Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater 9781315776514

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Half Title......Page 2
Title Page......Page 6
Copyright Page......Page 7
Contents......Page 8
List of Figures......Page 11
Preface......Page 12
Introduction......Page 14
PART I: Struggling with the Stage......Page 26
1 Going Through the Motions: Affects, Machines, and John Ford’s The Broken Heart......Page 28
2 Magnetic Theaters......Page 41
3 Feeling Unhistorical......Page 53
4 Literary Celebrity and Theatrical Culture in Shirley’s Bird in a Cage......Page 67
PART II: Engendering …......Page 80
5 Monstrous Teardrops: The Materiality of Early Modern Affection......Page 82
6 “Displeas’d ambitious TONGUE”: Lingua and Lingual Duality......Page 95
7 “Come, Eros, Eros!”: Re-reading Emotion and Affect in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra......Page 110
PART III: … A Nation......Page 122
8 Wondering in Henry VIII or All is True......Page 124
9 Angelica and Franceschina: The Italianate Characters of Juliet’s Nurse......Page 137
10 The Mirror and the Cage: Queens and Dwarfs at the Early Modern Court......Page 150
11 Gold Digger or Golden Girl?: Purifying the Pursuit of Gold in Heywood’s Fair Maid of the West, Part I......Page 165
PART IV: Theater of a City......Page 180
12 Civic Affect and Female Political Agency in Sir Thomas More......Page 182
13 Corporate Life in Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday......Page 195
14 Transforming the Younger Son: The Disruptive Affect of the Gentleman-Apprentice in Eastward Ho......Page 211
15 Managing Fear: The Commerce in Blackness and the London Lord Mayors’ Shows......Page 224
Afterword......Page 233
Contributors......Page 238
Bibliography......Page 244
Index......Page 268

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Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater

This collection of original essays honors the groundbreaking scholarship of Jean E. Howard by exploring cultural and economic constructions of affect in the early modern theater. While historicist and materialist inquiry has dominated early modern theater studies in recent years, the historically specific dimensions of affect and emotion remain underexplored. This volume brings together these lines of inquiry for the first time, exploring the critical turn to affect in literary studies from a historicist perspective to demonstrate how the early modern theater showcased the productive interconnections between historical contingencies and affective attachments. Considering well-known plays such as Shakespeare’s Antony and C ­ leopatra and Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday together with understudied texts such as court entertainments, and examining topics ranging from dramatic celebrity to women’s political agency to the parental emotion of grief, this volume provides a fresh and at times provocative assessment of the “historical affects”—financial, emotional, and socio-political—that transformed Renaissance theater. Instead of treating history and affect as mutually exclusive theoretical or philosophical contexts, the essays in this volume ask readers to consider how drama emplaces the most personal, unspeakable passions in matrices defined in part by financial exchange, by erotic desire, by gender, by the material body, and by theatricality itself. As it encourages this conversation to take place, the collection provides scholars and students alike with a series of new perspectives, not only on the plays, emotions, and histories discussed in its pages, but also on broader shifts and pressures animating literary studies today. Ronda Arab, Associate Professor of English at Simon Fraser University, is the author of Manly Mechanicals on the Early Modern English Stage (2011), an examination of the gender status of working men in Shakespeare’s works and works of his contemporaries. Michelle M. Dowd is Associate Professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. She is the author of Women’s Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (2009) and The Dynamics of I­ nheritance on the Shakespearean Stage (forthcoming 2015). Adam Zucker is Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the author of The Places of Wit in Early Modern English Comedy (2011) and the co-editor of Localizing Caroline Drama: Politics and Economics of the Early Modern English Stage, 1625–1642 (2006).

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Routledge Advances in Theatre and Performance Studies

  1 Crossing Cultural Borders Through the Actor’s Work Foreign Bodies of Knowledge Cláudia Tatinge Nascimento   2 Movement Training for the Modern Actor Mark Evans   3 The Politics of American Actor Training Edited by Ellen Margolis and Lissa Tyler Renaud   4 Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett’s Drama Anna McMullan   5 The Provocation of the Senses in Contemporary Theatre Stephen Di Benedetto   6 Ecology and Environment in European Drama Downing Cless   7 Global Ibsen Performing Multiple Modernities Edited by Erika Fischer-Lichte, Barbara Gronau, and Christel Weiler   8 The Theatre of the Bauhaus The Modern and Postmodern Stage of Oskar Schlemmer Melissa Trimingham

  9 Feminist Visions and Queer Futures in Postcolonial Drama Community, Kinship, and Citizenship Kanika Batra 10 Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter Marty Gould 11 The Theatre of Richard Maxwell and the New York City Players Sarah Gorman 12 Shakespeare, Theatre and Time Matthew D. Wagner 13 Political and Protest Theatre after 9/11 Patriotic Dissent Edited by Jenny Spencer 14 Religion, Theatre, and Performance: Acts of Faith Edited by Lance Gharavi 15 Adapting Chekhov The Text and its Mutations Edited by J. Douglas Clayton & Yana Meerzon 16 Performance and the Politics of Space Theatre and Topology Edited by Erika Fischer-Lichte and Benjamin Wihstutz

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17 Music and Gender in English Renaissance Drama Katrine K. Wong 18 The Unwritten Grotowski Theory and Practice of the Encounter Kris Salata 19 Dramas of the Past on the Twentieth-Century Stage In History’s Wings Alex Feldman 20 Performance, Identity and the Neo-Political Subject Edited by Matthew Causey and Fintan Walsh 21 Theatre Translation in Performance Edited by Silvia Bigliazzi, Peter Kofler, and Paola Ambrosi

26 Theatre and National Identity Re-Imagining Conceptions of Nation Edited by Nadine Holdsworth 27 Nationalism and Youth in Theatre and Performance Edited by Angela SweigartGallagher and Victoria Pettersen Lantz 28 Performing Asian Transnationalisms Theatre, Identity, and the Geographies of Performance Amanda Rogers 29 The Politics and the Reception of Rabindranath Tagore’s Drama The Bard on the Stage Edited by Arnab Bhattacharya and Mala Renganathan

22 Translation and Adaptation in Theatre and Film Edited by Katja Krebs

30 Representing China on the Historical London Stage From Orientalism to Intercultural Performance Dongshin Chang

23 Grotowski, Women, and Contemporary Performance Meetings with Remarkable Women Virginie Magnat

31 Play, Performance, and Identity How Institutions Structure Ludic Spaces Edited by Matt Omasta and Drew Chappell

24 Art, Vision, and NineteenthCentury Realist Drama Acts of Seeing Amy Holzapfel

32 Performance and Phenomenology Traditions and Transformations Edited by Maaike Bleeker, Jon Foley Sherman, and Eirini Nedelkopoulou

25 The Politics of Interweaving Performance Cultures Beyond Postcolonialism Edited by Erika Fischer-Lichte, Torsten Jost and Saskya Iris Jain

33 Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater Edited by Ronda Arab, Michelle M. Dowd, and Adam Zucker

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Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater

Edited by Ronda Arab, Michelle M. Dowd, and Adam Zucker

First published 2015 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2015 Taylor & Francis The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988. 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 Historical affects and the early modern theater / edited by Ronda Arab, Michelle M. Dowd, and Adam Zucker. pages cm. — (Routledge advances in theatre and performance studies ; 41) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. English drama—Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500-1600—History and criticism. 2. English drama—17th century—History and criticism. 3. Theater and history—England—History. 4. Theater—England—History—16th century. 5. Theater—England—History—17th century. I. Arab, Ronda, 1964- editor. II. Dowd, Michelle M., 1975- editor. III. Zucker, Adam, 1972- editor. PR658.H5H57 2015 822'.309358—dc23 2014041879 ISBN: 978-1-138-02050-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-77651-4 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

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Contents

List of Figures Preface

x xi

Introduction RO N DA A R A B, MI CH E L L E M. DOWD, AN D ADAM Z UC K ER 

1

PART I Struggling with the Stage   1 Going Through the Motions: Affects, Machines, and John Ford’s The Broken Heart

15

PAT R I C I A CA H I L L

  2 Magnetic Theaters

28

B E N E D I C T RO BI N SO N

  3 Feeling Unhistorical

40

E L L E N M AC K AY

  4 Literary Celebrity and Theatrical Culture in Shirley’s Bird in a Cage

54

A L L I S O N K . D EUTE RMAN N

PART II Engendering …   5 Monstrous Teardrops: The Materiality of Early Modern Affection I A N F R E D E R I CK MO ULTO N

69

viii Contents

  6 “Displeas’d ambitious TONGUE”: Lingua and Lingual Duality

82

L I A N N E H A B I NE K

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  7 “Come, Eros, Eros!”: Re-reading Emotion and Affect in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra

97

J YO S T NA S I N GH

PART III … A Nation   8 Wondering in Henry VIII or All is True

111

T I F FA N Y W E RTH

  9 Angelica and Franceschina: The Italianate Characters of Juliet’s Nurse

124

B I A N CA F I N Z I - CO N TI N I CAL ABRE SI

10 The Mirror and the Cage: Queens and Dwarfs at the Early Modern Court

137

PA M E L A A L L E N BROWN

11 Gold Digger or Golden Girl?: Purifying the Pursuit of Gold in Heywood’s Fair Maid of the West, Part I

152

JA N E H WA N G DE GE N H ARDT

PART IV Theater of a City 12 Civic Affect and Female Political Agency in Sir Thomas More

169

M A R I O D I G A N GI

13 Corporate Life in Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday

182

H E N RY S . T U RN E R

14 Transforming the Younger Son: The Disruptive Affect of the Gentleman-Apprentice in Eastward Ho RO N DA A R A B

198

Contents  ix

15 Managing Fear: The Commerce in Blackness and the London Lord Mayors’ Shows

211

IAN SMITH

Afterword

220

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P H Y L L I S R AC K I N

Contributors Bibliography Index

225 231 255

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List of Figures

  1.1  From Lucas Janszoon Waghenaer, The Mariners Mirror (London, 1588). Huntington Library, San 18 Marino, California.    1.2  Note with a pointing hand indicating Gervase Markham’s additions on the title page of Conrad Heresbach’s The Whole Art of Husbandry Contained in Foure Bookes. (London, 1631). Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 20   6.1  Detail of title page, Bulwer, Anthropometamorphosis (A2r). (c) The British Library Board, E.700 page A2r. 90  6.2  “Quò tendis?” Paradin, Heroicall Devises (I5r). Courtesy of the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 91   6.3  Bulwer, “IX Gesture: Silentium indico,” Chirologia (N7r). Courtesy of the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 94 10.1  Isabella Clara Eugenia, Infanta of Spain (1566–1633), with a child dwarf, c.1598–1600, by Frans Pourbus the younger. This portrait was once misidentified as Anne Boleyn with her daughter Elizabeth. By permission of Royal Collection Trust / @ Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014. 141

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Preface

The authors and editors gathered here have all had the incredible good fortune to be mentored, advised, befriended, and taught as we completed our dissertations by one of the most generous scholars we have ever met: Jean Elizabeth Howard. Each one of us could tell you a story of a time Jean went out of her way to help us in some crucial way with an idea, a text, a letter, a phone call, or with just a small nudge in the right direction. Each one of us could tell you about her willingness to read and re-read and re-re-read the essays and chapters and book proposals and even the brief professional letters we wrote earlier in our careers. Each one of us could tell you how remarkable her consistent and always timely willingness to continue to engage with us now seems, now that we ourselves teach and mentor students whose work needs reading and re-reading and re-re-reading; each one of us recognizes how extraordinary this commitment is given that Jean gathers new students every year. And each of us could tell you stories of how we strive to be models for our students—ethically, politically, ­pedagogically—just like Jean has been, and is, for us. We all knew as we worked with Jean towards our doctorates that we were being given a great gift by our advisor. We did not, however, know how rare that gift would turn out to be. Jean, we hope, already understands how grateful we are. Let this book stand as a simple repository for that gratitude, sitting in a library, held in a reader’s hands, indexed in The Cloud, shining on a screen, existing for as long as it can as a marker in thought and words of all our thanks, together.

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Introduction

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Ronda Arab, Michelle M. Dowd, and Adam Zucker

In contemporary theater, audiences act, sometimes as one. Trained in the conventional rituals of attending performances and gripped by story, spectacle, or gesture, we become silent together; we laugh out loud; we gasp, we clap, we cheer. As we do so, we make our bodies known to each other and to the creators of the show, however isolated we might seem to be from one another in the darkened hall. Performers want to sense our presence. Playwrights want to inspire us, to animate our bodies as well as the bodies on the stage. We commune in a space of unspoken but felt affiliation. This is surely part of the point of entering into the theatrical experience. But aside from being a more-or-less intuitive aspect of theater-going, this process of shared intensities contributes to drama’s political potential. Audiences leave theaters bearing an affective trace of the performance, and their subsequent acts can bear it as well. The conditions of early modern theater and dramatic performance in Tudor and Stuart London were obviously very different from our own. But, as scholars have begun to suggest over the past few years, a critical recognition of affect’s productive force—its identification in records of audience response, its presumed evocation in particular dramatic or theatrical spaces and moments, its ramifications for the meaning of playtexts and the sociable elements of performance outside the theater—can open new vistas on the cultural politics of early modern drama. This collection is meant to do just that by refracting a variety of historicist inquiries through differently shaped lenses of affect studies. This collection is also meant to honor the scholarship and teaching of a person who has shaped the life and work of each contributor here, to say nothing of the many others touched by her professional generosity and the clear, progressive ethic of her writing. It is no exaggeration to say that Jean Howard has transformed the way we think about the theater as an institution and as a practice in productive synergy with the social, political, and economic culture of early modern England. Over the last four decades, Jean has produced an impressive body of scholarship that, taken as a whole, repeatedly asks us to reevaluate what we think we know about early modern theater and its historical engagements. Her groundbreaking studies, most notably The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English

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2  Ronda Arab, Michelle M. Dowd, and Adam Zucker Histories (with Phyllis Rackin), and, more recently, Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598–1642, have been central to critical conversations in the field that take seriously the embodied, emplaced, and historically situated nature of theatrical entertainment. Most importantly, especially for the work of the scholars in this particular volume, Jean’s contributions to feminist scholarship, particularly materialist feminism, repeatedly demonstrate that gender is not simply one possible “method” through which to read early modern texts but a central category of analysis crucial to any sophisticated assessment of the past and its literary histories. If this statement sounds like a truism to us today, it does so owing considerably to Jean’s foundational scholarship. Jean’s twin commitments to feminism and the study of historical process have allowed her to recognize the political and social significance of aspects of experience that are often overlooked in other kinds of leftist discourse, and the essays here are meant, in part, to pay tribute to this characteristic of her work. In her pioneering essay on New Historicism, published in 1986, she proposed that scholars invested in the social historicity of early modern literary texts be open to a wider range of topics for investigation, “topics such as the way emotions and what we call instincts—and not just economic structures or political beliefs—are produced in a particular, historically specific social formation, and the way, of course, in which literature variously participates in this process of construction.”1 Although historicist inquiry and economic criticism has flourished in the many years since Jean’s essay first appeared, driven in large part by her own groundbreaking scholarship, it is only quite recently that scholars have begun to consider the interconstitutive relationship between affect and cultural production that Howard posited nearly three decades ago. We take up that link here in order to bring the explicitly political and ethical force of all that we’ve learned from Jean to bear on affect studies. What might it mean for early modern theater scholars to consider the felt experience of emotion or the physiological inducement of affect as a “historically specific social formation?” Or, to carry the thought even further in the direction of Jean’s scholarship, what might the political stakes of historical affect studies be? The essays gathered here attempt to answer these questions by turning to different records of early modern theatrical performance—play texts, scholarly archives, images, and material objects among them—in order to illuminate the affective stakes of drama in light of a wide range of historical correlatives that have shaped early modern studies over the past three decades, from gender relations to economic affiliations and conflicts, to physiological or sexual logics, or to questions of form that link genre and politics. Instead of treating history and affect as mutually exclusive theoretical or philosophical contexts, the essays in this volume ask readers to consider how drama emplaces personal passions into matrices defined not only by historical conflict and continuities but also by theatricality itself. Can historicist materialism, with its commitment to intervening in uneven

Introduction  3 relations of power and with its definitional understanding of the mutually productive interplay of cultural texts and economic or political structures, find a place for incorporating ideas about the body, the mind, and the network of nerves and impulses that underpin affect theory?

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AFFECT CRITICISM, IN AND OUT OF HISTORY The turn to affect has become an especially vibrant part of literary studies in recent years. Key texts by Sianne Ngai, Brian Massumi, Eve Sedgwick, Teresa Brennan, Lawrence Grossberg, and Patricia Clough (to name only a few), have helped transform the ways literary scholars look at emotion and affective impulse in and through textual production.2 However, the broader interdisciplinary and sometimes ahistorical nature of much influential affect theory has tended to preclude precise historicist inquiry into the production and maintenance of affective stances, sometimes robbing criticism of explicitly diachronic engagements. The most prominent works of affect theory and the literary criticism it has inspired are in no way a-political or antipolitical, but much of the work in the field makes a conscious turn away from the historicist imperative of materialist cultural criticism that characterized, in one way or another, much scholarship from the 1970s onwards. Eve Sedgwick, for example, introduces the essays collected in Touching Feeling by noting the ways she values “fibers and textures” as an inclusive, pan-sensory model for the affective resonance of thought and textual encounter.3 Her work is explicitly ethical and political (and it is not a-historical in the broadest sense), but it shares its gesture toward an abstract place for feeling in aesthetic encounter with constructs like Ngai’s “stuplimity,” a sense of tedium or boredom that underpins the repetitive, accumulative formal strategies of avant-garde texts by Gertrude Stein or the sculptor Ann Hamilton.4 The interconnectedness of bodies, sensations, and feelings in named emotions—be it shame, as in Sedgwick’s work; happiness or unhappiness in Sara Ahmed’s; anxiety in Brian Massumi’s or Ngai’s—finds its brilliant place in critical discourse (or “theory”) as a way to trace out diverse networks of affiliation and/or disidentification in spatial models, in literary expressions, and in social life. Visions of social struggle in and as a product of ideological process—or as conscious, discursive expressions of communal identification and alienation that lead to organized actions and eventual change—are, at best, a subsidiary or secondary interest in much of this work. That said, the ethical and political interests of the best studies of affect share many of the long-standing preoccupations of early modern studies. Working with any number of historical archives, early modern scholars have grounded the theater and its texts in an increasingly detailed vision of the economic networks and labor practices that produced them. The formal innovations and repetitions of the plays, both in print and in performance,

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4  Ronda Arab, Michelle M. Dowd, and Adam Zucker become knowable in this vein of scholarship as crucial outcomes of and contributors to historical process writ large. Only recently have strains of criticism begun to emerge that consider how the political and economic engagements of Renaissance drama might be made visible through less tangible contexts and experiences, such as emotion or embodied affect, mood, inclination, and manner. Studies of humoralism and the body,5 cognition, the senses,6 and literature’s affective consequences for audiences,7 have brought historiography to bear on psychoanalytic and neurological criticism. But with few exceptions, this work on affect and its constellated ideas in early modern studies has not yet engaged with all we have learned about the practical labor, production, and material socioeconomic relations underpinning the early modern stage—and the opposite is true, as well. Building on Jean Howard’s acknowledgment of the links between history, cultural formations, and emotion, the work represented here proposes to do just that. How might affect theory help us better understand the communities, nascent classes, audiences, and individual agents formed by theatrical practice in early modern England? And how, in turn, might materialist historicism critique and enliven ideas about drama’s unique status as an affective, performative text experienced and felt in multiple times and diverse spaces? There are no single answers to these questions, in part because of the fractious and diverse meanings of “affect” itself. In its ontological straddling of multiple binaries—inner and outer, mind and body, active and passive, sentient and unconscious, individual and collective—affect is notoriously difficult to define. Roughly speaking, the essays here take up affect in more or less explicit ways as conscious emotion and irrational sensation, as well as the conscious or unconscious bodily manifestations and performances of affective states. This broad conceptualization of affect understands it as those visceral forces, energies, or felt “intensities”8 engaging the senses and the emotions or “passions”; it encompasses experiences as well as responses, which range from the fully conscious to the autonomic, or “instinctive.” As Patricia Clough puts it, affects “illuminate … both our power to affect the world around us and our power to be affected by it, along with the relationship between these two powers.”9 To put it another way, affect can be both affectedness and effect—our state of being affected and the “thing itself” that affects us—and it can engage both our affectivity and effectivity—our ability to be affected and our ability to affect or create effects. Science-based schools of affect study concern themselves with affect as an innate physiological response determined by evolutionary hard wiring, an approach that suggests a sole or primary etiology located in the body. Without denying the significance of human hardware, we understand the origination of affect never to be singular or contained; rather, we see affect as created within economies of or circulations between human bodies, nonhuman bodies, and material things, mediated by social, cultural, and economic systems and practices.10 The ideals and practices of religion, family, politics, work, aesthetics, and communities, in interaction with each other,

Introduction  5 create systems of desire or structures of feeling —unfixed, changeable systems and structures—wherein the affects felt by or attached to bodies and things may be understood to reside. Since structures of feeling emerge in active negotiation with historically contingent institutional discursivities and practices, affects themselves must be understood as historically specific social formations; whatever physiological facticity it may also contain, bodily affect is so labile and alterable by stimuli of cultural etiology that biology on its own cannot offer a full explanation.12 To paraphrase one of Jean Howard’s classroom refrains: physiological facts exist, but they are always experienced and understood within cultural contexts. Cultural histories, then, must assist our analysis of affect, not the least because of the historical situatedness of biological discourse itself. Furthermore, in its relationship to institutional forces, affect might best be understood as an ideological and a potentially powerful political instrument, martialled in the name of racial identification, or feelings of civic belongingness, or even emergent notions of literary celebrity (to name a just few of the subjects of the essays that follow). As may be clear by now, we are arguing here for a historicist, culturalmaterialist affect studies, especially with regards to theatrical performance and dramatic texts. The causative power of the social and cultural networks within which affect is shaped and experienced suggests the importance of moving away from a model of affect that focuses primarily on the personal, subjective, interiorized phenomenon of the individual; affect’s generation and circulation through social networks suggest that it can be a shared or collective experience. Mob feelings of fear, anger, or celebratory joy; collective sentiments of patriotism, religiosity, or occupational pride; even the individual’s subjective feeling of a shared communal identity offer examples of collective affect as we understand it in this volume. The writing of historical affects, then, needs to examine affect as both individually and collectively generated and received, as something with and for an audience, and take into account how the felt experiences of individual bodies and groups of bodies in the world do cultural and political work that interact with historical processes writ large. Theatrical performance in material place, in textual form, and in practical, lived experience is and has been the site of these processes. As such, theatrical performance can also be a site for our shared labor (affective and otherwise) toward history’s critical illumination and attendant social change.

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11

*** The essays that follow have been divided into four sections, each one organized by eponymous ideas from Jean’s books. While some fit more neatly into their categories than others, the overarching concerns of the collection bind them all. Each is, roughly speaking, “materialist” insofar as a marxian understanding of the mutually constituting relationship of cultural production, social struggle, and individual action obtain throughout. The

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6  Ronda Arab, Michelle M. Dowd, and Adam Zucker doubled materiality of affect—bound to the human body but made meaningful through communal encounter or conflict within historical spaces and contexts—is likewise a predominant strain, with the performance of bodies both on- and off-stage occupying a crucial place in much of what follows. And some authors take on “material culture” more directly in the form of the stage’s or the archive’s physical objects, along with the complex social or economic relationships that these objects can encode, reveal, or mystify. This emphasis on materiality will come as no surprise to readers who are familiar with Jean Howard’s work and influence. We hope that the essays collected here pay tribute to that influence by furthering, questioning, rethinking, and refining a broader conversation about early modern drama and culture that Jean has lucidly shaped for so many years. STRUGGLING WITH THE STAGE What does it mean for critics and theater practitioners alike to stage social struggle? And how might the archival materials of theater history—even felt properties or the pull of objects—shape the ways we imagine the theater’s ability to forge audience affiliations or inspire social action through affective response? Drawing inspiration from the feminist critique of antitheatricalist rhetoric and the historical force of audience formation in Jean Howard’s essential book, The Stage and Social Struggle, our first section answers these questions in four very different ways. Using John Ford’s vivid and violent tragedy The Broken Heart, Patricia Cahill reveals the ways literal technologies of plot and stage can become sites of social inspiration and identification. The play’s mechanical chairtrap, for example, derided by Romantic and Modern critics as a ludicrous contrivance, is revalued by Cahill as a signifier of theater’s affective materiality, or as a node in a circuit of passionate calls-and-responses that trouble our own ideas about the ways a conscious, discursive emotionality produces interiority. This circuit binds man and woman, onstage and in the audience, into reciprocal, pleasurable exchanges organized, oddly, by things like plummet lines and leaden clogs. Cahill’s argument has much in common with Benedict Robinson’s essay on a different kind of forceful object: the magnet, which, owing to its mysterious effects on and transferrable connections to the world around it, served as a metaphor or point of explanatory contrast for natural philosophers and political thinkers from Montaigne, to Bacon, to Jonson. Montaigne in particular uses magnets as analogy for the power poetry and theater have over their audiences; Robinson shows how Jonson’s The Magnetic Lady similarly thinks its way through complex political and rhetorical problems using the philosophy of magnetic animation. What is the force that creates an audience in a theater? And how are we to understand it at such a distant historical remove?

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Introduction  7 Ellen MacKay’s essay gestures toward these questions as it looks to the theatricality, or the performative quality, of the early modern theater’s archive itself. Tracing through time the protean forms and multiple effects of an anecdote about a devil appearing during a performance of Doctor Faustus, MacKay draws out similarities between the historiographical presentation of documentary facts we take as solid truths and the vanishing presence of a particular staging of a play. Historical research and scholarly writing itself, MacKay suggests, are struggles cut from the same cloth as a theatrical event, and we are all willing audience members for a show that must always go on. In this section’s final essay, Allison Deutermann shows how the imprisoned William Prynne was put to use by James Shirley in Bird in A Cage to foster aesthetic divisions within an emerging audience of theater connoisseurs. By reading the play’s interest in the kinds of fame that adhere to elaborate plotting and spectacular devices (such as the eponymous cage itself), and by teasing out the sharp jibes in Shirley’s dedication to Prynne, Deutermann shows how style and celebrity become mutually productive forces in an often-overlooked Caroline moment. ENGENDERING … Many of the essays in this book, especially those in this section, suggest that the history of affect and emotion and their places in the early modern theater should be written through feminist accounts of gendered bodies and lived feelings. Ian Moulton’s essay, for example, takes up the transfer of passion we call love—be it parental, erotic, or some mixture of the two. Drawing on Montaigne and Aristotle’s ideas about fetal generation and the transmission of self-in-love, Moulton suggests that Shakespearean drama toys with the period’s uneasy sense that “love” might be composed of nothing more than a material exchange or a mixture of fluids. The emergence of a heterosexual imperative and contemporary genetics (to say nothing of the bourgeois family) in modern social formations has tended to obscure this strain in Shakespeare’s plays, but, as Moulton suggests, it is a central component in their depiction of intimacy. Lianne Habinek looks to the tongue, the eponymous character in Thomas Thomkis’s Lingua, to explore the gendered logic of sensory integration that characterizes both the play in question and the broader field of inquiry into the senses that appears in early modern anatomical and philosophical tracts. For Tomkis, the tongue is the site of a discursive ‘sixth sense’ that unites the other five and makes them knowable, but it is also often depicted or understood to be a troubling, sexualized feminine organ. Like Moulton, Habinek shows how attention to ideas and performances pertaining to the body’s material, historical presence can shed light on drama’s engagement with the medical discourses that were carving out and naturalizing gendered cultural forms.

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8  Ronda Arab, Michelle M. Dowd, and Adam Zucker Jyotsna G. Singh deals more explicitly with the logic of emotion in drama, as she shows how the creation of character and gender can entail a process of affective transition and exploration. Drawing on the ideas of William Reddy, Singh reads Antony and Cleopatra for its “emotional navigation,” a progression composed of the often drastic shifts in register that characterize Cleopatra in particular. Rather than seeing Cleopatra as “histrionic”—a highly gendered term that has been used to disparage her by actors and critics alike—Singh suggests we rethink masculinity and femininity in the play and “look beyond a binary that separates out strategic theatricality from an affective immersion in feelings.” … A NATION Hybrid combinations that forge unlikely alliances between nations, bodies, and genres are the subjects of the essays in our third section. In the first, Tiffany Werth finds the seams and overlaps between romance and history that criss-cross the diverse political patchwork of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII. Rather than endorsing a unified ecclesiology and a hermetic formal strategy, Werth suggests Henry VIII depicts the successful formation of Tudor England by invoking multiple, sometimes contradictory affiliations across spectrums of religion and political allegiance. Might the ideological, historical interpellations that compose “nation” in the early modern theater be more complexly critiqued with affective inspiration in mind? And might the material history of affect itself gain nuance from the context of the English theater’s project of nation-building? Questions of national consolidation and mixture also, Bianca F.-C. Calabresi argues, animate the figure of Juliet’s Nurse, a hybrid character not only by virtue of her staged language and depiction but also within material play-texts of Romeo and Juliet itself. “Italic type” here refers to more than just the typeface in which the Nurse’s early Q1 speeches are set: Calabresi’s reading of the stock figure of the Nutrice/Balia from Italian dramatic traditions teases out the erotic familial bonds between caretakers and children in the early modern period. Intimate domestic affects—like theatrical conventions, Calabresi argues—smudge lines that mark off the already porous boundaries of early modern national identities. Unexpected intimacies and their gendered ramifications are likewise the subject of Pamela Allen Brown’s essay. Relationships between court dwarfs and monarchs are so distant from our own ideas about political performance that it can be hard to think of them as anything other than unidirectional expressions of untrammelled force or power. But in Brown’s exploration of the topic, the subtle possibilities of mutual and comparative actions between queen and dwarf become visible. The structurally similar position, for example, of Elizabeth’s and her dwarf Thomasin’s bodies as quasi-theatrical spectacles—always on display; always made meaningful by

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Introduction  9 visibility and judgment—leads Brown to imagine the tenor of the mixed feelings that bound dwarf/monarch pairs in early modern history, feelings that gave force to the depiction of dwarfs on the English stage. In the final essay in this section, Jane Hwang Degenhardt uses the frame of economic history and England’s commercial expansion to explore the gendered and affective resonance of gold in Thomas Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West. Tracing the circulation of gold as it wanders along with the play’s romance narrative—from the streets of Plymouth to Spanish galleons to the court of Fez in Morocco—Degenhardt demonstrates how Bess, the play’s eponymous maid, embodies and purifies the conflicts and mutual interests that accompanied England’s entrance into what Laura Doyle has called the “inter-imperial” networks of the early modern world.13 The “goodness” and “fairness” attached to the body of the golden Bess allow her affectively to transmit female virtue into traditionally male realms, and become, for Degenhardt, a complex point of contact between foreign relations and theatrical culture. THEATER OF A CITY As Jean Howard’s Theater of A City demonstrated, London’s theatrical culture both displayed and interrogated the local knowledges and social or ideological fracture lines that composed the early modern urban scene. The essays in this book’s final section extend this observation, exploring urban affiliations and estrangements that animate London drama of various forms. First, Mario DiGangi looks to the figure of the armed, rebellious housewife Doll Williamson in Sir Thomas More to shed light on the ways political action and domestic sentiment intersect in the embodiment of a performed civic affect. Rather than being an entirely discontiguous figure in the play’s landscape, DiGangi argues, Doll gives voice to ideas about mutual obligation and urban community that “inform an ideology of citizenship” across gendered lines. For Henry Turner, this network of obligations contributes to the crucial urban institution of the corporation. Economic, political, and symbolic modes of status are marshaled by the corporate mode, a decidedly early modern process that the theater, Turner argues, both depends upon and displays. Turner’s analysis of The Shoemaker’s Holiday teases out its comic vision of corporate affiliations and corporate personhood in the figure of Simon Eyre, a character who, like many others in London’s first locally-set comic plays, is composed of the multitude of status configurations and communal logics that were authorizing an increasingly commercialized urban scene. In contrast to Turner, Ronda Arab develops an argument about drama’s interest in the potential disruptions made possible by affective registers in collectivities of young urban men, in particular. Counterposing the discontinuities

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10  Ronda Arab, Michelle M. Dowd, and Adam Zucker in masculine social performance of the two apprentices in Eastward Ho against a wealth of conduct literature and early modern social analysis on the place or status of younger-born gentry sons, Arab demonstrates the ontology of status as an affectively engaged state of being and argues for the significance of status-affect in the rise of anything we might call a “middle class” in Stuart London. If ideologies of guild, workshop, home, and theater collaborated in the production of gendered communities and incorporation in London, they also rested on modes of exclusion and exoticism that marked off the outer limits of the civic polity. Ian Smith’s essay on the representation of Moors in Tudor and Stuart Lord Mayors’ processions demonstrates this counter-narrative in stark terms. The same corporate institutions that fostered a communal sense of urban belonging staged racialized bodies to counter, and in some sense mystify, the fundamental economic disparity of new commercial endeavors which were based on the exclusion of the many and the profit of the few. The feeling of fear, Smith shows us, generated by difference and lasting long into the future, is thus a central aspect of civic affect in history and in performance. In her “Afterward,” Phyllis Rackin situates Jean Howard’s transformative scholarship and pedagogy within the critical matrices of affect and historicism that animate this volume; Rackin concludes by lauding Jean’s “splendid intellectual legacy” as sustained through “generations of readers and students.” Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater seeks to honor and extend this legacy. It is our sincere hope that the essays collected here not only pay tribute to Jean’s work as an exemplary teacher and scholar but help to perpetuate a politically engaged, historically sensitive criticism of the early modern theater that continues to do justice to Jean’s intellectual legacy for years to come. NOTES 1. Jean E. Howard, “The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies,” ELR 16.1 (1986): 13–43, esp. 21. 2.  See, among many others, Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005); Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002); Eve Sedgwick, Touching Feeling (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004); and Patricia Clough, The Affective Turn (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 3. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 24. 4. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, esp. 261–297. 5.  See for example Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) and Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson, eds., Reading the Early Modern Passions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

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Introduction  11 6.  See for example Lowell Gallagher and Shankar Raman, eds., Knowing Shakespeare: Senses, Embodiment and Cognition (New York: Palgrave, 2010) and Elizabeth D. Harvey, ed., Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). 7.  See for instance Katharine Craik and Tanya Pollard, eds., Shakespearean Sensation: Experiencing Literature in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 8.  Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Gregg and Seigworth (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 1. 9. Clough, The Affective Turn, ix. 10. As Gail Kern Paster writes, “the mind, the body, and the world are always connected through what philosopher Andy Clark describes as a network of ‘mutually modulatory influences’ in a dynamic action of ‘continuous reciprocal causation’” (Humoring the Body, 10). 11.  See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 128–35. 12.  For a more thorough discussion of this idea, see Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry 37.3 (2011), esp. 464–72. 13. Laura Doyle, “Inter-Imperiality: Dialectics in a Postcolonial World History,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Online 21 March 2013.

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Part I

Struggling with the Stage

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1 Going Through the Motions

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Affects, Machines, and John Ford’s The Broken Heart Patricia A. Cahill

In much the same way as Laertes encounters the mad Ophelia in the fourth act of Hamlet, Ithocles comes upon his sister Penthea and discovers she is mad in Act IV of John Ford’s The Broken Heart, a revenge tragedy first staged in Blackfriars Theatre and dated to 1629–33. It is tempting to say that Ford’s scene merely replicates Shakespeare’s depiction of fraternal anguish, but Ford actually makes a significant departure: while Laertes is passionately spurred on by the encounter with his sister (he tells Ophelia, “Hadst thou thy wits and didst persuade revenge, / It could not move thus” [4.5.167–8]), Ithocles suggests that the meeting has rendered him unable to feel or—as early moderns would have it—unable to be moved.1 Thus, in response to the assertion that Penthea’s madness is a “sight … full of terror,” Ithocles declares, “On my soul/ Lives such an infinite clog of massy dullness, / As that I have not sense enough to feel it” (4.2.174–6).2 Whereas the Shakespearean scene enacts a familiar narrative about the animating force of feeling, Ford’s proffers a complicated metaphor about being deprived of feeling: his soul is weighed down by a “clog” that is itself composed of sluggishness or gloom. Evoking the mechanism of the clog—that is, a “block or heavy piece of wood, or the like, attached to the leg or neck of a man or beast, to impede motion or prevent escape”—Ford calls to mind an apparatus attached to the monkeys kept as pets in aristocratic households since the medieval period.3 In Ford’s puzzling phrasing, vitality is to be found not in Ithocles’s “soul,” but rather in the wooden block that “lives” to bar him from both movement and feeling. Figured as an “infinite clog of massy dullness,” the experience of not feeling vehement emotion here possesses solidity, magnitude, and mass. Indeed, the “dullness” that has befallen Ithocles is substantial, weightier than even the terror of which his companion speaks. He may not be an impassioned Laertes, but Ford insists that Ithocles feels something: a psychophysical sensation of restraint. I linger on Ithocles’s words in this scene because they invite us to reassess how we understand feelings in early modern drama. For the past two decades, path-breaking work on the humors and passions has provided us with a framework for reading emotions on the stage, enabling us to attend to the liquescent materialities of shame, melancholy, and the like.4 But we have not acknowledged the significance for the drama of those more amorphous

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16  Patricia A. Cahill sensations that, like Ithocles’s sense of encumbrance, epitomize what contemporary theorists like Brian Massumi call “affect”: visceral intensities that lack the structure of emotions.5 Sometimes registered on the body involuntarily or autonomically, affect (much like early modern emotion) is highly mobile. As such, it is capable of passing between bodies or between bodies and objects so as to engender shared atmospheres, a fact that suggests its value for scholars interested in understanding how early modern playgoers may have encountered plays. In what follows I argue that what stands out about affect in The Broken Heart is that it is inextricably bound up with the regulated movements of mechanical devices, something crystallized perhaps in the image of the “clog.” In other words, the play’s atmosphere comes into being through a technological imaginary—that is, through the conceptual and actual presence of what early modern writers refer to as “devices,” “engines,” and “instruments.”6 Moreover, while Ford’s privileging of the mechanical might seem to suggest a lack of interest in soliciting the feelings of the audience, the play actually addresses playgoers viscerally, appealing through the mechanical not only to sight and sound, but to kinesthesia or what Deidre Sklar defines as the “proprioceptive sense of movement within our own bodies.”7 Set in ancient Sparta, The Broken Heart offers two intertwined tragedies of unfulfilled passion. The first emerges in the play’s opening scene wherein Ford reveals that Ithocles has recently forced Penthea into marriage with a sadistic nobleman, thereby thwarting her union with her beloved Orgilus. Subsequently, playgoers witness Penthea’s heartbreak, madness, and eventual suicide by starvation in Act IV. The second tale of frustrated desire centers on Ithocles and Calantha, heir to the Spartan throne. Although Calantha returns his love, Ithocles spends much of the play fearful that his vehement passion will be mistaken for social ambition. The plots come together in a shocking scene after Penthea’s death, when Orgilus—who in Act I pretended to leave Sparta, only to assume the disguise of a poor scholar and attempt unsuccessfully to win Penthea back—turns to revenge, trapping Ithocles within a sinister trick chair and murdering him with a dagger. Remarkably, Ithocles’s steadfast acceptance of this bloody end is soon after echoed by Orgilus as he unwaveringly submits to a horrific execution by phlebotomy. In a near-gothic final scene that mixes coronation, marriage, and funeral, Calantha, the only one of the lovers left alive, resolutely embraces her end. Putting a wedding ring on the corpse of Ithocles, she proclaims the cracking of her heartstrings and, while listening to a dirge she has composed, joins the other three in death. Given Ford’s depiction of burning passion and death-centered resolution, it is hardly surprising that commentators have long found in The Broken Heart a narrative about psychological interiority, corporeal vulnerability, and the force of emotional experience. Most famously perhaps, Charles Lamb, in a laudatory 1808 essay on the play, wrote effusively about Ford’s portrayal of the grief-stricken Calantha, likening her to a proverbial Spartan boy whose “fortitude” enabled him to “let a beast gnaw out his bowels till he died without expressing a groan.” 8 In modern criticism, scholars have

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Going Through the Motions  17 reminded us of Ford’s intellectual interests in neostoicism, homing in on the play’s tropes of emotional containment and characterizing the play as a tragedy of subjectivity and what Michael Neill calls the “passional self.”9 Extending this discussion of the play’s emotional terrain, Cynthia Marshall explored the play’s emotional solicitation of its audience: through its focus on the humoral physicality of psychic affliction, she proposed, the play forges strong “emotional interactions” and works to “shatter” the subjectivity of early modern audiences.10 The unusually formal aesthetic of The Broken Heart—its embrace of emblematic postures, deliberate movements, and protracted temporalities— features in many scholarly accounts of the play’s emotional terrain. As one of Ford’s modern editors comments, the play “takes place in slow motion against a muted background of tension,” and many of its scenes, including the music-filled female death scenes, are represented as virtually static tableaux.11 This slow-motion aesthetic, as others have suggested, reflects the play’s relationship to such matters as early modern humoral regimens, Catholic religious ceremony, and baroque artwork.12 But this aesthetic also has everything to do with the play’s affective dynamics. Indeed, as the two scenes I discuss below make clear, the play explodes with affect whenever inertial or seemingly perfunctory movement is staged. SINKING PLUMMETS AND POINTING HANDS Perfunctory movement dominates Penthea’s mad scene in which characters report over and over that they are overwhelmed with affect. Even before Penthea appears on stage in the conventional guise of a madwoman, weeping and with “her hair about her ears” (4.2.sd after 57), she is depicted as virtually intolerable to behold. Orgilus bemoans her loss of reason and marvels at his capacity to “have seen it, and yet live!” (50), and his claim is echoed by Ithocles who, as he accompanies her onstage, describes her as “a killing sight” (60). But while Penthea may look the part of the conventional stage madwoman, she does not act it. She certainly does not evoke the “noise, verbal extravagance, and confrontational movement” associated with Ophelia’s madness.13 Rather than offer bawdy song and lively action, her first words anticipate the singing of death knells. Subsequently in spare declarative verse, she draws attention to her somnolence and enervated, fugue-state movements, making it clear that she is merely going through the motions of living: Indeed, I’ve slept With mine eyes open a great while. No falsehood Equals a broken faith. There’s not a hair Sticks on my head but, like a leaden plummet, It sinks me to the grave. I must creep thither. The journey is not long. (4.2.74–79)

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18  Patricia A. Cahill For many scholars, Penthea’s abstract declaration about “broken faith” feeds into an analysis of her character and prompts readings that claim she is charging herself with betrayal or, alternatively, condemning her brother for preventing her marriage to Orgilus.14 Far more arresting, however, is the kinesthetic simile following Penthea’s indictment. Hinting at her subjection to external force, the verb “sticks” conjures a dagger’s thrust as it conveys the relationship between “hair” and “head.”15 Indeed, by insisting upon the adherence of her hair to her head, the verb also suggests a frustrated desire—possibly manifest in the actor’s gestures—to tear hair out. Above all, the affect-suffused language likening each hair to a “leaden plummet” emphasizes the actor’s (presumably) bowed posture.16 Identifying hair—the supposed ornament of beautiful ­womanhood—as what presses Penthea down, the lines suggest that, like Lear, she is reduced to an infantile posture, crawling toward certain death.17 In this context, Ford’s turn to quasi-metaphysical conceit is especially noteworthy, for the trope of the leaden plummet that “sinks” Penthea curiously aligns her with a navigational device redolent of Baconian empiricism.18 Her listless movements are represented figuratively as a consequence of weighted lead lines, instruments appearing, for instance, in each of the four corners of the cover illustration of an immensely popular work of the period, the frequently reprinted book of sea charts known as The Mariners Mirror (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1  From Lucas Janszoon Waghenaer, The Mariners Mirror (London, 1588). Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

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Going Through the Motions  19 Such instruments were used by sea voyagers to take soundings—that is, to discover their location, set their future course, measure particular oceanic sites, and determine the dangers their floors might present to vessels. Strikingly, then, as this simile links the “unsound” Penthea’s madness with the movement of the seaman’s plummet, it does not call upon a depth model of subjectivity. Instead of suggesting a female will to die, it evokes a woman whose movements are a consequence of physical forces partly external to her: Penthea is cast down precisely as such lines were cast into the depths of sea. Or perhaps we might more accurately say that the simile represents a hybrid creature: a mechanized figure whose unwilled sinking movements suggest those of a marionette, like the “talking motion” mentioned a few lines earlier by her distraught husband (105). Underlying this plummet simile, in short, is the suggestion that to watch the attenuated gestures of the downcast Penthea might be akin to watching those of an automaton. That the play’s affective atmosphere coalesces around leaden movement and instrumental technologies becomes clearer as the scene turns more explicitly to Penthea’s gestures. Thus Penthea, having declared that she once loved Orgilus, clasps his hand and in an opaque speech urges Orgilus to attend to Ithocles, alludes to Ithocles’s clandestine passion, and recollects a secret meeting at which she rebuffed Orgilus’s passionate advances: Complain not though I wring it hard. ‘I’ll kiss it. O, ’tis a fine soft palm. Hark in thine ear: Like whom do I look, prithee? Nay, no whispering. Goodness! We had been happy. Too much happiness Will make folk proud they say.—But that is he—   Points at Ithocles. And yet he paid for ‘t home. Alas, his heart Is crept into the cabinet of the princess. We shall have points and bride-laces. Remember, When we last gathered roses in the garden I found my wits, but truly you lost yours. That’s he, and still ’tis he. (4.2.112–22) Penthea’s body language, underscored by her explicit references to wringing and kissing, recalls an earlier scene (2.3) in which she similarly wrung and kissed Orgilus’s hand.19 Emphasizing her repetitive movement, the speech also, through Penthea’s description of the “creeping” of her brother’s heart, underscores the weary pace that, moments earlier, she identified as her own. But of course the scene’s most insistently repeated gesture is pointing, which is called for both explicitly by a stage direction originating in the margins of the 1633 text as well as implicitly by her assertion, “That’s he, and still ’tis he.” Indeed this gesture is emphasized even in the cryptic line in which Penthea, anticipating her brother’s wedding, punningly evokes both daggers and the lace threads known as “points.” The Broken Heart redoubles the affective force of Penthea’s pointing moments later when Orgilus in an

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20  Patricia A. Cahill aside avers that his encounter with Penthea has forcefully catapulted him into action: “She has tutored me. / Some powerful inspiration checks my laziness” (4.2.124–25). While remaining reticent about what is to come, the play nevertheless casts Penthea’s pointing as a climactic moment in its protracted revenge narrative.20 Significantly, this staging of the mad Penthea and the “tutored” Orgilus unites the play’s closely allied kinesthetic and technological imaginaries in ways unlikely to be easily legible to modern readers. Specifically, in this play rife with references to the written word, Penthea’s oddly insistent and stylized pointing evokes what William H. Sherman terms a “manicule”— that is, the pointing indexical finger or “printer’s fist” which, thanks to the mechanical culture of print technologies, was widely in circulation in early modern manuals and other books (see Figure 1.2).21 When the play shows Penthea’s indexical gesture, in other words, it subtly links her to printing and the mechanic arts.22 Indeed, it suggests that she performs the manicule, offering a kind of clarification amidst confusion. Simultaneously, it implies that Orgilus, who at the play’s start disguises himself as a book-mad scholar and at the play’s end explicitly refers to an “index” that “point[s],” will soon act like the practical readers about whom Sherman writes, for in his revenge plot Orgilus will soon, like them, be “taking the text in hand and fitting it to the purposes at hand” (5.1.36).23 My claim, then, is that the affective dynamics of gesture and movement in this scene of madness challenge scholarly accounts that find furtive emotional expression and repression at the core of Ford’s dramatic narrative. When we read this scene through modern-day concepts of psychological i­nteriority— suggesting for example, it exposes Penthea’s secret desire for vengeance or her ability to “liberat[e] Orgilus from his repressed secrets”—we overlook the scene’s rather different kinesthetic and affective strain.24 Above all, we miss the fact that Ford here depicts the beginnings of a strangely automated relay whereby Penthea’s pointing finger inevitably leads to Orgilus’s ­dagger-wielding hand. What early modern audiences witnessed—and presumably felt—is a kind of manipulation that is surely as mechanical as it is emotional. Indeed, what they encountered was a narrative of causality that, by turning to the mechanized workings of the hand, entirely short-circuited the inwardness that we moderns identify with strong feeling.

Figure 1.2  Note with a pointing hand indicating Gervase Markham’s additions on the title page of Conrad Heresbach’s The Whole Art of Husbandry Contained in Foure Bookes. (London, 1631). Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Going Through the Motions  21

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VENGEFUL ENGINES Just as Penthea’s mad scene depicts Orgilus as a reader following the directive of a mechanical hand (rather than as a revenger discovering his pent-up emotion), so, too, does the actual revenge scene staged at the end of Act IV join the mechanical and the expressive realm. That there was something off-putting—even audacious—about Ford’s use of a trick chair is suggested by Thomas Jordan’s ballad adaptation circa 1644, for it replaced the chair scene with a chivalric swordfight.25 Nineteenth-century reviewers fulminated against the chair, calling it, for instance, a “childish, needless, and paltry contrivance” and lambasting its “detestable machinery.”26 More recent scholarly appraisals either ignore the trick chair or regard it as a simple metaphor for emotional constraint.27 But the chair’s centrality to the affective and kinesthetic dynamics of the revenge scene is unequivocal.28 Picture the workings of this scene, which unfurls in slow motion. The dead Penthea is carried, veiled, onto the stage and placed in a chair by her waiting-women. As servants arrive and place a chair on either side of her, the women sit weeping at her feet and a seemingly composed Orgilus walks on stage with Ithocles. In a cryptic aside, a servant says to Orgilus, presumably while pointing to a chair, “Tis done; that on her right hand” (4.4.1). Soon, the women announce that Penthea is dead, and that, with her last breaths, she called for a funeral song lamenting the cruelty of Ithocles and the injury done to Orgilus. After the women depart, Orgilus, with apparent courtesy, invites Ithocles to sit in the chair on Penthea’s right, proposing to take the other and to weep alongside him. But, as Ithocles sits in the chair, he is, as the stage directions put it, “catcht in the engine” (sd after 20). Orgilus then acknowledges he lured Ithocles with Penthea’s body and unveils Penthea, mockingly identifies the trick chair as Ithocles’s “throne of coronation,” and draws a dagger (23). The dying Ithocle, embracing Stoic resolution, forgives his murderer and urges him on: “Strike home. A courage / As keen as thy revenge shall give it welcome” (39–40). In response, Orgilus twice stabs Ithocles and then commends his nobility as he bids him farewell. With its dramatic unveiling of Penthea’s corpse, this revenge scene is typically read as a scene of emotional exposure: a spectacle of “keen”—that is, acutely felt—revenge meted out in response to a secret, grievous wound. In fact, one critic has likened Orgilus to Vindice in The Revenger’s Tragedy.29 Like Thomas Middleton’s impassioned revenger, Orgilus uses the physical remains of his beloved as part of his secretive plot to avenge her death. But Ford’s tableau-like revenge scene makes no space for anything like Vindice’s exuberant histrionics; perversely enough, it foregrounds Orgilus’s quiet composure. Only once in this scene, in a restrained speech focusing on Ithocles’s social striving and Penthea’s suffering, does Orgilus acknowledge the wrong done to him, and, as he speaks, he consigns his pain to the past: “As for my injuries, / Alas, they were beneath your royal pity. / But yet they lived, thou proud man, to confound thee” (36–8). In fact, while Ford

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22  Patricia A. Cahill prefaces the play with a list of characters in which Orgilus’s proper name is, via the Greek, defined as “angry,” this scene shows Orgilus shaking the hand of his enemy and expressing his intent to be “gentle” and not draw out his pain (61).30 How are we to understand a tragedy in which vengeance is enacted in such a subdued way? What are we to make of a play in which a reference to the “keenness” of revenge suggests not the anguished sting of the revenger’s emotional wounds but rather the sharpness of his bladed instrument? One answer to these questions comes from this scene’s slow tempo, which again underscores the play’s investment in the look and feel of the mechanical processes it stages rather than in the invisible inner states of its characters. In other words, to regard this revenge scene in post-Freudian terms as focused solely on the exposure of Orgilus’s repressed feelings is to overlook the sequence of actions that begin with Penthea’s pointing finger and culminates in Ithocles’s entrapment within the immobilizing chair. Crucially, Ford represents the chair as a machine, thereby signaling his debts to neostoic intellectual traditions in which “machines [are imagined] as tangible prototypes for the proper control of the passions, for constancy, or for temperance.”31 Orgilus’s derisive reference to the chair as Ithocles’s throne hints at the play’s technological imaginary, for it alludes to the ceremonial chair that the blacksmith-god Hephaestus, also known as Vulcan, forged for Hera after she expelled him from heaven: diabolically, it held her in place with invisible bonds.32 Moreover, the chair’s appearance on stage belatedly activates two puns in Act III that highlight the mechanical as they bring together the theatrical and technological meanings of “invention” and “device”: thus earlier Orgilus deviously invited two would-be wedding masquers to assist him by “grac[ing] a poor invention” and “joining with [him] in some slight device” as he “venture[s] on a strain [his] younger days / Have studied for delight” (3.5.85–8). A similar pun brings the chair’s status as a machine to the fore in Act V when Orgilus’s father, with unwitting irony, explains to Calantha that his son has not yet arrived at the wedding party because he and Ithocles have secretly busied themselves “as actors” with “some new device, to which these revels / Should be but usher” (5.2.5, 3–4). Lest we miss these puns, the play also dates Orgilus’s acquisition of the chair to his temporary stint as a student of Tecnicus, the philosopher-artist whose name suggests the practical arts or “techne¯.” The play’s technological concerns become clearer when set alongside ­Barnabe Barnes’s 1607 lurid play about the Borgias, The Devil’s Charter, which depicts Lucretia Borgia butchering and strangling her (trick) chair-bound husband after boasting that she has “devised such a curious snare / As jealous Vulcan never yet devis’d— / To grasp his arms, unable to resist / Death’s instruments enclosed in [her own] hands.”33 In fact, The Broken Heart reads as an expanded version of this bloody episode in which Orgilus and Penthea share the roles of revenger and victim that Barnes assigns to Lucretia, for Orgilus reenacts the revenge performed by Barnes’s Lucretia, and Penthea, ­Lucretia-like, is abused and imprisoned by a cruel husband. But Ford thoroughly divests his revenger of emotion: there is little suggestion, after all, that anyone is “hail’d on with

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Going Through the Motions  23 fury” as was Lucretia, nor stirred by the extremities of passion as was the “jealous Vulcan” whom Lucretia emulates. Even when Orgilus, just before his execution, names his murder of Ithocles as an act of “vengeance,” he speaks not of his anger but of the regular workings of his “engine” (5.2.144). Indeed, as he holds out two modes of revenge—single “combat” versus technological ingenuity—the play turns to early modern debates about the nature of mechanical artifice: with Orgilus’s insistence that “fortune” might have worked against him in a duel but could not affect the outcome of his chair trick, the play endorses mechanical predictability (143). While Barnes’s chair signifies passionate depravity of the Italianate kind, Ford’s chair stands out more nearly as a mechanical simulacrum of intractable, grasping arms. Indeed, like a chair appearing in one of Matteo Bandello’s novellas, its action of entrapment may partly depend on the movement of its arms.34 As such, the stage property ensures that Orgilus’s revenge scene powerfully resonates with the prior scene of Penthea’s madness. Just as the mad scene circumvents narratives of passion by insisting upon the propulsive force of the mechanical hand, so, too, does the revenge scene outsource a putative desire to grasp and hold one’s enemy to the mechanical chair. In fact, Orgilus’s “engine” is even more complex than I have thus far argued, for not only does the chair suggest an extension of a vengeful female grasp otherwise not visible on the stage, but the chair also serves as part of a larger assemblage. More precisely, the play’s emphasis on mechanical process emphasizes that Orgilus’s seemingly perfunctory act of revenge— the deed that begins with the pointing hand of Penthea and ends with the d ­ agger-wielding hand of Orgilus—requires a sequence of coordinated actions involving servants, waiting women, chairs, a veiled corpse, a seated man, and the music for which (along with its seats) the Blackfriars Theatre was famed. Rather than depicting a revenger who treats the body of his beloved as a mere pawn in his plot, then, the play here distributes vengeance among the parts of its chair-engine, representing a strangely vibrant and collaborative apparatus, one that remains disquietingly alien even as it engages human action and even simulates human laps.35 In short, what to modern readers looks like a labored scene in which a not-so-passionate character goes through the motions of revenge might, to early modern audiences, have suggested something different: namely, the charged matter of watching the slow and intricate workings of a machine. What’s more, as this chair episode crystallizes the play’s attention to the kinesthetic dimension of performance, it also underscores the play’s metatheatrical interests, for in Blackfriars, of course, everyone watching Ford’s “device” would have been graced with seats and thus literally positioned to feel the scene’s affective force. It is by now a scholarly commonplace to observe that, despite the sheer lunacy of their attacks, the antitheatricalists were right about something important: insofar as emotions were recognized as theatrical “matter” and individuals were understood as vulnerable to the flux of humoral blood, choler, black bile, and phlegm, then play-going would indeed entail corporeal risk. But what if the theater’s relationship to feeling is more complex than this claim

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24  Patricia A. Cahill suggests? What if dramas do not merely arouse emotional responses and engender suffering in their audiences? In focusing on the charged intensities of slow motion in The Broken Heart—on its preference for showing the workings of the engine rather than the emotions lodged within—I have suggested the limits of conventional readings of Ford’s play as a tragedy about the emotional self in extremis, for the play offers a very different narrative when read from the perspective of affect. For Jonathan Sawday, machines have an important cognitive dimension: “the machine, together with the observation of machinery in operation” might be regarded as “a kind of thought experiment.”36 Like Sawday’s machine, Ford’s play may have “represented an opportunity to rethink, within the scope of a particular engine or device, the philosophical relation between cause and effect, action and reaction.”37 But such a reassessment must be understood as more than a cerebral matter, for, as I’ve demonstrated above, Ford’s play engages in a sophisticated way with felt dynamics and mechanical sensations even as it raises profound questions about the “how” of feeling. Ford’s play traffics in emotional perturbations, in other words, but, by turning to machines and slow motion, it also offers a compelling and thoroughly materialist investigation of how theater operates, including how it works on the bodies of playgoers. Indeed, as it startles the seated playgoers, the play reminds them of their role (along with the other human and nonhuman actants on the stage) in constituting the theatrical experience. As I’ve sought to demonstrate, scholarship on affect has the potential to open up the experiential dimensions of drama and help us to recover a fuller sense of the sensory register of the early modern playhouse. At the very least, because affect (unlike emotion) need not be tethered to narratives of corporeal vulnerability, investigation of affective dynamics may enable us to grasp the complex pleasures of early modern theater-going, a subject often obscured in scholarship that attends to the turbulent flux of bodily humors and passions. Affect scholarship may also enable us to grasp the psychophysical impact of drama more completely. By looking at the theater’s affectively charged matter—linguistic tropes, stage properties, actors’ gestures and movements—we might recognize the drama’s role as a laboratory for the exploration of feeling. Why, for example, are so many revenge dramas (texts that focus relentlessly on emotional extremity) invested in complicated mechanical processes and technological ingenuity? If Ford’s preoccupations with the presence, pressures—and even perhaps pleasures— of mechanical things matter, it is precisely because they allow us to rethink what the drama can tell us about the mechanisms of feeling itself. NOTES 1. William Shakespeare,  The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus  (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997). 2. All references are to  John  Ford, The Broken Heart, ed. T. J. B.  Spencer ­(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980).

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Going Through the Motions  25 3.  Oxford English Dictionary Online, “clog, n.,” http://www.oed.com. See also Jean E. Howard’s delightful speculation that one such trained monkey may have performed on the Blackfriars Theatre in 1605 in “Bettrice’s  Monkey: Staging Exotica in Early Modern London Comedy,” in A  Companion to the Global Renaissance, ed. Jyotsna G. Singh (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2009), 325–39. 4. The locus classicus for “emotion” scholarship is Gail Kern Paster’s pioneering The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early ­Modern England  (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). See also her Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) and Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson, eds., Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 5.  Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002) 23–45. See also Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean O’Malley Halley, eds., The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 1–3; Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010) 1–25; and Erin Hurley and Sara Warner, “Affect/Performance/Politics,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, 26.2 (2012): 99–107. A recent contribution to early modern affect study is Katharine A. Craik and Tanya Pollard, ed. Shakespearean Sensations: Experiencing Literature in Early Modern England (­Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 6. On early modern machinery and mechanics, see Jessica Wolfe, Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Jonathan Sawday,  Engines of the Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the Rise of the Machine (London and New York: Routledge, 2007); and Wendy Beth Hyman, ed. The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011). 7.  Diedre Sklar, “Remembering Kinesthesia: An Inquiry into Embodied Cultural Knowledge,” in Migrations of Gesture, ed. Carrie Noland and Sally Ann Ness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2008), 87. On the kinesthetic dimension of early modern theatrical performance, see Michael Witmore, “Arrow, Acrobat, and Phoenix: On Sense and Motion in English Civic Pageantry” in Hyman, Automaton, 109–28. 8. Charles Lamb, Lamb’s Criticism: A Selection from the Literary Criticism of Charles Lamb, ed. E. M. W. Tillyard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923), 24–5. 9.  Michael Neill, “Ford’s Unbroken Art: The Moral Design of The Broken Heart,” Modern Language Review 75 (1980): 257. On Ford’s stoicism, see Gilles D. Monsarrat, Light from the Porch: Stoicism and English Renaissance Literature (Paris: Didier-Erudition,  1984); Thelma N. Greenfield, “The L ­ anguage of Process in Ford’s The  Broken Heart,” PMLA 87.3 (1972): 397–405; and Reid Barbour, English Epicures and Stoics: Ancient Legacies in Early S­ tuart Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 128–34. R. J. Kauffman claims that no other play of the period is so obsessed with “the direction and control of the self” in “Ford’s ’Waste Land’: The Broken Heart,” Renaissance Drama, New Series III (1970), 185; William  Dyer observes that “Physical and emotional ‘damming up’ constitutes the primary activity in the play, the concealment of and escape from an inner self that every character

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26  Patricia A. Cahill practices” in “Holding/Withholding Environments: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Ford’s The Broken Heart,” English Literary Renaissance 21 (1991): 407–8; and Cynthia Marshall highlights passive suffering in The Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity, and Early Modern Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins ­University Press, 2002), 138–58. 10. Marshall, Shattering, 157–58. 11. Marion Lomax, introduction to ’Tis Pity  She’s a  Whore  and Other Plays by John Ford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), xiii (quoted in M ­ arshall, Shattering, 141). On the play’s stillness, see, for example, Neill, “Ford’s Unbroken Art,” 251; Lisa Hopkins, John Ford’s Political Theatre (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 162; Mark Stavig, John Ford and the Traditional Moral Order (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), 144; and D ­ onald K.  Anderson, “The Heart and the Banquet: Imagery in  Ford’s  ’Tis Pity and The  Broken Heart,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 2.2 (Spring, 1962): 213–217. 12. On humorality, see Marshall, Shattering, 141–53; and Blaine  S.  Ewing, Burtonian Melancholy in the Plays of John Ford (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940), 32–46, 79–87. On ceremony, see Hopkins, Political Theatre; Sophie Tomlinson, Women on Stage in Stuart Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 152; Ira Clark, Professional Playwrights: Massinger, Ford, Shirley and Brome (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1992), 91–111; and Elizabeth Williamson, The Materiality of Religion in Early Modern English Drama (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 102–5. On baroque artwork, see Ronald Huebert, John Ford: Baroque English Dramatist (Montreal: McGillQueens University Press, 1977) and Blair Hoxby, “The Function of Allegory in Baroque Tragic Drama: What Benjamin Got Wrong,” in Thinking Allegory Otherwise, ed. Brenda Machosky (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 87–118. 13.  Eric Nicholson, “Ophelia Sings like a Prima Donna Innamorata: Ophelia’s Mad Scene and the Italian Female Performer,” in Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theater, ed. Robert Henke and Eric Nicholson (Burlington, VT: ­Ashgate, 2008), 95. See also Douglas Bruster who illuminates dramatic conventions linking madwomen to “sexually explicit language” in Quoting Shakespeare: Form and Culture in Early Modern Drama (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 149. 14.  For a summary of critical views of Penthea’s character, see Spencer, “Introduction” (42–43) and Nancy A. Gutierrez’s “Shall She Famish Then?”: Female Food Refusal in Early Modern England (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 53–78. 15.  See “stick, v.1,” Oxford English Dictionary Online. http://www.oed.com. “I.1.a. trans. “To stab, pierce, or transfix with a thrust of a spear, sword, knife, or other sharp instrument; to kill by this means,” and II. 4.a. intr. “Of a pointed instrument: To remain with its point imbedded; to be fixed by piercing.” 16. See Sara Ahmed who defines affect as “what sticks, or what sustains or preserves the connections between ideas, values, and objects” in “Happy Objects” in Affect Theory Reader, ed. Gregg and Seigworth, 30. 17. For another view, see Hoxby, “Function of Allegory,” who connects Ford’s simile with “the palm tree weighed down by weights,” an emblem of suffering piety appearing on the frontispiece of Eikon Basilikes. For Erasmus, however, the ancient practice of weighting palms has to do with powerful individuals:

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Going Through the Motions  27 their strength of body and mind is like a “palm [that] does not break down nor bend but reacts against the weight, pushes upwards and makes a rising curve” in Adages Ii1 to IV 100, ed. Margaret Mann Phillips and R.A. B. Mynors, vol. 31 of Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), 237. 18.  On the Baconian associations, see Julie R.  Solomon, “Going  Places: Absolutism  and Movement in Shakespeare’s The  Tempest,” Renaissance Drama 22 (1991): 3–45 (30). 19.  On these gestural echoes, see Donald K. Anderson Jr., John Ford (New York: Twayne, 1972), 74–75. 20.  On the play’s protracted narrative structure, see Eugene M. Waith, Patterns and Perspectives in English Renaissance Drama (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988), 248. 21. William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 25–52. 22.  On printing and machinery, see Sawday, Engines of the Imagination, 78–82. 23. Sherman, Used Books, 47. 24.  Neill, “Unbroken Art,” 258. 25.  The ballad is reprinted in Spencer, “Appendix C.” 26.  Spencer, “Introduction,” 30. 27.  See, for example, Brian Morris who connects “Penthea, trapped in her marriage situation” and “Ithocles locked in the chair” in his introduction to John Ford, The Broken Heart (London: A & C Black, 1965), xxiv–xxv. For other accounts of the chair as metaphor, see Barbour, English Stoics, 131; Neill, “Broken Art,” 251; and Dyer, “Holding/Withholding Environments,” 417. 28.  The chair may also have topical political resonance: at a notorious 1629 meeting of Parliament the Speaker, Sir John Finch, was violently seized by House members who forced him to remain seated in his chair and listen to them (personal communication with Chris Kyle). 29.  Kauffman, “Ford’s ‘Waste Land,’”181. 30.  See Spencer for a reproduction of this list (216). 31. Wolfe, Humanism, Machinery, 27. 32.  Spencer’s “Appendix B” offers a detailed account of the chair’s literary ­precedents (224–8). 33.  Barnabe Barnes, The Devil’s Charter, ed. Nick de Somogyi (London: Nick Hern Books, 1999), 22. 34.  Spencer, 224–5. 35.  On the uncanniness of chairs in dramatic performance, see Alice Rayner, Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomena of Theatre (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 110–36. 36. Sawday, Engines of the Imagination, 50. 37. Ibid.

