Crossing Gender in Shakespeare 9780415873604, 9780203852781

Table of contents :
Book Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 The Transvestic Glove-Text of Twelfth Night
2 The Sound of “Un” in Richard II
3 Androgynous “Union” and the Woman in Hamlet
4 Impotence and the Feminine in Othello
5 Martial Cleopatra and the Remasculation of Antony
6 The Woman Within in Cymbeline
Epilogue: The Tain of the Mirror
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Routledge Studies in Shakespeare

1. Shakespeare and Philosophy Stanley Stewart 2. Re-playing Shakespeare in Asia Edited by Poonam Trivedi and Minami Ryuta 3. Crossing Gender in Shakespeare Feminist Psychoanalysis and the Difference Within James W. Stone

Crossing Gender in Shakespeare Feminist Psychoanalysis and the Difference Within

James W. Stone

New York

London

First published 2010 by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2010. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © 2010 Taylor & Francis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stone, James W. Crossing gender in Shakespeare : feminist psychoanalysis and the difference within / by James W. Stone. p. cm.—(Routledge studies in Shakespeare ; 3) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Androgyny (Psychology) in literature. 3. Transvestism in literature. 4. Sex differences (Psychology) in literature. 5. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Characters. I. Title. PR3069.A425S76 2010 822.3'3—dc22 2009043147

ISBN 0-203-85278-8 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0-415-87360-6 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-203-85278-8 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-87360-4 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-85278-1 (ebk)

The “Rainbow” Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I, attr. Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger (c. 1600). By permission of the Marquess of Salisbury, Hatfield House.

For Jack A. Stone, Dorothy Waller Stone, Janet Adelman

This effeminate love of a woman doth so womanize a man that, if he yield to it, it will not only make him an Amazon, but a launder, a distaff-spinner, or whatsoever other vile occupation their idle heads can imagine and their weak hands perform. —Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia

For these children, Ladies and Gentlemen will henceforth be two countries toward which each of their souls will strive on divergent wings, and between which truce will be the more impossible since they are actually the same country. —Jacques Lacan, Seminar on “The Purloined Letter”

The feminine . . . is not outside the masculine, its reassuring canny opposite, it is inside the masculine, its uncanny difference from itself. —Shoshana Felman

Contents

Preface Acknowledgments Introduction

xiii xvii 1

1

The Transvestic Glove-Text of Twelfth Night

24

2

The Sound of “Un” in Richard II

43

3

Androgynous “Union” and the Woman in Hamlet

61

4

Impotence and the Feminine in Othello

78

5

Martial Cleopatra and the Remasculation of Antony

95

6

The Woman Within in Cymbeline

112

Epilogue: The Tain of the Mirror

128

Notes Bibliography Index

131 169 179

Preface

In his introduction to the autobiography of the nineteenth-century hermaphrodite Herculine Barbin, Michel Foucault addresses the question of the truth of sexuality, the truth as sought and defi ned by the legal and medical-psychiatric authorities of the period.1 The scientific establishment insisted that every human subject must be biologically grounded in one and only one sex. So how to deal with the hermaphrodite like Herculine Barbin or the fictional hermaphrodites that crowd Balzac’s fiction? The hermaphrodite upset the insistence of the medico-juridical discourse that there was an essential relation between sex and truth: one sex and just one truth. Hermaphrodites were thus always dismissed as “pseudo-hermaphrodites,” beneath whose false or duplicitous claims to sexual doubleness lurked the monosexual truth discoverable only by licensed “experts.” In Crossing Gender in Shakespeare I take my cue from this model in order to argue for the “pseudo” status of all univocal claims to sexual truth, for the doubleness that shadows and informs the ideology of oneness, and for the way that the deployment of fictive letters can be said to figure, and to constitute, sexual difference. Shakespeareans today enjoy a far broader range of analytical tools than were available to the various avatars of formalist criticism, including structuralists and practitioners of deconstruction. The ferment of psychoanalytic and gender criticism of Shakespeare in the last twenty years of the twentieth century existed side by side with the inception and apotheosis of New Historicism, but the new millennium has witnessed a significant falling off in the close reading of gendered subjectivity in Shakespeare’s texts, although historicizing criticism has continued to flourish. Over the past thirty years New Historicists have made provocative contributions to our understanding of sex by unearthing the discourses of early modern medicine and anatomy and detailing the persistent variations upon Aristotelian and Galenic models for the roles of male and female in sexual reproduction. Our understanding of gender has benefited from historicist critics’ analysis of how the controversies of transvestism and hermaphroditism challenged normative gender expectations while ultimately reinforcing conservative hierarchies. 2

xiv Preface I indicate my debts to much historical criticism in this book, but it will be evident that the type of gendered reading of the Shakespearean text that has fallen out of favor in the past ten years (as a perusal of the specialized journals indicates quickly enough) is a project that I wish to revitalize. Cultural and social anxiety manifest themselves in historical contests, the stakes and interests of political players, and the dramatic texts through which the social circulates, but linguistic and rhetorical difference are what this book takes to be the defi ning locus of sexual difference and its discontents. I move beyond the critical focus in the last century upon the transvestite comedies to consider the crossing of gender in tragedy as well, a transition from comedy to tragedy for which the cross gartering of Malvolio instances an important hinge. The Introduction and the chapters that follow instance and analyze texts that focus on the issue of ideologically powerful but unsustainable male claims to self-identity and sameness, set over against men’s type-gendering of women as the origin of divisive sexual difference and discord and as the cause for undoing happy marital union.3 The way that words differ from themselves upsets the gender norms that discursive polemicists, whether in early modern or contemporary contexts, claim are not open to dispute. Fissures in discursive and literary practice reveal themselves locally, in the friction of a single letter, a negating prefi x, or a pun, or in the preposterous reversals and crossovers in chiasmus, ciphers, and anagrams. Resistances, from the smallest diacritical mark to the complicating tropes and figures catalogued in rhetorical manuals, undo the best (of unwittingly bad faith) efforts to impose surety and closure by means of putatively fi xed and determinate gender binarisms. Letters may be forged, or fail to arrive at their prescribed destination; or bait, invert, and anagrammatize their reader—the destiny that befalls Malvolio. And “words, words, words” entangle Hamlet and Richard II in an anxious bind: They blame their loquaciousness upon their effeminization, which in turn is the cause of their inability to take manly action, they protest too insistently. The text of Crossing Gender in Shakespeare and its notes (in which I play out many of the critical debates) will show how the literary and its elaboration in applied and theoretical criticism cannot support the imaginary (specular) ideal of a speaking subject not implicated in loss and difference, if only the minimal yet decisive diacritical difference of letters. My debts in writing this book are many, and can be acknowledged here only in part. Joel Altman gave a very close, often skeptical, local reading of the manuscript. I am grateful to him for many pointed suggestions on how to elaborate specific readings of passages from the text and to cut back, if not eliminate, some of my more tendentious and overwrought rhetoric. David McCandless indicated the need not to conflate female transvestism and male androgyny. Stephen Greenblatt elaborated that the historical embeddedness of cross dressing in the context of early modern gynecology called

Preface xv into doubt the free indeterminacy and shape-shifting that formalists tend to see on the English stage. Joel Fineman directed me to the psychoanalytic nexus of sumptuary and verbal crossing, the antithetical nodal point of text and language. Two of my research assistants in Cairo, Mohammed El-Asyuty and Dalia Eltayeb, were resolutely cheerful under the burden of what I asked them to gather. I thank John Henricksen and Ferial Ghazoul for their close readings of sections of the manuscript. Teresa Faherty, Nora Johnson, and Francesca Royster offered incisive critique without failing to encourage. In Singapore Walter Lim provided the friendship, encouragement, and advice that pushed this project forward and made it see the light of day. My editor at Routledge, Erica Wetter, elicited anonymous readings of the manuscript that were rich in the ore of detailed suggestions for revision, and she was both generous to me and unstinting in prosecuting the technical side of production. Requital for my noblest and most nurturing benefactors is expressed in my dedication to this book. J.W.S. October 2009 Singapore

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for having had the opportunity to present portions of my work to scholars at meetings of the World Shakespeare Congress, the Shakespeare Association of America, the Renaissance Society of America, and the International Congress of Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender. The American University in Cairo and the National University of Singapore gave me grants to pursue research at libraries abroad. I wish to thank several journals for granting me permission to republish work that originally appeared under their aegis. Part of the introduction was fi rst published in Style 36.1 (2002); Chapter 1 in Assays: Critical Approaches to Medieval and Renaissance Texts IX (1996); Chapter 3 in Shakespeare Studies 23 (1995); Chapter 4 in The Journal of Theatre and Drama 7/8 (2002); and Chapter 5 in Sydney Studies in English 28 (2002).

Introduction

This book explores the vexatious crossing of the boundaries between the sexes, emphasizing the transvestism of Shakespeare’s comic heroines and the emasculating androgyny of his male tragic heroes. Shakespeare may serve as the focal point in a chronology that ranges from the English translations of Ovid’s effeminized Hermaphrodite to Milton’s representation of the transition from prelapsarian sexual union to tragic difference after the fall. I critique the traditional paradigm that man is the principle of sameness-unto-itself (self-identity), and I unpack its misogynistic corollary, which projects the responsibility for all difference onto women. The play of sexual difference attaches itself to a material prop or support either in the mobile clothing of the transvestite or in the bipartite body of the hermaphrodite or, in Shakespearean tragedy, to a paronomastic language that undercuts fi rm gender distinctions. The male’s egoistic desire to defi ne himself as self-standing, not in any way dependent upon women, ultimately fi nds its defenses breached, its illusions punctured. Hamlet is troubled because his flesh is “sullied” (1.2.129) since his ghostly father had sexual intercourse with an unfaithful woman.1 So sullied is his spirit by his ineluctable fleshly origins in Gertrude, and so implicated is he in her adulterous bonds with Claudius, that Hamlet rails against himself as a whore by contamination, and he curses both the passive, corrupted flesh that he is heir to and his bondage to a treadmill of vainly repetitive denunciations of this state. These circuits of dilatory and effeminizing words prevent him from taking manly action. In febrile words he curses himself that he must pour out his self-mockery in debilitating words: Must like a whore unpack my heart with words And fall a-cursing like a very drab, A stallion! (2.2.568–73)

Hamlet is both male and female whore, corrupted on all sides by his mixing with baser matter. Language inscribes traces of the very loss that it occasions, and engenders sexual disgust and dissolution in Ovidian texts that range from Spenser’s

2

Crossing Gender in Shakespeare

Faerie Queene to Francis Beaumont’s epyllion, Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, and in the transvestite comedies of Shakespeare and the misogynistic tragedies. Significant is the difference that gender-designating letters can make in thematizing and performing the division of the sexes even in the act of sexual union. As a concatenation of syllables figures the act of copulation, so the dropping out of letters both indicates and performs the necessary loss that results from union. Union presupposes, moreover, the deformation of the parts (letters) that it comprises and that give it form; the letters must be sundered in some fashion in order to be concatenated. However arbitrary this literal-minded nominalism may seem, the difference of a single letter often inscribes the distinction, such as it is, between the sexes, as well as the implosive fatality of gender identities that cross over and contaminate each other chiastically.

I—TRANSVESTISM AND ANTITHEATRICALISM In his Anatomie of Abuses (1583) Phillip Stubbes was one of the most strident Renaissance polemicists to sound the charge against cross dressing because it is a species of hermaphroditical transgression: It is writte in the 22 of Deuteronomie, that what man so ever weareth womans apparel is accursed, and what woman weareth mans apparel is accursed also. . . . Our Apparell was giuen us as a signe distinctiue to discern betwixt sex and sex, & therfore one to weare the Apparel of another sex, is to participate with the same, and to adulterate the veritie of his owne kinde. Wherefore these Women may not improperly be called Hermaphrodita, that is, Monsters of bothe kindes, half women, half men. (Sig. [F5]) 2

To adulterate a sex is to cut it in half and to splice the pieces cross-wise. A woman dressed as a man represents for Stubbes a wanton, a whore, an overreacher whose license upsets a gender hierarchy conceived of as natural. She refuses to remain settled in the divinely ordained place unambiguously fi xed by her distinctive dress prescribed by biblical authority. The sumptuary instances the written law and so makes public and visible the inward and invisible mystery of the sexes. One’s otherwise invisible and unknown sex is made manifest in clothing. Clothing signals one’s substantive adherence to the written laws of sex, which purport to keep men and women whole in themselves and the difference between them clear and unconfused. Pertinent for a study of the drama is the phenomenon of the boy player dressed for the woman’s part. Puritan divines inveighed against both male and female transvestism, a problem taken up in the anonymous pamphlets Hic Mulier and Haec-Vir (1620):

Introduction

3

For since the daies of Adam women were neuer so Masculine; Masculine in their genders and whole generations, from the Mother, to the youngest daughter; Masculine in Number, from one to multitudes; Masculine in Case, even from the head to the foot; Masculine in Moode, from bold speech, to impudent action; and Masculine in Tense: for (without redresse) they were, are, and will be still most Masculine, most mankinde, and most monstrous. (Sig. [A3])3

The transvestite woman is portrayed in terms reminiscent of Stubbes’ Hermaphrodita, but in addition to the sumptuary transgression s/he is someone who violates the exigency of grammar, as epitomized in the titles of the pamphlets by the transgressive and anagrammatical mingling of a noun of one gender with a demonstrative adjective of another. The author of these pamphlets warns that as grammar is travestied, so clothing is transvested and conduct perverted. As for the Haec-Vir, this is someone monstrous because he/she confounds the exclusive either/or of grammatical and vestiary case in favor of an immodest no man’s land, a forbidden middle ground. By assuming a textile surface that defies conventional mood, tense, and case, he effects a “mingle-mangle” (Stubbes) in the textual letters that designate his gender. Text (fabric) corrupts text (letters), or vice versa. John Williams inveighed against women who performed this type of sexual and rhetorical crisscrossing in A Sermon of Apparell (1619): “Mulier formosa is now become mulier monstrosa, halfe man halfe woman.” The sexual/ textual differential slash of m/f ceases to bear its diacritical distinction once formosa becomes monstrosa, female male. A single letter makes all the difference. The way that the transvestite is associated with the anti- and the anagrammatical half man/half woman we will return to in the case of Shakespeare’s Malvolio, whose cross garters signal and perform the fracturing of his sexual integrity, which in turn is the effect of his name being cut into the anagram “M.O.A.I.” Renaissance depictions of sexual ambiguity are complicated by the practice of transvestism as institutionalized in the theater. Lisa Jardine refers to the boys who acted women’s roles as “play-boys” to highlight the precariousness of their sexual integrity, for critics of the stage argued that the boys were objects of homosexual abuse on the part of their elder fellow actors.4 Women’s garments, argued John Rainolds, stir up the passions of everyone on stage. “The appareil of wemen is a great provocation of men to lust and leacherie. A woman’s garment beeing put on a man doeth vehemently touch and moue him with the remembrance and imagination of a woman; and the imagination of a thing desirable doth stirr up the desire.”5 One problem elaborated by Rainolds is that of a man’s using female clothing as a fetish to arouse himself in masturbation. But Rainolds is also concerned with a more public dimension to the scandal of transvestism, namely the example set in and by plays performed on stage. If illicit desire was aroused in the audience members when they witnessed a man kiss a boy in drag, this

4

Crossing Gender in Shakespeare

implies that males in the audience may have found the cross-dressed boys on stage more desirable than their more habitual and conventional married partners. 6 Male-male desire avails itself of readier means of display and access and is more securely licensed when the male object of affection masquerades as a woman. On the stage the open secret of illicit desire dresses itself up as what is legal and conventional. A man-boy liaison would cause scandal off the stage, but the boy’s assumption of female garments provides illicit desire with a fetishistic protective buffer, the dramatic license of the theater. It is the loophole of this license that caused Puritans like Rainolds to attack the stage for wrapping illicit desire in the dress of conventional heteronormativity. Transvestism implies that gender is an assumed role which metamorphoses whatever may claim itself to be an underlying, essential sexuality into manipulable and disposable surfaces. Transvestism entails the freedom of role reversal implicit in impersonation. The practice calls attention to its own artifice, its theatrical conventionality, especially at those liminal moments when gendered disguise slips on and off. In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler calls into question the existence of any natural bedrock that could be taken to support the sexual component of the sex/ gender system. Sex collapses into gender, and gender is always a contingent performance, a series of repeated actions that may be independent of the performer’s anatomy: When the constructed status of gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female one. . . . That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality. . . . I would suggest as well that drag fully subverts the distinction between inner and outer psychic space and effectively mocks the expressive model of gender and the notion of a true gender identity. . . . In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency (italics in original).7

The confusion in performance between the gender of an adjective and the gender of the noun that it modifies, which Stubbes and the Hic Mulier and Haec-Vir pamphlets decry, is precisely what Butler construes as liberatory: masculine may modify woman. Butler’s theory of gender performativity undoubtedly works better for the facile surfaces of comedy than for the embodied depths of tragedy. The transvested comic heroine travesties and transgresses all sexual normalizations grounded in the body. In the generic terms of Shakespeare, I argue, comedy is the place for gender construction through transvestism, tragedy for the inescapable, fatal implosion of gender that androgyny entails.

Introduction

5

Whereas tragedy foregrounds internalized, psychologistic language, sometimes figured in a violently torn tongue, comedy emphasizes the specular, the external image that can be assumed and alternately cast off at will. It is the misogynistic representation of woman as duplicitous masquerader that marks the focal point of tragedy as such; tragedy passes beyond the ideal specularity of comedy to a specifically linguistic duplicity and subjectifying self-division, the principle of difference which patriarchal, misogynistic discourse takes woman to be. The debate between essentialists like Stubbes and constructivists like Butler concerns whether gender is sanctioned by nature and God or is instead the product of a human system of performative meaning, like the codes of the stage and of language. Twelfth Night exemplifies the constructivist position in coding gender in terms of theatrical playing: of dramatic parts and scripted characters, of love as epistolary intrigue, and of music as love’s language. The ambiguity of Viola’s gender is the Duke’s recurrent theme, the fetish that he all too willfully surfeits on. The Duke opines that “Diana’s lip / Is not more smooth and rubious” than Cesario’s. “Thy small pipe / Is as the maiden’s organ, shrill and sound, / And all is semblative a woman’s part” (1.4.31–34). The vocal “pipe” or “organ” carries the same gender bivalence as the reversible glove that Feste uses to metaphorize the wantonness of women and words (3.1.8–25), depending on the orientation of the pipe’s or organ’s pitch, on whether its referent is esophagal or genital, and if genital on whether male or female—pipe as protruding outer edge or pipe as inner surface and hollow. Is the “woman’s part” the indelible mark of genital difference or the arbitrary role of some protean actor? These alternative meanings of the “same” words—“woman’s part”—encapsulate the debate between essentialist (Stubbes, Rainolds) and constructivist (Butler) views of gender. Shakespeare rings analogous changes on the words “pipe” and “organ,” which may refer either to anatomy (essence as biological destiny) or, as vehicles for the ubiquitous musical metaphors in the play, to identities as instruments that one may play (free constructions; improvisations). Musicians and actors are the players of parts, parts either anatomical or written; or rather, anatomical as written, i.e., characterological, the parts scripted by the playwright or by his surrogates within the play, such forgers of letters and playlets within the play as Maria and Feste. Gender is such a scripted part for the transvestite Viola/Cesario, the character who is condemned not to be what she plays and to be (mis)taken indifferently for male and female parts by her confused admirers. How one defi nes “part” epitomizes a recurrent and long-standing divide in polemics about men and women, expressed in terms of binarisms like nature/nurture, essence/construct, and sex/gender. “Part” is used in the sense of essential, biologically determined nature in Cymbeline, when Posthumus blames all his travails on “the woman’s part in me—for there’s no motion / That tends to vice in man, but I affi rm / It is the woman’s part” (2.4.172–74). The Two Gentlemen of Verona offers

6

Crossing Gender in Shakespeare

an analogue for “part” in the sense of theatrical role: Julia, disguised as the page Sebastian, recalls that when “[o]ur youth got me to play the woman’s part” (4.4.156), she wore Julia’s gown. These two very different valences of the word “part” indicate, on the one hand, how essentialism expresses the man’s regard for himself as the putatively natural superior but for his exigent debts to women, whereas constructivism, on the other hand, undergirds a woman’s potential for social and gender mobility via the manipulation of sartorial convention. Can this distinction help us understand why Shakespeare’s transvestites are almost always female characters? It is women, after all, who are more burdened and disadvantaged by the conventions of gender, so they are more likely to be forced to go under erasure as a means of sidestepping conventional strictures. At issue in Shakespeare’s comedies is the transvestite, not the hermaphrodite, because on the stage, in an era well before the existence of reconstructive genital surgery, theatrical clothing is the privileged vehicle for the construction of gender. Clothing is the means of representation, via fetishistic displacement, of a body necessarily mute in itself. Since real women cannot appear on the Renaissance stage, their essential, anatomical body is representable only in the cross-dressed boy actor’s visible impersonation, his playing of the woman’s part. The transvestite is variably male and female, all the more ambiguous since there is so little agreement about whether to attribute the male or female designations to the transvestite’s body or to its clothing. A misogynistic tradition (e.g., Hamlet) portrays women as those who paint and prostitute nature, and clothe themselves meretriciously. By this standard, unadulterated, undisguised nature is male, and such maleness epitomizes chastity. But in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, a disguised woman like Britomart can also be a knight of chastity, provided that she maintains male armor as a buffer against the type of sexual insult or martial vulnerability that women are prey to. Only as a pretended male, in short, can Britomart have the persona to be a successful defender of female chastity. This paradox is tested when Britomart is a guest at the Castle Joyeous of Malecasta. She lifts up her visor but keeps the rest of her body veiled in armor, thus putting into play both her feminine beauty and her masculine chastity and invulnerability from the neck down: For she was full of amiable grace, And manly terrour mixed therewithall, That as the one stird vp affections bace So th’other did mens rash desires apall, And hold them backe, that would in errour fall; As he, that hath espide a vermeill Rose, To which sharpe thornes and breres the way forestall, Dare not for dread his hardy hand expose, But wishing it far off, his idle wish doth lose. (3.1.46) 8

Introduction

7

Britomart’s female flesh stirs up desire in men even as her “manly terrour” chastens all onlookers. Her virgin rose is protected by a sharp, armored exterior. Body is nature, and the naked, natural body is gendered female here. Clothing is culture, the chaste sphere of the male. But the mixing of these two opposing poles causes confusion and arouses desire, enticing Malecasta to jump into bed with the sleeping Britomart. Spenser metaphorizes the debilitation that results from carnal desire in terms of dismaying the chaste and disarming the militant. Being stricken sexually, whether the source is hideous (like Errour) or attractive (like Britomart), disarms a knight, often literally. When the transvested Britomart is unhelmeted by Artegall in a fight and her beauteous visage and long hair are exposed, the knight goes slack, his sword falls, and he loses control of his “arme” in the sense of both military and anatomical member: His powrelesse arme benumbd with secret feare From his reuengefull purpose shronke abacke, And cruell sword out of his fingers slacke Fell downe to ground, as if the steele had sence And felt some ruth, or sence his hand did lacke. (4.6.21)

Female beauty unmans the warrior, making him surrender the strength he had: “And made ech member quake, and manly hart to quayle” (4.6.22). When Scudamour is the next man to see Britomart without her cover, he too is “dismayd” (4.6.24). This, one of Spenser’s most frequently visited puns, indicates that although beauty may inspire a man to take brave action, it can also render him dis-made or dis-maid, hence no longer in fit form to complete his manly maiden quest. A man is unmanned when he is unmaided. Redcrosse is roundly criticized by the narrator for being “[d]isarmd, disgrast, and inwardly dismayde” (1.7.11) after forgetting his maid Una and coupling instead with Duessa, leaving him “disarmed, dissolute, dismaid” (1.7.51) when Orgoglio arrives on the scene. We shall see later that man is unmanned by contact with a woman in the obsessive repetition of the prefi x “un” in Richard II, analogous to Spenser’s negating particle “dis.” When the knight is dis-maid his martial boundaries melt, a word that recalls the fate of Ovid’s Narcissus and Hermaphroditus, and various of Spenser’s characters when they quaver before temptation. Spenser critiques the crossing of the sexes in the form of Artegall’s transvestism at the hands of the masculine and emasculating Radigund: Nought vnder heauen so strongly doth allure The sence of man, and all his minde possesse, As beauties louely baite, that doth procure Great warriours oft their rigour to represse, And mighty hands forget their manlinesse;

8

Crossing Gender in Shakespeare Drawne with the powre of an heart-robbing eye, And wrapt in fetters of a golden tresse, That can with melting pleasaunce mollifye Their hardned hearts, enur’d to bloud and cruelty. (5.8.1)

The climax of sexual union (“melting pleasaunce”) causes the knight to lose his erect and “hardned” “rigour” in the pubic, vaginal clutches (“fetters of a golden tresse”) of the cross-dressed woman who in turn cross dresses him, as Antony is dressed by Cleopatra in Spenser’s poem, 9 whereas in Shakespeare’s play Cleopatra dresses Antony for battle and intercourse hardens Antony’s military prowess. Here orgasm is clearly understood to be impotizing in that the male becomes not only conflated with but swallowed up by the female, which inverts “that fair Hermaphrodite” (3.12.46), the love union between Scudamour and Amoret that originally closed book 3. Transvested Artegall’s masquerade travesties the ideal of the hard and rigorous, self-contained male. Spenser’s representation of Artegall’s melting orgasm points to the male’s fear of postcoital flaccidity, his effeminization at the moment of sexual climax. (Cf. the standard Elizabethan pun on the verb die.) This going limp so threatens to compromise the hero that he may never be able to complete his mission, the success of which preconditions his eventual marriage to Britomart. Such a BritomArtegall union—in contrast to the enclosed and consummated embrace of ScudAmoret—Spenser’s “endlesse worke” can never achieve. His epic-romantic quest-poem must remain unconsummated. Shakespeare’s transvestite comedies likewise often refuse to achieve the closure of consummation because they are ambivalent about the value of fi xed gender identities. The more fluid and confused is the relation between the sexes and the orientation within any given sex, the greater the possibilities for dramatic exploitation.

II—HERMAPHRODITUS AND THE RENAISSANCE OVID Two models of hermaphroditism predominated during the Renaissance, deriving ultimately from the classical paradigms of Plato and Ovid. One model posits nostalgia for a prelapsarian union between the sexes; the other regards union between the sexes as causing the dissolution of each partner’s sexual integrity and specificity. The Platonic model, as set forth by Aristophanes in the Symposium, advances an ideal of combinate wholeness prior to the separation into discrete sexual units as punishment for human disobedience to the gods. 10 If Aristophanes is nostalgic for an initial pairing of the sexes that was later sundered, many of Ovid’s characters long for an original state defi ned in the very different terms of virgin singularity and separateness. In Ovid’s accounts in the Metamorphoses there is often a bitter sense of longing for the lost virginal state that precedes a usually violent, often rapacious, sexual initiation. To couple sexually with another

Introduction

9

undercuts one’s sense of wholeness; the conjunctive sum of the sexes is less than either of its parts, and sexual union is often followed by a sense of dissolution and disillusion. The one who is sexually initiated decries her or his loss of a type of single-sex union, as the violated Hermaphroditus, for example, regrets that he can no longer lay claim to the purity of asexual singleness. Nostalgia for lost virginity is often tainted by misogyny, because after the fall into language man blames woman for the way that the whole has been irrevocably divided by a lack or cut.11 The once harmonized components of the two-in-one are henceforth severed into two halfunities. This division is introduced by the same (but antithetical) language that speaks longingly in the fi rst place for androgynous wholeness in the idealizing, Platonic sense. As Kari Weil puts it, “Language functions only in the absence of the object, it is the very inscription of loss of the object, even as it offers the only tools for knowing and representing what it is that was lost.”12 In The Faerie Queene Edmund Spenser employs both a potentiating model of hermaphroditism and a debasing, impotizing one. A classic locus of the Hermaphrodite as Platonic ideal is Spenser’s original 1590 ending to book 3 of the poem, the union of Scudamour and Amoret outside the house of Busirane: “Had ye them seene, ye would have surely thought, / That they had been that faire Hermaphrodite” (3.12.46). This instance represents a conjunction of the sexes that fortifies and supplements what may be lacking in either one alone. Orgasm is perpetual climax rather than diminution, a pouring both outwards and inwards that fulfi lls and never empties out: But she faire Lady ouercommen quight Of huge affection, did in pleasure melt, And in sweete rauishment pourd out her spright. (3.12.45)

“Rauishment” in the sense of Busirane’s repeated rape of Amoret is staved off in favor of an antithetical sense of the same word, one that expresses mutual consent: the ravishing, orgasmic intermingling of the lovers. In Ovid, Salmacis rapes Hermaphroditus; not so in Spenser, where Busirane the rapist is supplanted by Scudamour the consensual lover. Spenser reverses an earlier violation, fictionally cleansing a traumatic stain that in real time would be indelible. For Ovid the metamorphic joining of male and female renders the former impotent and indistinct from the latter, whereas Spenser portrays a coupling whose whole exceeds the potency of its vulnerable parts. Not only the bodies of Spenser’s lovers metamorphose, but also the names of Scudamour and Amoret may be combined to form the complex compound ScudAmoret, a copulative concatenation of syllables modeled on, yet reversing the impotent conclusion of, the way Hermaphroditus’ own name conjoins the stock of Hermes and Aphrodite.13 This melting pleasure of love-making is the sexual analogue of what in narratological terms is the closure of interlaced narrative strands in the

10

Crossing Gender in Shakespeare

original ending of The Faerie Queene. The poem thus presents a model of ideal intermingling performed on linguistic, sexual, and narrative levels: concatenation, copulation, happy ending. The intertwining of narrative and sexual threads is figured emblematically in the account of the hermaphroditic goddess who presides over the Temple of Venus in book 4. Venus entails the ideal complement of male and female sexes, but only under the constricting condition that this perfection remains disguised beneath a “slender veile.” What the veil teasingly keeps covered is allowed to surface beneath it, at Venus’ feet, in a displaced allegorical emblem of bestial yet valorized bisexuality: “And both her feete and legs together twyned / Were with a snake, whose head and tail were fast combyned” (4.10.40). This snake whose union in itself symbolizes eternity contrasts with the snaky folds of Errour and Duessa, the monsters whose assumption of the phallic part signifies their uncanny power to sap male combatants of their strength. The priests of Venus attempt to draw a mystifying veil over the reason for needing such a disguise, but the poet-narrator has his own theory, as if only the poet, schooled in veiled metaphor and mystification, can penetrate the veil that he himself has deployed: The cause why she was couered with a vele, Was hard to know, for that her Priests the same From peoples knowledge labour’d to concele. But sooth it was not sure for womanish shame, Nor any blemish, which the worke mote blame; But for, they say, she hath both kinds in one, Both male and female, both vnder one name: She syre and mother is her selfe alone, Begets and eke conceiues, ne needeth other none. (4.10.41)

The “one name” that comprehends and conceals both kinds is the linguistic analogue of the sumptuary veil that does the same. The name signals an ambiguity on the verbal axis that corresponds on the visual axis to the veil’s impenetrability. Ambiguity at the linguistic level translates into bisexuality in the anatomical matrix. The unique epithet that describes the mysteries of such a love goddess is the Venus Hermaphroditus, she who comprises both Hermes and Aphrodite, male and female, under one riddling veil, one name.14 Ovid’s myth of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, translated in the English Renaissance by Arthur Golding (1567), Francis Beaumont (1602), and George Sandys (1620), presents an account that differs markedly from such idealizing representations of the hermaphrodite as Spenser’s union of Scudamour and Amoret in the original ending of book 3 of The Faerie Queene or the Venus Hermaphroditus in book 4. Whereas Scudamour secures his masculinity in coupling at long last with Amoret, Beaumont’s Hermaphroditus is a she-man who sees himself as a woman when reflected narcissistically

Introduction

11

in the glassy mirror of Salmacis’ eyes. He makes love not to an other but to an imaginary, specular projection of his sexually ambiguous self: How should I love thee, when I doe espie A farre more beauteous Nymph hid in thy eye? When thou doost love, let not that Nymph be nie thee; Nor when thou woo’st, let that same Nymph be by thee: Or quite obscure her from thy lovers face, Or hide her beauty in a darker place. By this, the Nymph perceiv’d he did espie None but himselfe reflected in her eye, And, for himself no more she meant to shew him, She shut her eyes & blind-fold thus did woo him. (691–700)15

Ovid’s Hermaphroditus regards himself as male, but Beaumont interpolates a cross-gender (androgyny) element into the original story of cross sexing (hermaphroditism), for the sexual ingénue sees himself as a girl (Nymph) in the mirror. Gender collapse anticipates the anatomical sexual collapse that will be Hermaphroditus’, and the tale’s, end; the initial fluid psychology of gender will become fi xed terminally and irreversibly in the anatomical destiny of sex. Beaumont follows Ovid’s canonization of the mythic conventions of gender by conventionally associating Phoebe with the chaste white beams of the moon reflecting upon the water, whereas her brother Phoebus is the sun that raises the pitch of desire to a boil. Although the moonbeams of Phoebe chasten the fi res of desire, the reflections that cross between the lovers’ watery eyes are suns that excite and chafen. But if this symbolic structure among the deities makes the woman chaste and the man desirous, it is reversed by the gender alignment of the sublunary protagonists of Beaumont’s poem: desirous Salmacis in pursuit of chaste Hermaphroditus. The rhetoric of desire in the poem thus describes an inversion of the traditional paradigm of the desiring male subject in pursuit of a reluctant female (e.g., Apollo’s attempt to rape Daphne). As both symbols and rhetorical terms cross in reverse of expected order, so do the sexes: the older woman pursues, and the younger male flees the chase, like some of the non-reciprocated mismatches in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Salmacis relishes the role reversal as much as Hermaphroditus fears it: Beleeve me, boy, thy blood is very stayd, That art so loth to kisse a youthfull mayd. Wert thou a mayd, and I a man, Ile show thee, With what a manly boldnesse I could woo thee. (713–16)

This type of self-reversing rhetorical formula (chiasmus) epitomizes androgyny: women will be men, men women.

12

Crossing Gender in Shakespeare

Throughout the poem Salmacis attempts to chafen the blood of timid Hermaphroditus in order to make a passionate man of him, but this aroused blood also brings to the surface in him the blushing woman in the midst of being devirginated. In the imagery of Salmacis’ rape of Hermaphroditus (787–800), desire becomes a figural crux, a chiasmus of colors: red arises from crossing over and coupling with the frictional resistance of white. The back and forth chafi ng of sex produces a reciprocal circulation of heat: her hand squeezes and arouses his hand, which in turn excites the blood in her breast; then her hand upon his white breast raises the red heart from below. Desire as effect becomes responsive cause of desire in turn, like an accelerating treadmill of perpetual motion, similar to Cleopatra’s pleasure barge at Cydnus described by Enobarbus. This crossing of skin colors in foreplay anticipates the hermaphroditic mixing of genitalia at the close of the poem. What is shocking for Hermaphroditus is not just that his cold white skin is interfused with the hot red blood of Salmacis, but also his discovery that the hot red blood is already within himself: the Salmacis within himself. The feminine is uncannily present within the male, not something exterior to him and thus easy to dismiss. Hermaphroditus has been a female in potentia all along. Losing his virginity makes him a female in (anatomical) fact, or so the poet implies. The blood drawn from Hermaphroditus by intercourse with Salmacis at the close of the poem brings to a head all of the images that Beaumont has foregrounded in his rendition of the myth: And in one body they began to grow. She felt his youthfull bloud in every vaine; And he felt hers warme his cold brest againe. And ever since was womens love so blest, That it will draw bloud from the strongest brest. Nor man nor mayd now could they be esteem’d: Neither, and either, might they well be deem’d. (901–08) [Nec duo sunt et forma duplex, nec femina dici nec puer ut possit, neutrumque et utrumque videntur.] (4.378–79)

Male anxieties that postcoital flaccidity is tantamount to invagination are at the heart of the sexual moralization of Ovid’s and Beaumont’s texts.16 Man becomes woman at the moment of sexual climax because this is simultaneously the moment of anticlimax, the downward arc of detumescence. And the moment at which the man’s breasts spew blood, as if displacing upwards the result of the violence done to his virgin knot. Salmacis seeks to aggrandize herself through sexual conquest. But for the male, does sexual union create a whole man or a male manqué? It is ambiguous whether the mixing of male and female results in a potent one or a neutered none. One is none, or perhaps two halves that don’t add up to a unitary whole. (The paradoxical one/none thematic is important for

Introduction

13

Shakespeare’s sonnets and for Richard II as well.) Put another way, the lovers are not two, nor are they one, but rather a coincidence of opposites that renders the one none. As such their union is anamorphic; seen awry, the act of love looks like death. Hermaphroditism proves fatal for the male in this, as opposed to Spenser’s, account of Hermaphroditus, because sexual initiation forces the boy to cross the mirror image of his reflection doubled anamorphically in the pool and in the eyes of Salmacis. This image instances anamorphosis because the boy’s integrated mirror reflection is but a deathly lure.17 In effect, to be effeminized is to be neutered (“neutrumque” = neuter/neither) or castrated, or, at the linguistic level, drawn apart between the two poles (“utrumque” = either) of a disjunctive antithesis. As two bodies become one—the cold white skin is interfused with hot red blood, the Iv’ry encircled by the serpent-like Ivy—and as the interior of the body rises to meet its superficies, sexual identity becomes indistinct, less a matter of either/or than either/neither. To be either sex indifferently is to be no sex at all in the exclusive sense of one or the other. As Lauren Silberman puts it, “Ovid plays ‘uterque parens’ [each of his parents] against ‘neutrumque et utrumque videntur’ [They seemed neither, and yet both] (4.379). The parents’ oneness contrasts with their son’s sense of noneness, of being neutered” (153 n). Sexual difference is no more fi xed than the arbitrary difference—effected by the letter n—between “utrumque” and “neutrumque” in Ovid’s Latin, or “either” and “neither,” “one” and “none,” in Beaumont’s English rendition.18 The rhetorical vehicle for the moment of dramatic and sexual climax is chiasmus, the privileged trope for intercourse. Salmacis prays that the lovers will be perpetually intertwined in linguistic as well as anatomical terms: May no day ever come that shall separate him from me or me from him. [ita, di, iubeatis, et istum nulla dies a me nec me deducat ab isto.] (4.371–72)

Mortals bind the gods by means of rhetorical formulae like this one. The speaking is the doing: the pronominal cross coupling of istum:me :: me:isto is what gives this prayer its performative force. Hermaphroditus will answer Salmacis’ binding formula with a counter-prayer of his own, which will bind all future bathers in these once pure, now contaminated, waters. He will plea for the inverse of Salmacis’ ideal of continual intercourse by insisting instead on perpetual impotence. Prospective pleasure is cross-countered by retrospective disgust; prayer is crossed and turned inside out by curse. Put another way, love-making in prospect may be prayed for; in postcoital retrospect it is vilified.19 Of the Shakespearean texts that I will discuss in this book, only Antony and Cleopatra holds out the prospect of a phoenixdesire that dies only to rise again inexhaustibly, in the apotheosis of Cleopatra on her barge at Cydnus.

14

Crossing Gender in Shakespeare

The hermaphrodite figures prominently in Renaissance poetry in two ways: as an ideal of potentiating sexual fruition that fortifies and supplements what may be lacking in either sex alone, and antithetically as the impotence that orgasmic ravishment effects, rendering flaccid the postcoital male, who like Ovid’s Hermaphroditus becomes neither man nor maid. In attempting to escape sexual initiation by diving into the water, Hermaphroditus succeeds only in dissolving his virginal oneness by pouring himself out. His death returns him to his Hermaphroditic birth; in the liquid (amniotic) beginning is one’s liquid (dissolute) end in the pool, a sort of demonic inversion of the oceanic sense. Such is the fate of all “offspring” (913) (wordplay on two senses: 1. progeny; 2. flowing out, dissolving). The dualism that permeates the symbolism of the poem—liquid eyes versus liquid water; water as exchange of liquids in intercourse versus water as chaste quencher of desire—divides Hermaphroditus’ gender as well. These multiple symbolic valences for water are antithetical in dissolving all hard and fast distinctions between female and male, subject and object, the sexual and the chaste. The liquid that is the medium for all the sexual coupling is both metaphor (in the text) and referential ground (in the world). The referent of the liquid may be taken in turn to be either the water of the pool or the promiscuous interchange of bodily fluids; or both, since in the confusion of intercourse the two types of liquid flow together (confluere). As the dominant imagery of chaste moon-reflecting water gives way to the antithetical symbolism of water as the fluid exchange of sexual liquids in intercourse, it is ambiguous whether the mixing of male and female creates a one or a none, a union or a dissolution, a blessing or a curse.

III—SHAKESPEARE What the hermaphrodite must live inescapably in the flesh the transvestite displaces onto clothing that serves as a body fetish, an entity more easily metamorphosed than the less figurable flesh. Clothing is a form of text, like written letters, standing as a textile metaphor for shifting social and gender roles and for some invisible, perhaps ultimately unlocatable, bodily ground. In the theatrical and social terms of Shakespeare’s comedies, female transvestism is valorized as a protector of female honor and a conduit for release of anxiety via laughter over mistaken identities, whereas in the tragedies male androgyny (effeminization) is one of the primary plights of the tragic hero. In several of the comedies a boy actor plays the role of a woman who in turn dons masculine attire as a self-disguising means of self-protection from the possible ravages of outlaw males. The transition from virginal girlishness at the start of the play to heterosexed womanhood must be effected ironically through the medium of imaginary and vestiary transformation into a man. After the woman has played out exhaustively the potential for confusion in her disguise, eventually she is freed to resume female attire on

Introduction

15

condition that she exchange the unruliness of transvestic dress for submission to a man in marriage, thereby insuring that the man alone will wear the pants from then on. Reinvestment in her femininity presupposes that the heroine subscribe to the strictures of patriarchy, redressing the temporary reversal of gender roles that propels the comic action in the fi rst place.20 So Shakespeare presents transvestism as a principle of misrule and disorder, as the Puritan antitheatricalists accused it of being, but a principle whose ultimate telos is protective and recuperative of order, defying Puritan skepticism by establishing social harmony and conservative hierarchization through marriage. The transvestic disguise opens up a temporary space for the playful reversal of traditional sex roles and hierarchies, like those that demand a daughter’s obedience to her father or a lady’s to her man, only to reinstate hierarchy when vestiary transparency is restored. Transvestism in As You Like It is relatively unproblematic and conventional by comparison to its use in Shakespeare’s later comedies. Rosalind is no less free to impersonate a member of the opposite sex than are boy players to dress as women, all the more so given Rosalind’s status as a literary fiction, a fact that underscores the contingency of gender as so much linguistic tissue, or so many figures of sumptuary rhetoric, with which Rosalind may clothe herself at will. Rosalind’s transvestism puts her constantly in the position of mediating between extremes. C. L. Barber argues that she mocks passion, like Touchstone, even as passion shines through her disguise, unlike Touchstone. 21 Rosalind’s attitude towards love lies somewhere between Touchstone’s mockery of romance and Silvius’ wholehearted endorsement of sentimental clichés. As a “play-boy,” the transvestite Rosalind/Ganymede is able to travesty the behavior of women and boys, as when she explains the love-cure to Orlando as follows: 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. (3.3.395–403)22

Because it is hypothetical, provisional, and expendable, Rosalind’s male disguise serves as a buffer or shield against misogynistic lore of the type that Ganymede pretends to endorse. In one biform person Rosalind can joke about the inevitability of the cuckold’s horns and slough off the pointedness of these jokes by commanding the saving appearance of Hymen. 23 “Things made even / Atone together” (5.4.108–9) thanks to the hymeneal coincidence of opposites in marital union. Rosalind can “make all this matter even” (5.4.18) simply by shedding her disguise. The triumph of the idealizing androgyny in As You Like It serves as a happy counterexample to the more vexed sexual mixings in the chapters that follow, which will

16

Crossing Gender in Shakespeare

describe how the “odd” “one” has a way of resurfacing and subverting the androgynous harmony of the two-in-one, especially in tragedy. 24 Marital union in Hamlet, for example, is undercut by the dark pun within the word “union” itself, which designates both a marriage jewel and the poison pearl dissolved in the chalice of wine in the fi nal scene, the drinking of which dissolves the union of Claudius and Gertrude. It is “union” that has made Hamlet melancholy. Against his originary conception and corruption in sullied flesh Hamlet inveighs, “we will have no mo marriage” (3.1.149). In tragedy Crossing Gender in Shakespeare focuses on untransvested male characters like Richard II and Hamlet who fear that they are betrayed by the sign of woman. Like Malvolio they are melancholics, and all these men attribute their melancholy to a greater or lesser degree to their broken relations with women. Effeminization anxiety has tragic consequences for the Shakespearean hero. It manifests itself when King Lear claims to be invaginated by the return of the “mother,” the “hysterica passio” (2.4.57) that rises in his chest to choke him. Defending against dependency anxiety, Coriolanus disclaims relationship to his mother Volumnia, asserting that he is “author of himself” (5.3.36). Antony’s masculinist peers accuse him of selling out to the fatal femininity of Cleopatra, who in fact, I argue, potentiates rather than vitiates Antony’s masculinity. 25 The male hero scapegoats a woman, hysterically, tragically, for his physical impotence, which in turn he makes the cause of his lack of moral potency to fulfi ll his duty to the patriarchal law. Othello, who epitomizes such exaggerated anxiety about impotence, comes to occupy the position of his elderly father-in-law, Brabantio, who can neither control nor fulfi ll the desire of his wife/daughter. The easiest outlet for relieving this anxiety lies in misogyny directed against those who putatively turn the hero against duty, family, marriage. But in thinking that he can disencumber himself by projecting his burden onto a woman, the male hero succeeds only in exacerbating his tragic bind. The fantasy of what he takes to be the woman’s wanton, treacherous part in what constitutes his (male) self leads the hero ultimately to melancholic introversion and death, brooding on the impending fatality of which engenders the passivity of heroes like Hamlet and Richard II and produces the highly paradoxical diction characteristic of tragedy. Tragic eloquence results from the confl ictual cross coupling (chiasmus) of male and female to form an unsettling cross-sexed amalgam (the complex of Ovid’s Hermaphroditus) within the male. 26 Chapter 1 begins by anatomizing the complexly inward-turning cross dressing of Twelfth Night, as opposed to the relatively external use of transvestism in As You Like It. Taking on male dress does not so much restrict as liberate Rosalind, allowing her the power to see unseen, to overlook and to direct the course of love. The transvestic disguise is a great licenser, representative of the poetical feigning of as if: “Your If is the only peacemaker: much virtue in If” (As You Like It, 5.4.102). Cross dressing makes a deeper confusion in Twelfth Night, from the “cut” of Malvolio’s yellow stockings

Introduction

17

and cross garters to the pathos of Viola/Cesario’s self-allegorization as alienated “Patience” on a monument (2.4.115). Viola’s disguise imprisons her in a limbo of impossible in-betweenness. The romantic tragicomedies exploit the complications that arise when a woman like Viola assumes (or usurps) male attire to compensate for the male thing that she “lacks” (3.4.308). Both as escape-mechanism and as straitjacket, male dress alienates the heroine as an intermediary between the two sexes—Viola as confl icted go-between for Olivia and Orsino. Neither female nor male, neither self nor other, Viola instances in her divided person the principle of difference: “I am not what I am” (3.1.143). Her only exit from this self-effacing because cross-clothed cry is to dis-cover the self in a mate whose proposal of marriage promises to reinvest her in female dress and the chastening norms of patriarchy. But she is allowed to give at best only partial voice to the muffle placed upon her affections at the end of the play. Whereas comic transvestism foregrounds specular surfaces that can be assumed and alternately cast off, Shakespearean tragedy shifts ground to the internalized, psychologistic language, the violently torn tongue and cleft heart, of the androgynized male. In the schema of Twelfth Night a woman masquerading as a man is but a figured reflection of man—Viola is a mirror image of her twin brother Sebastian—whereas the male is a subject whose embodied depths are tragic because penetrable, open to castration, invagination, and loss. Malvolio’s (imaginary) original wholeness is touched by female lack through the agency of his lady Olivia’s letter(s), “her very C’s, her U’s, and her T’s” (2.5.88). Malvolio is exemplary of the transition from comedy to tragedy, from cross dressing to the cross coupling (chiasmus) and cross gartering of love melancholia. The cruel trick of cutting his name apart in an anagram (M.O.A.I) opens up the formerly staid Malvolio and makes of him a subject, calling forth in him a voice of bitterness and loss, the voice that for Viola, in her straitened circumstances, must remain muffled. 27 New Historicism is at odds with Judith Butler’s notion of gender performativity that deploys itself across manipulable surfaces of textile and constructed persona. In his essay “Fiction and Friction,” Stephen Greenblatt locates and grounds the reversibility of Feste’s chev’ril glove in an early modern discourse of gynecology that posits but one sex, teleologically male: the female genitalia are homologous to the male genitalia turned outside in, like a glove. But I argue that the glove signifies not the anatomical reversibility of the sexes but the arbitrary nature of the sign. Feste is his mistress Olivia’s “corrupter of words” who makes words “wanton” (3.1.11–37). Words differ from themselves. Feste’s chev’ril glove may provide the ground for the difference between male and female genitals in the discourse of gynecology, but the ground is slippery because figural. The reversibility of the linguistic figure prescribes the language of material, medical discourse, not the other way around. The glove is less a material object in the world that may be turned inside out than it is a metaphor for

18 Crossing Gender in Shakespeare the real topsy-turviness of words, whether they form the language of the putatively objective and referential discourse of medicine or the language of dramatic poetry with its explicit feints, fantastical fl ights, and intentional confusions of rational-scientific categories. Viola is put through the purloined and wanton paces of the signifier as she bemoans her status as a woman (who is not who she is) wrapped in the strictures of male clothing. She must wear and bear the chev’ril glove that may designate either gender. In his cross-coupling cross garters Malvolio is caught in an analogous but more frenzied double bind imposed by an ambiguously signifying textile. The strictures and punishments that he suffers lead to proto-tragic madness, exile, and solitariness. Chapter 2, on Richard II, engages with French feminist psychoanalysis to critique the male fantasy of sameness-unto-itself and its corollary projection of all difference onto women. King Richard’s femininity, performed by the haunting and much remarked repetition of the sound of “un”—words like “undo,” “unwieldy,” “unkiss,” “unking,” “unborn”—is responsible for his fall. Freud’s thesis, in his essay on “The Uncanny,” is that the unheimlich place that was once most heimlich is the womb: “The unheimlich is what was once heimisch, home-like, familiar; the prefi x ‘un’ is the token of repression.”28 What King Richard tries to repress, to un-do, unsuccessfully, is the lyrical and feminine voice within himself, a voice which his society defi nes as unkingly because unmasculine. To be unkingly is fatally to undo oneself. The loss that Richard suffers—of subjects, family, friends—leaves him with no home to return to except the feminine womb/tomb, the originary and destinational heim, the walled chamber at Pomfret. Deposed from union with his titular self-identity, no longer spoken of as “King,” the king eases himself “with being nothing” (5.5.41). His very language sounds out the “un” within the “one” and the latter’s necessary dissolution into the “none”: “Thus play I in one person many people, / And none contented” (5.5.31–32). “Un” sounds out the “none”’s constitutive yet destructive founding of the “one,” since in any pairing of opposites each pole is dependent upon the contrary whose antipodal force constitutes its half-life. “None” and “un” are rhyming synonyms of negation that occur on three occasions in the play, as they recur in the sonnets. (Sonnet 136 epitomizes the one / none paradox: “Among a number one is reckon’d none.”) The one/none dichotomy constitutes the same type of antithetical interdependency as the male/female pairing, as we have seen in the paranoid fantasies of invagination that haunt Beaumont’s Salmacis and Hermaphroditus. The feminine is represented in male discourse as the not one, whether that negation takes the form of doubling or of reducing to none. The “un” marks the cleavage, the unconscious doubleness that shadows Richard’s interior monologues and self-representations as the unified “sun” (another “un” word). Luce Irigaray has argued that this doubleness is typically associated in Western philosophy with the feminine, since man

Introduction

19

arrogates to himself the status of the one, while he relegates woman to the positions of either double or none. Irigaray’s deconstruction of patriarchal representations of the female genitalia is apropos: “And her sexual organ, which is not one organ, is counted as none.”29 The uncanny feminine that divides and subverts the notion of masculine sameness-unto-itself is not outside the masculine, its reassuring canny opposite; it subverts masculine sameness from within, manifesting the masculine’s uncanny division within itself. Richard haunting sense of being fractured by the woman within is the catastrophic consequence of his difference from himself. Chapter 3 shows how Hamlet is like Richard II in the way that his inaction and delay, his soliloquizing, and his melancholy are type-gendered as feminine. In this chapter I critique the conception of Hamlet’s proverbial misogyny as a function of the fantasy that a woman, specifically the hysterical mother, inhabits him.30 Whereas other critics (Goethe, David Leverenz, Marilyn French) have tended to see the feminine in Hamlet as enabling, I see it rather as debilitating and horrifying, like the “union” pearl in act 5 that symbolizes antithetically the wedding of the sexes but also the poison that results from the indiscriminate mixing of male and female. The undoing of reassuring sexual difference is represented in the portrayal of Hamlet as a feminized, impotent man, and of Gertrude as an aggressive, masculinized woman. This collapsing of sexual distinctions, described in terms of “incest,” “jointure,” and making opposites “common,” comes to a thematic head in the way that misogyny informs the figure of “union” (marriage/poison), the love of/for a woman that antithetically enjoins death. Whereas female unfaithfulness suggests a complication that comic transvestism channels into cuckoldry jokes—the transvestic buffer miraculously defuses the charge of infidelity—woman’s androgyny in the tragedies incites a differentiating catastrophe. Somehow explicit androgyny is comic because it is false. By contrast, clearly defi ned sex roles evoke tragedy because their defi nitions, being unstable, must be resolved by violence, as Joel Fineman argues. 31 What René Girard characterizes as a sacrificial crisis—in the case of Hamlet, the marriage of Gertrude and Claudius which dissolves the incest taboo that insists that a woman not sleep with her brother-in-law—is what Hamlet is called upon to resolve through violence. This burdensome responsibility to act violently, which Hamlet is unable to assume effectively until act 5, is what for many critics spells the sacrifice of his appealingly feminine qualities of loquacious inaction. It is these same feminine qualities, however, which incite in the fi rst place the apotropaic violence in Hamlet to expel the feminine from within himself and from the realm. Chapter 4 effects a shift away from the peculiar extravagance of Othello’s race that has dominated discussion of the play for almost three decades in order to focus instead on how age and impotence make Othello as much an Other as race does. Othello comes to recapitulate unwittingly the structural position of his ineffectual and impotent father-in-law, the old man of

20 Crossing Gender in Shakespeare comedy flyted for his inability to control his daughter’s choice of a lover, analogous to the middle-aged husband unable to insure his wife’s fidelity. Othello is anxious because his “weak function” (2.3.339) and the “vale of years” (3.3.270) have made “the young affects in me defunct” (1.3.265). Impotence is portrayed in terms of the hero’s weakness and Desdemona’s contrasting assumption of unwonted masculine qualities in becoming her general’s general. Under the barrage of Iago’s deflating insinuations Othello calls into question his marital sexual potency in a way that he never doubted his martial prowess. Taking a cue from André Green, one may regard military virtue in terms of the Same, that with which Othello is familiar and which therefore poses no challenge to his identity, whereas his love for Desdemona, the Other, makes Othello differ from himself. The many signs of the phallus in his speech that bids “Farewell the plumed troop, and the big wars” (3.3.355) point to Othello’s despairing desire to regain a potency that he feels slip away under threat of emasculation. It will not be vouchsafed the valiant Moor to die on the field of honor, but rather to succumb dishonorably, pierced by Cupid’s darts. The military virtues are epitomized by Cassio, the object of Othello’s narcissistic love and admiration, a homosocial love that reinforces Othello’s sense of manliness more than his object-love for Desdemona can hope to do. Thus he prefers to see Desdemona in safely military (Same) than in romantic (Other) terms, as when he sets eyes on her in Cyprus, he exclaims, “O my fair warrior!” (2.1.182). Othello echoes Iago’s logic: if Desdemona will sleep even with him, then how can she resist a much younger man like Cassio? Iago repeats Othello’s words in ways that evacuate them of their univocal meaning. Words like “honor” and “honesty” are emptied out under Iago’s bemonstering echo, as is the integrity of the handkerchief as material token of a woman’s honesty. Chapter 4 offers a long reading of the handkerchief as an allegory of virgin sacrifice and the anxiety that Desdemona’s devirgination, marked particularly by the blood-stained wedding sheets and the corresponding strawberries on the handkerchief, induces in Othello. The alienability of the handkerchief, its reduction to the status of a “common thing” (3.3.306) that circulates all too freely, makes of its erstwhile possessor a “common” woman. The imagery of the fi nal act indicates that in killing Desdemona, Othello attempts in his imagination to close off her orifices and thereby to revirginate her, to make her no longer common. Othello’s fantasy that Desdemona’s putative hypersexuality needs to be closed off is a defensive screen for the warrior hero’s unconscious sense of male sexual inadequacy. Although Chapter 5, on Antony and Cleopatra, continues to pursue the method of feminist psychoanalysis, it further makes the case for the formalist project of reading against the grain: it foregrounds moments of decentering and disequilibrium within the Shakespearean text itself, and in the interstices of its critical interpellations, to demonstrate how

Introduction

21

Shakespeare anticipates and prescribes many of the theoretical developments foregrounded in my earlier chapters. This chapter concentrates on the connection between the way that Cleopatra renders Antony martial and the way that in her death performance she, as if mothering her lover, restores Antony symbolically to life, in defiance of the Roman prejudice that she unmans and bemonsters all her lovers. Women in Shakespeare’s plays who cross dress run the gamut from passive Viola, whose male garments straitjacket her, making her a prisoner to the alienation and debilitating indeterminacy of being a messenger between lovers who have more sexual interest in Cesario than they do either in Viola or in each other, to Cleopatra, who manages to port Antony’s martial sword and armor without having to sacrifice her passionate maternal nurturance of her “baby” asps upon her breast. Cleopatra’s sexual desire on the barge at Cydnus exhausts her partner even as it renews itself ad infi nitum. Her capacity for pleasure knows no satiety or limit. Like suicide, orgasm is not dying, or at least not dying as terminus but rather as endlessly renewing cycle. Suicide is militant nurturance, maternal defiance in defense of Cleopatra’s husband-child-asp. Cleopatra’s is an aggressive androgyny, a pangenic and polymorphous (but not parthenogenic) reproductivity, at the antipodes to the passive, passionless in-betweenness of Viola. In his representation of Cleopatra’s death Shakespeare offers a unique resolution to the antagonistic gender binarisms that characterize the other plays discussed in this book. Cleopatra chooses a death that echoes yet subverts the manly Roman fashion of suicide. In dying after the high Roman fashion she partially denies the woman in her, but the “fleeting moon” (5.2.239) of womanliness will not completely out: the woman breastfeeds her asp—Antony, her child, Antony as child—as her last martial and maternal act, her defiance that clears a legacy for nurture. She dies a warrior mother, an altogether original position in Shakespeare’s canon. In re-presenting the Roman discipline of death, Cleopatra’s ars moriendi displaces and recuperates the liquid languishing, the effeminizing and selfdefeating outflowing of Antony, in life and in his bungled suicide attempt, upon which the Romans heaped contempt. Cleopatra’s death art remasculinizes Antony (her lover, her child) posthumously. Cleopatra cannot be seen, except by her Roman enemies and detractors, as someone who threatens male potency in the way that Gertrude is represented by Hamlet in fantasy, making the mother the cause of Hamlet’s dilatoriness and melancholy. Cleopatra’s remasculation of Antony runs counter to the melancholic Richard II’s paranoia of being undone by the feminizing/castrating sound of “un,” and counter to Othello’s anxieties about age and impotence, which induce him to scapegoat Desdemona. The paradoxical combination of martial and maternal personae makes of Cleopatra a female figure who defies paranoid male fantasies of women as possessed of a monstrous potency that subjects men to effeminization, lack, and death.

