Making Trifles of Terrors: Redistributing Complicities in Shakespeare 9781503622494

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MAKING TRIFLES OF TERRORS

+

Making Trifles of Terrors

+ REDISTRIBUTING COMPLICITIES IN SHAKESPEARE

Harry Berger, Jr.

+ EDITED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION, BY PETER ERICKSON

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California 1997

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 1997 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University Printed in the United States of America CIP data are at the end of the book

To my students and their resistance,

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction, by Peter Erickson I.

ix XXV

Marriage and Mercifixion in The Merchant of Venice: The Casket Scene Revisited Against the Sink-a-Pace: Sexual and Family Politics in Much Ado About Nothing

10

3·

King Lear: The Lear Family Romance

25

4·

Text Against Performance: The Gloucester Family Romance

so

The Early Scenes of Macbeth: Preface to a New Interpretation

70

Text Against Performance: The Example of Macbeth

g8

2.

5·

6. 7·

8.

2

Sneak's Noise, or, Rumor and Detextualization in Henry IV

126

Psychoanalyzing the Shakespeare Text: The First Three Scenes of the Henriad

148

CONTENTS

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Textual Dramaturgy: Representing the Limits of Theater in Richard II

168

Ars Moriendi in Progress, or, John of Gaunt and the Practice of Strategic Dying

189

What Did the King Know and When Did He Know It? Shakespearean Discourses and Psychoanalysis

211

!2.

Food for Words: Hotspur and the Discourse of Honor

251

!3.

Making Trifles of Terrors: Redistributing Complicities in the Ethical Discourses

288

9·

IO.

II.

I4. What Does the Duke Know and When Does He Know It?

Carrying the Torch in Measure for Measure

335

Notes

429

Credits

475

Index of Names

477 484

Index of Topics

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgment-the difficulty of acknowledging, the failure to acknowledge, the fear of that failure, the desire to overcome it-is what the essays in this book are about. It's what I think the plays the essays discuss are about. I can't remember when I first started reading Shakespeare this way, but I assume it must have happened while teaching the plays in some undergraduate or graduate course because that's where it has always started for me. It begins in the questions students never quite seem to answer or even understand, so that I have to rephrase them and ask myself what I was trying to say or see. It begins in the answers students give to questions I never quite asked or even thought of, so that I'm forced to interrupt myself and try to imagine what they think I'm trying to get them to see or say. Such are the resistances, the lets and gaps, the predictably unforeseen disruptions, that make teaching a contact sport. They knock your latest Great Interpretation off its pins and guarantee that anything you have the temerity to teach you will be forced to unlearn and relearn. I weathered this pedagogical turbulence for some forty years before taking to the parachute and descending toward what I thought would be the promised El Dorado or deck chair of calm geriatric paradise snug up against the evergreen tree of knowledge. To all the unruly students whose pushing and shoving helped me stay continuously off course I dedicate this volume. But not in mere nostalgia, since in fact I don't have the sense that I reached the happy haven but feel more like one caught and suspended in a storm-battered tree, while all around me

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whip the crosswinds of the ghosts of students past reminding me that what I thrash about in is hardly the tree of knowledge I was aiming for. Rather it is-to put the best face on my predicament-the tree of acknowledgment. I owe this particular recognition not to my students but to the philosopher whose Shakespearean meditations initially stimulated and still haunt the interpretations developed in the following pages, Stanley Cavell. One of the propositions most fundamental to Cavell's project since his earliest work is modeled on Kant's methodological assertion, or admission, that he found it necessary to limit knowledge in order to make room for faith. In Cavell's version this becomes: it is necessary to limit knowledge in order to make room for acknowledgment. His account of acknowledgment is complicated by two apparently different pressures impinging on his deployment of the term. The first is illustrated in the essay "Knowing and Acknowledging;' by the following uses of know:" 'I know I am a nuisance', 'I know I am being childish', 'I know I am late'. To (say you) know in these cases is to admit, confess, acknowledge." 1 The invidiousness of the examples is worth noting, but more important is the parenthetical reference to utterance: "Acknowledgment goes beyond knowledge" in that it reveals, exhibits, represents, something you know (257, 259), and it does so through the medium of what may loosely be called a speech act. In Cavell's examples, to acknowledge is to confess or admit or concede something you know or think you know or claim to know about yourself But of course, you can confess it to yourself as well as to .others, or you can confess it to .others as a way of preempting and disarming their misperception ("I know you think I am being childish"). The latter is a directionally complex move in which you tell yourself you know you are not being childish. In the most striking instance of complex acknowledgment in Shakespeare's plays, "this thing of darkness I j Acknowledge mine" (The Tempest 5.1.275-76), Prospera's words identify Caliban not only as his rebellious slave but also as his responsibility. If they gesture toward "some deeper recognition of affinity, some half-conscious acknowledgment of guilt;' 2 they do so reluctantly. That sense is mu:fHed- but conspicuously mu:fHed, as if the speaker is trying to keep himself in the clark- by the laconic evasiveness ofthe utterance. A more straightforwardly evasive example of acknowledgment occurs in the first scene of King Lear while Gloucester is braving on about the deed of darkness that produced Edmund: "the whoreson must be acknowledged" (r.r.24). This feint toward acknowledging responsibility for the bastard actually works to minimize it: "whoreson" shifts the blame to the saucy "knave" and his "mother fair" for bringing Edmund into the world "before he was sent for" (r.r.2r-24).

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Cavell doesn't-and needn't-explore such complexities because the examples I cited from "Knowing and Acknowledging" perform a merely incidental service: the burden of his essay is a critique of a particular interpretation of Wittgenstein's private-language argument centered on the problem of feeling, knowing, and acknowledging pain, and the cited phrases illustrate functions of "I know" that are relevant to its use in the exemplary expression "I know I am in pain." 3 I mention this here because what I have learned from Cavell is intimately connected to another debt equally evident in the essays that follow. The theory of discourses as cultural readymades that emerges in the last four essays, dating from the mid-1980s to the present, was developed as a variation on the conception of language-games Wittgenstein elaborated in response to the private-language argument. The second pressure on the term acknowledgment as Cavell uses it is illustrated by the following passage: It is not enough that I know (am certain) that you suffer- I must do or reveal something (whatever can be done). In a word, I must acknowledge it .... But obviously sympathy may not be forthcoming .... The claim of suffering may go unanswered.... The point, however, is that the concept of acknowledgment is evidenced equally by its failure as by its success. A "failure to know" might just mean a piece of ignorance, an absence of something, a blank. A "failure to acknowledge" is the presence of something, a confusion, an indifference, a callousness, an exhaustion, a coldness. Spiritual emptiness is not a blank. (263-64)

It is this second sense, acknowledgment as a response to the claims others make on me, and not the first, acknowledgment as admission or confession, that Cavell takes up in his essay on King Lear: to acknowledge others, torespond to their claims, is to make others present to me. Expressed in these terms, the formula sounds painlessly (therefore painfully) unobjectionable, but the terms are mine, and what Cavell writes is more difficult, more dangerous: "there is no acknowledgment" of others "unless we put ourselves in their presence, reveal ourselves to them, ... allow ourselves to be seen." 4 In the context of an essay focused on the avoidance of love as the specific form in which the refusal of acknowledgment plays itself out, this use of the term drags it back toward the first sense: Lear and Cordelia (or Edgar and Gloucester) can't acknowledge each other or respond to the claims each makes on the other unless they risk acknowledging their own complicity in what was done to them- acknowledging it, that is, to themselves as well as to others. I want to insist-perhaps more than Cavell does-on the way Shakespearean language features the reflexive force of speech acts, their continuing effects on their speakers, who are often shown to be reluctant

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to make that acknowledgment. A paradigmatic instance of this reluctance occurs in Lear's "I know you do not love me .... You have some cause," which presumptively and archly inches toward then flinches away from what he could only acknowledge in Cordelia's absence ("I did her wrong"). He solicits her complicity in helping him refuse to acknowledge the wrong he did her, and she complies ("no cause, no cause"). Her compliance helps her "disremember" her share in what was done to him when she behaved as if she did have cause and committed him to her sisters' "professed bosoms" just after telling them she knows "what you are" and is "most loth to call/ Your faults as they are named" (r.r.269-72). The disabling condition, the cost, of their reconciliation is the mutual failure of acknowledgment: they edge toward renewal of love by turning away not only from each other but also from themselves. 5 As this example, with its reflexive emphasis, indicates, Cavell's suggestion that acknowledging is entangled in the. diffidence of apologetic speech acts- confession, admission- takes on special meaning when directed toward the effect on speakers of their reluctance or refusal to acknowledge complicity to themselves. In his terms that would amount to their reluctance, refusal, or fear to put themselves in their own presence. Such a refusal receives perhaps its most compelling Shakespearean articulation in the passage from All's Well That Ends Well that gives me the title for this volume, a passage that- I confess, admit, and acknowledge-recurs with tiresome frequency during the following essays: Lafew's "we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves in seeming knowledge when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear." For me, "ensconcing ourselves in seeming knowledge" is the equivalent of what Cavell, in his titular phrase, calls "disowning knowledge;' and the fear Lafew mentions appears in sharper focus if "unknown" is replaced by "unacknowledged." To disown knowledge is to refuse to acknowledge something within yourself you sense and fear, a fear you fear to confront and try to keep unknown. Coming on "The Avoidance of Love" in the 1970s was like encountering an essay from outer space. There was nothing like it in the literature on King Lear, and the danger of falling under its spell made the desire to resist it unavoidable. Resistance found its foothold in a passage that condenses one of the essay's principal theses and that occurs during Cavell's account of what motivates Gloucester: If the ·failure to recognize others is a failure to let others recognize you, a fear of what is revealed to them, an avoidance of their eyes, then it is exactly shame which is the cause of his withholding of recognition. . . . For shame is the specific discomfort produced by the sense of being looked at, the avoid-

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ance of the sight of others is the reflex it produces. Guilt is different; there the reflex is to avoid discovery. As long as no one knows what you have done, you are safe; or your conscience will press you to confess it and accept punishment. Under shame, what must be covered up is not your deed, but yourself. 6

It seemed to me then that even as Cavell's reading demolished the tedious conventional wisdom about the play's "sight imagery" that had prevailed during the 1950s and 1960s, even as it opened up a new world of interpretation and a more profound understanding of the terrible power driving the Lear language, the priority it gave to shame over guilt shifted attention ever so slightly, but significantly, from the source of that power. Slightly, because the reference to "fear of what is revealed" to others presupposes a fear of what has been revealed to oneself, and the avoidance of the sight of others presupposes- and is presumably part of- a strategy of self-avoidance. But significantly, because the emphasis on shame diverts attention from rhetorical resonances that register the varied pressures of conscience on speakers' self-interpretation, especially the pressure to confess and accept punishment, and the danger of self-discovery this pressure entails. Cavell assignedguilt a merely ancillary function as a contrastive term helping to define the peculiar quality of shame. I wanted to give a more central role to the textual indications of conscience because my interest in the stories speakers tell themselves about themselves and each other was centered on shades of expression that display or betray sensitivity to the failure of acknowledgment-the failure, that is, to acknowledge one's complicity in what has been done to others or to oneself So I began to look for traces of the familiar language-game that, in the· essays that follow, I call "the sinner's discourse." In searching for its textual filaments, however, I found them to be inextricably interwoven with those of other languagegames that seemed to constitute what I would subsequently learn to call a "discourse network" (borrowing that expression from Friedrich Kittler)those, for example, of the victim, the revenger, the villain, the hero, and the donor. The pressure of the sinner's discourse seemed to be registered chiefly by the "expense of cunning and avoidance" to which the other discourses go so that "guilt will alter itself or puff itself out of shape, in order to deny debt for the specific deed for which one is responsible." 7 I didn't think Cavell's passing reference to "the reflex" of guilt did justice to the signs of that discourse I discerned in the language of the plays. The textual evidence I gathered- initially from my reading of King Lear and the Henriad-persuaded me that the sinner's "reflex" or desire isn't reducible to "the reflex ... to avoid discovery" and that, indeed, as an ethical language-game the sinner's discourse may tempt those to and through

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whom it speaks to court exposure and get themselves punished. For even if no one else knows what you have done, you are not safe from yourself. Under guilt, what must not remain covered. up is yourself. You must be seen as you really are; therefore part of your punishment is, precisely, to incur shame. "Shame is by nature recognition. I recognize that I am as the Other sees me." 8 But to the extent that the Other is internalized, so also is "the sense of being looked at," and the sinner is forced to become his or her own confessor, audience, judge, and inquisitor. Yet, knowing yourself a sinner, you can't trust yourself to discharge these functions "objectively," and you may try to get yourself punished by others. Thus putting yourself in harm's way, you may be tempted to represent yourself less as a sinner than as a victim ("more sinned against than sinning"), and this in turn may arouse a desire for revenge against those you chose as agents of retribution, a move the bad faith of which can only intensify your self-contempt and your desire once again to place yourself in harm's way. The ethical scenario I just outlined was initially developed under Cavell's influence but took on its own life as the focus of one of the three exegetical paradigms explored in the sequence of essays that make up the present volume-paradigms in the sense of illustrative models of reading that center on (and are themselves illustrated by) particular problem areas in the current interpretation of the plays. I shall comment briefly on each. (r) The first paradigm, which I just discussed, unfolded from the interpretive decision to pick out and track the fluid and sinuous interactions among the language-games at. play in a finite if not closed discourse network. The earlier essays in this book are largely experiments in deploying the paradigm. Only in the final four essays (Chapters n-14, the last three of which are published here for the first time) do I try to come to grips with some of its general implications. Those essays alternately articulate and illustrate the ways in which the dynamics of the discourse network gives structure to the pair of interlocking themes pursued in earlier essays and enables them to be unpacked not merely as themes but as dramatic narratives: making trifles of terrors and redistributing complicities. (2) The second paradigm centers on the network of positional discourses that sets the relatively restricted field of ethical discourses within the context of the community of the play. In Chapter 6 I define that community as "a group of speakers placed in relation to each other by differences of gender and generation, of social rank and political status, and of position in households, families, and extended families," and to this array must be added the institution and positional discourses of theater considered in later chapters. In the same passage I note that the term community

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"refers to the more or less corporate, more or less institutional, structure of roles and relationships into which individual characters are cast and which they try to manipulate." At the time that essay was written, the concept of role was in good standing, having been the beneficiary of a large body of literature devoted to exploring its sociological and theatrical dimensions, and the relations between them. Subsequently, however, I came to have doubts about its usefulness. Chapter 13 takes issue with this socio-theatrical concept on the grounds that role denotes a foreshortened version, and thus a misrecognition, of discourse, one that "freezes and personifies what in textual perspective are dynamic and interactive discourses; role is the detextualization and allegorization of discourse. Were a speaker's language to be wholly invested in or taken over by a single discourse he or she would become a personification." The phrase "community of the play" was coined to displace a locution prominent in Shakespeare criticism of the middle decades of this century, "the· world of the play," where "world" included "world view" or "world picture" -the Elizabethan or pagan or Christian world view. The trouble with this locution was that it was used by critics accustomed to attributing its referent to the author and/or his culture as their world view, whereas it seemed to me, first, that plays often represent a particular version of the world as the product of the community of the play, its "Imaginary," and second, that they often interrogate this so-called world as a motivated ideological construction. The ideology is predictable. The community of the play is patriarchal in its organization of positional discourses. This organization can take several forms, depending on which positional role relations are featured-for example, lovers, siblings, father and son, father and daughter, mother and son, wife and husband, ruler and subject. In some plays only one of these sets is foregrounded, in others, several. Shakespeare could hardly avoid reflecting the patriarchal structures and conditions of his culture, but reflecting them is not the same as reflecting on them and making them the object of discursive and critical representation. The oldest essays in this collection (Chapters r through 6) were attempts to assimilate aspects of new approaches by feminist critics, cultural materialists, and others who, during the 1970s, focused attention on early modern representations of gender and generational politics. Some of their criticism was also directed against the conservatism of contemporary political and social investments in Shakespeare as a cultural icon, and against the donnish patriarchalism of academic Shakespeare studies. I profited greatly from this criticism. But I. often had problems with its interpretive results because I found that critics who targeted the patriarchalism of the Elizabe-

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than World Picture together with that of the modern Shakespeare Establishment did so by accepting rather than challenging the latter's view that Shakespeare reproduced and probably endorsed the dominant ideology. Nevertheless, I consider it a strength of these new perspectives, a testimony to their generativity and flexibility, that they can not only stimulate but also survive appropriation and redirection: in the process of trying to couple their insights into positional discourses with my still inchoate notions about the ethical discourses I began to see that their critiques of Shakespeare's patriarchalism reflected-and supplied models for-the critiques performed in the plays. Thus my first two chapters on romantic comedies test the hypothesis that attention to the traces in language of the donor's and victim/revenger's discourses may bring out the ironic elements in Shakespeare's portrayal of the overlapping of family politics with sexual politics. The two essays on King Lear (Chapters 3 and 4) also take up the interplay of ethical discourses with the positional discourses focused on generational conflict, while the essays on Macbeth turn to other aspects of this interplay. Chapter 5 explores the pressures imposed on ethical self-representation by the conflicts and contradictions of an anxiety-producing sociopolitical structure. In Chapter 6 attention shifts to the way the discourse of gynephobia is used to interrogate both the warrior ethos and the Christianizing cosmology that justifies it. The interaction between the discourses of gender and honor is the subject of the essay on Hot spur, Chapter 12. (3) The third paradigm is one that gave and still gives me a lot of trouble: the page vs. stage or text vs. performance paradigm. I revised it several times in response to well-justified crit~cism that the versions appearing in Chapters 4 and 6-9 showed little appreciation or understanding of theatrical practice. I confess that I am not and have never been a member of any theatrical party, that my attempt to overthrow the repressive regime of stage-centered interpretation flourishing in the performative revival of the 1960s and 1970s has about it all the marks of an isolated armchair fantasy, and that this hampers even the latest and most developed version of the paradigm elaborated in Imaginary Audition (1989). But my discussions of theater in all the essays dealing with the text /performance dialectic should never have been phrased in terms that allowed readers to think I was impugning performance per se. The intent of those discussions was to focus on Shakespeare's (not my) metatheatrical critique of theatrical conditions, a critique aimed at the aid and comfort the medium lends to ideologically dubious aspects of spectacle, pageantry, and historical narrative. Specifically, in the essays on Macbeth and the Henriad I was trying to develop the argument that the plays represent the coalescence of theatrical and narra-

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tive space-time as sites of ethical displacement: displacement from "inward wars" of discourse to "stern tyrant War," from "unseen grief" to its mere shadows in public grievances and "external manners of lament," from a conscience "swoln with some other grief" to the distracting spectacle of civil and "foreign quarrels." Such displacements are represented as conspicuously inadequate to repress or resolve latent conflicts. Historical victories and theatrical closures punctuated by athletic swordplay and the other conventions that sound the "music at the close" are often displayed as "smooth comforts false." This inadequacy is precisely what T. S. Eliot criticiz~d in his discussion of "the objective correlative." My point in making the. text vs. performance argument was that Shakespeare beat Eliot to the punch, that "objective" in Eliot's phrase meant "inadequate" in the value system of Shakespearean dramaturgy. And my concern was to direct attention to the way the plays thematize the function of displacement-from the textual site of discourse networks to the theatrico-historical site of performing bodies- as essential to those structures or strategies by which knowledge is disowned, complicities redistributed, and terrors made trifles. In the process of experimenting with these paradigms I came to realize that all of them made complicated demands on the assumptions about character and character analysis I had more or less taken for granted in the early stages of this project. I assumed, for example, that there "are" characters in plays and they preexist our talking about them. But the pressures exerted both from within the paradigms and from interrogations· of the characterological approach mounted by deconstructive critics and textual materialists led me to resist those assumptions and try to realign my sense of character in accordance with a more skeptical originary premise. The premise is that there are no characters, persons, or individuals, no subjects with bodies and minds, in the unperformed text; until actors lend their bodies and interpretations, the dramatis personae consist only of speech prefixes that designate the sites of utterance we call speakers and that we, as actors or readers, characterize- convert to characters- by our interpretations of the language assigned to them. At various moments in the essays that follow three consequences of this premise will be discernible: (1) There are no bodies in the text: speakers only "have" or temporarily acquire bodies and organic histories if they mention them, and that mention will be discursively motivated, as when they activate the victim's discourse by appealing to illness or old age. (2) Speakers are gendered not simply by their identification as male or female but also by their negotiations with ethical and positional discourses as well as by theatrical materialization. Elizabethan casting conventions ex-

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press the idea that males not only invent women's parts but also play them and speak through them, and this dramatizes a truth about the cultural construction of gender. Theatrical androgyny goes further and imposes another constraint on the depiction of women: the convention keeps them in place by representing them through the medium of immature, unmanly, and subordinate males. Not even the paragon of Venerean womanhood can claim equal rights: some squeaking Cleopatra boy undoes her. In spite of these constraints, however, such squeaking transvestism is ambivalent enough to retain an edge of danger: the boy/woman confronts men with an image of the weakness and feminization they fear. Representations of heterosexual relations are thus always open to, and encourage the play of, the transgressive inflections of homoerotic and pederastic desire. In this system of representation sexual differences are effects, articulations, of gender and class differences, and gender differences may in turn be used discursively to displace anxieties to causes other than oneself. (3) In the interpretive passage of a speaker from speech prefix to character, it may often be difficult to assess, or to agree on, the extent to which a character means what his or her language seems to say. For example, the basic thesis in the essays on Richard II is that a project of self-deposition is consistently sustained by the language assigned to the name, or speech prefix, "Richard." I put it this way to emphasize that I'm not concerned with what an imaginary person named Richard might actually have intended or been aware of at any moment. Rather, my concern is with the pattern of motivation traceable in his language throughout the play. It is entirely conceivable that two actors preparing ·to perform the role of Richard could agree that this pattern is discernible in the language and yet disagree as to whether at any particular moment Richard should be played as a speaker clearly aware, vaguely aware, or unaware that he is engaged in a scenario and discourse of self-deposition. In retrospect I can see that these hypotheses were impelled by ·the desire to shift what is normally psychological and characterological interpretation away from the form of analysis that examined speakers as if they were the Doctor's analysands, individuals with bodies, psyches, and organic histories. I hoped instead to mediate interpretation of individual speakers through the analysis of their engagement with the positions and interactions inscribed in the network of traditional discourses that animate and give shape to their utterances. It was here that Wittgenstein's account of language-games came in handy, for it redirected attention from speakers' mental states to regularities, repetitions, and variations in language use situated primarily in settled community practices and only secondarily in the

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individual. It offered a model of discursive agency in which such positions and interactions could be conceived as features of a ready-made network that preexisted any particular act of language use, features equivalent to a repertory of motivational profiles and the possible set of interactions among them, a combinatoire that extended qualified agency to individual speakers who could improvise within the limited range of the network. Wittgenstein writes that "to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life" and goes on to explain that "the term 'language-game' is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life.... Commanding, questioning, recounting, chatting, are as much a part of our natural.[or cultural] history as walking, eating, drinking, playing." The language-game consists "oflanguage and the actions in which it is woven." 9 Ethical discourses provide as clear-cut examples of language-games or discursive forms of life as Wittgenstein's strategically vague concept allows. Of course, in dealing with a theatrical text, whatever extralinguistic "activity" or "form of life" we imagine the language to be part of we construct only through our interpretation of textual activity. So we have to reverse the terms of Wittgenstein's formulation: in Shakespearean discourse the actions are woven into the language. Several consequences came into view when this emphasis on languagegames was coupled with the postulate that there are no bodies in the text. One was that if we are to look for and respond to something called "the unconscious," we should do so only at the level of discourse: the unconscious is a discourse network. A related consequence was that although this move made it possible for me to avoid the swirl of Freudian dogmas and debates prominent in Shakespeare studies during the early 1980s, it led straight toward the vertiginous vortex ofLacanian conundrums. The risk of being sucked down into those depths and lost forever could be taken only if one rigorously kept one's appropriations from Lacan as mundane and low-grade as possible. Protection against the risk was afforded by another consequence of the focus on language-games: the simple, familiar, and traditional character of the ethical discourses I consider- sinner, villain, hero, donor, victim/revenger-guaranteed thatthe analysis would be carried out at the embarrassingly misophisticated level of pop psychology, the level, that is, of the lang~age-games people play. Although the discourses are simple and familiar, complexity is reintroduced in the effort to do justice to the lability of their interactions. Consider, for example, the statement I use as the point of departure for my discussion of the ethical discourses, Lear's self-pitying rationalization "I am a man JMore sinned against than sinning." Most obviously, this is the for-

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mula for the victim's discourse. But its stability as such is imperiled from two directions. On the one hand, the strong accent and terminal position of "I am a man" infuses the hint of a threat into the statement, a reminder of the speaker's ability to retaliate and victimize his victimizers ("I am a man, and will have my revenges"), his ability ultimately to assert and luxuriate in the privileges of the villain who overturns the victim's discourse with the boast that "I am more sinning than sinned against." On the other hand, the formula's comparative construction gives it a defensive edge: "what they did to me is worse than what I did to them" acknowledges that "I" did something to them, and thus the air of rationalization, the suspicion of bad faith, endangers the claim of victimization and opens like a wound on its lurking obverse, "I am more sinning than sinned against," voiced here as the sinner's confession, not as the villain's boast. The formulaic identity of the sinner's and villain's discourses indicates another trouble.spot, a zone of unstable oscillation between the desire to be forgiven and the desire to do things that bring on and justify the judgment one feels one deserves (which in Lear's case involves villainously hurting those one loves as a way of hurting oneself). "Skepticism's doubt," writes Cavell in Disowning Knowledge, "is motivated . . . by a self-consuming disappointment that seeks a worldconsuming revenge" (6). Similarly, self-consuming disappointment in oneself may seek to displace itself into world-consuming revenge so that -like Lear, like Richard II -the sinner may secure the world's revenge on himself The sinner's discourse is self-endangering in arousing sensitivity to possible false notes or false claims in the performance of the other discourses. It gives voice to the demonic curiosity of conscience, the doubt and suspicion that submit one's motives to skeptical inquisition. The·paraphrase of Cavell's thesis contained in the jacket copy of Disowning Knowledge puts it in terms that link it more closely to my emphasis on the centrality of the sinner's discourse: "Cavell sees Shakespeare as offering ... a profound diagnosis of the skeptical refusal to acknowledge truths about oneself and one's relations to others, and as exploring the motives and tragic consequences of that refusal." But the diagnosis includes the sinner's interrogation of the refusal: even as speakers perform the discourses that represent them as generous, victimized, heroic, honorable, loving, saintly, or justified in seeking revenge, their language questions the performance. The suspicion of bad faith bends the sinner's discourse out of shape when it is allowed to stray toward the neighborhoods of desperation and despair, or when, as in Measure for Measure (see Chapter 14), it becomes the conspicuously unac-

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knowledged fear that impels the play's protagonist to pursue prolonged and outlandish strategies of self-exculpation. To focus on the lability· of the discourse network, and especially on the vicissitudes of the sinner's discourse, is to keep the drama of selfrepresentation in the interpretive foreground. It is to orient attention toward the signifiers in language of fears and desires that are ethical in the sense that they are concerned with dilemmas of conscience, problems of self-esteem, and skills of self-deception. And it is to foreground the way these ethical forces exert pressure not only on the interlocutory performances of speakers but also on the course of narrative events. At least in my case this interpretive perspective was hard to come by. I spent several years entranced by the sound of my moral rhetoric before coming to the realization that what I thought of characters was both less important and less interesting than what they thought of themselves -that the whole project of ethical appraisal was misguided so long as it led the critic simultaneously to preempt it from dramatic speakers and ignore the signs of its activity in their speech. My effort to resist the judgmental impulse took the form of a shift of emphasis toward the mode of reading I would eventually call imaginary audition, in· which one imagines one can "hear" what speakers hear in their utterances as they listen to themselves and monitor the effects of their speech on others. The shift opened up what was for me a new perspective on the basic challenge and response inscribed in Shakespearean drama. Consider, for example, the following genealogical fantasy. The author of Shakespeare's plays wrote poems before he wrote plays, and took many of the stories he staged from chronicles and fiction. He began, that is, by immersing himself in the lyric and narrative genres of a specifically literary medium that gives priority to the speaker or narrator who represents himself describing actions, commenting on characters, and sympathizing or criticizing in his own voice. In switching from the literary to the theatrical medium he encountered a new constraint: characters can only be represented in and performed by their own speech. If the functions or powers of description, representation, and interpretation are to survive the passage from literary narrative to theater, they must be transferred to·and wholly vested in dramatic speakers. The author of Shakespeare's plays seems to have met the challenge by transforming into a theatrical practice the epideictic art of representing selfrepresentation developed in the sonnets; that is, he transferred from lyric monologue to interlocutory drama an art of representing speakers who seem aware that in their words and actions they represent themselves to

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others, speakers who try to control the effects of their self-representation and who thus use their language the way actors do in an effort to impose on their auditors a particular interpretation of the persons they pretend to be. This hypothesis about Shakespeare's art presupposes a more general principle of reflexivity, which is that one can't represent oneself to others without representing oneself to oneself-without, in other words, imposing on oneself a particular interpretation of the person one pretends to be. To recognize this is also to recognize that in dramatizing the activity of self-interpretation the plays at the same time dramatize an activity of selfevaluation, a project of self-persuasion, motivated by a desire for both moral legitimacy and performative authority. And, one needs however reluctantly to acknowledge, the representation of this activity and motivation is not confined to the plays; it informs the critical practice of their interpreters.

+ After such disclosures, what forgiveness? Would anybody want his or her complicity in the production of this book to be publicized? Certainly not Beth Pittenger, Bruce Avery, Heather James, Margreta de Grazia, Marsh Leicester, Patricia Parker, David Lee Miller, Svetlana Alpers, Jay Farness, Michael Warren, Lynn Enterline, Katherine Rowe, Louis Montrose, Paul Alpers, Margo Hendricks, Judith Anderson, Catherine Gimelli-Martin, Stephen Greenblatt, Don Wayne, Linda Charnes, Paul Whitworth, Richard Martin, Oliver Arnold, Audrey Stanley, Tom Vogler, Susan Harding, Eleanor Winsor Leach, Janet Adelman, Susanne Wofford, Oliver Arnold, Lindsay Kaplan, Jonathan Goldberg, Katherine Eggert, Kenneth Gross, Lena Cowen Orlin, Stephen Orgel, Tom Greene, Angus Fletcher, Suresh Raval, Tom Cartelli, Mimi Sprengnether, or Michael Holahan. As I sneak down Memory Lane softly calling their names, they shrink back one by one into the shadows of disowned responsibility. But it was their friendship, writings, conversation, responsiveness, criticism, patience, and good humor that kept me thinking, kept me going, in the decades during which these essays were growing up and being difficult. At least they can step forward and be acknowledged for that. Especially Beth, from whom I get my best ideas, including the idea for the jacket illustration. There are no such shadows for· Peter Erickson to disappear into. This book was his idea. Without his urging and patience and persistence, without the many critical interventions that helped me see more clearly what I was trying to do, without his suggestions for the organization and content of the book, it never would have happened. He made me do it. And I'm indebted to Peter for much more than his willing assumption of culpability.

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His friendship, loyalty, insight, and courage over the years have brought me to that rarest and richest of boundary crossings, the moment when teachers recognize they have become students of their students. All but two of the essays in this book first saw the light of day by way of Charlotte Cassidy's typewriter- I was going to write "amazing typewriter," but it's Charlotte who is amazing. In this, the thirtieth year of our collaboration, it gives me pleasure to acknowledge my continuing admiration and gratitude not only for the beautiful work she does with such pride and devotion but also for the critical intelligence that has made her comments on the manuscripts a touchstone by which I gauge their readability. I suffered a near-breakdown about a year ago when, after skulking about for decades in the backward wastes of technophobia, I was finally tracked down and apprehended by the long arm of the computer, and it was made clear to me that for my sins I would have to submit Charlotte's artwork to the terrible fate of doublesided high-density floppydiscosity. Coerced conversions are difficult; the spirit is slow in coming. But "whilst this machine is to him," the closest thing to salvation one could expect to find in this pixellated vale of sorrows has appeared in the staff of the campus Word Processing Center supervised by Cheryl Van De Veer. Like many of my colleagues I count myself fortunate in being able to work withand in my case, learn from -Cheryl, Henrietta Brown, Zoe Sodja, and Joan Tannheimer. They have floppified hundreds of pages of fair and foul copy and thus enabled an aging Luddite to survive in the post-typewriter era. But that's only part of it. They continue to be wonderfully cooperative and patient, going out of their way time and again to help me meet deadlines, improve my copy, and induct me into the mystery of word processing. They have made this convert less reluctant, possibly less obtuse, and very grateful. Transforming fair copy into a book has been a much easier conversion thanks largely to Helen Tartar, whose remarkable powers of discrimination, breadth of knowledge, and generosity of spirit can't possibly be expressed by or contained in her official title, Assistant Director (Editorial) of the Stanford University Press. Poet, scholar, critic, and philosopher, Helen would be the exemplary editor were she not unique and therefore inimitable. She has been critic, guide, and friend as well as editor, and I have come to rely on her capacious understanding of current discourses in the humanities, and on her unerring sense of what is to be valued· in those discourses. I'm also privileged to have been able to renew my collaboration with Amy Klatzkin, who is in charge of the production of this book as she was of two earlier volumes, and to have had the benefit of Anne Geissman Canright's skillful and perceptive copyediting. Their high standards,

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scrupulous attention to detail, and constructive suggestions for revision gave aid and comfort to an author temperamentally unfit to do more than stumble or lurch blindly through the publication process. Finally, I want to acknowledge how much I learned about this book from perusing the indexes prepared with care and flair and analytic verve by Valerie Forman and Sarah Whittier. Once again, I take pleasure in acknowledging the support I have received over the years from the Committee on Research of the University of California at Santa Cruz. And I take even more pleasure in expressing my thanks to Caroline Berger for coming to my rescue at a critical moment and helping me put the manuscript in order.

+ Introduction BY PETER ERICKSON

The purpose of this collection is not only to make conveniently available Harry Berger's most recent essays on Shakespeare, including the three new final essays, which have not been previously published, but also, by bringing the essays together in this concentrated format, to highlight and clarify Berger's critical method in its overall, ongoing development. I have chosen to present Berger's method under the two rubrics of moral criticism and political criticism. However, I do not claim that these two are the only leading motifs, such that they exhaust the possibilities or subsume and cancel other perspectives. Berger's current work is sufficiently complex to invite and reward multiple approaches, and some readers may wish to delineate different avenues of entry into the essays gathered here. For example, the case can readily be made for placing the emphasis on the essays' linguistic, deconstructive, or psychoanalytic aspects. The reason I frame the inquiry in terms of the moral and political dimensions is not only that these two elements are crucial to an account of the particular shape of Berger's criticism, but also that these two features are. in my view the most likely to be ignored or underestimated. When one compares Berger's earlier work on Shakespeare from the 1960s with the more recent writing from the 1980s and 1990s in the present collection, one can see that the difference stems primarily from the impact on the latter of Berger's encounters with the whole range of structuralist and poststructuralist theory. But what makes these forays particularly in-

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tense is that Berger brings to them his own prior, continuing concerns and hence adapts and transforms poststructuralist themes to fit his purposes. Because Berger comes to poststructuralism as a mature critic whose larger interpretive framework is already in place, his response is not simply to immerse himself in the new theoretical modes and adopt them wholesale, but rather to make them his own. Much of the excitement· and vitality of Berger's current work comes from its. dramatization of the struggle between two powerful desires: the need to open himself to the challenge of new methodological influences and the need to incorporate them into his previous system. The result is that both the new influences and the previous system are modified. This change is registered with special force in the moral and political components of Berger's critical practice. In a recent summary account, Berger names seven types of critical reductionism.1 Prominently included are the categories of ethical and political criticism; indeed, these two flash points are by far the most emotionally charged. Yet the implication is not that these two approaches should be rejected outright but rather that they must be implemented according to a more sophisticated strategy. ·Nor. should the jocular echo of William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) lead us to understand that a properly nonreductionist style requires the reinstatement of New Criticism's all-purpose concept of ambiguity? Instead, Berger's aim is to work out a much more specific and detailed sense of what it means to pursue nonreductionist ·versions of moral and political criticism. Despite the severity of his strictures, Berger continues to use the words moral and political. The question therefore becomes: How does Berger gradually redefine and reorient these two terms? The issue can be put as a series of three paradoxes: How does Berger explain the difference between reductionist and nonreductionist versions of moral criticism? What is his means of distinguishing reductionist and nonreductionist political criticism? And finally, what relation does he see between nonreductionist forms of moral and political criticism? To pursue these questions, I shall probe the contrast between Berger's earlier work in the 1960s and the newer work presented here. Using the first stage as a baseline, I shall then go on to ask how Berger revises his previous practice with regard to moral and political formulations. The verb revise alludes to Berger's conception of revision as "the critical impulse behind the poet's development." 3 Such revision also operates as a conscious principle in Berger's work as critic. Berger's initial stance as a moral critic is epitomized in his outline of a general model of artistic development as a sequence of three phases: "recreative thesis, plaintive antithesis, moral synthesis" (n4). The following

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passage not only provides a compact sketch of Berger's conceptual apparatus during the 1960s but also conveys the depth and centrality of Berger's conviction about the moral status of literary analysis: For the point of Spenser's fable of the spider and the fly is that recreative fancy, however right and natural, must be cut short if poetry is to be more than whimsical escape.... If the poet is to break out of his womblike garden of pleasure, the spider within him must have its day. Some plaintive interruption- "death, or love, or fortunes wreck" -seems necessary to force the pure poetic sensibility of Clarion or Colin Clout into the world.... Poetry becomes moral when the recreative impulse and power are made to serve the mind's effort to cope with plaintive experience and to master it from within. Plaintive experience which remains unmastered leads to a poetry exhausted by complaint. ... it loses its moral character and becomes a gesture of defeat or escape rather than an effort at mastery or confrontation. The moral impulse is born when the poet develops a guilty conscience about his recreative self-delight, when he feels the need to justify his pleasure in art by directing it toward some new and non-poetic area, opening it to social, ethical, political or religious concerns. He may feel a conflict between the claims of art and those of life .... And he may use his art to depict this conflict, or cope with it, or escape from it. (ns-16)

I hardly need to point out the emphatic invocation of the word moral. What I do want to call attention to is the triple use of the word escape. In each of the three stages, the unfolding process of the poet's growth can be short-circuited by the ever-present possibility of evasion. Escape and its counterpart, responsibility (n8, 121), become the two resonant, value-laden terms in Berger's critical vocabulary. 4 Their dialectical tension constitutes the basic moral drama he discerns in works of art. Moreover, moral aspiration includes the prospect of an explicitly "political" focus. Thus baldly stated, this abstract overview of Berger's position may sound suspiciously schematic. Yet the approach is extremely supple in application, for three reasons. First, the great strength of Berger's criticism is his ability to combine the general and the particular, to move convincingly between large-scale cultural analysis and minutely nuanced close readings. Second, the passage quoted above contains a calculated slippage between mastering and coping. The latter suggests more modest expectations and thus less absolute moral criteria. The phrase "depict this conflict;' which stops well short of an insistence on total control and resolution, allows for considerable leeway and subtlety in moral assessment. Third, Berger is able to translate moral terminology into specifically formal properties through his insightful deployment of the pastoral mode. Berger's special contribution to the study of pastoral is his distinction

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between green world and second world. The former signifies an indulgence in escapism; the latter implies awareness of and resistance to this escapist tendency. The key role played by the problem of escapism indicates the underlying moral thrust, and the ultimate end remains unapologetically moral: "It is up to us to respond to the words and images graven in our souls, to carry them home with us from the theater as Rosalind and Prospero did from their retreats, to transform the bounded moment of esthetic delight into a model or guide for moral action. What Rosalind and Prospera finally communicate as they fade is a lesson, a moral significance." 5 Though they are not purely aesthetic concepts, green world and second world nevertheless provide another, less immediately and directly moral set of terms that enable Berger to defer the moral conclusion and to concentrate on the textual details. The two are mutually invigorating: the details would be less valuable without the .larger moral framework, but equally the perceptiveness of the conclusion depends on the quality of the details. For Berger, details are frequently "quirky details." 6 It is his particular ability to ferret out and make sense of their quirkiness that causes Berger's work to stand out. Berger's version of pastoral contains elements that can be usefully related to the influential terms set forth in C. L. Barber's Shakespeare's Festive Comedy.7 Berger's division of the dramatic action into the two phases of withdrawal and return corresponds to Barber's emphasis on the sequence from release to clarification. Berger's counterpointing of green world and second world resembles Barber's distinction between ritual and drama. In this regard, Berger and Barber share a common opposition to the simplified allegorizing tendency in Northrop Frye's criticism. 8 Despite these parallels, the tone, temperament, and clarifications manifested in Berger's and Barber's writing are strikingly different. The chief difference is the degree of ironic bite present in each. Barber has enormous powers of ironic perception, but the force of the irony is held in check and mitigated by Barber's belief in or desire for transcendent communal forms. For Barber, ironic insight makes available a necessary perspective, but one that carries negative connotations and destructive potential when it becomes the only point of view. In Berger's case, the potential for supervening grace is absent; hence irony is not subject to counterbalancing philosophical constraints. Refusing the redeeming consolations of piousness and faith and instead humorously advertising his irreverence, Berger pursues a comparatively unrestrained skepticism wherever it may lead. To put the contrast as a formula, one could say that their risks lie in opposite directions: the problem for Barber is an idealized faith that glosses over harsh insights, while the danger for Berger is a skepticism so corrosive that everything is radically suspect and no ground is left on which human contact could reliably take place.

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The respective sensibilities of Barber and Berger can be illustrated by their operation in readings of The Tempest. Berger's interpretation of this play is the culmination of the Shakespearean part of his project during the 1960s. Criticizing what he characterizes as the "sentimental reading;' Berger shows that Prospera's own account of his deposition in act I, scene 2, is selfimplicating and self-condemning. Prospera's admission that his exclusive preoccupation with the liberal arts caused the neglect of his civic duties gives Berger a clear-cut, valid opportunity to apply the evocative trademark words of escape (156, r66) from responsibility (150). 9 Because of Prospera's absenting himself from governmental obligations, Berger's critique is not only moral but also expressly political. In his appeal to the familiar distinction between "the active and common life" and "the contemplative life" (155), the former refers to "social and political circumstances" (154), "social and political existence" (157), and, more simply, "politics" (179). This political edge is missing from Barber's posthumously published response to the play. 10 In Barber's formulation, "Prospera's surrender of his daughter· to the large sustaining rhythms of life" acknowledges "his firm but tense recognition that such rhythms are beyond the power even of so potent an art as his own" (340). One can say that while Berger focuses on the tenseness, Barber's final accent falls on the firmness. Although The Tempest as a late romance grounded in "the older generation" (340) is distinct from the earlier festive comedies, Barber's extraordinarily confident, even serene, invocation of festive rhetoric can be heard in his commitment to "the large sustaining rhythms of life" (related phrasing appears on p. 37. of The Whole Journey). Barber movingly puts his whole self behind his belief in "the place of death in the great cycle of life" by alluding to his personal acceptance of death: "One cannot have lived to be older than Shakespeare when he died without that thought coming home" (340). What this external framework of belief does for Barber is enable him to subordinate complicating factors to the larger picture, as can be seen in the way the following gesture sweeps up difficulty: "But in the whole movement of the action, such elements are taken up into the affirmation of Prospera's manhood and the ultimately restorative, reparative cause his art serves" (336). To paraphrase Touchstone, much virtue in ultimately! The word ultimately acts as a hedge or dodge because the time to which it refers never quite arrives and therefore is never fully tested. One can, I think, legitimately point out the disproportionate relation between Barber's assertion and his proof The expression of a sensibility has taken over; evidence is beside the point. For Berger, there is no ultimate resolution. Prospera's flaws loom larger as abiding central elements because there is no exterior system to which they might be assimilated and hence softened or forgiven. The contrast be-

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tween Berger and Barber in this regard is heightened by their treatment of Prospera's concluding moment in the epilogue. Barber aligns himself with Prospera's final gesture of submission. The critical prose simultaneously interprets and itself adopts the language of penitence and hoped-for absolution that it attributes to Prospera. Berger, in contrast, conspicuously declines such assurance and comfort. Rather, his critical suspicion remains strongly in effect right through to the end. He refuses to join the ritual process in the spirit Prospera appears to intend and defiantly redefines it as part of Prospera's "last fling" (181) in order "to bring out the true strain of feeling under his exhilaration in the final act" (183): "The epilogueis thus another prologue; he is still tentative and still experimental, still unresolved and still on the verge of a new phase of life" (185). In thus defying resolution and insisting on open-ended difficulty, Berger faces down the "despair" that Prospero poses as the alternative to participation in his pardon. Berger's essay on The Tempest is now more than 25 years old and so from our present vantage point may not seem unusual. Yet seen in the context of the prevailing criticism of its time, this essay represents a radical break, opening up by its very style as well as its specific content new possibilities for interpretation. Thus, without being deliberately political, Berger's criticism has a strong political effect. 11 A principal feature of Bergerian politics is its performative aspect: the political impact of his criticism is conveyed in part by Berger's self-presentation as critic. In considering the. drama of Berger's self-fashioning, I refer to the critic's self-image as it is constructed within the criticism. Thus I apply to the critic Berger's definition of the poet's self: "Our focus is not on the career and self of the poet in an unqualified sense, but on the fictional or dramatic image of career and self embodied in the work." 12 Moreover, I consider this figure of the critic in relation to the three-part model of recreative, plaintive, and moral dimensions that Berger uses for the poet. Berger's writing is unusual in the degree to which it insists on and works with the palpable rhetorical presence of the critic. No one can read very far in Berger's work without noticing his ostentatious humorous play. Such humor can of course be appreciated for its sheer charm and entertainment value. This humor is, however, more purposeful, as I hope to demonstrate by situating it in the larger sequence from recreative through moral phases. Berger delights in his strong recreative impulses and does not stint in displaying them. He does not intend to miss out, at times can't seem to stop himself. His humor includes all manner of comic turns and high jinks covering a whole range of tones and gestures from robust exuberance to facetious deflation. However, Berger can indulge himself so freely precisely

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because this license is justified by its subordination to the eventual aim of moral seriousness. Just as the poet's recreative mode is a preliminary stage on the way to a more encompassing development, so Berger's humor is placed in the service of a higher goal. The role of Berger's assertive irreverence is, first, to set a tone of subversive informality that clears the air of stuffiness and narrow protocols that might inhibit freewheeling intellectual inquiry and, second, to signal Berger's immediate personal presence within his critical enterprise, as though his own person may in some open-ended way be at stake in the proceedings about to unfold. But Berger's presence in the scene of criticism is established by enactment rather than by theoretical argument. Such personal presence has strong theoretical implications, though these are advanced not as a matter of explicit theoretical argument but through dramatization. In Berger's account of the poet's growth, the function of the plaintive stage is to propel the poet out of permanent fixation in unsullied recreation. So far as the critic is concerned, this second phase takes place off the page. Its felt pressure can be inferred from the moral impulse to which it gives rise and by which it is transformed. 13 The point I wish to underline is the thoroughness of Berger's identification with the third phase of the poet's moral project. As I have already shown, the traces of the poet-critic parallel in this regard are abundant and are epitomized in Berger's assessment of Prospero. Berger is resolutely-some might say relentlessly-moral in his critical pursuits, and this moral emphasis brings me to the major transition between Berger's earlier and later work. For this transition partly hinges on Berger's revaluation of his basic moral stance. One can hear Berger's rethinking of the status of the moral element expressed in relation to C. L. Barber: Himself a genial ironist, he resisted my version of the ironic interpretation on the grounds that it implicated me in the very cynicism I thought I discerned in the text. With characteristic generosity he tried by that resistance to help me improve the tone and avoid the pitfalls of an approach for which he did not feel great sympathy. I think I have discovered what he wanted me to see: that unless the ironist was capable of a minimal level of sympathy for and generosity toward the fictional objects of his criticism, he could not hope to respond adequately to the human claims· the characters in the plays make on him .... As Barber's vision of the dramatic community released me from an overfacile commitment to the kind of ironic reading which is always achieved at the expense of the dignity and humanness of its subjects, so it also clarified the insights I was obscurely trying to develop about the interaction between the characters and the community of the play. It directed me toward what may

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be called the common ethos informing the behavior of all characters. ("Text Against Performance: The Gloucester Family Romance," Chapter 4 in this volume)

I have always found it amazing that what is arguably the most profound tribute in the memorial festschrift for C. L. Barber should be written by the critic whose relation with Barber was the most adversarial; but perhaps appreciation depends on such distance. 14 This passage seems to me crucial but easily subject to misinterpretation if one overestimates Berger's generosity in writing it or is tempted to construe it as a simple and total reconciliation. Let me mark out some limits to this imagined exchange. First, Berger does not suddenly turn over a new leaf and himself advocate genial irony; rather, he critically places Barber as a genial ironist. Second, Berger's new attention to community ethos, which in effect replaces the earlier concept of second world, is not favorable to Barber's critical approach; indeed, as the first two chapters in this volume show, Berger uses it to demolish the festive model of comedy. Third, despite the chastened tone of his tribute to Barber, Berger's general air of insouciance remains unabated, as fine-tuned as ever; it does not recede but is rather redeployed within a different critical system. The hallmark of this new system is a shift in the relative weight of the two interlinked terms, moral and political. The latter, which had been secondary, comes to the forefront. Whereas before the political was a function of the moral, now the political is treated as an independent category and the moral emerges out of the political rather than the other way round. However, although the term moral moves into the background, it is by no means completely abandoned. Berger's strong moral drive remains in force; the effort is to give his deeply moral commitment a more sophisticated grounding. I shall first discuss Berger's reorientation of the moral dimension of his criticism and then turn to his treatment of the political. Berger's response to C. L. Barber cited above acts as a catalyst for a series of adjustments that add· up to a fundamental change. The chief precipitating factor is Berger's evident dissatisfaction with his moral posture. In his recent reflections on New Criticism, Berger notes his discomfort with its particular moral slant: "I was troubled by (what was then) a vague but sharply felt sense that I was being preached to, was being told what to value and dismiss, and that this was in some way being smuggled in under the surface of an earnest, disinterested, benign, indeed often condescending, pedagogy: moral instruction embedded in sugar coated technical instruction." 15 This offensive moralism is what Berger's own sarcasm had always defended against. However, Berger now recognizes with a shock

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that this satirical defense had not kept him immune and that he was enacting his own version of condescending moral superiority-namely, moral judgment skewed by what he disarmingly acknowledges as "my own tendencies toward cynical reading." 16 Here is an example of Berger's changed attitude toward moral criticism: Ethical critics worry more about what they think of characters than what characters are shown to think of themselves. . . . It has been too easy for critics to find reasons for praising or blaming, liking or disliking, Harry, and although my own practice betrays the same tendency I try to minimize it, first, by distinguishing between what I think of Harry and what my reading of his language suggests to me about his self-representations and self-perceptions, and second, by bracketing out the former and isolating the latter as the only relevant object of interpretative concern. 17

As the word betrays intimates, this passage is as much a reaction against Berger's own previous criticism as it is against others. Moreover, his renunciation is extremely tricky. In the very moment of issuing a stricture to guard against ethical reductionism, Berger undoes the neat separation between character and critic on which the stricture is based. Here and elsewhere (see, for example, the final paragraph of "What Did the King Know and When Did He Know It?," Chapter II in this volume) Berger's punning self-references to Harry and harrying enforce a doubling up of identity that connects king and critic on a first-name basis and does so not by inadvertent betrayal but by conspicuous self-display. The critic's self-involvement points to a new moral subtlety implied by the shift in key words from escapism to complicity. As Berger indicates in relation to King Lear, the latter term implicates the critic: "The play puts us in jeopardy so that we may discover our own complicity, our kinship with what we condemn" ("Text Against Performance: The Gloucester Family Romance," Chapter 4 in this volume). The major transition in Berger's work can be marked at just this point in his respective readings of The Tempest and Lear. In Berger's response to Prospero, the division of labor is cut-anddried: the character is escapist, the critic who judges him· is responsible. Berger's writing on Lear, however, shows a new, more inward relation to the character. The generalized reverberations of darker and darkest purposes do not stop with the characters but extend to the critic. Berger's newfound ability to communicate the critic's drama at the deepest levels gives to his work the added resonance of implicit self-exploration: we can feel that he knows whereof he speaks, that his own darker purposes are implicated in the investigation. This is the distinctly new note in Berger's criticism. Berger's more complexly layered moral analysis shows itself not only

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in the reconstituted tonal relation to characters but also in the much more structural approach contained in the new emphasis on the concept of community. Here again the essay discussing his encounter with C. L. Barber is particularly helpful in spelling out the change. The play's community is "a language community" understood in a special sense: "the characters of a play do not speak its language;. the language speaks the characters. One language speaks, or circulates through, all the characters, one community langue speaks all the paroles." 18 This focus on language as a collective process takes some of the burden off a one-to-one confrontation between the critic and the individual character and redirects attention to a more neutral analysis of underlying structural patterns. So construed, criticism becomes less susceptible to zeroing in on character defects and more attuned to a community's systemwide problems. Hence Berger's understanding of redistributing complicities as a relatively impersonal phenomenon beyond individual consciousness or control. According to this phenomenon, a play offers two contradictory stories, one manifest, the other latent but available upon closer inspection of the language and action. The first is a simplified version that casts characters in starkly stereotypical roles of good and evil; the second is a more complex account of a shared, blurred network of motives to which all characters contribute. The critic can show how the first is a redistributed version of the second without automatically engaging in blame. Berger's revised critical mode may look as though it is designed to make cynicism impossible by eliminating it, but this is not quite accurate. If in one sense Berger removes cynicism out of reach as a critical reflex, in another sense he reintroduces it on a different level- as a motif in the plays. Thus, far from simply setting aside and suppressing cynicism, Berger more daringly places it at the very center of inquiry. This strategy can be seen in his move from Lear to Richard II. Both are portrayed as "self-wounding" characters, but in the book-length study of Richard II Berger's analysis of this syndrome is greatly intensified. Berger articulates in extraordinary detail the inner workings of Richard II's cynicism. In his bitterly potent mix of contempt for others and contempt for self, Richard II becomes. in Berger's portrait "a speaker who flaunts his contempt for his interlocutors .... The pleasure he clearly derives ... must be imagined as sardonic. It is the vertiginous pleasure in self-contempt and in the pursuit of moral self-degradation." 19 In Richard II's cynicism Berger finds as it were an objective correlative for his own. This situation gives him new leverage on the moral problem of cynicism because it affords a clear critical distance. But the power of this approach is that Berger achieves a valuable distancing without becoming emotionally detached.

INTRODUCTION

XXXV

In turning from the question of moral criticism to the issue of political criticism, I want to call attention to how insistent Berger's invocation of the term politics is in his recent work. The issue is one not of absence but of definition: what does Berger mean by politics? A clue may be found in his frequent usage of the combined term psychopolitical to describe the particular terrain he seeks to explore. Thus, for example, Richard II's behavior is not merely of psychological interest but has political consequences. But the reverse emphasis also holds: these political effects are expressed through Richard II's language and psychology, and indeed are accessible only through them. Berger's sense of the inwardness of politics is indicated by the following critical strategy: "Since I believe that Shakespearean politics is most highly concentrated in and as the interlocutory power plays that comprise the script, I look more to that level than to abstract institutional analysis for insights into the politics of any fictive community." 20 As this contrast with its implied choice of two directions suggests, Berger's definition of politics has two sides. The negative side has a quite specific context in Berger's perception of his friction with new historicism and cultural materialism?1 Berger has himself raised this issue on two occasions.22 One might be led by Berger's at times acerbic tone to conclude that his objection is simply a restatement of the familiar complaints about political correctness or lack of close interpretation. But this would be too hasty. Something deeper than the accusation of bad close reading is involved, which Berger poses as a problem of directionality. New historicism and cultural materialism surround the literary text with social contexts; Berger finds the contexts within the texts and so preserves and defends close textual analysis. Tension is seen to be inherent because they are moving in opposite directions: the former from the second world of fiction to the first world of actual society, Berger from the first world to the second. Berger is of course aware that first and second worlds are intertwined because the first world is a cultural construct in which linguistic and representational elements prominently figure and because the second world has perceptible institutional influence. What seems to concern Berger most is a premature confl.ation of the two that would jeopardize his own project, especially the hard-won sympathetic inwardness it entails. From this standpoint, new historicist and cultural materialist distance from the text threatens to reinstitute a version of the cynicism against which Berger is striving to build a critical antidote. Yet Berger's critical gains are purchased at a cost, to wit: the selfimposed restriction of his focus to political effects within the play's community. This limitation leaves unanswered the question of the play's political effects in the outside world of the larger culture. So incredibly strong,

xxxvi

INTRODUCTION

however, is Berger's dialectical mode that his instinctive response to any proposition, including even his own, is to turn it around and think through the opposite. If, for example, the topic of parricide comes up, Berger immediately turns the tables by reminding us of the possibilities of "symbolic filicide" ("Psychoanalyzing the Shakespearean Text;' Chapter 8 in this volume). One of the most astonishing instances of reversal occurs in Imaginary Audition when, having spent the better part of the book convincing us of the primacy of text over performance, Berger beyond all expectation changes the direction of the vectors in his epilogue, which goes "from page to stage." Berger's conclusion is to find the theater's role in culture, in the political context outside the play's onstage community, as subversive as one could wish. The source of potential subversion comes from the plays' dramatization of "the contradictions in the regnant discourses ofthe playgoers' culture."23 Yet this leap to the audience and hence to the culture ("playgoers' culture") has been disabled in advance. The role of the theater as a material and institutional site has been drastically preshrunk by the operation of a text-performance distinction that posits a built-in communication barrier between the two. The auditory limitations of the theatrical medium prevent complex textual meanings from getting across. This filter blocks the relation between author and audience, entrapping the former in a bitter sense of "discrepant awareness" and leaving Shakespeare's texts "crossed by a certain despair of theater." 24 Not explained by the epilogue's too compressed account is this apparent contradiction between the author's despair and the Elizabethan audience's subversion. There can be no last word and no closure, however, because Harry Berger's work is very much criticism in motion. He continues to elaborate and refine the critical procedures exemplified in this collection. In particular, three works in progress-a book for the University of California Press called Harrying: Skills of Offense in Shakespeare's Henriad and two related studies to be published by Stanford University Press, Graphic Imperialism: The Technology and Politics of Self-Representation in Early Modern Europe and Peiforming Gynephobia in· Two Early Modern Texts: Castiglione's uil Libra del Cortegiano" and Spenser's ((Faerie Queene" -will augment and exfoliate the work begun in the present volume. 25 When Harry Berger sets up the "Critic at Work" sign, takes out the tools, and summons his fellow critics as his co-workers, anything can happen. Whatever the exact outcome, we can already confidently say that the boundaries of Renaissance criticism will be so decisively stretched that they will not return to their preexisting shape. Harry Berger does not possess institutional authority in the conventional sense, nor can his work be seen as generating a critical school. Yet I

INTRODUCTION

XXXVll

would distinguish between institutional authority and professional impact. Even though his authority is not exercised in the usual fashion, his influence is powerful. His deviance is a mode of authority; his individualism and quirkiness are the message. I think I am not alone in finding Harry Berger a liberating, enabling figure because he is intellectually uninhibited, because he so successfully defies the academic protocols and received intellectual conventions of Renaissance studies. Quite apart from specific methods and positions, his very style gives license to think without arbitrary restrictions and frees one from the bind of having automatically to repress certain kinds of thoughts. I know of no one else in his generation (he was born in 1924) who plays this vital role. However, Berger's generational location is complicated. He refuses to observe generational protocol and assume his designated place in the traditional cycle. If, for example, C. L. Barber too willingly as well as generously and graciously placed himself in the role of nurturant but vulnerable father figure, Harry Berger vigorously resists this pattern, reserving the son role, as it were, for himself. This is the burden of Berger's self-representation as puer senex, which he translates as "aging boy." But we need to see this move not just as a refusal to grow old or a clever strategy to forestall his deposition but rather as another instance of Bergerian serio-ludere-in this case a calculated critical intervention by which Berger rewrites the psychology of the critics' family romance. Moreover, I think a decisive historical shift has occurred that has with astonishing rapidity dissipated the kind of institutional authority that critics of the older generation amassed and, at the same time, moved Berger's version of professional authority to the forefront. My theme here is not vanitas but the social conditions of the production of scholarly knowledge. What makes Berger's professional standing of particular interest is the way he positions himself not only with respect to the older generation but also with regard to the younger generation of scholars now coming of age. It is hardly news that the scholarly workplace is not an empyrean in which intellectual ranking can be finely calibrated in isolation from all other contaminating factors. Recent scholars who emphasize social contexts cannot help but be acutely aware of the role played by status hierarchies, display rituals, structures of rivalry, the politics of citation, and even chance in shaping scholarly activity. Organizational nodes around and among which such ancillary elements most visibly swirl are the critical groupings of new historicism, cultural materialism, and feminism. Their interrelations have involved not only genuine intellectual conflict but also a struggle over the allocation of bureaucratic power and prestige. One reason, for example, that Renaissance courtly behavior has been an at-

XX:XVlll

INTRODUCTION

tractive topic is its implications for our own critical jostlings: it provides an indirect, veiled means of alluding to troubling aspects of the critical enterprise that we find difficult to address directly. Berger's work offers a vantage point for reflection on the contention among younger scholars. The challenge that Berger's work poses in its institutional dimension lies not in the ruggedness of his individualism but rather in the idiosyncratic nature of his iconoclasm. The latter is. the key to Berger's persistence in endlessly questioning at the level of infinitely complicated detail, endlessly pushing the inquiry further. This drive is evidenced in the unusually large amount of space Berger devotes to intensive engagement with the views of other critics. The construction of such critical interchanges is a standard part of Berger's working method, and it offers a useful model for representing and adjudicating critical relations. I do not wish to romanticize this process. In the critical drama thus staged, Berger runs the show; the dialogue is under his control. Nevertheless, the overall performance is aboveboard and out in the open, allowing us to see the collaborative interactions by which critical interpretation is made. I therefore conclude that, in addition to its provision of specific close readings and its demonstration of a general critical method, Berger's work is valuable for a third reason: the particular nonconventional and reflexive form of professional authority it brilliantly exemplifies.

