothers in exile’.





A similar function is performed by the play’s songs; their charmingly wistful restatement of pastoral topoi helps to cement the society taking shape in the forest by (as Jaques scornfully puts it) ‘call[ing] fools into a circle’ (II.5.55). As an expression of custom and communitas, this commonplace discourse acts on one level as a cohesive force within the play, its consensual implications working to counter any drift towards a total relativity of values, such as may seem to be enshrined in the play’s title or implied by its delight in rhetorical transformation and multiple perspectives. Of course this is not to say that the play’s exuberant diversity can somehow be reduced to a simple rehearsal of certain literary clichés. Even such pure offspring of the Petrarchan convention as Silvius and Phebe have their unsuspected dimensions. Yet, as we are reminded by Corin’s invitation to see in their courtship a ‘pageant truly play’d / Between the pale complexion of true love / And the red glow of scorn and proud disdain’ (III.4.52), the play achieves much of its effect by reworking or playing off quite a narrow range of topoi. One consequence of this is that the received ideas which constitute the very basis and precondition for the practice of varying, also ensure that this is exercised within traditionally prescribed limits. The play’s centrifugal and centripetal tendencies, it might thus be argued, are rooted in one and the same set of rhetorical strategies. This is best illustrated by reference to another of the play’s inset ‘pageants’, which restages a familiar pastoral encounter between age and youth.49 In II.4, Silvius’s hackneyed complaint to Corin concerning the ‘actions most ridiculous’ to which he has been driven by his passion is overseen by Rosalind and Touchstone, who comment on the scene following his exit. Although Shakespeare had already experimented in Love’s Labours’ Lost and A Midsummer Night’s Dream with incorporating into the plot a sequence of theatrical performances watched by onstage audiences, it is in this play that he really begins to use the technique to highlight the spectators’ different viewpoints.50 So it is all the more significant that such discrepancies in outlook are expressed here in the context of a primary imaginative identification: Rosalind Alas, poor shepherd, searching of [thy wound], I have by hard adventure found mine own. Touchstone And I mine. I remember when I was in love, I broke my sword upon a stone, and bid him take that for coming a-night to Jane Smile; and I remember the kissing of her batler and the cow’s dugs that her pretty chopp’d hands had milk’d … We that are true



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In this comedy Shakespeare seems to be as intent as Alberti on creating affective links between the beholders (both on- and off-stage) and the events they are witnessing, whilst allowing for a greater diversity of response.51 Although undoubtedly heartfelt, Rosalind’s sympathy for the young shepherd is tinged with irony. In Touchstone’s mouth this becomes outright mockery, an irreverent parody of Silvius’s complaint that commutes its cloying sentimentality to bawdy innuendo. Still, the joke only makes sense as a burlesque refiguring of the stock absurdities of love. As if in wry acknowledgment of this compliance with ‘old custom’, Touchstone winds up his speech with a maxim about the universal folly of desire that, as his use of the first-person plural indicates, implicates him among the objects of its ridicule. Even as it is used to establish divergent positions, then, this display of the art of varying is enclosed, literally and figuratively, within commonplace utterances and the sense of fellow-feeling issuing from a shared experience they embody. It is the hidden pressure exerted by this language of consensus that in the final scene will permit four lovers to subsume their differences of opinion, albeit temporarily, in a choric reaffirmation of Petrarchan platitudes (V.2.83–106). This process of containment also operates where the differences of view are more sharply delineated and the sense of relativity they induce takes on a decidedly sceptical hue.52 One such moment is Touchstone’s debate with Corin on the stock pastoral quaestio of the relative merits of court and country. To the query, ‘And how like you this shepherd’s life, Master Touchstone?’, the Fool retorts: Truly, shepherd, in respect of itself, it is a good life; but in respect that it is a shepherd’s life, it is naught. In respect that it is solitary, I like it very well; but in respect that it is private, it is a very vile life. Now in respect it is in the fields, it pleaseth me well; but in respect it is not in the court, it is tedious. As it is a spare life (look you) it fits my humour well; but as there is no more plenty in it, it goes much against my stomach. (III.2.12) Touchstone does his best to overawe the illiterate shepherd with his flamboyant demonstration of a skill that every Elizabethan schoolboy



lovers run into strange capers; but as all is mortal in nature, so is all nature in love mortal in folly. (II.4.44)


was expected to master: the use of the dialectical ‘places’ (of definition, property, place) to argue in utramque partem – on both sides of the question. In this he is merely following approved argumentative procedures that, as I said earlier, were deemed suitable for dealing with doubtful subjects such as are susceptible to more than one answer. What is amusing and provocative about the speech, however, is its foregrounding of the relativism inherent in these strategies, which it takes to extremes by showing how (as Wilson had noted) both positive and negative arguments could be drawn from the same topoi. This treatment of the ‘places’ wilfully transgresses, in spirit if not according to the letter, that prescribed by classical dialecticians and their humanist successors. For if absolute truth remained out of reach, the general assumption nevertheless was that the clarifying effects of weighing and testing propositions against each other in debate would lead to a consensus about which is the more probable, to a form of ‘practical certainty’ that might serve as a valid basis for human conduct.53 ‘The sole object of our discussions’, wrote Cicero, ‘is by arguing on both sides to draw out and give shape to some result that may be either true or the nearest possible approximation to the truth’.54 Touchstone’s playful manipulation of the viewpoint embedded in the topoi mocks such modest truth claims with its insinuation that personal whim is the only arbiter of veracity, things being indeed as we like them. Yet, here too, hedonistic relativism is tempered by the forms in which it is articulated. Besides relying on the ‘places’ with all their normative force, Touchstone conducts his argument in ‘good set terms’. Like all Arden’s courtly exiles, he quarrels by the book. The rules of dialectic he observes – or pretends to observe – were primarily intended to enable the listener to sift truth from falsehood by exposing fallacious modes of reasoning: Logique, otherwise called Dialect … is an Art to trie the corne from the chaffe, the trueth from every falshod, by definyng the nature of any thing, by dividyng the same, and also by knittyng together true argumentes, and untwinyng all knottie subtleties, that are bothe false, and wrongfully framed together.55 ‘And therefore’, Wilson concludes, ‘I would wish that Logique were alwaies the square to rule our talke, & made the very touche stone to trie our reasons’.56 Wilson’s analogy supplies an important clue to one of the play’s enduring puzzles: how Touchstone came by his seemingly incongruous name. One way in which this cynical equivocator could



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be said to embody a common standard of truth is in his methods of argument, which empower his sundry interlocutors – and more importantly perhaps, the play’s audience or readers – to judge for themselves the relative merits of the opinions debated in the forest. Certainly, we are given the impression that the characters’ deliberations are not quite as open-ended as the play’s title suggests; of their being subject to an unstated yet omnipresent criterion that weighs the relative plausibility of each viewpoint, whether we imagine this to be lodged in the Fool, the audience or the forest itself: ‘You have said; but whether wisely or no, let the forest judge’ (III.2.121). Not only does the Fool’s chop-logic invite detection by flaunting its own speciousness, it also fails to get the better of Corin. When Touchstone proceeds to take a deliberately extreme and untenable line of argument – that a man who has never been in court must be damned, ‘like an ill-roasted egg, all on one side’ (a sly reference perhaps to his own lop-sided argument) – the shepherd opposes him not by unmasking his reliance on sorites (verbal ambiguity) and other forms of sophistry, but on pragmatic grounds57: Not a whit, Touchstone. Those that are good manners at the court are as ridiculous in the country as the behaviour of the country is most mockable at the court. (III.2.45) Corin’s brand of relativism, unlike Touchstone’s, is rooted in practical commonsense and a sensitivity to context that offer, as it were, “natural” analogues for the learned arts of decorum and topical invention paraded by the courtiers. He backs this up with a recitation of his shepherd’s creed, old as the pastoral tradition itself and as impressive in its dignified simplicity as it is ‘most mockable’ for its lack of sophistication: Sir, I am a true labourer; I earn that I eat, get that I wear, owe no man hate, envy no man’s happiness, glad of other men’s good, content with my harm, and the greatest of my pride is to see my ewes graze and my lambs suck. (III.2.73) Touchstone’s attempts to overturn this with further sophistical arguments appear strained by comparison, sacrificing a deeper persuasiveness to mere ingenuity. Although, technically, it is he who wins the skirmish, Corin speaks for values that are no less integral to this play,





values that become entwined with and help to stabilize the witty extravagance they seem to oppose: a sense of balance and moderation, a respect for received wisdom and the claims of the community over those of the individual.58 As You Like It is full of this sort of interplay between an emphasis on shared norms and a plurality of viewpoints articulated through a rich and varied invention. The manner in which this dialectic is handled is exhibited in microcosm by Jaques’s disquisition on the ‘seven ages of man’ in II.7, and by Rosalind’s similar set-piece about ‘time travell[ing] in divers paces with divers persons’ in III.2. In both speeches, the multifacetedness of human experience is unfolded in relation to a series of general character types (the schoolboy, the lover, the soldier, the maid, the lawyer, the thief, etc.) which have evidently been fleshed out using the so-called ‘places of person’ (age, sex, profession, disposition, etc.).59 And in both the speaker shows off his/her rhetorical prowess by detailing the behaviour appropriate to each type, in compliance with the rule of decorum which, as in Albertian compositio, mediates between the pursuit of copious variety and an equally strong premium on unity. But if these conflicting demands appear to be perfectly reconciled here, the unstable dynamic of their relationship dictates that such a balance can never be fully or finally achieved. There are moments when the play’s formal harmony is put under severe pressure by its proliferating inventions, when the differences of outlook and social interest implied by this rhetorical diversity cannot be satisfactorily resolved or glossed over by an appeal to common values. Many of these occasions involve Rosalind, whose masculine disguise allows her the freedom to experiment with multiple perspectives in ways that resist integration into a single, unified position. Largely through the medium of her restless wit, the play tests and exposes the limitations of commonplace language, to the point almost of invalidating its generalizing and cohesive properties. The assumption that this discourse constitutes an authoritative expression of a universally shared experience is held up to critical scrutiny, as is the nature of the social harmony it helps to construct. For the remainder of the chapter, I wish to focus on those factors that complicate our sense of the play as embodying an inclusive harmony, a discordia concors, by highlighting the fictive, provisional quality of this achievement. In II.7, Orlando, driven to desperate measures by Adam’s hunger and his own, rushes with drawn sword upon Duke Senior and his companions as they picnic peacefully under the shade of melancholy boughs. To his surprise, instead of uncouth rustics he discovers men of his own



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stamp, who ‘know some nurture’ and offer him only kindness and hospitality in return. ‘Speak you so gently?’, he exclaims, ‘Pardon me, I pray you / I thought that all things had been savage here’ (II.7.106). Courteous eloquence is interpreted on both sides as a mark, indeed the mark, of gentle birth and breeding. And just as Duke Senior signals his lineage with a graceful antimetabole (‘Your gentleness shall force, / More than your force move us to gentleness’), so Orlando, whose hostile gesture had threatened to put him beyond the pale of ‘smooth civility’, now reinstates himself within it by appealing in similarly patterned speech to their hypothetical shared past: If ever you have look’d on better days, If ever been where bells have knoll’d to church, If ever sate at any good man’s feast, If ever from your eyelids wip’d a tear, And know what ‘tis to pity and be pitied, Let gentleness my strong enforcement be. In the which hope I blush, and hide my sword. (II.7.113) The Duke’s repetition of this litany with minimal variation ratifies the moment of mutual recognition. This ritualistic invocation of a common fund of knowledge serves, figuratively, to ‘hide’ Orlando’s sword by dispelling the threat of violence and the deeper social tensions which its eruption would have forced into the open. Commonplace would appear to function here much as it did in the Duke’s earlier address to his ‘co-mates and brothers in exile’: as the rhetorical counterpart of those pastoral values of kindness, compassion and courtesy charged with repairing the ‘natural bond’ of brothers and with restoring the harmony of a vanished ‘golden world’. On closer scrutiny, however, it becomes apparent that the very language used to call up this image of an integrated community – predicated on the recognition of a common humanity or ‘kindness’ – simultaneously works to undermine its claim to inclusiveness. The effect of the reiterative verbal play upon Orlando’s ‘gentleness’ and ‘civility’ is to prise these cognate terms away from their universal signification, returning them to their original social meaning as denoting the civilized manners befitting good birth or life led in the city and at court.60 By means of this rhetorical sleight of hand, such ‘natural’ qualities are reassigned as the exclusive property of a privileged minority with access to the sorts of social ritual Orlando describes. The suggestion is that Duke





Senior’s ideal community defines itself as much in opposition to the boorishness of the lower orders, exemplified by Arden’s native population, as against the moral savagery of villains like Duke Frederick. Small wonder, then, that the persuasive force of Orlando’s ‘gentle’ speech needs to be backed up with more direct proof of his parentage before he succeeds in gaining admission to the Duke’s band of ‘contented followers’. As the Duke’s concern with issues of brotherhood implies, women too are marginalized by this emphatically masculine community, which can find no room for the comparable ties, ‘dearer than the natural bond of sisters’, between Rosalind and Celia.61 The disjunction enacted here between the egalitarian connotations of the commonplace discourse invoked by Duke Senior and Orlando and the actual practices regulating social relations in the forest has been noted by Louis Montrose in an important essay on the play. ‘Tensions in the nuclear family and in the body politic’ appear to be ‘miraculously assuaged’ in Arden, he writes, but while the courtly decorum of hierarchy and deference may be relaxed in the forest … it has not been abrogated; the Duke’s ‘brothers in exile’ remain courtiers and servants attendant upon his grace. An atmosphere of charitable community has been created among those who have temporarily lost or abandoned their normal social context; the sources of conflict inherent in the social order are by no means genuinely dissolved in the forest, but rather are translated into a quiet and sweet style.62 Acknowledging the part that language plays in ‘translating’ these hierarchical distinctions into more ‘charitable’ expressions of the social order, Montrose overlooks the extent to which it is also responsible for holding them in place. Duke Senior and Orlando are not the only characters for whom eloquence is an implicit assertion of rank and male prerogative. Touchstone’s ‘good wits’ are quite blatantly displayed as a means of enforcing his courtly credentials and his ascendancy over Arden’s rustic inhabitants, while Rosalind’s right to lay down the law to Silvius and Phebe is established by her adoption of ‘a boisterous and a cruel style’, suiting with her disguise as a ‘saucy lackey’. The language of ‘kindness’, it seems, can as easily become a medium for reinscribing social differences as for effacing their existence. A more conscious interrogation of commonplace and the less than benevolent social arrangements it sustains takes place in Rosalind’s courtship games with Orlando. For Rosalind, these games are an



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opportunity to confront a range of stereotypical notions of femininity (and masculinity) which threaten to distort her relationship with Orlando, if not to demolish these – the tentacular grip of commonplace on our thought and behaviour makes it, she is aware, impossible to exorcise completely – at least with the desire to show them for what they are. What makes this possible, of course, is her multi-layered disguise as Ganymede-Rosalind. It provides an ideal forum in which to act out conventional gender roles (imperious mistress, capricious wife, promiscuous shrew) without committing herself to the accepted truths they embody, or in any way compromising her ironic detachment. Equally, this shifting of persona allows her to multiply perspectives on the topoi of love and marriage by shuttling back and forth between masculine and feminine subject positions. Like Touchstone, she exploits the possibility created by her role-playing of speaking on all sides of the question in order to mobilize commonplace discourse against itself. But there are important differences. Rosalind’s wit is less reductive in its critique of orthodox wisdom; the effect of its enchanting playfulness being not so much to demonstrate the absurdity of seeking after truth as to coax the imagination into envisioning alternative, more enabling ways in which men and women might relate to each other by releasing this from the straitjacket of customary thought. We get our first real glimpse of the subversive qualities of this wit in III.2, when the idea of the mock courtship is broached. Rosalind, impersonating Ganymede who in turn claims to be relaying the opinions of his ‘old religious uncle’, offers to rid Orlando of his lovesickness by the same methods he once used to cure another ‘fancy-monger’: He was to imagine me his love, his mistress; and I set him every day to woo me. At which time would I, being but a moonish youth, grieve, be effeminate, changeable, longing and liking, proud, fantastical, apish, shallow, inconstant, full of tears, full of smiles; for every passion something, and for no passion truly anything, as boys and women are for the most part cattle of this colour; would now like him, now loathe him; then entertain him, then foreswear him … that I drave my suitor from his mad humor of love to a living humor of madness … and this way will I take upon me to wash your liver as clean as a sound sheep’s heart that there shall not be one spot of love in’t. (III.2.407) On the surface, this catalogue of women’s ‘giddy offences’, reiterating as it does the stale invectives of traditional misogynist satire, appears to





justify Celia’s complaint that Rosalind has ‘simply misus’d’ their sex in her ‘love-prate’ (IV.1.201). But the rhetorical extravagance of the speech, its dizzy syntax and heaping up of adjectives and clauses, acts as a corrective to such a literal-minded response. Far from receiving endorsement, it suggests, these popular beliefs about women’s behaviour are being ventriloquized, rehearsed in the service of a parodic mimicry whose effect is to strip them of their obviousness, as the putative expression of a universal (female) nature, thereby unmasking them as cultural fictions.63 What is being mocked, in other words, is not woman’s capriciousness, but the suspect generalizations of the satirist, in whose eyes ‘boys and women are for the most part cattle of this colour’. The irony becomes palpable at the end of the speech when the idea of the love-cure is undercut in turn with a neat chiasmic reversal and the comically deflating image of the sheep’s heart. In the space of a few lines, Rosalind thus manages to subvert both romantic and antiromantic clichés by the simple expedient of reproducing these in exaggerated, burlesque form and playing one off against the other. Elsewhere she attacks received notions of love more directly by distancing these from the experiential world in which they are supposedly grounded. Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but – she ruefully observes – not for love (IV.1.94 –108). Petrarchan conceits that credit the beloved’s eyes with the power to wound (IV.1.111), or assume that the true lover may be known by his symptoms (III.2.369–84), are likewise nailed as poetic ‘lies’. But it is the context of imaginative feigning established by her disguise which most effectively exposes the fictionality of such commonplace lore. Between Rosalind’s proverbial citations and the everyday realities they purportedly describe, her proliferating personae – the boy actor (obliquely recalled in the ‘moonish youth’) playing Rosalind playing Ganymede substituting for his uncle and then for Rosalind – insert many intricate layers of make-believe. It is not only the authority of commonplace wisdom that is called into question by Rosalind’s games, but its efficacy as a cohesive agent. So slippery is her wit that it refuses to become hostage to any of the viewpoints between which it moves. ‘The wiser, the waywarder’, she declares of her sex, Make the doors upon a woman’s wit, and it will out at the casement; shut that, and ’twill out at the keyhole; stop that, ’twill fly with the smoke out at the chimney. (IV.1.160)



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Just as her woman’s wit cannot be confined in any one place, being characterized rather by its evasion of fixed rhetorical positions and the perceptual limitations they imply, so her many roles cannot be gathered up into a single controlling identity or voice. Critics have tended to see these roles as dramatizing different facets of Rosalind’s personality, believed to be clearly discernible beneath the shifting disguises.64 But the constant rhetorical juggling with ideas hinders attempts to locate them as the expression of a specific persona, not to mention the ‘very, very Rosalind’, who (as we are intermittently reminded) is nothing more than the theatrical projection of the boy actor. The difficulty of knowing who is speaking at any one moment complicates our response to the platitudes offered up, as when Rosalind castigates her unpunctual lover by comparing him to a snail: Rosalind Nay, and you be so tardy, come no more in my sight. I had as lief be woo’d of a snail. Orlando Of a snail? Rosalind Ay, of a snail; for though he comes slowly, he brings his house on his head – a better jointure I think than you make a woman. Besides, he brings his destiny with him. Orlando What’s that? Rosalind Why horns! which such as you are fain to be beholding to your wives for. But he comes arm’d in his fortune, and prevents the slander of his wife. (IV.1.51) Appearing to take a stand on the proverbial notion that cuckoldry is man’s inescapable lot, the speaker contrives, at the same time, to refute this ‘slander’ by suggesting that horns are an attribute of nature and so none of his wife’s getting. Tempted as we may be to assign these conflicting views to Ganymede and the fictive Rosalind respectively, the volatile, free-wheeling quality of the wit resists such impositions. The speaker’s teasing assertion that he/she and Rosalind are one and the same person (l.65) merely underlines the impossibility of identifying what is spoken as a self-consistent statement emanating from a stable, unified being.65 It may be objected that the imaginative freedom from convention and its attendant constraints conferred by Rosalind’s disguise is shortlived, as she, with the other characters, is returned to her ‘proper’ role at the end of the play. It is undeniably the case that this kind of open-ended, sceptical playing with ideas is suspended in the final





act, along with the courtship games through which it has found release. The experimental pleasures of talking and seeing which have dominated the Arden scenes yield to a new emphasis on the more tangible rewards of sexual possession (V.2.42–52), while differences of view are virtually obliterated by the levelling effects of the mating instinct, as the lovers submit, one and all, to the rhythms of the ‘spring time, the only pretty [ring] time’. This may be seen as necessary preparation for the play’s culminating affirmation of harmony, the marriage dance where ‘earthly things made even / Atone together’ under Hymen’s auspices. The resurgence of Rosalind’s wit in the epilogue, with its play upon the ambiguities of her sexual identity (as female character/male actor), comes nevertheless as a powerful reminder of its continuing ability to unsettle such harmony. Arguably, it is this, not Jaques’s refusal to participate in the dance, in which he remains true to his melancholic type, that poses the most radical challenge to the final celebration of social concord and oneness of vision. Exposed to the disruptive force of Rosalind’s wit, the play’s movement towards closure is further undermined by the foregrounding of its artificiality. This is partly a consequence of the miraculous turn taken by events in the fifth act, which aligns its dramatic resolution with the ‘improbable fiction’ of fairy tales: the four marriages, two lightning conversions, and the intervention of Rosalind’s supposed and Hymen’s genuine magical powers. Less obviously, it arises from the concentration of ‘ifs’ in the final scenes, used more extensively here than in any other Shakespearean text.66 This harping on ‘if’, as David Young remarks, distils the play’s ‘atmosphere of artifice and hypothesis’, summing up its concern with poetic ‘feigning’ and (I would add) with probable or hypothetical modes of argument that, to varying degrees, fall short of complete certainty.67 Inasmuch as it denotes a grammatical construction, the word also calls attention to the role of language in manufacturing the complex unity figured by the dance. With typical rhetorical self-consciousness, the play offers its own gloss on the harmonizing function of ‘if’. Immediately prior to Hymen’s entry, Touchstone expounds the rules of courtly quarrelling for the entertainment of the marriage guests. Enumerating the seven ‘degrees’ of the lie, he asserts that conflict may be avoided by stopping short of the ‘Lie Direct’, and even this may be evaded with an if: I knew when seven justices could not take up a quarrel, but when the parties were met themselves, one of them thought but of an If,



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Touchstone derives the play’s vision of brotherly concord from the irenic properties of ‘If’; its capacity to ‘atone’ conflicting viewpoints and the fratricidal tensions in which they are rooted is seen as stemming from the play’s richness in forms of discourse that are predicated upon plausible or popularly accepted truths. Such truths, being impossible to verify, have to be taken on trust. Hence, as Hymen intimates, our faith in the ending ultimately depends on our willingness to assent to this kind of argument, to believe that it ‘holds true contents’: that its version of truth is both substantive and capable of bestowing lasting happiness. The cascade of ‘if’s’ at the play’s close seems designed to intensify any doubts we have on this score by reminding us of the fragile, conditional nature of the harmony they have helped to construct. What language makes, it may also unmake. In highlighting the precariousness of the unity it celebrates, the last act of As You Like It foreshadows future developments. The plays that follow this comedy chronologically in the Shakespearean canon chart the fracturing of its harmonious vision, as the balance intermittently achieved there between the forces of integration and dispersal tilts decisively in favour of the latter. In Hamlet, and to an even greater degree in Troilus and Cressida, rhetorical perspective functions as a disjunctive device, calling into question the unity of the perceiving subject and the power of language to communicate truth. While perceptual relativism and its philosophical corollary, scepticism, are evidently a possible outcome of the linguistic strategies pursued in As You Like It, we have seen that they are kept more or less under control. In the two later plays they will be allowed free reign, culminating in Troilus’s radically self-divided vision of his beloved. And even when a measure of unity is restored in Antony and Cleopatra and The Tempest, it is in the full consciousness of its fictive status, as a product of the idealizing imagination working on behalf of certain romantic and political interests. Before considering these texts in detail, though, we need to return to Albertian perspective and look at the changes which its governing conventions, especially the imposition of a single monocular viewpoint, underwent at the hands of Shakespeare’s English contemporaries.



as, “If you said so, then I said so”; and they shook hands and swore brothers. Your If is the only peacemaker; much virtue in If. (V.4.98)

English Beholders and the Art of Perspective

‘We shall believe we have achieved our purpose if in this difficult subject, which as far as I can see has not before been treated by anyone else, our readers have been able to follow our meaning’ (p.37).1 It is thus, in the full consciousness of the novelty and complexity of his subject, that Alberti introduces the perspective construction which, together with his notion of compositio, constitutes his main contribution to the theorization of art. As we noted in the previous chapter, this construction was the offspring of Euclidean optics, the geometrical analysis of vision or, more specifically, of the visual rays ‘by [whose] agency the images of things are impressed upon the senses’ (p.40). Developed from its classical origins by a succession of Arabic and Scholastic writers during the Middle Ages, the science of optics had hitherto remained entirely disconnected from artistic concerns. It was left to Alberti – following in the footsteps of his contemporary, Brunelleschi – to see how its lessons could be applied to the problem of ordering pictorial space. This marriage of art and science led to the invention of the painter’s perspectiva artificialis, so called to distinguish it from the perspectiva naturalis of optical studies: a set of rules enabling a mathematically exact and rigorously unified depiction of space organized around a single vanishing point. Alberti’s formulation of ‘artificial’ or ‘linear’ perspective acquired canonical status, and it is therefore necessary to familiarize ourselves with its basic conventions before attempting to assess what English artists and beholders made of them.2 Until the early fifteenth century artists had to make do with various empirical techniques for evoking a plausible illusion of depth and volume. Although these methods had gradually been refined in the workshops of Italy and northern Europe, all fell some way short of 32



2

complete mathematical consistency. In De Pictura Alberti proposed a new, scientifically grounded conception of painting that by putting the representation of space on a more systematic footing helped to raise the intellectual and social status of picture-making, rendering it fit to stand alongside the other liberal arts. A painting, he writes, is ‘the intersection of a visual pyramid at a given distance, with a fixed centre and certain position of lights, represented by art with lines and colours on a given surface’ (p.48). According to this model, the picture surface should be construed as a transparent vertical plane through the visual pyramid, the apex of which lies in the artist’s eye and its base in the object seen, while its sides are formed by the visual rays extending in straight lines between them. By tracing the outline made by these rays in their passage through the intersection, it was thus possible to produce a correctly projected image of the object (Plate 1). As a consequence of this simple but revolutionary manoeuvre, the whole of the depicted space was subjugated to the geometrical laws of vision, and the picture itself was transformed into an ‘open window’ through which the beholder looks out at the world of extension beyond. Having established that a grasp of the ‘rudiments’ of plane geometry and optical science is a prerequisite for good painting, Alberti demonstrates how this knowledge can be put into practice. While he omits any explanation of how the methods prescribed follow from his exposition of the visual pyramid, the basic steps are clear enough. They involve drawing a checkerboard floor or pavimento, seen from the front and in profile, that will serve as the framework for a carefully controlled spatial diminution. At every stage, as I remarked earlier, the constructional process is predicated on the beholder’s presence, which supplies the necessary mathematical coordinates for the making of the checkerboard floor. The artist first inscribes a ‘centric’ point (later called the ‘vanishing point’) ‘wherever [he] wish[es]’ in a rectangle taken to represent ‘the open window through which the subject to be painted is seen’ (p.54). This point is used to situate the horizon and as the locus of convergence for all lines at right angles to the picture plane (the orthagonals). It corresponds to the place where the main axis of sight emanating from the eye of the artist or beholder – since, as we shall see, they are closely identified in this construction – strikes the intersection. Alberti stipulates that this point should be located ‘no higher from the base line than the height of the [tallest] man to be represented in the painting’, whose proportions provide the main module for measuring its spatial relationships. ‘For in this way’,



English Beholders and the Art of Perspective 33


he notes, ‘both the viewers and the objects in the painting will seem to be on the same plane’ (p.54), and to share the same eye-level. If this rule is observed, the fictional space of the picture will appear to reach out beyond its frame to encompass the beholder, so accentuating their dependence on each other. The location of the horizontal lines parallel to the picture plane (the transversals) is also calculated by reference to the artist-beholder’s position at a ‘given distance’ from that plane. For where he elects to place himself in relation to the intersection will determine the orientation and degree of spatial recession within the painting. This is done with the aid of a second diagram showing the visual pyramid in side elevation, which allows the intervals between the transversals to be correctly marked off where the lines corresponding to the visual rays cut through the vertical intersection. When the notations obtained from the two drawings are combined, they result in a foreshortened pavimento whose regularly diminishing squares can be used to calculate precisely the relative size, location and distance of objects as they recede from the eye. Whatever their content, the pictured worlds constructed on the basis of such a grid are designed to exude a sense of rational control and proportional harmony. Seen under the right conditions, and once lights and shadows have been added to enhance the illusion of relievo, they will ideally appear indistinguishable from real scenes viewed through real windows. Aside from its scientific exactitude, the great benefit of this centralized perspective scheme, as Alberti conceives it, lies in the order and stability it imposes on the mutable, ambiguous domain of optical phenomena. Describing objects truthfully means attending to the constant alterations brought about in their appearance by changes in the quantity or direction of the light they receive or their position relative to the beholder, as Alberti acknowledges at the start of Book I (pp.39– 40, 44). The important point, though, is that this is treated as no more than a preliminary stage in a selective process designed to screen out all but one of the object’s manifold aspects. Similar ends are served by another Albertian invention, the so-called velo. This was a reticulated net or veil, divided up into ‘parallel square sections’ and placed between the artist’s ‘eye and the object to be represented, so that the visual pyramid passes through the loose weave of the veil’. By looking at the object through this grid from a pre-selected standpoint, the artist was able to fix its contours within the parallels before recording them on a drawing organized into a corresponding system of squares. This process was not simply intended to facilitate the precise



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transcription of appearances; it also helped to arrest or subdue their troublesome permutations, since one of the veil’s ‘many advantages’ cited by Alberti is that ‘it always represents the same surfaces unchanged’ (p.65). A version of the velo was included among the array of perspective instruments illustrated in Dürer’s treatise on measurement (Plate 2), and much the same function was performed by the larger, impressively elaborate machine shown on the cover of this book, which was recommended by Egnatio Danti in his commentary on Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola’s Le due regole della prospettiva pratica (Rome, 1583) over fifty years later. This kind of mechanical device had earned a permanent place in the arsenal of techniques at the artist’s disposal in his campaign to rationalize the depiction of spatial forms and reduce their volatile, illusory effects to ordered consistency. Like the ideal harmony of his historia, similarly conceived as the expression of a divinely instituted order, Alberti’s law-bound, homogeneous space possesses features that clearly mark it out as an imaginary construct.3 The coherence and stability of its visual geometry were achievable only at the cost of prohibiting all movement, whether in the object perceived or in the perceiving subject. To pass for a convincing image of three-dimensional reality, a painting had, according to Alberti’s theory, to be viewed ‘from a certain distance’ and through a single, fixed and immobile eye. The beholder was required, in effect, to insert himself into the same position originally occupied by the artist. Although the premises on which it was based have since been disproven, this precondition was reiterated by later theorists.4 Some went so far as to advocate the use of an eye-piece placed at the correct spot, of the kind seen in the Dürer engraving. These strict viewing conditions gave rise to one of the many paradoxes inherent in the theory of linear perspective. For while the artist is at liberty (within certain limits) to select his own viewpoint, thereafter he and the beholder are obliged to adhere rigidly to the designated place. Or, to put it another way, if the artist has the power, through his arbitrarily chosen position, to determine the spatial configuration of the painting, conversely the resulting optical image specifies the beholder’s viewpoint. In later chapters, this reciprocal process will be explored as an analogue for the way rhetorical discourse operates in relation to the speaker and those to whom it is addressed. Here I am concerned rather with its practical consequences. The conventions of Albertian space meant that it could only come into being by denying the circumstances that obtain in actual, binocular vision, where we are free to look through both eyes, to shift our gaze or move about, thereby opening up a much more fluid





visual field capable of extension in an unlimited number of directions. Ironically, the costruzione leggitima (as this system came to be known) is founded on a recognition of the degree to which visual appearances are contingent upon a particular beholder, yet manages to suppress the relativistic implications of that fact. It evokes the illusion of our shifting, multifaceted world of sight as never before, whilst enclosing this within a single, strictly delimited viewpoint. In so doing, it sacrifices the plurality of aspects and potential viewers implicit in the very notion of perspective to an ideal of uniformity. The costruzione leggitima, as its name suggests, rapidly established itself as the correct method for expressing the third dimension on a flat or curved surface. A knowledge of its conventions became an indispensable tool for every self-respecting artist in Italy and, in due course, across Europe. Meanwhile, its theoretical basis – as expounded in Alberti’s method or in the longer version, reproducing the intersection in full plan and elevation, worked out by Piero della Francesca – was codified and disseminated via a series of treatises published in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.5 Yet while the normative status of this construction was never in question, it is important to recognize that its hegemony was not absolute. It had always coexisted with other spatial systems, which, if they were not absolutely at odds with the orthodox method, did at least offer the artist alternative possibilities. Of these it is only possible here to touch on the two most significant, ‘aerial’ perspective and the ‘tiers point’ method. ‘Aerial’ perspective was based on the observation that as well as diminishing in size in proportion to their distance from the eye, objects gradually lose their colour and their contours become blurred.6 The ‘tiers points’ method, on the other hand, supplemented the central vanishing point of the costruzione leggitima with two ‘distance points’, usually placed on the lateral margins of the painting, which functioned as the point of convergence for lines lying at 45 degrees to its surface. Apart from providing a simpler route to constructing the pavimento, this system encouraged a return to the slanting space and forms set at an oblique angle to the picture plane that had been largely displaced by the frontal, rectilinear compositions favoured by Albertian perspective. There is some evidence to suggest that this spatial formula proved especially popular with northern artists. Dürer apparently employed elements from it for his 1514 engraving of St Jerome in his Study, with its sharply angled forms and plunging orthagonals which recede to a vanishing point eccentrically located on the right-hand margin (Plate 3).7 Although based on a workshop practice current in the Trecento, the



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‘tiers points’ method had to wait until the beginning of the sixteenth century to receive theoretical definition.8 Eventually Vignola would take it upon himself to demonstrate its mathematical soundness and its compatibility with the orthodox construction.9 Not only was the costruzione leggitima merely one of several possible systems for representing space; it was also a set of rules dependent for its practical implementation on the individual artist’s powers of invention and conditioned by the specific task he had in hand. Consequently it was rare, even at first, for these conventions to be dogmatically applied; rather, they were adapted and reinterpreted to suit the requirements of the moment, sometimes in daringly experimental ways.10 In the Cinquecento especially, the interpretive process was carried so far in some cases that Albertian norms were either more or less jettisoned or transformed beyond recognition. In Mannerist paintings, to cite a well known instance, the conventions of deep spatial recession and harmonic proportions are deliberately abandoned in favour of a more compressed pictorial space and gracefully attenuated figures. Artists such as Parmigianino and Pontormo skilfully exploited ambiguities in their handling of these aspects of painting, creating effects that defy translation into a rationally coherent or intelligible visual world. Alberti had treated the proportions of the human figure as a fixed scale by which the relative dimensions of other objects could be precisely measured, reasoning that ‘man is the best known of all things to man’ (p.53). By contrast, in Parmigianino’s Madonna del Collo Luongo (1534 –6) (Plate 4) the fantastically elongated proportions of the Madonna and child do not clarify the spatial relationships of which they are part, but, on the contrary, render them virtually illegible. Our difficulty in making logical sense of this picture is compounded by the abrupt cleavage between the cramped, overpopulated foreground and the twilight depths glimpsed to the right of this, which makes the distance between them impossible to ascertain, the column and the man with the scroll in the background appearing implausibly small in comparison with the towering Madonna. A more insidious challenge to the authority of Albertian perspective arose from some of the novel applications found for it in the course of the century. These usages did not involve a direct violation of the rules of the costruzione leggitima, still respected in essentials, so much as a teasing out of its potentialities. But by manipulating its conventions in extreme and self-consciously playful ways, they tended to destabilize the very system on which such effects depended. This development was bound up with the contemporary fascination with illusionism in





all its forms, as employed in the decoration of ceilings and walls, in the making of scenic designs and optical jeux d’esprit. It was during this period that illusionistic stage scenery – of the type that Inigo Jones would later transplant into the Stuart court masque – was first used for plays and intermezzi at the Italian ducal courts and more permanent theatres such as the Teatro Olimpico at Vincenza.11 Designed in strict accordance with the laws of perspective, such scenery often had to resort to accelerated foreshortening and other optical tricks in order to create the requisite impression of deep space on a shallow stage. The early decades of the century also saw the beginnings of the great era of the illusionist ceiling with its soaring architectural structures seemingly open to the heavens in which swirling figures are suspended. Its inventors – called upon to reorient the picture plane through 90 degrees – became adept at dramatically foreshortening their figures to accommodate the low viewpoint, and at blending fictive with actual architectural settings so that the ceiling surface is dissolved and one cannot tell where reality leaves off and illusion begins. In producing such convincing effects of infinite expanse, they perfected the trompe l’œil realism associated with the costruzione leggitima in ways that Alberti could scarcely have contemplated. But the illusion evoked is even more vulnerable than in conventional perspective paintings, for as soon as the beholder moves away from the predetermined viewpoint, the whole scene begins to distort alarmingly. This was also the case with anamorphic pictures which enjoyed a considerable vogue in Italy and, more especially, the North by the end of the century. 12 Typically, this species of perspectival image presents an indecipherable pattern of distended shapes if looked at from a centralized viewpoint, as Albertian conventions dictate, only assuming its true proportions when viewed from the margins at an angle close to the picture plane. Often dismissed as an ephemeral curiosity or divertissement, illustrating the more bizarre aspects of perspective, it could also generate thoughtprovoking art. One thinks, for example, of Holbein’s Ambassadors (1533) with its famous anamorphic skull, or, in a more light-hearted register, of the Schön engraving discussed in Chapter 5 (Plate 14). All these exaggerated and knowingly unorthodox uses of perspective figure prominently in treatises on the subject published in the second half of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Daniele Barbaro’s La Pratica della perspettiva (Venice, 1569), for instance, includes one of the earliest discussions of the art of anamorphosis, this ‘bella e secreta parte di Perspettiva’, as he calls it.13 It also reproduces the influential engravings of stage designs, based loosely on Vitruvius, for ‘Comical’,



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‘Tragicall’ and ‘Satiricall’ scenes – two of which show illusionistic architectural settings placed on a foreshortened pavimento (Plate 5) – which were originally devised for Sebastiano Serlio’s treatise on architecture. Vignola similarly devotes some attention to anamorphic images as well as offering detailed instruction on painting vaults, considered by him to be the most difficult yet admirable branch of perspective. Both these topics reappear in Gian Paolo Lomazzo’s Trattato dell’arte della pittura, scoltura et architettura (Milan, 1584), which will be examined in the next chapter as an important mediator of Italian aesthetic ideas via Richard Haydocke’s anglicized version of it. Lomazzo’s technical exposition of these and other applied aspects of perspective are largely confined to Book VI of the Trattato, which Haydocke never got around to translating. Yet, as we shall see, his general remarks on perspective in the earlier books reflect the proclivities of his artistic milieu in sanctioning practices that effectively subvert Albertian rules and canonical proportion whilst outwardly conforming to them. Thus the authority of perspectival norms was already being questioned in the format in which they were transmitted to English readers and to English artists, who, for their own reasons, would find them difficult to comply with. The multiple forms perspective might take and the different uses to which it was put support the line taken by a number of recent analysts who argue that, for all its historical dominance, the Albertian model was not a seamless whole, any more than it precluded the formation of alternative visual economies within Western culture.14 Svetlana Alpers, for example, has shown how seventeenth-century Dutch art assumes a very different mode of describing space, in which the framed prospect seen at a distance from a specified viewpoint is replaced by a panoramic aggregate of views which stand in for the (mobile) eye itself – a perspectival treatment conceived by analogy not with the open window but with the camera obscura and the map.15 Differences within the orthodox system were also brought into play when it came into contact with cultural contexts beyond the boundaries of its native Italy. Reviewing the dissemination and adoption of linear perspective across northern Europe, Martin Kemp observes that in the case of artists like Dürer we will not simply be witnessing a passive acceptance of Italian ideas. The way in which perspective became creatively transmogrified as it travelled Europe is partly a consequence of the possibilities it offered to artists of high intellect and individuality, but also reflects the position of perspective as a new citizen in an adopted




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Kemp is thinking here chiefly of Germany and France, but his remarks apply with equal force to the importation of perspective into English visual culture. Indeed, it may be argued that the process of creative transformation he describes is more obviously exemplified in the case of England, which was slower and altogether less eager to appropriate perspective than its continental neighbours and where it remained in many respects an alien discourse well into the seventeenth century. In the following pages, I shall consider the English reception of this pictorial technique, examining the ways in which its conventions were modified in practice and its meaning differently inflected in their new adoptive context. This will lead me to speculate about the qualities it came to embody in the minds of indigenous artists and, no less importantly for our purposes, of English writers – qualities that Shakespeare was able to harness for his own imaginative ends. Any attempt to define the place occupied by perspective in English visual culture at the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth must confront certain problems. To start with, the nature and degree of its importance for English artists and beholders are not self-evident but, on the contrary, need to be carefully established. One might reasonably ask just how relevant the concept of perspective was to a culture in which it made such a belated appearance and with whose native artistic traditions it was conspicuously at odds – a culture whose very participation in an Italian-style Renaissance has been seen by some as open to dispute.17 Painting was still widely regarded as a mere craft, and not a prestigious one at that.18 Moreover the period from 1590 to 1613, during which Shakespeare’s plays were written, was, from an art historical standpoint, a transitional phase that tended, Janus-like, to look as much to the past as to the future, and hence is one that does not lend itself to easy summarization. In speaking of contemporaneous developments in the visual arts, we often find ourselves obliged to proceed by means of qualifications, by statement and counterstatement. In this respect the map of the period handed down by Roy Strong and others, according to which the ignorance of continental aesthetic conventions prevailing under Elizabeth I abruptly gave way to the ‘revolution in visual perception’ ushered in by the Stuarts, proves unhelpfully schematic.19 As I shall try to show, the reception of perspective, in both theoretical and



country – naturalised to a degree, but still speaking with a foreign accent, for the first generation at least … In its new country, a certain strangeness tends to persist.16

practical contexts, was a more complex and chequered affair than this narrative suggests. If its intellectual rigour and powerful mimetic effects were enthusiastically embraced in some instances, they were disregarded or rejected in others. Indeed, acceptance and resistance can be hard to disentangle in the case of a picture by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger or the attitude of an artist such as Nicholas Hilliard or Henry Peacham. And even where the desire to assimilate this new technique is clearly paramount, its meaning and function are necessarily altered through contact with a foreign environment in ways that make Albertian norms, in their pure, originary form, largely inapplicable. Even once absorbed and domesticated, perspective retained its foreign accent. The question of relevance is posed most strongly by Elizabethan portraiture, notoriously lacking as it is in perspective, chiaroscuro, corporeal modelling and other illusionistic devices that had for so long been an integral part of the continental aesthetic tradition.20 In these portaits – which make up the bulk of artistic production in the period – figures tend to be represented as flat icons posed stiffly against a plain background or in a restricted space minimally defined by a few simple props. The emphasis falls on colour and linear patterning at the expense of any evocation of solid, three-dimensional bodies or attempt to create a convincing architectural setting. The purposes which shaped the making of such images were an additional factor militating against illusionism, in that their primary function was to express the subject’s social role, office, status and lineage rather than to record the quirks of an individual appearance or personality; as David Evett puts it, ‘their emblematic or iconic nature, calling up the role, the idea, more than the person, pulls the quality of the painting away from naturalism and hence away from naturalistic devices like perspective’.21 The ambition to produce a lifelike image seems largely to have been confined to what Alpers, speaking of Dutch painting, calls ‘descriptive presence’, or the precise rendering of surfaces. In English portraits of the period this is ostentatiously expressed by a delight in capturing the minutest details of costume: the texture of expensive fabrics, the light glancing off pearls, jewellery and armour, the intricacies of ruffs, lace and embroidery. Attention to surfaces was reinforced by the practice of superimposing on the actual picture plane heraldic devices or various types of inscription recording the date, the sitter’s age and identity, and even, on occasion, mottos and commemorative verses. Any impulse to read this plane as a window giving onto a world of infinite spatial extension was thus well and truly quashed. A more





appropriate paradigm for these portraits is, in fact, to be found in the medieval concept of painting as ‘a material surface covered with lines and colors which could be interpreted as tokens or symbols of threedimensional objects’.22 The Queen’s official portraits are the purest embodiment of this formal, decorative and two-dimensional style, her favourite miniaturist, Nicholas Hilliard, its chief exponent. Their famous exchange concerning artistic matters, recorded some thirty years after the event in Hilliard’s Arte of Limning (c.1600), has often been cited as a quintessential expression of late Elizabethan tastes in affirming the shared preference of the Queen and her limner for a linear style that eschews heavy shadowing. It is worth noting, however, that the details of their conversation reveal this preference to be something more than ignorant prejudice. The Queen, remarking on ‘the great difference of shadowing in the works … of sundry nations, and that the Italians, who had the name to be cunningest and to draw best, shadowed not’, wishes to know the reasons for this. Hilliard explains that while some painters prefer to work with a restricted light source in order to make ‘the work emboss well [appear in strong relief], and show very well afar off’, such use of ‘hard shadows’ is more suited to ‘story work’ – to an historia or narrative painting – than it is to miniatures, which are to be ‘viewed of necessity in hand near unto the eye’.23 Theirs is clearly an informed choice based on an awareness of stylistic alternatives as articulating national differences, and of what is distinctive about the English visual tradition and its peculiar product, the miniature. Hilliard’s views on perspective are, by contrast, impossible to pin down. He deplores the ‘disproportion and false perspective’ that mars ‘much fair work’, no doubt with their botched handling by native ‘artificers’ in mind (p.85), and explicitly defers to Lomazzo – on whom he draws via Haydocke’s translation – over the importance of understanding the rules of perspective, conceived as a science of visual measurement (p.71). Yet, as will become apparent when we take a closer look at his Arte of Limning in Chapter 3, he not only transposes Lomazzo’s definition into an alien and unmistakably English idiom, but refuses to be bound by the authority of rule and rational system implicit in that definition. To add to the confusion, his incidental remarks on perspective reduce it to a rough-and-ready practical device for obtaining a lifelike appearance: as the position is, or the drawer placed according to art, the furthest eye from the drawer must be a little higher than the hithermost,



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We are transported back to a pre-Albertian world of craft-based, empirical knowledge.24 As in his writings, so in his practice Hilliard’s response to the perspective techniques he must have encountered during his two-year sojourn in France was highly selective and non-committal.25 His portraits are invariably oriented towards the surface, his figures flattened out by the minimal use of shadow. In general, too, he avoids the use of any particularized spatial setting. One interesting exception is his large-scale miniature of the courtier and soldier, Sir Anthony Mildmay (Plate 6), represented in his tent surrounded by the paraphenalia of the Accession Day tilts. Perspective is used here locally and after a rudimentary fashion for the foreshortening of particular objects, such as the trunk on the far right, rather then being applied systematically as a means of organizing and unifying the whole picture plane. Optical logic has in fact been made to bow to expressive considerations; while the figure of Mildmay, with its gracefully elongated legs familiar from other Hilliard portraits, is viewed straight on, the ground plane is tilted towards us at an incredible angle so that the military accoutrements betokening his participation in these neochivalric games – his gauntlet, lance and plumed helmet – and, by extension, his status as a favoured courtier are displayed to maximum advantage. Little attempt has been made to disguise the resulting spatial inconsistencies. Sir Antony looks out at us, engaging us in a brief moment of intimacy, but the beholder is in no sense positioned or defined by the spatial organization of the picture.26 Indeed, as Clark Hulse has pointed out, the specific qualities of the miniature precluded any such mathematical relationship by destroying the symmetry between the artist’s and the beholder’s viewpoints posited by Alberti; painted at a distance of around six or seven feet, it was made to be viewed ‘in hand near unto the eye’.27 This relative indifference to perspective on the part of native practitioners was, to some extent, offset by the availability of continental models. Access to this alternative illusionistic tradition was, however, restricted in various ways. The Reformation had curtailed cultural traffic with Italy and inhibited any serious attention being paid to its art,



because of the perspective, if the drawer sit any deal higher than the party drawn; but if lower, then the further eye must be a little lower; if level, then to be of one height. So shall the work by well placing and true doing of the eye have great life. (p.79)


which, of course, dealt overwhelmingly with religious subjects. Only the privileged few had the opportunity to become acquainted with this art in situ, at a time, moreover, when the continental grand tour had not yet become an obligatory rite of passage for young aristocrats. On the other hand, from the 1530s, when Holbein’s services were engaged by Henry VIII, English visual culture was periodically enriched by the immigration of foreign artists, many of them Flemish and Dutch Protestants fleeing religious persecution.28 They brought with them their own style of substantial bourgeois naturalism, still clearly identifiable in the work of a Hans Eworth or a Cornelius Ketel, despite the pressures they were under to accommodate this style to the prevailing English taste for linear flatness and iconic formality. Works by foreign artists, both Italian and Flemish, are also known to have formed part of the extensive picture collections assembled by the Earl of Leicester, Lord Lumley and a handful of other noblemen who were the precursors of the great aristocratic collectors of the Caroline era.29 More difficult to assess is how far this interest in acquiring paintings by foreign as well as indigenous artists filtered down the social scale. In his epistle to the reader, Haydocke refers to an appreciation for well executed pictures shown by ‘divers private Gentlemen’ as well as ‘some of our Nobility’, and a desire to procure them at any cost, ‘as may appeare, by their Galleries carefully furnished, with the excellent monuments of sundry famous ancient Masters, both Italian and Germane’. But in almost the same breath he, like Peacham later, laments the lack of informed patronage and the low esteem in which painting is generally held in England.30 One way in which examples of Italian and Flemish art could have come within the purview of a broader section of society was through printed engravings; and, although facts are notoriously hard to come by in this area, Antony Wells-Cole’s recent book, showing how pervasive the impact of European prints was on the decorative arts, has established that the market in this kind of commodity expanded dramatically during Elizabeth’s reign.31 The cumulative evidence – sketchy as it is, and indeed contradictory in places – suggests that by the 1590s English men and women were beginning to acquire some knowledge of, and a taste for, works of art in what might be called the scientifically naturalistic mode. This increasing familiarity with illusionistic art was reflected in a corresponding growth in the number of allusions to linear perspective in the literature of the period. Lucy Gent has documented the intellectual curiosity and excitement with which many of the foremost writers of the day – including Shakespeare, Jonson, Chapman and



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Drayton – responded to what were, for them and their generation, the new-fangled devices of perspective and chiaroscuro.32 As she also notes, however, this newly awakened interest was not accompanied by or grounded in a working definition of perspective, a fact that she puts down to the absence in England of any extensive experience of continental art and, by extension, of a specialized artistic vocabulary adequate to deal with such sophisticated concepts. There were exceptions of course – men who lacked neither the education nor the appropriate discourse to discuss the theoretical principles involved. One such was John Dee, who, in his preface to Henry Billingsley’s translation of Euclid’s Elements (1570), defines drawing (or ‘Zographie’, as he calls it) in language that may, for the first time, be said to be truly Albertian (he owned a copy of De Pictura along with other works on perspective and architecture). A knowledge of geometry, arithmetic, perspective and proportion is, he declares, indispensable to the practice of ‘Zographie’, an Arte Mathematicall, which teacheth and demonstrateth, how the Intersection of all visuall Pyramides, made by any playne assigned, (the Centre, distance, and lightes beyng determined) may be, by lynes, and due propre colours, represented.33 But it was primarily as a graphic technique suited to a range of scientific purposes that perspective interested Dee, not as an artistic tool. He regarded the painter, for all his marvellous skill, as merely the mechanical executor of the draughtsman’s theoretical knowledge (‘but the propre Mechanicien, & Imitator sensible, of the Zographer’). In this, he was carrying on an English tradition of valuing perspective for its mathematical basis and its practical utility in matters of building, fortification, surveying, astronomy, ‘and topographie’, rather than for its association with the fine arts.34 The existence of such a tradition may account for the large number of perspective treatises to be found in surviving library inventories dating from around this time.35 It may also help to explain why the presence of these treatises, like Dee’s precocious definition, appears to have had remarkably little impact on the development of English aesthetic discourse. Untutored in the niceties of the intersection, the visual pyramid and light rays, the average Englishman could offer only impressionistic descriptions of perspective, emphasizing not its underlying scientific rationale but its powerful and wondrous effects. Poetic testimony to the sense of astonishment aroused in the beholder by the new illusionist technology is supplied, for example, by a passage in Drayton’s




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Large galleries, where piece with piece doth seeme to strive, Of pictures done to life, landskip, and perspective, Thence goodly gardens sees, where antique statues stand In stone and copper, cut by many a skilfull hand, Where every thing to gaze, her more and more entices, Thinking at once shee sees a thousand paradices … 36 For a poet, this lack of technical expertize did not necessarily constitute a handicap – he was not, after all, being called upon to execute a painting. What mattered to him, we may suppose, were the imaginative possibilities opened up by this ‘curious’ (in the sense of being both ‘ingenious’ and ‘strange’) device. And exposure to its miraculous effects was less likely to impel him to labour over the rules of perspective, than, as I argue in this book, to stimulate him into pondering its broader artistic implications and how they might be translated into his own rhetorical medium – whether through the sorts of ekphrastic technique employed by Drayton or by some other means. After the Stuart succession more determined and systematic attempts were made to get to grips with the theoretical basis of perspective. Haydocke’s 1598 translation of Lomazzo paved the way for other publications in this area, while the work of several painters and the stage sets devised by Inigo Jones for the court masque point to the emergence of a stronger, more self-conscious feeling for spatial depth and order. Much of this activity centred on Prince Henry, who, from 1610 until his premature death in 1612, endeavoured to build a continental-style court around him. One of a new breed of discerning art collectors, he dispensed artistic patronage on a broad scale and took an active interest in things scientific.37 According to the French architect and garden designer, Salomon de Caus, who was employed by the Prince on the refurbishment of Richmond palace during this period, he instructed his royal patron in the art of perspective for two or three years – a truly remarkable development, considering that drawing was still viewed in some quarters as a manual skill unworthy to be included in a gentleman’s education.38 It was to Prince Henry that De Caus dedicated La Perspective avec la Raison des Ombres et Miroirs (London, 1612), signed by him from ‘vostre maison de Richemont



Poly-Olbion (1612), where the river Soare is likened, somewhat improbably, to a maiden entering a richly furnished prince’s court where she ‘amazed is to see’

le premier jour d’Octobre, 1611’. The first text specifically devoted to this subject to be published in England, it runs through the standard topoi of late Renaissance art treatises, not omitting the more ‘extravagant’ uses of perspective for anamorphic images, the trompe l’œil decoration of galleries and garden walls, and catoptrics (mirror illusions), in addition to instructing the reader on how to foreshorten various regular forms of increasing complexity and shadow them correctly.39 Henry’s personal interest in artistic as well as scientific applications of perspective can also be seen as a motivating force behind at least two other publications of this period. The preface to the translation of Serlio’s Il Primo libro d’architettura (London, 1611), commissioned by his Serjeant-Painter, Robert Peake, and dedicated once again to the Prince, makes a pointed allusion to the latter’s training in ‘all excellent sciences’. Five years earlier, the first English handbook on drawing as a gentlemanly pursuit – with chapters on foreshortening, aerial perspective and ‘Landtskip’ – had been put together by Henry Peacham the Younger, who became a member of the Prince’s court (albeit in a rather peripheral capacity) and a popularizer of its aesthetic ideals.40 An expanded and revised version of his Art of Drawing with a Pen (London, 1606) was brought out in 1612 – given impetus perhaps by Peacham’s involvement with Henry’s circle – under the title of Graphice or The Gentlemans Exercise, in which the discussion of perspective is not only amplified but noticeably more technical and better informed. Peacham even promises his readers ‘a discourse of perspective I will shortly publish’, though it appears never to have seen the light of day. These texts are worth pausing over for what they reveal about the changing, yet still uncertain, attitudes to perspective emanating from the court of this ambitious young prince. In his dedicatory epistle to the ‘Serenissime Prince’, De Caus explains that what prompted him to convert his royal lessons into printed form is English ignorance on this important topic, ‘d’aultant qu’il me semble que ceste science n’a encores esté bien demonstrée en icelle la[n]gue: car ce qui en a esté fait jusques à present, n’a esté demonstré par auculne raison’. The lack of any real grasp of the theoretical principles underpinning perspective had clearly not escaped De Caus’s notice, and he feels it incumbent on him, as a foreigner versed in such matters, to insist that a knowledge of this mathematical science ‘est tant necessaire, qu’il est mal aise d’ordonner bien les ouvrages tant d’Architecture que de peinture, que l’on n’en aye quelque cognoissance’. Robert Peake similarly sees himself as repairing this deficiency




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to benefite the Publicke; and convay unto my Countrymen (especially Architects and Artificers of all sorts) these Necessary, Certaine, and most ready Helps of Geometrie: The ignorance and want whereof, in times past (in most parts of this Kingdome) hath left us many lame Workes, with shame of many Workemen; which, for the future, the Knowledge and use of these Instructions shall happily prevent.41 Nevertheless Peake is well aware that, however strong his own conversion to the cause, his compatriots may not be so receptive to the message that some training in the mathematical principles of art is both ‘needfull and necessary’. For he goes on to relate how he was almost prevented from publishing the first two books on geometry and perspective by ‘sundry friends and workemen’, who tried to dissuade him from his plan, The which I had surely effected, if I had been over-ruled by their requests and perswasions; alleadging strong reasons, that the Common Workemen of our time little regarded or esteemed to Worke with right Simmetrie: the which is confused and erronious, in the judgement of the learned Architect.42 This discouraging attitude provides a context for the strikingly defensive posture adopted by Peake, as he justifies his part in the publication of Serlio as being for the ‘common good’ and urges the ‘Artificers of our Nation’ to let themselves ‘be perswaded that who so shall follow these rules hereafter set downe, shall not onely have his Worke well esteemed of the common people, but also generally commended and applauded of all workemen, and men of judgement’.43 As Peake realizes, the ‘subtill and ingenious Arte of Perspective’ is in contention with the habits of English artists who, accustomed as they are to ‘following after their owne minde’ and to ‘work[ing] without rule or reason’, are unlikely to submit readily to its authority.44 Analogous tensions are discernible just beneath the surface of Peacham’s Art of Drawing. Like Peake, he deplores the ineptitude of his countrymen in matters of foreshortening, which ‘kind of draught is willingly overslipt by ordinary painters for want of cunning and skill to performe it’, and he catalogues at length the ‘notable absurdities’ into



in learning and its damaging effects on English artistic practice. His purpose in publishing Serlio’s work is, he says,


as in discerning a building 10 or 12 miles off, I cannot tell whether it bee Church, Castle, gentlemans house, or the like: So that in drawing of it I must expresse no particular signe as bell, portculleis &c, but shew it as weakly and as faintly as mine eie judgeth of it, because all those particulars are taken away by the greatnes of the distance. I have seen a man painted comming downe a hill some mile and a halfe from mee, as I judged by the Landtskip, yet might you have told all the buttons of his dublet. (p.30) But if Peacham is convinced of the need for the discipline imposed by perspective rules, he also makes it clear that this is to be the final stage of a programme of self-training in draughtsmanship shaped by very different aesthetic principles. The amateur artist is advised to start by practising how to improve his sketch ‘according to that Idea you carrie in your mind, in the generall proportion … using no rule or compasse at all but your own judgement in mending every fault lightly, and with a quick hand’ (pp.15–16).46 Only when he has learnt to draw without the benefit of measurement and rules should he think of meddling with perspective. A knowledge of geometry turns out, in actuality, to be less essential to Peacham’s scheme for becoming proficient in this art than ‘a prety fantastical head’, native wit and ‘co[n]tinuall practise’ (p.3). Two antithetical sets of values collide here – one founded on the authority of ‘rule and reason’, the other on whimsical invention and intuitive judgement, for which, inasmuch as it prides itself on an ability to dispense with rules, such learning is a superfluous and unwelcome encumberance – and each is subtly altered by its conjunction with the other. At around the same time that these writers were proselytizing on behalf of perspective as a form of scientific ratio guaranteeing the truthfulness of the visual image and the intellectual (and, by implication, social) respectability of the artist, it began to insinuate itself into English painting. This was largely due to the exertions of a small group of artists, including Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, Isaac Oliver and Inigo Jones. Each was exposed to wider continental influences, and their compositions consequently display a much greater degree of spatial control than their predecessors had been capable of. And here too, Prince Henry’s inspirational presence and patronage seem to have acted as a spur to artistic developments. Oliver and Jones, both



which this has betrayed them.45 He too feels obliged by the unfamiliarity of his subject to explain the basic laws of optical diminution:


of whom had travelled extensively on the continent by the end of Elizabeth’s reign and were entirely at ease in their handling of European stylistic conventions, entered the Prince’s service in 1610, having previously been patronized by his mother, Anne of Denmark.47 Of the two, Oliver is the more obscure figure. A Frenchman by birth, he is believed to have received his early artistic training as a subject painter abroad before becoming a pupil of Hilliard’s. From the first, his style reflected a ‘totally different aesthetic viewpoint’ from that of his tutor, and was apparently more in tune with – as it must have helped to fashion – changing tastes, for he had supplanted Hilliard as premier court miniaturist by the end of the century.48 Dramatic chiaroscuro is used in all his miniatures to give definition and depth to the human face and figure, while many of his larger compositions employ meticulously constructed landscape or architectural settings. His portrait of the three Browne brothers (1598) (Plate 7), for example, reveals a much firmer grasp of perspective than Hilliard’s comparable miniature of Sir Anthony Mildmay. The spatial layout of the room with its correctly receding wooden floor is free from incongruity, while the shadows cast by the intertwined figures help to locate precisely their relative positions. Oliver broke even more radically with Elizabethan pictorial conventions in a series of demonstration pieces, comprising both finished drawings and subject miniatures, dating from the mid-1580s onwards. Presenting a synoptic synthesis of the various Mannerist styles then fashionable on the continent, these self-consciously virtuosic works realised more fully than anything yet produced in England the Italianate concepts of disegno and the historia. Their impact on popular aesthetic assumptions is likely to have been negligible, however, if, as conjectured, they were made for a small, sophisticated group of connoisseurs, who alone would have been qualified to appreciate their pastiche of foreign art.49 Through his scenic designs Inigo Jones was able to introduce this art and its illusionistic vocabulary to a wider audience, though we should bear in mind that spectatorship of the masques was still restricted to court circles. For Jones, masques were famously ‘nothing else but pictures with light and motion’, and he treated them accordingly.50 Perspective scenery was already an essential feature of his first excursion in the genre, The Masque of Blacknesse, staged in the Banqueting House at Whitehall in 1605, as is clear from the account given by his collaborator, Ben Jonson. The astonished spectators, Jonson records, were treated to the vision of what appeared to be a vast sea (and united with this that flowed forth) from the termination, or horizon of which (being the levell of State, which was placed



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Over the next three decades, Jones would exploit his position as designer of the annual court masque to create a sequence of deep architectural and landscape vistas with the help of assorted scenic machines, painted stage flats and a raked stage.52 The proficiency and inventiveness he brought to the making of these ‘stage pictures’ may be gauged from the surviving designs (see Plate 16). For the first time an English audience was being asked to look through the picture frame of the proscenium arch into an optically coherent and credible world of make-believe. And, for the first time also in the nation’s cultural history, the beholder’s location was exactly defined, since the ‘lines of Prospective’ were made to converge on the eye of the monarch, whose chair of state was always placed at the optimum viewpoint. There can be little doubt that this (for the English) extraordinary viewing experience gradually altered visual expectations, ‘condition[ing] the taste of the new generation to look in terms of aesthetic depth’.53 Indeed, John Peacock has argued that the designs for these masques – which, like Oliver’s demonstration pieces, drew upon a vast array of European artistic sources – were part of a sustained and programmatic attempt by Jones to educate his countrymen in the ‘whole repertory of images, styles and visual conventions which had long been established on the continent … in what looks like a project to naturalise Renaissance art in England once for all’.54 But, if such was Jones’s intention, it was destined to be only partially fulfilled. The ‘revolution in visual perception’ inaugurated by him and a handful of other artists was, like most revolutions, a patchy business that encountered resistances and setbacks even among the elite social circles to which it was initially confined. Jones’s stage designs assumed a degree of familiarity with perspective norms and the visual language to which they belonged that his audiences did not always possess. As Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong remind us, the effectiveness of Jones’s perspective scenery lay less in its naturalism than in its power to project something that was recognised to be an illusion. For such an effect to be successful, a certain sophistication is required of the viewer’s perception as well as of the designer’s skill: one must learn not only how to devise



in the upper end of the hall) was drawne by the lines of Prospective, the whole worke shooting downewards from the eye; which decorum made it more conspicuous, and caught the eye a farre off with a wandring beauty. To which was added an obscure and cloudy night piece, that made the whole set of.51


perspective scenes but also how to read them. Straight lines on a page moving upward and converging will appear to recede to a vanishing point only if we have learned the rules for translating three-dimensional images into two dimensions, and back again … The evidence indicates that Jones had to deal with an untrained audience who were not, moreover, quick learners.55 That Dudley Carleton found the set for the ground-breaking Masque of Blacknesse puzzling is understandable; it is more startling that thirty years later at least one spectator lacked the requisite visual knowledge to interpret another of Jones’s designs correctly.56 Owing perhaps to the slowness of English beholders to assimilate perspective conventions, Jones’s brilliant scenic effects regularly found a more appreciative audience among foreign visitors and ambassadors accustomed to watching the intermezzi or comparable court festivals. Outside the enclosed world of Whitehall, moreover, it continued or was rare for artists to use perspective consistently as a way of rationalizing and unifying the whole of the pictured space. The founding Albertian metaphor of the painting as a window onto another world is rigorously enacted only in Jones’s designs, and his most ambitious perspectival illusions were not created until after his second trip to Italy in 1613–14. Undoubtedly the representation of space did become more widespread and more skilful from the 1590s onwards, even among artists who had no direct contact with the court. But, as might be expected given the idiosyncratic responses to perspective I have been outlining, it tended or was interpreted in a wayward or unorthodox fashion, or was adapted to and intermixed with existing traditions. This is very much in keeping with what happened to other Italianate or classical features introduced into English visual culture during this period.57 For, as recent work on the subject has shown, the vernacular culture was distinguished by its fluidity and heterogeneity, its capacity to accommodate radically different methods of ordering and imaging visual reality with no outward sense of strain.58 To test how far this description of English artistic practice is applicable to the treatment of space in the early seventeenth century, I propose to consider briefly the ways perspective, as a function of landscape, intersects with other kinds of pictorial convention in the work of two artists considered to be key players in the English aesthetic revolution, Robert Peake and Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger. I shall conclude with some reflections on what can be inferred about Shakespeare’s own attitude to perspective and how this compares with the artistic practices of his contemporaries.



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The turn of the century saw the emergence of a new vogue for representing figures in or projected against an outdoor setting, reflected in portraits from around this time which ‘begin, fairly routinely, to show glimpses of landscapes through open doors or windows’.59 ‘Landtskip’ itself was still an unfamiliar word and an unfamiliar concept for the English.60 Peacham’s Art of Drawing includes one of the first detailed discussions of the genre. He treats it as a major branch of perspective and expatiates appreciatively on the subtle optical effects of which it is capable, though its importance for him remains secondary, as ‘seldome it is drawne by it selfe, but in respect & for the sake of some thing els’.61 Predictably, the same artists who were most innovative in their handling of space in general also led the way in exploring the potentialities of landscape. Isaac Oliver and Inigo Jones both made sophisticated use of it. A more interesting because altogether more liminal case is the later work of Robert Peake, whom we have already encountered as the sponsor of a translation of Serlio and a would-be disciple of the new art of perspective. Although sometimes rated (rather unfairly) as a dull and incompetent artist, Peake clearly made valiant efforts to keep abreast of changing fashions in this and other fields. This is illustrated by two formally experimental portraits he painted of Prince Henry in a landscape setting. The earlier of these (Plate 8), dated 1603, shows the Prince and his young companion at hunt, situated on high ground alongside the body of the stag they have just killed, with a pleasantly wooded landscape, through which runs a river with a bridge, falling away behind them. Despite the compression of the foregound, Peake has succeeded in creating a fair sense of spatial recession through the use of overlapping forms, so that the foreshortened body of the stag, the Prince, his dog, horse and groom (each partially occluding the other) appear to occupy distinct yet contiguous planes. The landscape is also competently managed in perspectival terms, the diminishing line of trees conducting the eye inwards to the vanishing point in the distant hills. Structurally, however, the Prince and his companions seem to inhabit a separate world. Confined to their narrow strip of foreground, they are prevented from interacting with their surroundings, which (as Peacham implied) function merely as a decorative adjunct to the main subject. As in so many previous English paintings, that is, the figures appear to stand in front of space rather than in it. And, notwithstanding the attempt to convey movement in the slight twisting of the Prince’s body as he sheathes his sword, the overall effect remains static and two-dimensional in a manner reminiscent of an earlier tradition. The most persuasive





explanation for the conflicting impressions of superficiality and depth evoked by this portrait has been proposed by Ellen Chirelstein. Its oddly unrealistic venture into visual realism, she suggests, was inspired by Inigo Jones’s use of painted flats arranged sequentially to form an illusionistic backdrop for the shallow masquing stage on which the courtiers acted out their parts.62 Tradition and innovation, the spatially obsolete and the new, confront each other in less conspicuous ways in the portrait of Captain Thomas Lee (1594) by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger (Plate 9).63 Gheeraerts’s image of this ambitious soldier of fortune – an elaborate exercise in self-fashioning on Lee’s part, intended to further his bid to become chief negotiator between the English crown and rebellious Irish lords – is, optically speaking, quite refined.64 Lee stands unambiguously in space, even though not engaging directly with his environment. Aerial perspective has been sensitively used to describe the mountain range viewed in the far distance to his left, while the grove on the right, with its curved line of tree trunks and subtle gradations of light and shade, maintains the feeling of continuity between foreground and background. For all its naturalistic effect, however, the landscape is primarily symbolic in function; its details signify in ways that are meant to contribute to the complex political and iconographic programme behind the portrait. The mountainous terrain refers to Lee’s service in Ireland, while his bare legs and chest figure him as an Irish foot soldier or Kerne. Similarly, the oak tree beneath which he shelters is a traditional emblem of constancy, recalling here the personal motto of his influential kinsman and protector, Sir Henry Lee (‘Fide et constantia’). True, the use of emblematic imagery – so fundamental to the language of Tudor portraiture in general – is not inherently incompatible with a high standard of illusionism, as Gheeraerts’s picture demonstrates. Yet insofar as it elicits a different sort of attention, inviting the beholder to work at decoding the meaning of the image rather than dwell on its mimetic properties, it tended to operate as a reactionary force within English visual culture.65 This retrogressive emphasis on verbal meaning at the expense of more purely visual qualities is compounded, in the portrait, by the use of inscriptions; the one to the right of the figure recording his age and the date, the other (to the left) a quotation from Livy’s History of Rome epitomizing the heroism of Gaius Mucius Scaevola, the Roman soldier upon whom Lee modelled himself. Outmoded conventions are also brought into play by the concern with superficial detail – evident in the rendering of Lee’s exquisitely embroidered shirt and lace collar, the wrought surface of gun and



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helmet – which contrasts with the volumetrically conceived figure and sturdy white legs. As with the inscriptions, the inclusion of such details attaches the beholder’s eye to the picture surface, disrupting the movement into space urged by the landscape. The different conceptions of painting and its relationship to the third dimension engaged here, and the different artistic idioms through which they are articulated, are much more smoothly integrated than in the Peake portrait. Yet they are there to be activated by the viewing process, a latent source of tension. The spatial dissonances in these portraits by two of the most avantgarde painters working in England at the turn of the century call attention to the coexistence of different visual economies within the vernacular culture. Because of this, they can help us to see why it was that perspective, even when enthusiastically adopted by English artists, could not remain its original self. This imaginative pluralism, and the inability to conform fully to Albertian conventions that went with it, has often been deplored as a sign of English conservatism, a benighted tardiness in appreciating and assimilating the artistic achievements of the Italian Renaissance. Seen from another standpoint, however, it had certain benefits. In particular, it allowed native artists to approach linear perspective with an unusual degree of latitude, modifying or deviating from its rules at will – not, like their Italian counterparts, out of a desire to subvert long established norms (with which, as we have seen, they were not yet familiar), so much as from an apparent aversion to being bound by any rigid theoretical system. This seems to have been the case not just for English artists but for English writers too, who, as we noted earlier, took a keen interest in perspective. Shakespeare was the most deeply responsive to this device, the quickest to see that ‘perspective it is best painter’s art’ (Sonnet 24), and to explore its significance in the context of his own. His allusions to perspective span virtually his whole career, beginning with the trickery of anamorphic images in Richard II (II.2.14 –27), Henry V (V.2.20 –23), Twelfth Night (V.1.216–17), and All’s Well That Ends Well (V.3.47–52), and progressing to more nuanced descriptions of the spatial diminution of objects as they recede from the eye in landscape settings, of the type found in Edgar’s cliff-top speech in King Lear (IV.6.11–24) and in Cymbeline (I.3.14 –22, III.3.10 –15).66 Arguably, his involvement went much further than these local references, significant as they are in themselves. I would suggest that it fed into and helped to sharpen and define the already deeply rooted preoccupation with questions of viewpoint that informs all his work. Consistently in his writings, perspective is





associated with, and can function as a metaphor for, the relativity of human perception and of the cultural value-systems by which it is shaped, a relativity that is shown to be equally conducive to selfdelusion and conflict. This alerts us to the most obvious way in which Shakespearean versions of perspective diverge from Albertian norms. As a dramatist, he is necessarily concerned with multiple and conflicting points of view, rather than with the single, restrictively monocular focus of the costruzione leggitima – even when attempting to evoke something like a community of vision, as we have seen him do in As You Like It. Hence, his tendency is to emphasize the relativistic and subjective qualities of perspective over against its claims to scientific objectivity, reversing Alberti’s hierarchy. Another, more far-reaching way in which Shakespeare transforms the orthodox system is by not identifying perspective exclusively with the values of rationality, rule, measure and decorum; instead he extends its connotative range by employing it also as a vehicle for imaginative ways of seeing that are apt to exceed and destabilize such laws. Thus we shall discover that, rather like the Peake and Gheeraerts portraits examined above, two of his later plays incorporate fundamentally different visual economies that are, as it were, in competition for the same space. Antony and Cleopatra pits a Roman society that professes to live strictly by rule and reason against the fantastic world of the lovers, where everything ‘o’erflows the measure’ and proportions become infinitely manipulable. And likewise The Tempest dramatizes Prospero’s ambition, as an Inigo Jones-like figure, to impose his single, authoritarian perspective on others and its undoing by Caliban, whose physical deformities are more redolent of the grotesque, and whose distinctive mode of vision offers a very different kind of knowledge of the isle. The next chapter asks what factors made it possible for Shakespeare to experiment with translating the essentially visual phenomenon of perspective into the rhetorical (and dramatic) language of his own medium. As we shall see, the key to this conversion process was the discourse of ut pictura poesis. In addition to supplying a system of ready-made correspondences between the visual and verbal arts, it also invested their interchanges with a complex set of associations that would condition and enrich discussion of perspective on both sides of the Alps.