2 Magnetic Theaters

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Benedict Robinson

Near the end of his essay on Cato the Younger, Montaigne imagines the transmission of passion in the theater as a form of magnetism. As a magnet transfers its power to a surrogate, so a playwright’s passion is transmitted to an actor and an audience, producing an urgent affective response Montaigne calls a “ressentiment bien vif” and his translator John Florio a “lively feeling-moving”: The furie which prickes and moves him that can penetrate hir [poetry], doth also strike and wound a third man, if he heare it either handled or recited. As the Adamant stone drawes, not onely a needle, but infuseth some of hir facultie in the same to drawe others: And it is more apparently seene in theaters, that the sacred inspiration of the Muses, having first stirred vp the Poet with a kinde of agitation vnto choler, vnto griefe, yea and beyond himselfe, whether and howsoever they please, doth also by the Poet strike and enter into the Actor, and consecutively by the Actor, a whole auditorie or multitude. It is the ligament of our sences depending one of another.1 The theater transmits a “furie” or “agitation” that passes through the “auditorie or multitude” like a vibration; in observing a stage event the attending multitude participates in a circulation of energy that binds them together in the way a magnet binds together a chain of needles, infusing its power into each needle so that it in turn magnetizes others. Montaigne’s choice of needles—his ancient sources speak of iron rings—suggests the nearly literal sharpness of this experience, which is said to “prick and move,” to “strike and enter,” such that it seems at once to touch, wound, penetrate, and possess. If there is something quasi-divine about this experience, it is rooted in the powers of living flesh, in passion and sense, in the organism’s capacity to feel the often violent touch of an impinging world. If it is not quite the same thing as passion, it is a provocation to passion and perhaps even a cause of it. In the pages that follow I will pursue the links between magnetism, passion, and theater from Montaigne to Jonson’s Magnetic Lady, the title page of which in some copies of the 1641 folio bears an epigraph from

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Magnetic Theaters  29

Claudian’s poem Magnes: “Iam lapides suus ardor agit,” “rocks are moved by a passion of their own.”2 The metaphor of “ardor” as magnetism surfaces in a number of early modern texts and might readily be taken as a commonplace: “Loue is a loadstone,” Richard Braithwaite ponderously writes.3 But it is not always so inert. Angus Fletcher has traced a complex engagement with William Gilbert’s theory of magnetism in Donne’s “Anatomie of the World” and “To Mr. Tilman”: “as Steel / Touched with a loadstone, dost new motions feel?”4 When read in relation to the history of the passions, the trope of magnetism as affective force discloses a very particular set of concerns in which natural philosophy and theater come together in unexpected ways. This is certainly true of Montaigne, a close reader of Plato and Lucretius on the workings of magnetism; it is also true of Jonson, who owned a copy of Gilbert’s magnum opus De magnete in the second edition of 1628 and who cites two other magnetic experimenters by name in the text of his play.5 Jonson probably first became interested in magnetism because of the claim—often made in medical discourse and discussed by Gilbert in two chapters of De magnete—that magnets have the power to bring the humors into balance: a magnetic allegory suggests itself for a play that aims to show, as its subtitle announces, “Humors Reconciled,” adapting Jonson’s vein of humors comedy for a particularly fractious moment in English history. In Jonson and Montaigne we can see a rising concern with the passions as the foundation of all human relations as well as a changing concept of passion that treats it less as a cognitive act and more as a somatic agitation. The early modern period saw the emergence of a theory of passion that rooted it in the movements of animal spirits in the nerves, treating it as a truly physiological force. We can see this force at work in Philipp Melanchthon’s Liber de anima, where the passions are correlated with a secondary pain/pleasure system defined as states of the nerves. Over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries this secondary system began to swallow the primary one, as passion was reinterpreted in terms of nervous intensities no longer understood as the means whereby states of the soul produce effects in the body but as the means whereby the body causes alterations in the soul.6 From a corollary of passion the bodily state could even become the heart of the experience, a process visible in the history of the word “emotion,” which in the seventeenth century named the felt turbulence of passion but by the eighteenth became a substitute for passion itself.7 This way of thinking about passionate agitation transforms the ancient rhetorical concept of energeia, the force communicated by rhetorical performance.8 Often described, as by Quintilian, as a kind of nonverbal intensity, energeia is capable of being solicited and transmitted by language as well as by gesture, facial expression, and tone. In early modern rhetoric, energeia was typically conflated with enargeia or vividness: To see something vividly is also to be affected by that perception; the cognitive act of perceiving rules the transmission of affective energy.9 As passion was reimagined as a

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30  Benedict Robinson form of energy, magnetism was reimagined as a kind of passion, with the effect not only of animating stones (treating them as ensouled things) but also of materializing the soul, drawing it into the purview of an experimental natural philosophy. From a mode of perception “enargeia” becomes a kind of energy. Linking Jonson and Montaigne to the natural philosophy of magnetism draws out the links between rhetoric, poetics, and natural philosophy, and furthers our understanding of the theater as an experimental space where the passionate relations that constitute human sociality can be evoked, explored, and altered. Despite a number of important ancient and medieval precedents, the “magnetic philosophy” was a particularly early modern concern. Versions of Aristotelian physics had long proscribed every form of “action at a distance” with the result that an apparent case like magnetism was said by Aquinas to be beyond comprehension.10 The cause of magnetism was postulated to be an innate power of the magnet, but this power was called “occult” insofar as it was not available to the senses—occult qualities are “hidden in the gloom of veiled nature,” Jean Fernel writes—and thus not susceptible to natural knowledge.11 The early modern period was the great era of occult forces and action at a distance, establishing a science of occult forces by shifting its attention from their hidden causes to their observable effects. Far from banishing occult forces, early modern natural philosophy studied them, pursuing a science of magnetism that was not a “scientia” in the ancient sense (a discipline aiming at deductive certainty) but one of the “low” sciences whose archetypes were rhetoric, medicine, and chemistry. These were disciplines traditionally understood to aim at a probable knowledge based on inferences drawn from signs.12 The processes that brought action at a distance to the center of natural philosophy also brought a new natural philosophy of the passions. In the early modern period the passions entered philosophy in unprecedented ways, whether in systematic treatments like those of Descartes and Spinoza or in new natural histories, a new empirical psychology that would in time give itself as the basis of a naturalized study of human social and political relations from Hobbes to Hume.13 In this moment magnetism was not simply a metaphor for passion or energeia; it was a potential analogue for them, a homologous case susceptible to analysis on the same principles. The passion of stones became a natural force. It also became a tool for thinking about the transmission of passion and about the theater as a technology for producing that transmission. What does Montaigne—obliquely or playfully—suggest about the embodied nature of theatrical experience or about the body itself, caught by agitations that are transmitted magnetically through a whole mass of people? What is the status of the peuple or multitude produced by these lines of force? In the early modern moment the theater might quite literally seem to be, in Jean Howard’s phrase, a “troublesome and magnetic institution,” both an image of the polity as a naturalized, contingent, and fragile thing and a laboratory for the sociality of the passions.14

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MAGNETIC SOULS Montaigne’s most direct source is a famous passage from Plato’s Ion, which he virtually translates. He also inflects it in ways that mark the distance of his concerns from Plato’s. In the Ion, magnetism figures the inspiration through which a god takes possession of a poet and then of a rhapsode and a listener. Elsewhere Plato explains magnetism as an effect of the emission of “effluvia” by magnet and iron; the details of the theory are obscure but it clearly constitutes a rejection of action at a distance, proposing instead an imperceptible physical medium transmitted between the objects.15 The absence of anything like this from the Ion indicates how marginal the actual phenomenon of magnetism is to that text: here Plato is only interested in magnetism as an analogy for poetic performance. The point is to show that the active agent in the production of poetry is the god and only the god; everyone else passively transmits the force given off by that initial inspiration, and that passivity proves that poetic composition and recitation are not true disciplines.16 In Montaigne, to the contrary, the magnetic analogy does not discredit poetry or theater nor does it negate the agency of poet, actor, or audience. Where Plato is interested in causes, Montaigne is interested in effects: What concerns him is the figure traced by the circulation of energy as it is transmitted through and comes to define a collectivity. What catches Montaigne’s attention is not so much the magnet as the iron rings it animates. Those rings perhaps allude to a real practice in the mystery-cult at Samothrace; once Plato adopted them they became part of the discourse of magnetism.17 They appear to very different effect near the end of Book 6 of Lucretius’ De rerum naturae: This stone men gape in wonder at, because You can link rings in a chain suspended from it, And sometimes you’ll see five or even more Dangle in order and sway in the light breeze, One ring depending on the next, as each Communicates the magnet’s binding force.18 Lucretius bases his explanation of magnetism on his account of vision: “from everything we ever see / There must flow forever, be given off, be scattered, / Bodies that strike the eyes and stir the vision;” in vision “the blows take effect on our body exactly as if some object were striking us.”19 Magnetism also works by the impact of tiny particles that produce the magnet’s “vim vinclaque,” its “force and bond,” a phrase Anthony Esolen renders as “binding force” and W. H. D. Rouse as “power and attraction.”20 Since Montaigne’s rewriting of Plato appears in the “C” stream of revisions, the stream recorded in autograph emendations to the Bordeaux copy of the 1588 Paris edition and generally seen to show the strongest influence from Lucretius, it seems hard to imagine that Montaigne’s emphasis on

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32  Benedict Robinson the violence that strikes and enters, pricks and moves, does not recall the strikes and blows that are the basis of the Lucretian theory of magnetism.21 Where Plato keeps his natural philosophy out of the Ion, Montaigne blurs the boundaries between kinds of knowledge, allowing physics to seep into questions centered on poetry and theater. Gilbert’s De magnete specifically repudiates an atomistic account of magnetism, arguing that while electricity works through the emission of tiny particles, magnetism does not.22 According to Gilbert, magnetism is an innate power of the magnet belonging to a kind of soul. “Magnetick force is animate, or imitates life;” a magnet is “like a living creature,” possessing a “living soul;” as such it is governed by “the rule of the whole.”23 The source of magnetic power is the earth, “that great magnet, our common mother” (ii), and it operates by means of its total form. It is because of its relation to the whole earth that the magnet aligns itself north and south, reproducing in its poles the geometry of the planet; shaped by a knowing investigator, it becomes a “terrella,” a miniature earth (71–75). Gilbert analyzes the orbis virtutis of the magnet—the invisible sphere of influence it projects around itself—as a kind of globe with its own equator, poles, and meridians: The orbis virtutis imitates the earth, forming itself on the same model.24 One of Gilbert’s central claims is that there is no such thing as magnetic attraction, if by that we mean a force exerted by one object over another. “The word attraction unfortunately crept into magnetick philosophy from the ignorance of the ancients; for there seems to be force applied where there is attraction and an imperious violence dominates.” Instead, Gilbert postulates “magnetick coition” as a mutual relation in which the power in the magnet meets its complement in the iron (60): Coition is not a violent inclination of body to body, no rash and mad congruency; no violence is here applied to the bodies; there are no strifes or discords; but there is that concord (without which the universe would go to pieces), that analogy … of the perfect and homogeneous parts of the spheres of the universe to the whole. (67–68) Thales was not wrong to “grant the loadstone a soul,” and Gilbert adduces the scholastic formula for the soul—“all in all, and … all in every part”—to describe how the power of the magnet resides in the whole of the magnet and ultimately the whole earth (68). In the substitution of “coition” for attraction, in the rejection of the ancient theory of the primum mobilium because it imagines “in the government of the stars a universal power and a despotism perpetual and intensely irksome” (216), and in the claim that magnetic force operates through “the rule of the whole,” Gilbert’s account of force is at once political and philosophical. Underlying the difference between atomistic and animistic theories of magnetism is a difference about the nature of force. In one case it operates violently from without like a blow; in the other it operates inwardly through a conformation or predisposition through which things have a natural affinity for each other.

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In the mid-seventeenth century magnetism was a recurrent center of natural philosophical investigation. In Jan Baptista Van Helmont’s chemistry, for example, it became the model for a kind of sympathetic action at a distance whose most notorious other case is the so-called “magnetick cure of wounds,” which was famously given an atomistic interpretation by Kenelm Digby in 1658.25 According to Van Helmont, the cure is an instance of a more general phenomenon of sympathy: the magnet points to the pole because of “a naturall inhærent faculty” that operates “without any Corporeall effluvium,” such that the magnet can be said to have “Naturall sensation” and even a “Naturall phansy.”26 Citing Gilbert, Van Helmont argues that magnetism does not work by attraction, that is, by external force: “Loadstones … suffer no attractive force;” they are subject to no “forreigne alliciency, or attractive influx;” the magnet moves “of its owne accord” (G1v, G1r). For the Jesuit natural philosopher Athanasius Kircher, similarly, magnetism is one instance of a principle of sympathy that animates every sphere of being. The frontispiece of his Magnes, sive De arte magnetica depicts a circle of medallions, each inscribed with the name and emblem of an area of study and linked by a series of chains pendant from a central chain suspended from heaven. To the left and the right two further chains descend from heavenly hands under the label “occulta ui,” occult power.27 All of these are the magnetic rings of the Ion and perhaps of the mysteries at Samothrace: The links are not fused; what holds them together is not the pull of metal on metal but an invisible animating force emanating from heaven. The world and all the arts we use to know it are held together by what the frontispiece calls “nodis arcanis,” secret knots: Without magnetism, Gilbert writes, “the universe would go to pieces.”28 Kircher repudiates much of Gilbert’s analysis, but like Van Helmont he accepts Gilbert’s critique of the concept of attraction and adopts his term “coition” (B5r). The critique of attraction makes manifest a political subtext within the magnetic philosophy. In Gilbert, Van Helmont, and Kircher, magnetism is a force that is at once natural, affective, and political. In them we can glimpse a set of relays operating between physics, politics, and passion. MAGNETIC LADIES In Jonson as in Montaigne, the theater is a laboratory for this new science.29 In The Magnetic Lady, an allegory drawn from magnetic experimentation frames the way the play thinks about the theater as an institution and a practice, centered on the act of constructing and interpreting plots. If “the fable and fiction” of a play or poem is, as Jonson puts it in the Discoveries in a paraphrase of Aristotle, its “form and soul”—“the imitation of one entire and perfect action, whose parts are so joined and knit together as nothing in the structure can be changed or taken away without impairing or troubling the whole”—then the play, like Gilbert’s magnet, is governed by “the rule of the whole,” a principle residing in something like a soul. In The Magnetic Lady this interpretive principle is caught up with questions relating to the political

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34  Benedict Robinson divisions of the 1630s such that the rule of the whole is at once natural, aesthetic, social, and political. In magnetism Jonson saw both a kind of social energetics—a pattern of attractions, repulsions, and coitions—and the instrumentalizing experimental intelligence capable of setting it to work. The initiating event of the plot is a dinner party at the London house of Lady Loadstone held for a group of people concerned with the marriage of her niece and ward Mistress Placentia. On this marriage hangs the question of an inheritance of £16,000 that, by the terms of her father’s will, is conditional on her marrying a husband of whom her aunt approves. In the intervening years the money has been in the hands of her usurious uncle Sir Moth Interest, who is intent on keeping it. The question of the legacy makes Loadstone’s house into a kind of magnetic center attracting a mixed cast of characters interested in either seeking the marriage or advising Loadstone about it. In the opening scene the gentleman-wit Compass describes this confluence in terms that suggest both the play of attractions and repulsions that prevails here and his skill in managing those forces: there are gentlewomen, and male guests Of several humours, carriage, constitution, Profession too: but so diametral One to another, and so much opposed, As if I can but hold them all together, And draw’em to a sufferance of themselves But till the dissolution of the dinner, I shall have just occasion to believe My wit is magisterial. (1.1.5–13) Compass’s friend Captain Ironside calls this “a feast, / Where all the guests are so mere heterogene / And strangers, no man knows another, or cares / If they be Christians or Mohammedans” (2.6.105–8). The play and the marriage will in the end belong to Compass, who embodies a form of technological and instrumental control over this “heterogene” society and its passions. The play’s first act emphasizes Compass’s skill in reading the humors and passions of others, manifested in his rhetorical control over the literary genre of the “character;” over the course of the play Compass puts Loadstone to work for him, winning both a wife and a legacy that—as an inheritance left by a man who was governor of the East India Company—is itself a product of the compass as a piece of navigational technology. While The Magnetic Lady rehearses some typically Jonsonian elements of dramatic emplotment, quiet suggestions anchor the play to its moment of composition, three years after Charles I had dissolved Parliament and set out to rule England alone. The play repeatedly glances toward contemporary conflicts, between “Armenians” and “Persians”—Arminians and puritans (1.5.12–19)—“authority” and the “the sacred letter of the law” (1.7.14–16, 2.3.50–54), politics and finance (2.6.41–43), soldiers and “the great men o’ the time” (2.6.128). It explores the problem of social conflict in a world of

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diminishing consensus, posing the question of reconciliation from within the frame of Jonsonian humors comedy. In 1632 magnetic coition may well have suggested a principle of attraction capable, as Samuel Ward puts it, of turning a “confused multitude” into “one body.”30 On the one hand it evokes a specifically English form of power, vested in the composite entity of king-in-parliament, which in the ideology of the common law is neither “imperious violence” nor “despotism” but a kind of coition or two-in-one. On the other hand it could be used to glorify the ostensibly loving exercise of power by the Caroline court. What do we make of Samuel Ward’s The Wonders of the Loadstone, which presents magnetism as “the most excellent patterne and lively Embleme” of Charles’s “mild Government”? Is it praise or a warning when, in a book published in 1637 in Latin and in 1640 in English, Ward argues that “a Magnetick manner of Governing is most safe, most acceptable, and most comodious, both for Princes and Subjects”?31 For Ward magnetic power figures “dutiful subjection” to a “King” (B4v) but also a kinder, gentler exercise of power; “magnetick affection,” he writes, “doth more then slavish terrour.”32 In the magnetic philosophy this difference is often expressed in strongly gendered and sexualized terms, as is already implicit in the very concept of “coition.” In a 1613 treatise on magnetism, Mark Ridley, cited by name in The Magnetic Lady (1.4.5), follows Gilbert in arguing that “Magneticall attraction” is “no violent haling of the weaker to the stronger” but “a naturall incitation and disposition conforming to contiguity and vnion”: for Ridley this means that “the Adamant is Masculine vnto his beloued the Iron and Steele, and these are Feminine, as more apt to obey, respect, and follow the Masculine.”33 Where Gilbert emphasizes the mutuality of coition, denying that agency in magnetism belongs only to the magnet, Ridley reinserts a clear gender hierarchy. The history of magnetic philosophy is caught up with both political history and the politics of marriage. In The Magnetic Lady the marriage plot takes on some of this political energy, this crossing of sexual, social, and political bonds. Despite its subtitle the play hardly seems to show “Humours Reconciled.” Jonsonian humors comedy is altogether a problematic narrative base for stories of reconciliation, since it typically depicts the victory of a wit over a population of dupes who are necessarily left beaten by the twists of the plot. In The Magnetic Lady, Compass’s victory is secured by a combination of accidental discoveries, clever manipulation of information, an ability to read the personalities of others, and a working knowledge of the law of contract. He embodies a kind of improvisatory skill that is at once theatrical and experimental. The play’s first comic peripeteia occurs when Compass’s friend Ironside assaults the courtier Sir Diaphanous Silkworm at the dinner table, sending Mistress Placentia into sudden labor when no one knew she was pregnant. Compass’s first act in the play was to persuade the irascible Ironside to attend the dinner party, merely because he sensed that something unforeseeable and entertaining would ensue. This act has the quality of an experiment in the Baconian sense, deliberately placing stress on a situation to see what

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36  Benedict Robinson may result. As Michael Witmore has argued, Bacon thinks of experiments as deliberately replicating what naturally occurs by accident, altering a situation in the hope of teasing out secrets hidden under the surface of things.34 Compass is a kind of social experimenter, and like a good Baconian he is poised to benefit from the facts his experiment reveals. The play concludes with one surprising result of Compass’s experiment, the betrothal of Ironside to Loadstone, which Pastor Palate refers to as “capping” a magnet, that is, covering its poles with iron to increase its power (5.10.145–46). Ridley calls this “augmenting the vertue of the Magnet” (K1v) and the resulting “armed” magnets are depicted on the engraved title page of the 1628 edition of Gilbert’s De magnete. The sexual suggestiveness of this is obvious enough, but its real importance lies in the way it emphasizes Compass’s role as social technologist. If magnetism is an energy capable of regulating humoral differences, it is also a force to be manipulated in ways that are both interested and competitive. Jonson’s play is by no means irenic in its social imagination. At its end Loadstone claims that the discovery revealed in the fifth act—the switched-at-birth revelation that Mistress Placentia is in fact Pleasance the maid—endeth all / In reconcilement,” but Compass immediately reminds everyone of the price of this peace: there will be reconcilement “When the portion / Is tendered” (5.10.134–35), a payment that has been extorted from Interest by a threat of indictment for “felony and murder” (76). Whatever reconcilement is, it includes a dimension of both chicanery and force. The contracts signed at the end are not entered into with equal consent; in fact, contract is a weapon to be used against others. But Loadstone does not say that the characters are reconciled to each other: she says they are “reconciled to truth” (126). The issue is not subjective feeling but the recognition of an objective state of affairs embodied in the unfolding of the plot. “The quarrel caused th’affright; that fright brought on / The travail, which made peace; the peace drew on / This new discovery, which ended all / In reconcilement” (130–34). This is very close to the way the boy responds to the gallant Damplay’s complaint that the discovery of Placentia’s pregnancy is “a pitiful poor shift” by the playwright: “the quarrel” is the “accidental cause” of “the discovery,” which in turn resolves “the quarrel which had produced it” (3Chorus.1, 6–17). The plot is a self-devouring series of causes and effects, not so much a thread to be unwound as a magnetic chain in which the last link circles back around to the first and all are animated by the rule of the whole. Jonson repeatedly insists that Compass’s experimental skill is mirrored by that of an informed audience following the plot of the play (5.10.81, Ind.130–34). The audience shares in Compass’s quasi-experimental ability to produce meaning out of contingency, turning accident to advantage and bringing to light a kind of comic truth. The theater models a larger polity, and the skills of actor, performer, and interpreter are the same skills that are set to work in that polity. When Loadstone, like a kind of female Duke Vincentio, suddenly announces that she will wed Ironside, she deliberately takes the accidental for the intentional: She will marry him, she says, because

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his action has resulted in saving the honor of her household, “though by chance” (5.10.140). As so often in Jonson, a great deal turns on the operation of chance and on the ability—or the willingness—to make the most of it. While the play generally makes Compass into its primary active agent, leaving Loadstone for much of the time sequestered and invisible in her rooms, in shock, in this moment she emerges briefly as his proper counterpart, equally capable of making meaning out of contingency. Jonson’s magnetic allegory evokes a sense of the fragility and the chanciness of social relations, which must be made rather than being simply given. Evoking the space of the experimental laboratory and, with it, a discourse of empirical and probable knowledge that wrests a kind of truth from particularity and accident, the theater becomes a figure for a social world conceived in fully naturalized terms as the result of both contingency and manipulation. Jonson’s magnetic allegory suggests the possibility of an empirical science of the social founded on that traditional preserve of rhetoric and medicine, the knowledge of the passions and the humors, which are the raw material of Compass’s manipulations much as the force of the loadstone is the raw material of Gilbert’s magnetic philosophy. According to the gendered logic that distinguishes Lady Loadstone from the gentleman Compass—or, in the poem from which Jonson took his epigraph, the magnetic Venus from the iron Mars—the material of social improvisation is to be exploited by the male experimenter much as Bacon imagined male scientists penetrating the secrets of a feminized nature, forcing her to disclose her secrets.35 The Magnetic Lady’s failure in the theater perhaps testifies to the difficulty of the negotiation Jonson was undertaking, between an irenic trope of magnetism as the rule of the whole and a much more clear-eyed treatment of how a contract is produced by means of deception and manipulation. Tellingly, the debates about the merit of the play that broke out in the aftermath of its performance focus on the complications and improbabilities of its plot, exactly the thing Jonson had singled out as the play’s crucial accomplishment.36 Perhaps this was at some level a response Jonson cultivated when in Damplay he taught the audience how to complain about his play. If the theater audience emerges at the end of the play as the locus of a Jonsonian polity whose skill in recognizing the causal relations embodied in the plot helps constitute them as a group agreed upon and thus “reconciled to” some version of “the truth,” the contentiousness and dissatisfaction of that audience testify to the difficulty of imagining the rule of the whole in the England of 1632.

NOTES 1. English qtd. from John Florio’s translation, The Essayes (London, 1603), 115; French qtd. from the Montaigne Project, http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/ efts/ARTFL/projects/montaigne/, based on the Villey-Saulnier text, 232. Compare also The Complete Essays, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976), 169.

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38  Benedict Robinson 2.  The Magnetic Lady, ed. Peter Happé (New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), 62; translation modified. Claudian describes a temple to Venus and Mars in which the statue of the goddess has been carved from a single magnet while the statue of the god is made from iron; behind Jonson’s play lies a literally magnetic lady. Cf. Claudian, trans. Maurice Platnauer, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Loeb, 1922). 3.  Richard Brathwaite, The Poet’s Willow (London, 1614), F5r. 4. Qtd. from Angus Fletcher, “Living Magnets, Paracelsian Corpses, and the Psychology of Grace in Donne’s Religious Verse,” ELH 72.1 (2005): 1, 9. 5. Jonson, The Magnetic Lady, 1.4.5; David McPherson, “Ben Jonson’s Library and Marginalia: An Annotated Catalogue,” Studies in Philology 1 (1974), 66. 6.  Philipp Melanchthon, Liber de anima (Lipsiae, 1561), P1r–P3r. See G.S. Rousseau, “Discourses of the Nerve” (1989) and “Towards a Semiotics of the Nerve” (1991), reprinted in Nervous Acts: Essays on Literature, Culture, and Sensibility (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 211–42 and 243–96; Ann Thomson, Bodies of Thought: Science, Religion, and the Soul in the Early Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Susan James, Passion and Action: the Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Daniel M. Gross, The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle’s Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). There is an indirect line between this history—which lies at the root of early neuroscience, most importantly in the work of Thomas Willis—and modern theories of affect as a noncognitive, somatic intensity. See Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004). 7.  See my manuscript-in-progress, tentatively titled “Inventing Emotion.” 8.  Heinrich F. Plett, Rhetorik der Affekte: Englische Wirkungsästhetik im Zeitalter der Renaissance (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1975), 73, 80–82, 116, 135–47, 186–88. 9.  Cf. Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, trans. Donald A. Russell, 5 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 6.2.7, 29–32; Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 322. 10.  Keith Hutchison, “What Happened to Occult Qualities in the Scientific Revolution?” Isis 73.2 (1982): 237–38. On Gilbert, see John Henry, “Animism and Empiricism: Copernican Physics and the Origins of William Gilbert’s Experimental Method,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62.1 (2001): 99–119; and Gad Freudenthal, “Theory of Matter and Cosmology in William Gilbert’s De magnete,” Isis 74.1 (1983): 22–37. 11. Fernel, De Abditis Rerum Causis, qtd. from John M. Forrester and John Henry, Jean Fernel’s On the Hidden Causes of Things (Boston: Brill, 2005), 419. Fernel’s work is one of the great early modern arguments for the possibility of a limited experiential knowledge of occult qualities; cf. Henry’s introduction, pp. 45–48, and Fernel, pp. 679, where the model of an experiential knowledge of hidden causes is traced to Galen. 12. Hutchison, “Occult Qualities;” see Stephen Pender, “Between Medicine and Rhetoric,” Early Science and Medicine 10.1 (2005): 36–64; Barbara J. Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 38. 13.  Bacon calls for a “History of the Affections”—immediately after a “History of Pleasure and Pain in general”—in the “Catalogue of Particular Histories” that concludes the Novum Organum, items 76 and 77: see Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, et al, 14 vols. (London: Longmans, 1857–74), 4.269; and Walter Charleton, Natural History of the Passions (London, 1674).

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14.  Jean E. Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 1994), 4. 15.  Duane H.D. Roller, The De Magnete of William Gilbert (Amsterdam: Menno Hertzberger, 1959), 15–16; A.R.T. Jonkers, Earth’s Magnetism in the Age of Sail (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 39–41. 16. Plato, Ion, trans. Lane Cooper (1938). In Plato: The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 533e. 17. Susan G. Cole, Theoi Megaloi: The Cult of the Great Gods at Samothrace (Leiden: Brill, 1984), 30. 18.  Qtd. from On the Nature of Things, trans. Anthony M. Esolen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 6.911–16. Cf. On the Nature of Things, ed. W.H.D. Rouse, rev. Martin Ferguson Smith (1975; Cambridge: Loeb, 1992), 6.910–15. 19.  Esolen, 6.920; Rouse and Smith, 6.921. 20.  Rouse and Smith, 6.915; Esolen, 6.916. 21.  On Montaigne and Lucretius, see Gerard Passannante, The Lucretian Renaissance: Philology and the Afterlife of Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 22. Roller, De magnete, Book 2, chap. 4; J.L. Heilbron, Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 169–79. 23. English qtd. from On the Magnet, trans. S.P. Thompson (London: Chiswick, 1900), 208, 41. The first edition is De magnete (London, 1600). 24. Gilbert, De magnete (1600) G2v; De magnete (Stettin, 1628), title page. On the “Orbis virtutis” and the “Orbis coitionis,” cf. De magnete (1600), 6r and I4r–v. 25.  Sir Kenelm Digby, A Late Discourse … Touching the Cure of Wounds by the Powder of Sympathy (London, 1658), B8v. 26.  Jan Baptista Van Helmont, “Magnetick Cure of Wounds,” in A Ternary of Paradoxes, trans. Walter Charleton (London, 1650), M3v, G1v, G3v, L3v, M1v. On imagination and Paracelsian natural philosophy, cf. Fletcher, “Living Magnets.” 27. Athanasius Kircher, Magnes, sive De arte magnetica opus tripartitum (Rome, 1654). 28.  The frontispiece to the Magneticum Naturae Regnum (Rome, 1667) bears the tag “Arcana nodis Ligantur mundus,” the world is bound by secret knots. For Kircher, magnetism is a kind of passion just as passion is a kind of magnetism: cf. Magnes on the “Passiones Magnetis” (A1v) and the “Magnetismo Amoris,” that is, “the miraculous power and energy [vi, & energia] of love” (3E3r). On Kircher, see Paula Findlen, ed., Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything (New York: Routledge, 2004). 29.  See Ronald E. McFarland, “Jonson’s Magnetic Lady and the Reception of Gilbert’s De Magnete,” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 11.2 (1971): 283–93. 30.  Samuel Ward, The Wonder of the Loadstone (London, 1640), B4v. 31.  Ward, “A2v” (=B2v), “A3r” (=B3r), B4r. 32.  Ward, B4r; for the links between magnetism and marriage cf. D9r, g1v, G2v, G7v. 33. Mark Ridley, A Short Treatise of Magneticall Bodies and Motions (London, 1613), M2r, M1v. 34.  Michael Witmore, Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). 35.  The classic analysis is Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York: HarperCollins, 1990). 36.  See the material collected in the appendices to Happé’s edition.

3 Feeling Unhistorical

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Ellen MacKay

According to Shakespeare in Love (dir. John Madden, 1999), we owe the saying “the show must go on” partly to Philip Henslowe (who ­initiates it), partly to William Shakespeare (who completes it), and mainly to the  ­“business of show,” whose “natural condition,” Henslowe explains, “is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.”1 Such is the case at Romeo and Juliet’s première, when the boy actor playing Juliet’s part suffers the sudden and irrefragable onset of puberty: WILL: Sam! Do me a speech, do me a line. SAM: (the effect is horrible) “Parting is such sweet sorrow …” HENSLOWE: Another little problem. WILL: What do we do now? HENSLOWE: The show must … you know … WILL: Go on. HENSLOWE: Juliet does not come on for twenty pages. It will be all right. WILL: How will it? HENSLOWE: I don’t know. It’s a mystery.2

When the show does indeed go on, and to great acclaim, Romeo and Juliet’s success in the face of manifold adversity makes “the show must go on” a vindication of the witless stick-to-it-iveness that the phrase advocates. The effect is to uphold without explaining a decidedly mystifying condition of theatrical production: especially when disaster seems most assured, performance binds its practitioners to its continuance. Beyond the precincts of John Madden’s cheeky biopic, the early modern English stage’s adherence to this principal is strongly asserted. I have written elsewhere about spectators and performers who accede to their own undoing by letting a show go on.3 Middleton’s Women Beware Women, Massinger’s The Roman Actor and Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy are only a few of the works that dramatize this turn of events, though it should be noted that in these cases, unlike that of Shakespeare in Love, things do not end well. Instead, in their preoccupation with the question why must the show go on?, and more particularly why is the show so hard to stop when death is on the line?, these plays anticipate a central concern in the developing profession

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of the theatre, namely, how are performers whose first obligation is to keep the show going meant to preserve themselves from the “imminent disasters” that the show holds in store? The Actors’ Equity Association was born of one such disaster, when Kitty Gordon, the female lead in a 1913 production of the comic opera The Enchantress, stuck to her role despite debilitating illness.4 She collapsed midperformance and was unable to complete the show’s scheduled run, leaving all 67 members of the production’s company stranded in Los Angeles without the means to return home or the prospect of further employment. The actors’ union arose amid the widespread demand that contingencies like Ms. Gordon’s debility be prepared for; its subsequent work has been to regulate the conditions of production so that actors do not imperil themselves as she did to keep the show going (Equity’s temporary shutdown of Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark is a recent and famous case in point5). The problem, however, is that regulation and collective bargaining cannot fully secure the practitioners of an art that puts its own sustenance above all else.6 That actors continue to hurl themselves into roles and that audiences continue to watch them plummet brings out the strange pact between them, whereby what must be maintained at all costs is not the audience’s pleasure or even the actor’s life but the mutual pretense that nothing is happening. By this arrangement, performance keeps to a festal temporality, untouched by the consequentiality of everyday life. And its keeping going serves as the guarantee that there is no hitch to this eventlessness, inasmuch as there can be no instigation to shake free of the representational moment in order to ask “what just happened?”7 There is a film by George Cukor called A Double Life (1948) that demonstrates the strength of this commitment to uninterruption with remarkable clarity. It concerns a veteran actor who descends into madness while performing the role of Othello opposite his ex-wife, eventually slipping so far into character that he nearly strangles her. As she struggles to breathe, the film shows us the prompter behind the curtain, anguished in his cognizance that something is amiss, but oddly self-constrained from doing anything about it. Similarly effectless are the fellow actors who crowd the wings to hear the actress gasp, sotto voce, “Tony, Tony, please, you’re hurting me.” They too keep offstage, whispering “What’s happening?,” “What’s he doing?,” and “Be careful” to no one in particular until one of them says to the actress playing Emilia, “It’s your cue. For heaven’s sake, knock,” as if the only remedy in this circumstance is to keep to the script. The same peculiar discretion pervades the final scene, in which Tony catches sight of detectives offstage, waiting to arrest him for murdering a waitress who had the misfortune of asking, “Wanna put out the light?” The police wait patiently, not wanting to interrupt the show, but Tony falters, haunted by flashbacks of the crime he committed. As his cohort subtly prompts him to pick up his cues, he draws a real dagger from his sash and stabs himself in earnest. The actress playing Desdemona, now playing dead upstage, waits until the

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42  Ellen MacKay curtain falls to confirm the suicide that she clearly suspects, then covers her mouth to prevent her scream from reaching the audience. The film thus shows us twice, and without the suggestion that there might be any other way of considering the matter, that even when a life hangs in the balance, the show should not be stopped, but hastened onward. Worse than death, it would seem, is its fall and cease. These cinematic case studies of the Shakespearean stage’s unstoppableness are of course problematic for scholarly use. However well-pedigreed (both films won Academy Awards, Madden’s for best picture, actress and screenplay and Cukor’s for best actor), they remain impressional accounts of what feels true to theatre practitioners about their profession and about what makes Shakespeare germane to this common sense. Yet I find them no less informative for that fact. Extrapolating from Lauren Berlant’s claim that “affective responses may be said significantly to exemplify shared historical time,” I mean to show how the felt ongoingness of performance, conveyed in conditions that are always at odds with evidentiary protocols of sincerity, factuality, and artifactuality, transmits the experience of living in unhistorical time.8 Central to this project is the proposition that the show’s going on is notable for the experience that it does not trigger. If the tendency “to slow things down and to gather things up, to find things out and to wonder and ponder” is the perceptual threshold of the shift out of “the ordinary” and into a present that feels historical, then the theatrical demand for unperturbed continuance becomes legible as the negation of any such shift. At least, it is the means to keep such a shift from being noticed, so that spectators are prevented from “fac[ing] the loss of the freedom to be unconscious about the internal limits to their sovereignty.”9 By its refusal to slow down or stop in the face of contingency, and by instead barring from its system any prolongation or intensification of the dramatic pace that might invite the stopping-to-think that Berlant describes, performance makes itself an experiential environment in which history, as a function of “disturbed time,” is not to be sensed.10 The goal of this essay is to show some consequences of the affective production of inconsequence for the practice of early modern English theatrical history, for broadly construed, the drive to keep the show going has the effect of keeping the subject of this discipline at odds with its method. The problem can be summarized this way: If performance is underwritten by the injunction to stay in the “now,” it follows that it is also underwritten by the infinite deferral of a “then,” that point at which festal time’s freedom from historical significance would be disturbed by an event’s having taken shape. But perhaps its clearest expression is archival, inasmuch as the theatrical record in early modern England carefully preserves this condition of temporal unparticularity. Because overwhelmingly comprised of play-texts, the documentary evidence of the theatrical past elides the singularity of the show behind the fixed and predetermined rhythm of the script, catching readers in the fantasy of undifferentiated production. Rarer

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matter, including records of plays licensed, commanded, performed, and paid for, does little to dispel this view, since it leaves undetailed the act of performance, confining the theatrical past to the same state of inaccessibility. There are exceptions, of course, particularly in the case of a play’s catastrophic interruption, but the proscription of contingency and consequence produced by performance’s ongoingness leaves scholars to face the challenge of a subject that never seems to drop its act.11 Not to solve this dilemma, but to give a history to the incommensurable structures of feeling that divide theatrical from historical phenomena, I turn now to one such catastrophic interruption. My aim is to infer from its breach the unhistorical feeling—and here I borrow and negate an affect named by Berlant—that attaches to the theatre’s more ordinary experience.12 Or to put the project more positively, if it is only by means of its arrest and abandonment that theatre can cross over into the felt register of historical events, the sudden halt to which Edward Alleyn is supposed to have brought Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is surely a test case of this affective historicism, whereby what counts as factual or consequential is a function of its distance from the ongoingness of a show, and what counts as performance is a function of its refusal to convey the impression that something has actually happened. The story of this hiatus has the advantage of being both famous and brief: Alleyn (as the legend generally goes) breaks off his performance when he notices that his invocation of demonic spirits has proved over-effectual.13 Here is the fullest and most cited account of the incident preserved in The Shakespearean Stage (from a contributor known only as “J. G. R.” to The ­Gentleman’s Magazine), the penultimate of the four evidences E. K. ­Chambers’ gathers on the subject: N. D. [no date] ‘J. G. R.’ [authorial attribution] from a manuscript note on ‘the last page of a book in my possession, printed by Vautrollier’ (1850, 2 Gent. Mag. xxxiv. [September] 234), Certaine Players at Exeter, acting upon the stage the tragical storie of Dr. Faustus the Conjurer; as a certain nomber of Devels kept everie one his circle there, and as Faustus was busie in his magicall invocations, on a sudden they were all dasht, every one harkning other in the eare, for they were all perswaded, there was one devell too many amongst them; and so after a little pause desired the people to pardon them, they could go no further with this matter; the people also understanding the thing as it was, every man hastened to be first out of dores. The players (as I heard it) contrarye to their custome spending the night in reading and in prayer got them out of the town the next morning.14 As an overturning of the principal that the show must go on, this anecdote is ideal: by the power of collective “perswa[sion],” conjurations are “dasht,” characters are dropped (to announce that the performance must be discontinued), the audience flees, and the actors shed their wanton habits before

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44  Ellen MacKay decamping altogether. Such a surfeit of stoppage arrests even the m ­ oralizing work of its antitheatrical recollection. Hence William Prynne, author of the second of Chambers’ evidences, cannot quite make his version of the incident fit under its heading—that “The fruit of Stage-playes” is to “draw downe Gods fearefull judgements both upon their Composers, Actors, Spectators, and those Republikes that tolerate or approve them.”15 The reason he gives for not discussing “the visible apparition of the Devill on the Stage at the Belsavage Play-house, in Queene Elizabeths dayes, (to the great amazement both of the Actors and Spectators) whiles they were there prophanely playing the History of Faustus,” is that he wishes to “confine [him]selfe” to “printed examples.” But in a work so keen on demonstrating the “fatall Spectacle of Gods avenging judgement” upon the stage, the likelier explanation for his simultaneous raising and dropping of Faustus’s subject is its nonconformity with the other events he chronicles, in which the disastrous conclusion to which a show is brought—tallied in lives and limbs lost— presages God’s final reckoning.16 Since the devil disappears when the show is interrupted, the anecdote feels too inconsequential to serve as history and endures instead in the exordium to Prynne’s annals as a case “not to relate,” “nor yet to recite.”17 Chambers’ last version of the incident does not share in this reticence. To the contrary, in his survey of Surrey (commissioned in 1673 by the Royal Geographer for a never-completed national atlas), John Aubrey makes the abandonment of performance the means to the county’s archeo-historical “foundation[s]”: c. 1673. John Aubrey, Natural History and Antiquities of Surrey (1718–19), i. 190, The tradition concerning the occasion of the foundation [of Dulwich College] runs thus: that Mr. Alleyne, being a Tragedian and one of the original actors in many of the celebrated Shakespear’s plays, in one of which he played a Demon, with six others, and was in the midst of the play surpriz’d by an apparition of the Devil, which so work’d on his Fancy, that he made a Vow, which he perform’d at this Place. Aubrey, a pioneer recorder of supernatural incidents, or “Histoire Prodigieuse,” seems to take Prynne’s side on the question of whether the devil stalked the stage or Alleyn was “surpriz’d” merely in “Fancy.”18 In his account, the apparition is real enough to serve as the grounds for “an Edifice containing two Quadrangles, called the College of God’s Gift at DULWICH.”19 This translation of a supernatural visitation into material facts is all the more emphatic in light of the seven ensuing pages he dedicates to Alleyn’s lapidary record, including the College’s dedicatory marble plaque (“EDWARDUS ALLEYN, Armiger / Theromachiae Regia Praefectus / ­Theatri Fortunae dicti Choragus / Aevique sui Roscius, / Hoc Collegium instituit”20) and the grave markers for the actor, his first wife, and her mother.

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Subsequent historians have speculated that Aubrey’s version of the Faustus anecdote must not have existed when the Histrio-mastix was compiled, otherwise Prynne would not “have been silent, in what might have so directly served his purpose.”21 But if the tale did lie within Prynne’s grasp, Aubrey’s telling of it demonstrates why the antitheatricalist might have decided to eschew it, for Alleyn’s penance has become renowned as an act that is twice good. First, as Andrew Gurr writes, “[Alleyn] and his college” become “the age’s highwater mark” for “commercial and pietistic respectability;”22 among practitioners of the early modern theatre, the bequest is a redemptive gesture that goes unmatched. Second, and seemingly by way of righteous reward, this shift from the play-world of Doctor Faustus (or some semblable work) to the Dulwich estate marks a sharp improvement in Alleyn’s historicity. A quick scan of Chambers’ four versions of the Faustus “mythos” make this readily apparent: whereas the facts of the College’s founding are written in stone above the quadrangle entryway for all to see,23 the several reports of Alleyn’s theatrical mishap show the ‘facts’ of the performance to be troublingly unfixed: who was acting (only Aubrey mentions Alleyn), where the performance took place (one says the Theatre, another Essex, still another the Belsavage, while the last might indicate Dulwich24), and in what play (Faustus in three cases, something Shakespearean in the other), are left irreconcilable, to say nothing of who was watching, which is left unasked or unanswered—Prynne alone claims to have consulted witnesses, but without any evidence to show for it, his assurances only exacerbate the dubiousness of the story he would authenticate: “the truth of [the visitation] I have heard from many now alive, who well remember it.”25 Consequently, the College is the condition of Alleyn’s transformation from a person largely lost to history to a historical subject. The characterization of this circumstance is remarkably consistent across Alleyn’s early biographers. In William Blanch’s “Memoir” of the College’s founder (appended to his 1877 history of the institution), “The actor’s personations at the Bankside give way to the more magnificent acting at Dulwich.”26 In Thomas Fuller’s History of the Worthies of England (1810), “He who outacted others in his life, out-did himself before his death.” In the Biographia Britannia (1747), Alleyn withdrew “from the lesser stage” to make his mark in “the real theatre of the open world.”27 This string of antitheses, by which Alleyn’s finally and actually doing something is set against his long years of merely acting parts, originates with Francis Bacon, who as Lord Chancellor begins his discommendation of Alleyn’s petition with the quip: “I like well that Alleyn playeth the last act of his life so well”—in contrast, one supposes, to his salad days whiled away in mere playing. But its most immortal expression comes in Ben Jonson’s epigram to Alleyn, in which the actor’s superiority to later, lesser Rosciuses draws on the same distinction between hollow and effectual performance: “And present worth in all doth so c­ ontract / As others speak, but only thou dost act” (11–12).28 Given that the poem was written well after its subject’s 1597 retirement from the

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46  Ellen MacKay stage, when Alleyn was in the midst of his Dulwich scheme, it is possible that in Jonson’s case too, the reason for the actor’s fitness for “renowne” is yet another expression of the preference for recording ‘real’ deeds—Alleyn’s gift of charity—over feigned ones (13).29 Indeed, in the several unequivocal accounts of Alleyn’s philanthropy, the state of undifferentiated performance from which the actor emerges serves as the nihilo for his act of creation. Nowhere is this preference more evident, though, than in the Dulwich archive. If Alleyn’s history comes down to us as one worthy of its saving, in which a life given over to performance is at last redeemed and made consequential in “the real theatre of the open world,” the reason is the deed that is both the cornerstone and raison d’être of Dulwich College’s Manuscript and Muniment Library, and whose bestowal creates the necessity for a site that will preserve it. Once founded, other deeds and doings find their way into this strongbox, for the consequence of Dulwich’s royal instauration was to make the place, its founder, and any associated events a matter of record, which is to say, subject to a recollective imperative that is more or less antithetical to the haphazard and paltry archive of early modern English performance.30 Preserved for posterity, therefore, are such ordinarily disposable facts and figures as the cost of the “vellome” the royal patent was written on (17s 6d, including “strings”), and the reckonings of the various tradesmen who furnished the College’s inaugural dinner (“Butcher,” “Powlter,” “Cook,” “Saltyer,” “Confectioner,” “Grocer,” and “Vintner,” for a total expense of twenty pounds, nine shillings and two pence).31 And likewise captured within the event horizon of the college’s foundation is “most of what modern scholars know about the early modern English theatre, both as financial enterprise and artistic endeavour,” in the form of the records Alleyn inherited from Philip Henslowe, his impresario father-in-law, and his own theatrical artifacts and diary.32 So it came to pass that within the archive (allegedly) forged by performance’s disavowal, much of what remains of the theatrical history of the Tudor and Stuart stage came to rest. This is an outcome that would have outraged Prynne, since by his conversion to a life of piety, Alleyn preserves the business that he (rightfully) abandoned. But the conversionary narrative to which Alleyn is consigned is no less troublesome to those who would engage his theatrical history. As John Payne Collier writes in his 1841 Memoirs of the actor, “we may be quite sure that when Alleyn avowed his purpose of establishing his College, the Puritans, and the other enemies of theatrical performances, did not fail to impute it to remorse for his long career of wickedness and profanity.”33 Collier is but one among several of Alleyn’s biographers who has taken it as his task to disambiguate the accidental necromancer of Aubrey’s description from the figure preserved in the Dulwich archive, and thereby “discharge [Alleyn] of some misrepresentations wherewith he has been unjustly disguised, and produce him in a fairer, stronger light.”34 Repeatedly, it has been pointed out that for one thing, Alleyn had retired from the stage long before he set about his philanthropy, and for another, Alleyn’s affiliation with the professional

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theatres and public entertainments did not cease when he stopped acting (proprietor of the Rose, the Paris Garden and the Fortune, Alleyn also held the office of “chief master, ruler and overseer” of “his majesty’s games” from 1604 until his death in 1626).35 To no avail. Exorcized from the record as “very false and foolish” (1747), “fabricated” (1792), “ridiculous” (1841), “barely probable” (1877), “nonsense” (1904), and a “curious mythos” (1923),36 the devil persists in Dulwich College’s foundational prehistory as if to prove how insistently performance on the stage is kept apart from “performances” that “deserve to be remembered.”37 That the first must cease and even be sworn off entirely for the other to commence proves to be a feeling too charismatic to dispel, regardless of the facts. In this futile effort, Collier was among the first to draw extensively from the “mass of facts and documents” in the Dulwich archive.38 But the indifferent reception of his Memoirs of the actor—“a very dull book indeed” seems to have been the consensus—offers one indication of the difficulty of the task.39 For keeping faith with the profusion of particulars in Alleyn’s diary, Collier suffers the judgment that his book sacrifices “narrative” to “authentic[ity],” as if the facts refuse to yield the story they ought to tell, or to put the point more starkly, as if factuality were felt to be incompatible with the accounting of performance.40 Even more telling, though, are Collier’s infamous breaches of this diligence, such as when he has Alleyn speak back to the prevailing sense that a humble player cannot be counted among eminent men: And where you tell me of my poore originall and of my quality as a Player. What is that? … That I was a player I can not deny, and I am sure I will not. My meanes of living were honest, and with the poore abilytyes wherewith god blesst me I was able to doe something for my selfe, my relatives and my frendes, many of them nowe lyving at this daye will not refuse to owne what they owght me. Therfore I am not ashamed.41 Though the lines are reprinted frequently, in histories no less authoritative than Alleyn’s entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, they have been discredited as spurious.42 It is easy to see why: Collier describes finding them “on a loose slip, marked with an asterisk” that was never before seen and has never been seen since.43 The result is not just that theatre infiltrates the archive, in the sense that posterity remembers Alleyn according to a script of Collier’s invention. The fact that these lines live on, and under such explicitly fishy circumstances, demonstrates that when it comes to performance, what registers as true and valued testimony is not the stuff that feels historical, like the receipts and notations found that Alleyn kept, but a monologue—once recited by Dickens to fine dramatic effect—in which a player foregoes any particular account of himself to assert his worthiness for remembrance (“many of them nowe lyving at this daye will not refuse to owne what they owght me”).44

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48  Ellen MacKay No less than Prynne, Collier thus has the effect of throwing a light on the tendency of performance to be kept discrete from history. At its most exemplary, his biography of Alleyn is a dramatic restatement of the condition of its unhistoricalness, whereby the recognition due to eminent men (i.e., “statesmen, prelates, patriots, lawyers [and] divines”45) is shown to be (unjustly) incompatible with the life of a player. Consequently, however sympathetic the plea, it reproduces the segregation it protests. In the act of claiming the right to his own legacy, Collier’s version of Alleyn is all the more tightly bound within the register of performance. Moreover, once raised, Collier’s dramatic license puts other cherished evidences in doubt. In particular, I cannot help but wonder whether the “manuscript note” first published anonymously in the Gentleman’s Magazine and republished in Chambers’ Elizabethan Stage might be another instance of theatre passing for fact. The reasons for my suspicion are circumstantial, but they quickly add up: 1. Collier was unequalled in his knowledge and interest in this story, given his publication of the Memoirs of Edward Alleyn in 1841 and The Alleyn Papers in 1843. 2. In his account of the episode in the Memoirs, he expresses his exasperation with its “exaggerat[ions]” and “distort[ions].”46 3. The note in question, like the asterisked slip in the Alleyn diary, has never surfaced. 4. The account of it in The Gentleman’s Magazine neatly prefigures Collier’s modus operandi in the Perkins Folio, another old book whose manuscript “notes and emendations” Collier would forge and then publish between 1850 and 1853.47 5. The periodical in which this find appears is one to which Collier frequently contributed, sometimes anonymously or pseudonymously.48 In fact, an essay by Collier on Michael Drayton appears only a few pages later in the same issue.49 Mainly, though, what smacks of forgery in this anecdote is that like Alleyn’s outburst (“That I was a player I can not deny”), it redresses the theatre’s incompatibility with historicization. It is a telling feature of this version of the Faustus story that neither Alleyn nor the devil appears in it. Instead, in neat conformity with Collier’s claim that Alleyn “would not have condescended to play such a part,” the devil’s role is shared by a chorus of supernumeraries, while the fiend himself is merely the false “perswa[sion]” of a susceptible multitude.50 Even the hasty reformation of the players is flagged as doubtful: “(as I heard it).” The effect is to clear Alleyn of participating in an episode that is itself downgraded to a harmless case of stage fright—an impression that seems all the more deliberate given the allusion suggested in the anecdote’s preface (left off in Chambers’ reprinting): “The note in prose will remind the reader of the story told of Alleyne, the founder of Dulwich

Feeling Unhistorical  49



College.” And yet, its repealing of the “very false” circumstances under which Alleyn was said to renounce his profession can’t fix the problem of the theatre’s antithetical relation to authorized history, since its ‘information’ is equally unsecured to evidence. Read as its discoverer instructs us, against the old fable about Dulwich’s founding, the Faustus anecdote in The Gentleman’s Magazine frees Alleyn’s theatrical past from the category of Histoire Prodigieuse, but only by producing a version of that past that is equally dubious, and very possibly faked. Indeed, according to the history of the episode that I have proposed, the goal of making Alleyn’s theatrical career more properly historical abets the perpetuation of performance as a thing that cannot be fixed or saved, but instead endures off the record, consigned to the expressive register of what might be called popular disbelief.52 If I cannot prove that this best-known of early modern English theatrical anecdotes is Collier’s invention, I am not alone in asserting that early modern English theatre history is irretrievably tainted by the forger’s association with it. “Collier tampered with so much,” writes Samuel Schoenbaum, that “anything he handled is inevitably open to suspicion.”53 But whereas Schoenbaum attributes the forgeries to a mystifying character flaw—“What obscure object of desire tempted Collier down the devious path that led to his undoing?”54—I wish to suggest that Collier’s undoing is indicative of the felt force of performance’s ongoingness. The lesson to be gleaned from his fall from grace is accordingly the first rule of theatrical production: though disaster may be assured, performance binds its practitioners to its continuance. As a conclusion drawn from the forger’s crimes, this will seem too exculpatory. His Sisyphean condition, as one who by trying to save the Shakespearean theatre from its inconsequence has made it a show that goes on, is after all one of his own making. But Collier’s guilt is less important, I think, than the broader implications that his forgeries raise to mind. If it is Collier who personifies the warning to all subsequent theatre historians that there is fiction in the archives, the circumstance is sufficiently pervasive to have incited his emendations in the first place. Long before Collier took an interest in the early modern English stage, researchers proceeded under the injunction that “little … [is] known, and much of that little [is] but conjecture,” or to put the point more strongly, what remains is often “very false and foolish,” “fabricated,” “ridiculous,” and “barely probable” “nonsense.”55 Therefore it lies with the scholar to exercise judiciousness in her treatment of the evidence, by separating doubtful cases from true. The problem, though, is that ‘true’ performance, to the extent that it has been gathered for subsequent notice, tends to be performance that feels unhistorical. The fact that the Faustus anecdote has long been “deployed for the purposes of seasoning an undergraduate lecture or adding a little zest to a scholarly essay” is indicative of the affective atmosphere in which performance is habitually transmitted, and which keeps it at odds with history’s comparatively spiceless “mass of facts and documents.”56 Hence the

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51

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50  Ellen MacKay anecdote from The Gentleman’s Magazine in which “the devil is … explained away, rationalized, sanitized,” reads suspiciously like lore repurposed as evidence; the very plausibility of the tale is enough to raise the possibility that it does not belong in Chambers’ Elizabethan Stage, but to Collier’s handiwork.57 And yet, by this winnowing from the annals of the stage those documents that seem too good to be true, theatre historians maintain the incompatibility of performance and history. Inured to performance’s routine suspension of the sense of event, they expect from theatrical records a like freedom from actual or measurable consequence, even if that consequence is merely to establish that nothing, in fact, happened. All of which is to say that as a result of suspicions like the one I have expressed, the theatricality of early modern England’s theatre keeps going on. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is Collier’s assessment too. Having only just published his Memoir of Edward Alleyn, he returns to the Dulwich archive in the summer of 1841 to seek or forge new evidence for the Shakespeare Society. “Antiquarian researches,” he remarks at the beginning of this new quest, “are very inviting and ­animating because we never come to the end of them.”58 NOTES 1. Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard, Shakespeare in Love: a Screenplay (New York: Hyperion, 1998), 28. 2.  Norman and Stoppard, 127. 3.  Ellen MacKay, Persecution, Plague, and Fire: Fugitive Histories of the Stage in Early Modern England (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011). 4. This tale begins Alfred Harding’s book on the history of the Actor’s Equity ­Association. See Alfred Harding, The Revolt of the Actors (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1929), 3–7. 5. There was extensive reporting on this subject across a number of media platforms. The New York Times Arts Beat was one site of in-depth coverage. See http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/20/performer-is-injured-during-­ spider-man-performance/?_r=0 6.  In response to the serious accident that befell Chris Tierney on December 20, 2011, the President of AEA wrote a special letter to his membership in which he described this dilemma: Part of the joy of live theatre—for both the audience and the performers—is its immediacy and its vitality. A “boy in the bubble” strategy of taking everything down to half speed, of wrapping everyone and everything in cotton wool, obviously will not work. Live theatre, exciting theatre involves risk. Mistakes will happen: a slip, a stumble, a hesitation, a moment’s inattention. (See http://www. actorsequity.org/ newsmedia/news2011/jan2.spiderman.asp). 7. I take this hypothetical query from Lauren Berlant, “Thinking about Feeling Historical,” Political Emotions: New Agendas in Communication (New York: Routledge, 2010), 229. 8.  Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 15. 9.  Berlant, “Thinking About Feeling Historical,” 231.

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10.  Berlant, “Thinking About Feeling Historical,” 229, 231. 11.  For a sustained discussion of theatre history as a record of performance’s catastrophic interruption, see Ellen MacKay, “The Theatre as a Self-Consuming Art,” Theatre Survey 49:1 (2008); as well as Persecution, Plague and Fire. 12.  Berlant, “Feeling Historical,” 231. 13.  The first of Chambers’ versions runs as follows: 1604. T. M. The Black Book (Bullen, Middleton, viii. 13), “Hee had a head of hayre like on of my Deuells in Dr. Faustus when the old Theater crackt and frighted the audience.” Chambers’, 3:423. 14.  Chambers’, 3:423. 15.  William Prynne, Histrio-mastix The Players Scourge, or, Actors Tragaedie (London : 1633), sig. Gggg*4r. 16. Prynne, Histrio-mastix, sig. Gggg*3r. 17. Ibid. 18.  John Aubrey, Miscellanies Upon the Following Subjects Collected by J. Aubrey, Esq., Early English Books, 1641–1700 / 856:20 (London : Printed for Edward Castle ..., 1696), sig. Br. 19.  The Natural History and Antiquities of the County of Surrey. Begun in the Year 1673, by John Aubrey, Esq; F. R. S. and Continued to the Present Time. Illustrated with Proper Sculptures. In Five Volumes. Vol. 1, 5 vols. (London, 1718), 190. 20.  Natural History and Antiquities, 195–6. 21.  Biographia Britannica: Or the Lives of the Most Eminent Persons Who Have Flourished in Great Britain from the Earliest Ages Down to the Present Times (W. Innys, 1747), 118 at note F. 22.  Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 91. 23. Chambers’, 425. Unfortunately, this stone can be seen no longer. As Daniel Lysons writes in 1792, “the college seems to have been peculiarly unfortunate in its delapidations” (Daniel Lysons, The Environs of London: County of Surrey [T. Cadell, 1792], 103). By the time of its 1857 reconstitution, the original premises were fully abandoned. The present campus, designed by Sir Charles Barry, dates from 1841. 24.  This is Oliveira assumption, though Aubrey’s usage of “this place” seems more likely to refer only to the place of the vow’s realization, and not its swearing, too. See Anthony Oliveira, “One Devil Too Many: Understanding the Language of Magic Spells in the English Renaissance,” The English Languages: History, Diaspora, Culture 3.0 (July 30, 2012), 2. 25. Prynne, Histrio-mastix, sigs. Gggr, Ggg4v. 26.  William Harnett Blanch, Dulwich College and Edward Alleyn: A Short History of the Foundation of God’s Gift College at Dulwich. Together with a Memoir of the Founder (E. W. Allen, 1877), 60. 27.  William Oldys, ed. Biographia Britannica: Or, The Lives of the Most Eminent Persons Who Have Flourished in Great Britain and Ireland, from the Earliest Ages, down to the Present Times (1747) 1:119. 28. Ben Jonson, “Epigram LXXXIX,” in Epigrams; and, the Forest, ed. Richard Dutton (Manchester: Carcanet, 2003), 58. Jonson in his right may have been indebted to Thomas Nashe’s description of Alleyn as a man of action: “Not Roscius nor Aesope those admyred tragedians that hav lived ever since before

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52  Ellen MacKay Christ was borne, could ever performe more in action, than famous Ned Allen,” Pierce Penilesse his supplication to the divell (London, 1592), sig. F[4]v. 29. Though the College was not officially established until September of 1619, “Alleyn had for some years previously been carrying his great design gradually into effect” (Blanch, Dulwich, 1). Correspondence with Stephen Gosson, the quondam antitheatricalist turned rector of St. Botolph, shows Alleyn recruiting sisters and brethren to God’s Gift’s almshouses in 1616 (Blanch, 62). Jonson’s epigram was first published in 1616. 30.  Jan Piggot describes this still extant repository as Alleyn’s “great studded oak Treasury Chest” in “John Payne Collier,” The Dulwich Society Journal Spring 2013, http://www.dulwichsociety.com/2013–spring/809-john-payne-collier. 31.  Quoted in Blanch, Dulwich, 63–65. 32. The National Archives, “Philip Henslowe, Edward Alleyn and the Invention of London Theatre in the Age of Shakespeare” http://media.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ index.php/philip-henslowe-edward-alleyn-and-the-invention-of-london-theatrein-the-age-of-shakespeare/ (accessed June 25, 2013). For a detailed account of the other contents of this trove, see the home page of the Heslowe-Alleyn Digitisation Project, see http://www.henslowe-alleyn.org.uk/index.html. 33. John Payne Collier, Memoirs of Edward Alleyn: Including Some New Particulars Respecting Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Massinger, Marston, Dekker, &c ­(Shakespeare Society, 1841), 112. 34.  Biographia Britannica: Or the Lives of the Most Eminent Persons Who Have Flourished in Great Britain from the Earliest Ages Down to the Present Times (W. Innys, 1747), 116–117. 35.  Lysons, 91. 36.  Biographia, 118; Lysons, 95; Collier, 111; Blanch, 60; Karl Mantzius, The Shakespearean Period in England (Duckworth, 1904), 207; Chambers’, 3:423. 37.  This phrase comes from the publisher’s frontispiece to the second edition of the Biographia. Andrew Kippis, Biographia Britannica, The Second Edition, with Corrections, Emendments and the Addition of New Lives (London: W. and A.  Strahan), 1878. 38.  Anon., “The Memoirs of Edward Alleyn,” Athanaeum 696 (August 27, 1841): 163. 39.  Henry Crabb Robinson, ms. remarks quoted in Arthur Freeman and Janet Ing Freeman, John Payne Collier: Scholarship and Forgery in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 355. 40.  Anon., “Memoirs of Edward Alleyn,” 166. 41.  Collier, Memoirs of Edward Alleyn, 146. 42.  S. P. Cerasano, ‘Alleyn, Edward (1566–1626),’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/ article/398 (accessed 6 Aug 2013). Jan Piggot discusses the persistence of this forged passage in “John Payne Collier,” The Dulwich Society Journal (Spring 2013), http://www.dulwichsociety.com/2013–spring/809-john-payne-collier. 43. Collier, Memoirs of Edward Alleyn, 146. 44.  Piggot discusses Dickens’s performance of these lines, delivered in a speech to the guardians of the Dulwich estate by way of a plea to support indigent actors. See “John Payne Collier.” 45.  Publisher’s frontispiece, second edition of the Biographia. 46. Collier, Memoirs of Edward Alleyn, 112.

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Feeling Unhistorical  53

47.  The phrase appears in the book’s title: John Payne Collier, Notes and Emendations to the Text of Shakespeare’s Plays: From Early Manuscript Corrections in a Copy of the Folio, 1632, in the Possession of J. Payne Collier ... Forming a Supplemental Volume to the Works of Shakespeare by the Same Editor (Whittaker and Co., 1853). 48. In 1850 alone, Freeman and Freeman cite nine publications by Collier in The Gentleman’s Magazine. See Freeman and Freeman, John Payne Collier 2: 1367–9. 49.  The essay is “Michael Drayton and his ‘Idea’s Mirror,’ The Gentleman’s Magazine (September 1850), 262–5. 50. Collier, Memoirs of Edward Alleyn, 111. 51.  “Minor Correspondence,” The Gentleman’s Magazine (September 1850), 284. 52. The definition of performance as that which “cannot be saved, recorded, [or] documented” is Peggy Phelan’s in Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993), 148. 53. Samuel Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: Records and Images (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 153. 54. Ibid. 55.  Anon., “Memoirs of Edward Alleyn,” 163. 56.  Kristen Poole, “The Devil’s in the Archive: ‘Doctor Faustus’ and Ovidian Physics,” Renaissance Drama 35 (2006): 196. Another excellent account of the Faustus anecdote and its explanatory potential is Andrew Sofer’s “How to Do Things with Demons: Conjuring Performatives in Doctor Faustus,” Theatre Journal 61.1 (2009): 1–21. 57.  Poole, “The Devil’s in the Archive,” 197. For a discussion of this problem in a very different light, see Ellen MacKay, “Against Plausibility,” in Theatre Historiography: Critical Questions, ed. Henry Bial and Scott Magelssen (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2010): 22–31. 58.  J. Payne Collier, “Edward Alleyn, Founder of Dulwich College,” Athenaeum 722 (August 28, 1841): 663.

4 Literary Celebrity and Theatrical Culture in Shirley’s Bird in a Cage

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Allison K. Deutermann

1 James Shirley’s The Bird in a Cage (1633) opens with a dedication to “Master William Prynne,” whose antitheatrical Histriomastix had been published the year before.1 The dedication, which “congratulate[s]” Prynne on his “happy retirement,” is clearly ironic: Prynne had just been imprisoned for his book’s perceived attack on Queen Henrietta Maria’s participation in court masques.2 Soon he would be stripped of his membership in Lincoln’s Inn, ordered to pay a fine of 5,000 pounds, and forced to have his ears “cropped” for what would prove to be only the first of two times. This essay asks several questions about Shirley’s dedication, chief among them, why Prynne? Bird in a Cage has often been understood as an explicit defense of Queen Henrietta Maria (who was, after all, the Cockpit players’ patroness). But why would Histriomastix and its author have stood out as being worthy of a refutation? While Prynne’s name may now be synonymous, for historians and literary scholars alike, with a kind of hysterical early modern antitheatricalism, there is no reason to assume it would have been so for his contemporaries.3 But even if it was, how did it become so? A lawyer of Lincoln’s Inn, author of (at that time) at least eight texts, some in multiple editions, Prynne was certainly prolific. Yet his tracts were also, as Shirley’s dedication suggests, infamously long and poorly written. How could Shirley expect his own readers, who were unlikely to comprise Prynne’s target audience, to know who Prynne was and what he stood for so soon after Histriomastix’s publication? What kind of work, in other words, could Prynne do for a writer for the theater like Shirley? In what follows, I try to uncover some of the creative uses to which Prynne’s notoriety was put by Shirley and his contemporaries. In doing so, I hope to show how Shirley’s dedication to Bird in a Cage (alongside with the play itself) models versions of literary authorship and a dramatic aesthetic that are best articulated through, and are therefore to some extent dependent upon, Prynne’s negative example. By calling up feelings of identification and, more importantly, disidentification between his desired audience and a scorned critic, Shirley relies on an inclusive logic of what we would call “celebrity” to further his own aims as a playwright.

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2 Within the field of cultural studies, celebrity has generally been understood to be a modern phenomenon, dependent upon mass media for both its production and consumption.4 Literary scholars and historians have tended to locate its emergence much earlier, at various points within the long eighteenth century.5 It would be difficult to argue for the existence of celebrity culture in early modern England, when neither print mass media nor a large, anonymous reading public existed.6 We do know, however, that certain individuals associated with the theater developed an impressive degree of fame or notoriety in this period: the actors Edward Alleyn, Richard Burbage, Will Kemp, and Robert Armin; the historical Mary Frith, subject of Dekker and Middleton’s The Roaring Girl; and Ben Jonson, for example.7 If celebrity culture did not yet exist in early modern England, certainly famous people did, and the commercial theater was a major engine in their fame’s production. According to Douglas Bruster, as early as the 1590s, a new genre of “embodied writing” made individuals, both real and fictional, appear more vividly, physically present in print than ever before, a shift he attributes at least in part to the commercial theaters’ modeling of “imaginative, and public, representation of persons.”8 The theater may have been instrumental not only in cultivating fame or notoriety for specific individuals but also in building some of the structures of thought and models of representation that would later make celebrity, as well as celebrity culture, possible. I suggest that Shirley’s dedication to William Prynne participates in this process. It presumes the existence of a certain degree of fame for Prynne while simultaneously helping to produce it. Readers are invited to imagine Prynne sitting in his cell, greedily turning the printed pages of the play he is so sorry to have missed: “I may present you at this time, with the Bird in a Cage,” the dedication announces, “a comedy, which wanteth, I must confess, much of that ornament, which the stage and action lent it … I must refer to your imagination, the music, the songs, the dancing, and other varieties, which I know would have pleas’d you infinitely in the presentment” (368). By mockingly reimagining the antitheatricalist Prynne as an enthusiastic, engaged reader of plays, Shirley ridicules him on the theater’s own terms, transforming him into a semifictional character who is then exposed to public scrutiny and derision in a printed playbook. And indeed, for many scholars of early modern drama, Prynne continues to be an almost cartoonish theater-history villain, the “megalomaniac” “archenemy of the English stage” who can be quoted in the classroom for comic relief (and whose later Mr William Prynne a Defense of Stage-Plays, or, A Retratction of a Former Book …called Histrio-Mastix [London, 1649] is rarely mentioned).9 Shirley’s characterization of Prynne serves two separate, but crucially related, functions: it highlights Shirley’s own talent by contrast, both as a writer and, I will show, as a consumer of plays; and it helps to consolidate what was still an emerging theatrical culture by negative example. Prynne’s

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56  Allison K. Deutermann “prose,” which Shirley calls an “indefatigable Pegasus,” is said to ­“scorneth the road of common sense, and despiseth any style in his way” (368). His writing lacks not only “sense” and “style,” but also restraint, plodding tirelessly (“indefatigabl[y]”) along. Such complaints seem to have shaped Prynne’s notoriety from the start. During his second appearance before the Star Chamber, Prynne’s counsel explained that he refused to submit his client’s answer to the court because it was “so long, and of such a nature, that I durst not set my hand to it, for feare of giving your Honours distast” (8).10 The imprisoned Prynne, his counsel complained, “in a short time, sent me 40 sheetes; and soone I received 40 more” (8). In both Shirley’s dedication and in the pamphlet’s account of the trial, Prynne suffers from a kind of logorrhea, an embarrassing failure of self-control that exposes him as “distast[eful].”11 But Prynne is also “distasteful” in another sense. In Shirley’s dedication, it is not the ideological or political import of Histriomastix that seems to matter most, but Prynne’s failure to appreciate “that musical part of humane knowledge, Poetry” (367). In other words, Prynne’s rejection of the theater is recast as a lack of aesthetic discernment rather than as the product of any moral objection (the “fame of your candour,” or judgment, the dedication begins, is what “justly challenge[s] from me this dedication” [367, 368]). Both of the “crimes” for which Shirley’s dedication indicts the imprisoned Prynne—being a bad writer, being a bad critic—are linked, the joint products of bad taste. Prynne’s failings, both as a writer and as a critic, are therefore also social ones, which Shirley’s readers are assumed not to share. As Michael Neill, ­Martin Butler, Adam Zucker, and others have shown, the informed consumption of dramatic “art” was becoming increasingly privileged in Caroline ­London as a marker of taste and social distinction.12 Prynne’s rejection of that art identifies him as unfit for membership within an elite culture that newly valued commercial drama as a field of connoisseurship, much like painting or music.13 By isolating and ridiculing Prynne as “distasteful” (to borrow the pamphlet’s terminology), Shirley’s dedication helps to give shape to that dramatic culture and further suggests it might be desirable to join. But the dedication also puts forth, via Prynne’s negative example, a positive model of authorship—and even, I suggest, of literary celebrity. The implication is that Shirley’s skill, his ability to write with both “sense” and “style,” is dependent upon his capacity to judge and appreciate “Poetry” that has been written for the stage. Such a model of tasteful authorship places the dramatist firmly within the world of the commercial theater, rather than somehow apart from or above it, further valorizing Caroline dramatic culture.14 And it makes the question of how such commercial drama is to be judged—that is, what counts as a “good” play as opposed to a “fine” or an “excellent” play—paramount, for playgoers and playwrights alike. These are questions, I hope to show, that are at the very heart of Shirley’s Bird in a Cage. They form the cornerstone of Shirley’s bid for a kind of lasting literary fame which, though it doubtless has much in common with that cultivated by Ben Jonson decades earlier, is nonetheless the product of its own distinct historical and theatrical moment.