22

Crossing Gender in Shakespeare

Chapter 6 explores Cymbeline, a romance whose generic constraints cannot permit its heroine the post-tragic, celebratory suicide that Cleopatra is allowed to perform, but defi nes Imogen instead as the enduring, self-effacing wife. She cannot die since living for Posthumus is her reason for being, and the playwright’s rationale for her existence as well. Lacking Cleopatra’s political power and not capable of her grandiloquent rhetoric in celebration of desire, Imogen defines herself in terms of her chastity and loyalty to a single man. But in the middle of the play, shortly after she takes on male dress, Imogen is more inclined to express sexual desire for her husband Posthumus than many critics give her credit for, especially when she smears the blood of decapitated Cloten upon her face, an act (of misrecognition) at once funereal, memorial, and sexual in ways reminiscent of Cleopatra’s theatrical farewell to her deceased “husband.” As one who plays the woman’s part Imogen enacts a contrapuntal response to Posthumus, who denounces the woman’s part in him. While women express their longing for men’s superior freedoms by taking on male dress, men seek to repress their debts to the “woman’s part” in them. Cymbeline and Posthumus are envious of the property that they think that women hold in them, of women’s strength, especially of their ability to give birth and thus to control familial and national genealogies and histories. As proponents of parthenogenesis, these men want to usurp the woman’s exclusive claim upon parturition, to bypass their pangs of debt to the mother by dwelling aloof in a homosocial, all-male world. Imogen feels that love for her husband constitutes her as a woman rather than undercutting or compromising her in some way. Unlike her husband and her father, whose fantasy of parthenogenesis entails the desire to comprise in themselves both male and female parts, Imogen is willing to experiment with taking on male dress insofar as it may help her to effect a rapprochement with, not a swallowing up of, her male partner. The romance mode allows her to recoup her husband and her marriage in a much quieter, less theatrical manner than in Cleopatra’s liminal art of dying. Imogen eschews limit experiences, so much so that we tend to forget her at the end of the play as her humility pushes the heroine towards self-effacement beneath her assumed male dress and persona, which she makes no effort to divest herself of. Her distance, indeed absence, from her father’s triumphant assumption of the parthenogenic mother-father position is manifest in how her male garments smother her, as Viola remains imprisoned and suspended in male dress at the end of Twelfth Night. Imogen is more active when she dons her male persona as Fidele than Viola is as Cesario, but both heroines fi nd their female selves placed under erasure at the end of the drama. The cross dressing that promises female figures the powers of surveillance and of metamorphosis reduces them eventually to the status of invisible and silent embarrassments to the playwright, relegated to the margins of the stage once they and their mates resolve upon marriage. The exigencies of social stability and narrative convention and

Introduction

23

closure force Shakespeare to sacrifice the female persona whose unmarried condition, being hedged in with doubt, initially provided the drama with its narrative reason for being. If many plays posit a terminal male order predicated on the banishment of unruly women, Cymbeline instead fantasizes the incorporation of women into male rule, rendering and reducing them to complaisant silence if not irrelevance.

1

The Transvestic Glove-Text of Twelfth Night

Unlike nineteenth-century science as examined in Michel Foucault’s study of the hermaphrodite Herculine Barbin, the fluidity and ambivalence of sexual identity in Shakespeare’s transvestite comedies describes a paradigm that calls univocal sexual truth into question, and that fi nds pleasure in dwelling upon the questionable margins of truth. The hermaphrodite that informs my reading of Twelfth Night derives from Ovid and the many Renaissance translations and reworkings of his myth of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus. This is not the hermaphrodite as anatomical monster or scandalous prodigy, but rather the conventional literary figure that calls into question the body as the locus or ground of sexual truth. The hermaphrodite as metaphor defies the doctors who would reduce its defi nition to anatomy. My feminist and psychoanalytic approach to the play will unravel what I call hermaphroditic anamorphism, the quality of being and simultaneously not being one sex; of being both male and female and therefore neither one nor the other. Along the way I will engage Stephen Greenblatt’s celebrated essay, “Fiction and Friction,” in an effort to revaluate and reposition the relationship between anatomical and literary-metaphorical hermaphrodites.1 A range of cases brings to the fore the interplay between the body and its chafi ng (friction) and its representation in literary characters on stage (fiction): the boy actor clothed as a woman; the hermaphrodite veiled beneath the ostensibly disambiguating dress of one sex or the other; the female character on stage who takes on male dress. Is clothing a metaphor for sexual identity as changeable surface, manipulable more or less at will? Or is clothing instead an integument for some bedrock corporeality beneath? In the latter sense clothing would be a deictic pointer, an index, a signifier of the truth of the underlying body. So Puritan antitheatricalists insisted on defining the law of clothing. In opposition to this I believe that the clothing of bodies on stage in Twelfth Night, like the words of actors, is a textual construction whose underlying meaning is unstable. Conventions of law and the theatrical stage necessitate, of course, that the body cannot present itself in its naked truth, but only in the vestments that re-present such truth at a distance. Representation detours via costume and metaphor round about

The Transvestic Glove-Text of Twelfth Night

25

the body that is condemned to be mute and unsignifying in itself, not visible on stage except by the metonymic displacement of clothing. Viola’s male clothing allows her both to mourn and to fill in vicariously for the loss of what she takes to be her recently deceased brother, Sebastian. Because she looks identical to him under male cover of Cesario, she will be able providentially to effect his resurrection. In finding a prop for her male persona once Sebastian is brought back from the dead—a place, as it were, to hang her male clothing upon—Viola is able to become fully female at the end of the play by entering into matrimony. The more fundamental fantasy of hermaphroditical identical twins also comes to a head at the end of the play: that a person need not be forced to choose exclusively between one sex or the other. Running counter to these hopeful signs, however, is the pathos of Viola’s gendered double bind, as she testifies in muffled and self-divided voices that the man she plays is not what she is, and therefore she cannot have what she wants. The man for whom she woos as messenger is the one she would rather wed, while the woman who falls for Cesario’s masculine persona holds no interest for Viola as a future partner. Her masculine clothing straitjackets her in this intermediate crux, double bound to unsatisfying alternatives whichever way she turns. A sexual transformation even more punishing than Viola’s is the case of Malvolio, who is turned inside out when he receives the forged love letter supposedly from his lady Olivia. His reversal of orientation towards love is symbolized by the risible cross garters and yellow stockings that he assumes. Unlike Viola, who comes to have faith in a male twin upon whom she can parcel out her gender confusion, Malvolio is unable to fi nd a complementary prop for his shadow side. Far from hiding his embarrassment, his disguise exacerbates the visibility of the ostentatious display. The more he thinks he loves another, the more hysterical his narcissism becomes. He ends up playing both sex roles in himself alone, both lover and beloved, an implosion that drives him into the punitive darkness of the lock-up and fi nally into isolate exile. In addition to this transgression, the social structures of Illyria cannot tolerate a steward who seeks to appropriate the love and the status of the countess whom he serves. Malvolio violates sumptuary taboos in a way that he must pay for, so different from the rewards that may accrue to Viola for her patient self-erasure under the guise of a man. His wearing the cross garters is the all too visible sign that he has been double-crossed by the alluring but fictitious love letter, making him more an object of ridicule than Viola who, rendered almost invisible by her cross dressing, is a speaking subject of pathos. At the most general structural level, two models of sexual transformation operate in Twelfth Night: one looks to textured clothing as the locus for reading gender, the other to textual inscription in the words that conventionally designate and distinguish the sexes. In one model the cross dresser seeks to effect a gender transition by manipulating visible textile symbols. In the other, which posits a natural distinction between the descriptive languages

26

Crossing Gender in Shakespeare

used to designate men and women, the temptation of sexual ventriloquism arises, of becoming the other by assuming his/her characteristic tongue.2 Invoking the terminology of Roland Barthes on the fashion system, I want to show in what follows how Viola and Malvolio undergo gender transformation by means of both the transvestic transition from one image-text or vestment to another, and the manipulation (and the correlative fracturing and recombination) of a linguistic word-text. 3 The two agents of clothing and linguistic sign cohabit in the images of Viola’s cross dressing, Malvolio’s cross garters, and Feste’s motley anatomy of both wit and sexual excitation in the image of turning a leather glove inside out. Glove and garters are both articles of apparel and rhetorical figures for the way that language, as well as the sexual body clothed under its sign, is unstable. Viola and Malvolio are inverted images of gender crossing, hermaphroditical complements; one is the other turned inside out. Viola’s cross dressing, Malvolio’s cross gartering, and Feste’s motley: the operation of this three-ply textuality is epitomized in the chev’ril glove that can be turned wrong side outwards with such apparent ease, representing the wanton reversibility of clothing as a metaphor for the wantonness of words. And for the ease of gender transformation by means of the wanton manipulation of image- and word-texts.

I Olivia. Ourselves we do not owe. (1.5.314)

According to C. L. Barber, Shakespeare’s transvestite comedies license misrule temporarily, like carnival, in order to purge the restive urges of subordinate social groups: The disguising of a girl as a boy in Twelfth Night is exploited so as to renew in a special way our sense of the difference. Just as a saturnalian reversal of social roles need not threaten the social structure, but can serve instead to consolidate it, so a temporary, playful reversal of sexual roles can renew the meaning of the normal relation.4

Barber’s sanguine teleology sounds to me like a more accurate description of As You Like It than Twelfth Night. Viola’s disguise condemns her to a sexual passivity and futility before Olivia that contrasts with Rosalind’s or Portia’s active use of masking to further their sexual ends. “Disguise, I see thou art a wickedness, / Wherein the pregnant enemy does much” (2.2.26–27), she laments. Disguised as Cesario, Viola apostrophizes herself as allegorical Disguise, casting herself in the shadowy figure of the Devil, whose superior potency is gendered as the pregnant maleness of Viola’s masculine persona.5 Containing both male and female elements, Viola either impregnates herself or is impregnated by the devil. However

The Transvestic Glove-Text of Twelfth Night

27

conceived, the birth threatens to be a monstrous one (2.2.33), as if Viola’s anxious regret here serves as a testimonial to the warnings of Puritan antitheatricalists like Phillip Stubbes that transvestism is indeed the devil’s preferred instrument. Forced to perform at Duke Orsino’s suit the role of love page, Viola is constrained within a gendered double bind: a woman’s body (and soul) straitjacketed in the supposedly liberating clothing of a man. Her disguise, unlike Rosalind’s in As You Like It, estranges her into an alien role. The performance of gender is not as simple as assuming a persona at will, for Viola, unlike Rosalind, fi nds sloughing off the disguise not so easy. Gender is not just skin deep in Viola’s case; she is no swashbuckling Hic Mulier or Roaring Girl, women who take on the confident and aggressive roles that their clothing signifies. Double crossed and torn two ways by her situation as go-between, Viola’s transvested Cesario is marked by passive suffering: she represents herself under the guise of a fictive lost sister who “pin’d in thought, / And with a green and yellow melancholy / She sat like Patience on a monument, / Smiling at grief” (2.4.113–16). The comic player’s costume masks a melancholic interior, the patient suffering for the unrequited love of Viola’s sister-as-monument. A private, psychological depth is opened up beneath superficial masculine confidence, an interior space of feminine grieving that can express itself only on condition that it not be seen, except under a riddling veil. And also on condition that it not be heard by her interlocutor, since most of the remarks that reveal Viola’s interior are spoken awry, aside to the audience. Perhaps the sense of depth that we derive from Viola’s soliloquies is part and parcel of her sense of self-estrangement, and of our uneasy position as spectators who take qualified pleasure from her momentary grief. Disguise and displacement in the play operate at both sumptuary and linguistic levels. Olivia accuses Viola of speaking a poetic and therefore feigning text scripted by Duke Orsino, to which Viola responds by calling Olivia’s bluff, teasing her to lift the black veil of mourning for her brother. Like the affectations of love-making satirized in the following exchange, mourning too forms an unspontaneous tissue of formalities and clichés: Olivia. Now, sir, what is your text? Viola. Most sweet lady— Olivia. A comfortable doctrine, and much may be said of it. Where lies your text? Viola. In Orsino’s bosom. Olivia. In his bosom? In what chapter of his bosom? Viola. To answer by the method, in the fi rst of his heart. Olivia. O, I have read it: it is heresy. Have you no more to say? Viola. Good madam, let me see your face. Olivia. Have you any commission from your lord to negotiate with my face? You are now out of your text: but we will draw the curtain and

28 Crossing Gender in Shakespeare show you the picture. [Unveiling] Look you, sir, such a one I was this present. Is’t not well done? Viola. Excellently done, if God did all. (1.5.223–39)

The pre-scripted love text that Viola is prepared to deliver on the Duke’s behalf is no more affected than the textile covering that Olivia wears not so much to mourn her brother as to veil how insubstantial her pose of mourning is. Even when she purports to draw the curtain from her melancholyveiled visage, Olivia reveals instead of transparent flesh only a painted portrait, a cosmetic face. The only “present” that this face can lay claim to is as the cover of an unrecoverable absence (“was”), so the ostensible presentation of the flesh is just another mask of representation.6 Olivia proposes that her beauty is reducible to its postscript, the sum of what can be written about it in her will: “I will give out divers schedules of my beauty. It shall be inventoried, and every particle and utensil labeled to my will” (1.5.247–50). Uninventoried, uninscribed in a codicil, the beautiful face is mute without the testimony of letters, illegible without textual ascription, Viola’s witness notwithstanding. In short, the possibility of an uninscribed state of sincere nature is made risible in this hothouse world of both sumptuary and linguistic excess.7 Although Viola opts for the disguise of a page, her initial choice of posing as a eunuch reflects more accurately the sexual indecision (and impotence) that her attire cloaks, in that a eunuch is neither a fully equipped male nor a female. Viola’s male garments effect an uneasy liaison with Duke Orsino whereby she plays the go-between in his suit to Olivia, a match that she would rather not see realized: “I’ll do my best / To woo your lady: [Aside] yet, a barful strife! / Whoe’er I woo, myself would be his wife” (1.4.40–42). The clothing that she has taken on to escape the threat of assault does violence to her peace of mind by confi ning her to a position of impossible in-betweenness: she is both jailer and prisoner, always at guard with a self that threatens to escape the bars (male dress) behind which it has willingly imprisoned itself. The double bind that constrains her is at once sumptuary, theatrical, and psychological. In posing to herself the situation of loving a man who employs her to woo a woman who in turn falls for the messenger, Viola ricochets between rival gender hypotheses: As I am man, My state is desperate for my master’s love: As I am woman (now alas the day!) What thriftless sighs shall poor Olivia breathe? O time, thou must untangle this, not I, It is too hard a knot for me t’untie. (2.2.35–40)

Viola is tied up in a knot, a word that, unravelled, contains its homonym not, which occurs in emphatic proximity in the preceding line. The haunting

The Transvestic Glove-Text of Twelfth Night

29

coupling of the conflated knot/not with the doubled negative prefi x unserves to reiterate what I take to be Viola’s leitmotif of “I am not what I am” (3.1.143).8 Viola cannot untie and untangle what she is from what she inextricably is not.9 Viola is the only one of his transvestite heroines to whom Shakespeare gives the proto-tragic depth of undergoing suffering but having to express it as if it were another’s. Epitomizing her divided sexual and social condition, she confesses to Olivia, “I am not what I am.” This is a paradoxical articulation of the truth that nonetheless remains opaque to Olivia. In engaging the Liar’s paradox,10 the case of Viola belies society’s insistence that sexuality must have as its truth an exclusive either/or, for she is like Hermaphroditus in Ovid’s Metamorphoses both “am” and “am not” at once. The speaker is not the integral whole that she seems, the unity of a vestiary surface that represents the self-possessed, self-same male, like Viola’s twin brother, Sebastian. He is self-sufficient because he does not need Viola as she needs him; he, unlike Viola, does not have to cross dress to recuperate a lost sibling. (He is dependent, however, on the devotions of his friend Antonio.) In this play not only the articulated, interior depth, but also the duplicity that differs from surface male constancy, is gendered female, that which “is not” male. Woman is the “is not” to man’s “is,” the none to man’s one. Woman negates man; asymmetrically, she is defi ned (by man) as un-man. (But Sebastian is not constant either, especially in his relationship with Antonio.) Speaking as Cesario, Viola expresses to Olivia her opinion that the male remains independent in not needing a woman to second or ratify his oneness: By innocence I swear, and by my youth, I have one heart, one bosom, and one truth, And that no woman has; nor never none Shall mistress be of it, save I alone. (3.1.159–62)

This protestation of oneness could not be more sincere in stating Viola’s will not to marry a woman, yet she forswears herself in claiming to speak singly (unambiguously): the primary meaning of the third line is that no woman has claimed Cesario’s heart as mate, but it can also be taken to mean that no woman in herself is of single heart, bosom, and truth. The first proposition is true enough. And what could be truer as well, in the context of the play, than the second, given the fact that Viola is performing a gender lie even as she speaks? She knows fi rst-hand of a woman’s duplicity—that a woman can be a unitary man only by impersonating or doubling a man and thereby belying unity—and so “she” “alone” is in a privileged position to articulate truly her doubleness.11 What she lacks in unity she compensates for in being able to experience and to express movingly the double bind that women are more subject to than men—this is the one truth that she is

30

Crossing Gender in Shakespeare

“mistress” of. And although she is torn two ways at once, she is far from unconstant in her affections, especially in contrast to the fickle masters she serves as go-between. Woman is both the negative image of man in one model of sexual differentiation that informs the play and his mirror image in another. Upon being mistaken for Sebastian by Antonio, Viola gleans a hopeful sign that her existence as misrecognized reflection implies the continued vitality of the original: I my brother know Yet living in my glass; even such and so In favour was my brother, and he went Still in this fashion, colour, ornament, For him I imitate. (3.4.389–93)

This providential mirroring is a bearing witness that gives new life to the dead, and new hope of reintegration to the twins who are lost when separated. The way that Viola sees her brother mirrored in herself differs from Malvolio’s narcissistic gazing in the mirror, which serves only to isolate him from the world of vital relations, plunging him eventually into solipsistic darkness. Because the opposite sex siblings are indistinguishable, the loss of one’s twin entails the loss of self. Viola and Sebastian are the issue of a common womb; their destiny is to reunite via their bond with another woman who holds them in common, Olivia, who like them wants to compensate for the loss of a sibling. Viola takes on male clothing as a way of recouping the lost brother, like Olivia under her black veil. In playing the role of her opposite sex identical twin, Viola covers over his loss, perpetuating the memory of the dead by impersonating him: “Prove true, imagination, O prove true, / That I, dear brother, be now ta’en for you!” (3.4.384–85). Transvestic imagination will prove true in the event, bodying forth the lost brother. Since the resurrection of Sebastian is dependent on both the faith and the transvestism of his doubly gendered sister, this implies that the man too is removed from singleness and self-sufficiency. Like his sister, Sebastian is not who he is, save by grace and good luck and the agency of various others, like Viola, Antonio, and Olivia. Before Viola can secure a happy marriage for her brother—the precondition for her own nuptials—she is repeatedly reminded of the defects in her male impersonation. She is left feeling especially short of the mark in her duel with Sir Andrew Aguecheek, when she reductively attributes her cowardice to phallic diminutiveness, the lack of a brother: “Pray God defend me! A little thing would make me tell them how much I lack of a man” (3.4.307–9). Enter Antonio, Sebastian’s proxy, who lacks no such thing, and who roundly bloodies Sir Andrew and Sir Toby.12 It is Antonio’s mistaking of Viola for Sebastian, as we have seen, that assures Viola that

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her lack has fortuitously attracted the lost sibling who fills the masculinity vacuum. When Viola fi nds her lost masculinity in Sebastian, she should fi nally be free to be a woman. Encountering Sebastian and mistaking him for Cesario/Viola, Feste the Clown speaks truer than he knows in his mock skepticism: “No, I do not know you, nor I am not sent to you by my lady, to bid you come speak with her; nor your name is not Master Cesario; nor this is not my nose neither. Nothing that is so is so” (4.1.5–9). This remark reiterates the theme that the connections between bodies and their names, between insides and outsides, as well as the differences between men and women, are unstable. In addition to indicating the major characterological theme of doubleness in the play, Viola’s principle of “I am not what I am,” so like the Clown’s motley logic, describes the repeated scenes of misprision that structure the comic plot. Though she knows that she is not who she presents herself to be, Viola is only glancingly aware that, absent from herself she, or someone identical in dress, is perceived to be otherwhere. “I am not what I am” becomes in effect “I am not where I am.” The question of identity and person gives way to the question of place and position, perhaps reassuringly, as if one who has misplaced her identity can eventually relocate it elsewhere. Shuffling positions on the stage, like turning a glove inside out, as we shall see, forces one to recognize the other (sex) within the self-same. But since two persons, unlike two identities, cannot occupy the same place, there is hope that Viola will be able to pin her ambiguously gendered selves onto distinct and separate bodies. The interchangeability of Viola and Sebastian suggests that, like Ovid’s description of Hermaphroditus, they are and are not two sexes in one: “Nor man nor mayd now could they be esteem’d: / Neither, and either, might they well be deem’d” (Beaumont, lines 907–08). Seen in conjunction with her brother, Viola presents a dual perspective that is two in one: “One face, one voice, one habit, and two persons!—A natural perspective, that is, and is not” (5.1.214–15). This hermaphroditic anamorphism providentially rewrites Viola’s proto-tragic lament that she is not the one that she is, since the gender bind that formerly constricted and estranged her has now split into a fruitful exfoliation, which allows each Jill to have her Jack: Olivia gets her Cesario/Sebastian even as Cesario/Viola gets her Orsino. Speaking of himself and his sister, Sebastian remarks to Olivia how her love object is preposterous and disorienting because hermaphroditical: “You are betroth’d both to a maid and man” (5.1.261).13 What Sebastian as a univocal male cannot attain is precisely this defi nition of Viola’s androgyny: he says that he lacks—he too is not whole—“that deity in my nature / Of here and everywhere” (5.1.225–26). Once again sexual bivalence is displaced onto a topographical grid, for the “same” person seems to assume a different gender depending on the arbitrary symmetry of which side of the stage that he/she happens to be standing upon. By the end of the play Viola’s negative capability blesses her with the saving power of occupying more

32

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than one gender position at a time, so long as she remains fi xed on stage in the limbo of male dress and foreclosed consummation. In the fi nal scene Viola holds out to her brother, at the moment of their happy reunion, the hope of at last achieving the self-identity, the separation and individuation from one’s twin, that paradoxically only reunion can make possible. But separation depends on several doubtful conditions: If nothing lets to make us happy both, But this my masculine usurp’d attire, Do not embrace me, till each circumstance Of place, time, fortune, do cohere and jump That I am Viola; which to confirm, I’ll bring you to a captain in this town, Where lie my maiden weeds. (5.1.247–53)

The transition from the self-alienation of Cesario’s “I am not what I am” to the self-identity of “That I am Viola” is defi ned by a positional, temporal, and above all sumptuary transformation—clothes make the woman—that is no less problematic, however, in the closing scene than it was in the beginning. Viola must remain confi ned in her male garments at the end of the play, her female identity still foreclosed (at least on stage), for the captain who has her woman’s clothes has been imprisoned at the suit of Malvolio. The latter has stormed off the stage in the final scene, conspicuously unavailable and utterly ill disposed to effect any happy transformation in dress. The Duke’s proposal of marriage leaves Viola more tongue-tied than ever; silence is her only response. It remains uncertain how the Duke will react to seeing Viola as a woman since he falls in love with her only while she is disguised as a man, and their mutual service is predicated on this misrecognition. Viola is caught in a double bind, again: unhappy disguised as a man, but unable to effect the metamorphosis into a fully realized woman. In negotiating the double bind of his transvestic cross garters, Malvolio will undergo the trial of a similarly vexed metamorphosis.

II Clown. The tailor make thy doublet of changeable taffeta, for thy mind is very opal. (2.4.73–75)

It is frequently remarked that the names of Olivia, Viola, and Malvolio are anagrammatically (as well as etymologically) akin. This nominal-literal mix-up prescribes the multiple confusions of unrequited, misprised, and short-circuited love over the course of the play. Malvolio embodies ill will (mal: evil; voglio: I will or desire) because his narcissism and desire for absolute rule in his lady Olivia’s household threaten to subvert class

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hierarchy. Viola represents harmonious (perhaps measured on a musical model) will; as Cesario she is restrained and self-abnegating, but her androgynous beauty unintentionally arouses desire and upsets gender hierarchy nonetheless. Viola like Malvolio is a servant who seeks to marry her master; again like her anagrammatic namesake Malvolio, Viola pursues this aim under cover of unfamiliar dress. The game of witty dalliance with names, like the manipulations of a chev’ril glove, can turn a woman like Viola into a man like Cesario; can make Maria pass off her handwriting as her lady Olivia’s, a jest that wins her marriage to the higher ranking Toby; can, in this same jest, inflate the pride of the steward Malvolio so that he arrogates to himself the title of Count Malvolio and aspires to be his mistress’ master. Malvolio’s excited wit when he receives the counterfeit love letter from his mistress illustrates the truth of Orsino’s remark at the start of the play that fancy “alone is high fantastical” (1.1.15) in its infinite play of shape shifting, of gender reversal, and status inflation.14 If Viola and Sebastian are mirror images of each other, then Malvolio is Viola turned inside out. Whereas Viola’s cross dressing puts her in the double bind of having to speak the Liar’s truth that belies what she seems—“I am not what I am”—Malvolio’s yellow stockings and cross gartering make him appear like the gull that he is, though his narcissism traps him, in contrast to Viola, in a state of failed self-recognition and false consciousness. Malvolio’s sumptuous cross gartering is a stage image that represents phenomenally the (comical) truth of the psychic divisions that he experiences, but which he is not initially aware of, perhaps because that psyche is empty as far as we can tell, at least until the incarceration and ritual abuse that he suffers in act 4 make him, for many modern critics, an object of compassion. Put another way, while Viola stages her drama in a hushed and reticent dialogue of one (2.2.35–40), Malvolio steals the show by ostentatiously wearing the madness of his double bind—chaste Puritan and lovelorn narcissist—on his cross-gartered sleeve. The cross garters give visual flesh and symbolic point to his psychological predicament. Viola’s cross-dressed bind is prophylactic—it keeps her chaste— while Malvolio’s cross gartering parades his sexual availability for the fi rst time in his life, even as such preening extroversion guarantees the futility of his project. The cross gartering effects in Malvolio’s dress what the anagrammatic letter has already predicated; Malvolio simply dresses according to the dictates of the (wanton) script that his prankster enemies have surreptitiously forged, assuming “such forms which here were presuppos’d / Upon thee in the letter” (5.1.349–50). Anagrammatized, Malvolio becomes the Haec-Vir whose sexual and linguistic morphology violates the rules of grammar. Viola’s stage persona effaces the self by burying it beneath, as it were, a transvestic winding sheet for Sebastian, something like Olivia’s black veil of mourning; Malvolio, by contrast, turns inside out his Puritan noir in order to assume the gallant’s yellow, the preening color of sexual display.

34

Crossing Gender in Shakespeare

And also the color of the “green and yellow melancholy” that we have seen Viola attribute to her imaginary patient sister “smiling at grief” for unrequited love. Like the imaginary sister, Malvolio will force unfamiliar and unwelcome smiles upon the still grieving Olivia. Both Viola and Malvolio are yellow melancholics because the amorous smiles of both are unrequited. The allied traits of melancholy, smiling, and yellowness concatenate Malvolio and Viola in a common bind.15 Despite these superficial similarities between Viola and Malvolio, their sense of malaise stems from unlike causes. Viola’s occasional melancholy is that of someone humbled to the point of self-effacement, literally and figuratively so in her speech and dress. Malvolio’s melancholia is of a very different, ego-aggrandizing sort, since it is a response to the lure of amour and power that the social world dangles before him in a love letter —false lure because forged letter—and the consequent ridicule that his fellows heap upon him for aiming so high. I will argue that the garters which Malvolio comes to wear visibly crossed on his legs are an emblem of his newfound openness, or subjection, to the feminine, an equal but opposite replay of the way that Viola’s feminine interior blushes outward through her masculineusurped attire. The feminine will out for both Viola and Malvolio, but the latter’s outing will prove to have even more catastrophic, less liberating consequences, leading eventually to this insider’s exile. Malvolio performs his own undoing simultaneously in verbal and visual registers: he is crossed chiastically—double-crossed—by the riddling, anagrammatic letter (the linguistic antithetical) even as he is cross-dressed (the visual anamorphic). Maria’s acrostic word-text predicates a sumptuary image-text, as Malvolio performatively projects conflicted sentiments by wearing them marked crisscrossed upon his calves. The cross garters correspond to rhetorical tropes like chiasmus and syneciosis, the latter englished by George Puttenham as the cross coupler in The Arte of English Poesie (1589). If the figure of apparel corresponds to a rhetorical trope—if textile matter is a response to textual manner—Malvolio can be said to wear on his legs the double helixed cross-coupler, the symbol of a crossed, mixed sexual identity. Although it speaks of the mixing of species rather than genders, Puttenham’s defi nition of the rhetorical figure of the cross coupler makes explicit the cross-fertilization between language and the sexual body: “It takes me two contrary words, and tieth them as it were in a paire of couples, and so makes them agree like good fellowes, as I saw once in Fraunce a wolfe couple with a mastiffe, and a fox with a hounde.”16 Is not Malvolio’s proposed match with Olivia no less absurd than the bestial miscegenation that Puttenham’s examples illustrate? My own concern is less with the sexual body as such than with the phenomenal manner in which it is represented, as when the wolf masquerades in a mastiff’s clothing, as it were. The cross coupler turns back to front, inside to outside, like the two articles of clothing that are key to my remaining discussion: the cross garters and the reversible chev’ril glove.17

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In what follows I will anatomize the complex nexus between the linguistic crossword or anagram that designates Malvolio in love—“M.O.A.I.”—and the visual analogue that it calls forth in Malvolio’s dress, his cross gartering, which cross-counters his aim of attracting Olivia’s affections, as Maria anticipates gleefully: “He will come to her in yellow stockings, and ‘tis a colour she abhors, and cross-gartered, a fashion she detests: and he will smile upon her, which will now be so unsuitable to her disposition, being addicted to a melancholy as she is, that it cannot but turn him into a notable contempt” (2.5.198–204). The cross garters come to signal the way Malvolio becomes tripped up in the tangle of his narcissism and to flag him therefore as a conspicuously eligible target for abuse.18 Malvolio swerves from the straight and narrow of Puritan monosexuality and contempt for the differential other, discovering the difference from his former self that new-found (and newfangled) love inspires, love for someone he takes to be other than himself in terms of both social position and gender. This falling in love, this discovery of sexual difference, its pleasures and vicissitudes, is precisely what the puritanical Malvolio of the fi rst part of the play was so quick to denounce in others. The precisian condemned love as license, praised the censoring of love as virtue. He prided himself above all for being a devoutly single man who dismissed out of hand the follies and exigencies of the flesh, especially the unabashed carnality personified by Sir Toby Belch. But Sir Toby has cut through this hypocrisy with satirical directness: “Art any more than a steward? Dost thou think because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” (2.3.113–15). It is when Malvolio deciphers in the enigmatic writing of the letter the opportunity to be more than a steward by marrying above his station that he begins to differ from his long cultivated reputation as an enemy to love. Maria’s forged letter makes all the difference. Its recipient becomes the passive, unconscious dupe of a foreign agency, of a writing that directs him to trace unwittingly its every humiliating turn. The consequence is misrecognition: Malvolio thinks all along that his conscious self controls the interpretation of, and active response to, the amatory epistle, blithely ignorant all the while of the crowd of mockers pulling the strings behind him. “Malvolio” the conscious reader, moreover, becomes “M.O.A.I” the lover, the one so anagrammatized that he must pass through the excruciating and protracted effort of deciphering the letter before “recognizing” in himself its designated addressee, its subject matter, and the object of what he takes to be an invitation to romance with his lady Olivia. I emphasize the interplay between being the assignee of a letter of forged signature, the lure of romantic assignation, and the fracturing of Malvolio’s name into its (thence deconstituted) constituent parts in order to trace the agency of the letter in the formation of the subject as a subject of desire—subjective and objective genitive; desiring and desired—the self doubled by relation, however imaginary and unreciprocated, to another.19

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Dallying with Malvolio’s name puts it under pressure of what I will refer to later as the friction which excites a new persona even as it erases an old one. The friction of love-making undercuts Malvolio’s nominal identity and substitutes for it a coded cipher. The willful Malvolio takes these letters to be the secret code or nickname by which his lady Olivia allures him. My playful, if perhaps equally willful—the play’s subtitle is, after all, What You Will—interpretation of the M.O.A.I. anagram depends upon seeing it as the castrated or “cut” version of Malvolio’s proper name—the bawdy innuendo of “her very C’s, her U’s, and her T’s” (2.5.88)—that makes of the recipient a subject of constricture and loss. I suggest among other reconstituted permutations of this cipher/anagram the following possibilities: “I AMO” = “I love”; “I AM O” = “I am Olivia, a woman,” for we know that O is Olivia’s Lucrece, the letter that appears on her signet; “I AM O” = “I am a hanged man, a castrato.” One of Malvolio’s tormentors refers to O as the hangman’s noose (2.5.121), so O = hanged is a possibility that the text itself makes explicit. Since O is a cant term for the vagina, the deformation of Malvolio’s name and his consequent change of clothing may also designate his effeminization. 20 This transformation of Malvolio into something other than a man, into a man in love or a woman, points the way towards the dark androgyny of the tragedies, making Malvolio’s love melancholy a prototype for the more misogynistic and suicidal melancholy of Hamlet. 21 Far from empowering him, being in receipt of the forged letter paradoxically occasions the loss of letters in Malvolio’s own (now disowned) name. The letter’s promise of full satisfaction in love is undercut by the absence of any reciprocal sexual rapport with Olivia; instead, Malvolio is “sick of self-love” (1.5.89). He masquerades for his own benefit, becoming his own object of desire: he “practic[es] behaviour to his own shadow” (2.5.17), fondles his jewel (2.5.60), and kisses his hands affectedly (3.4.32). The only sexual charge that Malvolio gets for his efforts is the auto-frisson induced by his too tightly crossed garter straps: “This does make some obstruction in the blood, this cross-gartering” (3.4.19–20). Is Malvolio’s unwonted smile after he ties off his legs just a grimace resulting from lack of circulation? Is he like Viola caught uneasily in the bind of playing the eunuch?22 The theory that Malvolio is cast in the feminine position gets further support from a brief glance at the source story in Barnabe Riche’s Riche his Farewell to Militarie Profession (1581). In the fifth of Riche’s histories, a husband claims that his shrewish wife, who loves to “crossebite” him with her tongue, has gone mad. The husband pinions the arms of his wife with cords, scratches her arms with brambles until they bleed, then secures her “with a greate chaine about her legge, wherewith he tied her in a darke house that was on his backside.” Malvolio too is imprisoned for being an uncontrollable madman; his legs are constricted by cross gartering much as the shrew’s are by the chains. What Feste does to Malvolio can thus be

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seen as a species of shrew-taming. Shakespeare has displaced the genderchaining in the source story onto a gender-crossing in his play. The misogynistic tradition that holds that a male is effeminized by becoming the lover of a woman is dear to one of the most important pastoral romances of the decade before Twelfth Night. In Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, both male and female transvestism figure prominently. Musidorus says to the transvested Pyrocles, “This effeminate love of a woman doth so womanize a man that, if he yield to it, it will not only make him an Amazon, but a launder, a distaff-spinner, or whatsoever other vile occupation their idle heads can imagine and their weak hands perform” (134). 23 Or make the distaff-spinner a yellow-stockinged and cross-gartered fop, to add to Sidney’s list of effeminizing transformations. The play between subjective and objective genitive (“love of a woman”) epitomizes a standard topos of male misogyny: a man’s manly love of/for a woman transforms him into a woman—Pyrocles metamorphosed into Philoclea—because he is in turn loved of/by a woman. The active man is turned into the passive beloved. This receiving in turn the reverse of what one sends is all the more biting because Pyrocles’ love, like Malvolio’s, is not requited. In his voice as narrator Sidney maintains a distanced yet complicitous bemusement about Pyrocles’ sexual confusion: “I use the she-title to Pyrocles, since so he would have it” (34). The difference between he and she is simply the authorial fiat or indulgence of the letter “s.” Musidorus the love critic says to his friend the lover that passion “utterly subverts the course of nature in making reason give place to sense, and man to woman . . . transform[ing] the very essence of the lover into the thing beloved [i.e., a woman]” (133–34). The critic turns hypocritical, however, when just a few pages later Musidorus himself falls in love with Pamela, causing him like Pyrocles to assume an anagrammatically displaced yet relevant pseudonym and a change of clothing. Unlike Pyrocles’ sumptuary metamorphosis into a woman, Musidorus’ debasement in love is registered in terms of class, for he assumes the weeds of a shepherd. Malvolio’s debasement is a function of his inappropriate attempt to rise beyond his assigned station.

III Malvolio is turned inside out by a love letter, like the wanton chev’ril (proverbially lascivious goat) glove or the reversible genitalia of Hermaphroditus. In the discourse of gynecology from Galen to such Renaissance authorities as Ambroise Paré, an influential model represents male and female genitalia as morphologically equivalent but positionally and therefore hierarchically opposed: the female genitals turned inward are homologous to the male apparatus pushed outward and perfected. For Paré the male is the teleological completion of what in the woman is supposedly missing or atrophied. 24 (Viola, we recall, laments the “little thing” she “lacks” that makes her

38 Crossing Gender in Shakespeare insufficiently manly to take on Sir Andrew Aguecheek in the duel.) Feste’s comment on how a glove can be turned fi rst one way, then reversed, epitomizes sexual instability even as it links it to the slipperiness of the meaning of words. The conduct of the sexual body is a function of the agency of the glove-like word: Viola. So thou may’st say the king lies by a beggar, if a beggar dwell near him; or the church stands by thy tabor, if thy tabor stand by the church. Clown. You have said, sir. To see this age! A sentence is but a chev’ril glove to a good wit—how quickly the wrong side may be turned outward! Viola. Nay, that’s certain: they that dally nicely with words may quickly make them wanton. Clown. I would therefore my sister had had no name, sir. Viola. Why, man? Clown. Why, sir, her name’s a word, and to dally with that word might make my sister wanton. But indeed, words are very rascals, since bonds disgraced them. Viola. Thy reason, man? Clown. Troth, sir, I can yield you none without words, and words are grown so false, I am loath to prove reason with them. (3.1.8–25)

The glove functions as both a material and a manufactured object, on the one hand, and as a signifying metaphor, on the other. As artifact, the glove is both a practical apparatus and a garment of fashion. As metaphor, it carries several different tenors in the quoted passage: sex, fashion, love, wit, language. Viola’s initiating chiasmus of king:beggar :: beggar:king and church:tabor :: tabor:church epitomizes in its syntax the central theme of topsy-turvy social position. The two hands of the glove, right and left, are inverted mirror images of each other. Alternatively, a single glove can be turned inside out to image the reversibility of structural norms and hierarchies. The glove metaphorizes the anatomical reversibility of male and female genitalia and, characterologically, the wantonness of love: to turn the glove is to turn love inside out. Simply rearranging the letters in a proper name reverses its bearer’s sexual orientation from chaste to wanton, or from straight-laced to cross-gartered, to use terms that befit Malvolio. Dallying with a man’s proper name cuts apart its integrity; the proper metamorphoses into its scarcely recognizable, anagrammatic Other. Malvolio fi nds himself in the structural position of the Clown’s sister made wanton; dallied with, the proper name “Malvolio” and the bearer it refers to are made wanton in becoming “M.O.A.I.” Since both men and women are similarly designated by proper but alienable names, their dalliance with each other destines their names to fracture and to recombine illicitly. Or perhaps it is the other way around: rubbing against and thus breaking apart the name causes its bearer to experience a sexual chafi ng as well. Feste, as I see it,

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favors the latter interpretation: because language lies, his sister therefore lies indiscriminately in the sexual sense. Language prescribes action in the flesh, not the other way around. Linguistic chafi ng resists and inverts chastening; friction is inimical to staid Puritan virtue. Stephen Greenblatt illustrates sexual ambiguity in Twelfth Night by adducing the historical case study of Marie le Marcis, a seventeenthcentury French hermaphrodite with a retractable penis, who dressed as a woman. When he fell in love with Jeane le Febvre and declared his intention to marry her, a scandal ensued and the couple was prosecuted for sodomy. Finally Jacques Duval, a doctor learned in hermaphroditism and gynecology, was able to make the penis perform under the friction of his manual examination. The law courts allowed Marie to change his name to Marin, provided that he continued to wear women’s clothing for several more years. Greenblatt uses the image of the reversible glove in Feste’s remarks to illustrate the nominalist position that the difference of a single letter may uniquely determine the disputed sex of the hermaphrodite: The brief, almost schematic enactment of verbal friction leads to a perception of the suppleness of language, particularly its capacity to be inverted, a capacity imaged by the chev’ril glove. It is as if the cause of Marin le Marcis’s sexual arousal and transformation were now attributed to the ease—the simple change of one letter—that turns Marie into Marin: “Her name’s a word, and to dally with that word might make my sister wanton.”(90)

Greenblatt oscillates between arguing that letters nominally prescribe the meaning of the glove (and of the glove’s relationship to the body) and the very different, materialist, conception that the body and its explication in the discourse of gynecology determine what the glove signifies. His is at times a literal/corporal/medical glove, as distinguished from my reading of Feste’s glove as prescriptively (always already) a figure of speech whose tenor is the motley-ness of language, sexuality, and authority. Let me pose my question of critical authority this way: whose glove is it, anyway? The glove may belong, in the realm of medical metaphors, to the gynecologist, but on the stage its representation is on the tongue of the jester, a figure exemplary of the actor, a self-styled “corrupter of words” (3.1.37). Feste and Viola dally with double entendres, a subversive linguistic doubleness that is visually counterpointed in the Clown’s motley and Viola’s cross dressing. Viola is the allegorical personification, and its materially fleshed out instantiation, of the very glove that she and Feste banter back and forth, turn in and out, in dialogue. Over the course of the entire play Viola/Cesario plays out the allegory of (g)love—the inversion or chiasmus that man is woman, woman man—that Feste uses the glove to image in miniature. It’s not for nothing that the play’s chief spokesman for the paronomastic inside-out counsels the wearing of a doublet.

40 Crossing Gender in Shakespeare As the court’s licensed corrupter of words and malcontent anatomizer of the social hierarchies enwebbed in corrupt and mendacious language, motley Feste is a voice of subversion because he calls hierarchy a lie, even as he performs a hierarchy-subverting impersonation of Sir Topas on stage in order to reveal the clergy’s hypocritical colors. (“Well, I’ll put it on, and I will dissemble myself in’t, and I would I were the fi rst that ever dissembled in such a gown” [4.2.4–6].) To recall the wordplay between Feste and Viola: social standing is a lie. The vertical (stand) is the horizontal (lie): kings and beggars both lie flat in death in the churchyard, their difference in rank suspended. It is the Clown who gives the lie to the antithetical terms of hierarchical opposition, and who reveals how close these opposites lie: king v. beggar, curate (church) v. clown (tabor), steward v. count, man v. woman, outside v. inside of glove, chaste v. wanton love. The instability of the opposition between chaste and wanton—key to this dialogue of the chev’ril glove, and to the play at large—is thematized by the verb lie in the sense of fornicate: chastity lies and is turned inside out by wantonness (cf. sonnet 138). The honest steward, it seems, who claims a monopoly on virtue, is rendered wanton by the lying epistle that dallies with his name, the chev’ril glove that displaces not only his proper name but also his sense of social propriety: he wants to lie with his lady, the steward lying by the countess. 25 Opposites are not so far apart, as Feste observes when he philosophizes that virtue is but patched with vice, vice with virtue (1.5.44–47). Like Malvolio’s cross garters, Feste’s motley, crisscrossed parti-colors testify to the Clown’s punning conflation of high and low, dominant and subversive. Malvolio and Feste are unwitting allies in insanity, in playacting, in jesting, but Feste wears not motley in his brain, unlike Malvolio. If Feste is conscious of the subversive politics of impersonation when a mere clown dresses the curate’s part—reversed glove as image of upturned social hierarchy (the church stands by the tabor)—Malvolio is clueless as to how the steward is to play the count. And if the Clown manipulates subversive role playing for laughs, Malvolio is the unconscious butt of jokes intended to scourge the social climber back to his proper place. Because his awkward cantankerousness has upset the spirit of carnival, Malvolio must become a ritual object of abuse, the scapegoat through which society purges itself of its most antisocial tendencies by heaping them upon the exile. Far from defending Paré’s and Duval’s hierarchy of the putatively superior male over female, Feste is the heresiarch who uses the glove image to subvert hierarchal authority, especially any medical essentialism that seeks to ground its truth in the body. The boy actor may indeed be the anatomical truth that underlies the representation of women on the English stage, but dramatic representation per se, as opposed to its fleshly agents, is too fluid to be reducible to any one medical-scientific discourse. Perhaps I am more inclined to defer to the text than to the discursive praxes of anatomy, and to figures of clothing instead of the body beneath,

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for the simple reason that the body as such is unrepresentable, at least on stage if not in illustrations of the medical literature. The examination that Jacques Duval performed upon Marie le Marcis had to take place behind a curtain, backstage, not in the light of a public gaze. If Duval is a symbol of authority in the clinic and the courtroom, the representative authority on (and of) the stage in Twelfth Night is Feste, the irreverent corrupter of all authorities, who thumbs his nose at the self-proclaimed virtuous. He turns the authority of the medico-juridical glove on its head by using it as a metaphor for the wantonness of authority. The arbiters who speak for an authority whose name cannot be dallied with or fractured—doctors, curates, professed critics—can be no less arbitrary than the language that they wield as their medium. Malvolio learns this lesson to his humiliation, for the writing, hence the authority, of Maria is scarcely distinguishable from that of her lady Olivia. Maria and Feste are allied subverters of authority because they know that language lies and that even “official” writing may be forged, and play-writing must be.

IV Twelfth Night is preoccupied not with a sister’s wantonness, whether Sebastian’s or Feste’s, but with Malvolio’s; and not with a person’s wantonness, but a fictional character’s (indeed, a letter’s). In any event, it is linguistic play that is the agent of sexual wantonness; because words won’t stay still, neither will bodies. Malvolio and Viola both fall under the glove’s sign, but in inverted ways, as I have argued: Malvolio manifests wantonness when he exchanges his familiar black clothing for the extroverted cross gartering and extravagant yellow; Viola, anything but wanton, turns the glove inside out when she takes male for female clothes. In Twelfth Night the representation of gender is displaced in several directions: pushed outward onto a textile surface, internalized psychologically as self-doubt whether one will ever extricate herself from a gendered double bind, and inscribed in textual letters that purport to designate one’s sexual identity. To reduce this to the symbolic terms which the play itself advances, the love-glove is both a figure of clothing (image-text) and a figure of speech (word-text). It symbolizes the vexation that Malvolio wears crossed on his legs and the vestiary straitjacketing and sexual in-betweenness of Viola. The former ostentatiously reveals the wearer’s unwitting embarrassment, what the latter seeks cannily, though not altogether successfully, to veil. 26 Feste’s glove is a suggestive nodal point for key visual and verbal representations of sexual reversibility: the prophylactic cross dressing of Viola that allows her to be both man and maid; the fetishistic garments that Malvolio slips into, whose cover licenses his sexually charged egomania; the reversible and conflated genitalia of the Hermaphrodite—as literary metaphor, not as biological freak; the letters that by displacing other letters

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turn names (and sexual identities) inside out. Words are slippery things, wantonly reversing their course at the slightest punning pressure. As Feste would say, words “lie” by one another: words with bivalent sexual referents like “pipe,” “organ,” and “part,” and, of course, the “chev’ril glove,” belie any attempt to hierarchize gender or to designate it unambiguously. If Feste is right, the way that the meanings of words oscillate cannot be keyed to the anatomical differences between men and women, but simply to the way that words differ from themselves.