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Ut Pictura Poesis and the Rhetoric of Perspective

Reading As You Like It through the lens of Alberti’s pioneering treatise on painting and the interest in copious invention it shares with Shakespeare’s comedy has shown us that language has the capacity to function as a mode of seeing, that rhetorical devices embody and produce a particular viewpoint on the world. But precisely how may language be said to constitute a potential analogue or substitute for visual perspective? The answer to this problem must be sought in the commonalities forged between the verbal and visual arts by the venerable doctrine of ut pictura poesis. Ingeniously spun from Pliny’s anecdotes regarding famous artists of antiquity and some incidental remarks in Aristotle, Horace, Quintilian and Plutarch likening poetry to painting, this discourse evolved in the sixteenth century into a formalized body of commonplaces to which both writers and artists might resort. Its deepest roots, however, lay in the rhetorical system itself. By developing a critical terminology and a set of descriptive categories that were readily applicable to all the arts, classical rhetoricians and their humanist heirs created the conditions in which the modus operandi of poetry and painting – their subject matter, aims and techniques – could be treated as analogous, even interchangeable. The easy commerce between verbal and visual modes of expression we encounter everywhere in the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries is, in a very real sense, a product of comparative habits of mind implanted by this discursive tradition.1 We have already seen how a humanist like Alberti who wanted to construct a theory of painting was obliged, in the absence of any surviving classical text on the subject, to fall back on his rhetorical training. The linguistic model he imposed on painting in Book II of De Pictura enjoyed a long and vigorous afterlife. Cinquecento Italy 57



3


witnessed a vast outpouring of writing on the visual arts, much of it devoted to the task of hammering out the rhetorical correspondences that Alberti had been content to leave implicit. In the treatises of Gauricus (1505), Pino (1548), Dolce (1557), Armenini (1586), and Lomazzo (1584 and 1590), to name but a few, the scientific and technical aspects of painting that had so engrossed their predecessors were increasingly subsumed by the dominant humanist methodology with its broader literary and philosophical concerns. As a consequence, the theory of perspective shed some of its purely mathematical character, becoming embedded in a complex web of rhetorically derived topoi.2 In the process, I argue, it became indissolubly bound up with wider issues to do with artistic creativity and with the nature and status of representation which affected the writer no less than the painter. Accordingly, the aim of this chapter is to locate perspective and the closely affiliated concept of proportion within their sixteenth-century discursive context, by examining how discussion of these matters was coloured by the rhetorical disposition of the age. Assumptions about what was meant by imitation and invention, by illusion, and decorum or its licentious obverse, formed part of the common framework within which poetic language and pictorial perspective were understood to function. They helped to determine the criteria by which both were defined and judged. The chapter falls into three sections in which each of the above mentioned topoi is examined in turn in an attempt to show how they were instrumental in shaping attitudes to perspective (or proportion) and, in so doing, helped to produce and consolidate the relationships that tied pictorial to poetic practice. Each section will conclude by briefly reviewing some of the ways Shakespeare used these topoi, in order to demonstrate the range and diversity of associations that were available to him when exploring questions of viewpoint. As the original codifier of linear perspective, Italian art theory supplies an important point of departure for this discussion.3 Of more immediate concern to us, however, are the ways in which this particular mode of conceptualising space – or, to be precise, the rhetorically inflected discourse associated with it – was transplanted into English culture in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Although direct access to continental art theory was, so far as we can judge, restricted to an educated elite, by the turn of the century many of its basic themes had found their way into the mainstream of English artistic thought, where they coalesced with and were modified by vernacular traditions. What resulted from these encounters was, in important respects, quite unlike anything to be found between the covers of an



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Italian Renaissance art treatise. In fact the gradual absorption of perspective as an aesthetic idea follows a similar pattern to its appropriation as a mimetic technique by native artists, whose unorthodox handling of this device was examined in Chapter 2. Thus it is often possible to observe how artistic discourses emanating from the continent were adapted, manipulated or transformed to meet the needs and preoccupations of a different culture. Various factors, ranging from English pragmatism to English Protestantism, with its legacy of hostility to any form of reverence for the visual image, played their part in this process. Even where a reasonably accurate translation of an Italian source existed, as in the case of Haydocke’s rendering of Lomazzo, shifts in emphasis and meaning inevitably crept in. Moreover, the apparent echoing of Italian theorists on the part of English writers can disguise fundamental differences in interpretation. At the same time, it is important to recognize that such transvaluations were liable to occur not only between cultures but within a particular cultural setting, where competing views on a host of matters relating to poetry and painting were in circulation at any one moment, allowing a writer to select those best suited to his purpose. Along with grammar and the study of classical texts, rhetoric formed the staple component of a humanistic educational programme that by this time was ensconced throughout Western Europe.4 In this sense, it can be said to have functioned as a sort of lingua franca, capable of transcending cultural differences or at least of facilitating communication across them. To minds schooled from an early age in rhetorical modes of thought, Italian art theory may not have seemed so wholly alien as we imagine. The idea that visual images might fulfil certain persuasive functions, for example, was one educated Englishmen were well equipped to appreciate. The doctrine of ut pictura poesis, already fully naturalized in Tudor literature, where it had devolved into something of a cliché, provided another, complementary framework to which this foreign discourse could be assimilated. In affirming the kinship of poetry and painting, it must also have encouraged writers to look for parallels between their own stylistic strategies and the new artistic ideas being propagated across the Channel. But the ‘noble arte of eloquence’ contributed more than a repertory of common terms and patterns of thought that enabled concepts to be translated, more or less intact, from one cultural context to another. I suggest that it also offered a way of talking about the visual arts – and, by extension, about perspective – in terms not so much of conformity to nature or rule, but rather of that which exceeds or deviates from such approved standards



Ut Pictura Poesis and the Rhetoric of Perspective 59

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Imitation and invention In 1598, Richard Haydocke, a Fellow of New College, Oxford, trainee physician and amateur artist, published a translation of the first five books of Lomazzo’s Trattato dell’arte della pittura, scoltura, e archittetura (Milan, 1584) under the title A Tracte containing the Artes of curious Paintinge, Carvinge & Buildinge.5 Apart from omitting the final two books, Haydocke made a number of personal additions and emendations to the text, usually by way of concession to doctrinal objections or the ‘strangenesse of the matter it selfe’.6 Despite being limited to a single edition, the impact of the Tracte on evolving attitudes to the arts continued to be felt well into the eighteenth century.7 Its significance for our purposes is twofold. First, as the earliest translation of an Italian art treatise and indeed the first theoretical text on the subject to be printed in England, it acted as a crucial intermediary between continental aesthetics and English visual culture. Second, it specifically addresses the problem of what constitutes true proportion (or perspective) in the context of contemporary debates concerning imitation and with a shrewd eye to the rhetorical implications of the question. In the first book of the Tracte, devoted to proportion, Lomazzo/ Haydocke briefly rehearses one stock position on mimesis: Painting is an arte; because it imitateth naturall thinges most precisely, and is the Counterfeiter and (as it were) the very Ape of Nature: whose quantity, eminencie, and colours, it ever striveth to imitate, performing the same by the helpe of Geometry, Arithmeticke, Perspective, and Naturall Philosophie, with most infallible demonstrations.8 Geometry, arithmetic and perspective are seen here as the servants of an objective reproduction of nature, the accuracy of which is buttressed by their ‘most infallible demonstrations’. The instruction in the mathematical rules of proportion and perspective purveyed by the Tracte derives its authority from this very premise. Yet, from the outset, scientific correctness is dismissed as inadequate to encompass visual



of truth. This way of describing painting and its relationship to poetry steadily gained ground in Italian academic circles, and English commentators, uncomfortable as they often were with attempts to legislate the arts, seem to have found it especially congenial.


Proportion is of two sortes: either Proper, expressing the exact and true proportion of the thing to be represented … Or else in Perspective in respect of the eie, differing very much from the other.9 In exhorting the artist to follow the second type of proportion – thereafter designated as the ‘visuall’ or ‘perspective’ proportion – Lomazzo/ Haydocke is not simply recommending that he alter the dimensions of his figures in accordance with the laws of perspective, but that these should be further modified to take account of any resulting distortions. Such adjustments, already practised in antiquity and zealously codified by sixteenth-century theorists, were intended to preserve that pleasing impression produced by suitably composed proportions called eurythmia, after Vitruvius.10 For Lomazzo, this valuable skill was exemplified by the colossal statues of the Dioscuri on Monte Cavallo in Rome (plate 10), thought to be the work of the legendary Greek sculptors, Phidias and Praxiteles.11 Had these statues conformed to the ‘exact and true proportion[s]’, the beholder would nevertheless have judged them to be false, owing to the accelerated diminution caused by the remoteness of the upper parts from his/her eye. To compensate for such optical distortions and to appear correct when viewed from below, they were compelled to exceed their proper dimensions. A skilful artist, Lomazzo/Haydocke concludes, will therefore make his painting or sculpture ‘answerable to the place where it is to be set, in respect of the beholders eie’, and, taking his cue from the ancients, if the place be high, and the sight low, he shall make the head and higher partes of his picture bigger than the life … according to the generall rule which teacheth; that so much of that parte must be added, as is lost by the distance of the place; that so the picture may come to the eie in his due proportion.12 Even when his figures are placed nearer to the beholder and at eye level, so eliminating any natural foreshortening, the artist is under no obligation to observe the actual proportions but may enlarge or diminish as necessary in order to achieve those most graceful and ‘decent to the eye’ (p.184). What rapidly emerges from this discussion is that mimesis is being taken to mean much more than the literal



truth, which frequently requires that such rules be abrogated. This leads Lomazzo/Haydocke to postulate that – like colour and light, also subject to a ‘double consideration’ –


transcription of appearances, since only by deviating from their model will the artist’s representations look convincingly like it. To understand the full import of Lomazzo’s concept of a double proportion and the paradox it articulates, we have to see this as issuing out of a reappraisal of the status and function of perspective that culminated at the end of the Cinquecento.13 From its beginnings, this technique was, as Lomazzo implies, inextricably bound up with the prevailing aesthetic doctrine of mimesis. By equipping the artist with a seemingly objective method for depicting objects in space, it enabled him not only to render appearances in a more lifelike manner than ever before, but, in so doing, to reveal the divine geometry inscribed within them.14 Lomazzo’s assertion that it is impossible to represent this intelligible and harmonious order of nature without recourse to science harks back to Alberti and Leonardo. According to the latter, artistic practice must always be built on sound theory, of which perspective is the signpost and gateway, and without perspective nothing can be done well in the matter of painting. The painter who copies by practice and judgement of eye, without rules, is like a mirror which imitates within itself all the things placed before it without any understanding of them.15 Mere uninformed observation or indiscriminate copying, it was assumed, could not by itself guarantee a true imitation; for painting to reflect the visible world other than superficially it had to be grounded in a knowledge of first principles.16 By the time Lomazzo wrote his Trattato, however, the necessity for scientific rules as a prerequisite of, and ‘gateway’ to, good practice was no longer axiomatic. And the prospect of achieving a perfect replica of nature, though never entirely abandoned, had come to seem an insufficient goal for the artist. These aesthetic developments were themselves indexed to shifts of interpretation and emphasis within the notoriously fluid theory of mimesis. It is a critical truism that in the Renaissance, as in classical antiquity, the idea of imitating (in the sense of replicating) nature coexisted – often with scant regard for consistency – with the idea of going beyond it.17 Copying the appearance of things was, according to the latter view, not enough; the artist must also strive to express the perfection at which nature aims but which its material defects prevent it from fully realizing. There was more than one way of going about this. Alberti, who counselled the painter to ‘be attentive not only to



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the likeness of things but also and especially to beauty, for in painting beauty is as pleasing as it is necessary’, believed this was best attained by studying and selecting from the finest bodies in order to build up a composite ‘idea of beauty’ in one’s mind (p.90). Other commentators preferred to stress the role of the imagination or fantasia in improving upon nature. Literary associations were ineluctably brought into play here, since the classical text most often adduced in connection with the imaginative function was Horace’s Ars Poetica, the opening passage of which was a crucial locus for ut pictura discourse. Likening the hybrid shapes conjured up by the painter to writing where ‘the author’s idle fancies’ assume, as in a ‘sick man’s dreams’, an absurdly incongruous form, Horace concludes: ‘But,’ you will say, ‘the right to take liberties of almost any kind has always been enjoyed by painters and poets alike’. I know that; we poets do claim this licence, and in our turn we concede it to others, but not to the point of associating what is wild with what is tame, of pairing snakes with birds or lambs with tigers.18 The equivocal note sounded by Horace’s grudging concession of imaginative licence to poets and painters would lend its sanction to approbatory as well as hostile responses to such creative abandon. Writing at the turn of the fifteenth century, Leonardo embraced the activities of the fantasia with an enthusiasm that seems barely in keeping with his scientific creed.19 In his early notebooks especially, the imagination is identified with an inexhaustible fecundity of invention that, not content with ringing the changes on familiar forms, generates others never seen before or presumed to exist. ‘Painting’, he affirms, includes ‘not only the works of nature but also an infinite number that nature never created’, and he urges the painter to give ‘visual embodiment to [his] intention and the invention which took form first in [his] imagination’ (pp.46, 225). (Shakespeare was writing from within the same tradition when he credited ‘strong imagination’ with the power to invent ‘strange forms’ that, in their extravagance, outdo nature and give to ‘airy nothing / A local habitation and a name’.)20 Nevertheless Leonardo was as unyielding as Alberti on the necessity of remaining in close touch with nature even when exceeding anything it might show. The painter’s freedom to invent whatever he wished in the way of fictional landscapes or ‘monstrous forms’ did not release him from the primary obligation to ensure their consistency with natural appearances. Neither Leonardo nor his predecessors saw any incompatibility in these requirements.





In the following century, however, the alliance between imitation and idealization, science and imagination, grew increasingly strained, to a point where fissures began to appear in descriptions of mimetic practice. The sculptor Vicenzo Danti, in his treatise on proportion of 1567, specifically distinguishes between what he calls ‘ritrarre’, the representation of things in the flawed state in which we actually perceive them, from ‘imitare’, a nobler version of imitation that ‘uses all the powers of the intellect’ to apprehend and recreate the ‘perfect form as intended by nature’.21 Correspondingly the stock of the fantasia rose, particularly among Mannerist artists for whom it had become synonymous with conspicuous artifice, liberty of invention and autonomy from rules.22 Leonardo’s emphasis on its conceptualising powers prefigured the idealist and mystical tenor of much late sixteenth-century Italian art theory, epitomized by the writings of Federico Zuccaro and Lomazzo himself. Despite real differences in approach, these theorists were at one in locating the source of artistic production not in the exterior world but in an internal idea whose ultimate origin is divine. Hence Zuccaro argues that all arts and sciences derive their creative force from a mental image (‘disegno interno’) analogous to that idea in the divine intellect from which the universe was first fashioned, which is then manipulated into material form (‘disegno esterno’) with the help of the imagination and sensory perception. The capacity to conceive such an idea is granted to man, he asserts, ‘so that with this Design [Disegno], almost imitating God and vying with Nature, he could produce an infinite number of artificial things resembling natural ones, and by means of painting and sculpture make new Paradises visible on Earth’.23 Such claims for the artist’s God-given right to invent new and better worlds by following the bent of his own inspiration led not only to the devaluing of nature as an object of imitation, but to a general relaxation – even, in some quarters, a repudiation – of the authority of those mathematical laws on which an earlier generation of theorists had pinned their faith: The [artist’s] intellect must be not only clear but also free, and his spirit unfettered, and not thus restrained in mechanical servitude to such rules, because this truly most noble profession wishes judgment and good practice to be the rule and norm of working well. 24 Leonardo’s scorn for a mode of imitation based solely on ‘practice and judgement of the eye’ is thus completely inverted.



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What effect, then, did this displacement of emphasis from imitation to invention, and the privileging of an ideal beauty held in the mind over conformity to nature or rule, have on attitudes to perspective? In this matter we can look for no clearer or more eloquent guide than the preface to the third and final part of Vasari’s Le Vite de’ piu eccelenti Pittori, Scultori e Architettori (1550; revised edition, Florence, 1568). Here he famously affirms that artists belonging to the second period of the ‘modern style’ (that is, the Quattrocento), unlike those of the third (beginning with Leonardo), fell short of complete perfection, since their work lacked that spontaneity which, although based on correct measurement, goes beyond it without conflicting with order and stylistic purity. This spontaneity enables the artist to enhance his work by adding innumerable inventive details and, as it were, a pervasive beauty to what is merely artistically correct. Again, when it came to proportion the early craftsmen lacked that visual judgement which, disregarding measurement, gives the artist’s figures, in due relation to their dimensions, a grace that simply cannot be measured.25 Vasari is not saying that the artist can afford to ignore mathematics, for only those versed in canonical proportion and the laws of perspective know how to go beyond them. Rather, he is criticizing artisttechnicians such as Uccello and Piero della Francesca, who, in his opinion, had sacrificed beauty to what is merely artistically correct. Their ‘excessive study’ of scientific matters produced figures that appear ‘offensive to the eye and harsh in style’. Nowhere was this more evident, according to Vasari, than in their obsession with the finer points of perspective, which resulted in unimaginative and laboured effects, in ‘ugly foreshortenings and perspectives as disagreeable to look at as they were difficult to do’. Conversely, artists of the third period have attained perfection by violating these same rules, guided by a ‘visual judgement’ which lends their contrivances a semblance of naturalness and ease and thereby adds an indefinable grace to the whole.26 Vasari’s rehearsal of these contradictory positions regarding the necessity for mathematical accuracy and truth to nature as integral features of perspective is curiously echoed in one of the key modern debates on the subject. I am referring to the issue, still vigorously contested, of whether this method of representing space amounts to an objective description of certain immutable features of vision, or, as others have argued, is merely a set of conventions that bear no necessary relationship to the





way we actually see things.27 Had he been quizzed on this point, Alberti would surely have placed himself in the former camp. His faith in his new technique is expressed repeatedly in terms of its approximation to ‘things seen’.28 Indeed, for all its scientific rationalism, Alberti’s description of the costruzione leggitima is deeply informed by what Norman Bryson has called ‘the natural attitude’: the naive assumption, epitomized by Pliny’s tales of trompe l’œil realism and still ingrained in Western art theory, that such technological inventions edge the visual arts ever closer to their ultimate goal of producing a perfect copy of the visible world.29 Underpinning this attitude, Bryson argues, is a model of painting as the product of an encounter between the artist’s gaze, which ‘witnesses but does not interpret’ the sensory data it receives, and a pre-existing reality which the artist must strive to record as faithfully as possible but has no part in shaping. It would be hard to find a more striking illustration of this particular mind-set than the window and mirror metaphors which Alberti and Leonardo used to express their pictorial ideal. The picture surface, its status as artefact effaced, is imagined as a transparent medium through which may be glimpsed a prior and fully intelligible world. Moreover, the claim that perspective makes possible an exact replication of this world is bolstered by a tacit equation between vision and painting. It has been pointed out that Alberti’s famous definition of a picture as an ‘intersection of the visual pyramid’ glosses over the fact that it is, strictly speaking, an imaginary reconstruction of a plane section through the pryamid or cone of sight, not the thing itself.30 By eliding the crucial distinction between seeing and depicting, Alberti would convince us that perspectival images are a direct, unmediated transcription of the visual field as it imprints itself on the observing eye. What is absent from this influential account of painting is not just a recognition that all representation, like vision itself, involves a creative ordering of sensory experience; as Bryson remarks, it also suppresses the role of painting as a material sign whose meaning depends on cultural codes familiar to the beholder. Bryson’s poststructuralist critique of this naturalistic theory of painting was, to some extent, anticipated by Erwin Panofsky’s seminal essay of 1927, ‘Die Perspektive als “symbolische Form” ’.31 Here, Panofsky sets out to demonstrate that the costruzione leggitima entails a ‘systematic abstraction’ from reality, as defined by our ‘actual subjective optical impression’, in that it ignores the fact that we see not with a single fixed eye but with two in constant motion and that images are projected onto the concave surface of the retina, rather than (as in



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painting) onto a flat surface, so that straight lines are in fact perceived as curved.32 This analysis of the technical shortcomings of linear perspective prepares the ground for a more radical assault on the Albertian view. For Panofsky goes on to argue that perspective should be understood primarily not as a method for replicating optical reality but as an imaginative reconfiguring of visual experience. It functions, he maintains, as a signifying system that, in a manner analogous to other modes of cultural expression, communicates a historically specific view of the world (Weltanschauung), or, as he phrases it in terms borrowed from the philosopher Ernst Cassirer, as ‘one of those “symbolic forms” in which “spiritual meaning is attached to a concrete, material sign and intrinsically given to this sign” ’.33 With due allowance made for differences of intellectual outlook, it may be argued that this way of thinking was less remote from the aesthetic culture of the Cinquecento than we might suspect. As Panofsky noted, the discrepancies between the retinal image and its pictorial representation had not gone unnoticed even by the early theorists of perspective.34 Moreover, the idea of painting diverging from ‘objective’ reality was, as we have seen, entirely acceptable to a Mannerist like Vasari, for whom artifice and abstraction from nature were highly desirable (if not necessarily intrinsic) properties of the spatial image.35 That such images might operate as visual signs along broadly linguistic lines was also a possibility sixteenth-century theorists were prepared to entertain, though they naturally tended to think of this in rhetorical rather than Saussurean terms. The various factors I have been outlining came together to shape Lomazzo’s attitude to perspective. In Books I and V of the Tracte (the latter devoted to perspective) mathematical rules – and the rule of mathematics – are subordinated to the judgement of the eye and the pursuit of a grace that exceeds the natural while remaining consonant with it. Where arithmetical ratios are called upon to assist the eye in ascertaining the correct dimensions, they do so in a strictly ancillary capacity. Moreover, although Lomazzo/Haydocke stresses that it is imperative for the artist to acquire a solid grounding in the science of proportion, this is not because he ‘ought alwaies to observe the same’, but simply because it behooveth him first to be acquainted with this proper proportion of things [questa proporzione naturale e proprie de le cose], that thereby he may be the better inabled, to draw and transferre [ritrarla e trasferirla] it afterwardes to the Perspective of the eie.36





Lomazzo’s policy of hiving off the ‘visual’ from the ‘proper’ proportions confers official status on that bifurcation in mimetic theory which figured so prominently in contemporary discussion of the visual arts. By distancing the ‘visual’ proportions from the actual dimensions of the object, such passages as that quoted above foreground the stylized and conventional nature of images formed in accordance with the ‘Perspective of the eye’. Far from presenting themselves as a simple duplication or extension of optical reality, Lomazzo’s perspectival images flaunt their abstraction from the natural order and the mathematical laws thought to underpin this. The artist’s gaze, no longer imagined as the passive recipient of a given external reality, is cast as a discriminating agent, actively involved in the construction of an aesthetic – and ultimately social – ideal. The images produced retain their resemblance to nature, but this is now acknowledged to be an illusion, the product of sheer art. There is, as we have seen, little new about such views which echo, in a more ostensive vein, those expressed by Vasari and other Italian theorists. What is of special interest to us, however, is that Lomazzo finds in the traditional analogy between painting and poetry – or, more precisely, rhetoric – a language for articulating this other interpretation of perspective theory. Imitation had always been understood in rhetorical or literary contexts to imply the production of an artful likeness that does not simply seek to ape the object imitated.37 Even when delineating the visible world the poet was expected to go beyond a bare statement of fact by employing tropes and figures, whose primary function was not descriptive, so much as the communication of certain ideas, values and attitudes to the listener.38 It is the persuasive qualities inherent in poetic language, I suggest, that provide the template for Lomazzo’s rejection of unadorned pictorial realism. For just as his sense of what artifice can accomplish requires him to distinguish between two sorts of proportion, so eloquence was thought to depend on an awareness of the gap between the literal meaning and its figurative reshaping.39 And just as figurative discourse is constituted by its deviations from the literal or ‘proper’ sense, so Lomazzo’s ‘visual’ proportion takes its meaning and effect from its transgression of the ‘proper’ dimensions of things. (Even the fact that ‘proper’ clearly refers here not to the actual dimensions of an object but to the canonical proportions used to represent them in academic art echoes the frequent confusion of ‘literal’ and ‘common’ speech in discussions of elocutio). As if to underline the parallel, the artist’s practice of enhancing his figures by ‘draw[ing] and transferr[ing]’ them from their ‘proper’ proportions to others that are more



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a kinde of wresting of a single word from his owne right signification, to another not so naturall, but yet of some affinitie or conveniencie with it.40 Adopting a rhetorical model of painting has certain consequences for Lomazzo’s understanding of mimesis. It allows him to formulate a central paradox of mimetic art: that to capture either the outward appearance or the inner essence of things it is often necessary to violate objective truth; that to be like is not to be the same.41 More importantly, it could scarcely fail to induce a heightened consciousness of the expressive or iconic potentialities of perspective, of its capacity to signify. For, as rhetoricians had long taught, any swerving from literal or customary speech – and, by extension, from the ‘proper’ proportions – might work in various ways to enrich the meaning of a verbal (or visual) statement. Of the usages commonly assigned to metaphor, to stay with this particular trope, the two most important were embellishment and clarification. A writer introduced metaphors into his text in order to adorn his matter with pleasurable fictions – in much the same way that observing the ‘visual’ proportion is said by Lomazzo to lend a ‘wonderful grace and beauty’ to the painter’s compositions (p.184). The same trope could also help to illuminate the significance of his matter, being used to direct attention to the latent meanings embedded within it by expressing these ‘with more light and better note’.42 Both these metaphorical applications have a direct bearing on a key passage in the Tracte which reflects, memorably, on the associations brought to mind by the sight of graceful proportions: Now the effectes proceeding from proportion are unspeakable: the principall whereof, is that majestie and beautie, which is founde in bodies, called by Vitruvius, Eurithmia. And hence it is, that when wee beholde a well proportioned thing, wee call it beautifull; as if wee shoulde saie, indued with that exact and comely grace … But if we shall enter into a farther consideration of this beauty, it wil appeare most evidently, in things appertaining to Civile discipline [culto divino]. For it is strange to consider, what effects of piety, reverence, and religion, are stirred up in mens mindes, by meanes of this sutable comelinesse of apte proportion [da la maesta e belezza de le sacre imagini].43



pleasingly artificial, if still ‘like to the Natural’, is described by Lomazzo/Haydocke in terms that directly evoke the classical definition of metaphor (itself a trope of resemblance) as


Comely and apt proportions function in Lomazzo/Haydocke’s analysis as a powerful ‘symbolic form’, whose ability to act as a vehicle for culturally constructed meanings may be turned to a range of expressive and didactic ends.44 In deference to his Protestant readers, Haydocke has substituted ‘Civile discipline’ for Lomazzo’s ‘culto divino’ and has suppressed the ensuing discussion of the miraculous effects wrought by representations of Christ and the Virgin, in keeping with his policy of doctoring the Italian text wherever it ‘crosseth the doctrine of the reformed Churches’ (p.4).45 The effects of piety, reverence and religion are now stirred up in men’s minds by secular rather than sacred images. Yet the message remains essentially unchanged. By virtue of its iconic qualities – its distance from the literal – the ‘visual’ proportion can work upon the beholder in a manner analogous to figurative discourse, which seeks to persuade its listeners by variously delighting, moving and instructing them. Indeed, such is the power of eloquence vested in this idealised type of proportion that the beholder may be prevailed upon to acquiesce in the ideological values it communicates and to act in conformity with them. What this passage invites us to see is that perspectival images share with rhetorical figures certain signifying properties that enable each to project a particular view of the world in ways that seek to enlist the recipient in that vision. If Lomazzo implied that many of the functions ordinarily assigned to poetic language might be usurped by visual (or perspectival) images, conversely English writers were in the habit of invoking pictorial models when endeavouring to account for their own creative processes.46 ‘Poetry, and Picture, are Arts of a like nature; and both are busie about imitation’, wrote Ben Jonson, adding that ‘both invent, faine, and devise many things, and accommodate all they invent to the use, and service of nature’.47 As the capaciousness of Jonson’s aphorism suggests, the established homology between poetry and painting came in handy whether one was arguing that the writer should adhere to nature or that he should go beyond it. Arguably, though, it was in support of the latter position that such analogies were most effectively deployed. In the painter’s willingness to overstep the limits of ‘objective’ reality English poets found a useful parallel that authorized their own fictive inventions, whether they took the form of imaginative fables or displays of stylistic ingenuity. Thus George Chapman defended his abstruse style by appealing to a superior form of portraiture: That, Enargia, or cleerenes of representation, requird in absolute Poems is not the perspicuous delivery of a lowe invention; but high,



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and harty invention exprest in most significant, and unaffected phrase; it serves not a skilfull Painters turne, to draw the figure of a face onely to make knowne who it represents; but hee must lymn, give luster, shaddow, and heightening; which though ignorants will esteeme spic’d and too curious, yet such as have the judiciall perspective, will see it hath, motion, spirit and life.48 By apposition, the poet’s dark conceits are identified with the painter’s expressive ‘heightening’ of his likeness through the addition of ‘luster’ and ‘shadow’ [relievo] and both are excused as necessary to the unfolding of a ‘high, and harty invention’. Chapman’s evident appreciation of these newfangled illusionist devices might lead us to suspect him of possessing an intimate knowledge of the sort of ‘curious painting’ which was then beginning to find favour in England. However, such comparisons were part of a poet’s stock-in-trade and do not necessarily imply any special exposure to continental art or art theory. The obvious exception to this generalization is Sir Philip Sidney, whose handling of ut pictura discourse, uniquely for an English writer of the period, reflects his first-hand contact with European artists and an informed curiosity about every aspect of painting.49 One editor of the Apology for Poetry, noting parallels between Sidney’s famous declaration of the poet’s freedom to pursue the course of his invention beyond the restrictive bounds of nature and the claims made by Zuccaro on behalf of the painter, has gone so far as to state that the treatise is imbued with a ‘direct knowledge of advanced contemporary theorising on the arts’ and that its poetics may therefore be labelled ‘mannerist’.50 Even if this conclusion seems too reckless, we may yet concede that there are passages in the apology which point to a more than casual acquaintance with continental aesthetics. However, we do need to be alert to the skilful manner in which these imported ideas – in keeping with the philosophical hybridity of Sidney’s text – have been fused with, and tempered by, other influences more at home in late sixteenth-century English culture. At a crucial moment in his defence of his ‘unelected vocation’, Sidney turns to painting as the sole art resembling poetry in its ‘high flying liberty of conceit’. The difference between the historian, who is tied to the particular truth of things, and ‘right poets’, he says, is like that betwixt the meaner sort of painters, who counterfeit only such faces as are set before them, and the more excellent, who having no law





but wit, bestow that in colours upon you which is fittest for the eye to see: as the constant though lamenting look of Lucretia, when she punished in herself another’s fault; wherein he painteth not Lucretia whom he never saw, but painteth the outward beauty of such a virtue. For these [poets] … most properly do imitate to teach and delight, and to imitate borrow nothing of what is, hath been, or shall be; but range, only reined with learned discretion, into the divine consideration of what may be and should be.51 Like Chapman, Sidney frames his poetic code in terms of a distinction between the ‘meaner sort’ of painters who are content to copy what they see, and the ‘more excellent’, who strive to express a preconceived notion of perfection – their ‘Idea or foreconceit’ – by means of an ideal likeness. In pursuing this higher brand of mimesis, the latter are subject to no ‘law’ other than that supplied by their own ‘wit’ or ‘discretion’. It is this inner judgement rather than any prescriptive model that directs their choice of such ‘colours’ (a term that conflates the painter’s pigments with the poet’s rhetorical ‘colours’) as will best convey the invisible essence of their subject: Lucretia’s inner chastity as opposed to her outward appearance. Sidney, it is clear, shares Lomazzo’s conviction that in order to represent ‘what … should be’ the painter (like the poet) must be prepared to depart from literal truth and imposed rules, and that to do so is a mark of superiority. Equally, he shares Lomazzo’s sense of the suasive force of images, arguing that the key to the poet’s ability to move to virtuous action lies in his ‘feigning notable images of virtues, vices, or what else’ (p.103). By creating a ‘lofty image’ of heroic virtue, for example, the epic poet ‘most inflameth the mind with desire to be worthy, and informs with counsel how to be worthy’ (p.119). The logic of this position almost pushes Sidney into arguing that the poet’s aim should be to emulate the special vividness of the pictoral image, whose power to ‘illuminate’ and ‘figure forth’ its subject makes it a far more effective teacher than any ‘wordish description’.52 But at the same time, anxious perhaps to counter what to Protestant minds might seem a dangerous overemphasis on the sensuous appeal of the image, he takes steps to restore the primacy of the word. To this end he stresses that the poet’s ‘speaking picture[s]’ are, above all, a vehicle for his discursive and didactic meaning. For the same reason, perhaps, he also spells out much more directly than Lomazzo the rhetorical demands that bind the visual and verbal arts to each other. Whether it works upon the senses or through the mind’s eye, the image must fulfil its mandate of



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‘delightful teaching’. Mannerist doctrines are thus accommodated to the emblematic view of images, whereby they are to be valued less for their mimetic qualities than for the moral lessons they impart, that had for so long held sway over English visual culture.53 By such expedients, Sidney succeeds in adapting a foreign aesthetic to its new habitat, bringing it into conformity with patterns of thought that were deeply ingrained in his readers.54 Shakespeare’s pictorial conceits are recognizably a product of the same cultural milieu. Throughout his career he returned repeatedly to the topos of the artist as nature’s ape, whose works are so lifelike that they appear to be on the verge of breath, speech or movement. But he was no less attuned to the concept of art ‘surpass[ing] the life’, and his writing abounds in references to hyperbolic artefacts that defy what is literally true or physically possible, like those summoned to describe the excelling beauty of Adonis’s horse or Cleopatra on her barge.55 Existing only as a textual effect, these artefacts tend to function reflexively as a trope for Shakespeare’s own rhetorical virtuosity, thereby instigating a running paragone between poet and painter.56 As comments on the mimetic process, his pictorial allusions are mostly unremarkable additions to the stock of Renaissance commonplaces on this theme. Occasionally, however, they take on a new and precise significance. Such is the case in Antony and Cleopatra which, I argue in Chapter 6, is structured around an opposition between the rational values of ‘rule’ and ‘measure’ and the imaginative proportions that exceed them. This antithesis – so strongly reminiscent of Lomazzo’s two sorts of proportion – attests to the fact that Shakespeare, though lacking Sidney’s cultural advantages, was in touch with the aesthetic ideas filtering through from the continent. Other plays I shall be discussing offer further evidence of his familiarity with these ideas, and indeed demonstrate that his imagination was sufficiently engaged to explore their implications in some depth. What they also confirm is that Shakespeare was no less conscious than Sidney or Lomazzo of the power of spectacle to impress the eye and influence the mind – a power he conceives, like them, in terms of the capacity of the visual image to function rhetorically.57 The famous paragone between poet and painter in the opening scene of Timon of Athens serves ironically to show how little there is to choose between them, since each depends on the forceful eloquence of images to persuade his audience of some moral truth.58 Where the painter exploits the vivid expressivity of images to reveal the inner essence of character, the poet employs a succession of allegorical tableaux to instruct Lord





Timon in the slipperiness of fortune. In short, his speaking pictures communicate by means of the same iconic discourse as the ‘thousand moral paintings’ which, the painter boasts, can ‘demonstrate these quick blows of Fortune’s / More pregnantly than words’ (I.1.90 –92). The only real source of contention is which mode of ‘delightful teaching’ produces the more compelling effects. Whilst it would be foolhardy to equate Shakespeare’s understanding of mimesis with that voiced by these two woefully inadequate representatives of the sister arts, he clearly subscribed to the same logic of complementarity. Hence he tends to look upon the language of spectacle as an alternative, if ultimately inferior, mode of persuasion. Later chapters will examine some ways in which visual imagery is used in conjunction with verbal forms of expression to manipulate the beholder’s viewpoint. In particular, we shall see how Hamlet and Prospero exploit this aspect of the image as part of a broader rhetorical strategy for shaping the audience’s response to events.

Illusionism Thus far we have considered how visual images might be said to resemble poetic fictions not only in their sensuously lifelike qualities, but also in their deviations from canonical standards of truth. Mimetic doctrine stipulated that all arts, poetry and painting included, should conform to nature, but this imperative was interpreted sufficiently loosely to permit an infringement of the rules governing expression where this was thought to enhance the significance and impact of the work in question. If some sixteenth-century theorists were more than ready to avail themselves of this latitude within the theory of mimesis, it nevertheless remained a potential source of anxiety. For while such rule-bending found some sanction in what had been, as far back as Horace, the acknowledged right of poets and painters to invent forms answerable only to their own imaginations, it also brought with it the spectre of abuse. The licence to exceed the limits of nature enjoyed by both arts, so boldly reaffirmed by Lomazzo and Sidney, was construed by those opposed to such liberties as an invitation to illusionistic trickery and imaginative excess, deception and indecorum. In this and the following section I shall focus on the perceived liabilities of dealing in what might be called high mimetic artifice, and on the various ways in which these dangers were negotiated by Renaissance commentators, both Italian and English. In the opening pages of his Trattato, Lomazzo reminds the reader that a lifelike painting, by definition, is never what it purports to be.



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by meere arte, uppon a flat, where it findeth onelie length, and breadth, it representeth to the eie the third Dimension … and so maketh the bodie to appeare uppon a flatte, where naturally it is not.59 Perspective, it may be argued, raises these deceptive properties inherent in mimetic art to their highest power, since its peculiar feat is to transform a two-dimensional surface, with the help of chiaroscuro and other modelling techniques, into an illusion of three-dimensional solidity. In the process it endows what does not exist with virtual substance and life. Moreover, it shows things not as they are, according to their ‘exact and true’ dimensions, but as they appear from a given standpoint. Yet it is precisely this distortion of objective fact that makes perspectival images seem so truthful to the eye. For Lomazzo, as for most Italian art theorists, the ability to manufacture a compelling illusion by making a projecting body ‘appeare uppon a flatte where naturally it is not’ was the supreme achievement of art. On the other hand, these same conjuring tricks made painting vulnerable to much more hostile kinds of assessment. And, mutatis mutandis, what went for painting also went for poetry, in that each was assumed to ‘feign’, in the multifarious senses of that word, including to ‘invent’ and ‘dissemble’ (OED, 2 and 6). The important point for us to note is that the paradoxical qualities of illusionistic art created scope for a broad spectrum of responses to the poet’s and painter’s feigning – responses that often coexisted as contending possibilities within cultural consciousness.60 Pictorial illusion had been aligned with poetry and sophistic rhetoric since antiquity. In Plato’s devastating critique of mimetic art, all three were lumped together as ‘image-making art[s]’ capable at best of capturing the shifting appearances of the phenomenal world, not the eternal ‘Ideas’ behind them, which they reflected only at a ‘third remove’. Each stood accused of defrauding its audience with a ‘shadow play of images’ designed to appeal to the basest, most irrational elements of our nature rather than to the intellect, alone thought capable of acceding to the immutable order of knowledge. Perspective functions in Plato’s dialogues as a privileged trope and point of reference for such fallacious art because of its commmitment to recording the way things look and its tendency to pander to our fallible senses instead of correcting these with the aid of the rational sciences of measurement. Thus,



It disguises its material nature by calling up figures, objects and landscapes from a plane surface covered with lines and pigments, and thus


in Book X of The Republic, the painter’s depiction of a bed from an oblique angle is made to stand for all mimetic art in its distance from and radical distortion of the truth.61 Yet, weak as it is in ontological value, this type of copying is still deemed preferable to that imaginative remaking of appearances which strives only for a pleasing effect. Plato associates the latter type of imitation (which he labels ‘phantastic’, as opposed to ‘eikastic’) with ‘sculptors and painters who work on a colossal scale’ – as Lomazzo would later do, albeit in a very different spirit.62 Plato’s fundamental objection is that these artists, in their desire to eliminate any disagreeable effects arising from foreshortening, ‘leave truth to look after itself, and give the images they make, not the proportions of the original, but those which will appear beautiful’. Within the hierarchy of mimetic forms, this sort of image is the most mendacious and unreal in that it ‘appears to be a likeness without being so’ and looks correct only when viewed from a certain angle. In the same way, Plato argues, the imagery deployed by the sophist (or poet) may charm ignorant listeners, to whom it appears a plausible approximation of the truth, but discloses its emptiness to those capable of philosophical reasoning.63 Plato’s indictment of illusionism had a profoundly detrimental effect on the development of ut pictura discourse. If our Western habit of thinking of perspective as an epistemological tool – attested by our everyday use of the term as a metaphor for the cognitive act itself – originated with the Platonic dialogues, it was after a negative fashion.64 For perspective figures there as an anti-intellectual device, a spawner of phantasmagoric images that, like the sophist’s dazzling displays, threaten to mislead the mind in its search for knowledge. An unbridgeable chasm was thus opened up between intelligible reality and the hollow allure of mimetic fictions, a split which relegated the latter definitively to the realm of seeming as distinct from being. Although the Platonic dialogues may have largely disappeared from view during the Middle Ages, the branding of poetry and painting as cognate forms of deceptive illusion became part of the general fabric of discussion of the arts.65 What made these arts so suspect was their ability to manipulate truth, to make what is false appear veridical and disguise their own insubstantiality with a specious array of ‘colours’.66 This configuration of ideas lingered on into the sixteenth century, resurfacing, for example, in H.C. Agrippa’s ironic attack on rhetoric as a form of subtile Eloquence, [which] with exquisite colouringe of woordes, and with a false likelihoode of the truth doth allure the mindes of



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Painting is likewise characterized by Agrippa as an art that ‘deceiveth the sighte, and in an Image diversely placed, doth caste many fourmes over the eies of the beholders’, by means of the ‘Arte Perspective’.68 Ensnarement by the duplicitously lifelike image barely figures as a posssible scenario in Alberti’s De Pictura, where the illusory aspects of perspective are played down in the interests of its claim to scientific truth.69 But as continental artists from the early Cinquecento through to the Baroque period took to experimenting with various types of illusionistic and trompe l’œil art, there was a resurgence of interest in the theoretical aspects of illusionism and a renewed appreciation of its effects. The capacity of a naturalistic painting to make ‘that which in effect is not’ appear to be, by creating an impression of relievo and depth, was now more likely to draw admiring plaudits from the cognoscenti than to be condemned as a phantasm devoid of truth.70 The deceptions perpetrated by such images came to be regarded as (in Cleopatra’s phrase) an ‘excellent falsehood’, a mark of triumphant virtuosity designed to excite the beholder’s astonished delight at the artistry involved. Thus Titian is praised by Lomazzo for making his figures stand out with ‘wonderfull eminencie’ by his exaggerated use of lights and shadows in a manner that at once ‘ma[d]e knowne his arte’ and ‘beguiled the eies of such, as beheld his most admirable workes’ (pp.20 –21). As the branch of perspective illusion specializing in the production of such hyperbolic effects of projection and recession, foreshortening provided a natural focus for this web of associations. In Lodovico Dolce’s dialogue on painting, for example, Aretino, the eponymous speaker and authorial mouthpiece, observes that elaborate foreshortenings constitute ‘one of the leading problems in art’ which the painter may exploit to show off his skill in this field, but recommends that they be used sparingly, ‘for the rarer they are, the greater the wonderment they occasion; and the more so when the painter, pressed for space, succeeds by dint of them in fitting a large figure into a small area’, a trick that, when well executed, will ‘deceive the admirer’s sight’.71 Such dwelling on the painter’s ‘mirabile artificio’ – admirable in its very capacity to seem what it is not – in the discourses appertaining to perspective, foreshortening and relievo was anticipated by Leonardo’s famous comparison of painting and sculpture.72 In his paragone – the broad outlines of which were transmitted to English readers by Sir Thomas Hoby’s 1561 translation of Castiglione’s Book of



the simple, and leadeth them into the prison of erroure, seekinge to subverte the sence of the truthe.67

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the major cause of wonder that arises in painting is the appearance of something detached from the wall or other flat surface, deceiving subtle judgements with this effect, as it is not separated from the surface of the wall. By contrast, sculpture gives little ‘cause for admiration’, in that it is ‘nothing other than it appears to be’, taking its proportions and its modelling by light and shade directly from nature rather than from the poet’s own invention (pp.38– 44). Painting, that is to say, earns our applause to the degree that it succeeds in overcoming the material conditions of its existence to create images which, though illusory, are made convincing by art. As we have seen, this type of violation of literal truth was conceived as obeying a rhetorical schema, and the high valuation Leonardo set upon pictorial illusion was entirely consistent with the preference shown by many Renaissance writers for a consciously artificial and hyperbolic style – a style calculated precisely to astonish. The Ciceronian belief that ‘the purpose and function of the poet is to speak surpassingly well for the sake of arousing wonder’ was given wide currency by Italian treatises on poetics.74 So it is hardly surprising to find the appreciation of deceptive artifice implied by such aesthetic priorities being expressed in literature by reference to painting, or vice versa, especially given their long and largely negative association on the basis of this same quality. Thus Paolo Pino extols the painter’s skill in feigning as ‘propria poesia, cioe invenzione, la qual far apparere quello che non è sia’.75 Castiglione reverses the analogy, using a pictorial trope to describe the aspirations to eloquence he politely disclaims: I send unto you this booke, as a purtraict in peinctinge of the Court of Urbin: not of the handiwoorke of Raphael, or Michael Angelo, but of an unknowen peincter, and that can do no more but draw the principall lines, without settingfurth the truth with beawtifull coulours, or makinge it appeere by the art of Prospective that it is not.76 The accomplished poet or painter, Castiglione assumes, will not be satisfied with representing his matter in bare outline but will seek



the Courtier – the sense of wonderment excited by pictorial relief is specifically ascribed to its transgression of the literal.73 Painting is superior to sculpture, argues Leonardo, because it involves ‘greater artifice’ and ‘mental deliberation’, especially in the achievement of ‘spatial definition’, for

to adorn it with all the fictive devices at his command – be this with the ‘beawtifull coulours’ of rhetoric or with the ‘art of Prospective’, which, it is syntactically implied, are interchangeable means of conjuring up a delightful illusion. Before attempting to assess where the English stood in relation to this sort of argument, we might usefully pause to consider what we should understand by the power to deceive so often imputed to illusionist art, whether as matter for praise or blame. The ubiquity and utter conventionality of such claims – which recall Pliny’s oft-told tales of trompe l’œil images capable of fooling human beings as well as birds and animals – only add to our difficulty in knowing what to make of them. On the other hand, the self-conscious delight in artifice, and in the particular type of mental agility it demands, with which these commonplaces are imbued in Italian art treatises suggests that they are not to be taken entirely at face value. For all their talk of deception, Leonardo and his successors generally assume that the beholder must be fully apprised of the fictive nature of what he/she is seeing in order to experience the peculiar pleasures associated with illusionism. Indeed, it is often implied that the mimetic artefact will work its magic most effectively in the presence of the cognoscenti who, being acquainted with the problems of art, can appreciate the skill with which they have been resolved. These presuppositions are in broad agreement with the findings of modern science. As perceptual psychologists have demonstrated, the illusion generated by a naturalistic painting is rarely so perfect as to dupe the beholder; rather, it is conditional upon his/her active collusion in a familiar set of representational conventions.77 Even when the eye is momentarily tricked into experiencing a powerful illusion of depth – on first encountering a painted ceiling, say – this is quickly superseded by reflection on the mechanisms used to induce the illusion.78 A similar case could be made in relation to poetry, as we shall see, since the rhetorical theory in which it was rooted also assumed that the pleasure and instruction to be derived from figurative language are inseparable from the consciousness of artifice.79 Italian interest in the putative powers of illusionistic art to ‘beguile’ the sight was widely echoed by English writers at the turn of the sixteenth century. As Lucy Gent has shown, ‘where we see naturalism in the lifelikeness produced by perspective and chiaroscuro, they saw deceptiveness’.80 Their tendency to fasten on this aspect of illusionism to the virtual exclusion of any other manifested itself in various ways. It fuelled the native fascination with anamorphic devices – a species of ‘couzening picture’ that offered a witty reminder of the tricks perspective might play on the unwary beholder.81 More importantly, it





dictated the terms on which English commentators responded to and attempted to make sense of continental aesthetic ideas. Peacham’s increased exposure to these ideas is reflected in the addition of a chapter on the ‘manifold deceptions of the sight by perspective’ to the revised 1612 edition of his Art of Drawing. Likewise Haydocke specifically commends Lomazzo’s Trattato for the instruction it offers in ‘the mysteries of this Arte of Painting, whereby the unskilfull eye is so often cozened and deluded, taking counterfeit creatures for true and naturall’.82 A similarly biased and radically selective reading of Lomazzo was proposed by Nicholas Hilliard, whose Art of Limning is openly indebted to Haydocke’s translation. Citing Lomazzo’s point that objects seen at a distance cannot be represented by their ‘true superficies’, he adds by way of explication that painting perspective and foreshortening of lines, with due shadowing, according to the rule of the eye, worketh by falsehood to express truth … For perspective, to define it briefly, is an art taken from or by the effect or judgment of the eye, for a man to express anything in shortened lines and shadows, to deceive both the understanding and the eye. (p.71) For better or worse, it seems, perspective had become synonymous with deceit in the English imagination.83 Outwardly, there is little to distinguish Hilliard’s discursive terminology from that employed in similar contexts by Leonardo or Lomazzo. Yet we may have reason to suspect that the overfamiliarity of this topos, its very status as a cliché, masks a crucial discontinuity in meaning. The note of apprehension so often sounded in English references to perspective painting, even when the primary message is encomiastic, seems to point to a more literalist understanding of illusion than was the norm on the far side of the Alps, to a deeply rooted fear that the beholder might actually be duped into confusing the image with its referent. It was this anxiety, of course, that lay at the heart of the arguments about idolatry advanced by Protestant thinkers, who repeatedly warned of the dangers of mistaking visual symbols for the reality they signified.84 Margaret Aston notes that English Reformers were committed to the view, expounded in the Elizabethan homily against idolatry, that ‘different art-forms represented different degrees of danger: the greater the realism the greater the hazard of idolatry’.85 Sculpture was considered more harmful than flat images, but painting, especially



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perhaps where it imitated the third dimension, was not above suspicion either. Over-sensitization to the ‘abuses and deceipts used by Paynters’ can thus be seen as part of the ripple-effect created by the periodic outbreaks of iconoclasm experienced in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the iconophobic reactions they unleashed which defined all art, secular as well as religious, as potentially suspect.86 At the same time, it is important to bear in mind that the Protestant doctrine on images was never fully consistent with itself, any more than the English culture it helped to shape, which has been described as subject to a ‘continuous interplay, and the occasional major collision, between strongly iconic and strongly iconoclastic impulses’.87 Inevitably this made for a complex attitude towards the visual arts, one compounded, in differing measures, of attraction and distrust. Hilliard’s gloss might be said to encapsulate this ambivalence, moving as it does from a positive account of the paradoxical qualities of perspective, in which falsehood is a vehicle for expressing truth, to a more simplistic and morally ambiguous assertion of its capacity to delude ‘both the understanding and the eye’. The official reformist line on images did not deter even committed Protestants like Sidney and Spenser, acutely conscious though they were of the immanent dangers of idolatry, from responding appreciatively to the new illusionist technology.88 Nor did it make them or their compatriots unreceptive to or incapable of reflecting upon the pleasures of an illusion consciously entered into. As librarian to the Arundel household, Franciscus Junius may have enjoyed greater access to Italian sources than other writers in England, yet he was reiterating ideas familiar to them when he declared in his Painting of the Ancients (the English version of which appeared in 1638) that both poetry and painting doe wind themselves by an unsensible delight of admiration so closely into our hearts, that they make us in such an astonishment of wonder to stare upon the Imitation of things naturall, as if we saw the true things themselves; in so much that we doe not love, though we finde our selves misled, to have this our joy interrupted, but we do rather entertaine it with all possible care and studie.89 Junius recognizes that the wonder engendered by mimetic art depends on the readiness of beholders/readers to entertain the illusion in the knowledge that it is an illusion, to suffer themselves ‘wittingly and





willingly to be seduced and beguiled’. For many Englishmen, however, the pleasures afforded by this kind of ‘agreeable cheat’ were distinctly troubled.90 The whole-hearted approval of illusionism voiced by continental theorists tended to be qualified in English minds by misgivings about the moral and epistemological risks it posed for those who allowed themselves to be so seduced. Other factors in addition to Protestant ideology may have contributed to this stance. The English had not yet fully shaken off a moralistic attitude to image-making reaching back to the early Church Fathers, as evidenced by their practice of calling portraits ‘counterfeits’, which endured well into the seventeenth century.91 They were also less experienced readers of mimetic art than their European counterparts, and hence more likely perhaps to give credence to its fabled powers of deception. Whatever the causes, there was a widespread suspicion of visual images that, in some cases, cohabited uneasily with a more informed and open-minded response.92 In 1608, George Hakewill, for example, implicitly attacked painting by placing it in the same category as the ‘delusion of the sight’ worked by the ‘subtiltie of the divel, by the charmes of sorcerers … [and] by the knavery of Priests and Friers’, but went on to observe, with greater discrimination, that ‘among al artificiall deceiving of the eie … that of painting, and limming is the most noble’, because it so bewitches the sight ‘that its then most delighted, when tis most deceived’.93 Similar contradictions and instabilities emerged when Elizabethan writers endeavoured to get to grips with the nature of poetic illusion. In recent years critical attention has focused almost exclusively on the Puritan-led propagandist assault launched upon the theatre in the closing decades of the sixteenth century. But this needs to be seen in context, as a local skirmish in a much wider campaign against ‘painted eloquence’ and mimetic fictions or feigning in general.94 In each case the defence centred on the question of what status ought to be assigned to such fictions since, as John Harrington remarked, ‘this objection of lyes is the chief, and that upon which the rest be grounded’.95 As poetry’s most energetic advocate, Sidney employed two main strategies in vindication of its ‘feigned image[s]’. He maintains, as we noted earlier, that they make a better teacher than factual example, being free to evolve a ‘perfect picture’ of vice or virtue. More subtly, he argues that no attempt is made to deceive by disguising the imaginary status of these inventions: ‘the poet never maketh any circles about your imagination, to conjure you to believe for true what he writes’. Hence not even a child would be so gullible as to confuse the poet’s fables with



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life, or be tempted ‘to give the lie to things not affirmatively but allegorically and figuratively written’ (p.124). Sidney’s central point here is that we are culturally trained to recognize and decode metaphoricity and are thus accustomed to sifting meaning from the poetic falsehoods that represent it to best advantage, knowing ‘the application [to be] most divinely true, but the discourse itself feigned’ (p.115). Yet while he mounts a strong case for taking poetic fiction on its own terms, as a mode of communication that is sui generis, he also concedes much to its adversaries. Imaginative licence, he acknowledges, may be abused and so make poetry which should be ‘eikastike’, construed as ‘figuring forth good things’, to be ‘“phantastike”, which doth contrariwise infect the fancy with unworthy objects’ (p.125). Sidney’s rewriting of this crucial Platonic distinction between more and less acceptable forms of illusionism in ethical terms is symptomatic of a larger problem, for if he succeeds in redeeming poetry from Plato’s slur, it is only at the cost of binding it to the inculcation of edifying truths.96 Puttenham’s attempts in his Arte of English Poesie to put a favourable gloss on the charge of lying are no less equivocal.97 Poetic discourse, he states in well-known passage, is condemned by its transgression of literal speech to a fraudulent duplicity: As figures be the instruments of ornament in every language, so be they also in a sorte abuses or rather trespasses in speach, because they passe the ordinary limits of common utterance, and be occupied of purpose to deceive the eare and also the minde, drawing it from plainnesse and simplicitie to a certaine doublenesse, whereby our talke is the more guilefull & abusing. (p.154) Viewed in this light, Puttenham admits that the Athenian judges, the Areopagites, had good grounds for banning ‘figurative speaches’ from their courts as ‘meere illusions to the minde, and wresters of upright judgement’. And though he advocates greater leeway for poetasters in this respect, as they prosecute only ‘pleasant & lovely causes’, he would have them exercise this liberty within the constraints imposed by decorum, which act as a break on the abuses inherent in figurative discourse. For, as he sees it, all such speeches can he said to practise a ‘kinde of dissimulation’, in that their surface meaning does not correspond to their real intent (p.186). Yet, at the same time, he insists that the very doubleness which makes language ‘more guilefull & abusing’ also makes it more graceful and ‘significative’.





Moreover, it gives rise to the pleasures of working out ‘what it may be that is meant, and not expressed’ (p.195), a form of intellectual gratification long associated with ‘dark’ conceits which withold their true sense from a superficial perusal. A skilful poet will therefore convey his meaning ‘somwhat out of sight’, whilst ensuring that it remains accessible to the educated, if not to the ‘vulgar judgement’ (pp.137–8). Like Sidney’s theory of feigning images, then, Puttenham’s poetics of dissimulation presupposes a knowing reader who, so far from being duped by appearances, is able to grasp the truth they ingeniously conceal. Adopting interpretive tactics akin to those of an informed beholder stationed before a perspective painting, such a reader will take conscious delight in tracing the translation of this hidden truth from its original ‘plainnesse and simplicitie’ into a brilliantly illusionistic, multi-dimensional form. In defending the poet as a maker of fictions, Sidney and Puttenham thus become entangled in the conflicting significations generated by the paradoxical nature of illusion, as did Hilliard when seeking to explain perspective. Wishing to deliver feigning from its old association with lying, these writers yet continue to oscillate between seeing it as a medium for expressing truth and as a source of sensual and even mental delusion. While both show a more sophisticated understanding of the workings of fiction and of the kind of belief it elicits than many of their contemporaries, their readiness to grant its susceptibility to moral attack is proof (if any were needed) that they were not immune to the common prejudices of their culture. Feigned images are assumed to require continual surveillance if they are not to slide from the richly figurative into the purely ‘fantastical’ or downright falsehood. There is, in short, ample evidence to suggest that the myth of perspective and its poetic equivalents polluting the mind with ‘meere illusions’ retained its hold on the English imagination even when partially displaced by other, more complex, responses. These devices shared a capacity for decoupling seeming from being that was viewed in many quarters as conducive not so much to aesthetic pleasure as to serious cognitive error. True to his habit of playing opposing views of a given topic off against one another, Shakespeare exploits the full range of connotations that had accrued around the fictive devices of poet and painter. Occasionally he solicits our appreciation (via the admiring gaze of his fictional audience) for the deceptively lifelike qualities of the work of art. The ‘statue’ of Hermione and the ‘piece / Of skillful painting’ representing the fall of Troy in The Rape of Lucrece are pre-eminent examples of Shakespearean artefacts applauded for their capacity to



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‘beguile’ (in both senses) the beholder with their ‘wondrous skill’.98 Yet neither is presented in an uncritical light.99 Indeed, Lucrece’s perusal of the ‘well painted-piece’ provides a vehicle for some of Shakespeare’s most incisive and self-searching reflections on the painter’s illusionist techniques and their relationship to his poetic art. Among the first images to attract Lucrece’s eye is that of old Nestor captivating the assembled Greeks with his ‘golden words’, which establishes an implicit correlation between the coercive effects of his oratory and the painter’s own modes of persuasion. We are given a taste of this pictorial rhetoric in the following stanzas (ll.1408–28) where the perspectival arrangement of the scene, so plausible in its rendering of optical recession that it ‘seem’d to mock the mind’, is described at length: For much imaginary work was there, Conceit deceitful, so compact, so kind, That for Achilles’ image stood his spear, Grip’d in an armed hand, himself behind Was left unseen, save to the eye of mind: A hand, a foot, a face, a leg, a head Stood for the whole to be imagined. (l.1422–8) E.H. Gombrich first suggested that this account of perspectival distortion was modelled on the description of a picture of the fall of Thebes in Philostratus the Elder’s Imagines. If so, the allusion would strengthen the ut pictura context of this passage by locating it within the ekphrastic tradition of reconstituting visual artefacts by verbal means.100 In any case, it cannot be accidental that the foreshortened image of Achilles recalls, in the ‘imaginary work’ it both performs and exacts, the operations of synecdoche, one of the ‘dark’ tropes Puttenham commends for forcing the reader to look beyond appearances by making the part stand for the whole to be imagined.101 Either may aptly be characterized as a type of ‘conceit deceitful’, not to be taken at face value. In conflating a manifest pride in the painter’s (and, by association, the poet’s) skill in cheating both eye and mind with a sense of the potentially perilous consequences, the phrase itself asks to be read as a synecdoche that telescopes the complex understanding of illusion – in its various artistic, moral and cognitive guises – unfolded through Lucrece’s scrutiny of the ‘painting’. The more sinister resonances of this phrase prepare us for the heroine’s encounter with the figure of Sinon who, like the dissembling art of his maker, strives to ‘hide deceit’




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For even as subtile Sinon here is painted, So sober-sad, so weary, and so mild (As if with grief of travail he had fainted), To me came Tarquin armed to beguild With outward honesty, but yet defil’d With inward vice: as Priam him did cherish, So did I Tarquin, so my Troy did perish. (ll.1541– 47) To complete the ut pictura analogy, this disastrous omission is replicated at a rhetorical level: Lucrece’s naive trust in outward forms finds its counterpart in ‘credulous old Priam’, whose willingness to believe Sinon’s ‘enchanting story’ was, we are reminded, the error that sealed the fate of Troy. Darker undertones are, in fact, rarely absent from Shakespeare’s celebration of the virtuosity of illusionist art. Even the ‘majestic vision’ of Prospero’s masque comes with a health-warning to those like Ferdinand who are over-ready to put their faith in an ‘insubstantial pageant’. At a more radical level, the arguments brought by Plato and the moralists against mimetic fictions and their putative capacity to mislead the mind into a moral and epistemological quagmire provide an imaginative point of departure for two Shakespearean plays in particular. Troilus and Cressida and Macbeth explore the tragic consequences that might flow from a failure to resist the seductive appeal of such fictions. In each case the propensity of the titular hero to credit equivocating speech that ‘lies like truth’, and to yield to his own ‘fantastical’ visions, results in a mental dislocation from reality which contributes directly to his downfall. As we shall see in Chapter 5, the process culminates in the betrayal scene in Troilus and Cressida (V.2). Here the complete disjunction between the idealized image of Cressida that presents itself to Troilus’s inner eye and the sordid scenario being enacted before him combines with the slow corruption of persuasive discourse to plunge him into an abyss of self-delusion and doubt – an anamorphic hell where everything both ‘is, and is not’ (cf. Macbeth, I.4.141).



by concealing his guile under an assumed mildness (11.1501–19). Confronted by this treacherous image of a traitor (the visual prototype of her ravisher, Tarquin), Lucrece discovers that the key to her own tragedy lies in a failure to interrogate appearances.