MAKING TRIFLES OF TERRORS

+

CHAPTER I

+ Marriage and Merci.fixion in (The Merchant

of "Vt?nice':

The Casket Scene Revisited

If fathers and children know that the world must be peopled, property handed down, and the status quo perpetuated, they also know that the price of this investment in the future is the acceptance of death. As Alexander Welch has put it, in a fine essay on Shakespeare's problem comedies, "sexuality has constrained the husband to give life to. the son, but when he married he also acceded to the passing of his generation and his death." 1 Old fathers like Lear and Gloucester look back to the birth of an heir as their first step in prescribing their power, a step that binds them in service to their children's future lordship. The plague of custom and the curiosity of nations assign upbringing and inheritance to children as a right, not a privilege. Gloucester suspects that the rightful heir, born of the dull, stale, tired marriage bed by the order of law, may have more claims on him, may be more dangerous as enemy and competitor, than the child of nature to whom nothing is. owed. Edgar's appearance prophesies death, and the legitimate heir may be imagined to grow up waiting for his father to die so that he can rightfully claim what his father has kept from him all those years, and what his father finally loses: no less than all. Against this liability the father balances the major asset provided by the begetting of children. In the Republic, Socrates remarks that ''just as poets are fond of their poems, and fathers of their children, so money-makers too are serious about money-as their own product; and they are also serious about it ... because it's useful." Moneymakers and money; poets and poems;

2

'THE MERCHANT OF VENICE'

fathers and children: these three pairs can easily converge, or change partners. Fathers can use children as money, for example, to pay back their debts, and also as poems, to guarantee their immortality-to preserve themselves against the very death toward which marriage is the first step. This naturally causes special problems for daughters who find themselves assigned the role of commodity in the alliance market, and in the present essay I shall examine Portia's response to this predicament in The Merchant of Venice. That response is summed up in an ambiguous remark she .utters during the casket scene. As Bassanio approaches the caskets to make his choice, Portia compares him to Hercules about to save the Trojan maiden Hesione, whose father, Laomedon, had offered her as a divine sacrifice to a sea monster. Bassanio (says Portia) goes With no less presence, but with much more love, Than young Alcides [Hercules], when he did redeem The virgin tribute paid by howling Troy To the sea monster. I stand for sacrifice. (3.2.54-57) 2

I stand for sacrifice: either (r) I am placed here to be sacrificed, on the verge

of being captured and destroyed in order to save my father's kingdom; (2) I represent sacrifice, stand for the principle of self...;.giving as I prepare to surrender myself to whatever risks lie ahead (a subsequent remark by Portia inadvertently throws its beams on this sense of the phrase: "So shines a good deed in a naughty world," 5.I.9I); or finally (3) I advocate, I demand, sacrifice, expecting you to give and hazard all you have. This third sense is evoked by the inscription on the lead casket, "Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath," and for this reason it contributes to the evidence cited by those (including myself) who think Portia could conceivably be seen to help Bassanio choose the right casket. The movement from sense I to sense 3 is a movement from weakness to strength, the third sense shining with more brilliance because set in, and set off by, the second. The force of this movement adds sharpness to an allusion that already has a certain bite to it. Superficially the analogy between Bassanio's venturing for Portia and Hercules' saving Laomedon's daughter from the sea monster must be flattering to Bassanio. It confers on him the role of conquering hero. This may appear both tactful and self-canceling to those who construe the phrase "I stand for sacrifice" as pointing Bassanio toward the lead casket, since the words would then negate the very heroism they seem to call for. What makes this construal psychologically not improbable is the danger Portia is in, a danger anamorphically portrayed in the masculine marking of the myth she alludes to.

'THE MERCHANT OF VENICE'

3

Hercules answers the father's summons in order to win not his daughter, but his Trojan horses. It is as if Portia has guessed that Bassanio had earlier described himself to Antonio as one of the many Jasons questing for "the sunny locks" that hang on Portia's temples "like a golden fleece" (r.2.169). Perhaps the keys that will open those locks are in her father's gift, like those to the caskets in one of which Portia is locked. The paternal lock is an emblem of wariness and apprehensiveness, of the father's refusal to trust his daughter's discretion in handling his property (i.e., herself). It is, then-if we displace the father's distrust and wariness to the lock itselfa shy lock. If, as is likely in Venice, Bassanio is another Jason for whom daughter and ducats, person and purse, are indistinguishable, then her passion for him will expose her to Medea's doom. Like Medea, who also betrayed her father's secret and helped her lover to the fleece, she may betray herself. She knows fathers are in league with monsters that venture on the deep in search of prey, and perhaps she suspects that monster and hero are one. Caught in the male conspiracy, Portia may feel that she can win her freedom from the father only by accepting captivity to the husband, moving from one prison or watery deathbed, one set of sunny locks, to another. Lawrence Hyman has argued that "the main action of the play is centered on the struggle. between Portia and Antonio for Bassanio's love." 3 This action, ifanalyzed, may be broken down into the following elements: (r) Antonio uses Shylock to put himself in jeopardy so as to bind Bassanio to him just when Bassanio, through his assistance, is about to embark on the venture that will set him free; (2) Portia uses Shylock to save Antonio in order to break his hold on Bassanio; (3) She therefore uses Antonio to complete her conquest of Bassanio, and in that way she perfects the control-over herself, her husband, and her property-which her desire placed in jeopardy in the casket scene. Hyman's argument is persuasive as far as it goes, and is especially to be commended for its careful avoidance of the temptation to convert the powerful monosexual attachment of Antonio for Bassanio into a homosexual attachment.4 But it does not sufficiently account for other equally important aspects of the play: the centrality of the fatherchild theme and the consequent overlapping of family politics with sexual politics; the dilemma posed for Portia by the conflict within herself between the claims of desire and those of fear; and the deep structure of latent or tacit action that characterizes the various power struggles. For the most part the struggles are by no means practices in the straightforward sense exemplified by Don Pedro's stratagems in Much Ado. It would not be accurate to call them plots or scenarios, because they unfold at a less conscious level than that which we normally associate with the construction of plots and

4

'THE MERCHANT OF VENICE'

scenarios. This tacit quality is what makes The Merchant of Venice so haunting and tantalizing a play. A closer look at the casket scene will suggest how this quality is conveyed, and will at the same time link Portia's struggle with her father and Bassanio to the conflict within herself. The famous problem about the casket scene provides us with a logical point of entry. Critics go astray when they insist that Portia either did or did not offer Bassanio clues to the right casket. Certainly "I stand for sacrifice" and the song's terminal syllables (rhyming with lead) provide at least the makings of clues. Portia may or may not have intended them; Bassanio may or may not have missed them. The point is rather that the script encourages us to wonder about, and even to debate, the possibility. The dialogue preceding Portia's "I stand for sacrifice" speech is full of hints that Portia knows the secret and that her desire makes her half-willing to sin against her father's will. These hints are countered-or rather covered, and therefore enabled- by formal protestations of her unwillingness to be forsworn. But the point is also that, having encouraged us to wonder, the script never gives us enough evidence to resolve the issue with confidence. It is never made clear to us whether or not Portia actually intends the clues that lie inertly in the scene. Nor are we able to determine whether Bassanio intuits the clues and acts on them, whether he betrays at any time a sense of Portia's complicity, and-most important-whether Portia is any less in the dark about these two questions than we are. This is important because if she feels he has recognized her contribution to the choice she may decide that either (r) he is in her debt for the assistance or (2) she is in his power for having compromised herself. The question of power is thus as ambiguous as the question of knowledge. If there is anything at all to these speculations, the result is to make us feel that Portia must still be concerned to resolve her doubts by increasing his obligation and binding him more securely to her. She knows and fears enough to second Gratiano's opinion that (at least in Venice) ''All things that are, I Are with more spirit chased than enjoyed" (2.6.12-13). From the beginning of the scene Portia shows herself divided betwee~ desire and apprehension. She "betrays" to Bassanio her love for him by being conspicuously coy; she lets him see her difficulty in maintaining maidenly decorum: "There's something tells me, but it is not love, I I would not lose you" (3.2.4-5). She would detain him, first for a day or two, and then, a few lines later, for a month or two, and she makes it clear that she knows her father's secret: "I could teach you I How to choose right, but then I am forsworn" (3.2.ro-rr). On the other hand, she would detain him "before you venture for me." Venture strikes a different note because it implies some apprehensiveness about his interest in her golden fleece. This adds

'THE MERCHANT OF VENICE

5

an undertone to her previous words; that is, "Let's dally awhile and enjoy each other's company before you choose and either fail or else, succeeding, win too much- win control not only over my person but also over my father's purse." The undertone is louder in "beshrow your eyes, I They have o'erlook'd me and divided me" (3.2.14-15). It is concentrated in the multiple pun on o'erlook'd: (1) "given me the evil eye, bewitched me" (the sense under which the OED lists this line), and here she shifts blame to his eyes for her impulse to sin against her father's will; (2) "looked down on me from above;' which suggests the danger of mastery encoded later in her prospective image of Bassanio Triumphant, "when true subjects bow I To a newcrowned monarch" (3.2.49-50); (3) "looked over and beyond me" -toward the inheritance- "thus failing to see me, or disregarding me." Hence "you have divided me between the desire that induces me to surrender wholly to you and the premonition that makes me afraid of letting myself be reduced to the golden fleece and locked in a marital casket." "0 these naughty times I Puts bars between the owners and their rights" (3.2.18-19): desire tells Portia that her father bars Bassanio from rights conferred by the law of love, while apprehension tells her that her father and Bassanio bar her from her rightful ownership of her own person and, by extension, of her father's purse. The generalized form of her statement blames the naughty times for his predicament and also, we may infer, for any prospective violation of the letter of her father's will. Self-division makes Portia address their relationship as a struggle for power and possession, a struggle that her words register as they shift back and forth between the two poles of the division-either "mine" or "yours," but not "ours": Mine own I would say; but if mine then yours, And so all yours! 0 these naughty times Puts bars between the owners and their rights! And so, though yours, not yours .... (3.2.17-20)

She wants him but does not want to betray herself to him, and perhaps she would like it if she could somehow unknowingly conspire with him to outwit her father while observing the letter of the law. It would be ideal if she could "let happen" what she wants to happen, if the issue could be decided by ordeal: "Prove it so, I Let fortune go to hell for it, not I" (20-21; cf. Macbeth's "If chance will have me King, why chance may crown me, I Without my stir;' 1.3.143). Since the knowledge that she could teach Bassanio "how to choose right;' and the possibility of being forsworn, are never very far from her

6

'THE MERCHANT OF VENICE'

mind -for why else should Fortune go to hell? -they cannot be absent from ours. In fact, I think they loom rather large in the odd dialogue leading up to her speech of encouragement. The dialogue is odd, even compelling, because some of the phrases we hear are muffied indicators that Bassanio and Portia would each like to draw from the other (without being found out) a signal of willingness to· dupe the dead father. No clues are actually being given, but the words- if not the speakers- seem to be sounding out the feasibility of giving clues to the readiness to give or receive clues. In the following lines, the repeated term confess, the question about treason, and the phrase "doth teach me answers for deliverance" are meta-clues trying to perform this task without seeming to do so. They tend to float away from their syntactical context toward a more complicit meaning, and they are barely held in place under the sweet nothings of love talk that veil them; they barely sustain the innocence of their speakers: Bass. Por.

Bass.

Por.

Bass. Por. Bass.

Por.

Let me choose, For as I am, I live upon the rack. Upon the rack, Bassanio? Then confess What treason there is mingled with your love. None but that ugly treason of mistrust Which makes me fear th'enjoying of my love. There may as well be amity and life 'Tween snow and fire, as treason and my love. Ay, but I fear you speak upon the rack Where men enforced do speak anything. Promise me life, and I'll confess the truth. Well then, confess and live. Confess and love Had been the very sum of my confession! 0 happy torment, when my torturer Doth teach me answers for deliverance. But let me to my fortune and the caskets. Away then! I am locked in one of them. If you do love me, you will find me out. (3.2.24-41)

Given Portia's apprehensions, she might well entertain varying responses to his impatience: fear of losing him if he fails; fear and desire of his importunate passion (and hers); fear of his haste to win her in order to secure his fortune. Yet her question about treason may also put out feelers that lightly probe his willingness to betray her father. Against Bassanio's hyperbole of the rack she will later pit the image of Hesione chained to a rock. The three lines beginning with "Promise me life, and I'll confess the truth" are interchangeable: if Portia were asking for life and offering to

'THE MERCHANT OF VENICE'

7

teach him "how to choose right," Bassanio could be urging her to confess and live, and Portia would then seem to be recoiling from direct disclosure while keeping his hopes alive. That the assignment of lines is easily reversible indicates both the similarity and the conflict between them. Each says what she or he might like the other to say but would not dream of saying herself or himself Portia plays the inquisitor, but this is a role that, if she were more crass, she could conceivably induce upon Bassanio, assigning him the function of torturing out of her the "answers for deliverance" (for her deliverance as well as his), which she would have too many scruples to offer voluntarily-not only the scruple about being forsworn but also the scruple about crowning Bassanio over her as her monarch. Bassanio's last two lines in the above passage come dangerously close to sounding as if she had in fact triggered in him a suspicion that she was ready to teach him how to choose. Portia quickly backs off, terminating the discussion. She would have reason to shrink from his possessive "let me to my fortune," and perhaps also from the aural trace of "lead" (the verb, not the metal) in "let." If we sense these submerged resonances, they vibrate in her final rejoinder: she might terminate the dialogue because she feels she has secured his complicity and because she fears he has already found her out. "That ugly treason of mistrust" (that ugly mistrust of treason) is at work beneath the surface of these lines. It will not do to say, as I was on the verge of saying, that Bassanio and Portia carefully avoid the conspiratorial possibilities that play about these lines. I do not mean to attribute to either of them- not even to Portiathat much awareness of the desire to actualize the betrayal of the secret. The desire, however, hovers tantalizingly in the air of their language, and their airy words seem by themselves· to submit to the pressure even as they assert the innocence of their speakers' love play. That Bassanio's subsequent demeanor gives absolutely nothing away does not mean that these subtextual implications are absent from the casket scene. Rather it means that they remain present throughout the remainder of the play, affecting ourand Portia's- response to ensuing events. And I think it is worth noting that we are not unprepared for the subtext of the casket scene, since it had been directly conveyed to us earlier by Jessica and Lorenzo in their elopement scene: Jess.

Here, catch this casket; it is worth the pains. I am glad 'tis night-you do not look on me-

For I am much asham'd of my exchange. But love is blind, and lovers cannot see The pretty follies that themselves commit;

8

'THE MERCHANT OF VENICE'

Lor.

Jess.

For if they could, Cupid himself would blush To see me thus transformed to a boy. Descend, for you must be my torch-bearer. What, must I hold a candle to my shames? They in themselves, good sooth, are too too light. Why, 'tis an office of discovery, loveAnd I should be obscur'd. (2.6.33-44)

If these lines were engrossed in a plaque over the casket scene· they would describe both the scenario Portia eschews when she says she will never be forsworn (3.2.n-12) and the psychological conditions that would enable her to drop clues without being forsworn, letting blind Fortune go to hell for it. She will not descend to being Bassanio's torchbearer, holding a candle to her shames and risking the obscurity of being his page and servant, his "boy," for life. 5 Whatever she and Bassanio do will be obscured in the blindness born when fancy-desire and self-deception-is engendered in the eye. During the remainder of the play, Portia uses her wit to defend against the weakness for Bassanio that threatens to betray her into the power of the Royal Merchant Adventurers Club of Venice. Released from the bondage of her father's will into that of her own, she immediately goes to work to establish control over both herself and Bassanio. She does this by ostentatiously relinquishing control: But now I was the lord Of this fair mansion, master of my servants, Queen o'er myself; and even now, but now, This house, these servants, and this same myself Are yours, my lord's. (3.2.167-71)

So free and generous a gift is nevertheless carefully itemized to remind him of her value and worth, and hence of his obligation. He comes, he says, like one contending for a prize, "to give and to receive"; she only gives, and gives him all, and with a flair for self-advertisement that lays him under a burden of gratitude beyond his means to discharge. She then uses the additional gift of the ring to convert this first gift to a loan, a bond, which can be forfeit, but even in imposing that qualification she brings it off as still another generous act. She is a Christian, and she knows the power of the charity that wounds. When she regains the ring in the fifth act, the thematic resemblances to Much Ado become quite noticeable, and Portia's advantage is like that of the conquering Hero in acts. She teases Bassanio about man's inconstancy, and threatens to be as unfaithful as he was. The fact that he gave the ring to a man rather than a woman may seem to clear him, but actually it points

'THE MERCHANT OF VENICE'

9

toward a more dangerous tendency. The act of giving the ring to a man may have the same value as that of giving it to another woman in return for favors, since both acts indicate man's assumption that men are superior to women, that it is men who save each other and the world and who perform great deeds and sacrifices; the pledge to a woman can be superseded by the debt of gratitude owed a man. Once again we see how a culture dominated by the masculine imagination devalues women and asserts male solidarity against feminine efforts to breach the barrier. In her own way, Portia is no less an outsider than Shylock, and her "I stand for sacrifice" is finally not much different from Shylock's "I stand for judgment." If Shylock practices usury, Portia is the master mistress of negative usury. Usury, stripped of its subtleties, amounts to getting more than you give. Negative usury is giving more than you get. More efficient than Jewish or Christian fatherhood, it works like Jewish motherhood to sink hooks of gratitude and obligation deep into the beneficiary's bowels. Against Antonio's failure to get himself crucified, we can place Portia's divine power of mercifixion; she never rains but she pours. "Fair Ladies;' says the admiring Lorenzo, "you drop manna in the way/ Of starved people" (5.1.294-95). But the manna melts in Bassanio's mouth before he can swallow it. Confronted with his surrender of the ring,· he flinches, pleads necessity, is forced to his knees (like Shylock), and is made to promise he will behave. This gives Antonio one last chance to compete with Portia by rescuing Bassanio from blame, but she foils .that by making him the intermediary who formally returns the ring and bids Bassanio "keep it better than the other." Then in another diyine shower, she mercifies Antonio by giving him back his life and living. The last vestige of his power over Bassanio is thus happily ended, and·the age of good neighbors restored. If Dogberry had been standing by, he would have been ready with an appropriate comment: "God save the foundation! ... God keep your worship! ... God restore you to health! I humbly give you leave to depart. And [turning now to Portia and Bassanio] if a merry ending may be wished, God prohibit it!" An amiable constabularial farewell: Come, neighbors.

CHAPTER 2

+ Against the Sink-a-Pace: Sexual and Family Politics in (Much Ado About Nothing' For, hear me, Hero: wooing, wedding, and repenting is as a Scotch jig, a measure, and a cinquepace: the first suit is hot and hasty like a Scotch jig (and full as fantastical); the wedding, mannerly modest, as a measure, full of state and ancientry; and then comes Repentance and with his bad legs falls into the cinquepace faster and faster till he sink into his grave. -Much Ado About Nothing 2.1.63-69 1

"Sink-a-pace" is the way Sir Toby Belch pronounces the name of the five-step dance, and I borrow his pronunciation here because it signifies a slowing-down that beats against the galliard tempo of the dance. In Beatrice's formula, marriage, the afterlife of the wedding, is renamed repentance, and its tempo is divided into the two mutually intensifying rhythms suggested by placing Toby's pronunciation in tandem with Beatrice's description: on the one hand, the decelerating sink-a-pace of the yoke of boredom, the long dull anticlimax to the fantastical jig and stately measure; on the other hand, the frenetic reaction in which the penitent tries ever more desperately and vainly to escape back into jig time, tries to make himself giddy with acceleration and spin himself into forgetfulness. The state and ancien try of the wedding indicate the influence of the older generation, the father's interest in and control of the alliance that seals his daughter's future. Since Repentance is male, the bad-legged dancer may suggest either the husband himself or else the dominant tone that he-the dominant partner-gives to the monogamous relationship he finds himself unnaturally confined in by what Gloucester, in King Lear, called "the order of law." · Beatrice begins her little lecture with "hear me, Hero," and it is difficult, on hearing the ear pun, not to add it to the senses of her name.2 Most

'MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING'

II

of the "noting" about which there is much ado consists of hearing or over'"" hearing. Hero, who says almost nothing in the first two acts, hears a great deal, probably more than is good for her. If she notes what we note, she hears enough to make her feel that her fate in life is to be her father's passport to self-perpetuation, a commodity in the alliance market, the spoils of the love wars-inevitably a conquered Hero, "overmastered with a piece of valiant dust" who guarantees her anonymity by giving her his name and making her the prisoner and trophy that validates the name. Hero's name threatens to be her fate: Mrs. Hero. Yet even this most male-dominated of heroines betrays more than once her sense of her complicity in the sexual politics of Messina. The first clue to. this sense appears in the brief dance scene beginning at 2.1.75. When Hero responds to the masked Don Pedro's request for a promenade, the conditions she imposes sound like a self-description: "So you walk softly and look sweetly and say nothing, I am yours for the walk" (76-77). It is as if she is quite conscious of the principle of behavior to which she conforms, and in offering her role to the Prince she may, by a mere shift of the shifters, indicate the value and objective of that behavior: "So long as I walk softly and look sweetly and say nothing, I am yours for the walk," and for the sink-a-pace as well. During all but one (line 32) of the first 141 lines of the play she had looked on sweetly and silently, saying nothing while her cousin Beatrice crossed swords with Benedick and the other men, and saying nothing· while her father entertained a vapid joke or two about her legitimacy and his own easy assurance that he is no cuckold. "Is this your daughter?" Pedro asks: Leon. Her mother hath many times told me so. Ben. Were you in doub~, sir, that you asked her? Leon. Signior Benedick, no; for then you were a child. (!.!.94-96)

And Pedro, after a. gibe at Benedick, graciously responds that "the lady fathers herself. Be happy, lady, for you are like an honorable father" (9899). Benedick will not leave this alone: "If Signior Leonato be her father, she would not have his head on her shoulders for all Messina, as like him as she is" (roo-ro2). Bizarre as that image is- Hero wearing her father's bearded and graying head as a mask or visored helmet-it may have some truth as an emblem. After 1.1.32, Hero is silent until 2.1.5, where all she can summon up is one softly and sweetly limping line in support of Beatrice's comment that Don John's sour looks give her heartburn: "He is of a very melancholy

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disposition" (5). It is therefore a pleasant surprise to hear an unexpected surge of spirit in her dialogue with the Prince at the masked ball. Remember the situation: the Prince had offered to woo her for Claudio but had been wrongly overheard by her Uncle Antonio's man, who thought Pedro wanted her for himself. As a result, Leonato decided to break the good news· to her so "that she may be the better prepared for an answer." Thus when the visored Prince says, "Lady, will you walk about with your friend," she seems to know who her friend is, and has her answer ready: Hero

So you walk softly and look sweetly and say nothing, I am yours for the walk; and especially when I walk away. Pedro With me in your company? Hero I may say so when I please. Pedro And when please you to say so? Hero When I like your favor, for God defend the lute should be like the case! (2.1.76-83)

Hero peels off her mask of soft, sweet silence and becomes frisky. She tries to flirt, then to banter like Beatrice, and we suddenly see why the Prince's bastard brother had called her "a very forward March-chick" (1.3.49). Her· carrying-on keeps the Prince from getting to the point-telling her he is Claudio- before they move out of earshot. He has to coach her in the art: "speak low if you speak love" (2. 1.87)- "not so loud, not so fast, let's go off by ourselves and be serious." Since he does not know that she expects his proposal (so that if he pretends to be Claudio she will think it really is the Prince pretending to be Claudio), and since· these are the last words we hear, even the audience is not entirely sure of what happens. until over a hundred lines later. When Hero next comes on stage, at 2.1.190, it is in time to hear herself compared to a stolen bird's nest being returned to its owner, and to be traded to Claudio by her father as part of a package deal that includes Leonato's fortunes. She seems easily to reconcile herself both to the match and to the role of commodity, but I think we are allowed at least a momentary doubt as to whether she and Leonato would not have preferred the Prince to Claudio, especially when she hears the Prince casually offer himself to Beatrice after giving Claudio back his bird's nest. Even if we do not seriously entertain this doubt, we cannot help noticing something else about these scenes, namely that Hero's silence is the correlative of Beatrice's witty noise. Beatrice hogs the stage and, by basking in the limelight, does not let Hero and Claudio savor their betrothal; she manages the scene, gives them their cues, gets the affair quickly settled, and then, pushing it aside with "Good Lord, for alliance" (2.1.285), redirects attention to herself and her brief flirtation with the Prince. It is not only that

'MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING

13

the absence of parents seems to give her a freedom Hero might well envy: since no honorable father's head burdens her shoulders, she can father herself and fight men with their own weapons. It is also that in Hero's presence she continually puts down the norms Hero is trained to respect and the institutional functions Hero is destined to fulfill. What I find most interesting about all this is that Hero seems both to admire and envy Beatrice and to disapprove of her. This is suggested in her responses to the masked Prince. Her pert "I may say so when I please" (2.r.8o) reflects a struggle between two contrary pieces of advice she had just heard: on the one hand, Leo nato warning Beatrice that "thou wilt never get thee a husbandif thou be so shrewd of tongue" (2.r.r6-r7) and Antonio counseling Hero to be ruled by her father (2.1.43-44); on the other hand, Beatrice countering Antonio's advice with "Yes, faith. It is my cousin's duty to make cursy and say, 'Father, as it please you.' But yet for all that, cousin, let him be a handsome fellow, or else make another cursy, and say, 'Father, as it please me'" (2.1.45-46). Hero follows with an attempt to masquerade briefly as Beatrice while respecting her filial obligation. If we agree with one editor that she is flaunting "her permission to say 'yes; " then her "when I please" takes on a cutting edge, since it means "when my father lets me." 3 Her effort to say "as it please me" and emulate Beatrice fails in the utterance and turns instead into an implicit rejection of Beatrice's rebellious attitude. If Hero's behavior during the rest of the play lends support. to these narrowly based interpretive remarks, then she is a much more interesting character than she has been made out to be, for she not only reflects the limitations of her culture but also betrays a dim awareness of them. This comes out more clearly in her behavior during the gulling of Beatrice. She tells Ursula that when Beatrice hides to overhear them Our talk must only be of Benedick. When I do name him, let it be thy part To praise him more than ever man did merit. My talk to thee must be how Benedick Is sick in love with Beatrice. Of this matter Is little Cupid's crafty arrow made, That only wounds by hearsay. (3.1.17-23)

Their parts had obviously been assigned by Don Pedro, the Cupid who devised these crafty practices and to whom Hero had promised-with a fine concern for both her own image and the smooth functioning of societythat she would "do any modest office ... to help my cousin to a good husband" (2.1.334). Though she goes into the scene with an altruistic motive, helping soon

14

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turns into hunting. With Ursula she eagerly takes up Cupid's arrow, birdbolt, and fishhook and marches into ambush, impatient to see the golden Beatrice-fish "greedily devour the treacherous bait," the "false sweet bait that we lay for it" (3.1.28, 33). But the bait turns out to ~e neither false nor sweet, and Hero makes sure the hook of love is sharp, so that when the wounded Beatrice swallows the bait she will also swallow her pride. Hero's reciting her part in the Prince's .script- she is to speak of Benedick's lovesickness-only prepares us to see how far she strays from it. For she is herself a weapon of the Prince, and of her father, and of the Men's Club of Messina, and what she wants to harp on is Beatrice's disdain. The vigor with which she berates her cousin suggests that she is doing more than pretending for Beatrice's benefit. She only pretends· to pretend; the game of make-believe is a self-justifying blind, an altruistic mask, from behind which she can stalk Beatrice with "honest slanders" (3.1.84), letting her know what she really thinks of her, what she really feels, without (for once) being interrupted or put down: Disdain and scorn ride sparkling in her eyes, Misprizing what they look on; and her wit Values itself so highly that to her All matter else seems weak. She cannot love, Nor take no shape nor project of affection, She is so self-endeared. (p.)r-s6)

The implied contrast is of course to her own quiet, reliable, unappreciated girl-scout self. Unlike herself, Beatrice "never gives to truth and virtue that/ Which simpleness and merit purchaseth" (3.1.69-70). No, not to be so odd, and from all fashions, As Beatrice is, cannot be commendable. But who dare tell her so? If I should speak, She would mock me into air; 0, she would laugh me Out of myself, press me to death with wit. (72-76)

Hero thinks it wrong to rebel against fathers and husbands. The world must be peopled, and it is disconcerting to be told that marriage is virtue's repentance rather than its reward. Yet something more than her own wounded pride comes through in the language she uses to humble her cousin. There is a touch not only of envy but of grudging admiration in such images as the fish with golden oars cutting the silver stream, and the haggards of the rock whose spirits are "coy and wild" (3.1.35). And consider the following passage, in which Shakespeare oddly allows the usually quiet Hero to break into epic simile: she tells Ursula to bid Beatrice

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15

steal into the pleached bower, Where honeysuckles, ripened by the sun, Forbid the sun to enter-like favorites, Made proud by princes, that advance their pride Against that power that bred it. (3.1.7-n)

This is a displaced analysis of the whole situation, as well as a figurative embodiment of Hero's complex attitude. Beatrice is the rebellious favorite advancing her virgin pride against the masculine forces that ripen it- the solar energy of parents, princes, and admirers. But comparisons are odorous, and the simile does not quite work the way Hero wants it to: the courtly figure strains against the positive quality of its floral subject. It seems natural, lovely, and even fulfilling for honeysuckle to transform the sun's pride and power into its own, to ripen a fragrant shade, make an enclosed garden where women might protect themselves from princely or paternal penetration. What the imagery implies about Hero is that although she criticizes Beatrice's rebellious pride and independence, she finds them attractive and could even, perhaps, wish for the spirit to photosynthesize her own disdain. With the scorn sparkling in her eyes, Beatrice models an enviable alternative that calls into question Hero's pliant submission to the sun. According to the logic of her image, the alternative chosen by Hero is not pollination but pruning: to be married is to have womanhood's natural ripening into freedom interrupted by the wrench that will reduce her to a sprig worn by some conquering hero. Thus by putting down Beatrice and helping her to a husband, Hero either will eliminate the shadow cast over her own self-effacing commitment, or else she will triumph over Beatrice by reducing her to her own level- that is, by condemning her to everlasting redemption. Beatrice's view of marriage as a sink-a-pace of repentance is by no means exceptional in Much Ado About Nothing. Benedick seems to share it: Is't come to this? In faith, hath not the world one man but he will wear his cap with suspicion? Shall I never see a bachelor of threescore again? . . . An thou wilt needs thrust thy neck into a yoke, wear the print of it and sigh away Sundays. (r.r.175-79)

Don John agrees: "What is he for a fool that betroths himself to unquietness?" (1.3.41). It is conventional male wisdom that women are not to be trusted: "0, my Lord, wisdom and blood combating in so tender a body, we have ten proofs to one that blood hath the victory" (2.3.154-56). Leonato says. this for the benefit of the listening Benedick, but as his response to his daughter's defamation later shows, that is no indication that he does not ac-

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MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING'

credit its truth. The ease, indeed the alacrity, with which Leonato, Claudio, and the Prince seize on Hero's guilt confirms what they already suspect, and what they seem happy to suspect. It validates the conventional wisdom, and it affords them the added pleasure of having their sense of merit injured. It is difficult, however, to reconcile the opinion that men are more sinned against than sinning with another that seems to have equal weight: Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more! Men were deceivers ever, One foot in sea, and one on shore; To one thing constant never. Then sigh not so, But let them go, And be you blithe and bonny, Converting all your sounds of woe Into Hey nonny nonny. (2.3.59-67)

The Prince accl~ims this as "a good song" (73), and I think his behavior throughout the play shows that although in this instance he may be referring to the music, in general he. agrees with the sentiment. However playfully, he treats courtship as a military campaign, or a hunt, or a set of behind-the-back maneuvers-practices, as he calls them. He promises Claudio to take Hero's "hearing prisoner with the force/ And strong encounter of my amorous tale" (1.3.292-93); like a good engineer and physician, he will bridge the flood of Claudio's passion, and fit his disease with a remedy (1.1.284-:-93). Since, as Benedick concludes, "man is a giddy thing" (5-4-I06), men as well as women can be tricked into giving up their avowed and natural resistance to love and marriage. And in fact, not only can they be so deceived; they must be, for they would never march off willingly to what both know is a prison that constrains all their natural urges. The difference between men and women in this respect- so goes the regnant ideology of the play- is that women are responsible for their sins but men are not. Male deception and·inconstancy are gifts. that God gives, and their proper name is Manhood. But woman has an awesome responsibility. Since she bears her father's fame and fortune into the future as if-to borrow Benedick's image-she wore his head on her shoulders, and since by marrying she assumes the management not only of her husband's household but also of his reputation and honor, she is expected to conquer blood with wisdom even though the odds are ten to one against it. It may be that men dislike the virtue they both praise and lay siege to: they seem to demand the perfections of Diana only in order to prove that Diana, like Astraea, fled the earth long ago, in the time of good neighbors, leaving it to

'MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING'

!7

the corruptions of Venus. Claudio's bitter but obvious satisfaction in being victimized. owes partly to the fact that it reaffirms his moral superiority: "... as a brother to a sister;' he whines, I "showed/Bashful sincerity and comely love" (4.1.51-52), while you, You seem to me as Dian in her orb, As chaste as is the bud ere it be blown; But you are more intemperate in your blood Than Venus, or those pamp'red animals That rage in savage sensuality. (55-59)

A virgin who under false pretenses seeks associate membership in the Men's Club of Messina deserves whatever sentence she receives. On the other hand, the song tells the members of the club that "the fraud of men was ever so,/ Since summer first was leavy" (2.3.70-71). Men are born deceivers whose nature is to be inconstant, untrustworthy, lustful, contentious, and obsessed with honor, status, and fortune. This enables them to think better of themselves, and worse of women. Not only can't they be blamed for what they cannot help, but their inability to control themselves proves their passionate and virile manliness; it is only their inability to control sinful women that threatens to unman them. Having persuaded themselves of this, they are both more ready to suspect, and more willing to excuse, each other. It is to be expected, for example, that the Prince will swerve from his announced plan and end up wooing Hero for himself But the fault is more Hero's than his, according to Claudio, "for beauty is a witch j Against whose charms faith melteth into blood" (2.I.I6r-62). And though Hero's subsequent betrayal is a heinous crime against the whole Men's Club, Claudio and the Prince find themselves guilty only of a pardonable error in judgment, a position they coolly maintain in the face of Hero's announced death. The members of the Men's Club are securely joined together by the handcuffs of fashion. "Come;' says Dogberry, "let them be opinioned" (4.2.6r), and he conspires with his colleagues and Borachio to bring forth their opinionator, the deformed thief, Fashion, who "goes up and down like a gentleman" (3.3.II7-r8): Bor. Seest thou not ... what a deformed thief this fashion is? how giddily 'a turns about all the hot-bloods between fourteen and five-and-thirty? sometimes fashioning them like Pharaoh's soldiers in the reechy painting, sometime like god Bel's priests in the old church window, sometime like the shaven Hercules in the smirched worm-eaten tapestry, where his codpiece seems as massy as his club? (3.3.121-28)

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Dog . ... And also the watch heard them talk of one Deformed. They say he wears a key in his ear, and a lock hanging by it, ... (5.1.294-96).

In his stimulating essay on Dogberry, John Allen spells out the relevance of "Borachio's thumbnail sketch of fashion's way with gallants": "Freely interpreted, fashion first creates the model soldier, gorgeously arrayed but overconfident and bent on vengeance as a means of gaining honor; then it supplies him with the outward attributes of one who cherishes a sacred trust, although he secretly abuses it; and finally it ushers in his destined role as a uxorious lover, tricked by appetite into an unmanly servitude which passes for devotion to his female captor." 4 Fashion, as Borachio sees it, signifies the conception of one's self which one presents, or wishes to present, to the public eye. . . . Like a "deformed thief" ... fashion steals from men their knowledge of themselves, reducing them to posturing automatons who nourish the illusion of their individuality while actually possessing none, because they do not even choose the fashions they will wear but, whether they will or not, are fashioned to them. . . . The spoils of fashion are most frequently the qualities ... which nurture and solidify essential interpersonal bonds.5

Allen perhaps overstresses the extent to which the play presents men as the slaves of fashion. A clue to their own complicity in fashioning the fashion that robs them is given in Dogberry's charge to the watch. He tells them that "the most peaceable way" to keep order is not to interfere with those who disturb the peace. Item: Dog. If you meet a thief, you may suspect him, by virtue of your office, to be no true man; and for such kind of men, the less you meddle or make with them, why, the more is for your honesty. 2. Watch If we know him to be a thief, shall we not lay hands on him? Dog. Truly, by your office you may; but I think they that touch pitch will be defiled. The most peaceable way for you, if you do take a thief, is to let him show himself what he is, and steal out of your company. (3.3·47-56)

The Prince had· observed in his first speech that "the fashion of the world is to avoid cost" (r.2.86), and the constable whose office is "to present the Prince's own person" (3.3.69) agrees: "indeed the watch ought to offend no man" (3.3.74-75). Dogberry's instructions for maintaining respectability are worthy of Erasmus's Folly. The comic paradox giving them their point is that by refusing to associate with thieves (i.e., refusing to apprehend them) the watchman becomes their associate. He confirms his illusion of honesty and joins the community of thieves in one and the same act. And he is indeed su-

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I9

perior to the known thief in his ability to hide his thievery from himself, to rob himself of self-knowledge, by redistributing complicities. Avoiding the cost and preserving the peace of the self-deception Folly called philautia, he becomes, like the thief, "no true man," and he thrives on the ethical confusions of his situation, confusions that are beautifully expressed in the watch's language: Dog. Are you good men and true? Verges. Yea, or else it were pity but they should suffer salvation, body and soul. Dog. Nay, that were a punishment too good for them if they should have any allegiance in them, being chosen for the Prince's watch. (3.3.I-6)

It is by meaning and trying to be good men that they both enable thievery and legitimize their complicity. This does not make them less good and true; it only suggests that "being good" as Shakespeare presents it is a more difficult, a more complex and maculate, process than the purer whole-cloth conception of goodness- and of their own goodness- entertained by the characters. It seems unavoidable, then, that Shakespeare's "good" characters should merit salvation and damnation simultaneously. To suffer salvation, to be condemned to redemption, is to suffer the self-deception of philautia. Yet this very illusion of self-esteem is inseparable in most human beings from their good intentions no less than from the more questionable consequences of their actions. That the watch should be punished for their allegiance to the Prince extends this reasoning to the principal characters. The use of the term Prince itself implies this. Since Leonato is listed in the drama tis personae as the Governor of Messina, and· Pedro as the Prince of Arragon, "Prince" in this scene comprehends both of these ethically "vagrom" figures, one the leading elder of the group and the other its selfconfessed love-god. Thus the watch "presents" in its collective person the principles that underlie and unify the play's two wars-that is, between generations and between genders. And this extension from subplot to main plot is manifested in other ways. According to Dogberry, the ideal watchman is "desartless," literate, and "senseless," one who can "comprehend all vagrom men" but can talk himself into releasing them on the grounds that "they are not the men you took them for" (3.3.8-45). This standard makes "desartless" an accurate term, fusing "unworthy" with "disingenuous," and it makes "senseless" mean "self-blinding." Combined with the requirement of literacy, the formula·produces an exact description of the members of the Men's Club of Messina. They create and empower the deformed thief that robs them of

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the qualities which, in Allen's words, "nurture and solidify essential interpersonal bonds." Self-robbing thieves who preserve self-esteem by appropriating Fashion's image, they enable the deformed thief to present their person and go "up and down like a gentleman;' an arbiter elegantiae. "Fashion" is roughly synonymous with Erasmian folly and philautia. It is in part the ability to avoid cost to oneself by inflicting and blaming it on others. But it is more than that, as Borachio's words reveal. Passing from Pharaoh's soldiers through the priests of Bel to the shaven Hercules, his speech charts a move from war through specious veneration of an idol to virility unmanned by love. The connection of Bel to the themes of the play is less apparent, but Shakespeare may have chosen Bel because as the root of both bellum and bella it provides an etymological transition while referring to an instance of false devotion directed presumptively toward concern for the idol but actually toward oneself. The devotion of Cupid's proud subjects is not unlike that of the priests of Bel. The point of the sequence is borne out by the general sense that in Messina war and love are interchangeable, because war is the paradigm of love. Love of contention gives way to love as contention, and the honeyed rhetoric in which Claudio describes his transformation does not conceal the interchangeability suggested both by his syntax and by his subsequent behavior: now that "war-thoughts I Have left their places vacant, in their rooms I Come thronging soft and delicate desires" (r.r.269-71). The fashion that turns the hot-bloods about reflects their apprehensive reliance on power, their secret worship of self-gratification, and their excessive attachment to machismo. But as attempts to avoid cost, these styles of behavior only bring it on; Borachio's examples are all losers, defeated by the true God and woman. And since men were deceivers and self-deceivers ever-since "the fraud of men was ever so" -today's hot-blood adopts styles as fusty and worn as the art that communicates them. The Men's Club of Messina can trace its pedigree back to the days of Egypt, Babylon, and Hercules; it adopts and rehabilitates those outworn fashions because it shares the premises of power, cost-avoidance, and fear of love and women that have integrated the male community since summer first was leavy. If the gallants of Messina are doomed to repeat history, it may be because they enjoy their pain. Their chosen fashions betray their misprision of power, their allegiance to the fine art of self-defeat and its long history. Perhaps they avoid cost at one level only to encounter it at another. Like Leonato they come to meet their trouble and embrace their charge too willingly (r.r.85-93). Their club insignia may be the badge of which the messenger spoke: "joy could not show itself modest enough without a badge of bitterness" (r.r.J9-2I).

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21

If I may digress for a moment to cite a northern analogy, the same bylaws are in effect in the Gloucester Chapter of the Gentleman's Club of Old Britain. Gloucester, an old hand at cost-avoidance, tells Kent that Edmund's mother was fair, "there was good sport at his making, and the whoreson must be acknowledged" (King Lear I.I.19-23). If that sport smells of any fault, it belongs to the mother for her intemperance and carelessness, and to her son for his saucy disobedience in not remaining nothing. The father's language identifies the mother as a whore, and Edmund not as his bastard but as her son, and it suggests that mother and son conspired against father in producing the knave before he was sent for. It is thus to father's credit that he overlooks the inconvenience they have caused him, and assumes the consequences of their fault as his own burden: "His breeding, Sir, hath been at my charge" (1.1.8). This piece of bravery is partly a brag, alluding to his notorious accomplishment in lusty stealth, and partly a disclaimer of full responsibility. He seems eager to impress on Kent his paired accomplishments, in good sport and in sportsmanlike conduct. And this, incidentally, may throw some light on the convenient presence in Messina of Don John the Bastard. "Never came trouble to my house in the likeness of your grace" (1.!.88-89), Leonato tells the Prince, and this is because trouble comes in the .likeness of Don John, who seems eager to claim even more culpability than he deserves. The Prince drags him around on a leash, like a pet Caliban, so that Don John may receive blame for the trouble which, although it arises from the very foundation of Messina's "dissembly," is orchestrated by Don Pedro's practices. Both brothers, in fact, are practitioners, and the chief difference between them is that the Prince is much better at it. Don John is a comic villain who can hardly twirl his moustache without scratching his eye. 6 The ease with which his practice (put into play by Borachio and Conrade) succeeds, therefore, tells us more about the susceptibility of Messina than about the Bastard's motiveless malignancy. For the villain to succeed, everyone has to collaborate in helping him on with his bumbling villainies. But this is not something it would be useful for him to find out, for he struts his autonomy and -like Edmund in King Lear- takes a certain swashbuckling pride in virile and honorable professions of plainspeaking wickedness, though the pleasure of feeling himself to be a man, more sinning than sinned against, is occasionally justified by an appeal to his status as a pariah, more sinned against than sinning. It is sometimes hard to distinguish his own wing of the Men's Club from his brother's. Conrade matches Claudio, and Borachio Benedick, in the collegiate locker room of wit-crackers, although the latter two show better stuff before the play ends.7 The play's two scapegoats are a bastard named Trouble and a woman

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named Hero, and his bastardy tells us where the blame lies: like Edmund, no doubt, he is a testimony both to his father's prowess and to his mother's sin- a by-product of the frailty named Woman. If this is how men choose to distribute praise and blame, we can understand why they expect women to fail to live up to their responsibilities. If men are deceivers ever, their first deception will be to trick women into loving them. And since women have to be won by the practices of men who flaunt their God-given powers of deception and inconstancy as the jewels of manhood, there is no reason to expect the ladies to· honor their commitments. On the other hand, there is no reason not to demand it of them and chastise them when (as is likely) they betray their menfolk into shame. For women are, after all, in a double bond: they are to be wives as well as lovers. That is, they are not only prizes of war, but also commodities in the marriage market. Daughters are ducats. Marriage is a woman's vocation; it is her formal induction into the Men's Club; it is therefore her salvation; to be condemned into everlasting redemption is the fate she was born for. Man, however, was not born for wedlock. It is an accidental inconvenience of the system that after a man has amused himself in hunting his lawful prey, and succeeded in trapping her, he is then expected to deny his nature and spend his life by her side. Men have, then, a bad conscience about their use and abuse of women in both love and marriage. They know that they do not deserve the loyalty and respect they command women to .give them; they suspect their place, and they also suspect that women do. But this raises a question: If they are apprehensive about their own ability to be good husbands, is it because they choose to believe themselves born deceivers, or does it work the other way round? That is, could it be because marriage strikes them as a difficult, confining, and dull sink-a-pace that they choose to accept their fate as deceivers who are by nature unfit for it? Like the swan-brides in Spenser's Prothalamion, they resist the sink-a-pace because in various ways domesticity · presages helplessness and death. For one thing, it means committing their reputation to wives in whom the power of cuckoldry is legally invested. For another, it spells the death of their most precious experience: their companionship with other men. The solidarity of the locker room; the shared vicissitudes of love and war; the easy trust and distrust engendered in friends who are second selves to each other; their common allegiance to selfdeception- these are doomed to dissolve after the wedding. Wooing bonds men together in a competitive or cooperative association that marriage threatens; therefore when marriage beckons, men no less than women have to be forcibly separated from the arms of their loved ones. Thus Claudio

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23

clings to the Prince before his wedding, begging to escort him to Arragon as soon as the marriage is consummated. At the end of the play, Benedick dallies among his fellow bachelors, and finally, as the turncoats fall away, the Prince sadly stands alone, like the Farmer in the Dell's proverbial cheese. Male solidarity is never more in evidence than at its twilight. Everyone in the last scene does a Scotch jig to avoid the imminent dispersal through marriage. Benedick and Beatrice resume their earlier roles and seem for a moment ready to shy away from conjugation. The college of wit-crackers shoot off their last salvo of bad marriage jokes, and reaffirm their commitment to inconstancy. After the events of the fourth act, during which everyone was divided against everyone else, all have succeeded in escaping from that dream of unhappiness-come-true, and now, deceivers ever, they wake themselves with laughing (2.1.308-9) and take their hearing prisoner with the lock of fashion. One after the other, the men rejoin the ranks and redirect their suspicions away from themselves toward the fugitive Don John. At last the Men's Club is back together; but only for a moment. The Club is about to be dismembered. The work-that is, the play-ofLeonato, Claudio, and Benedick is over, even the Prince is urged to marry, and all will soon scatter to their newly full or empty households. Much Ado About Nothing is an endless moniment for short time, and what it celebrates, as the machinery of the sink-a-pace turns over, is the ending of happiness. This ending begins "aspiciously" enough when Claudio addresses his second wedding as one of the reckonings to be settled, a debt he owes and is owed, or a score he must repay. The first reckoning is with Benedick, who has just genially insulted him: Clau.

Ant. Clau. Leon. Clau.

Hero Clau.

Hero

For this I owe you. Here comes other reck'nings. Which is the lady I must seize upon? This same is she, and I do give you her. Why, then, she's mine. Sweet, let me see your face. No, that you shall not till you take her hand Before this friar and swear to marry her. Give me your hand before this holy friar. I am your husband if you like of me. And when I lived I was your other wife; And when you loved you were my other husband. Another Hero! Nothing certainer. One Hero died defiled; but I do live, And surely as I live, I am a maid. (5.4.52-64)

The language emphasizes the forms of apprehension. Claudio's is aggressive ("the lady I must seize upon"), Leonato's defensive. Having prayed at her

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"tomb;' the wolves continue to prey (5.3.25). But this time Hero is more than a match for Claudio. The parallels between lines 6o and 6r bring out the biting contrast produced by the difference between "when I lived" and "when you loved": his "love" is no more real than her "death," and we do not forget that the first marriage failed to take place. Nothing is "certainer" to Hero than that, although she was •defiled by slander, her virtue has triumphed over all efforts-and especially over Claudio's-to kill it. Her emphatic assertion of virginity pronounces Claudio guilty. She has the advantage and knows how to call in "other reck'nings." To borrow Portia's words, she capitalizes on "my vantage to exclaim on you" (Merchant of Venice 3.2.!74). Hero makes it clear that the new Hero is simply the old with a vengeance, and though Claudio tries to shuffie off the implication with "another Hero;' the Prince accepts it: "The former Hero! Hero that is dead!" (5.4.65). Her words reflect mordantly on the friar's self-delighting penchant for staging spiritual scenarios.8 They remind us that this community harbors no twice-born souls. The friar's practice is a travesty on religious psychology, conversion, and ethical self-transformation. It conspicuously excludes what it parodies, and substitutes a mere plot mechanism equal in ethical quality or causality to the bed trick. His terms of death and rebirth, being metaphorical and counterfactual, work by contraries to affirm that Hero and Claudio remain the same. No one is new-created by verbal or theatrical magic. The dialogue quoted above glances toward the conventional reconciliation. But the parties to it would have to be reborn in a new heaven and earth, a new Messina, before they could enter into a relationship free of the assumptions of their community. Their words, and the friar's game, evoke this possibility only to dispel it. They do not cut through the bond; they only nick it, and the play happily concludes, for Much Ado is a Shakespearean comedy-that is, an experience that ends in the nick of time.

CHAPTER

3

+ (King Lear': The Lear Family Romance

This reading of some aspects of King Lear's relationship to his daughters is one of a series of reinterpretations of Shakespeare motivated by an interest in returning to a modified character-and-action approach- the approach for which A. C. Bradley is famous or nefarious. The chief differences between my version and his are as follows: (I) I have no interest in, for example, how many children Lady Macbeth had. But I do have an interest in her interest in, and fear of, children as these affect and illuminate her relationship with Macbeth. And I have an interest in the abiding nature of that relationship as it reveals or betrays itself to us in the language they speak. That relationship antedates the opening of the play. When Lady Macbeth comes onstage reading Macbeth's letter and soliloquizing, we are asked to attend to the shifting nuances of a settled relationship, and asked at the same time to wonder whether it is, in this very moment, on the verge· of being permanently unsettled. We are therefore expected to assume, and so to reconstruct, a generalized past as the locus of stable or settled relationships. We are asked to. deduce and to evaluate these relationships at least in enough detail to enable us to respond both to their contribution to the present conflict and to the jeopardy with which it threatens them. (2) I look for themes and forms of action that are centrally psychological and ethical, and are so in a way that enables us to use the resources of the thought and experience of our time. At the same time I think it is

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important to avoid succumbing to system-bound language, to systematic terminology such as that of psychoanalysis, and to try for a mix between ordinary language and the terminological suggestions offered by the language of any particular play. (3) I look for those themes and forms of action not only in individual characters but also in the community or "group" of the play as a whole. By "community" or "group" I mean not only an aggregate of individuals but also the structured social and political relationships in which they find themselves as members of families, dynasties, courts, age groups, sex groups, kingdoms, etc. I think the institutions and structured relationships depicted in any play compose into a coherent and identifiable image of an institutional order specific (but not necessarily unique) to that play. (4) Putting items 2 and 3 together indicates the general orientation of this enterprise: I want to examine the way Shakespeare depicts the interaction of psyche with society in order to explore questions of the following kind: What are the social resources available to self-deception? How do characters use the roles and relationships of love, courtship, and marriage, of family, court, and kingdom, of race, religion, and gender, to validate their pursuits of power or pleasure or pain or self-interest or love? (5) Behind the particular themes and questions instanced above lurks a more abstract or pervasive question. Do the plays dramatize the thesis that individuals are not passive victims or servants of traditional arrangements, or of a divine order, but that they actively conspire with their institutions to re-create their world and society? And a correlative thesis: In so conspiring, do they jeopardize basic "natural" relationships? Relationships between parent and child, sibling and sibling, king and subject, leader and follower, woman and man, lover and lover, friend and friend? (6) My central interest, and one that integrates the previous items, is in a theme I call "redistributing complicities," and in the way Shakespeare's language carries the burden of redistribution. The ethical donnee of any play includes a range of characters from bad through mixed to good. Generally, characters come onstage displaying their particular ethical affiliation, after which two different kinds of things can happen. The characters may shift position on the ethical spectrum; and the play may offer the audience a model of the ethical range that differs from any particular character's version of it. It is the second of these with which I am especially concerned. Between the native's and the observer's models, the basic differences will be those of contrast and placement: the character's model will have more intense lights and darks than our model, and the character will tend to locate himself or herself closer to one pole or the other. This. does not

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mean that the audience is asked to condone duplicity, betrayal, or murder. It only means that the roots of such actions are not confined to the shallow plots of individual characters but spread down and out through the whole community or group of the play. Don John the Bastard, in Much Ado About Nothing, offers a paradigm case. His name is clearly Villain, or Trouble: his magnificent brother, the good Don Pedro, is wise enough to entrust him with a clog and muzzle and drag him along wherever he goes. "Never," says Leonato to Pedro, "never came trouble to my house in the likeness of your grace"; that is because it comes in the likeness of Don John, who seems eager to claim even more culpability than he deserves. Such characters, like ethical vacuums, suck the guilt out of their social environment. But for the character labeled Villain to succeed, everyone has to collaborate in helping him on with his wickedness. At the ethical poles of King Lear are two scenarios: the mixed and good characters try to make others and themselves believe "I am more sinned against than sinning." The bad characters try to make others and themselves believe "I am more sinning than sinned against." My hypothesis about the play is that while any character pledges allegiance to one of these two scenarios, his language also betrays the presence of the second challenging the first. The language reveals the complementary pressures of a self-justifying function and a scapegoating function. It shows us that characters tend to avoid recognizing their own contributions to the difficulties they face, while magnifying the complicity· of others. Their scenarios are frequently cast in the simplistic mode of folklore, fairy tale, or parable: for example, the Good and Bad Sibling, the Outcast and Usurping King, the Terrible Father and Helpless Child (or Helpless Father and Terrible Child). These parabolic conceptions often reinforce the character's sense of the inevitability of his or her plight, and they seem to have the effect that Freud ascribed to dreams in that their displacements and condensations enable the dreamer character to go on sleeping, to delay reentry into a world or knowledge or self whose reality is feared. Such themes and issues provide a background for my reading. I shall deal with some of them only incidentally and indirectly, but it will help to keep them in mind as we turn to the play's first scene and its first family.

+ The play opens with Kent and Gloucester showing mild surprise at the fact that although they always thought "the King had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall, ... now, in the division of the kingdom, it appears not which of the Dukes he values most" (r.r.r-s). 1 Then Glouces-

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ter utters a tortuous phrase that will bear looking at: "for equalities were so weigh'd that curiosity in neither can make choice of either's moiety" (5-7). Kenneth Muir, the Arden editor, brings out the uneasiness in his paraphrase: "the most careful scrutiny of either share could not induce either of the dukes to prefer his fellow's portion to their own." The weight of the phrase falls on the word curiosity, which Muir glosses as "the most minute and scrupulous attention or examination." Edmund later speaks of the inheritance laws covering primogeniture and bastardy as "the curiosity of nations." And in I.4 Lear chooses to blame the "faint neglect" of Goneril's household on "mine own jealous curiosity." Here Steevens's gloss suggests the force of the term applied by Gloucester to the two Dukes: "a punctilious jealousy, resulting from a scrupulous watchfulness of his own dignity" (in Muir, p. 79). Gloucester's phrase implies that each duke is scrupulously on the lookout for the chance to have his sense of his own merit injured. But it implies more than that, because it states Lear's perception of the case and his intention regarding it. Lear assumes that both dukes are anticipating an unequal distribution and waiting to start something- against each other or against him. And he will frustrate that impulse, deny them the satisfaction of injured merit. We learn, of course, that Lear is wrong, that Albany is more loyal, and that Lear's affecting Albany may have something to do with Cornwall's quick disaffection and Albany's weakness. We also learn that Gloucester appears to have been ignorant of Lear's darker purpose, to give the dukes equal thirds smaller than Cordelia's. But Gloucester's phrase prepares us to see that Lear views the political situation confronting him primarily under the aspect of a potential conflict that threatens his own future. And since he is about to give his youngest daughter more than the wives of the two dukes, there is no reason why he should not view it in this light. When Lear addresses the dukes directly, his careful rhetoric betrays the same concern: Know that we have divided In three our kingdom: and 'tis our fast intent To shake all cares and business from our age, Conferring them on younger strengths, while we Unburthen'd crawl toward death. (r.L37-41)

Note the articulated tension between the vigor implied by "our fast intent to shake" and the exaggerated weariness of "unburthen'd crawl toward death." The former warns his auditors not to underestimate his manhoodin spite of their younger strengths, while the latter prepares them to indulge in the weaknesses of age. Lear continues:

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29

Our son of Cornwall, And you, our no less loving son of Albany, We have this hour a constant will to publish Our daughters' several dowers, that future strife May be prevented now. The Princes, France and Burgundy, Great rivals in our youngest daughter's love, Long in our court have made their amorous sojourn, And here are to be answer'd. (41-48)

Lear does not say "no less beloved;' but "no ·less loving"; not "I love you both equally," but "each of you loves me equally." This is a way of reminding them that they are-or should be-contending with each other in loving Lear. The epithet "no less loving" is reserved for Albany as a qualifier that applies to Cornwall only retroactively, making the first vocative ("Our son of Cornwall") a little terse or brusque by contrast. Yet as a qualifier, it is only mildly commendatory ("not less loving" than Cornwall; but perhaps not more). Since we have been told Lear affects Albany more than Cornwall, we may feel that his difference of phrasing shows a bias in the very act of disclaiming it, and that both his language and strategy are working to set the dukes against each other even as he proclaims his intention to keep peace between them: strife now between duke and duke may indeed prevent future strife between the united dukes and Lear. Lear's reference to France and Burgundy adds a new set of rivals. As the succeeding action shows, they are rivals not only with each other but also with him, and-so far as land is concerned-with the husbands of Goneril and Regan. There is a certain bite in the phrase "amorous sojourn" that reflects back on "no less loving." The old king divines that none· of them is there for love of him, that the princes are probably not even there for love of the daughter he loves, and that they would deprive him of her for the land and power she symbolizes. But he can take pride in having kept them all waiting-the dukes for their dowries, the princes for his answer-until the moment when he can beat them at their own game, using their various desires and interests to effect his darker purpose. Part of this purpose seems to be to unburden himself of obligations by loading them on "the younger strengths" in this final burst of beneficence. He will show them once more how kind a father he· is, how dear they are to him, by giving them all. I say "once more" because in subsequent scenes Lear's angry thoughts turn often to the gratitude owed a father merely as his children's genitor: to give them birth is automatically to be kind and literally to be generous in an absolute sense that establishes a permanent inequity in the relationship. His children must always be diligent in honoring their bond to their creator,

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must say "ay" and "no" to everything he says, and tell him he is everything (4.6.roo,ro6). He, on the other hand, can rest on his laurels as their only begetter, can maintain that first advantage at little cost to himself, though it may be useful to remind them occasionally of the sacrifices he has made for them. This seems to be the sense of the paternal prerogative that Lear has carried with him through life and into the play. Now, as the play opens, he finds. himself in the position of having to give them all more strenuously and conspicuously than usual. He inflicts his generosity upon them with a show of power that betrays his sense of the weakness of his position. We can feel this in the tortuous. politics of his darker purpose, and in the tactical impulse behind the words with which he calls into play a third set of rivals. Tell me, my daughters, (Since now we will divest us both of rule, Interest of territory, cares of state) Which of you shall we say doth love us most? That we our largest bounty may extend Where nature doth with merit challenge. (r.r.48-53)

Not "which of you doth say you love us most;' but "which of you shall we say doth love us most?"- the judgment and the reward will be his to confer, and will be arbitrarily determined by what he decides to say~ Furthermore, their expressions of love are compromised in advance by the nature of his request, since he is asking them to show how amorous they are, not so much for him as for his land. Again, the rivalry cuts two ways: his daughters are to compete with each other, and he is now competing with them. If they want to strip him of his power, they will have to pay for it by risking a humiliating posture- sitting up and begging, crowing for cheese. And the bargain he offers is so unequal- all that land and power for a little rhetorical fluff-that theywill suffer the wound of his vigorous charity for years to come. The terms of his divestiture are therefore in the nature of a challenge thrown down to his children. For Goneril and Regan the psychological outlook is more hopeless than for Cordelia, because Lear's challenge to them is more specious. Why are their dowries withheld· until after their marriages, while Cordelia's is to be given before hers? Kittredge and the Cambridge New Shakespeare editors tell us this means the older daughters must have been recently married. This may be so, but later, when Lear says, "I gave you all," Regan replies, "and in goodtime you gave it" (2.4.252). Setting aside the Fool's favorite themethe folly of giving away his land-the question posed by his preferential

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JI

treatment is, why did he do it in this particular manner? On the face of it, his darker purpose was to give Cordelia the most opulent third of the kingdom and then, should that draw in exchange the vines of France or milk of Burgundy, move in with Cordelia so as to take advantage of his largest bounty combined with that of his new son-in-law: "I loved her most and thought to set my rest/ On her kind nursery." Stanley Cavell suggests that part of Lear's strategy may have been "to put Cordelia into the position of being denied her dowry, so that he will not lose her in marriage." 2 But even if he cannot prevent her marrying, he can give her in such a way as to get her back again by competing with her husband for her attention, and conferring on her the offices of the nursery-becoming his own grandson, outwitting death, in short, making her his mother during his second childhood. None of this, however, required the particular strategy unfolded during the first scene. Having flaunted his power by withholding their dowries, Lear with gratuitous cruelty plans to use, deceive, and humiliate Goneril and Regan in order to accentuate Cordelia's triumph and his partiality. Beneath the surface, then, his darker purpose seems to be to play on everyone's curiosity and to stir up as much envy and contention as he can among the "younger strengths" with the aim of dominating and dividing them, humbling and punishing them. Lear's behavior in this scene displays an ambivalence that is barely under control, and of which he can scarcely be unaware. Consider, for example, the words with which he reassigns Cordelia's portion to the other two sons-in-law: Cornwall and Albany, With my two daughters' dowers digest the third; Let pride, which she calls plainness, marry her. I do invest you jointly with my power, Pre-eminence, and all the large effects That troop with majesty. Ourself, by monthly course, With reservation of an hundred knights By you to be sustain'd, shall our abode Make with you by due turn. Only we shall retain The name and all th' addition to a king; the sway, Revenue, execution of the rest, Beloved sons, be yours: which to confirm, This coronet part between you. (I.I.127-39)

His act of giving quickly turns into a new imposition when the power and large effects that troop with majesty materialize in the next sentence as his hundred knights. What he bestows in one line he takes away in another. His

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beloved land-hungry sons are first invited to gorge their appetites on Cordelia's portion. At the end Lear invites them to part-and thus, no doubt, to fight over-the coronet. In this scene, then, he formally renounces power and property primarily with the intention of keeping informal control over them. As if afraid that the slow crawl toward death will inevitably leave him helpless, he tries to divide others, and lay them under obligation, against the time when he will no longer be able to deploy the political and psychological resources of kingship and fatherhood. By divesting himself of power he can hope to forestall or inhibit the more absolute divestiture he fears at the hands of others.