2

The Sound of “Un” in Richard II

Players unman, unchristian, uncreate themselves. —William Prynne, Histriomastix

The prefi x “un” is the token of repression. —Freud, “The Uncanny”

When Queen Elizabeth made her famous remark, “I am Richard II, know ye not that?” she was referring not only to the parallel between Richard as a usurped monarch and the abortive attempt of Essex to unseat her in 1601, but also perhaps to the shared precariousness of the sexual identity of both monarchs: as Elizabeth crossed beyond feminine stereotypes to assume masculine forms of speech, dress, and power, so too her distant predecessor undermined the norms of masculine rule by allowing the feminine within himself to surface. Both monarchs were, in short, androgynous.1 Many critics who have written about Richard II are struck by what they see as the femininity of the royal hero, the presence of a subversive and fatal Other that divides (or doubles) the patriarchal monarch from within. Femininity is Richard’s tragic flaw, critics argue, however diversely (and with varying degrees of sexist stereotyping) they define the manifestation of the feminine in Richard: his passivity, hysteria, loquacity, and poetizing, his overexcited attachment to the body, his weakness and proclivity for tears, his tendency towards theatrical masquerade, and his “lyric narcissism.”2 Coleridge was the first commentator to analyze Richard’s notorious weakness according to a stereotypical notion of femininity. “He is weak, variable, and womanish, and possesses feelings, which, amiable in a female, are misplaced in a man, and altogether unfit for a king.”3 In another essay, Coleridge calls Richard “a man with a wantonness in feminine shew, feminine friendism, intensely woman-like love of those immediately about him.”4 The Arden editor, Peter Ure, writes that the “weaknesses of his feminine sensibility” moves us to pity Richard.5 Harry Berger, Jr., remarks upon “the feminine nuances of his self-representation.” From a rhetorical point of view, “both the tonal and the figural emphasis is on feminine vulnerability, softness, and weakness.”6 Harold Bloom points to an androgynous crossing of the sexes. “A Freudian reading would find Richard an instance of ‘moral masochism,’ the collapse

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of the ego before the superego, sometimes related to strongly manifested bisexuality.”7 My specific point of entrée into this critical debate explores how Richard’s plight is represented in terms of what the male imagination typecasts as two marks of the “feminine,” subversive of masculine unity and self-identity: first, the double, and second, the repeated references to the negating words “none” and “nothing” and to the prefix “un.”8 In what follows I will elaborate on the way that the prefi x “un” defi nes man antithetically in terms of being not man: Richard is un-done, unmanned, un-kinged.9 In this play “un” marks the uncanny sound of negation (of the masculine) and castration, the opening up of the putatively self-identical into an efflorescence of difference. I argue that according to the typology operative in this play and to what counts as feminine for the male critics cited previously, the male is defined as the principle of self-identity, whereas difference (“un”) is gendered female. But Hélène Cixous puts a counterspin on the way that woman dissolves the masculinist assumptions of univocal rationality. In “The Laugh of the Medusa,” she writes, “Woman un-thinks [de-pense] the unifying, regulating history that homogenizes and channels forces, herding contradictions into a single battlefield.”10 Richard unwillingly but gradually becomes such an un-thinker, open to the divisively unmanning contradictions that heterogenize him. Although it may be true that Richard possesses some of the “feminine” qualities with which critics label him, it is also the case that these qualities are indistinguishable from his character as a man, and that they open within him a lyrical range of feeling unknown to more “manly” kings.

I—THE WORD AGAINST THE WORD The self-differentiating quality that I argue “un” signifies in Richard II is characteristic as well of numerous other linguistic forms in the play. If “the king is not himself” (2.1.241), as Northumberland announces when Richard disinherits Bolingbroke, it is because words, “the breath of kings” (1.3.215), are not themselves either.11 Words like “tongue,” “mouth,” “speech,” “name,” and “word” interlace the play with their multiple and contradictory meanings.12 Speech founds royal power even as it serves as the agent of its dissolution. The frequency in Richard II of words that denote words reveals “the propensity for verbalizing . . . which is Richard’s fatal weakness” and, more radically, “the unsubstantiality of human language.”13 I propose to examine how Richard’s equivocal language divides him against kingdom and self. If men defi ne the feminine as the principle of (linguistic) difference from masculine self-identity, as I have suggested, following Cixous and Luce Irigaray, Richard becomes crossed androgynously by feminine difference and contradiction. The play opens with a shouting match, a barely sublimated violence in which each contestant vows to shove his opponent’s lying words down his

The Sound of “Un” in Richard II

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throat. In response to Bolingbroke’s threat, “With a foul traitor’s name stuff I thy throat” (1.1.44), Mowbray avers that if not for the restraining influence of regal arbitration, his speech would post until it had return’d These terms of treason doubled down his throat. (1.1.56–57) Through the false passage of thy throat thou liest. . . . Now swallow down that lie. (1.1.125, 132)

Double edged, the word is both the instrument of violence used to gag others and the tongue that suffers violence. One tongue speaks against another in a verbal combat that tends towards violent resolution in the lists until Richard’s judgment arbitrates. But in banishing others to silence, Richard anticipates his own silencing when the exiled return. His words will double back to mete upon himself the injustices he has spoken against others. Richard sets a precedent for rebellion against the one in whose very name precedent is founded and kept. Language, like gender, is two sided; it lacks univocal direction; it is both the agent of aggression and the passive recipient of suffering. The word is set against itself and against anyone, even the king, who claims by precedence of position to limit its meaning. Richard is irked by Gaunt’s tongue and threatens that this “tongue that runs so roundly in thy head / Should run thy head from thy unreverent shoulders” (2.1.122–23). The tongue whose wordplay offends may also be the instrument that will suffer punishment for its treasonous remarks, as Northumberland announces: “His tongue is now a stringless instrument; / Words, life, and all, old Lancaster hath spent” (2.1.149–50). In his fi nal scene Gaunt instances the punning doubleness of language by using his name, the birthright by which he stands, to pronounce sentence of death upon himself and to curse Richard with the same: “Gaunt am I for the grave, gaunt as a grave / Whose hollow womb inherits nought but bones” (2.1.82–83). Death is the feminine womb that originates and destines (the proverbial womb/tomb rhyme that plays on the way oppositional doubles collapse into a common fold) both Gaunt and Richard. Gaunt blames Richard for his demise, hastened by Richard’s ruin of his son: “Since thou dost seek to kill my name in me, / I mock my name, great king, to flatter thee” (2.1.86–87). The dying man prophesies that Richard will fall by the same principle that motivates the pun that fatally shadows Gaunt’s name: one of the great names of the realm, but also the name of a cadaverous old man.14 As Gaunt’s very name is self-denying, so Richard’s exercise of power in the name of king is self-contradictory: his word effects banishment of Gaunt’s son and Mowbray for deeds committed under the aegis of the king’s own word. Gaunt employs the rhetoric of chiasmus to indicate how Richard has inverted the will of his grandfather, who, had he foreseen Richard’s eventual destruction of his heritage,

46

Crossing Gender in Shakespeare From forth thy reach he would have laid thy shame, Deposing thee before thou wert possess’d, Which art possess’d now to depose thyself. (2.1.106–8)

Richard is possessed of the crown yet also possessed by an evil spirit hostile to that crown. Because the king works against himself and the heritage which he is mandated to serve, serving in effect to dispossess his forebears, his “possession” is anything but stable or fi xed in its meaning. “These words hereafter thy tormenters be” (2.1.136). Richard’s name of king will prove to be no more univocal (self-identical) than the word “Gaunt.” As his name banishes the dying man’s son, so too is it reciprocally subject to banishment and death. Richard collapses into the very fate from which he seeks to differentiate himself. This will prove to be the only reciprocation that Richard knows, since in matters of the heart his love is not returned. In deciding to seize for himself Bolingbroke’s due inheritance from the deceased Gaunt, Richard violates the law of patriarchal succession which as king he personifies and which it is his responsibility to enforce. He sets the dangerously self-subverting precedent of breaking the very law by which he stands. This is a gesture towards self-imposed exile (answering the sentence of exile against Bolingbroke), even a suicidal renunciation of the selfidentity that defi nes the king’s integrity. York warns the king against the self-defeating consequences of violating Bolingbroke’s right of inheritance: “Let not to-morrow then ensue to-day: / Be not thyself” (2.1.197–98). By doing violence to the law which guarantees the masculine closure of selfidentity, Richard will open himself to the wounds from which his life will flow at Pomfret, the type of feminizing wounds that ally Richard, by his own reckoning, to the crucified Christ.15

II—THE UNDOING OF THE SUN King Richard metaphorizes the name of king under the symbolic rubric of the sun, the masculine image of absolute rule and self-contained, inexorable destiny. The heaven’s eye is the king’s eye and I, whose fiat affi rms (“ay”) what is and banishes the challenger of the king’s claim to absolute being, his oppositional “antipodes.”16 The king and his antithetical opposite are ultimately not so far apart; indeed, the two poles—sun and darkness (unsun)—prove mutually constitutive: Discomfortable cousin! know’st thou not That when the searching eye of heaven is hid Behind the globe that lights the lower world, Then thieves and robbers range abroad unseen In murthers and in outrage boldly here; But when from under this terrestrial ball

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He fires the proud tops of the eastern pines, And darts his light through every guilty hole, Then murthers, treasons, and detested sins, The cloak of night being pluck’d from off their backs, Stand bare and naked, trembling at themselves? So when this thief, this traitor, Bolingbroke, Who all this while hath revell’d in the night, Whilst we were wand’ring with the Antipodes, Shall see us rising in our throne the east, His treasons will sit blushing in his face, Not able to endure the sight of day, But self-affrighted tremble at his sin. (3.2.36–53)

The male sun penetrates and illuminates the “guilty hole” (locus of the shame-marked “treasons . . . blushing”) that threatens to drain it of its power—the “unseen” darkness becomes illuminated or sun seen. But in this passage the sun king fails to note that the sun also comprises an element of uncontrol, figured as golden-locked Phaeton, the sun god’s disobedient and threatening son. The sun whose rise unsettles rebellion eclipses itself in its setting; its self-identity—eye, ay, I—is negated and extinguished. Richard enunciates this self-negation in terms of “Ay, no; no, ay” (4.1.201). The sun contains within itself the sound of “un” (and note the “unruly” uncontrol in the following lines), the double that undoes unified male identity: Down, down I come, like glist’ring Phaeton, Wanting the manage of unruly jades. In the base court? Base court, where kings grow base, To come at traitors’ calls and do them grace! In the base court? Come down? Down, court! down, king! For night-owls shriek where mounting larks should sing. (3.3.178–83)

Each term of this antithetical doubling—up/down, superior/base, king/traitor, shriek/sing, night/day—threatens to collapse into its opposite. The sun risks being dissolved and decentered in negating darkness, represented here, I argue, by the sound of “un.”17 So too the founding opposition between the sun, on the one hand, and dissolution, dark matter, and negation, on the other, threatens to unravel for Richard as he falls into subjection and towards death, the Phaeton position, as he is dragged helplessly downward and symbolically feminized by the unruly female jades.18 The power of the sun claimed by Richard is countered by Bolingbroke’s tactical deployment of camouflage cloud and extinguishing rain: Be he the fire, I’ll be the water; The rage be his, whilst on the earth I rain My waters—on the earth, and not on him.

48 Crossing Gender in Shakespeare March on, and mark King Richard how he looks. See, see, King Richard doth himself appear, As doth the blushing discontented sun From out the fiery portal of the East, When he perceives the envious clouds are bent To dim his glory and to stain the track Of his bright passage to the occident. (3.3.58–67)

Bolingbroke’s charge that Richard’s face is illuminated with the blush of discontent answers Richard’s accusation that treasons blush in Bolingbroke’s face. Water, symbolic of Bolingbroke’s potential for undoing, threatens to dissolve the contained unity of the sun. Bolingbroke claims to nurture the kingdom with his waters, late relief for a land parched by the raging fi res of tyranny. After so much fire, the usurper promises a welcome quenching and dissolution. Richard attempts to co-opt clouds as well as sun by asserting that “my master, God omnipotent, / Is mustering in his clouds, on our behalf / Armies of pestilence” (3.3.85–87). But Bolingbroke, “like an unseasonable stormy day” (3.2.106), “hath clouded all thy happy days on earth” (3.2.68). God’s name, insofar as it is carried by his royal vicar on earth, is eclipsed, despite Richard’s repeated invocations of his unitary, privileged relationship to the deity: “Thy sun sets weeping in the lowly west, / Witnessing storms to come, woe, and unrest” (2.4. .21–22). Like the other “un” words in the play, “unrest” betokens the collapse of the sun king’s vaunted power to subordinate and to contain difference and the violence that upsets hierarchy. Rule gives way to unrest. The heavens, and the imagery of the play, turn full circle “from Richard’s night, to Bolingbroke’s fair day” (3.2.218). Richard himself pronounces the inefficacy of the divine name of king, and implicitly he glances at the divine name itself which secures kingship: O that I were as great As is my grief, or lesser than my name! Or that I could forget what I have been! Or not remember what I must be now! (3.3.136–39)

Richard is but a mortal body reduced to private feeling, and cursed with the immortal but wholly ineffectual name of king as well. The God who, masked in clouds, guarantees the name of the sun king, is the very name by which Richard performs his own deposition or setting, his unnaming (his unmanning): What must the king do now? Must he submit? The king shall do it. Must he be depos’d? The king shall be contented. Must he lose The name of king? a’ God’s name, let it go. (3.3.143–46, my emphasis)

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In God’s and the king’s name the king is deposed of his name of king, suggesting that even the absolute self-identity of God is subject to antinomian undoing. The system whose legitimacy presupposes sacred sanction is predicated on the contingency of God’s blessing, his capacity to contradict and to retract his word, to unking his one-time favorite. The hierarchy that is supposed to secure the chain of being from God on down is subject to slippage and inversion—even evacuation, deposition, death.

III—UNNAMING (SUBJECTING) THE KING The loss of name is an obsessive theme for the king. When he attempts to effect a show of strength by prefi xing the royal title to his commands on the battlefield, his words ring hollow: I had forgot myself, am I not king? Awake, thou coward majesty! thou sleepest. Is not the king’s name twenty thousand names? Arm, arm, my name! (3.2.83–86)

The manpower with which Richard claims the name of king is invested is stripped as one ally after another subscribes himself to the rival faction. Richard forgoes the title of king only to fi nd that his woes cannot be resigned, for they inflect his physical body, petty and personal yet nonetheless inalienable, in a way that words and titles are not. In uncrowning himself, Richard betrays himself as king, only to come closer to the griefs that rename the former head of state as an embodied subject, subjected to feeling: Bol. I thought you had been willing to resign. Rich. My crown I am, but still my griefs are mine. You may my glories and my state depose, But not my griefs; still am I king of those. (4.1.190–92)

Can Richard’s resignation to the lachrymose body as locus of feeling signify the surfacing of the feminine within him, and is there any genetic connection between the feminine and Richard’s unwonted and paradoxical assumption of the status of a subject, as opposed to his earlier service as the mainstay of patriarchy? Perhaps it is here, if anywhere, that we may hope to locate the “feminine” character with which so many critics have tagged Richard. In Richard’s psyche the battle is played out internally between the chiastic crossing of patriarch and subject, impassive dominion and openly wounded feeling. A once masculine patriarch, now subjugated, becomes the lyrical subject, whose feelings of suffering stem from being persecuted and oppressed by those less passive than himself.

50 Crossing Gender in Shakespeare Carlisle speaks for the conventions of monarchism in sharply distinguishing between king and subject: “What subject can give sentence on his king? / And who sits here that is not Richard’s subject?” (4.1.121–22). In an article on subjectivity and subjectification in the play, David Scott Kastan adduces a joke from Freud’s Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious about Louis XV and one of his courtiers renowned for his wit. The king commanded “the cavalier to concoct a joke at his [the king’s] expense. He wanted to be the ‘subject’ of the witticism. The courtier answered him with the clever bon mot, ‘le roi n’est pas sujet.’”19 Kastan goes on to define the transition from king to subject in terms of the way that theatrical staging evacuates the mysteries of royalty by making them public, open to the deflating inspection of the commons: History plays inevitably, if unconsciously, weakened the structure of authority; on stage the king became a subject. . . . Representation thus undermines rather than confi rms authority, denying it its presumptive dignity by subjecting it to common view . . . derogating majesty by subjecting it to the impudent gaze of its subjects.20

As the passive object of a gaze that subordinates and subjects him, Richard is at the opposite pole from masculine self-control. The persecutors who surround him subject him to a Christ-like humiliation, a comparison he is not loath to make himself: Though some of you, with Pilate, wash your hands, Showing an outward pity—yet you Pilates Have here deliver’d me to my sour cross, And water cannot wash away your sin. (4.1.239–42)

In unkinging himself the tearful Richard makes “glory base, and sovereignty a slave; / Proud majesty a subject, state a peasant” (4.1.247–52). One of the more revealing instances of Richard’s newly plumbed subjectivity casts the verb “subject” in the passive voice, which various critics associate with the feminine.21 “I live with bread like you, feel want, / Taste grief, need friends—subjected thus, / How can you say to me, I am a king?” (3.2.175–77). In resigning himself to Bolingbroke’s rule, Richard utters a torrent of antithetical words prefi xed with “un,” the sound of impotence, negation, and death, and the sound of the dark and “guilty hole” (3.2.43) within his guiding astrological sign, the sun. The “un” marks the cleavage, the doubleness that shadows Richard’s interior monologues and self-imaginings: the un-conscious. Luce Irigaray has argued that this doubleness is typically associated in Western philosophy with the feminine, since man arrogates to himself the status of the one, while he relegates woman to the positions of either double or none. (Sonnet 136 epitomizes the one/none paradox:

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“Among a number one is reckon’d none.”) Note the four “un” words in the following passage, in which Richard remarks the dissolution of his male identity into “nothing”: Ay, no, no, ay; for I must nothing be. Therefore no “no,” for I resign to thee. Now, mark me how I will undo myself. I give this heavy weight from off my head, And this unwieldy sceptre from my hand. . . . God pardon all oaths that are broke to me, God keep all vows unbroke are made to thee! Make me, that nothing have, with nothing griev’d, And thou with all pleas’d, that hast all achiev’d. Long may’st thou live in Richard’s seat to sit, And soon lie Richard in an earthy pit. God save King Henry, unking’d Richard says, And send him many years of sunshine days! (4.1.201–21)

“I know no I”22 is one possible transcription of the homophony in the fi rst line of this passage, which can also be interpreted as the renunciation of the eye (I) as sign of the royal sun. Richard is the renunciate ego, the no-I, who forgoes any further sunshine days and makes do with possessing nothing. The paradox of resignation is that Richard can say neither “ay” nor “nay” since he is no longer a self-sustaining I capable of predication. Yet he continues to speak, if only as a means to stave off death, albeit the words he speaks are a performative representation of his fall into mortality: Sometimes am I king, Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar, And so I am. Then crushing penury Persuades me I was better when a king; Then am I king’d again, and by and by Think that I am unking’d by Bolingbroke, And straight am nothing. But whate’er I be, Nor I, nor any man that but man is, With nothing shall be pleas’d, till he be eas’d With being nothing. (5.5.32–41)

The reflective, lyrical side of Richard—his status as a psychological subject—derives from his reflexive view of himself as both king and subject, ruler and ruled. The vacillation between king and unking parallels the oscillation between something and nothing, identity and dissolution. “Nothing” in this and the preceding passage represents the dissolution of male identity, death 23 as the figure of nothing (perhaps a vaginal nothing), 24 a principle of difference that negates the living and undoes what is the same

52 Crossing Gender in Shakespeare as itself (“any man that but man is”). If the king may not be king, then man is not man any longer. The prevalence of “no” and “nothing” in this play signifies the king’s dissolution, and this logic of negation, specifically the “un” sound, also motivates the antithesis between the words “one” and “none.” “Un” sounds the “none”’s constitutive yet destructive founding of the “one,” since in any pairing of opposites each pole is dependent upon the contrary whose oppositional force constitutes its half-life. “None” and “un” are rhyming synonyms of negation. The one defi nes itself as the negation of the none, the potentiation of a difference that posits something out of nothing. The yin-yang of the one/none dichotomy represents a type of antithetical interdependency analogous to the male/female pairing. The feminine is represented in male discourse as the not one, whether that negation takes the form of doubling or reducing to none. Irigaray: “And her sexual organ, which is not one organ, is counted as none” (26). That power I have, discharge, and let them go To ear the land that hath some hope to grow, For I have none. (3.2.211–13) So Judas did to Christ. But he, in twelve, Found truth in all but one; I, in twelve thousand, none. (4.1.170–71) Thus play I in one person many people, And none contented. (5.5.31–32)

The second in this series of “none” quotations suggests that Richard’s death is parallel to the betrayal and crucifi xion of Christ. The several references to Richard as Christ recall the feminine typing of Christ’s wounds on the cross—an appeal to fantasies of male menstruation?—as Jacques Derrida hints in his analysis of the question of woman in Nietzsche. “And then Nietzsche, as if in apposition or as if to explain or analyze the ‘it becomes female,’ adds there ‘sie wird christlich . . . ’ and closes the parenthesis.”25 The wounding of Christ on the cross—making the One none—provides a model for the invagination Richard suffers when he is penetrated by the knife in prison.

IV—IMPOTENCE AND FANTASIES OF PARTHENOGENESIS Richard becomes more impotent and isolated as the play progresses, eventually dissolving into the dead end of a branchless family tree, unrelated by blood or by marriage to anyone except his rivals—anti-selves, unselves— personified externally in the usurping cousin Bolingbroke, who by doubling the king (the one) renders him redundant, unnecessary, and in the exiled

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queen, who represents the threat of the nothing in addition to the double. Isabel laments that Richard’s abrupt departure for the Irish wars, without romantic leave-taking, has left his family unprovided for (heirless as well). She foresees in her empty womb that the future will bring only nothing: Yet again methinks Some unborn sorrow, ripe in Fortune’s womb Is coming towards me, and my inward soul With nothing trembles. (2.2.9–12)

This passage suggests that Isabel fears both the something (as yet “unborn”) that Fortune’s womb brings her and the “nothing” that represents the misfortune of childlessness. Whatever the event, it will prove ominous to the bearer: For nothing hath begot my something grief, Or something hath the nothing that I grieve— ’Tis in reversion that I do possess— But what it is that is not yet known what, I cannot name: ’tis nameless woe, I wot. (2.2.36–40) So, Greene, thou art the midwife to my woe, And Bolingbroke my sorrow’s dismal heir; Now hath my soul brought forth her prodigy, And I, a gasping new-deliver’d mother, Have woe to woe, sorrow to sorrow join’d. (2.2.62–66)

Something (“prodigy”) or nothing—either way Isabel is fated. Her naming of nothing and namelessness—her lament for barrenness—parallels her husband’s confrontation with the unnamable in the latter part of the drama. Curiously, the childless Queen Isabel describes her husband’s rival as her child, thereby wishfully reducing him to a subordinate position of infantile dependency. 26 Ironically, it is Bolingbroke’s status (anything but infantile) as rival that interrupts the union of Isabel and Richard and guarantees its fruitlessness. Bushy and Green rival Queen Isabel for the king’s affection. These sycophants interpose between the king and his sole means to perpetuate the monarchy by reproducing his kind. Bolingbroke unfolds the causes for executing the king’s intimate servants: they may have compromised the king’s masculinity by engaging him in a homosexual liaison. 27 You have misled a prince, a royal king, A happy gentleman in blood and lineaments, By you unhappied and disfigured clean. You have in manner, with your sinful hours

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Crossing Gender in Shakespeare Made a divorce betwixt his queen and him, Broke the possession of a royal bed, And stain’d the beauty of a fair queen’s cheeks With tears, drawn from her eyes by your foul wrongs. (3.1.8–15)

Estranged from his wife by subjects who subject and “disfigure” him, “unhappied” Richard is put in the position of having to renounce assistance from all quarters. Betrayed within and without, the king whose name guarantees the fealty of subordinates must speak performatively the undoing of this same fealty: Doubly divorc’d! Bad men, you violate A two-fold marriage—’twixt my crown and me, And then betwixt me and my married wife. Let me unkiss the oath ’twixt thee and me; And yet not so, for with a kiss ’twas made. (5.1.71–75)

The original kiss of fealty and the subsequent unkiss of renunciation are identical as signifiers—a kiss is a kiss—yet differ in significance: a kiss is not a kiss, is rather an unkiss of betrayal which marks the king’s ultimate isolation from communal relationship. Like the numerous genuflections in the play, kisses may signify sincere loyalty or its feigned similitude, surety for relationship or mark of betrayed coupling. 28 In its simultaneous positing of opposites, the kiss reminds one of Freud’s primal words, whose antithetical senses are mutually constitutive. 29 The kiss as unkiss recalls such antithetical pairs as one/none, something/nothing, masculine/feminine. A feminine agency is the none that wrenches apart the sun king’s univocal identity. Richard’s self-identity is divided by a shadowy other within himself; he falls prey to instances of femininity that seem to threaten him from without, but may as well reflect the king’s own weaknesses within. Scroope renders the portrait of a king who cannot muster what the play typecasts misogynistically as even a woman’s strength: Boys, with women’s voices, Strive to speak big, and clap their female joints In stiff unwieldy arms against thy crown; Thy very beadsmen learn to bend their bows Of double-fatal yew against thy state; Yea, distaff-women manage rusty bills Against thy seat. (3.2.113–19)

Like these effeminate boys with unwieldy arms, Richard is said to bear an “unwieldy sceptre” (4.1.205) because it turns subversively against the one who wields it, calling into question the masculine potency of its bearer. The king’s masculinity is a match not even for boys, beadsmen, and

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distaff-women. As his masculine strength is sapped, his least promising subjects fill the vacuum. Richard is a king in name only because he is unable to perpetuate himself; he is impotent, childless except in his imagination. Since there is no son, no paragon of masculine succession, to defend the sun king against its shadow son, the patricidal cousin Bolingbroke, Richard fantasizes for himself a defensive parenthood as motherhood. He defends vainly against fate, the threat of an external reality principle, by imagining himself as a self-contained and self-reproducing androgyne. At the last, mere thoughts of reproducing himself parthenogenically are his only company, much as the barren queen was haunted by the vision of her soul bearing a prodigy: My brain I’ll prove the female to my soul, My soul the father, and these two beget A generation of still-breeding thoughts, And these same thoughts people this little world, In humours like the people of this world. (5.5.6–10)

This is a description of busied neurosis and sleepless nights. Thoughts are stillborn and always (“still”) begetting their contraries, “for no thought is contented” (5.5.11). The pun on “still” indicates Richard’s doom to perpetual frustration in seeking an heir without the converse of his wife. Unable at either extreme to remain self-contented or to reproduce himself, Richard dissolves into lamentation. Landing from his fl ight by sea to Wales, he apostrophizes the “dear earth,” which he caresses As a long-parted mother with her child Plays fondly with her tears and smiles in meeting, So weeping, smiling, greet I thee, my earth, And do thee favours with my royal hands. (3.2.8–11)

Richard’s realm is his child, and he is its nurturing mother. The king sees himself as a mythic woman warrior who by sowing the earth with the seeds (stones) of his name will bring forth teeming legions: “This earth shall have a feeling, and these stones / Prove armed soldiers” (3.2.24–25).30 Richard imagines that the seed in God’s clouds, like the king’s tears, will bring forth loyal legions from the earth: And though you think that all, as you have done, Have torn their souls by turning them from us, And we are barren and bereft of friends, Yet know, my master, God omnipotent, Is mustering in his clouds, on our behalf, Armies of pestilence, and they shall strike Your children yet unborn, and unbegot,

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Richard and God are linked via their fecundating tears and parthenogenic progeny that will overbear all enemies. But Richard’s impotence is contrapuntally marked when his royal name, vaunted to be worth twenty thousand soldiers, can draw but few loyal followers. He is far from being God’s anointed seed, nor will he bear a divinely sanctioned successor. The earth that Richard mixes with serves as a substitute for his absent queen and unborn children, as well as figuring the king’s mortal and impotent body. Richard’s most famous speech secures the relationship between the earth and the female grave: Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs, Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth. Let’s choose executors and talk of wills. And yet not so—for what can we bequeath Save our deposed bodies to the ground? Our lands, our lives, and all, are Bolingbroke’s, And nothing can we call our own but death; And that small model of the barren earth Which serves as paste and cover to our bones. For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground And tell sad stories of the death of kings. (3.2.145–56)

Here again Richard meditates on the king’s two bodies. In his capacity as a mortal body not buoyed by title or right, the king is but earth—earth as a mortal mother that supersedes whatever relationship Richard has to his queen-wife-mother.31 Lines 153–54 fi x the connection between the childless earthly body and the barren earth which serves as its prototype and its destined end. The physical body is only barren earth, destined to be covered soon with barren earth in symbolic kind. This material body has traditionally been figured as feminine (“bosom of the earth”). It is this body that Richard waters lovingly yet non-productively with his tears. 32 The king’s relationship to his earthly body becomes increasingly erotic and lyrical the further he is distanced from an institutional identity. He lapses into a loquacious passivity, whose uncontrolled erotic gestures spell the undermining of his institutional authority.33 The very symbol of that authority, the crown, becomes instead the court of Death, and Death’s penetration of the passive, subject king strikes Richard as welcome relief from travail: —for within the hollow crown That rounds the mortal temples of a king Keeps Death his court, and there the antic sits,

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Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp, Allowing him a breath, a little scene, To monarchize, be fear’d, and kill with looks; Infusing him with self and vain conceit, As if this flesh which walls about our life Were brass impregnable; and, humour’d thus, Comes at the last, and with a little pin Bores thorough his castle wall, and farewell king! (3.2.160–70)

Death, the ultimate lover, not only embraces its willing consort, but penetrates his not “impregnable” feminized body, opening him to the kind of lyrical feeling which his monarchizing never allowed him to express before. The circuit of the crown is broken—bored through from within, it seems; insensate brass is rendered mortal flesh.

V—THE UNCANNY Richard’s unitary name of king is divided by the haunting doppelgänger (the shadowy double) that Richard saw in the mirror that he commanded to be set before him in act four, scene one. This is his last performative command, his final success, though a self-remarking as a failed king. The king’s words in this mirror scene reflect a glimmer of self-knowledge as he pronounces against himself the nay-sentences of self-ignorance and self-betrayal: Rich. Nay, if I turn mine eyes upon myself, I fi nd myself a traitor with the rest. For I have given here my soul’s consent T’undeck the pompous body of a king; Made glory base, and sovereignty a slave; Proud majesty a subject, state a peasant. North. My lord— Rich. No lord of thine, thou haught insulting man; Nor no man’s lord. I have no name, no title; No, not that name was given me at the font, But ’tis usurp’d. (4.1.247–57)

Richard is at odds with himself; he is his own avenging nemesis. His soul “undecks” his body and makes of the sovereign a subject and a slave, unnamed and untitled, even his baptism superseded.34 Richard is but a byword for usurpation, for the unnaming and unmanning of king. He decries that he “know[s] not what name to call myself!” (4.1.259) and wishes that he were “a mockery king of snow, / Standing before the sun of Bolingbroke, / To melt myself away in water-drops!” (4.1.260–62). This reversal of the earlier valences whereby Richard was

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the sun and Bolingbroke the clouds indicates the long gap through which Richard has fallen. Now he is the deliquescent one (snow), Bolingbroke the aggressive penetrator (sun), enforcer of norms, and captor of traitors. Coppélia Kahn argues that the sun and the mockery king of snow are antithetical doubles, whose confl ict unfolds according to a gendered hierarchy. “Richard II can be seen as an agon between maternal and paternal images of kingship, Richard identifying himself with England as an all-providing mother, Henry [Bolingbroke] with the patriarchal principle of succession.”35 Borrowing from René Girard’s analysis of carnival and scapegoat rituals, Naomi Liebler comments incisively on the reversal implicit in the doubled reflection of the sun king as the mockery king of snow: The carnivalization of Richard . . . prepares him, as Girard notes, for the role of pharmakos, for it is only as his own double, not as his kingly self, that he can take on the sacrificial function of the scapegoat. Scapegoat rituals are often fertility rituals, and these, in turn, are often sun rituals. . . . Richard wants to see Bolingbroke, not himself, as the roi soleil. But Bolingbroke has already identified himself inversely with rain, not sun [3.3]. It is Richard who is linked with the defeated sun (2.4.21). . . . The mockery king of snow is, in Girard’s terms, the inverse of the sun-king; in those terms, as sun turns to snow, Richard undoes himself. (236) 36

Undoing oneself fi nds expression in renouncing one’s royal and masculine estate as the sun in order to permit assault by a rival sun which dissolves one’s identity. Instead of being the sun, Richard’s solidity suffers a meltdown into watery and passive diffusion. Taking upon himself the status of ritual scapegoat, as only a king can do, Richard absorbs and dissolves (absolves) the collective guilt. Richard claims responsibility for his own unmanning, and so maintains a modicum of manly pride. It is Richard who calls for the mirror, “the double-edged symbol of vanity and truth-telling,”37 and he who smashes its representation of his now shadowed, formerly beaming face. Shakespeare alludes to Marlowe’s Faustus musing upon the wondrous power of Helen to destroy by dissolving her beholder: Rich. Was this face the face That every day under his household roof Did keep ten thousand men? Was this the face That like the sun did make beholders wink? Is this the face which fac’d so many follies, That was at last out-fac’d by Bolingbroke? A brittle glory shineth in this face, As brittle as the glory is the face; [Dashes the glass against the ground.] For there it is, crack’d in an hundred shivers.

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Mark, silent king, the moral of this sport— How soon my sorrow hath destroy’d my face. Bol. The shadow of your sorrow hath destroy’d The shadow of your face. Rich. Say that again. The shadow of my sorrow? ha, let’s see ’Tis very true, my grief lies all within, And these external manners of lament Are merely shadows to the unseen grief That swells with silence in the tortur’d soul. (4.1.281–98)

The double manifests itself here in the contrasting forms of light (active, penetrating) and shadow (passive, dark, immaterial). Both the king’s body and its mirror image are checkered in shadow and subjected to fracturing. Seeing one’s double produces unsettling side-effects, effects of anamorphic obliquity. The mirror-shadow distorts the original face into an anamorphic projection of death, a perspective glass of disintegral shivers. 38 Freud analyzes the shock of recognition at seeing one’s image doubled in a mirror as being a manifestation of the uncanny, a return of the repressed consciousness of one’s alienability and mortality, the repeated “shadow” image with which Bolingbroke taunts Richard.39 Freud distinguishes between the double that serves as “an insurance against destruction to the ego” and the uncanny “double that takes on a different aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the ghastly harbinger of death” (141). In its latter aspect, terrifying and demonic, the victim is frequently obsessed with the delusion that he is always being watched by an accusing other. He falls into involuntary repetition, e.g., Richard’s scarcely conscious repetition of “un,” which “forces upon us the idea of something fateful and unescapable where otherwise we should have spoken of ‘chance’ only” (144).40 Every occurrence of the uncanny double, doubly doubled via repetition, is the repression of what was once harmless and familiar. Freud’s analysis of the uncanny sheds light on the meaning of the frequent “un” words that interlace the text of Richard II: This unheimlich place . . . is the entrance to the former heim [home] of all human beings, to the place where everyone dwelt once upon a time and in the beginning. There is a humorous saying: “Love is home-sickness”; and whenever a man dreams of a place or a country and says to himself, still in the dream, “this place is familiar to me, I have been there before,” we may interpret the place as being his mother’s genitals or her body. In this case, too, the unheimlich is what was once heimisch, home-like, familiar; the prefi x “un” is the token of repression. (152–53)

Graham Holderness associates the repressed in Richard with the feminine: “Vestigial traces of femininity begin to surface: the repressed returns.”41 The

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repressed is the once hidden image of the double that surfaces to consciousness from its obscure origins in the unconscious, the locus of the feminine. Woman is the repressed side of man in this formula, the originary womb that was once forgotten or denied. Richard’s home(heim)coming is his death, his embrace of mother death according to Freud’s schema, symbolized proleptically by the shattering of the integrated self-image in the mirror. Richard, the wielder of power, comes to be haunted by the shadow of his “own” (disowned, alienated) “unwieldy sceptre” and crown in the hands of the very person he tried to disown and undo, Bolingbroke, who has been “bereft and gelded of his patrimony” (2.1.237) by the royal guarantor of filial succession, the redeemer of time who nonetheless suffers an anonymous death and is borne to the grave on an “untimely bier” (5.6.52). Paradox reigns as norm, even as it overturns the very possibility of norm. “Time is broke, and no proportion kept” (5.5.43). Richard’s language of “un,” as illustrated in the examples cited here and earlier, “sets the word itself / Against the word” (5.5.13–14), e.g., calling on the little ones to enter the kingdom of heaven while the tongue, twisted in self-defeating mockery, warns that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for the disinheritor of another’s son to be reclaimed by his heavenly father (5.5.15–17). “Un” sounds out Richard’s undoing, his feminization, the cacophonous shattering of the mirror image of integrity. The sound of shattered glass opens forth the sight of the mirror’s shadowed, invisible verso, the tain which represents the fatal Other that is Freud’s doppelgänger: the uncanny (return of a repressed desire for the dark and doubled genitals of one’s absent mother), the antithetical (the word against itself), the anti-ego (broken-mirror image), that which belies conscious intention and the will to mean what one says. 42 (In visual terms, imagine the picture of Dorian Gray, the death mask seen, impossibly, even as one still lives. It is such an image of death-in-life, seen in the mirror, that overshadows Richard’s identity.) The loss that Richard suffers—of subjects, family, and friends—leaves him with no home to return to except the feminine womb/tomb, the originary and destinational heim, the walled chamber at Pomfret. Deposed from union with his titular self-identity, no longer spoken of as “King,” the king eases himself “with being nothing.” His very language sounds out the “un” within the “one” and the latter’s necessary dissolution into the “none,” the abyss within the (feminized) double. Shoshana Felman comments on how the uncanny feminine inhabits and subverts the notion of masculine sameness-unto-itself: “The feminine . . . is not outside the masculine, its reassuring canny opposite, it is inside the masculine, its uncanny difference from itself.” 43 Although he is the royal standard bearer of univocality and sameness, Richard is uncannily fractured by the difference within.

3

Androgynous “Union” and the Woman in Hamlet

Some wish to see in Hamlet a womanish, hesitating, fl ighty mind. To me he seems a manly, resolute, but thoughtful being. —Sarah Bernhardt

I cannot see Hamlet as a man. The things he says, his impulses, his actions entirely indicate to me that he was a woman. —Sarah Bernhardt1

Hamlet has proven to be an interpretive mystery for critics interested in gender, a play whose proverbial excess of meaning has led some critics to gender the excess and the mystery of the text itself as feminine. Since the problem of this problem play is femininity as such, Ernest Jones was prompted to call Hamlet the Sphinx of modern literature, and Jacqueline Rose, following T. S. Eliot, calls it the Mona Lisa. 2 In what follows I will explore the various ways androgyny, the collapse of sexual difference, is represented, whether in figuring Hamlet as a feminized, impotent man, or Gertrude as a masculinized, castrating woman. The penetration or invagination of one sex by the other leads, I argue, to the collapse of moral difference and of meaning, an undoing of boundaries described in terms of “incest,” “jointure,” “union,” and making opposites “common.” I aim to show how even the foundational distinctions between soul and body, and love and death, implode, since they depend upon a gendered hierarchy whose implicitly exclusionist assumptions the play disjoints. Many gender critics of the 1970s, including some Shakespeareans, advanced the term “androgyny” to designate the harmonious reconciliation of sexual difference and friction.3 Theirs is an essentially comic notion deriving from the discordia concors or coincidentia oppositorum of Renaissance Neoplatonism as repopularized in Jungian psychology. This view of androgyny is imbued with the pious and nostalgic aim of recapturing the paradisiacal union of male and female components before the fall into separate and divisive sexes. Tragedy, according to this account, results from the impossibility of maintaining androgynous balance between man and woman. I believe instead that in Hamlet Shakespeare represents the way

62 Crossing Gender in Shakespeare that androgynous union engenders dissolution and death, both of which the play typecasts as feminine. The thesis that Hamlet’s tragedy lies in his having to expel the woman in himself in order to take manly action and to re-establish sexual difference is belied by the catastrophic “union”—a word whose importance I will explore later—that concludes the tragic action.4 The union that erases the ambiguously gendered divisions between mind and body, deeds and words, duty and affect, gives rise to a catastrophic crisis of non-difference. This tragic end point reiterates precisely the quandary which diseases Denmark at the opening of the play, when the absence of difference signifies that nothing is taboo, including incest, adultery, and murder. The woman in Hamlet is as much a threat to him as the invaginating “mother”—“hysterica passio” (2.4.57)—is to Lear, the inextricable “woman’s part” (2.5.20) is to Posthumus, and the (s)mothering Volumnia is to Coriolanus. Hamlet’s inaction, which he and others characterize as feminine, stems from the fact that he is “as patient as the female dove” (5.1.273) and prone to “such a kind of gaingiving as would perhaps trouble a woman” (5.2.205). 5 A defi ning axiom of the misogyny that pervades Hamlet is that the baser matter that contaminates male spirit is woman, in whose folds man is sexually implicated. Man’s figuring of himself as spirit is ultimately literalized (fatally—“the letter killeth”) as matter because man is born of woman. Shakespeare may intend a pun upon the Latin mater to suggest a resonant conflation of “mother” and “matter.” Hamlet makes a pointed juxtaposition of these two words when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern relate that Gertrude wants to meet him in her closet: “But sir, such answer as I can make, you shall command—or rather, as you say, my mother. Therefore no more, but to the matter. My mother, you say—“ (3.2.314–16). In the closet scene itself, Hamlet’s opening remark is “Now, mother, what’s the matter?” (3.4.7). Margaret Ferguson argues that the hysteria that Freud diagnosed in Hamlet results from the hero’s maternal/ material legacy: “As we hear or see in the word ‘matter’ the Latin term for mother, we may surmise that the common Renaissance association between female nature in general and the ‘lower’ realm of matter is here being deployed in the service of Hamlet’s complex oedipal struggle. The mother is the matter that comes between the father and the son—and it is no accident that in this closet scene Hamlet’s sexual hysteria rises to its highest pitch.”6 The punning association of matter with mater, body with woman, points to the woman’s part—her “country matters” (3.2.115)— that constitutes every man (as divided-invaginated). The maternal inheritance or matter from which Hamlet struggles to disburden himself is oddly associated with his loquaciousness. In his third soliloquy he curses his propensity for words and feelings rather than deeds, for which Claudius has accused him of being “unmanly” (1.2.94): Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave, That I, the son of a dear father murthered,

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Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell, Must like a whore unpack my heart with words And fall a-cursing like a very drab, A stallion!7 (2.2.568–73)

The play associates the dilatory circumlocution of “words, words, words” (2.2.192) with the unchaste female who makes of man the necessarily debased image of herself—“whore,” “drab,” “stallion.”8 Hamlet contrasts his purity of devotion to his ghostly father’s memory with the contaminating adulteration that results from material embodiment: “And thy commandment all alone shall live / Within the book and volume of my brain, / Unmix’d with baser matter” (1.5.102–4). But just what distinction obtains between the father’s spoken commandment and the feminizing words that Hamlet so outspokenly inveighs against for coming between himself and his filial duty? The mediation point between male and female speech is the body that both sexes share, that “mixture”9 of brain, book, and matter that no verbal legerdemain can slight, no rationalization gloss over. Hamlet’s moment of resolute clarity unwittingly betrays his most persistent blind spot. For all his verbal facility, the speaking subject fails to note one of the basic tenets of his education in rhetoric and philosophy: the res or substance of an idea is its matter, whereas the word that gropes to express it concretely is the verbum. By the logic of this standard rhetorical distinction, the matter or substance of Hamlet’s thoughts is feminine, while the words of the paternal commandment are masculine. Precisely when Hamlet insists upon his unmixed indebtedness and loyalty to paternal spirit (verbum) he betrays the maternal origin without which his and his father’s words would be groundless because immaterial. If one hierarchy posits male spirit as that which inseminates, informs, or animates female matter, a subversive and opposite conception insists on the ideational matter that gives birth to words, words that express at best imperfectly their material/maternal original.10 Hamlet feels that his inheritance from suckling Gertrude’s maternal matter is moral because corporal contamination: “I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me” (3.1.122–24).11 The original malaise of origin is exacerbated in the next developmental stage of incorporating the drabwhore-stallion’s language—another kind of matter—whose sole profit, Hamlet suspects, is the ability to articulate his malaise, curse it, and thereby suffer it the worse. Hamlet’s apostrophe to Gertrude—“Frailty, thy name is woman” (1.2.146)—applies as well to (the woman in) himself. He is a subject divided by the loss (of purity, of self-presence, of the father)12 that subjectivity presupposes, since the speaking subject attempts to recoup via language a loss that language itself has occasioned. Although words render Hamlet too effeminate to perform male deeds, the law of the father that enjoins the son to take dutiful action in the father’s name expresses itself by

64 Crossing Gender in Shakespeare means of the same linguistic mechanism that makes its fulfillment, in the third soliloquy quoted earlier, seem impossible. Words are indifferently the vehicle of both paternal law—Hamlet’s pledge of filial allegiance to “thy commandment” (1.5.102) and the “ghost’s word” (3.2.280); “[n]ow to my word” (1.5.110), he says as he screws up his courage—and of its breach and adulteration. The recognition of this non-difference between male and female speech, between performative and expressive utterance, is what undoes Hamlet’s best intentions to act (1.5.29–31), leaving him prisoner to his ineffectual self-reproaches, which are the melancholic introjection of his misogynistic reaction to the women in whose folds he senses himself helplessly implicated.13 Since woman is the Other who symbolizes self-loss for the man, it is no surprise that Hamlet’s soliloquies are touched with a misogynistic animus and a melancholic infatuation with suicide as release from feminine and feminizing loss. The violence that Hamlet is called upon to effect in the father’s name is what spells the sacrifice of those “feminine” qualities of loquacious inaction that some critics have regarded as Hamlet’s most ingratiating characteristic. It is these same feminine qualities, however, that excite in Hamlet the urge to violence in the fi rst place, a violence that aims to expel the feminine from within him. This violence is turned suicidally inwards; “manly” action gives way to melancholic enervation. Hamlet’s initial resolve to remain faithful to his father’s memory dissolves into suicidal self-disgust: O that this too too sullied flesh would melt, Thaw and resolve itself into a dew, Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d His canon ’gainst self-slaughter. O God! O God! (1.2.129–32)

Dissolution of the sullied because “solid” (Folio) flesh motivates the suicidal urge, whose promise is the body’s liquefaction. Ophelia, whom many critics have regarded as Hamlet’s estranged feminine self,14 will seek the same watery solace, the dissolution of resolution, in her suicide. In Hamlet’s case suicide is figured in terms of orgasmic melting and postcoital flaccidity, the relieving of a tension.15 The impulse for such release through sexual climax is paradoxically Hamlet’s sense of disgust at being indissolubly imbedded in his sexual body. Insofar as his body is sullied by sexuality, it is regarded as feminine. The law of the father forbids trying to escape the feminine by means of masturbatory self-slaughter: seeking to kill desire by extinguishing the demands localized in the phallus. But man’s imperative goal of self-identity is fractured under what it type-genders paranoically as the subversive influence of feminine difference and dissolution. Male “resolve” to do the father’s bidding suddenly means quite the opposite, “resolve” as suicidal dissolve, which frees one from paternal obligation. This contradictory use of the same word instances what Freud calls the antithetical meaning

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of primal words.16 What Freud sees as a difference of meaning that divides the putatively self-identical can be subsumed as well under the rubric of difference of gender. Antithetical gender confusion is implicit in the liquid imagery of the passage, which may be interpreted as male sexual discharge or the symbol of dearly besought female dissolution of the father’s law. In this fi rst soliloquy Hamlet curses the lust that hastens Gertrude to an incestuous remarriage, a lust that patently belies her masking self-representation as “Niobe, all tears” (1.2.149).17 Here unfolds a curious paradox: to forgo the whoring maternal flesh Hamlet contemplates resolving himself into a watery dew, but this water gets refigured as the salt water of woman’s tears, which represent the hypocritical disguise of a body more compact with lust than mourning. If being embodied taints Hamlet with the legacy of woman, his proposed escape from the maternal body by dissolving it is no less implicated in the language of female lust and hypocritical masquerade. The extinction that death promises as end point is but the return to an inescapable origin—what Hamlet will designate in his most famous soliloquy as the “undiscover’d country” (3.1.79)—a maternal presence that dissolves duty and the father’s law, such as the everlasting father’s “canon ’gainst self-slaughter.” Suicide is an escape from the maternal yet also the temptation of the maternal as that which licenses a return to (intrauterine?) deliquescence.18 Laertes serves as Hamlet’s mimetic double with respect to the imagery of water. He is the rival who swears to take action immediately upon hearing of Ophelia’s death by drowning, rather than avoid the responsibility for vengeance by dwelling upon thoughts of watery dissolution or the expense of melancholy tears: Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia, And therefore I forbid my tears. But yet It is our trick; nature her custom holds, Let shame say what it will. [Weeps.] When these are gone, The woman will be out. (4.7.184–88)

Laertes expels womanly tears as the only means of preserving his manly vigor intact. The same dewy tears that Laertes seeks to purge are the responsibility-dissolving liquefaction, the sweet consummation of death, that Hamlet dreams of merging with by melting into. But in the closet scene Hamlet adopts a more “masculine” position, asking his father not to look upon him with pity lest he “convert / My stern effects. Then what I have to do / Will want true colour—tears perchance for blood” (3.4.128–30). Hamlet’s forswearing of tears for the rhetoric of blood vengeance will make him indistinguishable from Laertes by the time that they square off together in the graveyard scene.19 Whether tears in Hamlet’s fi rst soliloquy represent Niobe’s sincere expression of grief or Gertrude’s masquerade of seeming, they serve variously to

66 Crossing Gender in Shakespeare defi ne the bifurcated feminine. In his initial appearance in the play, Hamlet in black dress takes pains to distance himself from ornamental or seeming mourning, dismissing tears as so many feigned motions of actors: 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 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. (1.2.76–86)

His scorn for seeming notwithstanding, soon enough Hamlet will act if not feign the madman’s part. In this passage and what follows I am concerned with the feminine associations of neither feigning nor madness, but rather with the inconsistent disavowal of tears and of playing. In his third soliloquy the fickle prince admires the Player, the man who plays the woman’s part, for his convincing simulation of tears. By the time that the players arrive in Elsinore, Hamlet has come to believe that public show is the sole means to plumb private conscience and that the only sincere expression of inner grief is paradoxically its impersonation on a public stage, completely reversing his earlier contempt for the actor’s “fruitful river in the eye.” Initially Hamlet envies the woman’s role portrayed by the Player because it differs so markedly from the female roles that he characterizes himself as having played up to this point, the roles of antic fool and madman. Hecuba’s “bisson rheum” (2.2.502) in response to the slaying of her husband “would have made milch the burning eyes of heaven / And passion in the gods” (2.2.513–14). This conflation of weeping and lactary nurturing, as if the slain husband is his wife’s child (Niobe, all tears), serves to foil Gertrude’s tearful posturing, but ultimately Hamlet comes to recognize Hecuba’s reality as that of an impersonated representation, a “fiction” evacuated of real motive, as yet another masquerading “nothing”: O what a rogue and peasant slave am I! Is it not monstrous that the 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 his visage wann’d, Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect, A broken voice, and his whole function suiting With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing!