The violation of literal truth that characterized illusionistic artifice, as cultivated by both poets and painters, called for the exercise of a particular sort of tact or judgement. During the period it was widely assumed that what constitutes ‘good use of speache’ can ultimately only be ‘knowen by a certaine naturall judgement, and not by art or anye maner rule’, particularly with respect to rhetorical figures since, by definition, they entail the ‘abuse of Grammer rules’.102 The more figurative discourse diverged from ‘common utterance’, the greater the abuse involved and the more crucial the role such ‘naturall judgement’ was required to perform. It was expected, in effect, to serve as a yardstick for measuring these verbal transgressions and thereby bringing them under control, for defining the limits to which they might acceptably go in the absence of objective criteria or definite rules. In this section I shall argue that the type of judgemental faculty thought to determine appropriate usage in the case of rhetorical ornament (elocutio) was regarded as fundamentally akin to that brought to bear on the making and viewing of pictures, and, by extension, on the regulation of social conduct. Although it sometimes went under different names and assumed diverse forms, this faculty may be broadly identified with the all-pervasive principle of decorum. As the judgements proper to the visual, linguistic and social arts were formulated along similar lines, so each posed similar kinds of problems for those who exercised them. Alberti’s strictures on the importance of observing a decorous restraint when embellishing pictorial compositions were endlessly recycled in sixteenth-century Italian treatises. So, too, was Horace’s warning that poets and painters should not overstep certain bounds with their fantastic inventions. The difficulty, as always, was in knowing precisely where those bounds lay. What makes this issue especially significant for a study of the interconnections between spatial representation and rhetorical modes of thought is that it tended to be addressed in terms of the powerful yet elusive concept of ‘due proportion’. Whether the particular activity under scrutiny were painting or architecture, poetic or social practice, it was around this key visual trope that critical discussion of decorum revolved. The identification of decorum, the knowledge of what is fitting in a given situation, with a ‘sutable comelinesse of apt proportion’, formed part of the intellectual legacy handed down from classical antiquity. Vitruvius had listed ‘decor’ (derived, like decorum, from the Latin verb ‘decet’: to be fitting) among the fundamental principles



Licence and decorum


of architecture, along with ‘ordinatio’ (order), ‘dispositio’ (arrangement), ‘eurythmia’ (proportion), ‘symmetria’ (symmetry), and ‘distributio’ (distribution), each of which is in some way directed towards achieving an ‘appropriate harmony’ through ‘the suitable display of details in their context’.103 ‘Decor’ was associated in particular with the ability to vary one’s use of the classical orders to suit different architectural contexts. The priority Vitruvius gave to this skill was part of a strategy to dignify the science of building by grafting onto it a fully established rhetorical and ethical theory of decorum.104 Conversely, the concept of ‘due proportion’ became a central plank in this theory as developed in the works of Aristotle and Cicero, who saw decorum as proceeding from a harmonious congruity between style and subject matter, or between style and context.105 And the same criterion that was imposed on architectural and linguistic styles was deemed equally applicable to social conduct, on the premise that the ‘universal rule, in oratory as in life, is to consider propriety’.106 That human beings should aspire to an ideal of ordered harmony in life and in art is the governing assumption behind Cicero’s highly influential treatise on ethics, De Officiis, where seemly behaviour is alternately defined by analogy with poetic decorum and with visual beauty: For just as the eye is aroused by the beauty of a body, because of the appropriate arrangement of the limbs, and is delighted just because all its parts are in graceful harmony, so this seemliness, shining out in one’s life, arouses the approval of one’s fellows, because of the order and constancy and moderation of every word and action.107 In all one’s doings, striving for a graceful proportionality was evidently regarded as the key to a beautiful, orderly and civilised existence.108 In seeking to realize this aesthetic and social ideal, Renaissance writers and artists saw themselves as upholding a fundamental law of nature. It is well documented that in Christian-Platonic cosmology the whole of creation was conceived as being composed of harmonic proportions, based on universally valid mathematical ratios that could be reconstructed from their microcosmic reflections in the musical scale and in the dimensions of the human form.109 Since its mission was to express this same God-given harmony across a range of activities, the theory of decorum is ultimately predicated on a belief in correspondency. It testifies to that habit of imagining the world as a vast system of analogical relationships which Foucault has identified as the



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distinguishing feature of sixteenth-century epistemology, but which had its roots in ancient Greek philosophy.110 Inevitably, this way of thinking helped to consolidate the links between the disciplines, given that as Lomazzo/Haydocke puts it, ‘there is no arte, but is some way beholding to Proportion’ (p.26). As ‘the first patterne of all Artificiall thinges’, it supposedly provided a metaphysical basis and sanction for all the liberal arts and sciences, including music, medicine, geometry, astronomy, architecture, painting, and of course language. By implication, therefore, to observe the correct or appropriate proportions in any of these domains was to conform one’s actions to a divinely instituted order, just as, by the same logic, not to do so was tantamount to disrupting that order: ‘disordered speech’, writes John Hoskins, ‘is not so much injury to the lips which give it forth … as to the right proportion and coherence of things in themselves, so wrongfully expressed’.111 While the desirability of achieving proportionality in one’s work was more or less a matter of consensus that transcended cultural and disciplinary boundaries, views on how this ideal should be implemented differed. In the following pages I shall consider what Italian commentators had to say on the subject before going on to compare their approach with that adopted by their English counterparts. Like Vitruvius, Alberti assumed that ‘due proportion’ was attainable by adhering to fixed mathematical ratios notionally derived from a perfect human body.112 By contrast, Lomazzo was, as we have seen, more interested in figures that exceed canonical proportions and are thus not amenable to purely rational methods of quantification. By what alternative criterion was the fittingness or otherwise of their dimensions to be determined? For Lomazzo, as for many of his contemporaries, the answer lay with the eye, which together with the intellect and ‘directed by the Perspective arte, ought to be a guide, measure, and judge of Painting and Carving’ (p.181). As artists sought to give their compositions a grace exceeding measurement, the judgement of the eye (giudizio dell’occhio) came to rival and even supplant mathematics as the final arbiter of artistic correctness. ‘No better standard can be applied than the judgment of the eye’, declared Vasari, ‘for even though a thing be perfectly measured, if the eye is still offended it will not cease to censure it’.113 As the principle responsible for regulating the irregular, the judgement of the eye was seen as having a special affinity with those aspects of proportion (or perspective) that were difficult to compute exactly. For Italian theorists in the latter half of the Cinquecento, this chiefly meant the distortions induced in the human form by foreshortening and movement. Elaborate schemes for





depicting the foreshortened figure by means of stereometric construction and for measuring movement arithmetically had been proposed by the early perspectivists. But to their successors, more conscious of the limitations of mathematical rule, these areas presented practical difficulties only soluble by recourse to the experienced eye. Michaelangelo’s famous dictum that ‘one should have compasses in one’s eyes, not in one’s hands, because the hands execute but it is the eye which judges’, is echoed in Book V of Lomazzo’s Trattato and elsewhere, as was his criticism of Dürer for attempting a rigidly systematic analysis of human proportions – for which, in any event, ‘no fixed rule can be given’ – without making sufficient allowance for movement.114 One of the interlocutors in Pino’s Dialogo della Pittura, for example, is reluctant to comply when pressed to explain the rules of proportion, objecting that they are of small use to the painter who tries to ‘capture the quickness of rapid and moving actions, where figures in some parts recede, shorten or diminish’; for this the painter is advised to rely instead on his own ‘discrezione’ and ‘buon giudizio’.115 Dolce similarly opined that foreshortening is ‘something which cannot be done without great judgment and discretion’.116 Infinitely mutating and irregularly proportioned, the human figure in motion was simply not reducible to any absolute standard of measurement. Arrived at intuitively rather than numerically, the judgements made by the eye were explicated in terms of the framework laid down by medieval faculty psychology.117 According to this Aristotelian discourse, each sense is capable of discriminating between the qualities peculiar to that sense – between high and low, for example, in the case of hearing; near and far, or light and dark, in the case of sight. Moreover, each sense will intuit the proper relation between these qualities on the basis of what it finds most pleasing, gravitating naturally towards the mean, and rejecting anything disproportionate, whether through deficiency or excess, as offensive to it. Insofar as the capacity for sensate judgement was presumed to be innate – a product of instinct, not acquired rules – it was also thought, in principle at least, to be common to all. If the instinctual basis of such judgements further eroded the authority of mathematical laws, so on another front did their involvement with the particular and the circumstantial. Like its literary equivalent, decorum, the giudizio dell’occhio was closely associated with the moral virtues of prudence and discretion, being known in common with them as a practical mode of reasoning concerned with ascertaining what is right or appropriate in a given instance.118 With respect to the visual arts, this usually implied an ability to adapt



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the laws of proportion or perspective to take account of specific circumstances, such as the subject matter of the work in question, or the place and context in which it was to be viewed. Lomazzo’s insistence on the need to adjust the dimensions of figures placed on high in order to accommodate the intended viewpoint (a process supervised by the artist’s eye rather than his compass and rule) appeals directly to this belief that canonical norms should be modified where necessary in the light of practical considerations. The same belief also dictated that the painter should not stick to a ‘single measure’ but should vary his proportions – in ways clearly impossible to quantify – to harmonize with the particular emotions, character, age and sex of the person represented.119 Owing to these properties, giudizio – in marked contrast to the mathematical laws it modified or displaced – was deeply resistant to codification. The intuitive, sub-rational status of such judgements, combined with the fact that they related to and were only valid within a specific context, made them almost impossible to marshal into rigid precepts. Moreover, they had to do, as I have suggested, with forms of artifice that operated outside normative rule and so, by definition, did not lend themselves to systematic methods of regulation. One consequence of this lack of theoretical fixity was that the concept of giudizio, traditionally thought of as a force for restraint, inculcating adherence to an Aristotelian mean, might equally be used to authorize opposing tendencies. Indeed, it was the flexibility of this principle that allowed Michelangelo and his Mannerist followers to bend it to their advantage when seeking to legitimize their violations of the rules governing perspective and proportion. However, these libertarian propensities had to contend with other, more powerful factors within Cinquecento culture that worked to counteract the incipient relativism of giudizio or, at any rate, to hold it in check. We may point, in particular, to the chastening effect of Counter-Reformation doctrines, which frowned on any deviation from the facts, any unnecessary display of imaginative licence, when representing historical or biblical scenes, or to the restrictions imposed by the prevailing, and in its way no less inhibiting, emphasis on a normative ideal in contemporary discussion of the arts.120 Evidence of this idealist bent greets us wherever we happen to look in Italian art treatises of the period. What concerns us here is how attitudes to measurement were affected by the cultural tendencies outlined above, and it should be noted in this connection that the widespread disaffection with mathematical rules did not prevent critics from endorsing the tried and trusted canons of proportion. Lomazzo’s





handling of this topic is altogether typical of such backsliding. Having argued that the artist ‘ought not to tie himselfe to any one kind of proportion’, since ‘there are as many varieties thereof, as there are naturall differences of bodies’ (pp.41, 49), he proceeds to advocate a series of measurements based on standard types originally formulated by Dürer – ‘a man of eight heads’, ‘a woman of tenne faces’, and so forth – on the pretext that ‘Arte being the Counterfaiter of Nature, must ever indevour to imitate the most absolute [i.e. perfect] things’ (p.51).121 Charged with adapting language and behaviour to fit the variable circumstances of ‘places, times and persons’, the principle of decorum not only shared salient qualities with the giudizio dell’occhio, but, to some extent, a common history. As the sixteenth century wore on, it too was applied ever more prescriptively, reduced to a set of binding precepts that left writers and artists no real latitude to speak of in the treatment of their subject. The Italian treatises on poetics that were churned out by the dozen during this period relentlessly reminded the writer of his duty to observe the rules of propriety by suiting style to subject matter and subject matter to genre. Above all, he was enjoined by critics such as Scaliger and Minturno to give his characters the speech and behaviour specified as appropriate to each type of person and meticulously classified according to country, sex, age, fortune, disposition, and so on.122 Any author so foolhardy as to swerve from these formulaic patterns, any who dared to show ‘indications of generosity … in an old man, or signs of temperance in a very low servant, or of shame in a prostitute’, could expect to be lambasted for indecorum and lack of verisimilitude.123 Such attitudes discouraged the free play of invention to the same degree that they rewarded conformity to typical modes of representation. Commentators on the visual arts echoed this doctrinaire approach to decorum.124 Dolce, who maintains that a sense of propriety (‘convenevolezza’) is as essential for the artist as for the writer, admonishes that one ‘should always pay attention to the personal qualities of [one’s] subjects’ when depicting them, besides taking into account ‘questions of nationality, dress, setting and period’; thus he finds fault with Dürer for depicting the Virgin in a German costume.125 Yet despite the fact that decorum was interpreted in a restrictive rather than in a permissive sense by the vast majority of its neoclassicizing Italian expositors, it was possible to read another and more liberatory set of meanings into the classical texts that enshrined this concept for later ages.126 Horace’s Ars Poetica, on whose authority Dolce, like most of his fellow critics, leans heavily, has generally been blamed for the normative and dogmatic tendencies that overwhelmed



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the theory of decorum in the course of the sixteenth century. Ironically, however, its opening statement could be said to exemplify the very inconsistency it attacks by conceding to poets and painters a conditional freedom to follow the promptings of their imagination (p.63). The ambiguity of the Horatian text is reflected in the ease with which it accommodated itself to opposing critical positions in the perennial debate about just how much artistic licence should be granted to practitioners of either art.127 The elasticity of decorum as a standard of propriety might also be inferred from another celebrated passage that became an important locus for both artists and writers because of its ut pictura analogizing. We have already seen how Quintilian likened rhetorical ornament to corporeal movement as a source of pleasurable variety (p.5). In Book II of the Institutio, he expands upon this conceit in the midst of a discussion about knowing when it is appropriate to bend the rules. ‘It is often expedient and occasionally becoming to make some modification in the time-honoured order’ (my emphasis), he writes, just as in pictures and statues Dress, expression and attitude are frequently varied. The body when held bolt upright has but little grace … But that curve, I might almost call it motion, with which we are so familiar, gives an impression of action and animation … Where can we find a more violent and elaborate attitude than that of the Discobolus of Myron? Yet the critic who disapproved of the figure because it was not upright would merely show his utter failure to understand the sculptor’s art, in which the very novelty and difficulty of execution is what most deserves our praise. A similar impression of grace and charm is produced by rhetorical figures … For they involve a certain departure from the straight line and have the merit of variation from the ordinary usage.128 With a decisiveness that does much to substantiate a basic premise of my argument in this chapter, Quintilian identifies the wilful transgression of artistic norms as the key to the resemblance between rhetorical figures and irregular proportions: the type of proportions exemplified by the elaborate torsions of Myron’s famous statue (Plate 11) and later revived by the Mannerists’ fondness for inventing extravagantly convoluted postures.129 Indeed, he argues that it is precisely their deviation from ‘ordinary usage’, whether defined by canonical proportion or customary speech, that gives these artificial configurations their peculiar





novelty, grace and charm. But the chief point for us to register is that their immoderation is being defended on the very grounds which Alberti and his neoclassically-minded successors would subsequently use to condemn such excessive movements – that is, in the name of decorum. Quintilian’s willingness to sanction verbal (and visual) licence in some circumstances should not be taken to imply the removal of all constraints. In common with every classical and Renaissance rhetorician, he took the view that ‘a certain proportion must be observed’ even – indeed especially – where literal truth is most flagrantly abused.130 This tenet raises more problems than it solves, however. For, as a moment’s reflection tells us, proportionality is even more difficult to gauge precisely in the case of figurative discourse than in those painted or sculpted figures whose dimensions are measurable only by the eye.131 How then are its limits to be determined, and by whom? Where objective calibration is impossible, what other kinds of yardstick can be applied? To conclude the chapter, I propose to look at some English responses to these intractable issues by juxtaposing Puttenham’s discussion of poetic decorum with Hilliard’s observations on the role of the judgement of the eye in miniature painting. The problem of how to define ‘due proportion’ is a crucial consideration for both men, who take for granted that it can only be resolved through the intervention of ‘naturall judgement’. While there are obvious parallels between this view and what was being said on the Continent, we need once again to be wary of allowing such discursive echoes to lull us into overlooking significant divergences of approach and emphasis. Compared to that enunciated by Lomazzo or Scaliger, the position adopted by these late Elizabethan writers on questions pertaining to decorum appears robustly empirical, involving the rejection of rule-making in favour of a more pragmatic and materialist agenda. Unhampered by the straitjacket of a narrow idealism, this approach allowed Puttenham and Hilliard to engage with those elusive and unstable aspects of decorum which, defying regulation, had been largely passed over by Italian commentators. Such differences, I suggest, can be seen as indicative of a continuing ambivalence in English attitudes to continental theorizing and, more particularly, a discomfort with neoclassicism itself. The chapters on decorum that round off Puttenham’s discussion of rhetorical ornament in The Arte of English Poesie follow logically from his acute sense of the indeterminate status of figures, of their susceptibility to being either condemned as ‘trespasses’ or extolled as



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‘vertues in the poetical science’. ‘The matter resteth much in the definition and acceptance of this word [decorum]’, he concludes, ‘for whatsoever is so, cannot justly be misliked’ (p.155). For Puttenham, the importance of decorum as an arbiter of propriety is matched only by its elusiveness and resistance to rational formulation, the difficulty being ‘to know what this good grace is, & wherein it consisteth, for peradventure it be easier to conceave then to expresse’ (p.261). After enumerating the diverse names by which it is known, he attempts to sum it up thus: Now because this comelynesse resteth in the good conformitie of many things and their sundry circumstances, with respect one to another, so as there be found a just correspondencie betweene them … The Greekes call it Analogie or a convenient proportion. This lovely conformitie, or proportion, or conveniencie betweene the sence and the sensible hath nature her selfe first most carefully observed in all her owne workes, then also by kind graft it in the appetites of every creature working by intelligence to covet and desire: and in their actions to imitate & performe. (p.262) Like so many of his precursors, Puttenham makes ‘convenient proportion’ the cornerstone of his definition of decorum. Moreover, his account of how this true proportion may be recognized – itself structured around a visual analogy – mirrors the concept of the giudizio dell’ occhio in certain key respects. Our senses naturally take delight in the objects fitted to them, he notes, except where the latter are vitiated by ‘excesses’, ‘defectes’, or some other ‘disorders’. So the ear is ‘ill affected’ by a sound ‘too loude or too lowe or otherwise confuse’, the eye by a body ‘without his due measures and simmetry’. Similarly, the aptness of ‘mentall objectes’ may be gauged by the amount of pleasure they impart, which ‘stand[s] no lesse in the due proportion of reason and discourse than any other materiall thing doth in his sensible bewtie, proportion and comelynesse’ (pp.261–2). Puttenham also treads old ground in affirming proportionality to be a basic law of nature, encoded in ‘all her owne workes’ and reflected ‘in the appetites of every creature’. All human beings, it is thus implied, are equally endowed from birth with the capacity to detect ‘any foule indecencie or disproportion’ in the intellectual as in the visual domain (p.155). But this democratic position is significantly modified when Puttenham goes on to state that, in the event of any ‘controversie as may arise





whether this or that action or speach be decent or indecent’, judgement ought to rest with those possessed of a ‘learned and experienced discretion, for otherwise seemes the decorum to a weake and ignorant judgement, then it doth to one of better knowledge and experience’ (p.263).132 From the context it is clear that precedence is being given to a courtly elite whose entitlement to judge rests more on superior education and social standing than on any innate powers of discernment.133 As a result of these manoeuvrings, a faculty initially presented as a form of universal instinct working in sympathy with the natural order is covertly redefined as the prerogative of a privileged minority with the power to impose its own interpretation of propriety on others.134 The lack of any absolute or common standard underlying decorum is further exposed by Puttenham’s emphasis on the inbuilt relativism of its deliberations. Owing to the differences in men’s judgements, he writes, and by reason of the sundry circumstances, that mans affaires are as it were wrapt in, this [decencie] comes to be very much alterable and subject to varietie, in so much as our speach asketh one maner of decencie, in respect of the person who speakes: another of his to whom it is spoken: another of whom we speake: another of what we speake, and in what place and time and to what purpose. And as it is of speach, so of al other our behaviours. (pp.263– 4) The volatility engendered by this proliferation of circumstances and subjective variations in judgment lies at the very core of Puttenham’s understanding of decorum. He is forever reminding the reader that a speech or action deemed to be ‘indecent’ in certain respects, may appear entirely ‘decent’ when judged by another set of criteria or viewed from an different standpoint. So slippery is this concept, in fact, that it is quite capable of converting a rhetorical vice into a virtue and vice versa, as shown by its ability to make ‘a bewtifull figure fall into a deformitie, and on th’other side a vicious speach seeme pleasaunt and bewtifull’ (p.261). The point was not new, of course; we have seen how alert classical writers could be to the difficulty of making hard-and-fast distinctions regarding matters of propriety.135 Nevertheless, Puttenham’s insistence on the alterability of such judgements compounds the problem by highlighting the propensity of decorum to invert itself – to become its own presumed antithesis by acting as a spur to the very kinds of excess it was meant to curtail.



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Thus a principle expressly introduced into the Arte to assist the reader in the delicate task of discriminating between legitimate and illegitimate forms of licence ends up threatening to erase this difference altogether. Another important effect of Puttenham’s emphasis on the radically contingent nature of decorous judgements, and the degree to which their authority depends upon the social status of those who wield them, is to foreground the role of society in defining what constitutes ‘due proportion’. That social context has a crucial bearing on this issue is openly declared in the transition from matters of verbal propriety to ‘al other our behaviours’ at the end of the passage quoted above – a shift replicated in the overall pattern of Puttenham’s commentary, which concludes with a chapter entitled ‘Of decencie in behaviour which also belongs to the consideration of the Poet or maker’. By continually alluding to this wider context and its determining influence on decorum, Puttenham inadvertently lays bare the true status of this principle, revealing it to be rooted not in some transcendent law of harmony, but rather in a set of culturally instituted norms that can be manipulated in the interests of different social groupings. Again, he was not alone in linking issues of proportionality with the socio-political formation. Lomazzo had glanced at the ideological effects of ‘due proportion’ in a passage already cited, where he comments on its usefulness as an instrument of religious / civil discipline (p.69). Similarly Puttenham’s treatment of the aesthetic and social domains as part of single continuum governed by the same kind of practical judgement was anticipated by both Cicero and Castiglione.136 What sets Puttenham apart is not his acknowledgment of the social implications of decorum per se, but the extent to which such a recognition informs his whole treatment of the subject. Nowhere is this more evident than in his strategy of illustrating the workings of this principle with page after page of historical examples. Many of the examples have been chosen with a view to underlining what is at stake in respecting verbal propriety by relating this to the maintenance of civil order and degree.137 Thus Puttenham objects to the term ‘pelfe’ when used of a prince’s wealth as incommensurate with the dignity of the owner, though it may properly be applied to ‘meaner persons’ (p.274). Likewise, he stresses the importance of selecting the appropriate stylistic register by aligning the literary genres with their corresponding gradations in the social hierarchy (pp.152–3). Examples of this kind serve to impress on the reader that failure to maintain a fitting proportionality in one’s speech has consequences beyond the





aesthetic; that to violate linguistic norms is, by extension, to be guilty of transgressing accepted codes of behaviour. Both, we are expected to note, were flagrantly abused by the French princess whom Puttenham rebukes for complaining that her lack of male genitalia debarred her from the throne, on the grounds that such language ‘became not the greatnesse of her person, and much lesse her sexe, whose chiefe vertue is shamefastnesse, which the Latines call Verecundia’ (p.267). Puttenham’s policy of explicating decorum through a succession of examples – drawn from the annals of courtly diplomacy or based on personal observation – does not simply reflect his assumption that the rhetorical and the political are interconnected. It is also the logical outcome of his belief that decorum is not reducible to a general method or rule. Given the variability of this principle, he argues, there is ‘no way so fit to enable a man truly to estimate of [decencie] as example, by whose veritie we may deeme the difference of things and their proportions, and by particular discussions come at length to sentence of it generally’ (p.263). Decorum, that is, can only be taught by heaping up specific examples. Puttenham happily admits that his approach is short on ‘doctrine’, but maintains that the pleasure it affords far outweighs any ‘rable of scholastical precepts’ (p.264). The exemplary technique pursued in the Arte of English Poesie defers indefinitely the formulation of a universal law to which it was supposed to lead and pushes the circumstantial logic of decorum to its limits. For by embedding his views on ‘convenient proportion’ in an open-ended sequence of concrete examples, Puttenham asserts, in effect, that judgments of this sort can never be divorced from the particular contexts in which they are made. He is demonstrating that by their very nature they cannot be spoken of in the abstract and general. Puttenham’s sensitivity to the relativistic nature of aesthetic judgements, which puts them beyond the reach of codification, is closely paralleled in Hilliard’s Art of Limning in ways that do not seem purely coincidental. Hilliard regards ‘good proportion’ as fundamental to the art of miniature painting, since it is in this – together with ‘complexion’ (flesh colouring) and ‘grace in countenance’ (affective expression) – that the whole ‘comeliness and beauty of the face resides’ (pp.75–7). But although prepared to grant the necessity for correct proportion, whose importance he admits has been too long neglected by English artists, he is not won over to the view that this requires mathematical knowledge, which was, for continental theorists, its inescapable corollary. ‘True proportion’, he argues, can only be delivered by an



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‘admirable instinct of nature [which] judgeth generally, both in wise and foolish, young and old, learned and simple, and knoweth by nature, without rule or reason for it, who is well-proportioned or wellfavoured, etc’ (p.75).138 The depth of Hilliard’s antipathy to rules is fully revealed when he recounts how he was once cross-examined by Sir Philip Sidney, on a technical point of proportion. Sidney reportedly inquired whether it was possible when confronted with two pictures measuring the same ‘scantling’ or size to tell which of these is intended to represent ‘a little or short man’ and which ‘a mighty, big and tall man’. Hilliard duly obliged by giving the kind of reasoned explanation calculated to satisfy such a ‘great scholar’, but not, as he makes clear, without experiencing some inward resistance: I showed him that it was easily discerned if it were cunningly drawn with true observations, for our eye is cunning, and is learned without rule by long use, as little lads speak their vulgar tongue without grammar rules. But I gave him rules, and sufficient reasons to note and observe. (p.83) Hilliard’s reluctance stems less from the impracticability of formulating rules and reasons than from their perceived irrelevance, their utter inadequacy to communicate the essence of ‘good judgment’ which he conceives of as a highly subjective, barely definable quality. (His insinuation that indigenous artists share the ability to manage without rules with those who express themselves in their native tongue adds an interesting nationalistic twist to ut pictura analogizing). While Hilliard may have found a supportive precedent in Lomazzo (whose word he invokes at every turn) for this privileging of the ‘true rule of judgment’, as exercised by the eye, over the false authority of reason, his repudiation of the latter is much more radical and uncompromising. In particular, he rejects Dürer’s classification of proportions, embraced with whatever reservations by Lomazzo and meticulously reproduced in Haydocke’s engravings (Plate 12), not only because in making figures out to be as rigid and unchanging as ‘pillars’ it ignores the effects of foreshortening and movement (p.71), but because its rules are ‘hard to be remembered, and tedious to be followed of painters, being so full of divisions’ (p.69). Over and above their academic pedantry, however, it is their irreconcilability with empirical observation that renders such precepts suspect in Hilliard’s eyes. Thus he counters Dürer’s axiom that ‘commonly all faces hold one measure and true proportion’ with the




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sometime Lord Chancellor of England, a man generally known and respected of all men amongst the best favours, and held to be one of the goodliest personages of England: yet had he a very low forehead, not answerable to that good proportion of a third part of his face; and on the contrary part, infinite number of faces there are which hold that proportion which Albert Durer commendeth, and yet are but ill-favoured or unpleasant faces to behold, so God in nature hath for difference ordained it. (p.81) Reiterated in Francis Bacon’s essay ‘On Beauty’, published in 1612, the basic elements of this anti-theoretical stance were still being rehearsed by Hogarth over a century later.139 If Hilliard’s pragmatic insistence on the diversity of ‘true proportion’ recalls Puttenham’s approach to poetic decorum, the same may be said of his assumption that the judgements involved always reflects a particular set of social circumstances. The making of the miniature, he likes to remind us, differs from the ordinary run of studio portraits in requiring the presence of the ‘party’ imitated and consequently derives its form and impact from the intricate relations (physical, affective and social) which exist between the artist, sitter and intended beholder[s]. It is this whole complex of relationships that is regulated by the artist’s ‘good judgment’, giving it a decisive role not just in determining which are the correct proportions in a specific instance, but in selecting the right location, lighting, position and viewpoint. Such judgements, in turn, are shown to be responsive to and inflected by a broad range of material factors, including the conditions in which the miniature is to be viewed (‘in hand near unto the eye’ and ‘in private manner’) and the emotional chemistry between the limner and his subject, as well as the latter’s personal tastes and social status. That this last was the overriding consideration for Hilliard is implied by his advice to the limner to take care when positioning his mostly noble patrons to secure those proportions that best become or express their dignity: In drawing after the life, sit not nearer than two yards from the party, and sit as even of height as possibly you may; but if he be a



proof of experience, which provides daily confirmation that physiognomic ratios vary infinitely from one individual to the next, and that beauty does not depend on conformity to an ideal canon. Such was the case with Sir Christopher Hatton,


Pointing out that rather than denoting actual stature, ‘high’ and ‘low’ may equally well refer here to gradations of rank, Clark Hulse astutely remarks that, according to this reading, the passage treats ‘physical relationships … [as] expressive of the social hierarchy’, and ‘transforms objective vision into class deference’.140 It does so, one might add, in much the same way that rhetorical relationships are regarded as an extension of their social equivalents in the Arte of English Poesie. Sharing Puttenham’s awareness of how deeply conditioned our aesthetic judgments are by such worldly considerations, Hilliard also shares his conviction that this skill is better taught by example than by theoretical precepts methodically expounded. The general ‘observations or directions to the art of limning’ half promised at various moments in Hilliard’s rambling treatise are repeatedly postponed, replaced by practical advice (be diligent and temperate in your habits; take heed that dandruff or spittle does not fall on your work!) and by gossipy anecdotes about his patrons and fellow artists. The conversation with Sidney on the subject of proportion, for example, forms a kind of diptych with Hilliard’s reminiscences about an exchange of views between him and the Queen regarding the correct method of handling light and shade (pp.85–7) – an exchange which, he avers, ‘hath greatly bettered my judgement’, in pointed contrast to his perusal of Dürer’s wearisome rules. And, as in Puttenham’s case, the unease with generalized abstractions Hilliard voices is complemented by the embodied particularity of the anecdotal form in which his opinions are conveyed. The belief that ‘true proportion’ is not reducible to rule was, as we have seen, widely espoused by sixteenth-century Italian theorists. By a curious paradox first noted by Panofsky, however, this revolt against the tyranny of mathematical laws coincided with a drive to legislate every aspect of the arts, just as its more radical implications were tempered by the subservience of Italian aesthetics to a normative ideal.141 The profound impatience with such rule-making expressed by Puttenham and Hilliard left them, by contrast, free to explore the protean and potentially heterodox qualities of giudizio. In the shared preoccupations of these writers we may perhaps detect the makings of



very high person, let him sit a little above, because generally men be under him, and will so judge of the picture, because they underview him. If it be a very low person or child, use the like discretion in placing him somewhat lower than yourself. (p.115. My emphasis)


a peculiarly English attitude to artistic problems – one that was less concerned with formulating rules than with responding to the specificity and diversity of things, less with prescribing an abstract ideal than with taking note of the various material factors that may impinge on day-to-day practice. This aversion to systematizing can be located within wider currents of resistance to the imposition of neoclassical models and to the growing pressures around the turn of the century for a comprehensive theorization of the arts along continental lines.142 It is a well-known fact that English writers, prior to the late seventeenth century at least, showed little taste for the kind of rigid adherence to propriety, and the associated doctrines of the three unities and the purity of the genres, which was considered mandatory in Italy or France.143 Even that precocious neoclassicist, Ben Jonson, was not so punctilious an observer of the rules as he liked to think. Far from being the product of laxity or ignorant insularity, this failure to conform to academic rules was often based on a considered choice which participated in a process of cultural self-definition. That is to say, it often reflected a conscious self-distancing from continental ways. Indeed, as Richard Helgerson has shown, for Elizabethan writers (and, we may add, artists) the question of whether to adopt the weighty authority of classical or humanist models, in preference to following the supposedly barbarous example of native practitioners, was inextricably bound up with the articulation of a national identity.144 It is against this backdrop that Shakespeare’s alleged breaches of decorum need to be seen. The frequency with which he was taken to task by later generations of neoclassical critics on this account should not surprise us, since his handling of the principle is quite as flexible and undoctrinaire as that of Puttenham or Hilliard, with which it has in fact notable affinities.145 Judgements about what is proper or improper are treated throughout his work as being highly subjective, a ‘parcel of men’s fortunes’ and their temperaments; such lack of uniformity becomes one more manifestation of the infinite diversity of human viewpoints. In addition, the referential density of Shakespeare’s fictive worlds calls attention to the fact that these judgements are never made in isolation from their socio-political context, reflecting as they do the particular constraints under which each character must speak and act. Consequently, we shall find that an extraordinary degree of elasticity is ascribed to the rule of decorum in the plays examined in this book. Caesar’s understanding of the concept is the antithesis of Cleopatra’s. Hamlet’s antic words and gestures imply an idea of what constitutes decorous behaviour that is fundamentally at



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odds with the restraint he enjoins on the players in III.2. Whether or not decorum has been violated in a given instance is thus often presented as a matter for contention. Of the political implications of breaching this law, on the other hand, we are left in no doubt; the aesthetic transgressions of characters like Cleopatra or Caliban, who refuse to submit to neoclassical canons of propriety, are construed as a manifestation of their rebelliousness against imperialist rule in general. Shakespeare’s readiness to subject the ideal of ‘due proportion’ to a process of dramatic contestation and reinterpretation suggests that it was no more stable a category for him than for the author of the Arte of English Poesie. But there is another, more basic sense in which Shakespeare’s use of this concept resonates with that of his contemporaries. When he invokes decorum in the context of Caliban’s monstrously ‘misshapen’ form, for example, or of Cleopatra’s dream of Antony reincarnated as a colossus of superhuman dimensions, he does so in ways that effectively revitalize the visual trope of proportion which underpinned this principle. Every renegotiation of its meaning, we are thus reminded, could be seen as taking place within the discursive framework of ut pictura analogising. This kind of translocation of ideas from a visual to a verbal context, and vice versa, is symptomatic, I have suggested, of a culture that accepted unquestioningly the interchangeability of the poetic and pictorial arts. It was this fundamental premise that allowed spatial images to fulfil certain rhetorical functions and, conversely, permitted figurative discourse to assume some of the properties ordinarily ascribed to such images. My intention has also been to show how theories of elocutio and theories of linear perspective or proportion, became enmeshed, in the course of their intersecting histories, with a broad repertoire of issues and topoi: artistic, moral, social and epistemological. Several of these topoi will be revisited in the readings of individual plays that follow in order to illustrate the extent to which they continued to inform and dictate Shakespeare’s treatment of problems of viewpoint.




Hamlet and the Art of Looking Diversely on the Self

On his first appearance, Hamlet marks out his singularity in relation to other members of the Danish court by distinguishing between his exterior, socially defined self and an authentic inner being, declaring ‘I have that within which passes show, / These but the trappings and the suits of woe’ (I.2.85). This chapter will attempt to situate Hamlet’s self-assertion in the context of aesthetic developments which were then taking place in English culture. It is generally accepted that the end of the sixteenth century was a crucial moment in the formation of the individual self, a moment when the subject acquired a sharper sense of its particularity and its power to shape or ‘fashion’ its own identity.1 Admittedly, Jacob Burckhardt’s much cited claim that during the Renaissance ‘man became a spiritual individual and recognised himself as such’, rather than as being merely a member of the collective, has been contested in recent years on both historical and ideological grounds.2 Critics have warned of the dangers of anachronistically reading into the texts of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean period a philosophy of selfhood that was not fully articulated or established as the norm until the latter half of the seventeenth century.3 To confuse Hamlet’s utterance with that of a wholly self-determining agent, whose consciousness serves as the ground of all meaning and action, of the type postulated by bourgeois ideology would clearly be misguided. But, as Katherine Eisaman Maus notes, such counter-arguments can produce their own distortions by encouraging a tendency to ‘minimize or underestimate the significance of conceptions of psychological interiority for the English Renaissance’.4 Evidence of an interest in the existence of a private inner consciousness is to be found across a wide range of discourses, including conduct literature, theological debate, psychology and jurisprudence. Some of the most compelling testimony 104



4

comes, however, from poets and painters who sought to adapt their respective media to the representation of the self and the inner life to which it increasingly laid claim. No longer content with describing external or generic marks of identity, they began to conceive of these as the threshold of an interior existence imagined as qualitatively different, if not yet as fully distinct from, social and familial roles. The development of individual portraiture has been widely adduced as one manifestation of this incipient ‘cult of personality’.5 Art historians have commented on the concern with psychological notation, with capturing the sitter’s distinctive qualities, evident in many Italian and Flemish portraits from the fifteenth century onwards. It is not by chance that these developments coincided with the perfecting of naturalism as the dominant mode in the visual arts; illusionist techniques were an important enabling factor in the evolution of a more individualized style of portraiture. The advent of linear perspective in particular made possible a new objectification of the self for the purposes of depiction, both by opening up a conscious distance between the artist and his subject and by seeming to permit a more exact replication of optical reality. The problem, as we have seen, is that the mainstream of sixteenth-century English portraiture cannot easily be assimilated to this continental tradition. Decidedly anti-naturalistic and largely innocent of perspective and shadow, it tended, significantly, to be less concerned with projecting an inner self than with the symbolism of public office and social rank. On the other hand, the fashion for the portrait miniature which took root in courtly and aristocratic circles during the 1580s would appear to be symptomatic of a growing interest in the expression of private emotion, to which the intimate format of this ‘picture in little’ was ideally suited;6 Nicholas Hilliard, for example, designates the chief task of the limner as being to ‘catch those lovely graces, witty smilings, and those stolen glances’, whereby the inner ‘affections’ are outwardly manifested (p.77). And, as contact with the artistic cultures of mainland Europe increased around the turn of the century, more psychologically realistic styles in both small- and large-scale portraiture began to find favour with artists and patrons.7 The later sixteenth century is further associated with the development of such ‘private’ literary forms as the soliloquy, the sonnet and autobiography, each of which was committed, in varying degrees, to a detailed exploration of personal experience.8 Anne Ferry has shown how poets of the period were foremost in articulating a radically new idea of inward existence unfolding at a distance from outward expression.9 Philip Sidney especially, and, in his footsteps, Shakespeare,



Hamlet and the Art of Looking Diversely on the Self 105

sought to forge a new poetic language responsive to the complexities of the inner life. To this end they exploited the possibilities for sustained self-analysis which Petrarch had first revealed in the sonnet cycle, using the genre to probe the innermost recesses of consciousness, its vicissitudes, feints and contradictions. In heeding the famous injunction of Astrophil’s Muse to ‘look in [the] heart and write’, these two poets, as Ferry also notes, dramatize the difficulties involved in giving truthful expression to what lies hidden within – a task complicated by the widening gulf between inner and outer, public and private. Her analysis of the impediments they had to negotiate in attempting to reveal the inner self has been echoed in an influential essay on that other ‘private’ artefact: the miniature. Comparing Hilliard’s miniatures with the Elizabethan sonnet as cognate forms whose appeal lay in their promise of intimate self-disclosure, Patricia Fumerton argues that in each case the private self could only be represented or viewed through public forms of artifice (ornament, convention and rhetoric), the effect of which was ironically to conceal the inner truths they claimed to divulge.10 Similar problems are encountered by Hamlet, who shares the conviction of these sonneteers and miniature-makers that truth is lodged within, their desire to make accessible the ‘privie thoughts and secret conceites of [the] mind’.11 More than any other literary creation, Shakespeare’s introspective prince has been taken to symbolize the shift towards an interiorized model of subjectivity we associate with the inception of the modern age. The main purpose of this chapter is to re-examine his claim to possess ‘that within which passes show’ – a claim endorsed, intentionally or not, by generations of critics who have taken Hamlet at his word, assuming him to be endowed with an inner life comparable in every respect to their own – in the light of his indefatigable efforts to grasp this within, the particular means whereby he engages in self-scrutiny. Introspection, as the word implies, entails an inwardly directed act of “seeing” with what we, like Hamlet, refer to as the ‘mind’s eye’. As this perceptual analogy might lead us to expect, the devices which facilitate Hamlet’s participation in this activity are visual as well as verbal, in the sense that they draw upon various modes of self-imaging in addition to a range of rhetorical strategies. While Hamlet’s interest in the theatre provides an obvious place of convergence for these different media, I shall argue that his methods of representing himself to himself can be analyzed no less productively by reference to the trope of self-portraiture, as it was deployed by both Renaissance painters and writers. Moreover, the techniques Hamlet



106 Vision and Rhetoric in Shakespeare

uses to portray or dramatize the self – presuming as they do the basic compatibility, even interchangeability of visual and verbal forms of communication – serve to establish ut pictura poesis as one of the main discursive contexts within which the play’s concern with subjectivity is worked out. Before considering the particular forms which Hamlet’s self-representation takes, it is useful to remind ourselves why they are necessary in the first place. The impossibility of beholding oneself directly, without external mediation, was a fact with which the Elizabethan theatregoing public was well acquainted and the implications of which are explored in several Shakespearean texts.12 Because, as Brutus puts it, ‘the eye sees not itself/ But by reflection, by some other things’ ( Julius Caesar, I.2.52), self-consciousness only becomes feasible where a person sees him/herself as other, becomes his/her own spectator. That is to say, it presupposes a splitting of the subject, a disjunction between the perceiving self and the self perceived. In Hamlet’s case, the requisite division of the self is chiefly effected by means of two devices whose operations are examined in detail below but may be briefly summarized here. The first depends, as Brutus hints, on the use of reflective images, For speculation turns not to itself Till it hath travell’d and is [mirror’d] there Where it may see itself. (Troilus and Cressida, III.3.109) Long associated with self-knowledge, the mirror becomes an indispensable agent in Hamlet’s attempt to discover – in the double sense of ‘finding out’ and of ‘disclosing what was hidden from view’ (OED, 3(a) and 8) – his own elusive essence.13 Hence he is forever manufacturing specular images whose specific function is to enable him and others to contemplate the ‘inmost part’ of themselves. It may well be argued, of course, that the mirror does not simply discover or reveal what is already there to be reflected; rather it actively constitutes the self imaged in its depths. Lacan famously held the child’s contemplation of its own reflected image to be paradigmatic of the formation of the ego, when the subject first acquires a sense of itself as a discrete and coherent entity.14 On a more historical plane, the play’s interest in selfreflection as a means to self-definition can be related to the rapidly expanding market for plate-glass mirrors in the sixteenth century.15 Several commentators have gone so far as to suggest that the emergent




modern subject ‘received an access of confidence’ from the increased availability of this type of mirror, which ‘must … have contributed to the individual’s sense of his or her own uniqueness’.16 Whether or not this is the case – and Hamlet’s self-imaging permits an altogether less reassuring set of inferences as we shall see – the invention of flat looking-glasses undoubtedly contributed to the growth of self-portraiture during this period. By definition, this pictorial genre necessitates a doubling of the self, just as it may choose to make of the mirror a vehicle for the artist’s bid to apprehend and express the innermost core of his being. It is for this reason especially that Renaissance experiments in self-portraiture can help to elucidate Hamlet’s fascination with specular images. The other main device forged by the prince for the purposes of selfreflection is that succession of roles known collectively as the ‘antic disposition’. His assumption of a dazzling array of personae ensures the internal distantiation, that objectification or ‘othering’ of the self, which we have seen to be a necessary condition for introspection to occur. Acting out different facets of his public identity as grieving son, lover, moralist, melancholic, revenger, theatre critic and royal heir allows Hamlet not only to reflect obliquely on the less accessible, more private and introverted qualities of the self, but to do so from a kaleidoscopic range of viewpoints. For, whatever form it takes, introspection is condemned to indirection and, by the same logic, to an accumulation of perspectives, as the perceiving subject strives to envision what (in a very literal sense) remains concealed from view. Hamlet’s characteristically involuted mode of addressing the world, his habit of pursuing indirections in order to find directions out, can thus be seen as motivated partly by a desire to circumvent the perceptual constraints that threaten to obstruct his quest for self-knowledge. Each shift of his rhetorical stance, each role newly assumed, seems to promise a fresh, if inevitably partial, insight into the hidden workings of his being. Although imagined in visual or specular terms, the perspectives deployed by Hamlet are, in fact, primarily linguistic in origin. It is therefore worth pausing at this juncture to consider what implications the issue of viewpoint, conceived of in these distinct yet complementary ways, may have for the definition of selfhood. Contemporary discussions of the history of vision generally take their cue from Lacan in associating the invention of linear perspective with the institution of the modern (Cartesian) subject: It is not for nothing that it was at the very period when the Cartesian meditation inaugurated in all its purity the function of





According to this line of reasoning, linear perspective exalts the individual by adopting man as its central point of reference and making him, in Alberti’s phrase, ‘the measure of all things’ (p.53). The spectator is confirmed in a state of omniscient self-possession through his mastery of the visual field, which arranges itself around his privileged viewpoint and reveals itself fully to his gaze. But the situation is a good deal more complicated in a case like Hamlet’s, where an individual simultaneously occupies the position of the viewing subject and the object viewed, the observer and the observed. Moreover, as Lacan recognized, the spatial regime described can itself be seen as tending to undermine rather than consolidate the subject’s claims to sovereignty.18 For one thing, the conventions governing linear perspective dictate that the viewing position, once chosen, remains fixed, thereby obliging all subsequent spectators (in theory at least) to occupy the same spot. Assigned a specific position requiring him/her to look in a certain predetermined way at the scene depicted, the beholder begins to take on the appearance not so much of the source or controlling centre of vision as of an incidental product of its geometrical laws. In fact, this reversal in the beholder’s status begs the question whether the subject should not be rethought as being, in Hubert Damisch’s words, little more than ‘an effect of perspective, as it is of language’.19 As Damisch’s aphorism suggests, the linguistic domain throws up similar paradoxes. We have already noted how one function of the rhetorical system was to enable individual speakers to enunciate ideas and attitudes – in short, to express their personal view of things – by making available a range of ‘places’ from which any topic under discussion could be considered. In its persuasive applications, however, rhetoric was more concerned with determining the viewpoint of the other. The aim was to work upon the listener in so irresistible a fashion that he/she would be compelled to identify with the opinions expressed and to adjust his/her behaviour accordingly, since eloquent speeches ‘by a vertue inexplicable do drawe unto them the mindes and consent of the herers’.20 Ideally, that is, language was conceived as having the capacity to alter a person’s entire mental outlook, how that person sees the world, and, by this process, bring about the transformation of his/her moral character. Here too, the idea of the subject as a selfdetermining, all-knowing agent is turned on its head by such a hypothesis; the implication being that rather than individual consciousness



the subject that the dimension of optics that I shall distinguish here by calling ‘geometral’ or ‘flat’ (as opposed to perspective) optics was developed.17

shaping speech, the self is as much a product of the way language is structured as it is of the laws regulating vision. As we shall see, the coercive properties inherent in language are vigorously exploited by Hamlet for his own ends. His rhetorical training allows him to manipulate the ways in which the many spies and onlookers at the Danish court perceive him and, more importantly, how he perceives himself. In so doing, he asserts his power to fashion his own identity as well as other selves, but in a manner that risks reducing that identity to an ephemeral effect of visual / verbal modes of representation over which he ultimately has limited control. This brings us up against a major irony of the play which will frequently be touched upon in the following pages. Whether they involve dramatic or specular self-imaging or the use of rhetorical perspective, the methods employed by Hamlet in pursuit of those truths which are ‘hid … Within the centre’ (II.2.157) prove to be counterproductive. This is partly because the forms in which he chooses to project himself, standing in an uncertain relationship to the perceiving self, offer disappointingly little insight into what lies ‘within’. But it also to do with the fact that his reflexive techniques call into question the very status of the subject by dislodging Hamlet from his position of assumed centrality and control. As a more detailed examination of these techniques will reveal, in fact, their combined action unsettles the basic premises from which his self-scrutiny proceeds: namely, his belief in a transcendent inner being that ‘passes show’ and in the possibility of an ideal mimesis capable of representing this truthfully. While the failure of Hamlet’s quest for self-knowledge may be variously explained, it is evidently closely connected with the play’s problematic investment in the visual domain. For the denizens of Claudius’s court where sophisticated systems of surveillance are in operation, sight is the predominant sense, offering access to the secrets which most of its inhabitants are bent on either revealing or concealing.21 It is a medium in which hypotheses concerning the nature of reality can be put to the test and demonstrably proved or disproved. Just as Horatio is asked to keep watch for the ghost in order to ‘approve’ what Marcellus and Barnardo have ‘two nights seen’, so Claudius is invited behind the arras to ‘try’ Polonius’s theory about Hamlet’s madness by spying on his nephew’s behaviour. And Hamlet, in turn, enlists Horatio’s help in observing the King’s reaction to the play: Give him heedful note, For I mine eyes will rivet to his face,





And after we will both our judgments join In censure of his seeming. But, as every reader of the play knows, the world of perception is also regarded as deeply suspect, owing to its association with opaque or deceptive appearances.22 Significantly, this distrust of appearances is focused through a number of references to painting that play upon contemporary anxieties about its tendency to obscure rather than manifest truth. Both Hamlet and Claudius appeal to what was, for English audiences, the stock identification of cosmetics with painting when accusing women of making themselves a false face to hide an unattractive reality (III.1.51–3, 144 –6; V.1.186–8). Like other Shakespearean texts, moreover, the play restates only to question claims made on behalf of the ‘art of physiognomy’ (i.e. portraiture) regarding its unrivalled capacity to express the inner character.23 Thus it implicitly invokes the classical topos which defined the limitations of painting, often by contrast with poetry, in terms of its constitutive inability to represent things invisible to the eye, notably the human mind or soul.24 Hamlet’s confidence that the twin portraits with which he confronts Gertrude, in III.4, do reveal with utmost clarity the mind’s construction in face and figure is offset by Claudius’s inquiry if Laertes’s grief for his father is genuine or whether, on the contrary, he resembles ‘the painting of a sorrow, / A face without a heart?’ (IV.7.108), and by his wry observation that, deprived of our rational faculties, ‘we are pictures, or mere beasts’ (IV.5.86). In keeping with this equivocal attitude to the art of portraiture and its ability to exteriorize the life of the soul, the play leaves us unsure of the extent to which any artificial construction – be it that of poet or painter – can capture the inward being it purports to resemble.25 In a play where the ‘hunger to know’ is dramatized as ‘the desire to see’, the constraints which hamper perception in Denmark point to a range of cognitive problems.26 Contrary to the position of rational mastery, of complete and assured knowledge, with which perspective is aligned in Alberti’s treatise and some versions of Cartesian epistemology, Hamlet’s use of a shifting viewpoint in the service of introspection generates only doubt. The continual adjustment of his standpoint inevitably reinforces his scepticism, which, as has often been remarked, is rooted in an acute sense of the relativity of perception and a consequent distrust of his own judgements.27 Even as he asserts Denmark to be a prison and man a quintessence of dust, he is troubled by the thought that they will appear otherwise to his companions and, in a



(III.2.84)

different mood, to him. His self-perception is not exempt from the uncertainty created by the availability of alternative views; a note of perplexity resonates through many of his statements about himself: ‘I have of late – but wherefore I know not – lost all my mirth’ (II.2.295); ‘I do not know / Why yet I live to say, “This thing’s to do,” / Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means / To do’t’ (IV.4.43) (my emphasis). Given the play’s concern with the problematics of vision, it is hardly surprising that its major epistemological conundrums tend to be framed in ocular terms. From the various appearances of the ghost to the spectacle of Ophelia’s madness, the characters are brought face to face with a number of enigmatic and highly unstable images that resist any attempt to assign them a determinate identity or meaning. Just as the characters (and the play’s audience) must struggle to make sense of these images, so Hamlet will experience comparable difficulties in his efforts to apprehend the “true” self presumed to lie behind its protean, outardly visible forms. The following reading of the play traces his mission to discover the invisible core of his being (II.2.158) in its dramatic unfolding. *

*

*

The characteristic forms of Hamlet’s introspection are inscribed in his first long speech. Gertrude’s well-meant inquiry why his father’s death should seem something peculiar to him provokes a virulent response: Seems, madam? nay, it is, I know not “seems.” ‘Tis not alone my inky cloak, [good] mother, Nor customary suits of solemn black, Nor windy suspiration of forc’d breath, No, nor the fruitful river in the eye, Nor the dejected haviour of the visage, Together with all forms, moods, [shapes] [F.‘shewes’] of grief, That can [denote] me truly. These indeed seem, For they are actions that a man might play, But I have that within which passes show, These but the trappings and the suits of woe. (I.2.76) Hamlet rejects what he sees as the hypocritical shows of grief indulged in by his mother and the court as inimical to his essential being which resides ‘within’, hidden and inexpressible. This antithesis between what ‘is’ (the innermost self) and what ‘seems’ (everything extraneous to




that self) is immediately qualified, however: ‘’Tis not alone my inky cloak … can [denote] me truly’. Outward forms are surreptitiously recuperated as partial expressions of an inner self that still exceeds our best endeavours to represent it. There then follows a catalogue of the costumes, gestures and facial expressions associated with mourning: the ‘customary suits of solemn black’, ‘the fruitful river in the eye’ and ‘dejected haviour of the visage’. Hamlet’s lingering over these exterior marks of grief (which depend on received visual codes common to Elizabethan acting and portraiture) suggests a fascinated recognition of, and a willingness to exploit, their signifying power before this is suppressed with the emphatically stressed ‘seem’ in line 84, which restores the context of wilful deception. Hamlet’s ambivalence towards such artificial modes of expression is further underlined by the pointed ostentation of his own ‘inky garb’ and his punning and hyperbolic utterances. The studied theatricality of these visual and vocal gestures compounds the ironies clinging to his denunciation of ‘actions that a man might play’ by reminding us that it comes from the mouth of an actor who, by his own definition, lacks any interiority or ‘within’. Even as the prince denies any truck with seeming, then, we are alerted to the histrionic propensities that will crystallise in the ‘antic disposition’. As A.L. French astutely remarks, there is ‘a certain unreality in his grief, a certain kind of histrionic self-regard … Whatever the “that within” may be, it is, even in Hamlet’s own sensibility, deeply involved with the outward show’.28 The depth of that involvement, as French suggests, is intimately related to the self-regarding impulses behind the speech. For I would argue that the responsibility for opening up a gap between an authentic inner self that passes show and an outward fictive self that is all show lies not so much with a court culture steeped in duplicity as with Hamlet’s extreme self-consciousness. Without such a division of the self and the detachment this enables, the inner recesses of his being would remain forever inaccessible to the mind’s eye. It is only by projecting himself in this manner that Hamlet can fulfil the conditions required for self-scrutiny. Thus his reflexive cast of mind pushes him towards the very theatricality he claims to despise, undermining the opposition between being and seeming, self and other, on which his speech is predicated. From the suspended syntax it appears, moreover, that his self-directed gaze is arrested and absorbed by those same ‘forms, moods, [shapes]’ he presents to the world, whose capacity to denote him truly is precisely what is at issue. By such means, the speech hints at the impossibility of penetrating beyond the constructed versions of the self to some prior essence. On examination,




then, Hamlet’s diatribe resolves itself into two contradictory and irreconcilable propositions: ‘the self-knowing subject knows not seems / the subject knows of itself nothing but seems’. While Hamlet’s ‘antic disposition’ is clearly prefigured by his histrionic performance of I.2, the birth of this creation is not announced until after his crucial encounter with the ghost in I.4 –5. It is therefore pertinent to ask whether the ghost’s intervention may have influenced the particular means Hamlet uses to represent himself to himself and others. From the outset, the ghost is characterized as an enigmatic ‘apparition’ of uncertain status, origin and meaning.29 Viewed through Hamlet’s rhetorical dubitatio it becomes a ‘questionable shape’ that both invites and evades interrogation: Be thou a spirit of health, or goblin damn’d, Bring with thee airs from heaven, or blasts from hell, Be thy intents wicked, or charitable, Thou com’st in such a questionable shape That I will speak to thee. (I.4.40) The instability of this image (which always threatens to ‘assume some other horrible form’) reflects the varying interpretations of the onlookers, impelled by the pressure of the ghost’s mystery to multiply conjectures. On one point those who witness the comings and goings of this ‘portentous figure’ are nevertheless agreed: that it is ‘like’ the late King of Denmark, indeed ‘so like’ as to be virtually indistinguishable (a point reiterated nine times in the opening scenes). It is not too fanciful perhaps to describe the ghost’s striking resemblance to the deceased king as being essentially of a pictorial nature, given that the primary function assigned to portraits both during and prior to the Renaissance was to preserve the memory of the dead by means of a living likeness. ‘Painting’, wrote Alberti, ‘possesses a truly divine power in that not only does it make the absent present (as they say of friendship), but it also represents the dead to the living many centuries later … Through painting, the faces of the dead go on living for a very long time’ (p.60).30 Horatio similarly emphasizes the commemorative value of the ghost’s facial and corporeal mien when he is reminded, on seeing them, of Old Hamlet’s bygone triumphs: Such was the very armor he had on When he the ambitious Norway combated.





So frown’d he once when in an angry parle He smote the sledded [Polacks] on the ice. It is significant, too, that doubts expressed about the ghost’s ontological status – about whether it is pure ‘illusion’ or ‘something more than fantasy’, whether it embodies the devil’s handiwork or the late king’s spirit – echo debates about mimetic art that were being conducted in England and on the continent.31 Yet however ‘like’ Old Hamlet and whatever its power to make absent things seem present, the ‘apparition’ cannot be anything other than an imperfect substitute for the dead king, an ‘image’ or copy that ‘usurps’ the place of the original. The reiterative use of the comparative adjective in connection with its appearance keeps before us the unerasable and indeterminate distance separating this ‘image’ from the reality it claims to represent. For all its suggestiveness, the ghost’s likeness to the dead monarch only intensifies the mystery surrounding its identity. Alternatively, the ghost can be understood in terms of a different but related paradigm: that is, as an actor who ‘usurps’ the ‘majesty of buried Denmark’ in the sense of putting on his ‘fair and warlike form’ (I.1.46–9). (Apart from a visible form, the word ‘shape’ might denote an actor or theatrical disguise in this period.) Hamlet is exhorted to ‘mark’ the ghost, as well as to ‘list’ its utterances, since in true thespian style the forms of eloquence deployed by this ‘apparition’ are framed as much for the eye as the ear. Thus it passes before the watch with ‘solemn march’, spreads its arms, ‘address[es] / Itself to motion like as it would speak’, and beckons Hamlet away with ‘courteous action’. And when it finally consents to speak, it is to issue a series of forceful commands pressed home with a graphic narration of Claudius’s crime. All these strategems, it should be noted, are ruthlessly directed at awakening Hamlet’s compassion in the interests of persuading him to revenge – notwithstanding the ghost’s disclaimer: ‘Pity me not, but lend thy serious hearing / To what I shall unfold’ (I.5.5). The rhetorical means by which this end is encompassed repay further study, both because they operate across artistic boundaries, and because they will lodge themselves in Hamlet’s imagination. The ghost’s predilection for affective figures, for example, has gone largely unnoticed, yet in the following passage, ecphonesis (exclamation) and adhortatio (command) are typically used, in combination with epizeuxis (an emphatic form of repetition) to create an overwhelming emotional appeal: O, horrible, O, horrible, most horrible! If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not,



(I.1.60)


Let not the royal bed of Denmark be A couch for luxury and damned incest.

What distinguished this class of figures was their ability to communicate inner states of feeling in such a way as to excite a corresponding emotion in the listener’s breast; indeed, their persuasive force was thought to be wholly conditional upon their skill in revealing the ‘sundrie affections and passions of the minde’.32 Henry Peacham, who discusses ‘figures of affection’ at some length, differentiates adhortatio from ‘bare commandements’ on the basis of its greater vehemency and emotional charge, having ‘sundry & mightie reasons to move the minde and understanding of man not only to a willing consent, but also to a fervent desire to performe the thing adhorted’ (pp.77–8).33 Descriptive figures were likewise deemed to prevail upon the listener by virtue of their power to evoke a range of feelings. There is ‘none more forcible to move pittie’ or to ‘amplifie’ the horrific nature of events such as murders, Peacham notes, than that which ‘doth as plainly portray their image, as if they were most lively painted out in colours’ (pp.139– 40) – in short, that incorporates the sort of vivid detail used by the ghost when recounting the effects of poison on its ‘smooth body’. Armed with such figures, a speaker might so ‘prevaile … in drawing the mindes of his hearers to his owne will and affection’, as to ‘quite alter the former state of their mindes’ and ‘move them to be of his side’ (p.121).34 As part of the rhetorical art of actio, gestures were credited with a similar expressive capacity and sway over the beholder’s will and emotions. ‘So bewitching a thing is lively and well spirited action’, declares Thomas Heywood in his Apology for Actors, ‘that it hath power to new mold the harts of the spectators and fashion them to the shape of any noble and notable attempt’.35 Its appeal to the eye, the most impressionable sense, arguably gave such ‘action’ the edge over verbal inducement; ‘Hadst thou thy wits and didst persuade revenge, / It could not move thus’ (IV.5.169), Laertes remarks of his sister’s crazed pantomime. In exploiting this power, the ghost draws upon a gestural tradition that bound together play-acting, oratory and painting as cogent forms of affective persuasion. A well-known passage in Quintilian’s Institutio compared the orator’s (and, by extension, the actor’s) command of rhetorical gesture with that of painting: Nor is it wonderful that gesture which depends on various forms of movement should have such power, when pictures, which are silent



(I.5.80)


The assumption that images share with words a ‘hidden force to move and compell our minds to severall Passions’ became a central pillar of ut pictura discourse.36 On the strength of this analogy, humanist and neoclassical theorists would construct an ‘exact, yet extensive pictorial rhetoric of gesture and facial expression’, which assigned to every passion its appropriate movement.37 Initiating this process, Alberti emphasizes, once again, the causal connection between the ability of gestures to make known the hidden movements of the soul through the exterior ‘movements of the body’ and their impact upon the beholder: A ‘historia’ will move spectators when the men painted in the picture outwardly demonstrate their own feelings as clearly as possible. Nature provides … that we mourn with the mourners, laugh with those who laugh, and grieve with the grief-stricken. Yet these feelings are known from movements of the body.38 The translation of Lomazzo’s Trattato, Book II of which deals with ‘actions and gestures’, was instrumental in disseminating this doctrine of empathetic identification to English readers. Not content with carrying the visual codification of emotion to new extremes, Lomazzo boldly asserted that the ‘comparison’ between painting and poetry ‘alone consisteth’ in knowing how to convey ‘the inward affections of the minde, by an outward and bodily Demonstration’ (Bk.II, pp.4 –5). It scarcely needs saying, however, that the belief that gestures, like the orator’s emotive figures, constitute a reliable index of the soul crumbles under critical scrutiny.39 In his treatise on the passions, Thomas Wright concedes that, while ‘for the most part’ it is possible, by a process of inference from a man’s speech and actions, to ‘view the passions or inclinations which … reside and lie hidden’ in his heart, the task of deciphering these exterior clues may be complicated by reticence or dissembling in the person studied. To add to the problem, all the ‘effects & externall operations’ of emotion may be reproduced artificially, as is shown in the case of ‘stage plaiers’ whom Wright holds up as a morally dubious example of the power to convince spectators of one’s authenticity by faking (‘act[ing] fainedly’) the signs of interiority.40 A similar point is made by Hamlet when he treats



and motionless, penetrate into our innermost feelings with such power that at times they seem more eloquent than language itself. (XI.3.67)

play-acting as a by-word for the display of sham emotion. His implicit admission that there is no direct or necessary correlation between the ‘externall image’ and the ‘internall minde’ it supposedly reflects is repeatedly endorsed. The gestural language of the play’s many dumb shows, for example, proves oddly illegible to their stage audiences.41 And, as rhetoricians warned, the expressive qualities of speech were equally open to abuse as tokens of sincere emotion and good faith – a point underlined this time, ironically, by the ghost, when inveighing against Claudius’s ‘wicked wit’ which had ‘the power / So to seduce’ into wrongdoing ‘the will of [his] most seeming virtuous queen’ (I.5.42–6).42 We are thus discouraged from placing too much trust in the ghost on the basis of its impassioned words and gestures; however effective as instruments of persuasion, they offer no real assurance of its royal identity or the morality of its intentions. Perhaps for this reason, Hamlet, though initially convinced of the spirit’s ‘honesty’ and prompt in assenting to its demands, soon relapses into doubt. But while the ghost’s theatricality does nothing to dispel the uncertainty concerning its true status and motives, it is this aspect of the visitation that seems to make the deepest impression on Hamlet, resonating as it does with his own self-dramatizing propensities. It is therefore no accident, I suggest, that he decides to assume an ‘antic disposition’ directly after their first encounter, since the ghost’s ‘questionable shape’ and histrionic mode of adddress act as a catalyst and a model for that invention. What Hamlet makes of the example will emerge in the course of this discussion, but two possible sources of influence can even now be pinpointed. We have seen how dramatic or pictorial self-imaging works to obscure the ghost’s real identity, while offering to disclose this to the view, in a game of obfuscation and revelation that Hamlet will mimic in his antic mode. It is also clear that the ghost’s theatricality is much bound up with the desire to elicit a certain reaction from its audience. In fact, our attention is explicitly redirected away from the promised, but significantly withheld, revelation of personal ‘secrets’ to the impact this might have on others: But that I am forbid To tell the secrets of my prison-house, I could a tale unfold whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres, Thy knotted and combined locks to part … (I.5.13)




Above all else, it is this imagined capacity to induce an empathetic response in the spectators, that Hamlet seeks to emulate in his revenge task. By compelling the Danish courtiers to see matters from his perspective he will try to ‘fashion’ or ‘new mold’ their identities. We are, of course, never told why Hamlet decides to assume an ‘antic disposition’. According to one time-honoured theory, its purpose is to hide his true feelings and intentions from the prying eyes of the court spies, while at the same time allowing him to vent these in covert form.43 (If self-concealment is the aim, though, we should note that the ‘antic disposition’ has the reverse and presumably not wholly undesired effect of setting both courtiers and critics on the trail of his inner mystery). The complex function of this dramatic invention in relation to the self is highlighted by an incident in III.2. Following Hamlet’s provocative behaviour during the staging of ‘The Mousetrap’, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are renewing their efforts to wheedle from him ‘some confession / Of his true state’. They are duly rebuked for attempting to pluck out ‘the heart of [his] mystery’, for daring to play upon him like a pipe. Clearly this is ironic, since it is not they who are manipulating him, but he them, as is confirmed when Polonius enters and is made to participate in Hamlet’s favourite game: Hamlet camel? Polonius Hamlet Polonius Hamlet Polonius

Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in the shape of a By th’ mass and ’tis, like a camel indeed. Methinks it is like a weasel. It is back’d like a weasel. Or like a whale. Very like a whale. (III.2.376)

In these imaginary cloud formations we are invited to find an emblem of the shifting ‘forms, moods, [shapes]’ assumed by Hamlet as part of his ‘antic disposition’. As his teasing of Polonius suggests, these artful transformations are partly a device to control the ways in which others (mis)perceive him. His playing of the malcontent, for example, is nicely calculated to convince his former schoolmates that the hidden spring of his madness is disappointed ambition. Similarly, his appearance before Ophelia with ‘doublet all unbrac’d, / No hat upon his head, his stockins fouled / Ungart’red and down-gyved to his ankle’ (II.1.75) exploits the conventional visual lexicon of love melancholy




in order to encourage her and Polonius in their mistaken belief that unrequited passion is the key to his mystery. From this we might conclude that the chief function of these transformations is to strengthen Hamlet’s advantage over the King and his stooges by at once inviting and frustrating their attempts to elicit the ‘secrets’ of his being. But the ‘antic disposition’ is much more than a political tool. Hamlet’s trick of continually donning and discarding roles seems to arise from some more compelling private need. It allows him, for a while, to resist or defer the single role of revenger that has been thrust upon him, to entertain the illusion of freedom from external pressures by reshaping his identity as the whim takes him. It creates a space in which he is able to rehearse the manifold functions – ‘the courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword’ – that might have been expected to form part of his identity, were it not for the circumstances of his father’s death. However, this exploratory process extends beyond his public self, for, as I noted earlier, such socially prescribed roles are implicated in Hamlet’s inward existence and his attempts to apprehend this. Through their mediating power he seeks access to the hidden reaches of his subjectivity, the cloud-like permutations of his personae reflecting a determination to bring every facet of that interior life into view. At the same time, the ironies attendant on this process are revealed with paradigmatic clarity in the game with Polonius. So far from occupying a position of omniscient control, as the sole possessor of his true self which he deliberately withholds or conceals from the intrusive gaze of others, he shares both their desire to uncover the heart of his mystery and their predicament as the detached and often baffled spectator of himself. ‘Th’ observ’d of all observers’ has become his own observer. The willed metamorphoses of Hamlet’s ‘antic disposition’ may thus be understood as part of a systematic self-interrogation, a way of ‘look[ing] diversely upon the self’. This last phrase is taken from Montaigne, whose sustained endeavour to see and represent himself truthfully in his Essays was elaborated through the trope of self-portraiture.44 As a writer intent on observing not only the outward man but consciousness itself in its devious unfolding, and sensitive to the difficulties posed by such a project, the French essayist supplies an illuminating analogue for Shakespeare’s self-absorbed prince. In a brief but suggestive article published in 1975, Robert Ellrodt argued that the plays written by Shakespeare around the turn of the sixteenth century bear witness to ‘the emergence in European literature of a form of




self-consciousness which implies a simultaneous awareness of experience and the experiencing self’, and that Shakespeare’s interest in this split form of consciousness may have been quickened by his recent reading of Montaigne.45 Unquestionably, Hamlet’s methods of selfscrutiny are closely anticipated in such passages as the following, from Montaigne’s essay, ‘Of the inconstancie of our actions’: The blast of accidents, doth not only remove me according to his inclination; for besides, I remove and trouble my selfe by the instability of my posture … Sometimes I give my soule one visage, and sometimes another, according unto the posture or side I lay hir in. If I speake diversly of my selfe, it is because I look diversly upon my selfe. All contrarieties are found in hir … according as I stirre or turne my selfe; And whosoever shall heedfully survay and consider himselfe, shall find this volubilitie and discordance to be in himselfe, yea and in his very judgement. I have nothing to say entirely, simply, and with soliditie of my selfe, without confusion, disorder, blending; mingling; and in one word, Distinguo is the most universal part of my logike. (II.1.195) The first thing to note here is that Montaigne manipulates his view of himself in much the same way that Hamlet manipulates Polonius’s: ‘sometimes I give my soule one visage, and sometimes another according unto the posture or side I lay hir in’. The indirect and divided structure of self-perception dictates this proliferation of perspectives, as it does in Shakespeare’s play. In so doing, however, it puts pressure on the conventional ideals associated with portraiture, its claim to fix the subject in a truthful and permanent image, to which Montaigne at times subscribed.46 For each shift of viewpoint discloses a different persona, generating a succession of selves whose discontinuity and contradictoriness preclude any integration into a single, unified entity. This production of new identities undermines the hypothesis of a transcendent inner essence in several ways. Apart from highlighting the ‘discordance’ and instability inherent in subjectivity, it postpones indefinitely the moment when the perceiving self may come into full possession of its own being, the moment when it may truly know itself. Denied the possibility of assured self-knowledge, Montaigne must be content with recording the mutations of his thought, and of the images he presents to himself and others, none of which, he is aware, bears reliable witness to the inner man. In another famous




reference to his self-portrait, he declares: ‘I cannot settle my object; it goeth so unquietly and staggering, with a naturall drunkennesse. I take it in this plight, as it is at th’instant I ammuse my selfe about it. I describe not the essence, but the passage … Were my minde setled, I would not essaye, but resolve my selfe’ (III.2.483). Montaigne’s analysis of his reflexive ploys also prefigures Hamlet in its emphasis on linguistic agency in the act of self-observation: ‘If I speake diversly of my selfe, it is because I look diversly upon my selfe’. Language enables Montaigne to alter his ‘posture’, and with it his mental outlook, by offering the writing /perceiving subject (the two are effectively identified here) a series of positions from which to ‘survay and consider himselfe’. Indeed, the twists and ‘turne[s]’ he performs in endeavouring to catch a glimpse of the consciousness that lies behind or at a distance from his outward selves specifically recall the turning powers ascribed to figurative discourse. So obtrusive is this rhetorical mediation that it threatens to invert Montaigne’s aphorism; if he looks diversely upon himself, it is because he speaks diversely of himself. Or, to put it another way, his identity is ambiguous and fragmented because his style is so: ‘I have nothing to say entirely, simply, and with soliditie of my selfe, without confusion, disorder, blending, mingling; and in one word Distinguo is the most universal part of my logike’. Hamlet, who concedes that his own wit has become so ‘diseas’d’ as to conform no longer to any ‘frame’ of reason (III.2.308–22), might have made a similar confession. That ‘Distinguo’ is also the governing principle of his logic is evident from his preferred forms of locution, which tend to produce a splintering of meaning. This is as marked a feature of his use of large-scale dialectic in the soliloquies, as of his fondness for figures involving some kind of doubling or equivocation, and his habit of wresting others’ words into a fresh and unintended sense.47 The effects of such linguistic waywardness on self-perception are obvious. As subjects viewed through and constituted in language, neither Hamlet nor Montaigne can lay claim to any substance or ‘soliditie’. Part of the linguistic flux, they are governed by its play of differences and are thus unable to ‘resolve’ their disparate selves or make them cohere into a single, durable image. Instead of leading to the discovery of a stable inner essence, their reflexive praxis draws them into a ceaseless rhetorical making and unmaking of the self. This reading is supported by Hamlet’s management of the soliloquy. As one of the chief loci of self-reflection in Shakespearean tragedy, the soliloquy is readily adaptable to the art of looking diversely upon the





O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I! Is it not monstrous that this player here, But in a fiction, in a dream of passion, Could force his soul so to his own conceit That from her working all the visage wann’d Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect … Yet I, A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause, And can say nothing. (II.2.550) Once again, the antithesis proves unsustainable, as the distinctions between the fictive and the real in which it is grounded begin to collapse. For Hamlet, it transpires, regards his situation in a similarly theatrical light, as a ‘cue for passion’, identifying his own task with the player’s48: What would he do Had he the motive and [the cue] for passion That I have? He would drown the stage with tears, And cleave the general ear with horrid speech, Make mad the guilty, and appall the free, Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed The very faculties of eyes and ears. (II.2.560) In Hamlet’s imagination the player’s performance coalesces with the ghost’s proven ability to amaze the very faculties of eyes and ears; and together they stimulate his fascination with the power of play-acting to compel a particular kind of emotional response – a reaction envisaged as precipitating in turn a moral transformation of the spectators’ individual natures. It is their combined example that leads directly to Hamlet’s decision at the end of the soliloquy to stage ‘The Mousetrap’,



self. Take the soliloquy at the end of Act II. Like his earlier speech affirming that he knows not seems, this is predicated upon a direct opposition between the player’s simulated passion and Hamlet’s genuine grief, between ‘actions that a man might play’ and the authentic action that Hamlet is called upon to perform:

thereby translating the revenge task from a problem of heroic action into one of dramatic persuasion.49 Meanwhile, Hamlet marvels at the theatrical fiction which, though ‘nothing’ in itself, has such sway over the emotions that even the player is profoundly moved. It was a commonplace of classical rhetoric that the orator (or actor) who would excite the feelings of others must first experience them in himself.50 But if the player does feel genuine pity, this is evidently no more than a by-product of his performance, called into being by an affective rhetoric of speech and gesture whose specific purpose is to manufacture an illusion of inwardness. Ironically, the same can be said of Hamlet, who is more stirred by the player’s ‘dream of passion’ than by the actual wrongs he has suffered and whose own feelings are likewise shown to depend for their existence upon an external and highly artificial code of expression. Thus he must resort to the vehement speech of the stock revenge hero – ‘Bloody, bawdy villain! / Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!’ (l.580) – in order to kindle in himself the necessary fury and desire for bloody action. Indeed it could be argued that it is the player who achieves the greater degree of sincerity in displaying an ability to identify totally with his ‘conceit’ that Hamlet, always alienated from his various roles, lacks. Fiction thus displaces the real thing not only in the sphere of action, but within subjectivity itself. The fictionalizing of the self implicit in Hamlet’s imaginative identification with the player is subtly confirmed by the introspective techniques employed in the soliloquy. The speech includes several shifts of viewpoint, clearly signalled in each case by a break in the verse: ‘Yet I … Why, what an ass am I! … Fie upon’t, foh! / About, my brains’. A consequence of Hamlet’s determination to get at the truth ‘though it were hid indeed / Within the centre’ (II.2.158), this changing perspective only serves to fragment further his already decentred identity. Comparison and antithesis supply the basic structure of the argument, but Hamlet’s rhetorical stance is more volatile than this suggests, generating the contrarieties that permeate this speech at every level. Thus the soliloquy uses its occasion (the player’s show of emotion) to inform both for and against Hamlet, oscillating between a negative and a positive evaluation of play-acting, between a proclaimed self-loathing and an implicit self-exoneration. As the speech works against its own structural oppositions, Hamlet’s self-definitions grow more equivocal and unsure: ‘Am I a coward? / Who calls me villain … ’Swounds, I should take it: for it cannot be / But I am pigeon-liver’d’. Try as he may to sum up these disparate perceptions of who or what he is in a definitive




image, his efforts are frustrated by the divisions that are an inescapable feature of self-consciousness and by his consequent inability, like Montaigne, to say anything entirely, simply and with solidity of himself. Their shared modes of reflection simply do not permit any more rooted self-knowledge. Far from yielding any insight into an authentic inner core that might stand over against the player’s feigned version, the soliloquy offers for inspection only a series of similarly improvised selves. Apart from the ‘antic disposition’ and the soliloquy, the most important vehicle for Hamlet’s introspection is the mirror image.51 Selfreflection, as the term indicates, depends on the mediating power of such images, and Hamlet proves highly adept at fashioning those characters and events with which he comes into contact into mirrors of the self: ‘by the image of my cause I see / The portraiture of his’ (V.2.77), he says of Laertes who, like him, has lost a father whom he is bound to avenge. Fortinbras, Horatio, Pyrrhus, Yorick, the player (to name but a few) are similarly recruited by Hamlet’s imagination and made to reflect different facets of his being. By dint of this identificatory procedure all encounters become occasions for self-examination, opportunities to revise his view of himself. ‘How stand I then …?’ (IV.4.56) he muses, when confronted with Fortinbras’s heedless bravado, so unlike his own habit of ‘thinking too precisely on th’ event’. The extent to which these specular images are able to disclose the ‘inmost part’ of him is nevertheless open to question. It is not just that, as with any mirror, they are subject to a degree of distortion, or that they necessarily offer only a limited and ephemeral perspective on the self. Hamlet’s identification with these figures is achieved in defiance of the fact that they stand in an ambiguous relationship to the perceiving subject, one founded as much on difference as on likeness. He may declare that he wears Horatio’s image in his ‘heart’s core’, but neither Horatio nor any other character in whom he strives to see himself is ‘his semblable’ in any unqualified sense of the word. None can be said to denote him truly, and hence none affords easy access to what lies buried within him.52 As if in acknowledgment of this fact, Hamlet’s attitude to these mirror images of his own devising is surprisingly off-hand. Having, for example, praised Horatio fulsomely as one whose ‘blood’ and ‘judgment’ are, in contrast to his own, ‘so well commedled, / That they are not a pipe for Fortune’s finger’, he abruptly dismisses the implied comparison with ‘Something too much of this’ (III.2.62–74). His habit of disengaging himself from such analogies, of playing them off against each other or elaborating them until they begin to break down,




suggests that, as aids to self-knowledge, they have for him at best an interrogative value. Given that the mirror is also, as I noted earlier, a prerequisite of selfportraiture, there is much to be gained from considering Hamlet’s use of mirror images alongside sixteenth-century pictorial examples of the genre. One artist who exploited the heuristic possibilities of self-reflection in a manner akin to Hamlet is Dürer. In his remarkable series of self-portraits executed between 1484 and 1522, the mirror becomes the agent of a sustained exploration of identity, ‘as [Dürer] pursues his elusive core of selfhood through various costumes, settings, and expressions’.53 Rather than examine these in detail, however, I have chosen to focus instead on Parmigianino’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror [Plate 13], executed in c.1524. My reason for selecting the later portrait is that, in making use of a convex mirror in preference to a flat one, it more clearly demonstrates the constraints and difficulties inherent in the process of self-representation – difficulties with which Hamlet must come to terms in endeavouring to bring before the eye his own core of selfhood. Painted on a curved wooden panel made in the shape of a convex mirror, Parmigianino’s painting shows the bust of the artist and the surrounding room with all the distortions – curvature of the beams and window, exaggerated foreshortening – proper to such a mirror. Evidently, the aim was to achieve a trompe l’œil effect by duping the beholder into supposing, if only momentarily, that what he/she is seeing is not a painted panel but the image of an actual person in an actual mirror. Commenting on the portrait in the second edition of his Lives, Vasari asserts that Parmigianino ‘succeeded so felicitously’ in this intent that ‘what was real was no different from what was painted’.54 A closer analysis of the picture may nevertheless lead us to conclude that this mimetic ideal is qualified in the very process of being affirmed. While the distortions enhance the illusion, they also interrogate the assumption that objective truth is achievable either in perceiving or in rendering the world of things. Experiencing an illusion of the real depends on being able to ignore the material means by which this is accomplished. The mirror recommended itself to Alberti and Leonardo as a model for painting precisely because of its translucent qualities and the confusion of image with reality they encouraged. But the effect of the distortions in Parmigianino’s self-portrait is rather to make us aware of the mirror as a mirror. This emphasis on the mediating function of the glass was itself unprecedented; Sydney Freedberg notes that ‘the mechanical agency through which a self-portrait is achieved, the mirror, had never




before been openly confessed, nor indeed exploited as it is here, nor had it been used as the vehicle for the formal structure of a portrait’.55 This trick of making the self-portrait foreground its own medium finds a striking parallel in Hamlet’s (or Montaigne’s) reflexive awareness of the ways in which perceptual and rhetorical structures shape his self-imaging. The potential relevance of Parmigianino’s self-portrait to Shakespeare’s play is not exhausted by its challenge to the belief in a perfect copy. The choice of a convex mirror also has implications for the way in which the portrait’s subject-matter, the self, is defined. The abnormal perspective scheme, the sitter’s hugely magnified hand in the foreground and his gentle gaze directed out beyond the picture frame, all contrive to make us more than usually conscious of the beholder to whom they are addressed. As the beholder in this case is also the artist, the effect is to exhibit very starkly the divisions inherent in subjectivity. By invoking the beholder’s presence in this way, the portrait also calls attention to the radically contingent status of the self, whose image is shown to take its particular configuration from the perceiving gaze as well as from the peculiar properties of the mirror itself. For rather than attempting to express the unchanging core of his identity, Parmigianino has elected to depict his appearance when viewed under highly specific and ephemeral conditions. As Montaigne would say, his self-portrait describes not the essence but the passage. Like Parmigianino’s self-portrait, Hamlet’s modes of introspection cast doubt on the existence of a transcendent inner being and the possibility of its objective mirroring. But just as the prince clings to his belief in a self within that ‘passes show’, so in his advice to the players he upholds the idea of a truthful mimesis, free from distortion. ‘Let your own discretion be your tutor’, he tells them, Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature: for any thing so o’erdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. (III.2.17) According to Hamlet’s orthodox encomium of theatre as speculum vitae, the play they are about to stage is composed of a sequence of arresting images, capable of reflecting the moral substance of the age as well as




its outward ‘form’ or ‘feature’. Dramatic fiction, he assumes, may be pressed into service as a ‘bait of falsehood’ with which to capture the elusive ‘carp of truth’, and the truth he is after here includes the secrets of the self. By holding the mirror up to Claudius, the play will seek to provoke him into a private recognition, accompanied by a public betrayal or ‘unkennel[ling]’, of his ‘occulted guilt’ (III.2.75–84). It is not only the King’s conscience that ‘The Mousetrap’ is intended to catch, however, but Hamlet’s own, in that, (like the Pyrrhus fragment he asks the players to perform in II.2), its reflective surfaces afford further opportunities to ‘scan’ his situation. This secondary aim may account for the surprising degree of indirection and complexity in the play’s treatment of its subject, which far exceeds its ostensible purpose of presenting as faithful an ‘image’ of the murder as possible. As Hamlet jocularly remarks, the re-enactment of Claudius’s crime asks to be interpreted ‘tropically’ rather than on a literal level (III.2.7); into this one action is compressed a range of meanings we have barely begun to unpack. What prompts this enlargement of the play’s scope beyond its immediate mimetic function, I suggest, is the need to accommodate the prince’s multiple and contradictory self-identifications. I am referring not only to his startling naming of the poisoner as ‘one Lucianus, nephew to the king’, which, in superimposing the figure of the revenger on that of the king-slayer, hints at Hamlet’s profoundly ambivalent attitude to the deed demanded of him. The long and seemingly redundant exchange between the Player-Queen and the Player-King can also be seen as continuing the debate with himself first broached in the soliloquies. The Player-Queen’s shrill protestations versus the Player-King’s world-weary tolerance, her moralistic rigour versus his quiet acceptance of mortality and the decay of human purpose, offer Hamlet alternative ways of thinking about his predicament, a means of reflecting upon the failure of will which afflicts him no less than Gertrude. The problem is that this element of superfluity in the play-withinthe-play threatens to obscure or deflect its message: the ‘necessary question’ of regicide to be considered. Moreover, the persuasive powers vested in ‘The Mousetrap’ also seem to be adversely affected, judging by its failure to provoke the kind of moral indignation Hamlet envisaged in his soliloquy of II.2. In keeping with the reflexive mood of the play’s central scenes, Hamlet’s advice to the players in III.1 provides its own commentary on the causes of this failure.56 The prince is well aware that the success of his plan depends on the accuracy of his dramatic mirror: its suiting of the word to the action, the image to its referent. And he therefore cautions the players against all forms of




histrionic excess, recognizing that ‘anything so o’erdone’ may detract from the desired transparency of signification. He knows too that any overstepping of the bounds of ‘nature’ is likely to cost him the support of the ‘judicious’ observers whom he must endeavour to win over to his cause. Such strictures concerning the dangers of excess carry an ironic charge, however, when coming from a character who struggles unsuccessfully to match the action to the word, and whose personal inability to maintain any vestige of ‘temperance’ in the whirlwind of his passion is confirmed by the flow of cryptic puns, obscene jokes and nonsensical rhymes he keeps up prior to and during the performance.57 Hamlet’s sense of the potentially disastrous consequences of any falling off from the mimetic ideals and neoclassical standards of decorum he has laid down for the players is fully borne out in the following scene. His inability to resolve the disparate meanings of ‘The Mousetrap’ leads to a blurring of the dramatic mirror, and in the process generates a surplus of viewpoints which is reflected in the divergent reactions of the spectators – ranging from Ophelia’s blank incomprehension (‘Will ’a tell us what this show meant?’), Gertrude’s quiet disclaimer (‘The lady doth protest too much, methinks’) and Horatio’s evasive verdict, to the King’s angry but unclearly motivated reaction. In lieu of the expected confession from Claudius, the play and its dumbshow succeed in eliciting only varying degrees of bafflement.58 Hamlet turns chorus in a desperate attempt to impose his own interpretation of events on stage, expounding the play’s meaning at every turn. But even this direct intervention fails to rally the audience to his viewpoint. Indeed, the authority of his vision of things is itself compromised, as (in his other role as witness to the proceedings) Hamlet is forced to share in the uncertainty experienced by the other spectators, left still unsure of the King’s culpability and his own moral bearings. Something similar occurs in his ensuing encounter with Gertrude, which gathers up many of the themes and issues examined in this chapter. In the closet scene, Hamlet proposes to create a verbal ‘glass’ in which his mother will be forced to contemplate the ‘inmost part’ of herself (III.4.18–20) in such a light as seems guaranteed to bring about a total reformation of her moral character. When speech alone fails to produce the desired effect, he turns for assistance to twin portraits of her past and present husbands. It is generally accepted that ‘the counterfeit presentment of two brothers’ was intended to denote two miniatures – versions of the ‘picture in little’ to which Hamlet alluded earlier (II.2.363) and which, as he makes clear, were circulated in the





See what a grace was seated on this brow: Hyperion’s curls, the front of Jove himself, An eye like Mars, to threaten and command, A station like the herald Mercury New lighted on a [heaven-]kissing hill, A combination and a form indeed, Where every god did seem to set his seal To give the world assurance of a man. This was your husband. Look you now what follows: Here is your husband, like a mildewed ear, Blasting his wholesome brother. (III.4.55) For Hamlet, the value of these two miniatures lies less in their sentimental or political associations than in the degree to which they realise the expressive ideals associated with portraiture. Their achievement, he suggests, is to reveal the essence of Old Hamlet and Claudius, so fixing the brothers’ true and opposed natures as Hyperion and satyr, god and beast. We have reason to suspect, however, that this limpidity of expression exists more in the eye of the beholder than in the portraits themselves.60 After all, nobody apart from the ghost appears to share Hamlet’s view of Claudius as morally and physically repugnant, tending rather, like Gertrude, to regard him as a perfectly satisfactory substitute for his dead brother. And it is unlikely that miniatures of the new monarch, for which his supporters were (according to Hamlet) willing to lay out such large sums, would portray him in anything other than a flattering light. Despite its tone of authoritative exposition, then, Hamlet’s paragone of these images mediates what is in fact a highly personal reading of the visual evidence, one born of his desire to reinscribe distinctions between the two kings that are being threatened with erasure.61 This is underlined by Gertrude’s failure to see what Hamlet sees in the miniatures. Berated by her son for her impercipience – ‘Have you eyes?’ he rants, ‘ha, have you eyes?’ (I.65–7) – she is briefly coerced into viewing herself and her marital history through his censorious gaze: O Hamlet, speak no more! Thou turn’st my [eyes into my very] soul,



period as badges of political allegiance as well as tokens of personal attachment.59 Too small to be seen on stage, the miniatures are made at once visible to the mind’s eye and morally intelligible by Hamlet’s ekphrastic description:


And there I see such black and [grained] spots As will [not] leave their tinct.