+ Lear's darker purpose is complicated and confused by an unruly range of feelings, but Shakespeare does not let the truth of his situation escape the old king any more than it escapes us. There is a still darker purpose under Lear's arbitrary and willful behavior, dark even to him but certainly not absent from his consciousness. As I said, he can hardly be unaware of the implications of his behavior- unaware that his giving was a form of taking; his paternal kindness a form of hostility; his renunciation an effort to retain his power; his retention of power a response to the terror of the impotency of old age. Cavell observes that Lear felt unworthy of love, and S. L. Goldberg agrees that he "needs others' respect in order to respect himself," and that "the very urgency of this need betrays the fear behind itwhich is a form not of self ignorance, but rather of self-mistrust, as if he cannot believe . . . in his mere self as worth the love and respect it needs." 3 To this insight I add one qualification: the source of his fear and need must lie in patterns of feeling, behavior, and relationship that predate the opening scene of the play. This is implicit in Goldberg's fine appraisal of Goneril, though he does not make enough of it. When Goneril says, "let me still take away the harms I fear,/ Not fear still to be taken" (r.4.339-400), she may be merely rationalizing, but the confidential remark~ she and Regan exchange at the end of the opening scene would support the thesis that in her case apprehension genuinely cuts both ways: apprehension as the desire to take (ap-prehend) is a function of apprehension as the fear of being taken. I agree with Goldberg that Goneril is more than "a hypocritical ingrate." She knows Lear's heart, he argues, "in the only terms in which he has given it to her;' and his behavior partly justifies her fears. Her response to the world is primarily defensive: "the control visible in Goneril's speech is the

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33

kind necessary to keep the world at bay, as though she could not cope with her experience of it otherwise." She "can see personal relationships only as power-relationships." 4 Since he is describing Goneril's "moral outlook" and its expression in her speech patterns- in tone, imagery, and rhythm- Goldberg would seem to be dealing with relatively stable aspects of her character, which raises the question he never quite asks: How did she get that way? -a question leading directly to Lear. For isn't her defensiveness ultimately the mirror and consequence of his? It must be an index to his habitual, not merely his recent, behavior; an index to a chronic rather than a critical problem of relationship. Goneril reveals Lear's basic approach to his children, to paternity and filiality, by her reflection of it. If he too has always treated "personal relationships . . . as power-relationships" from some basic fear, and has at the same time proclaimed his love and generosity, then he must be more the cause of her reaction to him than he is willing to admit. Where he differs from her is that the harm he fears comes as much from within himself as from others. "He has it in him so much nearer home, to scare himself with his own desert places;' to paraphrase Robert Frost's description of the feeling. Even the weakest twinge of recognition, the dimmest sense of his complicity, could have brought home to him the reason for, the justness of, his suspicion that he was unloved- the sense, that is, that he had never truly loved his children, that he had always used his paternal authority to command, demand, tease, and humiliate, that the hypocrisy of Goneril and Regan only reflected his own ambivalence in wanting to be flattered while having no respect for, no trust in, the flatterers. I find him quite openly showing contempt for his daughters and behaving otherwise in a manner calculated to make his court and family despise him. I think that in hurting and punishing Cordelia he is trying to hurt and punish himself, as if he finds out too late that he is the one who should have studied deserving and who, if he is genuinely loved, is under an obligation he could never, given his paternal premises, repay. Some ofthese feelings, in all their confusion, press into the flamboyant statement with which he unfathers Cordelia at I.I.II6-zo: The barbarous Scythian Or he that makes his generation messes To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom Be as well neighbor'd, p{tied, and reliev'd, As thou my sometime daughter.

Commentators point out that "generation" can mean either parents orchildren; both are potentially cannibalistic: in the Scythian mode of relationship each generation views the other apprehensively as a source of danger

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and of food. Against Lear's intention to liken Cordelia to the Scythian, the phrase likens the Scythian to Lear. It works as unintended self-caricature, and its hyperbolic quality measures the pressure of displacement. Doesn't Lear neighbor, pity, and relieve himself in doing and saying this to Cordelia? And doesn't he, equally, hate himself for it? In turning his hate outward toward Cordelia and the Scythian, he goes on doing precisely the thing that will feed self-mistrust, the suspicion of his own unworthiness. In the first scene, Lear seems on the verge of forcing ·others to make him acknowledge not so much what they really think about him, but what he has always thought about them, and therefore- by a kind of recoilabout himself. The darkest purpose, the one he keeps deflecting outward, can only be called self-retribution and self-wounding; the impulse to suffer the pain he obscurely but deeply feels he deserves, to bring on himself the judgment that alone "can tell me who I am" (1.4.238). If successful, the urge to self-retribution would have made this scene an awakening toward genuine, though possibly unbearable, self-knowledge. But Lear cannot let this happen, and he spends the rest of the play trying continually to regain (or remain in) the sleep of self-deception that the darkest purpose continually impels him to renounce. He cannot bring himself to be his own judge or to risk facing the punishment he feels he deserves. Suppose that in his confusion of darker purposes he sets up the scene with Cordelia partly to encourage self-wounding through mutual rejection. In the single act by which he could keep her from a husband and lose her himself, he would both prove his jealousy to himself and punish it. But when he commits his future to his other two daughters and their husbands, he shies away from the harder task of self-judgment to the easier task of self-justification. This provides what I think is a better alternative to the conventional reading, which accedes to Lear's perspective in viewing him as the foolish victim of his two cruel daughters. Lear knows that it is safer to make Regan and Goneril his chastisers, than Cordelia. He can more easily goad them into treating him shabbily. At the same time he can evade arousing his guilty awareness of the extent to which he has already victimized them, and he can do this by making himself their victim and making them his scapegoats. We can, then, distinguish in his speech and behavior the working out of two purposes additional to his own consciously proclaimed "darker purpose"- by which he means dark to the others but not to him. The two I have in mind are initially both dark to him, and I shall speak of them as darker and darkest: the darker purpose moves him to aggression against others; the darkest purpose moves him to aggression against himself. The darker purpose justifies itself accord-

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35

ing to the logic of the victim's formula, "more sinned against than sinning"; the darkest purpose justifies itself according to the logic of "more sinning than sinned against." Lear quickly discovers the presence within him of the darker purpose, and its usefulness, and he puts it to work. Among its uses are its effectiveness against the efforts of the darkest purpose to make itself known. It is the darker purpose, of course, that counsels madness. At the same time, to the degree that the darker purpose is effective in this policing function, it exacerbates the darkest purpose. Aggression against others, the projective distortion of guilt feelings, is the bad faith that creates, intensifies, and festers the darkest purpose. Finally, although the darker and the darkest are cross-purposes, they may lead to the same practical effect. In acts I and 2, Lear is moved by both together to get himself locked out of doors. We should note, especially in 1.4 and 2.4, the extent to which Lear provokes Goneril and Regan into their aggressive and mean behavior. Not that they are blameless-far from it- but he shares in their complicity more than he seems willing to admit. From the beginning, he makes himself an unwelcome guest, flaunts his willfulness, and in all but words dares Goneril not to throw him out. When he inflicts himself prematurely on Regan, he specifies precisely the condition that he knows will make her balk: "I can stay with Regan, I I and my hundred knights" (2.4.323-24). They owe him all, and he is going to do his best to demonstrate that they can't and won't pay it; by acting unreasonably he will test their gratitude and prove it inadequate. Being turned out in the storm becomes, for him, a triumph. His decision to reject their grudging hospitality ratifies their monstrous ingratitude: "No, rather I abjure all roofs, and choose I To wage against the enmity o' th' air" (2.4.210-n).

+ In Lear's experiences on the heath and at Dover-in acts 3 and 4-the conflict of purposes grows keener, and its terms vary, as the darkest purpose presses against constraint and cries for justice. Both purposes increase their force by moving Lear to assimilate the storm to his torn state as a kind of metonymic amplifier. When Lear exhorts the great gods that run the thunderstorms to "find out their enemies now," we should try to imagine that he dimly conceives himself to be their true target, and that he is addressing himself: Tremble, thou wretch, That hast within thee undivulged crimes, Unwhipp'd ofJustice; hide thee, thou bloody hand, Thou perjur'd, and thou simular of virtue

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That art incestuous; caitiff, to pieces shake, That under covert and convenient seeming Has practis'd on man's life; close pent-up guilts, Rive your concealing continents, and cry These dreadful summoners grace. I am a man More sinn'd against than sinning. (3.2.51-6o)

This may be felt as a generalized apostrophe to such wretches as his daughters and sons-in-law, yet the details reflect Lear's own condition more accurately. The image is melodramatic, hyperbolic, and simplistic, reducing the figure of evil to an outright stage villain, but this is partly because Lear is displacing its reference from himself to the world at large. With that crude form, he can avoid too close a fit. It is, so to speak, a systematically distorted communication to himself, at once thrusting in and fending off the sharp sword of justice. Only the subterranean pressure of self-retribution pushing up through layers of self-avoidance can account for the magnificence, the volcanic power, of "close pent-up guilts, I Rive your concealing continents, and cry I These dreadful summoners grace." But the power spends itself, or he rushes from it in terror toward the safety of the victim's plight: "I am a man I More sinn'd against than sinning." In his next utterance, after saying "My wits begin to turn," he urges the Fool into the hovel, thinks of straw to avert the cold, and muses, "the art of our necessities is strange, I And can make vile things precious." I read this according to the logic of the darker purpose: the necessities are those of self-avoidance; the art by which we keep our guilts pent up can make these vile or base (lower-class) discomforts important to us as diversions from more terrible thoughts. The stormy heath is the immediate provider of these diversions, but only as an extension of the monstrous ingratitude of Lear's daughters. For it is by targeting on their cruelty to him that he can divert himself from his cruelty to them. This process continues in the second heath scene, 3·4· Kent has been badgering Lear to take shelter in the hovel, and Lear's responses initially betray a certain confusion in his attitude toward the meaning of the storm. First he protests that it does not bother him, "is scarce felt," and in fact provides a distraction from the "greater malady" of "filial ingratitude," the tempest in his mind that "doth from my senses take all feeling else." Weathering the storm is an alternative to this, the lesser of two evils: "if thy flight lay toward the roaring sea, I Thou 'ldst meet the bear i' th' mouth." Yet even as he pauses to define filial ingratitude at line 15, his language betrays itself: "Is it not as this mouth should tear this hand I For lifting food to 't?" The immediate impulse of meaning comes from Lear's sense of himself as the victimized feeder. But the deeper impulse shapes an image

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in which feeder and fed are one, and thus in which filial ingratitude is the projected or displaced version of self-inflicted suffering. As if in response to this, the darker purpose pushes the punitive impulse outward: But I will punish home: No, I will weep no more. In such a night To shut me out? Pour on; I will endure. (r6-r8)

Here the relation between inner and outer storms changes- they become functionally related complements rather than alternatives: since exposure to the storm is the result of his daughters' ingratitude, enduring the elements only intensifies his sense of their cruelty. The elements and his daughters converge; to brave the weather is to stand up to Regan and Goneril and prove to himself that they have not yet deprived him of manliness or potency. Yet this feeling is immediately challenged at line 19 by the selfimage of the helpless undeserving victim: In such a night as this? 0 Regan, Goneril! Your kind old father, whose frank heart gave all,0! that way madness lies; let me shun that; No more ofthat. (19-22)

Madness will be induced by dwelling on his plight as victim and dotard rather than on his power and endurance, but in either case the tempest in the mind feeds on the physical storm. Hence Lear's confusion (and ours) takes still another turn when he refuses Kent's fourth prompting to "enter here" with Prithee, go in thyself; seek thine own ease: This tempest [the physical storm] will not give me leave to ponder On things would hurt me more. But I'll go in. (23-25)

The storm deepens the wound caused by filial ingratitude. What things would hurt him more? The answer is not difficult, and Lear's next speech contains it in distorted form. Lear delays entering the hovel, sends the Fool ahead of him, begins a meditation with a personifying apostrophe ("You houseless poverty,-"), and interrupts it to urge the Fool in as he explains, "I'll pray, and then I'll sleep." This is his prayer: Poor naked wretches, whereso'er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,

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Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these? 0! I have ta'en Too little care of this. Take physic, Pomp; Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to them, And show the Heavens more just. (28-36)

On the face of it, this is an attempt to shun the madness self-pity might bring on by abjuring the victim's role, converting wretchedness to fellow feeling, and imagining a scenario in which suffering will lead to wisdom and improvement when (presumably) the king regains his power. But the lines of connection between this scenario and Lear's past and future are tenuous in the extreme. We suddenly hear that Lear has neglected the poor, which has comically little to do with what has been going on since the play's opening; and we hear him making what sounds like a suggestion for better housing and other economic reforms. Except for the echo of the theme of land distribution, these reflections are conspicuously irrelevant, and also reductive-to define his problem in terms of poverty and bad weather makes it both impertinent and easy to deal with. Pomp and Poverty are personifications in a morality play that ends happily with the triumph of poetic and political justice. Does all this mean that Lear is only-as T. S. Eliot once said about Othello-cheering himself up? Does he really imagine he can reassume the power of Pomp and redistribute goods as energetically as he had tried to "shake all cares and business from our age"? It may seem that Lear is losing his grip on reality, but in a certain sense he is tightening it, trying to keep reality under control and out of sight. If we ask ourselves what persons or situations in the play this "prayer" calls to mind, two candidates present themselves: the effects, invoked and desired by Lear, of his banishment of Cordelia and Kent. In its evasive manner the prayer takes account of sentiments and phrases uttered in the anger of the play's first scene, for example, "Here I disclaim all my paternal care" (rr4); "The barbarous Scythian ... shall ... be as well neighbor'd, pitied, and reliev'd" (rr6-r9); "now her price is fallen" (197); "Dower'd with our curse and stranger'd with our oath" (204); "a wretch whom Nature is asham'd/ Almost t'acknowledge hers" (212-13); also the epithets Lear heard France apply to Cordelia-poor,Jorsaken, despis'd, cast away (250-53). With this scene in mind, the conspicuous irrelevance of Lear's prayer comes to seem more like conspicuous evasion. The prayer is a skewed reference to the plight he wished for Cordelia- to his "little care"- and a skewed acknowledgment that he is ultimately ·responsible for his own houselessness as well as hers; it is also a muffled expression of hope that, by

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inflicting a similar physical punishment on himself, he will somehow be in the position to undo the wrong and redistribute his land according to his original plan. "Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel" may merely command a new view, ex post facto, a new rationalization of the lockout Lear goaded his other daughters into imposing on him. But the degree of distortion or displacement in the prayer is an index of the pressure of guilt. His apostrophe, with its pluralizing, generalizing, and personifying force, and his focus on houselessness rather than homelessness register both the effort of avoidance and the self-accusing truth from which he flinches. Lear tries by verbal magic to grasp the power he feels deprived of, yet at the same time, as additional insurance, he keeps open the option of stepping into the role of wretched victim. "Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel" can mean two things: either (1) expose yourself to the feelings of wretches, share their feelings, or (2) expose yourself to the storm in order to feel what wretches feel-that is, stay out of doors and get pelted, a course of action that by occasioning wretchedness would sustain his wrath against his daughters and keep .him from pondering on things that would hurt him more. And this is in fact the exposure he courts. He does not "pray, and then . . . . sleep" in the sense of going into the hovel to retire. But ·his prayer seems figuratively to be an effort to put his guilt to sleep. His displacement of guilt with respect to Cordelia seems to me to be fairly obvious. Does he also feel uneasy about Regan and Goneril? H. A. Mason thinks we cannot be sure whether Lear in this scene "had begun to see himself as in some way responsible for their treatment of him." 5 Yet we should not rule out the possibility that the intensity and extraordinary richness of the rhetoric of displacement are meant to alert us to the continual regenerating of the darkest purpose- this is the boomerang or backlash effect. If in these scenes Lear is-in Mason's words- "play-acting humility," "enjoying the spectacle he imagines he is offering," "posturing" and "spouting;' he must also be uncomfortably aware of this- aware of the pressure if not the nature of the darkest purpose of genuine self-condemnation beneath his facile, misdirected "I have ta'en /Too little care of this." "In a ghostly way;' as Mason nicely puts it, "Lear's evil now begins to confess." 6 The evil, the darkest purpose, confesses in less ghostly fashion in 4.6. In his diatribes against hypocrisy, lechery, woman, authority, and justice, he re-aims once again from his own complicity to the corrupt world where an egregious good man like himself is the victim of usurers, cozeners, and flatterers. But self-reproach keeps pushing up toward the surface: ''Ay, every inch a king" gives way to "a dog's obey'd in office." After having verbally whipped "yond simpering dame" for her "riotous appetite," he tells the "ras-

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cal beadle" to hold his hand: "Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thine own back." Having recast its aggression in the form of cynical philosophizing, the darker purpose defends against such efforts at self-judgment by distorting them to self-pity (a dog in office), or merely by its generalizing context. "None does offend, none, I say, none; I'll able 'em" (4.6.170). Like the Savior, Lear in his crown of weeds will protect the adulteress (john 8 :3-n) by daring sinners to throw the first stone. "Take that of me, my friend, who have the power I To seal th' accuser's lips." But his next words come dangerously close to being a critique of his own performance in this scene-a critique of the darker purpose that has made Lear the world's accuser: "Get thee glass eyes; I And, like a scurvy politician, seem I To see the things thou dost not." Extricated from its concealing continents, the subtext would read something like this: "I cannot cast the first stone, since, looking within myself, I know myself sinful; playing the critic, the savior, only magnifies the sin. Rather than be my own accuser, I would prefer to seal my lips and blind myself by pretending to see deep flaws in human nature and society. In this way I can escape from the conscience that hunts me down." Lear then says, "Now, now, now, now; I Pull off my boots; harder, harder; so." He goes on to offer Gloucester his eyes "if thou wilt weep my fortunes," and to preach the patience that comes from knowing the world is a place for tears, a "great stage of fools." "Pull off my boots" has been glossed as the command of one who imagines he has come from hunting, and it also echoes the impulse worded in 3·4 as "off, off, you !endings" -the impulse to strip himself of what he has borrowed and owes in order to free himself from his conscience. So, in the effort to stop hunting himself down, he offers Gloucester his glass eyes, solicits his sympathy, and advocates the patience needed to tolerate the sins and follies of others. The effort, however, does not quite succeed: This' a good block! It were a delicate stratagem to shoe A troop of horse with felt; I'll put 'tin proof, And when I have stol'n upon these son-in-laws, Then, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill! (4.6.185-89)

"This' a good block!": "This is a good hat" is the commentators' first choice for an adequate translation, and their second is "This is a good mounting block;' that is, for a horse. He might want to put his boots back on so he can pursue his sons-in -law instead of himself, or keep them off so he can sneak up on them. But I think a third translation also makes sense here: "This is a good execution block." He takes off his crown of weeds to offer his head to the ax. The three blocks converge: he is, confusedly, the mur-

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derous avenger, the sacrificial victim of an unjust world, and-taking off his crown -the sinner acknowledging the justice of his punishment (a good block); and perhaps he also longs wearily to have done with it-"off, off, you !endings." But Cordelia's men intervene to rescue him from that escape. He is cut to the brains, but not dead. He is the prisoner of friends who are yet his enemies because they represent the accuser within ("Your most dear daughter"). Elbowed by a sovereign shame, he flinches toward the victim's role ("the natural fool ofFortune") and asks for help. He tries to diminish the threat Cordelia poses by imagining that she is capturing him simply to get ransom money- coming not to do him any kindness but to claim what is rightly hers, what he owes her and withheld. And if that is the case, he can at least use her surgeons to cure his cut brains and restore him to a stronger state of self-delusion. This mutual exchange will free them both of obligation. But Cordelia's spokesman thwarts this game: "You shall have any thing"- she will give him all, and after he gave her nothing. "No seconds? all myself?" -an unequal fight. Let him die rather than live on in torturing self-accusation, the captivity imposed by Cordelia. Let him confront her, fight her, make her kill him. Let her be not the daughter he has injured, but the bride who comes to unman him, corrupt him, betray him, if he lives beyond the first night. Let him finish the ax cut by dying in a manly act, a jovial incestuous attack that will flaunt his worthlessness. Cordelia's spokesman agrees- "we obey you" -and twists him forcibly back toward life and consciousness, denying him the accusation or the death he wants. Lear runs away to escape from Cordelia but runs away to make her capture him again; fleeing yet calling the hounds ("sa, sa, sa, sa"), he demands once more to be hunted down.

+ It is to be expected that when Lear faces Cordelia the darker purpose will recoil from its pole of aggression to the pole of helplessness in order to defend against the power of the darkest purpose that her presence energizes. In 4.7 the darker purpose tries to manage Cordelia's responses in this manner. "You do me wrong to take me out o' th' grave," he begins; "thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound/ Upon a wheel of fire": "I am already dead and being punished for my sins, while you are no longer suffering from the wrong I've done you." He continues to appeal to her pity for his precarious condition: "I am a very foolish fond old man"; "I fear I am not in my perfect mind." It is as if, fearing he deserves more stringent punishment, he shrinks away from it, tries to forestall it. On the verge of facing the truth and giving up all claims on his daughter, he divests himself of manhood

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and becomes the childish dotard so as to maintain or regain mastery of the relationship, to reimpose the bond that his action in I. I had canceled. But what about Cordelia in this scene? Has she no darker purpose? Is she as pure a redemptive figure as those about her believe? Does she entirely escape the play of darker purposes circulating through the Lear community? I think not, and I approach her performance in the first scene with a purely speculative hypothesis. This is, that the thought of Lear's setting his rest on her kind nursery (a heavy phrase! a heavy rest!) must surely be oppressive to her, though she is not likely to admit it to herself; that she would like to break free of the parental bondage, get out from under, though she is not likely to admit that to herself either; that if she could find a way to do it that wouldn't jeopardize her self-respect and her sense of obligation to Lear, she would be likely to take it; and that she does find a way, and does take it. Cordelia's first two speeches are interesting in that both are asides, and both reveal by their use of the third person that she self-consciously observes herself-possesses a strong theatrical sense of her image and role. One comes after Goneril's speech: "What shall Cordelia speak? Love, and be silent." The second after Regan's: Then poor Cordelia! And yet not so; since I am sure my love's More ponderous than my tongue.

The first aside may be construed as a stage direction to herself: "Given this overblown rhetoric of Goneril's, how shall I respond? I shall do the opposite of Goneril, hide my love, and say nothing" ("nothing, my lord"). The decision is made partly on competitive grounds. But something more clearly defined emerges after Regan's speech: "Then poor Cordelia!" Already she senses the value of the victim's role. ''And yet not so; since I am sure my love's I More ponderous than my tongue." In some better world than this, her virtue might be rewarded, but here it will have to be its own reward, her only riches, for Cinderella is sure to go unappreciated when Father listens to her wicked sisters. Glancing critically at Regan's heavy tongue, Cordelia displays a concern for style, and especially for her own style, her own presentation of self, in this· difficult moment. She competes not only with her sisters- "unhappy that I am, I cannot heave I My heart into my mouth"- but also with her father: "I love your Majesty I According to my bond; no more nor less." And· in exposing the extravagance of her sisters' answers she also exposes her father to ridicule. Some of the pressure that works on her is apparent in the following remark:

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Happily, when I shall wed, That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry Half my love with him, half my care and duty: Sure I shall never marry like my sisters, To love my father all. (r.I.Ioo-ro4)

Bradley observes that this statement "perverts the truth when it implies that to give love to a husband is to take it from a father." 7 But this tells us that Cordelia has somehow accepted her father's view. Even as she distinguishes the role of daughter from that of wife, she slips into the marriage formula. She acknowledges the father's right to compete with the husband but feels it oppressive and strains away from it; she will have to wrest her love away from her father. This is her plight. From line 223 until the royal entourage leaves the stage, Cordelia is caught in a losing struggle to sustain her dignity. "Make known," she says to Lear, "publish the fact," that it is no "vicious blot," no wickedness, that hath depriv' d me of your grace and favor, But even for want of that for which I am richer, A still-soliciting eye, and such a tongue That I am glad I have not, though not to have it Hath lost me in your liking. (229-33)

Lear's renouncing his paternity only proves to her how faulty his judgment is, and how genuine her virtue. He should have recognized that she is much better than her sisters, and she wants him to publish this truth, tell everyone he has undervalued her. Much later, at 4.4.16-17, there is a displaced echo that reminds me of this sentiment and suggests how deeply Cordelia has been troubled by Lear's failure to make her virtue known: "All you unpublish'd virtues of the earth, I Spring with my tears." She will be able, she hopes, to cure him, and with the very virtues he refused to acknowledge. When Burgundy rejects Cordelia, she responds with spirit and saves face by acting as if she had a choice in the matter: "Peace be with Burgundy! /Since that respect and fortunes are his love, I I shall not be his wife." But France immediately diminishes her by dwelling on his largesse and her good fortune, indulging nice antitheses at her expense: Cordelia is "most rich, being poor; I Most choice, forsaken, and most loved, despised." France will lawfully seize upon "what's cast away," no doubt invoking the law of salvage. We may feel that Cordelia has .brought this on herself by her commitment to the victim's role; that like Lear she wants to renounce, without really renouncing, the name and additions of daughter. But surely

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France's condescension must rankle. This is what Lear has brought her to. And so, when she bids her sisters farewell, we not only feel an edge of bitterness, but we also hear a trace of vindictiveness: I know you what you are; And like a sister am most loth to call Your faults as they are named. Love well our father: To your professed bosoms I commit him; But yet alas! stood I within his grace, I would prefer him to a better place. (r.r.269-74)

In asserting her moral superiority Cordelia is not entirely accurate, for she has already, and publicly, called their faults as they are named: "that glib and oily art/ To speak and purpose not"; ''A still-soliciting eye, and such a tongue /That I am glad I have not" (224-32). Knowing what her sisters are, Cordelia nevertheless commits her father to them. It is, after all, his own fault and folly that he has deprived himself of "a better place." And then she utters the couplet that I find all the more chilling for its aphoristic bite: "Time shall unfold what plighted cunning hides;/ Who covers faults, at last with shame derides." Cordelia is predicting the inevitable results to follow from her sisters' evil dispositions. But the gnomic form of the statement generalizes it, and increases its sense of predictive certainty: whoever covers his own faults, refuses to acknowledge his complicity, is finally exposed and shamed- not only to and by others, but to and by himself When he finally acknowledges his own guilt he will deride and hate himself, be ashamed. In generalized form this is applicable to Lear. And what Cordelia's words imply is that by their bad treatment her sisters will bring him to uncover his faults and be exposed to shame. Whatever she consciously intends, her action commits Lear to his other daughters for the punishment he deserves. Cordelia will ultimately be vindicated by the effects of their punishment, without herself having any hand in it. They will do the bad things that will bring Lear to realize how he has mistreated and misprized the daughter who loved him most. As I read her performance in this scene, then, Cordelia, for reasons of her own-not all of them available to her-accepted Lear's challenge, asserted her merit over against his nature-in-her, and by her stonewalling helped him bring on her plight. At the same time she helped Lear commit himself to her sisters' professed bosoms, after which Lear (with Kent's aid) worked with Regan and Goneril to bring out the worst in them. Yet nowhere in the play does Cordelia-or do her words-show the slightest recognition of her complicity in this skewing of relationships. When she returns in the fourth act her language remains-unlike Lear's-pure of

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conflicting voices, although there may be a touch of uneasiness in the way she carefully rehearses her good intentions in 4.4.23-28: "0 dear father! It is thy business that I go about ... No blown ambition doth our arms incite,/ But love, dear love, and our ag'd father's right." This seems to me to be part of her persistent habit of publishing her unpublished virtues, and I find it disarmingly ingenuous that she has to protest she was not blown across from France by political ambition. But I also find a touch of smugness in her echoing the words of Christ (my father's business), and this is of a piece with other indications in her Dover scenes that she is here as a merciful redeemer, one who was more sinned against than sinning but has forgiven her tormenters and now returns to restore them from their crimes and woes. She joins others in viewing herself this way, and she also joins Lear in harping on the violent wrongs her two sisters did by throwing him out of doors into the terrible storm. In blaming her sisters for their treatment of him, she effectively blames Lear for bringing his misery on himself by failing to acknowledge her unpublished virtues. With this background, Cordelia's performance in 4·7 and 5·3 takes on a more complex quality. Let's begin with S. L. Goldberg's good insight about the· partial nature of her response: However deeply moving and necessary is the truth of Cordelia's "no cause, no cause" . . . this is still not the whole of the truth. . . . What happened in the first scene and has happened since is ... also real. Lear has something to feel guilty about .... Nor, for that matter, is he wholly a "poor perdu," a victim, as Cordelia supposes. His face was not just "oppos'd against the warring winds," it was urging them on. 8

In the speech Goldberg alludes to, Cordelia reviles her two sisters for the violent harms they have made in his reverence, and she does so in the most Lear-like language she uses: Had you not been their father, these white flakes Did challenge pity of them. Was this a face To be oppos'd against the warring winds? To stand against the deep dread-bolted thunder? In the most terrible and nimble stroke Of quick, cross-lightning? to watch- poor perdu !With this thin helm? Mine enemy's dog, Though he had bit me, should have stood that night Against my fire. (4.7.30-38)

This speech forgets, or at some level denies, "To your professed bosoms I commit him"; it shelters under the rhetoric that characterized Lear's ag-

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gressive darker purpose on the heath. A sentinelle perdu, according to G. K. Hunter, "was an especially daring soldier who was placed ... so close to the enemy that he was considered lost." 9 If Regan and Goneril are the enemy, who placed him there? Lear, all by himself? I think 4· 7 is so poignant partly because of Cordelia's moving concern for Lear, the love she shows him in her careful tendance of his "reverence." At the same time, I think she has triumphantly refined the victim's role to a Christlike perfection, and she has done this by denying, by rising above, the cause: "I know you do not love me ... You have some cause." "No cause, no cause." But she did have a share in the cause he gave her; ignoring what he did is ignoring what she did. And this may be the only way the reunion can take place- its condition; its cost. And in act 5, her one brief speech indicates that the cause is not simply forgotten, but still there to be denied, for both of them.

+ "The final scene," writes Stanley Cavell, "opens with Lear and Cordelia repeating or completing their actions in the opening scene: again Lear abdicates, and again Cordelia loves and is silent." 10 Her words are oddly formal, aphoristic, remote- and these are her last words in the play. We are not the first Who, with best meaning, have incurr'd the worst. For thee, oppressed King, I am cast down; Myself could else out-frown false Fortune's frown. Shall we not see these daughters and these sisters? (5.3.3-7)

She moves into couplets with the old consolation (more sinned against than sinning), but by now we may be able to hear the subtext more clearly in the active shading of "incurr'd": "we aren't the first who have made the worst happen- brought it on ourselves and others-while intending the best." "Oppressed King" in the next line has the force of a tactful oxymoronbalancing his dignity against his plight-yet Cordelia's practice of addressing Lear only by his royal titles in the reunion scene seems less positive and affectionate here, a little too cool. She might have ventured something warmer, like "dear Father." And the sentence reverbs an unintended sentiment. She means to say ''I'm sorrier for you than for myself," but the phrase also incurs a worse meaning: "I have been cast down on your account, defeated and imprisoned because I came to relieve your oppression." And her question about seeing her sisters adds a specific sense to the previous line. She wants to outface her false sisters' frowns; she would remind the jewels of her father that she knows what they are, and that, as she predicted, time

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did unfold what plighted cunning hid. Her lines reveal the same competitive impulse we saw in r. r, and we remember that she was competing then with Lear as well as her sisters. Now, as Cavell suggests, she wants to repeat or complete that episode and bid her sisters a morally triumphant farewell before going once more into a kind of exile from the world. Lear prevents this reunion and banishes her again, this time to the cell of the smug bridegroom, giving her a share in his latest renunciation. The oppressed king becomes oppressive and imposes his old fantasy on her,11 but in a more constraining form, now that he has finally succeeded in displacing France: "We two alone will sing like birds i' th' cage" fulfills the hope expressed in "I lov'd her most, and thought to set my rest/ On her kind nursery" (r.r.r23-24). His touching description of the life he projects for them betrays his awareness of the life she'll be deprived of: we'll laugh "at gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues /Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too, /Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out"; and thus, as God's spies, "we'll wear out ... packs and sects of great ones." He promises to repeat the propitiating gesture of 4.7-kneeling and asking forgiveness- but that will only be part of the ritual by which he forgives himself for preempting her from life. "Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia, / The Gods themselves throw. incense. Have I caught thee?/ He that parts us shall bring a brand from heaven, and fire us hence like foxes." Edmund had just said, "Take them away," but Lear's "He that parts us" embraces friend and foe indifferently, and by no means excludes France. The sacrifices he enjoins have been, are, and will be mostly hers. He has caught her by running away from himself and making her run after him. And he is still running away, yet still urging on the hounds of heaven. We never learn how Cordelia feels about being caught. Edmund tells us that he ordered the captain to hang. her and "lay the blame upon her own despair" (5.3.253), but this does not quite reassure us that although she didn't hang herself she was not in despair. When Lear comes onstage with Cordelia's body immediately after, all these considerations bear in on us, as they do on him. It has been said that in this final scene he is caught between his knowledge that she is dead and his inability to accept it. Yet this does not quite square with the fluctuations his words express, nor is it adequate to the complex weight of feeling and responsibility he must now be suffering under. What he does is make sure she is dead before bringing her back to life; he controls her return, and he sends her back again to death: She's gone for ever. I know when one is dead, and when one lives; She's dead as earth. Lend me a looking-glass;

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If that her breath will mist or stain the stone, Why, then she lives. This feather stirs; she lives! if it be so, It is a chance which does redeem all sorrows That ever I have felt. A plague upon you, murderers, traitors all!

I might have sav'd her; now she's gone for ever! Cordelia, Cordelia! stay a little. Ha! What is't thou say'st? Her voice was ever soft, Gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman. I killed the slave that was a-hanging thee. (5.3.259-74)

"She's gone for ever" looks back toward Lear's proscription in the first scene: "Thou hast her, France; let her be thine, for we I Have no such daughter, nor shall we ever see I That face of hers again" (r.r.262-64). To have banished her to France was the first step in her banishment from life, and to have caught her in prison was the second step. He forgets this for a brief instant to grasp at "a chance which does redeem all sorrows," but Kent's interruption brings him back to himself, and also back, confusedly, to the first scene to listen again to Cordelia's "nothing, my Lord." Now his defenses return, he curses the sinners who might have helped him save her, puts her back to death, and revives her just long enough to reinterpret, or misinterpret, her "nothing" with a tonally bizarre statement, a statement that is at once an evasive explanation of his failure to hear her and a courtly epitaph: "Her voice was ever soft, I Gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman"as if to say, "The reason I misunderstood her was that she spoke softly and gently when I was asking for loud and clear protestations of love, and she could have given me that, or you traitors could have helped save her by speaking up for her. But no; the blame is mine, not hers; an excellent thing in woman." This touch of connoisseurship returns him to the role of her manly protector, which dissolves at once into self-protection: "I killed the slave that was a-hanging thee" -partly a brag, but partly also a defensive response to the accusing presence he imagines: "I did the best I could, and if it wasn't good enough, it's because I'm old" -which evokes the "I am old and foolish" of 4·7· Lear cannot shake the presence off, as the third person gives way to the second, and the past tense to the present. He can exorcise her, consign her to oblivion, only by dying. "Thou'lt come no more,/ Never, never, never, never, never": is it a cry of pained recognition? Or is it a judgment, a doom, a command? "Pray you, undo this button." Hearing this I think of the smug and incestuous bridegroom, but also of Lear's earlier "off,

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off, you lendings. Come; unbutton here" (3.4.III): another terrible effort to disencumber himself and make his conscience free, to shake all cares from his age and crawl unburdened toward death. But she will not let him. "Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips,/ Look there, look there!" What if she should wake before he dies? And waking, speak? And speaking, accuse? "For thee, oppressed King, I am cast down." And so are we.

CHAPTER 4

+ Text Against Performance: The Gloucester Family Romance

My interest in dramatic action as community action was first aroused by Shakespeare's Festive Comedy, in which C. L. Barber traced the path of the saturnalian pattern from "community observances of periodic sports and feast days" into the comedies. Barber's readings everywhere threw new light on the· way ritual forms shape the social and political environment of the plays' characters; in his subsequent work he never swerved from his allegiance to this concern. His essay on the family attests to the generative power of the original conception, for in assimilating the insights of psychoanalytic criticism to the study of community, he not only deepened and enriched those insights but also enhanced the explanatory power of his approach. 1 It is with mingled feelings prompted by the occasion of this volume that I acknowledge, however belatedly, my profound debt to his work. 2 My reading of the family romance owes much to his analysis of the family in the tragedies, and even more to his criticism of the first formulations of the topic of this essay. Himself a genial ironist, he resisted my version of the ironic interpretation on the grounds that it implicated me in the very cynicism I thought I discerned in the text. With characteristic generosity he tried by that resistance to help me improve the tone and avoid the pitfalls of an approach for which he did not feel great sympathy. I think I have discovered what he wanted me to see: that unless the ironist was capable of a minimallevel of sympathy for and generosity toward the fictional objects of his criticism, he could not hope to respond adequately to the human claims the

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characters in the plays make on him; and such a response depended on one's ability to engage the characters within the context of their community. As Barber's vision of the dramatic community released me from an overfacile commitment to the kind of ironic reading that is always achieved at the expense of the dignity and humanness of its subjects, so it also clarified the insights I was obscurely trying to develop about the interaction between the characters and the community of the play. It directed me toward what may be called the common ethos informing the behavior of all characters; I have explored this ethos in recent studies of Macbeth and King Lear, and the present essay will extend the study of Lear to the Gloucester family. 3 The Lear ethos may most concisely be characterized by Stanley Cavell's phrase "the avoidance of love," and it is marked by a settled diffidence, detachment, and evasiveness that (as Cavell's often moving account makes clear) is inseparably attached to, and motivated by, the desire of the love it avoids. 4 It is not easy- I would venture to say it is scarcely possibleto apprehend this ethos in performance because so much evidence for it is lodged in the fine tissues of rhetoric. The ethos discloses itself only when subject to the liberties of reading-only when such readerly intervention as moving back and forth over the text, slowing it down, rearranging and comparing passages, is granted its full privileges. This distinction between spectatorship and reading is crucial to my view of the play. I have discussed it elsewhere at some length 5 and will say more about it in a moment, after some additional remarks on the Lear ethos. The language of the play not only reveals the ethos in the static form described above; it also decomposes it into two contrary motives that circulate in dynamic conflict through the play's community and through its action. In "The Lear Family Romance" (see Chapter 3 in this volume) I borrowed a phrase from Lear and christened these motives the darker and darkest purposes, and I connected them to two formulaic modes of selfunderstanding. The first is the mode of victimization, expressed in the formula "I am more sinned against than sinning." The second mode, expressed in the antithetical formula "I am more sinning than sinned against;' comes in two styles: in "good" characters the mode is guilt or remorse, but in a self-proclaimed knave like Edmund the formula is voiced as a triumphant boast of power and autonomy, of complete freedom from any bonds of obligation. The darker purpose is an impulse to aggression against others, and its punitive aspect is rationalized as a response to the victim's mode and formula. The darkest purpose is (in "good" characters) an impulse to aggression against oneself that responds to feelings of guilt or remorse. In speaking of these purposes I have tried to avoid or at least soften

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the implication that the individual characters are being judged or blamed, by using the definite article rather than the possessive pronoun- the darker purpose, not his or her darker purpose. I do this partly to emphasize that the locus of these purposes and of the ethos they put into play is the community as a structured whole. But I am also eager to resist the temptation to assume a role that the play ironically offers us-ironically, because its representation of the role puts it in question. The play, that is, tests us by tempting us to adopt the unpleasant perspective of the ethical judge who voyeuristically penetrates the speech of the "good" characters and searches out the wickedness that flaws the heart. It tempts us to betray the basis of the judgmental role in the curiosity that, ferreting out the cynical motives of others, uncovers thereby the judge's own corrosive cynicism.6 The play puts us in jeopardy so that we may discover our own complicity, our kinship with what we condemn, and come to "see feelingly" without, however, refusing to see critically. It encourages us to assign responsibility; it does not encourage us to confuse this with assigning guilt. If we approach the problem of complicity in this way, I think we can meet the often-stated objection that the ironic reading of Shakespeare is necessarily a cynical reading, and also the less securely grounded objection that it is an anachronistic reading. It remains, however, a reading-an interpretation that constitutes the play as a text rather than as a script. In Chapter 6 below I confront objections to the reading or textualization of Shakespeare and argue that there is an intimate link between the residual textuality of Shakespeare's language and its representation of collective complicity and community ethos. Here I shall rehearse only the part of that argument which connects the perspective of textual irony to the focus on the social and institutional resources deployed by characters in the service of self-deception or self-esteem.7 The specific operations of reading that actualize the textuality latent in the plays are very different from those called forth by performance and audition. One index of the difference is to be found in the relative accessibility of diverse modes of irony to performance and to reading. There is a difference, first, between intentional irony and what I call structural irony. The former involves saying one thing and meaning another. Structural irony is its obverse: it involves meaning one thing and saying another. That is, in structural irony a character intends to communicate one message, but his language, speaking through him and in spite of his effort to control it, conveys another that he didn't intend. Intentional irony can be performed and heard with relative ease. But as I have tried to show in earlier studies, structural irony is so deeply and densely embedded in the language of the play that it can disclose itself only through reading.

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Neither of these forms of irony is the same as what Richard Levin has called "the old-fashioned 'dramatic irony' involved in the reversal of a character's situation and expectations." 8 A recent study of dramatic irony by Bertrand Evans shows why this is so. 9 Evans is interested in the "gaps" produced by "discrepant awarenesses" that result from the "practices" and plotting of characters and playwright. His concern is with a dramatic device observable largely in abstraction from the language of the play, and his emphasis is on the playwright's manipulation of our interest in the action; the criterion he employs is whether the "awareness gap" is "productive of dramatic effect" (r7o). My interest is much more closely connected to the linguistic manifestations of institutionally shaped structures of ambivalence. Because Evans's study remains framed within the classical scheme of peripeteia and anagnorisis-staples of the "old-fashioned" irony-it is essentially a character-and-action approach, relying little on the text as text. At the same time, his focus on "practices" orients his study toward intentions and intentional irony. Intentional irony is a function of the consciousness of the character who employs it. Dramatic irony is a function of the playwright's narrative construction. Both are adjusted to the theatrical limits imposed on the conditions of performance and audition. It would be wrong to conclude from the association of intentional irony with consciousness that structural irony discloses a character's "unconscious." It has nothing to do with the unconscious. Structural irony arises when the language of the play says things about the speaker of which he is unaware, and it would be a mistake to reify unawareness into the unconscious. Although structural irony may give psychological information, it is not itself psychological, but structural or metapsychological. It is present when the language of the play gives us what may be called a profile of unacknowleged or tacit motives from its position "outside" the speaker but "inside" the network of organized community relationships within which the speaker is himself positioned as a subject. And in fact, the characters of a play do not speak its language; the language speaks the characters. One language· speaks, or circulates through, all the characters, one community langue speaks all the paroles. What the play gives us is not so much a "world" -that basic but misleading image of poetic-drama criticism- but a community, and one that may be approached in different ways. There is, first, a language community; second, as I have said, a community ethos; third, a community structure. "Community structure" refers to the more or less corporate, more or less institutional structure of roles and relationships into which the individual characters are cast and which they try to manipulate. The community

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of the play is a group of speakers placed in relation to one another by differences of gender and generation, of social rank and political status, and of position in households, families, and extended families. Their interactions are mediated by these roles, their attitudes and projects heavily influenced by the assumptions and expectations, the constraints and opportunities, that adhere to the roles. Within this differential field, a single language system articulates a single set of norms, motives, and purposes; as these circulate throughout the community they change their configurations from speaker to speaker and role to role. This pattern of identity in difference makes possible the kind of structural irony produced by dislocating speeches and assembling them in paradigmatic clusters, or by displacing them from one speaker to another. One version of this is Maynard Mack's elegant notion of "umbrella speeches," so named because "more than one consciousness may shelter under them." 10 But here of course we have to recognize that such interpretive strategies, and the insights they produce, are textual in origin. They are, and can only be, generated by reading. The constraints of performance, and the literary shadow of those constraints thrown across the text by what has been called "stage-centered" reading, inhibit the deployment of such strategies and thus lead to a simplification or reduction of the interpretive possibilities of text-centered reading. There is an obvious reason why the sense of community is less sharply focused in performance than in reading: in performance the distribution of speaking parts among actors gives the characters more tangible substance as particular (and preinterpreted) presences and confronts us directly with individuals who "own" their speeches. But as readers of an undistributed text we possess the ability to disperse meanings back and forth across the boundaries of individual characters, rendering them more fluid and shadowy. The text privileges the collective setting of a community of disembodied "voices" whose intonational and intentional profiles we control. The varied echoings elicited by the readerly dislocation of language convey the structures, for example, of kinship, gender, generation, and marriage that interanimate the separate characters. Their performance as autonomous individuals, as distinct "selves" simple and integrated enough to be good material for-let us say- Morality emblems, is embedded by these techniques of reading in a collaborative matrix within which each "self" is problematically intertwined with the "significant others" that the character at once internalizes and opposes. These methodological pronouncements are not self-validating, and their "cash value" can hardly be determined without exploring their prac-

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tical implications. In what follows I shall illustrate this textual approach to the play's community, its structure of role-bound self/other relations, within the boundaries of the Gloucester family romance, after which I shall contrast this example of text-centered reading to one of the more influential and theoretically explicit versions of stage-centered reading.

+ The ethos of the Lear community, the crossing of darker. and darkest purposes, assumes a special form in the Gloucester family. The darkest purpose works more slowly in Gloucester than in Lear, and after he has found out the truth about his sons it naturally emerges to the surface as it never does in Lear. This partly accounts for the greater rhetorical power and energy of Lear's language, in which the need to displace or suppress feelings of self-recrimination seems more urgent. Lear dies to escape the darkest purpose; Gloucester, who tries to commit suicide, later dies because of it. But if it works more slowly, its presence as a possible threat is implied from the start, and haunts all his actions. Edmund's plot enables him to confirm apprehensions about his legitimate heir which he seems- by his aggressive and leading questions in r.2-almost too eager to entertain: he would, as he says, unstate himself "to be in a due resolution." "Find out this villain, Edmund," his father urges; "it shall lose thee nothing: do it carefully" (r.2.120-21). This second phrase, with its by now pregnant key term, "nothing," seems calculated to enlist Edmund as his instrument ("it shall lose thee nothing" "it shall gain thee something") in making what both of them want come true. Edmund's observations about the impatience of legitimate heirs to unstate their parents remind us, and perhaps Gloucester as well, that the very act of begetting a lawful heir is the first step in "prescribing" the father's power and binding himself in service to his son's future lordship. The heir is a potential enemy and competitor, the eventual replacement whose appearance prophesies his father's death. It is thus Edgar, not Edmund, who can deprive Gloucester through the plague of custom and the curiosity of nations. If a father loves his children for what he feels they owe him, his anxiety is aroused by what he feels he owes them. From Gloucester's point of view the whoreson is· owed nothing, the legitimate first son everything. His distrust of Edgar may be something he desires no less than something he fears. And to have found such suspicions groundless might well have exposed him to the inner retribution of the darkest purpose, as indeed it does later, when his heart "burst smilingly" on hearing Edgar's embellished tale of victimage and service. The rapidity with which, in r.2, Gloucester falls

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to vilifying Edgar and then reminds himself that he tenderly and entirely loves him suggests the pressure he feels from this boomerang effect. Luckily, he finds in Edmund a willing instrument to help avert the effect and make his suspicions come true. That is, he fends off the darkest purpose by relying on the bastard who embraces its distorted mirror image, the villain's formula. Edmund represents "the lusty stealth of nature" to which he owes his genesis. Gloucester's references to it in the first scene had been tonally uneasy: "His breeding, Sir, hath been at my charge: I have so often blush'd to acknowledge him, that now I am braz'd to it"; "there was good sport at his making, and the whoreson must be acknowledged" (r.r.9-II, 23-24). The rhetorical bravery that still affirms his manly lust gestures evasively toward a disclaimer of paternity and blames it on society. "His breeding ... hath been at my charge": "I have been accused of being his father; I have been made responsible for his nurture." His words identify the mother as a whore, and Edmund not as his bastard but as her son. Mother and son conspired against him in producing the knave "before he was sent for." He speaks of them with something like affection even as he claims credit for overlooking the inconvenience they caused him, and for assuming the consequences of their fault as his own burden. He seems eager to impress on Kent the paired accomplishments in good sport and sportsmanlike conduct that proclaim him a man. But his signs of affection toward Edmund are balanced by signs of diffidence: "He hath been out nine years, and away he shall again" (1.1.32) -that is, "shame would have it hid." The combined circumlocutions and braveries that mark the shaky machismo of his repartee in the opening scene suggest that he may not be as "braz'd" as he claims he is. When Gloucester instructs Edmund to remember Kent "hereafter as my honorable friend" and Edmund obligingly proffers "my services to your Lordship," it may conceivably appear to Kent and to us as a gesture toward a request for patronage. Kent's reply is guarded- "I must love you, and sue to know you better"- and Edmund meets this appropriately with "Sir, I shall study deserving" (30-31). Kent's terms of courtship, love and sue, sound a little dry because they primly reflect, and defend against, both aspects of the familiarity (sexual and political) with which Gloucester thrusts Edmund on him, as if to have Kent legitimize the embodiment of his lusty stealth. But the resonance of his statement is concentrated in the word must: "as your father's honorable friend and fellow peer, I am obliged to love you, in spite of your unfortunate status." The obligations imposed on relationships by membership in the established order are reflected in the virtually oxymoronic force of the phrase "I must love you" -that is, "whether I actually

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do or not"; and the more one loves according to one's bond, the more love is compelled by social custom or legal rules, the less likely it is to be genuinely felt and freely given. Gloucester, then, "must love" Edgar, but not Edmund, and Edgar need not "study deserving" to merit that love any more than his father is obliged "to sue to know him better." The son "by order of law," he says, "is yet no dearer in my account" than the bastard. This seems to mean that he ·likes Edmund as much as Edgar, but the phrase points with equal force in the other direction: he likes Edgar as little as Edmund. The words suggest a criterion of filial value that measures the true limit of paternal affection. When we let the two senses of "~o dearer in my account" play over each other they tell us that what the father chiefly values in his sons is his investment in them- the shares of pleasure, shame, trouble, sacrifice, and legal tenderness he has deposited in their characters. He loves his kindness in them, and because his younger son's illegitimacy obviates the necessity of love even as it extracts from Gloucester a higher rate of interest, he may in fact affect Edmund more. This affection and its sources, however, are inseparably coupled to the possibility of self-reproach that derives from the betrayal of the family-by-order-of-law. The shame· of the manly adulterer may be easier to bear than the guilt, the sense of unworthiness, that besets his feelings about the legitimate heir. The evidence of self-reproach lies in the eagerness and intensity with which he finds fault and seeks revenge. Further evidence is supplied later in the play by the fact that Edgar himself expresses his dilemma in terms of Gloucester's adulterous betrayal of the family interest. At }.4.80-99 he presents Poor Tom to Lear as an erstwhile lecherous dandy who is now being punished by the foul fiend for his sins. That Poor Tom can only be Gloucester at this point is made clear by the words with which Edgar introduces his cameo of the "servingman, proud in heart and mind": Take heed o' th' foul fiend. Obey thy parents; keep thy word's justice; swear not; commit not with man's sworn spouse; set not thy sweet heart on proud array. (8o-83)

The list of commandments has the ring of a parental catechism, and therefore helps target the father's hypocrisy. The problem for a legitimate son is lodged in the ambiguity of the prefatory injunction: either "beware of the foul fiend, keep him away by obeyii?-g your parents;' or "listen to the foul fiend, do as he tells you, and obey your parents." This reflects the conflicting messages Edgar must have received from his father, one represented by

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the act of darkness (which, incidentally, this passage reveals that he not only knows but also worries about) and the other by the paternal commandments. The commandments are supplemented a few lines later by prudential maxims in which the father urges his legal heir to protect the family name and interest: "keep thy foot out of brothels," and so on (97-99); to thine own self be true. Edgar envisages a paternal temper oppressed by the morality it preaches. Gloucester's past career as an adulterer is associated in Edgar's speech with his present distrust of his lawful son: "False of heart, light of ear, bloody of hand" (93-94). Begetting Edmund and discarding Edgar are presented as consequences of the same viciousness. Gloucester fends off the guilt associated with family betrayal by redistributing complicities in such a way as to present it to himself and others in the form of manly shame and victimage. Shame and victimage, at once the burden and the blazon of sexual prowess, can either motivate or excuse the acts of darkness that express the darker purpose. And the lustily stealthful product of Gloucester's act makes himself available, in 1.2, to help his father justify aggression toward Edgar. Like Gloucester, but more explicitly, Edmund blames his plight on "the plague of custom" while taking pride in the "fierce quality" he inherits from the act of darkness. Unlike Gloucester, he eagerly assumes the guilt he helps his father evade, though with a flourish of machismo that is no different from Gloucester's, only more confident in its swash: "Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law,/ My services are bound" (1.2.1-2). Thus as the darkest purpose is displaced from father to son it changes into the melodramatic caricature that confirms Edmund in his fantasy of virile and autonomous villainy. But since he represents so many of his father's features, we can respond with an oddly pungent mixture of amusement, pity, and apprehension to the profound dependency the caricature betrays. We see that he needs and relies on Gloucester as much as Gloucester needs and relies on him. Edmund's role as Vice and bravo sits uneasily atop other feelings that derive from his dependence on the father he contemns. These feelings are accessible to us chiefly through his soliloquies in I.Z, in the first of which he finds it oddly necessary to reinforce the villain's formula by appealing to the victim's justification -oddly, that is, if one expects the villain's delight in sinning to be a "motiveless malignancy." The troubled quality of Gloucester's animus against Edgar is most evident in his discussion with Edmund early in act 2. By this time he has so fully resolved himself that he can scarcely wait to get his- or someone else's- hands on Edgar. He has "set guard to take" him (2.1.17) even be-

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fore receiving the promised "auricular assurance" (1.2.94), and he pays little attention to Edmund's vivid inventions. Yet in calling for Edgar's death, Gloucester shrinks from direct participation: Let him fly far: Not in this· land shall he remain uncaught; And found- dispatch. The noble Duke my master, My worthy arch and patron, comes to-night: By his authority I will proclaim it, That he which finds him shall deserve our thanks, Bringing the murderous coward to the stake; He that conceals him, death. (2.1.57-64) '~nd found- dispatch": the phrase, half hortatory and half imperative, assigns the dirty job to others; "dispatch" wavers between verb and noun, and the terse, elliptical phrasing ("no sooner found than dispatched") works like a fiat converting the act to a fait accompli. Gloucester, safely removed, will speed his thanks to Edgar's captor not only for finding him but also for bringing-or, as the construction allows, for having brought-the murderous coward to the stake. And it will be Cornwall's authority that empowers Gloucester's proclamation as well as his thanks. I don't think it is enough to say of this impulse that Gloucester wants to minimize his own role in the execution he desires; he also wants (to develop Stanley Cavell's line of argument) to stay clear of Edgar's speaking presence. Commanding Edgar's execution, and commanding it from a distance, is a way of making sure his suspicions will remain unchallenged by the son he fears to confront. So, at line 43, he sends his servants after the fleeing Edgar but dallies himself to hear what Edmund has to say. "Let him fly far": "let it be done by others, and elsewhere, so that my resolve may not be diminished, my opinion changed, by having him brought before me to defend himself against Edmund's charges; let Edmund's 'picture' of the villain stand, and be disseminated 'far and near, that all the kingdom I May have due note of him.' " Within this context, Gloucester's "0 strange and fast'ned villain" is shaded by his contribution to the fastening. "Would he deny his letter, said he? I never got him" (2.1.77-78). Disclaiming paternity, he begets him anew, re-creates him as his wife's bastard, and guides his own darker purpose to its goal. And because, to borrow some terms from Edmund, he is credulous, because his nature may like Edgar's be "so far from doing harms I That he suspects none" (1.2.r8s-86)-none, that is, fashioned by himselfhe can respond to the sympathy of Cornwall and Regan with confused

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and feelingly reiterative self-pity: "0! Madam, my old heart is crack'd, it's crack'd"; "0! Lady, Lady, shame would have it hid"; "I know not, Madam; 'tis too bad, too bad" (2.1.90, 93, 96). This scene, in which he enlists Cornwall's aid to help him bar "all ports" so that "the villain shall not 'scape" (2.r.8o), must be set beside the moment in 3.3 when Gloucester complains that Cornwall has forbidden him to help Lear-"charg'd me, on pain of perpetual displeasure, neither to speak of him, entreat for him, or any way sustain him" (4-6). From the beginning, he feels his own safety entangled with the King's. In 1.2 he twice mentions Kent's banishment (23, 122), which must bother him because his own earldom is no less endangered by the events of the first scene. This danger appears to him to result not so much from Lear's instability itself as from the loss of power it produces: "prescrib'd his power! I Confin'd to exhibition" (24-25). In the general breakdown he apprehensively envisages in the soliloquy at 1.2.107-23 ("These late eclipses ..."),Lear's loss of power and the danger to the kingdom converge in his mind with the threat from Edgar. We may recall this when we hear him saying, "These injuries the King now bears will be revenged home" (3-3.12-13). Gloucester identifies Lear's cause with his own. But the other side of his solicitude for Lear ("If I die for it ... the King ... must be reliev'd," r8-2o) is his vengeful pursuit of Edgar, which is kept before us in this scene by Cornwall's similar proscriptions against Lear. The very impulse that motivates his effort to help Lear is the impulse that will disenable it, since it also motivates his pursuit of Edgar. 11 Here, as he plays into Edmund's hands, this linkage is ironically stressed by the way 3.3 echoes details in r.2 and 2.1. 12 In 1.2 Edmund had suggested that Gloucester suspend his indignation against Edgar "till you can derive from him better testimony of his intent" (Siff.), and in 2.1 he had invented a scene in which Edgar threatened to confront his father with the truth (64ff.). These references render conspicuous the alternative Gloucester chose not to take, and the rejected opportunity that fastens him to the pursuit of Edgar also fastens his fate to Lear's. In fending off the darkest purpose, the darker purpose affects Gloucester as it affects Cordelia. It invests both their paroles with an illocutionary force that simultaneously betrays and denies complicity: "To your professed bosoms I commit him" (1.1.272); "of my land, I Loyal and natural boy, I'll work the means I To make thee capable" (2.1.84-85). The first statement is a simple performative, while the second is more complex because the promise has, unbeknownst to its speaker, already been fulfilled; since every one of Gloucester's utterances in these scenes acts to enhance Edmund's capabilities, this one takes on the character of a summary performative. The illocu-

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tionary action seems by itself so to manage things that the "bad" characters will be enabled to discharge the vindictive impulse in deeds the "good" speakers would never sanction, much less do, themselves, even though they might feel vindicated by the consequences-might in fact be moved to intervene with mercy when they see that (in)justice had been done. In the Gloucester family, it is of course Edgar who most fully enacts this pattern. The rapid oscillation of cross-purposes evident in his Poor Tom language, the sense of betrayal and rejection that circles from retributive anger to guilt to sympathy to new anger engendered by the feeling that the sympathy is undeserved- these keep him from confronting his father, and produce the diffidence on the heath that confirms Gloucester's victimization and Edmund's triumphant villainy. Edgar's scenario, in which Poor Tom is pursued by the foul fiend, presents a distorted version of Gloucester's pursuit of Edgar, but it is distanced enough to allow for a certain flexibility as well as instability in the interchange of roles, and it is open to at least two lines of interpretation: a. b. 2a. 2b. I

I

Gloucester pursues Edgar. Edgar pursues Gloucester. A fiend within Gloucester tempts him to punish Edgar. A fiend within Edgar tempts him to punish Gloucester.