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3 Bird in a Cage is deeply preoccupied with fame: how to get it, what it can be used to accomplish, and what damage it can do. The play opens as Philenzo, who has been banished from Mantua for having pursued the Duke’s daughter, Eugenia, returns to court in the disguise of the madman Rolliardo. He quickly develops a reputation as a “humourist” whose catchphrase, “let me have money enough, and I’ll do anything,” is being echoed throughout the city. This newfound fame secures Rolliardo/Philenzo an audience with the Duke, giving him the opportunity he needs to pursue Eugenia, but it also puts his life in danger: as Rolliardo he is given free access to Mantua’s treasury for the period of one month, during which time he is to test the truth of his catchphrase by attempting to seduce the Princess, who has been imprisoned by her jealous father. If Rolliardo/Philenzo fails (as the Duke is sure he will), he will be executed for having made the attempt. In two speeches, each delivered at key moments in the play, Philenzo speaks about fame and infamy. The first time, he draws a sharp distinction between the kind of monumentalized fame chronicled in John Stow’s Survey of London (which dutifully lists the names of men and women whose charitable bequests and donations have built the city) and the renown that comes from being talked of for doing good deeds.15 The speech is delivered at the end of Act Two, after Philenzo (as Rolliardo) has failed to bribe Eugenia’s guards: Rolliardo then must forfeit; why, that’s the worst on’t; I will make a glorious blaze in death, and while I live, make the duke’s treasure pay for it, nor shall he accuse me, I exhaust him poorly; I’ll study out some noble way to build me a remembrance. Ha! a church or college? Tedious; my glass has but few sands, I must do something I may live to finish: I have it, I will send to all the prisons in the city, and pay the poor men’s debts for them; the world wants such a precedent. I have money enough; since I fail in my other ends, I will do some good deeds before I die, so shall I be more sure of prayers, than if I built a church, for they are not certain to continue their foundation. Fate, I despise thee; I sink under no cheap and common action, but sell my life to fame, in catching my death by so brave an aspiring. If I obtain a monument, be this all / Writ on my grave: This man climb’d high to fall. (2.1, p. 404) The speech’s structural centrality points to its thematic importance and highlights this play’s investigation of competing kinds of “noble” “fame.” On the one hand, there is the monumental, architectural, and (despite the shakiness of the church’s “foundation”) lasting fame achieved by Stow’s worthies. On the other hand, there is the kind of fame that is less tangible, as well as less “tedious” and less ponderous, than that enshrined in “monuments”

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58  Allison K. Deutermann (to which Philenzo’s “if” implies he is indifferent). It “blaze[s]” bright but threatens to consume itself quickly, even though Philenzo imagines it outlasting churches and colleges. Most importantly, it is produced not by chisel and stone, but by word of mouth. It spreads through gossip, or report, much like the catchphrase that got him into this mess in the first place (“let me have money enough, and I’ll do anything”). By seeking “prayers” for his reputed good deeds rather than using the Duke’s money to build a church, Philenzo is choosing the latter over the former kind of fame, a choice that is clearly endorsed by the play. His speech marks a turning point in the plot (and, by extension, in Philenzo’s fate), since by paying off the prisoners’ debts, Philenzo unwittingly releases the “decayed artist” Bonamico, who will eventually hatch the elaborate plot that sneaks him past the princess’s guards. The second speech about fame comes in the play’s final scene, when Philenzo announces to the court that he has wooed Eugenia successfully. With Bonamico’s help, he explains, he hid himself in an enormous birdcage which was then delivered into Eugenia’s tower as a gift. Philenzo then boasts of the fame this act has, by rights, won him: I come not to petition for a mercy, But to cry up my merit, for a deed Shall drown all story; and posterity, When it shall find in her large chronicle My glorious undertaking, shall admire it More than a Sybil’s leaf, and lose itself In wonder of the action; poets shall With this make proud their muses, and apparel it In ravishing numbers, which the soft-hair’d virgins, Forgetting all their legends, and love tales, Of Venus, Cupid, and the ’scapes of Jove, Shall make their only song, and in full quire Chaunt it at Hymen’s feast. (5.1, p. 444) What seems to matter most to Philenzo is not that he has saved his own skin, or even that he has won Eugenia, but that he has accomplished a task that will win him everlasting fame. The “deed” that “Shall drown all story” and be reported in the “large chronicle” of “posterity” is, first, his successful pursuit of Eugenia. But the manner of that pursuit matters just as much as its outcome. It is this—his intricate, artfully designed and well-executed scheme—that Philenzo imagines being “admire[d]” “[m]ore than a Sybil’s leaf” and sung of by poets. Philenzo’s lines draw a link between the kind of fame privileged in the first of these two speeches—that is, the kind that spreads by word of mouth—with creative artistry, and ultimately with a particular style of theatrical production. When, several lines later, Philenzo speaks of the “great work done that cancels all my debts,” he seems to be

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Literary Celebrity and Theatrical Culture in Shirley’s Bird in a Cage  59 referencing the cage itself as well as what he has used it to do (5.1, p. 444). But he is also referencing Shirley’s play, for which Bonamico’s birdcage is a synecdochic stand-in. All three—the plot to woo Eugenia, which Philenzo hatches with Bonamico’s help; the birdcage Bonamico constructs; and the comedy by James Shirley in which these elements appear—are equally elaborate, intricately ornate “works” of admiration worthy of inspiring lasting fame. These “works” are each, at different points within the play, identified as “art,” and Shirley’s investigation of their comparative worth and value helps to give voice to a kind of rudimentary organizing aesthetic theory for the Caroline stage. Simply put, some of these works are considered worthier of fame than others. The two works I want to focus on are, first, the ­invisibility scheme that brings Bonamico to our attention; and, second, Bonamico’s spectacular birdcage and the elaborate plot in which it stars. Bonamico is not just a “decayed artist,” but an artist associated with the playhouse. When we first meet him in Act Two, he is pressing his assistant Carlo on the question of whether or not he has “dispers’d my bills about the city”; later we learn that he “made properties, and grew poor for want of pictures” (2.1, p. 385; 3.2, p. 414).16 The scheme that lands Bonamico in prison in the first place depends upon theatrical props and sleight of hand, as he convinces Mantua’s gallants (through an elaborate series of costume changes, false signs, and false beards) that he knows the secret to “go invisible.” This is the trick his “bills” have advertised on doors and walls throughout the city, and it nets Bonamico a fortune from Mantua’s gullible gallants: Enter BONAMICO, in another habit. Bon: Save you, signiors; pray, where abouts is the sign of the i­nvisible man? Dond [and] Grut: The invisible man? Bon: Cry you mercy, now I see it. [Enters the house.] (2.1, p. 395) Bonamico and Carlo essentially turn the streets of Mantua into a stage, performing a play for the benefit of the city’s gallants which, as in the Cockpit itself, relies upon imaginatively reconstructing that space. The “bills” and “paper[s]” that advertise Bonamico’s invisibility scheme further link it to plays (like Shirley’s), which would have been announced in much the same way.17 But the clearest indication that Bonamico is a man of the theater lies in his use of its raw material. Once he has been released from prison, his debts paid, he appears onstage behind the gallants who have conspired to lock him up: Bon: [coming forward] Save you, noble signiors! Grut: Ha! Dond: ’Tis he! Grut: Did he not die in prison, and his ghost haunts us? brave!—’Tis not he.

60  Allison K. Deutermann

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Bon:

When this eternal substance of my soul, Did live imprison’d in my wanton flesh, And so forth? And how do you like don Andrea, gentlemen? poor snake! but he has cast his skin, and recovered a new coat of Destinies spinning. The bird is flown again. (3.3, p. 418).

Quoting from The Spanish Tragedy—specifically the opening lines of the soliloquy delivered by Don Andrea’s ghost in Hades—Bonamico demonstrates his knowledge not just of the lines themselves, but also of the play from which they are taken. Rather than being a decontextualized commonplace, it is a contextually rich reference that puns upon Grutana’s brief mistaking of him for a ghost, and which requires familiarity with both the plot and the staging of Kyd’s play—both on Bonamico’s part and on the part of Shirley’s audience. Bonamico’s knowledge of the theater proves crucial to Philenzo’s survival, and is thus central to the happy conclusion of Bird in a Cage. But it is also coded as old-fashioned and somewhat embarrassing, or at least insufficient, and as decidedly not “art.” Unlike Mantua’s courtiers, Philenzo is scornful of Bonamico’s invisibility scheme from the start. (When asked by Bonamico, “Do you despise my art?,” Philenzo sneers, “Art? but such another word, and I shall mar the whole expectation of your invisible traffic” [2.1, p. 388].) Although the scheme nets him a profit from Mantua’s gallants, it is ultimately unsuccessful in that it lands Bonamico in prison. By the end of the play, this earlier scheme seems rude in comparison to the more successful and more spectacular birdcage “plot” (as Bonamico calls it) that wins Philenzo his freedom. It stands in for a supposedly outmoded theatricality, like that of The Spanish Tragedy, or like that of the failed cross-­ dressing scheme of the gallant Morello (which not only attracts the ridicule of his fellow gallants, but also earns Morello the unusual sentence of having to remain in women’s clothing for one month’s time). What we have, then, are two different kinds of “art,” both associated with the stage. The first, which includes plays for which Bonamico may have painted his “pictures,” is old-fashioned, the stuff of revenge tragedy and cross-dressing comedy. The second is figured forth in Bonamico’s birdcage, and, of course, in Shirley’s Bird in a Cage itself, both of which are elaborate, spectacularly artificial structures. If earlier in the play Rolliardo objected to Bonamico’s characterization of his schemes as “art,” here he endorses and echoes it: Rol: Bon: Rol: Bon:

Can thy art procure this? My art? Why, look you, I made this watch. I’ll bestow it on you. What to do? To reckon the hours I have to live? It shall not cost me so much trouble as that toy did, to make you master of your wishes, still if heaven prosper it; come, let’s talk privately, you shall have the plot. (3.4, pp. 421–22)

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Literary Celebrity and Theatrical Culture in Shirley’s Bird in a Cage  61 Like the watch, which Bonamico dismisses as a trifle, the cage of birds is something made, or fashioned, but it is also an elaborate “conceit,” or a piece of theatrical artifice—a more ornate and more intricately fashioned piece than was his invisibility scheme. That this cage is a masterful work is suggested by the Duke. When Bonamico is admitted to court (where he is referred to once again as an “artist”), the Duke calls the cage “a ­master-piece” (4.1, p.  426). It is spectacular, visually intricate, and elaborate: “’twill feed the eye / With plenty of delight” (4.1, p.426). Like the lethal trick chair of John Ford’s The Broken Heart, which, as Patricia Cahill points out, punningly embodies both the “theatrical and technological meanings of ‘invention’ and ‘device,’” Bonamico’s birdcage is both a mechanical and a dramatic innovation that announces itself as something made.18 In this sense it mirrors the rococo ending of Shirley’s play, with its parade of reversals.19 Both the birdcage and The Bird in a Cage are well-wrought “master-pieces,” elaborate and “delight[ful]” works of “art” that the play suggests should and will inspire fame for their creators, largely through the echoing praise of other, future poets. 4 In this light, we can approach Shirley’s ironic dedication to Prynne not just as a topical allusion, but as a crucial component of the play’s sustained investigation of the relationship between dramatic “art” (or non-art) and fame. The same holds true for our understanding of the “New Prison” episode, the moment in this play that has received by far the most scholarly attention. It becomes possible to understand both as ruminations on the theater’s role in the production of both fame and of famous individuals, as well as the various kinds of art it could produce. The New Prison scene puts female actors, and acting, center stage. In order to wile away their time in prison, Eugenia and her ladies in waiting decide to perform a seemingly impromptu, all-female play-within-the-play. The subject they choose is taken from Ovid, the story of Jupiter’s rape of Danae, and it results in a titillating homoerotic exchange between the princess (in the part of Danae) and her women. This scene has been read as either implicitly endorsing the very accusations Bird in a Cage seems intended to refute—Prynne’s assertion in Histriomastix that women actors are “notorious whores”—or as discounting the supposedly dangerous eroticism of the stage by displacing it onto women’s desire for women (and, therefore, into the realm of the supposedly impossible).20 But the play’s investigation of different kinds of theatrical “art,” and of the role each plays in the production of fame, enables us to read this scene as something more than just a response to Prynne’s antitheatrical accusations. Instead, the New Prison scene becomes less about women’s acting— although it is also very much about this—than about the dramatist’s skill

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62  Allison K. Deutermann in devising such an intricate theatrical “device” as an all-female-acted play-within-a-play. As Mardona, one of the Princess’s ladies, says (in ­ response to Donela’s suggestion that they “play some pretty comic story”), “I like it, ’twill be new” (3.3, p. 416, italics added). This performance, which draws on a densely woven tapestry of intertheatrical references, is finally interrupted by the arrival of Bonamico’s cage, which Cassiana calls “one of the finest pieces of pageantry that e’er you saw” (4.2, p. 435). When the Princess, who sees in the cage “a mockery of [her] restraint,” orders it to be dashed “to pieces,” Donela objects, “’Twere pity, madam, to destroy so much art” (4.2, pp. 325–36). As with Philenzo’s willingness to label certain kinds of theatrical artifice as “art,” but not others, this exchange juxtaposes different kinds of dramatic device: the by now exceedingly familiar conceit of a play-within-the-play (even one as “new” as Shirley’s); and the unfamiliar “spectacle” of the bird in a cage (and, by extension, of The Bird in a Cage). This celebration of fine “pieces of pageantry,” or of newly spectacular dramatic conceits that develop out of, yet somehow exceed, theatrical precedent, makes Shirley’s choice of dedicatee all the more interesting. For if Shirley’s play is an example of a meticulously crafted work, ornately elaborate but refined, Prynne’s “indefatigable” prose is wildly expansive, his books practically bursting.21 Histriomastix represents Prynne at his most unrestrained: it is “gargantuan,” “massive,” and “highly redundant,” a work of “dropsical bulk.”22 For these reasons, Thomas Carlyle pronounced it unreadable, while Henry B. Wheatley claimed “no one could read through the book, with its notes overflowing into the margin.”23 In Shirley’s dedication, the expansiveness of Prynne’s prose is invoked to showcase by contrast the tightly orchestrated mechanics of Shirley’s well-wrought dramatic cage, a masterwork that functions like a finely tuned watch. And yet, if Prynne’s Histriomastix is the monstrous opposite of Shirley’s finely fashioned play, it is in some sense a dangerously proximate one. Bird in a Cage’s watch-like precision is built out of the inherited remains of what is (according to Shirley, at least) an at times all-too-expansive theatrical tradition, prone to the supposed rhetorical excess and heavy-handed tricks of a Spanish Tragedy or a cross-dressing comedy. Bird in a Cage uses this material and, again according to Shirley, builds a new masterpiece out of its leavings. Full appreciation of the finished product requires a thorough knowledge of the pieces out of which it was built and an awareness that it, too, like Bonamico’s cage, is an extraordinarily elaborate invention. When the Duke, desperate to reverse his order of execution against Philenzo, moans, “I … have run myself / Into a labyrinth, from whence no art / Can bring me off with safety,” he elevates the dramatist himself to the role of hero, and the play in which he appears to the designation of “art,” but he also hints at the possibility that all of this might be a bit overdone (5.1, p. 451). I have argued that Shirley’s dedication uses Prynne not just to defend the Cockpit’s patroness against the charges levied in Histriomastix, but also to build a community of insiders who learn, partly through the

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Literary Celebrity and Theatrical Culture in Shirley’s Bird in a Cage  63 fictionalized Prynne’s negative example, how to read, judge, and feel about a play. Bird in a Cage suggests this discerning critical work depends largely on being able to recognize the creative labor that went into a successful play’s production, and by doing so, it casts the dramatist as a theatrical consumer par excellence. Such thinking links dramatists, theatergoers, and readers together in both a network of production and a community of shared affiliations, turning the theater itself into a machine, or device, in which each of these individuals is a crucial, constructive element that makes all of the others work. Shirley’s dedication interpolates Prynne as an oddly vital part of the culture that is defining itself against him, a component of this play’s dramatic machine, but it also does something similar to Shirley himself: … my own occasions not permitting my personal attendance, I have entreated a gentleman to deliver this testimony of my service; many faults have escaped the press, which your judgment will no sooner find, than your mercy correct … If you continue where you are, you will every day enlarge your fame, and beside the engagement of other poets to celebrate your Roman constancy, in particular oblige the tongue and pen of your devout honourer, James Shirley (368–69) Shirley, too, becomes a character in his own dedication, albeit of a very different kind. If Prynne is to be publicly exposed to mocking view, Shirley is to be memorialized—celebrated in print and, just as importantly, in the talk of other poets (who, like Shirley, possess both “tongue” and “pen”), readers, and playgoers. What I think they are meant to talk of—what Shirley’s particular brand of literary celebrity is to be predicated upon—is his talent for thoughtful reproductions. Bonamico’s cage is something “new,” but it is also an exquisite representation, in miniature, of a decades-long tradition of theatrical performance, as is the richly intertheatrical Bird in a Cage. Both develop out of Shirley’s engagement with that tradition, even as they also seek to move beyond and surpass it. This is a model of literary authorship that celebrates consumption as much as production, and that incorporates readers, audiences, and dramatists into the making and judging of dramatic art as something distinctly valued.

NOTES 1.  This and subsequent citations to The Bird in a Cage are taken from The Dramatic Works of James Shirley, vol. 2, ed. Alexander Dyce (New York: Russell & Russell, 1966). 2.  I am simplifying things considerably here. According to Martin Butler, Prynne’s attack on actresses “was only one out of nearly fifty exceptions raised against

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64  Allison K. Deutermann Histriomastix.” See Theatre in Crisis, 1632–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). See also Kim Walker, “New Prison: Representing the Female Actor in Shirley’s The Bird in a Cage (1633),” ELR 21 (1991): 385–400. 3. Butler calls Prynne “arguably the most famous public Puritan figure of this era” (Theatre in Crisis, 85). The notorious punishment meted out to Prynne took place in 1634, after Bird in a Cage first appeared in print. Prynne’s second appearance before the Star Chamber was shared with two men (Bastwick and Burton), all of whom receive equal attention in A Briefe Relation of Certain speciall, and most materiall passages, and speeches in the Starre-Chamber (London, 1638), a pamphlet recounting the trial. 4. See especially Daniel Boorstin, The Image; or, What Happened to the American Dream (New York: Atheneum, 1962); Chris Rojek, Celebrity (London: Reaktion, 2001); and Graeme Turner, Understanding Celebrity (London: Sage Publications, 2004). Su Holmes and Sean Redmond acknowledge this assumption while encouraging “a more expansive media … approach” in “A Journal in Celebrity Studies,” Editorial, Celebrity Studies 1 (2010): 1–10. 5. See Clara Tuite, “Tainted Love and Romantic Literary Celebrity,” ELH 74.1 (2007): 59–88; Joseph Roach, It (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2007); and Tom Mole, ed. Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 6.  But cf. Jeffrey Knapp’s “Mass Entertainment Before Mass Entertainment,” New Literary History 44.1 (2013): 93–115, which counters the claim that mass media is a strictly modern phenomenon. 7.  Much has been written about each of these figures. On their celebrity status, see especially (regarding actors) Nora Johnson, The Actor as Playwright in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) and S.P. Cerasano, “Edward Alleyn, the New Model Actor, and the Rise of the Celebrity in the 1590s,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 18 (2005): 47–58; regarding Moll Frith, see Gustav Ungerer, “Mary Frith, Alias Moll Cutpurse, in Life and Literature,”  Shakespeare Studies 28 (2000): 42–84; Jean E. Howard, “Sex and Social Conflict: The Erotics of  The Roaring Girl,” in Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage, ed. Susan Zimmerman (New York: Routledge, 1992); and William N. West, “Talking the Talk: Cant on the Jacobean Stage,” ELR 33 (2003): 228–251. Ian Donaldson, editor of the forthcoming Cambridge edition of Ben Jonson’s works, calls him “Britain’s first literary celebrity” in his Ben Jonson: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 41. 8.  Douglas Bruster, “The Structural Transformation of Print,” in Print, Manuscript, and Performance: The Changing Relations of the Media Relations in Early Modern England, ed. Arthur F. Marotti and Michael D. Bristol (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2000), 49–89, at 50. 9.  Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press, 1981), 84; and Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 96. For Agnew, Prynne’s Histiomasitx is “more than an envious and literal-minded reaction to the recreational pastimes of others”; it is a “response” “to the problem of theatricality reconceived as a dimension of secular life” (100). 10.  A Briefe Relation, 8. 11. Also in twentieth-century scholarship: Barish calls Prynne’s Histrio-Mastix a “logorrhaeic nightmare” in The Antitheatrical Prejudice, 86.

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Literary Celebrity and Theatrical Culture in Shirley’s Bird in a Cage  65 12.  See Michael Neill, “‘Wits most accomplished Senate’: The Audience of the Caroline Private Theaters,” SEL 18 (1978): 341–60; Butler, Theatre and Crisis; and Adam Zucker, The Places of Wit in Early Modern English Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Like Zucker, and as my terms here suggest, I am using “taste” as defined by Pierre Bourdieu in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). On Caroline theatrical culture more generally, see Adam Zucker and Alan B. Farmer, eds., Localizing Caroline Drama: Politics and Economics of the Early Modern English Stage, 1625–1642 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); on print’s role in the cultivation of that culture, see Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser, “Canons and Classics: Publishing Drama in Caroline England,” in Localizing Caroline Drama, 17–41. 13.  See Neill, “‘Wits most accomplished Senate,’” esp. 344–46. 14.  Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser make a similar claim about the commercial dramatist as literary author in “Vile Arts: The Marketing of English Printed Drama, 1512–1660,” Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 39 (2000): 77–165. 15.  To give just one example: “Iohn Hinde Draper, Maior, 1405. newly builded his parish Church of Saint Scithen by London stone: his monument is defaced, saue onely his armes in the glasse windowes.” See John Stow, Survey of London, ed. Charles Kingsford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), vol. 1, 108. 16.  The play’s editors gloss this line as “such rude machinery, paintings, &c. as the stage required” (414, n. 1). 17. Tiffany Stern, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 18.  Cahill, “Going Through the Motions,” 22, in this volume. 19.  Philenzo is sent offstage to be executed, and when the Duke thinks better of his decree and tries to rescind it, he is told that the condemned has poisoned himself; Philenzo’s body is brought back onstage, where it suddenly revives, since he “is not dead, / But made, by virtue of a drink, to seem so” (5.1, 454). 20.  On the first point, see Sophie Tomlinson, “She that Plays the King: Henrietta Maria and the Threat of the Actress in Caroline Culture,” in The Politics of Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and After, eds. Gordon McMullan and John Hope (New York: Routledge, 1992); on the second, see Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 175–177. 21.  William M. Lamont calls him “the most prolific writer of the seventeenth century” in Puritanism and the English Revolution: Marginal Prynne 1600–1669, Vol. 1 (Aldershot, Hampshire: Gregg Revivals, 1991), 1. On the antitheatricalist tradition’s conventions, sources, and ideological and political investments more generally, see Jeremy Lopez, Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Jean Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 1994); and Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice. 22. Howard, Social Struggle, 6; Lopez, Theatrical Convention, 21; Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice, 84. 23. Wheatley, What Is an Index? A Few Notes on Indexes and Indexers (London, Longmans, Green, 1879), 14. Both are quoted in Ellen MacKay, Persecution, Plague, and Fire: Fugitive Histories of the Stage in Early Modern England ­(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 98.

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Part II

Engendering …

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5 Monstrous Teardrops

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The Materiality of Early Modern Affection Ian Frederick Moulton

Most scholarship on the Galenic, humoral body has concentrated on issues of selfhood, on how early modern people inhabited their bodies and understood their bodies’ place in the world.1 One consequence of seeing the body in Galenic terms is that humoral theory, explicitly or implicitly, tends to offer material causes for emotional effects. If early modern people feel happy, it may be in part because they have a relatively high amount of blood (that is, they are sanguine), which in Galenic theory was thought to promote cheerfulness. If early modern people are depressive, they may be suffering from an excess of black bile, or their bile may have dried up, causing them to be melancholy (from the Greek μελαν + χολη, “black bile”). My concern in this chapter is to explore how such materialist understandings of emotion and desire affected relations between people—in particular, the bonds between parent and child, as well as the sexual desires that led to procreation in the first place. I focus on texts by Montaigne and Shakespeare, writers who are not only remarkable for their in-depth analysis of character and psychology, but who were also parents who thought in some depth about the relation between fathers and their children, particularly their daughters. Of course, passion and affection in the sixteenth century were not understood purely in material terms. Galenism had its limits. Religious and philosophical discourses stressing the importance of the will and the supremacy of moral choice were extremely influential. Christian morality, both Catholic and Protestant, depended on the notion that the soul was free to make moral choices and that each individual bore full responsibility before God for the moral choices he or she made. Nonetheless, there was a strong and at times disturbing belief that both parental affection and the sexual attraction that led to procreation in the first place were rooted not in the spiritual, intellectual, or even emotional realms, but in physical processes that were beyond conscious rational control. These medical and materialist notions of affection certainly did not supplant philosophical and theological notions, but they coexisted with them, and in many ways contradicted them. In 1578, at the age of 45, Michel de Montaigne was seriously ill for the first time; he was stricken with kidney stones, an excruciating ailment that was particularly frightening for him because his father had died of the same disease. Kidney stones—small, sharp deposits of calcium that form in

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the kidneys and then pass painfully through the urinary tract—provided Montaigne with a resonant and intimate reminder of the fundamental ­ ­physicality of human life. He was especially struck by the fact that he seemed to have inherited the ailment from his father. In the text that closes the first edition of the Essays, “On the resemblance of children to their fathers,” Montaigne dwells on the mystery of what we would now call genetics: What monster is it, that this teare or drop of seede, whereof we are ingendred brings with it; and in it the impressions, not only of the corporall forme, but even of the very thoughts and inclinations of our fathers? Where doth this drop of water containe or lodge this infinite number of formes?2 For Montaigne, the relation of parents to children is rooted in the physical mystery of semen—how can traits, in temperament as well as physiognomy, be passed from one person to another by a “drop of water”? The term ­“monster” here is significant, connoting as it does the unnatural, the astonishing, the unexpected, and the terrifying.3 Ultimately derived from the Latin “monstrum,” or portent, the word “monster” was often used in the early modern period to denote something that was contrary to the natural order of things. That this most “natural” of acts—sexual generation of offspring— could be seen as monstrous, and therefore “unnatural,” indicates the ambivalence at the heart of early modern understandings of both parenthood and of the sexual attraction that generates children. The same drop of liquid that gives Montaigne life also gives him kidney stones.4 The material of life and death is identical. Although Montaigne’s resistance to seeing parent-child relationships in entirely material terms can be seen in his frequent insistence that his Essays are his intellectual children,5 the material connection between fathers and their offspring remains fundamental for him. Montaigne’s speculations on the monstrous materiality of sperm are in some ways a challenge to the orthodox Aristotelian understanding of generation. For Aristotle, human beings are made up of both form and matter: the form of the body is both its soul (which gives it life) and its organizing principle (which differentiates a human body as functioning organism from a simple mass of bones, flesh, and organs). Aristotle taught that male semen provided form,6 whereas the material of the fetus came from the mother. Although male semen obviously consists of matter (Montaigne’s drop of water), Aristotle believed that the physical, material portion of sperm was a mere carrier for spirit, and evaporated in the womb, transmitting immaterial form, but providing no part of the matter for the future child: The physical part of the semen … when it is emitted by the male is accompanied by the portion of soul-principle and acts as its vehicle. … This physical part of the semen, being fluid and watery, dissolves and evaporates because it has a liquid and watery nature; and on that



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account we should not always be trying to detect it leaving the female externally, or to find it as an ingredient of the fetation when that has set and taken shape, any more than we should expect to trace the figjuice which sets and curdles milk. The fig-juice undergoes a change; it does not remain as a part of the bulk which is set and curdled; and the same applies to the semen.7 Like juice curdling milk, male semen is a catalyst that shapes female ­menstrual fluid into an embryo, which then develops into a child during gestation.8 Aristotle thus sees male semen as an agent or tool that makes form out of female matter.9 Although Montaigne acknowledges that his father’s semen carries with it an “infinite number of forms,” his amazement that such a tiny drop could hold so much suggests that he is thinking in material terms—after all, since spirit is immaterial, an infinite number may easily be contained in the smallest of spaces. But Montaigne is not satisfied with this solution. How could that infinity of forms be embodied in one physical drop of liquid? That is the question. At times, Aristotle’s theory of generation suggests conscious volition on the part of the father—he claims, for example, that a father makes a child as a carpenter makes a bed (729b). But Montaigne’s father did not consciously choose to give him kidney stones. In any case, if Aristotle’s theory were correct, Montaigne presumably could not inherit the physical defect of kidney stones from his father, since all of his material body would have derived from his mother. Whatever the metaphysics, the physical fact of the kidney stones passing painfully through the physical channels of the body provides a compelling argument for a material connection between father and child. To what extent does this material connection between parents and children provide a basis for affection? Montaigne believes that parental affection is natural and is the strongest of the natural instincts after that of self-preservation.10 As often in the Essais, Montaigne is drawing here on Plutarch’s Moralia,11 in particular on Plutarch’s essay “Of the naturall love or kindnesse of Parents to their Children”12 which uses examples of animal behavior to make the point that parental love for children is a natural affection that often goes against self-interest narrowly defined.13 In particular, Plutarch argues, the physical economy that ensures that mothers’ bodies produce milk for their infants to drink is clear evidence that parental care for children is part of the natural world.14 Indeed, Plutarch says, who could love something “so naked, so deformed, so foule and impure” as a newborn baby if not through natural affection?15 This sentiment is echoed by ­Montaigne, who disliked infants and hated to have them near him.16 Although parental affection may be natural, Montaigne also believes that it tends to be excessive and needs to be tempered. For their own good, children should be raised at some distance from their parents: … it agreeth not with reason, that a childe be alwayes nuzled, cockered, dandled, and brought up in his parents lappe or sight. … For

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parents are not capable, neyther can they finde in their hearts to see [their children] checkt, corrected, or chastised … as they must needs be.17 Montaigne does not advocate parental cruelty or disinterest, but he is concerned that over-solicitous parenting will not give children the opportunity to learn the self-reliance, fortitude, and resilience they will need in a violent and uncertain world. Parents must learn to separate themselves from their children. For Montaigne, excessive parental affection for children is rooted not in altruism but in self-esteem: parents are indulgent because they see children as a part of themselves. I never knew father, how crooked and deformed soever his sonne were, that he would either altogether cast him off, or not acknowledge him for his owne: … he plainely perceiveth his defects, and hath a feeling of his imperfections. But so it is, he is his owne.18 The child is the father’s own because of that monstrous “drop of water” that materially transmits impressions of thoughts, inclinations and bodily form from fathers to children.19 Mario Equicola, whose De Natura d’amore (1525) was a popular compendium of notions about love in the sixteenth century,20 repeatedly suggests that all human affection is based in self-love. He defines self-love as the love of the body and the soul, and sees all other forms of affection, including parental affection, as being rooted in this fundamental attraction: We love our parents because they are our authors; we love our brothers because they are almost like other versions of ourselves; our ­children, because they are part of us.21 Indeed, Montaigne argues that parental affection for their children is bound to be greater than children’s love for their parents precisely because parents have created their children and see them as their own, while children naturally individuate themselves as they grow up.22 Montaigne also argues that a writer such as himself will love his writings more than his children because they contain his spirit, whereas the parent-child relationship is fundamentally material: If we shall duely consider this simple occasion of loving our children, because we have begotten them, for which we call them our other selves. It seemes there is another production comming from us, and which is no lesse recommendation and consequence. For what we engender by the minde, the fruites of our courage, sufficiencie, or spirit, are brought forth by a farre more noble part, then the corporall, and are more, our owne.23

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Shakespeare and Montaigne were both fathers of daughters, and the writing of both men on fatherhood reflects this. Shakespeare featured ­father-daughter relationships prominently throughout his career, across a range of genres; like Montaigne, he returned to the topic with some frequency. A ­possessive and at times materialist understanding of fatherhood is ubiquitous in Shakespeare. While Montaigne speculated on the parent-child bond, Shakespeare’s plays embody and enact it. Here is Juliet’s father, ordering her to marry according to his wishes: An you be mine, I’ll give you to my friend. An you be not, hang, beg, starve, die in the streets (Romeo and Juliet 3.5.191–192)24 For Capulet here, Juliet is an object he possesses and may obviously dispose of as he pleases. This seems very cold and cruel, though one should note that Shakespeare elsewhere is at pains to show Capulet is a loving father. When Juliet is not in disagreement with him, Capulet clearly dotes on his daughter, involving himself like a “housewife” (his own term) in her wedding preparations (4.2.43). Although in this moment of rage Capulet speaks of Juliet as if she were a mere possession, a crisis reveals that he considers the bond to be considerably closer: when he believes Juliet to be dead, Capulet says he will die too (4.4.66) and that Juliet was “my soul and not my child” (4.4.89), implying a spiritual as well as material union between the two, echoing Equicola’s notion that self-love is based on the attraction between soul and body. In other situations in Shakespeare, the daughter is seen not as an external object to be possessed, but as an integral part of the parent. In The Tempest, Prospero memorably calls Miranda his “foot,” as he contemptuously dismisses her efforts to plead for her beloved Ferdinand.25 In Much Ado about Nothing, believing his daughter Hero has betrayed him by losing her virginity before marriage, Leonato feels it would be easier if he were not her biological father: Why had I not with charitable hand Took up a beggar’s issue at my gates, Who smirched thus and mired with infamy, I might have said “No part it is of mine, This shame derives itself from unknown loins.” But mine, and mine I loved, and mine I praised, And mine that I was proud on, mine so much That I myself was to myself not mine, Valuing of her—why she, O she is fallen Into a pit of ink. … (4.1.130–39) Like the doting parents described by Montaigne, Leonato loves Hero so much that it blurs the boundaries of selfhood: “I myself was to myself not

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74  Ian Frederick Moulton mine.” In his rage and anguish, Leonato manages to use the words “I,” “mine,” and “myself” twelve times in three lines. This insistent, almost parodic, repetition emphasizes the troubling and problematic identity of father and daughter. Similarly, when Lear’s daughters start to act independently, the old king feels he is no longer himself: faced with Goneril’s insubordination, Lear responds by saying of himself, “This is not Lear” (1.4.201), and begins to fear that he is going mad. Lear suggests Cordelia’s parting from him is like death—a removal of a heart from a body: So be my grave my peace as here I give Her father’s heart from her. (1.1.123–124) “So be my grave my peace” may be a stock phrase, but the suggestion remains: taking his heart from her, Lear will die. As Cordelia stands apart from him, Lear refers to her as “little seeming substance” (1.1.195), as if, cut off from him, his daughter has become insubstantial and immaterial. Cordelia’s future husband, the King of France, twice refers to the breach between Cordelia and Lear as “monstrous” (1.1. 215–217). When Lear curses Cordelia, he equates her with cannibals who eat their own kin: The barbarous Scythian, Or he that makes his generation messes To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom Be as well neighboured, pitied, and relieved As thou, my sometime daughter. (1.1.114–118) Cordelia’s moral choice to disobey her father’s command is thus equated with material consumption: disagreeing with her father is analogous to devouring his flesh. Her rebellion monstrously incorporates his body into hers rather than admitting that her flesh is his, obeying him as a foot responds to the brain’s commands or the heart’s desires. The material bond between parent and child remains, but in this cannibalistic union, the child incorporates the parent and the parent is annihilated. Lear’s comparison of Cordelia to a Scythian is significant. In Classical thought, the Scythians, who lived north of the Black Sea, were traditionally seen as the ultimate nonGreek barbarians, and were often conflated with cannibals.26 In the quarto text of Lear, the Duke of Albany also compares Lear’s daughters’ ingratitude to cannibalism: they devour their father like “monsters of the deep” feeding on each other (16.48–49). Once again, this metaphor reinforces the materiality of the father-daughter bond while reconfiguring it as monstrous and unnatural. The child’s devouring of the parent symbolically reverses the parent’s engendering of the child. Of course, as everyone knows, fathers and daughters are not identical and seldom eat each other; whatever the bonds between them, they are



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separate people who have differences of opinion, perspective, judgment, and ­temperament—not to mention gender. In another context, Montaigne marvels at the weakness of the parent-child bonds that people assume are so strong and natural. Witness the common sixteenth-century practice of hiring wet nurses for babies in wealthy and aristocratic households: this, Montaigne argues, leads the nurses to neglect their own offspring and form stronger bonds with their master’s children: The same naturall affection, to which we ascribe so much authoritie, hath but a weake foundation. Fore a very small gaine, we daily take mothers owne children from them, and induce them to take charge of ours; Doe we not often procure them to bequeathe their children to some fond, filthie, sluttish, and unhealthie nurce, to whom we would be very loth to commit ours, or to some brutish Goate, not onely forbidding them to nurce and feed their owne children (what danger soever may betide them) but also to have any care of them, to the end they may more diligently follow, and carefully attend the service of ours? Whereby we soone see through custome a certaine kinde of bastard-affection to be engendred in them, more vehement than the naturall, and to be much more tender and carefull for the welfare and preservation of other mens children, then for their owne. And the reason why I have made mention of Goates, is, because it is an ordinarie thing round about me where I dwell, to see the countrie women, when they have not milke enough to feede their infancts with their owne breasts, to call for Goates to help them.27 This passage might seem to contradict Montaigne’s earlier notion that ­ arents are generally too fond of their children. In fact, the difference between p the two passages highlights the gender and class biases of ­Montaigne’s ­argument. Aristocratic fathers, it seems, dote excessively on their offspring. Aristocratic mothers, on the other hand, are happy to have other women nurse their children, and peasant mothers will let their children be raised by goats if it means they can gain employment as wet nurses. As far as bodily fluids go, it seems that Montaigne believes that milk is not as strong a binding agent as semen. But whatever the context, the ­materiality of the parental bond remains crucial—Montaigne believes that children would be better off drinking milk from their own mother’s ­bodies than from strangers. In fact, it was commonly believed in the period that “babies ingested the mental and physical characteristics of the women or animal” whose milk they drank.28 Montaigne’s concern to avoid nurses who are “fond, filthie, sluttish, and unhealthie” thus goes beyond the practical risks of entrusting one’s child to an unstable or unhygienic person.29 A  dishonest nurse’s milk risked morally corrupting the child who sucked at her breast. In The Winter’s Tale, when Leontes begins to distrust his wife ­Hermione’s influence over their son, he sullenly says to her

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I am glad you did not nurse him: Though he does bear some signs of me, yet you Have too much blood in him. (2.1.58–60) Leontes’ remarks suggest an equivalence between breast milk and blood—in Galenic theory all bodily fluids were considered to be fungible: blood could change into milk or semen as required.30 In As You Like It, Rosalind says any woman who is too dull-witted to get the better of her husband should “never nurse her child herself, for she will breed it like a fool” (4.1.150–151). In the same manner, goats’ milk was believed to make children goat-like, and sheep’s milk was said to make them dull and stupid. Medical authorities tended to advise against using animal milk to feed infants except in emergencies.31 The notion of a material connection between parents and children was supported by materialistic notions about the nature of sexuality. Generation and sexuality are, of course, intimately related. In the early modern period, sexual attraction was often seen in the same material terms as parenthood. In his essay on sexuality entitled “On Some Lines of Virgil,” Montaigne defines sexual desire in material terms: sexual intercourse is “a matter” [matière] that permeates all of nature: All the worlds motions bend and yeelde to this conjunction [­ copulation]: it is a matter every-where infused; and a Centre whereto all lines come, all things looke.32 The idea that both sexual attraction and romantic love were in some sense physical afflictions was common in the early modern period. The notion has its roots in ancient love poetry by Sappho, Virgil, and Ovid that describes the physical suffering entailed by frustrated desire—muscle tremors, sweating, hot flashes, pallor, difficulty breathing and speaking. 33 Also influential was the speech of the physician Eryximachus in Plato’s Symposium (186a–188e),34 which posits that love is a material force that regulates and balances contrasting physical states: heat and cold, sweet and sour, wet and dry. Disordered or frustrated love thus leads to a physical imbalance—an illness that can only be cured by medical intervention.35 The notion that lovesickness was a serious medical condition was taken up by Classical medical authorities, including Galen, and was codified and elaborated by Arab physicians in the Middle Ages.36 Galenic theories of lovesickness reappeared in Europe in the twelfth century, primarily through the Viaticum of Constantine the African, a widely reproduced compendium of medical knowledge for travelers.37 By the early seventeenth century lovesickness was a common notion, both in learned medical treatises and in common parlance. And for the first time, printed books in the vernacular were making medical lore widely available to the literate public.38 Authors dealing with the topic include the aforementioned Mario Equicola,

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the French moralist Pierre Boaistuau (a translator of the Romeo and Juliet story),39 André Du Laurens, doctor to Marie de Médicis and Henri IV, and Robert Burton, whose magisterial Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) devotes almost a third of its length—over three hundred pages—to a discussion of the symptoms, causes, and cures of love melancholy.40 The most elaborate and detailed treatise on the physical aspects of lovesickness was the French physician Jacques Ferrand’s On Lovesickness (1610, 1623), published in English in 1640 under the splendid title of Erotomania. Early modern medical discourse insists on the materiality of love. It assumes that love has material causes and can be treated by physical means: diet, exercise, drugs, and surgery. The material process by which love infects the body is described by Ferrand in some detail. Love is imagined as a physical agent that enters through the eye and systematically proceeds to conquer the three seats of power in the body: the liver, seat of desires; the heart, seat of emotions; and the brain, the seat of reason. Love first passes physically through the veins to the liver,41 where, like a branding iron on dry wood, it simultaneously “imprints” its form on that organ and kindles a fire. The metaphor then shifts, and Love becomes a warrior who races from the liver to the heart, conquers the heart’s fortress, and from there moves on to subdue the brain and take reason captive. Once the brain is affected, all is lost: The Senses are all out of order, the Reason is disturbed, the Imagination depraved, the discourses are all impertinent, and the poore Inamorato thinks of nothing but his dearely beloved Mistresse. All the Actions of his Body are in like manner quite out of tune, he growes pale withall, leane, distracted, has no appetite, his eyes are hollow and quite sunke into his head. Then shall ye have him ever and anon weeping, sobbing, and sighing by himselfe, and in perpetuall Anxiety, avoiding all company, and choosing solitarinesse; that so he may entertaine his Melancholy thoughts with the greater freedome. (67–68) While medical texts like Ferrand’s are not necessarily indicative of actual social practices, they nonetheless reveal much about ways of thinking about the physical aspects of love. The medicalization of love is certainly a common trope in Shakespeare, seen in plays as diverse as Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, and Othello.42 A materialist conception of love, sex, and procreation can definitely be observed in early modern ways of writing and thinking about bodies and the relations between them. It is more difficult, however, to determine the strength and significance of such ways of thinking. Medical writers tended to back off from the more radical implications of their materialist approach to the body and its health. They would insist that they focused on the material body only because that was a physician’s proper area of expertise—spiritual concerns should be left to the Church.43 One sees this division of labor in Macbeth when the doctor attending to

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78  Ian Frederick Moulton Lady Macbeth suggests that her distress is fundamentally spiritual and requires a priest to cure it (5.1.64). As I stated at the outset, material understandings of affection and attraction were common in the early modern period, but they were also strongly contested. The reductiveness of seeing sexual desire as a purely physical phenomenon was obvious to many in the period. It was parodied, for example, by John Donne in his poem “The Flea,” in which the speaker equates sexual union with the mingling of lovers’ blood in the body of an insect that has bitten them. If sex is purely physical, then why make such a fuss about ­mixing one person’s fluids with another? As Donne’s poem suggests, materialist conceptions of love tend to undermine traditional sexual morality. If love is a disorder of the liver, and sex just the mingling fluids, why worry about sin and virginity? In Classical and Arabic texts, the most effective cure for lovesickness was said to be sexual intercourse—with the beloved if possible, with someone else if not. But Christian writers shied away from this practical but immoral solution.44 Certainly the woman addressed in Donne’s poem is not convinced: She famously crushes the flea. And the speaker, one feels, is aware of the ridiculousness of his argument as well—it’s a playful come-on, nothing more. And so, the poem pulls back. There must be more to love than this. But by seeing love as a disease, early modern medical thought and writing raised seriously and at great length the possibility that there was not. In a post-scientific, more secular world, we often look to the material realm for certainty, but in the early modern period, as Montaigne’s formulation of semen as a “monster” suggests, materiality itself was a source of great ambivalence. On the one hand, materiality offered a certain solidity, as well as an imagined escape from responsibility and from social norms of behavior and judgment: An infection is not a sin. But the material world was also the realm of death and decay: All material things are mortal and will die, as the common poetic discourse of mutability frequently reminded Elizabethan readers. In an intellectual geography that saw a deep split between the mind and the body, the bodily realm was often conceived of as a prison—a series of limitations, an impediment to the spirit. That parental bonds, like the sexual desire that created them, were in some sense physical and not rational or spiritual could be deeply troubling. NOTES 1.  Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), and Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Michael C. Shoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). On Galenism, see Oswei Temkin, Galenism: Rise and Decline of a Medical Philosophy (Ithaca,

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NY: Cornell University Press, 1973) and Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), esp. 104–09 on the humors. 2. Michel de Montaigne, “Of the resemblence betweene children and fathers” (Essay 2.37) in The Essaies, trans. John Florio (London, 1603), sig. Pp3r. STC 18041. All references are to this edition. 3. For early modern medical ideas about monstrosity, see Ambroise Paré, Of Monsters and Marvels, ed. and trans. Janis L. Pallister (Chicago: University of ­Chicago Press, 1982). 4.  The analogy to syphilis or the pox is clear, but undeveloped by Montaigne. The notion that the drop of semen is a “teare,” suggesting sadness and weeping, is added by the English translator John Florio. Montaigne uses the word “goute” (drop). 5.  Montaigne, “Of the affection of fathers to their children,” sig. X2v–X3r. 6.  I use the term “male semen” because the notion that women also produced semen was relatively common in early modern medical thought. See Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (New York: Cambridge, 1980), 35–37. 7. Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals, ed. and trans. A. L. Peck (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), Book 2, section 3 (737a). Because of the multiplicity of editions, all references to canonical Classical works are to book and section number, rather than page number. 8.  “Thus, if the male is the active partner, the one which originates the movement, and the female qua female is the passive one, surely what the female contributes to the semen of the male will not be semen, but material.” Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals, Book 1, section 20 (729a). 9. “It is plain, then, that there is no necessity for any substance to pass from the male; and if any does pass, this does not mean that the offspring is formed from it as from something situated within itself during the process, but as from that which has imparted movement to it, or that which is its ‘form.’” Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals, Book 1, section 21 (729b). 10.  Montaigne, “Of the affection of fathers to their children,” sig. V4r. 11.  Hugo Friedrich, Montaigne (1949), ed. Philippe Desan, trans. Dawn Eng (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991), 72–75; Pierre Villey, Les sources et l’évolution des Essais de Montaigne (Osnabrück: Otto Zeller, 1976), 2.101–126. 12. Title from Plutarch, The Philosophie, Commonlie Called, the Morals, trans. Philemon Holland (London, 1603), STC 20063. Montaigne was familiar with Amyot’s French translation of 1572. The essay is also known as On Affection for Offspring [Περὶ τῆς εἰς τὰ ἔγγονα φιλοστοργίας—De amore prolis]. 13. Plutarch, Morals, sig. S8v–T4r. 14. Plutarch, Morals, sig. T2v. 15. Plutarch, Morals, sig. T3r. 16.  Montaigne, “Of the affection of fathers to their children,” sig. V4r. 17.  Montaigne, “Of the affection institution and education of children” (Book 1, essay 26) in The Essayes, trans. John Florio (London, 1603), sig. G8v. STC 18041. The original French makes clear that children ought not be brought up primarily by their parents: “ce n’est pas raison de nourir un enfant au giron de ses parents.”

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80  Ian Frederick Moulton 18.  Montaigne, “Of the affection institution and education of children,” Sig. G4r. 19.  On Aristotelian notions about the nature of semen, see “On the Generation of Animals,” esp. Book 1, section 17–22. 20. On Montaigne’s familiarity with Equicola, see Ian Frederick Moulton, Love in Print in the Sixteenth Century: The Popularization of Romance (New York: ­Palgrave, 2014), 103. 21.  My translation. Mario Equicola, De Natura d’amore (Venice: Pietro di Niccolini di Sabbio, 1536), sig. O3r. On Equicola’s notions of self-love, see Moulton, Love in Print, 74–80. 22.  Montaigne, “Of the affection of fathers to their children,” sig. V4r. 23.  Montaigne, “Of the affection of fathers to their children,” sig. X2v. 24.  All references to the works of Shakespeare are to The Norton Shakespeare, 2nd edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: Norton, 2008). 25.  “What, I say, / My foot my tutor?” (The Tempest 1.2.472–73). 26. Herodotus, The Histories, trans. Robert Waterfield (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), Book 4, section 106. 27.  Montaigne, “Of the affection of fathers to their children” (2.8) Florio’s translation. London, 1603. Sig. X2r. 28. Valerie Fildes, Wet Nursing: A History from Antiquity to the Present (New York: Blackwell, 1988), 73. 29. See Michelle Dowd, Women’s Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 77–94 on the complex class position of wet nurses in early modern England. 30. Paster, The Body Embarrassed, 9–10. 31. Fildes, Wet Nursing, 73–74. 32.  Montaigne, “On some lines of Virgil” (Essay 3.5) in The Essayes, trans. John Florio (London, 1603), sig. Xx1v. STC 18041. 33.  See especially Sappho’s lyric beginning “Φαίνεταί μοι κήνος ἴσος θέοισιν” [He is a god in my eyes, that man]: Sappho, The Love Songs of Sappho, trans. Paul Roche (New York: Prometheus Books, 1998), 63. Also crucial are Virgil’s account of Dido’s passion for Aeneas in Book IV of the Aeneid, and Ovid’s account of Echo and Narcissus in Book III of the Metamorphoses. See Donald A. Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella, “Jacques Ferrand and the Tradition of Lovesickness in Western Culture,” in Jacques Ferrand, A Treatise on Lovesickness, ed. and trans. Donald A. Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 1–201, esp. 40–42, 52–54. 34. Plato, Symposium, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, trans. Michael Joyce (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 526–574. 35. Moulton, Love in Print, 148–53. 36. For an overview of Arab medical writing on lovesickness, see Beecher and Ciavolella, “Jacques Ferrand,” 62–70. 37.  Mary Frances Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The Viaticum and its Commentaries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990). 38. On vernacular books dealing with lovesickness in the sixteenth century, see Moulton, Love in Print, 145–81. 39.  Boaistuau translated, adapted and moralized Bandello’s 1554 novella on Romeo and Juliet in his additions to Belleforest’s Histoires Tragiques extraites des ­Ouevres italiens de Bandel (Paris 1559).

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40.  On the relation of Burton’s Anatomy to medical texts in Latin and the vernacular, see Mary Ann Lund, Melancholy, Medicine, and Religion in Early Modern England: Reading The Anatomy of Melancholy (New York: Cambridge, 2010), 77–111. 41.  This formulation is based on Ficino’s De Amore, Speech 7, chapter 5, and derives ultimately from Plato’s Phaedrus and Lucretius De rerum natura. See Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love, ed. and trans. Sears Jayne (Dallas, TX: Spring Publications, 1985), 162–163. 42.  Lovesick characters include Romeo, Orsino in Twelfth Night, Roderigo in Othello, Helen in All’s Well, Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado, and many others. On the ubiquity of the discourse of lovesickness in early modern England, see Lesel Dawson, Lovesickness and Gender in Early Modern English Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 43.  For example, Ferrand, A Treatise on Lovesickness, 225. 44.  See, for example, Du Laurens, On Melancholike Diseases (London, 1599), sig. S1r–S1v; Ferrand, A Treatise on Lovesickness, 334–35.

6 “Displeas’d Ambitious Tongue” Lingua and Lingual Duality1

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Lianne Habinek

Nothing is in the intellect that was not previously in sense.2 Sensation, it used to be said, inaugurates intelligence.3

Anatomist Helkiah Crooke elaborates upon Aquinas’s Peripatetic axiom (the first of the quotations above) in describing the passage of sensory data to the intellect. The external senses convey information to “the Tribunall of the Internall sense” (i.e., commonsense), which would be “imperfect and unprofitable” without such knowledge: For if wee conceive anything in our minds, & nourish that conceit by discourse, againe and againe ventilating it to and fro, wee shall observe that all things had their originall from the outward senses; for neither could colours, odours, nor savours be knowne, neither could the Internall sense discourse of sounds, or of any Tactile qualities without the message as it were, and information of the outward senses, by which the Images of thinges are imprinted in it.4 Crooke’s language renders the intellect the arbiter of the information ­provided to it by the senses: the intellect, in a “Tribunall,” will “pronounce a true judgement” on sensory data. As such, the intellect appears at first superior to the senses, for it must weigh and make pronouncements upon sensory information and the veracity of the senses themselves. Yet the intellect cannot function properly (i.e., it will be “imperfect and unprofitable”) in the absence of the external senses, which provide the “originall” by which the intellect may access the outside world. Without external senses, the mind is barren. Ideas conceived in the mind—by the interaction of penetrating sensory information and receptive intellect, and “nourished” to full size by the “ventilation” of discourse—require the external senses and their appropriate functioning. Lurking in Crooke’s paean to the senses is the idea of communication not only between the external senses and the intellect but also amongst the senses themselves. Specifically, Crooke deploys the word discourse, two senses of which are here tidily collapsed: that of thinking and that of speech.5 It is

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through such discourse, the bearer of “the message” from the outside world, that the “Images of thinges are imprinted” in the intellect, and that the intellect can distill and synthesize the “colours, odours … savours,” sounds, and “Tactile qualities” provided to it by the senses. Without such discourse, the intellectual “Tribunall” simply could not be held. Discourse enables thought via speech, whether the speech is metaphorical or literal, and it is with this positive view of speech in mind that I turn now to the subject of this essay. The academic play Lingua, Or The Combat of the Tongue, And the five Senses for Superiority, printed in 1607, is generally attributed to Thomas Tomkis and is thought to have been written and performed in 1602.6 In print, at least, the play was enormously successful, going through six editions by 1657 and being translated into German, Dutch, and Latin, this last being, as Patricia Parker notes, a “rare distinction.”7 At once a satirical comedy and a learned document of early modern theories about the human body, the play in its prologue promises that it has “taught severe Phylosophy to smile” in order to “give displeas’d ambitious TONGUE her due.”8 In a feat of undercutting indicative of the play’s general tone, the ambitious tongue is indeed given her due, albeit one that comes at the price of her freedom and license. Also at stake in the play is what the prologue terms “The Senses rash contentions.” Though the play seems to pronounce such contentions as just and justified, I argue that Tomkis demonstrates the crucial role of discourse (in the form of Lingua herself) in either forging or destroying the connections amongst the senses, and between the senses and the intellect. The second quotation at the beginning of this chapter, by Michel Serres, notes that the intimate link between sensation and intellect, which Aquinas posits and which Crooke embellishes, is in fact a thing of the past. Lingua marks the tongue’s ability to move Proteus-like among modes of signification, to manipulate discourse in the service of her own agency, and to control (or wrest from control) the flow of information from the senses to the intellect. In her essay in this volume, Jyotsna G. Singh argues that Cleopatra’s “protean and myriad performances” in Anthony and Cleopatra reveal her “processes of emotional navigation.” This essay, too, will celebrate the protean unfixity of Lingua as it traces her materialization of the complex performativity of the tongue in the early modern period.9 In ways both serious and comical, Tomkis’s Lingua is perhaps ground zero for the uncoupling of sense and intellect. The chief conflict in the play, which takes place in the land of Microcosmus ruled by Queen Psyche, is between Lingua, who represents the tongue (though the terms of this representation are, as we shall see, more complicated), and the five Senses. Lingua desires to be numbered among the Senses—her “right,” she claims, “is to make the Senses sixe; / And have both name and power with the rest” (A4v). To that end, she enlists the help of her page Mendacio and leaves out a robe and crown she won from a tournament of orators, as “chiefe patronesse of their profession” (B2r). Lingua instructs Mendacio to “faine them some pritty fable, how that some God”

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84  Lianne Habinek left the items to be claimed by the best of the Senses (B2r). Each Sense arrives in turn—first Tactus, then Olfactus, Visus, Auditus, and Gustus—to argue his right to the items; eventually, civil war breaks out in Microcosmus, as Visus allies with Auditus, Tactus with Gustus, and Olfactus fights alone. A panel of judges, comprising Phantastes, Memoria, and Communis Sensus, assembles to determine which Sense really is chief, and to decide whether Lingua ought to be numbered among the Senses. Each of the Senses in turn presents his case, in elaborate emblematic masque-like shows; in the end, Visus is determined the prime sense, followed closely by Auditus (they split the crown); then Olfactus (who is made Psyche’s chief priest); then Tactus (who gets the robe); and finally Gustus (made “Psyche her onely taster, and great purveior for all her dominions”) (I3v). Lingua, meanwhile, is judged not to be a proper sense, but is made a sixth sense for women, “the last and feminine sense, the sense of speaking” (I4r). Lingua, displeased with the denial of her petition, poisons the Senses in revenge. Crapula and Somnus are left to pick up the pieces, with Somnus putting everyone, including Lingua, to sleep; the sleeping Lingua reveals her plot and is famously ordered to be shut up in Gustus’s house, “under the custody of two strong doors … with 30 tall watchmen” lest she “wagge abroad” (M4v). The problem, of course, is whether Lingua ought to be considered a sense. As the above passage from Crooke suggests, “discourse” enables communication amongst the senses—but should that capacity for communication itself become a sense? As Lingua claims, “a sense is a facultie, by which our Queene sitting in her privy Chamber hath intelligence of exterior occurents” (F3r). She begins to prove she is “of this nature” but is interrupted by the arrival of Appetitus, who delivers the Senses’ articles of treason against Lingua. These articles end with the “last and worst” item, “that shee’s a Woman in every respect and … not to bee admitted to the dignitie of a Sense.” Yet they also complain that she has “profited the people with translations,” has “prostituted the hard misteries of unknowne Languages to the prophane eares of the vulgar,” has imprisoned Veritas, is a witch who “excerciseth her tongue in exorcismes,” is a “common whore,” will “rail[e] on men in Authoritie,” will “len[d] wives weapons to fight against their husbands,” will “delude the Commanalty,” and is “an incontinent Tel-tale” (F3r–v). The mixture of antifeminist diatribe with post-Reformation criticism of the democratization of language must sit heavily with anyone approaching the play. Critical commentary on Lingua has quite reasonably fallen into two ­categories: historical-literary referents, and feminist considerations of the status of the female tongue in the early modern period.10 Yet from a broader perspective, it becomes clear that the tongue in Lingua signifies on multiple levels, involving itself in a discourse of affection. To be sure, Tomkis uses such a variety of approaches largely to skewer them comically, but the play contains a quite sophisticated (and at times strikingly modern) material performance of the body’s functions, informed by medical, theological, and poetic works which treat the body. Tomkis employs this multivalent

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knowledge to make a critical point: that the double (or more) nature of the tongue allows Lingua to do what the other Senses cannot, namely, to parse information selectively, and that this ability poses a threat to an established sensory order. On an allegorical level, the play suggests that certain types of knowledge offer an alternative to dominant modes of accessing information about the world. My key questions here are twofold: First, what is Lingua actually meant to represent, both from anatomical and allegorical standpoints; and second, what does such a characterization of the tongue as distinct from the faculty of taste reveal about the connection between body parts and senses on a more comprehensive scale? Ian Moulton’s essay in this volume describes an early modern discourse on “the materiality of love,” in which it is assumed that “love has material causes and can be treated by physical means.” In the words of Jacques Ferrand, whom Moulton glosses, once love hits, “[t]he Senses are all out of order, the Reason is disturbed, the Imagination depraved, the discourses are all impertinent.”11 Given that Lingua is capable of disrupting the entire microcosmos in the same way that love can, what precisely is being materialized in Tomkis’ play? The office of the tongue comes under scrutiny in Lingua: what Lingua is able to do with respect to language constitutes both the judgment against her and her own defense. As Carla Mazzio suggests, “[I]n Lingua the ‘passion for measurement’ and the ‘visual bias’ of sensory perception are turned inside out and upside down. This allegory is preoccupied with the question of ‘sense-ratios’ (what sense is valued most being the central question of the play) and particularly with the vulnerability of quantitative models.”12 Lingua is at first admitted only as half a sense, restricted to women only. After her treachery has been uncovered—ironically due to her own unrestrained tongue—she is further reduced. Yet the implied question of whether speech or language actually can be thought of as a sense has serious implications for the rest of the play. For example, Auditus denies Lingua’s petition on purely numerical terms: “[F]rom the first foundation of the world, / We never were accounted more then five” (A3r). Communis Sensus elaborates, arguing that “[t]he number of the Senses in this little world, is answerable to the first bodies in the great world,” such that, as there are “foure elements and the pure substance of the heavens,” “by which five means only the understanding is able to apprehend the knowledge of all Corporeall substances,” so there can only be five Senses (I3v–I4v). Thus, the reason why the five senses are no more than five is a pretty reason: because they are not six. Tellingly, Lingua does not comment immediately on her new designation. Her scheme for revenge upsets both Communis Sensus’s judgment and the play’s genre because in their drugged state all the Senses are equally reduced and because the revenge plot sways the academic approach the play had taken. Lingua’s challenge initiates a self-examination of all the Senses, as each strives to be rated the best, and consequently the very notion of what comprises a sense comes under scrutiny. The possibility that speaking could be considered a sense seems first to have been proposed in the fourteenth century

86  Lianne Habinek

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by Ramon Llull who, according to Mark Johnston, argues that “through speech men most share in loving, best help and understand each other, create knowledge, and achieve virtue.”13 While Llull’s suggestion seems not to have been subsequently elaborated upon, it is precisely Lingua’s point in her own argument for her inclusion among the Senses: Howe many bloudlesse Battailes have my perswasions attained, when the senses forces have beene vanquished. Howe many Rebells have I reclaymed when [Psyche’s] sacred authority, was little regarded … [Her laws] had beene altogither unpublished, her will unperformed, her illustrious deedes unrenoumed had not the silver sound of my trumpet filled the whole circuit of the Universe with her deserved fame. Her Citties would dissolve, traffique would decay, friendshippes be broken, were not my speech the knot. (F2v–F3r) Lingua’s defense eloquently counters the Senses’ articles against her, as she explains how language works to smooth and connect, to forestall battle and rebellion, and to publish Psyche’s laws and will. Lingua’s voice moves from gentle “perswasions” to a trumpet blast filling “the whole circuit of the Universe,” proving that she can moderate herself to fit the situation, her speech “the knot” to bind friendships, “traffique,” and entire cities. How are we to reconcile Lingua’s passionate defense with the articles of treason brought against her by the Senses? One approach lies in the tongue’s ability (or lack thereof) to moderate itself. Lingua claims her own authority, though for the early modern tongue in general this ability was by no means a given. The question of who or what ought to control the tongue has particular moral and anatomical solutions in the early modern period. Certainly the mouth as a prison was a vivid and accessible idea, yet it is not without its discontents. An early seventeenth-century moral tract offers a typically problematic rendering of the tongue’s power and its need for control: First, he (God) hath made it [the tongue] tender and soft, to signify our wordes shoulde be of like temper. Secondly he hath tied it with many threades and stringes, to restrain and bridle it. Thirdly, it is every way blunt, whereby we are admonished that our words ought not to be pricking or hurtfull. And fourthlye, it is enclosed with a quicke-set and strong rampier of teeth and gummes, and with lippes which are as gates to shut it uppe, for feare it should take too much liberty.14 If the tongue is “tender and soft” as well as “every way blunt,” why does it require “threades and stringes to restrain and bridle it,” along with a “strong rampier” of teeth, gums, and lips to act as “gates to shut it uppe”? Any

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distinction between the tongue and its offices is elided, its offices reduced to one only. No mention is made here of tasting or allowing food to pass, for the mouth is a prison for the speaking, not the tasting, tongue. The tongue’s very anatomy suggests that the temperance we ought to seek lies forever out of our grasp. Our words, for example, “shoulde be” soft and tender, and “ought not to be” hurtful or pricking, for the tongue itself is soft, but perpetually part of its physiognomy is the danger that it might become a weapon. Lingua, on the other hand, appears to operate without the authority of God and the “threades and stringes” and the “rampier” are only imposed upon her later as judgment for her transgressions. Because of her independent power, she presents a challenge to the dominant hierarchy of the Senses, who are both apparently autonomous and subservient to the will of Psyche and the triumvirate of judges. Tomkis’s play largely revolves around various attempts to control Lingua, or to demonstrate the superiority of the other, established, Senses. Lingua herself manipulates the Senses readily enough, and this manipulation represents perhaps the largest threat to the Senses’ own power. Consider, for example, Lingua’s synesthetic case, made in soliloquy in the first scene of play, for why she should have “both name and power with the rest” of the senses: Oft have I seasoned savorie periods, With sugred words, to delude Gustus taste, And oft embelisht my entreative phrase With smelling flowers of vernant Rhetorique, Limming and slashing it with various Dyes, To draw proud Visus to me by the eyes: And oft perfum’d my petitory stile, With Civet-speach, t’entrap Olfactus Nose, And clad my selfe in Silken Eloquence, To allure the nicer touch of Tactus hand[.] (A4v) Lingua here reorders the standard hierarchical ordering of the senses later deployed by the play. Instead of vision’s primacy, Lingua refers first to taste, then to vision, smell, and touch (hearing she leaves out presumably because her words have so far failed to sway Auditus, with whom she shares an opening debate).15 Lingua’s argument is highly physical and highly sensual: she manages quite spectacularly to detail her capacity to woo the other Senses with language drawn from each Sense’s perceptive domain. For Gustus, her periods and words are “savorie” and “sugred;” for Visus she decks her rhetoric with “various Dyes;” Olfactus she “entraps” with “perfum’d” style and “Civet-speech;” and she makes her eloquence “Silken” to draw Tactus to her. For Visus, Olfactus, and Tactus, Lingua points to their corresponding body part, and we can imagine if she had included Auditus she would have referred to his ears.