She is prevented from sustaining this rare moment of introspection not, as is sometimes claimed, by her lack of moral fibre but by her son’s increasingly wild behaviour. Once again, the clarity of Hamlet’s ‘glass’ is impaired, as, with his excitement mounting, reasoned exhortation degenerates into the excessive and uncontrolled language of the ‘antic disposition’. This allows Gertrude to formulate a very different view of the situation, one centred on her son’s madness rather than her own trespass. With the entrance of the ghost, the divergence of their perspectives is decisively re-established. Unlike Hamlet, Gertrude cannot see the ghost; what she does see and focus upon is the deranged appearance of her son: ‘Forth at your eyes your spirits wildly peep, / And as the sleeping soldiers in th’alarm, / Your bedded hair, like life in excrements, / Start up and stand an end’ (III.4.119–22). Her description of Hamlet’s demeanour briefly but tellingly objectifies for us the vulnerability of the perceiving mind whose views have so dominated the play.62 Of that vulnerability to cognitive error and distortion no one is more aware than Hamlet himself, and it may be supposed that Gertrude’s refusal to corroborate his perceptions only adds to the doubt which reverberates anxiously through his harangue.63 It is often stated that Hamlet returns in Act V from the aborted journey to England a changed man, that after much soul-searching he finally attains a more settled sense of purpose and identity.64 In support of this reading one might cite his unequivocal assertion of his royal identity in the graveyard, ‘This is I, / Hamlet the Dane!’ (V.1.257), and the firmness with which he lays aside past and present misgivings (V.2.63–70, 215–24), declaring the readiness to be all. Equally, it is probable that recent encounters with mortality and what he sees as ‘a divinity that shapes our ends’ regardless of our will have sharpened his awareness that he too is ‘subject to his birth’ and that his freedom to refashion the self is consequently limited.65 And this, in turn, may have made him more disposed to submit to his destined role, acting out the part of revenger to its bleak conclusion. Yet, in other respects, he appears little different from the introspective and histrionic prince of old.66 Musing in the graveyard on the ‘base uses’ to which all humanity must return, he invokes a range of exemplary figures – Alexander the Great, Cain, the politician, the courtier,



(III.4.88)

the jester – whose occupations and absurd ambitions reflect, in varying ways, his own. Even coming face to face with Yorick’s skull, which might seem to unmask the truth of human identity by presenting this in its final, most universal and irreducible form, does not signal the closure of Hamlet’s self-scrutiny. For, as I have tried to show, the very conditions which enable this activity preclude any such resolution. Similarly, Hamlet’s continuing use of dramatic tropes emphasizes the extent to which his conception of situation and self remains inveterately theatrical: Being thus benetted round with [villainies], – Or I could make a prologue to my brains, They had begun the play. (V.2.29) This is confirmed by his histrionic confrontation with Laertes at Ophelia’s graveside, so embarrassing to those critics who wish to see him as a reformed character. There may be an element of burlesque in his attempt to outdo Laertes’s hyperbolic speech and gestures, as several critics have suggested – a venting of patrician distaste for the ‘ranting’ of third-rate actors. The primary impression, though, is of Hamlet vying with Laertes more in rhetorical skill than out of love for the dead Ophelia, impelled by the same mixture of fascination and rivalry that characterized his reaction to the performances of the ghost and the player: What is he whose grief Bears such an emphasis, whose phrase of sorrow Conjures the wand’ring stars and makes them stand Like wonder-wounded hearers? This is I, Hamlet the Dane. (V.1.254) The fantasy reiterated here of exercising complete control over an audience through an irresistible appeal to its emotions continues to excite his imagination long after events have shown it to be unrealizable in practice. This ambition stays with him to the very end. His dying thoughts revolve around the response of the assembled courtiers – described as being ‘but mutes or audience to this act’ (V.2.335) – to the tragic spectacle they have just witnessed, and his determination to




shape that response from beyond the grave by having Horatio tell his version of the story. However, the misleading summary of events which Horatio gives to these onlookers at the play’s close (V.2.380 –86) does not inspire confidence that Hamlet’s posthumous attempts at audience manipulation will be any more successful than before. Like his rhetorical aspirations to ‘new mold’ the Danish court, Hamlet’s desire to apprehend that which lies ‘within’ persists undiminished because unsatisfied. For him no less than for the court spies and onlookers who observe him in a futile attempt to extract the secrets of his being, the inner self remains an ‘undiscover’d country’ beyond the reach of direct (or, for that matter, indirect) vision. That his relentless self-examination should yield so little in the way of substantive knowledge is, as we have seen, partly due to the techniques deployed in pursuit of that end. Not only are these techniques more effective in obscuring than in revealing inward experience, but the continual production of heterogeneous images of the self they set in motion calls into question Hamlet’s presumption that there is a heart to his mystery. Our analysis of the various strategies he uses to reveal that enigma to himself may thus lead us to concur with Francis Barker’s view that Hamlet’s assertions of interiority are primarily gestural and that the play’s ‘promise of essential subjectivity remains unfulfilled’.67 In Troilus and Cressida, written a year to two later, the erosion of a supposed core of identity (articulated in mythical and stoic rather than proto-bourgeois terms) by a rhetorical process of making and unmaking the self will be pursued to its logical conclusion. So too will Hamlet’s experimentation with alternative perspectives, bringing about the dissolution of all ‘rule in unity’ and the institution of a negative epistemology where any standard of value or truth is consumed by doubt.




Troilus and Cressida, ‘Imagin’d Worth’ and the ‘Bifold Authority’ of Anamorphosis

Troilus and Cressida culminates in an optical illusion, a hallucinatory apprehension of unreality. In V.2, Troilus, watched by Ulysses and Thersites, watches Cressida give herself to Diomedes and experiences a psychological schism that throws him into an agony of doubt. Unable to reconcile Cressida’s actions with his personal vision of her, he tries to deny what is taking place before his very eyes: But if I tell how these two did [co-act], Shall I not lie in publishing a truth? Sith yet there is a credence in my heart, An esperance so obstinately strong, That doth invert th’ attest of eyes and ears: As if those organs [had deceptious] functions, Created only to calumniate. (V.2.118) In place of the evidence of the senses, he asserts the legitimacy of the image residing in his heart and mind: This she? no, this is Diomed’s Cressida. If beauty have a soul, this is not she; If souls guide vows, if vows be sanctimonies, If sanctimony be the gods’ delight, If there be rule in unity itself, This was not she. (V.2.137) But this desperate move to heal his self-divided consciousness resolves nothing; each perception merely threatens to cancel out the other. If 134



5

Troilus’s ideal image of the beloved inverts and so undermines ‘th’ attest of eyes and ears’, conversely their sensate proof calls his romantic faith into question. For, by certifying that this is indeed she, it converts his hypotheses into a series of negative propositions: souls do not guide vows, vows are not sanctimonies, there is no rule in unity.1 Troilus is thus forced to give up the struggle to reintegrate his experience and submit to ‘bifold authority’, as he continues to oscillate between these conflicting views, neither of which offers him assured grounds for belief or disbelief. For a while he succumbs to a ‘madness of discourse / That cause sets up with and against itself’ in endeavouring to represent (by means of paradox, chiasmus and antithesis) a world of contrarieties, where ‘a thing inseparate / Divides more wider than the sky and earth’, where a union ‘tied with the bonds of heaven’ may yet be ‘slipp’d, dissolv’d and loos’d’, and every truth is also necessarily a falsehood since ‘this is, and is not, Cressid’.2 By the time Shakespeare wrote Troilus and Cressida (c.1601–2), the epistemological condundrum – paradoxical, tautological and selfnegating – of that which ‘is, and is not’ was already firmly associated in his work with anamorphic perspective.3 In his most extended perspectival allusion, which occurs in Richard II, the distortive effects of grief on perception are likened to ‘perspectives, which rightly gaz’d upon / Show nothing but confusion; ey’d awry / Distinguish form’ (II.2.14 –27). Attempting to dispel the Queen’s anxieties, which ‘for things true weeps things imaginary’, Bushy evokes the experience of viewing anamorphic pictures that look substantial enough from one viewpoint, but, seen from the correct oblique angle (‘ey’ d awry’), are revealed as ‘nought but shadows / Of what it is not’. Similarly, the difficulty of distinguishing the true Viola / Cesario from the false copy (her identical twin) reminds Orsino of ‘a natural perspective, that is and is not’ (Twelfth Night, V.1.216). So although no explicit reference is made to perspective in the betrayal scene, these verbal and contextual parallels strongly point to Shakespeare’s having a comparable device in mind. (The fact that the scene takes the form of an inset performance observed by three spectators, each with his distinctive philosophical outlook and each located at a different point on the stage, may also have helped to activate a latent perspectival metaphor). Troilus’s description of Cressida, ‘a thing inseparate’, mysteriously ‘divid[ing]’ into contrary images is particularly reminiscent of the sort of reversible portrait to which Cleopatra compares her own double-dealing lover, when she observes that ‘though he be painted one way like a Gorgon, / The other way’s a Mars’ (II.5.116).4 There is, then, a prima-facie case



Troilus and Cressida and the Bifold Authority of Anamorphosis 135


for supposing that this fashionable species of optical trickery also supplied the paradigm for Troilus’s crisis of doubt, a case that is strengthened when some of the cultural meanings that became attached to anamorphic images are taken into consideration.5 Valued from the time of its invention as a technical curiosity, a witty divertissement d’esprit, anamorphosis could equally be construed as presenting a more serious challenge to the perspectival conventions upon which it was founded. By forcing the beholder to abandon a monocular, unambiguous vision of the world – such as Troilus has hitherto espoused – it denied him/her that sense of security, of cognitive mastery, which the costruzione leggitima had seemed to confer. Instead, it demanded of the beholder a willingness to juggle alternative viewpoints, to weigh their competing claims against each other. Moreover, the undisguised illusoriness of anamorphic images can only have intensified their power to unsettle. Simply by adjusting one’s viewing position, distorted apparitions could be made to resolve themselves into intelligibility, or one image to metamorphose into another. The chimerical quality of these shifting configurations expressed in its most acute form that paradox of mimetic art which had intrigued Lomazzo and other Renaissance theorists: that to produce the appearance of optical truth it may be necessary to transgress the laws of reason; that whatever its pretensions to scientific objectivity, representation cannot dispense with an element of fiction. Commenting on the ways in which anamorphosis exploits the tensions inherent in the orthodox system, Jurgis Baltrusaitis notes that perspective is a science which fixes the exact dimensions and positions of objects in space, but it is also an art of illusion which recreates them. Its history is not only the history of artistic realism but the history of a dream.6 Dream and reality merge as troublingly in the visual ambiguities of anamorphosis as they do in Troilus’s phantasmagoric vision. Moreover, the effect of such ambiguity is to throw the beholder’s normal ontological categories into disarray by compelling him/her to experience at first hand the difficulties of disentangling the fictive from the real, truth from falsehood, much as Troilus is obliged to grapple with the enigma of a Cressida that both ‘is, and is not’. In this sense, almost any anamorphic artefact of the period would serve as a satisfactory analogue or model for Troilus’s perceptual



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dilemma. Hans Holbein’s exhaustively analysed painting, The Ambassadors (1533), with its distended skull floating eerily in the foreground, or the anonymous portrait of Edward VI (1546) now in the National Portrait Gallery, London, present themselves as obvious candidates, especially as Shakespeare may well have had the opportunity of seeing them when his company performed at Whitehall where both pictures were on display.7 However, for comparative purposes I wish to consider a lesser known engraving entitled Aus, du alter Tor! [Plate 14] produced in the 1530s by Erhard Schön, a Nuremberg artist and disciple of Dürer who developed a particular line of expertise in this kind of picture puzzle or Vexierbild. While its claims to artistic merit can hardly be said to rank with either of the Whitehall portraits, it seems to me to be closer in spirit to Shakespeare’s anamorphic betrayal scene, not only thematically but in the intellectually teasing manner in which its multiple viewpoints are turned to advantage. Just as Troilus tries to separate out ‘Diomed’s Cressida’ from his own, so here the two images are juxtaposed rather than, as was the more common practice, superimposed. On the left, we are shown in conventional perspective a young woman being caressed by an old man (presumably her husband), overlooked on one side by a clown and on the other by an elegantly dressed youth to whom the woman secretly passes the old man’s purse. To the right, there appears an indecipherable blur of swirling shapes, which, when viewed obliquely from the extreme left-hand margin, recomposes itself into a naked young couple making love. The disclosure of their illicit embrace simultaneously unlocks the cunningly concealed relationship of the figures and the significance of the small hunting scenes depicted above as an emblematic allusion to cuckoldry. It allows us to glimpse, as if through the window linking the two halves of the engraving (an arch reference perhaps to Albertian perspective and the unsuspected visions discoverable within it), the woman’s infidelity which remains hidden from the old man’s gaze, though not from that of her Diomedes-like lover or the Thersites-like clown, both of whom are present in the love scene. Quite apart from requiring us to revise our reading of the first scene, this doubling of images challenges our assumptions concerning the truth of perception itself. For it is possible to regard the ‘realistic’ image as pure illusion, a false semblance of marital harmony, the manifestly illusory anamorphic image as laying open the erotic reality. Unsubtle though its humour may be, the Schön engraving plays with differences of viewpoint and discrepant levels of awareness in unexpectedly sophisticated ways. In the process it stimulates reflection on the problematic





relationship between seeing and knowing, illusion and reality, as embodied in its own devious techniques. In the majority of cases, the disruptive effects of the ‘curious perspective’ (as anamorphosis was then called) were containable because short-lived. After experiencing an initial bewilderment and sense of dislocation, the beholder could expect to be compensated with a flash of insight once the correct viewpoint was established. To certain philosophical minds, however, this kind of optical illusion might come to figure a more comprehensive and lasting state of uncertainty, a more fundamental disjunction between reality and the ways it is perceived. Earlier we noted how Plato associated the distortive possibilities of perspective with the unstable realm of opinion and sense impressions, those treacherous substitutes for knowledge of the eternal forms (pp.75–6).8 This topos was revisited by a long line of classical and Christian writers.9 Sceptics of the Pyrrhonian School, in particular, placed optical illusions at the centre of their campaign to discredit sensate knowledge and, by a sort of domino effect, all intellectual systems.10 Their aim was to bring about a suspense of judgement concerning knowledge claims in general, and their means of achieving this was to put forward opposing evidence (whether arguments of equal probability or conflicting sensory data) pro and contra on any question. Among the ‘tropes’ or exercises prescribed by their spokesman, Sextus Empiricus, in the third century AD for attaining this state of undecidability was the reflection that since objects are always perceived in a specific relation to the beholder they never present the same appearance. Hence while we can, no doubt, state the nature which each object appears to possess as viewed in a certain position or at a certain distance or in a certain place, what its real nature is … we are unable to declare.11 The latterday Pyrrhonist, Montaigne, similarly considered the unreliability of the information supplied by our senses to be ‘the greatest foundation and triall of our ignorance’ (II.341).12 His ‘Apology for Raymond Sebond’, cites a number of stock examples of ‘the faults and deceits’ perpetrated by sight in support of its thesis that humanity is confined to the domain of variable and insubstantial opinions and, without the help of divine grace, can no more have ‘communication with being’ than it can ascertain the essence of things from the diversity of our sense impressions. For the Sceptic, the counterposing of opinions and sensations should lead – as it can be seen to do in Troilus’s struggle to reconcile the contradictory testimony of his senses and his heart – to a dismantling of the so-called criterion. To determine which of these



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conflicting propositions is true or false we need, as Montaigne remarks, a standard of judgement, a ‘judicatorie instrument’, whose authority is impartial and beyond question. But this criterion has to be supported in turn by further proofs, a process which generates an infinite regress or, should appeal be made to the evidence in question, a circular form of reasoning in our vain search for an unshakeable basis for judgement. The practice of making optical devices that exploit the infirmity of our senses the springboard to a radical critique of human knowledge continued to flourish into the seventeenth century. If Baltrusaitis is right in his conclusions, Descartes’s studies in optics and dioptrics, together with his interest in contemporary refinements of the ‘curious perspective’, played a crucial role in the formation of his philosophy of metaphysical doubt, en route to establishing a new criterion in the shape of the cogito.13 Coming closer to home, we have already observed how alive English sensibilities were to the deceitful properties of perspective, though for reasons that may have had more to do with religious and moral scruples than with metaphysics. There is evidence to suggest that the well-documented native fascination with anamorphic images was partly due to the vivid demonstration of the fallibility of the mind and senses afforded by such ‘couzening picture[s]’.14 Drummond of Hawthornden, for example, seems to be thinking of the double vision characteristic of anamorphosis when he invokes perspective as a trope for the delusions endemic in our earthly existence: All wee can set our eyes upon in these intricate mazes of Life is but Alchimie, vaine Perspective, and deceiving Shadowes, appearing farre other wayes afarre off, than when enjoyed, and looked upon at a neare Distance.15 A similar connection is made by Samuel Daniel between the multiple viewpoints characteristic of these devices and the relativism inherent in human judgements; each individual ‘standing according to the prospective of [his] owne humour, seeme[s] to see the selfe same things to appeare otherwise to [him] than either they doe to other, or are indeede in them selves, being but all one in nature’.16 One did not need to be a confirmed Sceptic like Montaigne, after all, to intuit the potential relationship between the beholder’s readiness to be taken in by these optical tricks and his/her susceptibility to more serious forms of error. The by now routine association of perspective with falsehood was a quite sufficient trigger.





Taken in this context, Shakespeare’s decision to stage Troilus’s selfconflicting vision of Cressida’s identity, his personal crise pyrrhonienne, in the form of an anamorphic puzzle has an obvious fitness. It is not difficult to see how germane such games of ‘bifold’ perspective are to the imaginative concerns of a play so obsessed by epistemological questions, especially by the discrepancies between ‘esteem’ and ‘worth’, things as they are and what the perceiver makes of them. Troilus’s hallucinatory vision is symptomatic of a world where accepted standards of truth have been usurped by the counterfeit authority of opinion, by hypothetical fictions that reflect without apology the minds that conceived them rather than any prior reality.17 This chapter considers what impact the play’s foregrounding of the relativity of perception has on its verbal and visual modes of representation. In particular, it examines the consequences of this decentring of vision for the play’s epideictic discourse, conceived as a medium of evaluation. In so doing, it aims to show how, to a degree unparalleled even in Hamlet, the absence of any rhetorical or perceptual ‘rule in unity’ submits both subjectivity and mimesis itself to a process of fragmentation and emptying out. All that is left for the mind to fasten upon is the flicker of ghostly images metamorphosing one into another. For the loss of the criterion, I argue, affects not only the characters’ capacity to apprehend and make valuejudgements about the nature of the world they inhabit, but our own. We may not, to be sure, share Troilus’s local difficulties in establishing whether it is really Cressida who surrenders to Diomedes, but at a metacritical level we are fully implicated in the problems of judgement and identification arising from the play’s rhetorical strategies. The Prologue sets the tone here with his sly insinuation that the judgements of the play’s ‘fair beholders’ will be quite as arbitrary, as determined by irrational whim, as those voiced by the characters, when he challenges us to Like or find fault, do as your pleasures are, Now good or bad, ’tis but the chance of war. (Prologue, l.30) But then, not content with making exorbitant demands on our mental agility, the play’s mutiple gestalts contrive to keep us off balance, in a state of radical perplexity. Anamorphic images thus turn out to be no less appropriate a metaphor for our experience of watching the play.18 *

*

*



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Let us begin this reading of Troilus and Cressida with another vertiginous moment. Barely has Ulysses finished expounding the importance of ‘degree’ in holding the traditional structure of values in place in I.3, before he displays the obverse of this principle, introducing us without further ado into the looking-glass world of opinion. Achilles, whom ‘opinion crowns / With an imperial voice’, is described wasting his days lolling on a ‘lazy bed’ and being entertained by his sidekick, Patroclus, while … with ridiculous and [awkward] action, Which, slanderer, he imitation calls, He [Patroclus] pageants us. Sometime, great Agamemnon, Thy topless deputation he puts on, And like a strutting player, whose conceit Lies in his hamstring, and doth think it rich To hear the wooden dialogue and sound ’Twixt his stretch’d footing and the scaffolage, Such to-be-pitied and o’er-wrested seeming He acts thy greatness in; and when he speaks, ’Tis like a chime a-mending, with terms [unsquar’d], Which from the tongue of roaring Typhon dropp’d Would seem hyperboles. At this fusty stuff The large Achilles, on his press’d bed lolling, From his deep chest laughs out a loud applause, Cries, “Excellent! ’tis Agamemnon right! Now play me Nestor, hem, and stroke thy beard, As he being dress’d to some oration.” That’s done, as near as the extremest ends Of parallels, as like as Vulcan and his wife; Yet god Achilles still cries, “Excellent! ’Tis Nestor right!…” (I.3.149) The ‘great’ Agamemnon and ‘venerable’ Nestor find themselves subversively reconfigured in the glass of Patroclus’s mimicry, translated from the unique, god-like figures of legend into comic caricatures. In the process, the notion of theatre as speculum vitae, the faithful mirrorimage of life, so eloquently defended by Hamlet, undergoes a parallel transformation. For Patroclus’s ‘pageant’ takes its place in an apparently endless sequence of imitations: Ulysses holds a critical mirror up





to Patroclus’s derisive apeing of the Greek generals, who (like the ‘strutting player’ of his description) in turn self-consciously act out their prescribed roles, modelling their behaviour on one of the many literary and dramatic recensions which, in this most knowingly intertextual of plays, intervene between Shakespeare’s version of the Troy story and its supposed historical origins.19 These multiplying imitations trigger a regress ad infinitum that distances the founding object of mimesis, putting it effectively out of mental reach. Behind each image we encounter only further representations, no final or fixed referent on which the imagination can come to rest. In this respect, Patroclus’s mime – a Renais-sance equivalent, as it were, of the deconstructionist’s mise en abyme, that vortex of undecidability associated with the topos of the mirror mirrored20 – seems exactly calculated to bring about a suspense or deferral of judgement. How, in these circumstances, should we respond to Ulysses’s pressing invitation to make an absolute distinction between the ‘o’er-wrested seeming’ of parody and the genuine article, between ‘slander’ and ‘imitation’? The problem is highlighted by the opposing reactions of Achilles and Ulysses to the spectacle described, the former being as quick to detect a likeness between the scurrilous ‘pageant’ and its putative model as the latter is to disclaim any such identity (‘That’s done, as near as the extremest ends / Of parallels, as like as Vulcan and his wife’). On their side, the play’s critics have perhaps too readily concluded that we experience the same thrill of pleasurable recognition as Achilles; that the Agamemnon and Nestor whom we encounter in this scene are captured with cruel precision in Patroclus’s fatuous hyperbolist and decrepit orator. But should we necessarily assume this to be the case? The variations which are an inescapable feature of the differential nature of imitation might, on the contrary, lead us to expect that each version will offer its own distinctive slant on the subject. Equally every actor has his particular way of handling a classic role, of expressing what he thinks it means to be a Ulysses or an Achilles. The difficulty of finding our critical bearings in this matter is compounded by the impenetrability of the speaker’s intentions. Ought we to infer that Ulysses’s indignation at such unqualified mockery of the Greek leadership is sincere or tongue-in-cheek? Is his irony, ostensibly reserved for the antics of the ‘god Achilles’ and his ‘male varlet’, in fact directed at the complacency and incompetence of his colleagues whose responsibility for this sorry state of affairs has been made abundantly clear in the degree speech? Either way, Ulysses’s duplicitously ironic stance helps to ensure the indeterminacy of response which this moment



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seems intended to provoke. Compelled to oscillate between these competing possibilities, we are prevented from achieving any resolution other than to conclude that this is and is not Agamemnon, is and is not Nestor. It is as an exemplary coda to the degree speech that this scene of theatrical reproduction taken to dizzying excess may best be understood. What it vividly demonstrates is the effects on representation of the dissolution of a stable, universally agreed order of values that Ulysses has anatomized moments before.21 Not only has the loss of ‘rule in unity’ fractured the glass of imitation into countless pieces; it has unfixed all mimetic constructs, so that words and images can no longer be matched with their customary objects or signifieds (‘right and wrong … should lose their names, and so should justice too’). The hierarchical system of distinctions to which Ulysses appealed as part of the preordained fabric of things has collapsed, making way for a promiscuous breeding of differences that precludes any meaningful ‘determination / ‘Twixt right and wrong’, truth and falsehood (‘Degree being vizarded, / Th’ unworthiest shows as fairly in the mask’). The consequent descent of representation into a ‘chaos’ of competing imitations drained of any substance – a sort of mimetic counterpart to the ‘envious fever / Of pale and bloodless emulation’ infecting the whole of the Greek camp – leaves no aspect of the play untouched.22 Ultimately, then, what we witness in the reflective surfaces of Patroclus’s ‘pageant’ (as rehearsed by Ulysses) is nothing other than an object-lesson in the play’s characteristic strategies. We are treated to an illustration of how the heroic ’matter’ of Troy and the seemingly weighty achievements of its legendary protagonists are emptied out in the process of being converted into so much grist for the characters’ rhetorical and theatrical games, becoming ‘stuff … to make paradoxes’. Throughout the play Trojans and Greeks are continually engaged in the kind of paradoxical (re)inscription of identity enacted in Patroclus’s mimicry. Defining themselves and each other is not simply a descriptive act for these characters, but a means of constituting identity; it becomes ‘a way of actually mediating and conveying their reality to another, re-creating them as individuals’.23 For, as Ulysses explains to Achilles in III.3, in a world where public opinion in the form of reputation holds sway, the self only exists as a knowable entity in relation to others: … no man is the lord of any thing, Though in and of him there be much consisting,




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Till he communicate his parts to others; Nor doth he of himself know them for aught, Till he behold them formed in th’ applause Where th’ are extended.

Hamlet’s belief in the virtues of reflection as an aid to self-knowledge is taken here to its logical extreme. According to Ulysses, only by beholding one’s parts as they are ‘formed’ in ‘the eyes of others’ or ‘in th’ applause / Where th’ are extended’ can one legitimately claim to be or know oneself ‘for aught’. It is as important to attend to the manner in which this idea is expressed, as to its philosophical ramifications. For, in conflating the activities of seeing, praising and valuing, Ulysses’ language points to the fusion of optical and rhetorical concerns which lie at the heart of the play. Individual identity is described as being apprehended ‘by reflection’, either in ‘men’s looks’ or, by a process of metonymic association, in the ‘glass of … praise’ that is repeatedly trained on the characters. The clear implication is that the language of praise functions as a necessary support, even as a substitute for vision (cf. ‘The present eye praises the present object’ (III.3.180)). In any event, the accent falls on the image which betokens the worth ascribed by others, whether this takes shape on the beholder’s retina or rhetorically in his/her epideictic discourse. In this scene, for example, Achilles is simultaneously made to feel the decline in his reputation by ‘word’ and ‘look’; that is, both by the ‘derision medicinable’ with which his fellow Greeks frame their greeting and by the ‘unplausive eyes’ they turn on him, which seem to ‘find out / Some thing not worth in [him] such rich beholding / As they have often given’ (III.3.90). Ulysses’s claim that identity is actively created in and through the gaze/praise of others is borne out by the characters’ habit of observing and commenting on one another. In the first scene Troilus and Pandarus interpret Cressida to each other. This situation is reversed in the second where Pandarus extols Troilus’s manliness to Cressida as they watch the Trojan soldiers parading past. Wishing to transform Ajax into a worthy rival for Achilles, the Greeks mirror him to himself in a glass of sardonic flattery (II.3.182–256). Thersites enacts Ajax’s folly for the amusement of Achilles and Patroclus in an echo of the latter’s ‘pageant’ (III.3.270 –99), while in IV.5 Ulysses ‘translate[s]’ Troilus to Agamemnon by recounting Aeneas’s eulogy of the young prince. The ubiquitous presence of gobetweens in the play comes to stand for the mediating power of



(III.3.115)

language itself, and Troilus’s self-confessed inability to manage without Pandarus (‘I cannot come to Cressid but by Pandar’ (I.1.95)) hardly overstates the degree to which he and the other characters are dependent upon such rhetorical intercession.24 I now propose to take a closer look at this process of verbal mediation and the peculiar qualities of the language of praise through which it is effected, paying special attention to its implications for the play’s epistemology and treatment of identity. Alexander’s bizarre portrait of Ajax in I.2 provides an early, almost programmatic forecast of its likely effects in both areas. Having summed up this Trojan lord for his mistress in conventional epic terms as ‘a very man per se’ who ‘stands alone’, Alexander unmakes this image through his rhetorical elaboration: This man, lady, hath robb’d many beasts of their particular additions: he is as valiant as the lion, churlish as the bear, slow as the elephant; a man into whom nature hath so crowded humors that his valor is crush’d into folly, his folly sauc’d with discretion. There is no man hath a virtue that he hath not a glimpse of, nor any man an attaint but he carries some stain of it … he hath the joints of every thing, but every thing so out of joint that he is a gouty Briareus, many hands and no use, or a purblind Argus, all eyes and no sight. (I.2.19) Initially designated as the autonomous, self-identical figure of heroic legend, Ajax is re-presented thereafter as a monstrously inchoate hybrid that is constantly being reshaped in relation to different contexts and different beholders.25 Each of the interlocking analogies that make up the portrait embodies an alternative perspective on the man. This archetypal ‘mongrel’ lord, who will be turned into a menagerie of bestial shapes by Thersites’s scurrilous wit and manufactured into a hero by the ‘voices’ of his fellow Greeks, is appropriately shown to exist only as the nexus of ‘additions’ bestowed on and by other creatures. The rhetorical dismemberment of Ajax (‘he hath the joints of every thing, but every thing so out of joint’) – a more extreme version of that inflicted on Cressida in the previous scene, where ‘her eyes, her hair, her cheek, her gait, her voice’ were handled piecemeal in Pandarus’s discourse (I.1.54) – illustrates in little how identity is violated by the very ‘applause’ through which it is constituted.26 As the play’s main epideictic device, comparison is a prime agent in this dislocation of the self. The use of this figure may be necessary to





establish a character’s status as a non-pareil, but its equivocal logic simultaneously undoes that claim to uniqueness by defining the object of praise in relation to others in ways that negate the possibility of ever being simply a man or woman per se. With her keen ear for rhetorical absurdities, Cressida homes in on this problem a few lines later when objecting to her uncle’s overuse of comparison. Pandarus Cressida Pandarus Cressida Pandarus Cressida Pandarus

… Troilus is the better man of the two. O Jupiter, there’s no comparison … Well, I say Troilus is Troilus. Then you say as I say, for I am sure he is not Hector. No, nor Hector is not Troilus in some degrees. ’Tis just to each of them; he is himself. Himself? alas, poor Troilus, I would he were! (I.2.61)

By reducing comparison in this fashion to its barest, most schematic form, Cressida pushes Pandarus into admitting its underlying tautological structure: Troilus is, and is not Hector; Hector is, and is not Troilus. That is to say, she unmasks this figure as the rhetorical counterpart of anamorphosis, a complementary expression of the play’s central epistemological riddle, which shares its ontological status as ‘to say the truth, true and not true’ (I.2.97). Her demystification of comparison exposes its capacity to strike at the roots not only of identity as such, but of our mental capacity to grasp it. Identifying Ajax or Troilus as himself may be unhelpful; on the other hand, to describe him in relational terms, in the context of his shifting attributes, risks turning him into a ‘minced man’ assembled out of left-over ‘fragments’ or greasy ‘scraps’ with ‘no date [i.e. centre] in the pie’ (I.2.238– 4), as she obliquely warns, and opens the door to intellectual chaos.27 Like ‘purblind Argus’, comparison frustrates our desire for enlightenment by lending us many eyes but no sight.28 At the same time, comparison epitomizes the relativistic code of values embraced by both Trojans and Greeks through its association with amplificatio, the set of rhetorical procedures whereby ‘matters [are] mightily magnified’, or conversely diminished.29 The rhythm of inflation and deflation governing the characters’ speeches can be seen to reflect the inevitable fluctations in an ‘imagin’d worth’ that is subjectively conferred.30 If the play’s mock-heroic magniloquence, the ‘terms unsquar’d’ of its ‘swoll’n and hot discourse’ which make ‘things small as nothing … [appear] important’ (II.3.169–73), corresponds to a



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general propensity to overvalue things, the opposing impulse to debase and diminish makes itself felt in Pandarus’s prosaic vein and Thersites’s delight in coining vile comparisons. That these seemingly antithetical tendencies are, in fact, interconnected is evidenced by the stylistic dissonances, the frequent slippages in register, that have been widely commented upon as a feature of the play’s dialogue.31 Troilus is, notoriously, one of the worst offenders in this kind. His opening blazon of Cressida’s charms (I.1.48–63) typically strikes several off-key notes with its self-conscious straining for effect and its reference to ‘the open ulcer of my heart’. Like all the play’s ‘ample proposition[s]’, it fails conspicuously in its ‘promis’d largeness’. The inadvertent bathos of this speech may partly explain the huffy response it gets from Pandarus, but his own more pedestrian style of panegyric is no less ambiguous. Superseded by Troilus’s rhapsodizing, it is made to sound almost derogatory and earns him a lover’s rebuke for speaking less than the truth (I.1.64 –5). Comparative figures play a crucial part in generating this ambiance of linguistic slipperiness; commonly employed to magnify an object or person by ‘ris[ing] from the less to the greater’, they were easily thrown into reverse, being capable, as Quintilian remarks, of ‘creat[ing] an effect in either direction’.32 Indeed, their basic modus operandi, which is to enhance the value of one thing at the expense of another, governs much of the dramatic action – not least Ulysses’s plan to inflate Ajax into a prize-champion by ‘giv[ing] him allowance for the better man’ in order to ‘pluck down Achilles’s plumes’. These double-edged tactics have also been worked into the play’s verbal texture, especially in the early scenes where the effects of comparison are insistently foregrounded. Cressida, for example, teasingly sabotages her uncle’s plan to advertise Troilus’s attractions as a lover by disparaging the latter as a ‘sneaking fellow’ and crying up Hector’s and Achilles’s superior virtues, while Pandarus’s own encomia perform so many somersaults that they begin to rival Thersites’s invectives in ‘comparisons with dirt’. Thus Paris is at first pronounced a ‘gallant man’, but, relative to the ‘admirable’ Troilus, he is ‘dirt’ and ‘Helen, to change, would give an eye to boot’ (I.2.227–9). The same scandalous bias prompts Pandarus’s dismissal of ‘great’ Achilles as ‘a drayman, a porter, a very camel’ (l.249). It is this versatility in serving indifferently to praise or dispraise that makes comparison ideally equipped to project the play’s contingent and unstable values. Its inbuilt tendency to self-inversion functions as a precise rhetorical analogue for the equivocal nature of opinion, which, as Thersites complains, can be worn ‘on both sides, like a leather jerkin’ (III.3.264).





The volatility of comparison as an instrument for communicating relative worth, a price-tag placed upon things, is underscored by the commercial associations it gathers to itself in this play.33 Shakespeare had already explored the proverbial correlation between praising and selling in Love’s Labours’ Lost and the Sonnets, where it is similarly used to express a wider unease about the misuse of ‘proud compare’ and exalted rhetoric in general34: I love not less, though less the show appear; That love is merchandiz’d whose rich esteeming The owner’s tongue doth publish every where. (Sonnet 102) But the critique is given greater edge here by grounding this traditional mercantile conceit in the reversible mechanisms of comparative discourse and by dramatizing its practical consequences. Knowing Pandarus’s reputation as the patron saint of all ‘traders in the flesh’, we may find something too uncomfortably literal in Troilus’s likening of Cressida to a ‘pearl’, which he, as ‘merchant’, hopes to procure with the assistance of ‘this sailing Pandar / … our convoy, and our bark’ (I.1.96–102). The disturbing corollary of this figure is explored further in a speech underlining its material power to convert Helen or whoever is so praised into a ‘thing’ to be bartered. Fair Diomed, you do as chapmen do, Dispraise the thing that they desire to buy: But we in silence hold this virtue well, We’ll not commend what we intend to sell. (IV.1.76) Troilus employs the same trope (in reverse) on parting from Cressida in a speech lamenting the abrupt fall in love’s price: ‘We two, that with so many thousand sighs / Did buy each other, must poorly sell ourselves / With the rude brevity and discharge of one’ (IV.4.39). Again, we are reminded that metaphor is about to be translated into fact, when Cressida is traded for Antenor – just as the proposal before the Trojan council is that Helen, herself described as ‘a pearl, / Whose price hath launch’d above a thousand ships’ (II.2.81), should be exchanged as a means of striking off wartime debts.35 In fact, Cressida shares Helen’s fate in a more than superficial sense, inasmuch as she, like the ‘ransack’d queen’, is ‘merchandiz’d’ by the fickle operation of fame, transformed by her lover’s praises into a covetable ‘prize’ that will



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awaken the cupidity of Diomedes. As commodifiable objects in whom men have invested their honour and for whom they are consequently prepared to pay a heavy price, both women are peculiarly vulnerable to the commercial logic of praise. Hence their marketable value is, more blatantly than any other, subject to sudden inflation and deflation, as they become, by turns, a ‘theme for depravation’ or for ‘honour and renown’. As a substitute for Achilles whose worth is artificially maintained through epideixis, Ajax interestingly finds himself in a similar position – a parallel that confirms his exposure to the insidious process of effeminisation affecting many of the male characters in the play.36 He too is alternately praised and dispraised as part of the policy whereby he is ‘bought and sold among those of any wit, like a barbarian slave’ (II.1.46). For Ulysses and Nestor are, ‘like merchants’, quick to exploit comparison as a sales tactic; their intention is to reduce Achilles’s price in the opinion-stakes by promoting Ajax in his stead, but ‘if not, / The lustre of the better shall exceed / By showing the worse first’ (I.3.357–61). The importance of not losing sight of the objective value of things when amplifying or diminishing, so as to ‘avoid too great swelling without substance’, was routinely stressed in the rhetorical handbooks.37 In clear defiance of such prescriptions, the play’s mercenary analogies announce that the only truth to be gleaned from its epideictic discourse concerns the capricious laws of the marketplace. That comparison is being abused here on an unprecedented scale is further attested by the wilfully irrational nature of the parallels and distinctions in which the characters seek to root their use of this figure.38 Erasmus and other Renaissance pedagogues had advised the use of familiar exempla as an aid to perspicuity and sound argument.39 Yet, perversely, Pandarus selects only what is most arbitrary and insignificant in the lives of his famous subjects: And her hair were not somewhat darker than Helen’s – well, go to! – there were no more comparison between the women! (I.1.41) Why, he is very young, and yet will he, within three pound, lift as much as his brother Hector … I think his smiling becomes him better than any man in all Phrygia. (I.2.115–23) Once again, the degree speech offers us the key to the problem. In orthodox fashion, this speech rehearses a series of graduated





correspondences between micro- and macrocosm supposedly encoded in the actual structure of the universe and thus long assumed to underwrite not only the socio-political order, but the analogical basis of representation itself. At the same time, however, the speech reflects on the breakdown of these parallels and its potentially disabling effects on comparison. What happens when the general is ‘not like the hive’, when he fails to conduct himself in a manner befitting the ‘glorious planet Sol’? Where Ulysses’s analysis breaks off, the rest of the play could be said to take over, drawing out the linguistic consequences of this collapse of a once absolute order. Without a stable system of rhetorical values – a ‘virtue fix’d’ – to which it might attach itself, the characters’ analogizing slides into the uncontrolled play of relativity or into meaningless differentiation. Ironically, one effect of multiplying differences is thus to make the objects of discourse appear ‘all affin’d and kin’, reducing them to an indistinguishable sameness. Characters are presented as oddly interchangeable; Pandarus confuses Troilus with Deiphobus (I.2.227), and Helen with Cressida, (III.1.34) while Ajax mistakes Thersistes for Agamemnon (III.3.261). That their compulsive analogizing merely exacerbates the problem by erasing previously clear-cut differences seems to be the point behind Diomedes’s elaborately sarcastic exercise in comparison in IV.1. After balancing Paris’s claim to Helen against Menelaus’s for eleven lines, he concludes that ‘Both merits poised, each weighs nor less nor more; / But he as he, the heavier for a whore’ (ll.55–67). In short, the play’s suspect language of comparison contrives by every means at its disposal to subvert the rational, elucidatory function traditionally assigned it. Even when used in a purely ornamental capacity, there still clung to comparison some of the logical force and forensic qualities it originally possessed as one of the ‘places’ of argument deployed in the law courts.40 Consequently, Renaissance rhetoricians tended to set great store by the clarifying effects of this figure, which was thought to facilitate sound judgement by laying open the true nature and value of things. Peacham, for example, anticipates Diomedes’s judicial metaphor when he states that ‘this forme of speech is of mightie force and power … to persuade by reason, for the parts of the comparison being brought together, their likenesse or unlikenesse, their equalitie or inequalitie is as plainly discerned, as things which are tried and judged by the ballance’ (p.158). Puttenham similarly observes that comparison ‘sets the lesse by the greater, or the greater to the lesse … and by such confronting of them together, drives out the true ods that is betwixt them, and makes it better appeare’ (p.234).



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But this rhetorical ideal is systematically violated, turned inside out in the play. Instead of enabling us to attain a clearer, more objective sense of their identity and worth, the characters’ verbal tick of comparing only confounds our tentative judgements. In the absence of any touchstone that would allow us to arrive at a reasonably impartial assessment of the play’s epideictic discourse and its objects, critics have sometimes tried to import such an entity into the play. Thus Thomas McAlindon has argued that we need look no further for an authoritative standard against which to measure the play’s rhetorical deviations than the rule of decorum: In this doctrine it is assumed that speech and conduct are subject to essentially the same laws of fitness … For the Renaissance theorist, it follows that fitting words signify an intelligent respect for the universal laws of “degree, priority, and place”; they are a recognition of the proportion and order implanted in things by nature.41 McAlindon rightly points out that the type of grotesque amplification and diminution in which Troilus abounds would have invited condemnation as an example of the related forms of indecorous excess known as bomphiologia (‘which giveth high titles to base persons, and great praises to small deserts’) and tapinosis (‘when the dignitie or majestie of a high matter is much defaced by the basenesse of a word’).42 The problem with this argument, however, is that decorum (as he also notes) is predicated on the doctrine of degree, priority and place, the very doctrine which has been so remorselessly called into question. It presupposes a knowledge of intrinsic worth that the play’s rhetorical and dramatic strategies consistently deny to the characters – and, insofar as we share their predicament, to us. To attempt to determine the fitness of mimetic forms which, having been uprooted ‘deracinate[d]’ from a defunct and discredited order of signification, are no longer subject to any rational verification is clearly not a viable proposition. For a critical gloss on this problem – the problem in effect of finding a valid criterion, as raised by the Sceptics – we may turn to Hector’s rebuttal of Troilus’s infamous assertion that private opinion is a sufficient determinant of worth (‘What’s aught but as ’tis valued?’): But value dwells not in particular will, It holds his estimate and dignity As well wherein ’tis precious of itself




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(II.2.53) Siding with rhetorical dogma, Hector takes the view that ‘’tis mad idolatry / To make the service greater than the god’ by lavishing praise on things way in excess of their demonstrable worth. Such rhetorical worship, he suggests, is sure to become a delusion and a snare wherever the individual desire to confer value is not matched by something inherently ‘precious’ in the person valued; or, more precisely, unless appeal can be made to ‘some image of th’ affected merit’ corresponding to (and so able to ground) the virtues ascribed to that person. It may help us to grasp what Hector is getting at in this notoriously difficult speech if we juxtapose this with Francis Bacon’s musings on the dangers of verbal idolatry, which are similarly couched in terms of a perceptual analogy: It seems to me that Pygmalion’s frenzy is a good emblem or portraiture of this vanity; for words are but the images of matter; and except they have life of reason and invention, to fall in love with them is all one as to fall in love with a picture.43 What is being stipulated in each case is that words, like images, should possess an inner substance that will allow them to function as a guarantor or ‘objective correlative’ for the qualities attributed by the desiring imagination. Arguably, the collapse of Troilus’s romantic expectations – his passage from infatuation to disenchantment with the mental image of Cressida he has created – stems from his failure to heed this advice. It will lend weight to Hector’s call for some more adequate token of ‘affected merit’ than the shadowy images produced in the gaze of the onstage beholders or mirrored in their discourse. Whether such a sign of objective worth, visual or verbal, exists in the play, however, is a moot point. Significantly, the ‘image’ in question is caught up here in a tautological pattern of assonance and alliteration, as if to suggest its inevitable absorption by the reflexive value system it is supposed to counteract. The worth ascribed to the prized object is reflected back upon the ‘prizer’ (‘infectiously itself affects’) in a circular motion that makes no reference beyond itself to any absolute norm or objective



As in the prizer. ’Tis mad idolatry To make the service greater than the god, And the will dotes that is attributive To what infectiously itself affects, Without some image of th’ affected merit.

fact. More directly, Hector’s sudden abandonment of his argument and his defection to the cause of ‘fame’ at the end of this scene – echoing Ulysses’s abdication of the rationalist position he formulated in I.3 – implies that there is no effective standard of truth to set against opinion.44 This pessimistic conclusion would seem to be confirmed by our experience of watching or reading the play. The dubious nature of the linguistic strategies employed by the characters are not the only thing preventing us from establishing a viable alternative criterion. One might also cite the striking disproportion between the play’s ‘matter’ or res and the volume of commentary it generates. Tellingly, the ‘argument’ of Troilus and Cressida is invariably spoken of in disparaging terms, as too inconsequential, ‘too starv’d a subject’, to justify the degree of conflict (both military and rhetorical) it provokes.45 A play in which interpretation so outweighs and sustains itself at the expense of content poses obvious difficulties for its audience. Quite simply, there is no substantive, unmediated reality here to which we might gain access. This is partly due to the play’s refusal to conform to the conventions of mimetic realism. Although the play’s characters and dramatic events are sometimes seen as providing a useful counterbalance that allows us to assess the validity of its rhetorical claims, other critics have acknowledged the lack of characterization of the threedimensional sort to be found here, or any action worthy of the name.46 The play typically reflects upon this deficiency and its relationship to the excessive production of epideictic discourse. Trojans and Greeks repeatedly warn that it is in the nature of praise, especially when selfdirected, to consume itself and the very deeds that could be used to validate its assertions: He that is proud eats up himself. Pride is his own glass, his own trumpet, his own chronicle, and whatever praises itself but in the deed, devours the deed in the praise. (II.3.154; cf. I.3.241– 4, III.3.169–74) The characters are continually having to contend with the epistemological problems stemming from this tendency for their rhetorical activity to overwhelm or devour anything that might conceivably act as an external standard of truth. The difficulty they have in recognizing each other from description or from prior acquaintance has often been remarked.47 No doubt this may partly be put down to the failure of these supposedly heroic figures to live up to their inflated





reputations. But a more fundamental factor, I suggest, is the continual barrage of discussion, which coercively shapes and directs the ways in which they perceive each other, whilst at the same time screening the person designated from view. And if this represents a handicap for the characters, it is no less of a problem for the audience. Just enough dramatic evidence filters through the verbal contamination to enable us to ascertain that things are otherwise than they are valued, not enough to serve as an independent basis for judgement. The sheer prescriptive weight of the play’s rhetorical commentary does not merely stand in the way of unbiased analysis; it also inhibits the development of subjectivity in the characters. Any independent sense of selfhood they seek to assert must struggle to maintain itself against the textual identities imposed on them by others, both in the play itself and, accretively, through the many prior retellings of the Troy story.48 In general, however, the characters show little inclination to resist the pressures created by this ceaseless reinscription of the qualities by which they are known.49 On the contrary, they are only too eager to identify with the images refracted back at them by the glass of praise. Diagnostically speaking, we could say that Troilus is not the only character to be afflicted by the Pygmalion complex of falling in love with an imaginary idol (Cressida) constructed by his own desires; or – to invoke another mythic analogue that haunts the play – that they all, to varying degrees, suffer the fate of Narcissus in succumbing to a self-destructive infatuation with their own fictitious images, as shown to them ‘by reflection’ in the mirror surfaces of opinion.50 The degree to which they are psychologically enthralled by these reflected images is evidenced by their often comic efforts to conform to them. Hence their tendency to self-parody: Nestor Tell him of Nestor, one that was a man When Hector’s grandsire suck’d. He is old now … (I.3.291) Hence also their chameleon-like knack of adapting their speech and behaviour to whatever context they find themselves in. We may be startled to hear Agamemnon respond in kind to the chivalrous idioms of Hector’s challenge in I.3, given that Greek concerns have hitherto taken a quite different direction, but such inconsistencies are legion in the play. ‘Languageless’ for most of the time, the foolish Ajax waxes nobly eloquent in the company of his cousin Hector. In I.1 Troilus declares himself too much in love to do battle without the walls of Troy, only to



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reverse this decision a few lines later. And both Ulysses and Hector foresake the rational principles they have enunciated for motives that cannot satisfactorily be explained either in psychological or political terms. It is clear, in fact, that such conduct makes a nonsense of any reading of the play which is committed to the idea of fully realized subjects, capable of interior reflection upon their experiences and of reacting independently to events. Ulysses, it seems, is right; the characters appear to have no sense of themselves, indeed no existence, above and beyond that conferred on them by the fickle authority of public expectation. In such conditions any attempt they make to preserve a degree of integrity or assert their autonomy from the tyranny of opinion is sure to founder. When exposed to the scorn of the Greek leaders in III.3, Achilles tries at first to defend his sense of intrinsic worth by distinguishing what is ‘simply man’ from ‘those honors / That are without him’, which he dismisses as ‘prizes of accident as oft as merit’ (ll.74 –92). But despite his protestation that there is a stoical self-consistency to his identity which the vagaries of fame cannot touch – ‘I do enjoy / At ample point all that I did possess, / Save these men’s looks’ – by the end of the scene this most narcissistic Greek of them all is forced to admit how troubled he is by his ‘gor’d’ reputation, how impossible he finds it to probe the depths of his own being (l.302). As long as it compels him to find himself in the gaze of others, Achilles’ self-infatuation condemns him, as Thersites gleefully remarks, to a life of ‘valiant ignorance’ (l.312, cf. II.1.66). Cressida seems to be the one exception to this rule of enforced superficiality insofar as she has struck many critics and play-goers as ‘a real person, in spite of her role as a commonplace in the play’s externalised and intellectual scheme’.51 She herself connives at this impression on her first appearance by suggesting that her caustic wit is a form of selfdefence (I.2.258–64). Like Hamlet, she would have us believe that she cultivates an enigmatic persona in order to protect an authentic self within that passes show. Our expectations that these intimations of Hamletian profundity will be developed are heightened when she delivers her soliloquy at the end of I.2 – expectations that, in the event, will be only partially fulfilled. Significantly, she begins by disclaiming any reliance on the mediatory offices of opinion when forming her own view of things: ‘But more in Troilus thousandfold I see / Than in the glass of Pandar’s praise may be’. We should note, however, that this defiant assertion of independence is qualified by the hint, in her hyperbolic ‘more’ and ‘thousandfold’, that she cannot so easily




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Yet hold I off. Women are angels, wooing: Things won are done, joy’s soul lies in the doing. That she belov’d knows nought that knows not this: Men prize the thing ungain’d more than it is. That she was never yet that ever knew Love got so sweet as when desire did sue. Therefore this maxim out of love I teach: Achievement is command; ungain’d, beseech; Then though my heart’s content firm love doth bear, Nothing of that shall from mine eyes appear. (I.2.272) ‘Yet hold I off’ expands on her earlier show of reserve, contextualizing this as the deliberate policy of a worldly-wise young woman who, fully comprehending the laws governing male desire and valuation of her sex, intends to exploit these for her own advantage. By playing hard to get she will drive up her market value and thereby retain a measure of autonomy and control over her fate in a situation of seduction which threatens to deprive her of either, since ‘achievement is command; ungain’d beseech’. Like Ulysses (whose analysis of the way value is produced in the play-world she shrewdly prefigures), Cressida both recognizes and wishes to manipulate for private ends the determining force of opinion, while at the same time seeking to distance herself from this. It is a tricky balancing act, and one that in the long run proves untenable. The precarious sense of selfhood generated by the gap between herself as she is prized and as she feels herself to be (‘Men prize the thing ungain’d more than it is’) seems always to be on the verge of collapse. For such moments of ironic detachment are rare. Ominously, elsewhere in the soliloquy she slips into speaking of herself in generic terms, as seen through the eyes of men (‘Women are angels wooing’), in ways that point ahead to her ever more pronounced narcissistic tendency to derive her sense of identity and worth exclusively from her variable status as an object of desire. Her pretensions to self-knowledge are further mocked by her diction, with its reliance on commonplace wisdom, its mechanical rhyme scheme (won, done; never, ever) and flat reiteration (knows, knows, knew), all bespeaking the second-hand nature of her insights. If the soliloquy reveals a certain inwardness and independence of spirit, then, it also suggests the impossibility of maintaining these



escape the inflationary logic of praise. The rest of the soliloquy undercuts itself in similar fashion:

qualities in a context where women, even more than men, are taught to value themselves as they are appraised by the beholding eye.52 Cressida will continue to act out these internal contradictions, albeit in increasingly schematic forms. Through its hesitations and retractions, the speech in the assignation scene where she opens her heart to Troilus (III.2.113–33) parades her conflicted desire to ‘hold off’ and to surrender herself to Troilus, who, she fears, will be licensed by her unguarded ‘confession’ to ‘play the tyrant’. So intense is the struggle between these opposing impulses that she figures her psyche as radically split: Troilus What offends you, lady? Cressida Sir, mine own company. Troilus You cannot shun yourself. Cressida Let me go and try. I have a kind of self resides with you; But an unkind self, that itself will leave To be another’s fool. I would be gone. (III.2.144) I take it that the ‘kind of self’ that would bestow itself on Troilus should be read as being in apposition (not in opposition) to the ‘unkind self’ which foolishly reveals itself by blabbing. The spontaneous self-abandonment demanded by love is, once again, seen by Cressida as an act of self-betrayal requiring her to relinquish her hardwon autonomy by consenting to become ‘another’s fool’. Whether we understand this last phrase as referring proleptically to her status as the object of Troilus’s idealism or of Diomedes’s more brutal attentions – or indeed to the role of archetype of female infidelity which legend thrusts upon her – what is at stake is an act that (as she sees it) will transform her into another’s creature, that would demean her ‘true’ self by allowing this to be defined in alien terms. But Troilus’s warning that she cannot shun this destiny, try as she might, turns out to be prophetic. At the end of this scene, she abruptly drops her struggle with her ‘unkind self’ and joins her lover in presenting herself as no more than the proverbial figure of legend, voluntarily playing Echo to his Narcissus. Thereafter she continues to oscillate between the desire to resist and a readiness to capitulate to, even to anticipate, her future reputation as the stereotypical wanton.53 After initially submitting to the generals’ kisses on her arrival in the Greek camp in IV.5, she regains command of the situation sufficiently to fend them off, but only by means of a coquettish display of wit that courts Ulysses’s





savagely misogynist assessment of her as one of the ‘sluttish spoils of opportunity, / And daughters of the game’ (l.62). At the moment of yielding to Diomed, she still shows signs of being caught between a now token resistance and acquiescence in her fate: ‘Well, well, ’tis done, ’tis past. And yet it is not; / I will not keep my word’ (V.2.97). But by then she has become a mere shadow of her former self, stripped of the rhetorical markers of inwardness as well as any degree of agency she once possessed, demoted to the status of devalued object. Cressida’s failure to sustain her real, if fragile, sense of selfhood in the face of popular opinion and its constitutive power over identity poignantly defines the limits placed on subjectivity in this play. Despite their apparently submissive compliance with the laws of opinion, there is nevertheless a sense in which the characters do rebel against the constraints these laws impose. Out of a desire to escape the corrosive, disintegrative effects of reputation on value and identity, Trojans and Greeks articulate a collective fantasy of transcendence whose grip on their imaginations is in inverse proportion to its basis in fact. Thus they hypothesize about distinguishing ‘valor’s show’ from ‘valor’s worth’ in contexts that point the futility of their wishes (I.3.46, IV.5.124 –32). They dream of isolating the essence of human beings and experiences through a process of winnowing or distilling that will enable this to emerge in its true ‘purity’, ‘strain’d’ of its ‘qualifying dross’, so that ‘what hath mass or matter, by itself / Lies rich in virtue and unmingled’ (I.3.23–30, III.2.20 –2, 164 –7, IV.4.2–10). Just as the Greeks like to think that the ‘protractive trials’ they have endured are a means of discovering a stoic firmness, a ‘persistive constancy’ in men (I.3.20), so Troilus predicts that his own ‘truth’ (in its dual sense of sincerity and constancy) will be approved by posterity. And both sides in the conflict are given to nostalgic day-dreaming about restoring the ‘rule in unity’, recuperating a lost integrity by organizing their experience around a new emotional or political centre (IV.2.101–5, V.5.44). The basic fantasy on which this tide of wishful speculation turns is the idea of establishing an absolute truth or core identity independently of any rhetorical agency – without, that is, the need for recourse to a language of (dis)praise which distorts, depletes and finally consumes its object. This essentialist desire to fix meaning and identity takes, as we shall see, both verbal and visual forms. One occasion when the longing for transcendence asserts itself with particular force – and, in so doing, demonstrates its impossibility – is that curious moment in III.2 where Troilus, Cressida and Pandarus, stepping out of the historical continuum of the dramatic action,



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identify themselves as the literary types of constancy, falsehood and pimping they will become in the popular imagination. By anticipating a future state of ‘perfection’, when their reputations will have been fixed for all eternity, this gesture appears to bring about a convergence between name, character and public ‘esteem’ of the sort which the play generally manages to frustrate. Troilus is determined to capitalize on this fact. He sees here an opportunity to affirm his personal integrity and, by this process, to redeem a language bankrupt by excess and ‘tir’d with iteration’: True swains in love shall in the world to come Approve their truth by Troilus. When their rhymes, Full of protest, of oath and big compare, Want similes, truth tir’d with iteration, As true as steel, as plantage to the moon, As sun to day, as turtle to her mate, As iron to adamant, as earth to th’ centre, [Yet] after all comparisons of truth (As truth’s authentic author to be cited) “As true as Troilus” shall crown up the verse, And sanctify the numbers. (III.2.173) As truth’s self-styled ‘author’ and originary prototype, Troilus sets himself up as an absolute standard of veracity / fidelity in love. By providing a stable referent in which future lovers can ground their empty and over-inflated rhetoric, ‘full of protest, of oath and big compare’, his personal truth will ‘sanctify [their] numbers’. We are thus invited to think of Troilus as an immutable presence, located outside and beyond the relativizing discourse of comparison. But the language in which it is couched belies this claim. ‘“As true as Troilus”’ is no less hackneyed a simile, no less tired a cliché than those other comparisons of truth he has just cited, and its proverbial status confirms the derivative, rhetorical status of the identity Troilus wishes to found upon it. Other and larger ironies haunt this desperate attempt to circumvent the nullifying effects of contingency. By now our suspicions should be well and truly aroused regarding the kind of truth with which Troilus identifies himself. For a start, this truth is itself relative in that it is defined by opposition to Cressida’s falsehood. One contentious, unstable truth is thus being offered as proof of another in a manner that evokes the circular process of reasoning which Pyrrhonian Sceptics used to dissolve the





notion of a reliable criterion. Moreover, this same truth is already associated with a range of incriminating qualities, since it is consistently described by Troilus in terms of ‘plainness’, ‘simplicity’ (i.e. sincerity and/or naivety) and immaturity: ‘but alas, / I am as true as truth’s simplicity, / And simpler than the infancy of truth.’ (III.2.168; cf. IV.4.102–8). Troilus’s disparaging view of his own truth as a foolish weakness, a ‘vice’ or ‘fault’, merely serves to reinforce the subtextual message that it is a hopelessly inadequate measure of the play-world, being far too monological – arrested, as it is, in a state of ‘unpractic’d infancy’ – to withstand the testing complexities of adult experience. And such is shown to be the case. For this truth, in its regressive ‘simplicity’, proves utterly incapable of comprehending the contradictory forces (rhetorical, psychological and ideological) that lead to its betrayal as a consequence of Cressida’s sexual surrender in V.2. The lovers’ futile bid to ‘stick the heart’ of truth (and falsehood) is enacted on a spectacular as well as rhetorical plane. Their vows completed, they solemnize their ‘bargain’ by taking Pandarus’s hands in a weird parody of a betrothal ceremony, offering themselves as the visual embodiments of their legendary qualities for our contemplation. This brief interval where the plot is suspended in a moment of contemplative stasis can be seen as one of several such instances in the play. It corresponds to what Agamemnon, welcoming Hector to the Greek camp in a passage added to the Folio text, calls the ‘extant moment’: What’s past and what’s to come is strew’d with husks And formless ruin of oblivion; But in this extant moment, faith and troth, Strain’d purely from all hollow bias-drawing, Bids thee, with most divine integrity, From heart of very heart, great Hector, welcome. (IV.5.166) All things, says Agamemnon – echoing Ulysses on the devastation wrought by time (III.3.145–53) – lose their distinctive identity and shape in the ‘formless ruin of oblivion’, strewed as this is with the ‘husks’ of discarded reputations; only in the ‘extant moment’ can they be ‘see[n] truly’ for what they are. In this instant, ‘faith’ and ‘troth’ will reveal themselves in their rightful forms to the beholder’s gaze. With its strong iconic properties, the ‘extant moment’ is imagined here as possessing something of that capacity to communicate the essence of



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things directly to human intuition, rather than by the more circuitous route of discursive processes, which Neoplatonists had attributed to the image.54 Its imputed power to disclose truth in visual form is perhaps the nearest equivalent for Hector’s ‘image of th’ affected merit’ the play has to offer. Yet even such moments as these are not permitted to retain their ‘divine integrity’; instead they are subjected to much ‘hollow bias-drawing’, directed ‘tortive and errant’ by the glass of praise which interposes its corrupting medium between eye and object. Nowhere is this process more clearly demonstrated than in the ‘loving interview’ between Greeks and Trojans which supplies the context for Agamemnon’s disquisition on the ‘extant moment’. The ‘embracement[s]’ exchanged by these enemy warriors are evidently intended as an emblematic expression of the chivalric code, which tempers aggression with courtesy.55 A stylized formality pervades the staging of the scene and accompanying dialogue between Hector and his hosts. Nestor brings the ceremony to a climax by mirroring Hector to himself in the idiom of heroic spectacle56: I have, thou gallant Troyan, seen thee oft, Laboring for destiny, make cruel way Through ranks of Greekish youth, and I have seen thee, As hot as Perseus, spur thy Phrygian steed, Despising many forfeits and subduements, When thou hast hung [thy] advanced sword i’ th’ air, Not letting it decline on the declined, That I have said to some my standers-by, “Lo Jupiter is yonder, dealing life!” (IV.5.183) Although this purports to be an eye-witness account, the introduction of flattering analogues and mythological comparisons calls its objectivity into question. As if to emphasize this point, Achilles – who has already weighed Hector well and found that what looks like courtesy is in fact pride (IV.5.81) – disrupts the ritual of hospitality a second time by brutally re-presenting it as a tawdry charade. Correctly viewed, he says, the meeting is a deadly confrontation and Hector, Troy’s ‘base and pillar’, no more than a walking carcase: Now, Hector, I have fed mine eyes on thee; I have with exact view perus’d thee, Hector, And quoted joint by joint. (IV.5.231)





Following Ulysses’s and Diomedes’s example – both of whom see Cressida’s body as yielding up its secrets without the need for an interpreter, though their textual/oratorical tropes suggest otherwise (IV.4. 116–20, IV.5.54 –63) – Achilles fallaciously identifies corporeal presence with an unmediated and therefore unerring vision. As before, however, the concealed bias in this ‘exact view’ betrays itself through verbal excess – through Achilles’s self-consciously iconoclastic reduction of Hector to butcher’s meat and his boasting at his rival’s expense. His ‘misprising / [Of] the knight oppos’d’ is further underlined by the use of salesman’s talk: ‘I will the second time, / As I would buy thee, view thee limb by limb’ (l.237). In this ambiance of rhetorical obfuscation, Hector’s protest that he cannot be so easily ‘read’ (ll.239– 41) carries an unusually strong charge, one that seems to be directed as much at the complacency of the play’s ‘fair beholders’ as at Achilles. Providing we heed the warning, we will experience this encounter not as a transparent icon of chivalry, but as an anamorphic-style puzzle, which in forcing us to consider it from opposing perspectives of equally questionable authority, leaves us no secure vantage-point from which to assess Hector’s reputation as the epitome of chivalric honour. Returning to the betrayal scene, we are now (I hope) better placed to appreciate its effect on Troilus as the culmination of a range of disintegrative pressures which ‘co-act’ to produce this hallucinatory experience. As with previous ‘extant moments’, we are compelled to witness Cressida’s seduction through a glass darkly, as it is drawn ‘bias and thwart’ by the commentary of the onstage beholders, each of whom reshapes it in the image of his own prejudices: Cressida Troilus Ulysses Thersites noted.