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For Hecuba! What’s Hecuba to him, or he to her, That he should weep for her? 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 appal the free, Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed The very faculties of eyes and ears. (2.2.544–60)

If Hecuba were not a representational fiction, one would conclude from this passage that emotion secures action: feminine tears are not opposed to masculine revenge but are instead the motivating guarantee of its success. However, it is precisely the feminine side of his nature that Hamlet scapegoats for his “pigeon-liver’d” (2.2.573) cowardliness, castigating himself in this same soliloquy, as we have seen, for being a wordy drab-whorestallion. The very words by which Hamlet bolsters his courage to act are the vehicle for dilation 20 since they defer action by substituting for it. The various distinctions that Hamlet meditates between sincere and feigned tears, acting and playacting, deeds and words can all be subsumed under the general rubric of what he takes to be male and female. 21 But such easy dichotomies do not hold, for the play insists on the antithetical collapse of primal antinomies. Hamlet charts clear-cut distinctions between himself and the Player’s fictional Hecuba, the good woman, but he is able to locate scant difference between himself and the real bad woman whose flesh and word are indistinct from his. Difference obtains between men until they are linked sexually by the bond of a common woman. Hamlet remarks the difference between his father and Claudius—“So excellent a king, that was to this / Hyperion to a satyr” (1.2.139–40); and he interjects the difference between his cowardly self and the archetypal hero into the triangle formed by his rival father figures—“My father’s brother—but no more like my father / Than I to Hercules” (1.2.152–53). Because the bad woman makes of Hyperion (Hamlet’s father) a satyr (Claudius), of Hercules a Hamlet, then by the chiastic terms of the analogy she makes of Hamlet a lascivious satyr like Claudius. Of a self-possessed man she makes the effeminate coward that is Hamlet’s consistent self-identification when taking stock of himself in the fi rst four soliloquies. Hamlet blames the bad woman with whom he is inextricably intertwined for his vacillation between virile resolve and conscientious scrupling. That man and woman are interconnected—that man is dependent, not author of himself—gives rise to his misogyny. The origin of his disgust for woman is man’s origin and telos in woman, in what he metaphorizes as her “undiscover’d country.” The darkness of this region of sex and death is what Hamlet points to as the cause of his effeminizing cowardice:

68

Crossing Gender in Shakespeare Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pitch and moment With this regard their currents turn awry And lose the name of action. (3.1.83–85)

Conscience is masculine “resolution” to do one’s duty. In antithetical fashion it also acts to resolve (dissolve) obligation, in the feminizing sense advanced in my reading of the liquid images above. The decline of “pitch” may suggest fears of postcoital flaccidity and the loss of manliness. But the resolution assured by conscience is “native,” a gift from the mother. How can conscience impel one forward to take manly action, on the one hand, yet transform one into an irresolute coward, on the other? As the swelling of thought and of conscientiousness that forecloses action, religious conscience prohibits murder and leaves vengeance to God alone. A very different conscience is expressed by the Ghost, the unwelcome paternal superego that exacts the killing of Claudius even as it forbids Hamlet to kill himself. Conscience makes contradictory demands because it fails to reconcile the masculine and feminine elements that it comprises. It epitomizes the gendered ambivalence (androgyny) between male and female, spirit and body, action and cowardice: binarisms that don’t align themselves in any consistent parallelism, but rather criss-cross androgynously. 22 Hamlet’s melancholy and madness are, like conscience, represented in terms of the feminine that both fractures and empowers him. 23 Although Hamlet castigates himself for being “unpregnant of my cause” (2.2.563) due to cowardice, Claudius sees in his nephew’s psyche a woman whose plotting he likens to an oedipally menacing parturition: There’s something in his soul O’er which his melancholy sits on brood, And I do doubt the hatch and the disclose Will be some danger. (3.1.166–69)

Here for a change feminine melancholy is thought to give rise to consequential activity. Like Richard II’s self-reflexive “My brain I’ll prove the female to my soul, / My soul the father, and these two beget / A generation of still-breeding thoughts” (5.5.6–8), Hamlet’s broodings are his parthenogenic progeny (brood); they disclose the only (living) kin he is willing to acknowledge. Gertrude characterizes Hamlet’s madness as his brooding and breeding internal female: This is mere madness, And thus awhile the fit will work on him. Anon, as patient as the female dove

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When her golden couplets are disclos’d, His silence will sit drooping. (5.1.279–83)

The oscillation from the fit of “mere” (French “mother”) madness to patient silence, both characterized as feminine extremes, traces Hamlet’s manic depression in terms of feminine fickleness.24 Hamlet is capable of both destructive violence and peaceable generativity, the feminine double bind that constitutes him. 25 Once the feminine is abstracted from the physical body and becomes a disembodied metaphor, it ceases to be threatening. Following literary and philosophical convention, Hamlet refers to the soul that informs his body as the feminine anima. This feminine in himself bonds homosocially with the same element in Horatio, Hamlet’s soulmate: “Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice, / And could of men distinguish her election, / Sh’ath seal’d thee for herself” (3.2.63–65). Horatio displaces Ophelia as Hamlet’s bosom bondman because he is safely desexualized. He is feminine insofar as he represents the allegorized rational soul, but he has excised the (feminizing) madness and passion of sexual desire, whose deleterious worldhistorical influence is personified in the play as the fickle whore Fortune. Hamlet admires in Horatio that he has been As one, in suff’ring all, that suffers nothing, A man that Fortune’s buffets and rewards Hast ta’en with equal thanks; and blest are those Whose blood and judgement are so well commeddled That they are not a pipe for Fortune’s finger To sound what stop she please. Give me that man That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him In my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart, As I do thee. (3.2.66–74)

We have seen that Hamlet contrasts “the motive and the cue for passion” that should inspire him to act with the Player’s imaginarily motivated passions. Since the prince is “patient” like a female dove and “patient” and “passion” are etymologically equivalent in designating passive suffering, then what Hamlet envies in Horatio is his freedom from female melancholy, the manic depressive roller coaster sometimes figured as Fortune’s wheel.26 Female Fortune is also identified with the type of wheeling and extravagant opportunism that Hamlet so despises in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: male varlets whose “privates” are collusively cross coupled with the “secret parts of Fortune” (2.2.234–35) to form an illicit because hermaphroditic union. Like the whore Fortune they try to manipulate Hamlet’s pipe: “You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass” (3.2.355–58). At this point Hamlet regards

70 Crossing Gender in Shakespeare himself no longer as a male whore, a minion-slave of the strumpet Fortune, whose threat, which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern personify, has become manifestly external and therefore easier for Hamlet to confound. In act 4 Hamlet will take fatal Fortune into his own hands by disposing of his old schoolfellow conspirators and thus disburdening himself of the feminizing menace that they personify. And by the ultimate scene of the play he will be able to bolster his sense of masculine courage by heaping abuse upon the foppish courtier Osric, who represents the no longer threatening feminine that the mature Hamlet can easily dismiss. One consequence of Hamlet’s inability to isolate and then excise the woman from himself is that the distinctions he tries to draw between other people are as confused as he is self-divided sexually. In the closet scene with his mother, Hamlet protests too much in overdrawing the contrast between the “counterfeit presentment” (3.4.54) of the elder Hamlet and of Claudius. Beneath the son’s defensively schematic opposition between ideal and nightmare father figures, Hyperion and satyr, lurks the doubt that they are not so different after all, since Gertrude has held both in common. Although Hamlet asserts that “sense to ecstasy was ne’er so thrall’d / But it reserv’d some quantity of choice / To serve in such a difference” (74–76), he criticizes in his mother the appropriation of sense by ecstasy and the resulting loss of difference. With the woman on top sense loses its hierarchic superiority over sensuousness, its subversive contrary, and reason becomes merely the instrument for satisfying desire: “And reason panders will” (88). That Hamlet’s father represents reason and his stepfather will is only an ideal presentment shown to be “counterfeit” since reason and will are not opposed but in collusion, rendered common in Gertrude’s faulted vice. 27 It is as if the elder Hamlet (reason) acts as pander-advocate for his own cuckolding, the willful coupling of Claudius and Gertrude. What belies the schematically contrasting portraits that Hamlet uses to badger his mother is his description of Claudius as “a king of shreds and patches—” (103), followed immediately by the stage direction “Enter Ghost.” The referent of Hamlet’s interrupted word portrait is indifferently and ambiguously Claudius and the elder Hamlet, since invoking the one seems to call up the other. Gertrude says that Hamlet’s vision of the Ghost is a hallucination induced by “ecstasy” (140), the very faculty whose improper dominance Hamlet said caused Gertrude’s failure to recognize the difference between Claudius and the elder Hamlet. The ultimate failure of proper difference is that the rational faculty of differentiation in both Hamlet and Gertrude has ceded place to mother and son’s common bond of ecstasy.28 In a way similar to his counterfeit portrayal of the collapsed rival father figures, it is impossible for Hamlet to separate Gertrude and Ophelia despite their ostensible differences. Whereas he tries but fails to keep the father figures separate, Hamlet doesn’t seem to want to distinguish between the women in his life. What he calls Ophelia’s “painting” (3.1.144) dovetails with his criticism of Gertrude’s masquerade of mourning. The sexual

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contamination that Hamlet insists upon attributing to his mother is transferred to Ophelia, who is the target of her friend’s obscene wit just before their joint spectatorship of The Murder of Gonzago. The remark that Ophelia should sequester herself in a “nunnery” (3.1.121) is famously subversive: is a nunnery where a young woman goes to preserve her chastity, or a brothel in which she squanders it; a place of sexual renunciation, or one of carnal indulgence? Does this once fundamental distinction still make any difference? Gertrude’s position as whore (in her son’s eyes) crosses over indifferently onto Ophelia’s chaste body, making of apparently antithetical contraries an indistinguishable conjunctive union. It is against this union of what should be opposites—ideal and debased fathers, chaste and unchaste women, spirit and body—that Hamlet inveighs when he attacks the conjunction of sexual opposites: “I say we will have no mo marriage” (3.1.149). Precisely this copular mixing of the sexes has informed Hamlet since birth, and we have seen that it is this contamination of origins that engenders mature thoughts of suicide. Hamlet can no more escape the fallen transformation of chastity (the “honesty” of mind) into heterosexual coupling (the telos of bodily “beauty”) than he can avoid his own originary embodiment: “The power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness” (3.1.111–14). Beauty belies honesty because honesty itself is not honest; honesty panders beauty. Hamlet thematizes the way that corporal beauty gives the lie to honesty when he plays upon the possibility of lying in the sexual sense with the nunnery-destined because dishonest Ophelia: “Lady, shall I lie in your lap? . . . That’s a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs.” The provocative allusions to “country matters” and to Ophelia’s reductive, genital “nothing” (3.2.110–20) imply that Hamlet’s lying in her beautified lap is the cause of dishonest moral lapse in herself and others. Revulsion is Hamlet’s response to the genital materiality of woman, which makes of her chastity a nothing, of her honesty a lie.29 Hamlet’s misogynistic banter early in 3.2 is a prelude to the staging of The Murder of Gonzago, a play within the play that thematizes the origin of man’s disgust for woman, whose effects have already evidenced themselves preposterously in Hamlet’s prescriptive fore-play with Ophelia. In recounting the scene of his death, the Ghost tells Hamlet that “the serpent that did sting thy father’s life / Now wears his crown” (1.5.39–40), the crown symbolizing both his kingship and his wife’s genitalia. 30 The liquid poured in the ear is a deathly bane that undoes the vital liquid that King Hamlet once disseminated in a homologous orifice. The contrary valences of the liquid image—semen = life versus semen = poison—instance Shakespeare’s antithetical pharmakon. King Hamlet is represented as emasculated. Coppélia Kahn notes the sexual confusion that the Ghost engenders in Hamlet in asking the son to identify with the feminized father: “The elder Hamlet is in the feminine position of being penetrated by the man who has already penetrated his wife.”31 The play within the play that Hamlet stages is an

72 Crossing Gender in Shakespeare attempt to recall, replay, and thereby undo the scene of the elder Hamlet’s death.32 If Hamlet sees a mimetic representation of his father penetrated and the reaction to it of the guilty royal spectators, he reasons that this will provide him sufficient motive for taking manly revenge, which entails the reassertion of the law of the father that the murder (and Gertrude’s adultery) breached. Manly revenge may be all the easier if Hamlet can demonstrate that his Claudian adversary, who wears the sexually ambiguous crown, is only a castrated, petticoat king, a replicated reflection of the turn that he effected upon his brother king. Perhaps Hamlet identifies the feminine in his own conscience with something similar in his stepfather, which will make the latter vulnerable to being caught by the play within the play: “The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King” (2.2.600–1). The Mousetrap conflates Claudius’ captured conscience with Gertrude’s, whose pet name, “Mouse,” is spoken in the closet scene. After the play within the play Hamlet uses the same “king”/“thing” rhyme and another double entendre with vaginal referent to express his confidence that Claudius has been hollowed into an empty shell: “The King is a thing . . . / Of nothing” (4.2.27–29).33 If both Claudius and King Hamlet are reduced to a feminized nothing, the distinction between them must have collapsed in Hamlet’s mind. Stanley Cavell advances the provocative thesis that Claudius is both father and mother in Hamlet’s dumb-show, because it substitutes Claudius as a veil for Hamlet’s mother, the conspiring murderess behind the murderer. (“None wed the second but who kill’d the fi rst” [3.2.175].)34 The dumb-show is a re-visioning of the unseen primal scene of original murder, which it reenacts with the mother-father (Claudius covering for, and acting at the behest of, Gertrude) taking the masculine position by pouring poison into the man’s ear, reversing the scenario in the primal scene (of intercourse), where the woman is the passive receptacle of what the man pours. 35 My quarrel with Cavell is his assumption that Gertrude was passive in the primal scene, whereas in the murder scene she turns around suddenly and assumes the aggressor’s stance. Instead, one may suspect that Hamlet has entertained the deep fantasy of a “masculine” Gertrude all along: in the primal scene that continues to haunt his unconscious, Hamlet is traumatized by the vision of his father castrated (feminized) in the act of intercourse. 36 Gertrude is imagined as the masculine aggressor in the two original primal scenes of sex and murder, of Death (Hamlet’s “consummation / Devoutly to be wish’d” [3.1.63–64]) as the punning confl ation (climactic-extinctive) of these two senses, which are but different manifestations of the same horror in the male imagination. In appropriating the masculine powers of her husband, Gertrude renders him impotent, the ghostly hollow of his former self, and so she must proceed adulterously to some other man to satisfy her swelling urge for sexual jointure. Hamlet describes the fierceness of Gertrude’s desire for his father

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in terms that ominously suggest a voraciousness that, like a parasite’s, devours its object to the bone and so must prey elsewhere: “She would hang on him / As if increase of appetite had grown / By what it fed on” (1.2.143–45). Gertrude’s devouring orality knows no bounds, for every taboo which poses a resistance serves only the more to excite her transgressive desire. The confusion of man and woman explicitly reaches the collapsing point of non-difference when Hamlet takes his leave of Claudius in order to begin his journey for England. He propounds a syllogism which intertwines the sexes incestuously and androgynously: Ham. Farewell, dear mother. King. Thy loving father, Hamlet. Ham. My mother. Father and mother is man and wife, man and wife is one flesh; so my mother. (4.3.52–55)

Hamlet’s ostensibly innocent allusion to the biblical idealization of sexual union in marriage points instead to a non-ideal, incestuous materialization. The prince is revolted by the interchangeability of parts (partners) in the sexual act, whose locus sonnet 137 suggestively designates as the genital “common place” (l.10), 37 the place where man and woman (as well as the elder Hamlet and Claudius, the ideal and degraded father images) become indistinguishable in the chiastic coupling of mother-father. Ernest Jones explains the mother-father confusion in terms of the psychoanalytic “combined parent concept” (113), in which the child imagines its parents as one flesh in coitus. Hamlet’s chop-logic employs the rhetorical common-place of chiasmus to signify and to predicate the reduction of sexual difference to the common genital site where the sexes are indifferently one (androgynous). It is the misogynistic representation of woman as duplicitous masquerader that marks the focal point of Hamlet as a tragedy; the play passes beyond the ideal specularity of comedy to a specifically linguistic duplicity and subjectifying self-division, the principle of difference which patriarchal, misogynistic discourse takes woman to be.38 Gertrude’s crossing of sexual boundaries and collapsing of difference informs the androgyny that so conspicuously marks Hamlet’s character. Whereas female unfaithfulness suggests a complication that comic transvestism turns into a joke, insofar as the transvestic disguise miraculously defuses the charge of cuckoldry, the perception of woman’s adultery in the tragedies incites a catastrophe of non-difference. Gertrude’s incestuous duplicity sloughs off external disguises that are merely specular and therefore comic in favor of a masculinely aggressive jointure, effected via duplicitous language, of things that are normally and normatively contrary. Her violation of the incest taboo, which insists on keeping one’s husband and brother-in-law distinct, leads to a collapse of difference in general. It is on account of Gertrude, the

74 Crossing Gender in Shakespeare “imperial jointress” (1.2.9), i.e., the one who undoes difference by effecting jointure, that “the time is out of joint” (1.5.196). She is responsible for making “the night joint-labourer with the day” (1.1.81) and for the undoing of propriety (proper difference) that results when “the funeral baked meats . . . coldly furnish forth the marriage tables” (1.2.180–81). Woman is the principle of difference that paradoxically collapses difference, reducing Claudius, Hamlet, and Hamlet’s father to the commonly denominated nexus of Gertrude’s shared body. All three men are bound together by Gertrude’s body—her vagina is a “common thing,” as Iago says to his wife Emilia in Othello (with reference to the handkerchief and to his wife’s body). The word “common” occurs several times to designate the universal reductionism of death: “Thou know’st ’tis common: all that lives must die” (1.2.72); “[Reason’s] common theme / Is death of fathers” (1.2.103–4). Death is the common lot of everyone born of woman’s “common place,” the uncanny home (unheimlich heim) that makes of woman man’s genesis (womb) and his destined end (tomb). In the “[t]o be, or not to be” soliloquy, Hamlet’s fears of death situate their imaginary locus in “the undiscover’d country, from whose bourn / No traveller returns” (3.1.79–80). The latent pun on the genital sense of “country” equates death with woman’s hell, her not so Elysian Fields.39 The nether country is where man and woman are at one in the three developmental stages of birth, copulation, and death.40 The sexes are made common in the primal scene of copulation and of death. Often in Shakespeare’s plays “death” puns upon the chiastic indistinction (or so the man fears in fantasy) of the sexes in orgasm. Death as the climactic collapse of male potency also points to castration anxiety. Although these senses of “dying” are not foregrounded in Hamlet at the level of local wordplay, they are a motivating thematic concern overall. Love is literalized (materialized) as death in the figure of Lamord, the Norman knight who rides “incorps’d” (4.7.86) upon the back of his horse, whose punning name collapses death (la mort) and love (l’amour, or the Latin amor). The erotic instincts aim towards the same release of tension that death grants, and life and death are tellingly juxtaposed (“incorps’d”) in Laertes’ exclamatory pseudo-recognition, “[u]pon my life, Lamord” (4.7.91). Lamord is like Hamlet a death messenger who adorns himself in the gallant’s fashionable jewels: “the brooch indeed / And gem of all the nation” (4.7.92–93). In mimetically similar terms Ophelia describes Hamlet as formerly “[t]h’ expectancy and rose of the fair state, / The glass of fashion and the mould of form” (3.1.154–55), though of course he subsequently drapes himself in deathly black, as if to say that love and mourning describe the singular and identical trajectory of every embodied consciousness. The love gem as poisonous death trafficker comes to a head in the “union” jewel of the fi nal scene of the play.41 Life and death are conjoined in a cyclical and interanimating feeding process:

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Ham. For if the sun breed maggots in a dead dog, being a good kissing carrion—Have you a daughter? Pol. I have, my lord. Ham. Let her not walk i’ th’ sun. Conception is a blessing, but as your daughter may conceive—friend, look to’t. (2.2.181–86)

Conception is corruption, and conversely; life generates spontaneously from death, only to provide more grist for death’s maw. Hamlet himself is the maggot son bred from the conjunction of living sun (Hamlet as father) and dead matter (mater): “I am too much in the sun” (1.2.67), he laments, as if to suggest that his exalted origins have over-ripened and putrefied. The necrophilic self-identification as cadaver-bred maggot suggests at once a sperm breeding and a parasite feeding. Love reduced to deathly parasitism is an analogue for the way that the liquid poured in King Hamlet’s ear and the union wine consumed in the fi nal scene are both conjunctive-inseminating and poisonous, with the latter sense, parodic of and parasitic upon the former, taking precedence. The chaliced union wine is a parasitic parody of the Communion wine of the Last Supper, the drinking and eating of a dead body in order to gain life thereby. Whether sex is poisonous or generative is also at the heart of the characterization of Ophelia, who is regarded with extreme ambivalence as an exemplar of unchaste beauty in life and chaste idealization in death.42 In terms of the analogy by which she is fi xed in the passage quoted earlier from act 2, scene 2, Ophelia is like rotting flesh which breeds, only to have her brood turn around and devour its life source incestuously. Flesh as food for maggots—“We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots” (4.3.21–23)—contrasts with Laertes’ remark at Ophelia’s funeral about the regenerative powers of her virgin body to conceive immaculately: “Lay her i’th’ earth, / And from her fair and unpolluted flesh / May violets spring” (5.1.231–33).43 Maggots or violets; dishonest or virginal woman; conception as curse or as blessing? To these confused binarisms Gertrude adds the “Lamord” question: epithalamion or funeral? [scattering flowers] Sweets to the sweet. Farewell. I hop’d thou shouldst have been my Hamlet’s wife: I thought thy bride-bed to have deck’d, sweet maid, And not have strew’d thy grave. (5.1.236–39)

Dead flowers substitute for marital defloration and “dying.” Gertrude the jointress again does what Hamlet reproached her for in act one when he complained that “the funeral bak’d meats / Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables” (1.2.180–81). Elegy is but a cover for matrimonial lust in Hamlet’s deflating satire.44 At the marriage table one engorges carrion. The collapse of love and death reaches its hyperbolic climax when Hamlet and Laertes, the rival lovers, leap into (penetrate) the open grave for one

76 Crossing Gender in Shakespeare last necrophilic embrace (with Ophelia, with/against each other). Hamlet can achieve his devoutly wished love consummation only with a corpse, and in the next scene he will consummate his death wish by becoming incorpsed in himself (by becoming himself a corpse). Hamlet points to the paradox of Laertes’ being “buried quick” (5.1.274) with Ophelia, an act of hyperbolic excess that he vows to imitate mimetically: And if thou prate of mountains, let them throw Millions of acres on us, till our ground, Singeing his pate against the burning zone, Make Ossa like a wart. Nay, and thou’lt mouth, I’ll rant as well as thou. (5.1.275–79)

Hamlet and Laertes become indistinguishable in their rhetorical overreaching (hyperbole), as well as in their ostentatious sacrifice of the quick for the dead. Earlier in this scene, before he knows that the grave is destined for Ophelia, Hamlet feels confident that he can distinguish between the living and the dead in much the same way as he can differentiate between truth and lying. He says that the Gravedigger “lies” in the grave in both senses of the word. “Thou dost lie in’t, to be in’t, and say ’tis thine. ’Tis for the dead, not for the quick: therefore thou liest” (122–24). When Hamlet jumps into the grave, he literalizes his earlier wordplay (3.2) about how much he would like to lie with Ophelia’s nothing, her death(nothing)breeding genitals (nothing). The state of the union (political, matrimonial) that words like “Lamord” symbolize is epitomized not only in the incestuous union of Gertrude and Claudius—their love is the elder Hamlet’s death—but also in the pearled “union” (5.2.269) that joins and unjoins the lovers. “Union” is both union (marriage jewel) and disunion (poison), a liebestod that re-engages the paradoxically inseminating poison of the primal scene/murder scene. “Union” is one of Freud’s uncanny “un” words whose primal sense is antithetical, both itself and not itself.45 This doubling dissolution is gendered (by men) as feminine, as that which introduces difference into male notions of selfidentity predicated on self-sameness (as we saw in our analysis of Richard II through the terminology of Irigaray). As the union pearl is dissolved in the cup of wine, so too the royal place in the hierarchy which the union symbolizes—“the term is normally reserved for pearls of finest quality, such as might be in a royal crown” is the Arden editor’s footnote (410)—is dissolved in death, reminding us of Hamlet’s malcontent satire on the power of death to undo social as well as sexual distinction by making common the king and the commoner:46 “a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar” (4.3.30–31)47 thanks to the anal reductionism of “impolitic worms,” for which “your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes, but to one table” (4.3.23–24).48 Since Hamlet has referred to himself as a beggar (2.2.272), in death he and Claudius, the beggar and the

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king, will be indistinguishably incorpsed. The androgynous “Lady Worm” (5.1.87) is the phallic penetrator and oral, feminine devourer that reduces the courtier, lawyer, and jester, the mother and her son, to the same level as the commoner in the grave. As high is reduced to low on the axis of social status, so sexual distinctions are likewise undone in death, as in birth and intercourse. Their collapse is what sets off the chain of deaths in the play, which in turn viciously re-establishes the cycle of sexual non-difference (a corpse of whichever sex is still just a corpse—indifferent, identical). Critics have frequently remarked upon Hamlet’s shift in character upon his return from England, usually describing it in terms of a new resolution and stoicism. I prefer instead to see in the later Hamlet someone who is far less anxious about the collapse of boundaries, to the point that he decides that there is but one way to resolve his formerly unresolved anxiety about non-difference: destroy difference via the massive implosion that death effects. The death that Hamlet once feared so obsessively ultimately becomes the lover he embraces (graphically symbolized when he enters Ophelia’s grave). When Hamlet assumes the manly role of avenger in the fi nal scene and realizes the fantasy playacting of Lucianus, he penetrates the feminized Claudius with his poisoned phallic sword. Revenge seeks by repetition of the primal scene to undo the original crime. But the compulsion to repeat manifests as well the drive towards death, fulfi lling Hamlet’s prophetic sense that his realization of manhood was fated to achieve but a reductive quintessence of dust, a return to residual matter (mater). Hamlet’s consummating manly gesture is vitiated in that the hero collapses again into his mother: like hers, his affiliation (union) with the husbandfather, whom he has addressed as “mother,” is fatally poisonous, a suicidal resolution figured as liquifying dissolve.49 The androgynous sexual mixture50 that consummately joins male and female, I have argued, is the indistinction of death. Death returns man to the undiscovered country whence he originated, the place where he and woman are joined in a common fault (foutre) or fold, cross-coupled in non-difference. It is through metaphors of “mixture,” “jointure,” and “union”—rendering the sexes “common”— that Shakespeare plays out the poisonous consequences of androgyny.

4

Impotence and the Feminine in Othello

Perhaps as much as his race, Othello’s age inserts him into a field of controversy because it suggests the possibility that he is not sexually fit for the task of being Desdemona’s husband. The old critical debate over when the marriage is consummated can be redrawn in terms of Othello’s anxiety about his own sexual powers as well as his anxiety lest in opening up Desdemona’s sexuality he may induce her to prefer not just a man of fairer skin and more conventional breeding than Othello, but someone younger and more sexually fit. Is Othello so gullible to the tricks that Iago plays, seducing him from faith to jealous rage, because unconsciously he wants the marriage to fail? Perhaps he ultimately internalizes the many voices that aver that he is unworthy of the match with Desdemona. Criticism of Othello in the past three decades has brought to the fore the issue of race, and of special significance in recent years is the way critics have attempted to draw connections between representations of race and femininity in the play.1 There were no females on the Renaissance stage, only boy actors; nor were there any blacks on stage, only white men in blackface. Women and blacks both suffered the status of being literally absent from the stage, or present on it only by means of representation.2 Othello and Desdemona share the identity of being marginal to the stage on which the black man and the (white) woman cannot be seen. Othello is marginalized by his blackness, and his love of a much younger white woman undercuts his status as manly general and defender against the subversive forces that haunt the margins of Venetian society and are inimical to its well-being. It is Othello’s anxieties about femininity, age, and impotence, not his race, that is the peculiar extravagance that I wish to focus on in this chapter, partly because the issue of race has been discussed so well by so many other critics. If he were white, Othello would still suffer a crisis of confidence caused by his being much older than his wife. The combination of his blackness and his age is a fatal tandem, leading Othello not to recognize himself by the end of the play. The scandal of an aging black man’s love for a much younger white woman is potentially impotizing for the man:

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Haply, for I am black, And have not those soft parts of conversation That chamberers have, or for I am declin’d Into the vale of years—yet that’s not much— She’s gone, I am abus’d, and my relief Must be to loathe her. (3.3.267–72)3

Othello lacks the confidence of the white courtier’s eloquence and youthful sexual vigor. His language fails him because his black and aging body fails to measure up to the ideal epitomized by Cassio. The body and its nexus of imperatives, impulses, and socially constituted debilities weighs down Othello’s sense of freedom of soul, for the weak and despised black body impinges on the very faculty of free and eloquent speech by which Othello won Desdemona in the fi rst place. Othello can speak no more except to lament the pitiful state of being his embodied self; his only vehicle for eloquence is to curse himself, his voice itself the chief embodiment of “weak function” (2.3.339) and “the vale of years.” Shakespeare traces Othello’s middle-aged vulnerability in love to the complete deprivation of love that he experienced as a child and young man. The stories by which Othello wins Desdemona’s ear are fi lled with pitiable scarcity and painful adventure, including serving time as a slave, but there are no stories of amorous exploits, either because he wants to spare Desdemona the pangs of jealousy or because Desdemona is indeed the fi rst love of his life. The latter is a possible conclusion for a man whose whole life has been devoted to martial exploits, who has been obliged to make “the fl inty and steel couch of war / My thrice-driven bed of down” (1.3.230–31).4 His bed has not been consecrated to pleasure. The specter of impotence that hangs over Othello, like his sense of racial inferiority, makes him regard himself as an inferior match for Desdemona. He is a man of middle age and failing appetite. He asks that Desdemona be allowed to accompany him on the mission to Cyprus not, he avers, “to please the palate of my appetite, / Nor to comply with heat, the young affects / In my defunct” (1.3.262–64).5 Love and war are antipodal, so Othello remains fit for the latter so long as he has little inclination for the former. He tells the Venetian nobles not to fear that his marriage will undermine his martial manliness and dutifulness: And heaven defend your good souls that you think I will your serious and great business scant, For she is with me; . . . no, when light-wing’d toys, And feather’d Cupid, foils with wanton dullness My speculative and active instruments, That my disports corrupt and taint my business, Let housewives make a skillet of my helm,

80 Crossing Gender in Shakespeare And all indign and base adversities Make head against my reputation! (1.3. 266–74)

Othello advertises his self-control here, but the play presents a counter point of view: Desdemona is not only her captain’s captain but, Iago suggests, she possesses complete mastery over Othello’s sexual body and therefore his self-control: She’s fram’d as fruitful As the free elements: and then for her To win the Moor, were’t to renounce his baptism, All seals and symbols of redeemed sin, His soul is so infetter’d to her love, That she may make, unmake, do what she list, Even as her appetite shall play the god With his weak function. (2.3.332–39)

“Weak function” implies either impotence or the inability to offer moral resistance to sex. Desdemona is an idol, a god, on whose altar Othello sacrifices body and soul and martial reputation, reverting from his status as Christian convert back to his pagan state, though stripped of his pagan prowess. Prior to his encounter with Desdemona, Othello defi ned himself as a warrior and led an unmarried life on the battlefield. But the state of marrying involves a reversal of the expected gender roles between male general and female lover, for, as Iago puts it, “[o]ur general’s wife is now the general” (2.3.305). When Iago convinces him that his wife has betrayed him, Othello bids farewell not only to marital happiness but also to his upstaged occupation as warrior. His manhood and the career that embodied it have been squandered for love: Farewell the tranquil mind, farewell content: Farewell the plumed troop, and the big wars, That makes ambition virtue: O farewell, Farewell the neighing steed, and the shrill trump, The spirit-stirring drum, the ear-piercing fife; The royal banner, and all quality, Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war! And, O ye mortal engines, whose wide throats The immortal Jove’s great clamour counterfeit; Farewell, Othello’s occupation’s gone! (3.3.354–63)

Othello waxes nostalgic for what he sees as his glorious occupation of warrior, in a world unpeopled with women. Only in the romantic past was he truly himself, the self that he takes pained care to name because he so strongly remarks how Othello now is no longer Othello. In the fi nal scene

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he will say much the same thing in the single simpler, less romanticizing sentence, “That’s he that was Othello; here I am” (5.2.285). The contrast is between Othello then and the hollow name of Othello that mocks him now. Name is both past reputation and present evacuated sound, the mere name as empty aftermath of what once was. In The Tragic Effect: The Oedipus Complex in Tragedy, André Green reads militarism in terms of the Same, that with which Othello is familiar and which poses no challenge to his identity, whereas love for Desdemona, the Other, makes Othello differ from himself. When Desdemona loses the handkerchief, “her phallic emblem, she is no more than a castrated woman—to be avoided in order to avoid any contact with castration.” What Green characterizes as the many “signs of the phallus” in the “Farewell” speech indicate Othello’s despairing love for a potency that he feels slip away under threat of castration. “It will not be given to the valiant Moor to die on the field of honour, but to succumb beneath Cupid’s darts on the field of dishonor.” 6 The military virtues are epitomized by Cassio, the object of Othello’s narcissistic love. Othello fi nds easier and more phallically assuring the narcissistic, homosexual love for Cassio than the object-love for Desdemona. Thus he prefers to see Desdemona in safely military (Same) than in romantic (Other) terms, as when he sets eyes on her in Cyprus, he exclaims, “O my fair warrior!” (2.1.182). Prey as he is to the image that the dominant culture has of him, Othello inhabits and recapitulates his father-in-law Brabantio’s perspective that Desdemona’s liaison with him represents an irremediable swerving from the norms of marital chastity and patriarchal duty. Othello will come to internalize the racist norms of Venetian culture, one of whose keystones is the revulsion against miscegenation, which Iago conflates with bestiality in his image of an old black ram tupping the white ewe. Brabantio thinks that Othello must have used magic and witchcraft in order to lure a white woman half his age to marry him. Othello’s anxieties recapitulate Brabantio’s incredulity whether Desdemona, So opposite to marriage, that she shunn’d The wealthy curled darlings of our nation, Would ever have (to incur a general mock) Run from her guardage to the sooty bosom Of such a thing as thou? to fear, not to delight. (1.2.67–71)

Othello’s racial self-doubts indicate that he occupies the position of his father-in-law, denouncing himself in the same terms that he is denounced. Othello will ratify this logic of the father-in-law and indeed parrot it, to the point that he will lose respect for Desdemona for desiring him and for betraying the father figure. Othello is himself this father figure as much as Brabantio is, the old man of comedy unable to control his daughter’s choice of a lover, analogous to the middle-aged husband who likewise fears

82 Crossing Gender in Shakespeare that he cannot control his wife’s choice of a lover.7 If Desdemona desires the hideous Othello, Othello reasons, along lines unwittingly predicted by his father-in-law, she may desire anyone, and certainly she will have every reason to incline towards a younger, more polished white man like Cassio the Florentine. Othello’s disrespect for the too easily swayed Desdemona reflects the debased image of himself that he sees in the mirror, especially in the mirror of Desdemona’s eyes: “Her name, that was as fresh / As Dian’s visage, is now begrim’d, and black /As mine own face” (3.3.389–91). “My name” (the Folio reading) has been blackened because Othello has blackened “her name” (the Second Quarto reading), her reputation for virginal chasteness. The denigration of the two names results from the union of his flesh and hers. Othello’s likening of his name to the virgin whiteness of Dian, a female, is an extraordinary gesture for a black male warrior to make, even if he is a virgin, as the iconography implies. A virgin male is equivalent to a virgin woman, it seems. The latent image that haunts the hero’s unconscious is that his blackness has rubbed off on Desdemona in the act of intercourse and has soiled both her and his name for virgin whiteness. Further, one senses that in making love to a woman, perhaps for the fi rst time, the warrior Othello worries lest contact with her has made her femininity wear off on him and thus undercut his martial manliness. The anxiety is double fisted: Othello makes the woman black even as contact with the woman feminizes him. The fact that Desdemona is willing to be “half the wooer” (1.3.176) and the “captain’s captain” (2.1.74) of her more passive beloved, in spite of paternal and social opposition to the match, surprises Othello and earns his admiration: Nor from mine own weak merits will I draw The smallest fear, or doubt of her revolt, For she had eyes, and chose me. (3.3.191–93)

Othello’s seeming confidence in Desdemona is belied by the way “weak merits” echoes “weak function” (2.3.339) to suggest that Othello was too old to perform well as a lover. Falling in love in the fi rst place is Othello’s weakness as defi ned by his enemies. A further belying doubt manifests itself in the way that the “and” in the last line just quoted may be read as “and yet”: Desdemona chose Othello in spite of the evidence of her eyes. Perhaps Brabantio was right after all in asserting that Othello must have used some magic spell in order to convince Desdemona to overcome the repulsion that visual evidence alone would induce in most Venetians. And indeed a few lines later in this temptation scene Iago alludes to Brabantio’s last words that Desdemona deceived her father in marrying Othello, a deception which may have set a precedent for Desdemona’s supposed hiding of her flirtatious susceptibility to other men of “charms.”

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Othello’s wavering about his manliness evidences itself most powerfully in his doubts about whether he can satisfy Desdemona sexually and whether she is true to him. He believes that if he fails on the fi rst count she must fail on the second. This linkage between male potency and female chastity is something that Othello takes for granted, however much the play may interrogate his logic. Othello’s fear of impotence is coupled with an inverse but related anxiety that in devirginating Desdemona he makes insatiable her hitherto dormant sexual appetite. Thus either Othello is impotent and he cannot satisfy and therefore hold on to Desdemona, or in successfully satisfying her Othello opens up in her desires that make her unable to be satisfied by a single man alone, however potent he may be. The handkerchief is the privileged token for both the unleashing of sexual desire and the faithful maintenance of chastity. That it represents these ostensibly contrary sexual valences in a unitary symbolic web makes of the handkerchief the play’s single most vexed object of critical interpretation. Othello regards the loss of the handkerchief as the sign of Desdemona’s betrayal, but the narrative strands that the handkerchief comprises suggest also the possibility of male unchastity, a third term that unsettles the too easy binarism between male desire and female chastity. The crux of Othello’s crisis of manhood lies in the web of the handkerchief, which serves as both the guarantor of secure heterosexual relationship and the locus of its dissolution through doubt. The handkerchief ravels up many narratives: of budding romance and the fated course of love, of virgin sacrifice, of chastity and its loss, of the relationship between mother and son. The genealogy of its transmission admits of more than one line. It becomes surcharged with hysteria when Othello takes the purity of its origins to have been corrupted; it comes to signify the alienability of love, love reduced to the status of a commodity passed from hand to hand, exchanged on the market of desire. The handkerchief as commodity is fetishized in the materialist sense that relations between the people who possess it take on the quality of relations between things, and fetishized in the psychoanalytic sense that it displaces the genitalia with an object that designates their referential absence and potential alienability.8 The gap between the various narratives woven in the magic web of the handkerchief and its corporal referent—the hymen, as we shall see—sparks a murderous desire to close this gap in the name of reintroducing marital security. But the play is pessimistic in insisting that the gap is always there, from the most innocent, early romantic stage of the relationship of the two lovers to the death of Desdemona that Othello hopes will restore her innocence by returning the hymen to its original, unbroken state. The physical hand is no less symbolically charged than the figured handkerchief associated with it by synecdoche; the hand no less than the artifact signifies metaphorically. The hands of lovers plighted in marriage, for example, are a figure for the spiritual bond that makes two bodies one incorporate and indivisible flesh. The image of one hand bound in loyalty

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to another, however, may also be put to wanton use, or to wanton interpretation, as when Iago plays upon the lusty sense of Desdemona and Cassio paddling palms in 2.1. [Aside] He takes her by the palm; ay, well said, whisper: as little a web as this will ensnare as great a fly as Cassio. Ay, smile upon her, do : I will catch you in your own courtesies: you say true, ’tis so indeed. If such tricks as these strip you out of your lieutenantry, it had been better you had not kiss’d your three fi ngers so oft, which now again you are most apt to play the sir in: good, well kiss’d, an excellent courtesy; ’tis so indeed: yet again, your fi ngers at your lips? would they were clyster-pipes for your sake . . . [Trumpets within.] (2.1.167–77)

Here Iago subverts the simple sense of innocence, willfully reasoning that the mere touching of hands is tantamount to the incorporate conclusion. In speaking aside Iago gives voice to the unconscious that sees in the image of one hand embracing another the latent representation of a dirty gesture for copulation. Or perhaps it is visions of digital, anal, or oral sex with which Iago amuses himself in solitary pleasure, for “clyster-pipes” are tubes used for either enemas or vaginal douches.9 Fingers are the physical prop for pipes or phalli, and Cassio’s fi ngers have indiscriminately conjoined, if not orally engorged, fair and foul. Kissing the hands in an exaggerated gesture of courtesy is deflated by Iago to a gesture that stands courtesy on its head, conflating orifices and digits and substituting lower for upper orifices, genitals for lips.10 Iago soon gives public voice to his preceding aside in language so reductively visceral and direct that even the dim Roderigo must understand that gestures of courtesy betray foul intent: Iago. Didst thou not see her paddle with the palm of his hand? Roderigo. Yes, but that was but courtesy. Iago. Lechery, by this hand: an index, and obscure prologue to the history of lust and foul thoughts: they met so near with their lips, that their breaths embrac’d together. When these mutualities so marshal the way, hard at hand comes the main exercise, the incorporate conclusion. (2.1.251–58)

Possibly even in advance of the consummation of Desdemona’s marriage, Iago asks us to posit an adulterous liaison between Desdemona and Cassio. This incorporate conclusion is rhetorically also a foregone conclusion (see 3.3.434), one that puts the conclusion preposterously before any evidentiary premises that would make it plausible or demonstrable. The logic depends again on turning top to bottom, lips to breaths to genitals in dizzying sequence, in scandalous metonymic leaps. The hand is illogically and preposterously both the evidence (incriminating body part) and the “index”

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(index fi nger, logical indicator), indicator of something incriminating or prohibited [OED sb. 6] that points reflexively to itself as shaming evidence. Both evidence, in other words, and the mode of arguing it involve circularly the hand or its parts. The rhetorical coup de grâce is Iago’s use of the hand not only as bodily referent but also as figure of speech and deictic rhetorical gesture in the phrases “by this hand” and “hard at hand.” “Hand” forces the hand of the audience; Iago’s rhetorical manipulations leave auditors like Roderigo dumbfounded, their tongues, as it were, tied behind their backs. It is evident that Othello’s status as a racial other cannot be divorced from the terms describing the emptying out of his manhood into impotence and effeminization. Race is a more public and open issue than sexual performance and it is considered fair game for some, especially Iago, to mock Othello’s blackness, as indicated in the opening pages of this chapter. Othello is an other, an outsider, due to what Iago calls his alien “clime, complexion, and degree” (3.3.235). Cassio, by contrast, is the ultimate insider. Othello comes to Venice as an other in several respects: as someone whose parentage is unknown, as a pagan who has converted to Christianity upon being redeemed from slavery, and as someone unattached in romantic terms. Iago too is an outsider, able to use his status as the one overlooked for promotion as an excuse to play the malcontent whose sole pleasure lies in subverting the status quo. Iago insinuates into Othello his disaffection with being the other vis-à-vis Cassio, who represents status quo success. In the temptation scene (3.3) Othello’s manliness is evacuated; his unitary being as a man is made to ring double and hollow. One of the important principles of hollowing out, I argue, is the way that Iago unmans Othello by echoing him. What I see as the hollowing out of Othello is a redescription of what traditional criticism regards in terms of Othello’s gullibility. Othello is gullible because he is so quick not to believe himself; instead, he believes that Iago is more honest, more true and chaste, than either Desdemona or himself. By the end of the temptation scene Othello and Iago kneel together, as if at the marriage altar, and exchange romantically charged vows. Othello’s sudden change in loyalty from Desdemona to Iago limns a trajectory made possible only by Othello’s gullibility. Iago’s chief tool for getting Othello to fall his way is his shadowing of Othello and repeating of his words, which fractures Othello’s confidence and reduces him to two men: Othello the confident lover of Desdemona and Othello the doubter of his wife’s chastity. Doubt, the fl ip side of credulity, results from the resounding of words, which causes them to be evacuated of their integral meaning and to resound hollowly. Such hollow words vitiate the potency of the one who speaks them, substituting credulity for potency. Echo is the principle of doubling that hollows out the meaning of a word. “Hand” and “handkerchief” become decreasingly meaningful the more often and insistently they are repeated in dialogue. In tracing the circuit from speaker to recipient and back again, the echoed word returns distorted, with a meaning antithetical to that of its original utterance. Iago

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epitomizes this insinuating distortion performed by the interlocutor’s echo. In the following passage he simply mimics (or echoes) the mode of echoing initiated by Othello himself. The boundaries between two men fade to indistinction: Iago. Did Michael Cassio, when you woo’d my lady, Know of your love? Othello. He did, from fi rst to last: . . . why dost thou ask? Iago. But for a satisfaction of my thought, No further harm. Othello. Why of thy thought, Iago? Iago. I did not think he had been acquainted with her. Othello. Oh yes, and went between us very often. Iago. Indeed? Othello. Indeed? Indeed: discern’st thou aught in that? Is he not honest? Iago. Honest, my lord? Othello. Honest? ay, honest. Iago. My lord, for aught I know. Othello. What dost thou think? Iago. Think, my lord? Othello. Think, my lord? By heaven, he echoes me, As if there were some monster in his thought, Too hideous to be shown: thou didst mean something; I heard thee say but now, thou lik’st not that, When Cassio left my wife: what didst not like? (3.3.95–114)

Any word put under pressure of rapid repetition or echo comes to sound like nonsense, as in so many children’s tongue twisters. Let a word alliterate against itself and it will disintegrate (as when Othello demands “the handkerchief!” of Desdemona four times in exclamatory succession [3.4.87, 90, 91, 94]). The repetition of “indeed” introduces into this word the possibility that what is ratified as fact is, in fact (indeed), not so. This is the first point in the play that Othello discovers, thanks to the promptings of Iago’s echo, the possibility that words designating truthfulness, like “indeed” and “honest,” may ring false. Conversely, he notes, also for the fi rst time, the contrast between Iago’s outwardly manifest reluctance to speak and the monstrous “close denotements” (3.3.127) that must be pried loose from his interior (3.3.115–20).11 Although the doubleness of words introduces Othello to the concept of deceit, the distance that he remarks between the outer and the inner Iago inconsistently fails to do the same, being taken instead as a benchmark of Iago’s sincerity. Secrets yielded reluctantly from interior depths must come from the heart, Othello believes, priding himself on the perspicacity of this revelation, though at precisely this moment he is blind to the mendacity that belies Iago’s “honesty.” As “honest” reverberates

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between Othello and Iago in this and other scenes to form a thematic leitmotif of Othello’s self-defeating trust, its two integral meanings of “chaste” and “truthful” are evacuated, and the word becomes a duplicitous mask for the hypocrisy of “honest Iago,” whose unfaithfulness and untruthfulness are perversely deflected onto Desdemona. As “honest” is hollowed out, so too is the etymologically related concept of “honor.” The beginning of 4.1 marks another scene in which Iago and Othello uncannily echo each other’s words and fi nish each other’s sentences. Under pressure of repetition “honor” comes to be equated not just with the handkerchief but with some invisible essence that the latter stands for: Iago. But if I give my wife a handkerchief— Othello. What then? Iago. Why then ’tis hers, my lord, and being hers, She may, I think, bestow’t on any man. Othello. She is protectress of her honour too, May she give that? Iago. Her honour is an essence that’s not seen, They have it very oft that have it not. (4.1.10–17)

A possible reading of the honor whose referent is something not seen may be the hymen, honor in it its most reductively material, albeit invisible, form. I shall have more to say about the handkerchief as visible token of an invisible (hymeneal) honor later. Suffice it to note here the ambiguity of “bestow’t.” May a woman bestow “it,” the handkerchief, without also giving “it,” her honor, away? The same pronoun, under pressure of Iago’s insinuating banter, is made to bear two contrary significations. The second meaning raises the stakes over the fi rst, as the handkerchief passes from the visible love token to one’s most intimate and least visible private part. Both meanings, handkerchief and hymen, reduce love to a fetish. A few lines later, when Iago implies that Cassio has told him of an affair with Desdemona, Othello jumps for the bait provided by Iago’s words. The climax of Iago’s obsessive repetitions—as if Iago is the (bad) conscience or alter ego of Othello—eventually makes Othello fall into what the Folio and Q2 stage directions term a “trance” (4.1.43) and what Iago himself calls an “epilepsy” (4.1.50). To echo unwittingly and too closely the text of another induces a species of “madness” (4.1.55): Othello. What hath he said? Iago. Faith, that he did . . . I know not what he did. Othello. But what? Iago. Lie Othello. With her? Iago. With her, on her, what you will.

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The critical distinction in meaning (signified) between unchastity and chastity is undercut by the indistinction in sound (signifier) between “on her” and what I hear as the homonymous “honor,” a word that evokes the handkerchief in a somewhat hysterical register. To lie “on her” is to belie her “honor.” This association of words is facile, irresponsible, glibly reductive, yet powerfully efficacious for Othello. Othello’s willful inclination to believe that he has been betrayed is the evident consequence of the alacrity with which he falls into the verbal traps of echo, doubling, and paronomasia. He allows wit to trick him out of judgment, the subversive sense of words to pervert his own good sense. He throws his love away for a mere trick of words—a sound effect—a lie that masquerades as some inevitable and deeply revealing conjunction of signifiers. The much pressured word “honor” occurs again frequently in the fi nal scene of the play to designate a man’s stake in keeping his wife chaste. He loses his honor the moment she loses hers. Othello draws the etymological connection: “But why should honour outlive honesty?” (5.2.246). This comment follows upon Othello’s belated recognition that “honest, honest Iago” (5.2.155) has belied Desdemona’s honesty. Finally Othello uses “honest” to modify the one who truly is so, Desdemona, but she can be seen as honest only once she is dead. Only when her voice is choked closed and silenced can Othello imagine his wife as chaste again. Dead, she will betray no more men. The parameters of echo extend well beyond local effects of dialogue, as in the evacuating repetitions of the word “honor,” to larger structures of allusion and topical concordancing, and to the way that characters seem to double each other. The play refers to both Othello and Iago as devils and as Turks. Both men are denigrated as animals: Othello is called a “circumcised dog” (5.2.353) and Iago a “Spartan dog” (5.2.362). Othello calls himself a “cursed slave” (5.2.277) and Lodovico opines that Othello has “fall’n in the practice of a damned slave” (5.2.293). Some of these doublets fall so close to each other in the text that even a reader with short memory will remark Shakespeare’s effort to collapse protagonist and villain under the single rubric of the subhuman: slave, animal, devil. Both Othello and Iago are outsiders uncomfortable with their position in the social order. One kills his wife because he misinterprets the displacement of the handkerchief; the other kills his wife because she reveals the provenance of this purloined keepsake. Though he forgets or ignores evidence that could serve to exonerate Desdemona, Othello remembers all too well, and echoes, advice that Iago has given him in the past. Even when Iago is not physically present at his side to prompt him in dialogue, his words continue to reverberate in Othello’s psyche by triggering effects from a distance. One such sound effect, which

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clearly shows that the two men are of one mind in their misogyny, is the theme of woman’s commonness, localized in the handkerchief: Emilia. Do not you chide, I have a thing for you. Iago. A thing for me? it is a common thing— Emilia. Ha? Iago. To have a foolish wife. (3.3.305–8)

Iago’s joke that a woman’s “thing” is common is a locus communis of misogyny, like his assertion that women are “foolish” or wanton, which recalls his scurrilous dialogue on female folly with Desdemona in 2.1. Here the handkerchief is treated like an item of intimate apparel—a thing conflated metonymically with a woman’s private parts—that has been made open to public view and is thus debased. Iago’s double entendre upon the word “thing” reduces love to its common denominator in the flesh, a thing that all women share indifferently, even indiscriminately, according to Iago. If women are held in common, the men who love them risk losing their own singularity as well by falling under the generic rubric of cuckold. One cuckold is like any other, a stock character emptied of the honor that secures individuality, a man thus made a commonplace object of ridicule. Although Othello is not privy to Iago’s exchange with Emilia, its message prescribes his action at a distance, with the incidental difference that Desdemona is substituted for Emilia. Thinking himself a cuckold, Othello unwittingly reprises Iago’s logic of woman as “common thing” in the brothel scene, where he casts Emilia as bawd and Desdemona he calls a “public commoner” (4.2.75), “that cunning whore of Venice” (4.2.91).12 Othello calls his wife a common whore because he assumes that her hands and her handkerchief are held in common. His obsession with hands echoes Iago’s emphasis on hands as sexually charged instruments. Like Iago himself, the hand is not what it seems: Othello. This argues fruitfulness, and liberal heart; Hot, hot, and moist, this hand of yours requires A sequester from liberty; fasting, and praying, Much castigation, exercise devout; For here’s a young and sweating devil here, That commonly rebels: ’tis a good hand, A frank one. Desdemona. You may indeed say so, For ’twas that hand that gave away my heart. Othello. A liberal hand; the hearts of old gave hands, But our new heraldry is hands, not hearts. (3.4.34–43)

Othello’s last remark designates the hand, formerly the secure pledge of troth, as the insignia of ruse and hypocrisy. The new heraldry opens up

90 Crossing Gender in Shakespeare the doubleness within words like “liberal” and “frank,” which under the old heraldic dispensation of trust signified freeness and openness but under the supervenient rule of deceit have come to mean the opposite, license and wantonness. The unwitting second sense of Desdemona’s speech is that to give one’s hand or heart once is to set a precedent for giving it again and again. The hand is duplicitous, ambidextrous; on the one hand it gives, on the other it takes away. Although the hand appoints itself as loyal conduit to the heart, this very act gestures towards its shadowy double: another, sinister hand that masks the heart in order to cover its shame for having betrayed its lover. The new heraldry is the deception that attempts to disguise the failed promise of the old heraldry to ground all promises in the transparency of cordial honor. The exchange regarding the untrustworthy hand sets the stage for Desdemona’s admission in the lines that follow that she no longer possesses the handkerchief. Not to have it in hand is to have lost her chastity, Othello concludes reductively. But his highly charged narrative of the handkerchief’s genealogy suggests that it is not chastity that is at issue, but virginity, as if to lose her virginity in his arms is equivalent to her betrayal of him with another man.13 Such is the message wrapped in the enigmatic genealogy of the handkerchief: That’s a fault: that handkerchief Did an Egyptian to my mother give, She was a charmer, and could almost read The thoughts of people; she told her, while she kept it ’Twould make her amiable, and subdue my father Entirely to her love: but if she lost it, Or made a gift of it, my father’s eye Should hold her loathly, and his spirits should hunt After new fancies: she, dying, gave it me, And bid me, when my fate would have me wive, To give it her; I did so, and take heed on’t, Make it a darling, like your precious eye, To lose, or give’t away, were such perdition As nothing else could match. (3.4.53–66)

The nine uses of “it” and its abbreviations ring referential changes on the handkerchief, chastity, and virginity in various contexts of this passage. Giving it, the handkerchief, away symbolizes sacrificing it, chastity, as both handkerchief and body become commodities put into circulation and hence lose the uniqueness that chastity presupposes. The perdition of losing it, however, sounds more like the giving up of a woman’s virginity: lost once and never to be regained. Is losing it, virginity, tantamount to giving it, chastity, away?14 The sanctity of the handkerchief’s bond is sealed by the mother who gives it to Othello while “dying,” a word

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many critics take in the sexual as well as mortal sense, as if conflating the mother on her death bed and the son’s future wife on her wedding bed.15 The conflation is reinforced by the ambiguous referent of the “her” (63) to whom Othello is supposed to give “it” when he marries. “Her” circles back to the dying mother and forward to the bride dying on her wedding night. Othello presides over the death of the mother and effects the dying of the wife, as it were in a single incestuous turn. “Her” death is the consequence of the son’s/husband’s “fate” to take a wife, a provocative choice of words. Othello laments that being made a cuckold is “destiny, unshunnable, like death: / Even then this forked plague is fated to us, / When we do quicken” (3.3.279–81). Cuckoldry is fate, and fate is death. The husband’s wife cuckolds him because his mother cuckolded his father before him—again the referential ambiguity of the pronoun “her,” uniting the two love objects in the man’s life, wife and mother. He was born a bastard—“quickened” or conceived under the sign of the forked plague—hence fated at birth to give birth to bastards like himself in turn. Othello’s lament, “Would thou hadst ne’er been born!” (4.2.71), expresses his disgust for the female body, the mother’s body as well as Desdemona’s. If for a man to be born is bastardy, for a woman to be born is to be born an adulteress, a traitor of flesh and blood. As early as its origin the handkerchief is implicated in, and indeed presupposes, death and dying. Its talismanic powers derive from transforming sacrificial death into the permanence of a magical artifact: ’Tis true, there’s magic in the web of it; A sibyl, that had number’d in the world The sun to make two hundred compasses, In her prophetic fury sew’d the work; The worms were hallow’d that did breed the silk, And it was dyed in mummy, which the skilful Conserve of maidens’ hearts. (3.4.67–73)

The red of the strawberries that spot the handkerchief derives from the blood of mummified virgins’ hearts. It is blood spilled in the pagan rite of virgin sacrifice: the sacrifice of virgins and/or the sacrifice or violation of their virginity.16 The blood that flows from the wounds of virgins in this sacralizing violence is sublated in the preservative dye that depicts an allegory of chastity achieved only at the expense of maiden sacrifice. Temporal dying, in the two senses of devirgination and decease (if not in the third sense of sexual climax), occurs but once in a lifetime and is the precondition for manufacturing the timeless dye of art. Devirgination in a passing moment provides the ground or material support (the dye) for a figural representation of chastity, a state of permanence in the textile work of art and in the moral subject who bears this labored handiwork (the handkerchief) as guarantor of her chastity.