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88  Lianne Habinek Yet in the case of Gustus, Lingua claims she deludes his “taste,” not his tongue, and this should give us pause. Gustus and Lingua by necessity have a curiously intimate relationship. In Lingua’s revision, taste’s primacy is due to its close anatomical link to Lingua herself, a point which Gustus himself (albeit while under the spell of Lingua’s poison) confesses: Worried that the sleeping Lingua is dead, he cries out, “Ah peerelesse Lingua mistresse of heavenly words, / Sweete tongue of eloquence, the life of fame, / Heart’s deare enchantresse what disaster fates / Have rest this Jewell from our ­common-wealth” (L3r). Gustus’s special distress here hints at the immediate anatomical connection between taste and speech. In Phineas Fletcher’s Purple Island, Gustus and Lingua live together: With Gustus, Lingua dwells, his prattling wife, Indu’d with strange and adverse qualities; The nurse of hate and love, of peace and strife, Mother of fairest truth, and foulest lies: Of best or worst—no mean—made all of fire, Which sometimes hell, and sometimes heav’ns inspire.16 In Tomkis’s play, Lingua’s ultimate punishment is that she is committed “to close prison, in Gustus his house,” to be kept “under the custody” of the lips and watched by the teeth, and if she should “wagge abroad,” she will have to “weare a velvet hood, made just in the fashion of a great Tongue,” which is “a very pritty Embleme of a Woman” in Phantastes’s opinion (M4v). For Tomkis, cohabitation with Gustus is a punitive action, and the idea is to constrain Lingua and to collapse her office with her fleshy being, both of which combine, emblematically, to underline her status as woman. In Fletcher’s rendition, Lingua has been married off to Gustus and the hinted connection in Tomkis is made explicit. For Tomkis’s Gustus, Lingua has an entirely positive function, to bring forth “heavenly words,” to be the “Sweete tongue of eloquence,” to enchant the heart, and Gustus’s reading lines up with Lingua’s own claims. Fletcher, on the other hand, brings to the fore the double nature of the tongue—a duality that functions on multiple levels. Gustus and Lingua must share a house, so taste and speech must live together; then, too, speech itself is double in nature, inspiring both peace and strife, truth and lies, best and worst, hell and heaven. Yet the tongue is not entirely to blame for conveying these mighty opposites to the mind. The metaphorical and allegorical duality of the tongue is treated in Lingua as part of Lingua’s nature, as she has her two surrogates (Mendacio and the mentioned-but-never-appearing Veritas whom Lingua commands Mendacio to “[l]ock up” (B1v)), and she is at the center of the play’s dual plots (serious rhetoric versus farcical revenge). I want here to explore this duality in anatomical and allegorical contexts, in order to illuminate the strong reaction the rest of the Senses have to

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Lingua who, after all, is physically part and parcel with Gustus. ­Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin calls the double function of the tongue “a complicated and dangerous crossroads,” an apt characterization of the situation.17 The Epistle of James wonders that “[e]ven so the tongue is a little member, and boasteth great things: behold, how great a matter a little fire kindleth;” “the tongue can no man tame, it is an unruly evill, full of deadly poison.”18 So small a being is endued with so much power—the serpent, after all, seduced Eve through speech, and so all of mankind fell because of the too-easy passage of words.19 Here the tongue is a masculine entity; certainly this was what Ferdinand means, for all that he protests, when he claims that “women like that part, which like the lamprey, / Hath nev’r a bone in’t.”20 John Bulwer’s collection of early modern body modification curiosities, Anthropometamorphosis, highlights the dangerous duality of the organ.21 Control of the wayward tongue is crucial, so it is no curiosity that the bulk of Bulwer’s gloss is devoted to a midwifery practice described by Aquapendentius, in which the “bridle” of the infant’s tongue (the ligament holding the tongue to the floor of the mouth) is cut by the midwife, who wears “the Naile of [her] right Thumbe long, but conform’d into the rising edge of a pen-knife” for the purpose (Ii3r).22 The anatomists Bulwer cites worry that the cutting of the bridle will result in muteness, pain, or even death, as the unskillful midwife’s nail might inadvertently cause dangerous inflammation. Nature placed the bridle as she did, Bulwer argues, “for the firmament of [the tongue’s] Basis,” “that the tip of [the tongue] might be easily moved everyway,” and that “it restraines the Tongue from being drawn backe beyond measure … and it hinders the Tongue from being put forth too monstrously and indecently, and from being too exorbitantly led to any one side” (Ii3v). The midwives, “as women are great friends to loquacity,” are thus in error, for they would remove the very structure that contains the motion of the tongue—yet this motion, curiously, is distinct from speaking, for, as Bulwer claims “Loquacity or Taciturnity depends upon a higher principle” (ibid). Instead of an instant cutting at birth, Bulwer urges the reader to wait until the child has grown into an adult, at which point if it is necessary “a skilfull Chirurgion” may cut the bridle “with caution” (Ii4v).23 Bulwer’s gloss on the tongue juxtaposes anatomy with morality, masculine academic restraint with feminine folkloric liberty, and careful distinctions with the collapse of the same.24 In Tomkis’s play, the tongue’s double nature is both hinted at and unacknowledged to its complete extent: female loquaciousness should be shown up by “restrained” masculine rhetoric, but this rhetoric ultimately proves useless. Each of the Senses, in a masque-like presentation of his power, is forced to emend or gloss his own display. When, for example, Visus presents a riddle, everyone has a go at solving it, but even the panel of esteemed judges (who, presumably, are in control of the flow of knowledge in Microcosmos) cannot answer correctly (G1v–G2r). Auditus has to ask his audience if they are deaf, for they seem not to “perceive the wondrous sound the heavenly orbes do make” (G3v). None of the

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90  Lianne Habinek Senses, that is, can completely explicate himself; Lingua can, but her own ­explanation is cast aside as so much womanish prating. Such gendered duality suggests, too, a concern with sexuality, which a detail from the frontispiece of Bulwer’s Anthropometamorphosis hints at (Figure 6.1). The rear of one of the revelers on the title page has been painted or tattooed to resemble a human face, with an eye on either cheek and a nose growing out of the division. We might reasonably expect to find the mouth hidden within the shadowy folds, and thus the tongue would correspond to the man’s penis. Here, then, is Ferdinand’s lamprey, albeit tidily hidden in this image.25 The connection between the tongue and the sexual organs is likewise made explicit in early modern emblems, such as Claude Paradin’s “device” (Figure 6.2).26 Paradin’s tongue, divorced from

Figure 6.1 Detail of title page, Bulwer, Anthropometamorphosis (A2r). (©) The British Library Board, E.700 page A2r.

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“Displeas’d Ambitious Tongue”  91

Figure 6.2 “Quò tendis?” Paradin, Heroicall Devises (I5r). Courtesy of the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

any earthly context, is an arresting image that, at first pass, appears not to be a tongue at all. The image’s title, Quò tendis? or “Whether goest thou?” invites speculation not only as to the place the tongue-ish creature will ultimately go (“whither”) but also as to “whether” it will go at all. The organ itself rises sinuously upwards, with a bulbous end. One could be forgiven for mistaking the tongue here for a penis.27 The image certainly invites comparison between the tongue and some sexual organ, and the attendant gender ambiguity only serves to make the tongue that much more problematic. The coils of the creature’s tail make vivid and explicit a connection to the serpent, while the unfeathered wings suggest devilish, rather than angelic, associations. In Paradin’s depiction, the tongue is at once fleshier and more surreal, pointing to (demonic) equivocation, a refusal to be connected to male or female, to earth or to heavens; to signify, that is, in any one ­direction at all. Such equivocation is precisely the problem at the heart of Tomkis’s ­Lingua. Lingua is condemned because she is a woman, but she is fully capable of masculine actions, and as such she can cross boundaries the Senses cannot.28

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92  Lianne Habinek The other Senses are threatened by Lingua because she perverts gender norms: They are genuinely masculine, while the tongue can, disturbingly and unnervingly, cross gender borders. From a rhetorical perspective, the tongue should be strong, convincing, and masculine. Yet garrulousness signifies, in the Senses’ opinion, as feminine, hence their “last and worst” charge, “that shee’s a Woman in every respect” (F3v). Then again, in the last act of the play, Lingua spreads poison such that, as a speaking agent, she penetrates the Senses, casting herself as masculine and each of them as feminine. Part of Lingua’s power as a potential sense is that she possesses the capacity to discern information and, subsequently, to allow what she calls the “free passage” of petitions and ideas. Her argument is that she can truthfully translate outside information to the intellect, whereas any sensory input is necessarily muddled by the Senses’ biased and self-important interpretations. Each of the other Five Senses shows his failings in this aspect at some point, as not only are they easily duped into civil war, they are also easily poisoned. In fact, the relative permeability of the senses was a special topic in early modern anatomical treatments and has been examined in a literary context.29 Key are Lingua’s objections regarding what the Senses have to do with this potentially faulty passing-on of information: Communis Sensus, Lingua claims, is informed by the Senses’ “false evidence”: So that a plaintife cannot have accesse, But through your gates hee heares but what, nought els But that thy [i.e., Auditus’s] crafty eares to him convaies, And all hee sees is by proud Visus shewed him: And what hee touches is by Tactus hand, And smells I know but through Olfactus nose, Gustus begins to him what ere he tastes: By these quaint tricks free passage hath beene bard[.] (A3v) Lingua criticizes the fact that each Sense mars his information, largely because each Sense has access only to a particular slice of the true world, the “free passage” of which is crucial, in Lingua’s opinion, for information untainted by craftiness, pride, and other “quaint tricks.” Sensory bias collectively “muffle[s] common sense: / And more, and more with pleasing objects strive[s], / To dull his judgment and pervert his will” with “darke pollicies” (A4r). Such muffling is dangerous, for where the Senses ought to be facilitating the flow of information from the physical world to the intellect, instead their preoccupations delude the mind. Despite the fact that Lingua herself ends up being severely punished, the play actually does little to counter her assessment of the Senses’ failings. Instead, Lingua offers an alternative means of “sensation,” one grounded on a control of information in a way the Senses are not capable of. Lingua complains that the Senses’ knowledge “is only of things present, quickly sublimed with the deft file of time; whereas the tongue is able to recount

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“Displeas’d Ambitious Tongue”  93

thinges past, and often pronounce things to come, by this means re-edifying such Excellencies, as Time and Age doe easily depopulate” (F2v). As Carpenter observes, here Lingua demonstrates “how language escapes the temporal limitation of the senses,” for each of them is bound to what he can experience at one particular point in time.30 Lingua, who has or claims to have more direct access to truth unbound by temporal restrictions, may convey knowledge of all things. She readily distinguishes herself from the decrepit Memoria, whose stores of past information overflow so much that he must depend upon a sardonic Anamnestes for support, and from the overbearing Phantastes, whose flights of fancy have placed him as the author of all great literature. She proposes for language a role that seems to integrate all the powers of common sense, yet without the need for mediation by any external senses. Lingua offers Crooke’s “discourse” the free communication of information uncoupled from sensory intrusion. She might have succeeded in such a petition, were it not for her dangerous duality. The articles of treason call her a prostitute and a whore, and Auditus complains that “[w]ords are thy Children, but of my begetting,” whereas she defends her “unspotted chastity” (A4r). The slippery nature of her sexuality, and of the perceived sexuality of the tongue in general, is problematic. The tongue’s alliance with speech and taste, and language’s alliance with hand and tongue, likewise work against her. Indeed, Lingua’s own contrary desires undermine her chances at being taken seriously: though she is the somber “chiefe patronesse” of orators, she also asks herself, “Art not a woman, doost not love revenge?” (B1v, A4v). Ultimately, the very clash of opposites in Lingua undoes her petition. One of the celebratory poems in another of Bulwer’s manuals, Chirologia, praises the hand’s “mute Vocalitie,” a paradox signaling the degree to which the hand is capable of controlling itself in its speech.31 The same, of course, cannot be said for the tongue: for Tomkis and Bulwer, this feminine organ requires constraint from without, whether (in Tomkis’s case) by the teeth, or (in Bulwer’s case) through (masculine) surgical hands. It is fitting, then, that the only image in Chirologia to show a woman is one in which her hand is used to silence her tongue (Figure 6.3). The hand here is disproportionately large with respect to the size of the woman’s head, a disjunction the other, male, figures do not suffer.32 Mazzio notes that, for early modern plays (and revenge tragedies more specifically), “If the tongue is imagined as the site where discursive and moral contagion begins and ends, it seems logical to detach it in the act of punishing transgression.”33 Instead of detachment, Lingua marks a different sort of punishment: The chastised and wayward tongue is bound indelibly to the body and all the body’s attendant materiality. She—or rather, it, as punishment must strip the tongue of power and gender—may no longer operate freely on any level. Effectively and affectively silenced, the tongue’s powers of discourse and signification are rendered useless by outward restraint. The tongue is hidden, contained in the mouth, in submission to the hand, feminine only in being made silent.

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94  Lianne Habinek

Figure 6.3  Bulwer, “IX Gesture: Silentium indico,” Chirologia (N7r). Courtesy of the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign.

NOTES 1.  I am exceedingly grateful for the criticism of Alex Benson, Maria Cecire, Lauren Curtis, and Erica Kaufman, who read an early draft of this essay. 2.  Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones disputatae de veritate, trans. Robert W. Mulligan (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1952), q. 2 art. III arg. 19. 3.  Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies, trans. M ­ argaret Sankey and Peter Cowley (New York: Continuum, 2008), 154. 4.  Helkiah Crooke, Mikrokosmographia (London, 1615), Iii6r. 5.  Oxford English Dictionary Online, “discourse, noun. 2a & 3a,” “discourse, verb. 2b & 3a,” http://www.oed.com. 6.  The title page of Lingua has no authorial attribution; a 1610 notebook entry by John Harington (BL Add MS 27632) ascribes the play to Tomkis; see Alan ­Nelson, ed., Records of Early English Drama: Cambridge 2 (Toronto: ­University of Toronto Press, 1989): 853. For dating, see F. S. Boas, ­“Macbeth and Lingua,” The Modern Language Review 4.4 (1909): 518, though he posits a date of composition for Lingua closer to Macbeth’s in 1606. See, too, G. C. Moore Smith, “Notes on Some English University Plays,” The Modern ­Language Review 3.2 (1908): 146–9, who suggests that Tomkis was likely not the author, given ­topical historical allusions that would likely have been before Tomkis’s time.

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7.  Patricia Parker, “On The Tongue: Cross Gendering, Effeminacy, and the Art of Words,” Style: A Quarterly Journal of Aesthetics, Poetics, Stylistics, and Literary Criticism 23 (1989): 454; Morris P. Tilley, “The Comedy Lingua and Sir John Davies’s Nosce Teipsum,” Modern Language Notes 44.1 (1929): 36. Tomkis’s other (known) play, Albumazar, was also a success in print; see Zachary Lesser, Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 71. 8.  Thomas Tomkis, Lingua, Or The Combat of the Tongue, And the five Senses for Superiority (London, 1607), A2v. 9.  Singh, “‘Come, Eros, Eros!’,” 103. 10.  For the first category, see Boas, “Macbeth and Lingua”; Smith, “Notes”; Alan Stewart and Garret A. Sullivan Jr., “‘Worme-Eaten, and Full of Canker Holes’: Materializing Memory in The Faerie Queene and Lingua,” Spenser ­Studies 17 (2003): 215–238; Morris Tilley, “The Comedy Lingua and Du Bartas’ La S­ epmaine,” Modern Language Notes 42.5 (1927): 293–299; Tilley, “The ­Comedy Lingua and the Faerie Queene,” Modern Language Notes 42.3 (1927): 150–157. For the second category, see Sarah Carpenter, “‘My Lady Tongue’: Thomas Tomkis’s Lingua,” Medieval English Theatre 24 (2002): 3–14; Carla Mazzio, “Sins of the Tongue in Early Modern England,” Modern Language Studies 28.3–4 (1998): 93–124; and Parker, “On the Tongue.” 11. Moulton, “Monstrous Teardrops,” 77. Ferrand, Jacques. A Treatise on Lovesickness, ed. and trans. Donald A. Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990, 67–8. 12. Carla Mazzio, “Acting with Tact: Touch and Theater in the Renaissance,” in ­Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 168. Mazzio quotes David Howes, “Sensorial Anthropology,” in Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses, ed. David Howes (Toronto: ­University of Toronto Press, 1971), 167–91, 185. 13.  Mark D. Johnston, “The Treatment of Speech in Medieval Ethical and Courtesy Literature,” Rhetorica 4.1 (1986): 29. The reference is to a passage in Llull’s Liber de Affatu, hoc est de sexto sensu (Lo sisèn seny lo qual apelam afatus); see Ramon Llull, Affatus, ed. Armand Llinarès and Alexandre Jean Gondras, Archives d’Histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Age 51 (1984): 269–97; see also Carpenter, “My Lady Tongue,” 5, 13 n.10. 14.  Joseph Hall or Richard Humfrey (?),The Anathomie of Sinne (London: 1603), quoted in Vienne-Guerrin, “Introduction,” in The Unruly Tongue in Early Modern England: Three Treatises, ed. Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin (Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2012), xxxiv, xlvii n. 123. 15.  See Robert Jütte, A History of the Senses: From Antiquity to Cyberspace, trans. James Lynn (Oxford: Polity Press, 2005), 54–71. It is curious that Auditus does not warrant inclusion on Lingua’s list, given the importance of the relationship between speech and hearing. 16.  Phineas Fletcher, The Purple Island (London, 1633): H2v. 17.  Vienne-Guerrin, “Introduction,” xxxv. 18.  Epistle of James, KJV 1611, 3:5, 3:8. 19. See Bryan Crockett, “‘Holy Cozenage’ and the Renaissance Cult of the Ear,” Sixteenth Century Journal 24.1 (1993): 48–51.

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96  Lianne Habinek 20.  John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, ed. Brian Gibbons (London: A&C Black, 2001), 1.1.328–9. 21.  But see George Webbe, who claims that the tongue has “a threefold Office, to be Taster, Interpreter, and Controwler.” The Araignment of an Unruly Tongue (London, 1619), in Vienne-Guerrin, 86. 22. “Tongue-tie,” or ankyloglossia, is a common abnormality in which the lingual frenulum is overly short and thick, resulting, it is thought, in speech and (for infants) feeding impediments. See Anna H. Messner and M. Lauren Lalkea, “The effect of ankyloglossia on speech in children,” Otolaryngology 127.6 (2002): 539–45. 23.  It is important to note that Bulwer chides the midwives for using pen-knives, whereas the surgeons may rely on the knowledge they acquired presumably through reading (printed) books. Lingua, as Mazzio suggests, makes reference to anxiety about the transition of oral to written to print culture; see Mazzio, “Sins,” 106. 24. Yet should the surgeon opt to cut the bridle, the tongue would be loosed to loquacity. 25.  For more on the early modern identification of tongue and phallus, see Mazzio, “Sins,” 100–101. 26. Claudius Paradin, The Heroicall Devises of M. Claudius Paradin, trans. P.S. (London, 1591), I5r–v. See also George Wither, A Collection of Emblemes ­ ­(London, 1635), esp. G1v; see also Mazzio’s reading of the emblem “No heart can thinke,” which borrows explicitly from Paradin’s emblem (Mazzio, “Sins,” 94). 27.  Or for an inverted vagina, which, in the early modern imagination, would have appeared anatomically similar to the penis. For discussion of this problem in particular, see Thomas Laqueur, “Sex in the Flesh,” Isis 94.2 (2003): 301–3. See also Michael Stolberg, “A Woman Down to Her Bones: The Anatomy of Sexual Difference in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries,” Isis 94.1 (2003): 276 for refutation of Laqueur’s “one-sex” model. 28. See Parker, “On the Tongue,” for discussion of the fact that in early performances of the play all the roles were played by men. 29.  See, for example: Peter Cummings, “Hearing in Hamlet: Poisoned Ears and the Psychopathology of Flawed Audition,” Shakespeare Yearbook 1 (1990): 81–92; and Elizabeth D. Harvey, “The Touching Organ: Allegory, Anatomy, and the Renaissance Skin Envelope,” in Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early M ­ odern ­Culture, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 81–102. 30.  Carpenter, “My Lady Tongue,” 10. 31.  J[ohn] B[ulwer], Chirologia: Or the Naturall Language of the Hand (London: 1644), A4v. 32. Another figure, who represents putting one’s finger in one’s eye to help the ­passage of tears, covers his face with his hand, but his outstretched finger clearly points to his eye. 33.  Mazzio, “Sins,” 105.

7 “Come, Eros, Eros!”

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Rereading Emotion and Affect in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra Jyotsna G. Singh

SETTING THE SCENE: “BEGUILED ME TO THE VERY HEART OF LOSS” It is a critical commonplace to approach Shakespeare’s characters, Antony and Cleopatra, as histrionic figures who do not convey a sense of interiority. They do not beckon audiences into any personal psychic journeys via soliloquies, and neither do they appear together in private at any time in the play. Among generations of viewers, the character of Cleopatra bears a particular burden because of easy associations between her self-conscious theatricality and abiding stereotypes of female changeability. Actors playing the part of Cleopatra also have been drawn to the histrionic dimensions of the role, often succumbing to an image of her as a wily game-player, while downplaying any intimations of a complex emotional make-up. One telling example of such an approach can be found in the response of the nineteenth-century actress Ellen Terry, as Michael Neill summarizes: To the distinguished … actress Ellen Terry, for example, the problem of satisfactorily interpreting the part of Cleopatra lay less in any actual psychological complexity than in the Queen’s histrionic ability to create an illusion of deep feeling by putting “all her emotions into words.” In spite of this eloquence, however, Terry found that “she gives … the impression of saying more than she feels.” The dramatist had clearly conceived the Queen as a “woman with a shallow nature,” she concluded, and “I should like to see her played as such. […However,] if she is represented as a great woman with a great and sincere passion for Antony, the part does not hang together.”1 Later generations of actors have also often approached the roles of both Antony and Cleopatra “by ironizing” the central relationship, emphasizing the self-conscious theatricality of their engagement, while not plumbing too deeply into the emotional resonances of their “hyperbolic rhetoric.” In the same vein, actors found no easy resolution when deciding whether to downplay the protagonists’ passionate eroticism for their games and power maneuvers.2 Of course, these debates on performance styles remind

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98  Jyotsna G. Singh us that Shakespeare does not afford his protagonists in this play the kind of multi-layered interiority that he allows Hamlet and Macbeth, for instance. Nonetheless, it is also worth keeping in mind that the protagonists’ ­interactions are not entirely performative but also emerge from, and are represented by, a rich and constantly varying palette of emotions, ranging from flirtation to eroticism, jealousy, and suicidal despair, among numerous others.3 In this essay I wish to counter Ellen Terry’s dismissal of Cleopatra’s (and Antony’s) potential for affective complexity and consider instead, that (flipping Terry’s words) they are capable of “feeling more than they say.” In following this claim, I take an affective journey into the world of Antony and Cleopatra, beginning with their interactions below, in 4.13. Antony: O this false soul of Egypt! this grave charm, Whose eye becked forth my wars, and called them home, Whose bosom was my crownet, my chief end,— Like a gypsy hath at fast and loose, Beguiled me to the very heart of loss. What Eros, Eros! (4.13.25–30)4 After Cleopatra’s departure from the sea battle at Actium, Antony’s sense of betrayal is expressed in language shot through with the self-revealing and self-altering emotional dynamic that defines their relationship. Here he expresses his strong bond to Cleopatra, albeit under duress in this instance, revealing how his sense of his own martial identity—including his “wars,” his “crownet”—has been subsumed by the appeal of Cleopatra’s charms. In Antony’s vision at this juncture, her beguilements are all negative, and he echoes the Roman condemnation of Cleopatra as a “gypsy” from the play’s opening lines. This expression seems to reveal Antony’s utter sense of despair—“the very heart of loss”—followed immediately by his angry resolve: “The witch shall die! / To the young Roman boy she hath sold me, and I fall / Under this plot—she dies for’t. Eros, ho!” (4.13. 47–49). Cleopatra herself is also wrestling with emotional turmoil in this moment: she is filled with despair and also deploys a rehearsal of her death to regain Antony’s affection: To th’ monument! Mardian, go tell him I have slain myself; Say that the last I spoke was ‘Anthony,’ And word it, prithee, piteously. Hence Mardian, And bring me how he takes my death. (4.14.6–10) Typically, this scene reinforces the view of Cleopatra as a performer par excellence, not unlike the classical and Renaissance sources in which she is repeatedly identified in terms of her propensity for role playing—and for

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“Come, Eros, Eros!”  99

her “infinite variety”—which is as much about control over historiography as over performance. A shrewd ruler like Cleopatra (like Elizabeth I herself, as some critics have noted) knows that political life is relentlessly theatrical; political rulers are always performing for the court or the public, and they must to some degree please their audiences if they wish to rule effectively.5 Furthermore, this play offers formal challenges that make it a distinctive kind of tragedy. “It eschews the device by which Shakespearean tragedy had hitherto achieved its most powerful psychological successes—­ soliloquy … [and] the play’s fascination with rhetorical surfaces, combined with its discontinuous, moment-by-moment psychology, means it is difficult to speak of anything ‘beneath’ or ‘behind’ its language.”6 Thus, questions arise as to whether this scene is simply a mercurial moment of play-acting on Cleopatra’s part—a form of “beguilement,” as Antony puts it. Are we to view Cleopatra’s theatrical flauntings as entirely unmoored from her emotions? Or, alternatively, by choosing to enact or cognitively rehearse her death does Cleopatra also embody or intensify emotions associated with loss, separation, and dying? As Margaret Clark has suggested, the choice to express an emotion may create the actual experience of that feeling, while the choice to suppress it may have the opposite effect.7 Interestingly, Hamlet’s reaction to the player’s emotionally charged Hecuba speech seems to make a similar point—“what’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba that he should weep for him?” 8 This indicates Shakespeare’s fascination with the way in which acted emotion, in some mysterious way, becomes “real.” In this context, Cleopatra’s theatrical renderings of affective processes can offer rich possibilities of emotional exploration beyond the calculated performances of the stereotypical Cleopatra as a shallow femme fatale, evident in the Roman script within the play as well as in the classical sources and ensuing critical traditions.9 Cleopatra’s affective complexity is apparent in the dramatic effect of her feigned death on Antony. In this compelling exchange with Eros, we also recognize that the power of their relationship is particularly evident in Antony’s repeated navigations between his feelings of great love and a sense of betrayal toward Cleopatra: “I made these wars for Egypt, and the Queen— / Whose heart I thought I had / for she had mine … / she, Eros, has / Packed cards with Caesar and false played my glory / Unto an enemy’s triumph” (4.15.15–20). He seems to lose all claim on his martial identity: “She has robbed me of my sword” (4.15.24), while accepting the Roman narrative of himself as a “strumpet’s fool” emasculated by an enchantress. But quickly, and quite remarkably, his emotional compass and condemnations of Cleopatra take a radically different turn when Mardian dramatically recounts his narrative of Cleopatra’s death: “The name of Anthony—it was divided / Between her heart and lips; she rendered life / Thy name so buried in her” (4.15.32–34). Antony immediately relents his earlier rejection of her: “I will o’ertake thee, ­Cleopatra, and / Weep for my pardon. So it must be, for now / All length is torture” (4.14.44–46).

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100  Jyotsna G. Singh Following this resolve, Shakespeare’s Antony articulates his vision of love in the afterlife in a soliloquy not only directed to his immediate audience but also to future history: “I come, my queen. … / Where souls do couch on flowers, we’ll hand in hand, / And with our sprightly port make the ghosts gaze. / Dido and her Aeneas shall want troops, / And all the haunt be ours. / Come Eros, Eros!” (4.15.50–54). The name of the character, Eros, a follower of Anthony, has obvious suggestive resonances in a performance setting because it would also seem to evoke his erotic longing embodied in Cleopatra. In sum, this highly evocative speech, as Heather James so compellingly argues, shows how “Antony’s Elysium represents the romantic narratives in which love takes precedence over the Roman Empire.”10 If Cleopatra was affectively offering a narrative of her and Antony’s relationship in her staged death in the earlier scene, Antony here is imaginatively rehearsing a desired afterlife as he resolves his literal suicide. James goes on to elaborate on implications of this moment for revisions of historical and literary myths: Long after Rome has melted in the Tiber and the wide arch of the ranged empire has fallen, Antony and Cleopatra will preside in fiction and in the Jacobean theatre over the Augustan Aeneas … ­Antony’s choice to marry his queen and walk “hand in hand” will, he claims, affect the way “Dido and her Aeneas” exist in the imagination of future readers.11 This moment also leads circuitously through earlier mythic and historical perspectives, with the “historical Antony speak[ing] through the fictional Antony and the actor onstage.”12 Furthermore, however, his powerful emotional imaginary also makes us wonder about what thoughts, feelings, and motives are being filtered through these various layers of discourse and performance. As we observe these (and other) affectively charged shifts in the relationship between Antony and the Egyptian queen, it often seems that their actual emotions and modes of emotional expressions interact in a highly dynamic way. Whether Cleopatra is staging her death or Antony is actually facing it, they are also redefining their roles as historic/literary/mythic figures. Of course, the structure of the play—with its numerous, undercutting scenes and a large number of minor characters observing and commenting on the main actors—certainly evokes some meta-theatrical moments, replicating the conditions of the stage. Furthermore, critics have also noted the numerous distinctly “staged” events such as Cleopatra’s spectacular ceremonial entry at Cydnus and her metadramatic or self-reflexive reference to boy actors—all of which echo early modern controversies and debates about the value and function of theater.13 However, in simply viewing the play metatheatrically or approaching the protagonists as ‘flat’ mythic/­ classical figures, we block off any further consideration of the emotional and affective dimensions of Cleopatra’s and Antony’s lives. As dramatic

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“Come, Eros, Eros!”  101

characters in the Roman play—as well as evoking mythic figures like Aeneas and Dido, Venus and Mars—they are in a sense caught in a palimpsest of the many figurations of their identities in prior accounts. But rather than being ­“flattened,” Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra reveal the affective tensions between interiority and stereotype—even though their interiority is constructed through affective variation rather than by the more typical Shakespearean technique of soliloquy. If, as mentioned earlier, we never see the two protagonists in private, nonetheless their shared engagement with performance as a form of affective bonding counters the normative emotional script of a Roman ideology whose hyper-masculinity frowns upon fluctuations of uncontrolled erotic desire. What fresh perspective on the affective world of the play is afforded to us via such “emotional navigations” of Shakespeare’s protagonists? Such a question calls for an approach to look beyond the play’s obvious metadramatic structure, with its emphasis on a histrionic conception of life and identity, and to chart instead the protagonists’ interactions within an affective economy shaped by different emotional management styles representing the particular “emotional regimes” of Rome and Egypt. I use the terms “emotional navigation” and “emotional regime” coined by anthropologist William Reddy. His analysis of emotional life shows what is at stake for individuals when accepting and feeling the emotions prescribed by specific organizations and when embracing emotional styles that render them obedient, aggressive, demure, and so forth. He identifies such structures as an emotional “regime,” or a “normative style of emotional management” incorporating “normative emotions and the official rituals, practices that inculcate them; a necessary underpinning of any stable political regime.”14 In any such structured entity, the expression of an affective life takes the form of “emotional navigation,” a process that Reddy explains through the concept of “emotives.” An “emotive is a type of speech act … which both describes and changes the world, because emotional expression has an exploratory and self-altering effect on the activated thought material of emotion.”15 It is through this process that a self embarks on a process of emotional navigation, among a broad range of feelings and desired goals. In this formulation we can identify what kinds of emotives are allowed in particular emotional regimes—and also to chart how emotional suffering results from an individual’s experience of tensions and conflicts among different goals, while facing the self-altering effects of emotional expressions.16 To sum up, Reddy aims his critique at rigid regimes, which denounce emotions that bring “unanticipated or unwanted change [in] the individual … [and] they thus offer in the end, an incomplete and contradictory vision of human nature and human possibilities.”17 What is at stake when reappraising affect and emotion in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, via Reddy’s theory, is the whole issue of emotional liberty that can enable affective connections from which contestation and interrogation of inflexible emotional regimes can be launched. At the end

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102  Jyotsna G. Singh of the play, when Cleopatra mockingly notes “’Tis Paltry to Caesar”(5.2.2), she clearly sums up the emotional and imaginative limitations of the Augustan ideal, which only offers a partial and skewed view of human experience. In the rest of the essay, I will examine some selected occasions of a­ ffective engagements, self-explorations, and emotional suffering on the part of Antony and Cleopatra, especially in response to the Augustan “emotional regime” with its narrative of Antony as the Roman hero emasculated by a “Gypsy’s lust.” ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA’S “EMOTIONAL NAVIGATIONS” Octavius Caesar’s approach to relationships seems premised on a regimented affective life to which he attempts to anchor emergent Augustan Rome as an empire. “Strict regimes denounce emotional activations to impose unanticipated or unwanted change on the individual,” and Octavius’ denunciations of Antony rioting in Alexandria certainly upholds the normative drives of such an order.18 A striking example of Octavius’ management style is evident in the marriage of political expedience between Antony and Octavia, of which Cleopatra learns belatedly, as Agrippa proposes to him: “By this m ­ arriage … / her love to both / Would each to other and all loves to both, / Draw after her” (2.2 137–44). A cornered Antony in Rome agrees to the marriage, which is strongly endorsed by Octavius: “A sister I bequeath you, whom no brother / Did ever love so dearly. Let her live / To join our kingdoms and our hearts; and never / Fly off our loves again!” (2.2.158–59). Soon after, Octavius reiterates a similar politically-inflected endorsement of the union in a language that figures affective ties as inanimate building blocks; he calls Octavia the “piece of virtue,” the “cement” that binds the two men, but, as he goes on to say, she could turn into “the ram to batter / The fortress” of their love if their relations take a down-turn (3.2.28–31). Within the context of Caesar’s Roman imperatives, of course, Cleopatra is negatively aligned with artifice and deception; however, her feminist defenders in the critical history of the play (implicitly echoing Enobarbus in their admiration), argue that as a queen she deploys spectacle and theatricality to assert her power.19 She knows how to enact “tear-floods” and “sigh-tempests,” familiar Petrarchan images that suggest the hyperbole that implies—and that the Romans assume—she lacks in subjective depth. The way in which Enobarbus both admires and implicitly parodies her displays is evident in this well-worn passage: “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” (2.2.241–44). In Roman eyes, as a critic notes, “she models desire for her beholders to interpret and internalize, but … her displays have little to do with ‘pure love.’”20 Cleopatra’s style of emotional management is certainly open to

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“Come, Eros, Eros!”  103

quick changes in affect, tone, and actions aimed at a particular audience. Of course, there are occasions when she represents her affective engagements in terms of emotional “scripts,”21 recounting her feelings rather than literally enacting them on stage. Such moments are evident when she declares: “If you find him sad, / Say I am dancing; if in mirth, report / That I am sudden sick” (1.3.3–5). In another famous instance, she describes her role-playing: “I drunk him to his bed— / Then put my tires and mantles on him, whilst / I wore his sword Philippan” (2.5.21–22). She also recognizes that desire and love are premised on the performative—though no less emotionally wrenching—display of feelings as when she pushes Antony to improvise on a scene of tears for his dead wife, Fulvia, and pretend they are for her: “… say the tears belong to Egypt. Good now, play one scene / Of excellent dissembling, and let it look / Like perfect honor” (1.3.76–79). But can we relegate her affective style to a mere modeling of desire? I argue that there is no reason to accept that her staged affects, often flaunting gender transgressions in Roman eyes, are inevitably or even often detached or completely separate from her emotions; rather, I believe, her protean and myriad performances make visible the processes of emotional navigation. They demonstrate the capacious and pliable nature of emotional self-exploration itself. Cleopatra’s psychic make-up emerges more clearly if we look beyond a binary that separates out strategic theatricality from an affective immersion in feelings. While stereotypically a protean, variable affect can imply a hollow core, Cleopatra’s performances of her feelings represent and produce psychic self-explorations for audiences and actors alike. Take, for example, Cleopatra’s response to the news that Antony has married Octavia. Her quicksilver, shifting expressions of rage at the messenger are self-revealing and self-altering. After striking the messenger, she gradually acknowledges her own denial of her feelings: “Is he married? / I cannot hate thee worser than I do, / If thou again say ‘Yes’” (2.5.90–93). She wishes him to lie, but also recognizes that Antony’s “fault” makes a “knave” of the innocent man. In her discursive fluctuations below, theatrical affect shapes her acknowledgement of Antony’s double-sided identity as Mars and a Gorgon who could turn her into stone. She opens herself up to “Pity” as she sizes up her rival: Lead me from hence, I faint—O Iras, Charmian—’Tis no matter. Go to the fellow, good Alexas, bid him Report the feature of Octavia, her years. Her inclination—let him not leave out The color of her hair. Bring me word quickly. Let him forever go—let him not, Charmian, Though he be painted one way like a Gorgon, The other way’s a Mars. (To Mardian) Bid you Alexas Bring me word how tall she is.—Pity me, Charmian,

104  Jyotsna G. Singh

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But do not speak to me. Lead me to my chamber. (2.5.111–120) This scene of free-ranging anguish and curious desire offers one instance of Cleopatra’s emotional self-explorations. She clearly expresses conflicting feelings emerging from searing jealousy, tormenting herself in wanting to know every minute detail about her rival, “not leave out / The color of her hair,” or “how tall she is”; yet after Alexas, the messenger of this news, exits, Cleopatra exposes her mixture of a desire to repress this painful news and yet to confront it: “Let him forever go: let him not.” What is evident throughout the play, however, is that the affective culture of Egypt, as articulated by Cleopatra, is invested in making visible the workings of a broad range of emotions: desire, anger, playfulness, despair, mockery, and stoicism, among others. In these dynamics we can see how the Egyptian milieu runs counter to the Roman claims of a singular steadfastness, which forms the basis of Antony’s struggles as he deviates from the demands of a Roman self-identity. A moment that vividly demonstrates how Cleopatra harnesses her emotions to a dramatic staging of self is when she prepares for her actual death at the end of the play: Give me my robe [Iras], put on my crown—I have Immortal longings in me. Now no more The juice of Egypt’s grape shall moist this lip. … Good Iras, quick—methinks I hear Antony call … Husband I come! … I am fire and air—my other elements I give to baser life. (5.2.279–88) Here, we can see how affect and effect coalesce in a tour de force of ­improvisation—how Cleopatra metadramatically plays her “part” for the stage, while also infusing pathos in her moment of death and expressing “immortal longings.” She channels the mutability of her mortal life first into a theatrical grandeur, “put on my crown,” but in a split second evokes her own transcendence and mutation into “fire and air.” In contrast to ­Cleopatra, Antony’s emotional navigations vividly demonstrate his conflicted sentiments, given that his identity is shaped by and grounded in the emotional culture of Rome with its promotion of a heroic masculinity over Eros. On the one hand, he repeatedly acknowledges his deep affective bond to ­Cleopatra, as for instance when he declares: “Egypt, thou knew’st too well / My heart was to thy rudder tied by th’ strings, / And thou shouldst tow me after” (3.11.55–56). But repeatedly, when Caesar and other Romans remind him (and the audience) of his own legends of heroism, evoking his identification with Hercules and Mars, Antony cannot escape this Roman judgment entirely: since his heroism is set up in terms of a stoic masculinity, then any unpoliced, seemingly uncontrolled expression of eroticism concerning ­Cleopatra is inevitably seen as a loss of his manhood. Not only is Antony cooling a “gypsy’s lust,” but also, as Caesar mockingly notes,

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“Come, Eros, Eros!”  105

he is “not more manlike / Than Cleopatra, nor the Queen of Ptolemy / More womanly than he” (1.4.5–7). And after the defeat at Actium his own ­soldiers remark in the Roman vein, “our leader’s led, / And we are women’s men” (3–7.68–69), and, “we have kissed away / Kingdoms and Provinces” (3.10.6–7). A fear of effeminization seems integral to Roman understandings of self-identity and power. Throughout the play, then, Antony must mediate between the Roman representations of himself as a “strumpet’s fool” and his feelings for Cleopatra, as he aptly sums up: “How much you were my conqueror … [and] … / My sword made weak by my affection, would / Obey it on all cause” (3.11.65–66). Embarking on his emotional navigations, Antony’s experiences, like Cleopatra’s, make visible the tensions and conflicts between different desired identities as well as affective goals. Furthermore, following Reddy’s formulations, one can observe that Antony’s psychic conflicts point to a “double-anchored self”—“a self that cannot be encompassed within a discourse or defined by a practice; it is a self that can be molded by discourse, altered by practice to a significant degree, but never entirely or predictably, never to the same degree from one person to the next.”22 In Antony’s tensions between images of Augustan masculinity, premised on a singular steadfastness, and his prolific, though fluctuating, desires for Cleopatra, especially as they intersect with the imperatives of the Roman Empire, we can chart the dynamic of a “double-anchored self.” He demonstrates flexibility and spontaneity, but nonetheless he experiences suffering resulting from his conflicts with the dominant Augustan ideology. At one moment, for instance, Antony feels unshaped, as he observes to Eros: “Sometime we see a cloud that’s dragonish, / A vapor sometime like a bear or lion, / A towered citadel, a pendant rock, … now thy captain is / Even such a body: here I am Antony, / Yet cannot hold this visible shape” (4.15.2–14). As a “Captain” Antony was a Roman, but at this point, he seems to lose all anchoring to any world—Roman or Egyptian. While Antony evokes his sense of ­self-dissolution, he seems to gesture toward the ineffable or in some sense inexpressible elements of affect. He is losing his self at the moment he tries to claim his name. Such metaphorical expressions of flux and an erasure of boundaries are exactly what the Roman emotional regime works against, even though, as we see in the bacchanal and war scenes, they cannot escape the flux of shifting desires, treacheries, and contingent alliances. Given Antony’s fluctuating emotions signaling self-dissolution as the ultimate self-alteration, it is remarkable that his final vision of his relationship with Cleopatra is that of a counter-Underworld; he rewrites the Augustan ideology of The Aeneid, in which Aeneas follows the bidding of the gods and abandons Dido, and instead figures a union between himself and ­Cleopatra in the afterlife. Shakespeare’s Antony finally asserts his emotional liberty beyond the normative edicts of Rome: Dying while in the embrace of “Egypt,” he flaunts a display of erotic surrender: “Of many thousand kisses the poor last / I lay upon thy [Cleopatra’s] lips” (4.16.22–23).

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106  Jyotsna G. Singh Cleopatra’s psychic journey throughout most of the play does not mirror the goal conflicts experienced by Antony, but the end brings them together in shared imaginative projections of a future life, first in ­ Antony’s re-­ creation of ­Elysium as I have already described, and later in Cleopatra’s fanciful “dream” of Antony as “emperor” recounted to a skeptical ­Dollabella, ­Caesar’s man: “I dreamt there was an emperor Antony … His face was as the heavens, and therein stuck / A sun and moon, which kept their course and lighted / The little O, o’ th’earth” (5.2.76–80). She goes on to describe him as almost mythic figure, a colossus—as aligned with nature’s forces or elements: His legs bestrid the ocean: his reared arm Crested the world; his voice was propertied As all the tuned spheres—and that to friends— But when meant to quail and shake the orb, He was as rattling thunder … … His delights Were dolphin-like; they showed his back above The element they lived in. In his livery Walked crowns and crownets; realms and islands were As plates dropped from his pocket. (5.2. 82–91) Does Cleopatra here simply displace her loss and grief into a formal, hyperbolic speech in which Antony’s heroic qualities have a cosmic affect/effect? While its affective charge seems muted compared to Antony’s Elysium for the lovers, and while Dollabella refutes her imaginings—“there was or might be such a man / As this dreamt of?” (5.2.93)—Cleopatra insists that ­Antony “was nature’s piece” beyond mere “fancy” (5.2.99). While she does not directly ­represent her own emotions here, the bravado of her figuration of the “emperor” ­Antony evokes to the audience the implicit pathos of her response, as finally summed up by Dollabella, who is won over with empathy for her: “Your loss is as yourself, great, and you bear it / As answering to the weight … I do feel … a grief that smites / My very heart at root” (5.2.101–104). ­Cleopatra’s imaginative “crowning” of Antony as an emperor not only projects a mythic future for them, but also signals their relationship in Egypt, where she invites Antony to share her power and rule. A similar invitation to share a kingdom is given to Aeneas by Dido in the various retellings of their story. But only Shakespeare’s version reverses and interrogates Aeneas’s decision to follow his political destiny rather than his love for Dido and his claims on her affection. Should we consider Shakespeare’s revision simply as a fanciful “aside” to the long affective story that has accrued to the tragic story of Dido? While this is not a subject of this essay, I conclude with an evocation of Dido’s ­emotional tragedy within the context of Antony and Cleopatra, which can illuminate hidden strata of affective expression: desire, fulfillment, loss,



“Come, Eros, Eros!”  107

despair, and revenge all change over time, proving to be self-exploratory and self-altering both for the tragic protagonists and for the audiences who are enthralled by Antony and C ­ leopatra’s passionate displays.

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NOTES 1.  Michael Neill, “Introduction,” in William Shakespeare, Anthony and Cleopatra (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 80. 2.  See Neill, “Introduction,” esp. 51–52, for a discussion of the acting choices faced by generations of actors as they sought ways to interpret the roles of the two protagonists in terms of balancing the demands of self-conscious theatricality and some intimations of an affective life. 3.  I use the word “emotion,” while recognizing that as a term for feeling, “emotion” was not widely used till the late seventeenth century. See Gail K. Paster et al., “Introduction,” in Reading the Early Modern Passions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 2–3, where they state: “The Renaissance words that mostly closely approximated what we call emotion were ‘passion’ and ‘affection.’” 4. William Shakespeare, Anthony and Cleopatra, ed. Michael Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). All further quotations from the play will be taken from this edition of the text. 5. A rich body of feminist and historicist work has drawn attention to Cleopatra as a performer par excellence—an attribute that is underscored by the various meta-theatrical moments in the play. These include Phyllis Rackin, “Shakespeare’s Boy Cleopatra; the Decorum of Nature, and the Golden World of Poetry,” PMLA, 87(1972): 210–12; Jyotsna Singh, “Renaissance Antitheatricality, Antifeminism, and Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra,” Renaissance Drama 20 (1989): 99–121; Theodora Jankowski, “‘As I am Egypt’s Queen’: Cleopatra, Elizabeth I, and the Female Body Politic,” in  Assays: Critical Approaches to Medieval and Renaissance Texts, Vol. V., ed. Peggy A. Knapp (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989), 91–110; Juliet Dusinberre, “‘Squeaking Cleopatras’: Gender and Performance in Antony and Cleopatra,” in Shakespeare, Theory and Performance, ed. James C. Bulman, 46–67 (New York: Routledge, 1996). 6.  For a full discussion of the play’s structure and its histrionic conception of identity, see Neill, “Introduction,” 78–88. 7. Margaret Clark, “Historical Emotionology: From a Social Psychologist’s Perspective,” in Social History and Issues in Human Consciousness: Some Interdisciplinary Connections, ed. Andrew E. Barnes and Peter Stearns (New York: New York University Press, 1989), 262–69. 8. My thanks to David Schalkwyk for drawing my attention to a similar point being made in Hamlet’s Hecuba speech. 9.  L.T. Fitz, “Egyptian Queens and Male Reviewers: Sexist Attitudes in Antony and Cleopatra Criticism,” Shakespeare Quarterly 28.3 (1977): 297–316. 10. Heather James, Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 132. 11. James, Shakespeare’s Troy, 132. 12. James, Shakespeare’s Troy, 132.

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108  Jyotsna G. Singh 13.  For a discussion of the play’s (undercutting?) structure as well as its m ­ eta-dramatic spectacles, see Janet Adelman, The Common Liar: An Essay on Antony and Cleopatra (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 50–57. 14. William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 121–30. For a ­further discussion of an application of Reddy’s theory of emotional navigation to ­literary works, see Singh, “‘Th’ Expense of Spirit in a Waste of Shame’: ­Mapping the emotional regime of Shakespeare’s sonnets,” in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Michael Schoenfeldt, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 277–89. 15. Reddy, Navigation, 128, 123. 16. Reddy, Navigation, 127–129. 17. Reddy, Navigation, 126. 18. Reddy, Navigation, 122–131. 19.  Please refer to note 5. 20. James, Shakespeare’s Troy, 135. 21.  I use the term “emotional scripts” as discussed by Paster et al. in the “Introduction” to Reading the Early Modern Passions, 1–20. 22. Reddy, Navigation, 115–116.

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Part III

… A Nation

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8 Wondering in Henry VIII or All is True

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Tiffany Werth

“All clinquant, all in gold” with “dwarfish” pages gilt like cherubims, two kings “Equal in luster” meet in the vale of Andres (1.1.19, 22, 29).1 ­Norfolk’s vivid imagery welcomes the audience for King Henry VIII (All is True) into a romance infused landscape where two “suns,” the French and English kings, perform such astonishing feats of arms at their historic ­meeting on the Field of Cloth of Gold that the “former fabulous story” of the medieval romance hero, Bevis of Hampton “got credit” and “was believed” ­(1.1.36–38). Norfolk’s fabulous tableau shatters almost immediately, but its effects foreshadow an affective performance that will be exploited throughout the play’s remaining action. When struck by astonishment or wonder, Norfolk suggests, an audience might be more easily roused to belief. Norfolk’s next words confirm the efficacy of wonderful spectacle when he confides to Buckingham that all these “fierce vanities” do but feed the Cardinal of York’s desires to make history (1.1.53). Barely fifty lines in, as critics such as Christopher Cobb, Alexander Leggatt, and Howard Felperin point out, the play’s dialogue of an idealized or romance-like vision of history fades before a Machiavellian reality as the jostling Dukes complain of Cardinal Wolsey’s power brokering behind the golden masque curtain.2 Like the chorus of Henry V, whose idealized narrative of events gets challenged by the play’s dramatic action, Henry VIII dismantles the lustrous vision remembered in its opening scene. It leaves the audience to wonder after the deft manipulation of storytelling modes rather than at the wonder itself. Norfolk, in a performance anticipatory of Fredric Jameson’s theories about magical narratives, reveals how “wonders” might disguise and further a personal and political agenda (1.1.18).3 Norfolk reveals how modes of storytelling and their attendant affect might be used to shape belief about English identity and the national imagination of its own past so that even the “former fabulous story” of Bevis might “now [be] seen possible enough” (1.1.36–7). Wonder, one of the most powerful affects, might be roused— and manipulated—by a narrative mode of storytelling. The play’s historical “truth,” in other words, might be a correlative to an emotion or, in early modern terms, a passion, or what we might call an “affect.”4 Much like the “dark play” cited by Pamela Allen Brown’s essay in this volume on dwarfs’ presence at early modern courts, the wonder elicited in this play’s

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112  Tiffany Werth opening might be termed a “dark wonder,” one that exploits affective power ­dynamics to deliberate advantage.5 Jean Howard has convincingly argued that London’s theatrical culture shaped national history. I apply her insights regarding the cultural work of genre to my reading of the play’s exploitation of wonder to forge a unique identity founded in part on England’s religious history.6 Shakespeare and Fletcher’s play, like Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia, substantiates a moment of origin, only here instead of rehearsing Arthur’s legend as a founding story for a translatio imperii, the play confronts the moment when Henry broke with traditional Roman Christendom, an act whose consequences sutured England’s national identity to its Church. The Field of Cloth of Gold with all its evocation of wonder sets at point two dramatic storytelling modes, history and romance, that will jostle for a claim to belief in the next four acts that trace Henry VIII’s story, a story transformed by the late sixteenth century into “a universal symbol of English identity.”7 Neither a history nor a romance, the play’s composite and hybrid form recapitulates Henry VIII’s legacy to England.8 As I shall argue, the play’s formal hybridity reflects a transreformational, religiously mixed England, a country and a church neither entirely Catholic nor wholly ­Protestant.9 As evoked in its opening scene, the play’s central emotive drive, wonder, was deeply implicated in Reformation debates, simultaneously courted and regarded with suspicion.10 Julie Crawford, amongst other scholars, demonstrates that wonders did not cease after the Reformation, but they and their attendant affective force came under new scrutiny.11 “Wonders” in Elizabethan and Jacobean culture were often controversial events, as likely to be a false means of inducing belief as true signs of providential favor.12 The “dark” aspect of wonder, in other words, was familiar. This essay traces how Henry VIII’s scrutiny of wonder and its a­ ttendant affect emerges most tellingly in the generic friction between romance and history, especially the scenes where romance motifs conjure a fabulous vision (as of the Field of Cloth of Gold) to dazzle its spectators.13 In England, at least since the time of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Geraldine Heng argues, historical phenomena and fantasy, or what we might also label “romance,” have collided and vanished into one another, often merging at the precise location where both might be mined to best advantage.14 This merger of history and romance in turn offers an imaginative, narrative space for working out issues of identity at both the personal and collective level; gender, sexuality, nationality, and religiosity are a sampling of the wide-ranging positions shaped by storytelling.15 The play’s use of the romance mode thus offers a formal means for making sense of England’s unique religious identity in part by exploring the correlation of a literary mode to affect and subsequently to belief. In doing so, it affirms the popular appeal, and indeed efficacy, of fabulous storytelling modes even as it exposes their seductive power and potential for error. It thus not only reflects on but also contributes to the hybrid religious identity of the English nation in 1613.16

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“THOU SPEAKEST WONDERS” At the play’s conclusion, the King finishes the final line of Cranmer’s o ­ racular prophecy of Elizabeth’s—and England’s—future with three words: “thou speakest wonders” (5.4.55). To an attentive hearer, the qualifying object “wonders” harkens back to the play’s opening, to Norfolk’s account of the Field of Cloth of Gold in Act 1. It bookends and sums up the play’s affective arc. This is not a tragedy wherein an audience is invoked to pity or to catharsis; rather it is asked whether a sequence of “wonders” might “all” be believed “true.”17 Following an episodic plot development, the audience witnesses a series of spectacles where councilors and queens are made and deposed: Buckingham’s treason in the first act; Katherine’s trial in the second; Wolsey’s fall from favor in act three; Cranmer’s near fall in act five; and the upward click of fortune’s wheel in the final two acts with Anne’s ascendance and Elizabeth’s birth. Structurally, the play appears set to eclipse Catholicism in the characters of Cardinal Wolsey and the Spanish Catholic Katherine with the rise of reform in Anne, Cranmer, and the “maiden Phoenix” Elizabeth (5.4.40). Yet the seeming telos toward reform when read affectively proves as illusory as the Field of Cloth of Gold. After perceptively exposing the fabulous—in both denotations as “astonishing” and “erroneous”—“truth” of the Field of Cloth of Gold, the Duke of Buckingham, confidant to Norfolk, for all his insights into Wolsey’s fabrications, himself fails to exercise enough caution against narratives whose wondrous promise feeds his own ambitious desires.18 Prophecy, a common motif of the romance mode, channels a more-than-human knowledge to a character. It feeds on the desire to know something, which is the second definition of the verb form of “wonder.”19 Interpreting prophecy becomes a crucial task, and as in Leontes’ reading of the Delphic oracle, frequently it engenders misreading and error. Buckingham, we soon learn, “was brought” to treason by “a vain prophecy of Nicholas Hopkins,” a Chartreux friar, who fed him “with words of sovereignty” (1.2.150). His wonder piqued, Buckingham fails to look behind the masque curtain. Although the surveyor in his betrayal claims he warned his lord that the monk might be but “deceived” “by th’devil’s illusions,” the prophecy nonetheless “forged” the treasonous ruminations of the duke; the two gentlemen, who act as a kind of chorus, concur, blaming Hopkins for having “fed” the duke with prophecies so that the very devil might, indeed, be believed (1.2.178–81). The first act thus sets at point the seductive and compelling motifs of romance against a “true” history of realpolitik. What convinces us, what compels us to believe, it suggests, may not necessarily be the same as what is “true.” What is “true” and indisputable, however, by the play’s logic, is the efficacy of romance’s wonderful motifs to rouse belief through their exploitation of affective desires. Romance’s efficacy to move readers fascinated and repelled writers across the Protestant spectrum from moderate writers, such as the

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114  Tiffany Werth humanist educator Roger Ascham, to “hotter” writers, such as the Puritan Arthur Dent.20 Romance had been regarded with mixed admiration and skepticism within English culture since Saint Augustine’s confession that he sobbed “over the death of a Dido” while he “wept not a tear” over the state of his spiritual alienation from God, but rather gave “pride of place in my affection to those empty fables rather than to more useful studies.”21 And while many continental and Catholic authors worried over romance’s compelling efficacy over reader memory (Juan Luis Vives being a noted voice), it posed a double problem for English authors writing after the waves of reform. Romance’s evocation of wonder bore a double antecedent: its overtures to the many gods of pagan and classical history as well as the overtones of a Catholic storytelling tradition. As Thomas Nashe quipped, romance constituted “the “fantasticall dreams of those exiled abbie-lubbers.”22 Romance held a fraught generic kinship to discredited hagiography and thus Catholicism in part because both trafficked with the supernatural, the “fantasticall” and “fabulous,” and perhaps most alarmingly solicited the emotion of wonder. The insistent vehement nature of the critique, however, unwittingly testified to romance’s power to sway an audience. Henry VIII exploits these anxieties to tell a story about the recent English past; it stages the efficacy of “wonders” to convince, and seduce, its hearers. In the first two acts, the play stages romance motifs as seductive storytelling modes that induce characters to make catastrophic decisions, to err in their reading of events. Having established romance’s efficacy to raise admiration and stimulate belief, first in the fabled Field of Cloth of Gold and then through the Chartreux friar’s oracular prophecy, the play next invokes them to present a complex vision of Anne Boleyn, mother to the play’s prophesied “bird of wonder,” the “maiden phoenix” Elizabeth (5.4.40). As mother to Elizabeth, the “spleeny Lutheran” Anne might be read as a harbinger to early English Protestantism and reform (3.2.99).23 Yet the play complicates such a straightforward reading. Characterized not by internalized, sparse devotion but rather by fabulous spectacle, the play presents Anne more like a romance heroine than a morning star of reformation. Such a characterization should make an audience pause. Henry, by the play’s account, first feels “heat” towards Anne Boleyn when they partner together during the masque, when he enters “habited like [a] shepherd” (1.4.63sd). Anne’s “fairest hand” and the king’s enamored response occur within the imaginative space of a romance conceit of disguise (1.4.75). The next time we see Anne, in 2.3, she speaks with an “old lady” who prophesies her rise to queen. By this point in the play, a perceptive audience might well be chary of such an oracular pronouncement. The old woman’s ribald language of “sovereignty” recalls the “vain prophecy” of Nicholas Henton from Act 1 who fed Buckingham’s desires with his “words of sovereignty” (2.3.29, 1.2.149). Although, as critics note, this scene humanizes

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Wondering in Henry VIII or All is True  115 Anne through her sympathy for Katherine’s plight, it complicates her “truth” within the context of yet another romance conceit—this time of dubious prophecy.24 Her next appearance, in Act 4 amidst the splendor of her coronation, is heralded by the two gentlemen chorus who remark on the “shows, / ­Pageants, and sights of honour” (4.1.11). The gentlemen’s language echoes that of the fabled Field of Cloth of Gold so exposed three acts earlier in Norfolk’s speech. The gentlemen praise her with the language of romance verging into hagiography: “she is an angel” (4.1.43) with “saint-like posture” (4.2.83); Henry “has all the Indies in his arms” (4.1.45). The gentlemen’s laudatory chorus creates a troubling reminder of Norfolk’s Act 1 description when the populace’s response to the “noble spirits” that made even the “former fabulous story” of Bevis credible (1.1.35–37). Anne’s coronation, her final onstage appearance, creates a strange ­paradox wherein, Jay Zysk astutely observes: “England’s first Protestant queen is fashioned as ... [a] saint, crowned in a traditional medieval ceremony that wove together political pageantry and sacramental spectacle.”25 As Zysk notes, the Catholic tenor of this scene emerges in the details: singing of the Te Deum, the use of canopies, her posture and approach toward the “altar.” Such rituals marked traditional worship that were under strain by the end of Henry’s reign and whose controversy continued to simmer under James. Reaching a crescendo in the coronation scene, traditional Catholic ­ceremonial habit laced with romance motifs mute Anne’s alleged “spleeny Lutheranism” (3.2.99). If viewers might expect a turn away from an older storytelling mode with Anne, the play’s presentation of her as a saintly, romance heroine saturated by a Catholic ritualized tenor frustrates any reading of a narrative reformation. Romance spectacle shapes Anne’s ascendant legitimacy and forges a useful merger with history, a ­conjunction proven on the Field of Cloth of Gold to convince an audience. The three anonymous gentlemen observers conclude that Anne “is the goodliest woman” (4.1.69), a paragon of beauty and piety. In brief, the wonder of the ceremony persuades them that Anne is a Queen. The “wonder” of Anne, who first enters the play as a fair banquet guest and who exits enshrouded with ceremonial splendor and saintly gesture, suggests how “the late Queen’s gentlewoman,” a “knight’s daughter,” might be believed to be “her mistress’ mistress” (3.2.94–95). Anne’s spectacular rise suggests how romance motifs, and their attendant affect of wonder, might be appropriated to propel to glory a “Lutheran,” one who would, or seemingly should, doctrinally eschew Rome’s trappings: its religion, rituals, ceremonies, motifs, and storytelling modes. Anne’s dramatic portrayal thus undercuts, or at least confuses, visual, narrative, and affective distinction between Catholic and Protestant. The play’s agnostic deployment of romance motifs erodes difference between queens and faiths, suggesting how both Catholicism and Protestantism alike appropriated romance’s wonder to shape history and belief.

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116  Tiffany Werth The play’s hybrid tenor reaches a fitting apotheosis during the play’s most supernatural scene: Katherine’s vision. If Anne’s story appropriates traditional romance motifs to gild her rise to power, Katherine’s final vision exploits them to recuperate the “unqueened” queen to the audience, and to history (4.2.172). As Carole Levin writes, although Henry abandoned Katherine, she believes that soon the King of Kings will welcome her.26 The play’s vision compels its audience to take a similarly beatific view.27 In a play redolent with prophecies and spectacle, Katherine’s vision is the cynosure, featuring what Katherine calls a “blessed troop” (4.2.87). Recalling Jupiter’s descent on his eagle in Cymbeline or the masquers who descend for Juno’s epithalamion to Miranda and Ferdinand in The Tempest or Pericles’ vision of Diana, this heavenly, theophanic vision fleetingly brightens the mundane world of power politics and human ambition. Its saturation with the language of liturgy, ritual, and ceremony, its musical pageantry, “reverential gestures, and postures of prayer and supplication” endow it with not merely pagan supernatural powers but with Christian overtones.28 “Personages, clad in white robes” (4.2.82.2sd) evoke Katherine as a true believer, welcomed to heaven by angels. Whether these masked figures bearing bays or palms are angels, saints, spirits, or the remnant of God’s elect, they Christianize the scene, dispensing with the pagan screen usually given to such moments of supernatural intervention in Shakespeare’s other late plays. The palimpsest is not pagan, ancient, or foreign. Instead, it represents a peculiarly English supernatural that hybridizes Catholic and Protestant imagery. Its indebtedness to Catholic saints’ legends and to Biblical imagery associated with Protestantism provide two alternative sources.29 The vision of six heavenly figures draws analogues to the Virgin Mary and as Ruth Vanita argues, aligns Katherine with the most venerated female ­figure of Catholic worship.30 More generally, angelic visions bear closer ties to Catholic tradition than they do to Protestantism. This detail as well as the liturgical repetition that Zysk notes in the musical accompaniment, the masque-like “golden vizards,” “reverend curtsies” and postures of prayer “hand to heaven” endow the rejected Queen with all the honors of Catholic ceremony (4.2.82.3, 8, 15sd).31 If the angels and ceremonial details point toward more traditional Catholic imagery, the scene equally invokes a Revelation subtext, a favored source for Protestants who periodically invoked it to condemn Rome. The white robed figures bearing palms resemble the elect “clad in white robes” who hold “palmes in their hands” and who are sealed as God’s elect at the day of judgment, honored for their endurance of “great tribulation.”32 Similarly, in 19:9, the bride comes to the “marriage of the lambe” “arrayed in fine linen, cleane and white: For the fine linen is the righteousnesse of Saints.”33 The inclusion of Katherine into the “blessed troop” gives her a seat at the final banquet within an eschatological schema favored by Protestant polemicists.

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Wondering in Henry VIII or All is True  117 The remarkable sectarian conjunction of this scene would likely have made some hotter Protestants and staunch recusants uncomfortable. Early audiences, Judith Andersen conjectures, likely found the play “appealing” but likely also felt “at the very least ambivalent” about its hybrid religious sympathies.”34 The play itself confirms the affective “appealing” power of the scene onstage to those who witness the Queen’s transformation, namely Griffith and Patience. Their reaction to the scene curries sympathy for the deposed Queen. Critics accordingly have read Katherine’s assumption as effectively expunging Anne from the text and thus undermining the triumphalism of the following prophecy.35 Rather, I contend that the scene recapitulates England’s mixed religious heritage to produce a hybrid identity, one whose wonders exploit and recuperate Catholic continuity even as it tinges them with the language of reform. The bricolage of this scene may not awaken faith as Paulina exhorts her audience to do in The Winter’s Tale, but it does effectively garner sympathy for a controversial historical figure. In rousing its audience’s wonder for first Anne, then Katherine, the play displays the complex indebtedness of both Protestant and Catholic identities to the same source: Henry VIII. Elsewhere in this volume, Bianca Calabresi argues that the English stage drew from both foreign and domestic models of female behavior to produce a transcultural, hybrid character in Juliet’s nurse, a figure both English and Italian who nonetheless might come to epitomize English theatre.36 Similarly, Katherine’s portrayal and wondrous arousal of audience affect demonstrates how “all”—the whole of English history—might point the way for a uniquely hybrid English religious, as well as cultural, identity. As the only spectacle not ironized by later commentary, Katherine’s vision contributes to the sense that England’s history, and thus its present, reached its cultural apotheosis by recognizing the irredeemably double legacy of the Henrician reform as the bedrock to English identity. CRANMER’S “BIRD OF WONDER” AND THE “GOLDEN AGE” The merger of romance motifs and history unveiled at the Field of Cloth of Gold reverberates throughout the play. It would seem then that Shakespeare and Fletcher use romance not as an escape from history but as a way to make history. The play forces its audience to confront the past: To ask how narrational modes, and by extension theatrical performances, might arouse wonder and stimulate belief.37 Its simultaneous attitude of cynicism and endorsement moves its audiences into an uncertain space. Such an uncertain or double position problematizes a reading that sees Cranmer’s concluding prophecy for Anne Boleyn’s daughter as the result of an inexorable religious turn toward a providential, Protestant history. Cranmer’s prophecy, a c­ ritical locus, has seldom been read (Mayer being an exception) within the context of its invocation of controversial romance motifs and their

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118  Tiffany Werth attendant wonder.38 Cranmer sees a golden world, where “ripeness,” “merry songs of peace” and beauty abound, qualities promised but frustrated in the Field of Cloth of Gold (5.4.20, 35). Cranmer’s prophecy announces, too, an immaculate birth, imagining how “yet a virgin” (5.4.60), Elizabeth will “create another heir” (5.4.41), i.e., James. Yet as the play is about to close, projecting a future that the audience already knows, it was apparent that the “thousand thousand blessings” (5.4.19) promised by Archbishop Cranmer were not yet realized.39 The king’s response to Cranmer’s oracular prediction, “Thou speakest wonders,” registers the ambiguity of his prophecy, for “wonders” are neither unequivocally true nor good, as the play demonstrates (5.4.55). If the play subtly undermines a triumphant Protestant vision with a phoenix-like miracle engendering James I as the apotheosis of the English Reformation, it also denies any simple recusant reading, presenting instead moments of sympathy, and of indictment, for each. The play thus flirts with, but ultimately refuses, to endorse a compelling foundational narrative for the origins of the English Reformation. Instead, it presents events in line with the sentiments of the irreverent wit John Harington, who argues that “all honest men I think will assent with me” that the beginning of the Reformation “that King henrie the viith made was not so sincere, but that it was mixed with private and politique respects, of gayne, of revenge, of fancie.”40 The alternate title, All is True, has been compromised from the opening speech that suggests what “gets credit” has more to do with the shaping power of certain kinds of narrative than with an absolute “truth,” an insight that throws into question the truth claims on both sides of the religious question. Near the play’s closing scene, the porter’s man, justifying his failure to keep out the rabble crowd of well-wishers gathered outside the court and waiting for the procession returning from Elizabeth’s christening, tells the master porter “I am not Samson, nor Sir Guy, nor Colbrand,” thus excusing the crowd’s surging against the gate he guards (5.3.18). Yet his words, and his determined negation of Biblical and romance heroes, “not Samson, nor Sir Guy, nor Colbrand,” sharply reminds us, his audience, that we are not in the landscape of romance, where Bevis (or Cranmer?) might be believed (5.3.18). The silent crowds pushing up against the gate, however, represent an image of the nation at large, gathering to celebrate the new princess, who will be so splendidly imagined in Cranmer’s final prophecy. This last image of the London multitude, eager to catch a glimpse of the “maiden phoenix,” reenacts the opening scene where “no discerner / Durst wag his tongue in censure” at the Field of the Cloth of Gold (1.1.34), bringing the play full circle. The romance conceits shot through the historical narrative exploit the eagerness and willingness of its audience to believe—and to devoutly wish for—the golden narratives. In the First Folio of 1623, Henry VIII appears as the final history play, perhaps unwittingly providing the first interpretation of it as a fitting conclusion to the earlier histories which looked forward to a

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Wondering in Henry VIII or All is True  119 time of peace and promise, an ending to the struggles for the throne and to the cycles of political upheaval.41 But this new mode of drama, somewhere ’twixt the history play and the romance, forecasts no ideal England, only a nation whose identity rests on an uneasy hybridity bolstered by “wonders.” Its establishment of Englishness in turn becomes its own prophecy, spawning the canon of English literature as we now read it. Cranmer prophesies a “golden age”—an epithet now often popularly mapped back on to the period itself so that we have films with titles like Elizabeth’s “Golden Age,” a theme that replays this myth of history—which of course is just what Cranmer, and the play, ­predict. Cranmer’s prophetic “golden age” affectively echoes back across the play’s history to the belief first inspired at the Field of Cloth of Gold, with its golden—happy, prosperous—image of a glorious English nation. The inherent subjectivity of truth to affect emerges as the play engages in an affective sleight of hand whereby the “gold” ideal of England’s history, whether true or not, prophesies its future.