I a and rb are the complementary modes of the darker purpose: on the one hand Edgar as unjustly treated fugitive and victim; on the other Edgar as judge, punisher, pursuer justly visiting vengeance or retribution on his persecutor. 2a differs from I a. in converting Gloucester from a fiend to a helpless victim of the fiend. Since he is possessed, he is not to be blamed for what he does, he deserves pity, and the really noble thing to do is try to save him from the fiend-which may sometimes feel like saving him from himself. To say "Gloucester is a fiend" (Ia) is to reduce him to a figure of pure evil and make him a scapegoat. 2a seems much more humane: to say "Gloucester is wicked because possessed by a fiend" appears more sympathetic. But in fact it verges on sentimentality. Note that it accepts a reading ~f Gloucester's behavior very much akin to the father's own self-deluding view as expressed in his lament on the late eclipses in act I, scene 2. Ia is a harsh reduction that encourages Edgar to flee from his father and punish him. 2a is a humane reduction that encourages him to pity his father and try to save him. While 2a is likely to occur as a guilty reaction to the first, it is no less an evasion than the first. It makes contact with, draws support from, 2b: Edgar, feeling guilty, flinches from recognizing his true

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complicity by attributing his own darker purpose to a fiend, an outsider possessing him; if he can get rid of the fiend and be himself again, he will be able to rise above the wrongs that have been done him and do his persecutor a Christian, maybe Christlike, service. 2a springs from an inability or unwillingness to acknowledge the truth about the shared complicity of father and son. 2a, backed by 2b, allows Edgar to fend off guilt by avoiding his own contribution to his father's plight while heightening his sense of himself as a redemptive or heroic figure: "Why I do trifle thus with his despair/ Is done to cure it" (4.6.33-34). Of course, if the darker purpose, ra-b, is still active, it may combine with the humane reduction to produce some interesting complications: "He took everything away from me, left me nothing, and in spite of that I am giving him all." To assume the Christlike posture may- since Edgar is not quite Christ-act back on the darker purpose and intensify it: ''In view of what I am doing for him, what he has done to me seems worse than ever." Hence the impulse to forgiveness and atonement may converge with a renewed impulse to administer justice. From the cliff scene to his account of Gloucester's death, Edgar will show that he fully merits the titles bestowed on him by Lear: "most learned justicer;' "robed man of justice." The readings of Edgar from which I have learned most have commented on his cruelty, his retaliatory impulse, his shame and guilt, and the "lethal" quality of his actions. 13 But they have not taken into account the way certain elements of his Poor.Tom fantasies on the heath articulate with his response to Gloucester's blinding and with his subsequent behavior. I shall single out two moments that seem to me especially important in this regard. At J.4.n8ff, when Gloucester first appears on the heath, Poor Tom refers to him as "the foul Flibbertigibbet" who "gives the web and pin, squinies the eye, and makes the hare-lip." The words glance obscurely and distortedly at the father who has obscured vision and distorted speech, whose blind acceptance of calumny is responsible for Edgar's Bedlamite appearance and speech. Edgar is already thinking of injured eyes, and the thought becomes more sharply focused at 3.6.24-25. In the middle of Lear's trial, he suddenly says, "Look where he stands and glares! Want'st thou eyes at trial, madam?" I think it most likely that these words refer to blindness and that Edgar is conducting his own trial, probably of his father and Edmund's mother (or Lear's daughter, or perhaps even Gloucester, unmanned by his lechery and transsexualized). This likelihood is increased by the fact that at 4.1.18 Gloucester eerily answers the question: "I have no way, and therefore want no eyes." Edgar had entertained the idea that blindness would be a just symbol, if not a just

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punishment, for Gloucester's inability truly to see him. Presumably what he cannot bear about his father's maimed appearance is his having entertained this idea, and not merely his being indirectly responsible for it in the sense suggested by Stanley Cavel1. 14 It is the shock of complicity that must have scared Poor Tom "out of his good wits" and into a "bad ... trade" that may riot earn him the release he desires: "bless thee, good man's son, from the foul fiend" (4.1.38-39, 56-57). For how could he make that up to his father short of becoming Gloucester's savior and redeemer? This is the "dreadful trade" of the sampire gatherer clinging halfway down the imaginary suicide cliff, trying to revive his father's appetite for life and yet aware that the redeemer's trade may arouse anger not only at the life he is trying to preserve but also at the preserver's unplumbed motives. 15 "There is a cliff;' says Gloucester at 4.1.73-74, "whose high and bending head/Looks fearfully in the confined deep," and Edgar knows that cliff well enough· to savor the vertigo he risks: ''I'll look no more, / Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight/ Topple down headlong" (4.6.22-24). One of the sad and chilling aspects of the cliff scene is that Gloucester cannot even succeed in taking his own life so long as Edgar chooses to prevent him in order to prove his own merit by curing his father's despair. Whether he jumps or not, Edgar will preserve his life until Gloucester has come to see the virtue of his son's ways, which inevitably involves seeing the error of his own. There is no doubt in my mind that Edgar's "Why I do trifle thus with his despair/ Is done to cure it" (33-34) is to be taken at face value; if the fact that he must rehearse it to himself sounds a little pious and self-justifying, that can be accounted for by the humiliating experience he has to put his father through. It is nevertheless the case that this is an act of symbolic parricide: the old man (and the old Adam in Gloucester) must be "killed" so that the father and son may slough off the former life and be reborn together. The problem is that Edgar can never fully rid himself of the fiend, and ill: his second attempt to cure Gloucester the parricide is less symbolic. 16 The execution of Gloucester is narrated in Edgar's "brief tale," the first part of which concludes, I ask' d his blessing, and from first to last Told him my pilgrimage: but his flaw'd heart, Alack, too weak the conflict to support! 'Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief, Burst smilingly. (s.J.I95-99)

To .tell his pilgrimage would be to remind the old man of what he has done to Edgar, and Edgar tells it after recognizing that Gloucester was "in

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ill thoughts again" (5.2.ro). In Shakespeare's source for this scene, book 2, chapter ro, of Sidney's Arcadia, the king ofPaphlagonia says to his good son, ''Ah ... how evill an Historian are you, that leave out the chiefe knotte of all the discourse? my wickednes, my wickednes." Edgar was presumably a better historian, and the conflict, the grief, that killed Gloucester must have been the searing guilt caused by the joy of recognition. And so his heart "burst smilingly": he was glad to die. For in spite of Edgar's genuine efforts to hug the cliff and exorcise the darker purpose, he did not prevail. The Edgar who tells the tale is the one whose words remind us that we once heard Gloucester say, "there was !?ood sport at his making": The Gods are just, and of our pleasant vices Make instruments to plague us; The dark and vicious place where thee he got Cost him his eyes. (5-J.I70-73)

He has by now displaced the deep shock of complicity, has assumed the savior's mantle and feels capable of pronouncing judgment. His tale drastically foreshortens his performance on the heath, edits out all his darker moments, and stresses his devoted tendance ("became his guide, / Led him, begg'd for him, sav'd him from despair," 5.3.I90-9I). His mercy changed to justice when the darker purpose-0 fault!-pierced through to the exposed and raw darkest purpose in Gloucester, and overwhelmed his heart. I take the last phrase from the counterchallenge uttered by Edmund a few minutes earlier in the same scene, before the brothers duel, because his words give utterance to a harsh and coarse analogue, a caricature, of Edgar's version of the darker purpose, but an analogue nonetheless. We can imagine these words to describe the inadvertent effect of Edgar's tale on Gloucester, even though they express sentiments Edgar would desperately avoid entertaining when he thinks of Gloucester: Back I do toss these treasons to thy head, With the hell-hated lie o'erwhelm thy heart, Which, for they yet glance by and scarcely bruise, This sword [this tale] of mine shall give them instant way, Where they shall rest for ever. (s.J.I46-so)

Edgar's tale of pilgrimage is a keener instrument of justice than Edmund's sword. The gods may make instruments of our pleasant vices. But of our "dull, stale, tired" virtues, of the virtues of the marriage bed, of the curiosity of nations and the plague of custom, they make even sharper instruments.

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In ((King Lear" in Our Time, Maynard Mack observes that "what we notice in performance . . . includes all we have learned from reading and discussion." 17 Yet I think ironic and related readings of the text have turned up enough evidence to suggest that another question is now more important: Is all we have learned from reading and discussion to be limited by what we notice-what we can notice-in performance? Mack's statement should be turned around. What we learn from reading and discussion includes what we notice in performance. On what grounds is performance established as the criterion that determines how much of what we learn should be included or excluded? Mack's eloquent essay on King Lear is performance-oriented, and his "all we have learned from reading" includes less than my "all." His observation is therefore not as bland as it seems, for he is intent on resisting any kind of "subtextualizing" (33) and any attempt "to motivate the bizarre actions that Shakespeare's play calls for in some 'reasonable' way" (29). The essence of Mack's argument against the kind of textual reading of King Lear I have given is that since characters are not only imaginary persons but also emblems, archetypes, and exemplars, motivation is beside the point. The theatrical traditions Mack identifies set "man" and his psychomachia in the center of a vast cosmic stage: This is what the Morality play was, a vision acted upon a platform whereby the invisible became visible and man's terrestrial pilgrimage was glimpsed whole in its entire arc of pride and innocence, temptation and fall, regeneration and salvation or ruin and damnation. This is also, essentially, what Lear is, save that in the case of Lear we must add to the arc of pilgrimage Shakespeare's more tragic vision of the creature whose fate it is to learn to love only to lose (soon or late) the loved one, and to reach a ripeness through suffering and struggle, only to die. (78-79)

It is in this context that Mack's subsequent emphasis on the play's sociality should be understood- "its continual reference to and evocation ... of the nature and significance of human society" (1oo). Mack is not speaking of "society" in its more local and specific forms of community and family. On the contrary, "Shakespeare dilates his family story into a parable of society of all times and places" (101). And Mack conflates Lear's misanthropic "vision of society in Dover fields" with Shakespeare's, as the italicized term in the following sentence makes clear: the vision relates "principally to the society for which it was written, and, I would wish to add, to all societies as such" (108; my italics). The ritual coerciveness of King Lear in performance makes itself felt, as Lear's sermon becomes Shakespeare's, and Shakespeare's becomes Mack's.

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If we compare this view of the play to the one I have elicited from the text, it may become evident that there is a difference between the story the text tells and the story or sermon performance preaches, which includes the stories the characters tell. Lear, Cordelia, Kent, Edmund, and Edgar all invent scenarios and tell stories about themselves (to themselves, primarily, but to others also), and these are indeed the stories Mack retells: Kent tells himself a tale of his loyalty and honesty in spite of Lear's failure to appreciate him; Edgar tells of his victimage, redemptive care, and pilgrimage of service, Cordelia of her medicinal love and her sisters' wickedness, Edmund of his dashing knavery. Lear tells himself of his own folly and others' knavery, generalizes his vision to all mankind, sees himself as Mankind, speaks as one who has learned to love too late and has attained wisdom through suffering. What the text shows, as I read it, is that these are stories they prefer to hear about themselves rather than others that strike closer to home and that they would find harder to bear.18 The "medieval conception of psychomachia" confines its agon within the soul of the individual pilgrim, sufferer, saint, or sinner, and extricates it from the dark complexity of a psychomachia in which parent and child, sibling and sibling, lover and beloved, might be competing agonists. The sinner abstracts and displaces the terms of the conflict so that it becomes a struggle between God and the Devil, along with their agents, for control of his will. Such a conflict requires a vision of Man centered in an ambience whose proper scope can be nothing less than universal history and the cosmos, an ambience that minimizes the deeply troubling entanglements of local relationships, just as the flight to Nature dismantles the oppressive folds of family favor and disfavor. If the persons surrounding the sinner "are in some sense (again as in the Morality plays) extensions of himself;' the text shows that it is important to determine precisely what that sense is. Parent and child, brother and brother, sister and sister, are extensions and reflections of each other, as I have tried to show, in the specific and familiar senses applicable to the psychomachia of the family romance. The medieval psychomachia differs radically from this: it is a consoling allegory because it reduces others to images of self, denies them full existence as persons who are loved or must be loved even if feared or hated, persons we are responsible for, persons whose ·love we want yet feel unworthy of. Janet Adelman has acutely diagnosed the tendency of critics to argue "that the presentation of a character at a particular moment is not naturalistic but emblematic" in order to absolve him "from the ordinary responsibilities of human beings": the argument "is often invoked at precisely those

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moments when the character might otherwise be suspected of unbecoming behavior or of an inconsistency painful to us." 19 I would add. that such critics have been coerced, or co-opted, to invoke the argument already employed by the character with reference to himself. And, following Howard Felperin, I would further add that if the conventions of the morality plays are felt to be present in King Lear, along with other features of the popular stage, they are present as targets of critical allusion?0 The conspicuous and critical reference to available theatrical traditions seems to me part of a more general critique of the structural limits of performance. In the case of the morality plays, I think the critique connects. their popularity with their power to tell their audiences just such self-deceiving stories as Lear and Edgar tell. Now these stories take on a peculiar quality as soon as we focus not on their intradramatic setting but on their. theatrical status as exemplary sentiments addressed to the audience. Again, some remarks by Mack very precisely illustrate the response such sentiments seem to demand in performance. Of Lear's speech in 4.6 "about abuses of authority and excesses of sexuality" he claims that if we read it back into his persona, we wind up in Mr. Empson's position, appalled by an old man's "ridiculous and sordid" obsession. This is particularly true onstage, where if we overstress by gestures and facial movements the psychic "authenticity" of Lear's lament, we lose altogetherits emblematic and Morality-based dimension as a meditation or oration in the tradition of De Contemptu Mundi. 21

Empson's is neither the only nor the best possible response to the "personal" and motivational aspects of Lear's lament. Mack's comments do not do justice to the extent to which we suffer with and for Lear. We feel and share the shame that motivates this diatribe, and that can only be intensified by it. We see how desperately he needs to keep from knowing what we know and wish he would recognize. And in this perception we acknowledge both his otherness as a person, the extent to which we are severed from him, and the bond of pained sympathy that joins us to him. What Mack, following the logic of performance, refuses is this, and not Empson's response, which is a straw man. And to the extent that the Morality convention governs performance, he is perhaps right to do so. But this only illuminates the ideological bias of performance. It isn't merely that the De Contemptu Mundi tradition is shown here as a culturally implanted resource of self-deception and rationalization. Even more significant is that if we accept Lear as an exemplum, we deny him full existence as a suffering,

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sinning, self-wounding person. We accredit Lear's story, the story of the play, that suffering brings wisdom, but we accredit this story in· the mode of voyeurism: Lear's suffering brings us wisdom; he is the instrument of our enlightenment, and he, of course, knows nothing about this. He is the victim of the playwright's practice, and we are the playwright's accomplices, and all of us hide behind the arras of performance. Cavell asks how we can overcome our invisibility to characters so as to acknowledge them as persons, which we do, he argues, by putting "ourselves in another's presence," by "revealing ourselves, allowing ourselves to be seen"- as opposed to Edgar, Gloucester, Lear, and (I would add) Cordelia, who resisted allowing themselves to be seen. He suggests that although we cannot put ourselves "in the presence of the characters" we can put ourselves "in their present. It is in making their present ours, their moments as they occur, that we complete acknowledgment of them." But, he continues, "this requires making their present theirs," which in turn presupposes a particular moment of self-revelation, that is, that "I am helpless before the acting and suffering of others. But I know the true point of my helplessness only if I have acknowledged totally the fact and the true cause of their suffering." This brings home to me both "my separateness from what is happening to them" and "the unity of our condition." 22 It is in Cavell's qualifying conditional that we locate the crucial difference between performance and text. Peiformance takes its cue from Cordelia, just as Maynard Mack takes his cue from performance, in insisting, "No cause, no cause:' But reading protests against this, "Cause, cause." It is only by taking advantage of the opportunities of the text that we acknowledge "totally the fact and the true cause." We may then find that the character is both credited and discredited, or we may refuse the language of praise and blame and assert only that the character is responsible, is complicit, in ways that account for and derive from his suffering. Textuality offers us not the answer, but the opportunity to struggle against the temptation to use or reduce or praise or blame. In this struggle, the struggle of interpretation, we define the character's personhood over against our own. And we do so in such a way as to preclude our closing the book on the character. I believe that Shakespearean drama in performance gestures toward the closing of the book in such a way as to make us want to open it up again. The Shakespearean script combines with the conventions of Elizabethan theater to conceal "the fact and the true cause" of suffering, or happiness, or self-deception, in so eloquent and flamboyant a manner as to make performance a continuous and conspicuous allusion to the absent cause. The revisionary perspective penetrates performance whenever Shakespeare repre-

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sents- and represents critically- the structure of theatrical relations within the dramatic fiction. And it penetrates performance in a more subliminal manner whenever Shakespeare's language teases or threatens its auditors with the sense that its rhetorical panoply conspicuously conceals, and protects them from, surplus meaning. Around the edges of performance, in the uneasiness that accompanies our feeling that we are never hearing all that is being said, the shadow of textuality falls, converting curiosity to anxiety: "what does your speech import? I I understand a fury in your words, I But not the words." This shadow invites us to .peer into it, to decelerate the language, dislocate it, listen for the meaning in the sound, understand the words beyond the fury.

CHAPTER

5

+ The Early Scenes

of (Macbeth':

Preface to a New Interpretation

Until fairly recently, interpretations of Macbeth have moved around a common basic reading in which restoration- both natural and supernatural-is the key idea. Duncan's kingship is described as "lawful and beneficent," Scotland has been peaceful, "natural and orderly" under his rule, and it is Macbeth who disrupts the "harmony in the Scottish state." "The play deals with the overthrow of the balance of royalty, with the development of all the evil implicit in that overthrow, and with the restoration of natural order under Duncan's rightful successors." 1 The "fertility of the land and the health of the body natural or body politic are dependent alike on the recurrent rhythm of times and seasons. Macbeth suffers in his single state of man all the disorder he has brought upon the greater organism of the state." 2 The play shows how evil naturally destroys itself-or else, in a slightly different version, it shows how divine providence again and again offers Macbeth chances to reject temptation, to repent, to regain what one writer calls his "Christian self-esteem." Critics who espouse this view generally emphasize the traditional, tribal, or medieval character of the society depicted in the play. Commenting on Duncan's address to his subjects as "Sons, kinsmen, thanes," G. Wilson Knight states that "Scotland is a family, Duncan its head. A natural law binds all degrees in proper place and allegiance." 3 The individual's sense of self, status, and role in this society, his sense of the world, his sense of others- these are deeply structured by his position in the order; they are, as

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anthropologists say, ascribed, that is, they are functions of the way community values are embedded in social and political institutions, which in turn are embedded in nature, understood as given, unalterable, and holy. The murder of Duncan and tyranny of Macbeth upset all these relationships. As a result, Scots are assaulted by instant anomie. They neither know nor trust each other. Behavior is hard to assess; actions are ambiguous. And the single state of this world is so tightly integrated that ethical and physical disorders converge, as in ancient legend or primitive belief: Macbeth's unholy act of murder seems to trigger unnatural phenomena. In my opinion, one of the more interesting versions of this reading is that of John Holloway, who sees Macbeth as "a kind of ritual victim: a scapegoat, a lord of misrule, who has turned life into riot for his limited time, and then is driven out and destroyed by the forces which embody the fertile vitality or the communal happiness of the group." Holloway points to the image of Macbeth -whose way of life is fallen into. the sere, the yellow leaf- "pursued by a whole company of others carrying green branches," as in a Maying procession. Beneath the immediate dramatic action, he sees the ancient ritual contours "of a sacrificial fertility ceremony, the expulsion, hunting down, and destruction of a man who has turned into a monster." 4 This archetype projects the obscure workings of Providence, the underlying pattern of order on which the chaos of men's affairs is seen to repose. The dramatic irony that critics so often find in Macbeth is well illustrated here: the ancient archetype is neither consciously nor unconsciously imitated by the characters in the drama; it has nothing to do with their psyches. Beyond their knowing, because- or in spite- of themselves, they participate in the perennial drama of grace. The transcendent system of order is momentarily upset, and then returns to the primal equilibrium from which it is seasonally disrupted. The structure is always the same, but the actors are different. Shakespeare sets his tragedy of evil within an idealized world that is spatially, temporally, logically, and ontologically integrated- the individual within the social order, society within the natural order, nature within the supernatural order. There is an important insight in Holloway's version of the orthodox reading, namely, the idea of a deep structure informing the surface action. This insight guides my own approach to the play, though of course the approach demands considerable adjustments in the insight. I would prefer to think of the underlying pattern in structuralist rather than in archetypal terms; but by "structuralist" I mean that the pattern should be referred to institutional (social and political) tendencies expressed in the action of the play and the behavior of its characters. Furthermore, I would smoke the

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edges of this structuralist approach with an existentialist emphasis on the responsibility of the characters, that is, on their freedom to reinforce or to oppose the structural tendencies. I think Shakespeare is centrally interested -in this play as in others-in dramatizing failures or evasions of responsibility correlated with problematic structural tendencies that seem benign because it is in the interest of self-deceiving characters to view them that way. I would say, for example, that the view of the play I just summarized is the view entertained and articulated by all the "good" characters in Macbeth; that they justify themselves and their society by appealing to it; and that it is the view Shakespeare subtly but persistently criticizes. My revision of the Holloway thesis takes its inspiration from Sigurd Burckhardt's account of the contrast between Shakespeare's two sets of English history plays. In the first tetralogy, according to Burckhardt, Shakespeare presents at face value a traditional and orthodox scheme of happy ending: the restorative pattern in which the cosmic order, after being disturbed by man, reasserts itself. But the second tetralogy (Richard II through Henry V) shows that Shakespeare had come to look on the orthodox scheme as a false ideal. The comforting emphasis on God's controlling hand might be appropriate for propaganda, or for a morality play, but not for the more realistic view that history is largely the work and burden of man. As Burckhardt puts it, the restorative view of history may function as a curse that damns "all genuinely human action and denies the dimension and meaning of time." Macbeth has sometimes been read as a kind of revision of Richard III, the last play in the first tetralogy-infinitely deeper and more complex, but essentially similar in its message. What Burckhardt wrote about Richard III would then apply to Macbeth: "In the end, a frightful disturbance has run its course, a curse has been lifted. 'The bloody dog is dead' and ... at the end of Richard III we are meant to feel, and do feel, that [through God's grace} things have finally come 'round': they are back to where they always should have been." 5 I would argue that this view of Richard III, which Burckhardt in effect ascribes to Shakespeare, cannot be applied to Macbeth in the same mannerthat is, it cannot be ascribed to Shakespeare as his view of the play- but that it can be applied. As I suggested earlier, it is the view Shakespeare ascribes to the good Scots, Macbeth's enemies, and it is a view he presents critically as self-justifying, scapegoating, and simplistic. Those who embrace it refuse, by so doing, to acknowledge their own complicity in the events of the play. Thus we are asked to see their pietistic restoration view as contributing to the subtler evil that obscures the Scottish air and envelops the loyal thanes as well as the bloody dog and his wife. In developing this thesis

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I shall be carrying further some readings of the play that in recent years have begun to challenge the orthodox view. The most forceful version of the challenge that I have come across·is Wilbur Sanders's interpretation, to which I am heavily indebted.6 But Sanders stops short of what I consider to be an adequate revision because he exempts Duncan and Macduff from the general curse, and thereby fails to come to grips with the pervasive influence-touching all the characters in the play-of what I have called the deep-structural tendencies affecting Scottish society. Symptoms of these tendencies appear in the first Scottish scene, 1.2, a scene that anyone· who thinks there is unity and harmony in the state of Scotland had better look at again: Macdonwald rebels against Duncan assisted by Irish "Kernes and Gallowglasses," and after Macbeth defeats him and fixes his head on the battlements, Sweno the Norwegian king attacks the Scots. After hearing that Macbeth and Banquo beat him back we learn that he was helped by "that most disloyal traitor, I The Thane of Cawdor" (1.2.53-54)? By the middle of 1.4 the Scottish king has run into two rebels, a foreign foe, and a budding regicide. These facts have to be set against the persistent praise of Duncan as an ideal king, the head of a harmonious state "whose members are bound into unity by the accepted ties of loyalty." 8 But we need not jump immediately to the conclusion that this disorder reflects on Duncan; that possibility will be explored later. On the other hand, it may throw an interesting light on the events of the final act. Macduff's killing of Macbeth recalls Macbeth's victory over Macdonwald: Macbeth also has Kernes fighting for him, and his head, Macduff threatens, will end up on a pole, if not on battlements. This may be viewed as poetic justice, the wheel come full circle. But it may also be simple recurrence, more of the same. In killing Macbeth, Macduff steps into his role. Will he become Malcolm's Macbeth? And in killing Macbeth he has killed not merely a tyrant but a properly appointed king, "nam'd" and "invested" at Scone (2.4.31). Malcolm's final reference to being "crown'd at Scone" may remind us that while Macbeth was a regicide he was not a usurper (which Macduff, at 5.9.21, wrongly calls him), and this means that Macduff is also a regicide. If Macbeth feels his title "hang loose about him," as Angus puts it (5.3.20), "like a giant's robe I Upon a dwarfish thief," it is still rightly his title; having killed the king he did not have to steal or usurp the throne, because the flight of the king's sons, and their suspicious behavior, left him the next in line. Thus in purely political terms, Malcolm's leading the English army to Dunsinane is no less disloyal to the Scottish throne than is Cawdor's treacherous assistance to Norway. Finally, it appears in act 5 that everyone revolts from Macbeth because of his cruel tyranny; yet there is only a difference

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of degree between this and the difficulties which the good king Duncan faced. I conclude from these observations that there is something rotten in Scotland-that something intrinsic to the structure of Scottish society, something deeper than the melodramatic wickedness of one or two individuals, generates these tendencies toward instability, conflict, sedition, and murder. If so, it is not something the characters of the play- especially the good characters, that is, everyone except the Macbeths- seem aware of. Is it, however, something that goes on in spite of them, or is it something to which they lend tacit support? Before dealing with so complex a question, it might be helpful to offer clues as to what this "something" is. Duncan's first words in the play-the words opening 1.2, the first Scottish scene-are "What bloody man is that?" and we assume that the officer to whom he refers is bloodied both by his own wounds and by those of his enemies and victims. The two bloods mixing together become a single badge, his medal of honor and pain. And he talks blood as well as dripping it. He portrays the loyal bloodlust of Macbeth, as that hero unseams and decapitates the merciless Macdonwald and as, with Banquo, he himself stands off the Norwegians so ferociously that even the military speaker is amazed. The officer clearly appreciates the theatrical possibilities of his role. He speaks and bleeds in high style, slashed with similes, rolling the gory images out with obvious relish, excited to verbal violence both by his fierce loyalty and by the savage example of Macbeth. The epic tone projects more than nationalistic and bloody fervor. Twice interrupted by Duncan, the officer attacks each of the three segments of his speech with a well-wrought simile that reveals more than a touch of epi. deictic self-consciousness. He is no mere messenger- Malcolm introduces him as "a good and hardy soldier" who "fought/ 'Gainst my captivity" ( 1 .2.4- 5)- and this suggests that Shakespeare wants to give him some claim to the attention due a valiant warrior. On the other hand, he is less than a named character whose motives and contributions to the plot concern us. He appears only to report the news, and vanishes after duly conveying the information requested, to be replaced by the Thane of Rosse, who brings the account up-to-date. It is at least worthy of note, therefore, that his language is insistently self-preferring, that it compels the king's attention, indeed respect, as much for the quality of its narrative as for its substance. The stage direction calls for an alarum, and Duncan's opening words resonate with the haste and confusion of battle. Yet when the officer begins to unfold his story, everything around him is strangely slowed and stilled: he becomes the voice and presence of battle; its confusion takes on the form he gives it; and his language changes its meaning even as it visualizes it-

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or, in some cases, devisualizes by figurative transformations. What, then, is the officer's function in the play? Why is he at once so conspicuous and so marginal? What does he contribute to our image of Scottish society, to our search for the "something [rotten] in Scotland" that precedes, rather than follows from, the horrors perpetrated by the Macbeths? These questions will inform my decelerated journey through the officer's words. Duncan infers from the bloody officer's appearance that "he can report ... of the revolt/The newest state" (r.2.1-3), as if-to twist the words a little-the revolt (like Hemingway's war) was always there and this is merely its latest phase. The officer responds to Malcolm's request for an up-to-date report "of the broil" with the first of his odd similes:

Dun.

Doubtful it stood; As two spent swimmers, that do cling together And choke their art. The merciless Macdonwald (Worthy to be a rebel, for to that The multiplying villainies of nature Do swarm upon him) from the western isles Of Kernes and Gallowglasses is supplied; And Fortune, on his damned quarrel smiling, Show'd like a rebel's whore: but all's too weak; For brave Macbeth (well he deserves that name), Disdaining Fortune, with his brandish'd steel, Which smok'd with bloody execution, Like Valor's minion, carv'd out his passage, Till he fac'd the slave; Which ne'er shook hands, nor bade farewell to him, Till he unseam'd him from the nave to th' chops, And fix'd his head upon our battlements. 0 valiant cousin! worthy gentleman! (1.2. 7-24)

Laurence Michel has brilliantly discussed this speech in The Thing Contained,9 and if I go over some of the same ground it is because my reading of the play is finally quite different from his and gives similar insights a different orientation. The two swimmers of the opening simile must represent the two opposing forces (or warriors epitomizing them) in the conflict. This dividing and doubling generates ambiguity: are these two fighters (or armies) trying to destroy each other or two swimmers trying to save each other? Or is each swimmer trying (like a fighter) to save himself by using the other as a buoy? In any case, clinging together produces a dysfunctional solidarity: warriors who in their exhaustion choke their warcraft rather than each other fail to destroy each other and begin to rely on each other to preserve themselves; swimmers who choke their swimcraft end up choking

EARLY SCENES OF 'MACBETH'

rather than saving each other, and they jeopardize themselves because they destroy their means of flotation in the very act of creating it (seizing the other swimmer). The bond joining enemies is no less symbiotic and no more destructive than that joining comrades. The simile projects a situation in which enemies cling together as friends, and friends as enemies. The officer's remarks after Duncan's interjection make it clear that the battle remains doubtful after Macbeth's defeat of Macdonwald, but since his latest information is that Macbeth and Banquo were soundly trouncing the Norwegians (1.2. 35-43), his opening assessment remains a little confusinguntil Rosse enters to finish the account. There is nothing doubtful, however, about Macbeth's defeat of Macdonwald. The officer vicariously lends Macbeth assistance by rhetorically diminishing his foe: at first merciless, Macdonwald is encumbered with villainies that swarm, as Muir remarks, like lice (6). F2 and F3 read "villaines," but "villainies" is better because it includes villains- that is, the poor Irish followers- as well as the defects, the vileness, of Macdonwald's own character. His villainy, his evil, is selfdefeating, and the officer next equips him with a whore, momentarily reducing him further to a petty rake like those who frequent the Boar's Head. No wonder "all's too weak": in the choice between Pleasure and Virtue, Fortune and Valor, Macdonwald erred, while Macbeth resisted temptation. The speaker frames this conflict in clear-cut moral antitheses that reinforce and justify the outcome: Macdonwald merits no pity, no mercy, not only because he is himself merciless but also because he is filthy, base, and therefore contemptible, the "slave" of his whore. Macbeth deserves to be called brave because he disdains the whore and gives his foe no quarter. His ferocity is the mark of his manliness and value, and it is warranted by the vicious weakness that makes Macdonwald "worthy to be a rebel." Some odd notes appear in this speech as soon as one dissociates oneself from the speaker's viewpoint. In the first place, the finality of Macbeth's triumph rubs against the uncertainty expressed in the opening simile. Simile and episode seem unrelated to each other, though one would normally expect the episode to illustrate or elucidate the simile. But what is thereby excluded is not. irrelevant: if the two are tacitly connected, this generates the idea that Macbeth in some manner relies on Macdonwald, that both together, hero and rebel, are "spent swimmers," perhaps equally victims of a common social weather. Having killed Macdonwald Macbeth will eventually, as I suggested earlier, find himself in a similar predicament and meet a similar death. In the second place, the language plays chiastically with the relations between persons and personifications: "like Valor's minion" echoes "like a rebel's whore," but Fortune is the whore and Macbeth is the minion;

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77

this is not the last time in the play that persons will be interchangeable with personifications, and the significance of this will be discussed later. Minion can mean "servant" as well as "favorite" or "darling" (cf. Falstaff's "minions of the moon"), and this brings it into contact with slave in the next line. What does it mean to be the favorite or servant of Valor? Is Valor a male or female personification? Who is the actual master or mistress veiled behind the personifications- is Macbeth the minion of something within or something beyond himself? Can one become the slave of Valor, and is this different from becoming the slave of Fortune? Macbeth will not disdain Fortune after he meets the witches: is serving Valor an alternative to serving Fortune, that is, a way of legitimizing impulses that might otherwise discharge themselves in questionable or unlawful causes? These impulses, finally, are registered with such rhetorical bravura as to raise another question: Doesn't the weakness in which the speaker mantles Macdonwald leave us with the sense that Macbeth's violence was extravagant? Valor and bravery are not defined in Hotspurian terms of risk or difficulty-the conflict is one-sided- but in terms of destructive fury. It is Macbeth's "bloody execution" that evokes Duncan's "0 valiant cousin! worthy gentleman!" But it isn't only that, for Macbeth is not alone in being carried away by this impulse. The speaker contributes to the overkill. He approves the violence. His salty phrases, his flamboyant verbal gestures, relish in the hero's carnage and add force to his brandished steel. Diminishing the rebel and enhancing the hero, he stands before the king as Macbeth's ally. Yet the alliance is not a comfortable one, as we shall see in the next passage. After Duncan interrupts to praise his valiant cousin, the officer draws attention back to himself with an even more laborious simile: As whence the sun 'gins his reflection, Shipwracking storms and direful thunders break, So from that spring, whence comfort seem'd to come, Discomfort swells. Mark, King of Scotland, mark: No sooner justice had, with valor arm'd, Compell'd these skipping Kernes to trust their heels, But the Norweyan Lord, surveying vantage, With furbish'd arms, and new supplies of men, Began a fresh assault. (r.2.25-33)

The simile is a roundabout way of saying that first Macbeth and then Norway attacked from the east. The officer increases suspense not only by using the historical present ("swells") but also by distinguishing between the comfort that "seem'd to come" from Macbeth and the swelling discomfort that follows his first triumph. Macbeth, defending from the west, is now

EARLY SCENES OF 'MACBETH'

in Macdonwald's position. The image of "shipwracking storms" and the theme of ambivalence both revive the uncertainty of the "spent swimmers" simile. Even more ominous implications have been noted by Roy Walker, who suggests that the storms and thunders at once recall the witches, and inform us from what source the danger threatens; and we remember that the Witches go to meet Macbeth. "Shipwracking" storms is the very subject of the Witches' next consultation. Macbeth is the source whence comfort seemed to come. From just that quarter danger threatens .... Let the King of Scotland mark the omen! ... The Sergeant ... is of course unconscious of the undertone of meaning. 10

Like Macbeth's bloody execution, the simile seems excessive, and the rhetorical excess seems intended by the speaker to shift the king's admiration from the news he tells to his telling of it. Duncan's "0 valiant cousin! worthy gentleman!" may move the speaker to an objection that is paraphrasable as follows: "Not so fast! The battle still stands doubtful, with more serious trouble in store. Mark my words: yield to the pace and shape of the story as I tell it. Let me be the immediate spring of your comfort and discomfort both." He means to prepare Duncan for Macbeth's next furious assault. But at the same time he is aggressively controlling the king's response and contending for royal approval against the heroic subject of his discourse. Furthermore, the immediate context of the simile lends it a fairly direct meaning as a caveat somewhat different from that suggested by Walker: the very violence the speaker had emphasized and Duncan praised may be a source of danger. This warning does not center specifically on Macbeth; it centers generally on the danger of violence, of the bloody-mindedness that is stimulated and valued in warrior society because essential to its survival. Valor's minions may propel their emulative energies toward rebellion and treachery as well as toward loyal service; let the king's justice be sure to arm itself with the valor whose minions are fierce thanes. There may thus be a momentary swerve in the language toward a more apprehensive view not necessarily of Macbeth alone, but of the warrior spirit he preeminently. possesses. The danger to a king is a structural component of his social order, inextricable from the positive energy that sustains the order. The speaker immediately redirects this warning outward toward foreign foes, yet the "discomfort" of the structural warning resonates and swells beyond the relatively quick submission of Norway. It is in fact implicit in his own speech, which betrays- however modestly- the warrior's competitive spirit and his desire for praise. The final section of the officer's speech is a response to Duncan's ques-

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tion whether Norway's attack dismayed "our captains, Macbeth and Banquo." "Yes," the officer replies,

Dun.

As sparrows eagles, or the hare the lion, If I say sooth, I must report they were As cannons overcharg'd with double cracks; So they Doubly redoubled strokes upon the foe: Except they meant to bathe in reeking wounds, Or memorize another Golgotha, I cannot tellBut I am faint, my gashes cry for help. So well thy words become thee, as thy wounds: They smack of honor both.- Go, get him surgeons. (r.2.J5-45)

As the officer doubles and redoubles his comparisons, he insists on their "sooth" and thus on the hyperbolic character of the bloodlust that truth compels him to report. Yet the rhetoric, competing with its subject, pushes both toward the edge of uncontrol, not only in reducing the heroes to grotesque war machines (one meaning of "minion" is "a piece of light artillery"- Macbeth is now Valor's cannon) but also in describing war machines dangerous to themselves and their operators: a cannon "overcharg'd with double cracks" is more likely to misfire and leave the cannoneer hoist with his own petard. "If I say sooth, I must report" may therefore contain a cautionary note within its explicit admiration, a reluctant acknowledgment of something dangerous, unreliable, in the heroes' fury, something that makes even this "good and hardy soldier" uneasy. But the consequent "so they" minimizes this note: because they were overcharged with double cracks they do~bly redoubled strokes upon the foe ("doubly redoubled" -either "quadrupled" or "both together doubled"). But even in this comfort discomfort swells: what would these eagles, lions, cannons do without sparrows, hares, or foreign foes to prey on? The uneasiness persists. The reference to Golgotha is crammed with double cracks and threatens to hoist the verbal cannoneer: another crucifixion, another killing of the good king who has been undone by traitors. Duncan is a more likely prospect for this role than Norway, yet the Golgothan aggressors remain Banquo and Macbeth. Striving to match and overgo their deeds, the speaker's language outruns the pauser, reason, and swerves aggressively against them in the very effort to do them rhetorical justice. Perhaps this helps his gashes reduce him to a moment of silence. He quickly steps forward as the wounded hero, the antithesis of "our captains": they

8o

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meant to bathe in reeking wounds; his gashes cry for help. And his words cry for praise: which is nobler, to wound or be wounded? He is all the more valiant and worthy for speaking in spite of his pain. Thus the speech that utters itself through the officer is equivocal. It seconds the officer's countrymen, adding its strength to theirs and so contributing to the harmony of Duncan's realm. At the same time it betrays an uneasiness, an apprehensiveness, about the heroes, and some of its admonitory force seems diffusely aimed at them as well as at foreign foes. It competes defensively against the threat obscurely felt in their power, but it also competes in a simpler, more direct manner: its florid and theatrical excess, reducing the heroes to emblematic caricatures, lays claim to the king's attention in its own right. Its twists and turns, its epideictic contentiousness, reflect a move to block, or at least share.in, the praises that flow from the king to heroes. When the Thane of Rosse rushes in to bring the battle report up-todate, his language is terser, more abrupt and nervous, but it retains the same self-dramatizing edge and the same equivocal relation to its subject. The pace is quickened by an interlace of alliteration, assonance, homoioteleuton, and repetition, and by the substitution of metaphors for similes. The speech conforms to Lenox's introductory description: What a haste looks through his eyes! So should he look That seems to speak things strange. Rosse God save the King! Dun. Whence cam'st thou, worthy Thane? Rosse From Fife, great King! Where the Norweyan banners flout the sky, And fan our people cold. Norway himself, With terrible numbers, Assisted by that most disloyal traitor, The Thane of Cawdor, began a dismal conflict; Till that Bellona's bridegroom, lapp'd in proof, Confronted him with self-comparisons, Point against point, rebellious arm 'gainst arm, Curbing his lavish spirit: and, to conclude, The victory fell on us;Dun. Great happiness! Rosse That now Sweno, the Norways' King, craves composition; Nor would we deign him burial of his men Till he disbursed at Saint Colme's Inch Ten thousand dollars to our general use. Dun. No more that Thane of Cawdor shall deceive Our bosom interest.- Go pronounce his present death, And with his former title greet Macbeth. Len.

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8!

Rosse I '11 see it done. Dun. What he hath lost, noble Macbeth hath won. (!.2.47-69)

Again the speaker begins by exaggerating the threat, and his misleading use of the historical present confuses because, after the officer's account of Banquo and Macbeth, one wonders whether their being overcharged led to a Norwegian victory. But the danger is moved into the past tense and quickly dissipated by Macbeth's victory over Cawdor. This report differs from the officer's in singling out Macbeth and ignoring Banquo. The sudden Norwegian collapse, like that of Macdonwald, is ascribed solely to· Macbeth. Since the victory has been won, why the haste, the look of one "that seems to speak things strange," the "God save the King!" (which, however formulaic, resonates here with the urgency of Rosse's entrance)? The more ominous overtones of this moment tend to gather around the haunting image of "Bellona's bridegroom, lapp'd in proof," a nightmare amplification of "Valor's minion." "Bellona's bridegroom" is paradoxical because the archaic goddess of war was a fierce unyielding virgin, the opposite of Mars's Venus; "lapp'd" means wrapped, swathed (like a baby?), clothed as in a soft blanket or robe, or as in waves, but the proof is gore. The image is not only gigantic, but also erotic and infantile; "lapp'd in proof" suggests something approximating what we would now call a security blanket, as if bathing in blood is his "great happiness" and the source of the "composition," the composure, he craves-as if, metaphorically, it cleanses, relaxes, and pacifies him. As Rosse proceeds, the distinction between the two Cawdors fades, and this owes partly to the fact that the clauses are not in parallel structureMacbeth is the subject of "confronted" but not, presumably, of "rebellious arm"- so that either warrior may be the antecedent of "his lavish spirit." Macbeth has his own spirit to contend with, to curb or pacify, and Rosse's preposition in the next line is ironic in a way he doubtless does not intend- "the victory fell on us" (like a rock). The "self-comparisons" fusing Cawdor and Macbeth can certainly have the proleptic function of dramatic irony noted by Roy Walker and others: "Macbeth is to match the Thane of Cawdor in treachery as well as in valor." But there is also a structural irony, and this comes out a little more clearly in Walker's comment on Duncan's "with his former title greet Macbeth": "the last title applied to the Thane of Cawdor was 'that most disloyal traitor.' " 11 What Cawdor has lost and "noble Macbeth hath won" is a set of possibilities-for treachery as well as valor- built into the very role of thane, or into the promotion from a less to a more eminent thaneship that brings one politically closer to the king. As Macbeth outfought Cawdor so perhaps his own lavish spirit will make

EARLY SCENES OF 'MACBETH'

the thaneship more powerful, and therefore more dangerous. The proleptic dimension of these ironies should not be overstressed: what troubles Scotland is a settled instability and not merely a future harm; it is the instability that makes the harm probable, given the right circumstances. Macbeth is not the only threat: in the final segment of his speech the officer's uneasiness was inspired coequally by Banquo and Macbeth. In a society that sanctions violence, that relies on the contentiousness of its members no less than on their solidarity, and in which ferocity and praise mutually inspire and intensify each other, the success of outstanding warriors must always be greeted with muffled concern as well as "great happiness." Admiration, relief, and gratitude speak through Rosse's words to Duncan. We, however-Shakespeare's audience-differ from Duncan in detecting the strangeness that looks through Rosse's eyes and words: an unknown fear, a touch of terror, the product of the ambivalence that has accumulated toward this moment from the officer's first simile. The officer spoke as if Macbeth (and Banquo) single-handedly carved passages through whole armies to reach the chosen victims, and Rosse ascribes the downfall of the Norwegian army to the defeat of Cawdor. His brief return to the present tense in "Sweno . . . craves composition" produces a somber effect. Sweno has paid the money, according to the verbs that follow, and by now may have buried his. dead. "Craves composition" ripples out beyond its context with the force of a general rather than historical present: he craves terms of peace, craves peace and composure, like one who has seen or experienced something that has murdered sleep, a spectacle that will let him sleep no more. But any such feeling unpacked from Rosse's words should not be construed primarily as a comment on Sweno; it reflects the speaker. For the Scots there are things besides Norwegian banners that "fan our people cold." Rosse's report builds on and continues the officer's, and while it differs in being less emulative, more apprehensive, the unspecified. anxiety that permeates it draws power from the officer's uneasy descriptions of Macbeth's violence. Worked on by their words and images, the figure heaving gradually into view gains in terror of aspect until, diabolized and lapped in proof, he calls to mind the dark slayer of another old king: The rugged Pyrrhus, he whose sable arms, Black as his purpose, did the night resemble When he lay couched in the ominous horse, Hath now this dread and black complexion smeared With heraldry more dismal. Head to foot Now is he total gules, horridly tricked With blood of fathers, mothers, daughters, sons,

EARLY SCENES OF 'MACBETH'

Baked and impasted with the parching streets, That lend a tyrannous and a damned light To their lord's murder. Roasted in wrath and fire, And thus o'ersized with coagulate gore, With eyes like carbuncles, the hellish Pyrrhus Old grandsire Priam seeks. (Hamlet 2.2.440-52)

The Scottish specter is more terrifying because it lives within the walls. Rosse's tightly furled metaphoric figure of Bellona's bridegroom laconically condenses such a dark fantasy, glances fearfully at it, acknowledges it, and fends it off. His language wins a Pyrrhic victory. Of the two news-bearers in this scene, Rosse is the most important of the minor characters-those with names or titles whose immediate interest (unlike Malcolm or Macduff) is not affected, who contribute little to the action and therefore speak with a kind of choric authority-while the officer is nameless. The latter has more than twice as many lines as Rosse, yet we do not feel compelled to probe his speech for insight into his personal motives. The cumulative effect of their speeches directs us toward something that transcends the particularities of character, and this is presumably why Shakespeare entrusted such complex responses to anonymous or choric speakers. Theirs is a group response, the refraction of needs, values, and apprehensions common to Duncan's sons, kinsmen, thanes, and their subordinates. Their armored rhetoric is haunted, as their society is shaken, by unknown fears and scruples. The fundamental image projected by !.2 is of men hors de combat, standing by in relative helplessness, waiting for the latest report from the front. They seem to have reached the limit of their own resources (including Malcolm, who had to be saved from capture), and they compose into a group of worried observers who, beneath their nervous and confused movements, appear passive to the point of resignation. They are forced to look beyond themselves toward the exceptional hero, the godfigure, to whom they have psychologically-not merely militarily-committed their fate. And this commitment goes further toward unmanning them, as if the apparition of their avenger, their terrible savior, has sapped all their strength and added it to his own. The paralysis that besets the tyrant's subjects in the fourth act had its origins well before Duncan's murder. It is important to set this view against the too exclusive focus on dramatic foreshadowing exemplified in Roy Walker's reading of the play.12 The latter emphasizes Shakespeare's transactions with us at the expense of the Scots' transactions with each other. It distracts us from those clues that point, not directly to Macbeth's future wickedness, but to the impression Macbeth makes on the other Scots, and to the group attitude that projects

EARLY SCENES OF 'MACBETH'

its hidden anxiety onto his figure. Clearly, the Macbeth we see from 1.3 on is very different from the Macbeth they see. From the moment in r. 7 when Macbeth approaches the murder as a real possibility, we see his attachment to the figure of Duncan increase. The richness of the bond that ties him to Duncan includes more than the torments of conscience: it includes a sense of Duncan's humanity, an anticipation of pity to be aroused by his personal qualities, and vivid identification with the plight or peace of the victim. After reducing Duncan to a corpse Macbeth did his best to mortify himself, desensitize himself, and reduce himself to a monster. All the other Scots cooperate in reducing him to a monster. And he finally cooperates with them in seeking his own death. Since we see more deeply than they do into Macbeth, we are in a position to judge the extent to which they strip away the deprived humanity, the tormented consciousness and selfhood he does have. Malcolm's final triumphant crowing over "this dead butcher, and his fiend-like Queen" seems itself a mental and rhetorical act of butchery, though it produces a nice morality-play antithesis to Macduff's earlier praise of Malcolm's parents as "a most sainted King" and pious queen. In an odd way, the Scots' treatment of Duncan is· no different from their treatment of Macbeth. To sublime a man to a saint is not much better, from a certain standpoint, than reducing him to a monster.· A striking fact about the play is that hardly anyone speaks at all about Duncan after he is dead. With the exception of the Macbeths, no one speaks of him as a human being, a loved and loving father, a man as well as a king-who should be an object of pity as well as reverence or terror. They speak of him in terms of kingship or terror only-as a thing, a symbol, the source of their former good and present fear. They evince great respect but little fellow feeling, great horror but little pity. He is memorialized but not remembered, sanctified as a gracious king but hardly mourned for as a man. Both Duncan and Macbeth are reduced from humanity to something more or something less (and more is less) -to symbols of good and evil. Both are drained of blood, the wine of life; both are beyond the pale of the milk of human kindness. But like Macbeth Duncan exists in the play as a man and not only as a symbol. His role in the play, his predicament, the peculiarity of his character and speech, the uneasiness of his relations with his subjectsthese have generally been glossed over by interpreters, and so I shall say something about them here, beginning with some obvious remarks about his precarious situation in 1.2. Act r, scene 2 begins with Duncan asking for a report of "the newest state" of the revolt, and later he asks whether Banquo and Macbeth were dismayed by the Norwegian attack. When Rosse enters with Angus, Dun-

EARLY SCENES OF 'MACBETH'

ss

can asks who comes, and from where. Scene 4 begins with Duncan wondering whether the treacherous first Thane of Cawdor has been executed yet, learning that he died repentant, and remarking with querulous bewilderment, "There's no art I To find the mind's construction in the face: I He was a gentleman on whom I built I An absolute trust-" (n-14). At this point Shakespeare nails the lid on Duncan's destiny, and on his heavenly wisdom and trust, by having Macbeth enter and be the next recipient of the king's misplaced confidence: "0 worthiest cousin!" Duncan's questions can be excused on the grounds that they elicit information the audience needs, but I think we also have to consider them in the light of his judgments of character. He seems almost as unclear about the rapidly changing state of war as he is about his thanes of Cawdor. I do not think we expect him to be up at the front any more than we expect other old kings-Charlemagne or Hrothgar-to be leading the charge. Yet the tempo of reversals is fast and confusing; certainly Duncan finds it so. The battle's lost and won two times on the field, and a third time in the life of the first Thane of Cawdor, who died confessing his treasons. Duncan has need of warriors eager "to bathe in reeking wounds," and he has reason to be grateful to them. His kingdom is no less shaky than his control of the facts or of his subjects' loyalty. It is not surprising, therefore, that his expressions of gratitude seem unrestrained and spontaneous, and that· his generosity superficially displays an easy-come, easy-go quality, as in his precipitate transfer ofCawdor's title to Macbeth. It was this, after all, that led Macbeth to take the witches seriously. Did Duncan confer it too quickly-too generously? Did he cooperate with the witches? Shakespeare's probable source, Holinshed, blames the problems of Scotland on Duncan's character as a man. He writes that Duncan was too "soft and gentle of nature, ... had too much of clemencie," and was negligent in punishing offenders, so that "manie misruled persons tooke occasion thereof to trouble the peace and quiet state of the common-wealth, by seditious commotions which first had their beginning in this wise." 13 Some of the softness. and gentleness carries over into Shakespeare's Duncan; it makes itself felt in his language of gratitude and love. But his quick response in sentencing Cawdor and rewarding Macbeth may seem like an effort to avoid the errors of his counterpart in Holinshed and to surround himself with fierce and loyal warriors. And this confronts his gentleness and generosity with a new set of problems. There is a certain urgency in his dispatching Rosse to tell Macbeth the news- as if not a moment can be lost. The instant and easy transfer of Cawdor's title- "what he hath lost, noble Macbeth hath won" -may be

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motivated by something more than Duncan's gratitude and natural "graciousness." When Rosse brings the good news to Macbeth in 1.3, his words betray tensions in the king as well as in himself: The King hath happily receiv'd, Macbeth, The news of thy success; and when he reads Thy personal venture in the rebels' fight, His wonders and his praises do contend, Which should be thine, or his: silenc'd with that, In viewing o'er the rest o' th' selfsame day, He finds thee in the stout Norweyan ranks, Nothing afeard of what thyself didst make, Strange images of death. As thick as hail, Came post with post; and every one did bear Thy praises in his kingdom's great defence, And pour'd them down before him. (r.3.89-roo)

We can probably ignore the fact that Rosse was absent from the first part of the scene he reports; if we do not ignore it we shall be struck by the freedom with which he interprets the only response by Duncan that was available to us: "0 valiant cousin! worthy gentleman!" Either Duncan displayed, or Rosse interpolates, an uneasy response to the obligation imposed on him byhis subject's "personal venture": "silenc'd with that" converts a facile hyperbole to a more realistic report of mental reaction. Of the phrase "which should be thine, or his," Walker notes that "in Macbeth's rebel heart that is the very question," 14 and if we are aware of this it serves to verify the uneasiness Rosse describes. The prowess by which the hero preserves Duncan's kingdom is at the same time a claim to praise and admiration worthy of a king, and this claim to primacy is a threat against which Duncan feels it necessary to contend. The remainder of Rosse's speech conveys his own uneasiness more than Duncan's. Wonders and praises contend with an underswell of "discomfort" in his reference to "strange images of death," which recalls Bellona's bridegroom, and also Lenox's "So should he look/ That seems to speak things strange." There is further discomfort in his odd image of a hailstorm of praises, which is swelled by previous references to bad weather and by Rosse's earlier "fan our people cold." If Macbeth is "nothing afeard of what thyself didst make," perhaps other people are, and perhaps their apprehension is deepened by his temerity. The impression Rosse leaves is that the fear his language discloses touches Duncan in the form of a need to reward/match/defuse Macbeth's "personal venture" with honors only a king can bestow, honors by which the king may placate the thane and maintain

EARLY SCENES OF 'MACBETH'

his own edge of superiority. This prerogative is stressed in the curiously impatient words with which Angus follows Rosse:

Rosse

We are sent, To give thee from our royal master thanks; Only to herald thee into his sight, Not pay thee. And, for an earnest of a greater honor, He bade me, from him, call thee Thane of Cawdor: In which addition, hail, most worthy Thane, For it is thine. (r.J.IOO-I07)

Angus's words reflect Duncan's uneasiness: the king wants to reserve to himself the act of payment so as to maintain his own in his competition with Macbeth. But Angus also competes. His "pay" strikes a harsh note, and seems directed as much toward Rosse's inflated speech-making as ·toward Macbeth. As if sensing a challenge or rebuff, Rosse comes as close as he can to "paying" Macbeth on the spot: the "earnest" is the verbal down payment on a title that is in the king's sole gift. No doubt we can assume that Macbeth would be startled by hearing of "a greater honor," but that should not keep us from noticing the momentary tension between the messengers. The tension cannot be· read at the personal level, since Angus barely exists and Rosse, in spite of his predominance, remains essentially a choric figure, the voice of the thanes. The exchange seems rather to extend into the present moment the king's dilemma, "which should be thine, or his," and to generalize the air of uneasiness-uneasiness about Macbeth, uneasiness about the prerogative and the terms of their mandate, uneasiness between the messengers themselves. These connect the eerie disquiet caused by. the witches in Banquo and Macbeth with what appears to be a settled unsettledness among the Scottish nobles. Tension and contention, guardedness, distrust, and irritability shake the basis of Duncan's regime; and beneath that basis are supernatural solicitings and terrible shapes of fantasy. Macbeth is not the only Scot haunted by demonic or apocalyptic images, by unknown fears and desires reaching for definition. When Duncan and Macbeth first meet, the pressure on both constrains their freedom of address: Dun.

0 worthiest cousin! The sin of my ingratitude even now Was heavy on me. Thou art so far before, That swiftest wing of recompense is slow To overtake thee: would thou hadst less deserv'd, That the proportion both of thanks and payment

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Might have been mine! only I have left to say More is thy due than more than all can pay. (1.4.14-21)

Macbeth has put him under an obligation that challenges his generosity to the limit. The tone is courtly and effusive, but the language is that of competition, debt, and payment. Macbeth, who has already heard the witches, answers in a restrained and even terse fashion: The service and the loyalty I owe, In doing it, pays·itself. Your Highness' part Is to receive our duties: and our duties Are to your throne and state, children and servants~ Which do but what they should, by doing everything Safe toward your love and honour. (22-27)

He defines the bond between ruler and subject precisely, and even understates it, hammering in clipped phrases at the essential words of relationship (your-our-our-your, throne-state-children-servants, service -loyalty-love-honour) and picking away at Duncan's use of the word due ("More is thy due") in "doing-duties-duties-do-doing." Macbeth seems to be contending rhetorically against Duncan's hyperboles, but also against the more ominous suggestions he might read into Duncan's words, "More is thy due than more than all can pay." This partly accounts for Macbeth's carefully measured and even guarded tone. But I think there are other reasons. Duncan is careful not to slight Banquo, though even as he tells him he has "no less deserv' d" he rewards him with less (not with a title, merely a hug) and sustains Macbeth in his preeminence:

Ban.

Welcome hither: I have begun to plant thee, and will labour To make thee full of growing.- Noble Banquo, That hast no less deserv'd, nor must be known No less to have done so, let me infold thee, And hold thee to my heart. There if I grow, The harvest is your own. (27-33)

Duncan's language solicits the very closeness and intimacy that exposes him to danger. Note here that Banquo has intercepted and expropriated the nature-image meant for Macbeth, and has grafted on an image that happens to fit his share in the witches' prophecies, and in fact speaks to his own earlier demand: "If you can look into the seeds of time, /And say which

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grain will grow, and which will not,/ Speak to me" (1.3.58-6o). Note also Banquo's quietly competitive response to the witches. Banquo knows that whether or not he "grows" depends on Macbeth, but it depends also on (a) how well he succeeds in lying low and remaining passive and (b) how thoroughly he can dissociate himself from Macbeth in order to keep not only his bosom but also his reputation "franchis'd." Banquo's "growing;' dependent on Macbeth rather than Duncan, yields as its first harvest the king's death. "My plenteous joys," Duncan continues, "wanton in fullness, seek to hide themselves/ In drops of sorrow" (33-35)- a curious transition to the next item on his agenda. With. Macbeth he had asserted his generative power ("I have begun to plant thee") over against the claim that his "part/ Is to receive," and here he completes Banquo's development of the figure by reaping an immediate harvest of joys, no mere "expectation of plenty." But why does he describe his joys as so wanton- illicit, "unrestrained, perverse" 15 -that they must hypocritically "hide themselves" as tears? He strains for a figure in which "fullness" in the open emotion of joy is tantamount to lack .of control and must conceal itself by expressing itself as its opposite. Fear of lack of control, danger from the excessive and·hyperbolic achievements of his heroic subjects-these are structurally the king's chief concerns within the Scottish social order. When Duncan says he weeps for joy, he effectively tells his thanes that he has no such fears or concerns; in this moment of triumph, everything is under control and all Scots harmonize in "doing everything/ Safe" toward his love and honor. But this hyperbole protests too much, and his next words indicate that he is apprehensive, that his words of joy hide fears, and that his fears seek further to hide themselves in drops· of honor. Those "whose places are the nearest"- nearest to the throne- are to know that "we will establish our estate upon/ Our eldest, Malcolm" (36-38). This is his way of insulating himself against the elevation of Macbeth to Cawdor, and of trying to stabilize the realm after the recent disturbances. But this move to consolidate power in the family immediately hides itself in a new shower of gifts. The honor to Malcolm must Not unaccompanied invest him only, But signs of nobleness, like stars, shall shine On all deservers. -From hence to Inverness, And bind us further to you. (40-43)

And indeed, as he strives to bind them further to himself, his bondage to them increases. Macbeth, as if taking those words at face value, rides offafter a melodramatic aside about overleaping Malcolm- as "harbinger" to

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"make joyful/The hearing of my wife with your approach" (45-46), and the scene ends with Duncan still effusing: True, worthy Banquo: he is full so valiant, And in his commendations I am fed; It is a banquet to me. Let's after him, Whose care is gone before to bid us welcome: It is a peerless kinsman. (54-58)

When Duncan greets Lady Macbeth at Inverness, he continues in the same pattern -proclaiming his love and struggling to outdo his hostess in the duel of compliments:

LAdy M.

Dun.

LAdy M.

Dun.

See, see! our honor'd hostess.The love that follows us sometime is our trouble, Which still we thank as love. Herein I teach you, How you shall bid God 'ild us for your pains, And thank us for your trouble. All our service, In every point twice done, and then done double, Were poor and single business, to contend Against those honors deep and broad, wherewith Your majesty loads our house: for those of old, And the late dignities heap'd up to them, We rest your hermits. Where's the Thane of Cawdor? We cours'd him at the heels, and had a purpose To be his purveyor: but he rides well; And his great love, sharp as his spur, hath holp him To his home before us. Fair and noble hostess, We are your guest to-night. Your servants ever Have theirs, themselves, and what is theirs, in compt, To make their audit at your-Highness' pleasure, Still to return your own. Give me your hand; Conduct me to mine host: we love him highly, And shall continue our graces towards him. By your leave, hostess. (r.6.ro-3r)

Duncan's courtly phrases are difficult because they are strained, and they are strained because he feels himself to be in a contest, a race, with Macbeth. Macbeth has "gone before;' Duncan is lagging behind, and his only means of overtaking is to "purvey" -that is, to impress on his subjects the superior power of royal generosity, but in ~ones and images of arch hu-

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mility. His first speech is an effort to catch up by confessing his debt but reinterpreting it as their love and his trouble, a trouble he magnanimously discounts. By his method of thanking the Macbeths, he will teach them how to discount their pains and give thanks for their trouble. We should note that he does not say "how you shall bid us reward you for your pains," a more likely and therefore conspicuously excluded alternative. His phrasing is more circumspect, but his sentiment more aggressive: the initiative will be his, and their gratitude will follow, expressed in prayers because only God can adequately reward or thank a king. Hence although Macbeth has ridden ahead, his love remains behind and "follows us." Lady Macbeth responds to this with a spate of duplicities that rhetorically exaggerate her pains and trouble (her second line doubles her trouble in rhyming with it) in order to flaunt their inadequacy as a defense against the heavy load and heap of honors that-like packing crates-fill their house. He needn't contend with them, Lady Macbeth implies, because they are already so beholden that they have given up and already rest his hermits bidding God reward and thank him. Duncan meets this challenge with a tactic of self-deprecation, aiming to raise her up from this meekness and reaffirm both his ennobling gift and his debt. She is no hermit, no contemplative, but the wife of the new thane, thanks to the king, and thanks also to the heroic activity and ambition exemplified now in Macbeth's horsemanship, the sharp spur of love that goads him forward leaving the king coursing his heels. There is a touch of mordancy in this image, as also in Duncan's somewhat awkward bid to match Lady Macbeth's humble hermitry with a courtly witticism: "We ... had a purpose/ To be his purveyor" -to precede him as his servant, to provision the household with new honors; this, after all, is what a thane looks for in a king. The image is overcharged, however, since it implies that in this little charade Macbeth is king (the purveyor being a royal officer), and Duncan quickly modifies the relationship to claim a guest's privilege. "We are your guest to-night" has, I think, the air of an appeal for truce, a reminder that she as hostess ought to respect her bond and leave off sparring. But she persists. By playing against the image of the purveyor she out-humbles him once again and diminishes the power of royal generosity: "Strictly speaking, your Highness is neither our servant nor our guest because this is your house. We and ours belong to you. Our gratitude can at best be that of caretakers, not of recipients of outright gifts, since you can't alienate your property to your humble custodians." To this Duncan can only renew his gesture of truce -like Sweno craving composition- and repeat his former sentiments in limp and prosy phrases that contrast sharply to the ambitious

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syntax of his opening remarks: "we love him highly" weakly parries "your Highness' pleasure" and gives way to the weary reiteration of "and shall continue our graces towards him" (more effective if the line is not regular. ized by Cuningham's suggested emendation, "continue in"). These, sadly, are Duncan's last words in the play. They reflect the plight of the king in this society: the more his subjects do for him, the more he must do for them; the more he does for them, feeding their ambition and their power, the less secure can he be of his mastery. It is as if, in the delicate balance of a zero-sum relation, the stronger he makes them, the weaker he makes himself. In retrospect his opening words epitomize his predicament: "What bloody man is that? He can report, I As seemeth by his plight, of the revolt I The newest state." The officer whose gashes cry for help foreshadows the "gash'd stabs" (2.3.n3) that manifest the final state of the revolt against the king. But "revolt against the king" is simply another name for the Scottish polity, and the killing of the king may be a recurrent feature of the political process by which the kingdom periodically rids itself of the poison accumulating within it as a result of normal institutional functions. D. A. Traversi writes that "Duncan and his subjects .... vie with each other in celebration of a relationship that is not one of mastery or subjection, but essentially free, expansive, life-giving," 16 and I think "vie with" is exactly the right phrase, though I don't find the adjectives applicable to anyone but Duncan. On the contrary, the question, the threat, of "mastery or subjection" is always in the air, which hums with danger and competition. Duncan's "life-giving, fertile poetry;' as Traversi calls it, has to be set in this context. It springs from his need to cope with the contradictions of his world. Such considerations, however social scientihc they sound, ultimately allow a more complex view of Duncan to emerge. For one thing, they humanize him, and suggest how Shakespeare might have translated Holinshed's references to Duncan's reprehensible meekness into a study of embattled feudal kingship at once profoundly sympathetic and realistic. For another thing, they enable us to distinguish the view of Duncan that Shakespeare offers us from the one entertained by most of his subjects, and to evaluate their view. I would like, therefore, to pursue these structural considerations a little further. The scenes with Duncan remind me of Marcel Mauss's classic discussion of the primitive economic institutions of exchange in The Gift: "To give is to show one's superiority, to show that one is ... magister. To accept without returning or repaying more is to face subordination, ... to become minister." 17 Duncan's "life-giving, fertile poetry" and his habit of informally bestowing honors like battlefield commissions reflect the pressure of this

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imperative and show that the spirit of competition is not restricted to overt acts of bloodshed or hostility. It diffuses itself throughout all the expressions and relationships· in the play-love, friendship, hospitality, homage, bounty, conversation, even the delivery of news and messages. The Scotland of Macbeth dynamically illustrates the working of the principle that Hobbes called war, the "war of every man against every man." Literally and symbolically, the natural basis of this warrior society is blood. Blood is, first of all, the organizing principle of social relations, the foundation of kinship and lineage, place and name, and critics have rightly made much of this ascriptive bond between the social order and nature. But they haven't made enough of the fact that other meanings of blood tend to contradict this harmonious basis. For blood is also the principle of individual self-assertion; the source of vital function, of courage, passion, and excitement; and beyond that, the principle of aggression. Blood will have blood. Bloodshed is the proof of manliness and the source of honor and reputation. Bloodshed, bloodiness, bloody-mindedness quicken the pulse of the social order and sharpen its edge. Remember the series of bloody encounters preceding Macbeth's statement to Duncan (1.4.24) that "our duties I Are to your throne and state, children and servants." These duties, children, and servants are deeds of blood; Macbeth's language reminds us that they have high social value, and that it is the king who is their source. Among the benefits that flow from the king to his subjects are bloody occasions. His vassals are under obligation to him for the chance to fight and kill, to die nobly, to show valor and loyalty, to contend with others in manliness, to compete for the reputation and honors by which valor is rewarded. Given this emphasis on manliness, this overdevelopment of the competitive instinct, it was a brilliant stroke on Shakespeare's part to stress the gentleness of Duncan's nature and to reveal both his often strained efforts to remain magister and the increasingly helpless sense of insecurity pressing into his "soft" rhetoric. I find something vaguely androgynous about his personality, something that reinforces the structural androgyny of his kingly function. For he is not only the king and father, but also the mother of his society: the spring, the fountain, the very source of blood and manliness, but also of the milk of human kindness and concord. Milk, like blood, is another natural principle and structural symbol: the source of nourishment; beyond that, of fulfillment and pacification; and beyond that, of the mutual pleasure. that binds together mother and child. "I have given suck," cries Lady Macbeth, "and know I How tender 'tis to love the babe that rnilks me." Human kindness means natural fellow feeling, imbibed at the source and opening into the range of sentiments and relationships that bind

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separate selves into concord, draw them toward each other in pity and suffering, tenderness and weakness, help and helplessness . Milk is the matrix of compassion, of love and concern, of innocence and meekness. But milkiness is connected with the nakedness of the helpless babe. Just after the murder Banquo advises his shocked companions to break up and reassemble after "we have our naked frailties hid I That suffer in expos.ure," and though this is only his way of saying "Let's get dressed," I feel the resonance of the words throughout the play. "Our naked frailties ... that suffer in exposure": that feel and create pain when looked at- or arouse guilt, or shame, or fear. Duncan's difficult role is to supply the functions of both principles, blood and milk, and in his personality he is the play's most conspicuous embodiment of the milky principle. What Shakespeare has done with Duncan is to take the functions essential to his kingly role and transfer them to his human presence so that they. become factors in personal relationships, and factors that make for uneasiness. He is forced to contend by pitting milk against blood and recommending himself "unto our gentle senses." I have tried to suggest that his effusive praise of Macbeth drew from the officer and Rosse something more critical than mere acquiescence, and I connected. that with the uneasiness Macbeth inspires. ~ now want to suggest that although Duncan and Macbeth represent extremes of softness and hardness, they unknowingly conspire in producing this effect. Displays of milky kindness may be felt as a threat to manliness, since milk, as a shrewd scholar once put it, denotes "absence of hardness." Warriors are trained to be suspicious of gentleness in themselves as a threat to their manhood. The play dwells persistently, naggingly, on the theme of sex roles, and on a basic uncertainty about them. Lady Macbeth chides Macbeth for his unmanliness, and he finds it necessary to protest his manhood, as do so many of his enemies in the last two acts. "Why," asks Lady Macduff, "do I put up that womanly defence, I To say, I have done no harm." The manly way is to do harm. Her husband, who wants the natural touch, was untimely ripped from the womb; he becomes Macbeth's nemesis because he was not "of woman born." Lady Macbeth's terrible image of plucking the babe from her nipple and dashing its brains out lurks in the background of the play like a pervasive threat not unconnected to castration fears, not unconnected to the dependence on, the terrible power of, the mother. To be deprived of the milky bond, to be left helpless, brings .on the milkiness of cream-faced, whey-faced fear: not the fear, born of fellow feeling, that keeps man within the pale of his great bond; but the egocentric and paralyzing fear produced by the trauma of sudden, violent deprivation.