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It is important to note in this allegory that chastity is not at odds with loss of virginity; indeed, it presupposes such loss, such maiden sacrifice. This truth is something that Othello fails to recognize, as we have seen, in spite of his implicit faith in the handkerchief. He feels that his devirgination of Desdemona opens her to insatiable desire, though none of the legends attached to the napkin imply this. Othello’s dying mother insists upon what Othello and too many critics forget: the loss of the handkerchief spells the loss of male chastity. The man’s eyes will wander after new fancies if ever the handkerchief slips away and fails to anchor him any longer. It is in tending to Othello’s pained forehead that Desdemona drops the handkerchief and it is Othello, eye witness to what will later be taken as the ocular proof positive against Desdemona but should instead be her vindication, who advises her, oddly, “Let it alone” (3.3.292). Why does Othello, odder still, fail to remember this episode when he asks for the handkerchief just one scene later? Blind to his role as accomplice in his own cuckolding, Othello seems willfully bent on destroying his marriage and scapegoating Desdemona in the process. If it is his “fate” to be cuckolded, Othello himself is fate’s instrument. Fate does not stand over against Othello; fate is wish fulfi llment. Although the handkerchief tells a story that the dye of maiden blood is surety for chastity, other images of blood in the play represent the lust that stains and destroys chastity. In a desperate expression of the talionic law, Othello says of Desdemona, “Thy bed, lust-stain’d, shall with lust’s blood be spotted” (5.1.36). Othello intends to refer to blood ostensibly drawn from Desdemona by a rival lover, but how can such blood be distinguished from the blood sacrifice of Desdemona’s virginity on the wedding night?17 The latter is seemingly identical with what dyes the handkerchief, makes it fast for chastity, and insulates Desdemona from being tainted by the other (lust’s) blood. We have seen that male hysteria holds the loss of virginity equivalent to the loss of chastity itself: Othello, under Iago’s power of suggestion, insists on reinterpreting the virgin’s blood as a sign of lust’s blood. The wedding sheet is a type of handkerchief writ large except that it radically inverts its meaning, making of the blood of virgin sacrifice that insures chastity the blot that erases it. The spotting of the wedding sheets recalls, with a difference, Iago’s description of the handkerchief “spotted with strawberries” (3.3.442). Spots may be innocent, on the one hand, or signify sin and the fallen order, on the other. Iago more than anyone is responsible for perverting the innocent meaning of signs to their bias, of spotting the spot. He evacuates the sign by hollowing it out, with the result that it comes to induce the dizzying anxiety that all signs resound hollowly: blood is not proof of honor; even the purest blood is spotted. Iago advises Othello not to poison Desdemona, but to “strangle her in her bed, even the bed she hath contaminated” (4.1.203–4). He conflates the wedding sheets with adulterous sheets, and he suggests a subversive analogy between the handkerchief as token of adultery and the bed-sheets

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as the place where the adultery took place. Desdemona will interpret these same sheets as her shroud. As the sheets bear her dying in the sexual sense, so too they will bear her to her grave. The wedding bed is the death bed: “If I do die before thee, prithee shroud me / In one of those same sheets” (4.3.24–25). Michael Neill has written suggestively about how the tragically loaded wedding bed is a scene of unknowing since the bed-curtains are drawn shut, the usual practice in productions of the play prior to the twentieth century because directors regularly found the death scene “too hideous to be shown” (3.3.107). Just what happens when Othello kills Desdemona behind the closed curtains is open to doubt on the stage. Does he make love to her fi rst, then kill her because he is upset that she is no longer a virgin? She calls him to “come to bed” (5.2.24) and he wants her to yield, yet her wish-fulfi lling yielding gives rise to disgust. The possibility that Othello kisses Desdemona before he kills her is scandalizing, Neill argues.18 In witnessing an 1855 production of the sex-death scene in which the curtains were open, the Melbourne Argus critic wrote indignantly, “[The] consummation should take place behind the curtain and out of sight.”19 The word “consummation” is triply charged, with the senses of sexual and dramatic climax, and with the sense of death: things too hideous to be shown.20 Othello smothers Desdemona in her bed so as not to draw blood, the mistake of the wedding night that he now hopes to reverse: Yet I’ll not shed her blood, Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow, And smooth, as monumental alabaster; Yet she must die, else she’ll betray more men. (5.2.3–6)

Othello’s fetishizing of whiteness and making of his wife a monument suggest that in fantasy he wants to restore her to the virgin state, but since this is impossible the next best thing must be, by some monstrously compelling logic, to kill her: When I have pluck’d the rose I cannot give it vital growth again, It needs must wither. . . . Be thus, when thou art dead, and I will kill thee, And love thee after. (5.2.13–19)

Although the rose cannot be put back on the bush once plucked, Othello thinks that he can close off any conduit of unchastity that the plucking may have occasioned: “These hands have newly stopp’d” (5.2.203) Desdemona’s hitherto too open orifices. His hands that strangle her thus undo the ill effects of her “frank” and “liberal” hands. Death is the remedy for the repetition of a sin “a thousand times committed” (5.2.213) and for the

94 Crossing Gender in Shakespeare hyperbolically repetitious lamenting of it. “Still as the grave” (5.2.95), Desdemona will be a worthy object of Othello’s love because she will not betray any man again: “Cold, cold, my girl, / Even like thy chastity” (5.2.276–77). Othello’s necrophilic embrace of his wife’s marmoreal or alabaster body restores to him in fantasy the broken hymen and reduces Desdemona to pure virgin whiteness again: “pale as thy smock” (5.2.274). The imagery suggests reversal of repetition, closure of openings, stilling of motion, and transforming of red to white. The only securely chaste woman, Othello’s perverse logic implies, is a dead woman. In the fi nal scene Othello tries to resecure his masculinity at the expense of Desdemona’s death. Iago’s duplicitous language succeeds in turning Othello inside out, creating from the once solidly masculine warrior a jealous, doubt-plagued monster. Under the barrage of Iago’s insinuations Othello calls into question his masculine potency in a way that he never doubted his martial prowess. In returning Desdemona to her pristine state of cold, statuesque whiteness, Othello thinks that he can recuperate his masculine strength, if only in terms of achieving the strength needed to kill himself: “I took by th’ throat the circumcised dog / and smote him—thus!” (5.2.353–54). Dead, Othello will be as secure in his masculinity as Desdemona is in her feminine chastity.

5

Martial Cleopatra and the Remasculation of Antony

Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra hold out the promise of androgyny, of two lovers who defy the straitjacketed gender expectations imposed by Roman masculinism. The lovers die for their temerity in preferring love to war, but their deaths successfully resist all efforts of Roman triumphalism to co-opt them as trophies. Cleopatra’s defiance of Caesar’s masculinism fi nds its triumph in a phoenix-like self-immolation, by which desire renews itself and its object, impossibly, at the moment of death. Cleopatra is the outside-the-law that ruptures the Roman legal claim to sexual and juridical order, even as the latter seeks to secure its foundation in opposition to the likes of Cleopatra. Antony is caught in the middle between the laws of his Roman heritage and the Egyptian pleasure that offers to free him from historical embeddedness. The temptations of such pleasure, obsessively figured in this play in terms of dissolving the integral self in water (liquefaction), threaten the integrity of his proper name, “Antony.” Cleopatra makes of “Antony” something other than what it is, rending the name and dissolving its bearer, as Antony intuits and his Roman peers constantly taunt him for. But extraordinarily in the Shakespearean canon, Cleopatra makes a strong claim to restore Antony to life and integrity in her suicide fi nale. She re-members and re-integrates the shambles of her lover, fractured in name but resurrected in spirit. Rendered dead for offenses to the law of the fatherland, Antony is restored to legitimacy as the “husband” of the woman whose maternal nurturance supersedes the law of the father and its exigencies of death.

I—THE PRIMAL SCENE Let us begin with the primal scene of love-making. To the extent that it is representable on stage the bedroom is a liminal space between the private scene of lovers’ intimacies and the public stage of martial display. It serves as an intimate space for the lovers to explore the dissolution of public roles and fi xed boundaries, especially by means of sumptuary experimentation, as if changing costume in one’s private theater effects a bodily change that

96 Crossing Gender in Shakespeare is insulated from public disciplinary intervention. In the private bedroom space Cleopatra is pleased to subvert gender stereotypes, though to what ultimate effect in the public sphere remains unclear: I drunk him to his bed, Then put my tires and mantles on him, whilst I wore his sword Philippan. (2.5.21–23)1

As sole occupant of the subject position Cleopatra does all the work of vestiary transformation for both parties. One consequence of the lovers’ exchange of “tires” is that Antony’s sword is no longer in his own hands. Is this to say that he is unmanned, unfit for battle? Yes, if we judge by the standards of Actium; no, if by the later battle outside Alexandria for which Cleopatra arms him the morning after making love. In the latter scene Antony avers that his departure from Cleopatra’s bed is sealed with “a soldier’s kiss” (4.4.30). Love is the servant of revivified, remasculinized war. Antony sees in the Soldier who greets him a reflection of his own sense of the fusion of business and pleasure: “To business that we love we rise betime / And go to’t with delight” (4.4.20–21). Soldier Antony parts “like a man of steel” (4.4.33), the sword Philippan securely his in a way that it was not at Actium. At every turn, Shakespeare presses the question of whether love-making vitiates or potentiates martial valor. When Cleopatra screws up her generosity to forgive momentarily Antony’s just reported marriage to Octavia, she is both generous and jealous: “Though he be painted one way like a Gorgon, / The other way’s a Mars” (2.5.116–17). Antony’s treacherous is his Gorgon side of the perspective glass; Mars is his obverse, masculine, and loyal side. 2 The equation of male treachery with the female Gorgon, the castrating woman within the man, is symbolically complex because perspectively double. What makes the anamorphic icon so vexing to interpret is that the Gorgon’s head is mounted with snakes, hence amalgamating female and male, castration and insemination within the ostensibly female half of the emblematic perspective glass. The antithesis between Gorgon and Mars fails to be a useful instrument for characterizing either Antony or Cleopatra, however, because it ignores what Shakespeare emphasizes elsewhere in the play: women are fecundating, not castrating. Cleopatra inspires Antony’s bounty. Moreover, bounty cannot be defi ned in the terms of restrictive accounting as nonrecuperable loss, but instead must be seen as a giving that swells the resources of the very font that depletes itself. Antony’s bounty complements Cleopatra’s infi nite capacity to arouse desire and to receive its gifts. For Antony desire is circular, baseless, vertiginous in consequence of its law of origin: a vacuum excites desire and desire rushes vainly to fill the vacuum. This vacuous regress or gap in nature is the exciting lack famously described by Enobarbus in his praise of Cleopatra’s

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barge on the river Cydnus. In satisfying itself desire knows no extinction, only an acceleration that further attracts: On each side her Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling cupids, With divers-coloured fans, whose wind did seem To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool, And what they undid did. (2.2.211–15)

The fan image is of a bellows (1.1.9–10) that makes the cheeks rosier the more it feeds them air; the cooling air returns heated and so the fans must beat faster still, though still ineffectually. The more Cleopatra satisfies her desire, the more it renews its emanations with added heat, like the ecstasy of Donne’s lovers who prove “the Phoenix riddle hath more wit / By us. . . . We die and rise the same” (“The Canonization,” 23–26). As Antony whistles to the air, the air, indifferent to his attentions, “but for vacancy, / Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too, / And made a gap in nature” (2.2.226–28). Not only do many airs wait upon her and do her service (insofar as vacuum-abhorring nature gives them leave) but Cleopatra herself is a source of inexhaustible, replenishing breath. Enobarbus observes that she gives as well as she gets: I saw her once Hop forty paces through the public street And, having lost her breath, she spoke and panted, That she did make defect perfection, And, breathless, pour breath forth. (2.2.238–42)

Exhausted, she nonetheless fills the gap in nature, does what is undone, and like a goddess makes perfect the fallen world simply by exhaling. Her beauty, however, devours by increase of appetite whatever it nourishes or redeems from torpor: Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale Her infinite variety. Other women cloy The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry Where most she satisfies; for vilest things Become themselves in her, that the holy priests Bless her when she is riggish. (2.2.245–50)

That desire for Cleopatra will put Antony on a treadmill is painful only in part, for his ever-renewed appetite is transmuted from vileness to something becoming. Antony calls Cleopatra “this wrangling queen! / Whom everything becomes” (1.1.49–50). The renewal of desire participates in the sacred mystery of riggish flesh made spirit, of death made condition of

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renewed life, as in gardens of Adonis. The pain of love fi nds some compensation in the process of becoming art that is becoming. 3 Cydnus represents an ideal of desire not subject to the problems of evil or extinction or death. The rhetoric of Cydnus privileges resolvable paradox, whereas much of the rest of the play prefers a less sanguine ambiguity and a more antithetical sense of gender symbolism. The oscillating symbolic valences of serpents, for example, give rise to a version of desire that is multiply sexed, but not happily so. The oscillation in locating Antony between marble pillar and muddy ooze parallels that between straightlaced Roman morality and the sexual decadence that the Romans associate with Egypt’s too great and perhaps malignant fertility, epitomized by the serpent, which Egypt’s enemies find both enviable and threatening, fecundating and sterilizing. Serpents bred spontaneously in the Nile are symbolic of fertility, whereas those that stand guard in the Gorgon’s head are classic vehicles for blight and vengeance. An example of the later valence occurs when Antony’s tarnished reputation as a lover incites Cleopatra to hope that Egypt will melt into the Nile, “and kindly creatures / Turn all to serpents!” (2.5.78–79). This is the serpent as destroyer of fertility, the identical ally that Cleopatra calls upon a few lines later to spite Antony: “So half my Egypt were submerged and made / A cistern for scaled snakes!” (2.5.94–95). But Egypt aswarm with serpents is alternatively an image for the fertility of the land flooded by the Nile, the spontaneous generation of its female body. It is in this vein that Cleopatra imagines Antony addressing her as “my serpent of old Nile” (1.5.26).4 Antony’s enemies in turn malign Cleopatra for being the overflowing measure of the Nile which has dissolved Antony’s manhood and thus metamorphosed him into a strumpet’s man. In what follows I will return to the representations of desire that straddle the extremes between Cydnus’ infinitely happy replenishment of a vacuum and the both fertile and blighting serpent.

II—THE NAME OF ANTONY Shakespeare saddles Antony with associations of compromised masculinity from the beginning of the play. No sooner is Antony called “the bellows and the fan / To cool a gipsy’s lust” (1.1.9–10) than the stage direction indicates the entrance of Antony and Cleopatra and her train “with Eunuchs fanning her.”5 Antony is mocked because his army is said to be led by Cleopatra’s eunuch Photinus and her maids; the ships are not “well manned” (3.7.34); Antony is no more manly than the “women’s men” (3.3.70) whom he leads. Comments like these are balanced by the antithetical assertion of Cleopatra’s unwonted manliness: Cleopatra. A charge we bear i’th’war, And, as president of my kingdom, will Appear there for a man. (3.7.16–18)

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Cleopatra. Celerity is never more admired Than by the negligent. Antony. A good rebuke, Which might have well becomed the best of men, To taunt at slackness. (3.7.24–27)

The gender complementarity of the two lovers sets a rhetorical promise that will not be realized militarily. Their ample leisure for amorous banter and playful role reversal forecloses valiant action for at least part of the play. Antony is left dangling in a rhetorical hole, the position of one slackened by talking with his beloved too much about his torpor. If “Antony” becomes a byword for the man like Hercules or Aeneas divided between love and duty, even between feminine and masculine sides of his own self, “Caesar” is the name that Shakespeare gives to the solid, the univocal, the one who needs no other. 6 Octavius Caesar epitomizes traditional Roman virtus, the title to right that derives from manliness (the word virtus comprises both senses). In conversation with Agrippa about the great leaders of Rome, Enobarbus praises Caesar as “the Jupiter of men,” the “nonpareil,” the man whose absoluteness permits no relative comparison. Like God, Caesar’s only equal, his sole similitude, is himself: “Would you praise Caesar, say ‘Caesar’. Go no further” (3.2.9–13). Agrippa praises Antony in exaggerated terms as well, but falls short of Enobarbus in making no claim that Antony enjoys the divine self-identity or that merely speaking his name performatively instantiates the law. The name “Antony” is open to fracture, to wounding, to being made mortal by love and war in ways that are remote from unbreachable “Caesar.” “If I lose mine honour, / I lose myself” (3.4.22–23), Antony confesses, and it is just such a name for honor that he fatally sacrifices for love, or so the victorious Caesareans will insist on seeing it. Honor defi nes for Caesar the all in all of his masculinity, a code that swallows all resistance to its bias. Enobarbus describes the contest between Antony and Caesar in terms of vacuous versus full states: That he should dream, Knowing all measures, the full Caesar will Answer his emptiness! (3.13.34–36) Sir, sir, thou art so leaky That we must leave thee to thy sinking, for Thy dearest quit thee. (3.13.67–69)

Antony is a foundering vessel whose every leak Caesar and his “tributaries” (3.13.101) will rush to fill. In regretting the defectors he sees in his midst, including perhaps Cleopatra, Antony cannot help but subscribe to the terms of the dominant aqueous metaphor:

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Antony’s performative use of his proper name to claim that he is yet himself is rather desperate—it is so by his say-so, he hopes—and his claim is belied by the conspicuously divisive enjambment between subject and predicate nominative. Antony’s doubts about the continuing power of his name to draw loyalty from subjects is inseparable from his impugning the good name of Cleopatra: “what’s her name / Since she was Cleopatra?” (3.13.103–4). He wonders whether the most damaging leaks that Caesar has capitalized upon are just such wounds to his manhood. His dark fantasy that Cleopatra has changed name in going over to Caesar is the wound that will kill him.7 Knowing the whole range of liquid measures—from full to empty, from being Antony to not being Antony—is one of Shakespeare’s key images for differentiating changing Antony from unchanging Caesar. Caesar is stoic, calculating, pragmatic; full, whole, solid. Thidias rests secure in following “the bidding of the fullest man and worthiest / To have command obeyed” (3.13.92–93). Antony mocks Cleopatra with the “boy” Caesar’s capacity “to fill thy wishes to the brim” (3.13.5). The surfeit of filling/fullness imagery in 3.13 forecasts Caesar’s victory even as it reminds us that elsewhere in the play Antony’s characteristic virtue, bounty, is described in terms of an emptying out in ample measures, an outflowing of largesse. In the zero sum game of warring triumvirs the rise of Caesar’s star necessitates that Antony’s fortunate stars “have empty left their orbs and shot their fi res / Into th’abysm of hell” (3.13.151–52). Antony’s self-emptying bounty thus plays into the hands of Caesar’s characteristic appetite for dominion. Caesarean fullness can never entertain reciprocity or even tolerate dissent. It brooks no mutual flow of influence; it melts, inundates, floods all opposition. It excels in battle by sea.8 The catastrophe at Actium is the result of Antony’s loss of self, described so typically in Roman terms as a loss of customary manhood. Canidius offers the tautological explanation: “Had our general / Been what he knew—himself—it had gone well” (3.10.26–27).9 Shakespeare takes from Plutarch this notion that a woman is to blame for alienating the man from his customary masculine performance: There Antonius shewed plainely, that he had not onely lost the corage and hart of an Emperor, but also of a valliant man, and that he was not his owne man: (proving that true which an old man spake in myrth, that the soule of a lover lived in another body, and not in his owne) he was so caried

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away with the vaine love of this woman, as if he had been glued unto her, and that she could not have removed without moving of him also.10

By this logic the female body ensnares the male soul and so renders it unworthy of anything beyond the corporeal treadmill of constant love-making. This explanation of his defeat, “that he was not his owne man,” is one that Antony, himself again, accepts in retrospect: I have fled myself and have instructed cowards To run and show their shoulders. Friends, be gone. I have myself resolved upon a course Which has no need of you. Be gone. My treasure’s in the harbour. Take it. Oh, I followed that I blush to look upon. ...................................... Pray you, look not sad Nor make replies of loathness; take the hint Which my despair proclaims. Let that be left Which leaves itself. (3.11.7–20)

In seeing clearly that he took leave of his senses in the heat of battle, Antony sets the precedent for his soldiers to abandon him in the martial scenes that follow, as he left himself. Such “manly” resolve is premised less on taking responsibility for oneself than on blaming another; Antony’s distanced perspective of defeat is not so much clear-eyed as recriminatory. Coming to one’s senses in the sober self-analysis after defeat is achieved only through projecting fear of the male enemy onto the lover. The general finds an easy scapegoat in her whose strings led his rudder astray. But the scapegoated Cleopatra will insist on speaking the last word, taking the responsibility to sacrifice herself without resort to scapegoating others on her pyre. Antony’s loadstone is not the self-identical sun but the moon (Isis, Cleopatra), to whose flow and ebb he is subject and whose alternation of fullness and emptiness Caesar never suffers. Antony laments how the obscuring of the moon causes and signals a falling off from fullness: “Alack, our terrene moon is now eclipsed / And it portends alone the fall of Antony” (3.13.158–59). The changeable Cleopatra is to blame for the waning of his fortunes, he opines, or at least for his rhetorical excesses in overswearing so. The “fall” from fullness is the descriptive sign of someone whose military, amorous, and dramatic trajectory is as variable as the attractive moon is changeable. But true to fickle form, Antony lets Cleopatra inspire him to one last exercise of prowess. In response to her plea that she would rather melt poison hail in her mouth and retroactively abort “the memory of my womb” (3.13.168) before she would ever turn cold to him, Antony pronounces that his sword is fit (3.13.180) and that there is ample “sap” (3.13.197) coursing through his veins. The eclipsed moon waxes in

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the ascendant and the life fluids buoy both soldier and lover. A narrowly evaded abortion gives way to the womb militant. Cleopatra describes the mutuality of the lovers’ new fortunes in terms that recall the interdependence of their vacillating identities up to this point: It is my birthday. I had thought t’have held it poor, but since my lord Is Antony again, I will be Cleopatra. (3.13.190–92)

Being oneself again is contingent upon another. In Egypt, unlike Rome, one is not author of herself; no one stands alone. The inverse of projecting the male warrior’s defeats onto the disintegrating influence of another is what Cleopatra here celebrates, a love that posits that a woman’s ability to pronounce her name whole presupposes hearing that name called by her beloved. In what follows I will explore how the violation of this circuit of calling out the name of one’s love brings about Antony’s suicide in act 4, and how in act 5 Cleopatra restores her lover by performing his rebirth. Antony’s abounding sap and amorous bounty fly in the face of the obligatory martial bias against emotional attachment and ignore as well the normative injunctions to confi ne one’s goals to pragmatic self-interest, Caesar’s forte. The assumption that the coursing that renews life in the soldier is identical to what makes the blood surge through the lover’s veins is called into question in Enobarbus’ last words in the scene, spoken in skeptical privacy: Now he’ll outstare the lightning. To be furious Is to be frighted out of fear, and in that mood The dove will peck the estridge; and I see still A diminution in our captain’s brain Restores his heart. When valour preys on reason, It eats the sword it fights with. I will seek Some way to leave him. (3.13.200–6)

Although the soldier’s discretion (“brain”) may flatter itself in mistaking the swelling of the heart’s blood for an increase in valour, in fact the sword is only self-consuming and deflating. Enobarbus, like Caesar, disavows the pretension that rekindled love will inspire the conquest of anything beyond the world of the lovers’ bedroom (perhaps not even that). Lust is not prowess. The amorously charged body must prey on itself, like some voracious bird. Separation from the beloved, Enobarbus reasons, is the only way to keep from devouring oneself by recklessly venturing oneself. His reasoning necessarily absents him from Cleopatra’s birthday party. The flow of fortune to which Antony but not Caesar is subject necessarily oscillates, given its metaphorical terms, between increase and diminution, waxing and waning, fulfi llment and evacuation. Antony’s meditation on

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the vaporousness of clouds in his penultimate scene on stage seeks to locate a reinforcing objective correlative for his wanton fortunes in the short duration and metamorphic fickleness of watery forms: 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. (4.14.9–13)

Reduced to the status of a body—now a bear or lion, next a citadel or mountain, fi nally a horse wryly insubstantial compared to the one that Cleopatra wished to ride upon (1.5)—Antony names himself as himself even as he recognizes the imminent indistinction or liquefaction of his life. The negative prefi xes in “dislimns” and “indistinct” perform at the linguistic level what the cloud pageant paints in visual “signs” (4.14.7). But there is a difference between the visual signs and the correlative linguistic commentary: the latter is self-conscious, aware of its own demise in a way that the non-conscious cloud world cannot be. Man alone of all creatures mocks himself with suicide; he alone is complicit in his own dislimning and dislimbing on the rack of cloud. Thus Antony will fi nd no solace in the clouds that cannot return his gaze of recognition or share his sense of impending loss. His tragic anticipation condemns him to see the clouds as signs symbolic of precisely the loss that they cannot see reciprocally in him. The immediate occasion of Antony’s attempted death is the false report of Cleopatra’s betrayal, which ruffles his interior sense of self, even though his visible form is no more secure than the cloud forms whose passing inspires his melancholy. Over against these toys of breath that change form instantaneously, Antony can claim to distinguish himself in being at least nominally self-identical: “Here I am Antony, / Yet cannot hold this visible shape, my knave” (4.14.13–14). Here again one sees the contrast between name and vision. Antony goes on to denounce what he takes to be Cleopatra’s having “packed cards with Caesar” (4.14.19), against which he shores himself up with another, desperate, version of the argument that he is yet identical to himself: “There is left us / Ourselves to end ourselves” (4.14.21–22). At least the name of Antony, via (assisted) suicide, remains true to report and reputation for integrity, whether or not the body passes away like water in water. The name is integral spirit, the body disintegrating flesh. This simple, highly orthodox formula is invoked often enough by the Stoic suicide.11 But the analogy does not hold in Antony and Cleopatra, for the spirit of Antony is not inviolable. What breaks the integrity of his name is not any false rumor of Cleopatra’s unchastity but rather Mardian’s false report of his mistress’ death, which the servant performs loyally according to his mistress’

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express instructions: “Say that the last I spoke was ‘Antony’, / And word it, prithee, piteously” (4.13.8–9).12 Cleopatra perpetrates this falsehood in order to test by his reaction to her “death” whether Antony has been false to her.13 She anticipated two acts earlier, somewhat hypothetically, that news of a lover’s death would spell death for his recipient partner: Cleopatra. Ram thou thy fruitful tidings in mine ears, That long time have been barren! Messenger. Madam, madam— Cleopatra. Antonio’s dead! If thou say so, villain, Thou kill’st thy mistress. (2.5.24–27)

Cleopatra’s incisive anticipation—“Antonio’s dead”—is a means of foreclosing upon a wrenching double death, Antony’s and her own. The Messenger’s forthcoming news of Antony’s marriage to Octavia, though far from the promise to make the long-barren ear or womb bear fruit again, is not fatal.14 Cleopatra’s hypothetical “Antonio’s dead” in act 2 is the type of utterance that she asks Mardian to replay in act 4. The transfer of the phrase from the principal in act 2 to the messenger in act 4 corresponds to the change in its performative status from anticipatory, foreclosing hypothesis to consciously narrated fiction. Mardian’s false witness unravels an act of death that sounds like an act of love. The name “Antony” is fractured in erotically charged terms, as if the name, its signified, and its referent (all three) die when Cleopatra speaks and then again when Antony hears report of his lover’s dying word, his proper name. “Antony” is ventriloquized, impersonated, rendered a redundant cipher: Death of one person can be paid but once, And that she has discharged. What thou wouldst do Is done unto thy hand. The last she spake Was ‘Antony! Most noble Antony!’ Then, in the midst, a tearing groan did break The name of Antony; it was divided Between her heart and lips. She rendered life, Thy name so buried in her. (4.14. 27–34)

These extraordinary lines, some of the most moving in the play, lose none of their power for being utterly false. The name of Antony is broken across a rending groan, at once mortal and sexual—“death” in its two senses—of lips and heart. The uniqueness of the death/debt that Cleopatra has paid and discharged by hand in the fi rst three lines emphasizes the complete foreclosure of any possibility of seconding or ratification on Antony’s part. He is supernumerary at once to her suicide and to her love-making, consigned to a position of superfluous belatedness. The last word spoken by

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Cleopatra in her ecstasy, the proper name of her lover, surprisingly establishes “Antony” as the longed-for signifier of fatality, whereas Antony the person is shunted aside as a redundant and irrelevant signified. Cleopatra’s doing the act alone marks the perfunctoriness and mere contingency of Antony as a presence of flesh and blood, and it anticipates the fact that her actual suicide in act 5 will indeed have no need of Antony as witness or auditor. He can be done without.15 North’s Plutarch is Shakespeare’s source for the symbolic disarming that results when Antony is deflated by Mardian’s words: He went into a chamber and unarmed him selfe, and being naked said thus: O Cleopatra, it grieveth me not that I have lost thy companie, for I will not be long from thee: but I am sory, that having bene so great a Captaine and Emperour, I am in deede condemned to be judged of lesse corage and noble minde, then a woman. (309)

Pre-empted and embarrassed thus, Antony cannot help being upstaged by Cleopatra in their respective death scenes to come. How can he kill himself with manly dignity when his name has already been “divided” by his lover in her moment of climax? A solitary moment at that, as if her suicidal ecstasy surpasses any climax she knew with Antony in her arms. The messenger’s theatrical representation of the act of death creates a more intense effect of love by fiction and absence than what the lovers together could have achieved. Hence Antony’s disappointment and soon to follow suicidal dissolution. He is spent and dispensed with prematurely by a distant lover in an act at which he did not assist, as either spectator or participant. It is small wonder that Antony’s impending suicide will fall so far short of the mark since already “she has robbed me of my sword” (4.14.23). The text of the lovers’ discourse is laced with play upon the vacillations of “sword” as instrument of martial honor versus manly love, the contesting poles for control of Antony’s soul in the classic debate that informs Antony and Cleopatra. When he leaves Cleopatra for the fi rst time and sets off for Rome, Antony appeals to the obligations attendant upon his “sword” (1.3.83, 1.3.101) in the sense of military honor, though after Actium he laments that his “sword, made weak by my affection” (3.11.67) inclined to Cleopatra at the moment most humiliating for his manhood.16 The report of Cleopatra’s own suicidal sword-play effects a double loss for Antony: of the lover’s phallic potency and of the soldier’s name for valor. Mardian’s fictive word picture of Cleopatra striking herself with the sword and uttering the name “Antony” in his absence hollows out both “sword” and the name “Antony.” Any claim that relies on these words to secure an inalienable masculinity is rendered merely nominal. In death Antony falls short of the high Roman ideal of suicide. In answer to Cleopatra’s arming him before battle, Antony asks Eros to unarm him so that he may slough off martial and amorous roles: “No more a soldier;

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bruised pieces go; / You have been nobly borne” (4.14.43–44). To divest himself of the livelihood-defi ning armor that he has borne and that has supported him in turn is tantamount to dying. His armor removed, devoted at last to liquefaction, how can he hope to retrieve his prematurely spent valor one last time to commit the act of death? Antony’s regret that Cleopatra has upstaged him as lover and as suicide resounds one last time the leitmotifs of unswording and unmanning: Since Cleopatra died, I have lived in such dishonor that the gods Detest my baseness. I, that with my sword Quartered the world and o’er green Neptune’s back With ships made cities, condemn myself to lack The courage of a woman; less noble mind Than she which, by her death, our Caesar tells ‘I am conqueror of myself.’ (4.14.56–63)

The courage and the temper of the sword that the woman wields is what the man lacks, for whatever courage he musters is tainted by bad faith, by the jealousy that stems from his sense of belatedness with respect to her: in beating his sword to the mark, hers makes his superfluous and, worse, ineffectual. Assigned to take Antony’s life, Eros demurs for sentiment. Thus Antony is robbed of his sword a second time, by his sword bearer no less, whose actions take their cue from the fictional representation of Cleopatra’s suicide performance. When Eros shows more courage than his master, Antony rekindles his flame for death in the hyperbolic because belated metaphorics of a lover’s passion: But I will be A bridegroom in my death and run into’t As to a lover’s bed. (4.14.100–2)

The metaphor of suicide as the bridegroom’s performance on his wedding night is taken up by Cleopatra in her death/consummation scene in the last act, where the spectacle she presents is the more powerfully moving for its contrast to Antony’s bathos.17

III—CLEOPATRA: MARTIAL AND MATERNAL In death Cleopatra seeks to fi x her reputation for posterity as sole guardian of her image of romantic heroine. She insists on representing herself, not on being represented by Caesar as a trophy-woman pretending obeisance to her captor’s magnanimity. She eschews the falsetto vocalizing

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of the boy actor and being pantomimed by the “Egyptian puppet” and “mechanic slaves”: The quick comedians Extemporally will stage us and present Our Alexandrian revels; Antony Shall be brought drunken forth; and I shall see Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness I’th’ posture of a whore. (5.2.215–20)

Theater is an alienating instrument in the service of colonialism, but Cleopatra’s theatrical staging of her death forecloses upon the strong claim of colonialism to control representation. Under the Caesarean scenario Cleopatra’s voice will be emptied out in ventriloquized impersonation. The revels of the would-be usurping lovers will be reduced to so much nonsubversive play, the mere traffic of the stage contained and defused within the walls of the Roman victor’s theater. The thought of the stage as vehicle of containment, discipline, and satire that mocks what it represents violates the integrity dear to Cleopatra. She refuses to see her private amorous play with Antony made public theater: so much titillating spectacle for the jeering voyeuristic captors. To countervail the voyeurism she decries, Cleopatra practices a species of heroic exhibitionism that uncannily aspires to privacy. One private space that defies representation is the bedroom that she shares with Antony, where she arms him for battle, and another is the inner recess of the monument where she plans to die protected from Caesar’s reach. These private spaces for death are nonetheless enfolded within a stage, albeit the inner one of the Globe, and Cleopatra is played by a boy actor, to be sure, even as s/he disclaims all traffic with such stage conventions as boy actors playing women’s roles.18 Although foregrounding the oxymoronic character of Cleopatra’s exhibitionistic quest for a private, nonrepresentable theatricalness on the public stage, Shakespeare does not simply deflate his heroine with irony at her expense. The spectators, after all, are unlikely to worry over the fact that a boy actor is squeaking the part in Cleopatra’s death scene, and we fi nd Cleopatra’s consciously theatrical self-representation disarmingly moving. Our defenses are shattered, our skeptical inclination to disbelieve is suspended.19 Only the staging of a Roman suicide, ironically, will allow Cleopatra to remain intact and unstageable in the Roman theater. Suicide vouchsafes Cleopatra her woman’s identity, in opposition to the epheban squeaks and posturings that would betray it. To be a woman she must act the man in killing herself, thereby securing her integrity at the expense of dissolving her being, thus playing out the classic contest of tragedy. By outdoing the Romans at their game, by hoisting them on their own theatrical petard, Cleopatra undoes the power of Roman colonialism to fashion her on its terms:

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The heroine fi xes herself as male soldier, marble Roman, Roman suicide. Yet she is also a mother and thus, her disclaimer notwithstanding, allied to the lunar Isis and even to Lucina, goddess of child bearing. Her child is the asp that brings her the erotic extinction of death. It is especially in terms of resexualizing the dead that Cleopatra’s abounding valor repays Antony’s and even recompenses his lapses.20 Cleopatra metamorphoses the end of the life cycle that autumn usually symbolizes into the ceaseless fertility of her lover, reminiscent of her own at Cydnus: “For his bounty, / There was no winter in’t; an autumn it was / That grew the more by reaping” (5.2.85–87). 21 The intensity of “immortal longings” (5.2.280) for an autumn that ever revives itself at climactic foison seems to rouse Antony to meet his bride: Methinks I hear Antony call. I see him rouse himself To praise my noble act. I hear him mock The luck of Caesar, which the gods give men To excuse their after wrath. Husband, I come! Now to that name my courage prove my title! (5.2.282–87)

The asp as substitute for the absent husband performs the act of death as the consummation of the wedding rite. Cleopatra’s “Husband, I come!” answers Antony’s identical death climax, “I come, my queen” (4.14.51).22 The lovers transformed to spouses lie secure within the bounds of legitimacy, laying to rest once and for all any doubts about the beloved’s faithfulness. Legitimacy and faithfulness in no way undercut eroticism, moreover; nor, I argue, does eroticism preclude that this union have a procreative or restorative aim. Shakespeare read in North’s Plutarch how Cleopatra aroused the asp to bite her more vehemently: she “did pricke and thrust it with a spindell of golde” (316). To rouse the asp thus is to court the sweet pain of death: “The stroke of death is as a pinch / Which hurts and is desired” (5.2.294–95). This image recalls Cydnus and its exultation in death, remote indeed from the expected tone of dirge. Cleopatra addresses playfully the asp that pinches her as her “poor venomous fool” (5.2.304), her baby that suckles life from and returns death to the nurturing breast. 23 The fluids exchanged between them are not merely poison, for the serpent’s bite effects a wishedfor, perhaps even fruitful union:24 Cleopatra. Dost thou not see my baby at my breast That sucks the nurse asleep?

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Charmian. O break! O break! Cleopatra. As sweet as balm, as soft as air, as gentle— O Antony!—Nay, I will take thee too. [Applies another asp to her arm.] What should I stay— Dies. (5.2.308–12)

The sensuous delicacy of Cleopatra’s poetry befits a wife addressing her husband on their wedding night. If one referent of “thee” is the asp as child sucking at the breast, another referent may be Antony himself, for whom the serpent stands in as a type of metonymic fetish. Cleopatra’s vocative cry, “O Antony!—Nay, I will take thee too,” may be construed to mean that it is Antony’s deadly but pleasing phallic bite that vouchsafes her the “sweet as balm” extinction. 25 From the Roman epithet of “strumpet’s fool” (1.1.13) Cleopatra transforms Antony into an asp-like “fool” of her own making and nurturing.26 As we have seen, Antony’s desperately repeated cries in act 3 to be equal to himself by the performative utterance, “I am Antony,” were broken once for all by Mardian’s fictitious report of Cleopatra’s calling out his proper name in death. But Cleopatra proves as good as her mendaciously impersonated word: in real death she does cry out the name “Antony.” Seen by hindsight, “Antony” is the only lover’s name that Cleopatra invokes at any point during the action of the play. 27 Whereas Mardian’s citation of “Antony” was a death blow to the referential Antony, is Cleopatra’s direct vocative address able to restore this real Antony—the man of flesh, that is, not the nominal signifier? By speaking “Antony” can Cleopatra revive Antony? Can she undo what Mardian’s fatal “Antony” did? Will she make Antony himself again? One way to approach these questions about romance and revival is from the perspective of Plutarch’s Of Isis and Osiris. The “baby”/asp that Cleopatra nurses at her breast is functionally analogous to the prosthesis that Isis, whom Plutarch calls “the nourse that suckleth and feedeth the whole world” (1301), builds to restore part of her lost Osiris: “in sted of that natural part, she made a counterfet one, called Phallus, which she consecrated: and in the honor thereof the Aegyptians hold a solemne feast” (1294). Cleopatra’s death performance is a defense against loss, like Isis’ construction of the artificial member. Both serve to keep alive symbolically what is dead and unrecoverable, substituting a symbolic remnant and ceremonial recuperation for the real thing that Isis has searched for in vain. 28 Erecting a phallus over the dead is both celebration and commemoration, both ecstasy and mourning: the two senses of “death.” The deceased Antony is resurrected and re-eroticized as a potent part, a synechdochal concentration or reanimation of the Antony who was, his reduced body now continuous solely with the phallic worm that grants the pleasure of death. The Clown’s many jokes on the phallic valences of worms in a basket of figs29 immediately before the suicide insinuate themselves into an interpretive panoply:

110 Crossing Gender in Shakespeare in addressing the worm Cleopatra is naming her husband, or her husband’s penis—call it “Antony,” as she does—or the phallus as symbol of the loss of “Antony,” or “Antony” as nominal signifier of the lost signifieds in the metonymic chain: penis, body, life. In Plutarch’s account the deceased Osiris is nonetheless active at a distance because as Nilus he is dispersed everywhere in liquid form. The priests designate by Osiris “all vertue and power that produceth moisture and water, taking it to be the materiall cause of generation, and the nature generative of seed” (1300). The fig resembles the dismembered organ, and its leaves are fetishes that recall what is lost: “which fig leafe signifieth the imbibition and motion of all things: and besides, it seemeth naturally to resemble the member of generation” (1301). In Antony and Cleopatra the fig leaves have tracks of “slime upon them, such as th’aspic leaves / Upon the caves of Nile” (5.2.351–52). Slime is both semen (OED v. 2a) and the mud of the Nile (OED v. 1a), and the combination of the two to form the hermaphroditic bed of spontaneous generation, which Shakespeare describes thus: Antony. The higher Nilus swells, The more it promises. As it ebbs, the seedsman Upon the slime and ooze scatters his grain, And shortly comes to harvest. Lepidus. You’ve strange serpents there? Antony. Ay, Lepidus Lepidus. Your serpent of Egypt is bred, now, of your mud by the operation of your sun; so is your crocodile. (2.7.20–27)

No hint of death mars this communication upon breeding. The slimy serpent whose genealogy Antony and Lepidus discuss may be identical to the asp that Cleopatra attaches to her breast in the fi nal scene.30 The “slime” in this instance, as opposed to the use of the same word at 5.2.351, is the feminine matter that the (also slimy) seed inseminates. That “slime” indicates fi rst female, then male seed in its two occurrences in the text, suggests the liquefaction of the distinction between the sexes, or the indistinction of the sexes in the muddy-aqueous breeding ground.31 So too the distinction of the seasons collapses in the context of Nilus’ hermaphroditic breeding: it is a short and rather disjunctive transition from the grain harvest in line 23 to the autochthonous serpents in the next line. The harvest that arrives so suddenly is like the bounty of Cydnus that Cleopatra celebrates in Antony: a winterless autumn that grows the more by reaping. If the Nile is Antonian in its bounty, it is little surprise that Shakespeare holds out the possibility that Antony is like the Nile in its fecundating eternal return. The fantasy that motivates Antony and Cleopatra is characteristic of the romance mode: against the conventions of naturalism the woman is able symbolically to reanimate the body of her dead husband by calling out his

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name, as she did before in Mardian’s fatal fiction of their last act of love de vivant. Cleopatra simply rehearses her earlier death rehearsal, performing it the second time to undo the effect it had earlier: having killed Antony by uttering his name excruciatingly, repeating and reversing the same will return him to life. She takes as her model the mother leaning over her baby (asp) and calling passionately the name that she gave it originally, as if rehearsing the name opens the mother’s talismanic secret of secrets: birth, life, resurrection. The name is no longer only nominal, adrift in mere signifying, but instead is endowed with the metaphysical power to rouse both significant meaning and referent (body) in its wake. If ever one could imagine such a unity between name and body, it would be at the moment of naming the child at birth, when the body of the child is still one with the mother-lover who calls it into being. Cleopatra chooses a death that echoes but subverts the manly Roman fashion, and in doing so she explicitly denies the woman in her, as we have seen (5.2.237–40). But it is not exactly the Roman fashion of suicide, since it makes the key substitution of worm for sword. The worm defies the easy phallicism of the Roman sword that militates for female chastity and conventional male virtus. And the “fleeting moon” of womanliness will not completely out: the woman breast-feeds her child as her last martial and maternal act, her defiance that clears a legacy for nurture. She dies a warrior mother, an altogether original position in Shakespeare’s canon. And the “fool” suckling at her breast is in one sense Antony, whose bungled suicide she now recasts recuperatively in marble (or rather in a playtext whose lines will outlast even marble). Cleopatra out-romans the Romans by repeating and re-presenting the Roman discipline of death, wielding the worm more pointedly than Antony did the sword. Marmoreal tragedy displaces the liquid languishing of Antony’s death, the effeminizing and selfdefeating outflowing upon which the Romans heaped contempt. A woman remasculinizes posthumously the broken name “Antony,” remaking that name into the force which renders Cleopatra’s death orgasmic and parturitional, pleasurable and re-creative. Dead, Antony is made the inseminating inspiration for Cleopatra’s death art and act. The wife recoups the losses of her lover by giving him new life—her life—in her memorial representation of him as husband and child.

6

The Woman Within in Cymbeline

CROSS DRESSING V. PARTHENOGENESIS AND THE MALE FANTASY OF PURE BLOOD Although cross dressing occurs in Cymbeline, the play invests its imagination less in women’s playful assumption of male dress than in the fantasy of male parthenogenesis, i.e., the male who dreams of comprising both male and female roles in reproduction. Imogen assumes male dress in a mode that downplays and renders redundant the playful gender reversals and comical double binds of earlier comedies like As You Like It and Twelfth Night. Since Imogen is chastely married from the opening scene, unlike Rosalind and Viola, her taking on of male garments does not facilitate fl irtation and rapprochement with a fiancé. There are hints that her brothers in the countryside are attracted to Imogen as Fidele, but the suggestions remain chaste and understated, never threatening to implode into the complications of incest. Her male dress grants Imogen the special prescience of seeing without being seen, but by the end of the dramatic action it puts her under erasure, since her status is that of a pseudo-male swept up in the surrounding triumph of homosocial bonds. Fidele loses much of “his” assertiveness once the sex beneath the disguise is revealed to be female at the end of the play, to the point of being fully content to cede the throne to Guiderius, but prior to that Fidele is vigorously enabled by the masculine part that Imogen takes on.1 Imogen’s thirst for experience is indicated no more clearly than in her undaunted willingness to assume the male part as she leaves behind her role as princess at court. Fighting in battle is not beyond Fidele’s reach, nor is the great performative lamentation before the headless body of Cloten dressed as Posthumus. Fidele is given more to say and to do than Viola/Cesario in Twelfth Night, and Fidele is less passive than most of his/her female counterparts (Portia excepted) who play the man’s part in other Shakespearean plays, to the point that Fidele’s conduct balances, subverts, and ultimately belies the thrust of Posthumus’ diatribe against the woman’s part as source of moral debility in man. Whereas the latter expresses extreme discomfort with the mixing of genders within the crucible of a man’s body, Imogen/

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Fidele excels in a disguise that allows her to conjoin the strongest and most salient elements of male and female personae. Unlike Rosalind in As You Like It, Fidele does not swoon. The woman made weak by love, a common paradigm of Shakespeare’s earlier transvestite comedies, neither blushes nor bleeds through Fidele’s male disguise. In some ways Imogen as Fidele is as strong as Portia cross-dressed as Balthazar (though not as learned), for she shares with Portia a refusal to be a mere passive object of androgynous delectation. She is neither more nor less androgynous than her two quite youthful, boyish brothers. All three siblings still have a greater level of maturity to reach, but all acquit themselves well in combat with the Romans and are undaunted by the new experiences that battle and future life beyond the pastoral enclosure hold in expectation for them. In Cymbeline textiles disguise not just gender but also class and bloodline. One is not what one plays, as Viola remarks wryly in Twelfth Night. The same is true of Imogen and other characters with whom she comes into contact. Textiles are strange and unreliable signs. Imogen disguises herself as a humble male, and her brothers too have been disguised as simple cave dwellers for as long as they have lived in exile from the court; Cloten assumes the garments of Posthumus; Imogen mistakes the garments of Posthumus for the man himself when she kneels before Cloten’s decapitated corpse; Posthumus mistakes the blood that stains the cloth as traces of the putatively guilty Imogen, when in fact the blood is Cloten’s; Posthumus dresses alternately as a Briton at court, an Italian gentleman, a British peasant who fights against the Romans, and finally as a Roman soldier. Cloth objects are thus taken variously as symbols—more often than not unreliable ones—of identity, gender, betrayal, murder, class, and national affiliation. When Posthumus reappears in 5.1 after a long absence, he mistakes the cloth stained with Cloten’s blood, which Pisanio brings him, for proof that Imogen is dead: “Yea, bloody cloth, I’ll keep thee: for I once wish’d / Thou shouldst be colour’d thus” (5.1.1–2).2 Only when Posthumus imagines that Imogen has been murdered can he forgive her for “wrying but a little” (5.1.5). Sparked by the sight of the bloody token, Posthumus regards Imogen in fantasy as fi nally chaste enough, according to the perverse formula that the only securely chaste woman is a dead woman, the jealous logic that motivates Othello and Leontes to regard their deceased wives with nostalgia.3 Posthumus enacts his regret for having ordered Imogen’s death by changing sides from Rome to Britain, and this change in loyalties is accompanied, and made possible, by changing from the garments of an Italian gentleman to those of a Briton: Let me make men know More valour in me than my habits show. Gods, put the strength o’ th’ Leonati in me! To shame the guise o’ th’ world, I will begin, The fashion less without, and more within. (5.1.29–33)

114 Crossing Gender in Shakespeare “Guise” may be glossed as disguise and the preferred mode of dress that it employs, in eschewing which Posthumous points to the possibility of a “fashion” or a habit divorced of reference to clothing: denuded fashion, as it were, or settled and consistent habitus. He insists on defi ning anew fashion/habit as something internal, something consciously démodé or beyond the vacillations of form. It is not a surface that may be assumed or alternatively cast off under pressure or for the convenience of the moment. Disguise and surfaces, like the many forged letters in the play, cause considerable misrecognition in Cymbeline, and the eventual elimination of misleading signs does not come easily. The play and its dramatis personae wish to escape from deceptive iteration, from manipulable and misleading imitation, from changing loyalties wantonly in love and war. The appeal is to character or indelible mark as security against fickleness and mutability. The blood that courses through various parts of the body and the blood that serves as vehicle for image clusters in the corpus of Shakespeare’s text—for example, the compacting of blood into moles and the blood of male sexual erection and display in warfare—will prove to be a locus in which unambiguous bodily identity triumphs over misleading sartorial surfaces and self-indulgent “habits.” Mounting appeals to blood, genealogy, and parthenogenesis serve as counterpart to the downplaying of and suspicion towards dress (and cross dressing) in Cymbeline. The ultimate male fantasy that the drama will propound is that of single sex reproductivity, which will come to be defi ned as male blood (spirit) unmixed with female matter, a romance alternative to the inescapable tragic destiny, that Hamlet bemoans, of being embodied in mater (mother)/matter. Belarius notes on several occasions that the royal blood of the princes will manifest itself despite the pastoral upbringing that has disguised their origins from everyone except himself, the author of the two princes’ dissimulated identities. Bloodline will eventually trump any and every effort to falsify it by the assumption of vestments that do not befit one’s origins. Dressing princes in rustic clothes and educating them in a pastoral vocation temporarily obscures their origin, but royal birth and hierarchy will reassert themselves in the end; natural tendency and teleology will surface for all to see. Their valor in battle against the Romans proves in the flesh that the unassuming pastoral weeds of Guiderius and Arviragus are a feint. Similarly, Posthumus, dressed in the garments of a humble Briton, will earn by his military valor the dream that vouchsafes him a vision of his true genealogy and the prophetic blessing of no less a figure than Jupiter, the providential deus ex machina. His true origins, like those of the princes, will be revealed as a reward for having long and stoically suffered, and in turn for repenting the perpetration of, misprision. Although blood will out and genealogy eventually be vindicated, especially when identical moles prove the siblinghood of Imogen and Guiderius, through much of Cymbeline the imagery of blood presents vexing problems of interpretation. One must work through various tangles in the imagery

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before blood can assert itself unambiguously as the truth of origins. Images of blood serve variously in the course of the play as signs of violence, menstruation and parturition, courage and nobility, social class, sexual desire, life, and death. The “cordial” medicaments that Pisanio gives to Imogen prove to be a misnomer, for they are a pharmakon that turns her deathly pale rather than causing blood to course through her heart (as the etymology of cordial would imply) and body: O, ’tis pregnant, pregnant! The drug he gave me, which he said was precious And cordial to me, have I not found it Murd’rous to th’ senses? (4.2.325–28)

Imogen’s revelation is paradoxically “pregnant” because she conceives correctly that the drugs are not what they are reputed to be. Far less prescient is Imogen’s mistaking the blood of the headless Cloten for that of Posthumus. Her smearing of her face with the blood from Cloten’s corpse is a belated sexual initiation, a chaste though ghastly rite of passage from virgin to lover of a corpse, matching her maidenhead with the violated head of her lover.4 Guiderius and Arviragus wish their Fidele a “quiet consummation” (4.2.280), recalling the “consummation devoutly to be wished” of Hamlet, where consummation instances both the sexual and the mortal sense of dying. “Give colour to my pale cheek with thy blood” (4.2.330), Imogen implores, implying unsettlingly that she will take from the sacrifice of “this bloody man” (4.2.297) a cold balm that will prove a restorative alternative to the poisonous cordial. Imogen’s funeral cum marital blood-rite, the smearing of blood upon herself intended as sign of loyalty to the deceased, may be seen in dark terms, for Imogen is, after all, however unintentionally, sharing a bed with Cloten, the lascivious bastard who impersonates Posthumus by wearing his garments. When Lucius asks, “Who is this / Thou mak’st thy bloody pillow?” (4.2.362–63)—complementing Imogen’s remark, “But, soft! no bedfellow!” (4.2.295)—his question gives momentary rise in the audience to subversive thoughts of adultery and murder, as if Posthumus gets both Imogen’s illicit liaison and the concomitant violent punishment that he seemed to wish for in fantasy. Moral dubiety and confusion result from the failure to identify correctly the blood traces of sexual liaison. Only asexual, parthenogenic reproduction, it seems, holds forth the possibility of non-contamination and purity.