NOTES 1.  All citations to act, scene and line from William Shakespeare, King Henry VIII, ed. Gordon McMullan (London: Thompson, 2000). I follow McMullan in assuming the play to be a collaborative effort between William Shakespeare and John Fletcher. For a useful summary of the controversy, see McMullan, 180–99, 445–9. 2.  The insistence of literary tradition to regard a clear contrast between “history” and “romance” and the difficulty of applying this to Shakespeare’s late plays, in particular, is discussed by Simon Palfrey, Late Shakespeare: A New World of Words (New York: Clarendon Press, 1997); George Wilson Knight, The Crown of Life (London: Methuen, 1948) influentially saw this play as the fulfillment of Shakespeare’s experiments with romance that ends with reconciliation. ­Others who read this play as a romance include Howard Felperin, Shakespearean Romance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972) and Christopher Cobb, The Staging of Romance in Late Shakespeare: Text and Theatrical Technique (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007). Alexander Leggatt, “Henry VIII and the Ideal England,” Shakespeare Survey 38 (1985): 135–143 highlights the play’s use of romance and history, stressing the tension between “ideal” and “real.” For it as history, see Frank V. Cespedes, “‘We Are One in Fortunes’: The Sense of History in Henry VIII,” English Literary Renaissance 10 (1980): 413–438. 3. Fredric Jameson, “Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre,” New Literary H ­ istory 2.1 (1975): 129–163. 4.  For seminal work on the passions in early modern England, see Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe and Mary Floyd-Wilson, Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell U ­ niversity

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120  Tiffany Werth Press, 1993), 285; Michael Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). The “affective” turn in scholarship and its relationship to the “religious turn” is discussed by Kenneth S. Jackson, “All is True—Unless You Decide in Advance what is Not,” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 54.3 (2012): 469–477. 5.  Brown, “The Mirror and the Cage,” 137. 6. In particular, see Jean Howard, “Shakespeare, Geography, and the Work of Genre on the Early Modern Stage,” Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History 64.3 (2003): 299–322; “Stage Masculinities, National History, and the Making of London Theatrical Culture,” in Center Or Margin: Revisions of the English Renaissance in Honor of Leeds Barroll, ed. Lena Cowen Orlin (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2006), 199–214; “Shakespeare and Genre,” in A Companion to Shakespeare, ed. David Scott Kastan (London: Blackwell, 1999), 297–310; and Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories (London: Routledge, 1997). 7.  Mark Rankin makes a convincing case for how this play “represents Henry VIII as a type of James’s own self-assumed responsibility for defining religious orthodoxy” in “Henry VIII, Shakespeare, and the Jacobean Royal Court,” Studies in English Literature 51.2 (2011): 349–66, 361. See also Jonathan Baldo, “Necromancing the ­ 59–386; Stuart M. Past in Henry VIII,” English Literary Renaissance 34 (2004): 3 Kurland, “Henry VIII and James I: Shakespeare and Jacobean Politics,” ­Shakespeare Studies 19 (1988): 203–217. Two recently edited collections testify to Henry VIII’s dynamic cultural and historical after-life, see Mark Rankin, Christopher Highley and John N. King, Henry VIII and His Afterlives: Literature, Politics, and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Thomas Betteridge and Thomas S. Freeman, Henry VIII and History (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012). See also Mike ­ dwardian, Marian, Rodman Jones, “The Tragical History of the Reformation: E Shakespearean,” Review of English Studies 63.262 (2012): 743–763. 8. As note 2 above documents, many critics have sought to reconcile the play’s disparate romance and historical registers. By contrast, I argue that the play’s composite structure deliberately reflects England’s hybrid religious identity, an identity tied to its sense as a nation. Jean-Christophe Mayer has shown that when this play was composed it contributed to a renewed theatrical trend that confronted audiences with reconstructed lives of foundational figures in the early years of reform including Cardinal Wolsey, Lady Jane Grey, and narratives on Cromwell, see Shakespeare’s Hybrid Faith: History, Religion and the Stage (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 9. The last decade of Reformation historiography has regarded the “long Reformation” of England as one where religious continuity and rupture exist simultaneously. For a superb summary, see Peter Marshall, “(Re)Defining the English Reformation,” Journal of British Studies 48.3 (2009): 564–586. Recent examples of Trans-Reformation book-length studies include James D. Tracy, Europe’s Reformations, 1450–1650: Doctrine, Politics, and Community, 2nd ed. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006). See also Peter George Wallace, The Long European Reformation: Religion, Political Conflict, and the Search for Conformity 1350–1750, 2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 10. Critical conspectus recognizes wonder’s centrality to romance in the early modern period, as both artifact and affect. For a summary, see Helen Moore,

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Wondering in Henry VIII or All is True  121 Romance, ed. Michael Hattaway (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 238–248. England’s vocabulary of wonder at least since the twelfth century closely aligned the passion with the object, signaling a link between “subjective experience and objective referent,” see Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 16. Seminal work that explores wonder’s complex hold over the early modern imagination and cultural practice also includes Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); James Biester, Lyric Wonder: Rhetoric and Wit in Renaissance English Poetry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); Peter G. Platt, Wonders, Marvels, and Monsters in Early Modern Culture (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999); ­Benedict S. Robinson, Islam and Early Modern English Literature: The Politics of Romance from Spenser to Milton (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 11.  Julie Crawford, Marvelous Protestantism: Monstrous Births in Post-Reformation England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 13–15. 12.  In addition to works noted above in note 10, see Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 387. 13.  For a sustained study of romance’s place in England following the Reformation, see my The Fabulous Dark Cloister: Romance in England after the Reformation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). 14.  Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 2. “Romance” and “history” challenge traditional taxonomies of early modern dramatic categories, and I use them here as a repertory of “frames” or fixes” on the world along the lines laid out by Rosalie L. Colie, The Resources of Kind; Genre-Theory in the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 128. These frames in turn create an expectation for a certain kind of story, an expectation that Henry VIII will exploit. Shakespeare was drawn to “romance story,” ­Barbara Mowat argues, for its dramatic potential despite condemnation of it by notables such as Sir Philip Sidney and George Whetstone, see Barbara Mowat, “Shakespeare and Romance,” in Staging Early Modern Romance: Prose Fiction, Dramatic Romance, and Shakespeare (New York: Routledge, 2009), 236–245. Although never named as such, dramatic romances, as Cyrus Mulready shows, were perennially popular, “‘Asia of the One Side, and Afric of the Other’: Sidney’s Unities and the Staging of Romance,” in Staging Early Modern Romance: Prose Fiction, Dramatic Romance and Shakespeare (New York: Routledge, 2009), 47–71. 15.  While my reading focuses on religious identity, the play has been read as constructing various kinds of English or national identity. For its construction of gender, see Alison Thorne, “‘O, Lawful Let it be / that I have Room ... to Curse Awhile’: Voicing the Nation’s Conscience in Female Complaint in Richard III, King John, and Henry VIII,” in This England, that Shakespeare: New Angles on Englishness and the Bard, eds. Margaret Tudeau-­Clayton and Willy Maley (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 105–124. For romance’s appropriation by an emergent generation of English writers to assert their identity, see Nandini Das, Renaissance Romance: The Transformation of English Prose Fiction, 1570– 1620 (Farnham, Surrey; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011). 16.  Whether the play favors a “Catholic” or “Protestant” bias has exercised critics. My argument benefits from their insights, but the play’s religious orientation

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122  Tiffany Werth interests me less than its negotiation of wonder as a means for understanding England’s unique religious identity in the early seventeenth century. In the “turn to religion,” many scholars have focused on Shakespeare’s own religious conviction to impose a particular religious agenda to the plays themselves. Notable are Richard Wilson, Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion and Resistance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare, the Lost Years (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985); David N. Beauregard, Catholic Theology in Shakespeare’s Plays (Newark, DE: U ­ niversity of Delaware Press, 2008); R. Vanita, “Mariological Memory in The Winter’s Tale and Henry VIII,” Studies in English Literature 40.2 (2000): 311–337. More convincingly, Jeffrey Knapp argues that the record’s silence suggest it more likely that Shakespeare outwardly conformed, but his inward belief remains opaque in Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in R ­ enaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). John Fletcher’s contributions ­ further complicate any absolute religious affiliation, see Gordon ­McMullan, “‘Swimming on Bladders’: The Dialogics of Reformation in S­ hakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII,” in Shakespeare and Carnival: After Bahktin, ed. Ronald Knowles (Basingstoke, England: St. Martins Press, 1998), 211–227. 17.  For an argument that the play’s tragic episodes deconstruct political spectacle and offer a lesson in vigilance against courtly spectacle, see Matthew Woodcock, “‘Their Eyes More Attentive to the Show’: Spectacle, Tragedy and the Structure of All is True (Henry VIII),” Shakespeare 7.1 (2011): 1–15. 18.  Oxford English Dictionary Online, adj. “fabulous.” http://www.oed.com., (accessed June 26, 2013). 19.  Oxford English Dictionary Online, “wonder, verb, 2,” http://www.oed.com. 20. The humanist educator Roger Ascham, for example, worries that romances seduce young readers to vice and heresy in The Schoolmaster (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), 68. The puritan Arthur Dent more explicitly accused romance’s “fabulous devices” of drawing readers from the truth into error in The Plaine Mans Path-Way to Heauen (London, 1609), Bb2v. 21. Augustine, The Confessions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 250. Augustine’s separation of scriptural study from other “empty” stories of the kind of Dido and Aeneas became popular in the Middle Ages as a trope against romance. 22.  Thomas Nashe, The Anatomie of Absurditie (London: Charlewood for Thomas Hacket, 1589), A2r. 23.  Exemplary of critics who see the play’s intention to praise Protestant emergence, see Alan R. Young, “Shakespeare’s Henry VIII and the Theme of Conscience,” English Studies in Canada 7 (1981): 38–53. 24.  See, for instance, Mayer, Shakespeare’s Hybrid Faith, 137–45. 25. Jay Zysk, “Of Ceremonies and Henry VIII,” in Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England, ed. James Mardock and Kathryn R. McPherson (Duquesne, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2014), 241–262 at 255. My argument concurs with Zysk’s conclusion that the play represents England’s religious hybridity but focuses on formal or generic hybridity as opposed to liturgical. A similar point about Anne’s ceremonial ambiguity and the shadow it throws over Protestant triumphalism is discussed by Alice Hunt, The Drama of Coronation: Medieval Ceremony in Early Modern England (Cambridge, UK: ­Cambridge University Press, 2008) 40.

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Wondering in Henry VIII or All is True  123 26.  In Carole Levin, Dreaming the English Renaissance: Politics and Desire in Court and Culture (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 118. 27. Amy Appleford, “Shakespeare’s Katherine of Aragon: Last Medieval Queen, First Recusant Martyr,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 40 (2010): 149–172. Appleford argues that Katherine represents a “Catholization” of Reformation history and in turn renders the play itself consciously “­Catholic.” 28.  Zysk, “Of Ceremonies and Henry VIII,” 256. 29. For its similarity to Marguerite of Angouleme’s dream, and thus reforming Catholic tradition, see E. E. Duncan-Jones, “Queen Katherine’s Vision and Queen Margaret’s Dream,” Notes and Queries 8 (1961): 142–143. The Cambridge 2  editor suggests an alternative view that the vision may have been influenced by a dream of Anne Boleyn as recorded by Holinshed, see William Shakespeare, King Henry VIII, ed. John Margeson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). For its use of Revelation, see Shakespeare, King Henry VIII, ed. M ­ cMullan, 135. 30.  Vanita, “Mariological Memory,” 311–337. 31.  Zysk, “Of Ceremonies and Henry VIII,” 20. 32.  Revelation 7:9 (King James Version). 33.  19.9 ibid. 34.  Judith H. Anderson, Biographical Truth: The Representation of Historical Persons in Tudor-Stuart Writing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 134. 35. Shakespeare, King Henry VIII, 120–36. 36. Calabresi, “Angelica and Franceschina: The Italiante Characters of Juliet’s Nurse,” 124–136. 37.  For the ways that the theatrical “shows” of the play are a misleading display, see Anston Bosman, “Seeing Tears: Truth and Sense in All is True,” Shakespeare Quarterly 50 (1999): 459–476. 38. Mayer, Shakespeare’s Hybrid Faith, 145–51. 39.  The ambiguity this speech may have invoked for its Jacobean audience has been noted by Frank V. Cespedes, “‘We are one in fortunes.” See also Ivo Kamps, Historiography and Ideology in Stuart Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 91–139. 40. Sir John Harington, A Tract on the Succession to the Crown, ed. Clements R. Markham (London: J.B. Nichols and Sons, 1880), 99. 41.  Many critics have subsequently wished to read Henry VIII’s culminating history as producing what Alexander Leggatt terms an “ideal” England; see “Henry VIII and the Ideal England.” Others recognize in it a darker ambiguity; as Lee Bliss argues, hopes “for paradisal harmony are repeatedly dashed” in “The Wheel of Fortune and the Maiden Phoenix of Shakespeare’s King Henry VIII,” English Literary History 42.1 (1975): 1–25. Many recent critics follow Bliss. See, by way of example, Susannah Brietz Monta, “‘Thou Fall’st a Blessed Martyr’: Shakespeare’s Henry VIII and the Polemics of Conscience,” English Literary ­Renaissance 30.2 (2000): 262–283.

9 Angelica and Franceschina The Italianate Characters of Juliet’s Nurse

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Bianca Finzi-Contini Calabresi

Recent work on Shakespearean drama explores the extent to which foreign theatrical practices, particularly the presence of women on the C ­ ontinental stage, influenced early modern English performance.1 When examining the effects of traveling troupes and transnational texts, the discussion tends to center on the characters of the innamorata and the courtesan, particularly cross-dressed, often as figures for same-sex desire or international ­commerce.2 This essay discusses a third import from Italian drama—the Nurse, Nutrice, or Balia —who, in her melding of native and foreign, represents a significant model for hybridity created by and for the stage.3 Focusing on the transnational constructions of the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, as well as other lesser-known representations, I argue that the Nurse or Nutrice/Balia emerges as a figure of slippage rather than national fixity, and that several elements of Romeo and Juliet Q1 and 2 allow us better to understand how and to what end Juliet’s Nurse was produced as an Italianate figure on the stage, neither completely homegrown nor imported.4 The figure of Shakespeare’s Nurse challenges stable national affiliations. For one, as Michelle Dowd has written, given the growing prevalence of wet-nursing outside the home, and despite her own references to the weaning of Juliet, the Nurse hardly fits early modern models of English care-giving: There remains a striking disjunction in the play between the Nurse’s occupational role and her protracted physical presence in the Capulet household. Given the prominence of wet-nursing in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the spatial separations that normally attended the practice in this period, Shakespeare’s audience would have been poised to find this disjunction more disconcerting than ­earlier readers and audiences.5 Dowd identifies both the Nurse’s extended household presence and her unchecked speech as signifiers of her unusual invasion of early modern domestic space and the marital transactions of normative upper-status families, finding in Shakespeare’s play a resulting process of “rhetorical distancing that is most clearly at work in the Nurse’s own lengthy monologue in Act 1.”6 Here, I examine an alternate reading of that speech which, while

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Angelica and Franceschina  125 continuing to distance the hybrid Nurse, presents her amalgam of native and foreign as potentially more enticing than “disconcerting.” As Susanne Wofford states, “[a] variety of evidence exists from differing levels of society for a notion of English selfhood that incorporated the foreign, seeing it as providing access to possibilities hidden or unavailable in English society.”7 This essay explores in particular how the affective relationships depicted between a seemingly English Nurse and her charge shift when marked in and through an Italianate setting. Juliet’s Nurse is described at times as emphatically Continental and at others as manifestly homegrown. Michele Marrapodi uses her as a ­paradigm for English borrowing of “the theatergram of the libertine balia … exemItalian plified in Ariosto’s I Suppositi (1509)” and other early modern ­ drama.8 David Bevington argues, instead, for a particularly indigenous rewriting of the Nurse, claiming that Shakespeare “regularly tones down the sexual explicitness or experimental nature of his [Italian] sources in a way that seems consistent with the mandate of his acting company and the ­Londoners to whom they apparently wished to appeal.”9 In part, this tension stems from the character’s mixed generic antecedents, both from the Italian novella tradition, passed through French and English translations to the stage, and late-sixteenth-century publications and translations of Italian drama by John Wolfe, George Gascoigne, and others. Louise George Clubb stresses the influence of Arthur Brooke’s “prating noorse” (Ciiir) and “drunken ­gossyppe” (Piiv) on Juliet’s Nurse.10 In Pierre Boisteau’s Histoires Tragiques, by contrast, Juliette’s Nurse appears as “vne vieille dame d’honneur qui l’avoit nourrie & eslevee de son laict” (“an old gentlewoman who nursed her and raised her since an infant”) whom Juliette addresses (in the continental fashion) as “Mere” or Mother.11 Aspects of this more mutual relationship can be seen in Shakespeare by Juliet’s request for “counsell” as well as “comfort” (H1v) from the Nurse and the Nurse’s expanded role in the household in Q1, i.e., her responsibility for “set[ting] all in rediness” (I1r) for the wedding feast.12 The early Quartos of Romeo and Juliet in particular emphasize the Nurse’s national hybridity.13 The Nurse’s additional lines stress simultaneously her Italianate extended domestic duties and her homey Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, as for example when she tells Juliet in Q1, “there’s a cleane smocke vnder your pillow, / and so good night” (H4v).14 Moreover, from the 1597 Q1 to the 1637 Quarto, the Nurse’s first speeches are set in a different typeface than those of the other characters—a typeface that calls attention not only to the set nature of the lines but also to her Italianate origins and associations. Specifically, in Q1, from her first entrance on page B4r through her exchange with Juliet on C4r, the Nurse’s lines are printed in italics, distinct from those of the other characters in the play (with one meaningful exception). The common understanding of this “error” is to see it as a textual a­ ccident: a result of the first section of the text having been set

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126  Bianca Finzi-Contini Calabresi by John Danter, with the second, greater portion of the play having been set by Edward Alde.15 While the presence of italics certainly stems from ­Danter’s printing habits, it holds potentially more significance than has been recognized. As Tiffany Stern has discussed, italics regularly appear in Tudor-Stuart “play manuscripts (and printed texts) to indicate ‘removable’ fragments like songs, letters, prologues, and epilogues; perhaps[,]” she suggests, “they also indicated malleable or less solidly rooted parts” and thus constituted “a playhouse system for indicating in a text which parts were changeable and which were fixed” (102).16 Italics had an additional function in early modern texts, however, including play-texts: marking foreign, particularly Latinate, speech.17 For example, in the 1588 trilingual edition of Castiglione’s The Courtier, printed in London by John Wolfe, the English translation appears in black letter, the Italian original is set in Italics, and the French translation in ‘roman’ (as was conventional during and after the reign of Francis I).18 In the trilingual edition of Giovanni Michele Bruto’s The Necessarie, Fit, and Convenient Education of a Young Gentlewoman. Written Both in French and Italian, and translated into English by W. P. … (London, 1598), i­talics and roman again mark Italian and French, respectively.19 By setting the English translation in roman as well, the text reinforces visually the chain of transmission that allows the reader to appropriate and assimilate the transnational lessons of raising a gentlewoman, where Italian, with its differential type, remains the source text and model. Juliet’s Nurse of course does not speak in Italian; nor does the “Clowne” who interrupts her long disquisition about Juliet’s youth. Yet both speeches appear in italics, in Danter’s part of Q1, and the combined associations of that typeface mark them as figurative translations. The Nurse’s first speech continues to be set in italics throughout the seventeenth-century Quartos; however, the interjection of the so-called “Clowne” of Q1 only appears in italics in this one edition. Once reattributed to a “servant,” the lines are printed in roman from then on. Following Stern’s logic, the combination of speeches in italics may mark the dialogue as a scenario or routine movable or detachable from the rest of the play. I would suggest, moreover, that the “Italian” typeface links the pair with the comedic routines of Serva [female Servant] and Zanni [Zany or Clown] that appear in commedia dell’arte scenarios and performances throughout the second half of the sixteenth century. One of the premier commedie troupes, headed by Drusiano Martinelli, that included such a pairing, could have been seen by London audiences in 1578. The naming of the Nurse as “good Angelica” (Iir) by Lord Capulet further connects her to the commedia dell’arte, and to Martinelli’s troupe in particular, as Angelica was famously the name of Martinelli’s wife, taking center billing in the group’s tours in the late 1580s.20 As M. A. Katritzky writes, “special licenses of 1587 allowing Drusiano, his wife Angelica Alberghini, his brother Tristano, their companions Angela Salomona and her (unnamed) husband, and ‘La Franceschina’” to perform were issued to the troupe in

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Angelica and Franceschina  127 Madrid. She notes that “the servetta Franceschina” was particularly associated with “Angelica’s troupe throughout the 1590s”: Franceschina being one of the serve most frequently paired with the zany or clown in commedia scenarios or set routines.21 Significantly, Danter himself was the printer for several texts which make direct reference to the commedia dell’arte, for example, The Divil’s Legend or A Learned Cachephochysme … wherein Doctour Pantaloun and Zanie his pupil doo teache all hope ought to be grounded on the Puissant King Phillip of Spain … (London, 1595) with the two commedie figures, Pantaleone and Zanni, prominently displayed onstage on the title page.22 The work appeared with “A new pleasant and delightfull Astrologie, invented by reuerend Maister Harlequin …”: the latter himself a creation of Drusillo Martinelli’s brother, Tristano, in 1584. Danter also printed Thomas Nashe’s Pierce Penilesse his supplication to the Divell (1592) which famously summarized Italian dramatic personae as merely a “Pantaloun, a Whore, and a Zanie.”23 Danter, then, had particular textual-cultural perspectives that might lead him to see the Nurse in the context of Italianate prototypes and comparisons. His “typing” of the Nurse as part of a dyad with the Clowne or Zany, in turn, opens up the possibility of rereading her along a different cultural vector than that which has been conventionally applied to her role as English wet-nurse. Grouped in tandem, the Nurse and Clown evoke in particular the comic duo “Franceschina and Pedrolino” (or “little Peter”): indeed, editions often conflate the “Clowne” with the Nurse’s attendant “Peter her man” (Q1E1r).24 How then might these several markings —by name, by typeface, by set pairing—of the Nurse as Italian, or more specifically as the commedia dell’arte Serva, change our vision of her role and character? Italics, precisely because of their Italian character, carried additional associations: as Mario DiGangi has suggested, they could serve to indicate the presence of queer or “preposterous” sexuality. DiGangi cites in particular Lapet’s instructions in Fletcher’s The Nice Valour (1615–16) to have his book printed “All in Italica, your Backward blowes / All in Italica, you Hermaphrodite”(4.1.236–37).25 In John Marston’s 1605 Dutch Courtesan, for example, italics mark the words “grincome” (the pox) and “foutra” (“lechery”) as obscene and foreign, in order to establish them as imports along with the eponymous courtesan “Francheschina,” although both words appear as English in other, contemporary texts. This Francheschina, as Jean Howard has written, “is a linguistic mess”: despite her considerable skills as a cortigiana, “a hybrid creation who masters no one tongue but roils about in a mixture of many.”26 An amalgam of the various nations in which La Franceschina played, she is the epitome of the interlexical persona who appears in many of M ­ arston’s works—like Shakespeare’s Bianca, the opposite of what her name s­ uggests— in this case a precise counter to the continental actress’ mastery of transnational idioms via the movable scenario or theatergram.27

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128  Bianca Finzi-Contini Calabresi In continental performance, the commedia Franceschina possessed a particularly liminal status: the scenarios collected by Flaminio Scala and printed in 1611 show her playing, among other roles, the keeper of an inn or boarding house; a cross-dressed Nurse acting as husband; a servant disguised as Mercury; and a rival lover and/or a merchant’s wife.28 Katritzky points out that “the servant’s simpler and plainer outfit” was “worn by most maids, nurses, and crones,” allowing for a fluidity of identification.29 Moreover, “[n]udity is sometimes associated with the servant role” in Italian commedia of this period, “as with Franceschina’s exposed breasts or legs.”30 The open neckline to the waist was a feature of Franceschina particularly in such marriage scenes as “Il bellissimo ballo di Zan trippu” (Ambrogio Brambillo 1583). As a result, Franceschina’s “frank” sexuality raised suspicion among Continental antitheatrical critics like Pierre de L’Estoile, who commented on the commedia performers making a show of their breasts and open chests: “elles faisoient monstres de leurs seins et poictrines ouvertes.”31 Like Dowd, Gail Kern Paster has read Juliet’s Nurse primarily within the context of English wet-nursing, observing that “Juliet, unlike most Elizabethan babies among the elite classes, was not sent away to nurse and thus did not face the postnatal trauma of physical separation from home and biological parents.”32 If we instead look outward for the effect of conspicuously “foreign” breasts on this seemingly intimate moment, however, the relationship between Juliet and her Nurse appears rather different. The perception of traumatic separation from the mother’s breast through ­wet-nursing does not appear in Italian narratives of Nutrice or Balia. Rather, the absence of parents, recalled for example as a trace in the Nurse’s account of the Capulets’ trip to Mantua during Juliet’s weaning, occasions the continued presence and shifting role of the Nurse from material feeding to other forms of care-giving within the household, including that of Foster Mother. While her title remains the same—Nutrice, meaning literally ‘Nourisher,’ and Balia, meaning simply, according to John Florio, “a woman nurse”—the so-named character of Italianate drama occupies a significantly more influential domestic place than do most English “Nurses.” These characters were newly available to audiences through translations of texts like Ariosto’s and Bruto’s plays and were maintained on stage through hybrid characters like the schoolmistress “Balia” in the anonymous play The Wit of a Woman (London, 1604). In his Necessarie, Fit, and Convenient Education of a young Gentlewoman, Bruto seeks to show “by what meanes a young Gentlewoman and daughter of noble birth ought to be nourished, taught, and instructed” in the absence of her parents. Significantly, the Italian word “allevare” signifies all three actions in the original. Moreover, “allevare” means first and foremost “to foster, to breede, to bring vp, to feede, to nourish” according to Florio’s 1598 World of Words; consequently an “alleuatrice” is the equivalent of an English “midwife, … nurse, … foster-mother” (14). The Italian form suggests a relationship considerably closer to that depicted in many

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Angelica and Franceschina  129 sixteenth-century Italian commedie erudite as well as in the prototypes by Boisteau and Bandello. For example, Lelia, the protagonist in Gl’Ingannatti, is described by her father as the “allieva” of the balia Clemenzia, a term that means not only “nursling” as Ruggiero/Giannetti translate but also “student” and “foster-child.”33 In other areas as well, the English translation of Bruto recasts the relationship between allevatrice and allieva, redefining the threat posed by “fanti & … seruenti” (“seruants and maides, and such light women,”34) to the young Gentlewoman.35 It describes as “prating” the donniciuole [K4r] (“women” or, in Florio, “poor sillie women”) who are “bergole & tenzonieri.” While “bergolare” means equally “to brable, to wrangle, to skold, to prate, to loyter idlie vp and downe” according to Florio, when paired with “tenzonieri,” its combative associations dominate, for “tenzonare” means “to striue, to quarrel, to contend, to brawle.” In Romeo and Juliet, this quarrelsomeness passes from the Nurse to her charge. Famously, as a consequence of “wormwood on the nipple of” the Nurse’s breast, Juliet became “teachie” and “f[e]ll out with Dugge” (B4v). The word “teachie” has challenged etymologists: Stanley Wells in “Juliet’s Nurse: the Uses of Inconsequentiality” includes it in a list of “colloquial expressions” and “familiar, even vulgar” diction.36 Yet, it is a word that in English form would have been largely unfamiliar to Shakespeare’s audiences, given its first rare appearance in print one year earlier. According to the OED, the derivation is still uncertain: the word “tache” from the Old French “teche”—as in “spot, blotch, or blot”—“has been suggested,” the editors write, “but there are difficulties both of form and sense.” Etymologists have so far overlooked the early modern Italian verb “taccagnare”—”to dodge, to wrangle, … to frump, to cauill” according to Florio—with its variants, “tacciare,” “taccare,” and “taccheggiare” meaning “to taxt, or blame” and “taccolare” meaning “to skould, to raile, as Taccare.”37 In its variant form— e.g., Juliet si taccia or sta tacciando—“tacciare” offers a credible origin for “teachie,” particularly given similar meanings of its companion “fall out.” For English audiences then, both the Nurse’s presence and her language could appear an influential hybrid of native and foreign.38 Yet if the first scene shows Juliet and the Nurse manifesting an Italianate dimension to their relationship, then the reprise of that separation, when Juliet banishes the Nurse from her bedroom, also shows Juliet as “teachie” and Italianate.39 It also allows English audiences to witness, up to and at the moment of its ending, the depiction and articulation of a “bosom” relationship that changed from literal nourishment to intimacy of a sort typically depicted between innamorata and balia. Such hybridity, when staged, arguably offers English audiences not a containment of alien elements but an expansion of affective possibilities, somatic and pedagogical, between two women. In this aspect, the balia Clemenzia in Gl’Ingannatti (1532) provides a powerful counterpart to Juliet’s Nurse.40 Clemenzia regularly refers to the house of her employer, Virginio, and his daughter, Lelia, as her own, as do other characters. Lelia (who has fled the convent dressed as a page in order

130  Bianca Finzi-Contini Calabresi

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to serve her beloved, Flamminio, incognito) explicitly turns to Clemenzia for counsel, explaining, “so I’m out at this hour to ask the advice of my balia, whom I saw come this way from the window. Together we can decide on the best strategy” (215). Equally importantly, Clemenzia has an ongoing sexual relationship with Virginio, which occasions her vocal objection to his choice of husband for Lelia. She insists on distinguishing between a partner who would suit a woman her age and one appropriate for an eighteen-year-old: And he’ll treat her like a daughter. Virginio: Clemenzia: That’s the problem: young girls want to be treated like wives, not daughters. They want men who sweep them off their feet, bite them, lay into them first from one side and then the other, not someone who treats them like a daughter. You think all women are like you, and you know that I know Virginio: you well enough! But she’s not like that—even if Gherardo is more than ready to treat her as a wife. Clemenzia: How? Why, he’s already well over fifty! What does that matter? I’m almost that old, and you know Virginio: I’m still capable of giving you a good ride, right? Clemenzia: Oh my, there are few men your equal! But if I thought that you would really give her to him, I’d drown her first. (213–214) Her outspokenness, not only about sex with Virginio, but about her desire for the cross-dressed Lelia, mitigates or complicates the balia’s conventional role as the voice of heteronormativity, as seen for example in Aretino’s Il Marescalco (1525). She both criticizes “this young showoff”—unbeknownst to her the as-yet-unrecognized Lelia—and states in an aside, “If you only knew how much I’m attracted to your type.”41 In fact, the elderly suitor Gherardo wishes he were in Clemenzia’s situation: he states, “if I were she, I would so often have hugged, kissed, and held to my breast my sweet Lelia …” (221). Similar erotic possibilities between Nurse and charge appear in one of Franceschina’s most famous scenarios, “Il Marito,” where as “nutrice” to the innamorata, Isabella, she takes a “nonlethal sleeping draught,” leaves town, and returns cross-dressed, marrying the heroine herself to block her charge’s unwanted marriage.42 As “Cornelio,” Franceschina lives with Isabella as husband and wife, performing amorous and jealous marital simulations for on- and off-stage audiences. Thus, whether as the voice of heteronormativity or of same-sex eroticism, the Italian Nurse/balia serves to enact a much later process of separation than that ascribed to Juliet’s Nurse’s as wet-nurse. Instead, the Italian plays represent the Italian innamorata’s departure from the household in pursuit of romantic love as a double rupture from a resistant father and an intimate—potentially erotic—Nurse, a rupture that is not simply recalled verbally but represented on stage as well. Thus we might read Juliet’s “Goe Counsellor, / Thou and my bosom henceforth shal be twaine” (H2r) not as a belated inversion of the weaning

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Angelica and Franceschina  131 scene described in the Nurse’s earlier speech but rather as the end of a ­relationship of council and comfort represented by the changing functions of the breast, in a character whose polymorphic sexuality allows her a liminality and authority in the household among masters and charges alike.43 Juliet’s invocation of her own breast at this moment thus becomes a way to rethink readings of Angelica as wet-nurse, to glimpse a range of potential Italianate roles—councilor, foster mother, or intimate companion—that appear elsewhere. I do not argue that the affective relationship of Juliet and her Nurse is necessarily erotic, although the balia/Nurse as vocal embodiment of nonprocreative female sexuality—with her charge as erotic object—does appear in several other English plays. In Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage (1593), Dido orders her Nurse to take Ascanius (really Cupid in disguise) to “the country to her house” in order to prevent Aeneas’s departure.44 The resistant Ascanius/Cupid is wooed by the Nurse’s promise of “[a]n Orchard that hath store of plums, […] A garden where are Bee hiues full of honey” (F1v), and, when the Nurse agrees to carry him there, he consents to “dwell with [her] and call [her] mother,” stating “so youle loue me, I care not if I doe” (F1v). Nurture and eroticism soon blur, however, with the Nurse exclaiming, “[t]hat I might liue to see this boy a man, […] Youle be a twigger when you come to age” (F1v). There follows an extended debate on the appropriateness of her desire, in which the Nurse asserts “Ile be no more a widowe, I am young, / Ile haue a husband, or els a louer” (F1v) provoking Cupid’s dismissive “A husband and no teeth!”(F2r). The Nurse vacillates, before concluding, “Fourscore is but a girls age, loue is sweete” (F2r). Here the Nurse articulates a postprocreative desire for her charge similar to that of Italian balia yet placed—despite the classical context—within a geography of English wet-nursing and wooing.45 As sign of Cupid’s power, however, this hybrid exchange underscores the Nurse’s lack of authority rather than her erotic control. Similarly, in Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge, the “Nutriche” enters recounting a distinctly amatory pleasure of her “finest dreame.”46 “O God, I was euen coming to it lawe, O Iesu, twas coming of the sweetest. Ile tell you now, me thought I was married, and me thought I spent (O Lord why did you wake mee) and mee thought I spent three spur Roials on the Fiddlers for striking vp a fresh hornepipe. Saint Vrsula, I was euen going to bed, & you, mee thought, my husband was euen putting out the tapers, when you …” until Maria interrupts her narrative of English “spending” with “Peace idle creature, peace” (B1v). The alternation of “& you, mee thought, my husband” potentially conflates Maria and the imagined husband as erotic objects. Nonetheless, both Maria’s rejoinders and her own status position as humorously uneducated undercut her memories of somatic satisfaction. Later, when the Nutriche appears as part of a set piece with “Marya, her hayre loose” (F2v), she councils her widowed charge to remarry, recalling “I haue had foure husbands my selfe. The first I called, Sweete Duck; the second Deare Heart; the third, Prettie Pugge: But

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132  Bianca Finzi-Contini Calabresi the fourth most sweete, deare, prettie, all in all: he was the verie cockeall of a husband” and observing that a “variety of husbands [makes] perfect wiues. I would you should knowe it, as fewe teeth as I haue in my heade” (F3v).47 To which Maria responds, “What an idle prate thou keep’st? good nurse goe sleepe.” Here again the Italian drama’s opinionated mature balia is recast as the literally toothless “prating nurse” thus reducing her rhetorical and narrative power; her expression of her own erotic desires now appears as fantasy or eulogy while her intervention in the erotic desires of others comes to fruitless or tragic ends.48 Similarly, Juliet’s Nurse regularly is accepted as a “mumbling foole” (Q2I1r) although that epithet only appears in Q2 and the Folio.49 Yet early editions, particularly Q1, show traces of the Nurse instead as counterpart to Bandello’s “la buona vecchia” (“good old woman”)— “una sua vecchia che nodrita avea” (“one of her old women who raised/nourished her” later described as “una sua vecchia che seco in camera dormiva” (“one of her old women who slept with her in her room”), adding endearments like “Lambe” (G4r) and “sweet-hart” (H4r) to the Nurse’s speech.50 Q1, Q2, and F1 all emphasize that the Nurse has until now slept in Juliet’s room, with Juliet asking the Nurse in each case, “leaue me to my selfe.” Q1 reinforces that intimacy by having Juliet add explicitly, “For I do mean to lye alone tonight.” This change in sleeping arrangements, although prompted by the Friar’s “let not thy Nurse lye with thee in thy chamber” (H3r), makes concrete Juliet’s sardonic declaration “Goe Counsellor, / Thou and my bosom henceforth shal be twaine” when she chooses fidelity to Romeo over the Nurse’s advice to remarry. The evocation of Juliet’s bosom in turn reminds the audience of the affective relationship that is about to end, in which the breast of the wet-nurse has already become transformed into the “bosom” and bed of somatic companionship, as, for example, is offered by Lysander to Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in his seductive, “[o]ne turfe shall serue as pillow for vs both, / One heart, one bed, two bosomes, and one troth.”51 Thus various traces recorded in Q1 signal how Juliet’s Nurse could ­alternately—and simultaneously—register for theater and print audiences as both English and Italian, producing a hybrid character, like Italics themselves, that displays early modern English performance’s complex indebtedness to importation and domestic revision and the alternative identities available for women on the Renaissance stage. In marking Juliet’s Nurse as typographically Italianate, the early Quartos render visible an act of transculturation that has remained relatively unnoticed, a translatio that obscures the potential pseudo-Italian staging of the Nurse. If the setting of the Nurse’s speech in italics itself recalls a series of “Backward blowes” and falling forwards that reflect both Juliet’s frank eroticism and the Nurse’s own heteronormativity, Juliet’s evoking of that speech, in her own description of separation from the breast, marks in turn another intimate relationship that, if less overtly stated, might have been equally visible when performed for early modern audiences schooled in Italian Nurses and their Innamorata charges.

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NOTES 1.  See, for example, the “Introduction” and essays by Bella Mirabella, Julie Campbell, and Rachel Poulsen, in Women Players in England 1500–1600, ed. Pamela Allen Brown and Peter Parolin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), as well as Pamela Allen Brown, “The Counterfeit Innamorata, or, The Diva Vanishes,” Shakespeare Yearbook 10 (1999): 402–26; Peter Parolin, “‘A Strange Fury Entered My House’: Italian Actresses and Female Performance in Volpone,” Renaissance Drama 39 (1998): 107–35; Frances Barasch, “Italian Actresses in Shakespeare’s World,” Shakespeare Bulletin 19.3 (Summer 2001): 5–9; “Hamlet versus Commedia dell’Arte,” in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literary Theories, ed. Michele Marrapodi (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011); and Eric Nicholson, “Ophelia Sings like a Prima Donna Innamorata,” in Transnational Exchange in Early ­Modern Theater, ed. Robert Henke and Eric Nicholson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). See more generally Karen Newman, Shakespeare’s Rhetoric of Comic Character (New York: Methuen, 1985) 57–76 and Louise George Clubb, Pollastra and the ­ rigins of Twelfth Night (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), 53–56. O 2. On same-sex female eroticism in Italian comedy, see Laura Giannetti, Lelia’s Kiss (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), particularly Chapter 2 “Woman with Woman.” For the courtesan as figure for international commerce, see, especially, Jean E. Howard, Theater Of A City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598–1642 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 151–57. 3. Louise George Clubb notes the shifting use of the term from the prose version of I Suppositi (Nutrice) to the “verse revision” (Balia); elsewhere she distinguishes between the Nutrice and the Balia in early modern Italian drama: “Italian Stories on the Stage,” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Comedy, ed. Alexander Leggatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 44; and Italian Drama in Shakespeare’s Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 9. 4. On the production of self-consciously pseudo-Italian personae and texts, see Calabresi, “Bawdy Doubles: Pietro Aretino’s Comedie (1588) and the Appearance of English Drama,” in Renaissance Drama: Italy in the Drama of Europe 36/37, ed. Albert Russell Ascoli and William N. West (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2010). 5.  Michelle Dowd, Women’s Work in Early Modern Literature and Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009),76. I am indebted to her excellent argument in Chapter 2. 6. Dowd, Women’s Work, 81. 7. Susanne L. Wofford, “Foreign Emotions on the Stage of Twelfth Night,” in Transnational Exchange, 145. 8.  Michele Marrapodi, “From Narrative to Drama: The Erotic Tale and the Theater,” in The Italian World of English Renaissance Drama, ed. Marrapodi and A. J. Hoenselaars (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1998), 60. 9. David Bevington, Shakespeare’s Ideas: More Things in Heaven and Earth (­Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 17. Mario DiGangi instead places the Nurse within a range of early modern English Bawds, some marked as foreign, some as native. See his Sexual Types: Embodiment, Agency, and Dramatic Character from Shakespeare to Shirley (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 160.

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134  Bianca Finzi-Contini Calabresi 10. Clubb, Italian Drama, 23; Arthur Brooke, The Tragicall History of Romeus and Iuliet, written first in Italian by Bandell, and nowe in English by Ar. Br. (London, Richard Tottell, 1562). 11.  Pierre Boisteau, XVIII Histoires Tragiques (Lyons, 1596), F4r/44. 12. Unless otherwise indicated, all citations are from Q1, An excellent conceited tragedie of Romeo and Juliet … (Printed by Iohn Danter [and Edward Allde?], London: 1597), STC 353.11, original in Huntington Library. 13. Q1, in particular, reveals or flaunts its Italian affiliations, as in the addition of “Catso” (“prick”) to Mercutio’s description of Tybalt as “the courageous ­captaine of complements, Catso, he fightes as you sing pricke-song, …” (Q1E1r). 14.  See Dowd, Women’s Work, 79: expressions such as “Oh goddegodden,” “by my maidenhead,” “what my Lamb, my Ladybird” seem to mark her as English. But see note 49 below. 15.  For the best account, see Romeo and Juliet, 1597 (Malone Society Reprints), ed. Jill Levenson and Barry Gaines (1999), vii–viii. 16.  Tiffany Stern, Shakespeare’s Theatres and the Effects of Performance, ed. Stern and Farah Karim-Cooper (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 102–103. Stern observes that “it is … a ‘bad’ Quarto quality to have an enlarged … fool section” (102), but does not note the additional italicization of the “Clowne”’s lines in Q1. 17.  See Chapter 1 of Calabresi, “Gross Characters: the Unseemly Typographies of Shakespearean Drama” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2003). 18.  See, for example, Wolfe’s edition of Il Pastor Fido (London, 1591). 19.  I am indebted to DiGangi, Sexual Types, 160, for this reference to the English translation. 20. See Robert Henke, “Border-Crossing in the Commedia dell’ Arte,” in Transnational Exchange, 31. M. A. Katritzky, The Art of Commedia: A Study in the Commedia dell’Arte 1560–1620 with Special Reference to the Visual Records (New York: Rodopi, 2006), cites John Marston’s “1599 reference to ‘the nimble tumbling Angelica’” as “taken by some as evidence for Angelica Alberghini’s presence during the Martinelli brothers’ 1578 English tour, or even as an indication of an otherwise undocumented later British visit by the troupe” (90). 21.  M. A. Katritzky, “Reading the Actress in Commedia Imagery,” in Women Players in England, 127–128 and 144, n.5. 22.  Skewed perspectival lines indicate that the figures were printed from separate blocks and thus, themselves, could function as interchangeable ‘parts’ depending on the scene or dialogue. 23.  Katritzky, “Reading the Actress,” 108. 24.  On Franceschina and Pedrolino, and links to Shakespeare’s Nurse, see Robert Henke, Performance and Literature in The Commedia dell’Arte (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 22. 25.  Mario DiGangi, The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 143. While italics seem to lean forward on the page, when set (in reverse, like all text type), they lean backwards. 26. Howard, Theater of a City, 153. 27.  See “Cazzo” and “Dildo” in Marston’s The first part of Antonio and Mellida (London, 1602). For Shakespeare’s interlexicality, see Keir Elam, “‘At the cubiculo’: Shakespeare’s Problems with Italian Language and Culture,” in Italian Culture in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, ed. Michele Marrapodi (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 99–110. Elam proposes “a form of micro-intertextuality

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Angelica and Franceschina  135 where a dialogic relationship is set up within a single word, due to competing meanings or competing cultural connotations deriving from two languages and two texts”(107). 28.  For the range available in “even the homely little theatergram of the innamorata’s abettor” throughout sixteenth-century Italy, see Clubb, Italian Drama, 10–13, and 20–21. 29.  Katritzky, “Reading the Actress,” 135. 30.  Ibid, 136. 31.  Henke, “Border-Crossing,” 28. 32.  Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 221. 33.  For “nursling” see Guido Ruggiero and Laura Giannetti, Five Comedies from the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 213. 34. Bruto, The Necessarie, K4r. 35.  The addition of “and such light women” marks another directed translation. 36. Wells, “Juliet’s Nurse: the Uses of Inconsequentiality,” in Shakespeare’s Styles: Essays in Honor of Kenneth Muir, ed. Philip Edwards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 51–66, 52. 37.  See also the nouns “Taccagnarie”—“wranglings, … cauillations … ill conditions” and “taccagnatore”—“a wrangler, a cogger, a cauiller … a niggard, a chuffe.” Elam, “‘At the cubiculo,’” describes Florio’s “central role not only as ­[Shakespeare]’s primary Anglo-Italian intertext … but also as a crucial ­transmitter of Italian cultural modes and models” (102). 38. See Dowd, Women’s Work: “[f]amilies who hired wet-nurses were justifiably concerned with the speech and education of the women they employed to suckle their children” (78), who were thought to communicate foreign tongues and habits through contact with the breast. 39.  See Clubb, Italian Drama for whom Polimnesta in I suppositi “defines her own character by contrast with the nurse” (9). 40.  On the publication history (1537–1611) and European influence of this Sienese play, see Giannetti, Lelia’s Kiss, 49. In 242, n.59 Giannetti explains how ­typically “wet-nurses, especially among the upper classes, often remained very close to the children they nursed and the families they worked for, thus, becoming members of the larger famiglia or household. In this context Clemenzia was much closer than a former employee, a fact which the comedy makes perfectly clear in the close interactions between her and Lelia.” 41.  Giannetti cites Aretino’s Ragionamenti where the midwife describes a naked woman in detail, arousing her auditor the balia (90). While she does not explore desire between women of different ages or status positions, it is often implicit in the scenes she analyzes (i.e., in La Veniexiana (c.1530) between the widow Angela and her serva Nena). 42.  See Flaminio Scala, Il Teatro delle favole rappresentative, ed. Ferruccio Marotti (Milan: Edizioni Il Polifilo, 1976), Giornata IX, 101–109; and The Commedia dell’Arte of Flaminio Scala: A Translation and Analysis of 30 Scenarios, ed. and trans. Richard Andrews (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press: 2008), 41. The ­Franceschina role is even more dominant in the 1618 five-act play Scala developed from this scenario, Il finto marito. See Rosalind Kerr, “The Actress as Androgyne in the Commedia dell’Arte Scenarios of Flaminia Scala” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 1993).

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136  Bianca Finzi-Contini Calabresi 43.  See the Nurse’s exchange with Capulet and Lady Capulet over cotqueans and mouse-hunts (I1r). 44.  Christopher Marlowe, Dido, Queen of Carthage (London, 1594), E4v. 45. The Nurse lives apart from the household in the country and offers a locus amoenis of a distinctly English sort as a lure. 46.  John Marston, Antonio’s Revenge (London, 1603), B1r. 47.  Maria appears earlier with “her haire about her eares” and threatens to “range about the Church, / Like frantick Bachanell, or Iasons wife.” Such theatergrams generally include the Nurse/Franceschina, see “The Madness of Isabella” in Andrews, Commedia dell’Arte, 225. 48. Brooke’s Nurse also recalls a “preposterous” predilection for youthful flesh, describing clapping Juliet on the “buttocke soft” and then kissing “where I did clappe”: “And gladder then was I / of such a kisse forsooth / Then I had been to haue a kisse / of some old letchers mouth” (Ciiir/19). 49.  With the transfer of “Oh goddegodden” to Capulet in Q1, the Nurse appears more terse and definitive in her objections: “You are too blame to rate her so … Why my Lord I speake no treason.” In response, Capulet dismisses her physically; the English phrase becomes a command to leave the room: “Oh goddegodden. Vtter your grauity ouer a gossips boule, / For here we need it not.” Likewise, in her encounter with Romeo and Mercutio, Q1 does not include the Nurse’s disquisition on Paris versus Romeo as potential husband nor the speculation on words beginning and not beginning with R. 50.  Matteo Bandello, La seconda parte de le novella (Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 1993), 62 and 65. 51.  Mr. William Shakespeares comedies histories tragedies (London, 1623), 150 [STC 22273–774].

10 The Mirror and the Cage

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Queens and Dwarfs at the Early Modern Court Pamela Allen Brown

Isabella Clara Eugenia, Infanta of Spain, arrives in France to visit her grandmother Catherine de Medici, collector of marvels. With her is a gentleman carrying a cloth-covered cage, who announces that the Infanta wishes to present the queen with a parrot that can speak many languages. From the cage comes a voice speaking eloquently in French, Dutch, Spanish, English, and Italian. With a flourish the gentleman whips away the cloth—­revealing a female dwarf, orating fluently. The court erupts in cries of shock and delight.1 The Infanta had hit her mark: while Catherine had a vast menagerie of exotic pets, she had an absolute mania for dwarfs, collecting rare specimens from Poland and Africa. Her latest acquisition turned her chamber into a wonder-booth for staging what Bacon called “frivolous impostures for pleasure and strangeness.”2 The imposture is largely the dwarf’s doing, but the strangeness lies in the pleasure of the spectator. An odd mimetic bond shapes that pleasure and calls it into being. Queen and dwarf are worlds apart yet uncannily mirror each other. Both arrive as strangers to foreign courts, where they are placed on show and must speak languages not their own. Both possess valuable bodies that function transnationally in courtly networks of exchange. Both are hyper-visible, vulnerable to the multiple gazes of a critical courtly audience. Neither seems forced by violence to act, and both stand to gain from arousing wonder as female prodigies. At the same time, their encounter betrays the limits of self-fashioning in the face of bodily abjection. Performance erases the self rather than fashioning it, surely, when a dwarf parrots a parrot.3 By accepting this gift, the queen reveals the peculiar shape of her own desire, an act that creates obligations and a new relationship that mingles abjection and affection. By arousing wonder, the dwarf obeys and disarms. Rosemarie Garland Thompson, a pioneer of disability studies, uses the term “the extraordinary body” to refer to the human form once called monstrous, a body always vulnerable to “minstrelization,” or involuntary exhibition. Early modern royals collected all sorts of extraordinary bodies and minstrelized them, whether the body in question was read as a sign of divine judgment or a natural wonder.4 When human beings make toys out of other humans, the result is “dark play,” cat-and-mouse games that are no contest

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138  Pamela Allen Brown because the outcome is controlled by one player.5 Courtiers cast dwarfs in roles evoking the nonhuman, the soulless, and the powerless: the animal, the edible, the child. Treated as toys and pets, subject to derision and violent abuse, even murder, made to do stupid tricks, and even to marry and reproduce for amusement, the court dwarf in many scenarios is made to mirror the bestial and the enslaved.6 This is dark play with a vengeance. But at certain fleeting moments—as with the sophisticated display of languages by the Infanta’s dwarf—the abject player might seem to act for reasons and motives that are her own, a key criterion of autonomy.7 Bringing autonomy into this grim picture produces vertigo, or perhaps disbelief. Could the Infanta’s gift-dwarf be considered an active collaborator in her exhibition? Did she claim her linguistic skills as her own? Did she perform willingly and with purpose? The queen’s part in her performance and its aftermath is even more mysterious. The gift initiates a relationship that may endure for life, like the pairing of owner and pet, and she takes it on with pleasure. What needs and fantasies feed the queen’s passion for dwarfs? What is the relation of that pleasure to the danger of mimetic vulnerability? Most important and most puzzling: when queens consorted with dwarfs for pleasure and companionship, why does the pairing so often mirror forms of abjection experienced by both monarch and dwarf? To pursue these questions this essay will consider ways in which royal women configured their relationships to the dwarf’s body and self. Subjected to wildly contrary impulses, from parental care to sadism and sexual aggression, the court dwarf inspired a plethora of technologies, representations, and spectacles. In a few remarkable cases, a dwarf became bound to a master or mistress by what seems to have been strong affective bonds of intimacy and friendship, as in the longstanding league between Queen ­Henrietta Maria and Jeffrey Hudson. These could reconfigure a proud queen as a split subject, a spectacle of strangeness. Elizabeth I, who famously cultivated her own sublime singularity, formed a lifelong relationship with her favorite dwarf, Madame Thomasin de Paris. As I will show, both possessed surprisingly congruent extraordinary bodies subject to mimesis and constraint, in a bond that brings into question the opposition between autonomy and abjection. For reasons murky to us now, dwarfs were “prominent in the consciousness of princely and aristocratic Europe for some 200 years, roughly from 1 ­ 500–1700.”8 Dukes and duchesses, kings and queens trafficked in human exotica with the avidity they devoted to prize dogs and horses—they sought out not only dwarfs, but hunchbacks, “blackamoors,” and fools. Many dwarfs entered the court as gifts from one aristocrat to another, but sometimes commoners would bring a dwarf child to court, some motivated by greed, but some seeking to better their child’s chances in a world that was harsh toward every kind of disability.9 To the very wealthy who could afford to collect them by the dozen, dwarfs were both amusing playthings and luxury goods. The Gonzagan ducal court of Mantua held lavish theatricals

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The Mirror and the Cage  139

played entirely by dwarfs, and Isabella d’Este gave and received dwarfs as gifts and built small apartments for her dwarfs in the ducal palace. Some dwarfs were mentally incompetent and became court “naturals,” but many were notably intelligent and rewarded for their wit. Most, however, left no track in historical records beyond scattered entries for clothes and shoes.10 Attitudes and beliefs about dwarfs were dizzyingly contradictory. Unlike the dire spectacle of a child shaped like a fish, dwarfs could be considered comic miniatures of humanity whose existence bred delight and laughter— living proof that Nature enjoyed showing her creativity and artfulness by throwing up lusus naturae or jokes of nature. Because they did not depart radically from the norm in their bodily shape, young dwarfs were baptized, and if mentally competent, they could eventually inherit and bequeath property.11 Neither popular prints of monstrous births nor taxonomies of “monsters, marvels, and prodigies” waste much ink on dwarfs. Ambroise Paré On Monsters and Marvels (1573) and Pierre Boaistuau’s Certaine secret wonders of nature (1569) mention dwarfism as deformity, but they do not count dwarfs among monstrous portents or terrifying prodigies.12 Most babies who were severely deformed did not live long, while dwarfs might live to old age in full possession of their wits. Dwarfs were often the most intelligent denizens of court menageries, with few or no disabilities, and in Spain, they might become caretakers for fools and other disabled inmates.13 Popular belief assumed dwarfs had their origins in fabulous far-off worlds, figuring them as strayed members of the pygmy races reported in Pliny, Mandeville, and wonder books.14 Dwarfs were obligatory characters in romances from Amadis of Gaul to The Faerie Queene, and in plays based on them, such as Robert Greene’s The Scottish History of James IV.15 Boys probably played dwarfs on stage, but an actual dwarf or a short adult might have made a specialty of such roles at times. In Thomas Heywood’s The Three Wonders of this Age the famous Molone brothers are said to be “of an extraordinary shortnesse, the one a witty Actor, the other a cunning Thiefe,” memorialized in the expression “as very a dwarf as Molone.”16 In Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle the Citizen Wife demands that Rafe have a dwarf as befits a wandering knight; the thankless task falls to George, her youngest apprentice, who gamely “romances” his diction, turning horses to palfreys and maids to damsels. Fine Lady Would-Be reduces Nano, the ringmaster of Volpone’s menagerie, to a romantic accessory with her famous line “Pray you lend me your dwarf.”17 ABJECTION AND THE CAGE OF DESIRE Dwarfs inspired spectacles of forced objectification and confinement. The parrot-cage in which the Infanta’s dwarf performed proclaims she is ­nugatory and unfree, a household “moveable.” Performing dwarfs might be hidden along with birds in a huge pie within a cage of crust, or forced to

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140  Pamela Allen Brown crouch under a player’s wide skirts until their cue brought them onstage.18 But ­dwarfism itself shares an older and more terrible history with the cage. Ancient Greeks used a cage called a gloottokoma to stunt the growth of infants who were locked inside until they emerged as dwarfs.19 The Romans practiced the art of creating human bonsais using dietary deprivation, among other methods. If they endured this torture, the artificial dwarfs would be pampered and petted. In a poem by Martial translated by ­Ronsard, he wished his parents had made him a dwarf instead of a writer: Were I a dwarf, naught would I be denied: I would have sixty sous a day, caressed By King and court; be plump, well dressed Bedecked, beprised, and much beloved beside. ... Ah, foolish parents who my youth misspent With Latin! Best had they misshapen, bent My limbs, or schooled me in stupidity!20 Dwarfs continued to be desirable and valuable, and it is possible that artificial dwarfing did not die out with the Romans. A seventeenth-century medical text from Leipzig instructs readers that to produce a dwarf, one should rub an infant’s spine with the grease of moles, dormice, and bats.21 In L’Homme Qui Rit Victor Hugo describes a gang of rogues in medieval Spain who captured children, crippled them, then sold them as dwarfs and hunchbacks.22 These scattered citations aren’t proof these practices actually occurred, but it is more certain that animals were subjected to dwarfing. Paré casually mentions “ladies who foster puppies in small baskets or other narrow containers to keep them from growing,” and Bacon’s citizen-scientists in New Atlantis experiment on animals to “make them greater or taller than their kind is; and contrariwise dwarf them, and stay their growth.”23 Some Renaissance aristocrats tried to breed dwarfs, but dwarf mothers often produced full-sized offspring or died in childbirth.24 The birth of a healthy dwarf baby was a matter of rejoicing at the court of Isabella d’Este. Occasionally she presented them as gifts to favored friends and allies. In one letter she says she plans to make a gift of the “first fruit from my race of little dwarfs,” a pretty two-year-old girl who has just begun to walk and talk: four years ago I promised the Most Illustrious Madama Renata [de Francia] that I would give Her Excellency the first fruit to issue from my race of little dwarfs, by which I meant a female. As Your Ladyship knows, two years ago a little girl was born. Though we cannot hope she will stay so small as my Delia, she will nonetheless without a doubt remain a dwarf, and given her beauty, she deserves to be treasured. Since she is now at the point where she is beginning to speak and walk, and is able to get around confidently all by herself ... I thought I would send her to Madama.25

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The passage exemplifies the one-sided relationship of “dominance and affection” analyzed by Yi-Fu Tuan. As affectionate as her letter sounds toward the toddler, Isabella holds the child’s life and fate in thrall, and she plays the role of loving parent but trains a sharp eye on her luxury value, which is heightened by her beauty. A human pet of this kind is “a diminished being” serving “the vanity and pleasure of its possessor.” Neither friend nor child, she is “a personal belonging ... that one can take delight in, play with, or set aside, as one wishes.”26 The toddler’s mother is probably the dwarf named Delia, who will have no say on the departure of her child for another owner and household.27 Princesses might play with dwarf children as if with luxurious dolls, and grow into adulthood with them. Isabella Clara Eugenia was raised at a court that doted on dwarfs, and her father Philip lavished attention and care on his favorites. The Infanta posed for several magnificent portraits with female dwarfs. After she married her cousin Albert, Archduke of Austria, Isabella Clara governed the Netherlands with him, but the couple never produced a child. In 1603 she sent a portrait to King James and Queen Anna, painted by Frans Pourbus, of herself with a child dwarf, but the diplomatic gift was a disaster (Figure 10.1). According to the Venetian ambassador, the

Figure 10.1 Isabella Clara Eugenia, Infanta of Spain (1566–1633), with a child dwarf, c.1598–1600, by Frans Pourbus the younger. This portrait was once misidentified as Anne Boleyn with her daughter Elizabeth. By permission of Royal Collection Trust / @ Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014.

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142  Pamela Allen Brown image shocked and discomfited Anna, who read it as a pathetic mimicry of ­motherhood. The queen “expressed her pity that so great a lady should endure the sorrow of not enjoying the sweet name of mother.”28 The painting became part of the royal collection but was never displayed. In the later seventeenth century the identities of the sitters were forgotten, and the portrait was actually misidentified as Anne Boleyn with the young Elizabeth—a fascinating error that seems moved by the desire to overcome a taboo. The great Elizabeth I is reduced to a toddler, literally dwarfed by the huge figure of her demonized “mother” who touches her protectively, rendering visible a relationship that had been dangerous to mention at Elizabeth’s court.29 Perhaps Elizabeth understood the threat of inviting pity (or ridicule) for her own suppressed status as a motherless and bastardized daughter. The combination of an adult woman and her childish dwarf also might raise the specter of barrenness, as it had in Anna’s eyes, which may explain why there are no confirmed images of Elizabeth with a court dwarf.30 For royal women who had their own children, acting the parent’s role in managing their dwarfs’ sexual futures could be treated as a pleasant game, full of jokes and make-believe. Whenever a male and female pair of dwarfs could be found, they were pressed into wooing each other and often into marrying.31 Some of these celebrations were comic, theatrical, and nonbinding, but others were legal and full of strained pomp. Henrietta Maria arranged the wedding of her dwarf William Gibson, a skilled miniaturist, to another dwarf, Anne Shepherd. The Queen gave her a diamond ring and Charles gave away the bride. The couple produced nine full-sized children and lived long lives. These facts do not capture the tenor of the occasion; that is probably better glimpsed in Edmund Waller’s “The Wedding of the Dwarfs,” which solemnly ruminates on marital rape, cuckoldry, and genital size: Eve might as well have Adam fled, As she denied her little bed To him, for whom Heavene seemed to frame, And measure out, this only dame. [...] None may presume her faith to prove; He proffers death that proffers love.32 This bride has no choice—to deny him her bed would be futile, and to take a full-sized lover, fatal. That last line may allude to the medical reality that dwarf mothers often suffered terrible pains during sex and pregnancy and risked death in childbirth—making the “jest” grotesque. Waller’s salacious interest in the sexuality of dwarfs is ill-disguised and conventional, with antecedents in classical erotic literature.33 According to Elizabeth Grosz, “The first reaction to the freakish and the monstrous is a perverse kind of sexual curiosity. People think to themselves, how do they do it? What kind of sex lives are available to [them]?” These voyeuristic pleasures blend with horror at the “intolerable ambiguity” and “blurring of



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identities” suggested by such bodies, which disturb the viewer’s narcissism because they “traverse the very boundaries that secure the ‘normal’ subject in its given identity and sexuality.”34 This anxious fascination with extraordinary bodies may help explain the insatiable desire to stare at and stage them.

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PLAYING FOR AUTONOMY As a visual wonder the dwarf could not escape the cage of theatricality, but a gift for performing might help her gain an extra measure of care and protection. The Infanta’s female dwarf entered the court in the guise of a caged parrot, yet the imposture gave her the chance to display her linguistic and theatrical skill and to win over her new mistress, Catherine de Medici, a renowned patron and producer of theater. In other words, this particular dwarf may have acted for herself while being acted upon. Another example of this dual identity appears in seventeenth-century Bologna. Senator Ferdinando di Cospi employed a dwarf to serve as an informed guide to the collections in his celebrated museum of natural marvels. This Italian dwarf functioned simultaneously as the “exhibitor and the exhibited.”35 In his remarkable and self-aware performance one may discern the shadow of Shakespeare’s Richard descanting on his deformities and wielding them to gain power, and it might also be compared to the self-promotion of denizens of the monster-booth and the freak show, who held forth to capitalize on their exhibition.36 Acting the pretty fool changed Jeffrey Hudson’s fortune. While he was still a young dwarf his parents gave him to the Duchess of Richmond, who presented him to Queen Henrietta Maria. Hudson made his entrance by springing out of a huge pie and hailing the queen with somersaults and bows. She was delighted, and he became her favorite. After she dubbed him “Sir Jeffrey,” he struggled for respect and dignity and took on such airs that he refused to recognize his own father. A proportionate dwarf, he was proud of his looks, but in a famous double portrait by Van Dyck, the smooth-faced Hudson looks like one of her children, though he was in his twenties at the time.37 He was kidnapped twice by pirates and enslaved in Algiers. Freed, he later fought a duel with a full-sized opponent who had taunted him. After killing this man, Hudson narrowly escaped execution, saved by his queen. While his life shows a constant effort to negotiate his status within the courtly world, he could never fully escape minstrelization. He was always fair game for the court in search for amusement—whether he had to box with a monkey, pop out from under someone’s gown at a masque, or play a piece of cheese in the pocket of William Evans, the court giant.38 According to Sara van den Berg, court dwarfs like Hudson and Thomasin also possessed symbolic utility. Lacking actual power, they could be used to comment on and signify more powerful bodies: “The dwarf could carry political, religious, psychological, and aesthetic meaning, serving as a surrogate for the ruler, the subject,

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144  Pamela Allen Brown the self, and perhaps the artist.”39 Moralizing the spectacle of a court dwarf might mean looking through the wrong end of a telescope at the high and mighty. In the mock-encomium to Jeffrey Hudson entitled The new-yeeres gift (1636) the author Microphilis (“lover of small things”) presents his ironic praises to the dwarf, knowing his satire will be read as directed at the court and monarch. Dwarfs are “accounted emblematically necessary, to denote those who desire to approach neere Princes ought not to be ambitious of any Greatnesses, but to acknowledge al their court-lustre is but a beame of the Royall Sunne their Master.” The author praises the court dwarf for providing a humbling perspective to even the mightiest, serving “as a voice crying ... O King remember how thou are little” (sig.5r). In his masterpiece Las Meninas, Velázquez disdains facile moralizing at the dwarf’s expense. At his easel the artist gazes directly at the viewer, while the king and queen’s images are merely blurry reflections in the mirror behind him. Two dwarfs of very different shapes and temperaments occupy the painting’s foreground. One, a pretty boy dwarf, kicks a large dog, who ignores him placidly. His futile aggression reminds viewers that humans’ control over their animality is weak, but it also bears an ironic echo of the casual sadism of courtiers toward the abject. Next to the princesses appears the stolid figure of Maria Barbola, a dwarf who seems determined to meet our eyes proudly, without flinching. Artist and dwarf share a look full of melancholy self-awareness, traits we associate with independent thought, however limited. Her gaze reminds us that court dwarfs in possession of their wits still could act in ways that might improve their lives, give them a sense of self-created identity, and guide them in negotiating with masters who seemed to hold all the cards.40 ELIZABETH’S “SHEE-DWARF” In Jonson’s Volpone the dwarf Nano reminds his audience that their pleasure in his mimicry reveals an unflattering equation between himself and his masters: First for your dwarf, he’s little and witty, And everything, as it is little, is pretty; Else why do men say to a creature of my shape, So soon as they see him, ‘It’s a pretty little ape’? And why a pretty ape? But for pleasing imitation Of greater men’s action, in a ridiculous fashion.41 Few monarchs have been more aware of the dangers of “pleasing imitation” than Elizabeth. When she said “we princes … are set on stages for the world, in the sight and view of all the world” she acknowledged that a queen’s performance is enforced: she can never escape the tyranny of theater

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or, for that matter, the democracy of the monster-booth. Her next sentence from the same speech drives home this point: “The eyes of many behold our actions; a spot is soon spied in our garments; a blemish quickly noted in our doings.”42 She endured invasive surveillance by her courtiers, her enemies, and the public, and was always prey to unflattering and even scandalous imitations that painted her as monstrous, heretical, and whorish, though she strove mightily to police her own iconography.43 In the special arena of the royal menagerie, imitations of the great were allowed. Elizabeth laughed at fools named “Ippolyta the Tartarian,” a mock-Empress, and Monarcho, a mad fool who believed he was a king.44 She called Ippolyta “oure deare and well beloved woman,”45 but she had a longer and perhaps closer bond with her dwarf Madame Thomasin de Paris. A well-shaped proportionate dwarf, Thomasin wore parts of Elizabeth’s glittering dresses, cut down and tailored for her, so must have looked at times like her mistress in miniature. Part of the queen’s household from the late 1570s to 1603, Thomasin received as gifts “a long series of attractive and elaborate gowns, petticoats and separate sleeves,” rings, gloves, shoes, mirrors, combs, sheets, and gilt plate.46 Some records of the queen’s gifts, such as “a penner and Inkhorne for writing,” suggest Thomasin possessed a high level of literacy and culture; most remarkable is the record of her visit to Doctor John Dee in his famous library at Richmond, where she stayed overnight.47 At another time Elizabeth paid for a gown for Thomasin’s sister Prudence de Paris, also a court dwarf, who may have been on a visit to the court. As a companion to the queen she witnessed many courtly festivities. In the famous painting at Penshurst described as Elizabeth dancing the lavolta, a tiny, richly dressed young woman sits at her feet. This may be Thomasin herself, though the identification is conjectural.48 Accounts of Thomasin’s special status differ. According to Southworth she “ranked among the gentlewomen of the household,” but costume scholar Janet Arnold believes “she was probably like an elegant doll, and as she remained at Court until the end of Elizabeth’s reign, she was doubtless an entertaining companion.”49 Diminutives such as “elegant doll” or “pretty little ape” seem distinctly inadequate, however, as descriptions of Madame Thomasin—a highly literate and worldly woman, with ties to international courtly networks, like her powerful mistress Elizabeth. The two had other experiences in common. After surviving dangerous childhoods, both Elizabeth and Thomasin made their way by learning how to please and to perform obedience before pitiless critics. Public and meant to be seen, both queen and dwarf were vulnerable to bawdy jokes and lurid speculation about their ability to conceive, reproduce, and bear children.50 Both were prodigies, arousing wonder, and both were targets of abjection due to bodily difference that disturbs gender norms. The queen’s abjection is not as obvious, of course, yet it qualifies and undermines her self-engineered apotheosis. Although Elizabeth portrayed herself as a semidivine wonder among women, counter-narratives always

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146  Pamela Allen Brown circulated about her body and her gender. Some of them are of Elizabeth’s own making: rhetorically she separated her own female body from “the heart and stomach of a king,” figuring herself as conjoined unequal twins. In her Golden Speech she proclaims that if she had yielded to her “sexly weakness” as monarch, she “had then not deserved to live.”51 Her seeming autonomy is cordoned off and qualified by her gender, which must be, but cannot be, expelled; and she is also abjected by the stage on which her extraordinary body must perform unto death. By creating copies of herself as both a girlish dwarf and a superhuman goddess, she avoids figuring her body as ordinary, female, menstruating, vulnerable, aging, or mortal. Elizabeth’s theatrical arts were matters of state, and they entailed massive amnesia and mystification, as well as miniaturization and gigantification. Spenser’s elaborate poetic compliment casts her as a tiny gloriously perfect Fairy Queen, while she cultivated personae not of woman born, proclaiming her otherworldly and disembodied state—Urania, Astraea, Cynthia. These prodigious images breed impure thoughts. Dangerous satires expose her divinity as riddled with abjection. In a manuscript decrying Pride, William Wodwall draws a monstrous bird with one cold eye, a cruel beak, and armored spikes in her enormous starched lace ruff—a pompous, vain and vicious fowl. Pretending this monstrous bird has been “discovered recently in Lincolnshire,” he parodies the conventions of monster ballads. He titles his poem “Queen Elizabeth Allegorized.”52 On a trip to Scotland, Ben Jonson chats with William Drummond about rumors that the queen is unable to have intercourse and produce an heir because of a membrane that obstructs the vaginal opening. Far from Scotland, an Italian actress ridicules Elizabeth’s supposed deformity in a mad scene, saying “she can’t piss.”53 Like the dwarf-bride in Waller’s poem, who is too tiny for “normal” penetration, the queen’s body obstructs the normative masculine imperative that lays the foundation of the state. In both cases the monstrously incapable female body is the target of satire. As the Queen grows older, allegories about her power and beauty grew more unreal. Visual fictions strive to create shock and awe at her power over nature and her subjects. In the Ditchley Portrait she towers over a map of England, a giantess and a weather-witch controlling storms and sunshine everywhere. Inevitably the image recruits “negative wonder,” the contaminating evacuations of apprehension and laughter.54 This gargantuan queen morphs easily into a sorceress of romance or even a swanky and exotic fairground monster. Where there be giants, dwarfs follow close behind, and it is strange to speculate that Thomasin may have worn an abstract of the same gown. For a queen so obsessed with controlling copies of her image, did the common spectacle of Elizabeth with Madame Thomasin at her feet magnify her greatness—or did cynical eyes see only a barren queen parading her vanity “in ridiculous fashion”? When Elizabeth reached her late sixties, the Rainbow Portrait appears. Wearing the official “Mask of Youth,” she is a cosmic prodigy who cannot age or die, who claims her own body as an erotic field, and who dominates

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the heavens and the world of signs. But once again, with eerie eyes and ears studding the gorgeous satin folds, the portrait also evokes a monster of excess. In this case, the image echoes crude woodcuts of monstrous births showing faces on the torsos of headless wonders and bizarre animals with superabundant limbs and eyes. This overlay challenges the boundary between self and other, human and animal, and it attracts and repels at the same time. After the queen dies, payments for Thomasin’s gowns and shoes end abruptly, suggesting she did not enter the households of James or Anna. The record is silent, unfortunately, on Thomasin’s last years, but in 1636 Thomas Heywood mentions her in a list of famous dwarfs: “Elizabeth had a sheedwarfe who lived til shee was very aged” (Three Wonders of this Age). In reviewing the decades-long bond of Elizabeth and Madame Thomasin, what is striking is the absence of evidence of dark play and forced performance in the dwarf’s long life and the presence of care and regard in many gifts small and large. If Thomasin indeed “ranked among the gentlewoman of the household,” as Southworth believes, her obligations to the queen resembled those of other longtime gentlewomen in her inner circle, providing her with personal service, companionship, and an assumption of trust.55 Theories about abjection on the one hand and autonomy on the other seem insufficient to explain the shared affection and intertwined identities of this anomalous pair. Asking whether Madame Thomasin might possess what Kant, Locke, or Rawls would call autonomy seems absurd, however. Closer to the mark might be the concept of relational autonomy, created as a feminist critique of individualistic, rationalistic, and masculinist accounts of autonomy. This theory, which is being applied in bioethics and disability studies today, holds that all persons are socially embedded “second persons,” and autonomy (even that of queens) exists only in relation to the social, to others who create the conditions for and sustain the self. 56 As I have tried to show, in an early modern world that associated the autonomous woman ruler with the monstrous and abject nullity with the dwarf, the queen’s vulnerability and her dwarf’s worldliness disturb our tendency to read only absolute power and abject enslavement into the scene. In this strange case, the intimacy of two prodigies might be read as a “frivolous imposture for pleasure and strangeness” motivated by dark play and domination. But it might also be read, more provocatively, as a collaborative performance on an endlessly demanding stage, subtended by ties that undermined neither player and sustained both. NOTES 1.  See Betty M. Adelson, The Lives of Dwarfs: Their Journey from Public Curiosity toward Social Liberation (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 13; Frieda Leonie, Catherine de Medici: Renaissance Queen of France (New York: Harper Collins, 2006), 179. 2.  Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, Book Two, in Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg. org/dirs/etext04/adlr10h.htm (accessed May 10, 2014).