Now, my sweet guardian, hark, a word with you. Yea, so familiar? She will sing any man at first sight. And any man can sing her, if he can take her cliff; she’s (V.2.7)

The dissolution of this scene into ideologically opposed perceptions is, so to speak, a dress-rehearsal for Troilus’s fractured vision. How are we to make sense of an experience that, for Troilus at least, evades rational explanation? Most simply perhaps, by locating its origins in the relativistic code of values to which all the characters subscribe in practice. But Troilus’s nightmarish sense of being ensnared in a ‘madness of discourse, / That cause sets up with and against itself’ also asks us to see



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this moment as the end-product of an unstable linguistic system whose openness to manipulation allows it to be turned ‘against itself’, of a rhetorical practice so disconnected from any agreed definition of reality that it has become a source of delusion in its own right. Equally, Troilus’s reaction to what he has witnessed confirms our suspicions that these self-divisions are accentuated by the monocular way of seeing he brings to the event. For, despite being plunged into an abyss of uncertainty by the irreconcilable images of Cressida before him, Troilus does his best to foreclose on this crisis of perception by refusing to confront its wider epistemological implications. Thus he takes steps not only to ‘contain’ his emotional turmoil (at Ulysses’s insistence), but, more importantly, to limit any disruption of his philosophical outlook and salvage his now ‘withered truth’ from the tide of scepticism that threatens to engulf it. Having denied the evidence of his senses in a vain attempt to preserve ‘rule in unity’ and keep the ‘simplicity’ of his truth intact, he tries to split ‘Diomed’s Cressida’ off from his own – a form of moral surgery that is intended to safeguard the purity of womanhood and of his own ideals. When this too fails, he commutes his love of Cressida into obsessive hatred of Diomedes and an equally single-minded pursuit of revenge (l.165). These evasive measures are repeated in the rhetorical sphere, as he takes refuge from his insight into the ‘madness of discourse’ and a disenchanted awareness that language has been emptied of all significance (‘Words, words, mere words no matter from the heart’ (V.3.108)) in further hyperbolic outpourings (V.2.163–76, V.10.23–9). What makes Troilus’s response so troubling, I suggest, is that we are not allowed to dismiss it as a purely personal failure, the consequence of youthful egotism or inexperience. Rather, this refusal to address the questions posed by the collapse of his ideals is shown to be systemic, written into the very conditions governing his dramatic world. For the same narcissistic self-absorption that causes Troilus to retreat from contrarieties that offer to wreak havoc on his intellectual mind-set into solipsistic affirmation also prevents the other characters from engaging in self-criticism or from reassessing their values when they break down. This collective failure of nerve is most strikingly illustrated by the change that overtakes Hector in the course of the play. A one-time opponent of dogmatism who sceptically urged the wisdom of ‘modest doubt’ in the Trojan council scene and proved himself to be an acute critic of his brothers’ self-delusions, Hector has by V.3 become an inflexible exponent of honour, as deaf to rational objections as any of his siblings. Yet to accuse either brother of failing to break out of





their blinkered attitudes would be beside the point; the milieu they inhabit is just as inhospitable to the pursuit of open-minded inquiry as it is to any pretensions to selfhood. We are thus faced with a paradox. While the play’s dramaturgy and its explicit interest in epistemological questions lend themselves to sceptical analysis, it lacks any character capable of the sort of complex seeing which it (more than any other Shakespearean text perhaps) seems to demand. There is no Rosalind or Touchstone here to make playful capital out of the constant shifts in perspective, no Hamlet who, by his stringent interrogation of appearances, might mediate – and so help us make sense of – the play’s uncertainties. In their place we find only varieties of myopic self-regard. The characters’ reluctance to allow ‘matter of the world / Enter [their] thoughts, save such as doth revolve / And ruminate [themselves]’ (II.3.186) ensures that the disillusionment which besets Troilus in V.2 does not pave the way – as it does in some of the tragedies and the late Sonnets – for a more securely based, because (ironically) more sceptical, understanding.57 ‘Hector is dead; there is no more to say’ (V.10.22) represents the sum-total of wisdom attainable in such a world. Doubting or fearing the ‘worst’ may enable one to see things more clearly than ‘blind reason stumbling without fear’ (III.2.71–3), as Cressida remarks; it may work to cleanse the ‘perjur’d eye’ of its falsehood (Sonnet 152). But this sort of cathartic insight is only possible where the beholder is willing to confront the facts ranged against his/her particular view of things and the desires it expresses. Being determined to cling to their discredited codes of love and honour even after these have been proven by events to be (in Thersites’s pithy phrase) ‘not worth a blackberry’, neither Greeks nor Trojans are able to find any release from their delusions. And, insofar as we have been prevented from establishing a clear epistemological advantage over these characters, the understanding that is denied to them also eludes us. Our judgement may have been more severely tested and our minds perplexed, but to no obvious end. Considering the extent to which we have been made to participate in the characters’ perceptual limitations and forced to contend with the distortive effects of their discourse, it seems grotesquely fitting that Pandarus’s epilogue should bring the play to a close by bequeathing the audience his diseases. Symbolically it is all the more appropriate that the eye is one of the organs worst affected by the pox, the ailment from which Pandarus suffers (V.3.104, V.10.48). Within the Shakespearean canon, the main inheritor of the problems thrown up by this play – problems concerning the relativity of



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perception and the subjective basis of human judgements – is Antony and Cleopatra. The protagonists of this tragedy once again become the focus of diametrically opposed evaluations, and commentary again outweighs action, placing serious obstacles in the way of independent analysis. But the sceptical distrust directed against the individual will and its fondness for constructing over-inflated images in the earlier play is, if not completely overturned, at least counterbalanced by a more positive assessment of this kind of imaginative activity. And this in turn allows scope for a more sympathetic response to rhetorical amplification, the language of ‘protest, of oath and big compare’, through which such activity is typically expressed. The next chapter will show how the recreative properties assigned to the imagination in Renaissance aesthetic discourse were a crucial factor in enabling the revaluation of this wayward faculty.




Antony and Cleopatra and the Art of Dislimning

In a celebrated set-piece of Antony and Cleopatra, Enobarbus offers to satisfy the curiosity of his fellow Romans by narrating how Cleopatra first appeared to Antony on the river Cydnus (II.2.190 –218). In so doing, he makes one of the play’s characteristic appeals to the imagination by asking both his immediate and off-stage audiences to visualize – to picture for themselves – something that is physically absent from the stage.1 The whole magnificent spectacle of the barge is conjured up retrospectively in the mind’s eye by Enobarbus’s description of it; the imaginative artistry originally deployed by the Egyptian Queen when staging herself as the goddess Venus or transforming her boy attendants into ‘smiling Cupids’ and her gentlewomen into ‘so many mermaids’ has become overlaid with his equally hyperbolic narration of its effects. Yet even as he recreates this scene for others through the combined agency of words and images, Enobarbus intimates, paradoxically, that neither can adequately mediate its significance, inasmuch as the Queen’s appearance ‘beggar’d all description’ and ‘o’erpictur[ed] that Venus where we see / The fancy outwork nature’.2 As if to emphasize the point, there is a gap at the centre of the tableau where Cleopatra herself should be. Her ‘own person’ is evoked only indirectly, in terms of its erotic impact on the senses of the personified elements and the spectators who crowd the ‘adjacent wharves’, and of the desires it awakens in them, especially the desire of looking. To the extent that Cleopatra is figured here at all, then, it is as a focal-point for the ‘amorous’ gaze of others. The clear implication is that the essence of her power, of her quasi-divine status, can only be fully apprehended in and by the beholder’s desiring imagination.3 The intensity of the audience’s involvement with her imagined presence is foregrounded in the complex response of Maecenas and Agrippa to this speech. In a further 166



6

illustration of Cleopatra’s extraordinary effect on others, the distrust usually felt by these hard-bitten Romans (Enobarbus included) for this kind of Egyptian extravaganza gives way to undisguised admiration. Shakespeare thus uses the barge speech to foreground certain aspects of the imagination which, however we choose to view them, are likely to be decisive for our reading of this play: its critical role in constructing the lovers’ mythical identities; the exaggerated forms, visual and verbal, through which it typically manifests itself; the sense in which, being a mode of perception as well as creation, it must be taken to be the common property of artist and spectator (whose collaborative activity is responsible for producing that ‘wonderful piece of work’, Cleopatra aboard her barge); and the mixed responses which such activity has always provoked. One purpose of this chapter is to show how the manner in which the imagination is conceived as operating here and elsewhere in the play is conditioned by contemporary discourses relating to this faculty – defined as the capacity for forming vivid mental images – and its role in artistic production. But the contribution of previous Shakespearean explorations of this topic to the genesis of its treatment in Antony and Cleopatra also needs to be acknowledged. The romantic comedies and the Sonnets, in particular, are concerned with the imagination as it informs the lover’s vision of things, since ‘love looks not with the eyes but with the mind’ (MND, I.1.234).4 A more complex stance is adopted towards the amatory imagination in these texts than in Troilus and Cressida, where, as we have seen, Shakespeare seems disposed to recognize only its fictitious and potentially idolatrous qualities. The later sonnets (later, that is, according to the arrangement of the 1605 Quarto) anatomize in unflinching detail the perceptual aberrations associated with that ‘blind fool, love’ and its lack of ‘correspondence with true sight’, which leads the poet to maintain that black is ‘beauty’s best’ contrary to the evidence of his senses and his reason. Yet, at the same time, the emotionally compelling nature of these delusions keeps open the possibility that sexual desire is truly capable of working its alchemy upon the beloved, of ‘creating every bad a perfect best’.5 Love’s ambiguous power to transpose ‘things base and vile’ to ‘form and dignity’ is also a recurrent motif of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It is love’s erring vision, intensified by the effects of Puck’s magic juice, that causes Titania to ‘madly dote’ upon an ass and much confusion besides. But while she and the Athenian lovers may be content to dismiss these events as nothing more than the ‘fierce vexation of a dream’, in Bottom’s mind they become the stuff of a ‘rare



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Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. (V.1.4) Moreover, the last word lies with his wife, whose conviction that the transfigurative power of these fantasies ‘More witnesseth than fancy’s images, / And grows to something of great constancy; / But howsoever, strange and admirable’ (V.1.23–7) closely anticipates Cleopatra’s defence of her dream of Antony in V.2. In fact, the whole debate between Theseus and Hippolyta over the status of ‘fancy’s images’ is reproduced on a much larger canvas in Antony and Cleopatra. A similar history of ambivalence marks the place of the imagination in aesthetic theory.6 To the lunatic, the lover and the poet, whom Theseus describes as being ‘of imagination all compact’, should be added the painter, since it was in the exercise of the imagination or fantasia that he was so often likened to the poet.7 When the younger Philostratus asserted, around the turn of the third century AD, that ‘the art of painting has a certain kinship with poetry, and that an element of imagination is common to both’, he was restating an established commonplace.8 We have already encountered perhaps the most influential version of this topos in Plato’s damning association of poets (or sophists) and painters as practitioners of ‘phantastic’ imitation, by which he meant the art of manipulating appearances to produce a pleasing but specious illusion, totally at odds with rational truth.9 But while Plato’s critique lost none of its force over the intervening centuries, it was displaced as the dominant discourse for describing the workings of the fantasia by the more empirical tradition of faculty psychology deriving from Aristotle’s De Anima. And it was in the context of this alternative discourse that the creative role of the imagination underwent a process of expansion and revaluation.10 Crucial to this development was the distinction made by proponents of the Aristotelian tradition between a passive, reproductive imagination which (as little more than a basic mechanism of perception) forms likenesses of external objects from the sensory data it receives, and a more active and freely compositive agency. Aesthetic theory put increasing emphasis on the latter, as a constitutively human and creative power. This higher version of the fantasia operated in relative autonomy from



vision’. Theseus’s rationalistic denunciation of the imagination is equivocally phrased:

the senses in that it was able to construct vivid images of things even in their absence and was thus closely allied to both memory and prophecy, as well as being held responsible for dreams and other species of delusive vision. Hence Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola (nephew of the famous Giovanni) states in his treatise on the subject that the imagination is ‘superior to sense in that, with no external stimulus, it yet produces images, not only present, but also past and future, and even such as cannot be brought to light by nature’; moreover, it separates and combines sensory forms ‘at will’.11 Pico della Mirandola touches here on another function that made the fantasia such a valuable resource for artists and writers: its ability to generate forms of a type never seen before by reconfiguring those which already exist in nature, whether by varying, combining, transforming or perfecting them. As an unlimited source of new artistic images and ideas, the fantasia was naturally considered to be an important aid to invention.12 Leonardo’s tendency to conflate these two functions (see p.63) was thus echoed a century later by Puttenham, who saw it as the business of a well-ordered imagination to represent ‘unto the soule all maner of bewtifull visions, whereby the inventive parte of the mynde is so much holpen, as without it no man could devise any new or rare thing’.13 Its partial freedom to construct images independently of the laws of nature made the fantasia an essential component of the creative licence to which poets and painters traditionally laid claim. One of the boldest reaffirmations of this liberty was penned by the Florentine painter, Cennino Cennini, at the turn of the fourteenth century. Having noted that painting requires ‘imagination and skill of hand, in order to discover things not seen … and to fix them with the hand, presenting to plain sight what does not actually exist’, he asserts that it justly deserves to be enthroned next to theory (scienza), and to be crowned with poetry. The justice lies in this: that the poet, with his theory … is free to compose and bind together, or not, as he pleases, according to his inclination (volonta). In the same way, the painter is given freedom to compose a figure, standing, seated, half-man, halfhorse, as he pleases, according to his imagination (fantasia).14 Cennini accepts that the painter, like the poet, trades in fictions, in things that do not exist. He accepts too that individual will or desire has greater control over their manipulation of natural forms than do rational imperatives. But it is this same freedom of invention which he sees as ennobling both arts; the fantasia here usurps the





authority normally assigned to the painter’s or poet’s scienza. Cennini’s placing of the fantasia on a par with or even above scientific accuracy may have been out of step with what would become the orthodox scale of values. Nevertheless, the higher imaginative functions were generally considered to offer a means of exceeding the limits of objective reality in order to evoke what cannot be seen by the eye or encompassed by reason alone. Again, antiquity offered precedents for this critical position. Philostratus (the Athenian) had mooted the idea that the Greek sculptors of antiquity were obliged to call upon some principle other than mimesis when seeking to capture the ineffable presence of the gods: ‘Imagination … wrought these works, a wiser and subtler artist by far than imitation [mimesis]; for imitation can only create as its handiwork what it has seen, but imagination equally what it has not seen’.15 Plato too, notwithstanding his many attacks on the poet’s and painter’s phantasms (phantasmata), believed that imaginative visions formed under the influence of sleep or disease can apprehend more than cool reason ever comprehends, becoming a vehicle for divinely inspired insights.16 The idea of the imagination affording access to a higher reality appealed strongly to some Renaissance minds, especially of a Neoplatonic bent. Hence its visionary qualities were vigorously defended in the literary and artistic quarrels of the Cinquecento: by Tasso, for example, who (following Dante) speculated about the existence of an imaginazione intellettuale capable of irradiating a world beyond the material, in contradistinction to purely ‘phantastic’ images; and by Michelangelo, who regarded the fantasia in a similarly mystical light, as an instrument for the discovery and expression of spiritual truths.17 Such large claims did not succeed, however, in dislodging the more hostile Platonic view of this faculty, which was kept alive by generations of moralizing commentators. The latter saw grounds for distrust in the freedom embraced so unreservedly by Cennini; imaginative invention, it was endlessly stated, must be subordinated to reason and kept within the bounds of decorum, lest it lead to the proliferation of vain, foolish or monstrous images.18 Even partisans of the fantasia echoed such strictures. Many of these criticisms are recycled in Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, written at the tail-end of the Aristotelian tradition.19 What gives Bacon’s commonplace remarks a certain interest for our purposes is their recasting into a dialectical form which makes their relevance to the central dynamic of Shakespeare’s tragedy strikingly apparent. Introduced in the context of a paragone that reflects Bacon’s empirical and rationalist agenda in being heavily weighted in favour of philosophy and history, poetry is defined as a ‘pleasure or



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being not tied to the laws of matter, may at pleasure join that which nature hath severed, and sever that which nature hath joined; and so make unlawful matches and divorces of things; Pictoribus atque poetis, &c. Measured by the strict standards of history or philosophy, the poet’s violation of the ‘laws of matter’ appears irrational and ‘unlawful’, and in this (the Horatian tag implies) he acts as irresponsibly as the painter. But the comparison also brings out another, more favourable aspect of the poetic imagination, leading Bacon to concede that its very licentiousness allows it to grant ‘some shadow of satisfaction to the mind of man in those points wherein the nature of things doth deny it’, by ‘feign[ing] acts and events greater and more heroical’ than any this world can show – a power necessarily denied to those disciplines under the sober dominion of reason. ‘And therefore’, he concludes, poetry was ‘ever thought to have some participation of divineness, because it doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind’. It will be argued here that this ongoing cultural debate over the value of the fantasia provides an important forum for the conflict, indissociably political and artistic, at the heart of Antony and Cleopatra.20 For the power struggle between Rome and Egypt is waged in and through their sharply opposed representations of themselves and each other, and the rival aesthetics that underpin these images.21 The positions adopted by the contending parties can be seen to reflect a familiar tension inherent in the theory of mimesis which has been discussed in Chapter 3: on the Roman side, a rationalistic empiricism such as forms the basis not only of history, the domain over which the ‘full-fortuned Caesar’ presides, but of scientific imitation with its emphasis on rules; and on the Egyptian side, an imaginative fecundity that ‘o’erflows the measure’ through its unceasing production of new and ever more hyperbolic forms. Consistent with its dialectical mode of presentation, I shall argue that the play offers a ‘double take’ on the lovers’ policy of enlisting the fantasia as a potent weapon in their conflict with Caesar. Initially in the ascendant, the denigratory Platonic view of the imagination is finally subsumed in a celebration of its visionary and transfigurative powers. What makes the revalorizing of this faculty formally possible is the interval between the deaths of



play of imagination’ which, its use of metre excepted, is ‘extremely licensed’ and

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It imposes a new angle of vision, an alteration of emphasis which, while it need not conflict with the previous development of the tragedy, will certainly modify our understanding of that development from a point beyond it in time.22 Taking my cue from Barton, I endeavour to show how the play’s inquiry into the ambivalent potentialities of the imagination falls into two distinct sections. The first, predominantly negative, movement culminates in Antony’s despairing vision of ‘black vesper’s pageants’ in IV.14, and ends with his death; the second, more affirmative, movement, epitomized by Cleopatra’s dream of ‘an emperor Antony’, leads to her triumphantly staged suicide.23 Of course, to put it so baldly risks oversimplifying a play where nothing is unambiguous, monosemic or static, where everything reminds us of its capacity to ‘become / The opposite of itself’ (I.2.125). And, indeed, we shall find the situation on the ground a good deal more complex than this overview implies; the Platonic attitude publicly espoused by the Romans is shown to be informed by a repressed sense of imaginative possibilities, while conversely Cleopatra, instead of seeking to eradicate that viewpoint, incorporates it into her defence of the fantasia as a superior mode of vision. But, however schematic, such a map of the play does highlight a genuine shift of emphasis, one crucial effect of which is to facilitate our imaginative participation in the lovers’ ultimate self-apotheosis. *

*

*

Take but good note, and you shall see in him The triple pillar of the world transform’d Into a strumpet’s fool. Behold and see. (I.1.11) From Philo’s opening exhortation to ‘behold and see’, we are positioned to view the lovers through shifting rhetorical perspectives, which (as has become customary to note) are broadly organized around, and located in, the conflicting cultural value-systems of Rome and Egypt.24 The belief, whence Philo’s derision arises, that Antony has abased himself by exchanging a heroic military past for a life spent



Antony and Cleopatra. As Anne Barton has noted in connection with this play, the device of the double catastrophe can be used to alter an audience’s perspective on the dramatic action:


Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch Of the rang’d empire fall! Here is my space, Kingdoms are clay; our dungy earth alike Feeds beast as man; the nobleness of life Is to do thus – when such a mutual pair And such a twain can do’t, in which I bind, [On] pain of punishment, the world to weet We stand up peerless. (I.1.33) However, it is precisely the necessary ‘space’ to make good his assertions that Antony lacks in these early scenes; his lyrical vision of the ‘nobleness of life’ is so hedged in and challenged by hostile forces as to have little prospect of establishing itself as a reality. It is a romantic gesture, nothing more, made in a futile bid to fend off the Roman messengers, who would remind him of his public responsibilities as triumvir. Furthermore, its sincerity is instantly questioned by Cleopatra herself: ‘Excellent falsehood! / Why did he marry Fulvia, and not love her?’ (I.1.40). Cleopatra’s distrust of Antony’s proclaimed allegiance to her turns out to be quite justified. Having succumbed to ‘Roman thought[s]’ in the next scene, he dismisses his love in the discourse of the ‘common liar’ in Rome, as a disastrous ‘dotage’ that breeds countless political ills (I.2.116–17, 128–30). Our worst suspicions concerning this love, with its inflated claims to uniqueness and professed disregard for worldly business, appear to be confirmed in II.2, when we learn that Antony, now back in Rome, proposes to sacrifice Cleopatra for an expedient union with Octavia in the hope of salvaging his political alliance with Caesar.25 But it is at this stage too that Roman values, which have acquired a kind of de facto authority, begin to be subjected in their turn to a devastating critique. A series of opportunistic negotiations first between Antony and Caesar, and then between the triumvirs and Pompey, culminates in the barely contained treachery of the feast aboard Pompey’s galley in II.7. Refracted through the sardonic commentary of Enobarbus and the servants, the point of this dramatic moment (and the subsequent scene with Ventidius) would seem to lie in its exposure of the threadbare nature of Roman honour and of the gulf between the triumvirs’ reputation for virtu and their actual conduct as observed



ministering to a ‘gipsy’s lust’, is countered and reversed when Antony, entering with Cleopatra and her train, declares the absolute value of his love relative to the paltry considerations of empire:


on stage. Rome, in short, is shown to have little moral advantage over Egypt, whilst lacking the grandeur of its imaginative aspirations. By the middle of the third act Rome and Egypt are in open conflict, and we (the play’s audience) seem to be heading for a parallel crisis of judgement, as we experience the pull and counter-pull of viewpoints whose legitimacy has in each case been seriously compromised.26 As in Troilus and Cressida, where the tussle between competing perspectives precipitated a similar crisis, our deepening critical dilemma is figured emblematically in the form of an anamorphic puzzle. Cleopatra, confessing her ambivalent feelings towards the lover who has temporarily deserted her, likens him to a reversible portrait: Let him for ever go! – Let him not, Charmian – Though he be painted one way like a Gorgon, The other way’s a Mars. (II.5.115) Dramatically, the impossibility of finding any ‘midway / ‘Twixt these extremes at all’ is suggested by the fate of those who try to mediate between Roman and Egyptian values. Lepidus’s attempts at peacemaking land him in prison, and Octavia is either paralysed (III.2.47) or riven apart (III.6.76) by her divided allegiances. Although Antony endeavours, colossus-like, to bestride the ocean separating Rome from Alexandria, he is forced to abandon his struggle to reconcile the Roman and Egyptian propensities within him. Having returned to Egypt, he pledges himself, apparently wholeheartedly, to Cleopatra, and, as a token of that self-surrender, opts to fight Caesar by sea (the element most closely aligned with Egypt and its queen) against all the dictates of reason. When disaster ensues, however, he reverts to the viewpoint of his Roman followers, seeing his conduct as an action of unsurpassed shame in which ‘Experience, manhood, honor, ne’er before / Did violate so itself’ (III.10.22). But any inference we might draw from this that Roman judgements are vindicated by Antony’s defeat at Actium, is rendered unsafe by Enobarbus, whose history mirrors his master’s in reverse. A Roman who is far from impervious to the lure of Egypt (as his barge speech attests), Enobarbus is finally driven to foresake Antony in an attempt to resolve the by now unbearable conflict between his emotional loyalties and his Roman sense of ‘honesty’. No sooner has he defected to Caesar’s camp, however, than he regrets his decision and dies of a broken heart – dies testifying to the superiority of Antony’s immeasurable bounty relative to Caesar’s cold calculation (IV.6.29–38).



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Along with Enobarbus and the other characters who serve as barometers of our fluctuating responses, we may feel that the ‘varying tide’ of the dramatic action is steering us towards making a definite commitment to one set of values over another. Yet, at the same time, the difficulties involved are made uncomfortably clear in a world where all such choices prove to be self-destructive or at least, self-diminishing. In this first half of the play where Roman values retain the edge, the attitudes expressed towards the imagination and its stylistic concomitants, hyperbolic speech and overt theatricality, are predominantly sceptical. Our attention is drawn time and again to the gap between the lovers’ rhetorical pretensions and the facts of the matter. Interestingly, the task of puncturing Antony’s fulsome assertions and heroic posturings is assumed not, as we might expect, by some Roman onlooker, but by Cleopatra, who seems as intent on demolishing her lover as on building him up. Not that there appears to be anything remarkable in itself about her attacks on his high-flown vows (I.3. 27–31), which echo a familiar litany of complaint directed at bombastic rhetoric. On reflection, though, her criticism of Antony may strike us as far from straightforward. Often Cleopatra seems to be manipulating her lover for her own inscrutable ends, provoking him into making lyrical statements which she then ridicules. At one point she invites him to play a ‘scene / Of excellent dissembling’ by pretending to weep for her rather than Fulvia: Antony You’ll heat my blood; no more. Cleopatra You can do better yet; but this is meetly. Antony Now, by [my] sword – Cleopatra And target. – Still he mends. But this is not the best. Look, prithee, Charmian, How this Herculean Roman does become The carriage of his chafe. (I.3.80) Ostensibly, the intention here is to poke fun at Antony for indulging in the absurdly histrionic bluster of a miles gloriosus. But the obvious sarcasm in the phrase ‘excellent dissembling’ threatens to double back on itself when uttered by a woman whom many have seen as a supreme embodiment of the very theatricality she mocks, and should alert us to the possibility of a contrary interpetation.27 According to this alternative reading, Cleopatra urges her lover in effect to live up to his ideal self, to ‘do better’, by ‘becoming’ a Hercules, the semi-divine ancestor





whose legendary rage he emulates.28 In its ironic deviousness, her praise of Antony’s ‘excellent dissembling’ – like her earlier ‘excellent falsehood’ – hints at the possibility of viewing such fictions not as Platonic falsehoods but as embodying a higher form of truth, a ‘lie … in the way of honesty’ (V.2.251–3, cf. II.2.133). Although these intimations will not bear fruit until much later in the play, they prepare the ground for a radical reappraisal of the sorts of imaginative feigning in which both lovers engage. In the second and third acts, Cleopatra’s contestatory function is largely taken over by Enobarbus. Throughout III.13 especially, he keeps up a scathing commentary on the heroic postures struck by Antony following his defeat at Actium. He sees his captain’s defiant, highpitched rant as reflecting a disastrous ‘diminution’ in his powers of judgment (III.13.29–37, 194 –200). In his moments of Roman lucidity or when confronted by Cleopatra’s capacity for betrayal, Antony agrees with this diagnosis, locating the source of his tragedy in blind infatuation (III.13.112–15). Antony’s self-confessed blindness seems intended to recall Cleopatra’s equally perverse behaviour in the two scenes (II.5 and III.3) where she receives news of his marriage to Octavia. Then the unfortunate messenger was, quite literally, bludgeoned into rearranging the facts to suit Cleopatra’s wishes, in accordance with her express preference for a pleasing lie over an unpalatable truth (II.5.93), making her a legitimate target for Charmian’s mockery, as Antony now is for Enobarbus’s. All of this establishes a somewhat ominous context for the lovers’ games of make-believe, emphasizing the degree to which their imaginative play has caused them to lose touch with political realities with predictably fateful consequences. Amidst so much evidence of wilful self-delusion, any faith we retain in the lovers seems mere folly, as Enobarbus observes. Yet, all the while, he remains alive to the possibility of putting another, more generous construction on their actions, which his own death will endorse: The loyalty well held to fools does make Our faith mere folly; yet he that can endure To follow with allegiance a fall’n lord Does conquer him that did his master conquer, And earns a place i’ th’ story. (III.13.42) Like Cleopatra’s ‘excellent falsehood’, Enobarbus’s willingness to imagine a different and (by implication) more sympathetic version of the



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lovers’ ‘story’ sounds an equivocal note that points ahead to a reversal of the negative judgements he has been voicing on behalf of Rome. As Enobarbus’s speculative musings suggest, the impression we are given of the lovers’ wishful fantasizing being called to account by the strict standards of truth and judgement upheld in Rome is further complicated by the fact that this sort of imaginative activity infiltrates both political camps. Despite their public disapproval of ‘Egyptian’ flights of fancy, the Romans are almost as given to the practice; the only real difference being the surreptitious manner in which they go about it and their consequent emphasis on the factual or reported basis of what is in truth mostly supposition. Aside from the unashamed embellishments of the barge speech, there are many other moments when Romans may be caught indulging in imaginative speculation concerning the lovers or the mysteries of Egyptian culture.29 The parallels are made most explicit when we are invited to compare the hyperbolic portraits of Antony proffered by Caesar in I.4 and by Cleopatra in I.5. In each case the absence of the discursive subject (Antony) has set free the speaker’s thoughts, allowing him/her to construct a larger-than-life figure after his/her own desires, one that is not held to any literal standard of veracity.30 Caesar’s Antony is imaged as a paragon of military valour and stoic fortitude; Cleopatra’s semi-divine warrior is the pretext for an erotic daydream (‘O happy horse, to bear the weight of Antony!’). But such distinctions matter less in the overall equation than the technical similarities between these speeches as complementary exercises in fantasia. The groundswell of imaginative activity that builds up in the first three acts cuts across cultural differences, requiring us to reassess the rigid polarization which has characterized our thinking about the play. And, more to the point, it calls into question the hegemony of Roman values by showing how an exclusively rational paradigm of reality cannot properly account for the behaviour even of those who profess to live by its rule. This ambivalent figuring of the imagination comes to a head in IV.14. Antony has just lost the last of his battles with Caesar, betrayed (or so he thinks) by Cleopatra, and is facing political ruin. The simultaneous collapse of his heroic self-image and his dream of love generate the cumulative sense of unreality so hauntingly evoked in Antony’s description of ‘black vesper’s pageants’: Antony Eros, thou yet behold’st me? Eros Ay, noble lord. Antony Sometime we see a cloud that’s dragonish,





A vapor sometime like a bear or lion, A [tower’d] citadel, a pendant rock, A forked mountain, or blue promontry 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. Eros Ay, my lord. Antony That which is now a horse, even with a thought The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct As water is in water. Eros It does, my lord. Antony 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.14.1) As Antony meditates on the shifting cloud formations, their permutations coalesce in his mind’s eye with those created by a scenic machine in some staged spectacle or masque; since both are ephemeral and illusory in nature, both are destined to vanish, like Prospero’s ‘insubstantial pageant faded’, which melts ‘into thin air’, leaving ‘not a rack behind’.31 In many ways, this moment functions as a conventional recognition scene (agnorisis), where the tragic hero emerges from a state of deluded ignorance into full consciousness of those factors that will destroy him. For what Antony, like Hamlet before him, beholds in these discandying, metamorphosing configurations which ‘mock our eyes with air’ is nothing other than the specular image of his own unstable identity: his vacillation between irreconcilable loyalties, the agony of his dissolution (following his figurative immersion in the watery flux over which Cleopatra reigns) and consequent loss of being, as he struggles and fails to ‘hold this visible shape’. In Antony’s eyes, then, the clouds are a symbol of his tragic undoing. But, as so often in the play, this image of annihilation carries enfolded within it the seeds of its own refutation. For if Antony’s vision recalls the optical illusion experienced by Troilus while watching Cressida betray him and arises out of a similar misplaced confidence in the romantic imagination and its power to redeem the literal, it can also be seen to stand in a more positive relationship to the fantasia. In its vivid picturing of remembered forms, it is itself, after all, an impressive demonstration of the workings of this faculty. But there is another, more precise sense in which Antony’s



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method of projecting intelligible forms into the clouds can be read as a paradigm of the active imagination. His reference to equinine shapes that are ‘dislimn[ed]’ ‘even with a thought’ hints at the voluntaristic or creative activity behind these seemingly random metamorphoses, and links this specifically with the art of painting (‘limn’ is the usual English term for ‘to paint’ in this period), which replaces (or perhaps merges with) scenic design. Since antiquity, in fact, it had been recognized that images may appear in irregular natural objects and be used by artists as an aid to creative composition.32 In the most famous Renaissance version of this topos, Leonardo recommends studying (among other things) clouds, ashes and stains as a means of stimulating the mind to new inventions: I shall not refrain from including among these precepts a new aid to contemplation, which … [is] of great utility in arousing the mind to various inventions. And this is, if you look at any walls soiled with a variety of stains, or stones with variegated patterns, when you have to invent some location, you will therein be able to see a resemblance to various landscapes graced with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, great valleys and hills in many combinations. Or again you will be able to see various battles and figures darting about, strange-looking faces and costumes, and an endless number of things which you can distill into finely-rendered forms. And what happens with regard to such walls and variegated stones is just as with the sound of bells, in whose peal you may find any name or word you care to imagine.33 The ability to perceive an endless succession of images in such amorphous phenomena, to bring them to completion or use them as a spur to the making of other ingenious figures, was to Leonardo proof of an inner inventive capacity that is comparable to divine creativity itself. Embedded in Antony’s speech there may thus be found an alternative model of the fantasia that offers a very different perspective on its vision of loss, according to which the unmaking of forms is but the obverse of their making, and dissolution a necessary precondition of, and prelude to, recreation. Identities are dislimned (erased, as though by an artist painting over them) only to be recast into new, more perfect or more fantastic forms, just as Cleopatra, having helped to destroy her Antony, will reinvent him as a godlike colossus. Viewed in this context, Antony’s meditation on the cloud-shapes constitutes a pivotal moment in our evolving attitude to the lovers. In





highlighting the destructive quality of their imaginings, it reflects a sceptical crisis that has been gathering force since the start of the play; on the other hand, it can also be seen as instigating a more auspicious development, whereby the lovers do not simply endure, but actively remake their fate. It is significant, for example, that Antony quickly recovers from this low point, and that his recovery is marked by his ecstatic vision of a posthumous reunion with Cleopatra in Elysium (IV.14.50 – 4). In this imagined scenario the lovers’ ignominious deaths are reconfigured as a theatrical triumph which will upstage even ‘Dido and her Aeneas’ – a transformation necessitating a radical rewriting of Virgil’s Aeneid, Book IV of which narrates how Aeneas, having abandoned Dido for the sake of empire, was spurned by her in the underworld.34 Not only does this kind of imaginative revisionism enable the lovers to make something positive out of their defeat. It also, I suggest, provides a way out of our critical impasse by allowing us to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s (a major historical victory over Egypt), while at the same time acknowledging the intervention of a superior force that transforms the very terms of the dramatic debate. Before turning to the play’s second phase, however, we need to examine more closely the rhetorical strategies involved in the lovers’ refashioning of themselves and their world, and how they seek to implicate the audience in this process. Like the imagination itself, these strategies are conceived of in perceptual terms and invite comparison with representational techniques employed by Renaissance artists. *

*

*

In her seminal monograph on the play, Janet Adelman demonstrates how the issues it engages turn on the opposition between forms that observe ‘rule’ or ‘measure’, signifying both the virtue of moderation and a standard of judgement, and forms that exceed this yardstick. By their heroic intemperance, she argues, the lovers free themselves from the limitations of Roman reality and gain access to a hyperbolic realm where ‘nothing stays to scale because everything overflows its boundaries’, everything is in process.35 This stylistic antithesis is announced at the very outset. The first scene opens with Philo accusing Antony of an infatuation (‘dotage’) which ‘o’erflows the measure’ and ‘reneges all temper’. On entering, Antony implicitly refutes these criticisms by declaring such Roman modes of ‘reckoning’ to be utterly irrelevant to his kind of love: Cleopatra If it be love indeed, tell me how much. Antony There’s beggary in the love that can be reckon’d.



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Here ‘measure’ is being invoked in a rather different sense, as the action of determining or computing the spatial magnitude of something – and, by association, its intrinsic value – by means of a fixed (often mathematical) unit (OED, 2a and 6). When Cleopatra teasingly threatens to take the measure of his passion by setting a bourn how far to be beloved, Antony warns that any attempt to circumscribe what is of infinite scope will force them to look beyond the confines of the present world, to ‘find out new heaven, new earth’. A few lines later he expands on this conceit, intimating that a love like theirs requires for its fulfilment a different kind of space than that imposed by Roman ‘rule’ – in its double sense of imperial domination and an instrument of measurement: Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch Of the rang’d empire fall! Here is my space, Kingdoms are clay; our dungy earth alike Feeds beast as man … (I.1.33) Together, these speeches suggest that Adelman’s broad opposition of ‘measure’ and ‘overflow’ can be defined more exactly as a politically charged conflict between competing spatial economies: one that relies upon strictly rational methods of quantification, and another that repudiates such fixed standards of measurement in favour of dimensions that are more subjectively determined. Appropriately, given the commitment of its citizens to living by the builder’s (or surveyor’s) ‘square’ and ‘rule’, Rome is metaphorically associated throughout the play with a classical, Vitruvian-style architecture that is shown to be as limited (and limiting) as it is impressive.36 The play’s Romans share a belief in the ‘wide arch of the rang’d empire’ as the enduring framework that holds their power in place. But, despite its apparently unyielding solidity, this imperial edifice proves quite unstable, liable to disintegrate under its own internal strains or when exposed to the more fluid properties of the world of Egypt and the imagination.37 By contrast, the architectural structures most closely identified with Egyptian culture, the Pyramids, are not only built to withstand the ebb and flow of the Nile but exist in



Cleopatra I’ll set a bourn how far to be belov’d. Antony Then must thou needs find out new heaven, new earth. (I.1.14)


harmony with it (‘they take the flow o’ th’ Nile / By certain scales i’ th’ pyramid’ (II.7.17). Ultimately, the stability of Rome’s wide arch depends upon the individuals who prop it up. Knowing this to be the case, Caesar brokers Antony’s union with his sister as a means of consolidating their alliance and preventing their kingdoms and their hearts from ‘fly[ing] off’ (II.2.150 –2). But the marriage has the opposite effect, as he predicted it would: Most noble Antony, Let not the piece of virtue which is set Betwixt us, as the cement of our love To keep it builded, be the ram to batter The fortress of it … (III.2.27) As one of the ‘triple pillar[s] of the world’, Antony further weakens the structures of empire by failing to keep his promise to abide henceforth by the Roman measure (‘I have not kept my square, but that to come / Shall all be done by th’ rule’ (II.3.6)) and returning to his extravagant Egyptian life-style. His actions reduce this pillar to a ‘noble ruin’ in Roman eyes, so devastated by Cleopatra’s ‘magic’ as to be past reconstructing (III.10.18). For the lovers, however, the fault lies rather with Rome itself, which cannot accommodate their aspirations within its rigid architectonic framework and must therefore be wished away (‘Let Rome in Tiber melt’). If the wide arch of the Roman empire is dismissed as too narrow to contain the lovers, who from the first show their back above the element they live in, the same may be said of the ‘three-nook’d world’ in which that empire appears to be firmly rooted.38 The lovers’ habit of belittling the ‘dungy earth’ or ‘this dull world … No better than a sty’ when mocking Caesar’s dominion over it is echoed by many other statements in the play emphasizing the physical limitations of the known world. Pompey’s fellow Romans fear his ambition ‘the sides o’ th’ world may danger’ (I.2.192), while Menas promises to make him lord of ‘what e’er the ocean pales, or sky inclips’ (II.7.68). Caesar affirms his readiness to search ‘from edge to edge / A’ th’ world’ for the ‘hoop’ that would bind him to Antony (II.2.122), and he later laments (insincerely perhaps) that the two of them ‘could not stall together / In the whole world’ (V.1.39). Cumulatively, these allusions to the drably prosaic and restrictively finite nature of the ‘little O, th’ earth’ support the emotional logic behind the lovers’ desire to ‘find out’ – that is, rhetorically speaking, invent – a ‘new heaven, new earth’ not subject to such limitations.



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Rather than the collapse of Rome’s wide arch, however, it is the dissolution of the ‘crown o’ th’ earth’, Antony himself, that finally makes this possible. For it is only through death, or the imminent prospect of death, that the lovers can begin to construct an alternative fictive space, able to mould itself to the vast contours of their desires. Death releases them from the confines of a humdrum world, but also of their own bodies, which have been figured – playfully at first, but with increasing seriousness – as under pressure from the swelling emotions of these lovers whose ‘huge spirit’ (we are told) cannot remain pent within so small and frail a ‘case’ (I.1.6–8, I.3.16, IV.14.39– 41, IV.15.94). It allows them to burst through the fixed, quantifiable limits of their own corporeal forms, so that, freed from rational constraints, their true mythical dimensions can at last be realized. Roman ‘rule’ has no jurisdiction, no authority over this brave new world of the lovers’ poetic making or the ‘strange forms’ that inhabit it. The fluctuating size and shape of these forms are accountable solely to the non-rational laws of the imagination, to the speaker’s internal, emotionally laden perception of things. All pretence of objectivity is discarded in the visionary rhetoric of the closing scenes, as the lovers balance the pigmy figures of the old world – where, the ‘odds’ having vanished with Antony, ‘Young boys and girls / Are level now with men … And there is nothing left remarkable / Beneath the visiting moon’ (IV.15.65) – against the grandeur of their own reconstituted forms. Each reshaping of their identity dissolves to be replaced by others. Yet they only seem to grow the more by reaping, culminating in Cleopatra’s vision of her Antony as a colossus, whose ‘legs bestrid the ocean’ and whose ‘rear’d arm / Crested the world’ (V.2.76–92), a vision that, in a very concrete sense, is ‘past the size of dreaming’. The ‘new heaven, new earth’ envisioned by the lovers prior to their deaths bears an instructive resemblance to the dream-landscape of Francesco Colonna’s architectural romance, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (c.1467), which was partially translated into English in 1592 as The Strife of Love in a Dream.39 Vitruvian values have been transmuted in both instances into something much more rich and strange. The titular lover of Colonna’s text encounters a number of highly fantastic architectural structures in the course of his dream-vision, causing him to marvel over and over again at the ‘hugenesse of the worke, the excessive sumptuousnesse, the straunge invention, the rare performance, and exquisite diligence of the woorkeman’ (p.7v.), which (he repeatedly states) surpass his powers of description. Among these idiosyncratic structures is a pyramid resting on a ‘massie frame’ and





surmounted by an obelisk inscribed with hieroglyphics. As he inspects the base of this monument, the lover discovers further ingenious devices, including a mural depicting giants engaged in combat, a ‘prodigious’ winged horse in bronze, a huge elephant made of black stone, and the statue of a ‘wonderfull large Colosse’, which by a ‘divine invention’ is made to emit a strange sound through its mouth (pp.10r.–18r.). In spite of the misleading flow of references to ‘symmetrie’ and ‘dew proportion’ in the Hypernotomachia, this edifice and its contents display a characteristic disregard for ‘measure’, an excess specifically linked by Colonna with Egyptian culture; indeed at one point they are said to ‘excee[d] the imagined conceit of Dinocrates proposed to Alexander the great, aboute a worke to be performed upon the hill Athos’. The work in question relates to a story handed down from antiquity regarding a plan dreamed up by the architect Dinocrates to carve Mount Athos into a gigantic statue carrying a city in one hand and a bowl, for collecting all the streams from the mountain, in the other.40 Aside from its striking affinity with Cleopatra’s titanic Antony of V.2, the relevance of this legendary project lies in the frequency with which it was invoked in Renaissance aesthetic discourse as a symbol of imaginative daring. For it is the power and fecundity of invention that is being celebrated here as in Shakespeare’s play, an invention that is set in motion by the lover’s state of longing and expressed in visual forms far removed from the rational, orderly and measured ideal of classicism. Moreover, the visions experienced by Colonna’s lover, like Cleopatra’s imaging of the dead Antony, are suffused with a sense of wonder, together with an overpowering nostalgia for the heroic achievements of a ‘perfect golden age’, now recoverable only in dreams. The markedly spatial quality of the hyperbolic discourse which Shakespeare’s play shares with Colonna’s text is indicative, I believe, of the resourcefulness with which the play’s meaning has been constructed out of existing linguistic /visual relationships. I am referring, in particular, to that generally (if tacitly) accepted parallel discussed earlier, between visual forms that exceed canonical proportion and a figurative language defined by its deviations from the norms of everyday speech (pp. 68–9, 93).41 We have seen how crucial rhetorical strategies of magnification and diminution are to the lovers’ fabrication of an imaginary space very different from that associated with Rome. But the final scenes merely bring to a climax a technique in operation throughout the play, where exaggeration and its obverse, conscious belittlement, are one of the chief means used to bring out differences of perception.42 If Cleopatra emphasizes Antony’s more-than-human



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stature, the Romans regard him as having dwindled into a ‘strumpet’s fool’, in that, by failing to observe due measure, he ‘comes too short of that great property / Which still should go with Antony’ (I.1.50). Cleopatra herself is a ‘lass unparallel’d’ in the eyes of her admirers, a ‘ribraudred nag of Egypt’ and worse to her many detractors. The discrepancy between Lepidus’s public eminence and his failure to cut a figure in the ‘huge sphere’ into which he is thrust is unscored by his figurative reduction from a cosmic body to vacant eye-sockets which ‘pitifully disaster the cheeks’ (II.7.14 –16). Likewise, Cleopatra publicly proclaims Caesar ‘sole sir o’ th’ world’, only to deride him behind his back as ‘Fortune’s knave’ and an ‘ass / Unpolicied’ (V.1.120, 307). Such violent modulations in size and scale call attention to the question of proportionality which Aristotle first identified as a basic principle of metaphorical discourse, and which was central to classical and Renaissance definitions of hyperbole, conceived as a method of amplification.43 Hyperbole was thus typically glossed as ‘a manner of speech exaggerating the truth whether for the sake of magnifying or minifying something’.44 For Peacham, it is the ability to translate a mental idea of value – of the relative greatness or smallness of things – into visualizable form which is the most salient thing about this trope: Hyperbole … is a sentence or saying surmounting the truth onely for the cause of increasing or diminishing, not with purpose to deceive by speaking untruly, but with desire to amplifie the greatnesse or smallnesse of things by the exceeding similitude … by this figure the Orator either lifteth up high or casteth downe low, either stretcheth things to the uttermost length, or presseth them to the least quantitie.45 Peacham is well aware that, from a rationalistic perspective, its willingness to take liberties with the actual, objective dimensions of things lays this kind of ‘exceeding similitude’ open to the charge of ‘speaking untruly’. But he tries to pre-empt this charge by suggesting that such licence may be warranted as a means of registering the perceived importance of things, which fidelity to the facts would only obscure. This spatialized definition of hyperbole, and its activation by the play’s distinctive modes of amplificatio, seem positively to solicit us to make connections with contemporary artistic practice. A suggestive analogue presents itself in the figures of exaggerated or distended dimensions that crop up everywhere in Italian Mannerist art.46 Like the





lovers’ transgression of the Roman measure, the disruption of the prevailing realist aesthetic by artists such as Parmigianino, Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino involved a conscious rejection of mathematical rule and rational authority in general. (The situation, as we have seen, was more complicated in England where, although ‘Mannerist’ idioms such as elongated figures and irrational space were employed, they did not assume the same knowledge of or resistance to the rules). Non-canonical proportions are accompanied in the compositions of these artists by an equally unorthodox management of space. Where previously rational consistency had been the goal, a painting like Parmigianino’s Madonna del Collo Luongo [Plate 4] revealed the powerful imaginative effects to be gained from extreme discontinuities in scale (p.37). Often this meant abandoning or radically modifying the architectural framework which had been used to give cohesion and legibility to the treatment of space long before Alberti showed how it might be done in De Pictura. Thus Mannerist artists, in a departure from the well-balanced composition of earlier Renaissance works, tended to compress their figures into areas too narrow or too lacking in perspectival depth to accommodate them. Many of the figures in Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling occupy such a drastically reduced space; the massive, exaggeratedly foreshortened limbs of the prophets and sibyls, in particular, appear to spill over the architectural niches in which they are ensconced [Plate 15]. As with Shakespeare’s lovers, the effect of confining these figures within an overly constrictive frame is to emphasize their monumental stature, to produce an impression of heroic energies striving for enlargement in a world beyond the present.47 Excessive forms of this sort, that consciously flouted literal truth or received norms, were moreover deployed by artists and writers for similar ends, having an established range of applications, some of which are highly germane to this play. In particular, the recognized effects of such hyperbolic modes of expression go some way towards explaining the extraordinary affective power which the lovers wield over audiences both on and off stage.48 For rhetorical amplification, and the ‘grand style’ of which it was a staple ingredient, were closely associated with the ability to evoke wonder and command the emotions.49 The sense of astonishment or meraviglia which figures so prominently in sixteenth-century accounts of the heroically proportioned figures of the Sistine ceiling can thus be seen as following a prescribed pattern of response.50 Another important source of emotive power identified by classical writers was the rhetorical quality of enargia. And since it entailed the conjuring up of mental images, ‘whereby things absent are



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presented to our imagination with such extreme vividness that they seem actually to be before our very eyes’, this quality depended directly upon the workings of the fantasia.51 Vivid imagery is specifically coupled with magniloquent expression in Longinus’s essay on the ‘sublime’ or grand style, as a device for stimulating wonder and the emotions in general.52 Describing the impact of this discourse, Longinus states that sublimity consists in a certain excellence and distinction in expression … For the effect of elevated language is, not to persuade the hearers, but to entrance them; and at all times, and in every way, what transports us with wonder is more telling than what merely persuades or gratifies us. The extent to which we can be persuaded is usually under our own control, but these sublime passages exert an irresistible force and mastery, and get the upper hand with every hearer.53 The distinction Longinus makes between two different styles producing different types of conviction has an obvious bearing on the play and can help us appreciate why its elevated register finally prevails. For while Rome may succeed in persuading us of the lovers’ folly on rational grounds, reason itself is superseded by a hyperbolic discourse that secures our belief by transporting us with wonder and exerting an irresistible hold over our feelings. The proven ability of Antony and Cleopatra to seduce others into identifying with the lovers’ viewpoint against their considered judgement can thus be put down to a formidable combination of pathos and imaginative force, which circumvents any logical objections brought against it by appealing directly to the emotions or the mind’s eye. How we view such displays of imaginative excess will ultimately depend, though, on our understanding of decorum, that aesthetic criterion in which all the complex issues of judgement raised by the play are distilled. In an earlier chapter, I noted how the question of decorum tended to be framed in terms of another: does it observe a proper proportion?54 As the use of a fluctuating scale in Antony and Cleopatra suggests, this question admitted of more than one answer. In fact, the concept of decorum was a very broad one indeed, being by definition a highly elastic principle, as useful for condoning as for condemning licence. In it both the upholders and the abusers of moderation might find a powerful sanction. A similar dialectic is rehearsed in the play, with the Romans and the lovers occupying respectively, as it were the strict and permissive poles in the debate. Dramatizing the relativistic nature of





this principle allows Shakespeare not only to highlight the opposing cultural ideals of Rome and Egypt, but, more crucially, to expose the deeper political issues at stake in their disagreement over matters of style. For the Romans, decorum signifies simply ‘measure’: a moderation achieved through strict adherence to the norm. That temperance is their main rhetorical criterion is confirmed early on by a dispute about what kind of speech best befits Antony, in which the plain-speaking Enobarbus (not for the first or last time) defends Egyptian excess: Lepidus Good Enobarbus, ’tis a worthy deed, And shall become you well, to entreat your captain To soft and gentle speech. Enobarbus I shall entreat him To answer like himself. If Caesar move him, Let Antony look over Caesar’s head And speak as loud as Mars. (II.2.1) But, like the concept of decorum itself, the issue of conformity to measure goes much wider than language, embracing every aspect of social behaviour. Caesar (the embodiment of Roman decorum) dislikes Antony’s ‘lascivious wassails’, whether these take place in Alexandria or on Pompey’s barge, not only because they are excessive and unseemly, out of keeping with the ‘graver business’ of empire, but because they are inextricably bound up with the transgression of other norms. Thus in his diatribe against his ‘great competitor’ in I.4, Caesar explicitly relates Antony’s intemperance to the confusion of social and gender roles in Egypt; to the fact that Antony is happy to ‘sit / And keep the turn of tippling with a slave’, to behave in ways that are ‘not more manlike / Than Cleopatra’, or she in ways ‘more womanly than he’. Similarly, what perturbs Antony’s soldiers most about his management of affairs at Actium is his decision to let Cleopatra take part in the battle ‘as a man’, thereby allowing private ‘affections’ to compromise his captainship, and gender roles to be reversed in a manner that risks making ‘women’s men’ of them all (III.7.1–70). Such behaviour, it is important to grasp, is not merely in bad taste as far as Antony’s critics are concerned; it violates behavioural standards or codes that are assumed to form the very basis of civilized life, as Caesar makes clear: … Let’s grant it is not Amiss to tumble on the bed of Ptolomy,



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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 smells of sweat: say this becomes him (As his composure must be rare indeed Whom these things cannot blemish), yet must Antony No way excuse his foils, when we do bear So great weight in his lightness. (I.4.16) The dangers Caesar spies in Antony’s overflowing of the measure are, at root, political. What he chiefly objects to in the latter’s conduct is a failure to maintain an exclusively masculine identity, to keep private pleasure cordoned off from public duty, and preserve that dignity and self-discipline which distinguish the ruler from the ruled – a failure that threatens to undo the socially instituted boundaries upon which Rome’s imperial authority is predicated. Yet even Caesar is willing to entertain, albeit ironically, the hypothesis that conduct utterly unacceptable in others might ‘become’ Antony himself.55 There is indeed something about the lovers that seems to exact this kind of paradoxical assessment. According to Lepidus, Antony’s faults can never be ‘enow to darken all his goodness’, for in him they ‘seem as the spots [i.e. stars] of heaven, / More fiery by night’s blackness’ (I.4.10 –15). Enobarbus likewise testifies to Cleopatra’s magical ability to make ‘vilest things / Become themselves in her’ (II.2. 237). These tributes echo and so corroborate those offered by the lovers themselves. First, Antony voices his admiration for the theatrical versatility of his ‘wrangling queen! / Whom every thing becomes – to chide, to laugh, / To weep’ (I.1.548). Then Cleopatra returns the compliment by converting Alexas’s typically Roman praise of the mean (‘Like to the time o’ th’ year between the extremes / Of hot and cold, he [Antony] was nor sad nor merry’) into an equally characteristic celebration of the extremes: O heavenly mingle! Be’st thou sad or merry, The violence of either thee becomes, So does it no man’s else. (I.5.59) Clearly, such praise implies a notion of ‘due proportion’ that is totally inimical to Roman ‘measure’. The decorum it invokes is ‘a decorum tolerant of excess’ and capable of accommodating an apparently





limitless overreaching of thought and expression, the overflowing of all established boundaries.56 Adopting Peacham’s line of defence, the lovers seek to legitimize their excesses by asserting – sometimes in explicitly spatial terms – that the magnitude of their status or situation demands a corresponding expansiveness of speech and action. Thus Cleopatra refuses to be consoled for Antony’s death because ‘our size of sorrow, / Proportion’d to our cause, must be as great / As that which makes it’ (IV.15.4; my emphasis). Importantly, this view is again confirmed by others, especially towards the end of the play when the lovers do incontestibly appear to have found in defeat and death a sufficient ‘cause’ for their grandiose rhetoric. So Dolabella is moved to acknowledge the decorousness of Cleopatra’s vision of Antony: ‘Your loss is as yourself, great; and you bear it / As answering to the weight’ (V.2.101; my emphasis, cf. V.2.320). Earlier I remarked how Antony’s exceeding of the ‘measure’ in itself undermines the cultural norms enshrined in this concept and their use as an instrument of empire. Instead of letting matters rest there, however, the lovers challenge head-on the criterion which sanctions the imposition of these norms on conquered peoples. By treating ‘due proportion’ as an infinitely variable quantity, they show the authority of the Roman ‘measure’, as a supposedly objective or universal standard, to be based on nothing more than a politically convenient fiction. But there is a further way in which the lovers’ idea of decorum functions as a mode of resistance to Rome’s cultural and political hegemony. Several critics have noted the semantic play on ‘becomes’, so often used in connection with the lovers; a verb that combines the idea of fittingness, of that which graces the subject, with the ontological sense of becoming. The implication is that the lovers’ mysterious knack of making their flaws ‘become’ them amounts to more than a scandalous affront to accepted notions of propriety; it attests to their possession of an art which manages to transmute even the ‘vildest things’ into an image of perfection, of what should be. It is a token or pledge of their capacity to transform themselves into (‘become’) their own ideal images. Behind this pun on becoming, then, lies an assertion that Antony and Cleopatra can effect a genuine transfiguration of their identity in ways that will put them beyond the jurisdiction of Roman ‘rule’. It is with the legitimation of this imaginative power as something of ‘great constancy’ – as distinct from the merely illusory or fantastical – that the second phase of the play is concerned. *

*

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My desolation does begin to make A better life. ’Tis paltry to be Caesar; Not being Fortune, he’s but Fortune’s knave, A minister of her will; and it is great To do that thing that ends all other deeds, Which shackles accidents and bolts up change … (V.2.1) What enables Cleopatra to forge ‘a better life’ out of her desolation is not so much her resolve to outwit Caesar by committing suicide, as her access to imaginative arts which are unavailable to ‘Fortune’s knave’, by definition subservient to and constrained by the measurable facts of history. All along, Cleopatra has been tacitly identified with the fantasia, owing to her delight in lying and duplicity as well as her ‘infinite variety’ and gift for making defect perfection. But only now does the vacuum created by Antony’s death and the collapse of their worldly powers allow her to make full use of this resource. Her mission is to salvage her lover’s reputation – and, since they are mutually constituted, her own – by reconstructing him in the image of her ‘immortal longings’ as a transcendent model of perfection. Admittedly, the manner of Antony’s death puts a severe strain on Cleopatra’s mythologizing ambitions, and not just because of his notoriously botched suicide. Unlike the Egyptian queen, he has difficulty in sustaining the imaginative energies which made his vision of a posthumous reunion with her so compelling. In fact, some of the dying Antony’s speeches are decidely backward-looking and negative in tone (e.g. IV.15.51–9). Incapable in death, as in life, of reconciling his vocations as lover and soldier, he continues to veer between them. Hence he tends to come across as the victim of his own internal contradictions, rather than the hero in charge of his destiny he would have us see in him (IV.15.14). Worse still, his death in the monument is staged in ways that accentuate the gap between the unheroic reality being enacted before us and the idealizing rhetoric with which it is invested, thereby giving fresh impetus to the ironic perspective which dogged the couple in the first half of the play.57 But everything that is defective in Antony’s end will be redeemed by Cleopatra, who echoes – and, in so doing, perfects – many of his gestures and pronouncements.58



At a critical moment in her and the deceased Antony’s fortunes, it occurs to Cleopatra that power and freedom reside with her rather than with all-conquering Caesar:


She will even remake his death with her suicide, performed (as his aspired to be) after the ‘high Roman fashion’, but transposed onto a new imaginative plane. Cleopatra’s policy of refashioning Antony as a figure not subject to rational criteria or human limitations culminates, of course, in her dream-vision of V.2. By now it will be clear that the excessive, unbounded forms in which she resurrects him constitute in their own right a virtual manifesto for the creative powers of the fantasia. No less important, however, is her defence of these powers which forms a discursive coda to the dream. What makes this defence so persuasive is Cleopatra’s tactic of engaging dialogically with the opposing voice of scepticism, both in her readiness to confront head-on any doubts we (as well as the Romans) may have about her methods, and in her skilful use of these doubts as a means of articulating her own vision. After recounting her dream, and as if partly unsure of its worth, she invites Dolabella to deliver the dismissive judgement she has anticipated (‘You laugh when boys or women tell their dreams; / Is’t not your trick?’): Cleopatra Think you there was or might be such a man As this I dreamt of? Dolabella Gentle madam, no. Cleopatra You lie up to the hearing of the gods! But if there be, nor ever were one such, It’s past the size of dreaming. Nature wants stuff To vie strange forms with fancy; yet t’ imagine An Antony were nature’s piece ’gainst fancy, Condemning shadows quite. (V.2.923) Cleopatra’s initial show of diffidence (seen, for example, in the modulation of her question from the indicative to the more tentative conditional) is revealed in hindsight to be part of a cunning manoeuvre that turns Dolabella’s negative response to her own advantage by using this as a springboard to still bolder and more far-reaching claims. For Cleopatra incorporates Dolabella’s rational scepticism into her hyperbolic vision only in order to emphasize the greater scope of the latter. And she does this by making a crucial distinction between his view of the fantasia and hers. Implicitly, she concedes that the ‘strange forms’ she has called up might be regarded as products of ‘fancy’ in the perjorative sense: the ‘fancy’ as defined by Plato and denigrated by Shakespeare’s Romans as a mere idle dream or shadow-play. But this



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merely goes to show how far her envisioning of Antony as the ‘demiAtlas of this earth’ (being ‘past the size of dreaming’) surpasses this debased version of the fantasia. Indeed, inasmuch as it is the imagination which enables her to conceive and find ways to express (whether by word or image) such a paradigm of human perfection, it must, she declares, be valued as ‘nature’s piece ‘gainst fancy, / Condemning shadows quite’. One reason why Cleopatra’s defence of her dream possesses such enormous resonance is because it intervenes directly in the wider debate over the status of the fantasia outlined at the beginning of this chapter. Close parallels have been noted, in particular, between Philip Sidney’s advocacy of the poet’s right to exercise imaginative licence, in his Apology for Poetry, and Cleopatra’s views on this subject.59 At the risk of exhausting the comparison, it is useful to bear Sidney’s argument in mind when attempting to unpack the Egyptian Queen’s more compressed apologia. In a famous passage, he asserts that poetry, uniquely among the arts, is not bound to observe empirical truth, but ‘lifted up with the vigour of his own invention, doth grow in effect into another nature, in making things either better than Nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in Nature’ (p.100). And, pursuing a line of defence that would be partially endorsed by Bacon for all his empiricist allegiances (p.171), he further maintains that it is precisely this freedom which sets the poet above his rivals, the philosopher and the historian, since it allows him to create a ‘perfect pattern’ or model of what ‘should be’, unlike the historian, who is ‘captived to the truth of a foolish world’ (p.111). At the same time Sidney takes steps to forestall criticism, being no less aware than Cleopatra how vulnerable such boldness of invention is to attack on both moral and rational grounds. Thus he seeks to distance ‘eikastike’ fiction – which ‘figur[es] forth good things’ – from idle or ‘phantastike’ conceits. However improbable, the poet’s inventions cannot be dismissed as mere fancy or ‘castles in the air’, he argues, ‘for any understanding knoweth that the skill of the artificer standeth in the Idea or fore-conceit of the work, and not in the work itself’ (p.101). According to Sidney’s Neoplatonizing train of thought here, poetic images of a ‘golden’ world may claim to be ‘nature’s piece / ‘gainst fancy’, inasmuch as they enable us to glimpse an idea of that ‘right heavenly nature’ once enjoyed by mankind in its prelapsarian condition. In much the same fashion, Cleopatra’s ‘new heaven, new earth’ is offered to us as the visionary recreation of a state of perfection lost through the fall not of our first parents but of Antony – a





vision that can only be adumbrated through forms which ‘outwork nature’. But, for Sidney, the ultimate test that distinguishes legitimate invention from vain fancy – the ‘eikastike’ from the purely ‘phantastike’ – is its efficacy in compelling the listener to acknowledge the truths it embodies, and, beyond that, to order his/her actions in accordance with these truths. Cleopatra would appear to have just this aim in mind when manipulating Dolabella. And her scheme succeeds. In being moved first to identify with Cleopatra’s feelings (V.2.102–5) and then (by betraying his master’s plans) to act in ways that enable her to realize her ‘immortal longings’ in death, and so convert ‘fancy’ into reality, Dolabella effectively confirms the ideational sources of her vision in spite of his sceptical reservations. The part played by this Roman soldier in Cleopatra’s dream, as audience and interlocutor, can be taken as a comment not only on the complexity of our own responses (caught between acquiescence and mistrust), but on the degree to which such imaginative visions depend for their fulfilment on our active collaboration. This idea was not a new one for Shakespeare. Several of his earlier plays explore the hypothesis that the poet’s ‘shaping fantasies’ must be supplemented by the audience. When Theseus suggests that the ‘palpable-gross play’ staged by Bottom and the other Athenian mechanicals may be ‘amend[ed]’ by the imagination, Hippolyta retorts that ‘it must be your imagination then, and not theirs’ (V.1.211–14). And in the epilogue to this comedy Puck extends a similar invitation to the theatre audience. That the process of making defect perfection requires a willingness on the spectators’ part to cooperate with such fictions is emphasized again in Henry V, where the Chorus repeatedly calls for their assistance in realizing ‘the brightest heaven of invention’. Only by mobilizing their ‘imaginary forces’, he implies, will it be possible to bridge the chasm between the literal action taking place on stage and the heroic ideal it is intended to evoke. As the power struggle between Egypt and Rome centres increasingly on issues of representation, securing the audience’s creative participation in this way becomes an urgent necessity. From the middle of Act III onwards, the military conflict between Caesar and the lovers develops alongside, and is finally overshadowed by, a contest in public image-making, with each side fighting for control over how their ‘story’ is staged, told or communicated.60 Undisputed victor in the military arena, Caesar nevertheless loses this propaganda war, inasmuch as his schemes to co-opt others for a public staging of his ‘princely’ attributes – his power, his love and benevolence – are all thwarted. In III.6, Octavia



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arrives in Rome unannounced and so prevents the ‘ostentation’ of her brother’s love, just after the latter has learned how Antony and Cleopatra displayed themselves to spectacular effect in the market-place in Alexandria where they were ‘publicly enthron’d’. More crucially, his plans to lead the lovers in triumph go awry. Caesar’s obsession with parading them in Rome reflects an awareness that their presence in his victory parade as ‘signs of conquest’ would testify eternally to his moral and military superiority (V.1.62–6). On their side, the lovers, no less aware of what is at stake politically and united in their refusal to be scripted into the degraded roles prepared for them in this ‘imperious show’, are determined to retain control over how they are perceived (as much by posterity as by their contemporaries) by staging their deaths in the manner of their own choosing. Although Antony cannot quite pull this off, Cleopatra arguably does so for them both in her sublime death-scene. But if there is a very real sense in which the lovers triumph over Caesar, it is not simply by upstaging him, but as a consequence of their superior ability to enlist others in the production of their mythical images.61 For they succeed in winning over some of the most sceptical members of their audience: Enobarbus, Dolabella, even Caesar himself. In the last two acts, successive spectators are drawn into validating the lovers’ self-fashionings, both by their affective responses and by their actions, which in several cases (Enobarbus, Eros, Iras and Charmian) involve willing their own deaths. We are given a demonstration of the lovers’ methods of involving the beholder in their imaginative reconfiguring of events when Cleopatra calls on her waiting woman, Iras, to picture with her the fate that awaits them in Rome: Cleopatra Now, Iras, what think’st thou? Thou, an Egyptian puppet, shall be shown In Rome as well as I. Mechanic slaves With greasy aprons, rules, and hammers shall Uplift us to the view. In their thick breaths, Rank of gross diet, shall we be enclouded. And forc’d to drink their vapor. Iras The gods forbid! Cleopatra Nay, ’tis most certain, Iras. Saucy lictors Will catch at us like strumpets, and scald rhymers Ballad ’s out a’ tune. The quick comedians Extemporally will stage us, and present Our Alexandrian revels: Antony




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Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness I’ th’ posture of a whore.

Adopting a strategy already tried out by Antony upon Eros (IV.14. 62–80), Cleopatra subtly repositions Iras not as a mere bystander or detached observer, but as a committed participant, by implicating her directly in the working out of her mistress’s fate.62 Moreover, by evoking the degraded forms in which she and Antony would be represented in the triumph or at the hands of the Roman comedians and balladiers – forms which, she maintains, travesty their true ‘greatness’ – she ensures Iras’s willing cooperation in producing the alternative fiction she is about to stage. And Iras will indeed play her part by helping Cleopatra to show herself like a queen and then dying, apparently of a broken heart; just as Charmian plays hers by perfecting the regal tableau of her dead mistress: ‘Your crown’s [awry], / I’ll mend it, and then play’ (V.2.318, my emphasis). By actively assisting the realization of this other version of the lovers’ ‘story’, Iras and Charmian secure their place within it. More importantly, I would argue, they also show us the way. Unlike the daring reflexivity of Cleopatra’s reference to being ‘boy[ed]’ in the posture of a whore, which reminds us provocatively of the boy-actor delivering these lines on the Jacobean stage, the ways in which we (as spectators) are implicated in this moment of critical self-reflection have attracted little comment. Yet, in Iras, Charmian and Dolabella, the play holds out exemplars of audience response that could hardly be more different from those associated with the ‘shouting varlotry / Of censuring Rome’ (V.2.56). Instead of deriding the lovers’ fictions according to the sort of ‘rules’ that ‘mechanic slaves’ swear by, the ideal spectator postulated by this model will collude with these images by recognizing their philosophical and affective power. It is perhaps this invitation to participate in the fabrication of a mythical ‘golden’ world, by projecting our personal visions and desires into the imaginary space created partly for that purpose, which proves hardest to resist. With the assistance of our ‘imaginary forces’, Cleopatra meets the challenge implicit in the Roman representation of events by staging herself on a higher plane, not as whore but as ‘Royal Egypt’, Antony’s wife and Isis, goddess of the moon and procreative nature with the asp-baby at her breast.63 To create this eikastic fiction, she fittingly employs both visual spectacle (robes, a crown, the bed) and that other medium of her imaginary becomings, figurative language. Her speech



(V.2.208)

transmutes the death-bed into a marriage-bed, the asp into a phallus or suckling infant, departure into a reunion, and death into sleep or sexual consummation. In a final inventive coup, she uses the moment of transition from life to death to bring about the most startling and paradoxical metamorphosis of them all, as she turns herself from a ‘breather’ into a figure of marble constancy, and so confers upon the fluid, unstable products of her fantasia the permanency of art. But the very inertness of this tableau of death may also seem to mark the limits of our imaginative involvement with the lovers, especially once Caesar has entered with his retinue and begun a clinical inspection of the corpses. For it is as nothing other or more than corpses that Cleopatra and her women are now made to appear. The cold light of Roman reason and commonsense floods back into the monument, threatening to disrupt the spell which Antony’s ‘enchanting queen’ has cast over us. It is especially significant, therefore, that Caesar should subscribe, if only momentarily, to the fiction of transcendence – and the idea of a self-transcending fiction – she has created. Contemplating the spectacle of the dead Queen, he feels impelled not only to accord the lovers’ version of the ‘story’ parity of status with his own (V.2.358–63), but to acknowledge Cleopatra’s power to redefine reality in accordance with her imaginative aspirations: O, noble weakness! If they had swallow’d poison, ’twould appear By external swelling; but she looks like sleep, As she would catch another Antony In her strong toil of grace. (V.2.344) Aesthetic issues are no less closely intertwined with political ambition in The Tempest, examined in the concluding chapter. If Caesar’s power struggle with the lovers is waged chiefly through the attempts on both sides to manipulate how their ‘story’ is viewed by audiences on and off stage, Prospero’s absolutist rule similarly involves imposing his own vision of things on others. Resistance to this process in the later play is articulated, once again, in terms of the opposition between a dominant neoclassical aesthetic – identified here with the court masque – and alternative modes of representation marginalized by its privileging of measure, proportion and rule. And each of these visual economies is shown to embody a different way of seeing the world.