THE WOMAN’S PART AND THE REDEMPTIVE MOLE Once Iachimo succeeds in causing Imogen’s husband to call her chastity into doubt, Posthumus plunges into a denunciation of all women in a

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soliloquy that has proven to be a touchstone for feminist criticism. Incremental doubts suddenly explode into a cascading abyss of paranoia and vengeance: Is there no way for men to be, but women Must be half-workers? We are all bastards, And that most venerable man, which I Did call my father, was I know not where When I was stamp’d. Some coiner with his tools Made me a counterfeit: yet my mother seem’d The Dian of that time: so doth my wife The nonpareil of this. O vengeance, vengeance! (2.4.153–60)

Posthumus’ conflation of the betrayal of his wife with that of his mother recalls Othello’s fatalistic sense that he was made a cuckold even at the moment that he was conceived (3.3.279–81), and Posthumus’ reference to his mother’s Diana-like purity recalls Othello’s lament over the sullying of his wife: “Her name, that was as fresh / As Dian’s visage, is now begrim’d, and black /As mine own face” (3.3.389–91). For Posthumus the romance of giving birth to children is evacuated; sexual reproduction is but the mechanical work of indifferent tools and stamps. Human agents are interchangeable; their offspring, debased to the point that it cannot support any differentiating distinction between original and counterfeit, is no more unique than the products of artisanal labor. Like Hamlet, Posthumus denounces what his monstrous imagination sees as female seeming and show. Notoriously, he vilifies as impure “the woman’s part in me— for there’s no motion / That tends to vice in man, but I affi rm / It is the woman’s part” (2.4.172–74). If only man were self-authored, he argues like Coriolanus, would he be able to escape the catch-all catalogue of vices that putatively derive from being born of a mother and dependent upon a wife: lying, flattering, deceiving, lust, revenge, ambition, covetousness, pride, disdain, slander, and mutability, to name the greater number (2.4.174–78). 5 Iachimo boasts that he will enjoy Imogen’s “dearest bodily part” (1.5.146–47). Just what the woman’s part refers to is open to question, here and elsewhere. Like the “vices” which this part supposedly engenders, it is anything and everything, an omnibus vehicle for whatever man fi nds desirable and distasteful in wife or mother. On several occasions in Suffocating Mothers, Janet Adelman highlights that the word “vice” not only designates moral faults but also serves as a slang term for the vagina.6 Is the referent of “the woman’s part” her hymen or the man’s navel that recalls his former umbilical link to the mother’s body7—parts from which, though separated, the raging cuckold senses himself nonetheless implicated within? Posthumus locates in his wife’s body “a pudency so rosy, the sweet view on’t / Might well have warm’d old Saturn” (2.4.163–64),

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suggesting that a woman’s bashful modesty and source of shame (pudor) are contrary to what they seem, arousing even the old and impotent. Modesty is immodesty—in the eyes of a would-be cuckold. In voyeuristic fantasy Posthumus sees Iachimo mounting his wife like a German boar, imagining that the penetrator “found no opposition / But what he look’d for should oppose and she / Should from encounter guard” (2.4.169–71). Here the woman’s part seems to refer to Imogen’s hymen imagined to be too easy of access to the suave foreigner, a sexual connoisseur who aestheticizes the female body and whose prowess and savoir-faire Posthumus is jealous of. If, as some argue, Posthumus and Imogen are married but probably have not yet consummated their love, then Posthumus’ fantasy of an open-gated Imogen may derive from his frustration that so many obstacles, social and psychological, have prevented him and his wife from making love.8 Posthumus’ soliloquy denouncing the woman’s part in him has proven fertile for feminist criticism because it encapsulates a major topos of misogyny: the problem of man’s tendency to project difference onto Woman hypostasized as Other. Since this reified object of obsessive fantasy is fertile ground for manifold denunciation, it can be seen to comprise all three of the women set forth in Freud’s schema in “The Theme of the Three Caskets”: the mother who gives birth to the male child, the wife whose bed he shares, and death or mother earth, the woman to whom he returns.9 The possibility of a fourth woman in man’s life, the redemptive daughter, is absent from Posthumus’ misogynistic diatribe, as it is from Freud’s schema.10 This fourth woman is the daughter so important to Shakespeare’s romances, like Marina in Pericles, whom her father lauds as “Thou that beget’st him that did thee beget” (5.1.195);11 or Miranda, whose marriage to Ferdinand allows Prospero to enjoy in retirement a dynasty that comprises Naples in addition to his native Milan, thus gaining through his daughter more than he ever lost through his naiveté and mismanagement of the realm. Daughters ultimately prove fecund for the interests of their fathers. Imogen contributes to the victory of her surrogate father (Belarius) and brothers over Rome, to the redemption of Posthumus, and to making Cymbeline the parthenogenic mother-father at the end of the play, as we shall see. The fourth woman in a man’s life, the daughter whom Freud neglects to include in his schema, allows one to reverse many of the misogynistic charges that Freud laid at the feet of the fi rst three women. Posthumus escapes his anxiety about the woman’s part in him by taking on the dress of a Briton and fighting for the British cause against Rome. Returning to the British side after his Italian sojourn is prelude and necessary rite of passage for returning to Imogen. Manliness in battle takes the place of earlier whining and self-pity. Changing clothes is changing sides, and the assumption of new political stripes prepares the way for realigning one’s romantic loyalties. As he passes through sartorial phases Posthumus wends his way back to Imogen, even to an Imogen who predates man’s

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falling away from sameness-to-self and into the noxious difference supposedly incumbent upon the woman’s part in him. Imogen’s husband redeems himself by becoming a partisan, employing the word “part” to indicate his parti pris for the British cause, and his love for Imogen, whose name he mentions in significant proximity to “part” in two passages: I’ll disrobe me Of these Italian weeds, and suit myself As does a Briton peasant: so I’ll fight Against the part I come with: so I’ll die For thee, O Imogen, even for whom my life Is, every breath, a death. (5.1.22–27, my emphasis) For being now a favourer to the Briton, No more a Briton, I have resumed again The part I came in . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . On either side I come to spend my breath, Which neither here I’ll keep nor bear again, But end it by some means for Imogen. (5.3.74–76, 81–83, my emphasis)

After serving so long the interests of misrecognition, clothes fi nally make the man and mark him as a valiant soldier. As he changes garments and changes sides or parts, Posthumus repents for having vilified the woman’s part in him. Coppélia Kahn comments pithily: “In place of ‘the woman’s part’ that bleeds within him, he will play the part—in costume as a British peasant—of Britain’s manly defender.”12 The transition is from effeminizing part and plaintive passivity to active gender performativity: playing the manly part. That Posthumus is a loyal Briton is the touchstone in proportion to which he reestablishes his faith in Imogen. It is his militating on Britain’s behalf that returns him eventually to his wife—she whose very name is “Britain” (1.7.113–14).13 In this way the nation-building, military subplot is inseparable from the romantic plot. The highly cathected and fetishized woman’s part, both attractive and repulsive for the man, metamorphoses eventually into a cherished mnemonic of origins: the birthmark, which in Cymbeline takes the form of a mole. Through time the birthmark suffers distancing and erasure as the child grows distant from the mother, falling to its symbolic nadir when Iachimo qualifies the mole as a “stain” or moral blot which Posthumus, echoing Othello, takes as proof that since Imogen “turns” once then she does so a million times (2.4.132–43): the stained mark of repeated fornication. At this point the mole seems to be iterable, imitable, easily falsifiable—at its maximum distance from the (shared) unique mark that it was at the birth of the siblings. The mole is redeemed from stain as it becomes the vehicle for returning a child to its maternal origin, a process which unfolds by means of linking one child to its sibling who shares,

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uncannily, the same identifying deictic: “a mole cinque-spotted: like the crimson drops / I’ th’ bottom of a cowslip” (2.2.38–39) on the breast of Imogen; “upon his neck a mole, a sanguine star” (5.5.365) in the case of Guiderius. Murray M. Schwartz points out that in Shakespeare’s source story, Frederyke of Jennen, the birthmark is “a blacke wart” on Imogen’s left arm. 14 Shakespeare re-envisions the mole as a crimson fetish object that hearkens back to the maternal body. He grants to the mole a talismanic function of recognition, disclosure, and the narrative closure that may result therefrom. The dramatically marked reappearance of the genderless mole manifests the common maternal origin of brother and sister. It identifies genealogy unequivocally after long confusion. The birthmark restores the maligned mother’s body to purity, for the mole’s conspicuous redness recalls the blood of the mother in the act of parturition, her woman’s part seen no longer, in this context, as the breeding/bleeding ground of vice and vexation. The part has metamorphosed from mark of difference to reassuring guardian of sameness. The mole is important not only for securing familial affi liation but also as a plot device—a commonplace of the romantic folk tale—that allows disparate narrative strands to disambiguate themselves. A nodal point like the mole allows the plot to resolve itself full stop, once and for all, signaled in the following passage on Guiderius’ mole by Belarius’ use of “end,” in three senses of the word: purposive (teleological), temporal, and narrative: This is he, Who hath upon him still that natural stamp: It was wise Nature’s end, in the donation To be his evidence now. (5.5.366–69)

Nature’s end returns full circle and vindicates nature’s beginning in the indelible birthmark that signs the baby with a unique genetic imprint. Whatever disguises, detours, and travails have kept this birthmark in abeyance, it must out in the end according to the generic dictates of the romance mode and the genetic and proprietary laws of biological and dynastic inheritance. As natural stamp, the mole guarantees a providential donation to the next generation. Cymbeline insists on performing the claims of a metaphysical teleology; as a romance, the play restores orphans to the womb, the home (or destiny conceived as point of return) from which the exigencies of (fallen) embodiedness caused them to drift. Freud’s unheimlich womb is made home-like again. Made manifest, the birthmark returns purloined children to their parental origins—a restoration that demarcates and secures their future as well. The unambiguous delineation of the past, achieved after considerable difficulty, is prologue to the future. Posthumus progresses from raving misogynist to brother in arms with Fidele, to the restored husband of Imogen and brother-in-law to Guiderius—in part due to the providential agency of the mole.

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POSTHUMUS ERECTUS Themes like sexual aggression and gender ambiguity play out not only for the individual but also for the nation. New Historicist critics have emphasized that Cymbeline is a play about not just Britain’s reconciliation with Rome but also King James’s revival of Augustanism and his efforts to bring together England and Scotland to form a united kingdom, but many of them have not connected these important political themes to the gendered imagery of the play or to the sexual bodies of its principals. One way to ground the politics of war and nation-building in the textual corpus and in the gendered bodies of the warriors is to plumb the sexualpolitical analogy between Iachimo’s clandestine entry into Imogen’s private bedchamber and his visual rape of her as she sleeps, on the one hand, and the Romans’ effort in their invasion of Wales to penetrate the mountain lane at Milford Haven, on the other. Iachimo succeeds, at least in the short term; but the Romans are repulsed in their effort to penetrate and to subdue Britain, and this military loss parallels the ultimate defeat of Iachimo’s attempted sexual violations. The narrative unfolding of the play is invested in keeping Britain intact, in setting her aright politically and sexually, which translates in terms of character into toppling the predatory, urbane sophistications of Iachimo and elevating in their stead a new defi nition of masculinism, located in the British countryside and personified in the pastoral family. The Romans are driven back by the “stand” (with pun on “erection”) made by Guiderius and his sons in the mountains. “Stand, stand, and fight” (5.2.13), the Welsh country dwellers exclaim in an effort to screw up their courage to block off the attempted invasion of the narrow lane—which many critics read as a vaginal canal—and so keep Wales untouched and unconquered.15 The upshot of the battle is that the Romans are undone. Iachimo, the erstwhile rapist, eventually laments how guilt for his treatment of Imogen “takes off my manhood” (5.2.2), making him impotent in battle. By comparison to the poor British soldier (Posthumus in disguise), Iachimo confesses “that we scarce are men” (5.2.10). Posthumus’ description of the way that the two boys, Guiderius and Arviragus, rise manly to the occasion despite their feminine “faces fit for masks, or rather fairer / Than those for preservation cas’d, or shame” (5.3.21–22), implies that they are ingénues, as inexperienced in war as in love. The boys and their father cry, “Stand, / Or we are Romans” (5.3.25–26), reversing the normative gender valences by equating the Romans with cowards who let their guard down and run from the battle: with this word ‘Stand, stand,’ Accommodated by the place, more charming, With their own nobleness, which could have turn’d A distaff to a lance, gilded pale looks;

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Part shame, part spirit renew’d, that some, turn’d coward But by example . . . ’gan to look The way that they did, and to grin like lions Upon the pikes o’ th’ hunters. (5.3.31–39)

The Welsh rustics undergo a transition to nobles and the immature boys take on the manliness that historically had been the domain and the renown of the Roman army, by defeating it. Their example inspires others to raise the manly lance and to forgo the woman’s distaff, to transform pale looks into looks ruddy with courage. The idea of blood pumping through the veins—whether in the standing penis, the metonymic arm raised in battle, or the face—contrasts with Arviragus’ cowering confession not long before the battle that the only blood that he had ever looked upon before, in the peaceful countryside, was “that of coward hares, hot goats, and venison” (4.4.37), i.e., animal blood signifying timidity, a lecherous male or a female in heat, or a carcass being dressed for consumption, respectively. These images of animal blood as objects of passive witness are quite different from the martial blood associated with wielding a phallic lance or standing tall in defense of the mountain lane under attack. War is a sudden rite of passage from boyhood to manhood for Guiderius and Arviragus, and for Imogen it is a test of whether she can remain true to her recently assumed male disguise as Fidele. The boys startle themselves (and their far more numerous Roman counterparts) with their show of unwonted valor. But this surprising manifest conduct is underlaid by blood that was waiting to show itself for years but had to remain latent due to sexual immaturity and to the straitjacketing of the boys’ royal identity under rustic disguise. Belarius observes on several occasions that the princes’ pedigree will manifest itself despite their humble upbringing: “their blood thinks scorn / Till it fly out and show them princes born” (4.4.53–54). Blood of birth, like that marked by the mole, eventually consummates itself in bloody scars on the battlefield: O boys, this story The world may read in me: my body’s mark’d With Roman swords; and my report was once First, with the best of note. (3.3.55–58)

Belarius seeks to excite his sons to emulation. Achieving battle scars like their father’s is a way for the boys to honor their blood and to undergo the rite of passage from anonymity and adolescence into adult male history. Jodi Mikalachki observes that “without fighting the Romans, the princes will have no such marks to read by the winter fire when they are old.”16 The bloody marks or scars perform the writing of historical narrative and furnish the occasion for oral-historical tales passed on from the older generation to the younger.

122 Crossing Gender in Shakespeare POSTHUMUS LEONATUS: ACQUILINE, JOVIAL The Roman credentials of Posthumus are foregrounded in his Latin name, in his dress as an Italian gentleman and later as a Roman soldier, and in his affiliation with the Roman gods. Although he is not of royal blood, his agnomen “Leonatus” signs him as the “lion’s whelp” (5.5.444) of the Soothsayer’s prophecy. The lion was the favorite emblem of royalty and courage in the medieval bestiary, and it served as the heraldic device of James I.17 As she laments over the headless corpse of what she takes to be Posthumus laid out in the cave, Imogen offers a romantic blazon of her husband’s body figured in terms of the bodies of Roman gods: “His foot Mercurial: his Martial thigh: / The brawns of Hercules” are displayed intact before her, everything but his “Jovial face” (4.2.310–11 ).18 In some sense Posthumus is anything but the divinities that Imogen praises him for being, for he has betrayed his wife, and her attributions of divine body and features are undercut by the irony that the eulogist cannot tell Posthumus apart from the headless, villainous Cloten. Although she mistakes the corpse’s foot, thigh, and brawns for those of Posthumus, Imogen is saved from the same pathetic—or ridiculous—error with respect to the Jovial head, since it at least is not physically present before her eyes.19 She knows a Jove-like head when she sees it—or rather, in this case, when she does not see it. Cymbeline goes to lengths to emphasize the jovial epithet as Posthumus’ most reliable identifying feature or mark, even when parts of his body go missing. In addition to endowing Posthumus with the epithet lion-born and an anatomy resembling the gods’, Shakespeare underscores his character’s manliness and nobility by emblematizing him as an eagle. Imogen claims that she chose an eagle by marrying Posthumus and avoided a puttock in refusing to marry Cloten (1.2.70–71). In Filario’s house in Rome, the Frenchman confi rms that Posthumus is eagle-sighted in being able to look directly into the sun (1.5.10–11). Posthumus’ descent from Jove is confi rmed by the fact that Jove’s bird is the Roman eagle, mentioned in the Soothsayer’s fi rst prophecy just a few lines after Imogen expresses sorrow over the loss of her husband’s Jovial face, and again when Jupiter descends upon an eagle, what Sicilius dubs “his royal bird” (5.4.117), in order to pronounce the destiny of Posthumus. Whether he is fighting on the British or on the Roman side, Posthumus is under the aegis of Jove’s eagle. Shakespeare makes ambivalent use of the eagle as a symbol in Cymbeline by deploying it on both sides of the political divide—with reference to Posthumus and to the Romans—and the playwright complicates the issue further by engendering the bird fi rst in male, then in female form. The eagle was a symbol of manliness and royalty for the Greeks and their Roman heirs, and ultimately for the romanized Britons too, whose realm—styled Troynovant in histories like Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae and Holinshed’s First Volume of Chronicles—was founded

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by Brute (great-grandson of Aeneas), whose wife was Imogen and whose grandfather was called Posthumus. 20 But in Shakespeare’s portrayal of the battle at Milford Haven, Rome’s masculinism gets evacuated even as its masculine mantle is passed on to the Britons. As the name of brave Roman metamorphoses into a byword for cowardice, as the Britons in turn exchange feminine distaffs for phallic lances and infuse blood into formerly pale cheeks, so the usual association of Romans with the eagle is turned inside out under pressure from Rome’s fiercer (though less experienced) enemies: Forthwith they fly Chickens, the way which they stoop’d eagles: slaves, The strides they victors made. (5.3.41–43)

In fl ight and on the run, the Romans are something radically different from what they were on the offensive, as the syntax makes passive objects of formerly intimidating subjects. Eagles in pursuit are now chickens in retreat. The turning inside-out of the expectation that Rome will triumph and that Britain will fall in battle is an instance of a larger pattern of what Patricia Parker calls “chiastic exchange” in the play. Who controls whom politically is subject to renewal and reversal: Posthumus vacillates between loyalty to Britain and to Rome; characters like Iachimo and Lucius from Rome submit to a westering of empire in making their peace with Cymbeline and Posthumus; Posthumus is the British Aeneas or chiastic British/ Roman who looks from Britain back to an eastern heroic origin in Rome and, earlier and farther east still, to Troy, as James I looked back in portraying himself as a restorer of King Arthur, as a second Brute, and as an apotheosis of Augustus. These instances of “historical chiasmus” parallel the gender chiasmus that I am anatomizing as Roman masculinism crosses over to become British masculinism, or as Imogen disguises herself under male clothing and nomenclature. 21 The Romans as eagles are male in the Soothsayer’s fi rst augury, in which he seems to predict a victory for Rome on the basis of observing “Jove’s bird, the Roman eagle” (4.2.348) fly westward into the sun, but the Soothsayer revises and regenders his prophecy at the end of the play after witnessing Rome’s defeat coupled with Britain’s magnanimous offer to continue paying the tribute money: For the Roman eagle, From south to west on wing soaring aloft, Lessen’d herself and in the beams o’ the sun So vanish’d; which foreshadow’d our princely eagle, Th’imperial Caesar, should again unite His favour with the radiant Cymbeline, Which shines here in the west. (5.5.471–77)

124 Crossing Gender in Shakespeare Caesar’s male eagle in the fi rst prophecy has become female in the Soothsayer’s revised interpretation. The male sun is no longer a symbol of Rome but, as it sets in the west, an image of Cymbeline and Britain. The political and cultural concord of the two realms is a brilliant illumination comprising eagle and sun fused together into a single state of hermaphroditic union, a chiasmus of male and female. 22 As a counterpart to the eagle’s sexual transformation at the close of the drama, male Fidele is revealed to be female Imogen in disguise (though her male dress remains in place for the duration of the stage action). Imogen metamorphoses from martial defender of the realm to loyal spouse, fulfilling the “letter of the oracle” to be Leonatus’ “mollis aer” or “mulier” (5.5.447–50). From being heir apparent, Imogen fades into the marriage that contains and defi nes her; she becomes mere air (aer), an obliging appendage rather than the major player in Britain’s national genealogy that Cymbeline and his court had expected her to be before Guiderius cast off his humble weeds and came clear to assert his primogeniture, the triumph of male right. 23

HOMOSOCIALITY AND PARTHENOGENESIS: OBVIATING THE WOMAN’S PART Homosocial bonding 24 is at the heart of the political alliance formed between Lucius (broker for imperial Caesar) and Cymbeline and in the reunion of Cymbeline’s male children (including Imogen cross-dressed as Fidele) at the end of the play, as it was earlier when Fidele and her adoptive male family in the cave staved off the Roman army’s attack. The elevation of Guiderius from cave-dwelling outcast to princely heir is a triumph of the homosocial, fi nding its non-homosocial counterpart in the renewal of the romantic bonds between Posthumus and Imogen: male bonds of politics and diplomacy, heterosexual bonds of companionate marriage. As her marriage is restored, Imogen’s political power as heir to the throne is ceded to Guiderius, her bachelor brother. Perhaps the most important homosocial relationship is that between man and god, for it serves as the capstone of the hierarchal pyramid that makes possible and secures all other male-male bonds. The alliance between Posthumus and his presiding deity, Jupiter, becomes strained when Iachimo claims to have come between Posthumus and his wife by sleeping with her as a result of the wager that binds the two men. Provoked and incited, Posthumus exclaims “Jove!” (2.4.98) at the moment that Iachimo shows him Imogen’s purloined bracelet, and then he repeats Iachimo’s swearing “by Jupiter” (2.4.121–22) that the bracelet is authentic, as if god’s name, even when taken in vain, is truer than Imogen’s. 25 (The irony is compounded by the many adulteries associated with Jupiter’s name, mentioned much later by Sicilius [5.4.33], and the audience’s witness that Imogen’s name for

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virtue remains untainted.) Posthumus is taken in by the confidence man because he trusts him more than his own wife, as Othello trusts Iago more than his beloved Desdemona in the temptation scene. Male bonds supersede marital oaths when Posthumus becomes upset over the prospect that Imogen has come between him and his new acquaintance, Iachimo, and between him and his patron god, Jupiter. It is not a woman—it is not Imogen—who introduces difference between Posthumus and Jupiter, but rather Posthumus himself who betrays the faith by cursing his wife and taking the name of his guardian deity in vain. When he descends from the heavens in Posthumus’ dream, Jupiter explicitly rebukes those of little faith like Posthumus and the family members who predeceased him and appear on stage belatedly as ghosts: No more, you petty spirits of region low, Offend our hearing: hush! How dare you ghosts Accuse the thunderer. (5.4.93–95)

As if speaking for the playwright, Jupiter reassures the faithless by promulgating the credo of romantic tragicomedy: “Whom best I love I cross; to make my gift, / The more delay’d, delighted” (5.4.101–2). His family members and Posthumus alike gave up too easily when their faith was tried. They squandered the special providence that awaited them if only they had endured their trials with patience, if only Posthumus had maintained his troth with Imogen and his trust in Jupiter. Posthumus is beset by a lack of faith, both religious and amorous: towards Jove and towards Imogen. As early as the temptation scene (1.5), the Iago-like Iachimo insinuates himself as the nihilistic principle of doubt and despair. Posthumus’ getting himself into trouble in the fi rst place when he takes in vain the name of the king of the Roman gods provides him the precedent for cursing Imogen’s infidelity in the same breath. He calls into question the names of those who devote themselves loyally to him—those to whom he has every reason to devote himself in return—projecting his betrayal of others onto the Other. Like Richard II and Hamlet, Posthumus type-genders women as the source of difference from putatively selfidentical male sameness, held prey as he is to a masculinist ideology, a male vice that blames women for the differential inconsistencies within the male self—as if the male soul takes on difference and division from the moment that it is embodied, once man is conceived in the womb and born of woman. But genealogy in Cymbeline is not dominated by mothers, as we have seen, misogynistic accusations to the contrary notwithstanding. Instead, Jupiter and Cymbeline control genealogy, inheritance, empire, and power. Jupiter and Cymbeline are kings, whereas Cymbeline fi nds it convenient to scapegoat the wicked stepmother Queen of fairytale lore and her bastard son Cloten (his bastardy much compounding his status as a mother’s boy)

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as personifications of evil and treason—defi ned as deferral, as resistance to and difference from male royal authority. Over against the rebellious Queen, male authority claims to be self-identical, univocal, and self-authoring. In appealing to a fantasy of purified, asexual genealogy, the play reimagines generation without resort to the woman’s part. The man appropriates this part to himself, collapsing difference into his putative whole and thus defusing its supposed threat. In a grand gesture that sweeps aside the evil stepmother and the monarch’s second Queen, Cymbeline the widower portrays himself as the original, uncontaminated mother, as if he both sires and gives birth to his children: O, what am I? A mother to the birth of three? Ne’er mother Rejoic’d deliverance more. Blest pray you be, That, after this strange starting from your orbs, You may reign in them now! (5.5.369–73)

The hierarchy of the spheres is restored (and narrative closure achieved) by a king who is mother as well as father. If not immaculate, such a conception is nonetheless miraculous in its parthenogenesis (more precisely, androgenesis). “Having separated from the wicked stepmother of the play, Cymbeline is allowed to take on the power of the mothers and to produce a family in which women are not half-workers,” argues Janet Adelman. 26 By claiming to be the mother, Cymbeline’s fantasy obviates Posthumus’ hysterical fear that the vilified woman’s part has made men “all bastards” (2.4.154). Excising the woman as medium of reproduction and as intermediary between the father and his child insures the purity and legitimacy of the male body, at least in fantasy—so Cymbeline implies, bonded in homosocial solidarity with his sons and his daughter dressed like a son. The monarch’s assuring himself of his purity, although very different in tone from Posthumus’ diatribe against the woman’s part that invaginates him, is inseparable from misogynistic anxieties that scapegoat the female body as the source of contamination for the male. What is gained by Cymbeline’s fantasy—its circumvention of misogyny induced by man’s debts to women—also silently implicates loss, namely the cutting out of women from the birth process, indeed the elimination of women altogether. 27 Such is the pattern of Shakespeare’s romances: Cymbeline’s wife is left out, as is Prospero’s, and Pericles’ and Leontes’ wives are absent (understood to be dead) for many long years. Jove’s eagle is variously male and female, as we have seen. Posthumus is like his jovial emblem. Flying into and merging with the sun in the Soothsayer’s second interpretation of the prophecy, aquiline Posthumus comprises male and female, British and Roman (each of which in its own right is variously described as male or female at different points in the drama’s

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military history), son-in-law and mother-father Cymbeline (the sun). Cymbeline’s transumptive claim to be both mother and father fi nds its dramatic complement in the way that Posthumus lacks biological parents. His bloodline is out of the ordinary, indeed hors jeu. Jupiter’s ex machina descent from the heavens in Posthumus’ dream reveals much about the relationship between the hero’s genealogical background and his future destiny. Posthumus is a doubly posthumous child, we learn, in that his father Sicilius died before he was born and his unnamed mother died in childbirth. Though he has no living parents and so must be denominated an orphan, he is not abandoned or unattended by guardians: the gods watch over him. His surrogate mother is the tutelary “great nature” (5.4.48). As his adoptive father, who “orphans’ father art” (5.4.40), Jupiter sees to it that Posthumus was born under “our Jovial star” (5.4.105). (Jupiter’s wife, Juno, is barely mentioned in the text of 5.4 and does not appear on stage at all, thus proving as marginal a figure as Posthumus’ anonymous mother or Cymbeline’s fi rst wife. 28) Pagan providence, like the Christian God’s provision for the immaculate birth of Christ during Cymbeline’s reign, maintains a vigil for those not conceived or able to be brought up within the normative family. Posthumus is the product of divine parthenogenesis, much as Cymbeline is the parthenogenic progenitor of three children. Parthenogenesis links sonand father-in-law homosocially. The emphasis on parthenogenesis in the birth of Posthumus and in Cymbeline’s “mothering” of three children exemplifies how romance responds to tragedy. We recall that in Hamlet marital “union” and its concomitant collapse of sexual difference into the incestuous remarriage of Gertrude and into the debilitating androgyny of the eponymous hero is the crux of the latter’s tragic plight. Hamlet insists that there be no more union. To ensure his murderous and suicidal fantasies, the “union” pearl serves as convenient means to poison marital union and its cursed offspring, and to purge the corrupt political union effected by Claudius in collusion with his incestuous partner, Hamlet’s accu(r)sed mother. Imagining himself the victim of adultery, Othello too decides to snuff out union. In Shakespeare’s late romances, the problem of adulterous female sexuality can be eliminated in two ways: fi rst, by showing adultery to be a heinous misogynistic fantasy indulged in by male characters like Posthumus and Leontes—heroes who repent eventually; second, in a very different mode, by indulging another male fantasy, unapologetic and impenitent in what I call its misogynistic idealism, viz. parthenogenesis. Parthenogenic romance eliminates the adulterous woman and then takes one step further in eliminating women altogether from familial and national genealogies. Gods like Jupiter and kings like Cymbeline are (imagined to be) the exclusive agents of providence and the sole progenitors of human history. In such a fantasmatic and fictive androcentric world, the state of the union—marital and political—need not admit discord since it refuses to admit sexual difference.

Epilogue The Tain of the Mirror

The insistence on the truth of sexuality manifests itself, in spite of its intentional patina of enlightened clarity and reasoned detachment, as an ideological illusion. Theorists as divergent as Foucault and Irigaray have deconstructed the notion that truth is grounded in some foundational referentiality of the body. Gender too escapes the constraints of univocal truth. Gender is performative, as Judith Butler argues, not grounded in the unfigured body. The notion of gender as the playing of a part is especially dear to Shakespeare’s female characters who dress as men. Such veiled heroines are given to making ironic comments, muttered to themselves and heard aside by the audience, on not being what they play. Playing the male part is a defensive strategy, a way of getting by, of accommodating oneself to hard circumstance. More often than not male garments knot and straitjacket the heroine. Even as it frees her from danger, male dress subjects her to the double bind of in-betweenness. Cross dressing allows one the power to see unseen, to be sure, but eventually she is reduced to the status of invisible and silent embarrassment to the playwright, relegated to the margins of the stage once the impediments to marriage have been resolved in the final act. In the name of social stability and narrative convention and closure, Shakespeare sacrifices the female persona whose unmarried condition, being hedged in with doubt and danger, initially provided the drama with its narrative reason for being, its pulsion of originating complication. Feminists have subjected to withering critique the male claim to be selfidentical, self-standing, without debt to the Other. The issue of man in isolation from and at odds with his female partner is central for Shakespeare’s male tragic heroes, who suffer from an inability to put into effect what their world type-genders as desirable manly action, and who blame women for their travails, for their melancholy, even for their obsessive compulsion to blame. The male subject’s lamenting his effeminization and his fall into androgyny as weaknesses results from his allegorization and projection of internal difference and division onto Woman, whether she assumes the symbolic form of the sound of “un” in Richard II, the undoing that returns one to death, or she is made to thematize the perils of “union” in Hamlet, the punning, antithetical conflation of matrimony and the poison pearl

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that dissolves marriage. Mater (mother) is man’s inheritance, he pines. The mother’s womb clothes the child, or acts as the envelope that embodies soul, according to canonical precept. Matter is what shadows and shatters the mirror in which Richard II hopes to ratify the dream of self-sustaining male specularity, of immortal kingship. In Luce Irigaray’s Speculum of the Other Woman the shadows projected on the wall in Plato’s canonical, foundational myth of the cave ultimately prove to invert and to evacuate the male dream of sameness-to-oneself—the dream that would permit one to foreclose death, to escape the mortal because material body, and to substitute for the cave-womb the blinding Ideal of the Sun, or pure form. Parthenogenesis is a common defensive strategy for the male ego to maintain its hold on Platonic form. Through fantasy man seeks to eliminate debt (death) to mater/matter, to erase the mother’s legacy by means of denegation. In the limit case of psychosis, the male arrogates reproduction to himself, and in doing so he reconciles himself to sexual difference on condition of incorporating, introjecting, and appropriating the woman— thus eliminating difference altogether. For Posthumus the woman’s part in him is the sexual desire that he must eradicate (castrate) and chasten, the arc of desire for woman (wife) that he vilifies as his inheritance as one of woman (mother) born—a desire that unmans and adulterates him, and makes of him a bastard, he claims. Anxiety over difference is defused in the re-establishment of self-identity, sameness-to-oneself, albeit in a fantasmatic dream-mode. The speculum of man reflects a narcissistic image of himself as whole, integrated seamlessly to his ego-ideal of likeness: selfcreated, self-creating, self-reproducing (parthenogenic). But integral sameness presupposes, even as it obscures in blinding light, the dark side of the mirror, the tain that the usurper Bolingbroke insists that Richard II not ignore: the fact that he is the shadow of a shadow (4.1.292–93). Antithetical negation, the sound of “un,” is constitutive of the ego, as of the royal Sun. The usurped Richard’s babble designates his resignation, his being made a (barred) subject: “Ay, no, no, ay; for I must nothing be. / Therefore no “no,” for I resign to thee” (4.1.201–2). No man can escape the forced return to the mother/wife’s womb, the uncanny recollection of an originary darkness that becomes strangely familiar once the veil of repression is lifted. No specular identity is realizable that is not the legacy (gift) of the shadows projected onto the uterine walls of the cave.

Notes

NOTES TO THE PREFACE 1. Michel Foucault, Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite, trans. Richard McDougall (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980). 2. The humoral body has received much attention from critics whose method emphasizes historical contextualization, as has the study of religious disciplines of the body through shame and taboo. These historicizing studies have turned literary critics away both from psychoanalysis and from the globalizing generalizations of the so-called Elizabethan world picture towards microhistories embedded in the nuances and contradictions of contesting ideologies in play at particular historical moments. Literary critics no longer make claims that pretend to speak for a period, a nation, much less for a global world-view. Fascination with the gender of monarchs like Elizabeth and James has continued to yield scholarly ore since the early 1980s, and historicist critics have also made valuable contributions to our understanding of beggars, vagrants, and middle-class merchants, to the way that the discourse of class circulates through the Shakespearean corpus. We have a better understanding than ever before of public and private playing companies, the economies of the theater, and the purposes and material causes of playing. 3. In Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), Luce Irigaray sees Plato’s metaphysics (his allegory of the cave) and Freud’s psychoanalysis as the canonical purveyors of the fantasy of the male as self-identical: “The desire for the same, for the selfidentical, the self (as) same, and again of the similar, the alter ego and, to put it in a nutshell, the desire for the auto . . . the homo . . . the male, dominates the representational economy” (26, ellipses in the original).

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION 1. All references to Shakespeare’s plays are to the Arden editions. Individual Arden editions are cited fully in the chapters that follow devoted to a single play. 2. Philip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses, reprinted from the third edition (1585), ed. William B. D. D. Turnbull (London: W. Pickering, 1836). Not all religious discourse was opposed to confusing the distinction between the sexes. In response to Deuteronomy 22:5, John Anson adduces a well-known

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counter-quotation from Saint Paul to justify the female transvestite saint: “For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3.27–28). The female saints took on male garb in order the better to imitate Christ. “The Female Transvestite in Early Monasticism: The Origin and Development of a Motif,” Viator 5 (1974): 1–32. 3. Barbara Baines, ed., Three Pamphlets on the Jacobean Antifeminist Controversy (New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1978). For discussions of these pamphlets, see Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540 to 1620 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), and Mary Beth Rose, “Women in Men’s Clothing: Apparel and Social Stability in The Roaring Girl,” English Literary Renaissance 14.3 (1984): 367–91. The message of Hic Mulier corresponds to what James I ordered to be preached from the pulpits of his realm. On January 25, 1620, John Chamberlain wrote in a letter, Yesterday the bishop of London called together all his Clergie about this towne, and told them he had expresse commaundment from the King to will them to inveigh vehemently and bitterly in theyre sermons, against the insolencie of our women, and theyre wearing of brode brimd hats, pointed dublets, theyre haire cut short or shorne, and some of them stillettaes or poniards, and such other trinckets of like moment; adding withall that yf pulpit admonitions will not reforme them he wold proceed by another course; the truth is the world is very far out of order, but whether this will mend yt God knowes. (Quoted in Woodbridge, 143)

Ironically, the notorious effeminacy of the male Jacobean court may have been responsible for women taking on male dress, as it were to fi ll the gap in masculinity created by foppish courtiers. This is an argument that Hic Mulier makes to her counterpart, Haec-Vir. 4. Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 5. John Rainolds, Th’Overthrow of Stage Playes (quoted in Jardine, 9). A number of Puritan divines besides Rainolds opposed the stage as a breeding ground of sin, like Stephen Gosson, Playes Confuted in Five Actions, and William Prynne, Histriomastix. For discussion of the Puritans’ opposition to the stage, see Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), and J. W. Binns, “Women or Transvestites on the Elizabethan Stage?: An Oxford Controversy,” Sixteenth Century Journal 5.2 (1974): 95–120. Stephen Cohen contrasts the emphasis on essential gender transformation in Queen Elizabeth and the Puritan polemics against cross dressing with the more playful and ultimately nondisruptive transvestite comedies of Shakespeare in “(Post) Modern Elizabeth: Gender, Politics, and the Emergence of Modern Subjectivity,” in Shakespeare and Modernity: Early Modern to Millennium, ed. Hugh Grady (London: Routledge, 2000), 20–39. 6. Lisa Jardine unravels many instances of the boy actor serving the function of a woman both on stage in female roles and off stage as sex objects for older men. She argues that the spectacle on stage of an older man kissing a cross-dressed boy was titillating primarily for male spectators. “Boy Actors, Female Roles, and Elizabethan Eroticism,” in Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, ed. David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass (New York: Routledge, 1991), 57–67. Stephen Orgel gives a comprehensive historical account of the scandal of the boy player

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in Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 7. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 6, 136–37. 8. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London: Longman, 1977). 9. In the next stanza Artegall is compared to three paradigms of the emasculated man—Samson, Hercules, and Antony: So whylome learnd that mighty Jewish swaine, Each of whose lockes did match a man in might, To lay his spoiles before his lemans traine: So also did that great Oetean Knight For his loves sake his Lions skin undight: And so did warlike Antony neglect The worlds whole rule for Cleopatras sight. Such wondrous powre hath wemens faire aspect, To captive men, and make them all the world reject. (5.8.2)

10.

11. 12. 13.

14.

This model of misogyny is familiar for the way that it locates the fatal traine in the lap of man’s leman. Men who are destined to be warriors become captive instead to a woman who forces them to remove their signature token of manliness; henceforth they wallow in undistinguished and impotent nakedness. Milton’s Samson Agonistes falls “into the snare . . . of fair fallacious looks, venereal trains” (533). And Dalila is “a manifest Serpent by her sting” (997). To such women and their men Spenser opposes a woman like Gloriana who inspires martial courage in her male admirers See John Brenkman, “The Other and the One: Psychoanalysis, Reading, The Symposium,” in Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise, ed. Shoshana Felman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 396–456. A pretext which Brenkman’s essay plays against is the idealizing account of Mircea Eliade, The Two and the One, trans. J. M. Cohen (University of Chicago, 1965). Eliade traces the history of the Neoplatonic doctrines of coincidentia oppositorum and discordia concors, the reconciliation of opposites whose most characteristic form is the harmonizing of sexual difference. For Adam’s sense of incompleteness or lack even prior to the fall, see my “‘Man’s Effeminate S(lack)ness’: Androgyny and the Divided Unity of Adam and Eve,” Milton Quarterly 31.2 (1997): 33–42. Kari Weil, Androgyny and the Denial of Difference (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 6–7. In The Analogy of “The Faerie Queene” (Princeton University Press, 1976), James Nohrnberg points out Spenser’s use of compound names formed from one syllable common to the male and the female characters of a couple: BritomArtegall, ThaMedway, OsirIsis, etc. (606–7). Mythographers interpreted the name Hermaphroditus to be compounded of the eloquent speech of Hermes and the bodily charms of Aphrodite. In Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), Edgar Wind characterizes the Venus Hermaphroditus as a composite whose male element is the soul and female the body. In these terms Origen explained the way God created the original human being male and female in one body—“male and female created He them.” Some commentators interpreted this to mean that there was an originary union between Adam and Eve, which the fall sundered into separate male and female identities nostalgic for their lost wholeness. Wind adduces further evidence from alchemy, “in

134

15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

20.

21. 22.

Notes which the Hermaphrodite, called Rebis, represents the apex of transmutation” (174). Commenting on Ovid’s story of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, George Sandys sees a parallel between the way Eve was taken out of the side of Adam and Aristophanes’ account in the Symposium of “how man at fi rst was created double, and for his arrogancy dissected into male and female: the reason of their affected conjunction, as coveting to returne to their originall.” Ovid’s Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologized, and Represented in Figures, ed. Karl K. Hulley and Stanley T. Vandersall (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), 208. For a comprehensive study of hermaphroditic gods in ancient Greek art and myth, see Marie Delcourt, Hermaphrodite: Myths and Rites of the Bisexual Figure in Classical Antiquity, trans. Jennifer Nicholson (London: Studio Books, 1961). Unless otherwise noted, I use Francis Beaumont’s translation of the poem, collected by Elizabeth Story Donno in her edition of Elizabethan Minor Epics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963). “Although Hermaphroditus gives an implicitly moral interpretation to his physical transformation—he has become weak and effeminate—the physical suggestions of postcoital flaccidity indicate a physiological interpretation of his experience,” writes Lauren Silberman in Transforming Desire: Erotic Knowledge in Books III and IV of “The Faerie Queene” (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 51. Silberman argues that the myth suppresses Hermaphroditus’ own desire by projecting it onto Salmacis, whom Hermaphroditus can then conveniently blame for the postcoital consequences. The anamorphic death’s head lies below the virgin surface. Diving through and hence articulating the surface of the reflective water marks the passing beyond what Lacan designates as the mirror stage, the stage of the Imaginary, into the alienating embrace, via language, of the Other. See The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), 79–90. Beaumont also deploys the or/nor and evermore/nevermore antitheses as further indications that in patriarchal discourse woman effects through intercourse the negation—literally the “n”—of man’s virginal singularity. Hermaphroditus is condemned to repeat the deliquescent dying in which his parents conceived him; the parents’ union “author[s]” (911) his nominal (the melded Herm-Aphroditus) destiny. Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass argue that the name of Hermaphroditus insists on the mother’s role as genetrix, but it effaces her gender by excising and replacing the expected gender-determining terminal letters (Aphrodit-us, not Aphrodit-e). In tracing the many Renaissance moralizations of Ovidian poetry, these critics make a strong case for how heterosexual virility itself is what effeminizes the male. “Fetishizing Gender: Constructing the Hermaphrodite in Renaissance Europe,” in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (New York: Routledge, 1991), 80–111. This formulaic progress of the comic heroine from unruly transvestite to obedient wife is a subject of Peter Erickson’s Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare’s Drama (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985). C. L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), 222–39. All quotations from As You Like It are from the Arden edition of the play, ed. Agnes Latham (London: Methuen, 1975).

Notes

135

23. In a production of the play at the Yale Repertory Theater in the late 1970s, Hymen was portrayed wearing a phallic bauble cap, indicative of Rosalind’s power to summon both female (hymen) and male elements, brought together in Hymen for the marital consummation. 24. My concern in this book is not to examine the sociology or history of transvestism, but rather the psychological implications of androgyny, especially in the form of male effeminization. I will try to steer clear of the Jungian defi nition of androgyny as a discordia concors or coincidence of opposites, a sentimentalized interpenetrating yin and yang. Androgyny is a concept in frequent use by Jungians and early feminists to express their hope for an end to the domination of one sex by another. Carolyn Heilbrun sounds a feminist project in her defi nition in Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (New York: Knopf, 1964): I believe that our future salvation lies in a movement away from sexual polarization and the prison of gender toward a world in which individual roles and the modes of personal behavior can be freely chosen. The ideal toward which I believe we should move is best described by the term “androgyny.” . . . Androgyny seeks to liberate the individual from the confi nes of the appropriate. . . . What is important now is that we free ourselves from the prison house of gender and, before it is too late, deliver the world from the almost exclusive control of the masculine impulse. (ix–x, xiv)

25.

26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31.

For a Jungian analysis of androgyny, emphasizing the coincidence of opposites, see June Singer, Androgyny: Toward a New Theory of Sexuality (Garden City: Anchor, 1976). See also Mircea Eliade, The Two and the One. I owe this declension of the woman in man and the anxiety that it induces to Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, “Hamlet” to “The Tempest” (New York: Routledge, 1992), chapter 2. My musings on the “master-mistress” cross coupler are indebted to Joel Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986). Jean Howard sees Twelfth Night as the most conservative of the transvestite comedies. Due to her initial refusal to love a man, Olivia is punished by means of an “unnatural” and unreciprocated love for Viola. Viola carries the burden of the normative as spokesperson for the play’s “fairly oppressive fable of the containment of gender and class insurgency and the valorization of the ‘good woman’ as the one who has interiorized—whatever her clothing—her essential difference from, and subordinate relations to, the male.” “Crossdressing, the Theatre, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England,” Shakespeare Quarterly 39.4 (1988): 418–40. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny” (1919), quoted in On Creativity and the Unconscious, ed. Benjamin Nelson (New York: Harper and Row, 1958), 153. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 26. See Adelman, chapter 2 (11–37). Joel Fineman, “Fratricide and Cuckoldry: Shakespeare’s Doubles,” in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 70–109, esp. 79. Gertrude is the androgyne because she collapses binary difference in general, e.g., that between husband and brother-in-law; her androgyny aggressively effects “jointure.”

136

Notes

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 1. Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988). 2. Patriarchal language both writes the deuteronomic law against cross dressing and suggests channels for subverting and travestying it. The transvestite wraps and constricts the patriarchal law that would prohibit gender transgression. As a cross dresser, she enjoys a certain anonymity through invisibility; no one can see that she is violating the law, since only her constructed masculinity is visible to the authorities. The sumptuary law gives way to masquerade. 3. For parsing the different ways that the material, iconic, and verbal elements in clothing signify, see Roland Barthes, The Fashion System, trans. Matthew Ward and Richard Howard (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983). 4. C. L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), 245. 5. All quotations from Twelfth Night are from the Arden edition of the play, ed. J. M. Lothian and T. W. Craik (London: Methuen, 1975). 6. Viola too points to the way that her self-presentation is a representational ruse when she asks the Captain to “present me as an eunuch” to Orsino (1.2.56). 7. Viola says of Olivia’s cosmesis that “’Tis beauty truly blent, whose red and white / Nature’s own sweet and cunning hand laid on” (1.5.242–43). Arden editors J. M. Lothian and T. W. Craik hear an echo of these lines in sonnet 20: “A woman’s face, with Nature’s own hand painted, / Hast thou, the Master Mistress of my passion.” This address of the sonneteer to the young man suggests that masquerade can work both ways, that either sex can paint. The young man is like Viola, a master-mistress because he comes between an older man and woman, both of whom fi nd him desirable. 8. In Chapter 2, on Richard II, I argue that the hero’s femininity, expressed by the haunting and much remarked repetition of the “un” sound, is responsible for his fall. I deploy Freud’s thesis in “The Uncanny” that the prefi x “un-” betokens a repression to demonstrate that what Richard tries to repress, to un-do, unsuccessfully, is the lyrical and feminine voice within himself, an androgynous voice which his society defi nes as unkingly because unmasculine. 9. Jonathan Crewe reads the pun on knot/not as the interlocking web (knot) of taboos that prohibit (not) Viola from certain types of inappropriate desire, like autoeroticism, incest, and same-sex love. “In the Field of Dreams: Transvestism in Twelfth Night and The Crying Game,” Representations 50 (1995): 101–21. To undo or unknot the effects of her transvestic dress necessitates an appeal to Providence, which will ultimately take the form of Viola’s other self, her twin brother, Sebastian. Exploring the issue of androgyny and twinning in Shakespeare’s comedies, Janet Adelman unravels a complicated thesis about this gender knot. In The Comedy of Errors, she argues, “the twins must be separated out from one another to know who they are; and yet they can know who they are only by seeing themselves mirrored in one another” (76). This paradox also characterizes later comedies like Twelfth Night, in which Viola becomes fully female “only when she has in effect found a repository for her maleness” (90) when encountering Sebastian face to face in the fi nal scene. Only then is the gender knot untied and Viola

Notes

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

137

allowed to split off and to project her male component onto someone else who is also her own flesh. But ultimately, Adelman argues, the play appeals to the fantasy that one may be both sexes at once rather than having to choose exclusively either one or the other. “Male Bonding in Shakespeare’s Comedies,” in Shakespeare’s Rough Magic: Renaissance Essays in Honor of C. L. Barber, ed. Peter Erickson and Coppélia Kahn (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), 73–103. The Liar’s paradox, fi rst enunciated by Eubulides of Megara, is a statement of the form, “What I am now saying is a lie.” If this proposition is true, then it is false; if it is false, then it is true. Iago is a master of denigrating the truth value of what he says in order to get leverage on the credulity of his listener. Like Viola, he too says, “I am not what I am” (1.1.65). See my discussion in Chapter 2 of how Luce Irigaray’s work explores the way that woman occupies in patriarchal discourse either the zero or the double/ duplicitous position, never the identical unity of the one. The putative unity of the male in the dramatic context of Twelfth Night is undercut by the fact that since boy actors play women playing men, the boy is forced to impersonate not only the woman but also the manliness that he himself lacks. It is Antonio who saves Viola in the duel in 3.4, but we hear in act 5 that Sebastian, Viola’s identical twin apart from the lack, interchangeably seconds Antonio’s aggression against Viola’s enemies. In The Stranger in Shakespeare (New York: Stein and Day, 1972), Leslie Fiedler suggests that the combined Viola-Sebastian serves as master-mistress for Antonio’s love. In the language of sonnet 20, Antonio would feel that even if nature were to supply what Viola lacks, it would be to Antonio’s purpose “nothing.” Antonio knows that “no one can have love’s ‘treasure’ without its ‘use’ and that, therefore, neither Sebastian, who is ‘pricked . . . out for women’s pleasure,’ nor Viola, who, like Ophelia, has ‘nothing’ between her legs, can provide him a happy ending.” As a result he cannot tell the twins apart when they stand together in the fi nal scene: “An apple cleft in two is not more twin / Than these two creatures. Which is Sebastian?” (5.1.221–22). I glean from Fiedler that in his inability to sort out one sex from the other Antonio epitomizes in his one person the gender confusion at the heart of the Viola-Orsino-Olivia triangle. John Hollander was the fi rst critic to cite sonnet 20 as analogue for how Viola-Sebastian is the master-mistress of Orsino’s and Olivia’s passion. “Twelfth Night and the Morality of Indulgence,” The Sewanee Review 67 (1959): 220–38. By the end of the play Orsino vows to reverse the tables one last time by making Viola “your master’s mistress” (5.1.325) and “Orsino’s mistress, and his fancy’s queen” (5.1.387). Mastered and queened, Orsino is chastened for the fi rst time in his life by a reciprocal and therefore fancyconstraining desire. In Shakespeare Our Contemporary (London: Methuen, 1964), Jan Kott advances the thesis that gender is just an appearance since Viola becomes Cesario, then unmasks as Viola, only to turn into Sebastian. In her single person she comprises both man and woman. Cristina Malcolmson offers a compelling analysis of how the issues of gender and class transgression are interwoven in the cases of Viola and Malvolio in “‘What You Will’: Social Mobility and Gender in Twelfth Night,” in The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Valerie Wayne (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 29–57. See also Karin S. Coddon, “‘Slander in an Allow’d Fool’: Twelfth Night’s Crisis of the Aristocracy,” Studies in English Literature 33.2 (1993): 309–25, and Jean Howard, “Crossdressing, the Theatre, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England” (cited in the Introduction). For an account that emphasizes Malvolio’s humiliation at being witnessed to be a social climber, see Allison P.

138

15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

Notes Hobgood, “Twelfth Night’s ‘Notorious Abuse’ of Malvolio: Shame, Humorality, and Early Modern Spectatorship,” Shakespeare Bulletin 24.3 (2006): 1–22. 24.3 (2006): 1–22. I owe to my colleague Teresa Faherty this observation about how the melancholy of Malvolio and Viola manifests itself in similar ways. In The First Night of “Twelfth Night” (New York: Macmillan, 1954), Leslie Hotson points out that in addition to signifying melancholy, yellow is the metaphorical vehicle for cowardice, narcissism, and jealous-foolish husbands. Hotson adduces the expression “to wear yellow stockings and cross garters” as a byword for jealousy (113). George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (1589), ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), 206. Joel Fineman discusses cross coupling as the quintessential and inevitable trope of the paradox of praise, of praise used to mock praise, in Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986). See also Fineman’s “The History of the Anecdote: Fiction and Fiction” (The Subjectivity Effect in Western Literary Tradition [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991]), 59–87, for its stringent argument that Feste’s reversible glove is a linguistic trope of inversion not reducible to any bodily cause or referent. In this same collection of essays, in “Shakespeare’s Will: The Temporality of Rape,” 165–221, Fineman points to the complementary, chiastic crossing of the letters M and W in The Rape of Lucrece, as in a phrase like “men have marble, women waxen minds” (line 1240). The remark of Viola that I have already discussed, “Whoe’er I woo, myself would be his wife,” expresses her gender confusion both in the disjunctive play between fi rst-personal “myself” and third-personal “wife”—the cross-dressed and cross-lettered interplay of M and W—and in the way the syntax unfolds in inverted order from third to fi rst person, then fi rst person back to third. Malvolio, it should be noted, does not speak such chiastic language as Viola. He wears the cross coupler and he is cross coupled by the tricky letter, making him more an object of ridicule than a speaking subject of pathos (Viola). Jonathan Crewe epitomizes the modern critical ambivalence about Malvolio’s sexuality in referring to the “cross-gartered if not strictly cross-dressed Malvolio” (117). Yoshiko Kawachi traces how a number of recent critics, like Marjorie Garber and Dympna Callaghan, locate in Malvolio’s festive yellow the sign that he is cross-dressed. “‘I am not what I am’: Mistaken Identity, Transvestism, and Gender in Twelfth Night,” in Shakespeare’s Illyrias: Heterotopias, Identities, (Counter)Histories, ed. Martin Procházka 12.23 (2002): 98–112. Loreen L. Giese sees the yellowness of Malvolio’s stockings as a sign of his suffering betrayal and of his “demasculinization” (242) in her essay “Malvolio’s Yellow Stockings: Coding Illicit Sexuality in Early Modern London,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 19 (2006): 235–46. Recall the way that being the recipient of a letter feminizes fi rst the Minister D— and later his pursuer, the detective “analyst” Auguste Dupin, in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter.” Sexuality is a function of one’s structural position in the signifying letter’s chain of transmission, which dictates the kind of reversible interchange that Jacques Lacan analyzes in his Seminar on Poe’s story: “For these children, Ladies and Gentlemen will henceforth be two countries toward which each of their souls will strive on divergent wings, and between which a truce will be the more impossible since they are actually the same country” (trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, Yale

Notes

20.