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148  Pamela Allen Brown 3. Dwarfs often performed with and were depicted with dogs, monkeys, and ­parrots. This association summons the abject, which marks the “primal repression” by which the human separates itself from animals and animalia, according to Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: A Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 13–14. 4.  On the long-term shift from early discourses on monsters as divine prodigies and natural wonders to the modern discourse of medical pathology, see Lorraine J. Daston and Katherine Park, “Unnatural Conceptions: The Study of Monsters in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France and England,” Past & Present 92 (1981): 23. 5.  Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction (New York: ­Routledge, 2013), 106. 6.  See Adelson, Lives of Dwarfs, 339, 363–65; Anton C. Zijderveld, Reality in a Looking-glass: Rationality through an Analysis of Traditional Folly (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), 92, 96; and Alice J. McVan, “Spanish Dwarfs,” Notes Hispanic 2 (1942): 103–104. 7.  Catriona Mackenzie and Natalie Stoljar, introduction to Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency, and the Social Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 5. 8.  Yi-Fu Tuan, Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 156. 9. Margaret A. Winzer, “Disability and Society before the Eighteenth Century: Dread and Despair,” in The Disability Studies Reader, ed. Lennard J. Davis, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1997), 75–109. 10. Adelson, Lives, 12; Mark Thornton Burnett, Constructing “Monsters” in Shakespearean Drama and Early Modern Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 20. 11.  Marie-Hélène Huet, Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 277. In 1628 Sir Edward Coke held that “a monster which hath not the shape of man kinde, cannot be heire or inherit any land, albeit it be brought forth within marriage, but although he hath deformitie in any part of his bodie, yet if he hath humane shape he may be heire.” Quoted in Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 116. 12.  Sara van den Berg, “Dwarf Aesthetics in Spenser’s Faerie Queene and the Early Modern Court,” in Recovering Disability in Early Modern England, ed. Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013), 24. For woodcuts of monstrous births, see Julie Crawford, Marvelous Protestantism: Monstrous Births in Post-Reformation England (Baltimore: Johns ­Hopkins University Press, 2005), 5–8. 13.  McVan, “Spanish Dwarfs,” 100. 14.  Paula Findlen, “Jokes of Nature and Jokes of Knowledge: The Playfulness of Scientific Discourse in Early Modern Europe.” Renaissance Quarterly 43.2 ­ (1990): 292–331, 306, 309. Also see John Block Friedman, Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). 15.  On Spenser’s dwarfs see van den Berg, “Dwarf Aesthetics,” 23–42. 16. Heywood’s Three Wonders of this Age (London, 1636) is a broadside with woodcuts of the biggest, smallest, and oldest humans then living; the statement about the Molone brothers is in the middle column.

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17.  See David Bergeron, “‘Lend Me Your Dwarf’: Romance in Volpone,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 3 (1986): 99–113. Dwarfs also appeared in masques, entertainments and drolls, e.g., Chloridia, Neptune’s Triumph, and Britannia Triumphans; Jeffrey Hudson played in many. Paul Semonin, ­“Monsters in the Marketplace: The Exhibition of Human Oddities in Early Modern England,” in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. Rosemarie ­Garland Thomson (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 97. 18. When dwarf actors today play aliens or robots hidden in confining costumes (e.g., R2D2 in Star Wars), they call such roles “dwarf in a box.” See Adelson, Lives, 244. 19. Longinus, On the Sublime, quoted in Tuan, Dominance and Affection, 154. 20.  Lyrics of the French Renaissance: Marot, Du Bellay, Ronsard, trans. Hope ­Glidden and Norman R. Shapiro (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 369. 21.  Edward J. Wood, Giants and Dwarfs (London: R. Bentley, 1868), 286. 22.  John Boynton Kaiser, “The Comprachicos,” Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology 40.2 (1913): 247. 23. Paré, Of Monsters and Prodigies, 42; Francis Bacon: A Selection of His Works, ed. Sidney Warhaft (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 450. 24. Tuan, Dominance and Affection, 154. 25.  Letter dated September 11, 1532, from Selected Letters of Isabella d’Este, ed. and trans. Deanna Shemek (Toronto: Center for Renaissance and Reformation Studies), forthcoming. The word “race” [razza] was used for breeds of dogs and other animals, as Deanna Shemek pointed out to me. I wish to thank Professor Shemek for graciously sharing letters and her expertise with me. 26. Tuan, Dominance and Affection, 140. 27. Adelson, Lives, 11–12. 28.  Karen Hearn, Dynasties: Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England, 1530–1630 (New York: Rizzoli, 1996), 182. 29.  According to the Royal Collection Trust, the portrait was given to Anne in 1603, then “was recorded in 1649 with a varied and important set of foreign and British royal portraits in the Cross Gallery at Somerset House, the Queen’s London residence. Soon after this it came to be described as Anne Boleyn with Princess Elizabeth and Catherine of Aragon with Princess Mary. The costume is clearly that of the Spanish and not the English court and the small figure is not a child but a ­ dwarf.” http://www.royalcollection.org.uk/collection/407377/the-infanta-isabellaclara-eugenia-1566–1633-archduchess-of-austria (accessed May 10, 2014). 30.  A painting at Penshurst Place of Elizabeth dancing may include Thomasin, but the identification is conjectural. See John Southworth, Fools and Jesters at the English Court (Stroud: Sutton, 2003), 251, n.15. 31.  See accounts of the huge, costly dwarf wedding, followed by the death of the dwarf bride in childbirth, at the court of Peter the Great (Adelson, Lives, 17–18); and the Tom Thumb wedding in nineteenth-century New York (Lori Merish, “Cuteness and Commodity Aesthetics: Tom Thumb and Shirley Temple,” in Freakery, ed. Thomson, 190–95). 32.  Edmund Waller, Poetical Works of Edmund Waller (New York: John W. Parker, 1854), 119. 33.  Ancient Romans used dwarfs as sex toys/slaves; dwarfs are often imagined to be hypersexual and to possess large genitals, and dwarfs male and female often appear in pornography of various time periods. Adelson, Lives, 10–11, 111.

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150  Pamela Allen Brown 34.  Elizabeth Grosz, “Intolerable Ambiguity: Freaks as/at the Limit,” in Freakery, ed. Thomson, 64–5. 35.  Findlen, “Jokes of Nature,” 309. 36.  Katherine Schaap Williams argues Richard advances to power by using “dazzling rhetoric [that] employs his distinctive body to signify an array of claims, and, likewise, works to destabilize all of the bodies in the play,” turning his disabilities to advantage. Katherine Schaap Williams, “Enabling Richard: The Rhetoric of Disability in Richard III,” Disability Studies Quarterly 29, no. 4 (2009), http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/997. On self-exhibition see Robert Bogdan, “The Social Construction of Freaks,” in Freakery, ed. Thomson, 25, 35. 37.  James Knowles, “‘Can ye not tell a man from a marmoset?’ Apes and Others on the Early Modern Stage,” Renaissance Beasts: Of Animals, Humans, and Other Wonderful Creatures, ed. Erica Fudge (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 158. 38.  Nick Page, Lord Minimus: The Extraordinary Life of Britain’s Smallest Man (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002), 52. 39.  Van den Berg, “Dwarf aesthetics,” 25. 40.  My reading is indebted to Adelson, Lives, 150. Leslie Fiedler hints that Velázquez allies himself with Maria Barbola but he does not develop the idea, Fiedler, Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (New York: Anchor Books, 1978), 69–71. 41.  Ben Jonson, Volpone, in The Alchemist and Other Plays, ed. Gordon Campbell (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1995), 3.3.10–15. For an excellent discussion of mimetic links between aping/playing and dwarfs, see Knowles, “‘Can ye not tell a man from a marmoset?’” in Renaissance Beasts, ed. Fudge. 42. Queen Elizabeth I, Elizabeth I: Collected Works, ed. Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 194. 43.  Carole Levin, “The Heart and Stomach of a King”: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), ­Chapter 4. 44.  Enid Welsford, The Fool: His Social and Literary History (London: Faber & Faber, 1935), 171. 45. Southworth, Fools and Jesters, 141–2. 46. Elizabeth Jenkins, Elizabeth the Great (New York: Coward-McCann, 1959), 195; Janet Arnold, Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Unlock’d (Leeds: Maney, 1988), 106–108. 47.  Dee noted “the Quene’s dwarf Mrs. Tomasin lay at my house” with two other guests, The Private Diary of John Dee and the Catalogue of His Library of Manuscripts, ed. James O. Halliwell (London: Camden Society, 1842), 101. 48. Southworth, Fools and Jesters, 251, n.15. 49. Southworth, Fools and Jesters, 142; Arnold, Queen’s Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Unlock’d, 107. 50.  No evidence has come to light that Thomasin had husband or children, although “Madame” or “Mrs” often precedes her name in court records. 51.  Elizabeth I: Collected Works, ed. Marcus et al, 342. 52. Rob Content, “Faire Is Fowle: Interpreting Anti-Elizabethan Composite ­Portraiture,” in Dissing Elizabeth: Negative Representations of Gloriana, ed. Julia Walker (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 229–251.

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The Mirror and the Cage  151

53.  Notes of Ben Jonson’s Conversations with William Drummond of ­Hawthornden, (London: Shakespeare Society, 1842), 23. On Isabella Andreini’s mad scene, in which she raved about “a rainbow to give a clister to Isola [Elizabeth] of England who can’t piss,” see Louise George Clubb, Italian Drama in Shakespeare’s Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 265. 54.  Anne Lake Prescott, Imagining Rabelais in Renaissance England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 161. 55. Southworth, Fools and Jesters, 142. 56.  Catriona MacKenzie and Natalie Stoljar, eds., Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency and the Social Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3–4, “second persons,” 6. For a related argument about the collaborative nature of early modern selfhood, see Nancy Selleck, The Interpersonal Idiom in Shakespeare, Donne, and Early Modern Culture ­(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

11 Gold Digger or Golden Girl?

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Purifying the Pursuit of Gold in Heywood’s Fair Maid of the West, Part I Jane Hwang Degenhardt

In Thomas Heywood’s Fair Maid of the West, Part I (ca. 1600), a lowborn English barmaid is deemed a “girl worth gold” by the King of Fez (as well as by the play’s subtitle). While this tapstress-turned-adventurer grows rich by plundering numerous Spanish ships, she refuses to allow herself to be bought, even for all the gold in Barbary. As she circulates from one English port to another, out to sea, and finally to the Moroccan coast, her value increases until she is seated like a queen next to the King of Fez and promised to be “ballast home with gold” (5.2.37).1 Though she circulates continuously, Bess becomes a “girl worth gold” precisely by resisting the fungibility and devaluation associated with the circulation of gold in the global marketplace. As Jean Howard has argued, her worth derives from her exceptionality: Bess represents “a paragon of modesty and faithfulness” and “as such she functions as a unifying symbol of the nation and as a catalyst to transform and perfect the men around her.”2 But how are Bess’s methods for accumulating gold also informed by a broader global awareness of imperial rivalry that renders gold’s meaning multivalent and unstable? By what means does Bess assume the status of golden girl and evade the negative attributes associated with gold digging? Assessing Bess’s labor within an inter-imperial geopolitical context, this essay demonstrates how Bess purifies the pursuit of gold by merging its material accumulation with an economy of moral value. By enacting a sexualized, affective form of labor, Bess links moral virtue to the accumulation of wealth in a global monetary economy. In addition, Heywood’s play offers a model of profitable overseas circulation that counters prevailing English concerns about the economic risks of circulation through its mobilization of “a girl worth gold.” As suggested by Queen Elizabeth’s 1600 proclamation prohibiting the removal of gold and silver from the English realm, particularly by foreign “strangers” operating out of English ports, global trade was perceived as a threat that might drain the English treasury and domestic economy.3 By contrast, Heywood’s play imagines the safe and profitable circulation of English gold through its sexual circulation of a heroine who refuses to compromise her chastity. Reflecting the sense in which “worth” denotes not just a measure of equivalence but also a state of “desert” and “entitlement,”4 Bess proves to be not merely a “girl worth gold,” but a girl worthy of it.

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As the play’s geopolitical contours make clear, gold’s multivalent associations were tied to inter-imperial dynamics involving Spain’s colonization of the New World as well as to the production and circulation of gold in North Africa and throughout the Ottoman-controlled eastern Mediterranean. The well-known “Black Legend” spawned a denigrating discourse of gold that aimed to expose Spanish greed and cruelty, particularly for Spain’s colonial exploitation of the mines of South America and treatment of the Amerindians.5 For the English, whose New World colonial ventures failed to gain momentum leading into the seventeenth century, global trade offered an alternative means to pursue wealth and empire; however, England’s forays into eastern Mediterranean trade required constant negotiation with the Ottoman Empire, as well as contention with piracy practiced by Spanish and other corsairs. In contrast to the tyrannical practices that the English associated with the Spanish and Ottoman empires, Heywood’s play offers a model for pursuing gold and strategically navigating Spanish and Turkish imperial dominance while remaining morally untainted. Gold is not represented in the play as neutral or intrinsically good; rather, it is made so through a process of labor and conversion enacted by Bess. Her plunder of Spanish ships purifies gold through its repossession from the Spanish, while her alliance with the sovereign nation of Morocco offers an avenue for trade ostensibly removed from Ottoman control. Although the plot of the play derives from the realm of fantasy and imagination, it pointedly engages Anglo-Spanish geopolitical developments from the recent past as well as topical events related to Anglo-Moroccan relations. Set during war with Spain, the action of the play begins just after Essex’s attack on the Spanish port of Cádiz in 1596. It follows Essex’s Islands Voyage to the Azores, an expedition intended to intercept and plunder the gold-laden Spanish fleet on its return from the New World. It is this expedition that Bess’s lover, Spencer, joins; Bess initially departs from England to reclaim Spencer’s body from the Spanish-controlled island of Fayal, where she believes Spencer has been killed in combat with the Spanish in a colonial struggle over the island. The play’s overt investments in anti-Spanish politics are interrelated with its interests in representing Morocco. Bess’s alliance with the King of Morocco, a mutual enemy of Spain, accords loosely with Queen Elizabeth’s attempts throughout the 1590s to establish diplomatic ties with Morocco, an endeavor that generated a stream of correspondence discussing trade, piracy, and a potential joint enterprise against Spain. In 1600, around the time of the play’s first performance, Elizabeth’s court hosted a formal embassy from the Moroccan king, which took up residence in London for six months. As Virginia Mason Vaughn has discussed, the visit was also facilitated by the Barbary Company and members of the Merchant Tailors’ Company, suggesting its commercial objectives.6 Trade with Morocco was appealing not just for its own sake, but also because it offered an alternative to the large portion of Mediterranean trade controlled by the Ottoman Empire. Thus, an Anglo-Moroccan alliance served as counter to

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154  Jane Hwang Degenhardt both Spain and the Ottoman Empire—two hugely powerful empires that achieved dominance through imperialism and trade and also threatened England’s subjugation. The play’s engagement of Anglo-Spanish and Anglo-Moroccan relations, as well as the interrelated dominance of the Ottoman Empire that necessarily informed these relationships, invites not just a transnational but also an inter-imperial analysis to illuminate the complex dynamics of empire operating in the play. Laura Doyle’s theoretical framework of “inter-imperiality” proves helpful here in apprehending how multiple empires interact simultaneously and in relation to capitalist formations across a longue durée.7 As I demonstrate, such an approach to the imperial dynamics of Heywood’s play makes visible the ways that England’s relationships to both Spain and Morocco are mutually shaped by Moroccan imperial struggles, Ottoman imperial dominance, and—as I discuss further below—Spanish New World colonialism. Within this inter-imperial context, the play negotiates tensions about the production of value, both economic and moral, through its depiction of a heroine who circulates widely without ever compromising her s­ exual virtue. In her pioneering essay on The Fair Maid of the West, Jean Howard demonstrates how the play mobilizes representations of gender, sexuality, race, and class to forge a model of English nationhood that coalesces around its lowborn heroine’s female virtue. She argues that the play’s representation of Anglo-Spanish hostility is ultimately overshadowed by the “much vaster gulf of distance [that] yawns” between the English and the racially-marked Moroccans, a difference expressed by Mullisheg’s sexual threat to Bess and the act of castration inflicted on her servant.8 By contrast, Barbara Fuchs emphasizes how the play couples the English with the Moroccans in a way that registers an othering of England itself, as a nation that is impotent compared to other empires and in danger of over-reaching.9 Despite their differences, both Howard and Fuchs are ultimately interested in how this play constructs English national identity in relation to Spain and Morocco. My reading seeks to extend their analyses by focusing on how nations are interrelated within a larger global web of empires. Locating early modern England within this global web enables us to consider England’s awareness of itself as not just a state but as an empire in the making. Our most familiar narratives of early British imperialism center on colonial expansion, most notably in the Americas and Ireland, and later in India. My discussion foregrounds English participation in a global economy that preceded England’s colonial expansion and that in some sense pointedly rejected a colonial model of expansion. In doing so, I adopt a longue durée view that locates the roots of modern-day globalization, which takes the form of global capitalism, in an early modern world-­system, wherein Europe—and in particular England—was decentralized and decidedly marginal. While certainly England’s commercial reorientation in the late sixteenth century and nascent involvement in global commerce did

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not constitute a coherent imperial agenda, these developments importantly informed England’s early conceptions of itself as an empire in the ­making. In addition, they enabled the English to embrace a particular model of empire that was articulated in contradistinction to empires amassed through colonization. Fair Maid’s over-determined representation of gold, a commodity/­ currency that is persistently prized and pursued by its characters, functions as a touchstone for assessing the complex, multi-lateral dynamics of empire that are imaginatively rendered in Fair Maid. In addition, gold reveals the potentially transformative effects of inter-imperial conflict on England and its citizens. In the opening scene an English gentleman and two sea captains discuss current news events outside of a tavern in the English port city of Plymouth; in particular, they marvel at the influx of gold as the result of Essex’s recent attack on the Spanish port of Cádiz: CARROL:  The

great success at Cales [Cádiz] under the conduct Of such a noble general hath put heart Into the English; they are all on fire To purchase from the Spaniard. If their carracks Come deeply laden, we shall tug with them For golden spoil. 2 CAPTAIN:  Oh, were it come to that! 1 CAPTAIN:  How Plymouth swells with gallants! How the streets Glister with gold! (1.1.5–12)

As Carrol attests, Essex led the English to an important victory by sacking the city of Cádiz, which served as a crucial point of departure for the Spanish treasure fleet to the New World. Plymouth, as the site of Essex’s embarkation and return, is reported above to bear the evidence of the venture’s success through its golden transformation (though in actuality, the Spanish minimized England’s gains by setting fire to their fleet before the English could capture it). Fueled by their success at Cádiz (and perhaps by the desire for more profitable plunder), the seamen discuss their eagerness to make further attacks on the Spanish. The men, like the streets of Plymouth, also bear a transformation, though in their case it manifests in their embodied affects: Their success “hath put heart” into them; “they are all on fire.” Theodore Leinwand has drawn attention to the early modern theater’s interests in exploring the affective dimensions of economic practices, though his discussion of venturing mainly uncovers an affective response of painful endeavor and toil.10 By contrast, the above exchange emphasizes fiery passion, which, according to the humoral system, is associated with yellow bile and a choleric or aggressive temperament. Though an overbalance of heat could prove pathological in certain contexts, it is rendered appropriate and fructifying when directed at redistributing the golden booty of colonial Spain to the streets of England. Of course, the

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156  Jane Hwang Degenhardt influx of gold is not entirely risk-free in its effects on the English population and requires a kind of further purification once it enters the English realm. As the banter outside the tavern suggests, foreign gold has transformed English men into “gallants”—or “men of fashion and pleasure”11—but not necessarily into gentlemen. Even the extent to which the streets “glister” with gold conveys the potential superficiality of Plymouth’s newfound sparkle and brilliance. As we shall see, the gallants will need Bess to transform them further into gentlemen. It seems important to recognize that the form of venturing that generates this response is specifically that of plunder aimed against the Spanish. The prospect about which the English “are all on fire” is not the opportunity to legitimately “purchase” gold from the Spanish, but rather to pillage their conquered ships for “golden spoil.” Whereas today the word “purchase” usually indicates acquisition in exchange for payment, its more familiar early modern meanings included “to obtain in any way,” “to take possession of,” and “to amass wealth.”12 Despite the violent force implied by this form of purchase, the conversational tone here is celebratory, morally triumphant, and even wondrous. Acts of plunder against the Spanish have virtually transformed England into a mystical El Dorado: Plymouth “swells with gallants” and the streets “glister with gold.” By targeting Spain’s New World gains in a form of morally justifiable plunder, the English capitalize on New World colonialism and even the score with Spain. Bess’s acts in particular elucidate the ways that plunder can facilitate not just masculine fieriness but a transmission of affective mercy that is morally redemptive. If the English were acutely aware of Spain’s extensive gains in the New World, predicated largely on the subjugation and exploitation of natives in the gold mines, they were also sorely cognizant of their own failures to claim or even access gold through the same means. Walter Ralegh’s notorious voyage to Guiana, widely disseminated through the publication of his ­Discovery of the Large, Rich and Beautiful Empire of Guiana (1596), charted his failure to catch more than a glimpse of Manoa, the fabled city of El Dorado, from the Caroni River. As William West discusses, when Ralegh returned to England with samples of black ore given as evidence of the gold he did not access but which he insisted lay beneath the impenetrable black ore, people speculated that his ore actually came from Barbary, “and even that he never went to America at all, but had hid out in Cornwall.”13 Ralegh’s mission was partly thwarted by weather and bad luck, but more definitively by the obstacle of Spanish dominion in the area. Thus, the English plunder of Spanish ships transporting gold back home from the New World offered an alternative means of enrichment that was not only attractive for ­(ostensibly) moral reasons but also for the practical reason that the English were incapable of extracting gold through New World colonization. In Fair Maid, plunder transforms England into an El Dorado without the English ever having to go there.

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The inflow of transnational capital into England is processed through the privately owned tavern where Bess works. Importantly, Fair Maid’s transformation of England into a place swelling with gallants and filled with gilded streets centers not on London but on Plymouth, a port city in the southwestern part of the country. Bess, who hails from Somersetshire and is sent to service in Plymouth before taking ownership of a tavern in Foy, which is even further West in Cornwall, firmly associates Bess’s business with a specific region of England. Heywood’s emphasis on the smaller western ports of Plymouth and Foy detaches the influx of gold from the ­London-based Mediterranean trade and from the state-regulated mechanisms of the Royal Exchange, the Royal Mint, and Royal Treasury. The business of the tavern depends upon international port traffic and serves to draw the wealth of this traffic into the domestic economy. Bess says she welcomes the pirates who frequent the tavern, for “Here they vent / Many brave commodities by which some gain accrues” (2.1.54–55). Her use of the word “vent” draws attention to the process of exchange by which her customers’ “brave ­commodities” pass into domestic circulation. Perhaps ironically, the name of the tavern in Plymouth where Bess works is called “The Castle,” which suggestively relocates royal authority to the space of a local business. This Castle in turn contains a room called the “Portcullis,” which was also the name of a coin issued by Elizabeth in 1600–01 exclusively for the East India Company.14 It was in this same year that the East India Company first received a license to export English bullion for the purchase of foreign wares, and likely that Fair Maid was first performed. In addition to drawing beer in exchange for income drawn from overseas, Bess conducts another form of exchange in the tavern through her conversion of the customers themselves. As a sexually desired agent who resists sexual exchange against all odds, she serves as a gold standard for measuring the value of others and as an agent for the moral redemption of those with whom she comes in contact. As Mario DiGangi observes in his examination of another exemplary female heroine elsewhere in this volume, taverns and other public places were sites where women exercised agency that had implications beyond the domestic realm.15 DiGangi is interested in how Doll ­Williamson (of Sir Thomas More) projects a link between the household and London civic government, whereas I am interested in how Bess’s virtues are projected into an international context. However, in both of our readings, female virtues are affectively transmitted into traditionally male realms. In particular, Bess catalyzes the moral transformations of R ­ oughman and Goodlack so that they may usefully serve her and the English cause on the high seas. Such transformations are premised in part upon Bess’s affective labor. While Bess’s chastity and self-restraint may seem to foreclose affective experiences, she herself feels things deeply. She reports being “ecstacied,” or “thrown into a state of frenzy or stupor,”16 upon Spencer’s bestowal of the Windmill Tavern upon her (1.3.42), and is a second time “ecstacied”

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158  Jane Hwang Degenhardt after learning that her lover is alive and well in Fayal (3.3.20). By the same token, she is brought to an emotionally embodied state of despair upon learning (incorrectly) of Spencer’s death: “Wilt thou not break, heart? / Are these my ribs wrought out of brass or steel, / That canst not craze their bars?” (3.3.29–31). Though she soon regains her “gentle temper” (3.3.34), she is subsequently outraged and devastated when she is told falsely by Goodlack of Spencer’s distrust of her chastity. But, as Goodlack attempts to convince Bess of Spencer’s betrayal, he is shamed into reform by Bess’s unwavering loyalty to Spencer. Moved by Bess’s sad distress in parting with Spencer’s portrait, Goodlack undergoes an affect-driven moral transformation: “Had I a heart of flint or adamant, / It would relent at this” (3.4.77–78). Teresa Brennan’s theorization of “socially induced affect,” which describes the involuntary transmission of emotion from one person to another, offers a useful model for understanding how Bess operates on the embodied affects of others.17 It is Goodlack’s witnessing of Bess’s affective response that prompts his own and leads to his conversion to mercy, honesty, and generosity. Similarly, when Roughman witnesses Bess’s bravery in standing up to his bullying, he is cured of his own cowardice: “She hath waken’d me / And kindled that dead fire of courage in me / Which all this while hath slept” (3.1.131–33). That Bess’s transmission of affect relies on her continuous circulation as a virgin whose sexual integrity remains intact also addresses a set of English worries about economic circulation and the loss of English bullion through London trade. Whereas proponents of “free trade” argued that foreign investment would be returned in the form of profit that exceeded the initial investment, creating a surplus of value, detractors focused on the risk of loss and on the debasement of English bullion engendered through the process of circulation. Both views associated global trade with a potential imbalance between investment and return. Jonathan Gil Harris reads Fair Maid as a play directly concerned with the drain on English bullion threatened by trade and piracy.18 Identifying Mullisheg’s castration of the clownish Clem with “the castration of England’s national treasure,” Harris contends that it “lends comic expression to a fear … that bullion flows are not unidirectional, and treasure (or ‘best jewels’) can be expropriated from England as much as appropriated by it.”19 In other words, if circulation entails the flow of bullion both in and out of England, then Fair Maid addresses the possibility that circulation will lead to greater losses than gains. As Harris illustrates, economic debates about the benefits or drawbacks of overseas investment, the scope of the East India Company’s sovereignty, and the appropriate means of regulation were prominently reignited and recorded in the 1620s through a series of pamphlets by Thomas Mun, Edward ­Misselden, and Gerard Malynes, but a number of the same issues debated in the 1620s were of active concern in the early 1600s. Malynes’s The Canker of England’s Commonwealth, published in 1601, expresses the same core principles that Malynes articulates in his later Maintenance of Free Trade

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(1622). Specifically, Malynes blames foreign bankers and merchants for the devaluation of English bullion traded abroad by accusing them of manipulating exchange rates to their own advantage. In turn, he argues for fixed exchange rates based on the intrinsic metal value of a nation’s currency and for monarchial regulation centralized in the mint and royal treasury. Fair Maid seems to offer an alternative to fixed exchange rates and monarchial regulation through its fantasy of a circulating female body whose intrinsic value resists exchange altogether. Its grounding of intrinsic worth in Bess’s sexually—and morally—embodied virtue seems consonant with a bullionist conception of value that emerges from a set of residual mercantilist values. As Mark Netzloff has discussed, “one of the primary assumptions underlying mercantilist economics was an equation of value with its material embodiment in bullion and coin.”20 According to a bullionist conception of value, circulation threatened to debase gold because it rendered it vulnerable to unfavorable rates of exchange as well as to the debasement of its material form through clipping and counterfeiting. As Stephen Deng has persuasively argued, early modern “monetary conceptions vacillated between intrinsic and extrinsic value theories, between the value embodied in a coin’s material and that ascribed by the state’s stamp.”21 Belief in a coin’s intrinsic or materially embedded value persisted well into the seventeenth century rather than undergoing an abrupt shift with the commencement of English global trade. Thus, as Deng explains, “by taking precious metal from a coin, one could have the value of the coin—assuming the person could still pass it at face value—as well as the value of any precious metal extracted from it.”22 Through its depiction of Bess’s unbreakable virtue, Heywood’s play offers an analogy to the anchoring of intrinsic value in gold. At the same time, this stabilization of value depends not on confinement or stasis but rather on an economy of movement and redirection. Both at home and abroad, Bess circulates freely while simultaneously resisting sexual exchange. Despite her production of desire among male customers in taverns at Plymouth and Foy, she draws a firm line at compromising her virginity and thus converts her customers’ desire into wonder and admiration. As her lover Spencer attests, “She’ll laugh, confer, keep company, discourse, / And something more, kiss; but beyond that compass / She no way can be drawn” (1.2.61–63). ­Similarly, while Bess’s sojourn with the Moorish King of Fez threatens to tarnish her golden reputation, she goes so far as to kiss Mullisheg but does not go any further. In courting male desire while staunchly retaining her constancy, patience, and self-control, Bess resists exchange and in turn prompts the exchange of others’ wealth into her own coffers. Rather than lose value through circulation, she retains and even accumulates new value as she travels within and then away from England. As noted at the opening of this essay, Bess is a golden girl not just because she is chaste and virtuous; she also facilitates the accumulation of gold and grows rich herself. If, as Howard argues, Bess’s sexual virtue is mobilized to unite

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160  Jane Hwang Degenhardt “men of different classes into a homosocial community of brothers,” it also serves as an economic model for the accumulation of wealth.23 Importantly, Bess’s virtue and wealth are drawn into the same economy where they are interrelated, and their value is directly dependent upon the circulation of Bess’s body. It is through this process of circulation—out to sea, in the waters of the Azores, and finally to the Barbary Coast—that Bess’s fame and wealth grow in relation to her constant virtue. In repossessing Spanish gold, Bess diverts it from the Spanish treasury into the English tavern. Prior to this repossession, the gold booty taken from the Indian mines is still a virginal c­ ommodity, so to speak, not yet marked by national affiliation. Simply put, it is not (yet) coinage, something stamped with a monarch’s likeness and exchanged for real commodities. If coinage is part of a national identity, one that necessitates the literal circulation of a female image stamped onto coins, then bullion both precedes and reconfigures that national identity in terms of a global network of multiple, flexible borders. Bess fixes the value of gold and Englishes it—as though pressing it into coins stamped with the monarch’s image. If Bess’s circulation addresses concerns about the devaluation of currency through the circulation of trade, Fair Maid also sidesteps these concerns to some degree by advocating plunder as the means to profit and decoupling plunder from trade. While Harris’s conflation of trade and piracy accurately reflects their close intertwinement during the early seventeenth century, Fair Maid conspicuously distinguishes them so as to represent piracy as the less risky venture and as one dependent on individual valor and virtue, rather than on the autonomous vagaries of the market. Moreover, the play represents Bess’s targeted plunder of the Spanish as a moral and affective form of labor that produces mercy and compassion as well as profit. Bess’s acts of plunder are morally justified in the play not just by war with Spain but also by Spain’s role in an inter-imperial history attached to the commodity of gold. Having in actuality taken Cádiz in 1596 without substantial financial gain, the English targeted the Azores in the hope of capturing the Spanish treasure fleet, loaded with gold from the Americas, as it left the Azores for Spain. The Spanish tyranny associated with the Black Legend centered on Spain’s disregard for the lives of Amerindians whom they slaughtered through excessive uses of violence to gain control of the gold and then exploited for their labor in the mines.24 Fair Maid’s depiction of the Spanish accords with this picture. When the male protagonist (Spencer) is en route to Morocco, hoping there to gain passage back to England, he is captured by a Spanish ship. Defeated not in a fair fight but because they are outnumbered, he and his shipmates are told that they will “pay no other ransom than their lives” in revenge for England’s defeat of Fayal (4.1.13). Spencer’s response articulates a familiar discourse of the Spanish annihilation of defenseless victims: Degenerate Spaniard, there’s no noblesse in thee, To threaten men unarm’d and miserable.



Gold Digger or Golden Girl?  161

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Thou might’st as well tread o’er a field of slaughter And kill them o’er that are already slain, And brag thy manhood. (4.1.14–18) In pointed contrast to the Spanish treatment of their English captives, Bess spares the lives of her captives when she defeats the same Spanish ship and unwittingly rescues Spencer. Even after being told that Spencer has been killed by a Spaniard and denied a proper burial, Bess mercifully spares the lives of her Spanish captives, exclaiming, “’Las, these poor slaves! Besides their pardon’d lives, / One give them money.—And, Spaniards, where you come / Pray for Bess Bridges, and speak well o’the’ English” (4.4.57–59). Hearing of this, the captain of the Spanish ship says he is not sure who “Bess” is, but “be’t your queen, / Famous Elizabeth, I shall report / She and her subjects are both merciful” (4.4.121–23). In this way, Bess becomes identified with the B ­ ritish monarch and her mercy becomes Englished. Through her transmission of mercy as an English affective value, Bess seeks to morally transform her Spanish adversaries. Such mercy is bound up not just with the granting of life but also with that of money in exchange for prayers and favorable reports. Unlike annihilation or physical violence, this form of subjection involves a consensual exchange of mercy and money for goodwill and good credit. It thus implies an English alternative to Spanish colonial methods that is characterized by consent, compassion, and their affective value. In addition, Bess’s sparing of Spanish lives offers moral justification for her plundering of the booty of Spanish ships. In effect, plunder, as a merciful alternative to execution, is cast as an extension of an English policy of mercy. Leading into the final act of the play, the Chorus narrates the sea victories of Bess’s crew: Much prize they have ta’en. The French and Dutch she spares, only makes spoil Of the rich Spaniard and the barbarous Turk, And now her fame grows great in all these seas. Suppose her rich, and forc’d for want of water To put into Mamorah in Barbary. (4.5.6–11) A barmaid-turned-privateer, Bess has grown both “rich” and “famous” through acts of plunder. That these acts may be cast as moral victories reflects a view of plunder as a legitimate form of revenge and economic gain aimed against specific, powerful enemies, in contrast to Spanish acts of aggression against defenseless victims. In setting Bess’s plunder of Spanish ships in contradiction to Spanish tyranny, the play suggests in effect that the repossession of Spanish gold by the English purifies it of the taint of tyranny. Whereas gold signified sin and greed in the Black Legend, it “glisters” with glory in the streets of Plymouth. Because of their moral desert, the English can celebrate the warm pleasure of wealth.

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162  Jane Hwang Degenhardt In addition, the Chorus’s coupling of the Spanish with “the barbarous Turk” invokes the imperial dominance of the Ottoman Empire, which though nearly absent within the immediate frame of the play, significantly informs England’s relationships to both Spain and Morocco. An alliance between England and Morocco offered access to Morocco’s rich stores of gold, sugar, and salt, as well as providing access to eastern Mediterranean trade that did not rely upon the Ottoman Empire. As Susan Iwanisziw discusses, during the reign of Ahmad al-Mansur, “the coastline of a unified Morocco stretched from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, providing vital ports for shipping—both legitimate and pirate—en route to and from the Americas and the East.”25 Furthermore, Turkey’s annexation of all of the North African Barbary States outside Morocco—including the major port entrepots of Algiers, Tripoli, and Tunis—made Morocco’s resistance and retention of sovereignty a particularly appealing model for the English. The play’s representation of Morocco opens with the king and his attendants discussing their recent imperial victories that have enabled them to retain their sovereignty from the Ottoman Empire. As Harris has observed, ­Heywood’s play represents the Moroccan king’s economic methods for refilling his state coffers as strikingly similar to Bess’s justification for piracy.26 Specifically, Mullisheg employs an aggressive customs system that expropriates treasure from foreign visitors. From the English perspective, this method of expropriation is morally justifiable, even merciful, if it punishes one’s enemies and spares one’s allies. During her sojourn in Morocco, Bess teaches the Moroccan king how to make this crucial distinction. She successfully negotiates free and protected conduct in Morocco, secures clemency for French and Italian merchants who have violated customs, and secures a promise to be “ballast home with gold” from Morocco—again linking mercy to economic gain (5.2.37). Such an alliance is presented as a relationship that retains English virtue, a condition demonstrated by the play’s deployment of Bess’s vulnerable, yet resolutely chaste, virginal body as a stand-in for England. Insisting upon the protection of her virtue, Bess cautions, “Keep off; for till thou swear’st to my demands, / I will have no commerce with Mullisheg, / But leave thee as I came” (5.1.46–48). Bess’s use of the term “commerce” encompasses both a personal, affective relationship and an economic and diplomatic relationship between nations. As the lynchpin for this relationship, Bess’s sexualized body functions as a commodity that refuses to be commodified. Mullisheg deems Bess an English “girl worth gold” precisely because she cannot be bought or sold. In addition, the play’s model of Anglo-Muslim alliance suggests an alternative to the Spanish pursuit of empire through New World colonization as well as to trade or alliance with the Ottoman Empire. Bess’s attempts to forge the beginnings of an English empire through strategic political alliance and the plunder of enemy ships reflects an inter-imperial awareness that understands targeted plunder as a merciful alternative to empires based on colonial expansion or tyranny.27 In this way, the Spanish

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Gold Digger or Golden Girl?  163

New World and the Ottoman Empire crucially impinge upon the play’s ­representation of Anglo-Moroccan alliance. Ultimately, and self-servingly, Fair Maid rails against the idea of an economic system that operates independent of morality, and uses affective response as a barometer for determining the moral desert of financial loss or gain. In both implicit and explicit ways, it conflates financial economics with a greater cosmic system whose unjustness or immorality is revealed through its secondary production of affect. Having been forced to separate from Bess and flee Plymouth after killing Carrol, Spencer bemoans the unfairness of a cosmic system that is ruled by the logic of fortune and thus blind to desert or morality. His musings on the interrelations between gain and loss describe a system of balance in which any gain must necessitate an equivalent loss someplace else: To imagine that in the same instant that one forfeits all his estate, another enters upon a rich possession. As one goes to the church to be married, another is hurried to the gallows to be hang’d, the last having no feeling of the first man’s joy, nor the first of the last man’s misery. At the same time that one lies tortured upon the rack, another lies tumbling with his mistress over head and ears in down and feathers. This when I truly consider, I cannot but wonder why any fortune should make a man ecstasied. (2.2.5–13) Spencer’s rendering of this balanced economy of gain and loss evokes the wheel of fortune, which though it may turn unpredictably, follows a predictable path of up and down. Within the contexts Spencer invokes (the forfeit or gain of an estate, marriage or execution, torture or sexual ecstasy), the gain of one man automatically necessitates the loss of another, which is experienced in the form of suffering. Through his linking of gain and loss to an economy of affect that is also compounded by the system’s blockage of empathy—“the last having no feeling of the first man’s joy, nor the first of the last man’s misery”—Spencer suggests that gain and loss should bear moral weight and responsibility. In suggesting, “I cannot but wonder why any fortune should make a man ecstasied,” he calls attention to the immorality of such ecstasy and, by extension, to the unjustness of a system in which gain and loss must create an equal and opposite effect someplace else. By contrast, Bess’s principles of moral virtue, which become attached to an economic strategy of targeted plunder, and which resist exchange, commodification, and subjugation, avoid the arbitrary whims of fortune. Bess is the antithesis to the blind and inconstant figure of fortune: She links gain and loss with desert and refuses to turn or to be converted into a whore. She further imagines plunder to extend mercy to the lives of her adversaries and empathy to those harmed by her gains. Within the inter-imperial framework of the play, her affective labor converts tainted gold into morally purified English gold. In doing so, Bess invites pleasurable affect to enter unambivalently into an inter-imperial economy of gain.

164  Jane Hwang Degenhardt

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NOTES Special thanks to Valerie Forman, Laura Doyle, and Marissa Greenberg for their comments on earlier versions of this essay. 1.  Thomas Heywood, The Fair Maid of the West, ed. Robert K. Turner (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967). Subsequent references are in the text. 2.  Jean Howard, “An English Lass Amid the Moors: Gender, Race, Sexuality and National Identity in Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West,” in Women, Race and Writing in the Early Modern Period, eds. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (London: Routledge, 1994), 104. 3.  By the Queene. A proclamation concerning coyne, plate, and bullion of gold and siluer, 1600. [STC 8273] 4.  Oxford English Dictionary Online, “worth, n.2,” http://www.oed.com. 5. For a discussion of gold and the Black Legend, see Edmund Campos, “West of Eden: American Gold, Spanish Greed, and the Discourses of English ­Imperialism,” in Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires, eds. Margaret R. Greer, Walter D. Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 6.  Virginia Mason Vaughn, “Representing the King of Morocco,” in ­Emissaries in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Mediation, Transmission, Traffic, 1550– 1700, eds. Brinda Charry and Gitanjali Shahani (Farnham: Ashgate Press, 2009). 7. Laura Doyle, “Inter-Imperiality: Dialectics in a Postcolonial World History,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 16, no. 2 (March 2013). 8.  Howard, “An English Lass,” 113. 9. Barbara Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and European Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), esp. 129–34. 10. Theodore Leinwand, Theatre, Finance and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), see esp. Ch. 4. 11.  Oxford English Dictionary Online, “gallant, adj. and n.” B. n. 1. a., http://www. oed.com. 12.  Oxford English Dictionary Online, “purchase, n.” n. II. a. and b., http://www. oed.com. 13. William West, “Gold on Credit: Martin Frobisher’s and Walter Ralegh’s ­Economies of Evidence,” Criticism 39.3 (1997): 323. 14.  Oxford English Dictionary Online, “portcullis, n.” 3, http://www.oed.com. Many thanks to Will Steffen for drawing my attention to this definition of the term. 15.  See DiGangi, “Civic Affect and Female Political Agency in Sir Thomas More,” this volume, 170. 16.  Oxford English Dictionary Online, “ecstasy, v.” 1, http://www.oed.com. 17. Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004). 18.  Jonathan Gil Harris, see chapter “Hepatitis/Castration and Treasure: Edward Misselden, Gerard Malynes, The Fair Maid of the West, The Renegado,” in Harris’s Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 19.  Harris, “Hepatitis/Castration,” 156.

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20.  Mark Netzloff, England’s Internal Colonies: Class, Capital, and the Literature of Early Modern English Colonialism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 21. 21.  Stephen Deng, Coinage and State Formation in Early Modern English Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 22. Deng, Coinage, 10. 23.  Howard, “An English Lass,” 102. 24.  See Campos, “West of Eden.” On the Black Legend, see also María DeGuzmán, Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). 25. Susan Iwanisziw, “England, Morocco, and Global Geopolitical Upheaval,” in Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and the Making of the North ­Atlantic World, eds. Robert Appelbaum and John Wood Sweet (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). 26.  Harris, “Hepatitis/Castration,” 154–55. 27. Valerie Forman makes a related argument about John Fletcher’s The Island ­Princess (19–21), though she contends that, within the context of the 1620s debate over trade, proponents of overseas investment over colonialism were motivated by “reasons of profitability, not honor.” See chapter “Captivity and ‘Free’ Trade: Fletcher’s The Island Princess and English Commerce in the East Indies in the Early 1600s,” in Forman’s Tragicomic Redemptions: Global ­Economics and the Early Modern English Stage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 115.

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Part IV

Theater of a City

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12 Civic Affect and Female Political Agency in Sir Thomas More

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Mario DiGangi

In their pioneering feminist study Engendering a Nation, Jean Howard and Phyllis Rackin explore the agency women exert “as orators, as warriors, [and] as custodians of dynastic legitimacy” in Shakespeare’s English history plays. By representing women’s participation in affairs of state, the English histories, Howard and Rackin argue, contributed to the “process of national consolidation,” or the conceptual development of the nation as a “geographical and cultural entity composed of distinct, particularized regions.”1 In this essay, I build on Howard and Rackin’s foundation by considering the relationship between female political agency and the more local dynamics of urban consolidation in Sir Thomas More.2 By “urban consolidation” I refer to the social, economic, and ethical values that shaped the ideology and practices of citizenship in early modern London. My focus is Doll Williamson, a citizen wife who stresses the importance of being a “good housekeeper” even as she functions publicly as an orator, warrior, and custodian of civic (if not dynastic) legitimacy during the Ill May Day uprising of 1517 depicted in the first part of the play (6.67–68). Drawing on familiar domestic sentiments, Doll publicly embodies and advocates a civic affect that binds the individual householder with the larger urban community in mutual relations of honesty and obligation. The complexity of Doll’s positioning within domestic ideologies is evident in her martial appearance and demeanor during the May Day uprising. Doll enters, according to the detailed stage directions, accoutered in “a shirt of mail, a headpiece, sword and buckler” (4.0.4–5). Jeffrey Masten, drawing on Kathryn Schwarz’s analysis of Amazon encounters in early modern literature, describes Doll as an “English Amazon whose overturning of patriarchal pieties of silence and obedience is itself produced out of the encounter with strangeness.”3 Whereas the aggressiveness of Doll’s gender performance might produce “antipatriarchal and sodomitical” effects, I understand Doll’s overall strategy as authorizing her political agency through an appeal to the patriarchal values of the household and guild.4 In particular, I intend to show how Doll’s complementary articulation of domestic sentiments and civic values foregrounds the political ideologies informing the May Day uprising. When Doll measures More’s trustworthiness against a standard of good housekeeping, she refers not to domestic drudgery but to an ethic of

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170  Mario DiGangi civic cooperation and economic fairness, the abuse of which have provoked Londoners to riot. As an interested party seeking redress of these abuses, Doll repeatedly touches on several subjects—the importance of honesty in domestic and civic exchanges, the householder’s accountability to the larger community, the sentiments and economics of mutual obligation—that centrally inform an ideology of citizenship in early modern England.5 That the More playwrights should make a female character the mouthpiece of such values is not as surprising at it might at first seem. As historian Phil Withington observes in The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England, the division between the public/civic and the private/domestic “is not only anachronistic” for sixteenth-century England but “also elides the very real powers of public criticism and intervention possessed by women both locally, and, when circumstances allowed, nationally.”6 Withington argues that English cities and boroughs “contained local and often female-dominated public spheres in which ... civility was closely tied to ‘honest’ conversation and reputation, and in which news and opinion was constructed, contested, and circulated” through civic discourse.7 Markets, streets, neighborhoods, and taverns were among the public places in which women crucially exercised agency in the “politics of opinion and reputation.”8 Furthermore, and crucially for an understanding of Doll’s role in More, the “cultivation of honestas” was required both in household and civic government.9 Given the conceptual overlap between the household and the commonwealth in this period, wives exercised a form of political agency as partners in the economic and moral management of the “household c­ ommonwealth.”10 Doll’s habit of affectively linking the household to the wider urban community provides a remarkable illustration of the political power of civic affect. From Holinshed’s Chronicles, the primary source for the play’s depiction of the events of 1517, the More playwrights took particular incidents as well as the tendency to represent the escalating conflict between Londoners and strangers (foreigners) in strongly gendered and emotional terms.11 According to Holinshed, the craftsmen of London conceived an ardent resentment towards strangers whom they regarded as economic competitors: “About this season there grew a great hartburning and malicious grudge amongst the Englishmen of the citie of London against strangers; and namelie the artificers found themselues sore grieued, for that such numbers of strangers were permitted to resort hither with their wares ...” (227). Holinshed illustrates the “great hartburning” of London’s artificers through two incidents: in one, a Frenchman snatches two doves from a carpenter named Williamson, claiming such delicacies “not meate for a carpenter”; in another, a Lombard named Francis de Bard “entised a mans wife ... to come to his chamber with hir husbands plate” (227, 228). With “insolent sawcinesse” and “diuelish malice,” the strangers appropriate their rivals’ goods and injure their honor, as when the “Frenchman called the Englishman ­[Williamson] knaue” (240, 227). As Alexandra Shepard shows in her

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Civic Affect and Female Political Agency in Sir Thomas More  171 analysis of Cambridge University court records, the most common insults directed against men were “social” terms such as “rogue” and “knave”: it was easiest to attack a man’s reputation by questioning his “economic integrity.”12 For the Frenchman, ­ Williamson is a “knave”—a term that “originated as a mock title in opposition to ‘knight’ to describe menial ­servants”—because he presumes to eat food too refined for a laborer.13 That Holinshed continues to refer to Williamson as a generic “Englishman” stresses the contest over gender and ethnic status that informs the overt economic rivalry. Whereas Holinshed represents riot erupting from male competition over goods and status, More opens with an aggrieved Doll Williamson, the wife the playwrights invent for the Chronicle’s wronged carpenter. As Barde attempts to compel her to a sexual encounter, Doll indignantly defends her honor as a citizen wife. Diminutive for “Dorothy,” the name “Doll” is relatively rare in early English drama, appearing in a handful of plays apart from More: 2 Henry IV, 1 Oldcastle, Northward Ho!, The Alchemist, and Epicene. In these plays, as Jowett notes, Doll is “a feisty London citizen; in some she is potentially or actually a prostitute.”14 Jowett rightly describes Doll Williamson as an exception to these typically promiscuous Dolls, and further, as an epitome of the humility and fierce loyalty the play attributes to Londoners. Although Jowett’s reading of Doll in contrast to the sexualized citizen women of contemporary drama is suggestive, a much fuller account is warranted of the ways in which Doll’s specific perspectives as citizen wife shape her active participation in a conflict that Holinshed depicts as a male contest for possession of women and property. Unlike some of her counterparts in the period’s drama—most appositely, The Alchemist’s Doll Common—Doll Williamson represents a commonality that is not about sexual availability but accountability to civic norms of sexual, social, and economic honesty. Identifying herself as “an honest, plain carpenter’s wife” (1.4–5), Doll establishes the good credit of her household by associating her sexual honesty and modest appearance with her husband’s economic honesty and plain dealing. Doll further articulates the intimate connection between household and civic order when she attests that her defense of her husband’s honor will find support in London ­women’s collective resistance to the strangers’ abuses: “[to Williamson] and wilt thou so neglectly suffer thine own shame? [to de Barde] Hands off, proud stranger, or ... if men’s milky hearts dare not strike a stranger, yet women will beat them down ere they bear these abuses” (1.61–66). To Cavaler, who has stolen her husband’s pigeons, she delivers a more explicit threat of collective resistance: “I’ll call so many women to mine assistance as we’ll not leave one inch untorn of thee. If our husbands must be bridled by law, and forced to bear your wrongs, their wives will be a little lawless, and soundly beat ye” (1.72–76). Doll imagines taking advantage of the legal doctrine of coverture, according to which a married couple became “one legal subject, a corporate entity in which the dominant partner (the husband) represents

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172  Mario DiGangi the union and raises its voice.”15 Frances Dolan explains that Catholic wives became a particular problem for the justice system in Protestant England because “coverture shelter[ed] them, making them legally inaccessible” to prosecution.16 Recusant wives could “evade legal scrutiny” more successfully than their husbands, and they were under less pressure to conform in the first place because they “had few rights or privileges to lose.”17 Thus it is not simply, as Jeffrey Masten argues, that Doll “imagines an unruly female army supplying male lack.”18 Beyond Doll’s shaming of her husband for having a “milky heart” that “dare not strike,” we can discern the shrewd recognition that coverture provides opportunities for women to seek j­ustice—on behalf of the household and the community—when husbands are “bridled by law.” Just as Doll links honorable domestic government to active civic virtue, so she further links active civic virtue to national accomplishments. Through general references to historiography as well as through specific allusions to figures and events memorialized in chronicle history plays, the playwrights attribute to Doll a consciousness of her significance as a historical agent. Doll boasts that her leadership in the riots will become the stuff of legend: “I’ll make a captain among ye, and do somewhat to be talk of forever after” (1.147–8). She also attests that the citizens’ deeds on May Day will be forever burned into the historical record: “We’ll alter the day in the calendar, and set it down in flaming letters” (4.38). Even Doll’s apparent revenge fantasy of a female mob that leaves no “inch untorn” of its enemies has a historical analogue in an episode recounted by the Chronicles, and by Shakespeare in 1 Henry IV, in which Welshwomen cut off the sexual organs and noses of English soldiers.19 When Doll vaunts her moral superiority to the ­“goldsmith’s wife” who gave all her husband’s plate to Barde, the playwrights are alluding to an incident from Holinshed that precipitated the May Day riots, in which a citizen wife cuckolds her husband with a stranger (1.10). Jowett suggests that Doll might also be evoking Jane Shore, the goldsmith’s wife seduced by Edward IV, an episode dramatized by Thomas ­Heywood in his 1599 play Edward IV (1.10 n.). Given Jane Shore’s notoriety, we might imagine that Doll consciously rejects the sexual role that landed the king’s mistress in the historical record; instead, Doll will earn her mention in the English chronicles through militant resistance to abusive strangers.20 Doll’s intention to authorize her actions in the name of English military accomplishments becomes evident when she complains of being “ashamed that free-born Englishmen, having beaten strangers within their own bounds, should thus be braved and abused by them at home” (1.80–83). In contemporary history plays, the recital of memorable English victories in foreign lands is commonly used to shame or to inspire the monarch into imitating his glorious ancestors. For instance, in Henry V (1599), the Archbishop of Canterbury goads Henry V to war by evoking the “warlike spirit” of Edward III and the Black Prince, who “on the French ground played a t­ragedy.”21 In Richard II (1595), Gaunt laments

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Civic Affect and Female Political Agency in Sir Thomas More  173 Richard’s degeneration from crusader monarchs such as Richard I and Edward I, who were “[r]enownèd for their deeds as far from home, / For Christian service and true chivalry.”22 Similarly, in Thomas of Woodstock (1591–95), Lancaster complains that Richard II has degenerated from the bravery of his father, the Black Prince, who “made so many funeral days / In mournful France.”23 Seeking inspiration, Richard consults a chronicle account of the Battle of Poitiers, from which he learns of his father’s victory, with an army of 7,750 soldiers, over a French army of 68,000 ­soldiers. Richard fantasizes that by attaining similar triumphs abroad he will be able to contain political strife at home. Doll’s citation of the military accomplishments of “free-born ­Englishmen” thus claims for citizens the right to participate in acts of legitimate violence enshrined by chronicle and history play alike. Doll’s engagement with More tests her linkage of household and civic virtue, in that the London sheriff emerges for her as both embodiment and possible betrayer of those values. Speaking for the rioters, Doll initially authorizes More’s trustworthiness based on his honest and generous service as London sheriff: LINCOLN:  Shrieve More speaks. Shall we hear Shrieve More speak? DOLL: Let’s hear him. ’A keeps a plentiful shrievaltry, and ’a made

my brother, Arthur Watchins, Sargeant Safe’s yeoman. Let’s hear Shrieve More! … MORE:  Good masters, hear me speak. DOLL:  Aye, by th’ mass will we, More.

Thou’rt a good housekeeper, and I thank thy good worship for my brother Arthur Watchins. (6.49–53, 66–9)

Doll’s praise of More’s “plentiful shrievaltry” attests to the patronage and hospitality duties of the sheriff, who was expected to go to great expense for the “lavish semiannual entertainment of the circuit judges” and for the “accoutrement of the ceremonial retinue his office demanded.”24 On these ceremonial occasions, the sheriff employed large numbers of household servants: contemporary accounts record staffs ranging from 56 to 116 servants.25 The ceremonies surrounding the judges’ visits also provided an opportunity for the sheriff to provide charity to the local poor.26 Doll’s validation of More’s performance as sheriff precisely accords with Phil Withington’s account of women who exerted political agency by acting as neighborhood arbiters of reputation. In his study of the practices and ideologies of citizenship in early modern England, Withington posits that “the idea of honest civility as a legally mediated, socially accountable and personally disciplined will. ... was a touchstone of urban freedom”—“freedom” being the technical term for the admission to citizenship controlled by the livery companies.27 Through the legal, social, and kinship systems that

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174  Mario DiGangi connect them, Doll can attest to the “disciplined will” that informs More’s housekeeping and civic duties as shrieve. Once More has persuaded the rioters to submit to authority, Doll requires him to adhere to this ethic of civic honestas: “Give me thy hand. Keep thy promise now for the King’s pardon, or, by the Lord, I’ll call thee a plain cony-catcher” (6.187–91). Doll’s reference to the cony-catcher—a criminal trickster figure popularized by Robert Greene—links More’s rhetorical and judicial management of the rioters to his earlier encounter with an actual cony-catcher, Lifter, the “only captain of the cutpurse crew,” who is the subject of legal discipline in More’s first scene (2.8). Both episodes reveal More’s ability to deflect questions about urban poverty and violence through rhetorical manipulation of his audience’s emotions. In the earlier scene, More’s primary audience is Justice Suresby, who has scolded a pick-pocketing victim for flaunting his wealth, thus tempting Lifter to steal. Intending to teach Suresby his own lesson, More promises Lifter a pardon if he can steal Suresby’s purse. When Lifter succeeds, More berates Suresby, just as Suresby had berated Lifter’s previous victim, for having “tempt[ed] necessity” with his wealth (2.171). Although More thereby exposes Suresby’s folly, he also reiterates Suresby’s inadequate understanding of theft as an incidental and opportunistic act, the consequence of a lapse of moral will: I promise ye, a man that goes abroad With an intent of truth, meeting such a booty, May be provoked to that he never thought. What makes so many pilferers and felons But these fond baits that foolish people lay To tempt the needy, miserable wretch? (2.172–177) In response to the question of what makes so many pilferers, early moderns gave various answers, including extreme poverty, simple opportunity, the general lawlessness of vagrants, and, increasingly after 1600, the pressures caused by urban expansion.28 In the Utopia, the historical More sympathetically presents the position that the “wretched need and poverty” caused by enclosure, homelessness, and lack of employment in England have turned desperate people into thieves.29 By turning Suresby’s own lesson against him, the play’s More possibly intends to mock Suresby’s reductive understanding of thieves as honest men seduced by the sight of a large purse. Although More here implies that it is poverty that pushes “needy, miserable ­wretch[es]” to steal, his views on crime cannot be determined from this speech because his aim is not to discover what motivates Lifter’s criminal behavior but rather to produce a moral “jest” at Suresby’s expense (2.60). As an agent of civic honestas, More might be expected to express charitable concern for Lifter’s subjection to the social and economic conditions that lead to crime; instead, More uses Lifter to embarrass and impress his superior through a display of his own deceptive wit.

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When Doll hints that More might turn out to be a “plain cony-catcher,” then, we might understand her to recognize that the sheriff’s concern for civil order might demonstrate not civic honestas in action but opportunistic, self-serving, rhetorical craft. In fact, even as they yield to More’s persuasion, the chief rioters express doubt about his willingness to offer an honest exchange of submission for pardon: DOLL:  Give

me thy hand. Keep thy promise now for the King’s pardon, or, by the Lord, I’ll call thee a plain cony-catcher. LINCOLN:  Farwell, Shrieve More. And, as we yield by thee, So make our peace; then thou deal’st honestly. CLOWN BETTS:  Ay, and save us from the gallows, else ’a deals double honestly. (6.189–95) Similarly, at an earlier moment in More’s oration, George Betts interprets More’s distress about the rioters’ inability to determine their own self-­ interest as a strategy for dismissing their analysis of economic injustice: MORE:  Alas,

poor things! What is it you have got Although we grant you get the thing you seek? GEORGE BETTS:  Marry, the removing of the strangers, which cannot choose but much advantage the poor handicrafts of the City. (6.78–82)



Refuting the condescension of More’s address to the citizens as “poor things,” Betts articulates the political knowledge that craftsmen remain poor because of foreign competitors protected by the crown. To More’s implication that the rioters are simple, Betts counters with the language of economic calculation: the “advantage” the craftsmen will enjoy from the removal of their rivals. At the end of More’s oration, when “All Citizens” finally yield to his arguments about the necessity of obedience, it is difficult to reconcile the collective voice of pious submission with the critical, pragmatic, and skeptical views that have been and continue to be voiced by Doll, Lincoln, and the Betts brothers. A similar dissonance distinguishes the sentiments expressed by Lincoln and Doll as they await public execution. Whereas Lincoln confesses his error and submits to punishment, Doll remains defiant and skeptical. The first rioter to be hanged, Lincoln delivers a brief scaffold speech before he “leaps off” the gallows (7.69sd). Lincoln’s scaffold speech adopts the affective stance of humility and remorse typical of this confessional genre: Then, to all you that come to view mine end, I must confess I had no ill intent But against such as wronged us overmuch. And now I can perceive it was not fit

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That private men should carve out their redress Which way they list. No, learn it now by me: Obedience is the best in each degree. And, asking mercy meekly of my king, I patiently submit me to the law. (7.52–60) Affirming the Pauline doctrine of “obedience to authority” that More had cited in his oration, Lincoln vindicates More’s role in bringing the rioters to justice (6.107). As Lincoln’s body swings from the gallows, however, Doll bids him farewell in a way that subtly undercuts his lesson of ­submission: “Say all what they can, / Thou lived’st a good fellow, and died’st an honest man” (7.70–1). By “they,” Doll presumably refers to the justices who have pronounced Lincoln and his companions the “chief and capital o ­ ffenders” of a seditious riot (6.248). Exposing the social and political conflict occluded by Lincoln’s evidently sincere confession, Doll understands judicial sentences as tendentious speech acts that can transform “a good fellow” and “honest man” into a criminal. The specifically political dimension of Doll’s testament to Lincoln’s honesty emerges more clearly when she publicly criticizes More for his apparent betrayal of the rioters. Doll first unfolds the material consequences of More’s rhetoric: Commend me to that good shrieve Master More, And tell him, had’t not been for his persuasion, John Lincoln had not hung here as he does. We would first have locked up in Leadenhall, And there been burned to ashes with the roof. (7.91–5) Shockingly, Doll links More’s successful “persuasion” to Lincoln’s hanging corpse, which remains “here” throughout the scene. Although Doll speaks temperately of More, to blame a sheriff for a citizen’s death has political implications given that many popular uprisings in Elizabethan London “were protests against harsh punishments imposed by city magistrates at the Crown’s insistence.”30 Doll’s implication that honest citizens have been betrayed and harshly punished by city magistrates resonates dangerously with the earlier action of the May Day rioters in breaking open Newgate prison, from “whence they have delivered many prisoners, / Both felons and notorious murderers” (5.20–21). Holinshed mentions that the rioters delivered from prison only two men who had been recently committed for attacking strangers. The More playwrights suggest a more pervasive anger at the overly severe administration of justice in London, even as they suppress the actual extent (and cruelty) of the executions of the May Day rioters.31 Voicing popular discontent, Doll expresses disappointment that the rioters were prevented from wreaking further destruction on London. Her fantasy of heroic martyrdom at the site of Leadenhall is significant, as the building had

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Civic Affect and Female Political Agency in Sir Thomas More  177 “strong sentimental associations for London citizens.”32 To imagine the razing of Leadenhall is to imagine a severe blow to the city’s literal and symbolic economies. Leadenhall plays a central role in the festive conclusion of D ­ ekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599), when Mayor Eyre invites the apprentices of London to breakfast at the “great new hall in Gracious street corner” he has recently erected.33 Unlike the grateful and well-fed apprentices in The ­Shoemaker’s Holiday, the armed apprentices in More are emblems not of civic harmony but of hierarchy and division within the urban guild structure. When Downes, a sergeant-at-arms, refers to the rioters as “the simplest things,” ­Lincoln stirs up the citizens’ indignation by attaching the insult specifically to the most humble among them: “How say you now, prentices? Prentices ‘simple’? Down with him!” (6.27, 29–30). Lincoln deploys the symbolic capital of urban labor against the civic authorities who materially profit from that labor, as Doll imagines the rioters would have done by destroying Leadenhall. Given Doll’s insistence that civic authorities be held accountable to standards of civic honestas, it is not surprising that her scaffold speech is less a confession than an emotionally charged political oration that situates domestic sentiments in broader political, economic, and theological ­frameworks. Doll begins by remarking equivocally on More’s recent advancement to the king’s Privy Council: Well, he is worthy of it, by my troth: An honest, wise, well-spoken gentleman. Yet I would praise his honesty much more If he had kept his word and saved our lives. But let that pass. Men are but men, and so Words are but words, and pays not what men owe. Now, husband, since perhaps the world may say That through my means though com’st thus to thy end, Here I begin this cup of death to thee, Because thou shalt be sure to taste no worse Than I have taken that must go before thee. What though I be a woman? That’s no matter. I owe God a death, and I must pay him. Husband, give me thy hand. Be not dismayed. This chore being chored, then all our debt is paid. Only two little babes we leave behind us, And all I can bequeath them at this time Is but the love of some good honest friend To bring them up in charitable sort. What, masters?—He goes upright that never halts, And they may live to mend their parents’ faults. (7.100–120) Acting once again as arbiter of civic honestas, Doll associates More’s promotion from “honest” London sheriff to Privy Councilor with his failure to

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178  Mario DiGangi keep his word to his fellow citizens. The resignation behind “[w]ords are but words, and pays not what men owe” acknowledges the likelihood that when individuals detach themselves from an ethic of civic obligation that encourages equitable exchanges and payment of debts, they will be driven by self-interest. Hence the painful gap that Doll perceives between More’s “words” and “our lives.” Making an implicit contrast with the socially ambitious More, Doll next addresses her husband as an equal and constant partner: a stance with political implications, especially given Doll’s dominant role as a “captain” of the rioters. Anticipating that unsympathetic commentators will blame her for her husband’s demise and thus infer conjugal strife, Doll affirms her affection and loyalty through the decision to suffer death before her partner. “What though I be a woman? That’s no matter,” she asserts. While proudly reminding her audience of her extraordinary bravery as a woman, Doll asserts the spiritual equality of husband and wife before God through the metaphor of death as shared domestic and economic accountability: “This chore being chored, then all our debt is paid.” Doll’s insistence on paying the “debt” of death claims for herself the civic honestas that More has betrayed in not having delivered the promise of pardon he owed Lincoln. Finally, even as Doll voices the domestic sentiments one might expect of a wife and mother preparing for death, she avoids the pious moralism that one finds, for instance, in Anne Sanders’ scaffold speech at the conclusion of the domestic tragedy A Warning for Fair Women (1599). Sentenced to death for murdering her husband, Anne urges her children to “learne by your mothers fall / To follow vertue, and beware of sinne.”34 She bequeaths to them a book of prayers with the homely advice: “Sleepe not without them when you go to bed, / And rise a mornings with them in your hands.”35 Doll mentions her children only at the end of her long speech, at which point she bequeaths to them not moral or theological lessons but “the love of some good honest friend / To bring them up in charitable sort.” Doll’s acknowledgement of the mutual obligations of husband and wife has modulated into an acknowledgement of the mutual obligations of friends and neighbors. Such a civic sentiment recalls the image of the “commons knit and united to one part” from Lincoln’s bill against the strangers, a document that Doll had maintained to be “honest” (1.130, 136). Doll’s assessment of the bill’s honesty resonates with Phil Withingon’s argument that urban householders displayed honestas by “insinuat[ing] their personal interests within the great will of the company from which they drew their economic freedoms, privileges, and personal successes.”36 For Doll, resistance to the strangers’ abuses embodies an ethic of “great will,” of personal interests knit up and united into the collective good. Even as she faces death for her involvement in the uprising, Doll continues to link her individual fate to the collectivity expressed by the “love of some good honest friend.” As a statement of political belief, Doll’s scaffold speech rivals More’s oration. Admittedly, the play gives no indication of how Doll’s performance

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Civic Affect and Female Political Agency in Sir Thomas More  179 affects her audience, in part because “a great shout and noise” heralding the king’s pardon immediately deflects attention from her speech (7.131sd). Nonetheless, from Doll’s sentiments about the relationship between household and civic honesty, we can conclude that More’s oration has not been entirely successful in convincing the rioters of the “horrible shape” of their rebellion (6.104). Nina Levine argues that More wins over the rioters through an argument based in “voluntary acts of empathy”: he asks them to imagine themselves as strangers, vulnerable to the same kind of violence they visit upon others.37 For Doll, at least, that lesson has not stuck. At the conclusion of her scaffold speech, Doll directly addresses the women of London, whom she had earlier imagined joining with her to punish the strangers. Once again, Doll conjures an indignant community of English women who define their virtue against the dishonest predations of foreign men: “And when that I am dead, for me yet say / I died in scorn to be a stranger’s prey” (7.130–1). Despite More’s appeals to empathy and identification, Doll continues to view the strangers with “scorn.” She finds them unworthy of her empathy because they have placed individual interests over communal freedoms and privileges. “Words are but words”: for Doll, the honestas that connects good housekeeping with good citizenship requires ethical and political practices that go beyond mere “words” to construct collective “lives.” NOTES 1.  Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories (London: Routledge, 1997), 26, 30. 2. John Jowett discusses the play’s extremely complex textual history. Multiply authored, More was never published in its own time, and there is no record of its performance. Although earlier critics had dated the play in the early 1590s, Jowett persuasively argues for a date closer to 1600, citing among other reasons the “renewed vogue for English history plays” and the emergence of city comedy around 1598–1600 (John Jowett, ed., Sir Thomas More [London: Methuen-­ Arden, 2011], 425). Citations from More will come from this edition and will be credited parenthetically in the text. 3. Jeffrey Masten, “More or Less Queer,” in Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. Madhavi Menon (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 312. See Kathryn Schwarz, Tough Love: Amazon ­ Encounters in the English Renaissance (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). 4.  Masten, “More or Less,” 314. What Masten calls Doll’s antipatriarchal stance is exemplified by her shaming tactics: “If thou be’st afraid, husband, go home again and hide thy head, for, by the Lord, I’ll have a little sport now we are at it” (4.63–65). Yet according to Alexandra Shepard’s historically precise definition of patriarchal manhood as a norm involving traits of “self-sufficiency, strength, self-control, and honest respectability,” Doll’s rebuke might be understood to uphold the patriarchal values her husband betrays through his cowardice (­ Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003], 9).