The Tempest and the Art of Masque

It is often observed that The Tempest, uniquely among Shakespeare’s plays with the exception of the early Comedy of Errors, adheres in almost textbook fashion to the unities of time, place and action. This atypical submission to neoclassical rules of literary construction may be linked with Prospero’s controlling presence and his sponsorship of the values of disciplined rationality. But neoclassicizing influences have left their imprint on the play in other ways too.1 Of these by far the most significant is the play’s involvement with the Jacobean court masque, which, under the aegis of the two great exponents of early English classicism, Inigo Jones and Ben Jonson, sought to emulate the splendours of antique theatre described by Vitruvius.2 Versions of pageantry and masque feature in several of Shakespeare’s earlier works, but his debt to such forms goes much deeper here, permeating every aspect of the play’s structure and conception.3 Again, Prospero clearly has a hand in establishing the primacy of this relationship; the masque is the main medium through which he seeks to achieve his aims. This is not to say that the play’s connection with the masque is exhausted by its use as an instrument of Prospero’s politico-ethical designs. For, as will become apparent, the whole of the play is drawn into a critical dialogue with this courtly genre and with the rhetorical arguments, visual and verbal, it deploys. To understand how The Tempest interacts with the masque, it is necessary to remind ourselves of the conventions which governed such entertainments.4 By the time the play was written in 1610 –11, the masque had already embarked on the most illustrious phase of its development at the hands of Jonson and Jones. Their notoriously stormy yet productive partnership endured from 1605 to 1631 and was responsible for introducing the genre to new standards of literary 198



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seriousness as well as the marvels of the Italianate illusionist stage. What remained unchanged was the essentially eulogistic function of the masque. A highly elaborate form of seasonal entertainment combining poetry with music, dance and visual spectacle, it paid ritual homage to the monarch and his courtiers, whom it imaged as the protagonists of an exalted fable, creating mythical roles for its aristocratic performers. As Stuart rule edged ever closer to absolutism, such fictions were increasingly designed to reinforce the doctrine of the divine right of kings by providing a show-case for the ideal virtues, the godlike powers of royalty. To James I, allegorized in the person of some classical god or heroic quality, was attributed the power to ‘salve the rude defects’ of ‘mere nature’ by transmuting blackness into beauty, to banish ignorance and folly and teach the ‘rites of true society’, to regulate the seasons and renew the golden age, and, most crucially, the capacity to restore a fallen world to ordered harmony. Although not fully elaborated until later in James’s reign, these motifs are clearly announced in Oberon, presented at Whitehall on 1 January 1611, a few months before The Tempest was first staged there: He is the matter of virtue, and placed high. His meditations to his height are even, And all their issue is akin to heaven. He is a god o’er kings, yet stoops he then Nearest a man when he doth govern men … ’Tis he that stays the time from turning old, And keeps the age up in a head of gold; That in his own true circle still doth run, And holds his course as certain as the sun. He makes it ever day and ever spring Where he doth shine, and quickens everything Like a new nature; so that true to call Him by his title is to say, he’s all.5 From 1609, the omnipotence of royal virtue was dramatized through its vanquishing of the unregenerate forces embodied in the so-called anti-masque. Conceived as a ‘foil or false masque’ preceding the main show, this device opened up a space for the antics of various disruptive agencies representing everything antithetical and opposed to the values enunciated in the masque proper. Often this confrontation was articulated visually; a range of comically grotesque beings – witches, satyrs, she-monsters, dwarves and pigmies, figures disguised as animals



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and phantasms – were brought on stage to create a ‘spectacle of strangeness’, the significance of which lay in its deliberate inversion of the masque’s rationalist aesthetic of order and symmetry.6 However, such figures were never allowed to undermine the idealised world of the masque in any serious degree, or to challenge its dominance. After being granted a brief licence to indulge their unruly energies, the anti-masquers were either routed or sufficently tempered, tamed or educated by contact with the masque world to enable their assimilation to its loftier vision. Either way, the threat presented by the antimasque functioned, by its swift eradication, to confirm the supremacy of the political regime celebrated in the masque, whilst illuminating the moral virtues in which that supremacy was supposedly grounded. The communication of this royalist ideology largely depended on how it was staged. Those powers which the verse or songs declared to be at the ruler’s disposal – powers to bring order out of disorder, to harness the forces of nature in the service of a benevolent and civilizing regime – were demonstrated for all to see in the transformations, discoveries and apotheoses wrought by Inigo Jones’s stage machinery. In The Masque of Queens (1609), to take one early example, a coven of witches emerged from an ‘ugly hell’ to the accompaniment of a ‘kind of hollow and infernal music’, before casting their spells and performing a grotesque dance, ‘full of preposterous change and gesticulation’. This was interrupted when on the sudden was heard a sound of loud music, as if many instruments had made one blast; with which not only the hags themselves but the hell into which they ran quite vanished, and the whole face of the scene altered, scarce suffering the memory of such a thing. But in the place of it appeared a glorious and magnificent building figuring the House of Fame, in the top of which were discovered the twelve masquers sitting upon a throne triumphal erected in form of a pyramid and circled with all store of light.7 Similar mechanically contrived miracles were performed in masque after masque: wild landscapes metamorphosed into princely palaces, street scenes gave way to pastoral bowers, and clouds parted to reveal the presiding deities. In such displays of optical wizardry, it has been argued, the audience would have beheld an affirmation of the control which mankind (or, more precisely, an aristocratic elite) was able to wield over nature by means of scientific knowledge exercised in alliance with virtue. By alluding to the otherworldly harmony recreated here on earth under Stuart rule, the neoclassical proportions



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of Jones’s Palladian stage architecture, in conjunction with the geometry of his perspective sets, helped to drive home the message. So, in another medium, did the orderly ‘measures’ of the dance and its musical accompaniment. The primary aim of this visual and auditory rhetoric was to induce a sense of wonder in the spectators, a ‘state of consciousness that bordered on the visionary’ and that would make them unusually receptive to the quasi-theological mysteries of kingship unfolded in the masque.8 Imaginative participation led in turn to a more tangible form of involvement. For the courtiers who beheld their perfected image in the mirror of Jonson’s poetry or Jones’s spectacle eventually became part of this world when, in the closing revels, the masquers descended from the stage and selected dancing partners from among them. In symbolic terms, that final opening out of the masque to include the audience represented the power of the royal ideals to absorb and transfigure reality. As Stephen Orgel remarks, ‘what the noble spectator watched he ultimately became’.9 This brings us to what was undoubtedly the most important element in the visual statement of the masque: the use of linear or single-point perspective. As we noted earlier, perspective scenery, of the type employed on a routine basis for the intermezzi at the Italian ducal courts, was first introduced to the English stage by Jones in The Masque of Blackness (1605) (p.50). Over the next three decades, as his technical expertise and audacity grew, he would create a remarkable series of landscape and architectural vistas where, framed within the proscenium arch, turning machines and sliding shutters, painted backdrops and scenes in relievo, interacted to produce a coherently organized and convincing stage picture [Plate 16]. The fact that such scenery was used exclusively at court or when the monarch was present, and that in Jones’s theatre all the sight lines were, by the law of optics, made to converge on the chair of state, is seen by Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong as possessing a clear political significance: Through the use of perspective, the monarch, always the ethical centre of court productions, became in a physical and emblematic way the centre as well. Jones’s theatre transformed its audience into a living and visual emblem of the aristocratic hierarchy: the closer one sat to the King, the ‘better’ one’s place was, and only the King’s seat was perfect. It is no accident that perspective stages flourished at court and only at court, and that their appearance there coincided with the reappearance in England of the Divine Right of Kings as a serious political philosophy.10





This centralized perspectival arrangement was congenial to the Stuart monarchs, Orgel and Strong suggest, because it allowed them not only to emphasize their place at the apex of the social pyramid, but, by fixing the viewing position of other spectators, to determine how the royal image was perceived. As such, it provided a potent symbol of their autocratic rule. The connection that Orgel and Strong make between the King’s monopoly over viewpoint and the growing concentration of power in his hands is certainly persuasive. But should we therefore conclude that privileging the royal perspective meant suppressing every other outlook, that both ‘politically and optically the masque allows the spectator only one point of view’?11 When the history of the masque is taken into consideration, this control over viewpoint begins to look less secure, the vision presented less homogeneous than has sometimes been assumed. For a start, the belief (assuming that monarch and designer did indeed believe it) that the beholder’s point of view is amenable to this kind of strict regulation was demonstrably a fantasy with no bearing on political reality; by the time Civil War broke out in 1642, even some of those who had participated in the court masques were having doubts about royal policy.12 Moreover, any degree of fixity Jones’s perspective sets imposed was offset by other features of the genre. In particular, the emphasis which the masque placed on movement, metamorphosis, and the shifts of consciousness they entail seems positively to imply and make provision for alternative visions. So too does the antithetical structure in which its conflict between good and evil was typically embodied, a structure whose dialectical possibilities were realized in the finest of Jonson’s and Jones’s productions. (In this regard, it is important to distinguish between the relative openness of the Jacobean masque, which could incorporate coded criticism of the monarchy through the antimasque, and its Caroline successors, where the use of single-point perspective was often compounded by a monological poetic vision).13 Shakespeare’s use of anti-masque motifs in The Tempest seems to indicate a sensitivity to the pluralistic, polycentric tendencies within the masque. And we shall find that his handling of these elements accentuates precisely their resistance to the authoritarian impulses associated with the form. This is not the only sense in which the masque might be said to be composed of contradictions. Jonson’s well-known preface to Hymenaei (1606) remains our best guide to the inbuilt tensions of the genre: It is a noble and just advantage that the things subjected to understanding have of those which are objected to sense that the



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one sort are but momentary and merely taking, the other impressing and lasting. Else the glory of all these solemnities had perished like a blaze and gone out in the beholders’ eyes. So short-lived are the bodies of all things in comparison of their souls … This it is hath made the most royal princes and greatest persons, who are commonly the personators of these actions, not only studious of riches and magnificence in the outward celebration or show, which rightly becomes them, but curious after the most high and hearty inventions to furnish the inward parts … which, though their voice be taught to sound to present occasions, their sense or doth or should always lay hold on more removed mysteries.14 Jonson acknowledges the occasional, and hence primarily political, nature of the masque; sounding to present occasions tended to mean in practice either commemorating a special event at court or offering an allegorical justification of the royal policies of the day. But while he does not minimize the obligation to engage with purely topical matters, he sees this importantly as only one aspect of the genre, which ‘doth or should always lay hold on more removed mysteries’. It was in fact Jonson who was chiefly responsible for giving the Stuart masque a strong moralistic slant; the classical erudition and esoteric symbolism he lavished on his productions were part of a didactic programme intended to persuade the courtly spectators to fulfil the ideal roles created for them. In making both the inculcation of eternal truths and the task of glamorizing the ephemeral life of the court the legitimate business of the masque, the preface re-enacts, in miniature, that confluence of Platonic and Machiavellian impulses which has been identified as a basic feature of the genre.15 These remits are not necessarily as incompatible as they appear on the face of it, and Jonson’s personal skill in linking the mystical with the topical has long been recognized.16 Nevertheless, there is undeniably scope for tension here, and in the hands of a less assured artist than Jonson, the Platonic-didactic and Machiavellian-pragmatic tendencies informing the masque might easily come into conflict with one another. In its attempt to prescribe the proper relationship between the literary and visual inputs into the masque, Jonson’s preface highlights another area of potential difficulty.17 The poet’s conceits, it argues, should possess ‘a noble and just advantage’ over the designer’s spectacular confections, for without these ‘high and hearty inventions to furnish the inward parts’, the visual glories of the occasion would lack true substance or durability. Years later, when it was clear that he had lost the argument and the partnership with Jones was over, Jonson presented his rival’s





ascendancy as proof that the ‘outward celebration or show’ had triumphed at the expense of any deeper philosophical import, commenting bitterly that ‘Painting and Carpentry’ were now ‘the Soule of Masque’.18 As Jonson saw it, then, the masque was always likely to succumb to a disjunction or imbalance between the aesthetic pleasures offered by opulent spectacle and the serious meanings it was intended to convey. These latent contradictions or incipient points of fracture within the masque are insistently foregrounded by Shakespeare’s play in the course of its dialogue with the genre. Because The Tempest makes such extensive reference to the forms and conventions of the masque, it is often assumed – wrongly, I believe – that it must share the ideological agenda behind these ostentatious celebrations of monarchical power.19 (This premise tends to go hand in hand with the equally questionable assumption that the play necessarily endorses Prospero’s views as the one and only source of authority.) The fact that it received two recorded performances at Whitehall, on 1 November 1611 and again in the winter of 1612–13 as part of a programme of festivities marking the marriage of James I’s daughter, Princess Elizabeth, to the Elector Palatine, has been cited as confirmation of the play’s aristocratic affiliations. As the play’s modern editors have cautioned, however, these performances are no proof that it was originally written or subsequently revised for the court. By far the more likely scenario is that it was destined from the outset to be played at the King’s Men’s regular ‘public’ venues, the Globe and the rather more upmarket indoor theatre at Blackfriars, a commissioned royal performance being an incidental bonus.20 If, as seems probable, the play was not in fact tailored exclusively for a court audience, and its composition owed as much, perhaps more, to Shakespeare’s long-standing involvement with the public theatre, this genesis may help to account for the critical detachment which characterizes its relationship to the masque. For what we are presented with cannot in any sense be described as a simple homage to a fashionable aristocratic genre, or a submissive imitation of one.21 Rather, the language of masque becomes the vehicle for a double-pronged inquiry into the motives of the play’s arch-illusionist Prospero and the limits of his power on the one hand, and the integrity (both structural and moral) of the court masque itself on the other. The following reading of The Tempest seeks to substantiate this claim by showing how Prospero’s experimental attempts to recreate on his ‘bare island’ the masque’s (putative) control over perception founder, owing to a combination of external and internal factors.



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In his introduction to the Oxford edition, Stephen Orgel makes the obvious yet frequently overlooked point that the masque forms deployed in The Tempest are part not of a court entertainment but of a ‘dramatic allusion to one’. Hence the mechanics of the masque and other apparitions in the play are those of the public theatre rather than the Banqueting House with its changeable scenery.22 Moreover, these ‘quotations’ from the masque have been interpolated into a larger dramatic whole, where the meanings and intentions originally associated with them may be qualified, transformed or resisted. This process invites us to reflect on the implications of relocating the masque within a context that is in many ways profoundly alien to its conventions and ideology.23 How might the masque be altered by being performed in a public theatre like the Globe with its apron stage, which, reflecting the socially eclectic composition of its audiences, is not structurally designed to give precedence to any one perspective? How can it be accommodated within a dramatic form whose characteristic multivocality or heteroglossic nature makes it equally resistant to the imposition of a single controlling point of view? Given this estrangement of the masque from its normal setting, it is surely predictable that Prospero’s autocratic vision of things will be contested as a result of being exposed to alternative viewpoints. His confrontation with Caliban brings this conflict of outlooks to a crisis. Not only does the ‘savage and deformed slave’ embody a mode of seeing that is literally worlds away from Prospero’s own, but, as I try to show, his monstrous appearance identifies him with a visual economy that – in a manner reminiscent of Antony and Cleopatra’s transgression of the Roman ‘measure’ – is defined by its repudiation of neoclassical rules and aesthetic ideals. Even as its feasibility is challenged from without, Prospero’s ‘project’ is destabilized from within by internal contradictions similar in kind to those tensions which threatened to crack open the masque, as well as by his own doubts regarding the legitimacy of his aesthetic strategies. The cumulative effect of these various disintegrative pressures, I shall argue, is to bring about a radical decentring of the masque form. *

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As has often been remarked, the eponymous tempest of the opening scene is evoked with a degree of verisimilitude unparalleled in the Shakespearean canon. The sounds of the raging elements and splitting ship, the mariner’s nautical jargon and wet garments, all contribute to





the intensity of the reality-effect. Even the hint of social insubordination in the Boatswain’s robust dismissal of the courtiers, which mirrors the elemental chaos on a human level, adds to the realistic ambiance by appearing to locate the action in the solidly mimetic world of history or tragedy rather than the realms of courtly fantasy. Consequently, we experience a shock of dislocation – not unlike that which Inigo Jones’s scenic metamorphoses must have produced in Whitehall audiences – on discovering, in the next scene, that the lifelike horrors of the wreck are in fact a consummate illusion, a ‘direful spectacle’ manipulated by Prospero’s ‘so potent art’: If by your art, my dearest father, you have Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them. (I.2.1) With one stroke, Miranda establishes the centrality of this relationship with the court masque to the construction of the play’s meaning. Apart from the power to conjure up visions, Prospero’s art is intimated to possess the same capacity to incite and allay conflict, to command natural forces and harmonize discordant elements in the micro- and macrocosm, that these ‘Spectacles of State’ imputed to the Stuart monarchs on a regular basis. The parallels so meticulously constructed in the storm scene between disorder in the elemental, social and psychic spheres also appear to support the theory, fundamental to the rhetoric of the masque, that the ruler’s dominion extends over each of these worlds. As it turns out, this myth is affirmed only to be questioned thereafter, as we become more aware of the problems confronting Prospero in his efforts to resolve conflict and salve the rude defects of nature. For while his ability to command the elements is never in doubt, the same cannot be said of his hold over human psychology. (The kind of long-range irony operating here is epitomized by the question with which the Boatswain taunts the courtiers: ‘Hence! What cares these roarers for the name of king?’ (I.1.16); though its mocking scepticism seems to be disposed of by the revelation that these ‘roarers’ at least are firmly under Prospero’s control, the query it raises about the limits of royal authority will reverberate through the play.)24 However, such complications lie largely in the future. What is emphasized in these early scenes is Prospero’s affinity with the idealized ruler imagined by Jacobean court entertainments, as though the play were anxious to launch its dialogue with the masque by foregrounding the premises they share. Hence the powers of the one-time Duke of Milan,



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like those on display in the masque, are presented as a function of his extraordinary wisdom (‘for the liberal arts / Without a parallel’) and virtuous self-discipline.25 They occupy the same indefinite terrain, somewhere between the traditional thaumaturgical virtues of kingship and the conquests of modern Baconian science. And, most importantly, they are realized in and through the arts of spectacle, finding their chief mode of expression in wonder-inducing displays of optical magic. From the outset too, Prospero endeavours in true masquing fashion to impose his personal vision upon the island’s other inhabitants by regulating their visual and auditory experience. Intent on shaping their response to events he himself has contrived, he appoints the times of their sleeping and waking, commands the touches of sweet harmony which sound about their ears, and determines what they see. He it is who manufactures the conditions in which the lovers first burst upon one another’s sight as the revelation of a ‘thing divine’ in I.2, producing a ‘discovery’ scene to rival one of Jones’s. Ariel’s song, with its oblique foretelling of a miraculous ‘sea-change / Into something rich and strange’ (l.401), lures Ferdinand to the spot where Miranda is directed to gaze upon him: ‘The fringed curtains of thine eye advance, / And say what thou seest yond’ (l.409). Later, in a burlesque echo of this scene, the grosser senses of Caliban, Trinculo and Stephano are worked upon by Ariel, acting as his master’s agent: Then I beat my tabor, At which like unback’d colts they prick’d their ears, Advanc’d their eyelids, lifted up their noses As they smelt music; so I charm’d their ears That calf-like they my lowing follow’d … (IV.1.175) Attempts to dictate how things are perceived may seem innocuous enough compared to other aspects of Prospero’s art (such as the use of his magical powers to disempower, immobilize or imprison his enemies), yet ideologically they reveal the same process of coercion, the same compulsion to bend others to his sovereign will. Almost all the island’s occupants are forced to participate in a series of visions, and these are arranged into a play-masque of which Prospero is the author and stage director, royal subject and ideal spectator, combining in one, so to speak, the roles of Jonson, Jones, and James I. His unrelenting surveillance of the action, either in person or through Ariel, evokes the monarch’s commanding view of the masquing stage and the absolute





sway this metaphorically exhibits and confers, most obviously when he watches Ariel’s performance as the Harpy from ‘on the top’. In other respects too, his theatrical shows ask to be seen as a dramatic extension or analogue of the court masque. The devices on which they depend – symbolic spectacle, oracular poetry, rich costume, music both harmonious and discordant – belong to the same basic vocabulary employed in the masque. Moreover, the aims for which these devices are mobilized pointedly recall those proclaimed by the court masque: to ‘new create’ a sinful humanity, resolve past strife and institute a ‘brave new world’ of social and metaphysical harmony. Or rather, one of its aims. For while the utopian elements in Prospero’s vision have tended to receive more critical attention, political imperatives play no less important a part in shaping this. The exiled Duke turns his play-masque into a spectacular vehicle for reasserting his power and legitimacy, compromised by his banishment from Milan, and, more insidiously, by Antonio’s doubts concerning his fitness for ‘temporal royalties’. He also exploits his art in pursuit of his dynastic ambitions, using this as a means of securing the restoration of his dukedom and engineering the marriage between Miranda and Ferdinand, thereby creating an alliance with Naples which consolidates and extends his power-base.26 In view of this, we may be tempted to dismiss the ethical ideals set out in his betrothal masque as a diversionary tactic, a convenient sublimation of the workings of realpolitik. Yet there is little evidence to suggest that these motives do not genuinely coexist in Prospero’s attitude to his art, much as they did in Jonson’s. Indeed, in ministering at one and the same time to the lofty principles embodied in ‘removed mysteries’ and to the political exigencies of ‘present occasions’, Prospero apparently achieves that perfect fusion of art and power envisaged in the preface to Hymenaei. Such has not always been the case, however. In the lengthy protasis of I.2, he recounts how his neglect of ‘worldly ends’ and the day-to-day responsibilities of government for the refined pleasures of ‘bettering … [his] mind’ once estranged him from his state and cost him his dukedom. For while he let himself become over-immersed in studying the liberal arts, his brother was practising the material arts of the Machiavel – whose recreative properties parody and outdo his own – to much greater effect. Antonio, Being once perfected how to grant suits, How to deny them, who t’advance, and who To trash for overtopping, new created



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The creatures that were mine, I say, or chang’d ’em, Or else new form’d ’em; having both the key Of officer and office, set all hearts i’ th’ state To what tune pleas’d his ear …

Prospero’s expository style, with its tortured syntax and obsessive iteration, suggests how deeply this experience affected him. A desire to reintegrate the two arts (the meliorative and the political) which, in a former life, he allowed to become disjoined with such disastrous consequences appears to be the driving principle behind his play-masque. And the firm grip he maintains – with one significant lapse – on the dramatic action, together with his wariness towards any display of artistic ‘vanity’, signals a determination to avoid past mistakes. Even so, the equilibrium Prospero manages to impose on the different objectives pursued by his art is under continual strain. Above all, it remains at risk from the propensity of the idealizing imagination to feed off itself, becoming a self-involved mode of aesthetic contemplation divorced from political realities. Such indeed was to be the fate of the Caroline masque; just as his ‘library/Was dukedom large enough’ for the former Duke of Milan, so, it has been argued, Charles I found in the Whitehall stage his ‘truest kingdom’, where the problems besetting his reign could be magically banished or transmuted into more acceptable Platonic forms.27 It is peculiarly apt, then, that the dangers of artistic solipsism should be borne in on Prospero afresh during the performance of his own masque in IV.1, when he momentarily forgets the need for action confronting him in Caliban’s conspiracy, for the pleasures of seeing his ideals realized in the pure, uncompromised harmonies of poetry, music and dance. In less obvious ways, the play continues to remind him (and us) of the risks involved in neglecting political engagement, with its inbuilt frustrations, for the easier satisfactions of art. Prospero’s betrothal masque is anticipated, in theme and spirit, by Gonzalo’s fantasy of a pastoral utopia ‘t’excel the golden age’ in II.1: Gonzalo I’ th’ commonwealth I would, by contraries Execute all things; for no kind of traffic Would I admit; no name of magistrate; Letters should not be known; riches, poverty And use of service, none; contract, succession, Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none; No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil;



(I.2.79)


No occupation; all men idle, all; And women too, but innocent and pure; No sovereignty – Sebastian Yet he would be king on’t. Antonio The latter end of his commonwealth forgets The beginning. (II.1.141) Gonzalo’s inability to grasp the difference between fiction and life blinds him to the glaring inconsistencies in his idyllic daydream – his wish to lord it over a colonial settlement (‘plantation’) supposedly free from social hierarchies – and so exposes him to the ridicule of Sebastian and Antonio. To equate Prospero with Gonzalo would be wrong, of course; the one is not half so politically naive as the other. If Prospero’s imaginary commonwealth echoes the Neapolitan’s in some respects, it also offers a riposte to the muddled idealism of the latter. Instead of trusting nature to manage itself and pour out its ‘foison’ ‘without sweat or endeavor’, his vision is predicated on the exercise of ‘sovereignty’ (through his surrogate, Juno), hard work (specifically, agricultural labour) and self-discipline. It is precisely this sort of toughmindedness which prevents him from falling into the same traps as Gonzalo. But, for all Prospero’s vigilance and worldly acumen, Harry Berger is surely right to suggest that he has more than a touch of Gonzalo’s weakness for escapist fantasy, as well as sharing Ariel’s tendency to artistic self-indulgence, that ‘gratuitous delight in putting on a good show’ which makes theatrical display an end in itself.28 Perhaps the greatest of the temptations he must learn to resist is the prospect of reducing his enemies to a state of helpless puppetry in which they will be compelled to respond to the dictates of the magician’s (or dramaturgist’s) will. Such absolute control is not possible in the ‘real’ world, even under the most despotic regime. Prospero’s own past has taught him that much, and when in his enigmatic epilogue he asks the audience to release him, we may speculate that the ‘bands’ from which he begs to be set free include the pleasures of artistic omnipotence, which, having made others his captives, now threaten to ensnare him. The very fact that he feels it necessary to give up his art before resuming his duties as governor of Milan implies that there can be no easy accommodation between them. This is witnessed by his play-masque, which becomes the locus of an irresolvable struggle to reconcile his idealistic intentions with a more hard-headed pragmatism. To appreciate this, we need to take a closer



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look at its structure. Each group of characters on the island is put through a different sequence of visual and auditory illusions. After being made to endure the ‘direful spectacle of the wrack’ and Ariel’s terrifying fire-display, Ferdinand is brought safely ashore where he encounters the wondrous vision that is Miranda. Barely has he had time to savour the strong enchantment of this meeting, before it is rudely dispelled by Prospero, who subjects the prince to hard labour and, having satisfied himself that his future son-in-law has sufficiently atoned for his ‘faults’ (IV.1.1–2), treats him and Miranda to the betrothal masque. Alonso and his companions are similarly presented with an inviting banquet which is abruptly snatched away by Ariel who, in his nightmarish guise as Harpy, reads them a lecture on their past crimes. On the guilty courtiers is then inflicted a period of mental torment that ends when they are pardoned by Prospero and recompensed with a ‘discovery scene’, the sight of Ferdinand and Miranda playing at chess. Even Caliban, Trinculo and Stephano are put through an abbreviated version of the same sequence; first lured by Ariel’s taborplaying on a painful treck around they island, they are tempted with a display of ‘glistering apparel’ before being put to flight by Prospero’s canine spirits. It is not difficult to discern an overarching pattern here: a fear-inducing spectacle is followed in each case by a more enticing apparition, which emblematically offers to satisfy the beholder’s deepest and most morally suspect desires, only to disappoint them by revealing itself as an ‘enchanted trifle’ sent to ‘abuse’ the eyes and mind.29 Succumbing to this delusion results in a period of hardship, which is eventually offset – in the case of Alonso and the lovers – by the granting of a ‘rare vision’. This scheme of purgatorial suffering leading, in principle at least, to spiritual insight and rehabilitation fits with the redemptive paradigm identified by Northrop Frye and others in the play.30 It concurs too with the masque’s emphasis on moral transformation, a motif frequently enacted by the shift from an illusory show of false pleasures to a more substantive and lasting ‘vision of delight’.31 Yet in tracing such a clear redemptive design in Prospero’s playmasque, we are constructing a version of it that is altogether simpler and tidier than the one The Tempest gives us. In so doing, we risk imputing to this ‘god o’ th’ island’ a greater degree of prescience and certitude than he in fact shows, as well as smoothing over inconsistencies in his ‘project’. It is worth reminding ourselves that at no point does he specify what end he has in view when ordering Ariel and his fellow spirits to stage their shows for the shipwrecked courtiers. Moreover, the courtiers themselves experience these illusions not as





part of a carefully crafted sequence, but as discrete and unrelated moments for which the past supplies no prologue. We are thus confronted with the possibility that, so far from having a coherent, fully worked out plan, Prospero is basically feeling his way as he goes along. This hypothesis gains substance if we pause to examine one of the key moments in the play-masque. In III.3, Ariel, having caused the banquet to vanish, passes judgement on the ‘three men of sin’ (Alonso, Antonio and Sebastian), expounding their torment as the action of outraged heavenly ‘pow’rs’, whose retribution can only be forestalled by means of ‘heart’s sorrow, / And a clear life ensuing’ (l.81). As usual, Ariel is following his master’s script to the letter here (l.85), and the desire it bespeaks to bring about moral reform through suffering seems unequivocal. Ethical concerns are, however, conspicuously absent from Prospero’s reaction to the show. First, he congratulates Ariel and his ‘meaner ministers’ on their bravura performance with undisguised relish: ‘Bravely the figure of this harpy hast thou / Perform’d, my Ariel; a grace it had, devouring’ (l.83). Then he proceeds to trumpet the efficacy of his ‘high charms’ in reducing his enemies to a state of distracted helplessness, declaring ‘they now are in my pow’r’ (l.92). In short, what we seem to be witnessing here is the didactic imperative jostling for precedence with, on the one hand, a simple aesthetic appreciation of Ariel’s ‘quaint’ devices, and, on the other, the desire for political mastery, expressed as the urge to subjugate others to his own volition. This ambiguous stance is reflected in many of Prospero’s statements concerning his art; we encounter it again, for example, in his habit of disparaging as a mere ‘trick’ or ‘vanity’ devices whose moral efficacy he elsewhere takes for granted. The absence of a single, coherent strategy which such contradictions reflect emerges most sharply at the beginning of Act V. Despite the confident tone with which Prospero announces the imminent end of his labours, he seems curiously irresolute, looking for assistance in completing his script to Ariel, who reminds him of what has been achieved and outlines a possible denouement. Under his servant’s delicate coaching, he arrives at a decision: Ariel Your charm so strongly works ’em That if you now beheld them, your affections Would become tender. Prospero Dost thou think so, spirit? Ariel Mine would, sir, were I human. Prospero And mine shall …



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Though with their high wrongs I am strook to th’ quick, Yet, with my nobler reason, ’gainst my fury Do I take part. The rarer action is In virtue than in vengeance. They being penitent, The sole drift of my purpose doth extend Not a frown further. (V.1.17) In announcing its outcome, Prospero retrospectively confirms the struggle between ‘virtue’ (the desire to redeem) and ‘vengeance’ (the desire to punish) that we have seen enacted not as a process of inner debate recorded in soliloquy, but in the discontinuities of the playmasque itself. Assuming (wrongly, as it transpires) that both the main aims of his art – to bring the guilty courtiers to his mercy and a state of penitence – have been accomplished, he vows henceforth to do without his ‘high charms’. As the dramatic postscript to this moment reveals, though, neither the proposed renunciation of his magic nor his opting for virtue over vengeance are sufficient to heal the selfdivisions within his mind and ‘project’, which, if anything, grow more acute in the final scene. The point I wish to make here is that, over and above their function as an index of Prospero’s psychological confusion, these divisions can be read as a comment on the structural tensions inherent in a genre (the court masque) composed of a volatile amalgam of aesthetic, didactic and political elements. In addition to being subjected to these internal centrifugal pressures, Prospero’s ‘project’ is further unsettled by its involvement with other ways of seeing. For it is not solely his ‘present fancies’ that are enacted in the play-masque; the imaginative lives of the island’s other inhabitants also become caught up in its symbolic structure. From very early on, these competing points of view are locked in a complex interaction and struggle for domination. The process is initiated in I.2 by Prospero’s narration of events prior to the dramatic action, which is supplemented and, to varying degrees, contested by the alternative versions of the past produced by Miranda, Ariel and Caliban, all of whom see different things in the ‘dark backward and abysm of time’ (l.50).32 Prospero’s preferred tactic for dealing with these memories is to integrate them into his own history wherever possible, while at the same time emphasizing their deficiencies and hence their subordinate relationship to his authoritative metanarrative. As little more than a blurred fragment, Miranda’s childhood recollections are easily absorbed into the story her father has to tell. Ariel and Caliban, being much less





biddable, present a greater problem. Reminded by Ariel of his promise to release the ‘dainty’ spirit, Prospero retaliates by accusing the latter of being partial and selective in his account of the past, especially where his dealings with Sycorax are concerned (‘I must / Once in a month recount what thou hast been, / Which thou forget’st’ (l.261)). Caliban’s tale of usurpation and harsh treatment at Prospero’s hands is simply dismissed, as the kind of outrageous fabrication a ‘most lying slave’ might be expected to concoct (ll.344 –8). Yet although this initial encounter with his two servants demonstrates Prospero’s power to foist his version of history on others, it should be noted that their dissenting voices are not suppressed, and their rival versions retracted under threat of violence before they have been fully registered. This willingness to give space, if not necessarily a clear endorsement, to alternative, unauthorized constructions of the past is consistent with the play’s practice of foregrounding the relativity of perception.33 For much of the action, Ariel is present to his master’s sight, but ‘invisible / To every eyeball else’ (I.2.302). To the optimistic Gonzalo the island looks marvellously lush and life-sustaining, whereas to Antonio’s and Sebastian’s cynical eyes the same landscape appears utterly barren and inhospitable (II.1.35–59). The moral callousness of this same ‘brace of lords’ also renders them insensible to the ‘solemn music’ that lulls their companions asleep; conversely, the more high-minded among this group of castaways apparently do not hear the judgement pronounced by Ariel on the guilty courtiers, and so forth. Insofar as each of these perceptions is, in some obvious way, partial, occlusive or skewed by the beholder’s temperament or self-interest, they may seem, like the supposedly faulty memories of Ariel and Caliban, to confirm the superior truth vested in Prospero’s representation of past and present realities. The cumulative effect, however, of introducing this kind of narrative diversity – especially in the context of a broader pattern of perceptual differences – is to call into question the centrality of Prospero’s vision and thus the degree of hegemonic control it is able to exert. The force of this challenge becomes apparent when we consider the practical consequences that flow from such differences of view. In several cases they nurture forms of rebellion more serious than any normally tolerated by the masque. One instance where we are invited to make a causal connection of this type, between imaginative and political dissent, is in the context of the fantasies of riches and empowerment which form a ‘prologue’ to Antonio’s dramatically conceived ‘plot’ to kill Alonso, and Caliban’s parallel conspiracy against Prospero.



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Like the vision of a crown dropping on Sebastian’s head conjured up by Antonio’s ‘strong imagination’ in II.1, Caliban’s dream of heavenly riches ready to drop upon him is described in terms that directly evoke a masquing apotheosis, and both parodically subvert the utopian vision staged in Prospero’s masque, where ‘honour, riches, [and] marriage blessing’ are showered upon the betrothed couple by Ceres and Juno: Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices, That, if I had wak’d after long sleep, Will make me sleep again, and then, in dreaming, The clouds methought would open, and show riches Ready to drop upon me, that, when I wak’d, I cried to dream again. (III.2.132) Prospero’s relationship to the plots against his own and Alonso’s life is profoundly ambiguous. Not only are they instigated under his monitoring gaze and with his tacit permission, but he continues, through Ariel, to intervene in their development before finally aborting them. So extensive is his involvement in these plots in fact, that it is hard to escape the conclusion that they are an integral part of his ‘project’, that they have been written into his own play-masque, to which they stand in broadly the same relationship as the anti-masque. The logic behind this strategy is presumably none other than the logic of the genre it invokes: Prospero, we may infer, has calculated that the treacherous schemes hatched by Caliban and Antonio will serve as a useful foil for the harmonious order affirmed in the betrothal masque (of which they are a debased or demonic reflection), just as their eventual overthrow will secure his moral and political supremacy as the island’s ‘god of power’. In any case, Prospero’s handling of these various conspiracies would seem to validate a thesis which has been strongly argued in recent years by new historicist critics, who situate the play in the context of early English colonialism.34 According to this reading, the various disruptive energies at work on the island are activated by Prospero for his own ends, as a means of legitimizing his oppressive rule, and are therefore inevitably recuperated by the dominant order. However eloquently or forcefully expressed, Caliban’s protests, like his plot, are robbed of any real subversive charge, since no dissent can exist for which allowance has not already been made. Moreover, it is usually





suggested that the play itself (being heavily invested in the colonialist enterprise) colludes with the process of containment put in place by Prospero. But it can be argued, on the contrary, that the play deliberately distances itself from this scenario by locating it precisely as the defining fantasy of the masque, a fiction only proper to this genre and one that has no validity beyond its confines. For, in marked contrast to the ease with which he subdued the elements unleashed on his orders in the storm scene, Prospero finds that he cannot fully master the oppositional forces inscribed in these plots, having once set them in motion. Beyond a certain point, the deviant imaginations of the island’s inhabitants resist Prospero’s attempts to incorporate them into his overarching ‘project’, refusing to be confined to a supporting role in his play-masque. It is Caliban, of course, who most clearly personifies this refusal. The friction between him and his master constitutes the dramatic nub of the play, and the betrothal masque is, appropriately, the place where this hostility is brought to a head. The masque itself represents the purest expression of Prospero’s utopian ideals, the highwater mark of his faith in the power of a sublime illusion to redeem humanity and institute a beneficent new moral and social order. As befits the occasion, its ‘majestic vision’ projects a multi-levelled concord like that celebrated in Jonson’s marriage masque, Hymenaei.35 The harmonious union of the elements – figured by Iris’s ‘heavenly bow’, which connects Juno’s ‘airy’ sphere with Ceres’s ‘proud earth’ – is replicated in the human institution of marriage, and, by implication, in the impending political union of Milan and Naples. The ‘graceful dance’ of nymphs and reapers, with its balancing of water against earth and cold against heat, functions as the visual summation of this argument, at the same time as it brings to symbolic fruition the cycle of cultivated nature. This, the masque’s second theme, takes us straight from landscape of ‘spungy April’ to the ‘foison plenty’ of high summer; there is no winter here: ‘Spring come to you at the farthest, / In the very end of harvest!’ (IV.1.114).36 As in the Jacobean court masques, this ideal of harmonious order, fertility and plenitude, triumphs through the ritual expulsion of opposing forces. Ferdinand’s pledge not to indulge in premarital sex is all that is needed to dispel the ‘wanton charm’ of Venus and Cupid, whose plot against the lovers threatens a repetition of the rape of Proserpine – an event that was traditionally construed as an analogue of the Fall because it brought death and wintery sterility into the world. However, this victory is ironically undone when Prospero’s edenic vision – from which all destructive agencies have been effortlessly exorcized – collapses at the mere thought of Caliban’s



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conspiracy. The Folio stage direction states that the dance of nymphs and reapers is broken off when ‘Prospero starts suddenly, and speaks; after which, to a strange, hollow, and confused noise, they heavily vanish’. As Ernest Gilman rightly notes, the cacophany which marks Caliban’s psychic eruption into the masque identifies this moment with the commencement of the anti-masque.37 But the differences are just as significant. No anti-masquer on the Whitehall stage was ever permitted to generate the degree of anxiety Caliban arouses in Prospero. Shakespeare is at pains to underline this deviation from masquing conventions, forcing us to notice the intensity of Prospero’s reaction through the comments of Ferdinand and Miranda who are startled by his outburst of ‘anger, so distemper’d’ (ll.143–5). Critics too have been puzzled by the excessive nature of his agitation, pointing out that he has already taken to steps to thwart the conspiracy, which is, in any case, too inept in the execution to do much damage. But the absence of any obvious dramatic justification should perhaps be taken as a cue to look elsewhere for the real source of his disquiet. Caliban’s capacity to perturb derives chiefly, I suggest, from his monstrous appearance and what this stands for. ‘Disproportion’d’, ‘misshapen’, and unclassifiable in its bewildering heterogeneity (Trinculo, for one, has trouble making out who or what this ‘mooncalf’ is, ‘being but half a fish and half a monster’ (III.2.29), epitomizing the play’s preoccupation with the ‘strange’ and outlandish (V.1.290), his physical form aligns him with the aesthetic tradition of the grotesque – and so, by extension, with the comically deformed creatures of the anti-masque.38 The fullest definition of this artistic style in the period is that supplied by Vasari in his Vite: The grotesque is a free and very humorous style of painting produced by the ancients for the decoration of vacant spaces in some places where only things positioned high up are suitable. For this purpose they fashioned monsters deformed by a freak of nature or by the whim and fancy of the workmen, who in these grotesque pictures make things without respect for any rule, attaching to the finest thread a weight that it cannot support, to a horse legs of leaves, to a man the legs of a crane, and similar follies and nonsense without end. And he whose imagination worked in the strangest manner was held to be the most able.39 What to make of this kind of grotesque imagery was very much a contested issue in the sixteenth century. The rediscovery in the 1480s of





Nero’s villa, the Domus Aurea, with its decorative mural designs based on the sort of whimsical, composite creations described by Vasari, initiated a vogue for ornamentation alla grottesca that spread from Italy throughout northern Europe. Despite its claim to antique origins, however, the grotesque was widely perceived as transgressing classical canons of order, proportionality, decorum and verisimilitude. In a widely cited passage, Vitruvius had specifically condemned the decadent tastes of his age, which relished fantastic wall-painting regardless of the fact that it contravened the laws of nature and mimesis by depicting things which ‘neither are, nor can be, nor have been’.40 His influence and that of Horace, whose strictures regarding the dreamlike, hybridized products of the poetic and pictorial imagination I discussed earlier (p.63), lies behind the frequent attacks made on the injudicious use of such ‘fantasmi vani e loro irragionevoli imaginazioni’ by Italian critics, especially those most deeply affected by the chastened spirit of the Counter-Reformation.41 As Nicole Dacos has shown, the key issue at stake in this debate centred on the competing values of classical proscription and an imaginative licence that, as Vasari said, was subject to no rule (‘senza alcuna regola’), since the grotesque was deemed to be a pure product of the fantasia, that is, of imaginative invention at its most wayward, capricious and unfettered. It is conceivable that Caliban’s appearance had additional resonances for the play’s original audiences; the grotesque, by now an embedded and thoroughly domesticated part of English vernacular culture where it mingled with gothic idioms, may have seemed to exemplify native resistance to the incursions of the Italianate aesthetic championed by Inigo Jones.42 In any event, they are unlikely to have missed the crucial point that the visible characteristics assigned to Caliban amount to a direct rebuttal of the neoclassical ideals underpinning Prospero’s masque – ideals on which his entire moral authority depends.43 Given the controversial status of the grotesque in contemporary artistic discourse, it is perhaps not surprising that Caliban’s monstrously misshapen form is open to more than one reading.44 A strong Neoplatonic bias (combined with other cultural prejudices) leads Prospero to interpret his servant’s outward monstrosity as a sign of inner spiritual deformity. Just as he reads Sycorax’s warped body as proof of her malicious nature (I.2.257), so he sees her son’s moral degeneracy as inscribed in the flesh: ‘And as with age his body uglier grows, / So his mind cankers’ (IV.1.191).45 At the same time, the excessive, irregular and aesthetically indecorous qualities of the grotesque body become linked with a violation of decency and rule in their



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broader social senses. For Prospero, they connote Caliban’s refusal of civilized norms of behaviour, as evidenced by his complaint that the latter is ‘as disproportion’d in his manners / As in his shape’ (V.1.291). (A similar collocation underlies the, probably non-authorial, designation of Caliban as ‘a savage and deformed slave’ in the Folio list of characters.) We have already seen in previous chapters how the ideal of ‘due proportion’ was invested by Renaissance writers with a range of powerful ideological associations. Those of most immediate relevance to the present context can be traced back to a fable in Vitruvius’s De Architectura. Book II narrates how the transition made by human beings from a peripatetic existence as hunter-gatherers to the establishment of settled, law-abiding agrarian communities coincided with their discovery of the art of building and their first hesitant steps towards mastering ‘the assured method of symmetry’.46 A parallel myth concerning the origins of the art of persuasive discourse, which similarly marks man out from the beast, was elaborated around the same time by Horace in his Ars Poetica, subsequently becoming one of the most overworked topoi in Renaissance discussions of rhetoric.47 Thus Caliban’s egregious ‘shape’, like his rejection of the colonizer’s gift of language (I.2.363–5), proclaims his exclusion from the civilized, highly regulated society founded upon the agricultural cycle which is evoked in the betrothal masque. It is received, in short, as confirmation of his irredeemable bestiality along with all those other qualities that make him, in his master’s eyes, ‘A devil, a born devil, on whose nature / Nurture can never stick’ (IV.1.188). Other members of the shipwrecked party take a less moralistic view of Caliban’s physical grotesqueness, one that reveals a seamier side of the colonialist project. For them, it is an invitation to commercial exploitation, a ludicrous, exotic freak of nature to be displayed before a public hungry for such curiosities back home (II.2.27–33, 67–78, V.1.263–6).48 Rather than obliging us to accept either of these derogatory constructions of Caliban’s appearance, however, the play allows us to see this as nothing more than the mark of his radical otherness, that which sets him apart from the European castaways as the representative of a type of being / seeing wholly foreign to the cultural values enunciated by Prospero in particular. Nowhere is this alterity of being more eloquently expressed than in Caliban’s descriptions of ‘all the qualities o’ th’ isle’; the vision of the island disclosed in these speeches (cf. I.2.336–9, III.2.135– 43) differs from that associated with the court masque in being rooted not in an abstract ideal but in the intimate knowledge of material objects, in an enumeration of heterogeneous particulars rather




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I prithee let me bring thee where crabs grow; And I with my long nails will dig thee pig-nuts, Show thee a jay’s nest, and instruct thee how To snare the nimble marmazet. I’ll bring thee To clust’ring filberts, and sometimes I’ll get thee Young scamels from the rock. (II.2.167) Arguably, the dissolution of the masque impels Prospero into a reluctant recognition that this alien mode of perceiving the world possesses a vigorous life of its own which prohibits it from being simply banished, assimilated or contained, and with which he must therefore reach some kind of accommodation.49 Prospero’s failure to convert Caliban to the values of the brave new world imagined in the masque reflects ironically not only on his personal impotence in this regard, but on the inflated claims made on behalf of the genre, inasmuch as it was supposedly empowered to recreate actuality in its ideal image. That is to say, it raises the question of the beholder’s part in validating these spectacular productions. As I noted earlier, the court masque depended on the audience’s collusion to an unusual degree; on its ability to decipher the arcane meanings which formed the ‘soul’ of such productions, and on the sense of wonder that made possible its inclusion in the mysteries revealed. ‘A writer should always trust somewhat to the capacity of the spectactor,’ wrote Jonson, ‘especially at these spectacles, where men, besides inquiring eyes, are understood to bring quick ears’.50 But his confidence in the audience’s powers of critical discernment was, as always, mixed with a strong dose of insecurity and distrust. What documentary evidence we have relating to the reception of the Whitehall entertainments suggests that there was some basis for these misgivings. For while some spectators appear to have been more interested (as Jonson feared) in the brilliance of the visual mechanics than in pondering the deeper meaning of his poetic conceits, both attracted their fair share of boredom and incomprehension.51 Prospero’s nervous insistence that his instructions for the staging of his play-masque be ‘performed to point’ (I.2.193, III.3.83–6, IV.1.49), together with his repeated demands that others bestow on both him and it the right



than the urge to weld these into an ordered whole. On this distinctly unclassical way of seeing, the play bestows its most hauntingly lyrical verse and, with this, a certain legitimacy:

quality of attention (I.2.36–8, 87, 106, 453, IV.1.59), similarly seems to reflect an awareness of just how vital the beholder’s participation is to the success of these shows, and a commensurate anxiety that this function will not be properly discharged. And his fears also prove to be well-founded. The responses elicited by his play-masque do not conform to the programmatic ideals laid down by theorists of the genre. In particular, the belief which Prospero shares with Jonson in the effectiveness of theatrical spectacle as a vehicle for philosophical indoctrination and moral persuasion, capable of speaking to the mind as well as the senses, is made to appear wildly over-optimistic.52 None of those who witness Ariel’s vanishing banquet seems willing or able to decode the moral allegory secreted within its visual imagery. Nor, despite Prospero’s (and Gonzalo’s) assertions to the contrary (III.3.104 –6, V.1.28, 77), are there unequivocal grounds for supposing that his playmasque has succeeded in pricking the conscience as well as pinching the body, in inducing remorse as opposed to merely befuddling the senses. Of the shipwrecked courtiers, Alonso is the only one to express regret for his past crimes, yet it is unclear how far this is a consequence of what he has seen on the island, rather than the feelings of repressed guilt and suicidal despair he has manifested all along.53 In question here is not just the efficacy of the masque as a rhetorical form, but the very possibility of persuasion. Like Hamlet before him, Prospero discovers that although theatrical devices can be used successfully to manipulate the beholder’s viewpoint, it does not follow that they can refashion or ‘new create’ the beholder’s inner self. Then there is the matter of the play’s ironic anatomization of wonder, the cardinal emotion of the masque.54 Like Antony and Cleopatra, Prospero sets great store by the irresistible power of wonder as a device for winning over an audience, though he relies upon feats of optical magic, not the sublime or ‘grand’ style, to achieve this. In this, he is attuned to the spirit of an age that had elevated the marvellous into an essential component of drama, especially tragedy. Capitalizing on the authority of Aristotle’s recently rediscovered Poetics which designated wonder together with pleasure as the chief end of poetry, literary critics of the Italian Cinquecento maintained that this most sought-after effect could be produced by a variety of means, including elevated language, unexpected happenings and other plot contrivances as well as (crucially) visual spectacle.55 In a parallel development noted earlier (p.77), illusionistic works of art were valued in direct proportion to their ability to evoke astonishment (meraviglia) in the beholder.56 So it was more or less inevitable that the masque, with its amazingly lifelike scenery,





would come to be associated with this emotion. A product of things strange, extraordinary and ‘almost beyond credit’, wonder is typically aroused by that which exceeds normal experience, that which eludes our familiar ontological systems or categories. Yet while it outstrips rational comprehension and offends our sense of probability, the marvellous, paradoxically, exacts a certain kind of belief. Analysing the role of wonder in the masque, Orgel and Strong define this Neoplatonically, as arising from a heightened state of consciousness capable of apprehending the essential form of perfection.57 But a more appropriate paradigm, I suggest, lay at hand in the religious miracle, which was, after all, one of the chief instruments for generating belief according to Christian doctrine. In support of this reading, it should be noted that the marvellous apparitions and events which figure so prominently in Shakespeare’s late plays are as a rule infused with religious affectivity, with a vivid intuition of supernatural forces at work; thus Paulina, preparing to reanimate Hermione’s statue and ‘strike all that look upon with marvel’, tells the expectant beholders, ‘It is requir’d / You do awake your faith’ (Winter’s Tale, V.3.94; my emphasis). In the Jacobean court masques the sense of wonder normally reserved for the inscrutable operations of divinity was transferred to the monarch or his agents. This appropriation of religious discourse and its accompanying aura of mystery for secular ends is foregrounded in one of Jonson’s later masques, where the figure of ‘Fant’sy’, together with her companion ‘Wonder’, identifies James I as the ‘god’ ‘whose presence maketh this perpetual spring’, having previously declared with unconscious irony, ‘How better than they are are all things made / By wonder!’.58 The process of debasement implicit in this awakening of a sense of the miraculous, as a means of dignifying the often sordid practicalities of rule by investing them with false mystery, is relentlessly laid bare in The Tempest. Like the Stuart monarchs deified by the masque, Prospero consciously exploits the mystificatory effects of wonder as part of what Paul Brown has called the ‘euphemization’ of power-politics in the play. Thus he nurtures the confusions of the shipwrecked courtiers who mistake his actions for those of providence or some god by keeping them in ignorance of true causes right up to and beyond the denouement (V.1.245–51). The pious Gonzalo needs little persuading that it is ‘you gods … that have chalk’d forth the way / Which brought us hither’ (V.1.201), and several of the castaways share his conviction that ‘this is no mortal business’ (I.2.407). By contrast, we (the play’s audience) are kept uncomfortably aware, as we are not in the other late



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plays where the supernatural is less ambiguously present, that the deity in question is merely human and the motives governing his orchestration of events on the island far from godlike. A rather different abuse of wonder is enacted by Antonio and Sebastian. On seeing the magical banquet served in by ‘strange shapes’, they are moved to declare their new-found belief in this and all such improbable curiosities: Sebastian A living drollery. Now I will believe That there are unicorns; that in Arabia There is one tree, the phoenix’ throne, one phoenix At this hour reigning there. Antonio I’ll believe both; And what does else want credit, come to me, And I’ll be sworn ’tis true. Travellers ne’er did lie, Though fools at home condemn ’em. (III.3.21) Whatever else it may involve, the faith of two such cynical materialists is unlikely to extend to any inkling of higher truths. Here it simply seems to indicate a recognition of incontrovertible facts. Where wonder is not literalized, it is absurdly misplaced, becoming implicated (as in the discourses associated with the New World) with credulity, superstition and idolatry. The gullibility displayed by Miranda (whose name specifically identifies her with this emotion) exceeds what might be expected even given her lack of experience. She persists in her belief that Ferdinand is an immortal ‘spirit’, for example, despite being corrected on this point (I.2.410 –20). Her enraptured contemplation of the guilty courtiers is still more disturbing: O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world That has such people in’t! (V.1.181) Prospero’s wry aside, ‘’tis new to thee’, compounds our unease by hinting at the disenchantment that inevitably lies in wait for this naive marveller. Moreover, the phrasing of Miranda’s speech clearly invites us to make the connection with Caliban’s ludicrously incongruous adoration of the ‘brave god’ Stephano and his ‘celestial liquor’. His dealings with his idol will quickly disabuse Caliban of his awe, as he discovers





himself to have been a ‘most ridiculous monster, to make a wonder of a poor drunkard!’ (II.2.165, cf. V.1.296–8). Yet his belated conversion to ‘grace’ in the final scene is almost as suspect, in that, like Miranda’s ecstatic response, it appears to be provoked more by the impressive appearance of the well-dressed courtiers (and perhaps fear of punishment, in his case) than by any genuine access of spiritual insight. Thus while certain characters (Antonio, Sebastian, and Caliban) are excluded from the apotheosis of Prospero’s play-masque by their insensibility to its visionary didacticism, those who participate in it through their capacity for wonder (Gonzalo, Alonso, Ferdinand, Miranda) do so in what has been revealed to be a state of false consciousness. Among the spectators estranged from the miraculous enchantments and revelations of the final scene we must number Prospero himself. At every stage, his confidence in the transformative powers of his art has been shot through with an awareness of its inherent risks and limitations. But it is in the ‘revels’ speech, issuing directly out of the crisis precipitated by the collapse of the betrothal masque, that this darker view thrusts itself to the fore. When Ferdinand voices the romantic longing to remain forever a dweller in the ‘paradise’ conjured up Ceres and Juno, he is firmly recalled to reality by his future father-in-law, who reminds him that what he covets is nothing more than ‘thin air’. This is followed by the illusionist’s categoric dismissal of his own ‘majestic vision’ as an ‘insubstantial pageant’ which leaves no permanent trace, ‘not a rack behind’ (IV.1.146–58). Observations on the emptiness of such courtly shows and their purely transitory effect were nothing new; frequent repetition, not least by the masque writers themselves, had sapped their critical force.59 That Prospero should turn these clichés against what is unquestionably the most serious artistic statement of his ideals is nevertheless unsettling. (It surprises us in much the same way as Cleopatra’s claim that her ‘fancy’s images’ possess the weight and substance of ‘nature’s piece’, which it exactly reverses.) The comprehensive disillusionment with the masque expressed here is presumably a major factor behind Prospero’s decision to renounce what he disparagingly refers to as his ‘rough magic’. Yet despite his loss of faith in the masque’s educative powers, in its capacity to bring about a genuine ‘sea-change’ in the beholder, he continues to exploit this artistic form for his own ends. The promised renunciation of his magical powers, like the promised release of Ariel, is repeatedly deferred in the final scene, while he persists in bringing forth fresh wonders and prolonging the courtiers’ astonishment, as though reluctant to forego the advantage which their helpless stupefaction



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gives him over them. In clinging to his masquing strategems and devices, Prospero perpetuates the tensions we have seen to inhabit them. The jarring mixture of magnanimity and naked compulsion directed at political ends in his pardoning of Antonio (V.1.130 – 4) is the starkest illustration of this. Familiar contradictions of this kind become overlaid with, and exacerbated by, new self-divisions, as Prospero strives uneasily to maintain his double role as chief contriver and detached critic of the masque, master of ceremonies in whose moral and aesthetic viability he no longer believes. These tensions reach their height with the ‘discovery’ of Ferdinand and Miranda ‘wrangl[ing]’ over a game of chess – a moment which, as David Lindley notes, plays on the dissolution of the masque, by re-enacting that symbolic climax when performers mingled with members of the audience and illusion became reality.60 Significantly, it is left to others – notably those two ingenuous optimists, Miranda (l.181– 4) and Gonzalo (l.200 –13) – to proclaim the coming into being of Prospero’s brave new world, while its maker watches and comments sceptically from the sidelines. If in this last scene, we seem, as Howard Felperin remarks, to be ‘at the furthest remove possible from the spells, magic, spectacle and wonder of a naive romance consciousness’, it is largely because we are invited to witness proceedings through Prospero’s detached and disaffected gaze. 61 With the play-masque over and its immediate political aims, if not much else, accomplished, he does at last relinquish his ‘charms’, standing before us a fallible and infirm old man reliant on our ‘indulgence’ to rescue him from ‘despair’. His self-confessed helplessness hints at the imaginary nature of the magical powers displayed in the court masque, which are shown to be co-terminous with the theatrical fictions that affirmed their existence. But perhaps the most subversive touch is reserved to last. By appealing to the audience for forgiveness, Prospero unexpectedly shifts control over the dramatic perspective, and the absolute power (to paralyse, confine, pardon, and so on) it connotes, away from himself and onto the individual spectators. The political significance of this gesture can surely not have escaped the play’s plebeian audiences at the Globe, as the ruler’s self-assigned prerogative to mould the views of his people, undermined and dispersed by the preceding action, is finally undone.




Preface 1 See Lessing, Laokoön, trans. Sir Robert Phillimore (London, 1905), and Wellek, ‘The Parallelism between Literature and the Arts’, English Institute Annual 41 (1942) 29–63. For a more recent and more nuanced assessment of the possible future directions of interarts criticism, see Paul and Svetlana Alpers, ‘Ut Pictura Noesis? Criticism in Literary Studies and Art History’, New Literary History 3.3 (1972) 437–58. 2 See, for example, Wylie Sypher, Four Stages of Renaissance Style: Transformations in Art and Literature 1400–1700 (New York, 1956); and Arnold Hauser, Mannerism: The Crisis of the Renaissance and the Origin of Modern Art, 2 vols (New York, 1965). 3 Shakespeare and the Common Understanding, pp.7, 12. 4 The latter phrase is taken from Graham Bradshaw, Shakespeare’s Scepticism (Brighton, 1987). Likewise, it has been argued that the visual arts embody culturally specific modes of perceiving the world. See, especially, John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London, 1972).

1 Alberti, As You Like It, and the Process of Invention 1 Leon Battista Alberti: On Painting, trans. Cecil Grayson and ed. Martin Kemp (London, 1991) p.88. All future page references in the text are to this edition. 2 Thereafter the term ‘invention’ was widely adopted into discussion of the visual arts. See, for example, Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist observers of painting in Italy and the discovery of pictorial composition (Oxford, 1971) p.101, Vasari-Milanesi, I, 169–74, and Mark Roskill trans. and ed., Dolce’s “Aretino” and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento (New York, 1968) p.117. 3 For an overview of the development of ut pictura discourse and the contestation of its authority by Burke and Lessing in the mid-eighteenth century, see Jean Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago, 1958). 4 See further Chapter 3, and cf. Harry Berger’s suggestive comments in ‘The Renaissance Imagination: Second World and Green World’, in Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction-Making (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1988) pp.17–25. Berger’s argument anticipates mine to the extent that he sees Alberti’s perspective scheme and the ‘green world’ of Shakespearean comedy as parallel instances of a Renaissance predisposition to construct hypothetical worlds, fictive heterocosms, in which tensions are ideally resolved. 5 See Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators, p.129. 226



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06 See, for example, Clark Hulse, The Rule in Art: Literature and Painting in the Renaissance (Chicago and London, 1990) p.61. On the rhetorical genealogy of Alberti’s theory of composition, see also Creighton E. Gilbert, ‘Antique Frameworks for Renaissance Art Theory: Alberti and Pino’, Marsyas 3 (1943–5) 87–106, D.E. Wright, ‘Alberti’s De Pictura: Its Literary Structure and Purpose’, JWCI 47 (1984) 52–71, and Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford, 1988) pp.342–53. 07 Giotto and the Orators, p.131. 08 See the opening passage of Horace’s Ars Poetica in T.S. Dorsch ed., Classical Literary Criticism (London, 1965) p.79. The implications of this locus classicus for poetry and painting are examined further in Chapter 3. 09 Cf. Cicero, De Oratore, III.54.206. On the importance attached to varying by Renaissance artists in theory and practice, see Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford, 1972) pp.133–5, and David Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art (Princeton, 1981) chap.5. 10 IX.1.11, cf. II.13.8–12. Earlier, Quintilian appeared to extend this visual analogy to the whole field of rhetorical expression, defining ‘figura’ as applicable to ‘any form in which thought is expressed, just as it is to bodies which, whatever their composition, must have some shape’ (IX.1.10). 11 For a fuller discussion of this aspect of ut pictura discourse, see Chapter 4. 12 Censuring unrestrained copia was itself a rhetorical commonplace. Advising the trainee orator to acquire a ‘copious supply of words and matter’, Quintilian had been careful to differentiate this from an indiscriminate heaping up of synonyms (10.1.5–14). The warning was echoed even by those like Erasmus (see below) who were fervent advocates of verbal abundance. But the most forthright attack came from Francis Bacon, who complained that the ‘affectionate study of eloquence and copie of speech’ cultivated by the humanists ‘grew speedily to an excess; for men began to hunt more after words than matter; more after … the varying and illustration of their works with tropes and figures, than after the weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of argument, life of invention, or depth of judgment’ (Arthur Johnston ed., ‘The Advancement of Learning’ and ‘New Atlantis’ (Oxford, 1974) p.24). 13 See, for example, C.L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy (1959; repr. Princeton, 1972) chap.9; Anne Barton, ‘As You Like it and Twelfth Night: Shakespeare’s Sense of an Ending’, in M. Bradbury and D.J. Palmer eds, Shakespeare’s Comedy, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 14 (London, 1972) pp.160–80; and Ruth Nevo, Comic Transformations in Shakespeare (London and New York, 1980) chap.10. 14 Harold Jenkins, ‘As You Like It’, SS 8 (1955) 50. Jenkins’s classic account of this technique has often been recapitulated. 15 See T.W. Baldwin, William Shakespeare’s Small Latin & Lesse Greeke (Urbana, 1944) I, 77–9, II, 179–81. The impact of Erasmus’s compositional methodology on humanistic programmes of instruction across northern Europe is reassessed in Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (London, 1986). 16 The Power of Eloquence and English Renaissance Literature (Hemel Hempstead, 1992) p.46. On the literary influence of De Copia, see also Emrys Jones, The



Notes

17

18

19 20 21

22

23

24

25

Notes Origins of Shakespeare (Oxford, 1977) pp.9–13, and Marion Trousdale, Shakespeare and the Rhetoricians (London, 1982) chap.3. While Love’s Labours’ Lost may seem a more suitable candidate for the kind of linguistic analysis I am proposing here, it is less overtly interested in the visual possibilities of ‘painted rhetoric’. Nevertheless, its self-conscious parading of standard compositional techniques is relevant to my argument insofar as it suggests that these comedies were pitched at a rhetorically alert audience, many of whom would have been familiar with these same techniques from their schooldays. Craig R. Thompson, Collected Works of Erasmus: Literary and Educational Writings 2, XXIV (Toronto, 1978) trans. Betty I. Knott, Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style, p.302. Compare the use of visual metaphor in Quintilian, Institutio, IX.1.41. Ibid, p.295. See Agnes Latham’s gloss on this passage in the Arden edition (1975) p.50. Her reading is supported by the Oxford edition (1994) p.145. On commonplace, see Ernst R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York, 1953) pp.79–105, Walter J. Ong, ‘Commonplace Rhapsody: Ravisius Textor, Zwinger and Shakespeare’, in R.R. Bolgar ed., Classical Influences on European Culture, 1500–1700 (Cambridge, 1976) pp.91–126, and Lynette Hunter ed., Toward a Definition of Topos: Approaches to Anagogical Reasoning (London, 1992). De Copia, p.638. On the importance of the commonplace book method in humanist culture as an aid to composition and imitation, see R.R. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries (Cambridge, 1954) pp.270–5. Like so many of Erasmus’s pedagogic works (including the Adagia and the Parabolae sive similia), De Copia can itself be seen as a glorified commonplace book. On the play’s handling of these themes, see John Shaw, ‘Fortune and Nature in As You Like It ’, SQ 6 (1955) 45–50, and Rawdon Wilson, ‘The Way to Arden: Attitudes to Time in As You Like It’, SQ 26 (1975) 16–24. Aristotle, Topica, I.1. Cf. his Rhetoric, I.1 (‘Rhetoric is the counterpart of dialectic, for both have to do with such things as fall, in a way, within the realm of common knowledge, things that do not belong to any one science’). J.R. McNally, ‘Rudolph Agricola’s De Inventione Dialectica Libri Tres: A Translation of Selected Chapters’, Speech Monographs, 34, 4 (November, 1967) 396. This form of reasoning gained prominence in the sixteenth century as a result of the displacement of Scholastic logic by a reformulated humanist dialectic centred on the ‘places’ and concerned with forms of argument that are ‘compelling but not amenable to analysis within traditional formal logic’. It became enshrined in school and university curricula, which encouraged both spoken and written forms of disputation. See Lisa Jardine, ‘Humanistic Logic’, in Charles B. Schmitt et al. eds., The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge, 1988) pp.173–98, and Peter Mack, Renaissance Argument: Valla and Agricola in the Traditions of Rhetoric and Dialectic (Leiden, 1993). On the English context, see W.S. Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England 1500–1700 (Princeton, 1956), and Lisa Jardine, ‘The Place of Dialectical Teaching in Sixteenth-Century Cambridge’, Studies in the Renaissance 21 (1974) 31–62.