21.

22.

23. 24. 25.

139

French Studies 47 [1972]: 38–72). The posting and inverted return of letters puts Poe’s literary characters through the same kind of mix-up of paces that befalls Malvolio. For a fascinating analysis of O as the sound of castration, see Joel Fineman’s essay “The Sound of O in Othello: The Real of the Tragedy of Desire,” in The Subjectivity Effect in Western Literary Tradition, 143–64. Of the many essays on what the M.O.A.I. anagram may mean, see L. S. Cox, “The Riddle of Twelfth Night,” Shakespeare Quarterly 13 (1962), 360; Cynthia Lewis, “‘A Fustian Riddle’?: Anagrammatic Names in Twelfth Night,” ELN 12 (1985): 32–37; and Winfried Schleiner, “Orsino and Viola: Are the Names of Serious Characters in Twelfth Night Meaningful?” Shakespeare Studies 16 (1983): 135–41. David Willbern warns against the paranoid style of critics who project their interpretations onto the M.O.A.I.: “In order to render meaning, the text is rent. Perhaps Malvolio and we fellow critics are, like Feste, not so much fools as ‘corrupters of words’ (3.1.37).” “Paranoia, Criticism, and Malvolio,” University of Hartford Studies in Literature 11.1 (1979), 13. The rending of the text is a necessary precondition for the rendering of meaning, however corrupt it may be. Thus, as I argue in the text, Feste thematizes how the meaning of words is corrupted in terms of the ease with which a glove may be turned wrong side out, an image applicable to the topsy-turviness of sexuality as well. In “Letters, Lovers, Lacan: Or Malvolio’s Not-So-Purloined Letter,” Assays 5 (1989): 63–89, Laurie E. Osborne argues that as the passive recipient of the letter that bears his broken name, Malvolio is repositioned sexually: “Cesario/Viola’s is not the only unstable gender in the text, just as she is not the only one traversed by the power of the signifier. Malvolio, once in possession of the letter, is feminized in dress as he seeks to make a fetish of himself by transforming himself into the signified of M.O.A.I. While he partakes of the feminine (and fl ies into what Lacan might call a feminine rage at the end of the play), his situation when he has the letter also partakes of a loss of the signifying phallus, but a loss which he does not apprehend. . . . In possessing the letter, Malvolio is feminized, losing his masculine attributes without knowing it” (74). Malvolio’s méconnaissance: he does not know that he is not the cynosure that he takes himself to be; he is not a man beloved of the one he thinks he loves; he is not made manly by his experience of falling in love with a woman. Leslie Hotson (111–12) delineates the complex play on the word “obstruction.” First, Malvolio gulls himself into believing that the letter is innocent of duplicity or danger: “There is no obstruction in this” (2.5.119). But the letter gives rise to the obstruction or oppilation of the vital organs and spirits. Obstruction in this medical sense may lead to fits of epilepsy or of demonic possession. Ultimately, the obstruction induced by the cross gartering results in Malvolio’s being obstructed or imprisoned in a dark house, given point by Feste: “Yet complainest thou of obstruction?” (4.2.39). I take Hotson’s tracing of obstruction to indicate how mental and physical impediments are interdependent and how their collective medical malfunction is the pretext for “paternalistic” state intervention. Quotations are from The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, ed. Maurice Evans (New York: Penguin, 1977). Thomas Laqueur explores the trajectory of the Galenic model of the sexes in Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). Hamlet amuses himself cruelly at Ophelia’s expense that it is “a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs” (3.2.117). He implies that Ophelia is not honest

140

Notes

(chaste) because fi rst she lies with other men, then lies to Hamlet about her sexual dishonesty. 26. In Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and Shakespearean Comedy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), Barbara Freedman posits the manifestation in the play of two extremes of belief: Feste and Viola mistrust playing as not what it is, while Malvolio sees the play as what he will. Freedman graphs this dichotomy onto Lacan’s Schema L, whose two axes Shakespeare reflects in “bringing into dialogue characters who acknowledge how language prevents self-presence and characters who seek to deny this truth by presumptuous self-fashioning and masochistic fl ights of unrequited love” (216). Translating into other, sumptuary, terms, I prefer to point to the gender pathos of Viola’s alien dress, the ridiculousness of Malvolio’s.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2 1. See Allison Heisch, “Queen Elizabeth: Parliamentary Rhetoric and the Exercise of Power,” Signs 1 (1975): 31–55, and Leah Marcus, “Shakespeare’s Comic Heroines, Elizabeth I, and the Political Uses of Androgyny,” in Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Mary Beth Rose (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 135–53. For a non-gendered, Bahktinian account of various texts pertaining to the Essex controversy, see the second chapter of James R. Siemon, Word Against Word: Shakespearean Utterance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002). 2. James Calderwood, “Richard II to Henry V: Variations on the Fall,” in Modern Critical Interpretations of “Richard II,” ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1988), 76. 3. Coleridge, “Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton” (1812), in “Richard II”: Critical Essays, ed. Jeanne T. Newlin (New York: Garland, 1984), 187. 4. Quoted in Leonard Dean, “From Richard II to Henry V: A Closer View,” in Paul Cubeta, ed., Twentieth Century Interpretations of “Richard II” (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 60. Coleridge catalogues a litany of what he takes to be the feminine characteristics of Richard. His faults spring entirely from defect of character . . . continually increasing energy of thought, and as constantly diminishing power of acting. . . . Constant overflow of feelings; incapability of controlling them; waste of that energy which should be reserved for action in the passion and effort of resolves and menaces, and the consequent exhaustion. . . . Above all, the seeking refuge in despair, so characteristic of inward weakness. . . . Exhaustion counterfeiting quiet; and yet the habit of kingliness, the effect of flattery from infancy, constantly producing a sort of wordy courage which betrays the inward impotence. The consequent alternation of unmanly despair and of ungrounded hope; and throughout the rapid transition from one feeling to its opposite.

The excitement of thought coupled with atrophy of the capacity for action suggests a parallel to Hamlet, to whom critics have often compared Richard as a prototype. Explicitly echoing Coleridge, Swinburne characterizes the poetic diction of Richard as being that of “a womanish or semivirile character”: The inspired effeminacy and the fanciful puerility which dunces attribute to the typical character of a representative poet never found such graceful utterance as the greatest of poets has given to the unmanliest of his creatures when Richard lands in Wales. Coleridge credits the poor wretch with “an intense love of his country,” intended to “redeem him in the hearts

Notes

141

of the audience” in spite of the fact that “even in his love there is something feminine and personal.” There is nothing else in it: as anybody but Coleridge would have seen. It is exquisitely pretty and utterly unimaginable as the utterance of a man.

5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

The emphasis throughout this mode of criticism is on a poetic diction unworthy of a man of action. Swinburne’s “King Richard II” is quoted in Newlin, ed., 243–44. King Richard II, ed. Peter Ure (London: Methuen, 1956), lxxxi. Harry Berger, Jr., Imaginary Audition (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 1989), 82, 80. Harold Bloom, “Introduction” to Modern Critical Interpretations of “Richard II,” 2. Luce Irigaray reduces this paradox of the feminine as double and as none to the contrary symbolic valences of the female genitalia: double by virtue of the two vaginal lips, none according to the Freudian model that woman represents lack or castration. This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 26. In Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 1947), Sister Miriam Joseph was the fi rst critic to point out, though she offers no analysis of, the proliferation of words in the play that begin with the prefi x “un”: “undeaf,” “unhappied,” “uncurse,” “unking’d,” “unkiss.” Paul Cubeta (6) notices a similar fetish for the prefi xes “de” and “dis,” whose obsessive repetition has much the same negative effect as “un”: “dissolute,” “dissolve,” “desperate,” “despair,” “degenerate,” “depressed,” “dishonor,” “depart,” “discharge,” “disperse,” “depose,” “decline,” “divide,” “debase.” W. F. Bolton gives a full table of the frequency of words in “un-“ and “-lesse” in Shakespeare’s English: Language in the History Plays (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992), 50. See also Bolton’s account of chiasmus and “un” in his Shakespeare entry for The Oxford Companion to the English Language, ed. Tom McArthur (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 925–30. Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1.4 (1976), 882. In “When Our Lips Speak Together,” Luce Irigaray valorizes woman as the principle of difference. Woman’s doubleness is inscribed physically on a body that signifies a liberation from the tyranny of masculine singularity. If we continue to speak of this sameness, if we speak to each other as men have spoken for centuries, as they taught us to speak, we will fail each other. . . . In their [men’s] calculations, we count as two. Really, two? Doesn’t that make you laugh? A strange kind of two, which isn’t one, especially not one. Let them have oneness, with its prerogatives, its domination, its solipsisms: like the sun. . . . We are two, long before any representation of us exists.

Trans. Carolyn Burke, Signs 6.1 (1980): 66–79. Irigaray’s model of the sun as metaphor for the prerogative of domineering sameness-unto-itself will resonate as we examine later how the sun is deconstructed by the very “un” which constitutes it. Translator Carolyn Burke elaborates on the question of sameness in Irigaray: In her view, the syntax of discursive logic does not tolerate such female speakers, who cannot be assimilated into a system of meaning based on masculine identity as sameness. “Sameness” refers to what Irigaray sees as the tendency in Western theoretical discourse to privilege masculine “sameness-unto-itself” as the basis of meaning and identity. . . . “Oneness,” like

142

Notes “sameness,” refers to the masculine standard that takes itself as a universal and collapses sexual difference. (67, 71)

11. All quotations from Richard II are from Peter Ure’s Arden edition (cited in note 5). 12. For the self-contradictory meanings of the many words that denote words, see M. M. Mahoud, Shakespeare’s Wordplay (London: Methuen, 1957). 13. Richard Altick, “Symphonic Imagery in Richard II,” in Newlin, ed., 261–62. 14. Catherine Belsey argues that since Gaunt is “gaunt by name and gaunt by nature” (33), his name as signifier and as signified are aligned in a way that will not be the case for the evacuated name of king of Richard. “Making Histories Then and Now: Shakespeare from Richard II to Henry V,” in Uses of History: Marxism, Postmodernism, and the Renaissance, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen (Manchester University Press, 1991), 24–46. 15. Taking his cue from Bakhtin, Peter Stallybrass argues that the classical, masculine body is closed, whereas the feminine body is associated with orifices open to the earth. “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed,” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourse of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy Vickers (University of Chicago, 1986), 123–42. 16. For analysis of the Neoplatonic picturing of an ocular sun as the figure for an ideal visual language, see Joel Fineman’s essay, “The Turn of the Shrew,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985), 138–59. The need to shadow the sun’s divinity in cloud (see the analysis of Bolingbroke later) derives from the prohibition against seeing God face to face or pronouncing his literal name. 17. Naomi Liebler concurs in reading this passage as foregrounding a disjunctive slippage between the king and the sun that symbolizes royalty. Richard accurately thinks himself not quite up to the role of sun; he is the sun’s son (or, if “sun” signifies an anointed king, the sun’s grandson): “Down, down I come, like glist’ring Phaeton” (3.3.178); in that image is his own confession of his failed potential.

18. 19. 20. 21.

“The Mockery King of Snow: Richard II and the Sacrifice of Ritual,” in True Rites and Maimed Rites, ed. Linda Woodbridge and Edward Berry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 236. Ernst Kantorowicz reads the downing of the sun as a figure for Lucifer’s fall from the empyrean. The King’s Two Bodies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 33. William W. E. Slights shows how Richard’s self-presentation as Phaeton humanizes and personalizes the common archetype of the “inverted rite” of the king’s “discoronation” (204). “Ain’t It a Shame: History and Psychology in Richard II Criticism,” in Re-Visions of Shakespeare: Essays in Honor of Robert Ornstein, ed. Evelyn Gajowski (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 243–59. “Jade” is both a contemptuous name for a horse and “a term of reprobation applied to a woman” (OED 2). Sigmund Freud, “Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious” (1905), quoted in David Scott Kastan, “Proud Majesty Made a Subject: Shakespeare and the Spectacle of Rule,” Shakespeare Quarterly 37.4 (1986), 459. Ibid., 461–63. See Jacques Derrida on the subject of feminine passivity in Nietzsche, quoted in note 25 of this chapter. For a critique of Freud’s account of feminine passivity, see Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 36.

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22. Contrast the “I know no I” with Richard III’s remark, “Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I” (5.3.184). Jonathan Goldberg notes how Richard’s claim to “resign” (202) to Bolingbroke may mean both that he gives away the realm and that he writes again (re-signs) his claim to it. Goldberg sees Richard’s speech as a reiteration or re-signing of Holinshed. “Rebel Letters: Postal Effects from Richard II to Henry V,” Renaissance Drama 19 (1988): 3–28. 23. Northrop Frye comments on the death wish implicit in Richard’s resigned lyricism: Ever since the beginning of language, probably, “nothing” has meant two things: “not anything” and “something called nothing.” Richard is saying here (not very grammatically) that every human being, including himself, is discontented, not pleased with anything, until he becomes that something we call nothing, i.e., in this context, dead.

In Bloom, ed., Modern Critical Interpretations of “Richard II,” 123. 24. For the association between “nothing” and the female genitalia, as well as the use of the word to designate death, see David Willbern, “Shakespeare’s Nothing,” in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 244–63. 25. Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow (University of Chicago, 1979), 89. In Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), Luce Irigaray speaks of “that most female of men, the Son” (199). The phallic nature of the Sun (267) and the Other as shadow (331, 334) are relevant to my analysis of the deposition scene. 26. Jeanie Grant Moore argues that the repeated references to “nothing” in the deposition scene represent Isabel as the “unseen,” whose unborn sorrow reappears in altered form as the inner grief of the king. “As if he had given birth to it, the inner nothingness of Isabel’s womb has been transformed into outer nothingness for Richard, now deprived of his role” (26). “Queen of Sorrow, King of Grief: Reflections and Perspectives in Richard II,” in In Another Country: Feminist Perspectives on Renaissance Drama, ed. Dorothea Kehler and Susan Baker (Metuchen: Scarecrow Press, 1991), 19–35. 27. The Arden editor, Peter Ure, notes the homosexual implications, but few critics are inclined to make anything of this passage. 28. Richard calls William Scroope, Bushy, and Greene “Three Judases, each one thrice worse than Judas!” (3.2.132), only to fi nd that they have been sacrificed on his behalf. 29. Sigmund Freud, “The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words” (1910) in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), 11:153–61. 30. Peter Ure looks to this passage as evidence that Richard’s “intense love of country is touched with a feminine feeling” (lxxi). Gaunt speaks of a crossing between the feminine and male generativity when he fondly apostrophizes “this England, / This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings” (2.1.50–51). While Gaunt regards England as the mother of kings, England’s King Richard styles himself a parthenogenic fountainhead of royal progeny. William Tyndale denounces the king who would be mother: A king that is as soft as silk and effeminate, that is to say, turned into the nature of a woman—what with his own lusts, which are the longing of a woman with child, so that he cannot resist them, and what with the wily

144 Notes tyranny of them that ever rule him—shall be much more grievous unto the realm than a right tyrant.

The Obedience of a Christian Man (1528), quoted in Irving Ribner, “The Political Problem in Shakespeare’s Lancastrian Tetralogy,” in Cubeta, ed., Twentieth Century Interpretations of “Richard II,” 33. 31. In “The Theme of the Three Caskets” (1913) (Standard Edition 12: 289– 302), Freud elaborates on the figuration of death (Richard’s “nothing”) as a woman: Perhaps a superficial allegorical interpretation of the three female figures in the theme becomes possible as well. One might say that the three inevitable relations man has with woman are here represented: that with the mother who bears him, with the companion of his bed and board, and with the destroyer. Or it is the three forms taken on by the figure of the mother as life proceeds: the mother herself, the beloved who is chosen after her pattern, and fi nally the Mother Earth who receives him again. But it is in vain that the old man yearns after the love of woman as once he had it from his mother; the third of the Fates alone, the silent goddess of Death, will take him into her arms. (301)

As Richard comes to identify with a personifying embrace with death, his estrangement from Queen Isabel (the second woman of Freud’s schema) becomes more pronounced. In Speculum of the Other Woman, Irigaray argues that as man appropriates self-identity and sameness to himself, “death will be the only representative of an outside, of a heterogeneity, of an other: woman will assume the function of representing death (of sex /organ), castration, and man will be sure as far as possible of achieving mastery, subjugation” (27). 32. Richard Altick comments that [I]n no other history play is the idea of tears and weeping so insistently presented. It is this element which enforces most strongly our impression of Richard as a weakling, a monarch essentially feminine in nature, who has no conception of stoic endurance or resignation but a strong predilection for grief. (259)

While Richard proposes to shed tears on the bosom of the dusty earth and tell sad stories of the death of kings, Bolingbroke swears to “lay the summer’s dust with showers of blood / Rain’d from the wounds of slaughtered Englishmen.” Bolingbroke’s astrological imagery casts himself as non-nurturer, as monster and menace to both sun and earth. But he claims not to want to bedrench “the green lap of fair Richard’s land” with such a “crimson tempest” (3.3.43–47). 33. Recapitulating a paradigm both classical and biblical, Jacques Derrida summarizes the way philosophical discourse typecasts the opposition between masculine and feminine: . . . [B]etween active, informative productivity and virility on the one hand, and material, unproductive passivity and femininity on the other. . . . Nietzsche, then, is following tradition when he inscribes the man in the system of activity . . . and the woman in the system of passivity. (Spurs, 77, 149)

If being “unproductive” is associated with the feminine according to this model—so contrary to the obvious sexual generativity of woman—then Richard’s impotence places him under this sign.

Notes

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34. Commenting on this passage, René Girard describes Richard as his own fatal double (mirror image): The dethronement scene in Richard II can be seen as a sort of coronation performed in reverse. Walter Pater described it as an inverted rite, but all rites demand that moment of inversion. The king acts as his own sacrificer, transforming himself by quasi-religious means into a double of all his enemies and their surrogate victims as well. He is himself a traitor, in no way different from those who do him violence.

Violence and the Sacred, trans Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 304. Richard is his own doppelgänger, projecting for himself a debilitating, othering, feminine side, the shadow fatality of androgyny. 35. Coppélia Kahn, Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 1981), 67. 36. René Girard argues that the sacrificial king takes on the role of the unworthy king, the antisovereign. The king then unloads on this inverted image of himself all his negative attributes. We now have the true pharmakos: the king’s double, but in reverse. He is similar to those mock kings who are crowned at carnival time, when everything is set topsy-turvy and social hierarchies turned upside down; when sexual prohibitions are lifted, and theft permitted; when servants take the place of their masters and women exchange clothing with men; when, in short, the throne is yielded only to the basest, ugliest, and most ridiculous and criminal of beings. (109n)

37.

38.

39.

40.

In forgoing the masculine position of sovereign rule, Richard invests his antisovereign double with female qualities. Peter Ure comments: “There is something deliberately unexplained, something therefore impulsive and compulsive, about his wish to have the mirror at this moment, and something intense and private in his act of looking at it, for this, too, is a kind of soliloquy, his fi rst” (lxxxii). For Ernst Kantorowicz the many faces that Richard addresses in the mirror manifest the contradictory roles that he impersonates. “The duplications, all one, and all simultaneously active in Richard—‘Thus play I in one person many people’ (5.5.31)—are those potentially present in the King, the Fool, and the God. They dissolve, perforce, in the Mirror” (27). The king and the carnivalesque mocker of the king meet in the mirror. Richard sees at once his living self and the dark promise of his death mask. In “The King’s Melting Body: Richard II” in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works: Volume II, The Histories, ed. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 395–411, Lisa Hopkins gathers a cento of passages on doubling in the text and relates them to the double that Richard sees in the mirror. The mirror fails to deliver the expected comforting image of the king’s iconic and enduring presence, rendering instead a shadowy anamorphosis. See Freud’s footnote to “The Uncanny” (156) for a description of his mortal shock at seeing his own image flash in the mirrored door of his wagon-lit compartment. In On Creativity and the Unconscious, ed. Benjamin Nelson (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), 122–61. Freud writes in “The Uncanny” that “what ever reminds us of this inner repetition compulsion is perceived as uncanny” (145), thus adumbrating his theory, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), that involuntary repetition is evidence of the death drive.

146

Notes

41. Graham Holderness, “‘A Woman’s War’: A Feminist Reading of Richard II,” in Shakespeare Left and Right, ed. Ivo Kamps (New York: Routledge, 1991), 173. 42. Richard’s relationship with his mother remains unspecified in the text. In his estrangement from Isabel, Richard prefers instead the embrace of the uncanny death-mother, upon whose bosom he sheds tears as he tells sad tales, musing upon his return to the womb of annihilation. Like the poet that he is, Richard is half in love with easeful death. 43. Shoshana Felman, What Does a Woman Want? Reading and Sexual Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 64. Contrast Joel Fineman’s traditionally masculinist account that genders difference itself as feminine: “In a formula whose lusty misogyny is recognizably Shakespearean, we can say that in Shakespeare’s sonnets the difference between man and woman is woman herself.” In a typical Neoplatonic schema, man is figured as the sun, woman as the moon, in service of an “orthodox erotics for which woman is the Other to man, the hetero to homo, precisely because her essence is to be this lunatic difference between sameness and difference.” Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), 17, 120.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3 1. My epigraphs from this ambivalently androgynous actress are gleaned respectively from M. Maurice Shudofsky, “Sarah Bernhardt on Hamlet,” College English 3 (1941): 293–95, and Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992), 38. In The Masks of Hamlet (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), 105–6, Marvin Rosenberg offers a cento of original reviews of Bernhardt’s 1899 performance, from which it appears that the ambivalent critics were roughly evenly divided on the issue of whether her Hamlet tended more (or too much) towards the masculine or the feminine. Marcel Pagnol suggested that since Hamlet “does not have the reflexes of a man,” perhaps his theatrical role better suits a woman: “Hamlet is for me, without any doubt, a philosophe d’un sexe douteux whose role could be perfectly played by a great comedienne.” Quoted in Norman Holland, Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1979), 183. 2. Ernest Jones, Hamlet and Oedipus (Garden City: Doubleday, 1949), 25–26. Jacqueline Rose, “Hamlet—the Mona Lisa of Literature,” Critical Quarterly 28 (1986): 35–49. 3. See Mircea Eliade, The Two and the One, trans. J. M. Cohen (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1965); June Singer, Androgyny: Towards a New Theory of Sexuality (Garden City: Anchor, 1976); Carolyn Heilbrun, Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (New York: Knopf, 1973). Heilbrun defi nes androgyny as a movement away from polarized sexual stereotypes towards a world in which gender roles and sexual behavior can be freely chosen. An early champion of androgyny, Heilbrun believes that Hamlet’s tragedy consists in having to eschew androgyny and to destroy Ophelia, his saving feminine self, in order to accomplish the manly task of vengeance. See also her more recent discussion in Hamlet’s Mother (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). 4. David Leverenz makes the most persuasive case for the beneficent value of Hamlet’s feminine side in his influential essay, “The Woman in Hamlet: An

Notes

147

Interpersonal View,” in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 110–28: Hamlet is part hysteric, as Freud said, and part Puritan in his disgust at contamination and his idealization of his absent father. But he is also, as Goethe was the fi rst to say, part woman. And Goethe was wrong, as Freud was wrong, to assume that “woman” means weakness. To equate women with weak and tainted bodies, words, and feelings while men possess noble reason and ambitious purpose is to participate in Denmark’s disease that divides mind from body, act from feeling, man from woman. (111)

5. 6.

7.

8.

In Shakespeare’s Division of Experience (New York: Summit Books, 1981), Marilyn French concurs with Carolyn Heilbrun that action is the province of the man, whereas Hamlet’s “primary response to experience is to ‘feel’ it—through sensation, emotion, or reflective thought. Hamlet’s response to life, then, is ‘feminine’” (147). In The Mystery of Hamlet (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1881), the Victorian scholar Edward P. Vining made the fi rst detailed argument for Hamlet as a woman, locating Hamlet’s femininity in such features as his melancholy, playacting (masquerade), hysteria, faintness, mysteriousness, gentleness, wordy poetizing, (feigned) madness, lack of strength, or courage to act—features “that are far more in keeping with a feminine than with a masculine nature” (48). Vining thought that Hamlet was in fact a woman disguised at birth as a man, like Ovid’s Iphis, because Gertrude knew that her husband wanted a boy. From his mother’s disguise of him as a girl, Hamlet learned “dissimulation” (82). The following toss-off is typical of Vining’s tendentiousness: “Hamlet has a woman’s daintiness and sensitiveness to perfumes” (77). Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Hamlet are from the Arden edition of the play, ed. Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1982). Margaret Ferguson discusses the conflation of mother and matter in “Hamlet: Letters and Spirits,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985), 295. See also Patricia Parker, “Othello and Hamlet: Dilation, Spying, and the ‘Secret Place’ of Woman,” Representations 44 (Fall 1993): 60–95. In Shakespeare Among the Moderns (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), Richard Halpern draws an analogy between the male as stylus and the female as the wax tablet of Freud’s “Mystic Writing Pad.” King Hamlet is the paternal law as the ideal expressed permanently in writing, but Gertrude represents the all too erasable tablet (mater/matter) on which the law is physically inscribed. King Hamlet is memory, Gertrude is forgetting (283). At various points in Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), Luce Irigaray discusses the conflation of mother and matter, as when she defi nes parthenogenesis as “reproduction (of self) without matter, or mother” (351), a fantasy of narcissistic specularity. In lieu of the Folio’s scullion, the reading printed in the Arden edition, I opt tendentiously for the Second Quarto’s stallion = “male whore,” a choice of words that better fits Hamlet’s sense of compromised masculinity. The animal virility suggested by stallion is undercut by the reference to prostitution which Hamlet and Hamlet associate with women. In his commentary on the function of language in Lacan, Mikkel BorchJacobsen points to the way speech disengages the speaker from the present immediacy of intuition, absenting the object that speech intends to capture by naming it, and thereby opening up a loss within the speaker himself that makes of him a subject:

148

Notes The subject speak[s] in order to say nothing: “Words, words, words. . . .” Speech, instead of saying something, now speaks itself and thus speaks the truth, which is precisely that speech says nothing—nothing other than the ‘hole in the real’ that is the subject at the moment when he speaks. (139)

Naming the object leaves in its wake “nothing but words, words, words— that is, a subject” (193). Lacan: The Absolute Master, trans. Douglas Brick (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). The “nothing” that the subject speaks is gendered feminine in Hamlet’s bawdy remarks to Ophelia during the play within the play. For the male, to become a subject is to fall under the sign of woman. At a spring 1994 symposium at Berkeley on “Rhetorics of Early Modern Masculinity,” Patricia Parker spoke about the efforts of Renaissance authors to achieve stylistic virilitas. Their goal was a sinewy (nervosus) style, which these anti-Ciceronian rhetoricians attempted to ground in the male body (nervus = “penis”). But no male could express a virile style in words whose lingua-derived copia was gendered feminine. In the epistle dedicatory to his A Worlde of Wordes (1598), John Florio commented anxiously on the emblematic proverb, “Le parole sono femine, & i fatti sono maschii, Wordes they are women, and deeds they are men.” Like Hamlet, Florio sensed his project for a virile style hopelessly compromised by its imbrication and entrapment in woman’s textual web. See Parker’s essay, “On the Tongue: Cross Gendering, Effeminacy, and the Art of Words,” Style 23.3 (1989): 445–65. Here Parker demonstrates how Erasmus’ Lingua treatise (1525) associates the loquacious male with the “loud and babbling harlot” of Proverbs 7, a passage relevant to Hamlet’s self-characterization as a wordy whore. Parker discusses the way that Erasmus prefers manly brevitas to excessive verbal copia: “The arts of rhetoric as devices for amplifying a theme (‘amplificandi rationes’) are not only contrasted with deeds but linked to a loquacity gendered as ‘foolish and womanish’ (‘stultam ac muliebrem loquacitatem’)” (449). 9. My contention that the male fears being compromised and contaminated by his dependency upon the mother’s body is deeply indebted to Janet Adelman’s Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, “Hamlet” to “The Tempest” (New York: Routledge, 1992). Adelman argues that the feminine presence that divides Hamlet’s male identity is the mother regarded as whore: He himself is subject to his birth: he would imagine himself the unmixed son of an unmixed father, but the whore-mother in him betrays him, returning him to his own mixed [mixture = “sexual intercourse” (OED 1e)] origin, his contamination by the sexual female within. (30)

Taking her cue from Kristeva’s Powers of Horror, Susan Zimmerman sees Hamlet in the placenta under threat of suffocation, a contaminating state that converges with the reality of leprosy and the preying upon garbage (107). “Psychoanalysis and the Corpse,” Shakespeare Studies 33 (2005): 101–8. 10. I owe to Joel Altman the tenor of my remarks about the way that res and verbum reverse the gender hierarchy of spirit over matter. 11. Erasmus’ Lingua begins with a proverb that suggests that the verbose male is he who has sucked too long at the mother’s breast: “Ubi uber, ibi tuber; fatti maschii, parole femine” (“Where there is a breast, there is a swelling; facts are masculine, words are feminine.”) Quoted in Parker, 460. 12. The son’s loss of the father results in the impossible duty to restore him, to avenge the dead by undoing the adulterous usurpation of Claudius and Gertrude.

Notes

149

13. In the closing chapter of The Gendering of Melancholia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), Juliana Schiesari analyzes the male’s scapegoating of woman in Hamlet, Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, and Freud’s works: The melancholic’s desire for the father’s gaze is concomitant to and inseparable from a profound denigration of women, who are typically accused of all the horrible things the melancholic can also accuse himself of: duplicity, inconstancy, inhumanity, animality, and base materiality. Obviously, the melancholic projects on women the lack that he would deny in himself, except of course when he addresses himself in the voice of his own superego. (239)

This observation leads to a reading of Burton that is relevant as well to my dissection of Hamlet: In diagnosing, as Freud too would, the female melancholic as phallicly needy, Burton blushingly foregrounds his own sexual deprivation, his own “unmanliness.” Much later, in discussing love melancholia, Burton does not mince words when he says outright that melancholia “turns a man into a woman” (3: 142). (252)

Hamlet suffers from an inversion of love melancholy since the woman in him makes him too disillusioned to love any woman. In “Mourning and Melancholia,” (Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey [London: Hogarth Press, 1955–74], 14: 237–60), Freud instances Hamlet’s melancholia, his self-reproaches and suicidal impulses, as the turning against his own ego of a repressed hostility towards a once loved object. The ambivalently cathected object is introjected, i.e., internalized as the ego’s own object, as opposed to the release of the object that occurs in mourning. Julia Reinhard Lupton and Kenneth Lupton invoke Lacan’s reading of Freud in arguing that whereas Oedipus Rex ends with the recognition of castration, Hamlet begins with it. Hamlet is like a little girl, they assert, in recognizing castration immediately: Since the little girl is mourning something that was never there in the fi rst place, we would argue that her relation to the phallus is melancholic rather than mournful. We could say that she mourns mourning—that is, that she mourns the lack of any real object that could be mourned, or, more precisely, that she mourns the lack of a lack that could be restored.

After Oedipus: Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 56. Janet Adelman takes issue with “critics who use the model of Freud’s ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ [who] generally assume that the lost object is Hamlet’s father; but Hamlet’s discovery of the whore inside himself suggests that the lost, introjected, and then berated object is his mother” (256–57). See also Ranjini Philip, “The Shattered Glass: The Story of (O) phelia,” Hamlet Studies 13 (1991): 73–84. In The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), Douglas Trevor distinguishes between Spenserian melancholy that may serve to inspire the poet, and the debilitating melancholy of Hamlet that derives from an abundance of black bile. 14. In “Creativity and Its Origins,” D. W. Winnicott anticipates Carolyn Heilbrun (see note 3 in this chapter) in arguing that the male and female elements in Hamlet are in harmony until his father dies. Thereafter he rejects the female and projects it onto Ophelia, whom he then maligns for her femininity. Playing and Reality (New York: Routledge, 1971).

150

Notes

15. Avi Erlich regards the “flesh” in this speech as a representation of the “solid” penis, which Hamlet wishes poured out orgasmically “into a dew.” Hamlet’s Absent Father (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 65. Erlich’s analysis is at times stretched and tendentious, but his book remains probably the most detailed compendium of psychoanalytic readings of the play. Philip Armstrong traces Erlich’s debts to an ego psychology whose optimism, archetypalism, and quest for wholeness derives from Carl Jung and Alex Aronson. Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 2001), 53–56. 16. Sigmund Freud, “The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words” (1910) in Standard Edition 11:153–61. 17. Julia Reinhard Lupton and Kenneth Lupton comment on the identification of Hamlet with Niobe: “Niobe, becoming her tears, is a favored Renaissance figure of narcissistic identification with loss; she thus becomes an image of the melancholic petrification to which Hamlet and Hamlet are subject. Niobe’s metamorphosis materializes the watery fate imagined in the soliloquy’s opening line” (115). 18. At several points in The Interpretation of Dreams (Standard Edition 4 & 5), Freud discusses water as a dream element that symbolizes woman, especially with regard to male fantasies of birth and of returning to the womb. 19. Laertes appeals to the blood/tears opposition in defending the incorruptibility of his descent and the chastity of his mother: That drop of blood that’s calm proclaims me bastard, Cries cuckold to my father, brands me harlot Even here between the chaste unsmirched brow Of my true mother. (4.5.116–20)

This confidence about origins contrasts with Hamlet’s nagging fear that Gertrude may have cuckolded King Hamlet and so have branded her son a bastard and a harlot. 20. In a series of articles Patricia Parker has argued the centrality for Shakespearean tragedy of “dilation” in the rhetorical and temporal senses, as well as in the sense of delation or accusation. I use the word to describe how Hamlet’s delay in the midst of resolution leads to self-accusation; dilation engenders delation. See especially Parker’s “Shakespeare and Rhetoric: ‘Dilation’ and ‘Delation’ in Othello,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (London: Methuen, 1985), 54–74. 21. Again the relevant foil for Hamlet is Laertes, whose deeds in defense of his slain father contrast with Hamlet’s soliloquizing. Claudius rouses Laertes to action by appealing to the bad example of Hamlet: “But to the quick of th’ulcer: / Hamlet comes back; what would you undertake / To show yourself in deed your father’s son / More than in words?” (4.7.122–24). The wordy son is the mother’s son who can only rail ineffectually against bastardy, whereas the father’s son is a man who vindicates his legitimacy in deed. 22. Even at the zero degree of etymology, some critics have construed the word “conscience” to express an irreconcilable sexual divide, since it may allude in its fi rst syllable to the female genitalia, while its independent root designates disembodied mind. In his edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), Stephen Booth glosses “conscience” in sonnet 151 as “cunt knowledge.” “Any word with con in it appears to have invited Shakespeare and his contemporaries (see Congreve, con and noc) to play on the commonest name for the female sex organ” (526). Other critics who comment on the sexual sense of “conscience” are Erlich, 188, 229–30, and Parker, 83.

Notes

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23. In her Foucault-inspired account of madness as that which opposes rational closure, Karin S. Coddon anatomizes the “feminization of madness” (392) in the play. “‘Suche Strange Desyngns’: Madness, Subjectivity, and Treason in Hamlet and Elizabethan Culture,” in the edition of Hamlet edited by Susanne L. Wofford (Boston: Bedford Books, 1994), 380–402. For a critical history of madness, love melancholy, and hysteria in connection with Ophelia, see Elaine Showalter, “Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985), 77–94. 24. Juliana Schiesari surveys the way that melancholy from Aristotle to Freud has been associated with male genius, whereas women have been relegated to the realm of unproductive mourning. See especially the introductory chapter of The Gendering of Melancholia (cited earlier). I argue, however, that Hamlet’s melancholy is at times figured as feminine and productive, not exclusively as feminine and debilitating. 25. Erlich is perhaps not at his credible best when he offers an analysis of the sexual oscillation in this passage in terms of erection and detumescence: “His golden couplets disclosed” strikes me as a possible though disguised reference to ejaculation, with “couplets” referring to Hamlet’s testicles and “disclosed” to an orgasmic bursting out. Similarly, “His silence will sit drooping” seems a description of a post-coital penis. (176)

Erlich calls ejaculation what I describe as parturition. 26. Peter Erickson contrasts the feminine side of Hamlet manifested in his soliloquies with the male element foregrounded in Hamlet’s relationship with Horatio. By the end of the play it is Horatio whom Hamlet asks to perpetuate his memory, as opposed to the usual means of passing on one’s legacy by linking with a woman who in turn gives birth to a male heir. Since Gertrude’s conduct corrupts the ideal of motherhood, Erickson argues, Hamlet turns to the chaste, passionless Horatio instead. “In a world where love between men and women has become irrevocably duplicitous, sexuality can be avoided by turning to male ties to fashion a dependable bond.” Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare’s Drama (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), 77. If Hamlet and Horatio are soulmates and the anima is gendered feminine, however, this would indicate that the male-male bond does not so much escape the feminine as sublimate it by abstracting it from the body. 27. See Adelman (252–53) for the way that the play inscribes woman’s responsibility for moral fault in her material body. “Fault” was a slang term for the female genitals, and the French foutre = “sexual intercourse” was pronounced the same way as the English “fault.” 28. Ophelia remarked earlier upon Hamlet’s “unmatch’d form and feature of blown youth / Blasted with ecstasy” (3.1.161–62). Ex-stasis defi nes madness as eccentricity, the alienation of the self from its rational center. 29. In Shakespeare’s Visual Regime: Tragedy, Psychoanalysis, and the Gaze (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), Philip Armstrong reads the “nothing” in the play as a manifestation of the Lacanian Real, the gaze that escapes representation, or the phallus that, as Lacan puts it, “always slips between your fi ngers” (21). 30. For the double valence of “crown,” see Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (New York: Routledge, 1992), 30.

152

Notes

31. Coppélia Kahn, Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), 135. In opposition to Kahn’s view of the ear as a vaginal analogue, it is also possible to regard the murder as an act motivated by homosexual jealousy (“the primal eldest curse . . . A brother’s murder” [3.3.37–38]) with the ear as locus of anal penetration. Jonathan Goldberg critiques what he regards as Kahn’s compulsory heterosexism in “Romeo and Juliet’s Open Rs,” in Queering the Renaissance, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 218–35. In the same anthology, Richard Rambuss’ “Pleasure and Devotion: The Body of Jesus and Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric” (253–79) cautions against the uncritical assumption, popular among heterosexist critics, that any penetrated body must be a female one, and that the site of entry is necessarily vaginal. Richard Crashaw, for example, imagines the wounds that penetrate Christ’s body on the cross in homoerotic terms. In “The Death of Hamlet’s Father” (Essays in Applied Psychoanalysis [London: Hogarth, 1951], I, 323–28), Ernest Jones argues that the poison is semen, the ear a displaced anus, so a homosexual rape is at issue. Norman Holland sums up the debate as follows: One need not choose between heterosexual or homosexual insemination for, in the unconscious, there is no negation. Rather, both apply; and the fact that the symbol is ambiguous suggests an ambiguity in the play’s presentation, one that reaches to an early level of infantile confusions. (194)

32.

33.

34. 35.

36.

37.

Context must determine symbolic usage, so it may be plausible to see the ear of the original murder as a homoerotic locus, while its replay in The Murder of Gonzago foregrounds the hetero sex act as murderous-castrating. The critics’ lack of consensus over anal versus vaginal interpretations may refl ect the ambiguously oscillating, androgynous orientation of the text itself. See Alexander Grinstein, “The Dramatic Device: A Play Within a Play,” in The Design Within: Psychoanalytic Approaches to Shakespeare, ed. Melvin D. Faber (New York: Science House, 1970), 147–53. Grinstein believes that the play within the play follows the same laws as Freud’s analysis of the dream within a dream: it is an attempt to undo a past event. Parker comments on these two references—“conscience” and “nothing”—to the woman in Claudius. Of the fi rst she says that catching the King’s conscience “elicits the ‘con,’ count, or euphemistic ‘country matter’ lurking within this monarchical ‘con-science’ and its closeted secrets” (83). Central to Janet Adelman’s argument is Hamlet’s fantasy of Gertrude as the phantom murderer of Claudius: “The playlet is in fact designed to catch the conscience of the queen” (31). This is Cavell’s summary comment in Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987): “One’s belief in Gertrude’s power is surely not lessened if in constructing the primal scene from the fantasy/dumb-show one fi nds a man collapsing not upon her pouring something into him but upon her having something poured into her (the reversal of passive into active)” (185). Avi Erlich is the critic who writes most extensively about the castration of King Hamlet in the primal scene. See especially Chapter 4 of Hamlet’s Absent Father. For textual evidence of castration, one may point to King Hamlet’s lament that he was “cut off even in the blossoms of my sin” (1.5.76) and his injunction to Hamlet to “[r]emember me” (1.5.91), which suggests that the son is called upon to restore (re-member) the father’s missing phallus. The “common place” is what in King Lear Edgar calls the “indistinguish’d space of woman’s will” (4.6.273), where “will” refers both to volition and to the genitalia. Desdemona’s fetishistic handkerchief, associated metonymically

Notes

153

with her private parts, is said to be a “common thing” (3.3.302), and in the brothel scene Othello addresses his wife as a “public commoner” (4.2.73). Troilus’ misogyny similarly points to the way that his Cressida is common to everyone because she makes her “thing” public, open to all comers: This is, and is not, Cressid. Within my soul there doth conduce a fight Of this strange nature that a thing inseparate Divides more wider than the sky and earth. (5.2.143–46)

Lars Engle suggests (Shakespearean Pragmatism: Market of His Time [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993], 238 n.) that Ophelia regards Hamlet in much the way that Troilus sees himself divided when he regards himself reflected in Cressida. Ophelia’s “O woe is me / T’ have seen what I have seen, see what I see” (3.1.152) might be paraphrased as “This is and is not Hamlet.” In Hamlet’s eyes, he is divided because he sees Ophelia as double (duplicitous), chaste and not chaste. In A Theater of Envy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), René Girard asserts that Ophelia is “contaminated with the erotic strategy of a Cressida and the other least savory Shakespearean heroines. What Hamlet resents in Ophelia is what any human being always resents in another human being, the visible signs of his own sickness” (285). Cressida and Ophelia are both objects of a misogynistic gaze that sees double when it sees woman, because it sees woman as common and therefore duplicitous. See also the discussion of “common” in Parker’s Representations article. 38. Joel Fineman contrasts the giddy and playful androgyny of Shakespeare’s transvestite heroines to the untransvested, unveiled duplicity of Gertrude: Symmetrical desire, a structure of homosexual jealousy that is resolved in the comedies by apportioning out to each pair of rivals a matching pair of beloveds, is precisely what we have unresolved in Hamlet, where, correspondingly, we might say woman herself, as woman, because her name is “frailty”—is the image of androgyny.

“Fratricide and Cuckoldry: Shakespeare’s Doubles,” in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 82. Fineman argues that woman’s androgyny becomes the mirror for man’s difference from himself: The dialectic of Difference and No Difference contained by the original fratricide structure is transferred by Shakespeare to another formula of mirroring reciprocity, to themes of women and their “frailty,” to a kind of masculine misogyny that fi nds in the ambiguity of woman its own self-divided self-consciousness, its own vulnerability, its mortality. (89) 39. King Lear makes explicit the way that sex and death coalesce in woman’s vaginal hell: “But to the girdle do the gods inherit, / Beneath is all the fiend’s. / There’s hell, there’s darkness, there is the sulphurous pit; burning, scalding, stench, consumption” (4.6.125–28). 40. For woman’s antithetical symbolization of both life and death, see Freud’s essay, “The Theme of the Three Caskets” (1913) in Standard Edition 12:289–302. 41. Much of my meditation on Lamord is indebted to Ferguson, 298–304. As an especially apt instance of the “Lamord” wordplay, Ferguson quotes the epigraph to chapter 15 of Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir:

154 Notes Amour en latin faict amor; Or donc provient d’amour la mort, Et par avant, soulcy qui mord, Deuils, plours, pieges, forfaitz, remords.

42. Valerie Traub argues that the only certifiably chaste woman is a dead woman. In life Ophelia is suspect because she is mobile and open, whereas in death her closure and immobility secure her chastity, thus making her available for the fi rst time as an object worthy of Hamlet’s romantic love (25–33). This conception of a safely enclosed because dead Ophelia is at odds with Patricia Parker’s analysis: In contrast to the “natural modesty” of women reported in Pliny and repeated in Crooke, Ophelia, in the “melodious lay” (4.7.182–83) of her drowning, floats more openly, face up, “her clothes spread wide” (175) in lines the ear may hear, given other such Shakespearean instances, as the spreading “wide” of her “close.” (75)

Parker glosses “spread” as “open for copulation.” Traub completely ignores the pronounced sexual innuendo of Ophelia’s death song: maids who open their “chamber doors” in losing their virginity (4.5.53), and the many phallic references to young men who “do’t if they come to’t— / By Cock, they are to blame” (60–61), to “sweet Robin” (4.5.184), and to the death garlands of “long purples” or “dead men’s fi ngers” (4.7.168–71). In dying Ophelia is foul (phallic)-mouthed, thus anything but closed-mouthed. For the chaste as dead woman, see also Carol Thomas Neely, Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare’s Plays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). Peter Stallybrass gives a brilliant reading of open versus closed women’s bodies in “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed,” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourse of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy Vickers (University of Chicago, 1986), 123–42. 43. It is a measure of Laertes’ ingenuous fatuity that he forgets his two earlier conversations in which violets are associated with the fading of love and death (1.3.5–10, 4.5.180–83). In this quotation from act 5 as well as in Shakespeare’s Ovidian poetry, the purpled violet may suggest graphically and etymologically love’s wound as consequence of phallic violation (violets/ violence). 44. Rhetorically, the elegiac cast that Gertrude gives to the shadowing of love by death corresponds to the isocolonic and oxymoronic formalism of Claudius, which also yokes contraries together in order to repress their contrariety: Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen, Th’imperial jointress to this warlike state, Have we, as ’twere with a defeated joy, With an auspicious and a dropping eye, With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage, In equal scale weighing delight and dole, Taken to wife. (1.2.8–14)

This facile reconciliation of opposites via juxtaposition, this specious balancing of equal and homologous units (isocolon), is the object of Hamlet’s critique, whose preferred rhetorical mode employs paronomasia to subvert and satirize isocolon. Of course Hamlet wants his own set of tidy moral contraries, provided that they not be reconciled. For discussion of Claudius’ use of isocolon, see Stephen Booth, “On the Value of Hamlet,” in Reinterpretations

Notes

45.

46.

47.

48.

49.

50.

155

of Elizabethan Drama, ed. Norman Rabkin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 137–76 (esp. 148–49), and Ferguson, 292–93. James Calderwood discusses “union” in terms of the frequent “hyphenisation of relations that leads to the total undifferentiation” in phrases like “unclefather” and “aunt-mother” (2.2.372), and in Hamlet’s confusing address of his (step)father as his “mother.” “All such repellent, hyphenised ‘unions’ flow poisonously into the cup from which Gertrude drinks in the fi nal scene and which Hamlet forces upon the already dying Claudius with the words, ‘Drink off this poison. Is thy union here?’ (5.2.331). Hamlet’s killing of Claudius is, in this context, an act of restorative destruction, an undoing of unions that came into existence not through the linking of like to like but through the disintegration of proper differences.” To Be and Not To Be: Negation and Metadrama in “Hamlet” (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 63. This returns us to my earlier invocation of René Girard’s notion that the only way Hamlet can establish his difference from the feminine (the hymenated hyphenization) is by means of effecting masculine violence. Steven Mullaney argues that because the playhouses were set in the marginal Liberties of London, the drama was able to arrogate to itself the license of having common men impersonate kings. Defenses of hierarchical degree, like Ulysses’ famous speech in Troilus and Cressida, were evacuated by virtue of their parodic-representational frame; hence, difference was made common. The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (University of Chicago Press, 1988), esp. 51–52. Francis Barker comments that this line “is extraordinary (if it is so at all) for its insistence on the democracy of mortality in contrast with the hierarchized body politic of the living world, not for the corporeal expression in which the idea emerges.” The Tremulous Private Body (London: Methuen, 1984), 23. Lalita Pandit points out that in the Saxo Grammaticus tale, when Amleth is questioned regarding the whereabouts of the eavesdropper (the unnamed Polonius figure) whom he has killed, he replies that “the man had gone to the sewer, but had fallen through its bottom and been stifled by the floods of fi lth, and that he had been devoured by the swine that came up all about the place” (264). In Shakespeare’s play Hamlet responds to Claudius’ inquiry about where Polonius is by saying, “At supper. . . . Not where he eats, but where a is eaten” (4.3.17, 19). The homology of “supper” and “sewer,” of eating and defecating, suggests a cannibalistic relationship between master and source texts as well as between living and dead bodies. “Language and the Textual Unconscious: Shakespeare, Ovid, and Saxo Grammaticus,” in Criticism and Lacan, ed. Patrick Colm Hogan and Lalita Pandit (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 248–67. The corpse of Alexander may be food for worms but also fecal dust used to stop a “bung-hole” (= anus, OED 6) (4.1.198). Norman Holland: “The fi nale, in which Hamlet and his mother die together, projects the wish to ‘die’ with the mother, to return to her womb in a sexual way” (167). A counterpoint to the union of mother and son that death effects results when Gertrude drinks the poisoned union wine: she gives the lie to the union that her imperial jointure posited, since her death uncovers the differential severing that any jointure presupposes, the separation by death (of/ from one’s betrayed spouse) that jointure aims to repress. Janet Adelman points out that union is just another version of Hecate’s “mixture rank” (3.2.251), the poison that kills Hamlet’s father: “Each is the poisonous epitome of sexual mixture itself and hence of boundary danger, the terrifying adulteration of male by female that does away with the boundaries between them” (28).