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180  Mario DiGangi 5. In sixteenth-century England, citizenship was primarily understood as an ­“economic right” that “conferred an urban rather than a national identity” (John Michael Archer, Citizen Shakespeare: Freemen and Aliens in the Language of the Plays [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005], 6). Archer specifies that the “economic ways of imagining social life” implied by citizenship include “a jealous guardedness about the means of production, reproduction, and consumption, a loyal but often fearful relation to the half-visible sovereign power that still controls exchange, and abhorrence . . . of aliens who threaten commercial competition, rivalry for royal protection, and, increasingly, ethnic difference” (69–70). All of these affective and ideological strains of citizenship are present in More. 6.  Phil Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 198–99. 7. Withingon, Politics, 200. 8. Withingon, Politics, 202. 9. Withington, Politics, 200. Withington defines the “Ciceronean notion of ­honestas” as “those qualities of honesty, discretion, wisdom, fitness, and decorum designed to enable men and women to constructively engage in community without the dangers of wilfulness, passion, and violence” (118). 10. Withington, Politics, 198. 11. Holinshed incorporates Edward Hall’s account, from the Union, of the May Day riot. Quotations from Holinshed are taken from Gabrieli and Melchiori’s edition of More and will be cited parenthetically in the text. Vittorio Gabrieli and Giorgio Melchiori, eds., Sir Thomas More, by Anthony Munday and others (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990). 12. Shepard, Meanings, 161, 164. 13. Shepard, Meanings, 175. 14. Jowett, ed., More, 30. According to Gabrieli and Melchiori, the name Doll ­usually designates a “free-spoken low-class wench” (p. 60 n. 1.1.0.2–3). 15.  Frances E. Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender and SeventeenthCentury Print Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 60. 16. Dolan, Whores, 61. 17. Dolan, Whores, 65, 63. 18.  Masten, “More or Less,” 312. 19. William Shakespeare, 1 Henry IV, The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen ­Greenblatt et al., 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 2008), 1.1.42–46. Further citations of Shakespeare come from this edition. 20.  Peter Stallybrass observes that Doll’s gender inversion “is legitimated because it is directed against a supposed ethnic inversion,” in which foreigners dominate native Englishmen (“The World Turned Upside Down: Inversion, Gender and the State,” The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of S­ hakespeare, ed. Valerie Wayne [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991], 212). 21. Shakespeare, Henry V, 1.2.104, 106. 22. Shakespeare, Richard II, 2.1.53–54. 23.  Thomas of Woodstock or King Richard the Second, Part One, ed. Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 1.1.33–4. 24.  Thomas Garden Barnes, Somerset, 1625–1640: A County’s Government during the “Personal Rule” (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 131. 25. Cyrus Harreld Karraker, The Seventeenth-Century Sheriff (Chapel Hill: ­University of North Carolina Press, 1930), 24–25.

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Civic Affect and Female Political Agency in Sir Thomas More  181 26. Karraker, Sheriff, 24–26. 27. Withington, Politics, 173–74. 28.  Paul Griffiths, Lost Londons: Change, Crime and Control in the Capital City 1550–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 144–147, 200–1. Noting the “desperation engendered by Tudor economic failures,” William C. Carroll cites contemporary sentiments such as “Men wille steale, thoughe they be hanged, excepte they may live without steling” and “the ritche men have gotten all into ther hands and will starve the poor” (Fat King, Lean Beggar: Representations of Poverty in the Age of Shakespeare [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996], qtd. 33). 29.  St. Thomas More, Utopia, ed. Edward Surtz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 27. 30.  Roger B. Manning, Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popular Disturbances in England, 1509–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 188. Manning estimates that fourteen out of the thirty-five London riots between 1581 and 1602 protested “administration of justice,” including “rescue of prisoners and mutiny of prisoners” (328). Some of these riots occurred during the 1590s in response to the harsh punishment of Londoners who had protested the presence of foreign craftsmen (203–4). 31. Holinshed reports that thirteen rioters were “executed in most rigourous ­manner” on May 4, and that the knight marshal showed “extreme crueltie to the poore yoonglings in their execution: and likewise the dukes seruants spake manie opprobrious words, some bad hang, some bad draw, some bad set the citie on fire, but all was suffered” (Gabrieli and Melchiori, eds., More, 235). John Lincoln was the first of a second group of prisoners to be executed on May 7, before word of the King’s pardon arrived. Ultimately, 411 rioters were pardoned (236). 32. Jowett, More, 7.94 note. 33. Thomas Dekker, The Shoemaker’s Holiday, ed. R.L. Smallwood and Stanley Wells (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 18.199. 34.  A Warning for Fair Women, ed. Charles Dale Cannon (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), lines 2686–87. 35.  Warning, lines 2708–9. 36. Withington, Politics, 174. 37.  Nina Levine, “Citizens’ Games: Differentiating Collaboration and Sir Thomas More,” Shakespeare Quarterly 58 (2007): 31–64, esp. 56.

13 Corporate Life in Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday

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Henry S. Turner

In recent years, scholarship on the political imagination of early modern drama has found inspiration in a variety of old traditions and new archives: in the rich mixture of classicism, legal thought, and theological debate that characterized Renaissance discussions of sovereignty and the polity; in the poor laws promulgated by Parliament and in the mercantilist policies of an expansionist Crown; in local disputes over office-holding and town governance; and in the regional and national patronage networks that gave structure to an emerging Tudor “State.”1 The essay that follows draws together several of these concerns by reintroducing an institution that was fundamental to much of the period’s economic, theological, and political life: the institution of the corporation. Looking more closely at the history of the corporation helps us understand how changes in the organization of labor and capital put pressure on traditional forms of political association, at several scales, and it reminds us how indistinct “economic,” “moral,” and “political” questions could be for early modern people. Furthermore, corporations implied representational problems that were fundamental to the nature of theater, and this was not lost on playwrights, whose play companies were themselves awkwardly positioned within a predominantly corporate urban landscape. Finally, attending to the strange representational “life” of the corporation sheds valuable light on a larger theoretical problem shared by many of the essays in this volume: the problem of how collective associations of all kinds are formed through the circulation of affect among persons, bodies, objects, and ideas. These collective formations are both real and fictional at the same time. They are real because they are fictional, a paradox that is fundamental to the very definition of both “theatricality” and “politics” in the early modern period (as today) and that the institution of the corporation can help us understand more clearly.2 In what follows, my aim will be to examine these arguments by way of a detailed analysis of Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599), a play that demonstrates both how central and how complex corporate ideas could become in the drama of the period.3 The play is a famous example of “London comedy” or “chronicle comedy,” as Jean E. Howard has called it, since Dekker draws on Thomas Deloney’s popular The Gentle Craft (1598), which had fictionalized the story of the historical Simon Eyre, a

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Corporate Life in Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday  183

young draper’s apprentice who became Sheriff of London (1434) and then Lord Mayor (1445).4 As Dekker’s Eyre rises from the shoemaker’s workshop through the political hierarchy of London, he assumes the chains and robes of office and becomes increasingly identified with Guildhall, the official space of civic administration; his foundation of Leadenhall at the end of the play then introduces a second, more explicitly commercial institution that aims to position the craft guilds at the symbolic and economic center of the city. The play’s hybrid historical sensibility thus illustrates the degree to which incorporated guilds and livery companies were not anachronistic medieval institutions persisting in a newly early modern landscape but had themselves become important vehicles for integrating new modes of highly capitalized investment and the values of a consumer-oriented market into urban society. And in this respect they resembled nothing so much as theaters: since actors continued to have many economic, legal, and affective associations with the craft guilds, and since the enterprise of commercial theater was itself employing a variety of legal and economic mechanisms— systems of credit and debt, a joint-stock division of property and profits, apprenticeships as well as hired actors—we may suspect that Dekker has more than mere shoemaking in mind.5 THE THEATER OF THE GROUP: NATION, CLASS, AND CORPORATION Ever since Richard Helgerson’s pioneering work on the representation of English nationhood during the sixteenth century, literary critics and historians of all stripes have recognized the importance of national ideas to the period’s political imagination.6 Interpretations of The Shoemaker’s Holiday have followed suit, often seeking to align the play’s national historical plot—the wars with France that bookend its opening and closing scenes—with what is usually described as the play’s “class” politics, as figured in its detailed portrait of trade and commerce. This interpretive gesture is itself a measure of how powerfully The Shoemaker’s Holiday imagines the economic dislocations of its own moment in terms of collective affective experience: the conflicts of Dekker’s play are conflicts among groups and not among “subjects” or individuals, a feature that accounts also for the strongly emblematic nature of its characterization.7 But however useful the notions of nation or class have proved to be for readings of the play, criticism has tended to reduce all types of group interest, group affiliation, or group experience to one of these two categories, emphasizing in particular the “unconscious,” structural, or impersonal nature of class relations. In this way, criticism obscures the degree to which “class” or “nation” are only two of the group phenomena in the play, and hardly even the most explicit. More recently, a third category for thinking about early modern political and economic life has become prominent: that of the city, and especially

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184  Henry S. Turner the example of London, with its distinctive culture of consumption, its legal seasons and proximity to court, its demographic strains and social disturbances, and its well-established political traditions.8 Although it was not officially incorporated until 1608, the legal entity we still know today as the Corporation of the City of London had long been a composite of many different corporate groups, all of which had overlapping commercial rights, religious purposes, and political authority. As the historian Phil ­Withington has shown in exemplary detail, across England corporate institutions were vital to forging a coherent sense of urban identity, and through this “urbanity” a sense of affective belonging in the larger political community of the realm.9 Whether we regard The Shoemaker’s Holiday, therefore, as forging a new national imaginary that can either integrate or exclude the foreign worker, or as creating new ideological alignments among the aristocracy, urban mercantile elite, and laboring guild members, or as asserting the primacy of masculine, homosocial economic structures over a household world in which women might retain a distinctive agency—to name several problems that have engaged some of the best criticism on the play—we should recognize that the play’s primary means of staging these relationships is to juxtapose different models of corporate identity with one another. The play brings these different corporate forms into relief not to resolve these conflicts, as critics sometimes argue, but to make these conflicts more visible, such that its “political” imaginary results from their ongoing confrontation. As a way of advancing this argument forward a step, it will be helpful to consider Weber’s distinction between “class” and “status” (Stände) groups. For Weber, “classes” are defined exclusively by their access to the market and hence by their power and flexibility over market processes. As a social category, “class” is a sociological artifact, an analytic abstraction reconstructed through sociological observation that we derive from considering people only in relation to market forces and especially in relation to property.10 For Weber, “class” is not primarily a self-identified grouping, except in moments of opposition around market relations; “class,” in short, becomes self-­conscious in moments of social action and is most visible when classes, or social groups positioned differently with regard to property and market, mobilize against one another. “Status,” in contrast, describes a highly self-conscious and highly ritualized way of defining group identity that depends on the possession and recognition of social honor. In this sense, “status” is always also a semiotic and ethical category, since it depends upon what Weber calls “style of life” (932). In status terms, consumption implies the accumulation and expenditure of symbolic capital as the primary mode in which participation in the group is secured; success depends on knowing how to manipulate signs and appearances to produce symbolic capital and knowing how to consume it—as well as knowing how to leverage symbolic capital in order to position oneself advantageously in relation to the e­ conomic market.

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Using Weber’s categories, we may distinguish more clearly between social position relative to economic circumstances and social position relative to symbolic power; we may see how status groups always overlap with class groups (as when honor produces privilege over goods and a market advantage); and we can understand how status groups always secure power by means that are distinct from their economic position. Thus the ­“aristocracy” would at one moment be considered as a “class” (in relation to the production, distribution, and consumption of wealth) and at another would be considered as a “status” group (in its relation to symbolic power), and it is precisely in the interplay and changing relationship between these two aspects that large-scale transformations in social life become thinkable. But Weber’s categories also illuminate the importance of corporate institutions in early modern society, since the guilds and companies were economic instruments that at the same time conferred social status.11 Corporate forms of all types allowed economic and symbolic forms of capital to be brought into alignment, in part by allowing different forms of wealth, such as land, labor, goods, money, or credit, to persist within the same collective institution. They also delimited lines of exclusion and differentiation: between those who were members of incorporated bodies and those who were not, between different companies in the same economic and political community, or between groups located within the structure of the company itself. In the 16th century, in short, one didn’t have a corporate position in addition to a class position, or corporate identity instead of a class position: one’s class position was a function of one’s corporate membership (or lack of one) in a market that was profoundly shaped by corporate activity. It is important to emphasize that the guilds and companies themselves were instrumental in creating oppositions between “capital” and “labor” that we associate with the period, for instance, and both types of corporate bodies took their own shape from the conflicts between economic and status position that they generated. These conflicts that unfolded within the structure of the guild were not independent phenomena with their own “transitional” logic—they were the direct result of the companies’ own activities and policies. The ongoing legal challenges between the Cordwainers (or ­shoemakers) and the Curriers in the late 16th century provide a useful illustration of this point, since they resulted from “class” tensions among traders, middlemen, and craftsmen who were situated within each company as well as across them. Here the corporate bodies of the Cordwainers and the Curriers have given a new shape to a division between traders and craftsmen that had existed from the very earliest examples of organized guild activity; both companies responded to this antagonism by exercising their respective authorities and by seeking new authorities from royal or civic officials, in this way reasserting themselves as institutional forms that had the power to regulate their members.12 We may now go a step further and, to Weber’s distinction between class and status, add Bourdieu’s insight that “class” always describes a struggle

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over meaningful acts of classification.13 For Bourdieu, it is this conflict over the authority to bestow meaningful categories upon social experience that constitutes the essence of “political” conflict, and this is because the gesture of classification always also implies a representational principle: A class exists in so far as—and only in so far as—representatives with the plena potentia agendi may be and feel authorized to speak in its name … what we have [in the concept of “class”] is a sort of existence in thought, and existence in the minds of many of those who are designated by the different taxonomies as workers, but also in the minds of those who occupy the positions furthest removed from the workers in the social space. This almost universally recognized existence is itself based on the existence of [those] who have a vital interest in believing that this class exists and in spreading this belief among those who consider themselves part of it as well as those who are excluded from it; [those] who are capable, too, of giving voice to the ‘working class,’ and with a single voice to evoke it, as one evokes or summons up spirits, of invoking it, as one invokes gods or patron saints; [those] who are capable, indeed, of manifesting it symbolically through demonstration, a sort of theatrical deployment of the class-in-representation, with on the one side … the entire symbolic system that constitutes its existence—slogans, emblems, symbols— and on the other side the most convinced fraction of the believers who, by their presence, enable their representatives to give a representation of their r­ epresentativeness. (741–42) Bourdieu might well be describing the associational world of The Shoemaker’s Holiday, since, as we shall see, the play offers us “representatives” of several types who “stand for” the members of different groups and who, in doing so, endow those members with an explicit sense of group identity rather than a merely individual one. The play’s conflicts are structured around these different representative figures and the competing categories of group identity that they animate, and this conflict among group identities is played out in the “minds” of the other characters who identify with them. Also, of course, it plays out in the minds of the audience—for these are characters who “stand for” economic and status positions that exist both within and outside the fictional world of the play. The play is thus literally a “theatrical deployment” of the process of how group identity emerges as a result of a shared belief in representatives and in the meaningful categories of social classification they embody, even by those who are not members of the group. It is also a theatrical demonstration of how group identity lives in the “slogans, emblems, and symbols” that mediate it, in signifiers that are both material and immaterial, concrete and abstract, “real” but at the same time—this is the central paradox of the corporation—also “­fictional.” These signifiers are taken up, literally “put on,” as well as endorsed or identified

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with, by characters and audience members alike; in this way, the play provides a demonstration of theater itself as a form of public, and hence ­political, association. As is often noted, Dekker polarizes his characterization around aristocratic and national political alignment on the one hand and models of urban citizenship rooted in corporate guild membership on the other, although the latter is in fact composed of two strata. Each of these strata has distinct markers of status and commercial resources: the Grocers, as figured in the character of Oatley, and the Shoemakers who surround Eyre throughout the play. Oatley sits between the aristocratic Lincoln and the craftsman Eyre, since he opens the play as the Lord Mayor and often invokes “Guildhall” (1.65, 70) as a base for symbolic gestures of authority; twice Oatley speaks of his “brethren” (1.66), by which he seems to mean both fellow guild members and fellow holders of civic office, and once Eyre has been elected ­Sheriff, Oatley congratulates him for having “entered into our society” (11.9), a term with marked corporate meaning in the period. But this assertion of a shared corporate membership obfuscates the fact that Oatley, in his ambition and his forms of wealth, as well as in the locations that characterize him—he resides outside the city in the village of Old Ford, where he entertains both Lincoln and Eyre, as well as inside the city on Cornhill Street—is pulled toward the aristocratic pole of the play’s symbolic field. Aristocracy and membership in the retail guilds are both shown to be forms of oligarchy, defined either by conspicuous consumption (Lincoln) or by investment in overseas trade (Oatley). The many different economic transactions that structure Dekker’s play and provide much of its historical texture, therefore, always position characters in relation to the competing corporate systems of value that define a status position and result in different capacities for political power. The fact that Eyre, too, comes to profit from a speculation on Dutch commodities and that he does so in partnership with Oatley (and Scott) is doubly significant: first, because it legitimates a mode of speculative investment that was otherwise often viewed with suspicion, folding it into the possible forms of wealth that a common urban citizen with a corporate membership might access; and secondly because the alignment between Eyre and Oatley is only temporary—it is merely a partnership and not the more enduring form of association that corporate guild or chartered company membership provides. Similarly, when Oatley says “Let’s have your company” (11.72) to Eyre later in the play as he ushers him offstage and into Old Ford, he uses the term to express a weak bond, one that is occasional or circumstantial and nothing like that of shoemakers. We may contrast this contractual arrangement, undertaken solely for individual profit, with Firk’s cry at the end of the play, when he is asked by Oatley and Lincoln to reveal where Lacy, disguised as “Hans,” may be found. “Shall I cry treason to my corporation?” (16.96), he demands, a betrayal that would be far more serious to the system of apprenticeship and civic power that depends on it than is

188  Henry S. Turner Lacy’s own evasion of military service, and hence his obligation to King and nation, at the opening of the play.14 So what are the characteristics of this corporate group that the play displays so prominently for us? Most obviously, they are to be found in the entire system of values that animates the world of the workshop:

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• •

• •

in the dancing, singing, and jocular festivity that the play is at pains to demonstrate in its awareness of the “generation and blood” of the guild, as Eyre comments to Rose at one point (11.45), voicing a corporate alternative to the aristocratic preoccupation with blood lineage that Lincoln articulates in the play’s first scene in the roving bands of shoemakers who dispense a rough justice in order to bring the marriage plots to a resolution in the idioms, the oaths and slang and insult, the mythical and literary references, many of them taken directly from the theatrical repertory system itself, that circulate among the shoemakers.

The figure of Hammon shows corporate membership to be as exclusionary as it is inclusive: he suffers a kind of civic excommunication from the world of the play, since, although he claims to be “a citizen by birth” (6.61), he has no membership in the many corporate bodies that make up the political, economic, and affective life of London. As a consequence, his moral personality is shown to be hollow, a shell that he tries to fill by speaking one of a variety of clichéd sonnet and romance idioms (i.e. 6.31–33 and 9.40–48). As Eyre declares to Rose, when told of Oatley’s plan to marry her to H ­ ammon, “those silken fellows are but painted images—outsides, outsides, Rose; their inner linings are torn” (11.42). Hammon is indeed a perfect dramatic illustration of ambiguity around the identity of the “gentleman” that has been well-documented by social historians, a status position that depended exclusively on a style of life, or on the ability to sustain the performance of status, without any of the traditional grounds for identity, whether blood, land, lineage, craft, or corporate membership. His language is as empty as his motives and as the price tag that he sees dangling from every hand; when he is rebuffed by Rose and turns instead to pursue Jane, he lapses clumsily into an approach that presumes the logic of a commercial transaction, asking “how sell you then this hand” (12.27) and eventually tries openly to buy her from Ralph (18.76–85). The reaction of the shoemakers to Hammon’s pursuit of Jane is extreme because they espouse such different systems of value: the shoemakers, despite all the scenes in which they seem to work and to make shoes, do not in fact espouse a strongly commercialist worldview; indeed, the entire plot of Jane and Ralph provides a qualitative and affective moral ground for shoemaking as a corporate enterprise, as opposed to the purely quantitative commodity logic associated with Hammon. The shoemakers,

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furthermore, speak and act not on their own behalf but on behalf of Ralph, one of their corporate fellows, which concentrates the force of their objection—it is a whole collective who speaks against Hammond, many voices against one. Ralph is, after all, physically incomplete, having returned from the wars in France with a severely damaged (if not missing) leg, and it would seem that the violation of his physical integrity somehow threatens the integrity of the corporate body, which needs now to be reasserted as emphatically as possible. Earlier in the play, Hodge and Firk had already moved to rehabilitate the corporate body by exhorting Ralph to work all the harder. When Ralph returns and laments that his wife Jane “will be poor indeed / Now I want limbs to get whereon to feed” (10.78–79), Hodge reminds him that his corporate identity is to be found instead in his hands: “Limbs! Hast thou not hands, man? Thou shalt never see a shoemaker want bread, though he have but three fingers on a hand” (10.80–82). Eyre has already asserted the same rhetorical equation to Jane in the play’s opening scene, upon Ralph’s conscription and departure: “Let me see thy hand, Jane. This fine hand, this white hand, these pretty fingers must spin, must card, must work” (1.210–11). The act of physical labor becomes a signifier for corporate belonging, filling the absence of the marriage bond; the hand that shifts the shuttle or pricks with the awl is suddenly neither Jane’s hand nor Ralph’s hand but the hand of all shoemakers, a ghostly limb animated by a corporate personality that is as relentless and demanding as it is nourishing or comforting.15 But Dekker also uses his play to recompose an idea of national belonging from the legal and affective structures of the corporate forms that the play’s central scenes represent to us. The war between England and France that preoccupies the aristocratic characters is pushed to the edges of the play; it sweeps up Ralph, who disappears for much of the play’s action and then reenters as a masterless man who must be reintegrated into the corporate image of the guild. By the end, even the King invokes a corporate idea in order to rally the shoemakers to the wars, vowing to “incorporate a new supply” of troops to those who are already fighting in France (21.138–41) and in this way to transpose an idea of corporate belonging from the workshop to the national community. The gesture can be read either as the final comic fulfillment of a collective idea—a celebration of corporate communitas in which even the King becomes a member, rather than its head—or, more cynically, as a call to arms that Lacy will again evade and to which Ralph will only suffer more injury. But however we interpret the play’s conclusion, the form of imaginative fellowship is “national” only insofar as it has been accumulated out of overlapping corporate ideas, the nation built up out of the city, city from workshop, workshop from shoemakers—shoemakers who are also actors and who find their representative in a larger-than-life character who comes to stand for all of them, and for all the communities they form together, in a single figure: Simon Eyre.

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THE CHARACTER OF THE CORPORATE PERSON Eyre is best understood not as an individual, dramatic portrait, nor as a fictionalized historical figure, nor even as an impersonal, quasi-allegorical comic type: he is a figure for the peculiar idea of the corporate person. This “corporate person” is a formal envelope projected off the actor’s body that can become a representative container filled with a range of collective identities, each of which might conflict with any of the others but each of which can be “stacked” within the actor’s frame. Eyre is shown donning the trappings of corporate power, first the gold chain that is a sign of his office as Sheriff—the “worshipful vocation of Master Sheriff” (­10.4–5), as M ­ arjorie puts it—and later the “velvet coat and alderman’s gown” (7.104sd) that he borrows in order to meet with the Dutch ship captain. But this multiplication of identity results not in a fragmentation of personhood but in its concentration: when Eyre asks Hodge “how do I look,” Hodge can only respond, “Why, now you look like yourself” (7.114). Whereas Marjorie shows herself to be acting and only ends up missing the mark, in this way opening herself up to satire, Eyre manages to gather his own representational power into himself, inflating the corporation with his own personality even as he derives his identity from the signifiers of office. These props multiply his personality, since in the gown he becomes not one person, and not two—Simon Eyre the shoemaker and a City officeholder—but at least four: When I go to Guildhall in my scarlet gown I’ll look as demurely as a saint, and speak as gravely as a Justice of Peace; but now I am here at Old Ford, at my good Lord Mayor’s house, let it go by, vanish, Madgy; I’ll be merry … prince am I none, yet am I princely born! (11.11–15) KING:  Is our Lord Mayor of London such a gallant? NOBLEMAN:  One of the merriest madcaps in your land. Your Grace will think, when you behold the man, He’s rather a wild ruffian than a Mayor. Yet thus much I’ll ensure your Majesty: In all his actions that concern his state He is as serious, provident and wise, As full of gravity amongst the grave As any Mayor hath been these many years. (19.1–9) Shoemaker, citizen, Sheriff, saint: Eyre is a large presence on stage because he is stuffed full of corporations, the principle of the King’s Two ­Bodies translated into a semigrotesque comic figure. By the end of the play, ­ workshop, office, London itself have been saturated by his bombastic ­ ­jocularity, always somewhat defensive in its self-assertion; his oaths string together London neighborhoods, landmarks, saints, and national holidays, ­sometimes all at the same time.16

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Dekker, in short, has borrowed some of the most important mechanisms of corporate membership—oath, trade, religious devotion, gift, legal bond— in order to bind together several collective identities at once, locating in theater the source of an imminent corporate personality that had previously been rooted in the symbolic gestures of the guild’s old fraternal core: the collective feasts and processions, the masses and funeral rites, the charitable collections and disbursements, the veneration of the craft’s patron saint.17 For, as David Scott Kastan has argued, the workshop really is a theater: we see actors acting like shoemakers who act as if they are working but actually produce nothing but the gestures of work, a symbolic activity that is itself interrupted by dances, songs, puns and other theatrical forms, out of which the workshop scenes, and the larger play, has been composed.18 Scene 13 shows the shoemakers making shoes, but they do not exactly make commodities, in the sense that the primary purpose of the object is not to be convertible to a price equivalent; one of the play’s more fantastic aspects is that it tries to imagine something like a purely artisanal mode of production in which singular, nonreproducible objects are made to fill an individualized use-value without at the same time having an exchange value, to use Marx’s language, which is why all the shoes mentioned in the scene also have proper names attached to them. The paradigmatic example for the symbolic and theatrical logic I have been describing is, of course, the pair of shoes that Ralph presents to Jane at the opening of the play, the “rings for women’s heels,” as he describes them, “cut out by Hodge, / Stitched by my fellow Firk, seamed by myself, / Made up and pinked with letters for thy name” (1.228–234). As a collective artifact, the shoe is a metonym for the corporate personality that offers it as a gift, through Ralph, with the purpose of incorporating Jane, too, into the fellowship even as she slips her heel inside the shoe. Marriage acts as an equivalent to apprenticeship, a logic that Sybil makes explicit later in the play when she declares of Rose, who has seen through Lacy’s disguise, “Tomorrow, if my counsel be obeyed, / I’ll bind you prentice to the Gentle Trade” (11.85–86). A similar image of reincorporation returns at the end of the play, when Ralph is presented with Jane’s shoes by one of Hammond’s servants and asked to make a copy of them: RALPH:  How?

By this shoe must it be made? By this? Are you sure, sir? By this? SERVINGMAN: How ‘by this’? Am I sure, ‘by this’? Art thou in thy wits? … Dost understand me? Canst thou do’it? RALPH:  Yes, sir, yes. Ay, ay, I can do it.—By this shoe, you say? I should know this shoe. Yes, sir, yes, by this shoe, I can do’t. … … this shoe, I durst be sworn, Once coverèd the instep of my Jane.

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This is her size, her breadth. Thus trod my love. These true-love knots I pricked. I hold my life By this old shoe I shall find out my wife. (14.8–19) The conceit of the shoe as an utterly singular, non-reproducible object is captured through the scene by the comic force (albeit a relatively weak one) of the repeated “this,” which strains to designate an object that can only exist as a concrete, immediate, singular presence: the shoe has a theatrical immediacy that words, and the translation of the play into print, cannot capture. This theatrical significance is all the more concentrated by the fact that the shoe is now also a structural link back to the opening of the play, a measure of the distance that has since unfolded and the bearer of all the symbolic value that resides in the relationship between Jane and Ralph, as well as a structural link forward to the resolution of the play and the final defense of the mystical body from the threats of Hammon and the commercial logic of the market he represents. Jane’s shoe, in short, has become more than just a prop: it has become one of the key elements that holds the play together, circulating among characters, collecting the play’s most important values, and becoming an index of their relation to one another, like a radioactive isotope in the theatrical tissue. And since the shoe is both a fictional and a real object, it shows how plays in general emerge out of an assemblage of objects, bodies, and words that are equally hybrid in their ontology: the play is the sum total of these things that are also signs and signs that are also things, some of which act as standards of relative measure for the significance of all the others. The gold chain that Eyre wears offers another point of reference for this calibration of theatrical value, as does Firk the character, or the word “princely”: all are privileged signifiers around which the play’s imaginary comes to hang. All can be described as theatrical fetishes, a function that Jane’s shoe makes especially obvious. The importance of the shoe, in particular, derives from the fact that it is a shared fetish among many different characters, as well as from the different fantasies that it holds together: the fantasy of shoemaking as a guild fellowship; the fantasy of marriage and reincorporation into the fellowship of shoemakers, despite a loss of physical integrity; the fantasy of a play, which is itself an imaginary construct unfolding before its audience. For this reason, Jane’s shoe demonstrates that the corporation, too, is a fetish, a fantasy structured around the absence of the missing limb, the scar or self-alienation that is necessary to all participation in the political community, as Roberto Esposito has argued, as the subject donates part of the self to the abstraction of the office.19 One of the compelling aspects of Eyre as a character is that he attempts to fill the office without any weakening or subtraction of personhood, as though the abstraction of the office could actually be filled by the “real” personality of the individual. Through his theatrical composition as a character we grasp that the personhood of the corporation, its identity and peculiar ontological condition as

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a fictional-real hybrid, results from the objects, language, images and other formal resources that come to characterize it. At the same time, reciprocally, the idea of the corporation allows us to grasp more clearly how the theater is a particularly complex example of such a hybrid fictional-real assemblage, a collection of objects, words, gestures, movements, scenic combinations, ideas, character-forms, and other elements, all of which come to cohere into the temporary unity we call a “play.” This “corporate” dimension to theater can be measured by comparing the play that unfolds theatrically on stage, in all its distinctiveness and contingency, with the Epistle to the first printed edition of the Shoemaker’s Holiday, addressed to us as readers, which Dekker calls “the argument of the play” (Epistle, 6–17). This bare sketch possesses none of the detail, none of the mechanism, none of formal translation that makes the play come to life; it lacks every dimension of how the play comes to be generated and apprehended as a theatrical event. Nor does the epistle capture any of the play’s interest in the associational life of corporate forms, the symbolic oppositions among the characters who actually make up those forms and bring them into being, or the play’s unusual ideological efforts to maintain a sense of corporate belonging at all costs. DEKKER’S CORPORATE THEATER By showing theater to be an institution that can provide a coherent personality for the city as a corporate entity—and to do so, moreover, by reconciling several different competing ideas of collective association with one another in a single figure—Dekker has shown theater to be necessary to urban life. He activates the symbolic and commercial means by which corporate life was sustained beyond or in addition to a formal charter, whether at the level of the guild or the city itself. But the theater, too, needed protection, for despite the many shared structures between professional acting companies and the craft guilds, the theater never incorporated—­antitheatrical sentiments and civic policies had made it impossible. When the King appears at the end of the play to consecrate the foundation of Leadenhall by Eyre, he shows that corporate life, however self-sustaining, always requires some form of legitimating authority to ensure its continuity. The scene captures perfectly the historical situation of the guilds, which, as George Unwin showed long ago, always remained distinct from the legitimating authority of the Church, the Crown, or the Mayor and Commonalty of London. Indeed, the guilds constantly moved among them, appealing to each of them in different moments as the fraternal body’s right to an independent jurisdiction was in some way challenged.20 But the scene also captures perfectly the historical situation of the play companies, for whom the monarch also acted as a royal patron: Eyre’s founding of Leadenhall as a place for the shoemakers to continue their symbolic “work” can also be understood as addressing the play companies’ own need for a theater, a place of commerce

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194  Henry S. Turner and assembly that could become the equivalent of their guild hall under the protection of the monarch—and which, in the case of the Blackfriars Theatre, would become an actual hall after all.21 For this reason, The Shoemaker’s Holiday is not simply a study of economic transformation and new political alignments but a subtle defense against the anti-theatrical polemic that surrounded it. The play proposes theater as a legitimate art and institution of assembly, in which many people might gather independently of their other associations and affiliations to watch plays come to life before their eyes: the incorporation into theater, by means of theater, of a general fellowship available for a penny. If civic authorities objected, as they often did, that the players distracted apprentices and tradesmen from their work, here we see them working conspicuously and affirming both urban and national allegiance; the real threat is a figure like Hammon, whose lack of corporate affiliation makes him suspect. And if the antitheatricalists railed against the theaters on the grounds that they were “publique assemblies of prophane plaies,” as Anthony Munday put it, or “brainesicke assemblies” and “the Counsell of the vngodly,” in the words of Stephen Gosson, where “the common people” “runne together by heapes” to form “a monster of many heades,” “a[n] assemblie of Tailers, Tinkers, Cordwayners, Saylers, olde Men, yong Men, Women, Boyes, Girles, and such like,” with no “grave, sober, discreete, wise” judgment that is “well exercised in cases of gouvernement,” then Dekker responds by showing his shoemakers forming a corporate community that can encompass both city and nation, with a Cordwainer for a Lord Mayor at its head.22 By the turn of the seventeenth century, in short, theater had assumed a potential “political” importance not only because plays might stage controversial ideas or serve as an instrument of Crown propaganda, although companies of players had been maintained by monarchs and statesmen throughout the sixteenth century for precisely this reason, which provided an important motive for the early institutionalization of playing under a system of royal and aristocratic patronage. Theater had become “political” because it had itself become a distinct mode of association alongside, and in many ways outside, other corporate groups such as the guilds, companies, or the City itself. It was this associational potential that fueled some of the most enduring antitheatrical arguments and civic restrictions on playing, and it was a principle that playwrights and acting companies needed to affirm if theater was to continue as a commercial venture with growing literary ambitions.

NOTES 1. For further discussion, see Henry S. Turner, “Corporations: Humanism and Elizabethan Political Economy” in Mercantilism Reimagined: Political ­Economy in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire, ed. Philip J. Stern and

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Corporate Life in Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday  195 Carl Wennerlind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 153–76, and Turner, “Toward an Analysis of the Corporate Ego: The Case of Richard Hakluyt” ­differences 20, nos. 2–3 (2009): 103–47. 2. See my further comments on fiction and theatricality in Henry S. Turner, ­“Generalization,” in Early Modern Theatricality, ed. Henry S. Turner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1–23. 3.  All citations are to Thomas Dekker, The Shoemaker’s Holiday, ed. Anthony Parr (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1990). 4.  See especially Jean E. Howard, The Theater of a City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 20, and Simon Morgan-Russell, “‘How Far Is It, My Lord, to Berkeley Now?’: English Chronicle History and the Rise of London City Comedy,” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 27 (2001): 245–62. On Dekker’s use of London history, see David Novarr, “Dekker’s Gentle Craft and the Lord Mayor of London,” Modern Philology 57 (1960): 233–39; on the play as a work of dynamic historiography, see Brian Walsh, “Performing Historicity in Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday,” SEL 46.2 (2006): 323–348; on the overlapping, multiple temporalities that the play activates through its references to London landmarks, see Jonathan Gil Harris, “Ludgate Time: Simon Eyre’s Oath and the Temporal Economies of The Shoemaker’s Holiday,” Huntington Library Quarterly 71.1 (2008): 11–32. ­ arris, 5.  On the economic organization of the play companies, see Jonathan Gil H “Properties of Skill: Product Placement in Early English Artisanal Drama,” in Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, ed. Harris and N ­ atasha Korda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 35–66, to which I am particularly indebted for my own reading of the play; Roslyn L. Knutson, Playing ­ ambridge UniCompanies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time (Cambridge: C versity Press, 2001); John Astington, Actors and Acting in Shakespeare’s Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); David Kathman, ­“Grocers, Goldsmiths, and Drapers: Freemen and Apprentices in the Elizabethan Theater,” Shakespeare Quarterly 55.1 (2004): 1–49; Kathman, “The Rise of Commercial Playing in 1540s London,” Early Theatre 12.1 (2009): 15–38; Kathman, “The Seven Deadly Sins and Theatrical Apprenticeship,” Early Theatre 14.1 (2011): 121–139; Ronda Arab, Manly Mechanicals on the Early Modern English Stage (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 2011), 28–31 and 34–35; and Henry S. Turner, The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts, 1580–1630 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 6. Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); see also Walter Cohen, Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories (New York: Routledge, 1997); Jonathan Gil Harris, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Claire McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590–1612 (Cambridge: ­Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Cathy Shrank, Writing the Nation in Reformation England, 1530–1580 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 7.  See, for instance, Peter Mortenson, “The Economics of Joy in The ­Shoemakers’ Holiday,” SEL 16.2 (1976): 241–52; David Scott Kastan, “Workshop and/ as Playhouse: Comedy and Commerce in The Shoemaker’s Holiday,” Studies

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196  Henry S. Turner in ­Philology 84.3 (1987): 324–337; two paired essays by Paul Seaver (“The ­Artisanal World”) and David Bevington (“Theatre as Holiday”) in The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre, and Politics in London, 1576–1649, ed. David L. Smith, Richard Strier, and David Bevington (Cambridge: Cambridge ­University Press, 1995), 87–100 and 101–116; Marta Straznicky, “The End(s) of Discord in The Shoemaker’s Holiday” SEL 36 (1996): 357–72; Ronda A. Arab, “Work, Bodies, and Gender in The Shoemaker’s Holiday,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 13 (2001): 182–212; Wendy Wall, Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 127–28 and 146–58; ­Marianne ­Montgomery, “Speaking the Language, Knowing the Trade: Foreign Speech and C ­ ommercial Opportunity in The Shoemaker’s Holiday,” in The Mysterious and the Foreign in Early Modern England, ed. Helen Ostovich, Mary V. Silcox, and Graham Roebuck (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), ­139–152; and Steven Deng, Coinage and State Formation in Early Modern English Literature (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2011), 161–86. Ivan Cañadas, Public Theater in Golden Age Madrid and Tudor-Stuart London: Class, Gender, Community (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 77–106, esp. 89, points out the importance of a group imaginary to Dekker’s play. 8. Work on the urban dimension of early modern literature is too extensive for a single note, but see in particular Howard, Theater of a City, and ­Lawrence ­Manley, Literature and Culture of Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge ­ ­ University Press, 1995), both with extensive bibliography; and the recent study by Adam Zucker, The Places of Wit in Early Modern English ­Comedy ­(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 9.  Phil Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); see also ­Oliver Arnold, The Third Citizen: Shakespeare’s Theater and the Early Modern House of Commons (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). On the urban, guild roots of political identity in English plays see John Michael Archer, Citizen Shakespeare: Freemen and Aliens in the Language of the Plays (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 10.  Max Weber, “Class, Status, Party” in Economy and Society, Vol. II. Ed. ­Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), ­927–939. 11.  Cf. George Unwin, The Gilds and Companies of London (London: Methuen & Co., 1908), 160. For a more deconstructive analysis of the problem of “class” ­ eading Class Through Shakein early modern culture, see Christopher Warley, R speare, Donne, and Milton (Cambridge: ­Cambridge ­University Press, 2014). 12.  See Unwin, Gilds and Companies, 84–85, 166, and 253; also Kastan, ­“Workshop and/as Playhouse,” citing Dekker’s own Seven Deadly Sins: the guilds “that were ordained to be communities, had lost their first privilege, and were now turned monopolies” (326–27); Arab, Manly Mechanicals, esp. 47 and 56. 13.  Pierre Bourdieu, “Social Space and the Genesis of Groups,” Theory and Society 14.6 (1985): 723–44. 14. Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth, 30–31, identifies apprenticeship as one of the most important mechanisms for constituting a corporate identity for the towns. 15.  On the reincorporation of Ralph’s wounded body into the symbolic body of the guild, see Arab, Manly Mechanicals, 55.

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16. On this dimension of Eyre’s characterization, see especially Harris, “Ludgate Time,” an excellent analysis of the way that Dekker uses the convention of the oath to layer together several different temporalities for the theater audience. 17.  On the fraternal basis of the guilds, see Unwin, Gilds and Companies, esp. 53, 93–109 and 110–126. 18.  Kastan, “Workshop and/as Playhouse,” 335–37. 19. See Roberto Esposito, Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, trans. Timothy B. Campbell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). 20. Unwin, Gilds and Companies, 28–29, 47–71, 80–81, 94, 105, 108, 159, 169–170, and 172. 21.  See Unwin, Gilds and Companies, 165, and Kathman, “The Rise of Commercial Playing,” esp. 17–22, on the practice of actors renting halls from the companies in order to perform their plays, a practice that resulted in increased attempts by civic authorities to restrict playing. On patronage models in the play, see Elizabeth Rivlin, The Aesthetics of Service in Early Modern England (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2012), who argues that Dekker’s play mixes a model of service “based on apprenticeship and guild fraternity” with one based “on court patronage and a patriarchal hierarchy” (93); also Cañadas, 84. 22.  Anthony Munday, A Second and third blast of retrait from plaies and theaters (London, 1580), 71; Stephen Gosson, Playes confuted in fiue actions … (London, 1582), B5r, B7r, D1r, C8v.

14 Transforming the Younger Son

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The Disruptive Affect of the GentlemanApprentice In Eastward Ho Ronda Arab

Chapman, Jonson, and Marston’s 1605 play, Eastward Ho, with its two younger gentry sons contracted to a London goldsmith, satirically stages contemporary social struggle over the identity of the gentle born apprentice in London. The play begins with a fracas between the master goldsmith Touchstone and his apprentice, Francis Quicksilver, over their divergent prioritizations of Quicksilver’s identity. While Touchstone insists, “Sirrah, … I am thy master, William Touchstone, goldsmith, and thou my prentice, Francis Quicksilver” (1.1.12–14),1 Quicksilver, chafing against the restrictions of apprenticeship as an insult to the privileges of a natural born gentleman, struts around the stage bedecked in the gear of a young gallant about the town, and insolently swears to a superior status: “Why, s’blood, sir, my mother’s a gentlewoman, and my father a justice of the peace and of ­quorum; and though I am a younger brother and a prentice, yet I hope I am my father’s son” (1.1.26–29). Quicksilver holds firm to this identity; within the first three scenes of the play, he claims his gentle status no less than twelve times, including four references to his father, one to his mother, and two to his right to bear arms. Soon enough, Quicksilver’s insolence, mockery, drunkenness, dishonesty, and insistence on his right to behave according to the prerogatives of the high-born get him discharged from his bond by his exasperated master. Shortly after being sent packing, Quicksilver appears on stage “in his ­prentice’s coat and cap, his gallant breeches and stockings, gartering himself” (2.2.sd after 11). It’s a great visual, with Quicksilver as a kind of sartorial hermaphrodite of social rank, dressed half in the clothing of an apprentice and half in the costume of a city gentleman. Quicksilver is eager to “put off the other half of [his] prenticeship” (2.2.32–33), and so while the audience watches, the play uses costume to stage a transformation from one social group to another, as he dons his “doublet, cloak, rapier, and dagger” (2.2.sd after 33). But while he stands on stage clothed partly in his apprentice costume and partly in the finery of the young urban gentleman, Quicksilver embodies a “both … and” logic of simultaneity that belies the idea of fixed borders guarding distinctions between estates. Social commentators were, of course, well aware of social fluidity, and most early modern accounts of the social order allowed for upward mobility of wealthy commoners into

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the gentry. What was less easily accounted for were the miscegenated identities of the many gentle-born young men, like Quicksilver and his fellow apprentice Golding, who apprenticed to master tradesmen in London. These socially hybrid gentle-born apprentices challenged early modern taxonomies of status and sparked debate about the ontological divide between gentle and commons. Following in the footsteps of Jean Howard’s work on the early modern London theater as a site where social struggles were enacted, I examine Eastward Ho as a locus of ideological contestation over the status and group identity of the gentleman apprentice. As Mario DiGangi and Henry Turner affirm in this volume, early modern English identities were often formed around collectivities involving specific communal values, ethics, and affects; the London theatre, as Turner writes, presented “types who ‘stand for’ the members of different groups and who, in doing so, endow those members with an explicit sense of group identity rather than a merely individual one.”2 But gentle-born young men apprenticing to the London guilds attest to the complexity of group identities within the fluctuating social and economic world of early modern England, where upward and downward economic or “class” mobility could displace individuals from one status group to another.3 This displacement was effected in large part by the entrenched custom of primogeniture among the gentry alongside the increased volume and significance of commerce in England. Peter Earle, in The Making of the English Middle Classes, argues that younger sons of country gentry were an integral component of the emergence of a middle station in London in the seventeenth century. London was the best place for younger sons to make their way in the world, and a 1630 herald’s visit to London attests that “91 percent of London gentry were younger sons of country gentry.”4 Earle contends that “an almost impenetrable web of relationships was woven between the middling people of London and the country gentlemen,” to the extent that “there would have been few members of the London business world who were not quite closely related to country families, and few country families who did not have a relative earning a living in London.”5 Earle’s claims about integration are bolstered by research demonstrating increases in the number of gentle-born apprentices in seventeenth-century London. According to one analysis of four different trade companies, the number of apprentices with gentle fathers increased from nine to eighteen percent between the very early seventeenth century and 1650.6 Another study of four counties calculates a steady climb of about twelve percent between 1575 and the end of the seventeenth century.7 While apprenticeship was “less common among sons from families in the upper reaches of the gentry,” it was nevertheless “taken up by more than one in seven [gentry] sons” (52).8 Nearly as many gentry boys entered London trade apprenticeships as entered the universities over the seventeenth century, twelve percent compared to fourteen; less surprisingly, almost ninety percent of these gentle apprentices were contracted to freemen of the wealthiest and most influential of the trade companies in

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200  Ronda Arab the city.9 Not surprisingly, the further down the birth order a son was, the higher the likelihood he would apprentice within a trade rather than enter university or the Inns of Court.10 Earle claims that established urban gentlemen “shared the same metropolitan culture and were happy for their children to intermarry” with wealthy middling citizens and argues that under these circumstances distinctions between the two social groups “became meaningless.”11 Notwithstanding Earle’s vision of a middle stratum wherein the symbolic status of social rank became irrelevant among those who shared economic power and urban culture, seventeenth-century pamphlet literature and stage plays about younger sons of the gentry make clear that integration of gentle and commons into a cohesive status group was far from complete or seamless. Eastward Ho demonstrates the potentially troublesome affective identity of the younger son turned apprentice whose social and cultural disposition may have developed in ways counterproductive to operating within the mercantile ethos of the urban trade world. Status—common or gentle—involves more than rights, privileges, and “place.” And for all the moral panic (and theatrical glee) over the performativity of status (and gender), embodying a particular social estate involves more than external acts of donning appropriate clothing and following a learned script. The affective element of status can render the shell of mimicry inadequate, as status involves ways of feeling and being in the world. To enact membership in a community “is to perform a certain way of being rooted in specific affects and emotions.”12 Felt identity, or one’s subjective experience of one’s identity, translates into material embodiment and feeling actions in the world, which render status identity visible and perceptible. Eastward Ho demonstrates the ontology of status as an affectively engaged state of being, and, further, it reveals the role status-inflected affect plays in establishing, reinforcing, and ensuring the smooth running of market relationships—or in disrupting them. By staging conflicts in the urban shop created by a swaggering, sneering, supercilious gentle-born apprentice, Eastward Ho illustrates how the embodied affect of younger gentry sons could create problems for suitably placing them within the economic order. Some early modern commentators saw a life in trade as particularly appropriate for younger sons in need of the means to make a living. In The Compleat Tradesman; Or, The Exact Dealers Daily Companion, N. H., a London merchant, argues that “the Shop-keeping Trade is both a convenient and easie way” to provide for younger sons so that “the Bulk of [the] Estates may go to the Eldest.”13 In fact, he argues that because “the Shopkeeping trade is an easie life” there are “too great number of Shop-keepers”14 in England, and the excessive numbers should be redressed precisely so more of the available shop-keeping positions might go to younger sons.15 Since the urban shopkeeper controlled the trade functions of commercial activity at a time when manufacture was gradually splitting off from retail, his work

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was considered more refined than that of a craftsman, and he was more fully a part of the privileged economic world of London’s culture of commerce.16 N. H. might well be pleased by the second gentle apprentice of Eastward Ho, Golding, who accepts his position in the shop, “trusts [his trade] taints not [his] blood” (3.2.116), and is speedily promoted to deputy alderman, thus suggesting that the more elite municipal positions, once the realm of ambitious commoners, could be refashioned as suitable for those extra sons of the gentry. Shopkeeping, in N. H.’s vision, becomes (literally) a gentrified trade, reclaimed for members of an elite who, lacking the full privilege of their status, have enough privilege to appropriate for themselves benefits from below. But for every Golding, it seems, there will be a Quicksilver, and ­Quicksilver’s affective deportment challenges the idea that shop-keeping might be fashioned as an appropriately gentleman-like occupation. The first scene of Eastward Ho offers an elaborate comparative display of manners and behaviors associated with shopkeepers and urban gentlemen, as if to emphasize their radical incompatibility. Quicksilver’s clothing and a­ ccessories—“hat, pumps, short sword and dagger, and a racket trussed up under his cloak” (1.1.sd)—denote membership among the youthful urban male elite, but it is through his actions that he makes most perceptible his subjective identification with his birth status, particularly in how his actions contrast with that of his fellow apprentice, Golding. Golding’s first entrance onto the stage appears to be from within the goldsmith’s shop, and he is introduced to the audience “walking short turns” (1.1.sd) in front of the shop, his pace and arena constricted by his duty to caretake his master’s goods. Quicksilver, on the other hand, assumes a physical liberty of movement more characteristic of elite men than obedient apprentices. ­Quicksilver’s entrance on stage from one side door parallels that of his master, Touchstone, from the other side door, suggesting an inappropriate parity in the freedom of movement between master and apprentice, as well as an extended range of geographical territory beyond the immediate setting. Significantly, Touchstone immediately accuses Quicksilver of embarking on “loose action” (1.1.1), and, indeed, every aspect of Quicksilver’s physical mobility throughout the scene, as well as his verbal tendencies, flaunt expansive movement. When ­ uicksilver “offers to draw” Golding insults him as a “rakehell” (1.1.152), Q (1.1.153sd), embodying the duelist’s “expanded sense of physical space,”17 an authoritative stance which, influenced by fencer’s training, an activity of the well-born, “eventually became a visible sign of gentle birth.”18 Quicksilver’s repeated calls of “Eastward Ho” are enticements to travel, evoking excursions beyond the restricted space of the city, and the extravagance of the image he invokes of gaily skipping coins over the water—“mak[ing] ducks and drakes with shillings” (1.1.140)—contrasts sharply with Touchstone’s plodding explanation of his success as a result of having “hired … a little shop, [and] bought low” (1.1.55). Language usage also reflects affective identity throughout the scene, with Quicksilver’s self-aggrandizing boasts

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202  Ronda Arab and oaths contrasting with Golding’s submission to the formulaic language of the shopkeeper and Touchstone’s rehearsal of the pat adages and verbal tics stereotypical of citizens in London comedies. Golding’s first words— “What do ye lack, sir? What is’t you’ll buy” (1.1.78)—signal his compliance with the shopkeeper’s code of polite deference and his willingness, in Quicksilver’s scornful estimation, to “stand with a bare pate and a dropping nose under a wooden penthouse” and look “like a sheep” (1.1.142–43; 147). Touchstone’s apoplectic “Work upon that now!” (1.1.15; 19; 117) reflects his indignant reaction to Quicksilver, but when Quicksilver uses the same phrase and others like it, the affect it reveals is gleeful mockery of Touchstone’s class and status-defined lexicon, derision for the pious niceties of citizen language presented with a satisfied smirk at his own cleverness. Quicksilver’s felt freedom to romp across and manipulate linguistic registers for his own personal amusement demonstrates that his dominant response to his city environs is a supercilious sense of entitled liberty. Against Golding’s compliant restraint and Touchstone’s indignant aggravation, Quicksilver is characterized by pride, contempt, and cocky expansiveness, embodying the affect of the quick-witted young gentlemen criticized by Roger Ascham for being fickle, easily bored, lacking depth, despising inferiors, and continually desiring newfangledness: “ready scoffers, privy mockers, and ever over light and merry.”19 While courtesy literature counselled restraint, moderation, and bodily control as the manly ideal and critiqued swaggering postures, boasting, and swearing as incontinent wantonness, Ascham and others make clear that, especially among young gentlemen, these “uncivil” behaviors were often valued. As Anna Bryson writes, “freedom from social constraints and obligations was part of an older language of gentlemanly status which to some extent survived in the code of civility, coexisting with the converse gentlemanly obligation to show exemplary self-restraint.”20 The manner of the unbridled gallant, according to Ascham, was expressed by a “little rude verse” that might well apply to Quicksilver: To laugh, to lie, to flatter, to face, Four ways in court to win men grace. If thou be thrall to none of these, Away, good peak-goose, hence, John Cheese! Mark well my word, and mark their deed, And think this verse part of thy creed.21 Notably, if one is not engrossed by this ethos, one is a low-born cheese-­ eating simpleton, a “peak-goose,” “John Cheese.” Gentlemen and tradesmen have distinct affective identities, Eastward Ho suggests; the London trades are not the solution to the problem of the younger son. That the affective qualities of the younger son could create problems for suitably placing him in the seventeenth-century economic



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order is noted as well by commentators more serious-minded than the satirical writers of the commercial stage. Younger sons, many point out, are raised alongside of and in like manner to their elder brothers, and this creates difficulties when they reach an age of maturity. Stephen Penton argues strenuously that younger sons “must know and be taught the difference of their Relation to the Patrimony,”22 complaining that brothers are bred up in one Common manner, enjoying the same Fondness, wear the same Clothes, go to the same School, Hunt and Hawk at the same Idle rate: this must needs plumb up the sensual Soul of the Youth, make him reckon himself as good as his eldest Brother, and of as Good Parts too, never considering that the other is to be Wiser by Five Thousand Pounds a Year.23 Penton counsels that younger sons must be taught that “Industry is an honourable Profession,”24 arguing against the foolish conceit “That Law, ­Physick, or Divinity is beneath the Son of a Person of Quality, though the Fourth, Fifth, or Sixth Son.” Penton does not consider the merits of a life in trade for younger brothers, but he speaks of the different life paths of elders and youngers in terms of freedoms and restrictions that resonate with the circumstance of the gentle-born apprentice. Foolish conceits such as the above proceed, in his view, “from an Aversion (to the confinement of a P ­ rofession) in the Children themselves, occasioned by an Unwary p ­ romiscuous way of their Education.”25 “None are ignorant of the force of education,” writes Champianus ­Northtonus in The Younger Brother’s Advocate (1654), contending that “younger brothers may often wish that they had been rather the sons of some yeomen than of Knights” after having been bred as gentlemen but then given “a slender allowance for the continuance of it.” The ­Advocate constructs younger sons as tragic figures, admirably formed through ­“generous breeding”26 but lacking the knowledge and means “to maintain themselves by honest and lawful waies,” and thus in danger of turning to crime in response to their dispossession. “Driven to beg, cheat, steal” and “many times hanged for theft,”27 the noble youth is ruined by his unfair circumstances. It is this inequality which compelle the many brave spirits desperately to run into the gulf of discontent, to turn Pirates, Turkes, Fugitives, Hectors, Knights of the blade …28 A victim of his injudicious but courageous mettle, the younger son is made of stuff too good for his prospects in a world with no suitable place for him.

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204  Ronda Arab The young gentleman’s breeding creates a “brave spirit” whose affect does not match his fortunes. While Champianus Northtonus’s glamorized portrait of a wretched but “brave spirit” undoubtedly exaggerates the ill-suitedness of the gentleborn-and-raised younger son for the worldly prospects that greeted him, the upbringing of gentry sons was indeed considerably different from that of commoners, even commoners from the wealthy yeomen families increasingly filling the ranks of London apprenticeships. According to Ilana Ben-Amos, by the time nongentry boys entered apprenticeships, they had been working “sometimes for as long as three, four, or even six or seven years of their lives” in any number of tasks: animal husbandry, ploughing, haymaking, cleaning barns, “fetching water and gathering sticks for fuel,” spinning, carding, running errands, preparing food, or working with their fathers at his craft.29 The children of wealthier yeomen did fewer tasks in order to focus on their education, but they generally assisted during harvest times and when they were free from school.30 In contrast, while the sons of gentlemen were expected to acquire certain kinds of pragmatic knowledge, characterized by Ann Wagner as “the necessities and amenities of life—including agriculture, health, domestic economy, childrearing and table manners,”31 their duties were generally managerial rather than manual; Ben Amos cites the example of a young gentleman surveying fields with his father to determine where ditches were to be dug and hedges set, but notes that he was “probably never required to actually work in hedging or ditching.”32 While there were increasing overlaps and interminglings, gentle and common early modern children largely grew up differently and apart. Debates about the education of gentle boys involved whether to prioritize humanist learning over traditional training in activities such as hunting, fencing, riding, and shooting with the long bow, urged “as becoming and healthful exercises for gentlemen” and “as necessary or helpful training for war.”33 Physical activity was thus emphasized for gentle-born boys, but it was not proposed as labor or conceptualized as a means of preparation for future labor, and even in its status as sport it was not imagined as an arena where young men of different social stations might meet. Young men of common status, unless they were being groomed as gentlemen by ambitious parents, were unlikely to participate in the gentry-coded activities mentioned above, which required a considerable investment of time and equipment to master, and young gentlemen were cautioned to “avoid football and similar activities popular with the masses” and discouraged from “engag[ing] in contest with men of lesser rank.”34 A second or third born gentry son in the early seventeenth century might indeed, by “the force of education,” have a very different subjective experience of feeling and being in the world than the yeoman and citizen sons he apprenticed alongside of, or for, in London. And it is made clear in Eastward Ho that ­Quicksilver, very much the “brave” if imprudent “spirit” who falls in with criminal company, comes from a different social world than his master. Quicksilver’s

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description of Touchstone’s parentage—“his father was a maltman, and his mother sold gingerbread in Christ Church” (1.1.135–36)—is probably meant to be taken as the sneering apprentice’s exaggeration, but by ­Touchstone’s own account he had a modest start in life. Quicksilver, on the other hand, is the son of a Justice of the Peace, a position of considerable status among provincial gentry; that his father is “of quorum” (1.1.27), part of the select decision-making body of justices, solidifies his profile as an elite son of the country gentry. The restrictive servility and obedience required of the apprentice, which Quicksilver’s birth-right pride rejects, figures prominently in debates over the social status of the gentle-born apprentice. One of the most trenchant questions raised in pamphlet literature about gentry sons is whether or not apprenticeship extinguished gentle status; in part, this was a question about the affective qualities that the experience of apprenticeship bred. Edmund Bolton, in his 1629 defence of apprenticeship, The Cities Advocate, In this Case or Question of Honor and Armes; Whether Apprenticeship extinguisheth Gentry, complains of those such as the influential Sir Thomas Smith, who, in Bolton’s words, castigates the “hopefull, and honest estate of apprentiship in London,” as carrying “the odious note of bondage,”35 and depicts the apprentice as a type of unfree slave.36 Followers of Smith include William Spriggs, who complains that “the younger sons of our Nobility and chiefest Gentry, are necessitated to stoop (for want of better employments) to low, servile, base and mechanic e­ mployments,”37 and Edward C ­ hamberlayne, whose1669 Anglia Notitia, or the Present State of England repeats nearly verbatim Smith’s description of the apprentice’s “bondage” to his master, and calls the apprentice’s various restrictions “Marks of ­Slavery.”38 Chamberlayne also directly addresses the phenomenon of the gentle apprentice by lamenting the loss of honor, the debasement, and the shame to England attached to this development: the English Nobility and Gentry till within late years, judged it a stain and diminution to the honour and dignity of their Families, to seek their Childrens support by Shop-keeping, but only … by ­Military, Court, State, or Church Emploiments, much less to subject their ­Children to an Apprentisage, a perfect Servitude.39 Delivering the ultimate denouncement of apprenticeship for gentle-born sons, he announces that “Heralds are of opinion that a Gentleman thereby loses his Gentility forever, till he can otherwise recover it.”40 Interestingly, the herald John Ferne, in The Blazon of Gentrie (1586), pronounces erroneous the view that the gentleman, in “exercising merchandising, [has] so far imbased himselfe, that thereby he hath forfeited both title and insigne of Generositie.”41 Nevertheless, he denigrates craftsmen in familiar terms, arguing that “Merchaundizinge, is no competent, or seemelye

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206  Ronda Arab trade of lyfe, for a gentleman,”42 and describing craftsmen as “bound to service for the apprehending of [their] craft,” during which time “they seeme as bound and of servile estate, little better in equalitie and condition, then those which our Lawyers call nativi, bondsmen.”43 His use of “seem” suggests a perceivable exterior appearance; what Ferne claims to identify in the appearance of apprentices is servility, a materialized manifestation of ignoble deference and subservience. It is telling that this manner of being is cast as an “estate,” a word that encompasses (or even conflates) affect and status by comprehending the meanings both of bodily or mental condition and of worldly rank. Bolton’s response to the discursive construction of the apprentice as odiously servile is to tease apart the conflation of subservience and social rank. He makes clear that apprenticeship is not, in fact, a legal bondage, pointing out its status as a civil contract under which both parties benefit and have legal obligations. But he also moves beyond legalistic arguments to dispute that the servile disposition attached to apprenticeship is a function of social station. He points out that pledging deference is a conventional aspect of relations among the elite: “what so common among nobles as to professe to serve?”44 And despite Quicksilver’s elitist scorn for the subservience of apprenticeship, Eastward Ho slyly upholds Bolton’s insistence on the prevalence of service and submissive affect throughout the ranks of English social life. When Quicksilver proposes to go to court, and his mistress points out the degree of control a humorous lord asserts over every bodily expression of the courtier—“What care and devotion must you use to humour an imperious lord, proportion your looks to his looks, smiles to his smiles, fit your sails to the wind of his breath?” (2.2.81–84) Quicksilver’s response—“Tush, he’s no journeyman in his craft that cannot do that” (2.2.85–86)—­acknowledges the similarity in the affective behavior of the apprentice and the courtier, even while he denies the status implications of it. Bolton reasons further that the subservience of apprenticeship is a function of age, not rank: apprentices hold their positions while young, “those yeares which are every where subject to correction,”45 and the pedagogic element of the apprenticeship contract is essential to its nature. Apprentices, Bolton argues, “whether Gentlemen of birth or others,” are simply students, evident particularly in that “the title [of apprentice] is common to them with the Inns of Court, where Apprentices at Law, are not the meanest ­Gentlemen.”46 Drawing on etymology, he explains that the word Apprentise commeth of Apprenti, the French word, a raw soldier, or young learner … or of the Latine word apprenhendo, or apprendo, which properly is to lay hold of, and translatively to learne.47 Furthermore, the duties of trade apprentices are no more servile than those of other young men in training. All students, whether “yong souldiers in armies, or schollers in rigorous schooles, or novices in noviceships” must

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suffer conditions that are “base and vile” in and of themselves—soldiers dig dirt; students go bareheaded to their fellows; novices wash dishes—but they do so for meaningful ends that remove the baseness from the action. Each of these other students: in their kind usually do, and suffer things as base and vile in their owne quality, simply & in themselves considered, without respect to the finall scope, or aime of the first institution, as perhaps the meanest of five thousands Apprentises in London.48 Thus, Bolton creates a single social group of young men in training that disregards rank; he gives them all a quasi-equal status without regard to the nature of the education they seek, and he attributes the base deference and servility they must assume to their positions as youthful trainees, detaching it from values associated with social station. Deferential servility is the appropriate affect for students, a category based on age and the activity of learning, not rank or profession. Read alongside of pamphlet literature about younger sons, Eastward Ho implies that the younger gentry son who abandons his sense of aggrieved entitlement and adopts the compliant deference of Bolton’s trainee will be compensated for the humility of apprenticeship with promotion to a position of authority more appropriate to his birth-status. But at the same time, the play’s irrepressibly supercilious apprentice, who refuses to acknowledge “the difference of [his] Relation to the Patrimony,”49 suggests the possibility of a contrary phenomenon, the entrenchment of rank-specific affect among gentle-born young men that render them an ill fit for the options available to them for economic survival. Thus while increases in commercial activity in early modern England inevitably made trade a significant economic option for noninheriting gentry, literary evidence of historically specific social formations of subjectivity associated with gentle born sons suggests resistance to adopting the humble and accommodating ethos expected of apprentices and tradesmen. The gentle-born apprentices of the seventeenth century offer a glimpse into one part of the process of gentry and citizenry integrating into a middle class, but the communal values, ethics, and affects of these distinct status groups suggest a less than seamless overlap between ideals of honor and economic position. NOTES 1. George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and John Marston, Eastward Ho, ed. R.W. Van Fossen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). All further references to Eastward Ho are to this edition. 2. Henry S. Turner, “Corporate Life in Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday,” this volume, 186. See also Mario Digangi, “Civic Affect and Female Political Agency in Sir Thomas More,” this volume.