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I have the sense, in listening to the tones of voice, that those who speak with Duncan respond to him with varying degrees of barely concealed constraint, irritability, perhaps condescension. All seem aware of the precariousness of the symbiotic relation to the king, perhaps because all must be aware of (even if all do not feel) the temptation to kill the golden goose, to seize and control the source of milk and blood. If the specter of Macbeth as Pyrrhic avenger inspires deep unmanning fear, perhaps the specter of Macbeth as regicide threatens the other Scots with the guilt of self-recognition. Fear and guilt together invade Scotland after the murder, afflicting the Scots with paralysis and self-avoidance. They are emasculated, traumatized, and their control. of tone as they speak to each other from 2.3 on is precarious. They waver between sarcasm and defensive hypocrisy; between resignation and fitful resolution; between despairing laments and pious avowals. For they can continue to be manly only so long as they can, so to speak, load all their gentler good on the king. His reliance on them for protection legitimizes their bloody-mindedness, therefore they rely on him to rely on them for protection; but his milkiness and their bloodiness doom him to jeopardy, and them to suspiciousness. He is the good scapegoat, as later Macbeth will become the evil scapegoat, of Scotland. His ·murder is in one respect a ritual killing of the gold and silver-male and female, solar and lunar- king; and although they have not murdered him, they may be responsible for his death. Shakespeare shows him increasingly helpless, increasingly encircled, first by overt enemies, then by traitors to his state, finally by traitors to his person. And not traitors only. There is a strange and troubling conversation between Duncan and Banquo in r.6, just before the king's interchange with Lady Macbeth. According to the stage directions, the two are surrounded by the flower of Scotland as they move toward Macbeth's castle, which, the king says, "hath a pleasant seat; the air I Nimbly and sweetly recommends itselfI Unto our gentler senses" (r.6.1-3). It is natural here to wonder whether Banquo intends to say something about the heath. Stage directions apparently leave it up to the director to decide whether he wants Banquo and Duncan to be separated from the others, thereby giving Banquo a chance he does not take. Later on that evening, at the beginning of act 2, Banquo asks the merciful powers to "restrain in me the cursed thoughts that nature I Gives way to in repose," and when Macbeth enters Banquo says he dreamed last night of the Weird Sisters. If we can assume these things are on his mind when he replies to Duncan outside· the castle, his words become exceptional for what they are trying not to say:

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This guest of summer, The temple-haunting martlet, does approve, By his loved mansionry, that the heaven's breath Smells wooingly here: nq jutty, frieze, Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird Hath made his pendent bed, and procreant cradle: Where they most breed and haunt, I have observ'd The air is delicate. (r.6.3-ro)

There is a contrast between harsh and sweet terms, between war and procreation, between the heavy images of protective architecture and the light images of summer and nature, between haunting and breeding. The guest of summer is a martlet, in which we hear the name of the war god. But as Mars is reduced to a diminutive and to a· bird, so the language in general tries to sweeten and lighten the terms ·of danger without fully succeeding. "Breed" gives way to "haunt"; "the air is delicate" trembles between its summery and precarious senses. As a symbolic projection, the passage refers to Macbeth's castle and may thus be construed as a comment on Macbeth. Banquo once again directs attention away from himself and toward his colleague. But the contrast evokes more directly the protective and gentle sides of Duncan as source of blood and milk, and furthermore the words tend to make the castle converge with the loved mansionry of a temple where heaven's breath smells wooingly-a royal image used later by Macduff ("the Lord's anointed Temple," 2.3.69). Who is the war bird who makes his home as a kind of parasite in Macbeth's castle and Duncan's kingship? Who has a bed hanging from either or both where he hides and watches from his secure coign of vantage? Who will soon rise to· haunt Macbeth? From whose procreant cradle will the future kings of Scotland emerge? Every word, the whole image, is a diffuse displacement of Banquo's situation with relation to Macbeth and Duncan. Even as he dissociates himself from Macbeth his words reconfirm the bond between them. There are of course many martlets living in and off the castle, and the image may be generalized to express the "delicate" political air ofScotland. But Banquo is in a special position that acutely focuses the general psycho-structural dilemma of Scotland. Together with his other remarks to Duncan or Macbeth, the speech tells us what he wants to believe, what he wants not to think about, and what he wants to happen. If Chance will have him father of kings, why, Chance may crown them without his stir. And if the witches' prophecy is not going to be mentioned, then it is not going to be ·mentioned with a vengeance. Could Banquo have kept Duncan from being

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killed? It was in his power to do so. Instead his words work to soften Duncan's defenses just as they try to domesticate the images of danger. When he hands Duncan on to Lady Macbeth, the defenses, as we saw, are weaker. Banquo's last remark about Duncan (to Macbeth) is, he "shut up" -went to bed- "in measureless content." The image is that of the closing of a flower: unmanned, and gentled into death. Banquo may have been right about Duncan's mood, but we shall never know. Duncan's "content" is not measurable by us. Is it conceivable that he, too, experienced "the cursed thoughts that nature/ Gives way to in repose"? Perhaps the subject who seems best to understand, and most to sympathize with, the old king should have the last word: Duncan is in his grave; After life's fitful fever he sleeps well; Treason has done his worst: nor steel, nor poison, Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing Can touch him further! (3.2.22-26)

CHAPTER

6

+ Text Against Peiformance: The Example of (Macbeth'

Rene Girard once observed that "characters will not hold the interest of the audience unless the audience can sympathize with them or deny them its sympathy"-that is, unless the characters are highly differentiated, the good clearly on one side and the bad on the other. On the other hand, he notes that "the dynamics of human conflict, the reciprocity of retribution and revenge;' leads toward what he calls undifferentiation: the more intense the conflict, "the more everything tends to become the same on both sides of the antagonism." Girard concludes from this that "great theater" is "necessarily a play of differentiation and undifferentiation." For example, in Shylock's trial, an "enormously performative and dramatic" scene, "the spectators and readers of the play cannot fail to be affected, and cannot refrain from experiencing Shylock's defeat as if it were their own victory.... The contagious effect of scapegoating extends" from the crowd on stage to the crowd in the theater. And yet, he insists, "if we look carefully at the trial scene, no doubt can remain that Shakespeare undermines the scapegoat effects just as skillfully as he produces them." But "Shakespeare himself must first generate at the grossly theatrical level the effects that he later undermines at the level of allusions": what we discover later is that "their mutual hatred has turned Antonio and Shylock into doubles of each other"- and also Portia and Shylock into doubles of each other, since her "I stand for sacrifice" and his "I stand for judgment" are ultimately interchangeable.1 In Girard's studies of Shakespeare a distinction is everywhere implicit

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in his rhetoric, one to which he himself is apparently blind. Both the distinction and his oversight are encapsulated in the phrase "spectators and readers." He uses his reading, with a certain elitist and hermetic condescension, to scapegoat the ordinary audience and critic in the street. They have been falling victim to the great Shakespeare scapegoat machine and misunderstanding the plays for centuries. Girard labels these victims of the machine "fools." I think, however, that a better name for them would be "spectators." I doubt whether Girard came to his brilliant interpretation while· sitting in a theater. All the qualifications that differentiate the stupid reading from the smart one suggest something else. He says, for example, "If we look carefully," if we take "a close look," "if we stop long enough to hear what is being said," we may "later" discover that Shakespeare undermines the stupid view.2 Now, how did Girard stop long enough to hear what is being said in the theater? Did he jump from his seat, cry "cut;' and ask the players to do that take again two or three times, and then shriek out ''Aha!"? He seems to forget he must have been at home reading the play, flipping the pages back and forth, performing all those unnatural acts with the text for which classroom Shakespeareans are nefarious, and which are justly scorned by defenders of performance and of what is called the stage-centered reading. In Girard's reading, spectator and reader remain undifferentiated, and both, potentially, are equally prone to being mystified by what he calls the surface play and I call performance. His own practice, however, absolutely demands an alternate explanation that is less invidious, and based on the differentiation between spectator and reader, between the play as a script for performance and the play as a text. This is the explanation I shall undertake to develop and illustrate here. I shall argue not only that the text differs from the script but also that the Shakespeare play, as a text to be interpreted by readers, provides a critique of the play as a script- that is, as the basis. of performance. I hasten to add that obviously if such a critique can be demonstrated we should not expect it to be so thoroughly antitheatrical as to advocate a ban on performance. Rather we should expect the text to solicit our collaboration in producing a performance that metatheatrically dramatizes characteristic limits of the medium. There is nothing unusual about this. "The theater," Jonas Barish reminds us, "has . . . never lacked a streak of antitheatricalism of its own. Perhaps a vigorous dose of it forms an essential ingredient in its vitality." 3 Barish's magisterial study contains many fine observations on the form of antitheatricalism that privileges text over performancea· form he explicates with reference to Ben Jonson and to modern critics and playwrights-and many others on Shakespeare's ambivalence toward

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theatricality. Yet neither he nor other commentators who have given us trenchant discussions of the latter theme (e. g., Anne Barton, Alvin Kernan, Howard Felperin, Stephen Greenblatt) have connected it with the former. In recent years the connection has been rendered problematic by the work of the new wave of stage-centered critics (Brown, Styan, Beckerman, Dessen, Richard Levin) who, with varying degrees of polemic fervor, reassert the values of theater against those poetic and textual values that had been stressed since. the early decades of this century by the poetic-drama approaches to Shakespeare. It seems appropriate to confront the polemic and ask whether text-centered reading can offer us any insights into Shakespeare's textual antitheatricalism and, if so, how the textual critique of performance contributes to the meaning of a particular play. The example I shall discuss in the second part of this essay is Macbeth, and the focus of that discussion will be the puzzling status of the witches. Before getting to that example, however, I want to try to state the case against the stage-centered approach and then unpack some of the ideological implications of my position. It may well be a contingent (if not accidental) function of history that we now live in a text-centered age- the ''Age of the Reading," Richard Levin mordantly calls it-which has made accessible interpretive possibilities that violate the structural conditions of performance. As one commentator remarks, a play "must be judged as by a spectator who is allowing himself to be caught up by it in performance and to be carried away into its illusion." The subtleties or "difficulties" unearthed in close reading "do not worry an audience; they cannot indeed be noticed in the quick movement of the play," for the spectators' "minds are engaged in what is happening, what is coming, not with searching for reasons to account for what has happened." 4 From this standpoint the coercively time bound sequence of performance must be respected and the reader's page-flipping freedom disallowed as a mode that falsifies theatrical experience. It is obviously the case that the ease with which we can breach the conventions of inert typographic space and sequence gives us a control over meaning that performance in theatrical space-time denies us. Performance does not allow us the leisure to interrupt, challenge, or question. And since we can't flip the moments of a performance back and forth the way we can the pages of a book, we are prevented as spectators from carrying out central interpretive operations that presuppose our ability to decelerate the text, to ignore sequence while accumulating synchronic or paradigmatic clusters of imagery, and to dislocate and compare speeches in order to explore, for example, the doubling that Girard calls undifferentiation, or the

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"umbrella" function that Maynard Mack has attributed to speeches under which "more than one character can shelter." 5 The stage-centered critic has a right to question this untheatrical practice, and to ask why the structural ironies, subtexts, and redistributed complicities it enables should be admitted as evidence. Even if he could be persuaded that they were distinct interpretive probabilities, that they were "in the text," he would still want to know whether they could be adequately communicated in ·performance. The answer to this is not only that they cannot be adequately conveyed or picked up, but also that inadequate or strained audition is a conspicuous effect of Shakespeare's language. Those of us who consume our Shakespeare chiefly from books and who trouble the text in classrooms find ourselves forced to listen selectively when at the theater. We tend to ignore the superflux that the spoken language shakes down about our ears, so that we may remain attentive to the "happening" that moves ever forward and waits on no auditor's leisure. It is hard for us to believe that playgoers understand all the figurative acrobatics executed by Shakespeare's language as it flies by, and it is equally hard to believe that Elizabethan spectators-whether standing in the pit or seated in the tiers, whether they were Harbage's happy commoners or Ann Cook's privileged playgoers 6 -were not in the same plight. Since his most magnificently theatrical passages of verse often seem to us to be the most notoriously misinterpreted ones, we· suspect that a trap, an antitheatrical comment, lies behind Shakespeare's arousal of what Geoffrey Hartman has called "the lust of the ears." 7 The language presents itself as having that within which passes show. It often teases or threatens its auditors by making them feel they are hearing more than they need to hear but less than they want to hear. If at first the auditor, like Desdemona listening to Othello, "with a greedy ear I Devour[s] up my discourse," there comes a moment when the continual display of withheld surplus meaning converts curiosity to anxiety: "what does your speech import? I I understand a fury in your words, I But not the words." This is the anxiety of, or for, the text that sends us from stage to book to see if we can get a better sense of what is really going on. The shadow of textuality falls across Shakespeare's heard language whenever its rhetorical panoply seems conspicuously to conceal, and to protect us from, surplus meaning. In these terms we may agree with Girard that Shakespeare "creates uneasiness among the spectators," but we must take "spectators" more literally than he does and add that if performance "places upon them a moral burden with which they cannot deal in terms of the scapegoat values present at the outset," it defers the explication of that burden to reading, where

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alone irony can be "experienced in a flash of complicity with the writer at his most subtle." 8 However it came to be, textuality is deeply woven into Shakespeare's language and dramatic practice. It preexisted quarto and folio; perhaps it generated them out of the trans theatrical necessities of its practice. This is partly why such appeals to Shakespeare's "intention" as that of Richard Levin have as little viability as the hypothesis of some ur-text of which quartos and folio are corruptions.9 The Shakespearian intention constituted by the reader and the interpreted text will differ from the one constituted by the spectator and the performed script. Girard's approach, thus corrected, may guide us toward an account of the tension between. the ideologies of performance and text as Shakespeare presents it, an account that grounds itself in the diverse structures of those two modes of representation. The most obvious structural distinction concerns the relation between dramatic speakers and their speeches. Because the text as a unit mediates between us and the absent speakers it denominates, because it is not dismembered to be distributed among the several bodily loci of speaking performers, we are free to interfere with the speaker/speech assignment, free to explore the "umbrella" potentiality of words by uncoupling them, abstracting them, and holding them over the play or· transferring them to another speaker. We do this, of course, provisionally, with the intention of restoring them to their proper place. But we do it legitimately so long as we constitute the play as a text. The distribution of speeches in theatrical space and their dislocation in textual space are alternate ways to dismember the play, and it isn't clear to me that the former should have absolute priority over the latter, though I am willing to grant it ultimate priority. In the script, the referent of a character's name is assigned to an actor. In the text it remains unassigned. The absence of an embodied representation of the drama tis persona who is the referent of the name makes possible a new freedom in the reader's relation to the absent character we imagine. For while it intensifies the directness of the encounter-the otherness of the character is uncompromised by the conspicuous illusion produced by actorial presence-it opens the character's unmediated absence to our representation. When the reader replaces the actor, in fact replaces the whole company of actors, he generates disembodied persons whose boundaries of identity are more permeable, stiffened only by the repetition of a name before speeches that tend often to drift off toward other characters or to rise and unfold umbrella-like over a group of them. The ideological consequences of the distinction between text and performance may be derived from the following two factors. First, theatrical

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distribution correlates with the irreversible temporality of performance, one speech following another in a syntagmatic flow the predictability of which is guaranteed, pre-scribed, by the script; textual deceleration and dislocation, on the other hand, interrupt temporality and gather utterances together into countertemporal or paradigmatic groupings. Second, theatrical distribution accentuates the positional status of the embodied speakers as individuals who produce and "own" their speeches, while dislocation challenges both the private ownership of speeches and the individualism of speakers. The first contributes to coercive, collective, and ritualistic potentialities of theater that are enhanced by the conventions embedded in the traditional types of drama Shakespeare knew and often ironically represented. The second contributes to the charismatic and ethical dimensions of actorial performance-to the individuation of characters and to the necessity that Girard associates with differentiation: "The characters will not hold the interest of the audience unless the audience can sympathize with them or deny them its sympathy." Both ritualism and individuation are problematized by Shakespeare; more precisely, they are dramatized in performance, frequently in such a way as to create among spectators the vague uneasiness that the text intensifies and articulates. Performance asks us to submit to its spell, and the text asks us to examine the implications of that submission. The ritualistic and charismatic features of performance converge to produce a particular effect that is often insufficiently appreciated because we assume that theater is a communal medium, different in that respect from the privacy of reading. This leads to the further assumption that the collective experience of the audience rubs off on the experience represented in performance. But a comparison between performance and text suggests that this is not the case. Where the stage replaces the book as the integrative medium, and where actors in roles replace the mere names to which speeches are textually assigned, the independence and substantiality of individual characters are more sharply outlined. Performance accentuates the speaking presence of distinct individuals who "have" character and personality. They may be larger than life, they may be embodiments of status or emblems of morality, but they engage each other, and the play engages us, in the logocentric mode of direct or face-to-face interaction. Furthermore, the theatrical ritual of actor worship may converge with and reinforce the dramatic ritual of character worship: the personality and charisma of the performer blend with the role performed and focus our attention on individuals. This was true of the great sixteenth-century actors, and the conventions of the Elizabethan public theater encouraged this charis-

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matic emphasis on the power of the speaking presence: "The building is primarily an auditorium, designed for speeches and gesture; acting in it will be largely a form of oratory. . . . Elizabethan playhouses . . . were theaters not of settings and scenic machines, not of illusions, but of actors." 10 In performance, the physical emphasis on the individual character is enhanced, not diminished, when the character is harnessed to an exemplary function. In a powerful essay on the informal ritual aspects of Elizabethan theater, Louis Montrose grounds these aspects in the affective and exemplary power of performance, and notes that contemporary defenders of theater stressed "a moral, behavioristic view of drama;' claiming that plays "imprint exemplary images of virtuous and vicious behavior in the minds of their audience, disposing them to imitate virtue and shun vice." He adds that the theater's enemies agreed with its defenders in respecting "its affective powers" and approaching it, or reproaching it, in ethical terms. After a review of some of the actions that, in Shakespeare's plays, "resemble rites of passage" in giving "a social shape, order, and sanction to human existence," Montrose concludes that although "the categories of Elizabethan culture classify drama as play rather than rite" and as "a socially marginal activity;' it may nevertheless have been the case that the public theater absorbed "some vital functions of ritual . . . not adequately performed by more centrally and officially sanctioned institutions.... In a society in which the dominant social institutions and cultural forms are predicated upon an ideology of unchanging order and absolute obedience, a new kind of commercial entertainment that is still imbued with the heritage of suppressed popular and religious traditions can come to serve a vital social function." 11 A glance at one of Montrose's examples of ritual action will suggest Shakespeare's problematic view of this function. Montrose states that Prince Hal and Edgar manage their "awesome journeys to adulthood and authority by mastering the art of acting and their own powers of projection and displacement." Each "invents his own rite of passage by playing, and the play itself becomes a rite of passage, created by playwright and players for their audience" (63). In other words, however sophisticated the theatrical and psychological representation of this passage may be, and however uneasy we may feel along the way, Hal and Edgar ultimately offer us "exemplary images of virtuous . . . behavior." Wouldn't this be because the "adulthood and authority" they achieve conform with the ideology that sustains "the dominant social institutions and cultural forms" of the time? In cheering them on, in empathically sharing their agon and triumph, we renew our sense of the value of rites by means of which "social boundaries are symbolically imposed upon the life cycle and can be safely crossed." We

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celebrate "the movement from separation to ... reincorporation" and the return to at least a semblance of the order that hierarchically organizes "the self, the family, the body politic, the cosmos" (63). I fully agree with Montrose that performance encourages this view and fulfills this ritual function for the audience. But my reading of Edgar and Hal greatly complicates my feelings about these "ritual passengers," and about the cost and implications of their rites of passage. Though Hal and Edgar may, as performed characters, succeed both in their "awesome journeys" and in their function of imprinting "exemplary images" in our minds, as "voices" in the text both of them fail to negotiate a particular strain in that journey: the ritual passage from sonship to adulthood. That ritual is interrupted; they never fully dismantle the folds of paternal disfavor; their Oedipal conflicts vibrate in their language to the very end. If performance minimizes this failure by its focus on the agon of the individual protagonist, and on his generalized relationship to social and cosmic order, reading shifts our attention to a more limited and complex set of relationships. Montrose clearly indicates what these are: "conflict among members of different families, generations, sexes, classes"; "points of transition in the life cyclebirth, puberty, marriage, death -where discontinuities arise, and where adjustments are necessary to basic interrelationships in the family and in society" (62-63). I submit not only that the two kinds of agon-individual vs. society and,. for example, son vs. father or man vs. woman- are radically different, but that the first may be used to mystify the second. More important, I would argue that while performance structurally privileges the first agon, reading privileges the second. Performance, I shall now argue, represents the play primarily as a "world," reading primarily as a "community." Since theatrical space-time was more directly experienced than dramatic space-time on the nonrealistic public stage, the Elizabethans, as S. L. Bethell put it, "relied on their poetry for much that is nowadays left to the producer." 12 Most details of dramatic locale and setting were communicated through the words of the characters. We never see cliffs and heaths, ships and islands, Egypt and Rome. We only hear about them. They belong, we say, to "the world of the play," that is, the fictive world that preexists and surrounds its characters, or at least coexists with them on the same ontological plane, and whose creator is the author outside the play. This world may be likened to a pie or cake all but one slice of which- the characters on stageis missing. We tend to imagine the relation of slice to pie metonymically as contiguous and visualizable. Yet the language of the play is of course not restricted to details of actual setting. It is so richly intermixed with rhetorical "images" -figures-as to alter our visualization of the world it represents.

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Images of the official Elizabethan world picture, of health and disease, clothing and nakedness, storms and music, flowers and animals, flood and fire, are easily conflated with references to the missing part of the pie, and the consequence is that they often pass less for metaphors than for symbols. We are told, for example, that in King Lear Shakespeare "creates a world of his own ... by means of imagery," that this world is inhabited by "dragons, curs, rats, geese, kites, wolves, vultures, tigers," that it contains "plagues, carbuncles, boils," and that such imagery, "better than any possible stage setting, provides a background for the action." 13 None of the feral inhabitants roams the heath, no one in the play suffers from boils, and clearly the writer doesn't mean to suggest that these items have the same status in dramatic space-time as do the characters. But if one follows G. Wilson Knight's advice to "see each play as an expanded metaphor," then, by an odd reversal, the "world of figures" is folded into the missing portion of the cake. That is, it becomes contiguous with the visible slice, infiltrates the literal plane of dramatic space-time, and, in expanding and altering that plane, borrows its ontological substance. It becomes inextricable from the world of characters, plot, and action. The premise that the poetic elements have at least the same degree of "reality" as the dramatic elements, and that they have the same ontological status as character, setting. or locale, and action, strikes me as the strength of the poetic-drama position. But it is also potentially its weakness. The poetic-drama critic too easily succumbs to the fatal Hotspurian affliction: "He apprehends a world of figures here, j But not the form of what he should attend." In his unified "world of images" the poetic elements are inseparable from the dramatic elements, are even located in a geographically imaginable field: "Send danger from the east unto the west, j So honor cross it from the north to south"; "pluck bright honor from the pale-fac'd moon, j Or dive into the bottom of the deep." The irony of this affliction is that it betrays the poetic-drama critic into the hands of his enemy, for even as he insists that the play should be read as a poem, he restores his poem to the stage, visualizing it in the terms of theatrical performance. And because he treats it as a poem, he attributes both the world of character/plot/setting and the world of images to the play's only begetter. The logic of this move leads him to assume that if there is a "world view" or "world picture" in the play, it must be ascribed to the playwright. Hence for the poetic-drama critic the play's great chain of being, or its natural order, or its Christian or pagan universe, becomes the whole of the pie concocted by the Stratford baker. The reality of this ontological confection sweetens the efforts of "good" characters to restore order, justifies the tragic heroes who die in its service, and mocks with dramatic irony those

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who-whether from noble or wicked intentions-defy it. Here the poeticdrama critic, for all his sensitivity to poetic language, inadvertently joins forces with more stage-centered critics. The latter come to similar conclusions by assimilating Shakespeare's practice to its theatrical "heritage" in mystery plays, Moralities and interludes, and didactic chronicle plays, and they protest vigorously against the athletic textuality that dissects language in search of structural ironies which expose the world view· of the surface play as a mystification. One· might well sympathize with this protest if, in spite of the evidence stored in the text, ironic readers were only demystifying for the sake of demystification, and proving nothing in the process but their own cleverness. It would be arbitrary, as well as cynical and anachronistic, to deny that the world of the play was the author's vision, for to whom else could we ascribe it? On what grounds and for what reason could we justify dissociating the play's "world of figures" from its author, even as we acknowledge his responsibility for its world of dramatic space-time? The answer to these questions, which has been gradually emerging during the last decade or so, is that there is a reason, there are grounds, for the dissociation, and there is another source to which the world view may be ascribed. Textual athletes deployed along several sectors of the interpretive frontier- gender criticism, psychoanalytic criticism, metatheatrical criticism, institutional or political criticism- have been moving toward what this writer perceives as a consensus that has not yet, however, been clearly thematized. I shall state what I take the view of the consensus to be, and then try briefly to unpack its significant features before illustrating it in a selective reading of Macbeth. The essence of this view, putting it in my own terms, is that the conceptions implied in the locution "the world of the play" divert attention from what should be the primary object of interpretive curiosity, namely, the community of the play, and that it is the community rather than the author that creates its world. In other words, the "worlds" of Macbeth and King Lear are the collective creations of the Macbeth and Lear communities. Furthermore, these worlds are the products not merely of their communities' "cosmogonical" labor but also of their ideological labor. In this view, cosmogony or world construction is a function· of ideology and may be a form of collective (as well as individual) mystification. To these postulates I add another, which I mentioned earlier: that is, that the tension between the play world and the play community, or between the ontological and ideological perspectives, is built into the tension between performance and text. The image of the community is clearly inscribed and developed only in the text; it is blurred and subordinated by the conditions of performance. Here a word is in order about the way I am using the term community.

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I don't intend it to refer to the mere aggregate of individual characters. Rather, it refers to the more or less corporate, more or less institutional, structure of roles and relationships into which individual characters are cast and which they try to manipulate. The community is a group of speakers placed in relation to each other by differences of gender and generation, of social rank and political status, and of position in households, families, and extended families. Their interactions are mediated by these roles, their attitudes and projects heavily influenced by the assumptions and expectations, the constraints and opportunities, that adhere to the roles. The community of the play, thus understood, has recently come into prominence through the efforts of the new psychoanalytical critics who focus attention on family, gender, and generation, treating characters less as autonomous individual psyches (the focus of the older psychoanalytical approach) and more as subjects whose "selves" include the "others" to whom they are at once bound and opposed by the reciprocal positionality of their institutional roles. In the hands of its most effective practitioners, this approach demonstrates the vital force and presence of the subject/role interaction through rhetorical analysis. Shakespeare's "world of images," his "poetry," now becomes the medium that reveals the systematically distorted communication by which characters labor under the pressure or camouflage of their roles to sustain, cherish, deceive, injure, or destroy themselves and each other. In this double mediation -first, through the internalization of the positional roles of family, gender, and generation, and second, through verbal expression- the "politics" of the community is not left behind. On the contrary, its significance is upheld and enhanced; the institutional order as the setting for character in action is "lifted to a higher plane of regard" when it is viewed as a common ethos inscribed in the positional network and revealed or betrayed in the community of poetic images. The old opposition between character and poetic drama is at once transcended and rehabilitated in a new dialectical form as a conflict, within the poetry, between the individual character's struggle to appropriate the common rhetoric and make it mean what he says, and its resistance to that effort, its ability to make him say what it means. The insights of psychoanalytic criticism are obviously textual in origin; they are, and can only be, generated by reading. This is so not only because of the reader's ability to deploy the decelerative and dislocative procedures that, as I noted earlier, enable us to disperse meanings back and forth across the boundaries of individual characters. It is also because the text, unlike the script, remains undistributed. In performance, the distribution of speaking parts confronts us directly with the experiencing individuals who "own"

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their speeches, whereas the text privileges the collective setting of a community of disembodied voices. The varied echoings elicited by the readerly deceleration and dislocation of language convey the structures of kinship, the motivational networks, that interanimate the separate characters. Their performances as autonomous individuals, as distinct "selves" simple and integrated enough to be good material for, for example, Morality emblems, is embedded by these techniques of reading in a collective and collaborative matrix within which each "self" is problematically intertwined with the "significant others" the character at once internalizes and opposes. "Lear's shadow," for example, is not only the Fool, and the fool within who· plays King, but also Cordelia's shadow represented by the Fool and reflected into Lear's consciousness as the penumbral edge of a darkness he struggles vainly to avoid, to annihilate, to make nothing. Edgar's self-annihilation ("Edgar I nothing am") confirms, intensifies, the bond of diffidence that reproduces and thus cancels Gloucester's paternal self-annihilation; each character disclaims the identity bestowed by a role, son or father, which is a shadow cast and defined by the other's role, and the disclaimer restores the disavowed identity. Thus the density or "roundness" of the character as an individual is constituted by the crossing and recrossing of those volatile motives that tighten the bonds of the family romance. The politics of any Shakespearean community ·is -like cultural and linguistic codes-textually endowed with a movement and self-preserving vitality of its own, one that is nevertheless sustained and enabled by the human individuals who give it life. And this, I repeat, is a textual phenomenon, a function of the reader's freedom to probe for subtexts and collate structural ironies. It is by transformations of the integrated text that we arrive at the view of the integrated community. Responding to interpretive pressure, the text speaks the community. And it does so in a way that foregrounds the ideological function of the world the community constructs. At the same time, however, it produces an impression so different from that privileged by performance, so much at odds with it, that the text sends us back to performance to reexperience its ritual power and reflect on the meaning of our submission to it. We realize then that the individual characters on stage tell us and each other (and themselves) certain stories, that the performed play as a whole tells us a certain story, and that these stories are in conflict with the textual image of the motivations embedded in the structure of role relationships that constitutes the community. It is at this point, I think, that we can discern the connection between the formal properties of what Girard calls "the theatrical and ritual process" and its ideological implications.

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Shakespeare gives this connection a particular skew by his deployment of the reflexive and allusive devices that accentuate the theatricality of his fictions, a topic which has received its share of critical attention. Since the time of Anne (Righter) Barton's Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play, his metatheatricalism has come increasingly to be viewed as a form of antitheatricalism that targets specific conventions of the theatrical traditions he inherited, criticizing them on ethical as well as aesthetic grounds. For example, Sheldon Zitner has described the Aumerle conspiracy scenes in Richard II as exhibiting Shakespeare's "disaffection from the mode of historical tragedy," his critical self-consciousness "about the artifice of the mode, its limits as a vehicle for the whole truth." The conspiracy scenes question "the illusion that man's existence in history is faithfully rendered in the huge public stylizations of historical tragedy." 14 Alvin Kernan observes that "all the internal plays written in the old style ... suggest that he was constantly trying to distance himself as a playwright from the older tradition in order to ask a variety of questions about its effectiveness;' and he connects Shakespeare's parodic use of the archaic style with, among other things, his sense of "the reductiveness of the morality-play conventions, their inability to reveal the full human truth." 15 I think the most sustained and trenchant study of this theme is to be found in Howard Felperin's Shakespearean Representation. 16 Basing his discussion on some remarks by Hamlet, Felperin distinguishes two "notions of drama, each with a long tradition," one moral and the other mimetic. "The former, the view of the play as moral vision, transcends·by its very nature considerations of time and place, associates drama with theology or moral philosophy, and is identifiable ... with medieval and Tudor allegorical theater.... The latter, the view of the play as lifelike illusion, is by its very nature timebound and localized," and Felperin notes that although Hamlet himself prefers the more modern illusionistic view, "the forms and figures of an older drama" are preserved within the play Hamlet (45-46, 52). After listing some of its manifestations, he argues that what is being parodied in these allusions to the archaic revenge form is a deeper archaism connected with justificatory tendencies in medieval drama and ideology which Shakespeare found questionable: In so far as the corrupt courts of the Elizabethan revenge play are pseudohistorical counterparts to the typological Babylon, Sodom, and Gomorrah of medieval drama, its revenger-heroes are the natural and naturalized offspring of Vindicta Dei and God's Nemesis. Like Hieronymo, most Elizabethan revengers see themselves as scourges of God, legitimate heirs to those Virtuefigures who have divine authorization to commit whatever acts are required

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to set right the disjointed world, even if the command of a ghost is not quite the same thing as that of God. (A recent analogue is the "licence to kill" conferred on its agents by the modern state in the coldwar reincarnation of the medieval psychomachia, the spy novel.) (53-54)

Felperin insists that revisionary allusion serves lifelike illusion in Shakespeare's images of archaic theatricality: the playwright does not merely represent complicated if recognizable avatars of Virtue and Vice in order to give his audience ethical guidance; he represents characters who themselves assume those traditional roles, who try by allegorizing themselves to mystify their own sense of the ethical meaning of their behavior. They create and perform morality plays for a variety of reasons, most of them following the rationale of Girardian differentiation. Felperin persuasively argues that it is the failure or inadequacy of their theatrical projects, their inability fully to embrace archaic roles, that contributes to our· sense of their illusionistic "roundness" as characters, and that the assumption of a theatrical role is simultaneously the assumption of the world view implicated in the role: "Shakespeare often surrounds a character with the trappings of an archaic theatricality as a way of identifying him with an older and passing order of things;' but it is the character- Hamlet or Richard II -who is portrayed as "the immediate author of his play's archaic theatricality" (59). The older models embedded in Shakespeare's plays "cast life as a drama of salvation and damnation, and the repudiation of those older models guarantees that there will be no clear-cut cases of salvation and damnation" (65). This formulation uses the findings but revises the conclusions of such scholars as Bernard Spivack and Robert Weimann. in a manner that places our understanding of Shakespeare's antitheatricalism on a new footing. Reading the studies of Felperin, Montrose, and Barish together, we can better see how Shakespeare's critique of theater is inseparable from his critique of the mystifications of ritual, hierarchy, and cosmology by which power seeks to convert itself into legitimate authority. For if, as Montrose claims, Shakespeare took over "a new kind of commercial entertainment ... still imbued with the heritage of suppressed popular and religious traditions," his work reveals awareness of a certain ideological sophistry inherent in those traditions- a sophistry that, implicit in the structure of theatrical experience, affected the "vital social function" they served in their secular as well as religious settings. Clearly he recognized that there was at least some validity to the antitheatrical prejudice manifested in the critiques leveled by Reformers and Puritans at the Catholic Church, the Elizabethan stage, and, eventually, the popish and theatrical Stuart court. His plays manage simultaneously to appropriate and to criticize the ritual power of the the-

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atricality that is by no means confined to the stage but is deeply embedded in institutional life, especially in an age dominated by what Stephen Greenblatt has called "the theatricalization of culture." 17 Shakespeare's critique of theater extends not only outward to institutional life but also inward to the problematics of role-playing. Some of the Puritan opinions cited by Barish testify to the connections that closely link attitudes toward self-fashioning and identity with religious and cosmological assumptions, and these opinions will also remind us that Shakespeare cast a squint eye at his fellow antitheatricalists: Players are evil because they try to substitute a self of their own contriving for the one given them by God.... One corollary of the concept of an absolute identity was the belief in an absolute sincerity. If it was possible truly to know the "uniform, distinct and proper being" one had received from God, then it was possible either to affirm that being in all one's acts ... or to deny it by disguise or pretense. "Every man," declares Gosson, "must show him selfe outwardly to be such as in deed he is." 18

But the radical theology of the Puritans "went hand in hand with a powerful social conservatism," an anxiety about appearance, an appeal to "traditional reassurances;' 19 and it is on this point that Barish's insights converge with Felperin's. For the Puritan's anti-Protean ideal of the constant God-given identity was itself a role nourished by the archaic model that casts "life as a drama of salvation and damnation." Shakespeare's repudiation of this view is well expressed in Dogberry's "0 villain! thou wilt be condemned into everlasting redemption for this." The correlation of role-playing with world-construction (or cosmogonizing) is the generative insight that gives the studies by Felperin and other metatheatrical critics their great power. But in order to secure the insight, we must combine it with another that they have not sufficiently appreciated: the insight into the community of the play made available by recent gender and psychoanalytic criticism. This is the connection I shall try to make in the next section of the essay, using Macbeth as my example.

+ Macbeth is filled with references to heaven and hell, angels and devils, cosmic disorder and natural restoration. The Scottish thanes gather together "in the great hand of God" against the regicide, see themselves caught in a cosmic melodrama, hope that the unnatural portents signify the anger of the heavens that will ultimately heal the breach in nature. Although the "good" Scots and the Macbeths range themselves under opposing banners of Light and Darkness, one party soliciting divine and the other demonic

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powers, both sides acknowledge the same spiritual cosmology. This dualistic vision forms the context in terms of which the "good" thanes differentiate themselves from the wicked figure who is a much less problematic scapegoat than Shylock. It enables them to justify not only the paralysis that unmans them after the murder but also the manly heroism of the final action. And it enables them to focus all blame on Macbeth, thereby relieving themselves of "fears and scruples," obviating deeper consideration of their own motives or complicity. As I tried to show in the preceding chapter, which was written earlier than this one, the opening scenes of the play reveal the contradictions between Christian cosmologizing and the institutional "deep structure" of the Scottish community. I connected these contradictions rather casually to the theme of gender conflict, and although I touched on the morality-play model in passing it was not until later, when I read Felperin's book, that I realized how much the metatheatrical elements contributed to my sense that Shakespeare presents the play's surface cosmology as a collective project of mystification. Felperin locates the revisionary targets of Macbeth in the general tradition of the didactic de casibus virorum model, and in the particular tradition of the English mystery plays. Emphasizing the special importance of the latter, he argues that "the resemblances of plot structure, characterization, even language between Macbeth and the medieval cycle plays . . . arise . . . as a result of the efforts of characters within the work to turn the action in which they are involved toward or even into a certain kind of older action, to recreate their experience in the image of certain precedents for their own purposes, purposes which cannot be immediately identified with the author's and which the play as a whole may not ratify." 20 What are these purposes? "Malcolm ... and his fellows must remake Scottish history into moral allegory, thereby legitimating themselves and their historical cause by assimilating them to an absolute and timeless struggle of good against evil." They do this by representing "themselves and their world, in precisely the terms of the play's medieval models, that is, in the. name of all that is holy" (127-28). The "parodic discrepancy between Christian vision and Shakespearean revision which runs through the play does not in the least prevent the Scottish resurgents from blithely conducting themselves and their counterplot as if no such gap existed.... It is ... their capacity to sublimate their naked frailties into the service of a missionary role and a divine plan that constitutes their real strength and the prerequisite for their success" (134-35). I think the last statement needs to be tempered a little, since the play seriously questions their "real strength" as well as their success. We may

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see this by exploring something that is strikingly evident at the mundane level of plotting, namely, the extent to which the "good" Scots are complicit both in the murder itself and in the subsequent acts of violence by which Macbeth maintains his shaky hold on the throne. The murder of Duncan is much more a group project than Macbeth or anyone else realizes, and heaven's vengeance is more a function of his own desperate quest for the peace of the grave than of the thanes' military triumph. The murder is a ferocious comedy of errors that barely gets off the ground. Duncan is betrayed first by his own hard-pressed and defensive generosity in rewarding Macbeth with the thaneship of Cawdor quickly enough to validate the witches' prediction and spur Macbeth on. Banquo contributes to the· betrayal by carefully keeping the prophecy secret, dissociating himself from Macbeth, lying low, and in general pursuing a course that may be expressed by the following variation of Macbeth's utterance: "If Chance will have my children Kings, why Chance may crown them/ Without my stir." The precipitate flight of the dead king's sons draws suspicion and leave Macbeth, as Duncan's cousin, next in line. After Macbeth's attempt to get rid ofBanquo and Fleance is botched, the banquet interrupted by the ghost is another grotesquely comic scene in which the thanes appear to keep their eyes steadfastly on their plates. The murder of Macduff's family is a politically senseless act born of Macbeth's desperate confusion, and Macduff contributes to it by leaving them unprotected. "Confusion now hath made his masterpiece!" Macduff explains after discovering the murdered Duncan, and the phrase reaches out beyond the confused blundering of the murderers to characterize the political and military confusion apparent in the Scottish community from the opening scenes of the play. It is epitomized by Angus's uncertainty about the first Thane of Cawdor: Whether he was comb in'd With those of Norway, or did line the rebel With hidden help and vantage, or that with both He labor'd in his country's wrack, I know not; But treasons capital, confess'd and prov'd, Have overthrown him. (r.3.rn-r6)

No one seems to know who is on whose side and for how long, and this is why James Thurber's conclusion to "The Macbeth Murder Mystery" is so apt: "'But who,' she demanded, 'do you suspect?' I looked at her cryptically. 'Everybody,' I said, and disappeared into a small grove of trees as silently as I had come." The Scottish war band is maculated with potential

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traitors and regicides (Macdonwald, Cawdor, the Macbeths) and with silent accomplices, like Banquo, who tersely keep their own counsel. Banquo's behavior in the play is anticipated by his own words when he describes the witches' gesture of silence: "You seem to understand me,/ By each at once her choppy finger laying/Upon her skinny lips" (1.3.43-45). The same reflexive judgment on silent complicity is later pronounced in the words of Rosse, whose apocalyptic image of fear and betrayal muffies the hints that betray his own fear, and thus contributes to the betrayal of Lady Macduff: I dare not speak much further: But cruel are the times, when we are traitors, And do not know ourselves; when we hold rumor From what we fear, yet know not what we fear, But float upon a wild and violent sea Each way, and move- I take my leave of you: Shall not be long but I'll be here again. (4.2.17-23)

It is because fears and scruples shake all the Scots, because all shift away in whey-faced fear or self-interest, because none of them tr1:1sts the others enough to share confidences, that the botcher of Scotland becomes the butcher king. If, then, we look behind or beneath the apocalyptic cosmology in terms of which the characters differentiate themselves as good and bad, we see the differentiation at least partly negated, and we also see small figures, poor players, throwing huge shadows as they strut and fret their hour on the, stage, shadows thrown by their golden rhetoric as by a candle against a backdrop stretching from an infernal cellarage to a "brave o'erhanging firmament;' "a majestical roof fretted with golden fire;' a "heavens, ... troubled with man's act." Yet the play doesn't make it easy for us to "look behind or beneath" the cosmology, reducing it to what Girard calls a "mythic excuse." For there are witches onstage, and a ghost, and spirits called up by the witches to impersonate weird apparitions. Hence the supernatural forces to which the Scots appeal must be more than airy nothings given a cosmic habitation and a place. And hence, in turn, the "good" thanes' sanctifying role as agents of justice and restoration must be as real as the witches are. The palpability of the witches, the assignment of witch-roles to actors, is in my opinion a stumbling block that Felperin's metatheatrical deconstruction doesn't sufficiently take into account. The theatrical evidence is prima facie all on the side of the traditional critic who, like David Bevington, assumes that "the defenders of righteousness are associated with positive images of natural order" by Shakespeare, and not only by themselves. 21 In order to secure Fel-

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perin's reading, we would have to examine the witches more closely than he does, and this means distinguishing what they embody in their speech and behavior from what they represent as "figures of [in]capable imagination." Onstage, the witches are capricious, trivial, and spiteful; pedants of mumbo-jumbo whose cauldrons are bubbling encyclopedias of black magic; pranksters and cozeners who practice what Hamlet calls "miching mallecho." Like children or kittens they seem to keep active mainly to use up their energies, and although they have appointments to keep it doesn't matter what games they play so long as they do and do and do. One sport is as good as another if it is as mean: killing swine; chasing a sailor halfway round the world because his wife refused to share her chestnuts; waylaying Macbeth. They take delight in contending with Macbeth, teasing him with dark sayings, confusing him with equivocal apparitions, and giving him false hopes by reversing the order in which the events those apparitions symbolize actually occur in act s. The whole technology of haunting, hounding, and cursing is a sheer joy to them, and they fall to it with the enthusiasm of wanton boys killing flies. They flash their credentials as symbols of transrational disorder by uttering paradoxes and inversions that sound pregnant but are easy to unpack. As characters, then, they are grotesques, shrunken figures of evil who are as comical as they are sinister. They may well be paradigms of what Girard calls "undifferentiation," and they may possess supernatural powers, but they do so at the level of folk superstition or according to the scapegoat rationale in terms of which Keith Thomas has analyzed witch-beliefs. "So wither'd and so wild in their attire;'.they "look not like th' inhabitants o' th' earth." But in addition to being withered and childlike they are also, as Banquo goes on to inform us, bearded women-not androgynes but bemonstered manlike images of the feminine power that threatens throughout the play to disarm the pathologically protective machismo essential to the warrior society. The First Witch revenges herself on a sailor's wife with "chestnuts in her lap" by sailing "like a rat without a tail" and draining the husband "dry as hay;' after which she flaunts "a pilot's thumb" as her trophy. The themes of phallic envy and emasculation distortedly glanced at here, and the related theme of dismemberment featured in the cauldron scene, may seem outlandish and even amusing when trapped in the "weyward" forms and tetrameter chants of witches; they are part of the fun of staging witchery, elements of caricature that, like the cackles of glee, could shoot some pleasant shivers up the audience spine. And that is precisely the rationale of scapegoating, the conspicuous reduction or exclusion or extrusion of something deeply feared. This reduction is performed by having the

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witches act out a travesty of Macbeth's elegiac sentiment "There's nothing serious in mortality;/ All is but toys." But when such themes melt, like the witches, "as breath into the wind;' when they are released from their bodies and disseminated throughout the text, they stain the play with a new meaning that sharply qualifies the manifest themes of the self-destruction of evil and triumph of good. In recent years, interpretation has brought the theme of gender conflict to the center of the play, and this critical development has taken place in two stages. In the first, the importance of the theme of sexuality, which is itself easily accessible in performance, was identified in terms that were not finally compelling or satisfactory. For example, the flaw in D. W. Harding's perceptive study is revealed by its title: "Woman's Fantasy of Manhood" would have been closer to the mark had it considered man's fantasy of womanhood. 22 When Dennis Biggins definitively linked the theme of sexuality to the portrayal of the witches, his appeal to traditional witchcraft literature led him to accept their maleficence at face value and extend it to Lady Macbeth in such a way as to suggest that the "warped sexual passion" that he saw as the cause of the play's destructive violence was occasioned by Macbeth's submission to feminine wiles and witchery. 23 Although he acknowledges the bisexuality of witches and notes references in other plays to male-generated witchcraft, Biggins locates the Macbeth witchcraft firmly in the feminine position by stressing "the sexual aspect of the Witches' maleficence. Their spiritual seduction of Macbeth will deprive him of true manhood" (263). His conclusion effectively ratifies the scapegoating of woman and shows how the gender theme may be skewed in favor of the very values of manliness affirmed by the Scottish cosmology and questioned by the text: Violence is an integral aspect of nobility in the society with which the play begins and ends. Properly channeled and directed by cohesive social forces involving service and selfless courage, it preserves order, upholds just rule, and is a power for good. When released by the individual with the headlong force of overmastering sexual passion and at the urging of evil forces from within and without, violence brings destruction, social disintegration, and personal damnation. (272; my italics)

This statement, to which Malcolm and his companions would have intoned a pious ''Amen," becomes the target rather than the message of the play when subjected to the deeper textual and subtextual analysis that characterizes the second stage· of gender criticism. Thus C. L. Barber has suggested that Macbeth, "in its complex way, is an exorcism" of the overpowering woman, "for it presents the witches as the outstretched shadows of Lady Macbeth and understands their power as depending on masculine

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insecurity." 24 Madelon Gohlke, situating a feminist reading on the metaphoric "margins of discourse," argues that "the hero's equation of masculinity with violence as a denial or defense against femininity leads to his destruction" as he becomes "what he most feared, the plaything of powerful feminine forces, betrayed by 'the instruments of darkness,' the three witches." 25 Gohlke's reading is too narrowly focused on Macbeth, but it may easily be modified in terms of her own brilliant formulation of the theme as a general Shakespearean concern: men "strive to avoid an awareness of their vulnerability in relation to women, a vulnerability in which they regard themselves as 'feminine.' " Their overemphasis on manliness is "a form of 'masculine protest' " that displaces weakness and helplessness onto women and children. "It is the so-called masculine consciousness, therefore, that defines femininity as weakness and institutes structures of male dominance designed to defend against· such an awareness.'' 26 This formulation can be extended to all the Scots. The violent, honorstudded, tightly muscled rhetoric with which they protest their manhood is the language of an unmanned community. Their great equivocation about gender is pointedly introduced in the deflationary perspective of the Porter's scene. When Macduff enters the Porter changes the subject from hell to the effects of drink and, briefly urged on by Macduff, lectures on the problem of being sexually impotent. Man's fear of being unmanned, the basic theme of the play as text, is here set side by side with the morality theme featured by the play as script, and both are trivialized in puns that smack of the locker room, the male sanctum sanctorum. The textual implications are restated in act 4, scene 3 during the oddly comic exchange in which Malcolm and Macduff display their mutual distrust. When Malcolm pretends to be the wickedest man in the world we hear him revel in the part of the hot-blooded manly undoer of women, ascribe other horrors of manly evil to himself, and then, priggishly absolving himself from "taints and blames," claim as his first virtue that he is still "unknown to woman." Macduff's response to Malcolm's proclamation of lust smirks with a smooth prurience that affirms the prerogatives of the privileged sex. The two scenes, taken together, convey the message that drunkenness and fornication are disgusting when they inhibit performance- that is, victimize men- but that there is a certain manly charm in vices that victimize- or virtues that eschew-women. Since lechery receives little dramatic attention in Macbeth, these scenes are all the more significant for what they suggest about the phallic assumptions and violence of the male imagination, and about the generalized dread of vulnerability and impotence that motivates the thanes. And in act 4,

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scenes 2 and 3, the male flight from vulnerability, and from what Malcolm calls "those strong knots of love," is disturbingly actualized in Macduff's precipitate flight from his wife and child. He dodges Malcolm's question about this· with an evasive allegorizing apostrophe that generalizes blame and displaces it to "Great tyranny" and Malcolm's pusillanimous "goodness" (4.3.3I-33). When Rosse brings the bad news and Malcolm counsels him to "dispute it like a man," Macduff laments his loss, and his responsibility for it, in the Christian language of the cosmic morality play (4.3.223-27). These terms again avoid the real issue: "He is not," as the Arden editor observes, "blaming himself for his flight from Scotland, but for his sinful nature." Malcolm shows him how to atone for this remediable defect by· framing his revenge in the harmoniously intertwined visions of manly and heavenly warfare: "This tune goes manly. I ... Macbeth I Is ripe for shaking, and the Powers above/ Put on their instruments" (4.3.235-39). In the final act the manly Christian tune drums up a .march against Macbeth that "Would, to the bleeding and the grim alarm, I Excite the mortified man" (5.2.4-5). The mortified man: this perfect characterization of the Scottish ethos reveals itself as the source of all their protestations, and divides them apprehensively from each other even when they contend in expressions of manly solidarity?7 So Banquo, after the murder: And when we have our naked frailties hid, That suffer in exposure, let us meet, And question this most bloody piece of work, To know it further. Fears and scruples shake us: In the great hand ofGod I stand; and thence Against the undivulg'd pretence I fight Of treasonous malice.

''And so do I," chimes in Macduff; "So all," add all, followed by Macbeth's "Let's briefly put on manly readiness, I And meet i' th' hall together" (2.J.I26-34). What these naked frailties are is concisely suggested by Lady Macduff, whose brief appearance in the play dramatizes the plight, the saneness, and the authentic humanity of a real woman, the woman abandoned and murdered not only literally by Macduff, Rosse, and Macbeth, but figuratively by the woman-haunted imagination of the Scottish male: Whither should I fly? I have done no harm. But I remember now I am in this earthly world, where, to do harm is often laudable; to do good, sometime

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Accounted dangerous folly: why then, alas! Do I put up that womanly defence, To say, I have done no harm? (4.2.72-78)

In contrast to Lady Macbeth, Lady Macduff makes only this mild and ironic gesture toward unsexing herself. The senseless, confused behavior of the men who attack and flee from her provides the subtextual choreography of the male fear of feminine contamination. To do harm is the manly defense, and it is a defense against this fear. It is thus a further irony that Macduff, in the next scene, initially claims that he has done no harm in leaving his family exposed to the tyrant. His words in that scene, and those of others, more clearly specify the nature of the fear: Let us rather Hold fast the mortal sword, and like good men Bestride our downfall birthdom. Each new morn, New widows howl, new orphans cry. (4.3.3-6)

The birthdom is the country that, Malcolm laments a little later, "sinks beneath the yoke;/ It weeps, it bleeds; and each new day a gash/ Is added to her wounds" (4.3.39-41). Rosse, bringing Macduff the bad news about his family, adds to the lament: ''Alas, poor country! /Almost afraid to know itself It cannot /Be call'd our mother, but our grave" (4.3.164-66). What is being assaulted is feminine and maternal, and Macduff's words ring with harsh irony: since in the previous scene Lady Macduff had proclaimed herself widowed and her son orphaned by his flight, his words remind us of both her accusation and her fate even as he associates himself with "good men" and imagines that the unmanly howl and cry is for the death of heroes like himself (for who would bother to kill a woman?). This context accentuates the ambiguity of the gesture embodied in "bestride our birthdom." Macduff means "let us protect it," but the words also mean "let us stand over it as a victor over a defeated enemy," and the aggressiveness is sexually toned. Having appropriated the generative principlefrom women and displaced it to the nature, the birthdom, that legitimizes their blood brotherhood, having excluded women from their public world of manly action, having tried to suppress the milky side of their own natures, the thanes are in the position of defending the very principle their ethos moves them to destroy in order to keep from knowing themselves. They aspire to be a nation of bachelor Adams, of no woman born and, as Malcolm boasts, "unknown to woman." Their subtextual attack on the maternal provider exactly complements the reciprocal violence of Lady

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Macbeth who, moved by mimetic desire to join the manly ranks, imagines plucking her nipple from her male child's "boneless gums" and dashing his brains out. The image of a boneless child, or of the witches' "finger of birthstrangled babe" (4.1.30), glances at the pervasive fear that compels the thanes to rip themselves untimely from the womb. In Malcolm's words, they "pour the sweet milk of concord into Hell." That is, they deprive themselves of the milk of human kindness, the bond of fellow feeling that makes the warrior vulnerable; so deprived, they are prey to the apprehensiveness, the fear of vulnerability, that is generated precisely by the rejection· of that bond? 8 And they displace their vulnerability to the maternal female they fear. Contending so vigorously against milky weakness and naked frailty, their language expresses a "lust for maleness" that, as Joel Fineman inge~iously observes, is itself female. 29 They can no more defeminize themselves than can Lady Macbeth. Her mimetic desire is paradoxically the precise model of their predicament, but the model is offered to us, not to them. Her first reference to Macbeth's milkiness discloses the extent to which, in previous scenes, they had re-created him as their model of defeminized violence- in Girardian terms, the model, rival, and dark double who arouses in them an admiration sharply edged with anxiety, as if their manhood had been usurped by their having to rely on his dangerously "overcharg'd" power to preserve them from their enemies?0 The centrifugal force of apprehensiveness inherent in this situation is only overcome when they drive out the dark double who followed the logic of their own desire to its ultimate conclusion. Thus, although Macbeth alone becomes disabused enough to realize it, all the Scots tell themselves tales of manliness full of the sound and fury that signifies the threatened "nothing" of emasculation, and Macbeth in his final moments rejects the insight to join his enemies in the effort to bury the mortified man. When this airy nothing is bodied forth in the local habitation and name of witch, its significance is radically changed and diminished. The witches' visibility as characters onstage does not simply reify and trivialize the complex problematic· of gender conflict that they come, under the scrutiny of the text, to represent. On the contrary, their embodiment conceals it. We do not see them as degraded images of the power and threat of femininity unless and until we have performed what is nowadays called a deconstructive reading of the text and clarified the process by which, in the play, "a fundamentally 'masculine' attitude is proposed as a universal norm." 31 At the surface level privileged by performance, the witches provide the visible anchor of the play's apocalyptic cosmology, and at this level

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the masculine/feminine conflict is displaced, neutralized, under the disguise of the battle between Good and Evil. Embracing this view, the thanes seek security in the closure of the conflict-and-restoration process that will purge the Evil the way scrofula or a plague is purged (4.3.141-59). Yet there can be no resolution or restoration so long as the Christianized ideology of restoration prevails, for it will only enable, by concealing, the ongoing dialectic of gender conflict and role reversal. The dialectic is concealed by a double scapegoating. Under the banner of virtue, the "good" thanes drive out Macbeth. Under the banner of selfcreated manhood, they drive out woman. The second accomplishment is manifested by the witches. But if,. from the textual standpoint, the witches come to appear as scapegoats of the masculine imagination, if they represent what has been done to women, from the standpoint of performance they are present as figures ofevil, placed low in the hierarchic structure of a cosmology that they, along with the ghost and apparitions, theatrically validate. It is especially important to remember that the witches are seen by no one but Macbeth and Banquo ·(Lady Macbeth reads about them), and the audience. Why, then, are we invited to contribute to the scapegoating, to accredit the sinister role assigned to women as instruments of darkness and thereby give assent to the mystified male-dominated cosmology that constitutes it? Why is a "mythic excuse" imposed on us as the "real world" of the play? Rosse's comment about the troubled heavens threatening man's "bloody stage" simultaneously reminds us that the heavens are only a theatricaUllusion and urges us to convert the illusion into a fictional "fact." The exhortation thematized by the Chorus of Henry V would seem to comprise the basic dictum of Shakespearean performance qua performance: "Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts"; "eke out our performance with your mind"; "Yet sit and see;/ Minding true things by what their mock'ries be"; "Vouchsafe to those that have not read the story,/ That I may prompt them"; "In your fair minds let this acceptance take." The Chorus aims to impress us into the service of a performance, a king, an ideology, which is at once theatrical and political, an impressment about which the text of the Henriad raises serious questions. Here, as in Macbeth, we, the audience, are asked to sustain and reify the myth the characters engender, and to help them mystify themselves as to its reality by mystifying ourselves. The choric voice of performance solicits us to overcome the obvious illusoriness of staged drama so that it may "acceptance take" in our fair minds. And this is precisely what the characters in the drama are trying to do: neutralize the fictiveness of a "world" that has its origins not in God's fair mind but

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in their own- in the beginning was the stage. We are, therefore, implicated in their efforts to make the unseen world borne aloft on wings of poetic imagery as real to them and us as are the visible bodies of actors on stage. Performance helps this project forward by assimilating the unseen world to those visibilia so that the status of the referents of imagery may be equated with that of the embodied speakers: one is as fictive or as real as the other; both inhabit a single "world." Shakespearean performance is a mousetrap devised not so much to catch as to test the conscience of the spectator. It is, like the witches, a monster- something misshapen or distorted, displayed before our eyes and poured (rammed, Cleopatra would say) into our lustful ears. Both gift and poison, slander and parade, it functions in a manner similar to such Spenserian monsters as Error and the dragon in book r of The Faerie Queene or the Blatant Beast in book 6. It diverts us with perceptible embodiments that conceal their· true nature by their very form and existence as embodiments. To externalize what the monster means as a monster is to make us forget temporarily that the meaning ·lies within the observer, and thus. to convert spectatorship to scapegoating. The dragon can only be understood by "killing" it, making it vanish like the witches as "breath into the wind" so that the meanings may be disembodied, released, disseminated as text. Yet performance does not encourage this dissemination. In the final act of Macbeth, though the witches have left the stage, their prophecies remain: they have been validated, not negated, by the disenchanted, even disappointing, form their fulfillment takes. If our final allegiance to the values of manhood and the forces of restoration is lukewarm, it is secured by the fact that the prophecies have weathered a return to the daylight world. Nature has come round, the long night has gone, the "music at the close" solicits our allegiance and celebration: "So thanks to all at once, and to each one, j Whom we invite to see us crown'd at Scone." I think the theatrical effect of this is similar to that produced by the Porter's scene. The latter generated disenchantment in the audience only to contain and disenable it. The scene appealed to -that is, constructed -the audience's superior modernity by combining morality-play allusions, contemporary innuendoes, and jokes about venereal disease and impotency. And then, as John B. Harcourt has shown, with the Porter's final multiple pun on vomit/urination/purge the audience is reoriented toward the "theme of evil being violently expelled from the body of the state." 32 Producing a rupture between the murder of Duncan and its discovery, the scene arouses our amused skepticism, allows us for a moment to assent to the self-mystifying deflation by which Lady Macbeth tries to "gild" her "guilt" ("'tis the eye of childhood/ That fears a

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painted devil," 2.2.53-54), but concludes by renewing our dedication to the Christianizing mythology of the play. We rush through the Porter's painted gate into a scene that resonates with apocalyptic imagery and intensifies our anxiety about our intimate relations to the murderers and their crime, intensifies also our sense of their folly and impotence, of their certain damnation, and of their probable apprehension. Shakespeare seems bent on challenging the premise contained in Sidney's defense of conspicuous theatrical fiction: "What childe is there that, comming to a Play, and seeing Thebes written in great Letters upon an olde doore, doth beleeve that it is Thebes?" Seeing Morality inscribed on the Porter's old door we are nevertheless pushed through it as through the looking-glass, so that the potential textual subversion ofthe mystified order- the textually accessible motive behind community mystificationis briefly disclosed only to be neutralized. Thus, although we "know that the Poets persons and dooings. are but pictures what should be," to the extent that we receive the performed pictures as if they were royal proclamations and embrace their "should" as the play's "is;' we risk giving "the lye to things not affirmatively but allegorically and figurativelie written." 33 If plays as proclamations of Morality are eventually challenged by the legislative authority of the parliament of readers, the challenge produces our subsequent detachment only insofar as it outlines our prior submission to what Stephen Greenblatt has called the "improvisational power" and "privileged visibility" of performance and, along with that, our prior submission to the interrelated values of Christian justice and manly honor. Greenblatt's remark about 1 Henry IV may be applied with appropriate changes to Macbeth: the play "confirms the ... hypothesis of the origin" of sanctified manly power in fear of impotency and vulnerability to woman "even as it draws its audience irresistibly toward the celebration of that power." 34 When we remember as readers to reassume or reimagine the theatrical perspective "that seems to 'give' us the world, ... we do so in ~ state of estrangement;' and yet, by the same token, we are "equally struck by the unreality of the whole performance and by its immense· power to impose itself" upon an audience. 35 "Why," Greenblatt asks, "should men submit to fantasies that will not nourish or sustain them?"; the question is certainly apposite to the fantasies of manhood and womanhood privileged by the script of Macbeth. Greenblatt notes that Thomas More's answer to this "is power, whose quintessential sign is the ability to impose one's fictions upon the world," and in Renaissance Self-Fashioning he goes on brilliantly to demonstrate the thesis that "one of the highest achievements of power is to impose fictions upon the world, and one of its supreme pleasures is to enforce the acceptance of

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fictions that are known to be fictions" (r3, I4I). Yet the politics of theater differs from the theater of politics, since we submit more freely to the ritual solicitations of the former, and are thus more fully complicit in our own submission: "We are, after all, in the theater, and our pleasure depends upon the fact that there is no escape, and our applause ratifies the triumph of our confinement." 36 Our pleasure and triumph, that is, is to conspire with the playwright and make him our factor in the Platonic project of working with and through him to impose on ourselves the fictions we want to believe in. If Shakespearean performance accommodates these desires, it nevertheless invests its charismatic representation of a world with verbal traces of the hidden processes by which the communities of the play and the theater join in producing that world. These traces tease us by suggesting the presence of a loophole, or peephole, through which we may target the triumphant fiction our applause ratified. The effect produced by Shakespeare's antitheatrical allusions and by the inherent textuality of his language is very much like that produced by the. distorted skull at the center of Holbein's "The Ambassadors," explicated by Greenblatt in a remarkable discussion (r7-24). Performance indicates the subversive or anamorphic perspective but at the same time controls it by the coercive power of its visible illusion. As the threat implied by the skull is repeated in diminished form in a small skull-shaped brooch that adorns one of the ambassadors, so, for example, is the threat to manhood in Macbeth reduced to its theatrical embodiment in the witches: "This reduction seems as much mocked as confirmed by the large alien presence that has intruded into this ... world of human achievement" (r8). When we sight through the anamorphic perspective of the text, the alien presence emerges in proper form as man's fear of becoming (in Gohlke's words) "the plaything of powerful feminine forces." And from this standpoint the reader awakens to his complicity as a spectator in the transformation of fear into cosmological fiction. Performance and text together produce the tensional effect Greenblatt attributes to "The Ambassadors": "The painting insists, passionately and profoundly, on the representational power of art, its central role in man's apprehension and control of reality, even as it insists, with uncanny persuasiveness, on the fictional character of that entire so-called reality and the art that pretends to represent it" (2r ). In the case of Macbeth this dual insistence is directed not only toward Shakespeare's own art but also toward the "art" by which the community of Scottish males socially constructs its interlocking systems of gender and cosmology, and, beyond that, toward the arts of spectatorship and reading by which we alternately reproduce and question the community's imaginative achievement.