156 Notes NOTES TO CHAPTER 4 1. In Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), Karen Newman avers that black Africans and women were not dissimilar but equivalent in monstrosity, hence making miscegenation doubly fearful. “Othello fears Desdemona’s desire because it invokes his monstrous difference from the sex/race code he has adopted and implicates him in femininity, allying him with witchcraft and an imagined monstrous sexual appetite” (86). 2. Dympna Callaghan argues that whiteness is associated more with the femininity of Desdemona than with her race. She points out that if Othello was played by a white man, so too was Desdemona. Her femininity was created by white pan-cake—the “whiter skin of hers than snow” (5.2.4)—on the boy actor, as Othello’s race was created by blackface. Both gender and race are a matter of making up the face. Shakespeare Without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage (New York: Routledge, 2000). 3. All quotations of Othello are taken from the second Arden edition of the play, ed. M. R. Ridley (London: Methuen, 1958). 4. Janet Adelman describes the world in which Othello passed his erring and extravagant but pleasureless childhood as a “landscape of maternal deprivation” (66). Othello felt betrayed by the loss of his mother, which explains why he falls so deeply in love with Desdemona for offering him motherly pity and why in turn he is so quick to assume that she, like his mother, abandons him. Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, “Hamlet” to “The Tempest” (New York: Routledge, 1992), 63–75. 5. This passage is a well-known crux, one meaning of which is that Othello is too mature to be a slave to physical desire, although the “proper satisfaction” of such desire is not wrong. Othello asserts that his love for Desdemona will not get the upper hand or force him to scant his military duties. 6. André Green, The Tragic Effect: The Oedipus Complex in Tragedy, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 110–11. 7. In “Charivari and the Comedy of Abjection in Othello,” in True Rites and Maimed Rites: Ritual and Anti-Ritual in Shakespeare and His Age, ed. Linda Woodbridge and Edward Berry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 75–97, Michael D. Bristol suggests that Othello can be taken as an abject comic figure ridiculed in the beginning of the play by the young men, led by the scourge Iago, who traditionally mock an older man who marries a younger woman as someone likely to be cuckolded. The “erotic grotesque” (90) is defi ned by an alliance in which the hideous and repellent outsider and racial other marries a beautiful and desirable woman of high social status. 8. Emilia calls the handkerchief a “trifle” (5.2.229), a designation that bears much in common with the idea of the fetish. 9. The editors of Othello are at loggerheads whether clyster-pipes are enema tubes or syringes for vaginal douches. That both anal and vaginal possibilities inform Iago’s sexual ego may indicate a conflation of homo- and heterosexual impulses. The Riverside and the Norton and the third Arden editors gloss “clyster-pipes” as enema tubes, whereas the editor for the second Arden edition prefers the meaning of vaginal douches. In “Iago’s Clyster: Purgation, Anality, and the Civilizing Process,” Shakespeare Quarterly 55.2 (2004): 148–76, Ben Saunders shows how the need to cleanse the body of excrement manifests an emerging discourse of racism. 10. Iago appeals to the identical nexus of base instincts when he tells Othello that he saw Cassio wiping his beard with the handkerchief. In “Othello:

Notes

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

157

An Essay to Illustrate a Method,” The Hudson Review 4 (1951): 165–203, Kenneth Burke offers the associative image that “this beard had by the same token obscenely scratched against Desdemona’s cheek or pillow” (200). If we recall the oral reductiveness of the clyster-pipes, we may posit a more obscene scenario still. In Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 229–72, Patricia Parker meditates on the many meanings of the Q1 “close denotements” and the Folio reading, “close dilations.” Samuel Johnson took the latter to mean “close delations” or “occult and secret accusations.” Parker delineates four relevant parameters that the phrase has for the play as a whole. First, it refers to the function of the delator or secret informer; second, the dilation or opening of woman’s secret or privy place; third, the discovery of the monstrous, or making the hideous visible; fourth, the discovery of a particular kind of monstrosity, namely unsanctioned homoerotic desire. One may combine some of these meanings in noting that Iago’s closest secret is his accusation that Desdemona’s privity has been made an open and monstrous common thing. In “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed,” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourse of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers, 123–42 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), Peter Stallybrass follows Bakhtin in distinguishing between the grotesque comic body, whose orifices are open and common, and the enclosed classical body. The grotesque body privileges the anus and it celebrates dung as the fertilizer of material life, whereas the classical body emphasizes the head as the seat of reason. The latter is usually gendered male and is regarded as the model for chastity. For a woman to be chaste she must be silenced and returned to the enclosure of the house. The very fact that Desdemona is open to Othello, a class aspirant, insinuates in Othello’s mind the possibility that she may be open to other aspiring men. In Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 222–54, Stephen Greenblatt traces a theological discourse according to which uxoriousness may be tantamount to a species of adultery. In the Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin writes, “The man who shows no modesty or comeliness in conjugal intercourse is committing adultery with his wife.” In his fi rst soliloquy, Iago remarks that Cassio is a “proper man” and a likely object of jealousy with which “to abuse Othello’s ear, / That he is too familiar with his wife” (1.3.393–94). The antecedent of the third-person pronoun is ambiguous: “he” is either Cassio or Othello himself. Because Othello loves his wife too much he is susceptible to the jealous belief that other men love her also, as if his love is responsible for adulterating her. Othello continues in the same vein a few lines later, worried lest in losing her handkerchief Desdemona has lost not only her chastity but her irrecoverable virginity as well: “Is’t lost? is’t gone? speak, is it out o’ the way?” (3.4.78). He demands that Desdemona “[f]etch’t, let me see it” (3.4.83), as if there can be ocular proof for an invisible essence (virginity) whose vanishing he himself is responsible for. For interpretations of “dying” in its sexual sense, see Adelman, who argues that the word encodes both maternal loss and marital consummation. The handkerchief represents specifically maternal virginity as “the impossible condition of male desire, the condition always already lost,” whose loss contaminates the man’s relationship to his wife’s virginity. The loss of the handkerchief reenacts the son’s loss of his dying mother, “her womb the fi rst

158 Notes

16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

place of betrayal” (69). Desdemona’s dead body is the counterpart of the mother’s. In “Othello’s Handkerchief: ‘The Recognizance and Pledge of Love,’” English Literary Renaissance 5 (1975): 360–74, Lynda E. Boose makes the best case for the theory that the strawberry spots on the handkerchief represent the blood-spotted wedding sheets. Edward A. Snow comments that “lust’s blood” may refer to Othello’s own blood. In devirginating her Othello turns Desdemona into a sexually demanding woman who, to his horror, he cannot satisfy. “The language of Othello consistently links submerged references to sexual initiation and phallic virility with imagery of castration and unmanning” (392). “Sexual Anxiety and the Male Order of Things in Othello,” English Literary Renaissance 10 (1980): 384–411. In his movie of Othello Orson Welles leaves open the bed-curtains to make his audience complicit in witnessing a rape/murder scene. After repeated viewings of the “consummation” scene, I fi nd myself unable to determine whether the instrument for suffocating Desdemona is the wedding sheet or her white wedding dress. The hem appears to suggest the latter, but most critics opt for the former. In Shakespeare on Film (Lanham: University Press of America, 1991), Jack J. Jorgens provocatively assumes that the choke-cloth is the handkerchief itself. This interpretation begs the psychoanalytic reading in spades: the virgin love token, transformed into a sign of promiscuity, in turn becomes the agent of murder/revirgination. Jorgens points out that “the Moor makes a symbol of love a hideous death mask” (182). See my essay, “Black and White as Technique in Orson Welles’ Othello,” in Literature Film Quarterly 30.3 (2002): 189–93. Quoted in Michael Neill, “Unproper Beds: Race, Adultery, and the Hideous in Othello,” Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989): 383–412. Critics used to debate the question of when or whether Othello and Desdemona consummate their relationship. In act 1 the marriage is interrupted by the call for Othello to go to war against the Turks in Cyprus. Othello seems oddly undisturbed by the prospect of leaving Desdemona unembraced, until she insists that “the rites for why I love him are bereft me” (1.3.256). Othello appoints Desdemona to go to Cyprus in a ship with Iago as her guardian, while he plans to take another ship on his own. Before boarding the ship Othello claims that he has “but an hour / Of love” (1.3.297) to spend with his new wife. The lovers are divided a second time when Cassio gets into a drunken brawl. In the fi nal bedroom scene Othello kills Desdemona, in most stagings without making love to her fi rst.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5 1. This and all subsequent quotations from Antony and Cleopatra are taken from the Arden Shakespeare, ed. John Wilders (London: Routledge, 1995). 2. Janet Adelman argues that Antony and Cleopatra is unique in Shakespeare’s canon in exposing its protagonists to the multiple and often critical perspectives of outside onlookers. As opposed to the earlier great tragic heroes, Antony and Cleopatra have scant opportunity to speak for themselves from a point of view not open to ironic commentary. The Common Liar: An Essay on “Antony and Cleopatra” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 24–49. 3. Carol Cook rings many useful changes on the imagery of becoming in the text, which she allies to the thematics of melting. The beautiful or becoming

Notes

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

159

is what eschews the solid state. “The Fatal Cleopatra,” in Shakespearean Tragedy and Gender, ed. Shirley Nelson Garner and Madelon Sprengnether (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 241–67. The dizzying genealogy of the serpent and its many symbolisms is unveiled in Philip Slater, The Glory of Hera: Greek Mythology and the Greek Family (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 75–122. In this psychoanalytic survey of classical literature the serpent is the maternal devourer more often than the phallic piercer. “The serpent represents the oral-narcissistic dilemma because it is the most common symbol of boundary-ambiguity” (91). Boundaries between life and death, male and female, are dissolved by Shakespeare’s Nile and its serpents that are both sterile and dangerously fecund. See also Constance Brown Kuriyama, “The Mother of the World: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra,” ELR 7 (1977): 324–51. The stage direction establishes a fundamental uncertainty, according to Donald Cheney, as to whether the Romans see Antony “as cock of the walk and sole possessor of this queen, or as part of her feminized entourage” (18). “‘A very Antony’: Patterns of Antonomasia in Shakespeare,” Connotations 4.1–2 (1994–95): 9–24. In Literary Transvaluation: From Vergilian Epic to Shakespearean Tragicomedy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 1984), Barbara Bono surveys Shakespeare’s many debts to classical sources: the story of Aeneas’ dilemma over whether to choose love for Dido or the exigent claims of empire; the tale of the adulterous love of Mars and Venus; and the allegory of Hercules’ vexed choice between love and long life with Omphale, who dresses him in female clothing, on the one hand, and the short but virtuous life of the soldier whose name lives long in memory, on the other. Both the Aeneas and Hercules stories assume that a man’s good name is inseparable from the memory in which it will be held and is incompatible with keeping a woman’s company. The story of the love of Mars and Venus was allegorized in two contrary ways, either as the overcoming of war by love that gives birth to peace, or as the unmanning of martial valor in succumbing to lust and luxury. See also the very extensive discussion of classical love myths in Adelman, 53–101. The security of the love affair depends on the lovers’ good repute, the proverbial reputation that they must live up to. Once the repute encoded in a name is compromised, the name ceases to signify what it did in the eyes of the beloved. So Troilus comes to regard “Cressida” as a byword for treachery— “This is, and is not, Cressid” (5.2.143)—because he has forced her to claim renown as a simile for falseness: “Yea, let them say, to stick the heart of falsehood, ‘As false as Cressid’” (3.2.195–96). In “Antony and Cleopatra: An Image of Liquifaction [sic],” The Aligarh Journal of English Studies 8.1 (1983): 79–93, A. A. Ansari surveys various liquid images—Cydnus, discandying, clouds, Nilus—as metaphors for desire, fertility, and evanescence. Antony uses a similar formulation to describe how Caesar must regard Antony’s defeat at Actium: “For he seems / Proud and disdainful, harping on what I am, / Not what he knew I was” (3.13.146–48). The contrast between the two Antony’s presupposes the opening of a temporal discontinuity, which in turn predicates the sense of tragic retrospection. Plutarch, The Life of Marcus Antonius, from Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes, trans. Thomas North (1579), in The Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), 5:301. Subsequent references to North’s Plutarch are cited by page number in Bullough’s text.

160

Notes

11. Coppélia Kahn traces the tension for Shakespeare’s audience between Stoic and Christian arguments for and against suicide. Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women (New York: Routledge, 1997), 110–39. 12. Modern editors of Shakespeare introduce quotation marks to observe the distinction between use and mention of a name. To be mentioned, in quotation marks, is to be pricked out for the alienation of one’s proper name. 13. Phyllis Rackin points out (90) that Cleopatra’s phrasing to “word it, prithee, piteously” is incriminatingly close to her summary dismissal of Caesar’s insincerity: “He words me, girls, he words me, that I should not / Be noble to myself” (5.2.190–91). “Shakespeare’s Boy Cleopatra, the Decorum of Nature, and the Golden World of Poetry,” in New Casebooks: “Antony and Cleopatra,” ed. John Drakakis (London: Macmillan, 1994), 78–100. 14. “The extraordinary vigour of the sexual imagery here calls to mind the Roman empress who is supposed to have lamented the fact that the female anatomy has only seven orifices.” David Bevington, ed., Antony and Cleopatra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 132. 15. Janet Adelman gives a powerful defense of the play’s “maternal matrix,” including a redemptive reading of Mardian’s description of Cleopatra’s death. Adelman sees in the latter’s fi nal groan the hint of an abortive birth: “But Cleopatra’s monumental recreation of Antony rewrites this abortive birth: in the protected female space of her own monument, the memory of her womb can at last bring Antony forth whole and undivided, rendering him life” (187). Cleopatra will indeed fantasize a resurrection of Antony in good time, in act 5, but Mardian’s lines in act 4 I read literally as death, not (yet) metaphorically as rebirth. Cleopatra rends life before she renders it to another. But Adelman cogently points out that Antony is relieved to meet his own death since it permits him to abandon the rigid and wearying Roman sword in favor of fluid dissolution and union with the beloved. Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, “Hamlet” to “The Tempest” (New York: Routledge, 1992). Rackin emphasizes the diminishment that Antony suffers in a suicide that is “a messy affair” (90), not the Stoic model of noble triumph over mortality. Cynthia Marshall sees an Antony fragmented, dispersed and feminized in death. “Wounded, bleeding, and lacking agency, Antony takes on a typically feminine position” (403). “Man of Steel Done Got the Blues: Melancholic Subversion of Presence in Antony and Cleopatra,” Shakespeare Quarterly 44.4 (1993): 385–408. Although my approach in these pages seems to throw cold water on the romantic reading of the play, I embrace such a reading with a vengeance in discussing act 5. 16. Madelon Gohlke derives the hero’s anxiety about losing the mettle of his sword from his self-perception as womanish. The matriarchal vision in the play sees Cleopatra in terms of both witches and non-nurturing mothers like Circe, Acrasia, and Eve, and in terms of the swelling life-force whose “conception” of Antony preserves him for celebration by future lovers. “‘I wooed thee with my sword’: Shakespeare’s Tragic Paradigms,” in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 170–87. 17. Anne Barton gives the classic statement of how Cleopatra’s death follows with such surprising redemptiveness upon the bungled death of Antony. “‘Nature’s Piece ’Gainst Fancy’: The Divided Catastrophe in Antony and Cleopatra,” Essays, Mainly Shakespearean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 113–35. In contrast to Barton and Cynthia Marshall, Coppélia Kahn argues on the basis of analogy to the bloody yet dignified suicide

Notes

18. 19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

161

of Cato that Antony’s suicide is not “bungled.” Antony commits suicide not for love but to outdo Caesar in the contest for honor. Suicide “is the ultimate expression of homosocial rivalry. Through suicide, Antony will regain his sword” (130). Suicide grants him escape from “a feminizing shame and restoration of the honor that is a crucial component of his manhood” (131). Lorraine Helms puts the death scene of Cleopatra into the context of the violent endings in English Senecan plays. “‘The High Roman Fashion’: Sacrifice, Suicide, and the Shakespearean Stage,” PMLA 107.3 (1992): 554–65. See also Harry Levin, “Two Monumental Death Scenes: Antony and Cleopatra, 4.15; 5.2,” in Shakespeare—Text, Language, Criticism: Essays in Honour of Marvin Spevack, ed. Bernhard Fabian and Kurt Tetzeli von Rosador (Hildesheim: Olms-Weidmann, 1987), 147–63. Andrew Gurr gives an exhaustive account of the uses of the inner stage in The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). For a performance history that stresses Shakespeare’s debts to the private theater, especially in the use of boy actors to play the roles of Cleopatra and her entourage, see Michael Shapiro, “Boying Her Greatness: Shakespeare’s Use of Coterie Drama in ‘Antony and Cleopatra,’” The Modern Language Review 77.1 (1982): 1–15. Of the many critics who comment on Cleopatra’s desire not to have her greatness boyed in Rome, Rackin is especially adroit in teasing out the ironies. Many images apart from those already cited suggest Antony’s impotence and exhaustion. His “soldier’s pole is fallen” (4.15. 67); his sword is “robbed” (4.14.23) fi rst by Cleopatra, then “robbed” from his “wound” (5.1.25) by Dercetus; his “lamp is spent, it’s out” (4.15.89). Cleopatra’s sigh, “The crown o’th’ earth doth melt,” followed immediately by the stage direction, “[Antony dies]” (4.15.65), gives point to the many metaphors used to describe Antony’s self-defeating expense of spirit. Plutarch’s Of Isis and Osiris describes Typhon the sea drying out Osiris the river Nile. The time of the river’s flood is “greene, fresh, pleasant, and generative: but the latter season of Autumne, for want of moisture, is an enemie to plants, and breedeth diseases in man and beast” (1300). The Philosophie, commonlie called The Morals, trans. Philemon Holland (London, 1603). (Subsequent references to Holland’s translation of Plutarch will be cited in the text by page number.) In re-creating Antony as an autumn that is never desiccated, Cleopatra-Isis restores Antony-Osiris from “siccity” (dryness, impotence) at the hands of Caesar-Typhon. In other terms, against the inevitable seasonal cycle that ends in death, Antony-Osiris captures autumn from passing into the control of Caesar-Typhon. For a more complex and detailed elaboration upon this mythographic declension, see Bono, 191–213. Michael Lloyd gives a compact and useful synopsis of the allegorical and symbolic motifs of the Isis and Osiris story in “Cleopatra as Isis,” Shakespeare Survey 12 (1959): 88–94. Apropos of 5.2.286, even a conservative editor like Bevington comments that “the word ‘come’ often includes an erotic suggestion, especially in this play” (254). A thorough tracing of the implications of “come” and other bawdy terms can be found in Philip Traci, The Love Play of Antony and Cleopatra (The Hague: Mouton, 1970). In Plutarch’s account Cleopatra applies the asp to her arm. But Shakespeare was not the fi rst author to have Cleopatra apply the asp to her breast. Marvin Spevack, ed., discusses the rival traditions in A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: Antony and Cleopatra (New York: Modern Language Association, 1990), 337–38.

162

Notes

24. In Hamlet the “union” (poison pearl) effects death that dissolves the illicit union of Gertrude and Claudius and thereby frees the hero from the smothering maternal bond that plagues him. Poison in Antony and Cleopatra is an altogether different wine, whose coursing through the veins promises Cleopatra re-union with her lover and satisfaction of her “immortal longings” (5.2.280). Hers is a consummation to be wished, whereas Hamlet’s desire for death is joyless and aims vehemently to be spared the trials of life after death. 25. The dashes and the bracketed stage direction are not in the Folio. Without the pointing that modern editions like the Arden give, the referent of “thee” is indeed ambiguous. 26. Antony, or an associated part of him, either is symbolized by the asp or is its (pet) name. For the tradition of feminizing and babying the penis, see George Gascoigne’s “The Lullabie of a Lover,” in which the aging poet lulls his penis to sleep: Sing lullaby, as women doe, Wherewith they bring their babes to rest, And lullaby can I sing to, As womanly as can the best. ............................. Eke Lullaby my loving boye, My little Robyn take thy rest, Since age is colde, and nothing coye, Keepe close thy coyne, for so is best: With Lullaby be thou content, With Lullaby thy lustes relente, Lette others pay which hath mo pence, Thou art to pore for such expence. (1–4, 33–40)

27. 28.

29.

30.

In The Glory of Hera Slater adduces the many ways in which the Greeks gendered their serpents as feminine: curvaceous, devouring, nurturing. See especially his discussion of the opposition between the straightness of male erection and the feminine curves of serpents (80–83). To say that Cleopatra speaks via direct address the name of no other lover but Antony is not to deny, however, her references in the third person to past lovers. Peter Erickson makes use of the myth of Isis and Osiris to argue that the maternal in Antony helps create the maternal in Cleopatra, whereby she effects his restoration: “He has disintegrated into Osiris-like fragments, and in grieving for him, Cleopatra reconstructs his image on a colossal scale.” Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare’s Drama (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), 141. Walter R. Coppedge discusses puns on lie and die in the Clown’s remarks on worms and figs, as well as seminal images of water, melting, and seed, in “The Joy of the Worm: Dying in Antony and Cleopatra,” Renaissance Papers (1998): 41–50. Interpretation of the sexual symbolism of the asp may, of course, yield to moral allegory, as in Richard Madelaine’s reading, in his edition of the play, of the asp as “a tragic instrument of apotheosis: changeable lust (the serpent) becomes committed love (the baby), through the agency of ennobling death (the worm).” Antony and Cleopatra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 22. A. M. Kinghorn sifts the herpetological clues in “‘All Joy O’ The Worm’ Or, Death by Asp or Asps Unknown in Act V of Antony and Cleopatra,” English Studies 75.2 (1994): 104–9.

Notes

163

31. The OED cites the following well-known passage from Spenser’s Faerie Queene for the use of slime in the sense of the hermaphroditic ooze whence creatures arise spontaneously: As when old father Nilus gins to swell With timely pride above the Aegyptian vale, His fattie waves do fertile slime outwell, And overflow each plaine and lowly dale: But when his later spring gins to avale, Huge heapes of mudd he leaves, wherein there breed Ten thousand kindes of creatures, partly male And partly female of his fruitfull seed; Such ugly monstrous shapes elsewhere may no man reed. (I.i.21)

Spenser’s tone of moralistic disgust contrasts with Antony’s fascination for the Nile’s fecund mixing of the sexes. What Spenser sees as “monstrous” Antony envies as nature’s ingenious and effective short-circuiting of man’s compulsion to labor in agricultural production and in sexual reproduction. The Nile, as if unfallen, simply gives life spontaneously.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 6 1. In “Sexual Disguise in Cymbeline,” Modern Language Quarterly 41, no. 3 (1980): 231–47, Nancy K. Hayles distinguishes between the use of transvestism in Shakespeare’s earlier plays and its “curiously uneconomical” (231) use in Cymbeline by appealing to the notion that false appearance in the latter allows the mostly passive Imogen to discover and to speak unconscious truths about the mythic structure of the family. Hayles appeals to archetypes of the androgyne from Plato to Jung that are absent from my brief analysis of cross dressing in the play. I see Imogen as passive when she loses her right to the throne at the end of the play, but in the opening stages of her cross dressing she is less passive than many critics, including Hayles, suggest. 2. All quotations from Cymbeline are taken from the Arden edition, ed. J. M. Nosworthy (London: Methuen, 1955). In “The woman’s parts of Cymbeline,” in Staged Properties in Early Modern Drama, ed. Jonathan Gil Harris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 288–315, Valerie Wayne discusses the “bloody cloth” as a stage prop that (together with the bracelet and the ring) serves to commodify love. She associates the cloth with a martyr’s relic, menstruation, and wedding sheets stained after intercourse. 3. To the best of my knowledge critics of Cymbeline are without exception in celebrating Posthumus’ forgiveness of Imogen, overlooking the fact that he was far too quick to doubt her chastity in the fi rst place. 4. Ruth Nevo, Shakespeare’s Other Language (New York: Methuen, 1987), 87. 5. For the indebtedness of Posthumus’ misogynistic catalogue of abuses to the popular discourse of Shakespeare’s day, see Evelyn Gajowski, “Sleeping Beauty, or ‘What’s the matter?’: Female Sexual Autonomy, Voyeurism, and Misogyny in Cymbeline,” in Re-Visions of Shakespeare: Essays in Honor of Robert Ornstein, ed. Evelyn Gajowski (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 89–107. For the tracing of Posthumus’ misogyny to Virgilian roots, see Heather James, Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 151–88. James draws relevant parallels to Virgil’s varium et mutabile semper / femina, “woman is an ever changing and mutable thing” (166).

164 Notes 6. Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, “Hamlet” to “The Tempest” (New York: Routledge, 1992), 351n. Adelman argues that it is not just illegitimate sexuality that Posthumus blames on woman’s “vice”; it is sexuality per se—including chaste love within wedlock—that is suspect. For the genital association of “vice,” see Eric Partridge, Shakespeare’s Bawdy, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 1968), 276–77. 7. For the role of the navel as unisexual symbol of the unknown and the unreadable in Freud’s analysis of the foundational dream of Irma’s injection, see Shoshana Felman, “Postal Survival, or the Question of the Navel,” Yale French Studies 69 (1985): 49–72. Posthumus may be upset precisely by the unknowability of this part that male rationality claims defensively to know so well and to stereotype as the origin of all the irrational passions and vices that divide men from women. Felman argues that the navel frustrates because it is “a knot of female differentiality with respect to any given defi nition; a knot, in other words, which points not to the identifiability of any given feminine identity, but to the inexhaustibility, the unaccountability of female difference” (64). It is this sense of being exceeded by the woman’s navel part in him that leaves Posthumus feeling impotent (in the sense of out of control), enraged. 8. Anne Barton unravels the many ambiguities of canon and civil law regarding the status of marriage per verba de praesenti and of clandestine marriage in “‘Wrying But a Little’: Marriage, Law and Sexuality in the Plays of Shakespeare,” in Essays, Mainly Shakespearean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 3–30. She argues that the preponderance of the evidence suggests that the secret marriage of Imogen and Posthumus was not yet consummated at the time that it came to public light. Maurice Hunt believes that the marriage has been consummated and gives reasons why Imogen and Posthumus could not have married according to the non-binding sponsalia per verba de futuro. “Dismemberment, Corporal Reconstitution, and the Body Politic in Cymbeline,” Studies in Philology 99, no. 4 (2002): 404–31, esp. 413n. For an interesting art historical argument, see Susan Frye, “Staging Women’s Relations to Textiles in Shakespeare’s Othello and Cymbeline,” in Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race, and Empire in Renaissance England, ed. Peter Erickson and Clark Hulse (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 215–50. Frye argues that the tapestry in Imogen’s bedroom suggests non-consummation because Cleopatra is just meeting Antony, Diana is bathing and has not yet looked upon Actaeon, and Tereus’ rape of Philomel is suspended in the telling since Imogen has put down the book and folded the page (237–38). 9. Sigmund Freud, “The Theme of the Three Caskets” (1913), in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), 12:289–302. 10. Burton A. Melnick suggests that the fourth woman in a man’s life, his daughter, symbolizes rebirth for her elderly father. He quotes a letter from Freud to James S. H. Bransom, in which Freud refers to “the secret meaning” of King Lear as being “the repressed incestuous claims on the daughter’s love” (25). “Psychoanalysis as Poetry, Psychoanalysis as Rhetoric: Freud’s ‘On the Theme of the Three Caskets,’” Studies in Psychoanalytic Theory 4, no. 2 (Fall 1995): 18–28. Ruth Nevo discusses Imogen in terms of one of Shakespeare’s “beloved, thaumaturgic daughters” of the romances, who “supplement Freud’s death-dominated triad” (93). Nevo recalls that Freud personally did not discover the value of daughters until his “Anna-Antigone” helped him in his illnesses (157n).

Notes

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11. Pericles, ed. F. D. Hoeniger (London: Methuen, 1963). 12. Coppélia Kahn, Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women (London: Routledge, 1997), 167. Yong Li Lan demonstrates how Posthumus is not only a performer of parts but also a character who is passively constituted, constructed and re-formed, in his dream in 5.4, by the theatrical machinery, the archaic verse and the high artifice of the performances by Jupiter and by the ghosts of Posthumus’ family. “Theatricality, Authority, and God-likeness in Cymbeline,” Journal of Theatre and Drama 7/8 (2001/2002): 83–94. 13. G. Wilson Knight observes of Imogen that she “is not merely a single lady, but Britain’s soul-integrity.” Quoted without bibliographical reference in Emrys Jones, “Stuart Cymbeline,” Essays in Criticism 11 (1961), 99. See also Knight’s The Crown of Life: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Final Plays (1947; rpt. London: Methuen, 1965), 129–202. This exalted status as Britain is denied Imogen once she takes on male dress, within whose straitjacketing confi nes she remains bound at the end of the play. Rhonda Lemke Sanford compares Imogen as Britain to the iconography of Queen Elizabeth standing on a map of her realm in the Ditchley portrait, in “A Room Not One’s Own: Feminine Geography in Cymbeline,” in Playing the Globe: Genre and Geography in English Renaissance Drama, ed. John Gillies and Virginia Mason Vaughan (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998), 63–85. Iachimo comments that Imogen is “fasten’d to an empery” (1.7.120), as much a world-historical place as she is a person. 14. Murray M. Schwartz, “Between Fantasy and Imagination: A Psychological Exploration of Cymbeline,” in Psychoanalysis and Literary Process, ed. Frederick Crews (Cambridge: Winthrop Publishers, 1970), 240n. 15. For the common sexual pun on “stand” in the Shakespearean canon, see Partridge, 247. In “Palisading the Elizabethan Body Politic,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 33 (1991): 327–54, Linda Woodbridge explores how Shakespeare figures the land as a female body subject to rape and military invasion. She speaks of “the cervix of this lane” (334) defended successfully by the Britons: “the Roman army is fended off in the act of breaching Britain’s maidenhead at that narrow lane. Imogen’s perils are Britain’s” (335). Kahn adduces Livy’s account of Horatius’ defense of Rome against the Tarquins by taking his stand at a narrow bridge on the Tiber as a relevant analogue to the British peasants’ defense of the mountain pass. The latter she qualifies as “sexual terrain” (164). Nevo regards Posthumus’ successful defense of the king at the crossroads “or maternal portal” (89) as a reversal of Oedipus’ unintentional killing of his father at the crossroads. Meredith Skura also comments on the battle at the narrow lane as a replaying of the oedipal primal scene, in “Interpreting Posthumus’ Dream from Above and Below: Families, Psychoanalysts, and Literary Critics,” in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 203–16, esp. 209. 16. Jodi Mikalachki, “The Masculine Romance of Roman Britain: Cymbeline and Early Modern Nationalism,” Shakespeare Quarterly 46 (1995), 315. 17. See the Introduction and Chapter 2 of Frances Yates, Shakespeare’s Last Plays: A New Approach (London: Routledge, 1975), for the Jacobean iconography of the lion. See also Leah Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and its Discontents (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 131–32. 18. In Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987), 132–140, Patricia Parker discusses the various blazons in Cymbeline as inventories of rhetorical tropes and properties.

166 Notes 19. Heather James (171–74) comments on the grotesque side of Imogen’s bloodying her face from the truncated body of Cloten, likening her to Pentheus’ mother Agave and to a bacchante after the dismembering of Orpheus, and also pointing to the uneasy equation between Posthumus and Priam, beheaded by Pyrrhus at the close of the Trojan War. For the analogy between the dismembering of Orpheus and the decapitation of Cloten, see also Hunt, 420. 20. Emrys Jones (89–95) discusses how James I saw himself as the second Brute, the re-founder of Britain’s ancient unity, and how in recollection of the pax Romana that united Augustus and Cymbeline James portrayed himself as Jacobus Pacificus. Jones was the fi rst critic to highlight that Milford Haven was the landing place of Henry Earl of Richmond (Henry VII) in 1485, who as the great-great-grandfather of James licensed the latter to pride himself on the Stuarts’ link to the Tudors. 21. Patricia Parker, “Romance and Empire: Anachronistic Cymbeline,” in Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance, ed. George M. Logan and Gordon Teskey (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 189–207. 22. In “Cymbeline and the Sleep of Faith” in Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare, ed. Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay, and Richard Wilson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 197–217, Margaret JonesDavies argues on the basis of alchemical lore that Cymbeline is the lion or the sun in the phase of coagulatio whose sulphurous fi re swallows up the Roman eagle, which represents mercury in the phase of dissolutio (212–13). For the fusing of sun and eagle as a figure for James I’s uniting of Scotland and England to form the new empire of Great Britain, see Leah Marcus, 121, 134. 23. Jean Howard notes the pun that Imogen the “heir” becomes “air” in the closing scene, in her introduction to the play in the Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: Norton, 1997), 2962. Mary Floyd-Wilson cites a passage in Camden’s Remains whose language is similar to that of the Soothsayer: the warlike Saxons gradually spread their “branches farre and wide, being mellowed and mollified by the mildness of the soyle and sweete aire.” The mollifying of the Saxons is analogous and etymologically related to the way that Posthumus benefits from mollis aer. Floyd-Wilson reads Posthumus as a Scot who becomes civilized by virtue of being embraced by the Britons. “Delving to the Root: Cymbeline, Scotland, and the English Race,” in British Identities and English Renaissance Literature, ed. David J. Baker and Willy Maley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 101–15. 24. See Mikalachki for a historicizing application of the idea of homosocial bonds. The “originary female savagery” represented by the insular Queen must give way to the male bonds that unite Cymbeline and his sons to Roman virtus, a “masculine embrace of the civility of empire” (303). Nationalism is acceptable, indeed desirable, so long as it belongs to the male order of things (not to matriarchy). Imogen comes to embody “respectable nationalism” once she takes on male dress (308). See also Mikalachki’s book, The Legacy of Boadicea: Gender and Nation in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1998). 25. Schwartz reads the explicit references to the names of Jove and Jupiter in a different way from me, suggesting that the invocation of divine authority serves as a buttress for Posthumus’ wish to believe the worst of his wife. The divine superego is impressed into the service of Posthumus’ repressed libido. I agree with Schwartz that Posthumus “now demands his own cuckolding, and Iachimo grants his most cherished unconscious wish” (242–43).

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26. Adelman, 202. Adelman analyzes how the fantasy of parthenogenesis allows Cymbeline to push aside his wife and to ally himself instead with two male entities: the Rome of Caesar (the father-figure who knighted him) and the allmale family that he creates for himself in fantasy. Luce Irigaray argues that parthenogenesis makes the woman forgo “her desire for reproduction of her ‘image,’ of herself (as) same, for auto,” instead of which her desire is directed solely to her father’s phallus-penis. Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 79. 27. Nevo employs Lacan’s nom/non du père as a useful moniker to designate Cymbeline as a blocking figure (68, 92). Even when he takes on the role of mother and appears to be the affi rmer rather than the nay-sayer, Cymbeline blocks the feminine by appropriating it for himself. 28. In Hymenaei Ben Jonson gives a central role to Juno, by contrast to the goddess’ marginal status in Cymbeline. D. J. Gordon notes Jonson’s use of Unio, an anagram of Juno, to emphasize how marriage effects simultaneously a romantic and a political state of union. In Cymbeline the political and genealogical import of family ties in Posthumus’ dream vision trumps the hymeneal. “Hymenaei: Jonson’s Masque of Union,” in The Renaissance Imagination, ed. Stephen Orgel (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), 177. See also Barton (24–25) who objects to viewing Jupiter as an allegorical figure for James I, the thesis initiated by Emrys Jones and given its most extravagant elaboration in the third chapter of Leah Marcus.

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Index

A Adelman, Janet, 116, 126, 135n25, 136nn8–9, 148n9, 149n13, 151n27, 152n34, 155n50, 156n4, 157n15, 158n2, 159n6, 160n15, 164n6, 167n202, adultery, 1, 72, 73, 84, 91, 92, 115, 127, 157n13. See also cuckoldry Altick, Richard, 142n13, 144n32 anagrams, xiv, 3, 17, 32–38, 139n20, 167n28 anamorphosis, 13, 34, 59, 96, 134n17, 145n38 hermaphroditic anamorphosis, 24, 31 androgyny, 1, 11, 21, 43, 61, 68, 73, 95, 113, 136n9. 146n1, 153n38 Jungian account of, 135n24, 163n1 malign consequences of, 4, 14, 36, 61–62, 77, 127–28, 135n31, 145n34 and parthenogenesis, 55 as wholeness, 31, 33, 61, 135n24, 146n3 Ansari, A. A., 159n8 Anson, John, 131n2 antitheatricalism 2–8, 15, 27, 132n5 antithetical words, 9, 14, 18, 19, 46–47, 50, 58, 60, 67, 68, 71, 76, 128–29 Freud’s use of, 54, 64–65, 76, 153n40 Antony and Cleopatra, 12, 13, 16, 20–22, 95–111 Antony liquefaction of, 103, 106 remasculation, remasculinization, 21, 96, 111 suicide, 103–06, 160n11, 160n17 vacillation between being and not being Antony, 99–103

Cleopatra Cydnus, as symbol of her inexhaustible desire, 97–98 as martial and maternal, 106–11 suicide, 107–09 cross-dressing, 95–96, 106–07 Isis and Osiris, 101, 108, 109–10, 161n21, 162n28 (see also Plutarch) Nile, fertility of, 98, 110, 159n4, 161n21, 163n31 serpents and asps, 21, 98, 108–11, 159n4, 162n26, 162n29 Armstrong, Philip, 150n15, 151n29 ars moriendi, 21. See also suicide Augustus, 123, 166n20

B Barber, C. L., 15, 26 Barbin, Herculine, xiii, 24 Barish, Jonas, 132n5 Barker, Francis, 155n47 Barthes, Roland, 26 Barton, Anne, 160n17, 164n8, 167n28 Beaumont, Francis, Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, 2, 10–14, 18 Belsey, Catherine, 142n14 Berger, Harry, Jr., 43 Bernhardt, Sarah, 61, 146n1 Bevington, David, 160n14, 161n21 Binns, J. W., 132n5 Bolton, W. F., 141n9 Bono, Barbara, 159n6, 161n21 Boose, Lynda E., 158n16 Booth, Stephen, 150n22, 154n44 Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel, 147n8 boy actors, 2–6, 14–15, 40, 78, 107, 132n6, 137n11, 161n19 Brenkman, John, 133n10 Bristol, Michael D., 156n7

180

Index

Burke, Carolyn, 141n10 Burke, Kenneth, 157n10 Burton, Robert, 149n13 Butler, Judith, 4, 5, 17, 128

C Calderwood, James, 140n2, 155n45 Callaghan, Dympna, 156n2 Calvin, John, 157n13 Cavell, Stanley, 72, 152nn35–36 castration, 13, 17, 21, 36, 44, 72, 74, 81, 96, 139n20, 141n8, 149n13, 152n36, 158n17 Chamberlain, John, 132n3 chastity, 6, 11, 14, 22, 33, 40, 71, 81, 83, 85, 87–92, 94, 112, 113, 115, 150n19, 152n37, 157n12, 157n14 as death, 75, 88, 154n42 Cheney, Donald, 159n5 chiasmus (the cross-coupler) 2, 11–13, 16, 17, 34, 38, 45, 67, 73, 123, 124, 138n17, 141n9 Christ, as androgyne, 46, 50, 52, 131n2, 152n31 Cixous, Hélène, 44 Coddon, Karin S., 137n14, 151n23 Cohen, Stephen, 132n5 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 43, 140n4 constructivism, 5, 6 Cook, Carol, 158n3 Coppedge, Walter R., 162n29 Cox, L. S., 139n20 Craik, T. W., 136n7 Crashaw, Richard, 152n31 Crewe, Jonathan, 136n9, 138n18 Cubeta, Paul, 141n9 cuckoldry, 15, 19, 70, 73, 89, 91–92, 116–17, 150n19, 156n7, 166n25 Cymbeline, 5, 22–23, 62, 112–27, 129 Cymbeline as mother, 117, 126–27 homosocial bonds, 112, 124–26, 166n24 Jupiter and his eagle, 114, 122–27, 167n28 manliness, 117, 118, 120–21, 123 mole as providential agent, 118–19 mollis aer, prophecy of, 124 parthenogenesis, 112, 114, 115, 117, 126–27, 129, 167n26 transvestism, 112, 113, 121, 163n1 “the woman’s part,” 112, 116–19, 126

See also genealogy, familial and national; James I

D Dean, Leonard, 140n4 Delcourt, Marie, 134n14 Derrida, Jacques, 52, 142n21, 143n25, 144n33 Donne, John, 97 double, doppelgänger 57, 59, 60, 65, 145n34, 145n36, 145n38

E Eliade, Mircea, 133n10, 135n24, 146n2 Eliot, T. S., 61 Elizabeth I, 43, 131n2, 132n6, 165n13 Engle, Lars, 153n37 Erickson, Peter, 151n26, 159n4, 162n28 Erlich, Avi, 150n15, 150n22, 151n25 Erasmus, Desiderius, 148n8, 148n11 essentialism, 5, 6 Essex, Earl of, 43

F Felman, Shoshana, 60, 164n5 feminization, 1, 13, 14, 16, 21, 36–37, 43–44, 46, 47, 49, 50, 52, 54, 56–57, 59–60, 61, 63, 64, 67–71, 82, 85, 111, 118, 128, 132n3, 134n19, 135n24, 139n21, 140n4, 143n30 Ferguson, Margaret, 62, 153n41, 155n44 Fetishism, 3–4, 14, 41, 83, 87, 109, 110, 118, 119, 152n37, 156n8 Fiedler, Leslie, 137n12 Fineman, Joel, 19, 135n26, 138n17, 139n20, 142n16, 153n38 Floyd-Wilson, Mary, 166n23 Florio, John, 148n8 Foucault, Michel, xiii, 24, 128 Frederyke of Jennen, 119 Freedman, Barbara, 140n26 French, Marilyn, 19, 147n4 Freud, Sigmund, 50, 62, 131n3, 147n4, 147n6, 149n13, 152n32, 164n7 “The Antithetical Sense of Primal Words,” 54, 64–65, 76, 153n40 “The Theme of the Three Caskets,” 117, 144n31, 164n10 “The Uncanny,” 18, 43, 59, 60, 76, 119, 136n8, 145nn39–40

Index See also antithetical words; castration; fetishism; Oedipus Complex Frye, Northrop, 143n23 Frye, Susan, 164n8

G Gajowski, Evelyn, 163n5 Galen, 37 Garber, Marjorie, 146n1 Gascoigne, George, 162n26 genealogy familial and national, 22, 114, 119, 124–27 of Desdemona’s handkerchief, 83, 90 Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britanniae, 122 Giese, Loreen L., 138n18 Girard, René, 19, 58, 145n34, 145n36, 153n37 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 19, 147n4 Gohlke, Madelon, 160n16 Goldberg, Jonathan, 143n22, 152n31 Gordon, D. J., 167n28 Gosson, Stephen, 132n5 Green, André, 81 Greenblatt, Stephen, 17, 24, 157n13 Grinstein, Alexander, 152n32 Gurr, Andrew, 161n18

H Halpern, Richard, 147n6 Hamlet, xiv, 1, 6, 16, 19, 21, 61–77, 114, 115, 127, 128, 139n25, 140n4, 162n24 androgyny, 61–62, 68, 73, 77, 135n31, 146n1, 146n3, 153n38 common place or thing (genital), 70, 73, 74, 76, 77, 152n37 conscience, 68, 150n22, 152n33 country matters, 65, 67–68, 71, 74, 77 incest, 19, 65, 73 love and death, collapse of, 74–77, 115 mater (mother/matter), 62–63, 114, 129, 147n6 misogyny 62, 64, 67, 71 “nothing,” 71, 72, 151n29 primal scene, 72, 152nn35–36 suicide, 64–65, 77 “union” (poison pearl, political/ marital union), 62, 75–77, 127, 155n45, 155n49, 162n24 water and tears, 65–68, 150nn17–18 woman as difference, 73–74

181

woman in Hamlet 19, 62, 63, 65, 67, 68–69, 146n4, 148n9 wordiness, 62–63, 67, 146n4, 147n8, 150n21 Hayles, Nancy K., 163n1 Heilbrun, Carolyn, 135n24, 146n2, 147n4 Heisch, Allison, 140n1 Helms, Lorraine, 161n17 hermaphroditism, xiii, 1, 2, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 25, 26, 110, 124, Hermaphroditus, 7, 8, 9, 13, 14, 16, 24 re, 29, 31, 133n13, 134n14, 134n16, 134n19 Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (Francis Beaumont), 2, 10–14, 18 Venus Hermaphroditus, 10, 133n14 heteronormativity, 4 Hic Mulier and Haec-Vir, 2, 27, 132n3 Hobgood, Alison P., 137n14 Holderness, Graham, 59 Holinshed, First Volume of Chronicles, 122 Holland, Norman, 146n1, 152n31, 155n49 Hollander, John, 137n13 homosexuality, 3, 53–54, 81, 85, 143n27, 152n31, 153n38. See also homosocial bonds homosocial bonds, 20, 22, 69, 112, 124–26, 160n17, 166n24 Hopkins, Lisa, 145n38 Hotson, Leslie, 138n15, 139n22 Howard, Jean, 135n27, 137n14, 166n23 Hunt, Maurice, 164n8, 166n19 hysteria, 16, 19, 43, 62, 88, 92, 126, 146n4

I impotence, 8–9, 12–14, 16, 19–20, 50, 52, 55, 56, 78–80, 83, 85, 120, 133n9, 140n4, 144n33, 161nn20–21 in-betweenness, sexual, 17, 21, 28, 30, 41, 128, 136n7 incest, 19, 61, 65, 73, 76, 91, 112, 127, 136, 164n10 Irigaray, Luce, 44, 128–29, 143n25 parthenogenesis, 147n6, 167n26 sameness-unto-itself, critique of masculine fantasy of, 131n3, 141n10, 144n31 woman as double and as none, 18–19, 50, 52, 137n11, 141n8

182

Index

J James I, 120, 122, 123, 131n2, 132n3, 166n20, 166n22, 167n28 James, Heather, 163n5, 166n19 Jardine, Lisa, 3, 132n6 Johnson, Samuel, 157n11 Jones, Ann Rosalind, 134n19 Jones, Emrys, 165n13, 166n20 Jones, Ernest, 61, 73, 152n31 Jones-Davies, Margaret, 166n22 Jonson, Ben, 167n28 Jorgens, Jack J., 158n18 Joseph, Sister Miriam, 141n9 Jungian psychology, 61, 135n24, 150n15, 163n1

K Kahn, Coppélia, 58, 71, 118, 160n11, 160n17, 165n15 Kantorowicz, Ernst, 142n17, 145n38 Kastan, David Scott, 50 Kawachi, Yoshiko, 138n18 Kinghorn, A. M., 162n30 Knight, G. Wilson, 165n13 Kott, Jan, 137n13 Kuriyama, Constance Brown, 159n4

L Lacan, Jacques, 134n17, 138n19, 139n21, 140n26, 147n8, 149n13, 151n29, 167n27. See also anamorphosis; letters, agency of; specularity Laqueur, Thomas, 139n24 letters agency of, 17, 28, 35, 38, 41, 138n19, 139n21 counterfeit, 25, 33–36, 114, 139n22 difference of a single letter, xiii, xiv, 2, 3, 12–13, 37, 39, 134nn18– 19, 138n17 literalization, 62, 124 See also anagrams Leverenz, David, 19, 146n4 Levin, Harry, 161n17 Lewis, Cynthia, 139n20 Liar’s paradox, 29, 33 Liebler, Naomi, 58, 142n17 liquefaction, 65, 66, 103, 106, 110, 159n8. See also Hamlet, water and tears; Richard II, water and tears Lloyd, Michael, 161n21 Lothian, J. M., 136n7

Lupton, Julia Reinard and Kenneth, 149n13, 150n17162n

M Madelaine, Richard, 162n29 Mahoud, M. M., 142n12 Malcolmson, Cristina, 137n14 manliness, masculinity, 1, 4, 70, 72, 77, 82, 85, 94, 95, 99, 117, 118, 120–21, 123 loss of, 7–8, 10–14, 19–20, 36–37, 43–44, 48, 51, 57–58, 61–62, 65, 67–68, 79, 82–83, 85, 96, 100, 105, 106, 120, 121, 122, 133n9, 140n4 See also feminization; impotence Marcus, Leah, 140n1, 165n17, 166n22 Marlowe, Christopher, 58 Marshall, Cynthia, 160n15 melancholy 16, 17, 21, 27, 28, 34, 35, 36, 64, 68, 69, 128, 138n15, 143n13, 149n13, 151nn23–24 Melnick, Burton A., 164n10 Mikalachki, Jodi, 121, 166n24 Milton, 1, 133n9 misogyny, 1, 5, 6, 9, 16, 19, 37, 62, 64, 67, 71, 73, 89, 117, 119, 12527, 133n9, 146n45, 152n37, 153n38, 163n5. See also woman Moore, Jeanie Grant, 143n26 Mullaney, Steven, 155n46

N necrophilia, 75, 76, 94 Neely, Carol Thomas, 154n42 Neill, Michael, 93 Nevo, Ruth, 163n2, 164n10, 167n27 New Historicism, xiii, 17, 120. See also Greenblatt, Stephen Newman, Karen, 156n1 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 52, 142n21, 144n33 Nohrnberg, James, 133n13

O Oedipus, Oedipus Complex, 62, 149n13, 165n15 Orgel, Stephen, 132n6 Osborne, Laurie E., 139n21 Othello, 16, 19–20, 74, 78–94, 113, 116, 118, 125, 127, 152n37 chastity, 81, 83, 85, 87–92, 94, 157n12, 157n14 reduced to a “common thing,” 89 echo as evacuation, 85–89

Index feminization, 82, 85 handkerchief, 20, 81, 83, 85, 87–92, 158n16 and blood of virgin sacrifice, 91–92 homosexuality, 81, 85 impotence, 78–80, 83, 85 monstrosity, 86, 94, 156n1, 157n11 revirgination, 93–94 Ovid, 1, 7–16, 24, 29, 31, 133n14, 146n4

P Pagnol, Marcel, 146n1 Pandit, Lalita, 155n48 Paré, Ambroise, 37 Parker, Patricia, 123, 147n6, 148n8, 148n11, 150n20, 150n22, 152n33, 154n42, 157n11, 165n18 parthenogenesis, 21, 22, 55, 56, 68, 112, 114, 115, 117, 126, 127, 129, 143n30, 147n6. See also Cymbeline, Richard II patriarchy, 15, 19, 49, 73, 134n18, 136n2, 137n11 Partridge, Eric, 164n6, 165n15 Paul (the apostle), 132n2 phallus, phallicism, 20, 64, 77, 81, 105, 109–11, 139n21, 149n13, 151n29, 154n42, 167n26 Pharmakos/on, 58, 71, 115, 145n36 Plato, 8, 9, 129, 131n3, 163n1 Plutarch, 100, 108, 109, 161n21, 161n23 postcoital flaccidity, 8, 12, 14, 64, 68, 134n16 primal scene, 72, 74, 76, 77, 95, 152nn35–36, 165n15 Prynne, William, 43, 132n5 Puritanism. See antitheatricalism; Rainolds, John; Stubbes, Philip Puttenham, George, The Arte of English Poesie, 34

R Rackin, Phyllis, 160n13, 160n15, 161n19 Rainolds, John, 3, 4, 5 Rambuss, Richard, 152n31 Ranjini, Philip, 149n13 Ribner, Irving, 144n30 Richard II, 7, 13, 16, 18–19, 21, 43–60, 68, 128, 129, 136n8 femininity of Richard, 43–44, 46, 47, 49, 50, 52, 54–57, 59–60,

183

140n4, 143n30, 144n32, 145n34 homosexuality, 53–54 mirror, shattering of, 58–60, 82, 129, 145nn37–38 parthenogenesis, 55–56 sun, as symbol of royalty, 46–48, 142nn16–17, 143n25, 146n43 “un,” prefix and sound of, 7, 18, 51, 54, 57, 59, 60, 76, 128, 136n8, 141n9 the uncanny, 57–60, 145n40, 146n42 water and tears, 55–56, 144n32, 146n42 See also woman, as not one, as “nothing” Riche, Barnabe, Riche his Farewell to Militarie Profession, 36 Rose, Jacqueline, 61 Rose, Mary Beth, 132n3 Rosenberg, Marvin, 146n1

S sameness, sameness-unto-itself, 1, 18, 20, 76, 81, 118, 119, 126, 129, 131n3, 141n10, 144n31 Sandys, George, 134n14 Sanford, Rhonda Lemke, 165n13 Saunders, Ben, 156n9 Saxo Grammaticus, 155n48 scapegoat, 58, 92, 101, 125, 126 Schiesari, Juliana, 149n13, 151n24 Schleiner, Winfried, 139n20 Schwartz, Murray M., 119, 166n25 Shakespeare, William As You Like It, 15–16, 26, 27, 112, 113 The Comedy of Errors, 136n9 Coriolanus, 16, 62, 116, King Lear, 16, 62, 152n37, 153n39, 164n10 The Merchant of Venice, 26, 112, 113 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 11 Pericles, 117, 126 Sonnet 20, 136n7, 137nn12–13; Sonnet 136, 18, 50; Sonnet 137, 73; Sonnet 151, 150n22 The Tempest, 117, 126 Troilus and Cressida, 153n37, 155n46, 159n7 The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 5 The Winter’s Tale, 113, 126, 127 See also Antony and Cleopatra; Cymbeline; Hamlet; Othello; Richard II; Twelfth Night

184

Index

Shapiro, Michael, 161n19 Showalter, Elaine, 151n23 Shudofsky, M. Maurice, 146n1 Siemon, James R., 140n1 Silberman, Lauren, 13, 134n16 Singer, June, 135n24, 146n2 Skura, Meredith, 165n15 Slater, Philip, 159n4, 162n26 Slights, William W. E., 142n17 Snow, Edward A., 158n17 specularity, 5, 11, 73, 129, 147n6 Spenser, Edmund, The Faerie Queene, 1, 6–10, 13, 133n9, 133n13, 163n31 Spevack, Marvin, 161n23 Stallybrass, Peter, 134n19, 142n15, 154n42, 157n12 Stone, James W., 133n11, 158n18 Stubbes, Philip, The Anatomie of Abuses, 2, 5, 27 suicide, 21, 36, 46, 64–65, 77, 103–06, 107–09, 127, 160n11, 160n17 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 140n4

T Transvestism, xiii, 1–8, 14–17, 19, 21, 22, 25–30, 33, 34, 37, 39, 41, 73, 112–14, 121, 128, 131n2, 132nn5–6, 134n20, 135n24, 136n2, 136n9, 138n18, 153n38, 166n24 transvestite comedies, xiv, 2, 8, 24, 26, 113, 135n27 Traub, Valerie, 151n30, 154n42 Trevor, Douglas, 149n13 Tyndale, William, 143n30 Twelfth Night, xiv, 3, 5, 16–18, 21, 22, 24–42, 112, 113 chev’ril glove, 33, 40, 138n17, 139n20 cross coupler, 17, 18, 34, 138n17 cross garters, xiv, 3, 17, 18, 25–26, 32–37, 38, 40, 41, 138n18, 139n22 “Fiction and Friction” (Stephen Greenblatt), 17, 24, 39–41 melancholy, 27, 28, 34, 35, 36 M.O.A.I. anagram, 3, 17, 34–36 See also anamorphosis, hermaphroditic; in-betweenness, sexual; letters; twins twins, 25, 30, 32, 136n9, 137n12

U Ure, Peter, 43, 143n27, 143n30, 145n37

V Vining, Edward P., 147n4 Virgil, 163n5 virginity, 7, 75, 115, 157n15 loss of, 8–9, 12, 14, 20, 75, 83, 90–94, 154n42, 157n14, 158n17 male virginity, 82, 134n18 revirgination, 20, 93–94, 158n18

W Wayne, Valerie, 163n2 Weil, Kari, 9 Welles, Orson, 158n18 Willbern, David, 139n20, 143n24 Wind, Edgar, 133n14 Winnicott, D. W., 149n14 Woman, 116, 129, 144n33, 151n23 as “common” place, thing, 20. 70, 73–74, 76, 77, 89, 152n37, 157nn11–12 as death, 62, 65, 67, 91 Freud, “The Theme of the Three Caskets,” 131n3, 144n31, 164n9 (see also Hamlet, “union”) as difference, origin of, 1, 5, 17, 18–19, 44, 64, 73–74, 117, 125, 126, 128, 146n43 as double/duplicitous, 137n11, 153n37 as double (in positive sense), 141n10 (see also Irigaray, Luce) as non-difference, creator of, 62, 64, 73–74, 77 as not one as “none,” 18, 19, 29, 44, 50, 52, 54, 60, 141n8 as “nothing,” 18, 44, 51–53, 54, 60, 66, 71, 72, 137n12, 143n24, 143n26, 148n8, 151n29 as whore 1, 2, 63, 67, 69–70, 71, 89, 107, 148nn8–9, 149n13 “the woman’s part” genital, 5–6, 22, 62, 89, 112, 116–19, 126, 129 theatrical, 2, 5–6, 22, 66 wordiness, 62–63, 67, 140n4, 146n4, 147n8, 150n21 See also Hamlet, woman in womb, 53, 101–02, 143n26, 143n30, 150n18, 157n15, 160n15 as grave, 45, 56–57, 59–60, 74, 76–77, 146n42, 153n39, 155n49 as home, 18, 119

Index as the “mother” (uterus), 16, 62 and Plato’s myth of the cave, 129, 131n3 See also woman, as death Woodbridge, Linda, 132n3, 165n15

Y Yates, Frances, 165n17 Yong Li Lan, 165n12

Z Zimmerman, Susan, 148n9

185