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26 The Rule of Reason, conteinyng the Arte of Logique (1551; revised ed., London, 1553), p.37r. 27 See Walter J. Ong, Ramus, Method and the Decay of Dialogue (1958; repr. Cambridge, Mass., 1958) p.100. Terence Cave has shown how Agricola’s emphasis on the topoi as a source of verbal abundance prefigures Erasmus’s approach in De Copia, by allowing subject matter to proliferate way beyond ‘the rigorous pathways of dialectic’ (The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford, 1979) pp.13–19). 28 In fact, Erasmus treats the ‘places’ only cursorily, referring the reader to standard expositions by Aristotle, Boethius, Cicero and Quintilian. Book II of De Copia gives far greater weight to analogical arguments (i.e. induction), including historical and fictional examples, similes and fables. 29 Rule of Reason, p.60v. 30 This inference is supported by the moment in III.2 where Orlando and Jacques accuse each other of deriving their wit from stale aphorisms ‘conn’d’ out of rings or painted cloths. 31 Cf. I.3.130–1, III.2.308–11, V.4.191–2. 32 See the introduction to his translation of Aristotle’s Rhetoric (London and New York, 1932) p.xxiv. 33 See Ong, Ramus, pp.118–19, and Sister Joan Marie Lechner, Renaissance Concepts of the Commonplaces (New York, 1962) pp.113–14. Ong notes how the Greek and Latin terms for wood (␯␭␩ and silva), with their connotations of an abundance of raw material that must be given form or suitably arranged, conditioned the Renaissance understanding of topos and were reflected in the titles of commonplace books, most famously Jonson’s Timber, or discoveries upon men and matter as they have flowed out of his daily readings. 34 For the hunting analogy, see Cicero De Oratore, 2.34.146–7, and Quintilian Institutio, 5.10.20–2. 35 The usual solution is to see the forest as a fusion of Shakespeare’s native Warwickshire and the traditional landscape of pastoral: see, for example, E.C. Pettet, Shakespeare and the Romance Tradition (St Albans, Herts, 1949) p.90. Recently, there has been a (misconceived, I believe) trend towards a historical literalization of Arden, which has been situated in the context of contemporary usage of the forest for pasturing (A. Stuart Daley, ‘Where are the Woods in As You Like It?’ SQ 34 (1983) 172–80), and the enclosure of woodlands (Richard Wilson, ‘ “Like the Old Robin Hood”: As You Like It and the Enclosure Riots’, SQ 43 (1992) 1–19). 36 See Francis Yates, The Art of Memory (London, 1969), and Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1990). The various rhetorical meanings of topos are, if not exactly interchangeable, closely related, since each functions as a prop to invention by enabling conceptual material to be stored and retrieved. 37 Cicero, De Oratore, 2.87.360. Cf. Ad Herennium 3.16.30. The substitution of images reviewed with the mind’s eye for the reading of texts is made explicit by Thomas Wilson: ‘The placing of these Images, is like unto wordes written … The utterance and using of them, is like unto reading’ (G.H. Mair ed., Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique, 1560 (Oxford, 1909) p.214). 38 On conventional melancholic postures, see Roy Strong, ‘The Elizabethan Malady: Melancholy in Elizabethan and Jacobean Portraiture’, Apollo 79



Notes

39

40

41 42

43 44

45

46

47 48 49 50

51

52

53

Notes (1964) 264–9; on the sobbing deer, see Michael Bath, ‘Weeping Stags and Melancholy Lovers: the Iconography of As You Like It, II.1’, Emblematica 1 (1986) 13–52. Cf. Erasmus’s virtuosic demonstration in Book II of De Copia of the techniques whereby ‘thousands of similes’ can be drawn from the topos of sailing and enlisted as illustrative proof on behalf of different and even contradictory arguments (pp.641–2). Shakespeare is invoking here the topos of ‘the book of nature’, itself closely associated with the finding of ready-made arguments (See Curtius, European Literature, pp.319–26). See Metaphors we Live By (Chicago and London, 1980), esp. chaps.6 and 12. ‘De Inventione Dialectica’, I.2, p.398. First published in 1515, this was one of the most influential manuals disseminating the new humanist dialectic and went through numerous editions in the first half of the sixteenth century. The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1978) p.53. Cf. Trousdale, p.49. On the play’s complex relationship to the pastoral tradition, see David Young, The Heart’s Forest: A Study of Shakespeare’s Pastoral Plays (New Haven and London, 1972) chap.2, Rosalie Colie, Shakespeare’s Living Art (Princeton, 1974) pp. 243–65, and Judy Z. Kronenfeld, ‘Social Rank and the Pastoral Ideals of As You Like It’, SQ 29 (1978) 333–48. See, for example, Michael Taylor, ‘As You Like It ’: the Penalty of Adam’, Critical Quarterly 15 (1973) 76. More charitably, the Oxford editor notes that the Duke is ‘gracefully stating platitudes, discoursing on a theme’ (p.125). Camille Wells Slights also sees the rebuilding of a fractured society through the creation of a new order based on the conservative values of religion, hospitality and compassion as the priority for Arden’s exiled community (Shakespeare’s Comic Commonwealths (Toronto, 1993), chap.10). Rule of Reason, p.49r. Cf. Quintilian, Institutio 5.11.36–41. See Peter V. Marinelli, Pastoral (London, 1971), especially chap.2. Cf. the February eclogue in Spenser’s Shepherds’ Calendar. In the earlier comedies, onstage audiences, if they comment at all, tend to emphasize their collective plight (as when the members of Navarre’s Academy ‘o’ereye’ each other’s betrayal of their vows of celibacy) or respond as an undifferentiated group (as in their reaction to Holofernes’s pageant). One notable exception is the debate between Theseus and Hippolyta triggered by the farcical performance of Pyramus and Thisbe. It is remarkable how often audiences in this play express an imaginative identification with what they see, even where this includes an element of critical dissent (e.g. I.2.210–15, II.7.136–39, III.4.57). The epilogue, too, directly implicates the audience in the gender roles and sexual desires explored in the play. On the sense of relativism induced by the play’s multiple perspectives, see Young, Heart’s Forest, pp.50–8, and Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love (London, 1974) pp.197–8. Humanists like Lorenzo Valla and Rudolph Agricola revived the Ciceronian link between dialectic and Academic scepticism, with its pragmatic emphasis on reasoning from and towards probabilities. See Jerrold E. Siegel, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism (Princeton, NJ, 1968)



230

54 55

56 57

58

59

60

61

231

pp.8–18. Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence and Scepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca and London, 1985) chap.1, and Lisa Jardine, ‘Lorenzo Valla: Academic Skepticism and the New Humanist Dialectic’ in M. Burneat ed., The Sceptical Tradition (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1983) pp.253–86. H. Rackham ed., Academica (London, 1913), II.7–8. Rule of Reason, p.2v. The emphasis here on the testing and analytical dissection, as opposed to the getting, of arguments reflects the Aristotelian division of dialectic into Iudicium (or Dispositio) and Inventio. Cf. Ralph Lever’s remark that the art of reasoning – which he differentiates into the ‘decerning parte’ and the ‘finding parte’ – ‘serveth to manye singular purposes. For she doth not onely teach an order to reason wittily of doubtfull matters, and to speak forceably of them … But she also yeldeth to them, that are cunning and experte in hir, a generall understanding to judge of all matters whatsoever, and to discerne what is saide or done according to reason, and what is not.’ (From the Preface to The Arte of Reason, rightly termed, Witcraft … (London, 1573) Scolar Press Facsimile 323 (Menston, England, 1972)). Ibid, p.60v. See Brian Vickers, The Artistry of Shakespeare’s Prose (London, 1968) p.206. For an in-depth analysis of Touchstone’s sophisms, see Sister Miriam Joseph, Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language (New York, 1947) p.197. Cf. Rosalind’s castigation of all forms of extremism (IV.1.5–7, IV.3.22) and the affected idiosyncrasies which lead Jaques to proclaim his uniqueness (IV.1.10–20) or prevent Phebe from submitting to her common destiny (III.5.35–63). There is, of course, a generic basis to this privileging of the community over the individual in comic convention. Cicero lists eleven ‘places’ of person: name, nature (e.g. sex, race, country, age), manner of life (e.g. education, profession), fortune, disposition, passions, interests, purposes, achievements, accidents and past sayings. Like Jaques, Wilson reorganizes the ‘places’ around the sequential ages of man (Arte of Rhetorique, pp.12–14). But it is important to note that while the characters’ affinity with stock types such as ‘Monsieur Melancholy’ and ‘Signor Love’ is repeatedly signalled in the play, their roles, for the most part selfconsciously adopted, are not reducible to the stereotypes of Jaques’s speech. The impact of the ‘places’ on dramatic characterisation in the period is discussed by Madeleine Doran in Endeavours of Art (Madison, 1954) chap.2. Cf. Spenser’s play on the word ‘courtesy’ and its derivation from ‘court’ in the opening stanza of Book VI of The Faerie Queene. In a detailed analysis of their usage in the play, Madeleine Doran notes that the original social meaning of ‘civility’ and its cognates was never wholly supplanted by their figurative (i.e. ethical) senses (‘ “Yet am I inland bred”, SQ 15’ (1964) 99–114). Taking this point further, Mary Thomas Crane argues that the play ‘reveal[s] the implication of language in the reproduction of the ideologies of class’ through its insistent use of such ambiguous or ‘shifting status terms’, which legitimise the exclusion of the lower classes from the possibility of social mobility on grounds of their innate moral inferiority (‘Linguistic Change, Theatrical Practice, and Ideologies of Status in As You Like It’, ELR 17 (1997) 361–92). Several critics have commented on the importance of this ‘idealized male alliance’, and its sidelining of the romantic plot; see esp. Peter Erickson,



Notes

62

63

64 65

66 67

2

Notes Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare’s Drama (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1985), chap.1. By contrast, William Kerrigan argues that female friendship takes precedence over male rivalry (‘Female Friends and Fraternal Enemies in As You Like It’, in Valeria Finucci and Regina Schwartz eds, Desire in the Renaissance Psychoanalysis and Literature (Princeton, 1994) pp.184–203). ‘ “The Place of a Brother” in As You Like It: Social Process and Comic Form’, SQ 32 (1981), repr. in Ivo Kamps ed., Materialist Shakespeare: A History (London and New York, 1995) pp.52–3. Montrose argues that the function of Duke Senior’s masculine community is to reconcile the social tensions created by the laws of primogeniture with the ideal of ‘spiritual fraternity’. Throughout the play, in fact, issues of kinship / brotherhood are closely enmeshed with the question of status, from Orlando’s complaint that Oliver ‘bars [him] the place of a brother’ by denying him the education due to a gentleman (I.1.17) to Duke Senior’s final promise that his ‘brothers in exile’ will share in his restored fortune ‘according to the measure of their states’ (V.4.167–70). Jean Howard comments perceptively on the ‘playful masquerade’ in which Rosalind ‘acts out the parts scripted for women by her culture’, revealing their limitations in the process (‘Cross-dressing, the Theatre, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England’, SQ 39 (1988) 434–5). See, for example, Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, p.233, and Nancy K. Hayles, ‘Sexual Disguise in As You Like It and Twelfth Night’, SS 32 (1979) 65. Catherine Belsey argues that the sexual ambiguities generated by the transvestite disguise of Shakespeare’s comic heroines are used to explore the possibility of ‘speak[ing] from a position that is not that of a full, unified gendered subject’, and so undoing an oppressive system of sexual differences (‘Disrupting Sexual Difference: Meaning and Gender in the Comedies’, in John Drakakis ed., Alternative Shakespeares (London, 1985) p.180). See also Phyllis Rackin on androgyny as a metaphor for social/gender transgression (‘Androgyny, Mimesis and the Marriage of the Boy Heroine on the English Renaissance Stage’, in Elaine Showalter ed., Speaking of Gender (London, 1989) pp.113–33). See Maura Slattery Kuhn, ‘Much Virtue in If’, SQ 28 (1977) 40–50. ‘The Heart’s Forest’, p.46. In his Dialecticae disputationes, Valla identifies a sliding scale of probability in ratiocination, based on premises that may be verum, verisimile, possibile or impossibile (Jardine, ‘Lorenzo Valla’, p.269). Dialectical arguments, hypothetical modes of reasoning and poetic fictions are similarly treated as graduated parts of a single spectrum in As You Like It.

English Beholders and the Art of Perspective

01 Alberti makes great play of the originality of his approach. However, it is generally agreed that the principles of linear perspective were first demonstrated by Brunelleschi c.1413 with two panels depicting the Florentine Baptistry and the Palazzo de’ Signori (though the precise technique used is still a matter for conjecture), while the credit of putting these into artistically usable form belongs to Alberti. Artists like Masaccio and Donatello



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03 04

05

06

07

08

09 10

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were using perspective more or less correctly prior to the completion of De Pictura in 1435 (it was not printed until 1540). The secondary literature on perspective is voluminous. My discussion of this artistic device is chiefly indebted to the following studies: Erwin Panofsky, ‘Die Perspektive als “symbolische Form”’ (Berlin, 1927), trans. Christopher S. Wood (New York, 1991); John White, The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space (1957; revised ed., London, 1967); Jean Gadol, Leon Battista Alberti: Universal Man of the Early Renaissance (Chicago and London, 1969); Samuel Edgerton Jr., The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective (New York, 1975); and Martin Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven and London, 1990). For further discussion of this point, see Chapter 3. The belief that a perspective painting will appear false unless viewed from a specified viewpoint has been challenged by perceptual psychologists, who have shown that the resulting distortions are minimised by the ‘robustness’ of perspective. See Michael Kubovy, The Psychology of Perspective and Renaissance Art (Cambridge, 1986) chap.4. Piero’s De Prospectiva pingendi, written c.1474, was not printed until 1899. For an authoritative account of the theoretical development of linear perspective, see Kemp’s Science of Art. The scientific development of this technique owed most to Leonardo, who conducted a detailed study of its effects in both his painting and his writings. See the entry on non-linear perspective, in Jane Turner ed., The Grove Dictionary of Art (London, 1996), XXIV, 491–4. Dürer’s ‘nahere Weg’ (‘shorter way’) of foreshortening objects explained in his Underweyssung der Messung (1525) appears to combine elements of the ‘tiers points’ method with the principles of the costruzione leggitima, which he had probably mastered as a result of travelling to Bologna in 1506 to receive instruction in the ‘secret’ art of perspective (see Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (1943; revised edn, London, 1945) I, 247–53). The ‘tiers point’ method was first codified by the French ecclesiastic, Jean Pelerin (‘Viator’) in his De artificiali perspectiva (Toul, 1505). On the ‘bi-focal’ method from which the ‘tier points’ system derives and its survival in Gauricus’s De Sculptura, published a year before Viator’s handbook, see Robert Klein, ‘Pomponius Gauricus on Perspective’, in Form and Meaning: Essays on the Renaissance and Modern Art, trans. Madeline Jay and Leon Wieseltier (New York, 1970) pp.102–28. See Timothy A. Kitao, ‘Prejudice in Perspective: A Study of Vignola’s Perspective Treatise’, Art Bulletin 44 (1962) 173–94. The non-prescriptive nature of Alberti’s rules has been stressed by historians of perspective (see, for example, Edgerton, Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective, p.50, Kubovy, Psychology of Perspective, p.121, and Kemp, Science of Art, pp.23–4). See Roy Strong, Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals 1450–1650 (Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, 1984) pp.32–5. The standard work on anamorphosis is Jurgis Baltrusaitis’s Anamorphoses ou magie artificielle des effets merveilleux (Paris, 1969), trans. W.J. Strachan as Anamorphic Art (Cambridge, 1977). For a valuable study of its impact on



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Notes English writers, see Gilman’s Curious Perspective (New Haven and London, 1978). The epistemological implications of anamorphic devices are examined more fully in Chapter 5. La Prattica della perspettiva, p.159. Martin Jay, for example, argues that ‘the scopic regime of modernity may best be understood as a contested terrain, rather than a harmoniously integrated complex of visual theories and practices’, one comprised of different ‘visual subcultures’ (‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity’, in Hal Foster ed., Vision and Visuality (Seattle, 1988) p.4). See The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago, 1983) chaps.2 and 4. Alpers also suggests that this spatial mode correlates with a ‘special northern tradition of perspective construction’ – Viator’s ‘tier points’ method – where the viewpoint is located on the actual picture plane instead of in front of it (pp.53–8). Science of Art, p.53. Cf. Panofsky’s assertion that ‘the Renaissance would interpret the meaning of perspective entirely differently from the Baroque, and Italy entirely differently from the North’ (Perspective as Symbolic Form, pp.68–9). For Panofsky (though not for Kemp) such cultural variations underline the conventional status of perspective. See, for example, Alice Friedman, ‘Did England Have a Renaissance? Classical and Anticlassical Themes in Elizabethan Culture’, in Susan J. Barnes and Walter S. Melion eds, Cultural Differentiation and Cultural Identity in the Visual Arts, Studies in the History of Art 27 (1989) 95–111. See, for example, Eric Mercer, English Art 1553–1625 (Oxford, 1962) pp.152–4. See especially Strong’s The English Icon: Elizabethan and Jacobean Portraiture (London, 1969). See Strong, English Icon; John Buxton, Elizabethan Taste (London, 1963) chap.3; and David Piper, ‘Tudor and Early Stuart Painting’, in Piper ed., The Genius of British Painting (London, 1975) pp.62–110. Literature and the Visual Arts in Tudor England (Athens, Ga. and London, 1990) p.30. Cf. Mercer, English Art 1553–1625, pp.157, 171. Panofsky, Albrecht Dürer, I, 247. Cited by Lucy Gent in Albion’s Classicism: The Visual Arts in Britain, 1550–1660 (New Haven and London, 1995), p.383. R.K.R. Thornton and T.G.S. Cain eds, A Treatise Concerning the Arte of Limning (Ashington, Northumberland, 1981) pp.85–7. All future page references in the text are to this edition. Given the pride in his craftsmanship, befitting a member of the Goldsmiths’ Company, which mingles with Hilliard’s pretensions to a gentility based on artistic talent in his Arte of Limning (l.3) it is unsurprising that the nearest equivalent to this passage is to be found in Cennino Cennini’s Il Libro dell’arte (c.1396), a manual codifying Trecento workshop practices. According to Cennini, ‘the moldings which you make at the top of the building should slant downward from the edge next to the roof; the molding in the middle of the building … must be quite level and even; the molding at the base of the building must slant upward’ (trans. Daniel V. Thompson, Jr., as The Craftsman’s Handbook (1933, repr. New York, 1960) p.57). Hilliard was in France from 1576–8/9. Although allusions to Valois court art are discernible in his later work, the visit failed to bring about any



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appreciable change in his style (see Roy Strong, The English Renaissance Miniature (London, 1983) p.81). This sense of personal contact can be seen as a constitutive feature of the miniature, which was usually intended as a love token. In the Arte of Limning, Hilliard stresses the special intimacy surrounding the making of the miniature and even asserts that the limner can only properly fulfil his task if he experiences something of the desire his image is meant to excite in the beholder. In short, he is more concerned with the affective aspects of the interaction between image and beholder than with the spatial, in contrast to Alberti who emphasises both. Rule of Art, p.131. By contrast, the only significant Italian in-put was the brief visit of Federico Zuccaro to England in 1575. But even these collectors appreciated paintings more as symbols of political or familial status, than for their aesthetic value (Buxton, Elizabethan Taste, pp.96–106). This situation only began to change in the early Jacobean period (see Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558–1641 (Oxford, 1965) pp.710–22). For a survey of picture-owning habits among the gentry and mercantile classes, see Susan Foister, ‘Paintings and other works of art in sixteenth-century English inventories’, Burlington Magazine, 123 (1981) 273–82. A Tracte containing the Artes of curious Paintinge, Carvinge & Buildinge (Oxford, 1598), The English Experience Facsimile 171 (Amsterdam and New York, 1969), Prefatory epistle to the ‘Ingenuous Reader’ [v] v. All future page references in the text are to this edition. Art and Decoration in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The Influence of Continental Prints, 1558–1625 (New Haven and London, 1997) p.14. Picture and Poetry, 1560–1620: Relations between Literature and the Visual Arts in the English Renaissance (Leamington Spa, 1981) pp.22–7. The Elements of Geometrie of the most auncient Philosopher Euclide of Megara. Faithfully (now first) translated into the Englishe toung, by H. Billingsley … With a very fruitfull Praeface made by M.I. Dee … (London, 1570) d.ii, v. Leonard Digges’s popular manual on mensuration and quantity surveying, Pantometria (1591), for example, argues that a knowledge of longimetra – the science of calculating distances on the basis of angles and sight lines – is useful for all men, but ‘for a Gentleman especially that professeth the warres, aswell for discoveries made by Sea, as Fortification, placing of Campes, and conducting of Armies on the lande, how necessaree it is to bee able exactly to describe the true Plattes, Symetrie and proportion of Fortes, Campes, Townes … Coasts and Harboroughes, I thinke there are none so unskilfull, but will confesse these Geometricall mensurations most requisite’ (‘Preface to the Reader’). In fact geometry and optics were fundamental to many of the advances made in the practical sciences by English ‘mechaniciens’ during this period (see Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited (Oxford, 1997) chap.1). See the useful survey of books on art, perspective and architecture in English Renaissance libraries printed as an appendix to Gent’s Picture and Poetry. Poly-Olbion, Song 26, ll.87–92, in John Buxton ed., Poems of Michael Drayton (London, 1953), II, 674.



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37 See Roy Strong, Henry Prince of Wales and England’s Lost Renaissance (London, 1986) pp.86–137, 184–219, and R. Malcolm Smuts, Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England (Philadelphia, 1987) esp. pp.149–54. According to Smuts, a growing aesthetic appreciation went hand in hand with an informed curiosity about practical mechanics and experimental science in Stuart court circles. His findings are confirmed by Timothy Wilks, who notes that in Prince Henry’s entourage these interests were often combined with a respect for Italian culture (‘The Court Culture of Prince Henry and his Circle’, unpublished DPhil dissertation, Oxford University, 1987). 38 Although drawing was generally deemed to be more respectable than painting because of its practical utility, and several Tudor educationalists (including Elyot and Mulcaster) had recommended that it be taught, their views went largely unheeded. This situation only began to be rectified with the publication of Henry Peacham’s Art of Drawing (see below). 39 On De Caus’s contribution to the development of anamorphic perspective and catoptrics, see Baltrusaitis, Anamorphic Art, chap.3. For his theory of shadow projection, see Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, ‘The Perspective of Shadows: The History of the theory of Shadow Projection’, in The Mastery of Nature: Aspects of Art, Science and Humanism in the Renaissance (Princeton, 1993) pp.49–78. 40 See F.J. Levy, ‘Henry Peacham and the Art of Drawing’, JWCI (1974) 174–90. 41 The first Booke of Architecture, made by Sebastian Serly … Translated out of Italian into Dutch, and out of Dutch into English (London, 1611), Dedicatory epistle. 42 Ibid, epistle ‘To the Lovers of Architecture’. 43 In his epistle to the reader, Haydocke similarly acknowledges the ‘difficulty and strangenesse of the matter it selfe’, and justifies his labours as being for the ‘common good’ through ‘the increase of the knowledge of the Arte’, the lamentable state of which in his native land is responsible for ‘most lame, disproportioned and unseemelie Counterfeites [i.e. portraits]’ (Tracte, [iv] v.–[v] v.). 44 Quoted from the opening paragraphs to Books I and II. 45 The Art of Drawing with the Pen, and limming in water colours … (London, 1606) p.28. All future page references in the text are to this edition unless otherwise specified. 46 This and other such references to drawing according to an ‘Idea’ in the mind have sometimes been taken to carry the full conceptual and Neoplatonizing force of the Italian word disegno, but probably only refer to the English practice of doing without a ‘pattern’ or live model (cp. Arte of Limning, p.79). On English difficulties with this concept, see Michael Baxandall, ‘English disegno’, in Edward Chaney and Peter Mack eds, England and the Continental Renaissance (Woodbridge, 1990) pp.203–14. 47 Although little is known for sure about Oliver’s early movements, he is conjectured to have been working in France in the 1570s before journeying north via Flanders to England c.1587. He was certainly in Venice in 1596, and possibly made another visit to Italy later. Inigo Jones is believed to have travelled around France, Italy and Germany in the period 1598–1603. He later accompanied Lord and Lady Arundel on their continental tour of 1613–14. For biographical details, see Strong, English Renaissance Miniature;



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55 56 57

58 59

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Mary Edmond, Hilliard and Oliver: The Lives and Works of Two Great Miniaturists (London, 1983); and John Harris et al., eds, The King’s Arcadia: Inigo Jones and the Stuart Court (London, 1983). Strong, English Renaissance Miniature, p.143. See Jill Finsten, Isaac Oliver: Art at the Courts of Elizabeth I and James I (New York and London, 1981) pp.140–1. The phrase is used in Jones’s masque Tempe Restored (1632), produced in collaboration with Aurelian Townshend. The Works of Ben Jonson, eds C.H. Herford and P.E. Simpson (Oxford, 1947) VII, 171–2. The sources of Jones’s stagecraft are unclear. Harris et al. conclude that ‘although [he] may at some stage have had access abroad to a “picture frame stage” of the type evolved for the intermezzi of 1589 … his stage mechanics were largely self-invented’ (King’s Arcadia, pp.83–4). What probably mattered most to Jones was the link with Vitruvius, whose cryptic references to the use of perspective and scenic machines on the antique stage (V.6.8–9; X, Preface) lent this a classical sanction, emphasised by Barbaro, Serlio and other Italian theorists who called perspective ‘scenographia’ after Vitruvius. Strong, English Icon, p.55. The Stage Designs of Inigo Jones: the European Context (Cambridge, 1995) pp.13–14. Peacock argues that it was Jones, rather than Oliver, who inducted the English public into the conventions of linear perspective (p.44). Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1973) I, 11. Ibid, I, 12. This reinterpretive process is especially conspicuous in architectural contexts where classical or Italianate motifs were freely combined with vernacular idioms. See, for example, Friedman, ‘Did England Have a Renaissance?’, and Timothy Mowl, Elizabethan and Jacobean Style (London, 1993) chaps.4 and 6. See Gent ed., Albion’s Classicism, especially the essays by Christy Anderson, Ellen Chirelstein and Lucy Gent. Evett, Literature and the Visual Arts, p.183 (cf. Mercer, English Art 1553–1625, pp.179–80). Evett views this burgeoning interest in the naturalistic description of landscape among both writers and artists as evidence of ‘a change in the visual consciousness of spatial relationships taking place in England around the turn of the seventeenth [sic] century’. The first known reference to ‘landskip’ occurs in Angel Day’s English Secretarie (1586). Other early English examples are found in Haydocke’s translation of Lomazzo; Jonson’s description of the set for The Masque of Blacknesse (initially concealed by a curtain depicting ‘a Landtschap consisting of small woods, and here and there a void filled with huntings’); and Drayton’s Barrons Wars (1603) and Poly-Olbion (1612). For further references, see Henry V.S. and Margaret S. Ogden, English Taste in Landscape in the Seventeenth Century (Michigan, 1955) chaps.1–4. Art of Drawing, p.28. This caveat is significantly modified in the 1612 edition, entitled Graphice or The Gentleman’s Exercise, where ‘if’ is substituted for ‘seldome’ (p.40). Peacham’s increased appreciation of landscape for its own sake, is also reflected in the addition of chapters on ‘the fairest and most beautifull Landtskips in the world’ and ‘the Graces of Landtskip’. In



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Notes c.1650, Edward Norgate refers to the treatment of landscape as a distinct genre as ‘an Invencon of these later times’ (Miniatura or The Art of Limning ed., Martin Hardie (Oxford, 1919) p.45). See ‘Lady Elizabeth Pope: The Heraldic Body’, in Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn eds, Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure in English Culture c.1540–1660 (London, 1990) pp.51–6. Landscapes often formed part of the scenic designs for the Stuart court masques. Of Flemish origins, Gheeraerts the Younger grew up in London where his father Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder, also a painter, had settled c.1568. In the 1590s he experimented with landscape settings in a number of compositions, including a portrait of the Earl of Essex in front of a burning Cadiz (1596). On the complex political context of the portrait and Lee’s self-imaging, see the helpful entry in the exhibition catalogue, Dynasties: Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England 1530–1630, ed. Karen Hearn (London, 1995) p.176. See Gent, Picture and Poetry, pp.29–30. This habit of treating the visual image as a receptacle for discursive meanings did, however, predispose the English to appreciate the rhetorical aspects of the new art theory emanating from Italy (see Chapter 3). It will be clear that I disagree with Roland Mushat Frye, who maintains (wrongly) that Shakespeare’s references to perspective all date from the post-Elizabethan era, in support of his thesis that the latter should be classified as a ‘great artistic conservative’, whose vision parallels that of late Tudor artists who ‘either disregarded unified perspective, or treated it minimally and with pervasive inconsistency’ (‘Ways of Seeing in Shakespearean Drama and Elizabethan Painting’, SQ 31 (1980) 323–42).

Ut Pictura Poesis and the Rhetoric of Perspective

01 This discursive tradition has been extensively discussed. See especially Hagstrum, The Sister Arts; Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis; Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators; Gerard Le Coat, The Rhetoric of the Arts (Berne and Frankfurt, 1975); Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric, chap.7; and Hulse, Rule in Art. 02 On the rhetoricization of perspective, see Klein, ‘Pomponius Gauricus on Perspective’, and Robert Klein and Henri Zerner eds, Italian Art 1500–1600: Sources and Documents (1966, repr. Evanston, Illinois, 1989) pp.xii–xiii. 03 Although both Vitruvius’s De Architectura and the chapter on painting in Pliny’s Natural History made tantalizing references to perspective, no exposition of it as a coherent representational system survived from antiquity. 04 On the installation of this humanistic curriculum, see esp. Baldwin, Small Latine and Lesse Greeke; Bolgar, Classical Heritage, chaps.7 and 8; and Grafton and Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities. 05 For biographical details, see Karl Joseph Höltgen, ‘Richard Haydocke: Translator, Engraver and Physician’, The Library, fifth series, 33 (1978) 15–32. 06 The main additions made by Haydocke include the epistle to the reader, marginal glosses on Lomazzo’s text, ‘A Briefe Censure of the Booke of Colours’ at the end of Book III, followed by an indictment of cosmetics (still commonly regarded in England as a form of painting) for jeopardizing



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women’s morality and health, and 13 engravings by his own hand, based mostly on Dürer or Serlio. See Frederick Hard, ‘Richard Haydocke and Alexander Browne: Two halfforgotten writers on the art of painting’ PMLA 55 (1940) 727–41, and Alistair Moffat, ‘Lomazzo’s Treatises in England in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries’ (unpublished MPhil dissertation, University of London, 1975). The latter points out that hitherto English manuals for painters had been almost entirely technical, consisting of recipes for colours and practical precepts, so confirming the received view of painting as a lowly handicraft. Tracte, p.14. For the Italian text, see Roberto Paolo Ciardi, Gian Paolo Lomazzo: Scritte sulle arti (Florence, 1974) II, 26. Ibid, pp.21–2. For Italian text, see Scritti, II, 34. De Architectura, III.3.11–13, III.5.9, VI.2.1–5. Prior to Lomazzo these optical adjustments had been discussed by, among others, Dürer (1525), Serlio (1545) and Barbaro (1559). See Thomas Frangenberg, ‘Optical correction in sixteenth-century theory and practice’, Renaissance Studies, 7, 1 (March, 1993) 207–28. See Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500–1900 (New Haven and London, 1981) pp.136–41. Tracte, p.22. For the Italian text, see Scritti, II, 35. As I mentioned in Chapter 2, this revaluation took place concurrently in artistic practice and theory. See Antony Blunt, Artistic Theory in Italy, 1450–1660 (1940; repr. Oxford, 1987), chaps.1 and 2, and Martin Kemp’s introduction to De Pictura. Martin Kemp ed., Leonardo on Painting (New Haven and London, 1989) p.52. All future page references in the text are to this edition. Cf. Alberti’s insistence on the need to ‘explain the art of painting from the basic principles of nature’ (On Painting, p.37). See Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis, pp.9–16, and Erwin Panofksy, Idea: A Concept in Art Theory, trans. Joseph J.S. Peake (Columbia, 1968) p.48. T.S. Dorsch, Classical Literary Criticism (London, 1965) p. 79. Leonardo’s notebooks date from 1489 to 1518. Their seminal contribution to defining the role of the fantasia in artistic production is discussed by Martin Kemp in ‘From “Mimesis” to “Fantasia”: the Quattrocento Vocabulary of Creation, Inspiration and Genius in the Visual Arts’, Viator 8 (1977) 347–98. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, V.1.16, and Antony and Cleopatra, V.2.98. The impact of this theorising of the artistic imagination on Shakespeare’s understanding of perceptual and creative processes is examined further in Chapter 6. From Primo libro del trattato delle perfette proporzioni … (Florence, 1567) XVI, trans. Klein and Zerner in Italian Art 1500–1600, pp.182–4. For the Italian text, see Paola Barocchi ed. Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento, Fra Manierismo e Controriforma (Bari, 1960) I, 264–7. Interestingly, Danti anticipates Sidney’s discussion of poetic / pictorial mimesis in the Apology (see below) by assimilating the two types of imitation to the Aristotelian distinction between history and poetry, and associating ‘imitare’, things ‘as they should be seen’, with portraiture. David Summers associates this premium on fantastic invention with Michelangelo and his followers, who, he argues, situated themselves within



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Notes a ‘sophistic’ tradition that identified painting with poetry in point of licence, in contrast to the Ciceronian tradition endorsed by Alberti, which subjected invention to reason and moderation (Michelangelo and the Language of Art (Princeton, 1981) chaps.7 and 14). L’idea de’ pittori, scultori et architetti (Turin, 1607) I.7, trans. Panofsky, Idea, p.88. On Zuccaro’s aesthetic theories, see also David Summers, The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics (Cambridge, 1987) pp.283–308. Zuccaro, L’Idea, II.6, trans. Panofsky, Idea, p.78. Lives of the Artists, trans. George Bull (1965; repr. London, 1987) I, 250. For the Italian text, see Vasari–Milanesi, IV, 9. As Antony Blunt pointed out long ago, the implication that producing a semblance of naturalness and ease is the supreme accomplishment of art derives from Castiglione’s courtly ethic of sprezzatura (Artistic Theory pp.97–8). What he neglected to mention (but Castiglione does not) is that this principle in turn is based on a rhetorical commonplace (see, for example, Cicero, De Oratore, II.1.4–5 and Quintilian, Institutio, VIII, Pr.). An ideal of artful simplicity was regularly prescribed for both painting and poetry (see Roskill, Dolce’s ‘Aretino’ p.157). Those who have taken the former view include E.H. Gombrich, ‘The “What” and “How”: Perspective Representation and the Phenomenal World’, in Richard Rudner and Israel Scheffler eds, Logic and Art: Essays in Honour of Nelson Goodman (Indianapolis, 1972) 129–49. Among those who, following Panofsky’s lead (see below), have argued for the conventionality of perspective are Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis, 1968); Edgerton, Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective, pp.153–65; and Max Wartofsky, ‘Visual Scenarios: The Role of Representation in Visual Perception’, in Margaret Hagen ed., The Perception of Pictures (London and New York, 1980) II, 131–52. I am inclined to agree with Clark Hulse that ‘accurate or not, perspective is in any event a construction of the human mind and not something given by nature’ (Rule of Art, p.53). Cf. Leonardo’s assertion that ‘that painting is most praiseworthy that has the most similarity to the thing reproduced’ (cited by Panofsky, Idea, p.47). Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (1983; repr. London, 1991) esp. chap.1. Hulse, Rule of Art, p.59. For an alternative view, see Alpers, Art of Describing, p.42. This is not to confuse Bryson’s brand of cultural semiotics with Panofskian iconology, which has been criticised from a post-structuralist standpoint for inattention to the materiality of the sign and an over emphasis on the fixity of its meaning. For my purposes, however, both offer useful ways of thinking about perspectival images as a rhetorical form, capable of expressing culturally specific meanings. Perspective as symbolic form, pp.28–33. Ibid, p.41. On the indebtedness of this essay to Cassirer’s neo-Kantian philosophy of symbolic forms, see Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (Ithaca and London, 1984) chap.5. These discrepancies were studied in particular by Leonardo, who experimented with ways of bringing the perspectival image into closer alignment with its optical counterpart (see Kemp, Science of Art, pp.44–52).



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35 On the cultivation of these qualities by Mannerist artists, see John Shearman, Mannerism (London, 1967), and S.J. Freedberg, ‘Observations on the Painting of the Maniera’, Art Bulletin 47 (1965) 187–97. For a useful critical survey of competing definitions of Mannerism, see John M. Steadman, Redefining a Period Style (Pittsburgh, 1990) chap.5. 36 Tracte, pp.25–6. Haydocke’s version adheres particularly closely to the Italian text at this point (see Scritti, II, 38–9). 37 I am concerned here with mimesis not imitatio, i.e. with the imitation of nature rather than other texts. However, it should be noted that many of the questions raised by sixteenth-century debates over what form of imitatio should be practised were also of concern to artists and are not irrelevant to the issues discussed in this chapter. In particular, the dissatisfaction of some sixteenth-century painters with mere fidelity to nature parallels the rejection by Erasmus and others of the slavish, rule-bound adherence to one’s literary model advocated by the Ciceronians in favour of a more independent recreation of it. (See Thomas Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven and London, 1982) chap.5). 38 See Rosemund Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery (Chicago and London, 1947) Part I. 39 Cf. John Hoskins’s observation that ‘metaphor is pleasant because it enricheth our knowledge with two things at once, with the truth and with similitude’ (Directions for Speech and Style, ed. Hoyt H. Hudson (Princeton, 1935) p.8). 40 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, eds Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge, 1936) p.178. All future page references in the text are to this edition. Puttenham’s phrasing is remarkably close to that used in the Tracte, but cf. Ad Herennium, IV.34.45, and Quintilian, Institutio, VIII.6.4–6. 41 Lomazzo calls attention to this paradox in his paragone of painting and sculpture. Likeness, he argues, does not reside in ‘quantity’ (i.e. proportion), which may be common to many human beings, but rather in the ‘particularizing qualities’ (produced by colour in painting) that distinguish them from one another. Hence sculpture, though it reproduces exactly the dimensions of its object, lags behind painting in ‘precise imitation of the life’: ‘For the carvers intent is onely to give the selfsame quantity to his figure, which his naturall patterne hath, so that his speciall purpose is to make the figure equall to the life, which cannot therefore be saied to be perfectly like thereunto’, whereas the painter with his pigments gives ‘the true similitude and proper resemblance to his counterfeits’ (p.18). 42 Hoskins, Directions, p.8. 43 Tracte, pp.25–6. Cf. Scritti, II, 38–9. 44 Apart from drawing on Panofsky’s analysis of perspective as a ‘symbolic form’, my reading of this passage has been assisted by Barthes’s structural analysis of the image. In his essay ‘The Rhetoric of the Image’, Roland Barthes distinguishes between the ‘literal’ or denotative meaning of the image (i.e. its representation of visual objects) and its culturally assigned ‘symbolic’ or connotative meaning (Image–Music–Text, trans. Stephen Heath (Glasgow, 1977) pp.32–51). In stressing the power of the image to stir up feelings of piety/civic virtue, Lomazzo privileges the symbolic over its literal meaning.



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45 Karl Höltgen notes that this sanctioning of images for ‘civill use’ is in keeping with mainstream Protestant opinion. See ‘The English Reformation and Some Jacobean Writers on Art’ in Ulrich Broich et al., eds, Functions of Literature: Essays Presented to Erwin Wolff on his Sixtieth Birthday (Tübingen, 1984) p.143. 46 The same was true of many sixteenth–century Italian critics. (See, for example, Girolamo Fracastorius, Naugerius, sive de Poetica Dialogus, trans. Ruth Kelso, University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature 9, 3 (1924) pp.59–60, and, for a more critical attitude to poetic-pictorial comparisons, Andrew Bongiorno ed., Castelvetro on the Art of Poetry (Binghamton, New York, 1984) pp.9, 46–8). The difference is that in England, lacking a fully fledged art theory, ut pictura analogizing tended to flow one way – from poetry to painting. 47 Herford and Simpson eds, Works, VIII, 609. 48 Prefatory epistle to Ovid’s Banquet of Sence (London, 1595). 49 On Sidney’s interest in the visual arts, see Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘Sidney and Titian’, in English Renaissance Studies: Presented to Dame Helen Gardner in Honour of her Seventieth Birthday (Oxford, 1980) pp.1–11, and Norman K. Farmer Jr., Poets and the Visual Arts in Renaissance England (Austin, Texas, 1984) chap.1. 50 Geoffrey Shepherd ed., An Apology for Poetry (Manchester, 1973) p.66. This theory has been dismissed by D.H. Craig on the grounds that the Apology predates the publication of Lomazzo’s and Zuccaro’s treatises and diverges from them in philosophical emphasis (‘A Hybrid Growth: Sidney’s Theory of Poetry in An Apology for Poetry’, in Arthur F. Kinney ed., Essential Articles for the Study of Sir Philip Sidney (Hamden, Connecticut, 1986) pp.113–34). But Mannerist theories were in general circulation by the end of the Cinquecento, and the possibility that Sidney knew and was influenced by them does not depend on showing a specific debt to these texts. 51 Shepherd ed., Apology, p.102. All future page references in the text are to this edition. 52 As S.K. Heninger Jr. notes, the quasi-pictorial vividness Sidney praises had long been enjoined on the writer through his use of the rhetorical quality of enargia (‘Speaking Pictures: Sidney’s Rapprochement between Poetry and Painting’, in Gary Waller and Michael Moore eds, Sir Philip Sidney and the Interpretation of Renaissance Culture (London, 1984) pp.13–14). Nevertheless, Sidney works his pictorial analogies unusually hard, seeming at times to forget that poetry is itself a ‘wordish description’. 53 It has been persuasively argued that the iconic language of the emblem or impresa, combining words and images, provided the main link between literature and the visual arts in England. See especially Michael Leslie, ‘The Dialogue between Bodies and Souls: Pictures and Poesy in the English Renaissance’, Word and Image 1 (1985) 16–30. 54 How emblems related to Protestant ideology and aesthetics is a vexed question (see Michael Bath, Speaking Pictures: English Emblem Books and Renaissance Culture (London and New York, 1994) pp. 200–1). However, it may legitimately be surmised that one reason why English culture embraced a theory of images which emphasized their semantic content was that it neutralized the ever-present dangers of idolatry.



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55 For the former commonplace see, for example, The Rape of Lucrece, ll.1373–86; the Induction to The Taming of the Shrew, ll.47–58; The Merchant of Venice, III.2.114–29; and The Winter’s Tale, V.3.60–70. For the latter see, for example, Venus and Adonis, ll.289–94, and Antony and Cleopatra, II.2.204. Cf. Cymbeline, II.4.80–85. Shakespeare’s elaboration of these twin topoi, and the sceptical inflection sometimes given to them in the process, are discussed by Leo Salinger in ‘Shakespeare and the Italian Concept of “Art”’ in his Dramatic Form in Shakespeare and the Jacobeans (Cambridge, 1986). 56 Cf. William Heckscher’s comment that ‘wherever we observe Shakespeare observing the figurative arts, it is as if he wanted us to become witnesses to a paragone between poesis and pictura from which poesis would emerge as the predictable winner’ (‘Shakespeare in his Relationship to the Visual Arts: A Study in Paradox’, RORD 13–14 (1970–1) 8). 57 This power is perhaps more theoretical than actual, for David Bevington has shown how systematically Shakespeare exposes the limitations of spectacle, using the dramatic context to undercut its putative powers of expression and persuasion (Action is Eloquence: Shakespeare’s Language of Gesture (Cambridge, Mass., 1984) pp.17–22). My analysis of the use of visual imagery in Hamlet and The Tempest supports his conclusions. 58 On the possible indebtedness of this scene to Italian art theory, see Antony Blunt, ‘An Echo of the “Paragone” in Shakespeare’, JWCI 2 (1938–9) 260–2. 59 Tracte, p.15. For the Italian text, see Scritti, II, 27. 60 On the paradoxes of pictorial illusion see Summers, Michelangelo, chap.2. 61 The Republic, 597b–598c. Plato goes on to recommend measuring, counting and weighing as a prophylactic against sensory illusions, as, for example, when the apparent size of an object varies according to its distance from the eye or a stick looks bent in the water (602c–e). Earlier, in Book VIII, he argued that a philosopher’s training should include the mathematical sciences because they direct the mind away from appearances towards intelligible reality and a knowledge of the eternal forms. 62 The Sophist, 234–7. See John Warrington, trans. Parmenides, Theaitetos, Sophist, Statesman, (London, 1961) pp.178–81. 63 See ibid, and cf. Plato’s Gorgias, 454–63. On Plato’s quarrel with the Sophists, see Vickers, In Defence, chap.2. 64 Plato is curiously omitted from Claudio Guillen’s otherwise excellent survey of the development of perspective as a cognitive trope (‘On the Concept and Metaphor of Perspective, in Stephen G. Nichols Jnr. and Richard B. Vowles, eds, Comparatists at Work (Waltham, Mass. and London, 1968) pp.28–90). Modern usages of this trope, by contrast with Plato’s, tend to be positive; we talk about ‘seeing things in perspective’ (i.e. in their proper context, as they really are) and assert the merits of our own ‘point of view’. 65 See, for example, Isidore of Seville’s assertion that painting ‘is a feigned image, not truth … when they [pictures] strive to make things more real, they bring forth falsehood’ (Etymologiae, 19.16, cited in Summers, Michelangelo, p.48). 66 A key component of ut pictura discourse, the term ‘colours’ acquired connotations of deceitfulness and empty superficiality that only served to reinforce the mimetic arts’ shared reputation for mendacity. See Wesley Trimpi, ‘The Meaning of Horace’s Ut Pictura Poesis’, JWCI 36 (1973) 1–34.



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67 Of the Vanitie and Uncertaintie of the Artes and Sciences, trans. James Sanford (London, 1569) p.19v. 68 Ibid, p.35r. 69 This omission may also be explained by the fact that Alberti, like Leonardo, positioned himself with an Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition that (in contrast to the Platonic) valued the senses, especially sight, as a reliable source of knowledge of the material world – hence his adoption of a radiant, winged eye as his impresa. 70 Cf. Giovan Battista Armenini on relievo: ‘Thus, with reason, the flat surface is altered admirably and there is made to appear that which in effect is not [‘quello che in effetto non e’]’. (De’ veri precetti della pittura (Ravenna, 1587) I.5, trans. Edward J. Olszewski as On the True Precepts of the Art of Painting (New York, 1977) p.116). 71 Dolce’s ‘Aretino’, pp.148–9. Cf. Vasari-Milanesi, I, 177–8. 72 Such admiration was not universal, of course, even in Italy where, in the wake of the Counter-Reformation, Plato’s arguments were revived along with Horace’s strictures in an attempt to chasten pictorial licence, if not prescribe it completely. 73 Cf. Virginia Cox ed., The Book of the Courtier (London, 1994) pp.88–9. Hilliard and Peacham both gestured towards the paragone, but the closest parallel is found – predictably given his long residency in Italy and intimate knowledge of its art – in Sir Henry Wotton’s Elements of Architecture (London, 1624). ‘An excellent Piece of Painting’, he writes, ‘is to my judgement the more admirable Object, because it comes neere an Artificiall Miracle; to make diverse distinct Eminences appeare upon a Flat, by force of Shadowes, and yet the Shadowes themselves, not to appeare: which I conceive to be the uttermost value and vertue of a Painter’ (p.83). 74 From Pontano’s Actius Dialogus (1518–19), cited in an appendix to Ruth Kelso’s translation of Fracastorius’s Naugerius, pp.82–3. Cf. Minturno’s affirmation that ‘no one can be called a poet who does not excel in the power of arousing wonder’ (cited in J.V. Cunningham, Woe or Wonder: the Emotional Effect of Shakespearean Tragedy [1951; repr. Chicago, 1969], p.82). For further references to the poetic inducement of meraviglia, see Chapter 7, note 54. 75 Barocchi, Trattati, I, 115. ‘Painting is true poetry, that is, invention, which causes what does not exist to appear …’ (my translation). 76 Book of the Courtier, p.14. 77 See, for example, E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (1960; 5th edn, Oxford, 1977) Part 3, and Kubovy, Psychology of Perspective, chap.5. Cf. Martin Kemp, ‘Illusion, Allusion and Collusion: Perspective and Meaning in the Historical Context’, in A. Harrison ed., Philosophy and the Visual Arts (Dordrecht, 1987) pp.255–68. 78 Cf. Norman Bryson’s discussion of the complex interplay between different levels of the real and the simulated in which Roman illusionistic decoration engages the beholder, in Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays in Still Life Painting (London, 1990) chap.1. 79 See Trousdale, Shakespeare and the Rhetoricians, chap.5. 80 Picture and Poetry, p.60. 81 George Chapman, All Fools, I.1.47 (cited in Gilman, Curious Perspective, p.36). For further references to anamorphosis, see Chapter 5, note 4.



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82 Epistle to the reader (Tracte, iii v). 83 Cf. Jonson on the use of perspective in painting: ‘From the Opticks it drew reasons; by which it considered, how things plac’d at a distance, and a farre off, should appeare lesse: how above, or beneath the head, should deceive the eye &c.’ (Herford and Simpson eds, Works, VIII, 611). 84 See James R. Siemon, Shakespearean Iconoclasm (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1985) chap.2. 85 England’s Iconoclasts: Laws Against Images (Oxford, 1988) I, 405. 86 These ‘abuses’ are mentioned alongside ‘the scandall of Images and Idols’ in George Buc’s ‘The Third Universitie of England’, appended to John Stow’s Annales, or Generall Chronicle of England (London, 1615) p.986. Distinctions between abused and unabused, religious and commemorative images, in the Tudor laws regulating their usage often broke down in practice. See John Phillips, The Reformation of Images: Destruction of Art in England, 1535–1660 (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1973), and Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, esp. chap.6. 87 Ernest B. Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation: Down Went Dagon (Chicago, 1986) p.3. On inconsistencies in the Protestant attitude to images, see Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London, 1988) chap.4, and Margaret Aston, ‘Gods, Saints, and Reformers: Portraiture and Protestant England’, in Gent ed., Albion’s Classicism, pp.181–220. 88 Their ability to appreciate illusionistic art even while conscious of the risks to body and soul latent in its seductive appeal is attested by such examples as the ekphrastic descriptions of Kalander’s picture gallery in chap.3 of Sidney’s New Arcadia, and of the ‘goodly workmanship’ of the Bowre of Blisse (II.12.42–62) or the tapestries adorning Busirane’s castle (III.11.28–46) in Spenser’s Faerie Queene. 89 The Painting of the Ancients in three bookes (London, 1638) p.54. For further examples emphasizing the conscious and pleasurable aspects of illusion, see Gent, Picture and Poetry, pp.44–6, 60–61. Gent interprets these as evidence of a revolution at the turn of the century in attitudes to pictorial and poetic fiction, whose truth was discovered to reside paradoxically in its mode of feigning. 90 The phrase is taken from John Evelyn’s Diary, ed. W. Bray (Washington and London, 1901) I, 53. Cited by Guillen, ‘On the Concept and Metaphor of Perspective’, p.33. 91 ’Counterfeit’ is Shakespeare’s standard term for portraiture, and even Haydocke uses it consistently to translate Lomazzo’s ‘ritraere’ (to portray or depict) and ‘rittrato’ (portrait). 92 As late as c.1650, Norgate felt it necessary to defend painting as a ‘harmeles and honest Recreation’, ‘which by Ignorance and Bestie chi Parlano, is undeservedly traduced, as idolatrous, impious or impertinent’ (Miniatura, pp.44, 88). 93 The Vanitie of the eie (Oxford, 1608) pp.53, 88–9. 94 The connection is noted by Jonas Barish in The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1981) p.93. On the largely Puritan driven invective against florid eloquence, see Richard F. Jones, ‘The Moral Sense of Simplicity’, in Studies in Honor of Frederick W. Shipley, Washington University Studies, 14 (St Louis, 1942) pp.265–87.



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095 ‘A Brief Apology for Poetry’, in Smith ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays, II, 201. 096 The same holds good, by analogy, for the visual arts; Sidney stipulates that the painter’s inventive powers should be worthily employed in ‘some excellent perspective’ or ‘some fine picture … containing in it some notable example, as Abraham sacrificing his son Isaac’, not in ‘wanton shows of better hidden matters’ (p.125). 097 Daniel Javitch argues that Puttenham’s ‘confident endorsement of deceptive verbal devices’ is unparalleled in English rhetorical manuals of his day, which remain uneasy about their deceitful properties, and that it was sanctioned by a ‘courtly code of dissimulation’, based on an ironic awareness of the discrepancy between surface meanings and the truths they hide (Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England (Princeton, 1978) chap.2). However, he fails to allow for Puttenham’s concessions to a more reactionary view of poetic artifice. 098 The former turns out, of course, to be a living woman, not a statue, while the latter is generally assumed to refer to a tapestry rather than a painting on canvas or panel, though I have followed Shakespeare in designating it as such. For a discussion of the various prototypes proposed for Lucrece’s ‘piece’ and of the paragone around which its meaning is constructed, see Clark Hulse, ‘ “A Piece of Skilful Painting” in Shakespeare’s Lucrece”’, SS 31 (1978) 13–22. 099 Thus the spectre of idolatry and black magic which hangs over the statue scene in The Winter’s Tale has to be exorcized by assurances from Perdita and Paulina (V.2.41–3, 88–91, 110–11). 100 Art and Illusion, p. 177. David Rosand argues that Shakespeare may also have intended an allusion to another famous ekphrastic passage: Pliny’s account of Timanthes’s depiction of the sacrifice of Iphigenia, which leaves the beholder to imagine Menelaus’s grief by covering his head with a mantle (‘ “Troyes Painted Woes”: Shakespeare and the Pictorial Imagination’, Hebrew University Studies 8, 1 (Spring, 1980) 90). 101 The parallel with synecdoche has been noted by several commentators. Cf. Puttenham’s description of how this figure ‘encombers the minde with a certaine imagination what it may be that is meant, and not expressed’ (p.195). Peacham describes foreshortening in similarly suggestive terms: ‘the whole is concluded into one part, which onely appeareth to the sight: as if I should paint a ship upo[n] the sea, yet there should appeare unto you but her fore part, the rest imagined hid … ’ (Art of Drawing, pp.27–8). 102 Book of the Courtier, p.68. 103 De Architectura, I.2. 104 See John Onians, Bearers of Meaning: The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Princeton, 1988) pp.36–40. 105 See, for example, Aristotle, Art of Rhetoric, III.2.3–4, 9–10, and Cicero, De Oratore, III.50.195–6. 106 Cicero, Orator, XXI, 71. 107 Cicero: On Duties, trans. and eds, M.T. Griffin and E.M. Atkins (Cambridge, 1991) I.98, p.39. 108 Cf. Alberti’s definition of beauty as ‘a form of sympathy and consonance of parts within a body, according to a definite number, outline and position, as dictated by concinnitas [symmetry], the absolute and fundamental



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rule of nature’ (On the Art of Building, trans. J. Rykwert et al. (Cambridge, Mass., 1988) p.303. On the metaphysical significance attributed to harmonic proportion in the arts, see Rudolph Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism third edn (London, 1962) especially chap.4, and Leonard Barkan, Nature’s Work of Art: The Human Body as the Image of the World (New Haven and London, 1975) chap.3. See Les Mots and les choses (Paris, 1966), trans. as The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1970; repr. London and New York, 1989), chaps.2 and 3. Directions for Speech and Style, p.2. Italian Renaissance artists generally employed one of two ‘classical’ canons of proportion: the ‘Vitruvian’ of ten face-lengths and the ‘pseudo-Varronic’ of nine face-lengths. Uniquely, Alberti devised and set out in De Statua his own canon based on the module of the ‘Exempeda’ (foot-length) and arrived at by averaging the measurements of ‘a number of bodies considered by the skilful to be the most beautiful’. See Erwin Panofsky’s seminal essay, ‘The History of the Theory of Human Proportions as a Reflection of the History of Styles’ (1921), in Meaning in the Visual Arts (1955; repr. London, 1993) pp.82–138. See Vasari-Milanesi, I, 151; trans. L.S. Maclehose, Vasari on Technique (London, 1907) p.146. Vasari, Lives of the Artists, I, 419. For the Italian text, see Vasari-Milanesi, VII, 270. Cf. Haydocke, Tracte, p.198. For Michelangelo’s critique of Dürer’s handling of proportion, see Ascanio Condivi’s The Life of Michelangelo, ed., Hellmut Wohl and trans., Alice Sedgwick Wohl (Oxford, 1976) pp.99. ‘Lo faro, ancor che di rado ci occorre far figure tanto semplici, ritte e inscepide, che si possino integramente misurare, perche ciascun maestro si debbe acuir nella prontezza degli atti moventi e pronti, dove le figure in piu parti fuggano, scurzano o diminuiscano …’ (Barocchi, Trattati, I, 103; my translation). Dolce’s ‘Aretino’, p.147. Cf. Armenini’s statement that in matters of foreshortening ‘it is more necessary to rely on the light of reason than on rules’, since ‘laws cannot grant good judgment’ (On the True Precepts, II.4, p.162; for the Italian text, see Marina Gorreri ed., De Veri Precetti Della Pittura (Turin, 1988) p.111). On the giudizio dell’occhio, see Robert Klein, ‘Judgment and Taste in Cinquecento Art Theory’, in Form and Meaning, pp.161–9, and Summers, Michelangelo, chaps.8 and 10. For a fuller account of the philosophical traditions underpinning this concept, see Summers, Judgement of Sense. That prudence and decorum were thought to entail similar modes of practical wisdom or judgment is established by Victoria Kahn in Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism, chap.2. Originally advanced by Leonardo (Leonardo on Painting, pp. 119–20), this idea was elaborated by later theorists, including Lomazzo (Tracte, p.41). On the aesthetic doctrines of the Counter–Reformers, see Blunt, Artistic Theory, chap.8. Thus criticism of canonical proportions is frequently the preface to a submissive rehearsal of the same. Cf. Dolce’s ‘Aretino’, pp.137–9, and Pino,



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Notes Dialogo della Pittura, in Barocchi ed., Trattati, 1, 103–6. A more radical critique of mathematical proportion as applied to painting and sculpture was developed by Danti in his Primo libro (see Klein and Zerner eds, Italian Art 1500–1600, pp.100–5). See J.E. Spingarn, Literary Criticism in the Renaissance (1899; repr. New York, 1949) pp.85–9, and Bernard Weinberg’s monumental study, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago, 1961) 2 vols. Alessandro Piccolomini, Annotationi nel libro della Poetica d’Aristotile (1575) p.23. Cited by Weinberg, ibid, I, 550. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis, pp.34–41. Dolce’s ‘Aretino’, pp.119–27. John Shearman notes the ‘surprising licence’ accorded to rhetorical embellishment by classical writers, even when reiterating Aristotle’s warnings against excess in this area: ‘What matters is that it was as easy to justify these “excesses”, in the visual or literary arts, on the basis of ancient precept, as it was to condemn them’ (Mannerism, p.42). For a libertarian reading of Horace, see Cennini’s Il Libro dell’Arte, p.2, and Michelangelo’s gloss on this text as reported by Francisco de Holanda in his Four Dialogues on Painting, trans. Aubrey Bell (London, 1928) pp.60–2. For a hardline restatement of the opposing interpretation, cf. G.A. Gilio, Due dialoghi … degli errori ed abusi de’ pittori (Camerino, 1564) in Barocchi, Trattati, II, 16–19, and Gabriele Paleotti, Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre e profane (Bologna, 1582) in ibid, II, 401, 442–4. Institutio, II.13.8–11. The importance of this passage for Renaissance art theorists has been widely noted. See, for example, Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators, pp.18–19. On this vogue and its rhetorical antecedents, see Shearman, Mannerism, pp.81–91, and David Summers, ‘Maniera and Movement: the Figura Serpentinata’, Art Quarterly 35 (1972) 269–301. Institutio, VIII.6.73. Quintilian is discussing hyperbole. The point is best made by comparison with poetic rhythm and metre (or ‘proportion poetical’, as Puttenham terms it) which, being regarded as a species of musical harmony, could be calculated numerically. A similar slippage occurs in Cinquecento discussions of giudizio. In Dolce’s Aretino, for example, the question is posed ‘whether a man who is not a painter himself is qualified to judge painting’. Aretino initially argues that all men can recognize beauty and ugliness – and the (dis)proportionality on which these qualities depend – by virtue of their familiarity with the human form. But he later narrows his definition to exclude the ‘masses’, restricting the right to judge to those in whom common visual experience has been refined by a knowledge of literature and painting (pp.101–5). An inbred mastery of decorum was considered to be a defining mark of courtly superiority. See Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness, pp. 51–3, and Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1984) p.52. Commenting on the process whereby discretion is elided here with the opinion of a courtly elite, Derek Attridge shrewdly notes that ‘the “naturalness” of decorum is at a distant remove from universal human nature or instincts; it is an ideological product … whereby a historically specific class



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attitude is promoted and perceived as “natural”’ (Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (London, 1988) p.34. See, for example, Quintilian, Institutio, VIII.3.58, and Cicero, Orator, XX, 70. Book II of Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier is largely given over to a sociological analysis of giudizio – previously discussed in relation to artistic matters – as the governing principle by which the courtier should regulate his conduct. Patricia Parker has shown that it was common practice for rhetorical handbooks of the period to associate the regulation of figurative discourse with questions of social ordering and control in ways that are clearly ideologically motivated (see Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London, 1987) chap.6). Few do so quite as blatantly as Puttenham, however. As in the Arte of English Poesie, the egalitarian implications of this appeal to natural instinct are strongly qualified, in this case by Hilliard’s repeated assertion that ‘none should meddle with limning but gentlemen alone’ (p.63), though the ‘true gentility’ he has in mind is conferred more by ‘natural aptness’ or divinely bestowed talent than by social pedigree. Bacon rejects Dürer’s ‘geometrical proportions’, asserting that ‘there is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion’, a beauty that is achievable ‘by a kind of felicity … and not by rule’ (The Essays, ed. John Pitcher (Harmondsworth, 1985) 189–90). The parallel was first noted by John Pope-Hennessy in ‘Nicholas Hilliard and Mannerist Art Theory’, JWCI 6 (1943) 89–100. Cf. Hogarth’s critique of the neoclassical doctrine of mathematical proportion as ‘foreign’ to artistic purpose and his corresponding emphasis on the eye, in The Analysis of Beauty ed., Joseph Burke (Oxford, 1955) pp.89–94. Rule of Art, p.132. The ambiguity was previously noted by Arthur F. Kinney and Linda Bradley Salamon in their edition of Hilliard’s Art of Limning (Boston, 1983) p.81. Idea, p.79. These anti-theoretical tendencies continued to counteract the increasingly rigorous systematization of the arts well into the eighteenth century. See Laurence Lipking, The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England (Princeton, 1970) Part II. Thomas Kranidas’s comment is especially germane: ‘English criticism follows the Italians … but there is in Renaissance English poetry, including Jonson and Milton, no slavish adherence to the dramatic unities, genres, or character decorum of Italian criticism. For the Elizabethans, the term decorum has something of the protean quality of the term wit. The best critics, like Puttenham, are aware of the instability of the term’ (The Fierce Equation: A Study of Milton’s Decorum (The Hague, 1965) p.38). See Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago and London, 1992) chap.1. Helgerson’s argument focuses on the debate about whether English verse should, or could, be made to conform to quantitative metres. Significantly, one of the leading interventions in that debate which champions native rhyme against classical metrics, Samuel Daniel’s A Defence of Rhyme (1603), repeatedly invokes the authority of ‘discretion’ along with that of ‘Custome that is before all Law, Nature that is above all



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4 Hamlet and the Art of Looking Diversely on the Self 001 See Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago and London, 1980). Greenblatt’s initial premise that Renaissance males possessed the power and freedom to shape their own identities is strongly qualified in the course of his argument (see especially pp. 255–7). 002 The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S.G.C. Middlemore and ed. Irene Gordon (New York, 1960) p.121. Challenges to Burckhardt’s thesis have tended to emphasize the degree to which identity continued to be derived from the social formation. See, for example, L.A. Montrose, ‘The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text’, in Patricia Parker and David Quint eds, Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts (Baltimore and London, 1986) pp.303–40, and the essays by Stephen Greenblatt and Nathalie Zemon Davies in Thomas C. Heller et al. eds, Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality and the Self in Western Thought (Stanford, 1986). 003 See, for example, Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (London, 1984), and Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London, 1985) pp.33–51. Both see the emergence of the modern subject, first given philosophical definition by Descartes and Locke, as a consequence of the rise to power of the bourgeoisie after 1650, though they concede that it is foreshadowed in literature from the turn of the century onwards. 004 ‘Proof and Consequences: Inwardness and its Exposure in the English Renaissance’, Representations 34 (1991) repr. in Kamps ed., Materialist Shakespeare, p.158. Andrew Mousley similarly argues that one consequence of equating notions of interiority exclusively with a bourgeois ideology of the self has been ‘to obscure the possibility of differently conceptualizing, and differently reading the history of, individualism’ (‘Hamlet and the Politics of Individualism’, in Mark Thornton Burnett and John Manning eds, New Essays on Hamlet (New York, 1994) p.67). 005 The phrase is taken from John Pope-Hennessy, The Portrait in the Renaissance (London and New York, 1963). See also Lorne Campbell, Renaissance Portraits: European Portrait Painting in the Fourteenth, Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (New Haven and London, 1990) pp.9–39. 006 See Strong, English Renaissance Miniature; Edmond, Hilliard and Oliver; and Roy Strong and V.J. Murrell, Artists of the Tudor Court: The Portrait Miniature Rediscovered 1520–1620 (London, 1983). 007 As seen, for example, in Isaac Oliver’s style of limning or some of the largescale portraits produced by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger from the 1590s onwards.



Arte’, and inveighs against ‘the tryannicall Rules of idle Rhetorique’ (Smith ed., Elizabethan Essays, II, 356–84). 145 For an overview of neoclassical opinion on this topic, see Brian Vickers ed., Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage (London and Boston, 1974) II, 1–12.

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08 See J.W. Lever, The Elizabethan Love Sonnet (London, 1956) pp.71, 103, and Paul Delaney, British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1969) pp.11–17. On the evolution of the soliloquy from the primarily expository to the fully interiorized mode of expression it became in Shakespeare’s later tragedies, see Wolfgang Clemen, Shakespeare’s Soliloquies, trans. Charity Stokes (London and New York, 1987) pp.1–12. 09 See The “Inward” Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne (Chicago and London, 1983). 10 ‘ “Secret” Arts: Elizabethan Miniatures and Sonnets’, Representations 15 (1986), repr. in Stephen Greenblatt ed., Representing the English Renaissance (London, 1985) pp.93–133. Other impediments to self-revelation have been identified by Eisaman Maus, who notes that ‘the ritual[s] of discovery’ operative in the English theatre and law courts were forced to rely on unsatisfactory modes of inference in attempting to achieve ‘the technically impossible feat of rendering publicly available a truth conceived of as … inward, secret, and invisible to mortal sight’ (p.170). 11 The phrase is taken from Henry Peacham the Elder, The Garden of Eloquence, second edn, (London, 1593), ed. William G. Crane (Gainesville, Florida, 1954) A.B.iii r. All future page references in the text are to this edition. 12 See, for example, Richard II, IV.1.264–98; Julius Caesar, I.2.51–70; Troilus and Cressida, III.3.95–123. 13 The topos of the mirror as an agent of self-knowledge derives from Socrates and was ubiquitously invoked in the Renaissance. See Herbert Grabes, The Mutable Glass: Mirror Imagery in Titles and Texts of the Middle Ages and English Renaissance, trans. G. Collier (Cambridge, 1982) p.137. On its importance as an accessory to the introspection of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, see David J. Palmer, ‘The Self-Awareness of the Tragic Hero’, in Malcolm Bradbury and David Palmer eds, Shakespearian Tragedy, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 20 (London, 1984) pp.129–57. 14 See Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’, in Ecrits: A Selection (London, 1977) pp.1–7. For a recent reading of Hamlet in the light of Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage and of the gaze, see Philip Armstrong, ‘Watching Hamlet watching: Lacan, Shakespeare and the mirror/stage’, in Terence Hawkes ed., Alternative Shakespeares II (London, 1996) pp.216–37. Armstrong stresses the fact that theatre is figured in the play as a mirror that does not simply reflect life in a passive sense, but has the power to mould the spectators’ consciousness and behaviour. 15 Although glass mirrors were being manufactured as early as the fourteenth century, it was not until the beginning of the sixteenth century that the technology for the production of large, flat looking glasses was developed in Venice. These gradually superseded the convex mirror, which neverth less continued to feature in northern European painting. See Benjamin Goldberg, The Mirror and Man (Charlottesville, 1985) chap.8. 16 Andrew Belsey and Catherine Belsey, ‘Icons of Divinity: Portraits of Elizabeth I’, in Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn eds, Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure in English Culture c.1540–1660 (London, 1990) p.31. A similar argument has been advanced by the historian Georges Gusdorf in ‘Conditions et limites de l’autobiographie’ (cited by Delaney, British Autobiography, p.12).



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17 Jaques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, ed. JacquesAlain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (1977; repr. London, 1991) p.85. 18 This other, more subversive, face of the costruzione leggitima is explored in Lacan’s proposition that its laws can become a means of decentring the subject through their connection with the gaze. Put simply, this occurs when the spectator’s gaze is directed back upon itself from another point in the field of the ‘Other’, so that the viewing subject, no longer the sole focus for the lines of perspective, is demoted to being the object or spectacle of an alien look. In painting, the vanishing point functions as this alternative locus towards which the visual field converges and thus as a symbol of the subject’s ‘annihilation’ (Four Fundamental Concepts, pp.79–89). For a lucid explication of this difficult topic, see Norman Bryson, ‘The Gaze in the Expanded Field’, in Foster ed., Vision and Visuality, pp.87–108. 19 The Origin of Perspective, trans. John Goodman (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1994) p.126. 20 Sir Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named the Gouvenor, ed. Henry Croft (London, 1883) I, 117. 21 On the play’s complex ‘patterns of concealment and exposure’, see Mark Thornton Burnett, ‘The “heart of my mystery”: Hamlet and Secrets’, in Burnett and Manning eds, New Essays on Hamlet, pp.21–46. 22 The classic study of this theme is Maynard Mack, ‘The World of Hamlet’, Yale Review 41 (1952) 502–23. 23 Compare the ways in which expressed admiration for the painter’s ability to ‘cipher’ an individual’s inner qualities in The Rape of Lucrece (ll.1394–1400, 1443–56) and Timon of Athens (I.1.30–38) is later subjected to ironic qualification. His betrayal by the Thane of Cawdor similarly forces Duncan to conclude, though without direct reference to painting, that ‘there’s no art / To find the mind’s construction in the face’ (Macbeth, I.4.11). 24 John Shearman discusses this topos and how it inflected the paragone between poet and painter in Only Connect: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (Princeton, 1992) chap.3. Cf. the final couplet of Sonnet 24 (‘Yet eyes this cunning want to grace their art, / They draw but what they see, know not the heart.’), and John Lyly’s Campaspe (1584) III.4.73–80 and III.5.50–5 (‘Now must I paint things unpossible for mine art but agreeable with my affections: deep and hollow sighs, sad and melancholy thoughts, wounds and slaughters of conceits … ’). 25 Clark Hulse similarly argues that Shakespeare’s sonnets explore ‘the impossibility and the necessity of knowing and of showing the mind’s construction’ through the interlocking metaphors of painting, mirroring, acting and reproduction (‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the Art of the Face’, John Donne Journal 5 (1986) 3–26). 26 Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago and London, 1996) p.244. Parker’s analysis of how this play, like Othello, obsessively exploits the language of spying out, discovering or opening to view ‘privie secretes’ in relation to a range of contemporary contexts is highly germane to this discussion. 27 Hence his tendency to qualify such statements with the rider that the world seems so to him (e.g. I.2.133, II.2.249–51, 308). On Hamlet’s capacity for



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holding multiple and contradictory views at any one moment, and the scepticism it sustains, see Bernard McElroy, Shakespeare’s Mature Tragedies (Princeton, 1973) p.38, and Susan Snyder, The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare’s Tragedies (Princeton, 1973) pp.91–136. Shakespeare and the Critics (Cambridge, 1972) p.45. The ghost has been widely regarded as the play’s pre-eminent symbol of hermeneutic indeterminacy. See, for example, Harry Levin, The Question of Hamlet (Oxford, 1950, repr. 1978), and Cedric Watts, Hamlet, Harvester New Critical Introductions to Shakespeare (New York and London, 1988) pp.32–7. Allusions to the commemorative function of portraiture are ubiquitous in the period. For a useful discussion of the subject see David Rosand, ‘The Portrait, the Courtier and Death’, in Robert W. Hanning and David Rosand eds, Castiglione: The Ideal and the Real in Renaissance Culture (New Haven and London, 1983) pp.91–129. For a fuller discussion of attitudes to illusionism, see Chapter 3. On the expressive function of these figures and their use as an instrument of movere, see Vickers, In Defence, chap.6. Cf. Peacham’s emphasis in his ‘Epistle Dedicatorie’ on the self-revelatory function of eloquence, which enables man ‘both to powre forth the inward passions of his heart, and also as a heavenly planet to show foorth, (by the shining beames of speech) the privie thoughts and secret conceites of his mind’. Peacham is in fact discussing figures of ‘amplification’ here, not of ‘affection’, but, since the two are treated together under ‘figures of thought’, his arguments are equally applicable to both. An Apology for Actors (London, 1612) p.B4r. Junius, Painting of the Ancients, p.55. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis, p.28. See also Lecoat, Rhetoric of the Arts, chap.1. Alberti, On Painting, p.76. Cf. Leonardo on Painting, p.144. For a critique of ‘physiognomic interpretation’ – the belief that the face and bodily gestures can be read as an index of the mind – as it continues to be enshrined in art-historical practice, showing how this is problematised by the elements of self-dramatization in Renaissance portraiture, see Harry J. Berger, ‘Fictions of the Pose: Facing the Gaze in Early Modern Portraiture’, Representations 46 (1994) 87–120. The Passions of the Minde in Generall (1604) ed. Thomas O. Sloan (Urbana, Chicago and London, 1971) pp.105, 179. Hamlet’s reported visit to Ophelia in II.1, the dumb-show preceding the performance of ‘The Mousetrap’ in III.2, and the spectacle of Ophelia’s madness in IV.5, all rely on the mute rhetoric of gesture and each contrives to baffle the spectator[s], despite their efforts to make its meaning ‘fit … their own thoughts’ (IV.5.7–13). This is part of a larger anxiety about the openness of eloquence to abuse, arising from the absence of any necessary correlation between rhetorical effectiveness and moral probity. (See G.K. Hunter, ‘Rhetoric and Renaissance Drama’, in Peter Mack ed., Renaissance Rhetoric (London and New York, 1994) pp.109–111.) See, for example, Levin, Question of Hamlet, pp.112–13, and Peter Mercer, ‘Hamlet’ and the Acting of Revenge (London, 1987) pp.171–2.