CHAPTER

7

+ Sneak5 Noise, or, Rumor and Detextualization in

(2

Henry IV'

They say miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons to make modern and familiar, things supernatural and causeless. Hence it is that we make trifles of terrors ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear. -All's Well That Ends Well2.3.1-6

This philosophical observation is the old courtier Lafew's comment on the dubious knowledgeability of the doctors trying-pretentiously and without success-to diagnose the king's mysterious disease. It may or may not be important that the title of the play invites us to ensconce ourselves in the seeming knowledge of a closure that works to minimize fears deeply inscribed in the play's characters and community; that the speaker's comment is itself pretentious and seemingly knowledgeable; that anyone who chooses to appropriate and utter Lafew's insight, present company not excepted, is subject to the same penetration. Nevertheless, as the hapless Duke of Albany would say, does say, "that's but a trifle here;' and my aim in this essay is to direct Lafew's comment toward 2 Henry IV in such a way as to make modern and familiar things supernatural and causeless. To begin with some definitions: a sconce is a fortification, a defense, and a trifle is not only something trivial but also, in one of its older senses, a false tale or lying fable told to deceive or divert. I want to explore and test a particular hypothesis about Shakespearean dramaturgy, which is that the play text represents its dramatic and theatrical circumstances as forms of defensive trifling. The hypothesis is based on a modern and familiar theory of the relations between latent and manifest content, and of the dynamic mechanisms- condensation, displacement, visualization, dramatization-

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that preside over their transformations. To redirect Freud's model to plays does not mean reducing them to dreams or jokes, since the dynamics of the model gives shape to the economy of many other representational activities. Dreamwork, jokework, and playwork are different expressions of the same general field of forces. In applying the model to Shakespeare's writing, I shall center on the passage from latent psychological conditions or relationships to the manifest circumstances of narrative, dramatic, and theatrical performance. My reason for choosing the two terms italicized in the previous sentence is based on several etymological considerations. In· using circumstance I mean to activate not only such senses as "factors that modify a course of action" and "additional or accessory information" but also those implied in the phrases "circumstantial evidence" and "pomp and circumstance." Buried in my use of the word condition is the Latin verb behind its Latin cognate, condere, which means, among other things, to write or compose, to collect, to preserve, to bury, to conceal. The meanings collected under this signone of the meanings of the Latin root of collect is to read- allow me by a happy coincidence to bind together two kinds of latency: the latency of what may be called deep-structural psychological conditions and that of textual conditions, that is, the rhetorical, syntactical, and lexical play of meaning most fully accessible when the system of verbal. signs is committed to writing and offered to readers for interpretation. Superimposing psychological and textual conditions in this manner implies, on the other side, the superimposition of two kinds of manifest content: that of the unfolding circumstances of dramatic narrative (story or mythos and its organizing emplotment) and that of the theatrical play of bodily and phonic signs in which meaning is circumstantially conveyed through kinesic, proxemic, and speech patterns. In regard to the specific relationship of textual conditions to theatrical circumstances, I think it obvious that it is polarized and conflictive. The polarity arises from the different aims and structures of literary and theatrical interpretation. To borrow some terms from the Chorus of Henry V, theatrical. interpretation- by spectators, not by the director, whose relation to the text is that of a reader- asks for winged thought, while literary interpretation is "cripple tardy-gaited" thought that meanders painfully about the text and leaves filthy little tracks like a snail. Or, putting it in the language of corpuscular theory, theater induces quick motions that heat up the mind, while reading induces slow motions that make it pale, cold, and melancholic. Actors and spectators display the symptoms Falstaff attributes to the "twofold operation" of sack: it makes them "full of nimble,

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fiery, and delectable shapes ... delivered o'er to the voice" and ear (and eye); and it makes the blood "course from the inwards to the parts' extremes" until "it illumineth the face." On the other hand, because readers are more "sober-blooded" and eschew "inflammation," they suffer from the anemia of "demure boys" who imbibe thin potations and get wenches. Or so it seems to those who insist that "the foolish and dull and crudy vapors" environing the text be burnt off in accordance with the criterion of performability-of what can be digested in a staged play-and who think the "learning" of armchair interpreters to be "a mere hoard of gold kept by a devil" (2 Henry IV 4.3.85-I23). . These are relatively obvious and mundane observations, even more trifling if all they refer to is a polarity between text and performance, or reading and audition. How can empirical statements of this sort be made to converge on thematic claims about the relation of psychological conditions to dramatic circumstances? A first move in this direction is to resituate the polarity within reading and to consider it as a conflict between two interpretive emphases, to which the terms "text-centered" and "stage-centered" may be applied. One effect of this move is that the locus of the representational medium shifts from the mutual presence of theatrical performance and audience to that of text and reader. Thus displaced, theatrical performance no longer has pride of place as the actual medium that "imitates," communicates, and interprets a dramatic fiction, and the relation between them is no longer an empirically fixed prior condition that escapes and determines interpretation. Rather, theater joins drama as one of the absent representata of the text. Its use and meaning, its relations to· dramatic fiction and text, are now among the variables· whose interplay is open to the reader's interpretive decisions. From here it is only a short step to a second move, one that· will allow me to state my claim in its strongest and .most controversial form. Situating the text/performance dialectic within reading produces the following consequence: whether ·and why reading should or should not be constrained by the structural characteristics of theatrical performance become (at least potentially) substantive problems that affect the meaning of the dramatic fiction. These are the problems whose existence T. S. Eliot accurately discerned, but whose thematic status he misunderstood, in his discussion of the "objective correlative." My claim is that this problematic is built into the Shakespeare text as a critical thesis about theater in particular and theatricality in general; that the critique can be extended to stage-centered reading; and that it is fully accessible only to text-centered reading, which provides an interpretive standpoint outside the direct or indirect influence of the stage.

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Text-centered reading is of course as parasitical on stage-centered reading as it is on theater itself. For it must always attend to the ways any theatrical interpretation -whether by actors and directors or by readersreflects interests, values, powers, dangers, privileges, . and constraints embedded in the very structure of theatrical relationships as they were institutionalized in Shakespeare's time and are represented by his texts. His dramatic fictions are clearly written for theater, and aspects of the theatricality with which this purpose invests them are often thematized as constituents of their meaning. At the same time, his texts are just as clearly underdetermined by their theatrical purpose. They flaunt the seductive generativity, the exploding semiosis, of an ecriture .that transcends the digestive capacity of the performed play and aspires to the condition, say, of the Sonnetsa condition that assimilates the perpetuum mobile of the play of the signifier to that of (what may loosely be called) the play of the psyche. I submit that this ecriture is not merely metatheatrical but antitheatrical. And to the extent that the narrative circumstances of Shakespeare's dramatic fictions manifest the theatricality that informs them, his ecriture is not merely metanarrative but antinarrative. It defends against the reduction of latent conditions to manifest circumstances by representing the circumstances as defensive transformations of the conditions, and it does so in a manner that may be elucidated by the analyses of Freud and Lafew. Text-centered reading focuses attention on this transformational process by postulating that both actors and performance, both characters and story, may be construed as circumstantial embodiments- construed, that is, as the "nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes" that stand around psychological conditions buried in the text, shapes that fence those conditions off and keep them just out of earshot. In Theseus's more conventional and innocent version, the conditions are the "things unknown," the "airy nothing," that "imagination bodies forth" and that "the poet's pen I Turns ... to shapes," giving them ''A local habitation and a name" (Midsummer Night's Dream s.I.I4-I7). In the Henriad the "things unknown" become Lafew's "unknown fear," and for the text-centered reader this "buried-fear" vibrates in "secret whispers," in "creeping murmur and the poring [eye-straining] dark" of meanings that ramify like rhizomes through the subsoil of the text (Henry V 4, Ch. 7, 2). On the Freudian model, to body them forth and visualize them is to repress .them, and to repress them is to stimulate their rhizomatic growth, for they have the same properties as crabgrass or the Hydra. They grow "like the summer grass, fastest by night, I Unseen, yet crescive in his faculty" (Henry VI.I.6s-66). For the pale hermeneutical farmer who circles tirelessly if tediously

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around fields of text and practices reading-intensive cultivation, these rhizomatic manifestations take a particular form. What I have been calling "visualization" or "embodiment" is reunderstood as a process of detextualization. In this process, the denotative function of linguistic reference (or pseudoreference) is given priority over the connotative play of linguistic meanings. The effect of binding language to referents, the effect, that is, of displacing a privileged set of meanings to the local habitation of theatrical and narrative circumstances, is to control or repress· other meanings. My point is that the other meanings need not be dismissed as irrelevant or unstageable; they may be considered as unwanted and dangerous. Detextualization can be seen as imposing a kind of ideological closure on the semiotic power of the text. The question for interpretation then becomes whether this closure in any instance appears motivated and thematized in terms specific to the meaning of the play. This is the question to which the following discussion of 2 Henry IV speaks. How do the play's circumstances generate the defenses, the sconces, against its conditions? Do the mechanisms of detextualization that are a generic property of Shakespearean dramaturgy have a specific meaning in this play as agents of repression, and if so, what do they repress?

+ In the second act of 2 Henry IV, Francis asks another tapster to see "if thou canst find out Sneak's noise" (2.4.10-n). "Sneak's noise" is the name of a band of musicians, and it suggests the kind of Punk Rock Anti qua one might expect to hear in any big-town Renaissance tavern. ''I'll see if I can find out Sneak," the tapster replies after some conversation focused chiefly on the "excellent stratagem" of the Prince and Poins, who are expected soon, and who "will put on two of our jerkins and aprons, and Sir John must not know of it" (rs-r7). Halfway through the scene the musicians arrive, and the disguised Prince and Poins sneak in eight or nine lines later. Theatrically, Sneak's noise is the warmup band opening up the little show Falstaff and Doll unwittingly put on for the princely voyeur. Textually, the name Sneak tends to drift from the bandleader to the future king, where it changes from a proper to a common noun so that the melody of its reference is harmonized by meaning. "Sneak's noise" might well pass as the name of the game defined by Harry in his very first soliloquy, the excellent stratagem or practice he has been fathering at least since his own father was crowned. "Sneak's noise" is aptly characterized by the tapster who says that the stratagem will be "old utis," since according to A. R. Humphreys, the Arden editor, utis means both "noise, confusion, din" and ''jollification,

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period of festivity ... i.e. strictly the 'octave; eighth day, or eight days, of a festival." 1 Sneak's noise, then, is the diversionary din of carnival, and its momentary embodiment as Old Utis, that is Falstaff, is itself a diversion from the sneakier noises and one that conceals their source. Harry's theatrical carnival extends to the conclusion of Henry V, and as its din becomes more strident the sneakier noises become ever more disturbing. Those noises are audible in performance, but they tend to be muffled not only by the Chorus of Henry Vbut also by the general conditions of theatrical embodiment and audition, as well as by the mythical emplotment of the heroic prince's education. Sneak's noise, under the pressure of the present meditation, is metamorphosing into the music of the text, the music whose blend of voices we almost but never quite distinguish while in the audience. For spectators and auditors of Shakespeare there are always anamorphic moments and sneaky noises that tempt one to "stop the vent of hearing" in order to consider them more deeply and piece out their imperfections with interpretive thought. When we turn from performance to text, when we stop listening to what is being spoken and start "hearing" what we see on the page, then the whole of the performed play becomes reorganized as an anamorphosis of the text. I propose to detach Sneak's noise from all the referents and circumstances mentioned above with the aim of finding it out in the textual conditions of the play's strange Induction. "Stop the vent of hearing" is a phrase the text assigns to Rumor, the speaker of the Induction, and while I shall not fully commit myself to the task of reembodying, or detextualizing, the meaning of Sneak's noise in the figure of Rumor, I shall try to see what light can be shed on the infratheatrical and -political atmosphere of the play by Rumor and her first victim, the Earl of Northumberland. Who, then, is Rumor, what is she, and- to ask her own question- "Why is Rumor here?" Clifford Leech gives one answer: "Shakespeare needed an introductory speech . . . both to remind his audience of what had happened at Shrewsbury and to make plain the irony of the false news brought to Northumberland"- though one might well question the second necessity, for why should false news be brought to Northumberland if not to make plain the irony of Rumor? Leech correctly observes that these "needs" did not require an unpleasant "quasi-morality figure" who "expresses scorn for the credulity of men, and even-though irrelevantly-for their love of slander," 2 an observation that simply reraises the question in a slightly different form: "Why is it Rumor that's here?" D. A. Traversi, who finds the Induction "eminently ... practical" as a linking device, thinks Rumor's

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function is primarily anticipatory and atmospheric: "This prologue conveys an impression of insecurity, of concealed menace, which the following action will amply confirm." 3 James Calderwood generally agrees: " 'Why is Rumor here?' The answer is ... palpable: because expectations, lies, misconstructions, and bad faith govern [the play]." 4 This answer, like Traversi's, is fine as far as it goes, but it isn't palpable enough. It ignores the particular form of Rumor's representation, at least as given in the 16oo Quarto: "Enter Rumor painted full of tongues" -not only a "quasi-morality figure," but a literary rumor that goes back to Virgil's figure of Fama; a personification, that is, a pseudopresence, a textual fantasy, an abstraction whose embodiment is itself a form of false report. Calderwood's answer also ignores the puzzling relation of this figure to its expository task as well as to its audience. For as John Blanpied notes, Rumor implies "that the audience ... even in consenting to hear the play thereby consents as well to aid him in his business of spreading 'continual slanders .. .' " 5 Finally, the answer ignores the puzzling question of Rumor's gender, which I shall take up first. Blanpied and others assume Rumor is male. For a long time I thought otherwise, not only because of the Fama tradition but also because the speaker's self-praise, ironic rhetoric, and manipulation of the audience reminded me of Erasmus's Moria. Recently, however, I have been persuaded by my colleague John Lynch that several details in the speech make this far from certain, for example, the image of Rumor on horseback, the phrase "my household," and the parade of phallic references between lines 8 and 15, suggesting that the ear-stuffing Rumor possibly fathered "some other grief" on the big year and that the pipe (a Dionysian attachment?) may belong to the anatomy of "My well-known body" (Ind. 13, 21). I conclude from this not that Rumor is male but that the speaker's gender is, like almost everything else in the Induction, conspicuously obscure-perhaps male, perhaps female, perhaps androgynous. In fact, why not think of a male actor impersonating a formidable phallic woman who appropriates a male role? Such a gender turnabout, familiar in Shakespeare, would not be irrelevant to a play in which the spirited and sympathetic presences of three of its four women make their victimization and marginalization all the more poignant. At every level and in every respect, Doll Tearsheet, Hostess Quickly, and Lady Percy are consigned the role of "the weaker vessel" who "must bear" whatever men thrust upon them -labors, losses, blame, grief, and the false report of the reductive stereotypes that their names signify in a world where names are conferred by men or reflect their dominance and perspective. In such a context, Rumor's aggressive address might well-like that of the Wife of Bath- dramatize the outsider's revenge. She appears as the

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nightmare and scapegoat constructed by antifeminist fantasy, the embodiment of male fears of woman's power, fears and power exacerbated by repression. That "she" is impersonated by a male actor and is a personification rather than a person could well contribute to this appearance. These speculations are hardly decisive, yet given the unsatisfactory choice of available pronouns (he, she, sjhe, and it, the latter appropriate to a personification) they persuade me to continue referring to Rumor as "she" in spite of the term's inadequacy. Rumor's pseudopresence is a liability she seems eager to overcome, since she talks chiefly about herself. In the first half of her forty-line speech she tells us who she is, and in the second half why she is here. She begins by transforming her abstract deterritorialized being into a figure of territorial imperialism: Open your ears; for which of you will stop The vent of hearing when loud Rumor speaks? I, from the Orient to the drooping West, Making the wind my post-horse, still unfold The acts commenced on this ball of earth. (Ind. r.s)

The rhetoric rapidly swells Rumor's power from the vent of hearing to the volume of space and time that she traverses, like the sun, in a day's journey from the (ancient) Orient to the West for whose "drooping" she is about to claim credit. "This ball of earth": the shifter swells up the Virgilian monster to its mountainous size, evokes the misanthropic acrophilia borrowed by Erasmus's Folly from Lucian's Icaromenippus, and sprays contempt on a scene that seems too insignificant for such windy world-girdling power. Yet although she is aggressively self-preferring and inflates herself to grandiose proportions, we should note that among other sneaky noises in her speech the wind she rides on derives at least etymologically from the vent of hearing. For Rumor's painted tongues are a misdirection, a metonymic displacement from cause to effect. The first step in exorcising Rumor is to rub out the tongues and paint her with ears. It is in her interest to insist on a melodrama of malicious intentions in which the ear is the passive victim of slanderous assaults from the outside: Upon my tongues continual slanders ride, The which in every language I pronounce, Stuffing the ears of men with false reports. I speak of peace, while covert enmity Under the smile ofsafety wounds the world;

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And who but Rumor, who but only I, Make fearful musters, and prepar'd defence, Whiles the big year, swoln with some other grief, Is thought with child by the stern tyrant War, And no such matter? (Ind. 6-15)

Yet her next words gesture toward the different notion that false report originates within the hearer and issues out through the ear: Rumor is a pipe Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures, And of so easy and so plain a stop That the blunt monster with uncounted heads, The still discordant wav'ring multitude, Can play upon it. (Ind. 15-20)

This refigures and reexplains "stop I The vent of hearing": air blown through a pipe is vented outward through the stops; if the ear is such a vent, the meaning must be that the hearer discharges "surmises, jealousies, conjectures" onto the speakers or words he hears. The reversal of Rumor's original empha.sis was at once prepared for and damped down in the opening passage from the "vent of hearing" to the "wind" on which Rumor rides. It is also implicit in "the big year, swoln with some other grief," because "ear was often pronounced, and spelt, with a 'y' " 6 and appears in that form at 1.2.193-94· The pun suggests that the alternative to "stern Tyrant War" comes from within-for example, from Henry's "buried fear" and "inward wars," from the chambered music of Sneak's noise, which (in Warwick's words) makes "Rumor ... double, like the voice and echo, I The numbers of the feared" (3.1.97-98). Rumor's insistence on "Who but Rumor, who but only I ... ?" is her basic false report, but there is no attempt to deceive. The question is too aggressively voiced to remain merely rhetorical. It is arch; it bullies; it threatens to pour scorn on the gull who believes, or believes in, Rumor, and who forgets that what personification metacommunicates is its own nonexistence- not merely because the embodiment signifies an abstraction but because to personify is to misrepresent alienated power as alien power. "But what need I thus I My well-known body to anatomize I Among my household?" (Ind. 20-22): her subjects know that body well, having created it in a continuing process of collective production that antedates Virgil and Babel. The rhetorical moves made by Rumor are Falstaflian. She treats spectator and reader with contempt, and at the same time, by sharing her nasty secrets with them, she gleefully arouses their contempt for both her and her

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victims. Spectator and reader may well resist the gesture by which she includes them in her universal household of slanderers and dupes. She will not abuse them with her false reports. Yet it is flattering to be taken conspiratorially into her confidence. She promises the smooth comfort of a salacious and sadistic voyeurism: lines 6-15 appeal directly to the reader's or auditor's capacity for covert enmity. Stuffing the ears with continual slander: why pretend it is a threat rather than a promise? Why else go to theater if not for the pleasure of seeing others duped and slandered for a change, while the watchers smile in safety? Why, for example, do I, who claim to see through Rumor, find it difficult to work up any high-minded objections to Prince John's Gaultree caper, and on the contrary take deep pleasure in the highminded stupidity of the rebel leadership? Not to mention the pleasure that comes from its being good theater-much better than seeing or reading about a confused tangle of people brandishing weapons and pretending to drip blood all over the stage. The Gaultree episode is not one for whose aesthetic quality (at least) the Chorus of Henry V would have to apologize. The moral superiority that results from seeing through and rejecting Rumor lets one safely approach the play in Rumor's terms and thus reestablishes her hegemony. Her rhetoric, like Falstaff's, is a rhetoric whose witty insistence on the powerlessness it represents is a strategy for gaining power, and whose witty insistence on the license it represents is a strategy for bringing on what is most deeply desired: powerlessness and punishment, confinement and evacuation, so that-in Northumberland's words- "the rude scene may end." The unveiling and rejection of Rumor is the condition of her triumph; it eliminates the well-known body that targets her in place. Because the flesh is weak, the body vanishes to let the spirit of rumor burrow into the text and raise its head in other displacements. The doubts Rumor throws on the tale she tells about herself are illustrated in lines 9-15, which consist of a report of her two kinds of false reports: false rumors of peace when war is brewing, and false rumors of war when something else is the cause of trouble. "Covert enmity / ... wounds the world" is a vague and portentous statement, as is "the big year, swoln with some other grief," which is further confused by the unclarity of the image -pregnant from some other cause, or not pregnant but swollen with disease? The very vagueness of the image, its dark reaches, its conspicuously withheld reference, provoke our own "surmises, jealousies, conjectures" about those which lurk behind the noncommittal "other grief." Throughout the play, the characters will be similarly teased and provoked, and the "other grief" will be kept before us in synonymous variants that continue to preserve its obscurity and to elicit interpretation.

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Thus the Induction offers Rumor's audience two interpretations of her role and power. In the first, she is the tongue-wagging figure of power who promulgates false reports, through malicious or gullible channels. In the second, she is the effect rather than cause of aural rather than oral discharges of grief. Both interpretations are evident enough to make it clear that the offered choice is preempted by the speaker, whose performance presses the first on us (as it is in her interest to do). Her existence and power depend on the ability to persuade hearers to shift blame from ears to tongues, slandering others and victimizing themselves by creating diversionary targets: Rumor, stern tyrant War, the uncounted heads of the blunt monster, the body and its diseases, the "history" of the civil war from Shrewsbury to Gaultree, the dramatic narrative of this history, and the theatrical staging ofthe narrative. A speech so pregnant or swollen with uncounted meanings insists on parading before us the latency of its content. Hence the cavalier manner with which Rumor discharges her expository function has the force of a displacement. The exposition is confined to nineteen lines· in the second half of the speech (22-40). This minimal attention to narrative linkage accords with the attitude suggested in "this ball of earth," and reduces the linkage to an excuse for continuing with the self-portrait. But it is also a reduction in that what Rumor's language implies about the meaning of rumor, both in the muffied, teasingly vague allusions to subversive deceits and in its manipulation of her audience, resonates with complexities that far exceed the narrative circumstances to which she binds them. Since the first twenty lines scatter clues to latencies that we can't yet make out, the summary of the events and aftermath of Shrewsbury is suspiciously anticlimactic and diversionary: Why is Rumor here? I run before King Harry's victory,

Who in a bloody field by Shrewsbury Hath beaten down young Hotspur and his troops, Quenching the flame of bold rebellion Even with the rebels' blood. But what mean I To speak so true at first? My office is To noise abroad that Harry Monmouth fell Under the wrath of noble Hotspur's sword, And that the King before the Douglas' rage Stoop'd his anointed head as low as death. This have I rumor'd through the peasant towns Between that royal field of Shrewsbury And this worm-eaten hold of ragged stone,

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Where Hotspur's father, old Northumberland, Lies crafty-sick. The posts come tiring on, And not a man of them brings other news Than they have learnt of me. From Rumor's tongues They bring smooth comforts false, worse than true wrongs. (Ind. 22-40)

This passage is full of sneaky noises because it distinguishes true from false in purely circumstantial terms that caricature the deeper notion of falsehood embedded in the speech as a whole. As a result, the simplicities of the narrative itself, and of Rumor's diminished role in it, present themselves as part of the caricature. Rumor speaks falsely in claiming to speak truly, since it is false to say this is why she is here. It will be noted that her social scapegoat, the blunt monster, raises its heads in "the peasant towns"; such belaboring of lower classes reappears in the mouths of several speakers in both aristocratic factions, who are united in blaming the source or necessity of rebellion on the unruliness they personify as the commons. Thus, although Rumor vanishes into her exposition, her spirit festers·on.

+ The signs of her resurrection or dissemination are already inscribed in the meanings that entangle her description of Northumberland. The information she communicates is that Northumberland pretends sickness as an excuse for not reinforcing his son at Shrewsbury. But the final phrase burrows through the verb to bare another meaning beneath the indexical function, one that speaks to his condition rather than to his circumstances: he continues to lie to himself and is sick of his craft; he has belied his son, persists in lying to himself about that, and when he learns what happened he knows himself responsible for his son's death and continues to shuffle off that grief like a mortal coil because he cannot bear it. Referentially displaced and pried loose from his intention, his own language accuses him: "he doth sin that doth belie the dead" (1.1.98); "he that but fears the thing he would not know" (85). Thus unfolded by the subsequent action in I.I and 2.3, "Lies craftysick" sends an allegorical charge back into the phrase it follows: the "hold" (Theobald's emendation) in which he hides and ensconces himself has become a "hole" (r6oo Quarto, First Folio) eaten by the worm of guilt and mistrust. What his son's widow accuses him of in 2.3 is hardly news to him: The time was, father, that you broke your word When you were more endear'd to it than now; When your own Percy, when my heart's dear Harry,

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Threw many a northward look to see his father Bring up his powers; but he did long in vain. Who then persuaded you to stay at home? There were two honors lost, yours and your son's. (2.J.ro-r6)

Lady Percy does not stop here. She contributes to the doom of the rebels' political cause with an odd argument to the effect that Northumberland should once again lose honor by staying home: since he has betrayed his son he should not "do his ghost the wrong" of holding "your honor more precise and nice /With others than with him" (39-41). Northumberland continues to shuffle, and minimize his wrong- "you do draw my spirits from me/ With new lamenting ancient oversights" (46-47)- but the "other grief" that the word oversights suppresses infiltrates his next words even as he faces toward the relief offered by going to war: But I must go and meet with danger there, Or it will seek me in another place, And find me worse provided. (48-49)

He does not go to meet with danger there ("I will resolve for Scotland," 67), but makes his stand too late, after the main event (4.4·97-99), and this effectively kills the rebellion. Since he continues lying crafty-sick, danger finds him worse provided, and this effectively kills Northumberland. In Northumberland's first words, uttered before he receives the bad news, we can see the projective force with which the guilt registered in his language exposes itself in the very act of trying to efface itself: What news, Lord Bardolph? Every minute now Should be the father of some stratagem. The times are wild; contention, like a horse Full of high feeding, madly hath broke loose, And bears all down before him. (r.r.7-n)

The father's betrayal and his concern for the son he has betrayed are displaced and condensed in the allegorizing torque of the second sentence (reading "stratagem" both in its modern sense and, with Humphreys, as "deed of blood or violence"). The rapid, nervous shift through personification and simile into the equine image secures the externalization of the "inward wars" that consume the speaker and binds them to a symbol of the general circumstances connected to stern tyrant War. "The times are wild": character after character will resort to similar generalizing rationalizations, and commentators follow suit. Thus Traversi judges Northumberland's "helplessness" to be "related to a sense of tragic circumstance" and reads in his opening words "a sense of impending dis-

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aster which, superbly embodied in the blind sensual power of the horse, looms with terrifying magnitude over the petty drama of senile indecision." 7 But the aestheticism of "superbly" misses the real power of the horse, attributing it to Shakespeare's developing art of poetry rather than to Northumberland's failing craft of guilt management. For the image of a runaway, perhaps riderless, horse glances at Hotspur and at the battlefield from which Northumberland absented himself on grounds of "inward sickness" (1 Henry IV 4.1.31), a tellingly redundant phrase. It is a sense not so much of impending as of achieved disaster that troubles his language. When the horse ·breaks loose from speech and becomes the protagonist of the little drama of reportage that follows (r.r.34-59), it fathers another stratagem. The thing Northumberland fears, "the thing he would not know," is displaced from his betrayal to his son's death: he compares himself to Priam hearing the news of Troy's burning (and not, as the context and details of the simile lead us to expect, of Hector's death), and laments that "what he fear' d is chanced" (r. r. 70-87). For more than fifty lines after acknowledging Travers's report ("Of Hotspur, Coldspur?"), he engages his informants in a protracted shuffie, alternating between the demand for a true report and the demand for smooth comforts false. The rhetorical facility of these lines (6064, 66-81, 83-90, 93-103) makes them register more than mere vacillation. On the one hand, his concentration on news-giving may be read as a diversion not simply from grief over Hotspur's death but also from guilt over his complicity in the death. On the other hand, it is like rubbing salt into the wound: "Tell me a lie; tell me the truth; build up false hopes; strip them away." Northumberland's words. do not suggest flinching from the surface truth of circumstance so much as savoring it. They are the words of one motivated to incur the punishment that he feels the deeper truth of his condition deserves, even as they keep him from directly confronting that truth. The pressure of the "other grief" of guilt is most tortuously inscribed in Northumberland's response to the news that the king "hath sent out JA speedy power to encounter you": For this I shall have time enough to mourn. In poison there is physic; and these news, Having been well, that would have made me sick, Being sick, have in some measure made me well. And as the wretch whose fever-weaken'd joints, Like strengthless hinges, buckle under life, Impatient of his fit, breaks like a fire Out of his keeper's arms, even so my limbs, Weaken'd with grief, being now enrag'd with grief, Are thrice themselves. Hence, therefore, thou nice crutch!

2 HENRY IV'

A scaly gauntlet now with joints of steel Must glove this hand: and hence, thou sickly coif! Thou are a guard too wanton for the head Which princes, flesh'd with conquest, aim to hit. Now bind my brows with iron, and approach The ragged'st hour that time and spite dare bring To frown upon th'enrag'd Northumberland! Let heaven kiss earth! Now let not Nature's hand Keep the wild flood confin'd! Let order die! And let this world no longer be a stage To feed contention in a ling'ring act; But let one spirit of the first-born Cain Reign in all bosoms,. that, each heart being set On bloody courses, the rude scene may end, And darkness be the burier of the dead! (r.r.136-6o)

This is the kind of heightened speech that illustrates L. C. Knight's astute discussion of the modes of rhetoric by which Shakespeare prompts "the audience, without explicit comment, to see some kind of insincerity, whether in the sense of a deliberate attempt to deceive others, or in the sense of a half-conscious or unconscious attempt to deceive others, or oneself, about the true state of affairs"; rhetoric that "is framed, whether the speaker is supposed to know it or not, to express and seek endorsement for a particular-and vulnerable-posture." 8 Northumberland tries to persuade himself that poison is physic because the news of princes aiming at his head renews his desire to resist, but a different meaning breaks like a fire from his control, and it is clear by the end of the speech that the medicine he seeks is not revenge or heroic confrontation but the death that will cure him of his tormented consciousness. G. R. Hibbard has noted that this speech anticipates similar outbursts by Macbeth and King Lear? and indeed it expresses in concentrated form the impulse that drives Macbeth toward death in act 5, for example: Arm, arm, andout!I 'gin to be aweary of the sun, And wish th' estate o' th' world were now undone.Ring the alarum bell!-Blow, wind! come, wrack! At least we'll die with harness on our back. (Macbeth 5.5.46-52)

But in the image of himself as a feverish wretch, Northumberland continues to rely on his old excuse-to lie crafty-sick-and melodramatically to portray the weakness his rage must overcome. If the "fit" that drives him to

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seek punishment and death at the hands of an external foe is crafty-sickness, then the "keeper's arms" may be interpreted as a secondary restatement of the ragged worm-eaten keep or holdjhole of his conscience. Yet it is something else that makes this speech truly remarkable and poignant, and Humphreys's casual comment on the last ten lines suggests what it is: "Shakespeare's command over rant has already appeared in Hotspur's outbursts." 10 The ghost of Northumberland's son haunts his language in both auditory echoes and visual images. 11 The two are half-identified in the condensed and displaced figure of the wretch whose joints "buckle under life, j Impatient of his fit." Morton had described the fiery spirit of Percy whom Hal's "swift wrath beat down j ... to the earth, j From whence with life he never more sprung up" (LI.I09-II), an expansion of the phrase used by Rumor (Ind. 25). And, most movingly, "breaks like a fire j Out of his keeper's arms" figures Northumberland's terrible longing in a sad reversal that adumbrates his guilt: Hot spur breaking out of his father's arms and rushing headlong, unsupported, toward the foe. Hovering over this image and echoed in the phrase "To feed contention" is the betrayal of guilt encoded in Northumberland's opening speech ("contention, like a horse ..."), and the continuity of his self-despite is confirmed in the later speech. It is a powerful, pathetic, and corrosive reaching out toward atonement with his son and atonement for the wrong he did him. What drives it is the "spirit of the first-born Cain" that reins/rains in his bosom: this displaced and generalized figure of kin-murder is as close as Northumberland can come to accusing himself, and even as he touches on the "other grief" that weakens him, he conflates the figure with the purifying and obliterating deluge he prays for. In Northumberland's "strained passion" (LI.I6I), universal destruction is the only scenario, the only punishment, the only excuse he can conceive of as adequate to his "inward sickness." The theater of "tragic circumstance" (Traversi) that can do no more than "feed contention in a ling'ring act" will not suffice. All "external manners of lament j Are merely shadows to the unseen grief j That swells with silence in the tortur'd soul" (Richard II 4.1.296-98). Even words fall short, since as shadows-that is, players-they embody and externalize the ·grief in a rhetorical performance, and in so doing fictionalize and falsify it-which is what happens to Richard in this very statement.12 Verbal clamor defers acknowledgment of "true wrongs." If speakers fail to shadow or conceal this from themselves, iflike Northumberland and Henry IV they are not sufficiently "forgetive" -inventive and forgetful13- then, as the increasingly strident rhetoric ·of their displacements reveals, the "imposthume" of their guilt, their self-despite, can only worsen.

'2 HENRY IV'

Rumor's drama of false report is a reductive misdirection that ripples through the play in a series of frustrated and frustrating episodes, protracting its "ling'ring act" with remarkable power all the more amazing for the variety on which it inscribes a single theme with obsessional redundancy. Northumberland lies crafty-sick. Henry lies uneasily in trying to blame his illness on the burdens of the crown ("uneasy lies the head that wears the crown"). Falstaff knows better- "It hath it original from such grief ... it is a kind of deafness" (1.2. II4 -21)- and is only partly serious when he distinguishes from this his own "disease of not listening ... malady of not marking." He includes· himself in his contemptuous dismissal of Shallow- "how subject we old men are to this vice of lying" -and goes on to prove his point by confecting his own fable of the past. Around this theme tableaus of social misrule and political disorder compose into a "rude scene" which is a mere shadow to the unseen grief that produces it. What actually happens in castle, tavern, palace, battlefield, and country orchard is -like Rumor's exposition -conspicuously inadequate or anticlimactic. Yet this consistent and coherent inadequacy serves a function in the play's economy of guilt. 2 Henry IV is a festered carnival extending well beyond the malingering sink-a-pace of Twelfth Night. Its players feel they have lived too long, yet cling to lives and lies they do not particularly care for. What they desire most deeply is to hurt. They want- as the idioms goto be had, to "hurt good," but to be had and hurt by the world and others rather than by themselves. It is not exactly-or not simply-a play about thwarted hopes and expectations, as it has often been called. Rather, the frustration of hope is the scenario the major figures desire and are moved to actualize. Inasmuch as they cannot entirely conceal their true wrongs from themselves, they try, however deviously, to bring on the frustration, judgment, and doom they obscurely feel they deserve (though Harry is the Malvolian exception to this rule, or misrule). At the same time, the desire to submit oneself to punishment is countered and contaminated by another motive: those who provide the punishment are represented as foes, monsters, blameworthy victimizers, or legitimate victims. To shift the source of guilt and anxiety from grief to grievance, from inner condition to outer circumstance, to alienate it to some more manageable and culpable scapegoat on whom bad humors can be vented, offers the relief of action, purgation, and closure, as well as the pleasures of victimization.

+ These "stratagems" are of course most brilliantly and knowingly executed, and therefore best illustrated, by Falstaff. In the soliloquy that concludes 3.2, he promises to

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fetch off these justices. I do see the bottom of Justice Shallow. Lord, Lord, how subject we old men are to this vice of lying! This same starved justice hath done nothing but prate to me of the wildness of his youth, and the feats he hath done about Turnbull Street, and every third word a lie, duer paid to the hearer than the Turk's tribute. I do remember him at Clement's Inn, like a man made after supper of a cheese-paring. When 'a was naked, he was for all the world like a forked radish, with a head fantastically carved upon it with a knife. 'A was so forlorn, that his dimensions to any thick sight were invisible; 'a was the very genius of famine, yet lecherous as a monkey, and the whores called him mandrake. (3.2.295-309)

If lines 303-21 are set beside 2.4.240ff. of 1 Henry IV, it becomes clear that one of the real targets of Falstaff's animus is Harry. Flaying Harryin the person of Shallow compounds the insult, and the caricature is sharpened when Falstaff harps on Shallow's thinness, then proceeds, in the following lines, to stuff the Prince into the Justice's pathetic eel-skin. Since Shallow's prating of "wildness" recalls Harry's, Falstaff's assimilation of the two reveals that he sees the Prince's Prodigal Son scenario as equally a fiction (cf. 2.1.142-43). It is no doubt the incarnation of Harry in Shallow that explains the otherwise unaccountable reference to "the young dace" in the final sentence: And now is this Vice's dagger become a squire, and talks as familiarly of John a' Gaunt as if he had been sworn brother to him, and I'll be sworn 'a ne'er saw him but once in the tiltyard, and then he burst his head for crowding among the marshal's men. I saw it and told John a' Gaunt he beat his own name, for you might have thrust him and all his apparel into an eel-skin -the case of a treble hautboy was a mansion for him, a court; and now he has land and beefs. Well, I'll be acquainted with him if I return, an't shall go hard but I'll make him a philosopher's two stones to me. If the young dace be a bait for the old pike, I see no reason in the law of nature but I may snap at him: let time shape, and there an end. (3.2.313-27)

Falstaff is taking his revenge on Harry for a variety of Eastcheap pranks, the latest in 2.4, and perhaps also indulging his own bitter nostalgia for the times deceased. If it galls him that he cannot get even with Harry, he can at least derive bitterfaction from taking it out on Harry's hapless "Old Double" and thus, as the ChiefJustice says to the new king, from being able to "mock your workings in a second body" (5.2.90). Yet since "Rumor doth double, like the voice and echo, /The numbers of the feared"-or of the despised-Harry's "Old Double" is also his own. In the above passage he does exactly what he accuses Shallow of doing: talk familiarly of Gaunt; the repetition of sworn accentuates this. It is as if he enjoys reminding himself that his every third word is a lie, savors in himself what he contemns in others, takes perverse pleasure in imposing fictions on

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himself that he knows are fictions. The barbs aimed at Shallow's thinness are shaped like boomerangs to return and target Falstaff's fatness. "Minding true things [true wrongs] by what their mock'ries be" (Henry V 4, Ch. 53): "The bottom of Justice Shallow" is on the surface where Falstaff sees and hears the image of his own workings, the mocking echo of his voice. By the aggressive bravado of his soliloquy he likens his way of addressing the present to Shallow's way of addressing the past: to speak of making Shallow "a philosopher's two stones to me" is not merely to acknowledge the folly of the alchemical dream of perpetual potency. Rather, it is Falstaff's way of acknowledging, with a certain savage amusement, his relish for imaginary testicles, for the impotent bluster that will reduce him to "bait for the· old pike" and guarantee that he will become a prey that (in Northumberland's words) "princes, flesh'd with conquest, aim to hit." 14 Thus the boomerang of his invective circles past Shallow to Harry and then returns home: "let time shape, and there an end." This soliloquy compresses within itself the whole trajectory of Falstaff's career, self-expansive and self-destructive, continually transgressing the proprietary boundaries that distinguish a self from an other, or a subject from an object, or a speaker from a hearer, or a mind from a body, or a knave from a gull. He exhibits immorality as much as he indulges in it, offers it as a target for criticism while mimicking the immorality of the critics. His judgments on others both satirize their judgments on him and acknowledge their justice, and in this way he knowingly embodies Shylock's ambivalent assertion "I stand for judgment"-"I represent judgment" and "I demand to be judged" -together with a scapegoat version of Portia's ambivalent "I stand for sacrifice." His friendship with Harry is concisely expressed in the following remark: "Hal, if thou see me down in the battle and bestride me, so; 'tis a point of friendship" (1 Henry IV 5.1.121-22). It is unclear whether he expects the point to save him or stab him. The scenario entitled "The Rejection of Falstaff" is not something dreamed up by Harry on his own and sprung on Falstaff as a surprise. It is a story they have been collaborating on since the opening line of the second scene of 1 Henry IV. "'Death is certain. Is Old Double of your town living yet?'/ 'Dead, Sir'" (3.2.40-41). Old Double, a good bowman whom "John a' Gaunt loved ... well, and betted much money on his head" (43-44), is Rumor's echo, Sneak's noise, the desire and spirit of death. In this scene, as in those that precede and follow it, the desire is insistently keyed to "the times deceas'd" of Richard II. We are reminded of Gaunt, who indeed courted death, suggesting both himself and the young dace Richard as bait for the old pike; and who, like Falstaff at 3.2.319, played nicely with his name ("Gaunt for

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!45

the grave"). "Off, off, you lendings": death as the ultimate reward and punishment, as escape from obligation and guilt, as release from the tortuous tropings that shadow "unseen grief"; the golden, orgiastic death that makes martyrs or heroes· while freeing them from their inward wars: this dream of death becomes a canceled option in the early scenes of Richard II. In r. 3, Mowbray, preparing to meet Bolingbroke in the lists, gives it utterance: Never did captive with a freer heart Cast off his chains of bondage, and embrace His golden uncontroll'd enfranchisement, More than my dancing soul doth celebrate This feast of battle with mine adversary. (r.3.88-92)

Mowbray verbally throws himself into, loses himself in, the prospective encounter as into a gilded hyperbole of liberation and celebration. But from what captivity? He had just insisted that his own probity can't be affected by the outcome (85-87). It is not in the resolution of the issue per se that freedom lies. It must therefore lie in the mode and process of resolution. The ritual occasion itself provides a sanctioned outlet for the discharge, displacement, and condensation of violence that the foreplay of words, "the trial of a woman's war" (r.r.48), only inadequately pre-vents. In 2 Henry IV, this dream, this canceled option, can word itself only in the Marlovian self-parody of Pistol; his ''A foutre for the world and worldlings base!" finds its negative cause and complement in "Then death rock me asleep, abridge my doleful days!" and in "Then, Pistol, lay thy head in Furies' lap" (5.3.96; 2.4.193; 5.3.103). Pistol's continual discharge of verbal blanks seeks the thrill and finality of real bullets in response, and still seeks them at the end of Henry V after he has goaded Fluellen into cudgeling him with a leek, the symbolic· gesture by which ancient Greek scapegoats were driven out of the community.

+ A. R. Humphreys remarks of 2 Henry IV that the fluent energies of its language are "more important, dramatically, in that the narrative content is not greatly compelling;' and I connect this with his subsequent statement that the style "is cogent and picturesque, perpetually enlivened by physical realization." 15 Better to say that it seeks the closure of physical realization, that its proliferating figures of embodiment shadow their own demise in dramatic action even as they defer it. The style is "enlivened" for the same reason that the "narrative content is not greatly compelling": embodiment and emplotment manifest a content that is conspicuously inadequate to

'2 HENRY IV'

Rumor's other grief. Humphreys notes that a local antecedent of Rumor appears in an image used by Worcester in 1 Henry IV: "Supposition [suspicion] all our lives shall be stuck full of eyes" (5.2.8). The allegorical figure made visible by the predicate phrase is one that represents the embarrassment of visibility, its constraints on the dissemination of meaning. As Worcester remarks a few lines later, "Interpretation will misquote our looks" (13). This is a danger that theatrical performance tries to diminish and that I have been exacerbating in the present essay. It is the danger Rumor first symbolizes and then evades by disappearing into the words of others. Rumor is Shakespeare's image and critique of the spirit of theatrical embodiment. She represents the displacement of inner condition to outward circumstance, the condensation of several chains of meaning into an embodiment. As a personification and pseudopresence, she provides a simplified referent to which the textually generated complex of meanings signified by "rumor" is bound, and by which it is reduced and domesticated. And as such, she represents the limits and misdirections of representability. Reduced by what Freud called "considerations of representability," a personification is patently incommensurate with the meanings it visualizes. The presence of the nonpresence named Rumor is doubly reinforced, first by the personifying upper case that gives "her" the privilege of speech, and second by the actor who lends "her" his body. This double reinforcement is conspicuous: in attracting our attention it also attracts our skepticism. The disproportion between the actor and the persona is glaringly obvious. Rumor's bodyis "well known" because it is a literary commonplace, and not a body at all unless one assimilates it to Virgil's epic-sized grotesquery. The mediation of a mere life-sized actor speaking Fama's lines produces a tension between persona and actor similar to that which obtains between her inflated, portentous speech and the story to which it is applied. There is a conflict between the inherent textuality of her language and its bondage to personification, actor, narrative, and theatrical performance. This is, as I noted in the first part of this essay, the bondage of meaning to reference effected by the process of detextualization. Inscribed in the strategies assigned to Rumor, detextualization produces a parodic and melodramatic displacement of unknown fears and terrors. Yet the process does not fully dissolve or repress Sneak's noise, whose "creeping murmur" and "secret whispers" linger on and seep into "the wide vessel of the [play's] universe" (Henry V 4, Ch. 2-3). What Rumor manifests is not so much the latent content of some other grief-which remains undisclosed in the Induction- as the latency of the content, the conspicuous inadequacy of her self-representation. If her Shrewsbury-Northumberland

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exposition is a trifle, it yet touches off the tremor of the unknown fear. For it marks itself as deficient. In similar fashion, Rumor marks herself as deficient. She materializes momentarily and reductively as a condensation, displacement, and visualization. When the echoes of her rhetoric and sentiments are disseminated into the hyperliterary swells of many subsequent speeches, the textualized and disembodied Rumor reappears in a heady desire for disembodiment, an ambivalent urge both to escape from and to find retribution in the time, the place, the body, name, and self whose tightening bonds constrict the speaker. And it is when Rumor becomes thus retextualized that we discover the fuller implications of her initial detextualization. This dialectic between detextualization and retextualization emerges most clearly when the conflict between text-centered and stage-centered reading is itself dialectically sustained, but sustained from the point of view of the text. We become aware of theatrical performance and dramatic fiction as interrelated products of detextualization when we oppose to any imagined or actual performance an interpretive counterforce, a power of reading whose aim is to retextualize what has been detextualized- to ·recuperate what has been repressed. This dialectic may perhaps be adumbrated, but it cannot be comprehended, by a reading that reduces the play to a poem, as in the academic poetic-drama approach against which recent stage-centered interpretation has arisen in protest. It is only by taking the play's dramatico-theatrical form seriously, by reading it as a story to be performed, by staging it in imagination or in actuality, that we can grasp the form's power and function along with the limits and deficiency from which they are inextricable. The play is not an accomplished translation from text to performance, or from inward conditions to outer circumstances, but an ongoing dialectic of translation, and one in which the two poles continually strain against each other. Shakespeare's text is more than the representation of drama per se; rather, what is represented is the construction of drama out of the text's. discourse of the Other, and against that discourse: a construction that simultaneously criticizes and delights in the sound and fury of its detextualized embodiment in theater.

CHAPTER

8

+ Psychoanalyzing the Shakespeare Text: The First Three Scenes

of the

'Henriad'

Patriarchal ideology is shown in the Henriad to create deep tensions that are not dispelled, and are often exacerbated, by its mechanisms of repression and displacement. This is partly because the problems inherent in the cultural constructions of "natural" or jural fatherhood are carried into the wider sphere of national and dynastic politics in two uneasily related forms of symbolic fatherhood: the Christian principle of divine paternity and the aristocratic principle of what might be called heraldic genealogy. The name of the Father, God, is used to authorize the distribution of patriarchal power onto two axes of "descent": the "vertical" axis of substitution called hierarchy, and the "horizontal" axis of succession, heraldic genealogy. In both axes, the formal "cause" or criterion is mimesis, but whereas in the first, descent is organized in terms of declining resemblance to the Father, in the second, the Father ideally achieves genealogical immortality by reproducing its image in progenial replicas} My emphasis in this essay will be on a certain disorder in the mimetic principle itself, a contradiction that, as Plato saw, causes the structure of genealogical mimesis to be contaminated by that of hierarchical mimesis. The ideal of genealogical mimesis is appealed to early in Richard II by the Duchess of Gloucester, who reminds Gaunt that his father's seven sons "Were as seven vials of his sacred blood, / Or seven fair branches springing from one root" (I.2.r2-13), and that his murdered brother, her late husband, "was the model of thy father's life" (28)? Similarly, in 2.1, York appeals to it when he urges Richard to live up to the standards set by his father, remind-

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ing him that "His face thou hast, for even so look'd he" (176). A little later, he gives the principle its classic statement: Is not Gaunt dead? and doth not Herford live? Was not Gaunt just? and is not Harry true? Did not the one deserve to have an heir? Is not his heir a well-deserving son? Take Herford's rights away, and take from time His charters, and his customary rights; Let not to-morrow then ensue to-day: Be not thyself. For how art thou a king But by fair sequence and succession? (2.I.I91-99)

Although these appear to be blandly constative articulations ofthe mimetic principle, they are being uttered in the face of its violation, and York's rhetoric is already charged with a sense of its fragility-a sense of the generational malaise that he will betray later in the play, and that may be imagined to motivate the blandness and the appeal of heraldic genealogy. Consider, for example, the third and fourth lines: their chiasmic bonding does not quite efface the tension between the claims stated in the two separate rhetorical questions. Gaunt "deserves" an heir not only because he was just but also because he is dead. His son "deserves" to be an heir not only because he is true (we could read this mimetically as "true· to his father," "in his image") but also because he is alive. The heir represents his father's death, the loss of authority, power, life-"no less than all"-and he can plead his right to this appropriation by appealing to the plague of custom and curiosity of nations. Edmund's pungent if pathetic braveries- the cliches of knavery and folk cynicism- take on a different kind of life when transplanted to the soil of primogeniture and legitimate inheritance. For they clearly apply: This seems a fair deserving, and must draw me That which my father loses; no less than all: The younger rises when the old doth fall. (King Lear 3.3.25-27)

York tries to secure the rhetorical icon of the transmission he is defending by the chiasmus "one-deserve-heir-heir-deserving-son": "the one" reappears at the end, but not quite, in son; mimesis implies and demands a difference which it tries to overcome by a mirroring that recuperates the lost identity, but the inversion that expresses the difference at the heart of the process also expresses opposition between the two orders of "the one" and "son."

ISO

PSYCHOANALYZING THE TEXT

The threat of external violation that York addresses in his protest to Richard thus reflects a problem lurking within the mimetic process itself, and may partially account for the ineffectuality of the protest. Such persuasions meet stiff competition in paternal criticism of sons, as exemplified by Gaunt early in Richard II and much later by Gaunt's son in 2 Henry IV: 0, had thy grandsire with a prophet's eye Seen how his son's son should destroy his sons, From forth thy reach he would have laid thy shame ... (Richard II 2.r.ro4-6)

... See, sons, what things you are ... (2 Henry IV 4.5.64)

The negative and positive sides of paternal ideology are expressed in the following two statements by Bolingbroke, the first to York, who has just disclosed his son's treason, and the second to Harry: 0 loyal father of a treacherous son] Thou sheer, immaculate and silver fountain, From whence this stream, through muddy passages, Hath held his current, and defil'd himself, Thy overflow of good converts to bad ... (Richard II 5.].58-62)

And now my death Changes the mood, for what in me was purchas'd Falls upon thee in a more fairer sort; So thou the garland wear'st successively. (2 Henry IV 4·5.I98-2or)

But the negativity and positivity of these utterances are complicated and indeed challenged as soon as they are contextualized. Psychoanalytic criticism has tended to approach the problems these statements adumbrate by resituating them within the network of explanations made available by the institutionalized lore of psychoanalysis. I propose as an alternative taking a scion from that root and grafting it onto a different explanatory network, whose stock is the mimetic process. As I mentioned earlier, there is a disorder, a structural flaw, in the very notion of mimesis, and it is magnified by confusion in the paternal deployment of the genealogical principle. The father's desire of immortality may produce a desire to clone and control an endless series of identical replacements. This, incidentally, implicates a latent ideal of male parthenogenesis that may be expressed in the fear, scapegoating, and repression of the feminine. But this desire is crossed by the desire to overgo one's replacements, to be the unrepeatable archetypical eponymous progenitor whose all-giving cannot

PSYCHOANALYZING THE TEXT

rsr

be matched. What the father then wants to reproduce are not replicas but images, imitations. It is of the nature of an imitation to be defective, to fall short of what it represents so that it can represent itself as the representation of an exemplar. A perfect imitation, as Derrida notes, "is no longer an imitation"; the tiny difference between imitated and imitation makes all the difference; imitation "is not what it is ... unless it is in some way at fault or rather in default." 3 The paternal project entails the reduction of the son's difference, his otherness, to assure· both the genealogical continuity of the paternal archetype and its hierarchic superiority to the weaker vessels that transmit its image. This is a project of symbolic filicide, and it is nourished by the desire of immortality, that is, by the fear of death that, projected onto the potential replacement, makes of a "true inheritor" a true competitor. In the space or gap of otherness that the act of paternity creates, and that symbolic filicide cannot efface, indeed can only render more alien, arises the answering project of symbolic parricide. The centrality of this theme to the Henriad has often been recognized and discussed, but with two limitations that I shall try to confront in this essay. First, the burden of critical discussion has been placed on Henry IV as father; virtually ·no attention has been paid to him as son, and this will be the subject of the· following interpretation. Second, I know of no serious attempts to correlate psychoanalytic criticism with the two other major lines of interpretation addressed to the Henriad: political and metatheatrical criticism. While I do not have space to consider these in any detail, I shall illustrate and formulate a methodological hypothesis for connecting metatheatrical issues to the intratextual representation of political and generational conflict. For reasons that will become clearer as we proceed, a metatheatrical approach to the dramatic and theatrical dimensions of the "story" of the Henriad presupposes a standpoint outside the normative limits of what has been called "stage-centered" reading. It calls for a project that is doggedly textual in orientation, and is thus antitheatrical: it will generate readings that don't readily lend themselves to performance and that will necessarily draw fire from stage-centered critics. But that, in a perverse way, is my point- that is, that the antitheatricality of the readings I shall give reflects an antitheatricality in the Shakespeare text. By calling that text antitheatrical I mean that it throws into question all the dramatic structures-narrative, episode, scene, character, and body-that theatrical performance privileges and the author of Shakespeare's. plays clearly loves. I include among these structures the political and historical scenarios as embodiments of the patriarchal ideology with its two axes of hierarchy and orderly succession. I shall read the critique of drama and theater politically

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as a critique of that ideology, but what I am chiefly interested in is its relation not to the politics of the state but to that of father/son conflicts. I therefore view psychoanalytic, political, and dramatico-theatrical interpretation as closely intertwined striations of a single activity. Mimesis is the common representational principle informing the organization of genealogical and hierarchic relationships, and of relationships among the text, the dramatic narrative, and theatrical performance. Thus I assume the text to be performing a critique of mimesis- and of its own mimetic status- in the very act of producing a mimesis. In exploring the critique I shall not bother with its possible relevance for allegories of the playwright's literary or psychological development. I prefer to seek within the dramatic community and its generational conflicts for the motives that lead to the production and critique of mimetic structures. What regulative and representational functions do these structures fulfill in relation to the father/son conflicts depicted in the Henriad? And since "in the Henriad" here means in the language of the play as it offers itself directly to readers rather than to actors, what functions do those structures fulfill in relation to the text? I consider these two questions to be the same question, and I shall respond to it by exploring, in the interpretations that follow, a particular hypothesis: that Shakespeare's mimetic structures-theater, drama, and the narrative sequences they represent- are related to the text as manifest to latent contents; that they are explicitly and conspicuously presented as displaced, condensed, and dramatized visualizations of latent textual meanings they thereby repress. This hypothesis will now be tested by excavating from the text of the first act of Richard II the shadowy evidence of the first major father/son conflict in the Henriad. In the opening scenes of Richard II, the inflation of speech is no more conspicuous than the silences it constitutes as hidden behind it. Participants within the drama share with audiences and readerships an uneasy awareness that the ceremonially dramatic but otherwise noncommittal language pushes much into the background, that ritual speech is being used to hide, mystify, or justify other motives than those expressed, and that no one knows exactly what those motives may be-perhaps, in some cases, those whose motives they are least of all. Since the characters seem for the most part to be maneuvering in the dark, it may be risky to venture into one of the more charged and salient pockets of silence, the one that encloses what goes on between John of Gaunt and his son. That pocket is peripheral to the more central one enclosing what goes on between Richard and Bolingbroke, but since both pockets are mediated, or set off, or circumscribed, by

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I

53

the more accessible relationship between Richard and Gaunt, I shall observe due caution and begin there. The Gaunt/Bolingbroke relation remains a mystery throughout the Henriad. Bolingbroke's obsession with his relation to Richard crops up frequently in the Henry IV plays, and his revisionary retrospects afford at least limited access to what went on (or goes on) in Richard II. The relation between Gaunt and Richard is resolved with considerable stridency by the time act 2, scene I of the first play is over. The general tenor of Richard's attitude toward Gaunt may be caught by trying to listen to the former's opening words with Gaunt's ears: Old John of Gaunt, time-honored Lancaster, Hast thou according to thy oath and band Brought hither Henry Herford thy bold son, Here to make good the boist'rous late appeal, Which then our leisure would not let us hear, Against the Duke of Norfolk, Thomas Mowbray? Gaunt I have, my liege. (I.I.r-7)

The chiasmic patterning of name-title-title-name in the first and last lines works to Gaunt's detriment, since the last line lacks modifiers, which Richard so pointedly uses in the first. The blunt and familiar opening, "Old John of Gaunt," edges the elegant variation that follows it with faint sarcasm. Richard pushes on the tonal difference between personal and ritual address, converts apposition into opposition, ~akes the second epithet sound like a euphemistic or mystified equivalent of the first. Then, turning from father to son, his alliterative coupling of bold with boist'rous reduces the ambivalent first term to its negative connotation: under the pressure of the meanings of boisterous (rough, coarse, clamorous, unskillful), bold shifts from "fearless" or "confident" to "presumptuous" or "forward." At the same time the combination of son and boist'rous tends to diminish Bolingbroketo boy him-and to stress Gaunt's responsibility for his son's good behavior. In the lines that follow the opening exchange, Richard continues to press on Gaunt's role as surety: Rich.