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208  Ronda Arab 3. See Henry Turner on Weber’s distinction between class and status groups, “between social position relative to economic circumstances and social position relative to symbolic power.” As Turner notes, it “is precisely in the interplay and changing relationship between these two aspects that large-scale transformations in social life become thinkable” (“Corporate Life,” 185, in this volume). 4.  Peter Earle, The Making of the English Middle Classes: Business, Society, and Family Life in London, 1660–1730 (London: Methuen, 1989), 6. 5. Earle, English Middle Classes, 7. 6.  Christopher Brooks, “Apprenticeships, Social Mobility and the Middling Sort, 1550–1800,” in The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England, 1550–1800, ed. Jonathan Barry and Christopher Brooks (London: Macmillan, 1994), 61. Brooks’ calculations are based on lists of entrants to the Haberdashers, Fishmongers, Carpenters, and Coopers. 7.  Patrick Wallis and Cliff Webb, “The Education and Training of Gentry Sons in Early Modern England,” Social History 36.1 (2011): 47, fig. 2. 8.  Wallis and Webb, “Education and Training,” 52. In a sample of 188 sons of the greater gentry, 14 percent of second sons (that is, 14 percent of 65 boys) and 14 percent of younger-than-second sons (14 percent of 51 boys) apprenticed (50). 9. Wallis and Webb, “Education and Training,” 44. The great twelve companies, which had a monopoly on the highest and most prestigious civic offices and the greatest numbers of merchants, were the Mercers, Grocers, Drapers, ­Fishmongers, Goldsmiths, Merchant Taylors, Skinners, Haberdashers, Salters, Ironmongers, Vintners, and Clothworkers. 10.  Wallis and Webb, “Education and Training,” 49, table 3 and fig.3. The reasons for the increased numbers of gentlemen serving apprenticeships in the seventeenth century are varied. Earle argues that the “practice of primogeniture took a firmer hold in landed society” during this period (88); he also cites the increasing numbers of gentry and improvements in mortality rates among children; the undeveloped state of the army; and limited opportunities in the professions, which were also only an option for those with scholastic aptitude. There were more younger sons and fewer of the traditionally elite options for them. Seventeenth-century literature on the phenomenon of the younger son is extensive: It variously takes up the topic of what to do with and how to raise younger sons; debates the advantages of gavelkind versus primogeniture or argues that parents should be allowed to choose how and to whom to leave their estate; criticizes elder brothers for idleness, decadence, or mistreatment of their siblings; and laments diminishing opportunities for second and later-born boys. 11. Earle, English Middle Classes, 6. 12.  Josue David Cisneros, “Looking ‘Illegal’: Affect, Rhetoric, and Performativity in Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070,” in Border Rhetorics: Citizenship and Identity on the US-Mexico Frontier, ed. D. Robert DeChaine (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2012), 133. 13. N. H., The Compleat Tradesman; Or, The Exact Dealers Daily Companion (London, 1684), 35. 14.  N. H., Compleat Tradesman, 33. 15. “[T]he Shop-keeping Trade is both a convenient and easie way for the Gentry, Clergy, and Communalty of this Kingdom, to provide for their younger

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Transforming the Younger Son  209

Sons, that so the Bulk of their Estates may go to the Eldest” (N. H., Compleat ­Tradesman, 19). 16. See Ronda Arab, Manly Mechanicals on the Early Modern English Stage ­(Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 2011), Chapter 4. 17.  Jennifer A. Low, Manhood and the Duel: Masculinity in Early Modern Drama and Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 59. 18. Low, Manhood, 7. 19.  Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster (1570), ed. Lawrence V. Ryan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), 21–22. 20.  Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 245. See also Amanda ­Bailey’s Flaunting: Style and the Subversive Male Body in Renaissance England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), which argues for the existence of a subgroup of well-born young men whose extravagant sartorial habits defied the social constraints appropriate to their positions. Arguing that this social group consisted of disenfranchised elite men who used style subversively, she explicitly names younger brothers as part of the sub-culture. I would argue, however, that elder brothers were also often positioned as extravagant gallants who posed threats to the conventions of social order. 21. Ascham, The Schoolmaster, 43. 22.  Stephen Penton, New Instructions to the Guardian (London, 1694), 12–13. 23. Penton, New Instructions, 11. 24. Penton, New Instructions, 13. 25. Penton, New Instructions, 10. Emphasis added. 26.  Champianus Northtonus, The Younger Brothers Advocate, Or a line or two for Younger Brothers, With their Petition to the Parliament (London, 1655), A2v. 27. Northtonus, Younger Brothers, A3. 28. Northtonus, Younger Brothers, A3v. 29.  Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos, Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 39–41. 30. Ben-Amos, Adolescence, 46. 31.  Ann Wagner, “Idleness and the Ideal of the Gentlemen,” History of Education Quarterly 25 (1985), 43. 32. Ben-Amos, Adolescence, 43–44. 33.  Ruth Kelso, The Doctrine of the English Gentleman in the Sixteenth Century (Gloucester, MA: P. Smith, 1964), 49. 34.  Wagner, “Idleness,” 51. 35. Edmund Bolton, The Cities Advocate (London, 1629 Facsimile Edition, Amsterdam & Norwood, NJ: Walter J. Johnson, Inc. & Theatrum Orbis ­ ­Terrarum, 1975), A3v. 36.  De Republica Anglorum was published at least eleven times between 1583 and 1640, and Smith’s words about the nature of apprenticeship are repeated by several commentators after him. 37.  William Spriggs, A Modest Plea for an Equal Common-wealth Against Monarchy ... Also, An Apology for Younger Brothers, the Restitution of Gavil-Kind, and Relief of the Poor. (London, 1659), 65. 38.  Edward Chamberlayne, Anglia Notitia, or the Present State of England (London, 1669), 435. 39. Chamberlayne, Anglia Notitia, 434–5.

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210  Ronda Arab 40. Chamberlayne, Anglia Notitia, 435. Emphasis added. 41.  John Ferne, The Blazon of Gentrie (London, 1586 Facsimile Edition, Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms, 1968), 74. 42. Ferne, Blazon, 72. 43. Ferne, Blazon, 8. 44. Bolton, Cities, 30. 45. Bolton, Cities, 26. 46. Bolton, Cities, 13. 47. Bolton, Cities, 10–11. 48. Bolton, Cities, 14. 49. Penton, New Instructions, 13.

15 Managing Fear

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The Commerce in Blackness and the London Lord Mayors’ Shows Ian Smith

1 Among the performance genres that contribute to the archive of racial representation in the early modern period, the annual London Lord Mayors’ Shows brought Africans, typically racially cross-dressed actors, into the English social imagination. Emerging in 1535 in the wake of the declining Midsummer Watch, the shows marked the installation of the new mayor each year on October 29th. A water pageant accompanied the mayor elect as he made his way along the Thames to Westminster for the swearing in. Upon his return to the city, the land pageant unfolded, consisting of spectacular processions that followed an established route along various landmarks punctuated with emblematic tableaux.1 Given the pivotal presence of the honoree and the ambassadorial jockeying at these events, David Bergeron proposes that, “all civic pageants are political events.”2 An alternate approach focuses our attention on the producers of these shows—the London livery companies or trade guilds that sponsored the mayoral pageants as expensive promotional entertainments favoring overseas commerce and fostering a foreign-infused taste for goods where Africans, showcased within the spectacle, became the metonyms for prized imports. Elected from among the city aldermen, each mayor was a member of a livery company that bore the cost of the pageant for a given year. By 1538, the ranking of the twelve major city companies had been resolved: Mercers, Grocers, Drapers, Fishmongers, Goldsmiths, Skinners, Merchant Taylors, Haberdashers, Salters, Ironmongers, Vintners, and Clothworkers.3 Eightyfive percent of the twenty-seven Elizabethan mayors were “invested in overseas trading companies,” and the extravagance of the Jacobean shows signaled the moment “when the London merchant elite was consolidating the power and controls it had been nurturing for well over fifty years.”4 Thus while the pageants dispensed advice on good government to the newly installed official and produced self-affirming narratives touting social and national stability, they notably encoded and justified the companies’ motivating spirit of economic enterprise. Along with the dignitaries flanking the processional route, the swirl of people crowding the streets were all spectators to the joining of “righteous industry and capital.”5

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212  Ian Smith When read against the backdrop of an evolving mercantilist program, the Moors appearing in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century pageants were public relations tools for the promotion of international trade and commerce. Beyond the spectacle of exotic dress and striking epidermal difference, these Moors are primarily presented for their commodity value—as paraded markers of overseas consumer items and trade—and as such are entailed in a materialist discourse geared at becoming the lingua franca of London life. In examining Moors in civic pageantry, I emphasize the shows’ public, audience-inclusive format that is especially relevant because the notion of race is the product of collective, social agreements about how to read and evaluate signs of human, somatic difference. Race, of course, is not endemic to or located in the body, and modern science has questioned the assumptions of hierarchies of difference based in so-called positivist corporal claims, the legacy of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinking invented to justify colonial slavery. Nevertheless, race remains a strategy and ideological practice synched to acts of reading and interpreting corporal signs along a perverse gradient of difference.6 In short, race is an audience issue. This privileging of the staged African body for semiotic unpacking was already being promoted in early modern mayoral pageants. The shows, argues Lawrence Manley, “suspended everyday norms, producing an antistructural condition,” a temporary, neutralizing tendency toward social hierarchy.7 But this antistructural moment is an illusion, the necessary product of civic pageantry’s creation and management of a public sphere—a space for the consolidation of the discourse of the public good—in which the fantasy of the democracy of commerce and consumption ruled.8 The city space functioned as a managed public sphere where Londoners were invited to participate as readers partnered in a mercantilist vision of civic wellbeing. The shared view of London’s wealth was in practice designed for the benefit of the few; the vision of common good was but a euphemism for the capital enrichment of the livery company elite. Race as a participatory reading endeavor, however, served as a class solvent within the ideological, performative space of the city where a diverse public could invest in the shared illusion of community. 2 The Midsummer shows had featured Moors with a typical assortment of properties that spoke to a fierce, uncivilized, warlike personage. The ­Drapers’ records for 1521 detail the payments for a long sword and forty-five reeds of wildfire for the King of the Moors; sixty darts for an equal number of Moors of varying sizes; and fire for the Moors after they had stripped themselves naked.9 The explosive scope of the pageant afforded spectacular entertainment while reinforcing the notion of the Moor as a wild specimen existing

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in a state of nature. A provincial mayoral installation in Norwich in 1556 repeated the iconography of the skillful but naked Moor standing atop a richly adorned pavilion holding a great dart and a target.11 Given the traditional representational associations of the Moor with danger and incivility, later Lord Mayors’ shows would dramatize the Moor’s accommodation to London’s commercial estate. To this end Middleton deploys the concept of conversion in The ­Triumphs of Truth (1613) mounted for the Grocers’ company. When the King of Moors and his retinue arrive in a ship, their frightful blackness constitutes the singular disturbance typically associated with earlier pageant Moors’ weapons and accoutrements. The king remarks immediately on the “amazement” (411) or “overwhelming fear” (OED 3) etched in the faces of the “white people” (412), triggered by the sight of blackness.12 Among early modern writers on the passions and medicine, it was thought that fear led to sickness and death.13 But the pageant organizers hoped to argue that economic viability was indispensable for a healthy London, thereby privileging material concerns over whatever consequences the fear of blackness might portend. The crowd is assuaged by the African king’s confession of being converted by “English merchants, factors, travellers, / Whose truth did with our spirits hold commerce” (437–38), in a pointed allusion to the crude mercantile proffer of the gospel for goods. Mercantile conversion overseas acquires a metaperformative function that explains the affective and material work of pageant spectatorship: the crowd converts its collective fear into the recognition of blackness’ commodity value according to the economic imperatives regulating city life. Showcasing five islands laden with foreign imports, specifically nutmeg, ginger, almonds, and sugar loaves, the pageant equates these consumer items with the dark hue of the Moors, including those visibly located among the islands.14 The sugar loaves, in turn, recapitulate graphically the narrative of transformation with the conversion of dark molasses into a white substance. The Moors’ dramatic arrival in their ship is, therefore, a commercial metaphor for the entry of foreign imports rendered acceptable, their black bodies being identified with commodities traded and purchased overseas for resale in the London and European markets.15 The changing perception of blackness argued by the pageant is rooted in economic profit where money made traditional color biases operationally fungible given the right financial and consumer interest. Middleton repeated a similar island scenario in 1617 in The Triumphs of Honor and Industry, and in 1622 The Triumphs of Honor and Virtue featured an “East Indian Paradise.”16 For Industry, the Grocers’ court records specify fifty sugar loaves; thirty-six pounds of nutmeg; fourteen pounds of dates; and one hundred and fourteen pounds of ginger thrown among the crowds by those sitting on griffins and camels.17 In all three pageants, the products itemized in court records advertise the Grocers’ sustained commitment to the East Indian market.18 The second most powerful of the twelve great livery companies, the Grocers traditionally controlled confectioners,

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214  Ian Smith tobacconists, and druggists (with apothecaries successfully lobbying James I for separation in 1617), but their association with the newly incorporated East India Company—which received its royal charter in 1600—constituted a significant new enterprise geared at expanding overseas commerce. Costs associated with using the conventional land routes connecting Africa, Asia, and the Far East led to highly inflated prices; as an alternative, the opening up of direct trade via the eastern seaways promised an economic boon to the East India Company that was at its inception “by far the largest and most ambitious merchant association yet conceived in England.”19 The early years saw uneven successes, yet Ania Loomba remarks that the East India Company had an average return of 101 percent for its first five voyages, enough to attract ongoing support for future investments.20 “Between 1600 and 1613,” Miles Ogborn also observes, “the East India Company sent out 12 separately capitalized, and generally profitable, voyages.”21 The East India Company contributed, therefore, to “the first phase of a commercial revolution which in the course of the seventeenth century made England into an entrepot of world trade and the centre of a commercial empire.”22 The main thrust of the eastern venture was commercial, in contrast to English and European objectives of conquest and colonization in the western, Atlantic arena. The prime directive of the East India Company was commerce not conflict, trade not conquest. Still, for Kenneth Andrews the commercial drive of mercantile capitalism “was not a pacific movement but an acquisitive and predatory drive for commodities and for the profits to be made on the rich products of the outer world.”23 Middleton’s Moors, prominently configured as proxy persons or stand-ins for negotiated and imported goods, are caught in this predatory design of international commerce and thrust among the slew of products making their way into English and European markets. Moreover, despite the general rule of antagonism-free commerce, another type of violence—the violence of human c­ ommodification—insinuates itself into the commercial mandate and practice of corporations like the East India Company. It might not have been as outwardly brutal as the capture of slaves or as nakedly rapacious as the European colonial reach into the western hemisphere, but by influencing the way Moors were conceived and read, it effected a conversion in the English mentality more historically eventful than the pageant’s purported ­“conversion” of the Moors.24 3 The processional structure of the mayoral shows, often designated ­“triumphs,” draws inspiration from the ancient Roman triumphal entries with their emphasis on the march of animals and dignitaries, the display of military spoils including human plunder, and glory deriving from foreign conquest. This classical staging of achievement coordinate with mastery

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is iterated in the early modern parade of animals, Moors, and foreign goods that signaled for Londoners the livery companies’ growing institutional clout along with the glory of commerce and its objectifying power. The ­Goldsmiths’ court records pertaining to Anthony Munday’s Chruso-­ thriambos; The Triumphs of Gold for September 7, 1611, provide processional details absent from the pageant’s printed text. Ahead of the central pageant device—a mobile platform bearing a mountain of gold and an assortment of seated artisans—march Justice and “her two daughters dispersing money” to the crowd along with two Moors perched on unicorns likewise “casting abroad, the ore.”25 The iconography of Moors mounted on animals or leading them in the pageant procession was repeated throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Skinners’ court books for October 6, 1551, show payments of “4li. 3s” to George Cabbell “to make and thoroughly to garnish a ‘luzern’ in his colours to be borne with 2 lads and led with a ‘moryne,’” the animal in question being a “luzern” or lynx.26 Over a century later this identification of Moors and animals persisted. John Tatham’s Aqua Triumphalis (1662) describes a water pageant with the Merchant Taylors’ barge bearing “two Camels (supporters of the Companies Arms)” attended by two Moors who serve as their guides.27 In 1672, London Triumphant, composed by Thomas Jordan for the Grocers, boasts an entry with a black boy, a real person of African descent, as opposed to a racially cross-dressed actor, seated on an animal effigy. On the front of the stage “is erected the Crest of the Worshipful Company of Grocers, being a Camel artfully Carved, and properly painted, which is neer as big as the life, and sheweth very magnificently; on whose back a Negro Boy is mounted.”28 The presentation of Moors and animals in pageantry amounts to more than a march of a menagerie intended to whet spectators’ taste for extravagance. It articulates a grandiloquent sign system whose formal elements feature in the elaborate institutional narrative each company-sponsored show wanted to tell. As the examples from Munday, Tatham, and Jordan suggest, various animals were associated in heraldry with different guilds, often emblematizing a company’s history and ideals in the crest and coat of arms. The Merchant Taylors employed the camel to recognize the company’s patron saint, John the Baptist, who wore clothing made of camel’s hair. For the Grocers, the hardy camel asserted the traffic, transportation, and abundance of assorted comestibles from distant sources. Symbolized by the unicorn, purity was embraced by the Goldsmiths for the relevance to the company business of ore extraction and purification. The frequent juxtaposition of Moors and these company animals in the public shows served to update company history, making the Moor into a symbol and modernizing catalyst of the companies’ revised commercial programs that targeted increasing revenues in the exotic overseas markets. Consequently, the Moor becomes the latest human addition to the bestiary of the shows’ heraldic discourse. The effect is performance literacy, giving the crowds an unmistakable image—the Moor inserted into a company’s crest and coat of arms

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216  Ian Smith brought to life—that taught them to comprehend the ritual of institutional power enacted in the pageant procession that conjoined English commercial interests and the appropriative reception of Moors. London Triumphant, nevertheless, with its self-conscious deployment of the framing company crest provides a particularly striking example of the consequences of the institutional cooptation of the Moor, the result of mastery that is objectification. The “Negro Boy,” mounted on a camel and situated between two baskets “which contain several sorts of Fruits, as Raisons, Almonds, Dates, Figs, Prunes, and other variety of Grocery Wares” to be scattered “with a plentiful hand amongst the people,” ranks as merely one among the elements in this list of consumer delights (491). The following year, Jordan’s London in its Splendor recapitulates a similar scene with a “Negro Boy” described as “beautifully Black” to complement the anticipated gustatory pleasures of the imported food items as well as to simultaneously misdirect viewers with the boy’s aestheticized blackness while enforcing a narrative of traffic, transport, and sale.29 Rehearsing a familiar marketing ploy from mayoral pageant practice, the black boy scattering delectable products among which, ironically, he numbers as a proxy figure participates in a cruel and scripted enactment of human debasement. Embedded in a syntax of palatable treats, the black boy exists in a horizontal relationship to consumer items that defines him as a commodity; flattens him out to mere contiguity; and effects the audience’s education into the dehumanization and disposability of blackness. 4 From the sixteenth century onward, the education offered the audience through the mayoral street shows pointed forward to levels of racial objectification that were routinely rehearsed and disseminated in the public sphere of the London civic pageant. While blackness appeared to be abhorrent to the popular imagination, audiences were invited to convert their fear, persuaded by the livery companies’ superseding rhetoric of economic necessity. At the same time, since company interest in blackness was always partial and contingent, audiences witnessed simultaneously the cooptation of Moors by a system that insisted on their human worthlessness: Moors reduced to the radical contiguity of things; Moors produced as the perverse essence of their corporal difference. One final, brief set of examples highlights this production of racial knowledge as the consequence of managing fear and through which a confident commercial London could claim unified civic interests. The spectacle of the Moor’s blackness is epitomized in the corporal mimesis (skin-on-skin identification) resulting from Moors riding animals readily identified by coat coloration, spots, or rosettes. London’s Triumph from 1656 exhibits “two leopards bestrid by two Moors, attird in the habit of their Country.”30 Of special note, the lynx, symbol of the Skinners’ company

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with two featured in its coat of arms, motivated the organization’s highly marketable connection between the animal’s spotted pelt and a Moor’s equally striking black skin. George Peele’s 1585 pageant for the installation of Wolstan Dixie introduces a Moor, in what is one of the first speaking pageant parts, and repeats the image from the Skinners’ pageant in 1551, referenced earlier, of a Moor riding a lynx: “behold I come, / A straunger, straungely mounted, as you see, / Seated upon a lusty Luzern’s back.”31 The Moor is made to emphasize his foreignness, but the doubling of “strange”— he has a different, unfamiliar body; he is connected to and resembles this animal in a unique, perverse way—names the exotic as attention grabbing while directing the crowd’s gaze to observe the blurred lines between Moor and animal that signal racial embodiment as having limits placed on human subjectivity. Spotted lynx and black Moor coexist in racial counterpoint to the unspotted, white English audience whose racial homogeneity masks the economic disparity that exists between company power and the ordinary Londoner in the streets. Moreover, associated as the lynx’s skin is with the African’s, its high demand for domestic fashion points to a similar incorporation of the Moor’s provocative blackness into the guild’s commercial interests. As the animal’s coat is regarded as its most visible and valuable asset so, too, the Moor’s skin becomes his totalizing identity and the symbol of his marketability both metonymic and real over the course of the seventeenth century when the mayoral pageants unfolded in historic counterpoint to African slavery conducted in the English-speaking Caribbean.32 Thus while the pageants from the 1650s on have Caribbean plantation politics and chattel slavery as their backdrop, earlier mayoral shows also achieve something quite important: through the invention of the commodified Moor, they help shape and prepare the English mentality for the historic eventualities that required, yet again, the further dehumanization and objectification of blacks for purely economic imperatives. The “Negro Boy” did not just emerge in the 1670s; he was invented before his time. NOTES 1.  On the route traveled, see Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky, “The Triumphes of Golde: Economic Authority in the Jacobean Lord Mayor’s Show,” ELH 60.4 (1993): 880–81. 2.  David M. Bergeron, “Pageants, Politics, and Patrons,” Medieval and ­Renaissance Drama in England 6 (1993): 140. 3.  Thomas Middleton, Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 965. 4. Theodore B. Leinwand, “London Triumphing: The Jacobean Lord Mayor’s Show,” Clio 11.2 (1982): 146, 138. 5.  Leinwand, “London Triumphing,” 140. 6. James Gordon Finlayson, Habermas: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), writes: “Ideologies are on this view the false

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218  Ian Smith ideas or beliefs about itself that society somehow systematically manages to induce people to hold” (11). 7.  Lawrence Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 214. 8. On Habermas’s articulation of the practical limits of the public sphere, see ­Finlayson, 8–15. 9.  Collections III: A Calendar of Dramatic Records in the Books of the Livery Companies of London, 1485–1640, ed. Jean Robertson and D. J. Gordon (Oxford: Malone Society, 1954), 6–7. 10.  Anne Lancashire, London Civic Theatre: City Drama and Pageantry from Roman Times to 1558 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), describes similar details for May games in London in 1557, including “a sultan, an elephant and castle, young Moors with shields and darts” (168). 11. Robert Withington, English Pageantry: An Historical Outline, 2 vols. ­(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1920), 2:16. 12. All Middleton references are taken from Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works. 13. On the notion of “fear as illness,” see Allison P. Hobgood, “Feeling Fear in ­Macbeth,” in Shakespearean Sensations: Experiencing Literature in Early ­Modern England, ed. Catherine A. Craik and Tanya Pollard (Cambridge: ­Cambridge University Press, 2013), 31–33. 14.  Collections III, 88. 15. The growth in foreign imports was not without its critics who feared the negative impact on the balance of trade; dispensing with this particular concern, the pageant sponsors were bullish. On imported clothing and cloths, see Roze Hentschell, “Treasonous Textiles: Foreign Cloth and the Construction of ­Englishness,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 32 (2002): 544–46. 16.  Collections III, 104. 17.  Collections, 92. 18.  Collections III, 92; 104. 19. Emily Erikson and Peter Bearman, “Malfeasance and the Foundations for Global Trade: The Structure of English Trade in the East Indies, 1601–1833,” The American Journal of Sociology 112.1 (2006): 200. 20.  In Middleton, 1717. 21.  Miles Ogborn, “Writing Travels: Power, Knowledge and Ritual on the English East India Company’s Early Voyages,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, 27.2 (2002): 159. 22.  Kenneth R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder, and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480–1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 8. 23. Andrews, Trade, Plunder, and Settlement, 5. 24. Of Truth and Industry, Ania Loomba writes: “In reality Oriental populations, let alone the monarchs, were hardly as tractable as Middleton’s Indian Queen or King of the Moors. The Mughal emperors, for example, were intellectually interested in Christianity … [b]ut none of them came even remotely close to ­converting” (in Middleton, 1717). 25.  J. H. P. Pafford, ed., Chruso-thriambos; The Triumphs of Gold (London, 1962), 12. 26.  John James Lambert, ed., Records of the Skinners of London, Edward I to James I (London, 1933), 209.

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27.  John Tatham, Aqua Triumphalis (London, 1662), sig. B. 28. Thomas Jordan, London Triumphant, in Some Account of the Worshipful ­Company of Grocers of the City of London, 3rd ed, ed. Baron Heath (London, 1869), 491. 29. Thomas Jordan, London in its Splendor, in Some Account of the Worshipful Company of Grocers of the City of London, 3rd ed., ed. Baron Heath (London, 1869), 510. 30. Withington, English Pageantry, 2:46. 31.  George Peele, The Device of the Pageant Borne before Wolstane Dixie, in The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, vol. 2, ed. John Nichols (London: John Nichols, 1823), 446. 32. On African slavery in the Caribbean, see Susan Dwyer Amussen, Caribbean Exchanges: Slavery and the ­ Transformation of English Society, 1640–1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 5–42.

Afterword

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Phyllis Rackin

For one year, we were lucky enough to have Jean Howard at Penn, but as hard as we tried to keep her, she finally decided to return to Columbia. I should have known she would. Although professional and institutional considerations must have played a part in Jean’s decision, I don’t know what they were. What I do know is that, although Jean was born and raised on a potato farm in northern Maine, the city of New York is her natural home. Jean is in love with New York—in love with its throbbing energy, with the cultural abundance that makes it the great metropolis of the contemporary world, and, perhaps most of all, with its theaters. Much critical scorn has been heaped on critics who postulate an “ideal audience” for a Shakespearean play, but Jean is every actor’s, every playwright’s, and every director’s ideal audience. I’ve never seen her enter a theater without high expectations; and almost every play we’ve seen together—even the ones I found ­disappointing—managed somehow to elicit a generous response from Jean. That same delight animates Jean’s recent work on the plays of Tony Kushner and Caryl Churchill, as well as her decades of scholarly engagement with English Renaissance theater and the culture of the remarkable city that gave it birth. It is probably most evident in Theater of a City, but it could be seen in her earlier books as well. In Shakespeare’s Art of ­Orchestration, she elucidated the performance strategies encoded in ­Shakespeare’s play scripts that shaped the experience of appreciative playgoers. In The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England, she showed us how much we had been missing when we reduced the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries to the grim mechanisms of repression that previous new historicist criticism had trained us to discover. It has long been recognized that Jean knows more than most scholars about her subject and that she brings an exceptionally keen and original mind to its analysis. Her work was also distinguished from the very beginning by sensitive readings of Shakespeare’s play scripts and a lucid prose style that expressed sophisticated insights with clarity and grace. But the national and international reputation that placed her in the top ranks of her profession was based on the remarkable series of papers and articles that culminated in The Stage and Social Struggle. With an unsurpassed ability to analyze the implications of hotly contested scholarly debates without

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Afterword  221 simply reproducing the terms of those debates, Jean’s interventions had far-­ reaching implications for the subsequent work of other scholars. One case in point is the important paper she presented in 1989 at the Essex Conference on Postmodernism, Marxism, and History, an academic symposium whose very name was articulated at a level of abstraction that erased the category of gender and with it the entire project of feminist analysis. A compelling theoretical argument for the necessity of feminism to a critical discourse that threatened to erase it, Jean’s paper mobilized academic analysis to move feminism from the margin of that discourse to its center and, in so doing, to reconstitute the entire discursive field. These and many other of Jean’s interventions are well known and widely appreciated. Less well known but equally remarkable about Jean and her work are the generosity of spirit and the capacity for delighted appreciation that distinguish her personal relationships and animate her encounters with the material she studies. I learned to appreciate these qualities when we were working together on Engendering a Nation. They made her a joy to work with, and they also enriched the work we produced. A good example is her reading of Mistress Quickly and the Eastcheap tavern in the Henry IV plays. We both agreed about where Quickly’s tavern and her disordered speech fit into the overall scheme of the plays, but Jean’s analysis was subtler and truer than mine, not only because of her brilliant explication of the ways Quickly’s speech works in the context of the play, but also because her analysis was enriched by her generous response to the character Shakespeare had created and to the theatrical pleasure Quickly was designed to provide. Jean’s understanding of the ways Quickly’s “uncertain control of the English tongue jam[s] the communications networks by which the law does its work of making distinctions and hierarchies” and “pluralizes the language of the play” is subtle and complicated, but she also recorded her own delight in “the double-entendres that dance through [Quickly’s] speech” (The heavyhanded italics are mine: the eloquent verb is Jean’s).1 Months later, I was present when Jean read one of Quickly’s speeches in a lecture based on that analysis. In Jean’s elated voice, Shakespeare’s character came alive. That same generous spirit is apparent in Jean’s dealings with her students. The former students who contributed to this collection include familiar names—scholars who have already established distinguished reputations— as well as fresh new voices that continue to carry on Jean’s legacy. But what may be most revealing about that legacy is the diversity of the material these essays examine and the fact that each of the writers has her or his own voice and perspective. Unlike other famous teachers, Jean does not make clones. What she gives her best students is her devotion to truth, her independent mindedness, her sturdy common sense, her rigorous standards of scholarship, and her willingness to question received opinions with an open mind. More than most collections of essays designed to honor a great teacher, the essays in this collection are united by a common task—the difficult work of teasing out the workings of affect in a historically specific

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222  Phyllis Rackin setting. Nonetheless, they approach their task in radically different ways. The subjects they examine range from Pamela Allen Brown’s analysis of the relationships between Renaissance queens and their dwarfs to Patricia Cahill’s examination of the uses of trick chairs in the production of early modern plays, and their methodology ranges from Benedict Robinson’s intellectual history of theories of magnetism to Jyotsna Singh’s close reading of a Shakespearean play script. The editors’ organization of the essays in this collection explicitly situates them in grounds Jean uncovered in her best-known books, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England, Engendering a Nation, and Theater of a City; but Jean’s influence is apparent in other ways as well. In a book that is not named in the Table of Contents, Shakespeare’s Art of Orchestration, Jean took on the difficult task of articulating the complex relationships between the plays Shakespeare left us and the affective responses they were designed to elicit. Her analysis in that book included astute close readings not only of the words in the play scripts but also of the theatrical directions they implied and their intended effects on the playgoers. From the beginning, Jean reminded her readers of the mutually constitutive relationships of plays and playgoers—of both the audience’s role in shaping theatrical production and the role of the performances they attended in shaping the playgoers. Moreover, despite the editors’, and my, explicit references to specific books that Jean has already published, the way Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater most shows her influence and follows her example is the fact that it takes a fresh new look at a subject of intense current—and intensely current—interest. The reasons for the current interest in affect are worth examining. As Jean wrote long ago in her definitive essay on the new historicism, “There is no transcendent space from which one can perceive the past ‘objectively’ [because] our view is always informed by our present position.” 2 In the context of literary history, the recent turn to affect can be seen as a reaction, predictable in retrospect, against a dominant tendency in twentieth-century literary criticism—a tendency which can itself be seen as a reaction against the critical thinking of the Romantics and Victorians. A version of affective experience conceived as “emotion” was privileged during the nineteenth century as the source of poetic inspiration, the subject of poetry, and the most valued aspect of a reader’s experience; but this view was emphatically repudiated by the leading critics in the first part of the twentieth century, who called for a literature and a criticism that was “hard,” dry,” and ­“objective.” Rebutting Wordsworth’s famous definition of poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquility,” T. S. Eliot declared that “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion.”3 One of the most widely cited and reprinted essays of the mid-twentieth-century was William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley’s refutation of what they called “the affective fallacy” and defined as “a confusion between the poem and its results,” which “begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological effects of the poem

Afterword  223 and ends in impressionism and r­elativism.” Given this historical context, the current turn to affect studies in literary criticism might be viewed as an attempt to recuperate emotion for literary study while avoiding the negative connotations it had acquired. But literary criticism is not the only area in which affect is attracting attention. In recent years, discussions of emotions, feelings, and affect can be found at of every level of contemporary discourse, from the cheerful exhortations of mass-market self-help books to the impenetrable jargon of the most recondite academic analysis. What distinguishes the essays in this collection, in addition to their freedom from such jargon, is the fact that they analyze affective responses as the products of historically specific social and cultural contexts and in so doing open the way for political analysis. More typically, the discourse on affect—academic as well as popular—is a-historical. But although its historical and political implications are rarely examined, it is worth speculating about the possible reasons for the privileged place that affect has acquired in contemporary discourse. To be sure, it is no doubt too soon to develop more than a preliminary account of the features of our current historical situation that may be motivating this interest and shaping the directions it is taking, but one way to understand it even now is as a response to a growing sense of our helplessness in the face of invincible destructive forces, such as disastrous climate change and a ruthless global economy. The current focus on affect can be seen as an attempt to speak for and to the human subject, to which these forces are totally indifferent. Although the words we use to designate affect, emotions, and feelings are often used interchangeably, they can also help to adumbrate a kind of historical trajectory and suggest some of the ways their users inhabited their worlds. “Passions,” one word favored in the sixteenth century, implies experiences we passively suffer. Another was “humors,” which implied a body that was porous and therefore subject to changes in its environment.5 Although both words persist in our own vocabulary, they were gradually displaced by “Emotions,” a word that implies something we actively produce, something that comes, as the word “e-motions” implies, from us, an activity of our inner being which we “have” rather than “suffer.” “Affect,” the term favored in contemporary analysis, can include “emotions” and “feelings,” and it is notoriously difficult to pin down. But if we think of the differences between those terms as implications rather than clear-cut distinctions, several of them are useful when considering the affective dimensions of theatrical performance. One is that “affect” implies a transaction between outer and inner, a response elicited by an external stimulus. Another is that an affective response is in-the-moment, immediate, and usually transitory, while an emotion is not necessarily lodged in a specific time and place, since it can often be recalled and reexperienced, even in solitude, when whatever evoked it is recalled to mind. Both of these differences make “affect” a much more useful concept than “emotion” or “feeling” for thinking about the collective experience of playgoers in a theater, for situating that experience in

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224  Phyllis Rackin a historically specific time and place, and for speculating about its political implications. The essays in this collection take full advantage of all those possibilities, and they constitute a worthy tribute to the teacher whose work they honor. But Jean Howard has taught a lot more students than she ever met in a classroom. I know that I am one of them. She has taught generations of scholars better ways of looking at the texts they study and the worlds in which those texts were produced. She has shown feminists, new historicists, and Marxists how much all of them can profit by paying serious, respectful attention to each other’s work. It is customary to refer to scholarly work as “contributions,” an honorable name that is not always deserved—but in Jean’s case it is exactly right. Both as a paradigm-shifting scholar and a generous teacher, she has trained generations of readers and students who perpetuate her splendid intellectual legacy. NOTES 1.  Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories (London: Routledge, 1997), 182, 178. 2.  “The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies,” ELR 16.1 (1986): 22. 3. “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), in Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1932), 10. 4.  “The Affective Fallacy” (1949), in 20th Century Literary Criticism: A Reader, ed. David Lodge (Burnt Mill, Harlow, Essex, 1972), 345. 5. See Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 9.

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Contributors

Ronda Arab (Ph.D. Columbia University) is Associate Professor of English at Simon Fraser University. She is the author of Manly Mechanicals on the Early Modern English Stage (2011), an examination of the gender status of working men in the era of Shakespeare and his contemporaries; recent articles include “Will Kempe’s Work: Performing the Player’s Masculinity in Kempe’s Nine Daies Wonder,” in Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama (2011) and “Dangerous Men in Drama: Teaching the Cade Rebellion of Henry VI, Part Two” in Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s English History Plays (forthcoming 2015). Her current book project, tentatively titled Seventeenth-Century London Lads, examines younger sons, gentleman-apprentices, and citizen-born wits. Pamela Allen Brown (Ph.D. Columbia University) is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, Stamford, and author of Better a Shrew than a Sheep: Women, Drama, and the Culture of Jest in Early Modern England, co-editor of Women Players in England, 1500–1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage, and co-editor with Jean Howard of As You Like it: Texts and Contexts. She has published articles on foreign actresses, boy divas, stage clowns, fishwives, female spectators, and con women in Early Theatre, Shakespeare Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, English ­Literary Renaissance, and The Ben Jonson Journal. Her current book project, The Shakespearean Diva, examines the advent of the professional actress in Italy and its impact on female impersonation and the innamorata type in England. As part of this project she is co-translating a volume of dramatic dialogues by the virtuosa Isabella Andreini. Patricia Cahill (Ph.D. Columbia University) is Associate Professor of English at Emory University. She has published articles and chapters on Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Middleton and on topics ranging from siege craft to vertigo. She is also the author of Unto the Breach: Martial Formations, Historical Trauma, and the Early Modern Stage (2008), which shows how the early modern stage articulated ways of knowing and feeling generated by the Elizabethan experience of battle. Her current book project, Shakespeare’s Skin, also focuses on drama. Taking its cue from recent

226 Contributors

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interdisciplinary work on the senses, this book engages the question of why and how the sense of touch mattered for Renaissance drama, ­especially tragedy. Bianca F.-C. Calabresi (Ph.D. Columbia University) is Visiting Instructor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She specializes in Comparative Renaissance literature; her particular interests lie in book history, early modern drama, and women’s cultural production from 1450–1650. Her essays have appeared in journals including ­Renaissance Drama and edited collections published by Ashgate and University of Pennsylvania Press. Her current book manuscript, BLOOD WRITES: Reading Bleeding from Shakespeare to Milton, charts how changes in print technology allowed canonical works, true-crime pamphlets, almanacs, and emergent racial treatises to exploit red ink as simulated blood on the early modern stage and page. Jane Hwang Degenhardt (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania) is Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the author of Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage (2010) and the co-editor of Religion and Drama in Early Modern England (2011). She has published articles on early modern intercultural encounters, as well as on the intersections between public theater and religious culture in PMLA, ELH, Studies in Philology, The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and the Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare. She is currently working on a study of “fortune” in early modern drama, which considers how England’s participation in a protocapitalist global economy influenced the popular stage as a site for reconciling the apparent whims of fortune with God’s will. Allison K. Deutermann (Ph.D. Columbia University) is Assistant Professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York. Her essays on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theater and culture have appeared in edited collections and journals, including Shakespeare Quarterly. She is co-editor of Formal Matters: Reading the Materials of English ­Renaissance Literature (2013); currently, she is writing a book called Audiences to this Act on hearing, taste, and theatrical form in early ­modern England. Mario DiGangi (Ph.D. Columbia University) is Professor of English at ­Lehman College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. Author of The H ­ omoerotics of Early Modern Drama (1997) and Sexual Types: ­Embodiment, Agency, and Dramatic Character from Shakespeare to Shirley (2011), he has published articles on Renaissance drama and culture in several essay collections, including Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare; Love, Sex, Intimacy and Friendship between Men, 1550–1800; A Companion to Renaissance Drama; A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works: The Comedies; and A Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, Race. Additionally, he has edited

Contributors  227

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Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Barnes & Noble Shakespeare and The Winter’s Tale for the Bedford Shakespeare: Texts and Contexts series. He is working on a new book, Staging Affect: Embodied Knowledge in the Early Modern English History Play. Michelle M. Dowd (Ph.D. Columbia University) is Associate Professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. She is the author of Women’s Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (2009), which won the Sara A. Whaley Book Award from the National Women’s Studies Association. She is also the co-editor of Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England (2007), Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama (2011), and Early Modern Women on the Fall: An Anthology (2012). Her essays on early modern drama and women’s writing have appeared in such journals as English Literary Renaissance, Modern Philology, Renaissance Drama, and Shakespeare Studies. Her most recent book, The Dynamics of Inheritance on the Shakespearean Stage, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in 2015. Lianne Habinek (Ph.D. Columbia University) is Assistant Professor of Literature at Bard College. She has published in Shakespeare and ­Configurations, and her chapter “Altered States: Hamlet and early modern head trauma” appears in the volume Embodied Cognition and ­Shakespeare’s Theatre: The Early Modern Body-Mind. She is currently working on a project titled Such Wondrous Science: Brain and Metaphor in Early Modern English Literature. Ellen MacKay (Ph.D. Columbia University) is Associate Professor of English at Indiana University. She is the author of Persecution, Plague and Fire: Fugitive Histories of the Stage in Early Modern England (2011), as well as several articles and book chapters on theatre theory and historiography more broadly, from the Roman naumachia to The Performance Group’s Dionysus in ‘69. She is working on two book projects: one on sea spectacles and the epistemology of theatre illustration and another on the subrational address of early modern English audiences. Ian Frederick Moulton (Ph.D. Columbia University) is Professor of English at Arizona State University. He is the author of Love in Print in the ­Sixteenth Century (2014) and Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England (2000), as well as editor and translator of Antonio ­Vignali’s La Cazzaria, an erotic and political dialogue from Renaissance Italy (2003). His articles have appeared in Shakespeare ­ Quarterly, English Literary Renaissance, and the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. He is currently co-editing a forthcoming ­volume for the Modern Language Association on teaching early modern literature with archival resources. Phyllis Rackin (Ph.D. University of Illinois) is Professor of English Emerita at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a past President of the

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S­ hakespeare Association of America and the author of numerous articles on ­Shakespeare and related subjects and of four books on Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s Tragedies; Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles; Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories, which she wrote with Jean E. Howard; and Shakespeare and Women. She has recently co-published an anthology of essays on The Merry Wives of Windsor. Benedict Robinson (Ph.D. Columbia University) is Associate Professor of English at Stony Brook University. He is the author of Islam and Early Modern English Literature: The Politics of Romance from Spenser and Milton (2007), co-editor of Textual Conversations in the Renaissance: Ethics, Authors, Technologies (2006), and editor of the forthcoming Arden edition of The White Devil. He has published in English Literary History, Shakespeare Quarterly, Studies in English Literature, and The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies. He is currently finishing a book on the language and history of emotion tentatively titled Inventing Emotion. Jyotsna G. Singh (Ph.D. Syracuse University) is Professor of English at Michigan State University. She is the author of Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues: ‘Discovery’ of India in the Language of ­Colonialism (1996); Feminist Politics co-author of The Weyward Sisters: Shakespeare and ­ (1994); editor of A Companion to the Global Renaissance (2009); and co-editor of Travel Knowledge: European ‘Discoveries’ in the Early Modern Period (2001). She is co-editor of Antony and ­Cleopatra: Texts and Contexts (Bedford, forthcoming 2015); and is also currently working on a monograph, entitled Transcultural Islam: Muslim and Christian Identities in the Early Modern World. Ian Smith (Ph.D. Columbia University) is Professor of English at Lafayette College. He is the author of Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors (2009), and his work on Shakespeare, race, and early modern drama has appeared in several anthologies, as well as journals such as Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Studies, and Renaissance Drama. He is currently preparing a book on early modern English blackface theater titled Dressed in Black: Racial Cross-Dressing on the Early Modern Stage. Henry S. Turner (Ph.D. Columbia University) is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University. He is the author of The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts, 1580–1630 (2006), which received Honorable Mention for the SLSA Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize, and of Shakespeare’s Double Helix (2008). He is editor of The Culture of Capital: Property, Cities, and Knowledge in Early Modern England (2002), editor of 21st Century Approaches to Early Modern Theatricality (2014), co-editor of a special issue of

Contributors  229

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­Configurations (17.1–2) on “Mathematics and the Imagination,” a Contributing Editor to the Norton Anthology of Drama, and co-editor of the book series “Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity” at ­Ashgate. His essays have appeared in Shakespeare Quarterly, R ­ enaissance Drama, ELH, differences, postmedieval, Isis, and South Central Review, among other venues. He is currently writing a book on the history of the corporation in early modern England. Tiffany Jo Werth (Ph.D. Columbia University) is Associate Professor of English at Simon Fraser University. Her work on the vexed relationship of romance to the Protestant Reformation has appeared in article form in the Shakespeare International Yearbook (2008) and English Literary Renaissance (2010) and as The Fabulous Dark Cloister: Romance in England after the Reformation (2011). Her essay for English Literary Renaissance was awarded the journal’s best essay prize (2010). Her current book project explores how stone and mineral matter offer a new keystone for investigating an entire epistemological shift in English Renaissance culture (c.1530–1660) and for shaping accounts of “the human” that linger into modernity. Article-length versions of this work have previewed in the edited collection The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature (2012), Literature Compass Online (2013), and in Upstart: a Journal of English Renaissance Studies (2014). Adam Zucker (Ph.D. Columbia University) is Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he won the 2012–13 CHFA Outstanding Teacher Award. He is the author of The Places of Wit in Early Modern English Comedy (2011), which was shortlisted for the 2012 Globe Theatre Book Prize, and the co-editor of Localizing Caroline Drama: Politics and Economics of the Early Modern English Stage, 1625–1642 (2006). Other recent publications include essays on the gamesters of early modern London, Shakespeare’s late plays, and a commentary track on the Folger’s IPad edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He is currently writing a book on stupidity, incompetence, and Shakespeare.

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Index

Note: “n” after a page number indicates an endnote; “nn” after a page number indicates two or more consecutive endnotes. The page number for a figure is indicated in boldface. abjection 137–9, 144–7, 148n3 actors see under performers Actors’ Equity Association 41, 50nn4–6 Aeneas 80n33, 100–101, 105, 106, 122n21, 131 affect 8–9; and audience 1, 4, 6; civic 5, 9, 10, 169–81, 184; definition of 3–5, 11n10, 16, 38n6, 223; domestic 8, 9, 169–70, 177, 178; embodied 4, 5, 7, 30, 155, 158, 200; materiality of 5–6, 8 affect studies 1–3, 5, 223 affection 107n3; materiality of 7, 69–81, 85; see also emotions; passions Agnew, Jean-Christophe 64n9 Ahmed, Sara 3, 26n16 allegory 29, 33, 37, 85, 88–9, 146, 190 Alleyn, Edward 43–50, 51n13, 51–2n28, 52nn29–30, 55 Andersen, Judith 117 Anna, Queen 141–2, 147, 149n29 antitheatricalism 6, 23, 44, 52n29, 54, 55, 61, 65n21, 128, 193, 194; see also Prynne, William Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare) 8, 97–106, 107n2, 107n5 anxiety 3, 77, 114, 143 Appleford, Amy 123n27 apprentices 9–10, 177, 182–3, 187–8, 191, 194, 196n14, 197n21, 198–210, 208n6, 208nn8–10, 209n36; see also guilds Aquinas, Thomas 30, 82, 83 Arab, Ronda 1–11, 198–210 Archer, John Michael 180n5 archives 6, 7, 46–7, 49, 50, 52n30, 182, 211

Aristotle 7, 30, 33, 70–71, 79nn8–9 Arnold, Janet 145 Ascham, Roger 114, 122n20, 202 Aubrey, John 44–5, 51n24 Augustine 114, 122n21 Bacon, Francis 6, 18, 35–6, 37, 38n13, 45, 137, 140 Bailey, Amanda 209n20 Bandello, Matteo 23, 80n39, 128–9, 132 Barish, Jonas 64n11 Barnes, Barnabe 22–3 Beardsley, Monroe 222–3 Ben-Amos, Ilana 204 Bergeron, David 211 Berlant, Lauren 42, 43 Bevington, David 125 Bird in A Cage (Shirley) 7, 54–63, 63–4n2, 64n3, 64n9, 64n11, 65n16, 65n19, 65n21 Blackfriars Theatre 23, 25n3 blackness 138, 211–17; see also Moors; racial identification Bliss, Lee 123n39 Boaistuau, Pierre 77, 80n39, 125, 129, 139 Boisteau, Pierre see Boaistuau, Pierre Boleyn, Anne 114–17, 122n25, 123n29, 141, 142, 149n29 Bolton, Edmund 205, 206–7 Bourdieu, Pierre 185–6 Braithwaite, Richard 29 Brennan, Teresa 3, 38n6, 158 The Broken Heart (Ford) 6, 15–24, 18, 25n25, 25–6n9, 26nn15–16, 26–7n17, 27n18, 27nn27–8, 61

256 Index

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Brooks, Christopher 208n6 Brown, Pamela Allen 8–9, 111, 137–51 Bruster, Douglas 26n13, 55 Bryson, Anna 202 Buckingham, Duke of 111, 113, 114 Bulwer, John 89–90, 90, 93, 94, 96n23 Burton, Robert 64n3, 77, 81n40 Butler, Martin 56, 63–4n2, 64n3 Cahill, Patricia 6, 15–27, 61 Calabresi, Bianca Finzi-Contini 8, 117, 124–36 capitalism; see also colonization; commerce; imperialism; interimperiality; trade Carpenter, Sarah 93 Carroll, William C. 181n28 Catholics see under religion celebrity 5, 7, 54–63 Cespedes, Frank V. 119n2, 123n37 chairs 6, 15–24, 27nn27–8, 61 Chamberlayne, Edward 205 Chambers, E. K. 43, 44, 45, 48, 50, 51n13 Chapman, George 198–210 Charles I (king) 34, 142 chastity 93, 152, 157–89, 162; see also virginity cities see the corporation, London, Plymouth, urban community citizenship 9, 169–81, 187, 188, 200, 202, 204, 207 Clark, Margaret 99 class 10, 75, 154, 180n14, 183–7, 199, 202, 207, 208n3, 212; definition of 184–6; see also status Clough, Patricia 3, 4 Clubb, Louise George 125, 133n3, 135n39 Cobb, Christopher 111, 119n2 Collier, John Payne 46–50, 53n48 colonialism 153–6, 161, 162, 165n27, 212, 214 commedia dell’arte 126–8, 134n20, 135n42 comedy 9, 55, 59, 83, 135n40; city 179n2, 182; cross-dressing 60, 62; humors 29, 35 commerce 9, 10, 124, 154–55, 158, 162, 165n7, 180n5, 182–94, 199, 200–1, 207, 211–17, 218n15; see also imperialism, trade the corporation 9, 182–97 Cranmer, Archbishop 113, 117–19 Crawford, Julie 112

Crooke, Helkiah 82–4, 93 cross-dressing, 60, 62, 124, 128, 130; racial 211, 215 Cukor, George 41, 42 Danter, John 125–6, 127 dark play 111, 137, 138, 147 Degenhardt, Jane Hwang 9, 152–65 Dekker, Thomas 55; The Shoemaker’s Holiday 9, 177, 182–97 Deng, Stephen 159 Dent, Arthur 114, 122n20 Deutermann, Alison K. 7, 54–65 devils 7, 44, 47–50, 113 Dido 80n33, 100–101, 105, 106, 122n21, 131 DiGangi, Mario 9, 127, 133n9, 157, 169–81, 199 Doctor Faustus (Marlowe) 7, 43–5, 48–50, 51n13 Dolan, Frances 172 domestic space 124, 125, 128, 157, 169–70 Donaldson, Ian 64n7 Donne, John 29, 78 Dowd, Michelle M. 1–11, 80n29, 124, 135n38 Doyle, Laura 9, 154 Dulwich College 45–7, 48–50, 51n23, 52nn29–30, 52n44 dwarfs 8–9, 111, 137–47, 141, 148n3, 148n16, 149n18, 149n25, 149nn29–31, 149n33, 150n41, 150n47, 150n50 Dyer, William 25–6n9 Earle, Peter 199–200, 208n10 East India Company 34, 157–8, 213–14; see also commerce; imperialism; trade Eastward Ho (Chapman, Jonson, and Marston) 9–10, 198–210 education 122n20, 126, 128, 131, 135, 203–4, 207, 216 Elam, Keir 134–5n27, 135n37 Elizabeth I (queen) 8–9, 99, 113, 114, 118–19, 149n29, 151n53, 152, 153, 157, 161 and dwarfs 8–9, 138, 141, 142, 144–7, 149n30 emotions 3, 4, 107n3; felt experience of 2; see also passions emotives 101, 112 energeia 29–30 Equicola, Mario 72, 73, 76

Index  257

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Eros 97–108 Esolen, Anthony 31 Esposito, Roberto 192 The Fair Maid of the West (Heywood) 9, 152–63 Farmer, Alan B. 65n14 fear 5, 10, 16, 74, 105, 180n5, 211–19 Felperin, Howard 111, 119n2 femininity see under gender feminism 2, 6, 7, 84, 102, 107n5, 147, 169, 221, 224 Ferne, John 205–6 Fernel, Jean 30, 38n11 Ferrand, Jacques 77, 85 Fiedler, Leslie 150n40 Finlayson, James Gordon 217–8n6 Fletcher, Angus 29 Fletcher, John 127, 165n27; Henry VIII 8, 111–23, 119nn1–2, 120nn7–8, 121nn14–15, 121–2n16, 122n25, 123n27, 123n39 Fletcher, Phineas 88 Florio, John 28, 79n4, 79n17, 128–9, 135n37 Ford, John 6, 15–24, 18, 25n25, 25–6n9, 26nn15–16, 26–7n17, 27n18, 27nn27–8, 61 Forman, Valerie 165n27 Fuchs, Barbara 154 Gabrieli, Vittorio 180n14 Galen 38n11, 69, 76 gender 2, 7, 35–7, 38n2, 112, 145–6, 154, 169, 170, 171, 180n20, 200, 221; femininity 8, 35, 84, 89, 92, 93; masculinity 8, 9–10, 35, 89, 91–2, 93, 101, 104–5, 146, 147, 156, 184 genre 2, 8, 34, 55, 73, 111–19, 119n2, 120n8 gentry 9–10, 198–210, 208n6, 208nn8–10, 208–9n15, 209n20, 209n36; see also class gesture 18–20, 20, 24, 29, 94, 116, 187, 191, 193; see also movement Giannetti, Laura 129, 135nn40–1 Gilbert, William 29, 32, 33 gold 9, 152–65, 190, 192, 215 goldsmiths 172, 198, 201, 208n9, 211, 215 Gordon, Kitty 41 Greene, Robert 139, 174 Grossberg, Lawrence 3 Grosz, Elizabeth 142–3

guilds 10, 169, 177, 183–5, 187–95, 196n12, 197n21, 199, 211, 215, 217; see also apprentices, livery companies Gurr, Andrew 45 Habinek, Lianne 7, 82–96 Harding, Alfred 50n4 Harington, Sir John 94n6, 118 Harris, Jonathan Gil 158, 160, 162, 197n16 Helgerson, Richard 183 Heng, Geraldine 112 Henrietta Maria (queen) 54, 138, 142, 143 Henry IV (Shakespeare) 171, 172, 221 Henry V (Shakespeare) 111, 172 Henry VIII (king) 112, 115, 117, 120n7 Henry VIII (Shakespeare and Fletcher) 8, 111–23, 119nn1–2, 120nn7–8, 121nn14–15, 121–2n16, 122n25, 123n27, 123n39 Henslowe, Philip 40, 46 heteronormativity 7, 130, 132 Heywood, Thomas 139, 147, 148n16, 172; The Fair Maid of the West 9, 152–63 historicism 1, 2, 3–5, 43, 222 history plays 111–19, 119n2, 120n8, 121n14, 169, 172–3, 179n2, 182 Holinshed’s Chronicles 123n29, 170–2, 176, 180n11, 181n31 Holmes, Su 64n4 Howard, Jean 1–2, 4, 5–6, 9, 10, 25n3, 30, 112, 127, 152, 154, 159–60, 182, 199, 220–2, 224 Hoxby, Blair 26n17 Hudson, Jeffrey 138, 143–4, 149n17 the humors 4, 15, 17, 23, 24, 29, 34–7, 69, 155, 223 hybridity 8, 19, 111–23, 124–33, 192–3, 199 inconsequence 41–50 identity 74, 98–9, 101, 103–5, 107n6; civic 5, 9, 10, 169–81, 184; and class see class; and dwarfs 142–3, 144; national 111–19, 120n8, 121n15, 122n16, 122n25, 123n39, 154, 160; racial see racial identification; and status see status; urban see the corporation, urban community Ill May Day uprising 169–79, 180n11 imperialism see interimperialism inclinations 4, 32, 70, 72 the individual 5, 101, 102, 192

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258 Index interimperialism 9, 152–5, 160, 162, 163; see also colonization interiority 5, 6, 16, 20, 97, 98, 101 intimacy 7, 8, 128–32, 138, 147 Isabella Clara Eugenia 137, 141, 141, 143, 149n29 Isabella d’Este 139, 140–41 italics, function of 8, 125–7, 132, 134n16, 134n25 Italy 101, 135n28, 124–36 Iwanisziw, Susan 162 James, Heather 100 James I (king) 115, 118, 141, 147, 214 Jameson, Fredric 111 Johnston, Mark 86, 95n13 Jonson, Ben 6, 45–6, 51–2n28, 52n29, 55, 64n7, 144, 146, 198–210; The Magnetic Lady, 6, 28–37, 38n2 Jordon, Thomas 21, 215, 216–17 Jowett, John 171, 172, 179n2 Kastan, David Scott 191 Katherine of Aragon 113, 115–17, 123n27, 123n29, 149n29 Katritzky, M. A. 126–7, 128 Kauffman, R. J. 25n9 Kircher, Anthanasius 33, 39n28 Knapp, Jeffrey 64n6, 122n16 Knight, George Wilson 119n2 Kristeva, Julia 148n3 Kyd, Thomas, The Spanish Tragedy 40, 60, 62 labor practices 3, 4, 160, 177, 182, 184, 185, 189, 204; see also apprentices; Ill May Day uprising Lamb, Charles 16 Lamont, William M. 65n21 Lancashire, Anne 218n10 Laqueur, Thomas 96n27 Leggatt, Alexander 111, 119n2, 123n39 Leinwand, Theodore 155 Lesser, Zachary 65n14 Levin, Carole 116 Lingua, Or The Combat of the Tongue, And the five Senses for Superiority (Thomkis) 7, 82–94, 94n6, 95n15, 96nn20–4, 96n28, 96n32 livery companies 173, 183, 211, 212, 213–16; see also guilds Llull, Ramon 86, 95n13 London 10, 57, 65n15, 169–79, 181nn30–1, 182–4, 188, 190, 193, 198–210; and commerce 153, 157–8;

and Lord Mayors’ shows 211–19; theatrical culture of 9, 56, 112, 118, 125, 126 Loomba, Ania 214, 218n24 Lord Mayors’ shows, 211–19 love, materiality of 7, 69–81, 85 Macbeth (Shakespeare) 77–8, 98 machines 6, 15–27, 61, 63, 65n16; see also technological imaginary Mackay, Ellen 7, 40–53 Madden, John 40, 42 madness 15–23, 41, 74, 145, 146 The Magnetic Lady (Jonson) 6, 28–37, 38n2 magnetism 6, 28–37, 38n2, 39n28 Malynes, Gerard 158–9 Manley, Lawrence 212 Manning, Roger B. 181n30 Margeson, John 123n29 Marlowe, Christopher: Dido, Queen of Carthage 131; Doctor Faustus 7, 43–5, 48–50, 51n13 Marrapodi, Michele 125 Marshall, Cynthia 17, 26n9 Marston, John 127, 131, 134n20, 198–210 Martinelli, Drusiano 126, 127, 134n20 Marxism 5, 191, 224; see also historicism masculinity see under gender Massumi, Brian 3, 16 Masten, Jeffrey 169, 172, 179n4 materiality 5–6, 69–78 Mazzio, Carla 85, 93, 96n23, 96n26 Mayer, Jean-Christophe 120n8 McMullan, Gordon 119n1, 122n16 mechanical processes 6, 16, 20–4, 61; see also technological imaginary Medici, Catherine de 137, 143 melancholy 15, 69, 77–78, 144 Melchiori, Giorgio 180n14 mercy 58, 59, 63, 158, 160, 161–3, 176 Middleton, Thomas 21, 40, 55, 213–14, 218n24 monarchs 8, 9, 138, 144–6, 159–61, 172–3, 193–4, 218n24; see also specific monarchs’ names monstrosity 69–81, 137–51, 148n3, 148n11 Montaigne, Michel de 6, 7, 28–37, 69–73, 75–6, 79n4, 79n12, 79n17 Moors 10, 138, 159, 212–17, 218n10, 218n24; see also racial identification morality 78, 86, 89, 152–64, 170, 172, 174, 182, 188, 200; and

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Index  259 antitheatricality 44, 56; and children, 69, 71, 74, 75; women and, 73, 78, 93, 118, 152, 157–89, 162, 178 Morocco 9, 152–4, 160, 162–3 Morris, Brian 27n27 Moulton, Ian Frederick 7, 69–81, 85 movement 15–20, 20, 21, 23–24, 29, 79nn8–9, 89, 159, 193, 201; see also embodiment; gesture; the senses Mowat, Barbara 121n14 Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare) 73, 81n42 Munday, Anthony 194, 215 Nashe, Thomas 51–2n28, 114, 127 nation 8–9, 109–65, 169, 170, 172, 180n5, 183–9, 194, 211; see also citizenship national identity see under identity natural philosophy 6, 29–33 Neill, Michael 17, 56, 97, 107n2 Netzloff, Mark 159 the New World 153–6, 162–3; see also colonialism; imperialism; interimperiality Ngai, Sianne 3 Norfolk, Duke of 111, 113, 115 Northtonus, Champianus 203–4 the occult 30, 33, 38n11 Ogborn, Miles 214 Oliveira, Anthony 51n24 Othello (Shakespeare) 41, 77, 81n42 Ottoman Empire 153–4, 161–3 Ovid 61, 76, 80n33 Palfrey, Simon 119n2 Paradin, Claude 90–1, 91, 96n26 Paré, Ambroise 139, 140 parental affection 69–81 Parker, Patricia 83, 96n28 passions 16, 17, 28–37, 39n28, 107n3 Paster, Gail Kern 11n10, 25n4, 107n3, 108n21, 128 Penton, Stephen 203 performers 3, 36, 41, 50nn5–6, 51n13, 51nn23–4, 51–2n28, 52n44, 128; actors 18, 24, 28, 31, 36, 40–50, 52n44, 55, 61, 63–4n2, 97, 100, 103, 107n2, 127, 139, 146, 149n18, 183, 189, 190, 191, 179n21, 211, 215 performativity 4, 7, 83, 98, 103, 200, 212, 213; see also theatricality Phelan, Peggy 53n52 Piggot, Jan 52n30, 52n42, 52n44

Plato 29, 31–32, 76, 81n41 plunder 152, 153, 155, 160–3, 214 Plymouth 9, 155–7, 159, 161, 163 poetry 6, 31–2, 56, 76, 222 primogeniture 199, 208n10 procreation 69–78 Protestants see under religion Prynne, William 7, 44–5, 46, 54–63, 63–4n2, 64n3, 64n9, 64n11, 65n21; see also antitheatricalism racial identification 5, 10, 154, 211–17, 218n10, 218n24; see also Moors Rackin, Phyllis 2, 169, 220–4 Rankin, Mark 120n7 rebellion 169–79, 180n11 Reddy, William, 8, 101, 105, 107–8n14 Redmond, Sean 64n4 the Reformation 84, 111–23; see also religion religion 4–5, 8, 120nn7–9, 143–4, 184, 191; Catholics 17, 69, 111–17, 121–2n16, 123n27, 123n29, 172; Protestants 69, 112, 113–18, 121–2n16, 122n23, 122n25, 172 revenge 15–27, 40, 60, 62, 84–5, 88, 93, 106, 118, 131, 160–1, 172 rhetoric 6, 29, 30, 34, 88–9, 92, 97, 99, 124, 132, 146, 150, 174–6, 216 Richard II (Shakespeare) 172–3 Rivlin, Elizabeth 197n21 Robinson, Benedict 6, 28–39 romance 8, 9, 111–19, 119n2, 120n8, 120–1n10, 121n14, 122nn20–1, 139, 146, 188 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) 8, 40, 73, 77, 117, 124–32, 133n9, 134nn13–14, 136n43, 136nn47–9 Rouse, W. H. D. 31 Ruggiero, Guido 129 Sappho 76, 80n33 Sawday, Jonathan 24 Schoenbaum, Samuel 49 Sedgwick, Eve 3 semen 70–1, 75–6, 78, 79n4, 79n6, 79n8 the senses 4, 7, 82–94, 95n15, 96n21 sexuality 35, 36, 69–70, 76–8, 90–1, 90, 91, 112, 125; dwarfs and 138, 142–3, 149n33; same-sex 127, 133n2, 135n41, 136n48; women and 7, 26n13, 61, 93, 128, 130–1, 152, 154, 157–9, 171; see also heteronormativity

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260 Index Shakespeare, William 7, 15, 42, 69, 74, 76, 143, 169, 172, 220–2; Antony and Cleopatra 8, 97–106, 107n2, 107n5; Henry IV 171, 172, 221; Henry V 111, 172; Henry VIII (Shakespeare and Fletcher) 8, 111–23, 119nn1–2, 120nn7–8, 121nn14–15, 121–2n16, 122n25, 123n27, 123n39; Much Ado About Nothing 73, 81n42; Othello 41, 77, 81n42; Romeo and Juliet 8, 40, 73, 77, 117, 124–32, 133n9, 134nn13– 14, 136n43, 136nn47–9; Sir Thomas More 9, 157, 169–81; The Tempest 73, 73, 116; Twelfth Night 77, 81n42; The Winter’s Tale 75–6, 117 shame 3, 15, 47, 73, 158, 171, 172 Shepard, Alexandra 170–1, 179n4 Sherman, William H. 20 Shirley, James 7, 54–63, 63–4n2, 64n3, 64n9, 64n11, 65n16, 65n19, 65n21 The Shoemaker’s Holiday (Dekker) 9, 177, 182–97 Singh, Jyostna 8, 83, 97–108 Sir Thomas More (Shakespeare) 9, 157, 169–81 Sklar, Deidre 16 Smith, G. C. Moore 94n6 Smith, Ian 10, 211–19 Smith, Sir Thomas 205, 209n36 Sofer, Andrew 53n56 Southworth, John 145, 147, 149n30 Spain 139, 140, 153–4, 155, 156, 160, 162 The Spanish Tragedy (Kyd) 40, 60, 62 Spriggs, William 205 Stallybrass, Peter 180n20 status 9, 10, 124, 135n41, 138–9, 171, 184–8, 194, 198–207, 208n3; definition of 184–6; see also class Stern, Tiffany 126, 134n16 Stolberg, Michael 96n27 Stow, John 57, 65n15 Tatham, John 215 technological imaginary 7, 16, 18, 19–24, 34, 61–3; see also mechanical processes The Tempest (Shakespeare) 73, 73, 116 Terry, Ellen 97–8 theatricality 2, 7, 8, 50, 60, 64n9, 97–8, 102–3, 107n2, 143, 182 Thomasin (Madame Thomasin de Paris) 8–9, 138, 143, 145–7, 150n50 Thomkis, Thomas 7, 7, 82–94, 94n6

Thompson, Rosemarie Garland 137 trade 152–4, 157, 158, 160, 162, 165n27, 183, 187; see also commerce, imperialism tragedy 6, 43, 61, 99, 113, 122n17, 178; and revenge 15–27, 40, 60, 62, 84–5, 88, 93, 106, 118, 131, 160–1, 172 Turner, Henry S. 9, 182–97, 199, 208n3 Twelfth Night (Shakespeare) 77, 81n42 Underwood, Robert 93 Unwin, George 193 urban community 9–10, 169–70, 180n5, 182–94, 196n9, 196n14, 200–1 Van den Berg, Sara 143–4 Van Helmont, Jan Baptista 33 Vanita, Ruth 116 Vienne-Guerrin, Nathalie 89 Virgil 76, 80n33 virginity 73, 78, 118, 158–60, 162; see also chastity; morality Wagner, Ann 204 Waller, Edmund 142, 146 Ward, Samuel 35 Webbe, George 96n21 Weber, Max 184–5, 208n3 Werth, Tiffany 8, 111–23 West, William 156 wet-nurses 8, 75–6, 117, 124–36 Williams, Katherine Schaap 150n36 Wimsatt, William K. 222–3 The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare) 75–6, 117 Withington, Phil 170, 173, 180n9, 184, 196n14 Witmore, Michael 36 Wofford, Susanne 125 Wolsey, Cardinal 111, 113, 120n8 women 9, 70–1, 79n6, 79n8, 84–5, 89, 97, 117; actors 61–62, 124, 132; and political agency 157, 169–79, 179n4, 180n9, 180n14, 180n20, 184; on the stage 124; and sexuality 7, 26n13, 61, 93, 128, 130–1, 135n41, 152, 154, 157–9, 171; see also gender, wet-nurses wonder 31, 42, 111–19, 120–1n10, 121–2n16, 137, 139, 143, 145–7, 148n4, 159 Zucker, Adam 1–11, 56, 65n12 Zysk, Jay 115, 166, 122n25