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44 All future page references to the Essays in the text are taken from John Florio’s English translation in Michel de Montaigne: The Essays, 1603, Scolar Press Facsimile (Menston, 1969). In addition to the references cited below, Montaigne employs the trope of self-portraiture in I, 26; II, 17; and III, 13. For a useful discussion of Montaigne’s handling of this topos see R.A. Sayce, The Essays of Montaigne: A Critical Exploration (London, 1972) chap.4. Like Hamlet, Montaigne also links introspection with self-dramatisation (see, e.g., I, 19 and II, 6). 45 ‘Self-consciousness in Montaigne and Shakespeare’, SS 28 (1975) 42. Ellrodt also provides a helpful summary of the voluminous critical speculation which has pondered the extent of Shakespeare’s indebtedness to Montaigne. Although Florio’s translation was not published until 1603, it is likely to have circulated in manuscript before then. Modern editors generally accept that Hamlet draws on the Essays and is close to them in spirit. 46 Cf. his declaration: ‘I write not my jests [gests] but my selfe and my essence’ (II, 6, p.220). 47 For example, Hamlet makes extensive use of paranomasia (a play on words similar in sound but different in sense), antimetabole (a phrase repeated in inverse order) and hendiadys (a yoking together of two adjectives by a conjunction). On his fondness for puns and wordplay, see M.M. Mahood Shakespeare’s Wordplay (London, 1957) chap.5, and Terence Hawkes, Shakespeare’s Talking Animals (London, 1973) chap.8, and on his use of hendiadys George T. Wright, ‘Hendiadys and Hamlet’, PMLA 96 (1981) 168–93. 48 The proliferating ironies generated by this identification with the player are perceptively analysed by Graham Holderness, Hamlet, Open Guides to Literature (Milton Keynes, 1987) pp.67–9, and Maurice Charney, Hamlet’s Fictions (New York and London, 1988) pp.66–8. 49 Several critics have commented on this dramatization/rhetoricization of the revenge task. See, for example, Richard A. Lanham, The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New Haven and London, 1976) pp.129–43, and Mousley, ‘Hamlet and the Politics of Individualism’, p.73. 50 See, for example, Cicero De Oratore, 2.45.189–94, and Quintilian Institutio, 6.2.26–30. We have here another instance of rhetorical doctrine being foisted on painting regardless of whether or not it was appropriate (see, for example, Dolce’s ‘Aretino’, pp.156–7). 51 On Hamlet’s self-mirroring, see Rosalie Colie, Shakespeare’s Living Art (Princeton, 1974) pp.219–24, and Marjorie Garber, Coming of Age in Shakespeare (London and New York, 1981) pp.198–205. 52 Hamlet himself hints at the impossibility of anybody serving as a satisfactory image or copy of the perceiving self when remarking of Laertes that ‘his semblable is his mirror, and who else would trace him, his umbrage [i.e. shadow], nothing more’ (V.2.118). Cf. Richard II’s admission that mirror images (like ‘external [manners] of laments’) are ‘merely shadows’ in respect of the ‘substance’ that lies within, incapable of revealing ‘the unseen grief / That swells with silence in the tortur’d soul’ (IV.1. 292–9). 53 Delaney, British Autobiography, p.13. For a fuller discussion of Dürer’s selfportraits, see Panofsky, Albrecht Dürer, I, 24–5, 41–3, 241. 54 Lives of the Artists, II, 188. Since, according to Vasari, the self-portrait was made to impress potential patrons in Rome, which Parmigianino was



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shortly to visit, we may assume that the choice of a convex mirror was motivated, in the first instance, by the desire to advertise his technical virtuosity. Parmigianino: His Works in Painting (Cambridge, Mass., 1950) p.105. On the play’s holding of the mirror up to itself as well as spectators on and off stage, see Anne Righter [Barton], Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (London, 1962) pp.158–64, and James L. Calderwood, To Be and Not to Be: Negation and Metadrama in ‘Hamlet’ (New York, 1983). The tensions between the neoclassical principles of mimesis and decorum advocated by Hamlet and the non-referential mode of his ‘antic disposition’ have been analysed by Robert Weimann, who associates the latter with the clowning, punning and impertinency of the ‘mad’, nonsensical Vice figure (‘Mimesis in Hamlet’, in Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman eds, Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (New York and London, 1985) pp.275–91). Although we learn from Claudius’s soliloquy in III.3 that the play has succeeded in catching his conscience, this is not apparent to the court since he does not unkennel his guilt in either verbal or visual form. Many critics have wrongly assumed with Hamlet that he does, but for the contrary view, see Snyder, Comic Matrix, p.100, and Graham Bradshaw, Shakespeare’s Scepticism (Brighton, 1987) pp.115–16. The critical controversy about the kind of picture referred to in this scene is usefully summarised in an appendix to Harold Jenkins’s Arden edition of the play (1982) pp.516–19. There is an interesting parallel here with the scene in The Two Noble Kinsmen (IV.2) where Emilia’s description of the miniatures of her two lovers as studies in contrast is undone by her subsequent cross-valuation of these portraits, which suggests that the eye is under the sway of the beholder’s changing emotions. This could be taken as evidence of Shakespeare’s authorship of this scene, which is still in dispute. The erosion of these distinctions and Hamlet’s psychological investment in maintaining them are lucidly analysed by Janet Adelman in Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare, ‘Hamlet’ to ‘The Tempest’ (New York and London, 1992) chap.2. Although Hamlet is conscious of his fallibility as an observer, the fact that we view dramatic events almost wholly through his eyes confers a spurious authority on his vision of things. Gertrude’s very different perspective therefore comes as something of a shock, especially as she has hitherto existed for us mainly as the object of Hamlet’s warped perceptions. For a comparable moment with Ophelia, see III.1.150–61. In this connection, we should note that the questions which punctuate his tirade (e.g., III.4.65–81, 188–91) can be taken as more than purely rhetorical. See, for example, Mack, ‘The World of Hamlet’, pp.520–1; Kenneth Muir, Shakespeare’s Tragic Sequence (Liverpool, 1979) p.88; and Jenkins’s introduction to the Arden edition, pp.157–9. Hamlet has of course always been dogged by such awareness, as evidenced by the many references to his sense of entrapment in ‘too too sallied flesh’, in the ‘prison’ that is Denmark, etc. Until now, however, the perception of himself as a ‘limed soul’ has been offset by the leisurely expansiveness with



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which he engages in self-scrutiny. On the conflict between Hamlet’s desire for freedom and acceptance of restriction, see Mark Rose, ‘Hamlet and the Shape of Revenge’, in David Young ed., Shakespeare’s Middle Tragedies (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1993) pp.7–17. Thomas Greene locates such tensions within the context of Renaissance philosophies of selfhood in ‘The Flexibility of the Self in Renaissance Literature’, in Peter Demetz et al. eds, The Discipline of Criticism: Essays in Literary Theory, Interpretation and History (New Haven and London, 1968) pp.241–64. 66 Citing the absence of soliloquies, Nicholas Grene argues that ‘what makes us feel that Hamlet is different in Act V is that we are cut off from the sense of his inner life’ (Shakespeare’s Tragic Imagination, second edn (London, 1996) p.58). But Hamlet’s musings in the graveyard are still clearly self-directed. 67 Tremulous Private Body, p.38. Cf. Terry Eagleton, William Shakespeare (Oxford, 1986) pp.70–5. Both critics explain the gestural nature of Hamlet’s references to an inner essence in terms of his status as a transitional figure, whose historically premature claims to bourgeois selfhood are unrealizable within the limits of the text.

5 Troilus and Cressida, ‘Imagin’d Worth’ and the ‘Bifold Authority’ of Anamorphosis 01 Cf. A.P. Rossiter, Angel with Horns (London and New York, 1961) p.135. 02 Troilus’s perceptual crisis is mirrored in reverse by Cressida (V.2.107–12). If ‘the error of [her] eye directs [her] mind’, his vision is distorted by an intellectual idealism that scorns mere facts. 03 For a full analysis of this conundrum and its historical applications, see Rosalie Colie, Paradoxica Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton, 1966) esp. pp.3–40. 04 Cf. the references to anamorphic portraits in Chapman, Ovids Banquet of Sence, stanzas 2–6, and All Fools, I.1.47; Michael Drayton, Mortimeriados l.2330; Ben Jonson, The Alchemist, III.4.87–97; and George Herbert, ‘Sinne (II) l.10. For further literary allusions to the genre, see Allan Shickman, ‘ “Turning Pictures” in Shakespeare’s England’, Art Bulletin LIX (1977) 67–70. 05 For a recent discussion of the play’s anamorphic qualities, see François Laroque, ‘Perspective in Troilus and Cressida’, in John M. Mucciolo ed., Shakespeare’s Universe: Renaissance Ideas and Conventions: Essays in Honour of W.R. Elton (Aldershot, 1996) pp.224–42. 06 Anamorphic Art, p.4. 07 The Ambassadors has been subjected to detailed theoretical analysis, most notably by Jacques Lacan (Four Fundamental Concepts, pp.85–9) and by Stephen Greenblatt (Renaissance Self-Fashioning, pp.17–26). 08 See further Chapter 3. 09 See David Summers, The Judgment of Sense, chap.2. 10 For a useful overview of the revival of classical scepticism in the Renaissance, especially its contribution to the controversy between Reformers and Counter-Reformers regarding the proper criterion of religious knowledge, see Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1979). See also Victoria Kahn’s brilliant



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analysis of Montaigne’s sceptical rhetorical practice and its deconstruction of the humanist belief in a consensual standard of judgement grounded in natural law (Rhetoric, Prudence and Scepticism, chap.5). Outlines of Pyrrhonism, trans. R.G. Bury (Buffalo, NY, 1990) p.52. Montaigne reserves until last his attack on the authority of the senses on the grounds that they are the ultimate basis of all human philosophy and therefore ‘those Sects which combate mans science, do principally combate the same by the uncertainty and feeblenes of our sences: For, since by their meane and intermission al knowledge comes unto us, if they chaunce to misse in the report they make unto us … wee have nothing else to holde by’ (II.12, 343). Many of these arguments were reiterated by Sir Walter Raleigh in his tract, The Sceptic. Anamorphic Art, pp.66–9. Compare the movement in Descartes’s Meditations (1641), from a rigorously sceptical demolition of the foundations of human knowledge, beginning with sensory impressions, to the discovery of new grounds for certainty in a rational self-consciousness underwritten by God. Cf. Ben Jonson, ‘In Authorem’. See also Gilman, Curious Perspective, chap.6, on the widespread use of the perspective glass (i.e. the telescope or other type of refracting lens) as a trope for the infirmity of human (as opposed to divine) understanding in early seventeenth-century devotional verse. ‘A Cypresse Grove’, in Robert Macdonald, ed., William Drummond of Hawthornden: Poems and Prose (Edinburgh and London, 1976) p.155. Cited by Guillen, ‘On the Concept and Metaphor of Perspective’, p.42. ‘A Defence of Rhyme’, in Smith, ed., Elizabethan Essays II, p.376. In some respects Daniel’s sceptical inflection of the perspective metaphor was anticipated by Nicholas Cusanus, who invoked an actual pictorial exemplum at the beginning of De visione Dei in order to illustrate the fallibility of a religious faith grounded in the finite human intellect. Just as Rogier van der Weyden’s self-portrait produces in every beholder the illusion that it is looking directly at him, wherever he may be located in relation to the painting, so every individual believer constructs the ineffable, transcendent godhead in his own image: ‘For as everything appears red to the physical eye when it looks through a red glass, so the spiritual eye, in its limitedness, sees you ... according to the nature of its own limitation. Man is capable only of human judgment.’ (cited by Ernst Cassirer in The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. Mario Domandi (Oxford, 1963) pp. 31–2. See Winifred Nowottny, ‘ “Opinion” and “Value” in Troilus and Cressida’, EC 4 (1954) 282–96, and Tinsley Helton, ‘Paradox and Hypothesis in Troilus and Cressida’, Sh.Studs 10 (1977) 115–31. The play’s preoccupation with the relativity of value-judgements is helpfully located in its historicointellectual context by W.R. Elton, ‘Shakespeare’s Ulysses and the Problem of Value’, Sh.Studs 2 (1966) 95–111. From this it will be clear that I find the received reading of the play as primarily an exercise in satirical debunking unsatisfactory. To see the play as involving little more than the deflation of chivalric and amatory codes is to assume that Thersites’s reductive view of its action as all ‘wars and lechery’ must be taken as authoritative, even though this view is subjected to the same stringent critique as any other in the play – not least by Thersites



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Notes himself who twice denies its legitimacy (V.4.28, V.7.16–18). Above all, it is to underestimate the power of the play’s rhetorical and dramatic techniques to perplex and disturb us by their indeterminacy – precisely that indeterminacy which the play shares with anamorphic images. For an analysis of the ways in which the play ‘persistently calls attention to its intertextuality, its anachronicity, its dependence upon a prodigious literary and rhetorical legacy’, see Elizabeth Freund, ‘ “Ariachne’s broken woof”: the rhetoric of citation in Troilus and Cressida’, in Parker and Hartman eds, Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, pp.19–37. Lucien Dällenbach, for example, sees reflexivity as a constitutive feature of the mise an abyme experience: the literary work duplicates itself either in one or a series of internal (and sometimes paradoxical) mirrors, thereby ‘open[ing] up dizzying perspectives’. (See The Mirror in the Text, trans. Jeremy Whiteley with Emma Hughes (Cambridge, 1989, chaps 3 and 4)). Cf. Gayle Greene’s assertion that the play traces the ‘linguistic implications of loss of belief in a transcendent order – the problems of definition and description which follow when sanctions of value have been undermined and the correspondence of language to reality can no longer be assumed’ (‘Language and Value in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida’, SEL 21 (1981) 274). My own reading of the play is indebted to Greene’s cogent argument. René Girard has argued that both the erotic and military plots exemplify ‘mimetic desire’, the law whereby desire is generated by the presence of competing desires focussed on the same object (‘The Politics of Desire in Troilus and Cressida’, in Parker and Hartman eds, Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, pp.188–209). This idea can be extended to the play’s treatment of imitation, for, as Renaissance theorists emphasized, the practice of imitatio is similarly driven by ‘mimetic rivalry’: the wish to emulate, and in the process outdo, another’s representation of a particular theme or subject. Terry Eagleton, Shakespeare and Society (London, 1967) p.14. On the metaphorical functions of the go-between in this play see Richard D. Fly, Shakespeare’s Mediated World (Amherst, Mass., 1976) chap.2. Zvi Jagendorf argues that the levelling force of satire in the play ‘works against the heroic idea of identity as unique, specific and autonomous’ (‘All Against One in Troilus and Cressida’, English 31 (1982) 199–210). So too, I suggest, does the relativizing force of comparison. While the female characters especially are subjected to rhetorical fragmentation, in keeping with the blazon tradition (see Nancy J. Vickers, ‘Diana Described: Scattered Women and Scattered Rhyme, Critical Inquiry 8 (1981) 265–79) – the reifying itemization of a woman’s physical charms – their male counterparts are by no means exempt from such treatment (cf. I.2.251–5, II.1.47–9, IV.1.70–3, IV.5.54–7, 124–32, 231–8). The association of the play’s fractured identities with the culinary imagery of ‘o’er-eaten’ ‘scraps’, ‘orts’ and ‘fragment[s’] (e.g. V.1.8, V.2.156–60) makes the loss of heroic integrity seem morally repellent. Several critics have noted this emphasis on the obfuscatory and tautological qualities of comparison. See, for example, Colie, Shakespeare’s Living Art, pp.336–7, and Greene, ‘Language and Value’, 281–3.



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29 Peacham, Garden of Eloquence, p.91. For Wilson, amplification ‘consisteth most in augmenting, and diminishing of any matter’ (Arte of Rhetorique, p.120). 30 This process of rhetorical inflation and deflation is discussed by, among others, Patricia Thomson, ‘Rant and Cant in Troilus and Cressida’, Essays and Studies, 22 (1969) 33–56; T. McAlindon, ‘Language, Style and Meaning in Troilus and Cressida’, PMLA, 84 (1969) 29–43; and Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins, pp.220–8. 31 See, for example, Michael Long, The Unnatural Scene (London, 1976) pp.106–13, and Bradshaw, Shakespeare’s Scepticism, chap.4. 32 Institutio, VIII.4.9–29. 33 Discussing this commercial imagery, C.C. Barfoot shows how the play exploits the semantic links between ‘praise’, ‘prize’ and ‘price’ in its dialogue and plot (‘Troilus and Cressida: “Praise us as we are tasted”’, SQ , 39 (1988) 45–57). 34 Cf. Love’s Labour’s Lost, II.1.13–16, IV.3.235–7, and Sonnet 21. On Shakespeare’s distrust of ‘proud’ or ‘false compare’, see John Kerrigan’s introduction to the Penguin edition of the Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint (London, 1986) pp.22–33. 35 In one sense Helen has already been exchanged since she was seized by the Trojans in retaliation for the Greeks’ detainment of Priam’s sister, Hesione (II.2.76–9). Helen’s and Cressida’s common function as objects of exchange within a masculine economy of desire is discussed by Carol Cook in ‘Unbodied Figures of Desire’, Theatre Journal, 38 (1986) 34–52. The classic treatment of this subject is Gayle Rubin, ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex’, in Rayna R. Reiter ed., Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York, 1975) pp.157–210. 36 On this process of effeminization, see especially Gary Spear, ‘Shakespeare’s “Manly” Parts: Masculinity and Effeminacy in Troilus and Cressida’, SQ 44 (1993) 409–22. 37 Hoskins, Directions for Speech and Style, p.22. 38 The nearest Shakespearean equivalent is Richard II, which explores the linguistic implications of a major epistemic shift in similar terms. Thus it traces the erosion of the metaphysical basis of analogical discourse, which becomes fragmented and subjectivized as a consequence. 39 See Collected Works of Erasmus, XXIV, 625. 40 For the use of comparatio in forensic debate, see Cicero, De Inventione, I.30.49 and Topica 18.68–71, and Quintilian, Institutio, V.10.86–93. 41 ‘Language, Style and Meaning’, p.30. 42 Definitions of these vices are taken from Garden of Eloquence, p.168. Cf. Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, pp.259–60. 43 Advancement of Learning, p.26. 44 In his reflections on fame in III.3, Ulysses shifts to an implicitly sceptical position; he does not deny that intrinsic values exist, only the possibility that they may be known, given the contingent, ephemeral and superficial qualities of opinion-making the ‘whole world’ over (ll.169–84). Agamemnon’s attempts to distinguish between ‘esteem’ and ‘worth’ where Achilles is concerned (II.3.116–34) are likewise undercut by his admission that, in dancing attendance on the ‘great Myrmidon’, the Greeks ‘underwrite’ his assumed superiority.



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45 See, for example, Prologue, 5–10, I.1.90–3, II.1.8, II.3.95–101. 46 On the play’s two-dimensional quality, see John Bayley, The Uses of Division: Unity and Disharmony in Literature (London, 1976) pp.186–204, and on the absence of plot, Barbara Everett, ‘The Inaction of Troilus and Cressida’, EC 32 (1982) 119–39. 47 See, for example, I.2.1, 218, I.3.223–32, III.1.30–6, IV.5.75. Even when characters are successfully identified, it is often by a laborious process of inference from known physical attributes (see, e.g., II.2.98, IV.5.13–16, 160–2). 48 Harry Berger notes how ‘the oppressive pressure of spectators, the clash of perspectives and interpretations to which the characters are subject’ places ‘limitations on inwardness’, in ‘Troilus and Cressida: The Observer as Basilisk’, Comparative Drama 2 (1968) repr. in Second World, p.143. 49 According to Linda Charnes, the play dramatizes the struggle of its protagonists ‘to produce subjective self-representations that can in fact only be realized at the expense of their notorious identities. Subjectivity … is posited as the disruptive effect of simultaneous resistance, and subjection, to the determining force of famous names’ (‘ “So Unsecret to Ourselves”: Notorious Identity and the Material Subject’ in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, SQ 40 (1989) p.418). But, with the partial exception of Cressida (see below), submission to this process of cultural inscription is much more in evidence than resistance. Rosalie Colie is nearer the mark when she comments on the characters’ voluntary self-reduction to the status of stereotypes, Shakespeare’s Living Art, pp.325–6, 338. 50 The narcissism associated with the topos of self-reflection is touched on throughout (e.g., II.3.151–7, III.3.102–11, 308). The play, I would argue, explores the interface between these twin Ovidian myths of Pygmalion and Narcissus, their common interest in the idolatrous potentialities of the imagination and the beholder’s desire, fuelled by self-consuming pride, to embrace the ‘shadow that he sees’ as though it were a ‘lively boddie’ (Arthur Golding, The XV Bookes of P. Ovidius Naso, entituled Metamorphosis … (London, 1587) p.37v.). Like the Trojan cult of Helen, Troilus’s adoration of Cressida is profoundly narcissistic, since any qualities bestowed on her redound to his own fame (cf. II.2.199–202). 51 Bayley, Uses of Division, p.205. This fact reflects perhaps a debt to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, since his portrait of the titular heroine is the most complex and psychologically realistic in the poem. 52 With the advent of feminist criticism, the degree of selfhood achieved by Cressida has become a focus for lively debate. Janet Adelman argues that she is initially presented as a ‘fully articulated subject’, although later demoted to the status of ‘opaque object’ by a dramatic logic which necessitates her assimilation to Troilus’s fantasies (Suffocating Mothers, pp.45–63). Others see her as the pure product of her world, who has internalised its belief that identity and worth are conferred by opinion and thus whose ‘fate is the working out of a character who lacks integrity or autonomy’ (Gayle Greene, ‘Shakespeare’s Cressida: “A Kind of Self”’, in Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz et al. eds, The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare (Urbana, 1980) p.136. Cf. Carolyn Asp, ‘In Defence of Cressida’, Studies in Philology 74 (1977) 406–17, and Claire M. Tylee, ‘The Text of Cressida and Every Ticklish Reader: Troilus and Cressida, the Greek Camp Scene’,



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SS 41 (1988) 63–76). My own view is that Cressida’s subjectivity (such as it is) is generated by the interplay between these possibilities; she is ‘paradoxically … both self-centred and insufficiently autonomous’ (Marianne Novy, Love’s Argument: Gender Relations in Shakespeare (Chapel Hill, 1984) p.121). Cressida’s premature embracing of her reputation as a whore is remarked upon by Ulysses (IV.5.54–63). There is an intriguing parallel here with her father, who abandoned Troy and ‘incurr’d a traitor’s name’ before it was strictly necessary. The classic discussion of this subject is E.H. Gombrich’s ‘Icones Symbolicae: The Visual Image in Neo-Platonic Thought’, JWCI, 11 (1948) 163–92. Cf. I.3.230–6, IV.1.8–34, IV.5.205–6. On Shakespeare’s manipulation of the iconographic conventions associated with the Troy story, see Jill Levenson, ‘Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and the Monumental Tradition in Tapestries and Literature’, Renaissance Drama 7 (1976) 43–84. Arnold Stein argues that one reason why the play falls short of tragic experience is the ‘singleness of attitude and passivity’ displayed by its characters (‘Troilus and Cressida: The Disjunctive Imagination’, ELH 36 (1969) 145–67).

Antony and Cleopatra and the Art of Dislimning

01 The use of pictorial tropes to describe imaginative activity is nothing new; it can be traced back to Plato, who argued that the senses paint images on the soul (Philebus, 39B), and was commonplace in the Renaissance. 02 Cleopatra’s ‘o’erpicturing’ of Venus has prompted critical speculation that this passage refers specifically to Apelles’s famous painting of Venus Anadyomene, mentioned by Pliny. But irrespective of whether Shakespeare had a particular artistic prototype in mind, the suggestion that Cleopatra displayed herself according to iconographic conventions employed by painters (based on a hint in the play’s chief source, Thomas North’s 1579 translation of Plutarch’s ‘Life of Marcus Antonius’, cited in John Wilders, ed., Arden 3 edition (1995) p.139) is important for my argument, insofar as it confirms that we are expected to locate this scene in the context of ut pictura discourse. 03 Cf. Jonathan Gil Harris’s subtle analysis of the play’s articulation of a narcissistic model of desire that invites the beholder to project his/her own longings into its textual/ theatrical lacunae. Noting that Cleopatra’s seductive power is predicated upon her ‘paradoxical absence’ from Enobarbus’s speech, he likens the latter to a ‘rococo mirror, its extraordinarily ornate and copious frame enclosing a subtly camouflaged glass in which Enobarbus’s Roman listeners glimpse whatever they want to see’. (“Narcissus in thy face”: Roman Desire and the Difference it Fakes in Antony and Cleopatra’, SQ 45 (1994) 418). 04 Cf. Orsino’s remark, ‘So full of shapes is fancy / That it alone is high fantastical’ (Twelfth Night, I.1.14). David Young usefully situates Shakespeare’s treatment of the imagination in relation to the contradictory views of this



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Notes faculty circulating in the period, in Something of Great Constancy: The Art of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (New Haven and London, 1966) pp.115–41. Sonnet 114. Cf. sonnets 113, 137, 141, 148, 150, 152. The following discussion assumes that the discourses pertaining to the fantasia were common currency in Italy and England, though differences of emphasis might occur. There is some evidence that Italian writers had fewer scruples about the use of the imagination as an artistic tool; their English counterparts, as William Rossky has shown, had to negotiate the overwhelmingly negative account of this faculty in popular psychology (‘Imagination in the English Renaissance: Psychology and Poetic’, Studies in the Renaissance 5 (1958) 49–73). Although classical and Scholastic writers sometimes distinguished between the imaginatio as a passive, reproductive agent and the freely creative phantasia, by the sixteenth century these terms were often used interchangeably (see Murray W. Bundy, The Theory of Imagination in Classical and Medieval Thought (Urbana, 1927) pp.179, 278). However, it is important not to confuse either with our modern usage of the word ‘fantasy’; while the fantasia (I have adopted the Italian spelling; cf. the English ‘phantasie’ or ‘fancy’) similarly connotes the power of desire to reshape quotidian realities, this is a voluntaristic not an unconscious process. Prooemium, Arthur Fairbanks trans., Philostratus ‘Imagines’; Callistratus, ‘Descriptions’ (London and New York, 1931) p.285. The Sophist, 236a–b. For further discussion of Plato’s critique of illusionism, see Chapter 3. On the developing role of the fantasia in Renaissance art theory, see Kemp, ‘From “Mimesis” to “Fantasia” ’; Summers, Michelangelo, chaps 7 and 14; and Sharon Fermor, Piero di Cosimo: Fiction, Invention and Fantasia (London, 1993) pp.29–37. Harry Caplan trans., Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola: On the Imagination (1501), Cornell Studies in English XVI (New Haven, 1930) p.31. See Murray W. Bundy, ‘ “Invention” and “Imagination” in the Renaissance’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 29 (1930) 535–45. Arte of English Poesie, p.19. The Craftsman’s Handbook, pp.1–2. The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, trans. F.C. Conybeare (London and New York, 1912) VI.19. Timaeus, 71–2. See the extract from Tasso’s Discorsi del poema eroico (1594) in Allan H. Gilbert ed., Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden (New York, 1940) p.477. For a useful survey of the critical debate over the role of the imagination in literary production and the eicastic-phantastic distinction, see Baxter Hathaway, The Age of Criticism: The Late Renaissance in Italy (Ithaca, NY, 1962). See, for example, Robert Burton’s distrustful appraisal of the ‘phantasie’: ‘In Melancholy men this faculty is most Powerfull and strong, and often hurts, producing many monstrous and prodigious things … In Poets and Painters Imagination forcibly workes, as appeares by their severall fictions, Antickes, Images … In men it is subject and governed by Reason, or at least should be; but in Brutes it hath no superior, & is Ratio Brutorum, all the reason they



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have’ (Thomas Faulkner et al. eds, The Anatomy of Melancholy (Oxford, 1989) I, 152, cf. 251). Advancement, pp.80–1, 116. The growing impact of post-structuralist theory on literary criticism has resulted in a sharpened recognition of the degree to which questions of representation are imbricated with power relations in the play. For examples of this approach, see John Drakakis ed., Antony and Cleopatra, New Casebook series (London, 1994), especially the pieces by Barbara Vincent, Ania Loomba, and Jyotsyna Singh. Phyllis Rackin likewise reads the play in terms of a debate between the rationalist aesthetic of the Romans and the play’s neoclassically minded critics, and the claims of the idealizing imagination, exemplified by Cleopatra’s showmanship (‘Shakespeare’s Boy Cleopatra, the Decorum of Nature, and the Golden World of Poetry’, PMLA 87 (1972), repr. in Drakakis ed., Antony and Cleopatra, pp.78–100). But whereas Rackin’s brilliant essay is theatrical in focus, I am interested in the broader implications of this debate for our view of the fantasia as a creative resource, since many of the play’s shows are staged only in the mind’s eye. ‘ “Nature’s piece ’gainst fancy”: The Divided Catastrophe in Antony and Cleopatra’, Inaugural lecture, University of London (London, 1973) p.4. Cleopatra’s dream is similarly seen as the ‘central counterstatement’ to Antony’s vision of the dissolving clouds in Arnold Stein, ‘The Image of Antony: Lyric and Tragic Imagination’, Kenyon Review 21 (1959) 586–606, and cf. Sidney Homan’s discussion of the play’s ambivalence towards the imagination (‘Divided Response and the Imagination in Antony and Cleopatra’, PQ 49 (1970) 460–8). The precise values identified with Rome and Egypt vary from critic to critic, but the former is generally seen as standing for military prowess, public duty, the ‘strong necessity of time’, reason and self-restraint, the latter for sensuous pleasure, idleness, a sense of timelessness, imagination and excess. As Jonathan Dollimore notes, ‘the language of desire, far from transcending the power relations which structure this society, is wholly in-formed by them’ (Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Brighton, 1984) p.207). Ironically, of nothing is this more true than the lovers’ claims to transcendance, which (I argue below) become a mode of political resistance. Most of the play’s critics comment on its dialectical structure. See especially John Danby, ‘Antony and Cleopatra: A Shakespearean Adjustment’ in his Poets on Fortune’s Hill (London, 1952), and Ernest Schanzer, The Problem Plays of Shakespeare: A Study of ‘Julius Caesar’, ‘Measure for Measure’, ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ (London, 1963). For recent discussions of Cleopatra’s theatricality, particularly the way this is constituted as a threat to the Roman ideal of a stable masculine identity, see Jyotsyna Singh, ‘Renaissance Anti-theatricality, Anti-feminism and Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra’, Renaissance Drama 20 (1989) repr. in Drakakis ed., Antony and Cleopatra, pp.308–29, and Laura Levine, Men in Women’s Clothing: Anti-theatricality and Effeminisation 1579–1642 (Cambridge, 1994) chap.3.



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28 On Antony’s Herculean qualities, see Eugene M. Waith, The Herculean Hero in Marlowe, Chapman, Shakespeare, and Dryden (London, 1962) pp.113–21, and Richard Hillman, ‘Antony, Hercules, and Cleopatra: “the bidding of the gods” and “the subtlest maze of them all”’, SQ 38 (1987) 442–51. 29 Cf. I.4.1–10, 16–21; II.1.19–27; II.6.62–70; II.7.24–51; III.6.1–19. 30 The reiterated idea that the perceived value or identity of a person alters when he/she is absent, that he/she only becomes an object of desire when irrecoverably lost (see, e.g., I.2.122–7; I.4.41–4), should perhaps be seen as arising not so much from a preoccupation with the state of nostalgic belatedness (cf. Michael Neill’s introduction to the Oxford edition (1994) pp.94–8), as from the play’s investment in the fantasia, which achieves its fullest scope only in the absence of the thing it works on. 31 A useful list of analogues for the topos of the metamorphosing clouds and pageantry trope is supplied by Marvin Spevack’s New Variorum edition of Antony and Cleopatra (1990) pp.273–4. 32 See H.W. Janson, ‘The “Image Made by Chance” in Renaissance Thought’, in Millard Meiss ed., De Artibus Opuscula XL: Essays in Honour of Erwin Panofsky (New York, 1961) I, 254–66. While perceiving images in natural objects was regarded as a sign of imaginative creativity, it was not the artist’s prerogative alone but something shared with the beholder in general. This crucial point is made in Philostratus’s Apollonius of Tyana, II.22. Discussing the animal shapes seen in cloud formations, Apollonius observes that ‘the mimetic art is twofold, and we may regard the one kind as an employment of the hands and mind in producing imitations, and declare that this is painting, whereas the other kind consists in making likenesses with the mind alone’. 33 Leonardo on Painting, p.222. Cf. Vasari’s use of the same topos in his life of Piero di Cosimo (Lives of the Artists, II, 107). 34 See Barbara J. Bono, Literary Transvaluation: From Vergilian Epic to Shakespearean Tragicomedy (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1984) p.187. 35 The Common Liar: An Essay on ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ (New Haven and London, 1973) pp.121–31, 139–49. Like much recent criticism of the play, this chapter is deeply indebted to Adelman’s study. 36 By this I mean a style of architecture that embodies rational precepts through its observance of mathematical proportion and symmetry, in keeping with the ideals set out in Vitruvius’s De Architectura. David Bevington’s New Cambridge edition (1990) includes some illuminating annotation of the play’s architectural imagery. 37 Analysing the play’s imagistic patterns, Susan Synder notes how the solid fixity of Rome is destabilised by the seemingly undirected flux identified with Egypt (‘Patterns of Motion in Antony and Cleopatra’, SS 33 (1980) 113–22). 38 Terra firma is figuratively identified not only with the empire and its conquering land armies (III.7.41–8, 61–6), but with the Roman ideal of a ‘firm’, unified and self-contained identity (I.5.43, III.11.1). But if it cannot guarantee the permanence or stability of the first, neither does it provide a flexible enough basis for selfhood. 39 The translator was almost certainly Robert Dallington (for bibliographical details, see Karl Joseph Höltgen, ‘Sir Robert Dallington (1561–1637): Author,



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Traveler, and Pioneer of Taste’, The Huntington Library Quarterly 47 (1984) 147–77). All page references cited in the text are from Stephen Orgel ed., Hypnerotomachia: The Strife of Love in a Dream (New York and London, 1976). See De Architectura, II, Preface (1–4). Like Cleopatra’s vision of Antony, this audacious project seems consciously to emulate the fabled wonders of antiquity (e.g. the Colossus of Rhodes) and is conceived as a fitting tribute to a world-conqueror. The play’s hyperbolic discourse has been extensively discussed: see, for example, Maurice Charney, Shakespeare’s Roman Plays: The Function of Imagery in the Drama (Cambridge, Mass., 1961) pp.79–141; Madeleine Doran, ‘ “High events as these”: the language of hyperbole in Antony and Cleopatra’, Queen’s Quarterly 72 (1965) 26–51; Colie, Shakespeare’s Living Art, chap.4; Adelman, Common Liar, pp.110–21; and the introductions to the recent New Cambridge, Oxford and Arden 3 editions. Yet curiously little attention has been given to the spatial/optical qualities of this discourse. Shakespeare had exploited rhetorical amplificatio for this purpose in the first act of Julius Caesar, where it is used to emphasise the opposing valuations of Caesar, and again, more intensively, in Troilus and Cressida (see Chapter 5). Apart from emphasizing the general obligation to observe ‘due proportion’ in figurative discourse, Aristotle identifies a specific type of ‘proportional metaphor’, consisting of four terms which stand in the same relation to each other and are therefore inter-substitutable (The Art of Poetry, 21.4; cf. Rhetoric, III.4.3–4). Ad Herennium, IV.33. Garden of Eloquence, pp.31–3. Cf. Richard Sherry’s definition of amplification as a process of ‘increasing and diminyshing, [which] serveth for thys purpose, that the thyng shulde seme as great as it is in dede, lesser or greater then it seemeth to manye’ (A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (London, 1550) e.iii v.). In his essay, ‘Jacobean Tragedy and the Mannerist Style’ SS 26 (1973) 49–67, Cyrus Hoy comments illuminatingly on the Mannerist qualities of this play, though he is mainly concerned with its juxtaposition of different orders of reality. Cf. Walter Friedlander’s observation that ‘the gigantic figures of the prophets and sibyls of the Sistine ceiling live and act … [in a space that is] fearfully narrowed, almost canceled, and their powerful expansiveness points towards liberation only in a transcendental and divine space’ (Mannerism and Anti-Mannerism in Italian Painting (New York, 1965) p.15). Admittedly, this affective power is subjected to the same sceptical interrogation as every other aspect of the lovers’ behaviour (e.g., III.2.53–9, IV.2.24), but those most suspicious of this power (Enobarbus, Caesar) are nevertheless moved against their will to apparently genuine displays of emotion. The lovers also know how to mobilize imaginative energies in others, harnessing these for their own political ends. By contrast, the Roman attitude to persuasion is strictly utilitarian (e.g., III.12.26–31, V.1.61–6). On the ‘grand style’, see Cicero, Orator, V.20, XXVIII.97, and Quintilian, Institutio, XII.10.58–65.



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50 See Vasari, Lives, I, 360, and Condivi, Life of Michelangelo, p.39. Significantly, Michelangelo’s work was seen in his own day as belonging to the ‘grand style’ (Summers, Michelangelo, p.19). 51 Quintilian, Institutio, VI.2.29. 52 See Dorsch ed., Classical Literary Criticism, pp.121–6. 53 Ibid, p.100. 54 See Chapter 3, p.87. Several critics have commented on the conflicting views of decorum informing the play (see esp. Rackin, ‘Shakespeare’s Boy Cleopatra’; Adleman Common Liar, pp.141–5, and T. McAlindon, Shakespeare and Decorum (London, 1973) pp.167–213), but the spatialised treatment of the problem has again gone virtually unnoticed. 55 In endowing Antony with this paradoxical quality, Shakespeare is building on a remark in Plutarch’s text, which states: ‘Furthermore, things that seeme intollerable in other men, as to boast commonly, to jeast with one or other, to drinke like a good fellow with every body … it is incredible what wonderful love it wanne him [i.e. Marcus Antonius] amongest them’ (New Variorum edition, p.399). 56 Adelman, Common Liar, p.141. 57 As Michael Neill notes, this scene ‘lurches in performance between high poetry and the grossest physical awkwardness, as Cleopatra and her women struggle to haul up Antony’s mutilated body into the monument’ (Oxford edition, p.77). 58 Schanzer lists instances where Cleopatra’s words, sentiments and actions echo Antony’s and notes their increase towards the end of the play, but attributes them to an affinity of outlook between the lovers rather than a conscious policy of remaking (Problem Plays, pp.133–8). 59 See, for example, Rackin, ‘Shakespeare’s Boy Cleopatra’, pp.85–9, and René Weis, ‘Antony and Cleopatra: The Challenge of Fiction’, English (1983) 1–14. 60 Cf. Levine, Men in Women’s Clothing, pp.69–70. 61 Barbara Vincent notes that the lovers’ apotheosis ‘depends on how successfully they engage the desires of the beholders’ (‘Antony and Cleopatra and the Rise of Comedy’, ELR 12 (1982), repr. in Drakakis ed., Antony and Cleopatra, p.241). 62 Enobarbus undergoes a similar repositioning in IV.9, when he exchanges his role of detached observer for that of protagonist, at the mercy of his own emotions and watched by others. Ironically, he fulfils his earlier prediction that remaining loyal to the lovers would entail such a change of status: ‘he that can endure / To follow with allegiance a fall’n lord … earns a place i’ th’ story’ (III.13.43). 63 On Cleopatra’s self-imaging as Isis, see Michael Lloyd, ‘Cleopatra as Isis’, SS 12 (1959) 89–94, Bono, Literary Transvaluation, pp.197–213, and T. McAlindon, Shakespeare’s Tragic Cosmos (Cambridge, 1991) pp.229–32.

7

The Tempest and the Art of Masque

11 For example, it also employs the four-part structure of Roman New Comedy. See Daniel C. Broughton, ‘Jonsonian Structure in The Tempest’, SQ 21 (1970) 3–10.



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02 See Peacock, Stage Designs of Inigo Jones, p.11. 03 Notable examples include Love’s Labours’ Lost, As You Like It, Timon of Athens, Macbeth, Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale. Only The Tempest, however, attempts to reproduce anything like a full-scale court masque. 04 Those studies of the genre I have found most useful include Stephen Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque (1965, repr. Oxford, 1990) and The Illusion of Power (Berkeley, Calif., 1975); Orgel and Strong, Inigo Jones; Graham Parry, The Golden Age Restor’d: The Culture of the Stuart Court, 1603–42 (Manchester, 1982); David Lindley ed., The Court Masque (Manchester, 1984); and Strong, Art and Power. 05 Stephen Orgel ed., Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques (New Haven and London, 1969) p.169. 06 Anne Lake Prescott has shown how grotesque imagery was used by Jonson and Jones as an old-fashioned, irrational yet not unproductive counterpart to the neoclassical style underpinning the ordered harmonies of the masque (‘The Stuart Masque and Pantagruel’s Dreams’, ELH 51 (1984) 407–30). 07 Orgel ed., The Complete Masques, p.134. 08 Parry, Golden Age Restor’d, p.43. 09 Illusion of Power, p.39. 10 Inigo Jones, I, 7. The point is restated more fully by Strong, who notes the irony whereby perspective, initially associated with the humanist civic values of the Italian city-states, was appropriated as an instrumentum regni by the absolutist rulers of sixteenth-century Europe (Art and Power, pp. 32–5). 11 Gilman, Curious Perspective, p.64. 12 Notable performers in the Whitehall masques who later aligned themselves with the Parliamentarians include the Countess of Arundel, Sir John Digby, the Earl of Essex, and Lord Rich. (See the index of performers in David Lindley ed., Court Masques: Jacobean and Caroline Entertainments 1605–1640 (Oxford, 1995). 13 On this point I am indebted to discussion with Dr. Lesley Mickel, whose monograph on the Jonsonian anti-masque is forthcoming from Scolar Press. 14 Orgel ed., The Complete Masques, p.75. 15 Orgel, The Illusion of Power, p.40. 16 See, for example, Leah Marcus, ‘ “Present Occasions” and the Shaping of Ben Jonson’s Masques’, ELH 45 (1978), 201–25, and Sara Pearl, ‘Sounding to Present Occasion: Jonson’s Masques of 1620–5’, in Lindley ed., The Court Masque, 60–77. 17 For the definitive account of Jonson’s dispute with Jones over this issue, see D.J. Gordon, ‘Poet and Architect: The Intellectual Setting of the Quarrel between Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones’, JWCI 12 (1949) 152–78, repr. in Stephen Orgel ed., The Renaissance Imagination (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1975) pp.77–101. 18 From ‘An Expostulacion with Inigo Jones’, in Herford and Simpson eds, Works, VIII, 404. The whole poem sums up Jonson’s jaundiced attitude to the new orthodoxy which identified the ‘Eloquence of Masques’ with its ‘Mighty Showes’ and ‘the mere perspective of an Inch board’. 19 See, for example., Glynne Wickham, ‘Masque and Anti-masque in The Tempest’, Essays and Studies 28 (1975) 1–14, and Gary Schmidgall, Shakespeare and the Courtly Aesthetic (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1981).



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20 Dryden referred to The Tempest as a Blackfriars play in the preface to his 1674 adaptation of it. While we have no firm evidence that it was also performed at the Globe, this would fit with the usual practice of the King’s Men, who from 1608 alternated seasonally between these two playing houses. For a review of the question, see Appendix E in Frank Kermode’s Arden edition. 21 That the play performs a critical revision of the masque has been argued, with different emphases, by several critics. See especially Ernest B. Gilman, ‘ “All eyes”: Prospero’s Inverted Masque’, Renaissance Quarterly, 33 (1980) 214–30; David Lindley, ‘Music, Masque and Meaning in The Tempest’, in Lindley ed., The Court Masque, pp.47–59; and David Norbrook, ‘ “What cares these roarers for the name of king?”: Language and Utopia in The Tempest’, in Gordon McMullan and Jonathan Hope eds, The Politics of Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and After (London and New York, 1992) pp.36–8. The play’s relationship to the masque is also discussed in Robert Grudin, ‘Prospero’s Masque and the Structure of The Tempest’, South Atlantic Quarterly 71 (1972) 401–9, and John Gillies, ‘Shakespeare’s Virginian Masque’, ELH 53 (1986) 673–707. 22 See his introduction to the Oxford edition of the play (1987) pp.2, 43–4. 23 This question has begun to be addressed in recent criticism. Graham Holderness, for example, argues that the different venues where the play was staged would have determined which meanings were activated in Shakespeare’s text. While the play’s discursive links with the court masque allowed it to be received at Whitehall as a conservative celebration of the royal prerogative benevolently exercised by an ideal ruler, he believes that Globe audiences would have been inclined to identify with the viewpoint of socially marginalized characters, especially the Boatswain’s plebeian commonsense and Caliban’s defiance of authority (Graham Holderness et al., Shakespeare: Out of Court: Dramatisations of Court Society (London, 1990) chap.9). David Norbrook, in an essay that tries to retrieve the ‘republican subtext’ embedded in the play’s utopian allusions, likewise warns against oversimplified authoritarian readings, noting that the play’s audience ‘would have contained people who were far from taking an absolutist dynastic perspective for granted’ and that the text ‘does permit a certain detachment from the courtly viewpoint’ (‘ “What cares these roarers” ’). 24 The Boatswain’s question derives its resonance partly from the fact that ‘roarers’ ‘connoted misrule and rebellion, roaring boys or girls’ (Norbrook, ‘ “What cares these roarers” ’, p.21). The socio-political discontent of an Antonio or a Caliban proves more difficult to allay than the waves. 25 Prospero’s account of his ‘secret studies’ in I.2 is broadly consistent with Frank Kermode’s portrayal of him as a Neoplatonic Mage, whose art involves achieving mastery over the natural world and his own passions by ‘the disciplined exercise of virtuous knowledge’ (introduction to the Arden edition (1954, repr. 1988) xli, xlvii–viii) – a view endorsed in essentials by C.J. Sisson, Frances Yates and Karol Berger. But this idealized image of Prospero’s art is rapidly subverted, as we witness his furious outbursts at Ariel, Caliban and Ferdinand, and are invited to note the parallels between Sycorax’s brand of sorcery and his own. For a fuller discussion of these ironies, see Margareta de Grazia, ‘The Tempest: Gratuitous Movement or Action without Kibes and Pinches’, Sh.Studs. 14 (1981) 254–6.



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26 Royal or aristocratic nuptials were, of course, among the prime occasions of the masque. On the dynastic concerns informing Prospero’s art, see David Bergeron, Shakespeare’s Romances and the Royal Family (Lawrence, Kansas, 1985) pp.178–203. 27 Orgel, Illusion of Power, p.79. 28 ‘Miraculous Harp: A Reading of Shakespeare’s Tempest’, Sh.Studs. 5 (1969), repr. in Harold Bloom ed., William Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’, Modern Critical Interpretations (New York, 1988) p.13. 29 Just as the removal of the banquet by the rapacious Harpy allegorizes the very desires (devouring greed) which it frustrates, so the ‘trumpery’ used to catch Caliban and his ‘confederates’ reflects their longing for the trappings of rule. The vision of Miranda presented to Ferdinand similarly plays on his self-confessed susceptibility to women (III.1.39–46), though his sexual desires are not permanently thwarted. On the symbolic significance of the banquet, see Jacqueline Latham, ‘The Magic Banquet in The Tempest’, Sh.Studs. 12 (1979) 215–27. 30 See, for example, Frye, A Natural Perspective (New York, 1965) pp.156–9, and Howard Felperin, Shakespearean Romance (Princeton, 1972) pp.270–3, 278. Felperin subsequently revised his view (see note 61 below). Presumably, Caliban and his ‘confederates’ are denied a final vision not only on moral grounds, but because their socially low or ‘pariah’ status makes them unfit candidates for redemption. 31 This is the title of a Jonson/Jones masque performed at Christmas 1617. 32 It should be noted that, like the imagination with which it was closely associated, memory was conceived of as an image-making faculty and mode of perception. 33 See Anne Barton’s introduction to the New Penguin edition of the play (London, 1968) pp.35–6. Holderness also notes that ‘the processes of storytelling, the means by which representations of the past are constructed, are made so obtrusively explicit that the relativities of memory and interpretation become insistently foregrounded’ (Shakespeare: Out of Court, p.175). 34 See, for example, Francis Barker and Peter Hulme, ‘Nymphs and reapers heavily vanish: the discursive contexts of The Tempest’, in Drakakis ed., Alternative Shakespeares, pp.191–205, and Paul Brown, ‘ “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine”: The Tempest and the discourse of colonialism’, in Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield eds, Political Shakespeare: New essays in cultural materialism (Manchester, 1985) pp. 48–71. While not denying that the play stages (albeit unconsciously) the contradictions and anxieties attendant on the colonialist project, these critics argue that such difficulties are suppressed in the interests of ideological closure. A greater degree of ambivalence about that project is allowed for in Stephen Greenblatt’s ‘Martial Law in the Land of Cockaigne’, in Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford, 1988) pp.129–63. 35 The resonances between Prospero’s masque and Hymenaei are multiple. Jonson’s masque, performed at court in 1606 to mark the wedding between the Earl of Essex and Lady Frances Howard, celebrates under the mystical trope of union both a marriage alliance between the opposing Protestant and Catholic factions, and the prospective political union of England and Scotland (See D.J. Gordon, Hymenaei: Jonson’s Masque of Union’, in Orgel



Notes

36 37

38

39

40 41

42 43

44

Notes ed., Renaissance Imagination, pp.157–84). According to John Orrell, Prospero’s masque also imitates Jonson’s masque in employing a structure modelled on the Pythagorean system of harmonic proportions (‘The Musical Canon of Proportion in Jonson’s Hymenaei’, English Language Notes 15 (1977–8) 178). For a fuller analysis of these themes, see especially Grudin, ‘Prospero’s Masque’, and Gillies, ‘Shakespeare’s Virginian Masque’. ‘ “All eyes” ’, 215–16’. As Gilman argues, much of the significance of this moment lies in its reversal of the normal sequence in which masque follows anti-masque and what this says about Prospero’s inability to dispose of the threat associated with Caliban. For relevant discussion of the grotesque, see Nicole Dacos, La Decouverte de la Domus Aurea et la Formation des Grotesques à la Renaissance (London and Leiden, 1969); David Summers, ‘Michelangelo and Architecture’, Art Bulletin 52 (1972) 146–57; Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature (New York, 1981) pp.19–28; and Kaufmann, Mastery of Nature, pp.161–4. From the theoretical introduction to painting in Vasari’s Vite, chap.13 (Vasari-Milanesi, I, 193). The translation is mine. Cf. Armenini, De’ veri precetti III.12, trans. Olszewski, p.262. De Architectura, VII.5.1–7. Gabriele Paleotti, Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre e profane, II.37, in Barocchi, Trattati, II, 425, cf. pp.446ff. and Gilio, Degli Errori de’ pittori, pp.15ff. in the same volume. On the place of the grotesque in English visual culture, see Evett, Literature and the Visual Arts, chap.5. My focus on the art historical meanings of the term has meant excluding other possible contexts for the grotesque, in particular the culture of popular Renaissance festivals analysed by Mikhail Bakhtin in his seminal study of Rabelais. Nevertheless it should be noted that Caliban also shares certain features with the grotesque body of the Rabelaisian/Bahktinian imagination: its multiple, hybrid, excessive and disproportioned shape (which Bakhtin contrasts with the enclosed, monumental figures of classical art), and its gross physicality (e.g. Caliban’s smelliness and earthiness (I.2.314), his association with the lower bodily functions (II.2.105–7) and sensual pleasures, like drinking, as against the “higher” operations of abstract reason). Moreover, his indulgence in festive misrule and flouting of authority identify him with carnivalesque culture and so, by extension, with the antics of the anti-masque figures (for example, the tipsy saturnalia of the satyrs in Oberon (1611) or the ‘drunken orgies’ of Comus and his attendants in Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue (1618)). For a useful introduction to the Rabelaisian/ Bakhtinian grotesque, see Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London, 1986) pp.6–23. On its literary manifestations in England, see Neil Rhodes, Elizabethan Grotesque (London, 1980). Leonard Tennenhouse argues that Shakespeare loads Caliban with ‘some of the more negative features of the grotesque body’, but does not explain what these are or admit the possibility of their being read in a more favourable light (Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare’s Genres (New York and London, 1986) p.178).



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45 The Neoplatonic assumption that the body directly reflects the spirit, so central to Shakespeare’s late plays (cf. I.2.458–60), is interrogated by Gonzalo’s observation of Ariel and his fellow spirits, that ‘though they are of monstrous shape, yet note /Their manners are more gentle-kind than of / Our human generation you shall find / Many, nay almost any’ (III.3.31) – to which, ironically, Prospero assents. 46 De Architectura, II.1.1–7. 47 Dorsch ed., Classical Literary Criticism, pp.92–3. Cf. Wilson, Arte of Rhetorique, Preface, and Elyot, The Gouvenor, p.117. 48 On the contemporary mania for collecting and exhibiting the trappings, customs and inhabitants of alien cultures, see Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago and London, 1988) chap.3. 49 We may read such a recognition, among other meanings, into Prospero’s famously enigmatic reference to Caliban: ‘this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine’ (V.1.275). 50 Orgel ed., The Complete Masques, p.125. This expression of faith in his audience is belied by the belligerently defensive tone of the preface to The Haddington Masque and many of Jonson’s glosses on the printed texts of his other masques (e.g., ibid, pp.107–8, 516, 547, 549). 51 For documentation on contemporary reactions, see Herford and Simpson eds, Ben Jonson, vol. X, and the comments on individual masques reproduced in Orgel and Strong, Inigo Jones, vols 1 and 2. 52 Whilst not discounting the possibility that Jacobean masques exerted an influence on the ethico-political agenda of the monarchy, Martin Butler has cautioned against overestimating their educative or persuasive powers, which would inevitably have been compromised by ‘the contingencies of court life’, including the constraints of the patronage system (see ‘Ben Jonson and the Limits of Courtly Panegyric’, in Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake eds, Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (London, 1994) pp.91–115). 53 Ironically, the one character in whom spectacle does produce a change of heart is Prospero, who responds with belated empathy to the mental image Ariel evokes of Gonzalo mourning over the witless courtiers (V.1.10–20). 54 For a pertinent discussion of wonder in the context of classical and Renaissance literary theory, see J.V. Cunningham, Woe or Wonder, chap.4, and of art history, John Onians, ‘ “I wonder … ”: A short history of amazement’, in Onians ed., Sight and Insight: Essays on art and culture in honour of E.H. Gombrich at 85 (London, 1994) pp.11–33. Stephen Greenblatt’s stimulating analysis of wonder as the quintessential response evoked in the European coloniser by his encounters with the New World is also germane to the play (see Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Oxford, 1992) pp.14–23, 74–81). 55 For Aristotle’s views on the ‘marvellous’ as a dramatic prerequisite, see Dorsch ed., Classical Literary Criticism, pp.45, 49, 68. On the preoccupation of Italian critics with meraviglia and its affective impact, relationship to the verisimilar, and association with the higher genres of epic and tragedy, see Weinberg, History of Literary Criticism, especially pp.172–3, 238–9, 340–2, 397–8, 622–4, 650, 688, 773–5.



Notes

272

Notes

See Chapter 3. Inigo Jones, I, 10–11. From The Vision of Delight, in Orgel ed., The Complete Masques, pp.252–3. Cf. Samuel Daniel’s self-deprecating reference to the authors of court masques as ‘poor engineers for shadows’ who ‘frame only images of no result’ in the preface to Tethys’ Festival (1610), or Plutus’s inveighing against ‘the false and fleeting delight’ offered by masques in Jonson’s Love Restored (1612) (see Lindley ed., Court Masques, pp.55, 67). For further analogues in the Jacobean masques, see Orgel’s Oxford edition, p.180. 60 ‘Music, masque and meaning’, pp.54–5. 61 ‘Romance and Romanticism’, in The Uses of the Canon: Elizabethan Literature and Contemporary Theory (Oxford, 1990) p.24.



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Adelman, Janet, 180 –1, 255, 260, 264, 265, 266 Agricola, Rudolph, 17, 228, 229, 230 Agrippa, H.C., 76–7, 243 Alberti, Leon Battista, 1–8, 17, 31, 35–9, 41, 43, 52, 56–58, 62, 63, 66–7, 77, 87, 94, 109, 111, 114, 117, 126, 186, 232, 235, 239, 244, 246, 247, 253 De Pictura, xv, 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 77, 226 theory of composition, 3, 4, 8, 24, 32 Alpers, Svetlana, 39, 41, 226, 234, 240 Altman, Joel, 17, 230 anamorphosis, xiii, xvi, 38, 47, 55, 79, 135– 40, 146, 162, 174, 233– 4, 244, 254 Anne of Denmark, 50 Aristotle, 12, 57, 88, 90, 91, 168, 185, 221, 228, 229, 239, 246, 265, 271 Armenini, Giovan Battista, 58, 244, 247, 270 art collectors, 44, 46, 50, 235 Aston, Margaret, 80, 244 Bacon, Francis, 100, 152, 170 –1, 193, 207, 227, 249, 259, 263 Baldwin, T.W., 227, 238 Baltrusaitis, Jurgis, 136, 139, 233, 236, 257 Barbaro, Daniele, 38, 234, 237, 239 Barber, C.L., 227, 232 Barker, Francis, 133, 250, 256, 269 Barthes, Roland, 241 Barton, Anne, 172, 227, 255, 263, 269 Bath, Michael, 230, 242 Baxandall, Michael, 4, 226, 227, 236, 238, 248 Belsey, Catherine, 232, 250, 251 Berger, Harry, 210, 226, 253, 260, 269 Bevington, David, 243, 264 Blunt, Anthony, 239, 240, 247 Bolgar, R.R., 228, 238

Bono, Barbara, 264, 265 Bradshaw, Graham, 4, 255, 259 Brown, Paul, 223, 269 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 232 Bryson, Norman, 66, 240, 244 Bundy, Murray W., 262 Burnett, Mark Thornton, 250, 256 Burckhardt, Jacob, 104, 250 Burton, Robert, 262 Buxton, John, 234, 235 Cassirer, Ernst, 67, 240, 257 Castelvetro, Lodovico, 242 Castiglione, Baldassare, 77–8, 97, 240, 244, 246, 249, 253 catoptrics, 47, 236 Caus, Salamon de, 46–7, 236 Cennini, Cennino, 169–70, 234, 248 Chapman, George, 44, 70 –1, 72, 242, 244, 256 Charles I, 209 Cicero, 4, 5, 22, 88, 227, 229, 231, 239, 240, 246, 254, 259, 265 Colie, Rosalie, 230, 254, 256, 258, 260, 265 Colonna, Francesco, 183, 265 commonplace, xv, 11–12, 19–21, 24 –29, 229 books 11–12, 14, 228, 229 see also under rhetoric: topoi (dialectical ‘places’) Condivi, Ascanio, 247, 266 copiousness, 5, 9–10, 13, 17–18, 229 dangers of, 6–7, 10, 227 costruzione leggitima, see under perspective Curtius, Ernst R., 228, 230 Cusanus, Nicholas, 257 Dacos, Nicole, 270 Damisch, Hubert, 109, 252 Daniel, Samuel, 139, 249, 257, 272 Danti, Vincenzo, 64, 239, 247

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Index

Index

Day, Angel, 237 decorum, 5, 7, 23, 24, 56, 87–8, 90, 92–8, 129, 151, 170, 187–90, 218, 247, 248, 249, 254, 265 Dee, John, 45, 235 Delaney, Paul, 251, 254 Descartes, René, 108, 111, 139, 250, 257 disegno, 50, 64, 236 Dolce, Lodovico, 58, 77, 90, 92, 226, 240, 244, 247, 248, 254 Doran, Madeleine, 231, 265 Drayton, Michael, 45–6, 235, 237, 256 dreams, 63, 169, 183, 192–3, 215 see also ‘fantasia’ Dürer, Albrecht, 36, 39, 90, 92, 99–101, 126, 137, 233, 234, 238, 239, 247, 249, 254, see also Plates 2 and 3 Eagleton, Terence, 256, 258 Edgerton, Samuel Jr., 233 eicastic/phantastic debate, 83, 168, 193– 4, 197, 262 ekphrasis 46, 85, 246 Elizabeth I, 40, 42, 44, 101 Ellrodt, Robert, 120, 254 Elyot, Sir Thomas, 236, 271 Empiricus, Sextus, 138, 257 epideictic discourse, 144 –9, 153– 4, 158–62, 199–200, 259 Erasmus, Desiderius, 9–10, 18, 149, 228, 230, 259 Evett, David, 41, 234, 237, 270 fantasia, 63, 64, 165, 166–72, 175, 177–80, 184, 187, 190 – 4, 213–16, 218, 239 feigning, 30, 75–9, 81– 4, 175–6, 191–3, 196–7, 245, 246 Felperin, Howard, 225, 269, 272 Ferry, Anne, 105, 251 Foucault, Michel, 88, 247 Fracastorius, Girolamo, 242, 244 Francesca, Piero della, 36, 65, 233 Freedberg, Sydney, 126, 240, 255 French, A.L., 113, 253 Frye, Northrop, 211, 269 Fumerton, Patricia, 106, 251

Gauricus, Pomponius, 58, 233 Gent, Lucy, 44, 79, 234, 235, 237, 238, 244, 245, 251 Gheeraerts, Marcus (the Younger), 41, 49, 52, 54, 56, 238, 250, see also Plate 9 Gilman, Ernest B., xiii, xiv, 217, 233, 244, 257, 267, 268, 270 Gilio da Fabriano, G.A., 248, 270 Golding, Arthur, 260 Gombrich, E.H., 85, 240, 244, 246, 261 Gordon, D.J., 267, 269–70 Greenblatt, Stephen, 250, 251, 256, 269, 271 Greene, Gayle, 258, 260 Greene, Thomas, 241, 256 grotesque, the, 56, 199–200, 217–20, 267, 270 Guillen, Claudio, 243, 245, 257 Hagstrum, Jean, 226, 238 Hakewill, George, 82, 245 Harrington, Sir John 82, 246 Hawthornden, William Drummond of, 139, 257 Haydocke, Richard, 39, 44, 46, 59, 60 –2, 67, 69–70, 80, 99, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 244, 247, see also Plate 12 Helgerson, Richard, 102, 249 Herbert, George, 256 Heywood, Thomas, 116, 253 Hilliard, Nicholas, 41, 42–3, 80 –1, 94, 98–102, 105–6, 234, 235, 249, see also Plate 6 historia 1–8, 42, 50, 117 Hogarth, William, 249 Holanda, Francisco de, 248 Holbein, Hans, 38, 44, 137, 256 Holderness, Graham, 254, 268, 269 Höltgen, Karl J., 238, 241, 264 Horace, 5, 57, 63, 74, 87, 92–3, 218–19, 227, 239, 243, 244, 248, 271 Hoskins, John, 241, 247, 259 Hulse, Clark, 43, 101, 227, 235, 238, 240, 246, 249, 252 humanists, 2, 22, 57–8, 228, 230 –1



286

idolatry, 80, 81, 152, 154, 167, 242, 245, 246 illusionism, 37–8, 74 –82, 126, 134, 136–9, 199–201, 205–7, 211, 221–2, 243, 244, 245 imagination, see fantasia imitatio, 141–3, 240, 258 imitation, see mimesis invention, 1, 4, 9, 13, 17, 24, 65, 169–70, 179–80, 184, 193– 4, 231, 232 James I, 199, 204, 207, 222 Jardine, Lisa, 227, 228, 231, 232 Javitch, Daniel, 246, 248 Jones, Inigo, 49, 50 –2, 53, 198, 200 –1, 203, 207–8, 220 –1, 236, 237, 267, 269, see also Plate 16 Jonson, Ben, 14, 44, 70, 198, 201, 202– 4, 207, 220 –1, 229, 237, 242, 244, 256, 257 judgement of values, 23, 146–151, 174 –5, 187–8, 231, 249, 157, 159 of the eye, 62, 64 –5, 89–91, 94 –5, 99–101, 247, 248 criterion of, 23, 94 –7, 138– 40, 151–3, 158–60, 180 –1, 187, 247, 248–9 see also decorum Junius, Franciscus (François du Jon, the Younger), 81, 245, 253 Kahn, Victoria, 231, 247, 257 Kaufmann, Thomas DaCosta, 236, 270 Kemp, Martin, 39, 233, 234, 239, 240, 244, 262 Klein, Robert, 233, 238, 244 Kubovy, Michael, 233, 244 Lacan, Jacques, 107, 108, 251, 252, 256 Lakoff, George (with Mark Johnson), 16, 230 landscape, 47, 51, 52–3, 55, 237–8 Le Coat, Gerard, 238, 253 Lee, Rensselaer, 238, 239, 248, 253 Lee, Captain Thomas, 54, 238, see also Plate 9

287

Leonardo da Vinci, 62–64, 65, 66, 77–9, 80, 126, 179, 233, 240, 244, 247, 253, 264 Lever, Ralph, 231 Levine, Laura, 263, 266 licence (artistic), 55, 61–3, 65, 68, 74, 78, 83, 87, 92– 4, 129, 151, 167, 169–71, 180 –1, 183, 192– 4, 200, 217–18, 239, 240, 248, 249, 270, see also under perspective, proportion, rhetoric Lindley, David, 225, 267, 268, 272 Lomazzo, Gian Paolo, 39, 42, 46, 58, 59, 60 –2, 67–70, 72–7, 80, 89–92, 94, 99, 117, 136, 238, 239, 240, 242, 245, 247 Longinus, 187, 266 Lyly, John, 252 McAlindon, Thomas, 151, 259, 266 Mannerism, 37, 50, 64, 67, 71, 73, 91–3, 185–6, 240 –1, 242, 248, 265 marvellous (meraviglia), the, 77–8, 184, 186–7, 201, 221– 4, 244, 271 masque, xvi, 50 –2, 178, 197, 198–209, 213–17, 220 –2, 224 –5, 237, 267, 268–70 Maus, Katherine Eisaman, 104, 250, 251 memory, 15–16, 169, 214, 229, 269 Mercer, Eric, 234, 237 Michelangelo Buonarotti, 90 –1, 170, 186, 239, 247, 248, 266, see also Plate 15 mimesis (doctrine of ), 60 –5, 68–9, 70, 74, 169–71, 192– 4, 239, 240, 248 miniatures, 42–3, 50, 98, 100, 105–6, 129–30, 235, 250 –1, 255 see also portraiture Minturno, Antonio, 92, 244 Mirandola, Gianfrancesco Pico della, 169, 262 mirrors, 107–8, 126–7, 201, 251 as metaphor for (self-) representation, 62, 66, 108, 126–7, 141–2, 144, 162, 251, 255, 258



Index

Index

Montaigne, Michel de, 120 –2, 127, 138–9, 253– 4, 257 Montrose, Louis A., 26, 232, 250 Narcissus, 154, 157, 260 neoclassicism 94, 102, 184, 197, 198, 205, 218, 237, 249, 250, 254, 267 Neoplatonism, 64, 161, 170, 193, 203, 209, 222, 261, 270 Norbrook, David, 268 Norgate, Edward, 237, 245 Oliver, Isaac, 49–50, 51, 53, 236, 237, 250, see also Plate 7 Ong, Walter J., 228, 229 Onians, John, 246, 271 Orgel, Stephen, 51, 201, 205, 222, 267, 269, 270, 271, 272 Paleotti, Gabriele, 248, 270 Panofsky, Erwin, 66–7, 101, 233, 234, 239, 240, 241, 247, 254 –5 paragone, the, 73, 77, 170, 241, 243, 244, 246, 252 Parker, Patricia, 249, 250, 252, 255, 259 Parmigianino, Francesco, 37, 126–7, 186, 254, see also Plates 4 and 13 pastoral, 10, 13, 15, 18–20, 25, 229, 230 Peacham, Henry (the Elder), 150, 185, 190, 251, 253, 259, 265 Peacham, Henry (the Younger), 41, 44, 47–9, 53, 80, 236, 237, 246 Peacock, John, 237, 267 Peake, Robert, 47–8, 52–3, 55, 56, see also Plate 8 Pelerin, Jean (‘Viator’), 233, 234 perspective, invention of, 2, 32– 4, 232–3 instruments, xiv–xv, 34 –5, 257 rules of, 3, 33–6, 60, 66–7, 75, 79–80, 238, 240 deviations from rules of, 36– 41, 52, 55, 59–60, 61, 65–7, 76, 89, 136, 186 rhetoricization of, 46, 58, 68–70, 109–10, 238 effects on beholder, 6, 51, 109, 186, 235, 252

as cognitive metaphor, 76, 108–9, 111–12, 243 as symbolic form, 67, 70, 201–2, 225, 240, 267 English attitudes to, xiv, 31, 42–55, 58–9, 139, 186 Phillips, John, 245 Philostratus (the Athenian), 170, 262, 264 Philostratus (the Elder), 85 Philostratus (the Younger), 168, 262 Pino, Paolo, 58, 78, 90, 244, 247 Plato, 75–6, 138, 168, 170 –2, 192, 243, 244, 261, 262 Pliny, 238, 261 Plutarch, 57, 261, 266 Pope-Hennessy, John, 249, 250 portraiture, 70 –2, 111, 114 –15, 245, 252, 253 continental, 44, 105, 250 English, 41–2, 53–5, 105 self-portraiture, 106, 108, 120 –2, 126–7, 254 see also miniatures Prince Henry, 46–7, 49–50, 53, 235–6 proportion canonical, 60, 89, 247–8, 270 deviations from, 37, 60 –2, 67–9, 89–93, 183–6, 218–19, 247–8, 249 as rhetorical metaphor, 87–8, 93–5, 103, 185, 187, 189–91, 248, 265 ideological meaning of, 69–70, 88–9, 97–8, 100 –1, 189–90, 218–19, 247 English attitudes to, 94, 98–100, 186, 249 Protestantism, doctrine on images, 80, 241–2, 245 impact on English culture, 43– 4, 59, 70, 72, 80 –2, 242 Puttenham, George, 83– 4, 85, 94 –8, 100 –2, 150, 241, 245, 248, 249, 259, 262 Pygmalion, 152, 154, 260 Quintillian, 5, 57, 93– 4, 116, 147, 227, 228, 229, 230, 240, 241, 248, 249, 254, 259, 265, 266



288

Rabkin, Norman, xiii, 226 Rackin, Phyllis, 232, 263, 266 rhetoric pedagogical training in, 9, 59, 238 as basis of interarts comparisons, xiv, 8, 57 effects on listener, 5–6, 109–10, 115–19, 186–7, 195–6, 220 –2, 265 visual/spatial tropes in, xiv, 9–10, 14 –17, 87–9, 95, 103, 185, 187, 189–90 abuse of, 118, 149–51, 253, 258 limits of persuasion, 128–9, 132–3, 197, 216–17, 220 – 4, 243, 271 figures of: adhortatio, 115–16; affection, 5–6, 115–16; amplification, 146–7, 165, 184 –7, 259, 265; antimetabole, 25, 254; chiasmus, 135; comparison, 145– 51, 159, 258, 259; description, 68, 116; dubitatio, 114; ecphonesis, 115; enargia, 186–7, 242; epizeuxis, 115; hendiadys, 254; hyperbole, 175, 184 – 7, 248, 265; metaphor, 18, 69; paradox, 135, 143, 189–90, 256, 266; paranomasia, 254; prosopopeia, 18; topoi (the dialectical ‘places’), 12–15, 17, 19, 21–3, 24, 150, 228, 228, 230, 231; varying, 5, 9–10, 18, 20 –1, see also commonplace, copiousness, decorum Rhodes, Neil, 9, 227, 270 scepticism, 31, 138– 40, 151, 159–60, 163–5, 180, 192, 230 –1, 256–7 Scaliger, Julius C., 92, 94 Schanzer, Ernest, 263, 266 Schön, Erhard, 137, see also Plate 14 selfhood, Renaissance philosophies of, 104 –7, 109–10, 250, 256, see also Shakespeare: treatment of subjectivity Serlio, Sebastiano, 39, 47, 48, 53, 236, 237, 238, 239

289

Shakespeare, William on mimesis, 73– 4, 84 –6, 102–3, 143, 171–2, 191–7, 243, 254 dramatic viewpoint in, xiii, 8–9, 20, 24, 27, 31, 55–6, 142–3, 162, 171–80, 187–90, 191–3, 196–7, 202, 204 –5, 207–8, 213–16, 219–21, 224 –5, 230, 238, 252, 255, 268 self-reflexivity in, xvi, 107–8, 125–6, 128–9, 130 –2, 141– 4, 154, 254, 160 –1 self-dramatization in, 27–9, 108, 113–14, 115, 117–20, 123– 4, 132, 175–6, 180, 196–7, 232, 263 treatment of subjectivity, xvi, 31, 104 –14, 120 –2, 124 –8, 131–3, 140, 143–6, 154 –8, 252, 255, 258, 260 treatment of epistemology, xvi, 31, 110 –12, 125–6, 129–31, 133, 140, 151– 4, 158–65 interrelation of visual and rhetorical ideas, 2, 8, 13–17, 56, 106–7, 122, 144, 146, 160 –1, 184 –5 works: As You Like It, xv, 3, 7, 7–31, 56; All’s Well, 55; Antony and Cleopatra, xvi, 31, 56, 73, 135, 165–8, 171–97, 239, 243; Cymbeline, 55, 243, 267; Hamlet, 31, 104, 106–8, 110 –33 140; Henry V, 55, 194; Julius Caesar, 107, 251, 265; King Lear, 55; Love’s Labour’s Lost, 9, 20, 228, 259, 267; Macbeth, 86, 252, 267; Merchant of Venice, 242–3; Midsummer Night’s Dream, 20, 167, 194, 239; Rape of Lucrece, 84 –6, 242, 246, 252; Richard II, 55, 135, 251, 254, 259; Sonnets, 55, 164, 167, 252, 259, 261; Taming of the Shrew, 242; Tempest, xvi, 31, 56, 197, 198, 204 –25; Timon of Athens, 74, 252, 267; Troilus and Cressida, xvi, 31, 86, 107,



Index

Index

Shakespeare, William – continued 134 –65; Twelfth Night, 55, 135, 262; Two Noble Kinsmen, 255; Venus and Adonis, 73, 243; Winter’s Tale, 222, 243, 246, 267 Shearman, John, 240, 248, 252 Sherry, Richard, 265 Sidney, Sir Philip, 71–3, 74, 81, 82– 4, 101, 105, 193– 4, 239, 242, 245, 246 Smuts, Malcolm, 235 Snyder, Susan, 253, 255, 264 soliloquy, the, 105, 122–5, 251 Spenser, Edmund, 81, 230, 231, 245 Strong, Roy, 40, 51, 201–2, 222, 229, 233, 234, 235, 236, 250, 267, 271, 272 Summers, David, 227, 239, 240, 247, 248, 256, 262, 266, 270 Tasso, Torquato, 170, 262 theorization of the arts, 46–9, 55, 94, 101–2, 249–50 Trousdale, Marion, 228, 230, 244 Tuve, Rosemund, 241 ut pictura poesis as a critical approach, xii–xiii, 57–8 discourse of, xii, xv, 2, 56–7, 59, 70 –1, 76, 85–6, 93, 99, 103, 107, 117, 168–9, 171, 218, 226, 227, 238, 240, 242, 243, 248, 252, 254, 261 Valla, Lorenzo, 228, 230, 232 Vasari, Giorgio, 65, 67, 126, 217, 218–19, 226, 239, 244, 247, 254, 264, 266, 270

Vickers, Brian, 227, 231, 238, 243, 250, 253 Vignola, Jacopo Barozzi da, 37, 233, see also Plate 1 Virgil, 180 visual culture, continental, 39, 64, 91–3, 101–2, 217–18, 244, 247 English, 40 –2, 45, 52, 54 –5, 71, 73, 80 –1, 84, 94, 101–2, 218, 236, 237, 238, 249 visual economies, 39, 55, 56, 181, 183– 4, 197, 205, 234 visual spectacle, as mode of persuasion, 70, 72– 4, 116–18, 123– 4, 128–9, 132–3, 197, 198, 203, 207–12, 220 –2, 241, 243, 253, 271 Vitruvius, 38, 61, 69, 87–8, 181, 183, 198, 237, 238, 239, 246, 247, 264, 265, 270, 271 ways of seeing, xvi, 56, 134 –6, 163– 4, 205, 213–15, 219–20, 226, see also visual economies and Shakespeare: dramatic viewpoint in, Wilson, Thomas, 13–15, 19, 22, 229, 230, 231, 259, 271 Wotton, Sir Henry, 244 Weinberg, Bernard, 248, 271 Wright, Thomas, 117, 253 Yates, Frances, 229, 268 Young, David, 230, 261–2 Zuccaro, Federico, 64, 71, 235, 239, 242



290

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