Gaunt

Tell me, moreover, hast thou sounded him, If he appeal the Duke on ancient malice, Or worthily as a good subject should On some known ground of treachery in him? As near as I could sift him on that argument, On some apparent danger seen in him, Aim'd at your highness, no inveterate malice. (8-14)

Although Richard's questions are clearly ceremonial, and therefore rhetorical, he puts them to aggressive use not merely in picking away at Gaunt's

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responsibility for the good faith of the appeal but also in trying to elicit a response that will reveal the extent of the knowledge, and perhaps complicity, Gaunt shares with his son. The response is evasive: not "known ground of treachery," but "apparent danger seen." The measured, heavily stopped blank verse of Gaunt's vague reply expresses the care he takes to dissociate himself from any appearance of complicity or knowledge. We hear much in later scenes about his view of Richard and England, but never a word about his relation to Bolingbroke's appeal-or, for that matter, about his relation to Bolingbroke. This is the subject that the following textual excavation aims to elucidate. Bolingbroke prefaces his accusation of Mowbray with words in which, as the Arden editor observes, he "takes care to explain ... the purity of his motives": In the devotion of a subject's love, Tend'ring the precious safety of my prince, And free from other misbegotten hate, Come I appellant to this princely presence. (31-34)

While "other misbegotten hate" answers to Richard's "ancient malice" and thus apparently has Mowbray as· its object, the vagueness of both phrases gives them a wider sweep, for in the background of the appeal lies the murder of Gloucester, which is the climactic and most heavily stressed of the three articles in Bolingbroke's accusations: "misbegotten hate" may refer to the family feud and the motive for revenge. In the rhetorical climax of his accusation, Bolingbroke asserts that Gloucester's blood, like sacrificing Abel's, cries Even from the tongueless caverns of the earth To me for justice and rough chastisement; And by the glorious worth of my descent, This arm shall do it, or this life be spent. (104-8)

His generational logic is less shaky than it seems, for why should Gloucester's blood be like the archetypal murdered brother's, and why should it cry to him to be God's surrogate in this affair, unless he is replacing the father whose consenting silence amounts to symbolic fratricide, and whose "unwilling tongue" (r.3.245) diminishes "the glorious worth" of Bolingbroke's descent from Edward III? It is to these lines that Richard/Cain responds: "How high a pitch his resolution soars!" (r.r.ro9). A few lines later, assuring Mowbray of his impartiality, he redefines the lineal scheme to his own advantage:

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Were he my brother, nay, my kingdom's heir, As he is but my father's brother's son, Now by my scepter's awe I make a vow, Such neighbor nearness to our sacred blood Should nothing privilege him ... (rr6-2o)

As Kittredge observes, the second line is a "slighting antithesis to 'my kingdom's heir.'" Although the derogation of Gaunt is here only a move in the game of lineal checkers, the opening·words of the play had already begun to establish Richard's disdain for his uncle, and this impression is situationally reinforced shortly after when Gaunt participates in the tactic Richard employs to frustrate Bolingbroke's justice. In jingling rhymes whose flippancy sharpens the calculated tone of affront, Richard makes Gaunt share the onus of his arbitrary interruption of the ritual: "Good uncle, let this end where it begun;/We'll calm the Duke of Norfolk, you your son" (r58-59). Gaunt complies with a disingenuous aphorism that avails itself of Richard's opening, "Old John of Gaunt," to activate the weakling's plea, senility: "To be a make-peace shall become my age. /Throw down, my son, the Duke of Norfolk's gage" (r6o-6r). Bolingbroke directs his bitter refusal to Richard and continues insulting Mowbray, but if in reading his words we pretend once again to be listening with Gaunt's ears we may feel that his son's sentiments are not entirely displaced to those two targets: 0 God defend my soul from such deep sin! Shall I seem crest-fallen in my father's sight? Or with pale beggar-fear impeach my height Before this outdar'd dastard? Ere my tongue Shall wound my honor with such feeble wrong, Or sound so base a parle, my teeth shall tear The slavish motive of recanting fear, And spit it bleeding in his high disgrace, Where shame doth harbor, even in Mowbray's face. (187-95)

The second line contains the only verbal acknowledgment of his father's presence Bolingbroke makes in this scene. It is ceremonially correct: he salutes the immediate source of "the glorious worth of my descent" and states his unwillingness to dishonor the source by displaying cowardice before his father's eyes. Nevertheless, this line gives the whole speech the capacity to strike daggers into any ears pretending to be Gaunt's. Since Gaunt commanded the display, the ritual force of the rhetorical question changes to "Shall I let my father have the satisfaction of watching me perform the base act he and Richard urged on me?" The question that

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follows may then be heard as intensifying the speaker's sense of outrage: "Is this what you ask me to do, lower my crest by impeaching my height with a display of fear?" The parallelism of the prepositional clauses that end each question places Gaunt and Mowbray in the same position. This adds interest to outdar'd: it does not characterize Mowbray's behavior, and as a ritual insult it does not have to, but it can be applied with some justice to Gaunt who, unwilling to avenge or speak up for his brother himself, seconded the king's attempt to frustrate Bolingbroke's appeal "for justice and rough chastisement." His son's refusal to be infected with this shameful fear-bred silence challenges Gaunt's self-imposed tonguelessness: the amputated tongue symbolizes the father's "feeble wrong" ("Ere my father/ Shall wound my honor"), and the hyperbolic violence directed at this ritual surrogate is at once masked and enabled by the careful emphasis of the final clause, "even in Mowbray's face." This displacement effectively makes the speech self-referential, for Bolingbroke is spitting his challenge to Gaunt in Mowbray's face. Our evidence for decoding the meant or unmeant messages one character receives from another's words comes from the meant or unmeant meaning transmitted through his own words. Gaunt's words to the Duchess, which follow almost immediately after Bolingbroke's speech, register an uneasiness that suggests he is belatedly directing toward her the kind of lame excuse he might wish to make toward his son; yet at the same time, they register more aggressive feelings: Alas, the part I had in Woodstock's blood Doth more solicit me than your exclaims To stir against the butchers of his life; But since correction lieth in those hands Which made the fault that we cannot correct, Put we our quarrel to the will of heaven, Who, when they see the hours ripe on earth, Will rain hot vengeance on offenders' heads. (r.z.r-8)

Gaunt is very careful here with his plural forms and shifters, and although we immediately identify "the butchers," "those hands;' and "offenders;' "they" in line 7 is less obvious-what divine, angelic, or human avengers pluralize "the will of heaven"? When will they judge the time to be ripe? And into what saving community of "we" does the first person of lines r-2 vanish? If the apocalyptic excuse is meant to suggest a more legitimately sanctioned revenge than his son's effort, and one from which Gaunt will be spared, what could that possibly be? The vagueness of "offenders," lacking the article that would link it more closely to particular "butchers"

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and "hands;' implies something no less encompassing and remote than the Psalmist's wish for fire and brimstone, or the Last Judgment; it measures the sense of justified helplessness Gaunt encodes in the "we" of line 5, hence according to the logic of his argument those who wrongly attempt correction will join the offenders at the general doom. In I. I he had heard his son say that he would make his challenge to Mowbray "good on earth, I Or my divine soul answer it to heaven" (37-38), and buried in Gaunt's words to the Duchess is a protest against that arrogance. The Duchess, however, does not let Gaunt slip off into the Elizabethan world picture or even into the sunset of his declining years: "Finds brotherhood in thee no sharper spur? I Hath love in thy old blood no living fire?" (9-ro). She accuses him of something very like the "pale beggar-fear" and "feeble wrong" spat out by Bolingbroke: thou dost consent In some large measure to thy father's death In that thou seest thy wretched brother die, Who was the model of thy father's life. Call it not patience, Gaunt, it is despair; In suff'ring thus thy brother to be slaught'red, Thou showest the naked pathway to thy life, Teaching stern murder how to butcher thee. That which in mean men we intitle patience Is pale cold cowardice in noble breasts. What shall I say? to safeguard thine own life, The best way is to venge my Gloucester's death. (25-36)

In these words Gaunt could well hear Bolingbroke's allusion to symbolic fratricide repeated as a direct accusation, intensified by conversion to symbolic parricide. He defends himself with an aggressive restatement of the Tudor ideology: God's is the quarrel-for God's substitute, His deputy anointed in His sight, Hath caus'd his death; the which if wrongfully, Let heaven revenge, for I may never lift An angry arm against His minister. (37-41)

These words both acknowledge his feeble wrong and register the need to justify it more fully by rejecting the Duchess's appeal to the vendetta ethic. The concluding lines use the Tudor theory to rationalize his own "patience;' but they also imply a criticism of Bolingbroke's impatient arm. To Dover

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Wilson they seemed to "condemn in advance the usurpation of his son ... after his death;' 4 but I think the observed connection to Bolingbroke is strengthened by being shifted from the prospective mode of dramatic irony to the retrospective mode of structural irony. When Gaunt suggests that the. Duchess should direct her complaint to "God, the widow's champion and defence," her reply is definitive, and Gaunt makes no answer to it:

Gaunt

Why then, I will. Farewell, old Gaunt. Thou goest to Coventry, there to behold Our cousin Herford and fell Mowbray fight. 0, sit my husband's wrongs on Herford's spear, That it may enter butcher Mowbray's breast! Or if misfortune miss the first career, Be Mowbray's sins so heavy in his bosom That they may break his foaming courser's back And throw the rider headlong in the lists, A caitive recreant to my cousin Herford! Farewell, old Gaunt; thy sometimes brother's wife With her companion, grief, must end her life. Sister, farewell; I must to Coventry, As much good stay with thee as go with me! (44-57)

The Duchess refuses to call Bolingbroke Gaunt's son. In the first of her three references to him he is "Our cousin"- she shares him equally with Gaunt in a general classificatory relation-and by the third, at line 53, her possession has become singular. This shift destabilizes the modifier in the next line: we may read it either as "thy brother's sometimes wife" or as "the wife of thy sometimes brother;' cut off from Gaunt not only by his death but also by the recreancy that would leave "sacrificing Abel" unavenged-that is, "you are no longer of 'our faith; and our extended kin group is now represented by our cousin, not by you; he has assumed your lapsed responsibility." But since the Duchess has already described that lapse as a wrong done to her husband, the implication is even stronger. "0 sit my husband's wrongs on Herford's spear": to replace Gaunt and to redress his wrong is to challenge him to combat. Once again, the "recreant" Mowbray is a ritual scapegoat, and the violent imagery of trial by combat provides a hyperbolic image, a melodramatic outlet, for the displaced expression of sentiments that might be less easy to entertain toward Gaunt. The argument I have excavated from the tongueless caverns of the Duchess's language is that Bolingbroke has replaced-indeed, displacedhis father as the true son of Edward III and brother of Gloucester, and

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that some defensive and even resentful recognition of the argument is embedded in Gaunt's language. When I read "Hath love in thy old blood no living fire?" I recall and refocus Gaunt's "to be a makepeace shall become my age," seeing it now tinged by rueful and bitter if resigned acknowledgment of the trimmer's role he has assumed in others' eyes, tinged also by a more aggressive complement: "to be a troublemaker becomes his youth." The Duchess names Gaunt four times in this scene: she calls him "Gaunt" twice in her opening speech when she still hopes to persuade him to action, but switches to "Old Gaunt" after he has referred her to God the widow's champion and she turns instead to Herford for succor. I think the contexts in which the Duchess, Richard, and Gaunt himself refer to his age-whether in epithets, descriptions, or puns-almost always skewer the reference on the sharp sword of the father-son interaction: when his authority over Bolingbroke is invoked or being called into question (LLI, I6o, I62-63); when-as here-Bolingbroke's challenge is contrastively related to his own ideologically toned evasions; and when, after being party to his son's banishment, he complains to Richard that it will hasten his death (1.3.2I6-32). Under the pressure of these contexts and their language, "old" and "gaunt" become Gaunt's defensive weapons in the struggle between father and son that marks the passage of patriarchal authority from predecessor to successor, aged to young, old to new- it would be better to say the passage of phallic power, since my excavation leads me to conclude that the play's language characterizes Gaunt not only as pleading impotence and not only as accused of it but also as symbolically "castrated" by Bolingbroke's challenge. And this is the conclusion I want to carry as a hypothesis into the third scene of act I: Bolingbroke's presence and behavior are a standing rebuke to Gaunt; he feels accused and challenged, replaced and excelled, by his son; Bolingbroke's innuendoes in I. I, reinforced by the Duchess's charges in 1.2, point toward a father who has been "deposed," or self~deposed, having allowed his son to "usurp" his place and function in the generational order. Thus to see and be seen by his son ("in my father's sight") may not cause him unmitigated joy, and this occasions another speculation- that is, will it cause him unmitigated grief to be relieved of that presence? ''As much good stay with thee as go with me": the limp sentiment with which Gaunt takes his leave hardly suggests that he is any more eager to rush off to Coventry than he is to linger on and hear the Duchess talk about it. The contrast to Bolingbroke is driven home in the opening lines of 1.3: Mar. Aum.

My Lord Aumerle, is Harry Herford arm'd? Yea, at all points, and longs to enter in.

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Bolingbroke does not immediately appear, however; Mowbray enters and speaks first. Ritual purists complain that the appellant should have preceded the defendant into the lists. 5 But the reversed order makes possible an interesting variation in Richard's two requests to the Marshall to administer the oath of justice. For Mowbray, he uses these words: "swear him in the justice of his cause." For Bolingbroke, however, the formula is significantly altered, and I think the significance is underlined by its contrast to the earlier request: "Depose him in the justice of his cause." Reading the word that names the central action of the play I succumb to the charm of several temptations. First, of course, the pun invites a proleptic interpretation -as if Richard already· sees Bolingbroke crowned and pronounces a curse ("Let him be deposed") that nevertheless reflects·awareness of his own unjust regime. This implies a second alternative- "Depose me in the justice of his cause" -from which I slide helplessly into the pleasure of imagining either or both statements as expressions of Gaunt's dilemma: "if my son is 'deposed' by Mowbray, his cause will be proved unjust, ergo I shall be justified, but if his cause is just, I am 'deposed."' A similar temptation is dropped in my path by Richard's leaye-taking of Bolingbroke: We will descend and fold him in our arms. Cousin of Herford, as thy cause is right, So be thy fortune in this royal fight! Farewell, my blood; which if to-day thou shed, Lament we may, but not revenge thee dead. (r.3.54-58)

In the first line I see not only a foreshadowing of the deposition scene but a condensed visualization of Richard's latent project as it unfoldsthrough the play, here displaced to the physical circumstance of a ceremonial gesture. The rhythm accentuates the will to descend; the second phrase is a kinesic hyperbole that mimes. the desire coupling Richard to Bolingbroke in their dance toward deposition and regicide, and toward the subsequent regime, when the embrace gradually becomes a stranglehold. This line chimes wit~ "depose" and with the odd reference to "royal fight" as an element of the proleptic rhetoric threading glints of the latent project through the first and third scenes of the play. The second couplet adds another element: Richard's message is that if Bolingbroke loses he will unjustly have shed the "high blood" his royal kinsman shares, but his language also lets the alternate message, "if you kill me," flicker briefly before us. In the final line, the alert excavator might discern another displacement. While the statement is sardonic in Richard's mouth- as if he might be expected to avenge his kinsman and has to ex-

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plain .that he won't-it crisply epitomizes the attitude Gaunt expressed in 1.2: "Lament" = ''Alas, the part I had in Woodstock's blood"; "but notrevenge" "I may never lift I An angry arm," since Mowbray will have proved to be heaven's minister. In the balanced duplicity of these lines Richard flaunts his mastery of the rhetorical tease. He (con) descends to favor Bolingbroke with a hug and a word of tepid encouragement (by the judicial logic of trial by combat, "as" in line 55 must mean "if," not "since"), then devotes the last line and a half to harping on his possible defeat. Rhymes, end-stopping, and echoing caesuras add bite to his wicked tongue- the finality, certainty, and witty detachment of aphoristic or recited speech. This is political, not merely poetic, mastery. Even as he folds the successor-to-be in his arms, he sends the usurper-to-be off with a dry-eyed mock. Bolingbroke parries the mock in answering couplets that are more forceful but less balanced and assured:

=

0, let no noble eye profane a tear For me, if I be gor'd with Mowbray's spear! As confident as is the falcon's flight Against a bird, do I with Mowbray fight. (r.3.59-62)

This begins well with "profane a tear": the lament would be profaned not only by his unworthiness but also because it would indubitably be feigned. Yet the expansive energy of his heroic cliches flags suddenly at the end of each enjambment. The falcon comes down on its prey more confidently than the figure does on "a bird." The trajectory of Bolingbroke's career, its brief upward surge and long anticlimax, is epitomized in this rhythm. His real contest is not the physical encounter with Mowbray but the verbal encounter with Richard and, behind that, the silent encounter with Gaunt. The putative referent of the words-the anticipated fight with Mowbrayis actually the signifier of the present power struggle that goes on, and will continue to go on, within the "fair designs" of the rhetorical lists. After two unrhymed lines of farewell to Richard and Aumerle, and a summary couplet broadcasting his self-assurance, Bolingbroke winds up for the climax of his speech- his farewell to Gaunt- with an odd simile: "Lo, as at English feasts, so I regreet I The daintiest last, to make the end most sweet" (67-68). The figure implies that these "ceremonious" farewells and salutes are things to be savored, things to be consumed. The farewell salute to Gaunt will be the tastiest morsel. Bolingbroke's emphasis is on rhetorical pleasure and performance rather than on the illocutionary force of the sentiment; he will confect a filial dessert of sweetly end-stopped pieties. Yet once again, the language wries out of his control and serves up a more disconcerting message:

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0 thou, the earthly author of my blood, Whose youthful spirit in me regenerate Doth with a twofold vigor lift me up To reach at victory above my head, Add proof unto mine armor with thy prayers, And with thy blessings steel my lance's point, That it may enter Mowbray's waxen coat, And furbish new the name ofJohn a Gaunt, Even in the lusty havior of his son. (69-77)

The frame or crust of this trifle is a request for blessing; the filler is .a respectful aemulatio. But from under the mock modesty of the fourth line something interesting begins to bubble forth. "To reach ... above my head" can hardly refer to victory over Mowbray; whatever the speaker intends, the words are steeled (or stolen) by another sky-aspiring proleptic allusion: they point toward Richard. Then, with "furbish," they become more abrasive as their lance passes almost too easily from Mowbray's waxen coat to Gaunt's rusty name. Ure makes a good case for preferring the Quarto's furbish to the Folio's furnish: "Besides its more general meaning of 'clean up' ,furbish means 'scour the rust from armor' ... so Gaunt's name (honor, repute) is also his armor, and the metaphor continues the references to arms and armor in the preceding lines." 6 But it also joins with new to scratch away at the film of self-apology Gaunt has coated his name with-" Old John of Gaunt." It is the former spirit of Gaunt's youth that Bolingbroke invokes to help the falcon soar to the height of his heavenly author's quarrel; a spirit that died and now revives only in the "lusty havior" of the son whose angry arm will "scour the rust" from his earthly author's (and his family's) once untarnished honor. Bolingbroke's English confection thus concludes as a challenge to Gaunt to support his cause: the son's victory will clear his father's name. The name-clearing problem places Gaunt in a classic double bind, since he also seems to want a clear name in the court's eyes and those of God's anointed deputy. This problem comes into focus after the interruption when Richard reminds him that his "tongue a party-verdict gave" to his son's banishment (1.3.234). Gaunt's rueful reaction to the verdict and to his share in it is troubled by his strident protest of nonresponsibility. But I think it is also troubled by the deceptively truistic distinction with which he justifies himself: You urg' d me as a judge, but I had rather You would have bid me argue like a father. 0, had it been a stranger, not my child, To smooth his fault I should have been more mild.

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A partial slander sought I to avoid, And in the sentence my own life destroy'd. Alas, I look'd when some of you should say I was too strict to make mine own away; But you gave leave to my unwilling tongue Against my will to do myself this wrong. (237-46)

The first couplet says that if he had been arguing as a father he would have been more mild. The second couplet says that if he had been arguing as a non-father he would have been more mild. The first couplet implies that he argued as a non-father in order to avoid the charge of prejudice. The second couplet implies that being less mild in order to avoid the charge of prejudice is acting like a father. But consider also the following variation: "Because it was no stranger but my child, j I could not smooth his fault or be more mild." This more· directly conveys the message that the partiality of the loving father is not toward any child but toward a guilty child. Gaunt acknowledges his son's fault, confesses to a father's impulse to overlook it (only a "child," after all), and goes on to lament the strictness of the loyal and obedient subject forced to suppress the impulse in the interest of justice. In this parable, the primary focus of self-presentation is on the trials of the Good Father. Gaunt is smoothing faults all around-Richard's, his own- and the smoothness penetrates the syrupy rhymes and rhythms of his speech. What the speech actually suppresses is the fear and guilt of the Bad Father, who pleads the avoidance of partiality to cover other motives for being less mild to a son than to a stranger. He blames others for letting himself destroy his life and for not telling him "I was too strict to make mine own away." The elliptical strain of this phrase betrays the pressure of his not mentioning what he is doing to his "child": insofar as "make ... away" is apposite to "my own life destroy'd" it means "do away with," but insofar as it refers to Bolingbroke's exile it means "send away." In the blurring together of these senses, "mine own" opens up to include not only his upright self-sacrifice but also the sacrifice of his son that enables him to avoid a partial slander. "Mine own" justifies both sacrifices because it suggests that his son, like his life, is his possession, to dispose with as he judges right. This judgment, he explains, is the source of his grief. Yet further reflection will show that it is also the effect of his guilt, which it reinforces. Since Gaunt's conversation with the Duchess· established his interest in· making himself and others believe that it is wrong to oppose the king, we can imagine him seeing Bolingbroke's de facto challenge to Richard through the medium of Mowbray as a fault in which he could easily be

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implicated as an accomplice to a plot fomented by the Gloucester faction. This changes the import of "partial slander" from "accusation of leniency" to "accusation of complicity": it would have been easier for him to smooth the fault of a stranger whose questionable motives did not glance at him. What could make his party-verdict doubly painful is his sense that he has sacrificed his son to clear himself His behavior constitutes a betrayal of Bolingbroke and his cause; worse than that, it expresses a desire to betray his son. He looked in vain for others to temper this ignoble impulse. The unstable syntax of the final couplet betrays the effect of their failure. Construed as a redundant negative construction, it says that both he and his tongue were unwilling to do himself the injury of voting for his son's exile, or to inflict on his son the injury he ignobly desired to inflict. But construed as an antithetical construction-" [my unwilling tongue] /Against [my will to do myself this wrong]" -it says that he had a will, a desire, to do this wrong, that he was unwilling to actualize the desire in speech, but that Richard's urging prevailed upon him. The conclusion of this strenuous excavation of Gaunt's lines is that they betray his fear of being contaminated by Bolingbroke's action; his reluctant agreement to the sentence of exile in response to that fear; the desire to defeat the son who challenges him; the guilt occasioned in him by that desire and by an agreement that sacrifices his son's interest to his own; and the attempt to assuage that guilt by blaming his party-verdict on others, an attempt that could only increase the corrosive power of self-despite. What destroys his life, then, what makes him gaunt for the grave, is not merely grief at being separated from his son, perhaps forever, but guilt at having willed to do his son that wrong. On Bolingbroke's side, the father/son conflict is concealed, enabled, exacerbated, by a double displacement: from Gaunt to Richard to Mowbray; from father to king to peer. Mowbray serves as the medium in which are condensed Bolingbroke's darker purpose-to accuse the king-and his darkest purpose-to rebuke his father. The centrality of this conflict in the Henriad is obvious and has often been noted, but never with reference to Gaunt and Bolingbroke. As I stated at the beginning of the essay, my purpose in excavating their relationship has been to situate an interpretation in the most antitheatrical reaches of the text in order to position myself "outside" the politico-historical and dramatico-theatrical narrative privileged by stage-centered criticism. This positioning (or positing) allows me to interpret the emergence of that narrative in functional terms as a defensive transformation of latencies in the text, and to explore the dialectic by which Shakespeare represents the meaning of theatrical drama in those terms. I conclude with a brief read-

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ing of a passage that will open up onto a summary overview of the process I have been discussing. Early in the play Richard commands the appearance of Bolingbroke and Mowbray in characteristically tortured syntax: Then call them to our presence; face to face, And frowning brow to brow, ourselves will hear The accuser and the accused freely speak. (u.rs-r7)

"Face to face,/ And frowning brow to brow": leading off thus with a pair of unbound modifier phrases frees them up for serial redefinition. In a first fleeting mirage they seem to describe Richard confronting the other two as his antagonists and/or appellants. This gives way to a second when the strangely pluralized royal plural suggests that he confronts and/or accuses himself. Finally, the opposed selves are bound to their proper ritual representatives in line 17, and their proper ritualized representation in lines r8-r9, an event celebrated with the play's first rhymed couplet: "Highstomach'd are they both and full of ire, / In rage, deaf as the sea, hasty as fire." The shift in these five lines from enjambed internally stopped blank verse to end-stressed rhymed verse reinforces. the shift from uncertain syntax and rapidly changing impressions to the too predictable formulas of chivalric rhetoric, which in this case produces an oxymoronic relation between what is said and how it is said: the analogies of nature are cliches of art; the reported unruliness of the combatants is overruled by the measured rhythm of the report, by its discountable literary hyperboles. And there is a sense in which their rage will be as artificial and literary as the language, a sense in which the "report" is actually a self-fulfilling stage direction that prescribes the emotions and behavior appropriate to culturally prefabricated roles embedded in a certain institutional narrative. The rage will also be artificial because it will be ritually displaced and misdirected. The shifts described above combine to mark the most fundamental process that structures this drama: the passage and transformation of conflict from the tongueless caverns of some "hidden imposthume" to the safety of the' sanctioned artifice and "fair designs" of ritualized combat and behavior. In the Henriad the equivalents of Hamlet's phrase are, like his, carefully vague, as if keeping their distance from the miasma they fear to touch: "buried fear," "some other grief," "inward wars." The passage from this latent content to the manifest fictions of ritual embodiment is perfectly described by Lafew in All~ Well That Ends Well: "we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge when we should

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submit ourselves to an unknown fear" (2.3.3-6). A sconce is a fortress, and in Richard II the conspicuous trifles, the stiff and stilted formulas, of ritual are the palisades that impose quarantine against the miasma: I'll answer thee in any fair degree Or chivalrous design of knightly trial ... (I.I.8o-8r) On pain of death, no person be so bold Or daring-hardy as to touch the lists, Except the marshall and such officers Appointed to direct these fair designs. (1.3.42-45)

The textual confusions buried in Richard's call to the combatants resonate with obscure, labile, and dangerous power struggles-rooted in fear, guilt, aggressivity, self-contempt, and Janus-faced desire-that defy closure and shun exposure; his final couplet visualizes the dramatic form in which they can find legitimate heroic expression and narrative resolution. Trial by combat displaces, condenses, dramatizes, and thereby at once represses and represents such "inward wars" as those that divide a father from his son and from himself. Shakespeare's achievement lies in making the "fair designs" represent and be touched by the miasma they eschew. The prescribed rhetoric of ritual speech and action is shown to be· inadequate to deal with or represent whatever "other grief" is buried in the language of the dramatic community. It is precisely its inadequacy, its parodic and artificial character, that lets the ritual function as a mode of concealment enabling the hidden struggles to continue. To borrow Rene Girard's terms, if trial by combat is a caricature of differentiation, Shakespeare presents it as such by encouraging us to search his text for the undifferentiating forces that produce the caricature as its instrument. Cutting across the differentiating boundaries of the nominal combatants and subjects of dispute, the text throws anamorphic shadows that bathe the empty glitter of ceremonial speech in a rich chiaroscuro. Girard's distinction was formulated for the analysis not of a particular ritual but for all ritual, including what he refers to as the "surface play," and I have argued elsewhere that the surface play is the one privileged by theatrical performance? My concluding incautious generalizations are that the preceding comments on trial by combat apply to Shakespeare's representation of the "fair designs" of theatrical performance on its audience; apply to dramatic fiction, whether staged or not; apply to any transformational interaction between the excavated meanings of the text and the speech assigned to names we conventionally reify and imagine as persons. They apply wherever language is distributed among the embodied subjects

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who speak it. The metamorphosis of text into bodies produces conspicuous anamorphosis that has the same function and effects as those of the "fair designs" of trial by combat. Socially or culturally produced structures of embodiment-of presences, subjects, characters, roles, individuals-are quarantines against the "discourse of the Other" that smokes the edges of clear visualization and ambiguates simple location. The plastic design behind that mode of production is to pre-vent "bad humors" by providing identities and stories the actors can live with, narratives that enable them to discharge those humors while preserving unawareness and self-esteem. The embodiment of presence is thus the building of Lafew's sconce. Shakespeare's text, then, is not the representation of drama per se but rather the representation of its construction out of the text's discourse of the Other and against that discourse-the representation and, in the positive sense, the critique of the self-concealing motivational conditions of embodiment. Insofar as theatrical performance is the ritual reinforcement of the drive to embodiment, is its actualization in living bodies, it intensifies the defensive flight of drama from text, imposing itself on the contours of drama like a template that masks off its underlying textuality. Shakespeare's metatheatrical critique of theater is, as we know, contained within his metadramatic critique of drama. These are enabling, not inhibiting, critiques: they support his production of dramatic fictions and theatrical performances in a transgressive manner, that is, by clearly signaling their limits, laying bare the motives behind their production, adumbrating a textual dimension at once implicit in them and beyond them. To represent performed drama as a flight from· text is to enrich it with the. transcendent fringe of meanings, the signifying nothing conspicuously concealed by the sound and fury of the words, conspicuously frustrated by the splendors of embodiment. The fury, splendor, and frustration can be experienced together only in performance; we have to feel the presence and pressure of the theatrical template, submit to its fair designs, in order to measure both its power and the shadowy counterforce of the power it represses. The politics of that repression cannot be borne home to us in any other way. But the fury, splendor, frustration, and politics can only be understood and evaluated by the excavation that psychoanalyzes the text.

CHAPTER

9

+ Textual Dramaturgy: Representing the Limits of Theater in 'Richard II'

For a long time the strange dramaturgy of Richard II puzzled or irritated those commentators who took it seriously enough to be troubled by the effect of its stylistic excesses and anomalies on the historical drama it stages. Some have worried over the stiff parade of ceremonialism and verse, others over the passages of near farce or bathos that jar the journey through the last two acts. But in 1974 and 1978 two essays appeared that in my opinion finally made sense of some of the play's more perplexing features: Sheldon Zitner's study of the Aumerle conspiracy scenes and Leonard Barkan's examination of the play's theatrical consistency. 1 The great value of these essays derives in part from the fact that their interpretations of anomalous detail are explicitly grounded in questions of dramaturgical theory that open up on basic features of Shakespearean practice. No one who encounters their contributions to Richard II, either to borrow or to disagree (or both), can fail to deal with those questions, or to gain something from the encounter, because the questions are posed in such a way as to suggest that a new reading of Richard II and the Henri ad implicates a new approach to what may be called textual dramaturgy-that is, to indications of staging given by the Shakespeare text. 2 Textual dramaturgy is an old topic, of course, and has received much attention during the past two or three decades owing to the wave of stagecentered criticism that arose partly in reaction to the excessive literariness of armchair Shakespeareans. But I think the studies of Zitner and Barkan

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begin to give the topic a turn in a different direction -not necessarily a direction they themselves are aiming at, but one toward which I want to steer them by means of a critique that brings them into line with my own reading of the play and the conspiracy scenes. In order to set up this encounter I shall begin by giving a condensed account of the two primary features of the reading that informs the critique: first, the portrait of Richard and the profile of his relationship with Bolingbroke; and second, the profile of Bolingbroke's relation with Gaunt. Since I discuss the second in Chapters 8 and ro, I need say very little about it here, and will confine most of my preliminary remarks to the Richard/Bolingbroke profile.

+ The Richard portrayed· by Shakespeare dramatizes the same complex mode of cultural and institutional disenchantment- despair is a stronger term for it- that Chaucer depicts in his Pardoner. It is the same interaction between the impulse to aggression against others and the impulse to aggression against oneself that Chaucer represented and Shakespeare would explore further in King Lear, a spiraling oscillation between contempt for self and contempt for others. This interaction is inscribed in Richard's rhetoric and politics. It patterns the course of his behavior and the trajectory of his career. It establishes the psychological framework within which his successors in the Henriad are forced to operate. I agree with some recent commentators who argue that he is extremely effective, at least in theatrical terms, and that he upstages Bolingbroke throughout the play. 3 But I would claim in addition that he is equally effective in political terms, given what I take to be his project: to get himself deposed, pick out a likely "heir" to perform that service, reward him with the title of usurper, and leave him with a discredited crown and the guilt of conscience for his labor. The first item in this schedule is announced early in the play by Gaunt: "[thou] art possess't now to depose thyself" (2.r.ro8). Several of the others are compressed in Richard's wicked little game in 4.I. "Here, cousin, seize the crown" (r8r), where "Here, cousin" offers a gift and dangles the bait, while "seize the crown" retracts the offer, publishes the act as a usurpation, and transfers both blame and guilt along with the crown to the usurper. The result is not only that Bolingbroke will lie uneasy all his life but also that he will lie uneasily to himself and will remain unpersuaded, as when he tries to attribute his insomnia to the political burden that accompanies the possession of the crown rather than to the moral burden that accompanied its acquisition: "Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown." To read "wears" as a displacement that suppresses "stole" is to reorganize the figure circling about

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n'

the main verb so as to scratch the political metonymy on its surface and betray the metonymy of self-accusation it tries to conceal from its speaker. 4 My view of the scenario embedded in Richard's language is encompassed in a single line uttered during his ceremonial farewell to Bolingbroke before the two combatants begin battle: 5 "We will descend and fold him in our arms" (1.3.54). This foreshadows the deposition scene, but it is also a visual trope expressing Richard's latent project as it unfolds through the play, here condensed within the confines of a single ceremonial gesture. The rhythm accentuates the. will to descend. "Fold him in our arms" is a kinesic hyperbole that mimes the desire coupling Richard to Bolingbroke in their dance toward deposition and regicide, and toward the subsequent regime, when the embrace gradually becomes a stranglehold. This account of their relationship develops an idea long ago suggested by Wilson and Tillyard, the idea that although Bolingbroke "acts forcibly he appears to be borne upward by a power beyond his volition," grows increasingly bewildered, "has no steady policy and . . . is the servant of fortune." 6 But the power that bears him up, the power whose servant he is, is not fortune; it is Richard. To be more precise, it is the vector sum of the close collaboration between Richard and Bolingbroke as each, by his acts, helps progressively to sharpen and define motives in the other that appear initially to have been vague, hesitant, indecisive, or not fully articulated. Bolingbroke's words and actions in the early scenes do not reveal any clear plan. He seems diffusely aggressive, ready for anything, but not certain as to what specific course he will take. He jumps abruptly forward with imperious gesturessuch as his almost instant return from abroad with a large force even before his father's death -then nervously backtracks into deferential postures. Richard's seizure of his inheritance gives him an excuse after the fact: it partially justifies, ifit does not legitimize, his reason for being in England. More important, it gives him a middle ground that allows him to continue vacillating between the two courses- regaining Lancaster and gaining the throne-and thus temporarily to resist Richard's attempts to make him cross the Rubicon. As A. R. Humphreys justly observes, "Richard's despairing haste to yield power virtually thrust[s] the crown into Bolingbroke's hands." 7 With this act he also thrusts a curse into Bolingbroke's hands. The succession of kings in the Henriad is a genealogy of guilt that, seeded in Richard's own self-division, transmits itself with increasing virulence. The virulence testifies to the abiding power of the murdered king, a power seriously underestimated by the canonical view of Richard as a weak and politically inept ruler who, if he victimized anyone, only victimized himself. In 4.1 York announces that Richard has adopted Bolingbroke as his heir

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I7I

and "son," and this folds a father/son motif into the relationship of succession. Most critics would now agree with Richard Wheeler's opinion that the Henriad centers "on royal inheritance complicated by patricidal motives in relations to actual and symbolic fathers." Wheeler goes on to observe that Richard "collaborates in his own destruction" and that his behavior seems "calculated to bring on his overthrow ... and to bring punishment upon himself for his guilty actions." 8 But he fails to draw the connection between the second observation and the first: between the desire for punishment and the problems attending the transmission of phallic power from fathers to sons, especially in a psychic economy affiicted by a notable shortage of mothers and by what I think is a related failure in paternal authority. Bolingbroke's problem with his symbolic father, Richard, finds ample outlets of expression in the Henriad, his relation to his son being one of them. Yet whatever problem he may have with his actual father finds no direct outlet of expression. This needn't mean that he does not have such a problem- in other words, that it is not inscribed in the text of his and John of Gaunt's language. In "Psychoanalyzing the Shakespeare Text" I argued that Bolingbroke's language in I.I and 1.3 resonates with the sense of his father's double betrayal: first, Gaunt's refusal to avenge Gloucester's murder; second, his complying with Richard in the suspension of the judicial duel and the sentence of exile. I concluded from my analysis of Gaunt's language that it discloses "his fear of being contaminated by Bolingbroke's action; his reluctant agreement to the sentence of exile in response to that fear; the desire to· defeat the son who challenges him; the guilt occasioned in him by that desire and by an agreement [with Richard] that sacrifices his son's interest to his own; and the attempt to assuage that guilt by blaming his party-verdict [1.3.234] on others, an attempt that could only increase the corrosive power of self-despite." This paternal relationship does not end with Gaunt's death, for before Richard adopts Bolingbroke as his son, Bolingbroke casually "adopts" York as his father, and York's role in this surrogational parade is of considerable interest. It begins in 2.3, shortly before he collapses under the pressure imposed by Bolingbroke and his allies and accedes to the violation of exile. The collapse is anticipated in the nostalgic counterfactual conditional that echoes Gaunt's submission in I.I ("To be a make-peace shall become my age," 160) by pleading senility as the excuse for helplessness: Were I but now the lord of such hot youth, As when brave Gaunt, thy father, and myself, Rescued the Black Prince, that young Mars of men, From forth the ranks of many thousand French,

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0 then how quickly should this arm of mine, Now prisoner to palsy, chastise thee, And minister correction to thy fault! (2.3.98-1o4)

After another exchange, Bolingbroke co-opts him by choosing him to be Gaunt's successor: You are my father, for methinks in you I ~-ee old Gaunt alive. 0 then my father, Will you permit that I shall stand condemn'd A wandering vagabond ... [?] You have a son, Aumerle, my noble cousin; Had you first died, and had he been thus trod down, He should have found his uncle Gaunt a father To rouse his wrongs and chase them to the bay. (2.3.n6-27)

The lines beginning with ·"0 then my father" are an exact statement of what Bolingbroke could or should have said to Gaunt but (so far as we know) sadly failed to say. They describe Gaunt's role in the sentence of exile. This throws a strange light on the utterance that follows: Does the speaker imply that Gaunt would have been quicker to "rouse" Aumerle's wrongs than those of his own son? Or that he collaborated with Richard as a hunter flushing out the "wrongs" committed by (rather than against) Bolingbroke? If we don't imagine the speaker to imply these meanings, they yet reside in his language. It would be more interesting to imagine that he doesn't intend them but that they rise from the motivational forces inscribed in the speaker's language and breach his utterance, edging it with a bitterness barely kept under control. It is thus when York is preparing the ground for his nonresistance that Bolingbroke sees "old Gaunt alive" in him, and in fact resurrects Gaunt in him by soliciting his aid in recovering his rights to the duchy of Lancaster- his rights to the inheritance Richard and Gaunt together denied him. This relationship is next focused at. the precise moment in which the father/son conflict is being transferred to the next generation. The Aumerle conspiracy episode in act 5 sandwiches the introduction of the Prodigal Son scenario on which Bolingbroke and Harry collaborate for the better part of the next two plays. The birth of the new relationship is attended on by the passing of the old, but that passage is announced and staged in the strangely distorted form of a melodramatic discharge, which renders it suspect. It is this distortion to which the essays by Zitner and Barkan address themselves, and for which the previous discussion has laid the groundwork.

+

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The similarities between Gaunt and York are parodically insisted on in 5.2-3, when York offers up his son to the newly crowned king partly to free himself from any complicity in Bolingbroke's eyes. Aumerle's conspiracy gives York a chance to show Henry that his own previous vacillation is behind him and his loyalty confirmed. That the ferocity of York's reaction expresses a deep uneasiness is revealed by his utterances at the beginning of 5.2: the speech conveying his lingering attachment to Richard ends with an echo of the religious justification of nonresistance Gaunt had employed with the Duchess of Gloucester. 9 Aumerle may be doing what York would have liked to do had he the will and means and courage to do it; therefore it· is a tactical error for his wife to defend her son by asking York, "Is he not like thee? Is he not thine own?" (5.2.93-94), since that resemblance is precisely what York wishes to exorcise.10 The York/Aumerle episode, which ends in doggerelized comedy, is a compressed caricature, a skewed icon, of the Gaunt/Bolingbroke interaction. York screams for his son's death, while Gaunt reluctantly consents to his son's banishment. Yet York's melodramatic noise is crossed by Gaunt's reverberating silence, and the parodic character of this restatement lends it a clarity that briefly brings to the surface the theme of father/ son conflict just at the moment in which it is about to pass and burrow into Bolingbroke's relation to Harry. The episode displaces and precipitates out as parody the deeply embedded and repressed power conflict between Bolingbroke and Gaunt. Before discussing the implications of this treatment of the episode, I want to enumerate three of the features that should keep us from taking its melodrama at face value. First, the episode is distinguished by the presence of the only mother in the Henriad except for Lady Northumberland, who speaks four and a half lines in 2 Henry IV. In a tetralogy one of whose major concerns is the relation between real or surrogate fathers and sons, the absence of maternal women onstage, and the infrequent but interesting occurrences of figurative Mother in the language, deserve far more attention than I can give them here. 11 Suffice it to say that the presence of the Duchess of York allows the problem to be quickly brought to a head and discharged in melodramatic parody. The Duchess wins the battle and apparently saves her son, after which we hear no more about this father/son conflict. The York family quarrel is an isolated episode with no narrative antecedents or consequences. As such, it provides a conspicuously inadequate model of the way to dramatize such a conflict. At the same time, it signals a decisive shift of dramatic weight from the political to the domestic scene of conflict. Both duchesses-Gloucester and York-assert the primacy of family loyalty and kinship claims over those ofthe wider political group. Yet though both are

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treated sympathetically in thematic terms as spokeswomen for the values of a passing order, in theatrical terms they fare less well, since Shakespeare fades them out in gales of megaphonic self-indulgence, as if to suggest that the kind of theater best suited to that order- the theater of Richard III and the first tetralogy-is also a thing of the past. I said that the Duchess apparently saves her son because of a second peculiarity in 5.3, which is that Bolingbroke conditionally pardons Aumerle before the Duke and Duchess intervene: if the fault was intended but uncommitted, "how heinous e'er it be, I To win thy after-love I pardon thee" (33-34). This is odd, because he had arrested Aumerle in the gage-throwing scene, and because the expediency that motivates a pardon sight unseen is so ingenuously stated. At this moment in his young and shaky regime, Bolingbroke could be expected to feel pressed both by the need to cultivate allies and by concern for his safety. Hence it is· understandable that he pardons Aumerle and that, after reading about the conspiracy, he ignores or mistakes York's accusation and pardons him again, for his father's sake (5264). But it is clear that he does not feel threatened by Aumerle, so that all the floor-pounding and rafter-bending of "shrill-voic'd suppliant[s]" is gratuitous. The onset of rhymed couplets·at line 68 signifies a further lightening of tone as the petitioners lose themselves in the rhetorical pleasures of point-scoring and turn-taking in the game of Debat. The onset of Aumerle's mother at line 72 draws from Bolingbroke a good-humored comment on maternal solicitude and an equally good-humored dismissal of her boy's capacity for harm: "My dangerous cousin, let your mother in; I I know she's come to pray for your foul sin" (79-80). The few words Bolingbroke utters during the remainder of the praying session betray an attitude that is the third and surely the most peculiar feature of the scene. On three occasions separated by equal intervals of rhyming rant he begs his aunt to stand up: "Rise up, good aunt" (9o); "Good aunt, stand up" (ro9); "Good aunt, stand up" (127). These repetitions generate a delicious array of multiple choices. He is: amused, diverted, disdainful, embarrassed, patient, impatient, uncomfortable, comfortable, and all of the above. Since he has already made up his mind, he practices balancing his two bodies by politely humoring the Yorks both as their respectful nephew and as their gracious king. He finds himself the object of fulsome ceremonial fuss in a melodrama that is nevertheless as familiar and reassuring as any spat that remains All in the Family. Bolingbroke's presence thus puts onstage a relatively detached observer who could be said to anticipate much of the criticism commentators have leveled at this scene. But something else is going on, and it lurks in the second word on my

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multiple-choice list: diverted. I think the scene is represented as diverting Bolingbroke from other worries. The most obvious candidate is mentioned at the end of the scene and separated from what precedes it by the return to unrhymed verse: the Oxford conspiracy. But there are two other candidates, both of which I find more interesting. I shall only mention them now, deferring discussion until after the more· general implications of the scene have been explored. The first is suggested by the words with which he praises York for disclosing his son's treason (57-64): these words are crossed by reminders of Bolingbroke's relation both to his father and to his son. The second is suggested by the one· phrase that momentarily jolts the easy forward march of couplets. It is the third of his four speech acts pardoning Aumerle: "I pardon him, as God shall pardon me" (129): these words are crossed by a sharp reminder of Bolingbroke's relation to Richard. Such reminders lead me to think that the speaker of those words is represented as distracted by an episode that provides temporary relief from more serious concerns, or, to put it the other way round, he is distracted by those concerns from a scene to which he is only partly attentive. This accounts for the strange tonal dissonance between the rhyming rant and Bolingbroke's brief punctuations or punctures. I think it also helps account for stylistic anomalies that puzzled or dismayed commentators until the stimulating essays by Zitner and Barkan showed us how to appreciate them. Zitner explains the deflationary elements in those scenes as expressing Shakespeare's "disaffection from the mode of historical tragedy," his "deliberate send-up of the Elizabethan· big bow-wow style" and of "the vision of life as a historical pageant," and his reflexive critique of the "elevation and seriousness" of "Richard II as theater." 12 Barkan shows how elements of farce, bathos, and "semi-comic dramaturgy" divert us from the play's serious questions and deflate "the seriousness with which such questions can be handled." He argues that the clustering of these elements in the last two acts signifies the release of chaotic forces of passion or violence- forces suppressed by the ritualistic style of the early scenes and let loose when Henry's usurpation ushers in the "raucous and destructive" modern world to whose style he is "personally unsympathetic" even though its "combination of comedy and bloodshed" dominates the plays and the regime to which he gives his name. 13 The metatheatrical focus of Zitner's study and the metadramatic focus of Barkan's converge on a common feature of Shakespeare's dramaturgy: using signals in the theatrical code to interpret and criticize both its own conventions and those of the dramatic code; serving up a particular view of the represented fiction by means of presentational devices indicated in

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the text of the play. In similar- but not identical- arguments both studies persuasively justify the way theatrical deflation and deflection contribute to dramatic meaning. I want to take advantage of these insights by giving them a different interpretive bounce in order to resituate them within the field ofpsychopolitical tensions I have been exploring. 14 The message Ireceive or elicit from both the ritualistic and the deflationary elements of Richard II is that such questions as the latent conflict between Gaunt and Bolingbroke can't find adequate expression within the scope of "historical tragedy," which, as Zitner makes clear, is a form of drama peculiarly suited to the theater that caters to the tastes of Elizabethan audiences (wherever and whenever they exist). Of course, I could not receive or elicit such a message if I did not first receive or elicit two other messages: that the latent conflict is represented, and that it is represented as being unable to find adequate expression in a drama whose apparent themes lend themselves to "the huge public stylizations of historical tragedy" 15 -theatrical externalizations of drama that, aspiring to be larger than life, are smaller than life. This means that my romance with the text has a different orientation from Zitner's and Barkan's: I am lured not only by textual aspects that indicate how the drama is to be staged but also by aspects that suggest what can't be directly staged, what must somehow be indirectly communicated against the grain of staging. My reading of those aspects produces, and is guided by, a further hypothesis, which is that the inadequacy conveyed by the theatrical rhythm of the play-strongly marked ritualism followed by deflation and deflection- has a positive psychopolitical function: the very limits of ritualized drama work both to repress latent conflicts or scenarios and to enable their continuance by providing sanctioned media of displacement so that they can be expressed and discharged in safely distorted form. 16 One of the often-noted peculiarities of Richard II as dramatic fiction is the extent to which the theatrical practices and effects that stage it are reproduced, represented, in the theatricality of its major episodes and of the "Player King" who (we never cease to be told) "stage-manages" them. Students of Shakespeare's dramaturgy in this play and others have shown that whether the theatrical effect is ceremonial or deflationary it is produced by a persistent focus on the stage presence and materiality of signifiers-verbal as well as physical-that ordinarily point beyond themselves but stubbornly refuse to get out of the way. Gages, crowns, rhymed couplets, boots, and genuflection all serve instrumental functions as conveyers of narrative movement and symbolic meaning. When they are conspicuously foregrounded in a way that makes them conspicuously irrelevant to those syntagmatic and metonymic functions, then, to borrow Richard's

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pun, "conveyers" -thieves- "are they all" (4.1.317). Bolingbroke's reign is inaugurated by a series· of ceremonial misfires that, whether accidental or mischievous, compromise the solemnity of state and contribute to the embarrassment of a king whose haplessness increases with his power. Thus in 4.1 the epidemic of gage-throwing builds to a thudding climax when Aumerle runs out of gages and the news of Mowbray's death frustrates Bolingbroke's attempts at closure. 17 Richard begins his domination of the deposition scene by subjecting Bolingbroke to a tug-of-war over the· physical crown 18 and ends it by staging his tantrum with the mirror. This is followed by the parting which gives Richard and Isabel such sweet sorrow that they end it in a weird rhyming contest of moans and groans 19 - a contest rendered all the more notable for a feature that marks the portrayal of Isabel throughout the play: her silence about the actual character of Richard's regime and his contribution to its downfall, a silence so conspicuous as to seem willfully to avoid what her sometimes tortured language shows she understands too well. 20 After this odd "unmarriage" scene the York family melodrama reaches one climax in the turmoil over York's boots (5.2) and another in the frenzied battle of the bended knee (5. 3). These effects indicate something more specific than the general release of chaotic forces· Barkan ascribes to them. They drive the wedge deeper between what goes on in the psychopolitical drama and the theatricalized narrative that reduces the drama to a parade of iconic stage spectacles. The gap is first opened up by the hyperritualism of the early scenes, that is, by the way the two opponents push recitative redundancy and formulaic self-explanation to the point of parody. But if Bolingbroke and Mowbray expend inordinate energy in staging themselves- "mark well what I do, mark how I do it, mark what I say it means"- this excess· escapes parody because it is justified by the general atmosphere of distrust and suspicion, as if everyone knows that the ritual format is a misdirection, that the words, gestures, and conventions of the ceremonial procedure ·serve to keep the lid on some "hidden imposthume." The tense uneasiness conveyed by such care of ceremony so archly preempts attention from "inward wars" to the "big bow-wow style" that we listen with equal care for some clue to what is being withheld: Do Richard, Gaunt, Mowbray, and Bolingbroke have hidden agendas, are they all different agendas, are they all equally aware of these agendas, etc.? Their suspiciousness becomes ours, and our suspicions are increased rather than allayed when the "external manners;' the "trappings and the shows," of earlier episodes are recalled and travestied in the last two acts. This illustrates the general phenomenon, discussed by James Siemon, of "the conflict between iconic and iconoclastic impulses." 21 The iconic

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representation featured in the early scenes is itself obviously diversionary and misleading, and the iconoclastic impulse is already active in Richard's mordantly mocking verse no less than in his tactic of interrupting rituals. The emphasis on verbal and gestural signifiers, the. insistent treatment of words as bodily blows, bespeaks the effort to confine and discharge the action within the immediate range of the visible agents, and to control its outcome within the approved channel of a ritual pretense that seems to deceive no one. Exaggerating the circumstantial immediacy of embodiment and performance in this emblematic mode injects the staginess of theatrical representation into the tissues of the represented drama. The effect is to make the "historical" characters seem engaged in calculated performances before their onstage audience. From this standpoint, I think Barkan's thesis about the play's theatricality needs to be supplemented by two premises that will carry it further into the fictional interior lurking in the text. First, it is not only Shakespeare who deflects attention, and his audience whose attention is deflected; deflecting attention is a strategy practiced by the characters on themselves and each other. Second, what is involved is not merely suppression and deflection but repression and displacement. That is, the very inadequacy of ritual and· deflationary elements makes them a suitable medium in which characters may displace or discharge things that would hurt them more, to vary Lear's phrase. They have the effect of Lear's storm, which, like the genuflection in 5.3, at once "deflects attention from the main concerns" and represents them in emblematic distortions.22 In Lafew's phrase, they help the characters and us "make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves in seeming knowledge when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear"rather than, say, bury it as Gaunt and Bolingbroke bury their conflict under ritual displacements, or as Richard buries his fear deep in Bolingbroke's mind, or as Bolingbroke tries unsuccessfully to reinter it in his conflict with Harry, who, as Henry V, buries all those accumulated "inward wars," all that "swoln ... other grief," by redirecting "the stern tyrant War" outward toward the French scapegoat. To say that "without the Aumerle scenes, the full comic truth of the asininity of the natural body and the asininity of pomp- implicit in the doctrine of the king's two bodies-would have escaped the play" may be putting it a little too strongly.23 It isn't the asininity of the body and pomp that is targeted, but their growing inadequacy to represent and displace the latent conflicts in external manifestations. It may be true that "to show York's palsy and age as comic, and the Duchess' mother-love as ludicrous, and Bolingbroke's canny expediency as also ineffectual embarrass-

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ment" serves partly to mock "the illusion that man's existence in history is faithfully rendered in the huge public stylizations of historical tragedy"or tragical history (255). But in my opinion that truth is contingent on two important points obscured by Zitner's emphasis on York's "toothless fussiness" (245), the play's "harsh geriatric slapstick" (248), and its "sometimes cruel insistence on the awkward, farcical claims of the physical, 'the withness of the body'" (254)?4 The first is that if there is an emphasis on York's "age and physical enervation in contrast with a querulous fluency;' that emphasis is York's; Zitner borrows the term palsy from York himself, as his reference to "the palsied arm speech of II .iii" suggests (247). York represents-transitively- his age and weakness as Gaunt and the Duchess of Gloucester do theirs. When "the old Duchess of Gloucester" mentions "'good old York' in her first conversation with old Gaunt," it is as "one of the triumvirate of an ineffectual dying generation" (247). Zitner's argument is "ineffectual because dying," but surely the alternative deserves consideration: "dying because ineffectual; ineffectual, therefore dying." When York says he has never bent "one wrinkle on my sovereign's face" (2.1.170), the image makes more vivid the long-suffering patience that Richard's seizure of Lancaster has just ended, and there are no wrinkles in the powerful speech that follows. And when the Queen describes York as having "signs of war about his aged neck" (2.2.74), it reflects her own foreboding and precedes a performance in which his ineffectuality springs not from age but from indecisiveness. The palsied arm speech, which uses age to excuse inaction, elicits Bolingbroke's comparison of York to "Old Gaunt," and York's subsequent reason for remaining "as neuter" extends the impotence of his palsied arm to that of his paltry armament: "my power is weak and all ill left" (2.3.152-58). That there exists a clear alternative to York's choice of impotence is dramatized in the play by the speeches of the Bishop of Carlisle, whose age is never mentioned but whom I would very much like to think of as wearing the makeup of a senior-if not senile-citizen. For age, like makeup, is an artifice of self-representation or self-concealment?5 Zitner is wrong to argue that the representation of age or illness (or any other aspect of the "withness of the body") as a "natural" determinant, a motivational "cause," is to be ascribed solely to the author of Shakespeare's text and not to its speakers. Those speakers do not have body, age, or illness unless or until they need them, and when they put bodily states into play, they do so to mystify moral effects as physical causes.26 Senility is a trope of disguise and displacement, a form of self-applied makeup. The second point to be made against Zitner's argument is that York's

r8o

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use of senility is affected by its being a ghostly echo of Gaunt's and a comment on it. "To be a make-peace shall become my age" is Gaunt's third utterance and first appeal to the trope in r.r; here "become" sits uneasily on a paronomastic powderkeg, "shall be transformed into," that tells us senility is the weakling's plea. Commenting on York's forgetfulness at the beginning of 5.2, Zitner (246) remarks that Shakespeare observes the slavery of the person to the flesh lightly in passing. But it is a terrible home observation that deflates plumed troops and big wars. Beside it, Gaunt's old age is only the literary convention of the Pisgah Sight and its attendant rhetoric. York's set piece ends with his resignation to whatever heaven offers,

but in a few moments, when heaven offers Aumerle's conspiracy, he calls for his boots and his horse with enough guilt-spurred vigor to suggest that he momentarily forgets the literary convention of Nestor, whose attendant makeup he had so sedulously applied earlier. 27 The dismissal of Gaunt's "Pisgah Sight" is unwarranted, as I hope I have shown, and tends to dull the rich chiaroscuro that gives the comedy of the conspiracy scenes its illuminating force. Barkan observes of 5.3 that "kneeling is a highly charged symbolic issue in a play about definitions of royalty; and so, while kneeling deflects attention from the main concerns, it also symbolizes them." 28 But it is also a highly charged issue in a play whose language and major action continually suggest the tremor cordis of a conscience that desires or flinches from forgiveness. Pardon is the subject ofthe scene, and Barkan's comment applies to it as well as to kneeling. The deflection receives its power from all that is implied and left unsaid by Bolingbroke's "I pardon him, as God shall pardon me" (129). To say that pardon is the subject of the scene is also to be able to appreciate, thanks to Zitner and Barkan, the positive contribution the style of the episode makes to the meaning of Richard II. Any conspectus of the motives of the Henri ad's three kings that follows on a close study of their language will reveal how central the problematic of conscience and guilt management is to the tetralogy: the ambivalent fear/desire to be punished, to be forgiven, to be judged, to get or to avoid what one thinks one deserves. Bolingbroke's desire for pardon deepens until it becomes the driving force of the motivational drama expressed by the political and paternal scenarios that shape both the civil and the moral "inward wars" of the next two plays. The complexity of this drama is bound to the complexity of the language that nourishes it, cherishes it, displays its reticence to go on display, preserves it from the ever-present threat of embodiment and reductive closure

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in the icons of chronicle history plumped up by "huge public stylizations" in the theater. The Aumerle pardon scene introduces a superficial thematic version of that drama as a conspicuous misdirection- that is, it dramatizes the wrong way to deal with the theme, the wrong way to express or represent something that badly wants to find its way into expression but wants just as badly to avoid direct confrontation. For how to stage the desire of forgiveness, or even to represent it to oneself, as in soliloquy (a method Richard unsuccessfully tries)? Or what sort of desire of forgiveness would it be that could be adequately staged or efficiently discharged within the confines of a soliloquy or two? If words fly up, thoughts must remain below. The same is true of flying swords, blessing hands, bending knees, and such aesthetic fantasies as the one Richard half-mockingly plays with, for "a hermitage," "an almsman's gown," "a palmer's walking staff," "a pair of carved saints" (J.J.I48-S2) -a mordant comment, perhaps, on the vacation from guilt others look for in trips to the Holy Land. Whether Mowbray actually "Cast off his chains of bondage" (1.3.89) and purged his soul "with works of war" against the infidels, we shall never know. We have only Carlisle's word for it (4.I.9I-IOo), and he is an interested party. Yet, although Carlisle makes it sound a little easy (giving up the soul to Christ in Venice)- or possibly because it sounds a little easy-Bolingbroke is not unaffected by the pleasant prospect, and until the moment of his death he retains the idle fantasy of venturing abroad in search of the spiritual peace that would vanish as soon as he got there. Bolingbroke's "as God shall pardon me" thus affords a glimpse of what the conspiracy scene conspicuously excludes and of the distance between his own problem with forgiveness and the use of pardon as a political commodity by which the donor forges alliances and the donee saves his skin. The amused contempt playing over his reference to "The Beggar and the King" indifferently embraces the style of political theater he is trapped in, the moral poverty of the kind of pardon he is empowered to give, and the irony of his receiving that power only by wounding himself with a much deeper version of the need for pardon he can so quickly satisfy. If we listen to the Duchess's last two comments with Bolingbroke's ears, the irony produced by the scene's conspicuous exclusion takes on a wry resonance. After his fourth statement of pardon, she replies, ''A god on earth thou art" (s.J.I34). The god's final speech is another attempt-following the failures in 4.1 -to couple political with theatrical assertions of control. He concludes his instruction to York •to mop up the Oxford conspiracy with one rhymed couplet (signal of the desire for closure) and devotes another to proclaiming the Duchess's suit Happily Ended: "Uncle farewell; and cousin too,

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adieu:/ Your mother well hath pray'd, and prove you true" (I42-43). But the Duchess foils the attempt by making it a triplet, and the line she adds is charged with an echo of the desire for another kind of closure, the possibility of redeeming grace, a grace beyond the earthly god's competence to bestow on another, much less on himself, and a grace that is mocked, dissipated, by the facile courtliness both of its political meaning and of its easy rhyme: "Come, my old son, I pray God make thee new" (I44). 29 This haunting, or taunting, echo is freighted with the burden of Richard's legacy to Bolingbroke. For more than the latter will ever show he knows, Richard's stagy representation of himself as the hapless victim of the wicked usurper had persuaded Bolingbroke and others to place the entire weight of guilt along with the discredited crown upon the usurper's head. 30 Richard's behavior in acts 3 and 4 promoted two very different kinds of danger: the external political danger of unending civil strife and the internal danger of unending guilt, the ineradicable sense of moral reprehensibility that can be dealt with only by displacing the inward war to more external and inadequate wars-paternal, physical, civil, foreign. "Can a weak empty vessel bear such a huge full hogshead" of the "other grief" that "swells with silence in the tortur'd soul"? The conspiracy scene represents the first danger and its inadequacy as "a weak empty vessel," albeit one to which Bolingbroke has committed and confined his labors of displacement, knowing that every exercise of his power of royal pardon can only drive him farther from his own hope of forgiveness. "I pardon him as God shall pardon me" provides the peephole that refocuses the conspiracy scene as an anamorphic distortion of "things [that] would hurt me more." If Bolingbroke's words in the scene express amusement, contempt, puzzlement, and a touch of embarrassed helplessness, if in this scene he draws closer to us as, at least apparently, a detached and critical observer of the Yorks' style of behavior, it reinforces our sense of another dramatic dimension, another kind of theater, which that style excludes, and one of the many virtues of Zitner's essay is his emphasis on the way the selfmockery of the scene anticipates the very different Falstaffian style of the next two plays (255-56). It has been pointed out to me that the conspiracy scenes are fast theater and fast reading, which is to say they display all the conventional artifices dramatists use to engage audiences, to encourage the blood to "course from the inwards to the parts' extremes," to burn off those "foolish and dull and crudy vapors" that prompt the pale interpreter to consider too curiously. 31 These scenes tempt us even to read them theatrically, to consume them as sack drama, and they offer a false model of theatrical reading that could well reduce the rest of the play to a sack. drama about the folly and crimes of overmighty men on the stage of royal history. That

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II'

is a drama which- as Howard Felperin has so persuasively shown- Shakespeare represents as the middle term yoking an "archaic" form of theater to the inadequate morality he associates "with an older and passing order of things." 32 Although Falstaff's praise of sack in 2 Henry IV (4.3.88-ri2) is obviously not meant as a serious explanation, neither is he simply mocking the praise as an inversion of the message that sack makes one drunk, not valiant. Rather, he is targeting all such quasi-physical, -medical, and -technical rationalizations for resorting to placebos that enable people to go on doing what they may despise themselves for doing. 33 Sack is a conspicuously inadequate and reductive displacement of what it represents, namely, whatever it is that will make ·bad things good, turn fear into courage, and redirect attention from inner griefs to outer grievances. Falstaff's emphasis is .on a settled condition of inward fear and war that is externalized as aggression against others; courage is therefore defined as fear turned outward, as the flight from "the inwards to the parts' extremes" that makes the fear bearable. The praise of sack is an amplification ofLafew's principle that helps explain the dramaturgical meaning of what I have just referred to as sack drama. If we model our response to the Aumerle scenes on this response to the praise of sack, the message conveyed by the elements of farce is that some deep anxiety, some unknown fear or terror, is being deflated to a theatrical trifle; a terror latent in the language of the text is kinetically manifested in a theatrical mode that can't do it justice. The trifle has the force of a condensation that is overdetermined by the dense intertwine of meanings that branch like a rhizome through the text. An operatic moment given a Brechtian skew, the comic style of the second conspiracy scene (5.3) has the effect of raising placards over the episode-FATHER/SON CONFLICT IN PROGRESS supplemented by MOTHER PLEADING FOR HER BOY-and suggesting that we had better look elsewhere for full details. The "elsewhere" resides in the motivational impulses transmitted through .the branches from· other moments of the play and complicating the sense of such words as those Bolingbroke addresses to York when the latter discloses his son's treason: 0 heinous, strong, and bold conspiracy! 0 loyal father of a treacherous son! Thou sheer, immaculate and silver fountain, From whence this stream, through muddy passages, Hath held his current and defil'd himself, Thy overflow of good converts to bad; And thy abundant goodness shall excuse This deadly blot in thy transgressing son. (5.3.57-64)

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This speech is crossed by remote as well as proximate echoes. Most obviously, Bolingbroke had just complained about his own son. But as E. K. Chambers notes, "0 loyal father of a treacherous son" echoes Mowbray's address to Gaunt at r.r.r36 ("The honorable father of my foe"); 34 the pertinence of the observation lies in the fact that Mowbray is reminding Gaunt that he had confessed his attempted ambush on Gaunt's life and begged his pardon for it. 35 If pardon is on Bolingbroke's mind, as it is in his words to York, one father/son pair may stand in for the other. James Winny argues that Bolingbroke's terms fit Gaunt better than York and proposes a reading that bears out his negative view of Bolingbroke: he unconsciously supplies "a double moral commentary upon himself, by admiring the integrity of a confederate who shares his own dishonor, and by lamenting the disgrace which a dissolute son has brought upon the noble reputation of his father." 36 But even on this reading, some of York's tarnish rubs off on the noble reputation so that one could assume Bolingbroke to be diminishing Gaunt's aura by reconstituting him as York. And the speech, so construed, offers different tonal possibilities: he could be expressing his father's view and criticizing himself, or he could be bitterly mimicking this view and criticizing the father's criteria of loyalty and treachery-criteria rendered problematic by the different ways in which he and Richard have violated the norms of kingship. There is no reason why both these possibilities can't be simultaneously entertained. Together they express the speaker's inward wars, and I find it easy to imagine that he momentarily projects onto the inadequate figure of York his frustrated wish for the strong father he lacks, his wish for the idea of a "sheer, immaculate, and silver fountain" of a father who represents justice or the higher Law, and who will reward and support or else challenge and punish his son- or pardon him. Another commentator suggests that the "unnatural loyalty" expressed in York's response to Bolingbroke (5.3.6571) "reads like a perverted echo of Gaunt's speech in a similar situation;' his uneasy defense ofhis "party-verdict" at 1.3.236-46.37 To anyone listening with Bolingbroke's ears it may well seem that York is replaying Gaunt's muffied betrayal of his son in a melodramatic key. "I pardon him, as God shall pardon me" is vexed by these crossings. Bolingbroke sides with the son who did what York feared to do when he- Aumerle- defended the former king and conspired against the usurper. At the same time, he sees his own likeness to Aumerle in the context of usurpation. But he also pardons him as a father whose ownfather refused any similarly direct encounter, neither accusing nor forgiving, and who perhaps hopes he will find it within himself to pardon his son.

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I say "perhaps" because his remarks about Harry suggest that although he claims to "see some sparks ofbetter hope" he is already fashioning Harry's truancy into an instrument of displacement that will prepare him to function simultaneously as a scapegoat and as "unthrifty" Richard's surrogate: "If any plague hang over us, 'tis he"; "he, young wanton, and effeminate boy, I Takes on the point of honor to support I So dissolute a crew"; ''As dissolute as desperate" (5.3.3, 10-12, 20).38 The first phrase is doubly charged. It echoes Gaunt's "suppose I Devouring pestilence hangs in our air" (1.3.283-84), as if Bolingbroke, remembering and responding to it, reminds his audience in passing that his son (i.e., not his usurpation) is the only pendant plague. But in the next play these anxieties converge in the confused oscillation of his guilt and anger. He constructs Harry both as Richard redivivus and as Richard's and God's revenge, "mark'd I For the hot vengeance and the rod of heaven, ITo punish my mistreadings" (3.2.9-n). 39 The unresolved question of Bolingbroke's relation to his father fuses with the overresolved question of his relation to Richard, who, as Bolingbroke learns from York in 4.1, "with willing soul I Adopts thee heir" (1089) and thus becomes another father. The fusion is clearly felt in the final speech of Richard II. Although Bolingbroke is speaking of the murdered king, the language with which he banishes Exton remembers earlier moments: With Cain go wander thorough shades of night, And never show thy head by day or night. (5.6.43-44) Which blood, like sacrificing Abel's, cries Even from the tongueless caverns of the earth to me for justice ... (I.I.104-6)

It remembers Mowbray's "Then thus I turn me from my country's light, I To dwell in solemn shades of endless night" (1.3.176-77), and above all it remembers Gaunt's anticipatory gesture toward the escape from complicity or guilt that death affords: My oil-dried lamp and time-bewasted light . Shall be extinct with age and endless night, My inch of taper will be burnt and done, And blindfold Death not let me see my son. (1.3.221-24)

During the next two plays Henry projects his self-doubt onto Harry, whose conscience he tries to pack with guilt for being a bad son so that he can deal both with his own guilt and with the power wielded by the true inheritor on whom he depends to secure the legitimacy denied him so long as he lives. At the end of his life, responding to Harry's removal

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of the crown in a replay of his tug-of-war over the crown with Richard ("Here, cousin, seize the crown"), his rhetoric swells with the pleasures of self-pity, and his ominous prediction ofthe fifth Harry's effect on England (2 Henry IV 4.5.64-137) recalls his father's dying denunciation of Richard. Gaunt's speech evades his own passive complicity in the "shameful conquest" he deplores, while Henry finds bitter consolation in anticipating a return to the state of Ricardian riot that will make him and his·"poor kingdom" look better by comparison (4.5.133-35). In Richard II, Gaunt vainly wishes he can perform the magical office of scapegoat, and Henry repeats this gesture in the final reconciliation scene. His self-pity is muted but not absent from the words defining the sacrifice that will clear his son's possession of the crown: To thee it shall descend with better quiet, Better opinion, better con£rmation, For all the soil of the achievement goes With me into the earth. It seem'd in me But as an honor snatch'd with boist'rous hand, (187-91)

and "boist'rous" carries us back to the opening speech of Richard II, in which Richard mentions Bolingbroke's "boist'rous late appeal." Not that Henry, who hadn't yet come onstage, remembers those words, but they remind us of the perspective he critically glances at in his reference to sacrificing Abel. 40 "How I came by the crown, 0 God forgive,/ And grant it may with thee in true peace live" (218-19). The music of this close is all the more moving when we view it in ironic retrospect and see how Henry's relation to his son mirrors the relation to his father suggested in the first act of Richard II- suggested but never made explicit, never openly articulated, by either son or father. As to Richard, his ultimate victory over Bolingbroke is won on the eve of the battle of Agincourt, when Henry V resurrects his spirit and utters his sharpest, most explicit indictment of his father. We learn for the first time that he has already taken measures to expiate Bolingbroke's crime. But as Peter Erickson has shown, the tone of the following prayer betrays the hopelessness of Harry's attempt to protect his own "purity by confining the blame to Henry IV;' and it conveys "an oblique admission that his own royal power as well as his father's may be contaminated." 41 The oddest thing of all in the prayer is the faint and distorted echo of the motif that embarrassed Bolingbroke in the second conspiracy scene, "The Beggar and the King": 0 not to-day, think not upon the fault My father made in compassing the crown! I Richard's body have interred new,

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And on it have bestow'd more contrite tears Than from it issued forced drops of blood. Five hundred poor I have in yearly pay, Who twice a day their wither'd hands hold up Toward heaven, to pardon blood: And I have built two chantries, Where the sad and solemn priests sing still For Richard's soul. More will I do; Though all I can do is nothing worth, Since that my penitence comes after all, Imploring pardon. 42

Harry's attempt at religious insurance is noteworthy not only because he seeks to make sacramental puissance by piecing out his imperfections into a thousand prayers a day but also because of the personnel he has recruited. Clearing the streets of five hundred members of the underclass and giving them decent employment is an administrative expedient of which he may be justifiably proud. And it will increase the national tone of piety: instead of begging for alms they will beg for pardon; instead of begging for themselves they will beg for another; instead of begging for the body, they will beg for the soul. The York family prayer meeting is as nothing compared to this institutionalized extravaganza. The beggars' "wither'd hands" attest to their long experience of the ars mendicandi, though if that detail suggests undernourishment as well as age it may detract a little from confidence in their expertise. Harry's scheme is vulnerable to a certain symbolic contamination because his criterion of the ability to beg for pardon is the ability to beg for money or food, and the equivalence may suggest one reason why all he can do- or have the beggars do on his behalf- "is nothing worth." The background of this effort at ritual atonement suggests what may be at stake. From the beginning of act 4 the rhetoric had been permeated by images of resurrection and the Day of Judgment, and by barely muffied allusions to damnation and salvation.43 Thus, after Bates argues that if "his cause be wrong, our obedience to the king wipes the crime of it out of us," Williams adds that "if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make; when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day ... it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it" (4.1.133-48). Harry's defense of the king is strangely breached by the analogy of king to father, for although he refers to himself, the analogy brings into play his relation to Henry IV: So, if a son that is by his father sent about merchandise do sinfully miscarry upon the sea, the imputation of his wickedness, by your rule, should be im-

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posed upon his father that sent him ... But this is not so: the king is not bound to answer the particular endings of his soldiers, the father of his son. (4.1.150-6!)

The subsequent reference to those who make "the wars· their bulwark, that have before gored the gentle bosom of peace with pillage and robbery" (r69-71) recalls Harry's tavern capers and thus sharpens the distortion produced by the father/son analogue. For Harry's intended self-defense against the soldiers' "imputation" thereby admits into its recesses a latent defense of Bolingbroke against his own imputation of the latter's wickedness. It is as if he has to remind himself that although he is carrying out his father's order to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels, the guilt and the responsibility are his, not Bolingbroke's. And to remind himself of that is of course to adopt the father's perspective, as indeed he does when his speech on ceremony echoes- and in places replicates- Bolingbroke's insomnia soliloquy in 2 Henry IV. He manages to fight off that perspective, to clear himself and displace the imputation of wickedness, when he speaks. of "the fault/ My father made." These, then, are the pressures of self-division that penetrate his prayer. The effect is to bathe the ingenuous fervor of his desire for decontamination in a mordant shadow. The effect is not unappealing in itself, since he is trying to persuade God and himself together that he has done all he could do, and that if it is worth nothing, the fault is not his. Yet the participial construction of the final short line, "Imploring pardon," floats dangerously free of its appositional dependence on "my penitence," and takes on a continuous-present force. Is it pardon for his father that he implores? For himself? The speech as a whole insists that pardon is not in his gift, that only God can grant it. This is a perfectly legitimate Catholic response, and it is no doubt a conventional expression of pious atonement to establish chantries for the sake of Richard's soul. What is less appealing, what is very sad, is the omission that the preceding argument covers and rationalizes. The priests sing only for Richard's soul. They might also have sung for Bolingbroke's. To claim that what he does is "nothing worth" is to reaccuse Bolingbroke and deny the gesture of atonement he might have made. For there is a kind of pardon that lies within the human gift, a pardon that is private as well as political, a pardon that springs from one's awareness of one's own need of pardon, a pardon the bestowal of which might make it less terrifying for the one who pardons to confront himself and implore pardon for himself, a pardon Harry fails to say: "I pardon him, as God shall pardon me."

CHAPTER IO

+ 'Ars Moriendi' in Progress, or, john

of Gaunt

and the Practice of Strategic Dying And nothing can we call our own but death.

"Holinshed's Gaunt is a turbulent and self-seeking magnate, whose death in 1398 ... is very simply noted by the chronicler." But his death and life in Richard II mount up like the dying Richard's soul, freed from the sepulcher of this gross historical flesh, and Peter Ure, from whose Arden introduction I am quoting, applauds Shakespeare for resurrecting John of Gaunt as "a father and patriot of grandiose stature, a prophet whose dying speech on England attracted the attention of the anthologist . . . as early as I6oo." 1 The present meditation aims to compose the place of Gaunt's Third Coming, not to mention his Third Going. The Shakespeare resurrected from the text by Ure and others brings the father of Henry IV back primarily as a patriot. His role as father is not much remembered in their praises, and this may be because it is not much remembered in his famous closing music. The England speech has been described as a nostalgic fusion of Christian and aristocratic values in praise of the feudal monarchy Gaunt sees Richard bent on destroying; as the patriotic outcry of one of the "proud, courageous" representatives of "a still vigorous political order" who, on the verge of death, becomes newly "inspired by his love of England" and refuses at last to continue leaving "the quarrel to God"; as the "poignant assertion of patriotism" beneath which "there lies a sense of spiritual value, the expression of a tragedy, reflected in Gaunt's own death, which finds.in the religious reference a universal expression." 2 There is not much here about his paternal achievements. These opinions may at some level be true or at least tenable, but it is

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important to determine just what the level is, since they have been placed in question by two incisive studies that shift attention from the anthologocentric spirit of his speech to its unglorified body. Donald Friedman's analysis of Gaunt's "rhetoric of frustration" restores something of Holinshed's "selfseeking magnate" to the figure of the patriot, while Stephen Booth sends up Gaunt's syntactical turbulence in an elegantly exasperated account of the relation between extreme "wordiness" and "extreme weakness." 3 Both, however, respect Gaunt's silence as a father enough to leave it unbroken. Noting the "repellent qualities" Friedman discerned in the "hugely paraphrastic 'England speech,' " Booth adds that modern audiences continue to find "Gaunt a wholly sympathetic character, and his aria on England-far from irritating audiences~ has thrilled them." 4 As if to prove him right, a later admirer of Gaunt's sacramentalism, Herbert Coursen, takes the aria "as chorus for the entire tetralogy," the vision "against which all subsequent visions and versions of England will be measured." At the same time, a preview of the Third Coming glimmers darkly through the smoked glass of a notion Coursen briefly entertains: the possibility that "Bolingbroke acts as Gaunt's agent," that father and son "have discussed the matter,'' and that Gaunt discreetly "encourages Bolingbroke's return to England" while bidding him farewell. Coursen's noncommittal response to the idea-it "goes beyond textual evidence" but it is actable-is prudent, for if"Gaunt's speech stands as a vivid contrast to all that happens in" the tetralogy, such a conspiracy would be among the happenings it stands in vivid contrast to. 5 Coursen's idea previews and touches off my own intervention because it points to episodes we might well expect to have occurred and therefore makes much more compelling the alternative for which I submit there is textual evidence: not only did they fail to occur, not only did father and son refrain from discussing the matter, but the strident appeal Bolingbroke displaced from Richard to Mowbray was at the same time a silent appeal of Gaunt. I have examined the evidence for this view in Chapter 8 and ~ill only summarize the position here. Bolingbroke's language in I.I and 1.3 resonates with the sense of his father's double betrayal: first, Gaunt's refusal to avenge Gloucester's murder, and second, his compliance in the suspension ofthe judicial duel and the sentence of exile. I concluded from my analysis of Gaunt's language that it discloses "his fear of being contaminated by Bolingbroke's action; his reluctant agreement to the sentence of exile in response to that fear; the desire to defeat the son who challenges him; the guilt· occasioned in him by that desire and by an agreement [with Richard] that sacrifices his son's interest to his own; and the attempt to assuage that guilt by blaming his party-verdict [1.3.234] on others, an attempt that could only increase the corrosive power of self-despite."

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I9I

The discussion that follows will extend this reading to the debate between father and son that concludes !.3 and to Gaunt's performance in 2.!. My aim is to show that the language of Gaunt's England speech reflects the shame and self-protectiveness that motivate the speaker. It is his belated response to the accusation expressly leveled by the Duchess of Gloucester and implicit in his son's language and action; his attempt both to justify himself (to himself as to his son) and to compete with Bolingbroke in a last-minute burst of patriotic zeal. Beyond that, the speech is part of the preparation of the death mask, for Gaunt's performance in 2.! is an ars moriendi by which he strives to reduce himself to the self-representation he wishes to impose on himself, his son, and the future. The death he chooses is that of the wise, good, and unheeded elder, the prophetic speaker of painful truth victimized by powers of darkness, the personification of ancient virtue who offers himself up as a scapegoat so that "the scandal [will] vanish with my life." In this view, Ure's "patriot of grandiose stature" is not merely Shakespeare's production but also, and more importantly, Gaunt's, and it is through just such· explorations of his language as those undertaken by Friedman and Booth that we can watch and hear the production taking place. This will call for a minor revision of Booth's thesis that although Gaunt's speech in the first two scenes was an oasis of crisp restraint in a desert of excess, the frustrated syntax of 2.! makes his "wordiness feel extreme and suggestive of extreme weakness." Booth can only attribute this to his physical ~mpotence: it is because he is close to death that he begins to resemble the "morally weak" Richard and "behave as if he mistook the manipulation of wo~ds for the manipulation of things" (ror, ro3). But Gaunt is the host of a sudden access of crusading fervor and is undergoing an eleventh-hour reformation. I shall try. to show that his wordiness is a sign not of weakness tout court but of the desire to represent himself in a position of moribund weakness that will set off his heroic courage as a "precious stone set in the silver sea" (2.!.46). The advice he offers his son encodes the strategy of his own ars moriendi: The sullen passage of thy weary steps Esteem as foil wherein thou art to set The precious jewel of thy home return. (1.3.265-67)

It is the strategy his grandson will inherit and make the most of: My reformation, glitt'ring o'er my fault, Shall show more goodly, and attract more eyes Than that which hath no foil to set it off. (1 Henry IVI.2.208-ro)

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The debate between father and son in 1.3 begins after Bolingbroke fails to respond to successive utterances by Aumerle and the Marshall: Gaunt Bol.

0, to what purpose dost thou hoard thy words, That thou returnest no greeting to thy friends? I have too few to take my leave of you, When the tongue's office should be prodigal To breathe the abundant dolor of the heart. (!.3.253-57)

Gaunt's could be merely a paternal reproof at his son'~ poor mastery of the etiquette of exile, uttered on behalf of the previous speakers. But perhaps he includes himself among the friends and would like some reassurance on that score. The exchange is in sharp contrast to Bolingbroke's previous elaborate leave-taking, and his comparatively cool response at least includes Gaunt if it does not single him out as the chief referent of "you." In the stichomythia that follows, Gaunt's crude attempts at consolation are brusquely dismissed, and his first three efforts have an uncomfortable resonance because they echo the drift of his earlier complaint to Richard (216-32) blaming the king for shortening his journey to death: "Thy grief is but thy absence for a time"; "What is six winters? they are quickly gone"; "Call it a travel that thou tak'st for pleasure" (258, 260, 262). As one commentator long ago suggested, the implication is that Bolingbroke's exile is a temporary inconvenience compared to the one Gaunt faces. 6 Gaunt once again takes refuge in his senility. This ameliorative contrast has a defensive/offensive edge, and Bolingbroke offensively defends against it in his replies. Later, as Gaunt unsuccessfully. tries to persuade Bolingbroke to make a virtue of necessity, he disowns his share in the party-verdict by shifting all blame to the king and suggesting a more positive fantasy-role for himself: Think not the king did banish thee, But thou the king ... Go, say I sent thee forth to purchase honor, And not the king exil'd thee; or suppose Devouring pestilence hangs in our air, And thou art flying to a fresher clime. Look what thy soul holds dear, imagine it To lie that way thou goest, not whence thou com'st. Suppose the singing birds musicians, The grass whereon thou tread'st the presence strew'd, The flowers fair ladies . . .

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For gnarling sorrow hath less power to bite The man that mocks at it and sets it light. (1.3.279-93)

The logic that binds· together these escape recommendations is subversive: (I) "Devouring pestilence" metaphorically glances at the corruption of Richard's court, instantiated by his exiling Bolingbroke; but doesn't that corruption also include Gaunt, and· isn't it instantiated by his saying "say I sent thee forth to purchase honor"? (2) The parallelism of the first two suggestions makes that statement stand in as a substitute for "But thou the king": that Bolingbroke should leave England because his father sent him to purchase honor is as outlandish as the idea that he banished the king. (3) Gaunt's mockery of exile includes a selective emphasis that transforms it to a paradise of birds, grass, and flowers. But since "the presence" is presumably the English royal chamber, the courtly source of pestilence is inscribed on the image of the "fresher clime": that, Gaunt oddly suggests, is what Bolingbroke's "soul holds dear." Yet it is not so odd if we remember that Richard and Bolingbroke belong to the generation of Gaunt's successors, and if we assume that his diatribes in 2. I represent sentiments that predate their deathbed utterance. Gaunt sees Richard as "possess'd now to depose thyself" (2.I.Io8). Does he also entertain a suspicion that replacing Richard might be what his son's "soul holds dear"? Whether he suspects Bolingbroke's ambition or merely questions his intervention in God's quarrel, we can imagine his apprehensiveness to be aroused by Richard and Bolingbroke together. Though they oppose each other they are perversely bound to each other, and they confront Gaunt as representatives of the unruly filial forces that threaten the fathers. Richard's political assault on the old order, on the values and interests of the aristocratic constitution, is a relatively easy target for Gaunt's invective. Bolingbroke's challenge is harder to deal with because it exposes the contradiction in Gaunt's appeal to the old order (nonresistance vs. revenge, Christian monarchic ideology vs. feudal aristocratic ideology); it questions both Gaunt's place in the genealogical order and his right to be its spokesman-which may explain why he finally decides to speak up in 2.1. Thus Gaunt's performance is as much a self-exculpating defense as it is a paternal consolation. The lack of conviction evident throughout the speech shapes the aphoristic vapidity of the final couplet (292-93), which Bolingbroke echoes and forcibly hurls back at the end of his retort: 0 no, the apprehension of the good Gives but the greater feeling to the worse. Fell sorrow's tooth doth never rankle more Than when he bites, but lanceth not the sore. (r.3.300-303)

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Bolingbroke implies that on occasions Sorrow, in the act of making its wound ("sore"), also goes deep enough to probe it like a surgeon and so starts the cure. He is complaining that Gaunt is trying to blunt the probe of surgeon Sorrow (or the tooth of animal Sorrow) with silly consolations so that the wound it makes will fester. (Ure, Arden ed., 39)

This catches the acridity of Bolingbroke's response, but it blurs the syntactical articulation of the image, which distinguishes the wound sorrow makes from the already present "sore" that festers when the wounding bite "lanceth (it] not." The victim or patient is "swoln with some other grief" than that directly occasioned by exile. The relation between the sore and the bite is not immediately obvious and depends on our clarifying that between Bolingbroke's two sentences. If "doth never rankle more" = "Gives but the greater feeling to the worse," then it must be Gaunt's "silly consolations" ("the apprehension of the good") that impede the curative function of sorrow's tooth and intensify the pain. Consider one such consolation, "Go, say I sent thee forth to purchase honor," and imagine Bolingbroke's response: "0 no, since this states an 'apprehension' we both know is untrue, it would only worsen things between us. Better to accept the sorrow of exile as it is; perhaps we could then more easily confront and discharge the other grief connected to it." But they do not accept it as it is. That Gaunt might offer or Bolingbroke take the chance of confronting what lies unsaid between them -this is a "good" that both may desire and fear to grasp, a bitter good capable of lancing the sore. Gaunt keeps it unsaid by offering other "goods" to diminish sorrow's power to bite and thus gives but the greater feeling to the worse. When Bolingbroke rejects his father's recommendations and prescription, Gaunt can only respond with a mildly impatient attempt to expedite his son's departure. Bolingbroke's scene-ending reply is not to his father: Gaunt

Bol.

Come, come my son, I '11 bring thee on thy way, Had I thy youth and cause, I would not stay. Then, England's ground, farewell; sweet soil, adieu, My mother and my nurse that bears me yet! Wher'er I wander boast of this I can, Though banish'd, yet a true-born Englishman. (!.3.304-9)

What does Gaunt's second line mean? With the accent on thy it is simple advice: "If I were you, I would get away from here as quickly as possible." With the accent on I it suggests a contrast: "If I were not old, etc., I would leave too; but I can't." But, to fill in the etc. what is the cause Gaunt assigns to his son but not himself? The anger and dishonor caused by Richard's

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interrupting the appeal process? The idealistic desire of political reform, the chivalrous impulse to family revenge, that led him to lift an angry arm against the ritual surrogate of God's minister? The frustration of his effort to do something about the "devouring pestilence" that "hangs in· our air" -or as Gaunt would put it in 2.1, the effort to fight ''Against infection" spreading over England from its source in the morally corpulent king whose "waste is no whit lesser than thy land" (44, 103)? No matter what Gaunt's word cause might refer to, it touches on some aspect of the "pestilence" he is implicated in, hence this sentiment exposes the various strains the relationship imposes on him: (1) "I sympathize with you; if I weren't so old and had reasons like yours, could still fight for causes and purchase my honor, I'd leave this sick place instantly; since I can't, I'm sending you forth to purchase it instead, so come, 'I'll bring thee on thy way.'" (2) "Please sympathize with me; had you my age and cause, you would not go, and if you understood how 'thy youth and cause' could place me in double jeopardy, political and psychological, you might also understand my eagerness to 'bring thee on thy way.'" (3) "If I were you, I'd get away from me." (4) "If I were me, I'd get away from me; 'I would not stay' but die." "I'll bring thee on thy way" thus grasps at Bolingbroke with an oppressive mingle of apprehensions ranging from paternal solicitude and companionship to. fear of being contaminated and the self-despite that is its blacklash. Bolingbroke refuses contact. Gaunt has been bringing him on his way to exile at least since he rendered his party-verdict. Bolingbroke's response concludes a mutual (p)act of symbolic disinheritance. He turns away not merely from his father toward his mother, but from the particular patriline that no longer bears- births, supports, tolerates- him toward the autochthonous matrix of ethnonational identity. From this brotherhood his cousin king is banished, and perhaps his father. When an echo of Bolingbroke's first couplet finds its way into Gaunt's deathbed elegy, its expanded form suggests the note of ambition, the buried fear or desire of an apprehended good, that someone listening with Gaunt's ears might detect: "This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings" (2.1.51)_7

+ What else is Gaunt's speech about England but a complaint of the fathers over their inability to defeat the sons in order to transfer and thus preserve the paternal image and power intact through the heraldic sequence of replicas? The speech is uttered only to York, his brother father, and is set within the framework of a debat between Age/Wisdom and Youth/Folly.

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Having failed to persuade his son to accept exile gracefully and resign himself, as the wise do, to becoming a citizen of the world (''All places that the eye of heaven visits I Are to a wise man ports and happy havens" [1.3.27576], a sentiment soon to be contradicted), he prepares to dispense counsel to another target. His death mask is at hand and his ars moriendi ready to fire: "Will the king come that I may breathe my last I In wholesome counsel to his unstaid youth?" (2.r.r-2). York doubts the counsel will be heeded, since the "open ear of youth" prefers "other flattering sounds" (17-20), and he advises Gaunt to "deal mildly" with Richard's "youth, I For young hot colts being rein'd do rage the more" (69-70). 8 But York's advice itself goes unheeded when Richard's brisk entrance provokes Gaunt to a little heat and rage of his own and even to a pair of carefully diffused references to Bolingbroke's exile: Old Gaunt indeed, and gaunt in being old. The pleasure that some fathers feed upon Is my strict fast- I mean my children's looks, And therein fasting hast thou made me gaunt. Gaunt am I for the grave, gaunt as a grave, Whose hollow womb inherits nought but bones. Since thou dost seek to kill my name in me, I mock my name, great king, to flatter thee. (2.1.74-87)

"To kill my name in me" means "to keep me from being reborn in my son and perpetuated in the mimetic succession." Genealogical resurrection and immortality-that is what sons are for; if they accepted their fate the paternal grave would become not Gaunt's "hollow womb," but what he earlier described as the "teeming womb of royal kings," which the former phrase contrastively echoes. The condition of fertility, however, is specified in the next line of Gaunt's laudatio: "This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings, I Fear'd by their breed, and famous by their birth" (51-52). The alliterative and appositional redundancy of line 52 appears at first to reinforce Gaunt's appeal to the aristocratic panacea, that is, blood and birth as failsafe mechanisms of transmission. But the italicized phrase wries out of its lineal bondage to the second clause (with its causal by) and shifts toward an agentive construction: not "feared because of their breeding" but "feared by those they breed." 9 It is partly because today's sons are not sufficiently father-fearing, pious, respectful, that England is "bound in with shame" and Gaunt is "for the grave":

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0, had thy grandsire with a prophet's eye Seen how his son's son should destroy his sons, From forth thy reach he would have laid thy shame ... 0, spare me not, my brother Edward's son, For that I was his father Edward's son; That blood already, like the pelican, Hast thou tapp'd out and drunkenly carous'd. (2.1.104-6, 124-27)

It is partly that. But it is also because the speaker of these words had been the target of others in r.2 for leaving the quarrel to God and refusing to "lift I An angry arm against His minister": Finds brotherhood in thee no sharper spur? Hath love in thy old blood no living fire? That which in mean men we intitle patience Is pale cold cowardice in noble breasts. 0, sit my husband's wrongs on Herford's spear, That it may enter butcher Mowbray's breast. (1.2.9-10, 33-34, 47-48)

Gaunt's passionate projection of shame and blame onto Richard responds to the Duchess's accusation and also to her claim that in refusing to avenge his brother Gloucester's murder "thou dost consent I In some large measure to thy father's death" (25-26). Now, in 2.I.I04, he lifts his angry voice to make common cause with his father in prophecy and, in the next line, to join his brother in the common plight of Edward's sons. But the sudden intensity of this anger may attest to the force of the concern it displaces: to the extent that his words remember and acknowledge the Duchess's verdict on his behavior, his own son's challenge coupled with his compliance must be a standing rebuke to him. The political dimensions of Gaunt's performance have been discussed by Donald Friedman, whose persuasive reading is focused on the elitist interest that motivates Gaunt's idealization of a feudal England. Friedman emphasizes Gaunt's "sense of the kingdom as a [hereditary] property that must be defended, the material essence of . . . titles and rights." 10 "The abstract dignity of Gaunt's vision of the English nation is fleshed out by his sense of family solidarity" (292) and of the "happy breed" as "a kind of perpetual knightly order sworn to the defense of its fortress island and of its own privilege" (289). Friedman attributes the frustration of this ideal, enacted in Gaunt's rhetoric as in all other aspects of the play, to the dissociation and "uneasy relation of ... two concepts," "the notion of intrinsic

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value" and "the sceptical, psychological notion of the preeminence of the valuer and his motives over the thing valued" (296-97). Without sacrificing any of the insights yielded by this perspective, I would like to apply enough torque to twist it closer to the generational axis around which Friedman's reading too loosely situates it. What happens to that reading when we view Gaunt's performance in 2.1 as a reaction to the father/son conflict I have excavated from the text of act r? Some of Friedman's individual statements respond immediately to the torque. For example, he connects Gaunt's "sense of family solidarity" with the Duchess of Gloucester's appeal to his share in "Edward's sacred blood" (292), but this only reminds us that any ideal of solidarity Gaunt conveys in his England speech lies uneasily above a sense of his own family's unsolidary state. The disaffected words of the Duchess vibrate behind his deathbed performance so that when Friedman paraphrases Gaunt's hope "that his dying breath may have the power of counsel that the king had refused to hear" (284) we remember that Gaunt has refused to give such counsel, at least during the course of act I. Gaunt (Friedman continues) invokes "not only the respect and sentiment that surround the deathbed utterance ... but also what he takes to be the irresistible worth, the persuasive force, of words spoken in pain and at great cost; they must be listened to, because they are the ultimate expression of disinterested counsel, the unquestionable altruism of the good adviser who knows he cannot benefit from his own advice" (284-85). But these effects and purposes adhere to a rhetorical posture that is compromised by his previous refusal to act or speak out, by his party-verdict, and by all the moments of muffied guilt, aggression, and evasion I have discussed: 0, but they say the tongues of dying men Inforce attention like deep harmony. Where words are scarce they are seldom spent in vain, For they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain. He that no more must say is listened more Than they whom youth and ease have taught to glose; More are men's ends mark'd than their lives before. The setting sun, and music at the close, As the last taste of sweets, is sweetest last, Writ in remembrance more than things long past: Though Richard my life's counsel would not hear, My death's sad tale may yet undeafhis ear. (2.r.s-r6)

This is a rhetorical tour de force, a metapersuasion in which Gaunt tries to give York and himself reasons why the reasons he wants to give Richard

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will at last not go unheeded. Its formal patterning, the ponderous enthymemic explicatio that drags the opening proposition toward the concluding hope, the facile repetition of canned wisdom that makes the utterance seem twice as long and glozing as it needs to be: the speech belies the rhetorical persona its purpose is to describe and promote. Since Gaunt's words are neither "scarce" nor noticeably hampered by whatever pain they cost him, they must not- by his own logic- be true. And of course his concluding surmise will prove to be mistaken. The speech too conspicuously tries to represent "the ultimate expression of disinterested counsel" and thus betrays the interest behind it: the ideology of elders and fathers. There are things it appears to be trying not to say, not to "remember;' but that nevertheless slip through the rhetorical net. For example, the echo of Bolingbroke's English dessert figure throws his son's shadow across the speech: Lo, as at English feasts, so I regreet The daintiest last, to make the end most sweet. (r.3.67-68) As the last taste of sweets, is sweetest last, Writ in remembrance more than things long past.

The sad tale Gaunt is composing may be intended eventually to undeaf his son's ear, and subsequent phrases echoing passages in 1.3 suggest that Gaunt's elegiac performance is crossed and affected by his debate with Bolingbroke, and that the speech is a kind of replay of the debate. Two have already been noted: Gaunt's "This nurse, this teeming womb ofroyal kings" recalls Bolingbroke's farewell to "my mother and my nurse;' and the "precious stone" of England recalls "The precious jewel of thy home return." A fourth, the reference to England as an "other Eden, demi-paradise," recalls his illuminated image of bird musicians, flower ladies, and the "presence" of 1.3.288-91. "This fortress built by Nature for herself/ Against infection" (2.1.43-44) recalls and fends off an earlier supposition, "Devouring pestilence hangs in our air" (1.3.284). The supposition, like its referent, remains suspended by Gaunt's "self-indulgence and contrived delay of predication" as, clinging to the lost ideal through a twenty-line parade of Thises, he defers and aggravates the invective fever that erupts with the fury of an avenging angel at the thither boundary of his sentential paradise. 11 Perhaps my use of recalls in the previous paragraph is too vague. I don't wish to speculate about Gaunt's "consciousness" or intentions at this point. Whether or not he remembers earlier phrases would be interesting if it were determinable, but it is not. I prefer to say, therefore, that his language remembers earlier moments and conveys to us- as readers, actors, or spectators- the news that the speech act which the language represents is

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motivated, perhaps overdetermined, by the earlier speech acts it responds to. My preference presupposes a hierarchy in which the fundamental level of the play is the continuous language as text; this language represents the dialogical "sides" of fictive speech acts, and the speech acts in turn represent their speakers. 12 The two links between these levels are at once constitutive and open, providing the spaces for interpretive intervention. Thus I adopt the hypothesis that the character-for example, Gaunt-is a speech effect, and I view its conventional obverse (that the character is the cause of his speech) as a merely derivative and contingent hypothesis: only by prior interpretation of language and speech effects as such can I determine whether in any particular case causal distinctions can be made between, for example, what the speaker means to say and what his saying means. 13 Included in the purview of these prior interpretations are the words uttered by others in the speaker's presence. Theater people justly complain of the film and video tendency to isolate speakers in close-ups that exclude their interlocutors even though how an auditor listens may convey as much information as what a speaker says. In reading, we compensate by imagining the effect of N.s speech on B, listening with B's ears, and we inscribe the results of this audit in the accounts we render of B's language. We also do something else, something persistently encouraged by Shakespearean writing: we listen to B's language with B's ears; we premise that every interlocutory act is partly a soliloquy in which the speaker constitutes himself as the theater audience he shares confidences with or tries to persuade, affect, deceive. As readers we join B, or B joins us, in monitoring his speech acts. This perspective converts B's speech to continuous self-interpretation or -interrogation so that if at one level we posit Bas a speech effect, a character constituted by (our interpretation of) his speech, at another level B reproduces this posit by continuously representing and responding to himself as a speech effect. Yet there is a distinct limit as to what all this can tell us about B. Whether we listen with B's ears to B's speech or to N.s, the interpretive field we mark out necessarily includes the first two levelsthe language of the text and the fictive ·speech acts it represents- and is referred to the third level, the speaker as speech effect, but it may not extend very far into the speaker as a personlike character. We can find muffied signs of conflict or ambivalence in Gaunt's language without being able to determine the precise degree or nature of his awareness and intention. For the language is there, even if he isn't. These stipulations free up a more or less objectified region of speech acts embedded in such larger patterns of psychopolitical discourse as that which unfolds the structure of father/son relationships. When I say that the

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echoes noted above mark Gaunt's encomium, and the invective that follows it, as an ambivalent response to Bolingbroke's challenge; when I say that his speech is an act at once of competition and atonement, that it is Gaunt's appeal of Richard, I intend to make statements only about the generic speaker as an effect constituted by my reading of his language in the light of what I imagine him to have heard and assimilated. The language represents a particular set of objectified speech acts-competition, atonement, appealalong with the speaker/listener to whom they are deictically referred, and it can do this without offering any clues as to how the speaker's cognitive or psychic relation to those acts is to be specified. This interpretive space is left open for actors to occupy. But since unstaged fictive speakers are purely the effects of the linguistic representations ofspeech acts, their psyches are intermittent. Perhaps in this respect they differ from actual speakers; but perhaps not. At any rate, I shall continue to refer to Gaunt and "his" speech acts with the understanding that those references are at best imprecise articulations of what any speaker constituted by his words might be imagined to think, feel, intend, or in general be aware of. We can listen with Gaunt's ears to his first two speeches in 2.1 in order to isolate their reflexive quality. They then appear to produce a speaker trying to produce a different speaker, and to persuade both his interlocutor and himself that he is the second speaker rather than the first. The attempt at persuasion is signaled by redundancy, end-stopped aphoristic verse, and the varying and selective use .of rhyme. Prepared to end his silence and silence his guilt with wordy dying, he prefaces his English elegy with a small shower of consoling bromides: Methinks I am a prophet new inspir'd, And thus expiring do foretell of him: His rash fierce blaze of riot cannot last. For violent fires soon burn out themselves; Small showers last long, but sudden storms are short; He tires betimes that spurs too fast betimes; With eager feeding food doth choke the feeder; Light vanity, insatiate cormorant, Consuming means, soon preys upon itself. (2.1.31-39)

There is little to add to Friedman's able exposition of this speech. His comment on Gaunt's "delighted contemplation of the possible play on the word 'breath'" (285) in the first two lines reminds us that the speaker speaks and listens to himself with as much satisfaction as he displays in contemplating the inevitability of the doom he predicts and the variety of the maxims he can mobilize to lend credence to his claim to prophecy. ''As he

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contemplates Richard's actual behavior as king, his regard is that of the detached moralist, funded richly with the wisdom of experience and with the moral laws which received tradition has provided to characterize and judge the experience," and the vividness of his images is "appropriate to the act of condemnation" (286). What the rhetoric solicits and enjoys is the effect of the detached moralist, and I emphasize this because an unsolicited self-description disturbs the effect as soon as we take into account his own passive complicity in the folly he is condenming. "New inspir'd" euphemistically registers the belatedness of this truth-saying stance. And because it is belated, because it enacts an effort to dissociate himself from Richard's folly, because his inspiration is no sooner inhaled than it will be exhaled with his dying breath, the speech does not manage to secure the benefits of small showers. The fantasy of old England-another exculpatory actbriefly interrupts and prolongs the condemnation but is itself the foreplay producing the climax of a rhetorical storm that is sudden, violent, and short. The frustratingly protracted syntax analyzed by Friedman and Booth delays Gaunt's final appeal of Richard in the same way that he has himself delayed it until the moment of death. The hope that his "wholesome counsel" will be remembered "more than things long past" is overcharged with double cracks: it implies that there are things he doesn't want remembered. Not everyone would like his headstone to be inscribed with Malcolm's clubfooted praise: "Nothing in his life/ Became him like the leaving it." In staging his death, Gaunt tries to squeeze himself into his words as into his name, so that there will be nothing left outside the iconic death mask, no unruly surplus of ambivalence, guilt, desire, or unmeant meaning.14 Selfallegorization expresses the desire for the death preceding heraldic resurrection in the "name" that is wholly meaningful and wholly meant. Gauntfor-the-grave is the self-created icon of the victim and scapegoat who bears England's evils with him into the grave: That England that was wont to conquer others, Hath made a shameful conquest of itself. Ah, would the scandal vanish with my life. (2.1.65-67)

Friedman shrewdly remarks that Gaunt's "highly-colored portrait of a crusading band doing Christ's work . . . are not the words of a Christian knight, but those of a feudal nobleman to whom the reputation · of Christian chivalry is central to his conception of himself" (290). And it remains central at the moment of utterance, for it helps Gaunt depict himself as England's ransom, blessed Edward's son, surrounded by the "stubborn Jewry" of the Ricardian court. Thus he finally takes up the Duchess's and

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Bolingbroke's challenge and regains his place· in the genealogical order by pronouncing his malediction on Richard as both national slumlord and kin-murderer. It is crucial to the self-allegorizing strategy that he "die pronouncing it" (59): Join with the present sickness that I have, And thy unkindness be like crooked age, To crop at once a too long withered flower. Live in thy shame, but die not shame with thee! These words hereafter thy tormentors be! Convey me to my bed, then to my graveLove they to live that love and honor have. (132-38)

Death is the purifying closure. that secures his protective ensconcement in the perpetuity of the self-conferred name. Death is also the escape from the unmeant meaning that continues to wither the flower; it is the strategy of one who fears· he may not deserve the love and honor denied by those from whom he most wants themwho fears, therefore, to live in that shame. He knows the scandal will not vanish with his life. By the very logic of the allegorizing parallel he entertains- the passing of old England and old Gaunt- he is an instance of the self-conquest he criticizes. His complicity in England's·self-conquest is the burden of the appeal that Bolingbroke has displaced in the ritual challenge aimed through Mowbray at Richard. Gaunt's wordplay registers his entanglement in that network: "Now he that made me knows I see thee ill, I Ill in myself to see, and in thee, seeing ill" (93-94). The ill he sees in the bad son, Richard, is inextricable from the ill he sees in himself for having consented, as the Duchess said, "in some large measure" not only to his father's death in his brother's but also to the banishment of the good son who undertook- however indirectly and for whatever end- the challenge he refused to make. The strategy of dying is thus a form of ostrichism: having the last word and then sticking one's head forever into the sand. "These words hereafter thy tormentors be! I Convey me to my bed, then to my grave." To die is to escape from the vulnerability of the bodily presence and its exposure to the gaze, one's own as well as others'. Gaunt's image of the visual fast conveys his active share in this strategy in a manner that rubs against his representation of himself as a sacrificial victim: The pleasure that some fathers feed upon Is my strict fast- I mean my children's looks, And therein fasting hast thou made me gaunt. (79-8r)

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The syntactic dangle and awkward "thou" of the last line betray the attempt to stave off the pressure of an infelicitous figure whose argument is that the father voluntarily abstains from seeing and being seen by his children. The meaning of ocular avoidance has been discussed at length by Stanley Cavell in his classic essay on King Lear and need not be elaborated on here. 15 Gaunt dies to elude. the appeal of the mutual gaze expressed in the ambiguity of "looks" and muffied by the evasive plural, "children." His earlier response to Richard's abridgment of the sentence flinches in the same way: before the six years of exile are over, My oil-dried lamp and time-bewasted light Shall be extinct with age and endless night, My inch of taper will be burnt and done, And blindfold death not let me see my son, (1.3.221-24)

nor let his son see him; for· in the figure he is the source and object of visibility, and he imagines death primarily as the end of visibility. This expresses a complaint. Does it also express a hope? The relationship between Gaunt and his son remains shot through with silences. Gaunt's belated appeal cf Richard is an appeal to Bolingbroke: "My death's sad tale" is the testament he leaves in lieu of some less fictional if more painful gesture of atonement. No act of closure relieves the strictness of his fast. His ostrichism,. his choice of blindfold death, produces a rupture in "fair sequence and succession" because it amounts to a withholding of either blessing or curse, a refusal to confront or let his son confront the reality of what has transpired between them. He takes his death stance against youth, against sons, against the complicity and responsibility of fathers, against the forces in his own language that betray this stance as a mystification. His death is not a dying toward or into his son but a dying away from him that hoards his authority in the untransmittable name, Gaunt1or-the-grave. Dying as Old John of Gaunt, he refuses to yield up the ghost of Time-honored Lancaster. In this respect, there is no symbolic equivalent to ritual burial and mourning or revenge by which the paternal ghost is laid and his phallic authority passed on to the son. Thus when Richard seizes Bolingbroke's patrimony he only formalizes a rupture that had already been effected. His seizure displaces it in a melodramatic symbol, but one with proleptic force, since he will soon follow York into the paternal position occupied by Gaunt.

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Gaunt's first serious competitor in the ars moriendi is the Duchess of Gloucester, who runs a fast heat in r.2 after she tries to stoke up his guilt for his refusal to avenge her husband's murder. This scene has attracted attention chiefly for its expository and thematic functions. Gaunt, we learn, takes it for granted that Richard was responsible for Gloucester's murder. The Duchess is affiicted by a virulent strain of frustrated revenge, and when he declines to lance the swelling sore on grounds of Tudor Orthodoxy she suffers a critical attack. At first she comes back with strong words that accuse him of consenting In some large measure to thy father's death In that thou seest thy wretched brother die, Who was the model of thy father's life. Call it not patience, Gaunt, it is despair; In suff'ring thus thy brother to be slaught'red, Thou showest the naked pathway to thy life, Teaching stern murder how to butcher thee. That which in mean men we intitle patience Is pale cold cowardice in noble breasts. What shall I say? to safeguard thine own life, The best way is to venge my Gloucester's death. (1.2.26-36)

The first four lines glance at the subtle generational conflicts on which the Henriad will center, conflicts that displace the politics of fear from the naked pathway of murder to the hidden passages, "the tongueless caverns;' of guilt. But the last seven lines turn back toward the old order in which the Duchess remains locked. It is the naked vendetta world where, as in Woodstock and the first tetralogy, morality and politics are fully expressible by the melodramatic conventions of the theater of revenge, violence, and unburied fear. The Duchess's swan song at the end of the scene contains an unintended judgment on the values she cherishes and urges Gaunt to preserve, since her reference to "empty lodgings and unfurnish'd walls,/ Unpeopled offices, untrodden stones" (68-69) testifies to the principle that the quantity of unburied fear is directly proportional to the quantity of buried bodies. She nevertheless brushes aside the argument of nonresistance and asserts the primacy of kinship claims, and her obsessive desire of revenge leads her to put the ars moriendi into play when it becomes clear that Gaunt will not help out. The ars ·discloses itself in the several false exits she stages during the second half of the scene. These must be interpreted together with the demeanor we imagine for her silent interlocutor. To imagine Gaunt discomfited is to suspect that the grief-laden farewells not only express but also perform and display her feeling. Her language prolongs the display and

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serves up the grief for which she wants him to feel responsible, as if her consuming desire for revenge still seeks a target and turns its weary shadow on the man who now frustrates it. But this "weary shadow" is not unaffected by a notable decline into bathos of the verse that stretches it out: Just over half-way through scene two the Duchess declares the scene over: "Farewell, old Gaunt" (44); thereupon she goes on for eleven more lines, concluding with another farewell- this one extra final because it is in a rhymed couplet; Gaunt answers with a farewell couplet of his own ... [which is his] last in the scene. The Duchess thereupon continues the scene for another seventeen lines (58-74), lines which not only feel superfluous but include explicit reference to the inconclusiveness of formal conclusions: Yet one word more! Grief boundeth where it falls Not with empty hollowness but weight. I take my leave before I have begun, For sorrow ends not when it seemeth done ... (r.2.58-61) 16

The Duchess's sorrow does not keep her from indulging in a double luxury-first, of fitting it with a metaphor ("Grief boundeth where it falls"), and second, of using the next line to edit out an infelicitous connotation: although her grief continually bounces back up like a· ball, Gaunt is not to suppose it is hollow or empty. 17 The correction only accentuates the justice of the unedited image, for she goes on actively bouncing her grief in hollow couplets to toy with poor Gaunt, who is eager to get away (but not to go to Coventry), and she enjoys the lively false-exit game that keeps bouncing him back for more punishment. Her aggressively toned manner of lament hollows out her "tortur'd soul" by externalizing it, and she puts away her childish toy only after a final rebound leaves Gaunt with an icon to commemorate the effect of his "pale cold cowardice" (34): "Desolate, desolate, will I hence and die: j The last leave of thee takes my weeping eye" (73-74). These lines conclude the play's first and briefest exercise of the ars moriendi and, in so doing, illustrate the peculiar thematic force of Shakespeare's use of theatrical artifice. The speech that parades the Duchess's death also marks two other endings: it is an exit speech and a scene concluder. Rhymed couplets are effective signifiers of theatrical closure because the end-stopping that showcases the rhyme and symmetrizes the prosodic unit enhances the finality of aphoristic resolution. At the same time, it enhances the artifice of the scene concluder that shifts attention from dramatic (fictional) to theatrical space: the conspicuous formality is the playwright's invitation to the audience to relax for a brief interval and gather itself for the next dramatic movement. The artificiality of characters is momentarily

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focused; they speak on behalf of the play in its extrafictional (yet still aesthetic) theatrical matrix. Shakespeare makes this theatrical device impact on the portrayal of the fictional character. It would be a mistake to treat this metatheatdcally as a break in the illusion. This is partly because-for anyone who sees a play or reads it as a text to be staged- there is no illusion to be broken, since our double consciousness of actors playing characters is part of the game.18 But it is also because the Shakespeare text as an implicit dramaturgy reflects the theatrical "exterior" into the fictional "interior" so as to make theatrical devices interpret the motives, speech, and behavior of the characters. Thus the language the Duchess speaks represents her as someone who is not merely bidding farewell to Gaunt and to life but performing it "at" him as if she were going offstage, ending a scene, and, after protracting a part that is all too brief and unimportant, making her last moment in the play as memorable as she can. The redundant end-stopped couplet that both names and visualizes the emotion to be inscribed in Gaunt's conscience as an epitaph, a mortuary icon, dramatizes the intention to impose closure. The product of her performance of the ars moriendi discourse will be the abiding, simplified, allegorical figure of the Abandoned Victim who died as nobly as she lived, frustrated by the kinsman who should have upheld her cause. But this performance is not for Gaunt's benefit-or, more accurately, for his "benefliction"- alone. 19 Its megaphonic accents give it a public ring: it is uttered for All the World to hear, or overhear. To listen with Gaunt's ears is to imagine the embarrassment of one who has been left alone onstage with his shame exposed to the accusing gaze of posterity. If we respond to this performance by thinking, "It may work for Gaunt but it won't work for us," the scene will have succeeded. We will have registered the odd double effect of its theatricality. On the one hand, it is excessive in its staginess; the rhetoric hollows out the character and fills her with an actor's weight. On the other hand, the implicit analogy of death to a stage exit is a bathetic reduction; we are not supposed to be moved by it. This combination of hyperbole and (to coin a term) hypo bole distances the Duchess's grief and invites us to redirect our attention as spectators or our imagination as readers to the way Gaunt silently reacts. Whether or not the Duchess actually dies is inconsequential. And her death is inconsequential: it is casually dispensed with in a line in 2.2, and York, to whom she had commended herself, barely acknowledges it (97-99). What matters is that she has used her death. Hers is the language of one whose project is to give death meaning and offensive power by deploying the ars moriendi as a strategy in the victim's discourse. Her scene with Gaunt focuses on the use, not the fact, of death. The single unrhymed lines that periodically interrupt

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her couplets indicate the hesitation of someone feeling her way into the discourse and then finding the handle, gathering confidence, in the final sequence of three uninterrupted couplets. I think this is where the genius of the scene lies. If the Duchess's grief is distanced by her verse, we are nevertheless drawn to the innocence of an "aged" speaker who achieves competence in the ars moriendi discourse so rapidly but so late, who stumbles upon it with childlike relish as if it were a lively, gaudy, bouncing ball. The very limits of her execution make the scene affecting. The Aumerle conspiracy scenes produce a similar effect. The presence of an old duchess in 5.2-3 recalls her sister-in-law in r.2. Both duchesses assert the primacy of kinship claims and family loyalty over those of the monarchy. Both are treated sympathetically in the thematic register as spokeswomen for the values of a passing order, and they compare favorably with the moral pusillanimity of their male counterparts. But in the theatrical register they fare less well, since Shakespeare fades them out in clouds of fustian, and I think this is a signal that the kind of theater best suited to the older order~the theater of Richard III and the Henry VI plays-is also a thing of the past. There is, however, as Herbert Coursen has noted, a disjunctive analogy between the Duchess of Gloucester begging for revenge and the Duchess of York begging for pardon,20 and these opposed forms of an ars precandi (imprecation and prayer) suggest the relation of this archaic theater to the new theater of the second tetralogy.

+ The presence and relative silence of Gaunt in r.2 and Bolingbroke in 5. 3 speak to each other by speaking against the histrionic flamboyance that assaults them. That the muted bathos of r.2 is farcically intensified in 5.3 suggests how much more deeply the intervening action has driven the wedge between the thematic material that lends itself easily to theatrical discharge and the material that resists it and clings diffidently to the language of the text. The force behind the wedge is precisely the difference between the Duchess of Gloucester's theme of revenge and the Duchess of York's theme of pardon. That difference, which is also the difference between the first and second tetralogies, turns on the effect produced when the desire of revenge, along with the forms of narrative and theater it generates, is augmented and complicated by the desire (or need) of forgiveness. This changes the scene of revenge from the external drama of deferred or repeated violence, from the obsessional rhythm of plot and counterplot, to the internal drama of conscience. As the direction of revenge turns inward, pursuit becomes self-pursuit, flight becomes self-evasion, naked fear gives

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way to buried fear. Forgiveness itself can become a. form of revenge, and revenge, therefore, a form of forgiveness? 1 The basis of the difference is that one cannot forgive oneself. One can only be forgiven by others or by God for what one has done to others or to oneself. But to be forgiven by those one has wounded is always a threat, for it exposes one to the poison of the gift. It deepens the wound of conscience. "I gave you all" must be fended off by "in good time you gave it." "You have some cause" is painfully disarmed by "No cause, no cause." But if one can't forgive oneself, one can take revenge on oneself. And if one can't bring oneself directly to it, one can dare or seduce others to perform the nasty service. This has the advantage of allowing one to contemn them if they reject the challenge and of justifying oneself in displacing aggression to them if they take it up; and if they take it up there is an added bonus, which is that one can enjoy the savor of one's victimage. One always looks, in Portia's words, for "my vantage to exclaim on you." The disadvantage of this strategy is that it can hardly fail to increase self-contempt or remorse, making the desire for forgiveness more intense even as it seems more futile. This interior dialectic cannot easily be staged, cannot even be persuasively verbalized in the rhetoric of the historical tragedy of Shakespeare's time. It confounds theatrical embodiment and resists theatrical closure. Its tempo is slow, its passages devious and deep. It can be represented only in narrative and theatrical forms that somehow manage to signal their inadequacy to the task by marking themselves as displacements, condensations, visualizations of a buried fear or an "other grief." Such fear or grief cai.J.not possibly be discharged in a scene; it wants to be amortized, and so we may perhaps speak of an ars admortiendi as well as an ars moriendi. It is by mixing these two arts and increasing the proportion of the former that we establish the surface-to-depth continuum of practices. The Duchess of Gloucester does not amortize her grief but pays it out in a lump sum. Her version of the ars moriendi is thus a caricature that announces the presence of the practice in the play. As a culturally constructed discourse, the ars invades her language, performs itself through her speech in a manner that makes it easy to recognize and label, surfaces and discharges itself with a rapidity that reduces her to little more than a Jamesian ficelle, a reflector of the discourse, a silver foil that sets it off. Then, in 1.3, the discourse gradually passes into Gaunt's language, briefly submerges, and decelerates its tempo until it flares up and consumes itself in 2. I. Thereafter the discourse sputters intermittently on the surface of the play in the reflectors provided by the Duke and Duchess of York. But this is not its true destination. The more powerful operation of the ars moriendi is reserved for the language of speakers who do

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not claim the prerogative of age, and whom I can only mention here, since their conduct of the discourse goes well beyond the present topic. 22 The career of Richard II is represented from the beginning as a profoundly devious ars moriendi, at once bitter and self-amused, tasting the mockery of the "sweet way" to despair, self-vindictively defying the augury of damnation. The legacy he leaves to the heir and usurper he has appointed, the son he has adopted, is the long, slow, poignant duree of Bolingbroke's ars moriendi. The "sequence and succession" of these two dying regimes binds the first three plays and malingers festering in the famous victories of the fourth. Emblem: Even through the hollow eyes of death I spy life peering. (2.1.270-71)

CHAPTER I I

+ What Did the King Know and When Did He Know It? Shakespearean Discourses and Psychoanalysis

Ambivalence, guilt, aggressivity, masochism, sexuality, displacement, projection, desire, repression; fantasies of omnipotence, emasculation, violation, terrible fathers, terrible mothers, terrible sons and siblings. Any short list of the themes psychoanalytic interpreters focus on will make it obvious that those themes have been around since the earliest cultural texts and didn't need to wait for psychoanalysis to pick them out. So the question is always, what difference do specifically psychoanalytic readings make, and how useful are they? Given the co-constitutive relation of data and conceptual frameworks, how transferable are psychoanalytic·paradigms to systems whose interdependent components are constituted differently? And within the range of those paradigms, are some more useful and usable than others? In this essay I shall indicate my own choice by proposing an approach to Shakespeare that derives aid and comfort from Lacan's critical revision of the paradigms developed by Freud's followers. The hypothesis that underwrites the approach is that many of the themes listed in my first sentence are unfolded by the Shakespeare text into a dynamic field of interpenetrating motivational patterns whose varied linguistic representations I shall call discourses. This term is sufficiently overworked and distended to demand the rough attempt at a definition that occurs on pp. 222-28 below. Since the definition I pose is modeled partly on the Wittgensteinian notion of language-game, it follows that its focus will be on patterns that are, so to speak, public property, circulating through the community of the play and traversing the language of indi-

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vidual speakers, whom I conceive as the operators but not the owners of their discursive practices. The analysis of the discourses to be considered will be governed by the related premise that speakers are the effects rather than the causes both of the language assigned to their names and of the interpretations we give that language. This premise is strictly methodological in intent and implies no attitude toward agency. That is, its purpose is not to reduce speakers to mere passive sites of discursive activity but to establish the principle that the analysis of language should precede the analysis of its cognitive or psychological relation to its speaker-that the semiotic and psychological dimensions of textual analysis should be kept distinct, as in practice they often are. It is a common occurrence for readers to agree on the meaning of a particular passage but subsequently to disagree as to its psychological disposition. Consider, for example, the line that concludes the troubled king's insomnia soliloquy in Part Two of Henry IV: "Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown" (3.1.31). In this, his first appearance in the play, Henry moves quickly from an allusion to his guilty conscience as the cause of insomnia to a more consoling emphasis on the burdens of state that keep a king awake while his subjects, free of such cares, sleep soundly. Readers who agree with this description of the speech will have no difficulty agreeing that lies functions as a pun, and that the last line in effect comments on the evasion that diverts attention from the real source of care: "uneasy lies the head that stole the crown." But will those readers go further and agree on Henry's relation to the statement? Is he aware or unaware of the pun? Is the utterance a piece of mordant and self-lacerating irony? Is the pun something he suddenly stumbles on and recognizes? Does it signify something he is trying to block? Or is he unaware, does he remain unaware, that his language is giving him away? What did the king know and when did he know it? For a not very satisfactory answer to these questions, see the conclusion to this essay. Questions of this kind will always be open to controversy, but I think it reduces confusion and more sharply circumscribes the area of useful controversy to dissociate them from semiotic questions. The decision to confer ambiguous status on the word lies may be influenced by speculations about the speaker's state of mind or conscience, but it is in itself strictly a semiotic decision, a matter of linguistic and rhetorical interpretation that differs from and- in terms of methodological sequence- precedes any psychological disposition readers may make of it. The claim to be able to distinguish between meant and unmeant meaning in every case of ambiguous language presupposes a consistent knowledge of the speaker such that the boundary between awareness and un-

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2!3

awareness can always be determined. And interpretive experience shows that this is simply not possible, that a consistent inconsistency in these matters is the best policy. Yet the consistent ambivalence or ambiguity of the language can still be demonstrated. It could be demonstrated even if the text had no "sides" and appeared as a continuous monologue. Hence the interpretation of textual ambiguity is theoretically prior to and separable from the interpretation of the speaker's relation to that ambiguity. My point in emphasizing this is to nudge toward the status of a regulative principle the idea that we may reach consensus on the meaning of a given stretch of utterance yet still differ in our assessments of what the speaker intends by it and whether he hears or is aware of what readers see in his language. And these "assessments"- the word is too modest- are in fact acts of construction by which the interpreter transforms a speaker into a character (a fictional person). A finite range of possible characters is embedded in the language assigned a speaker. One of those characters is what the speaker will become-or, to state it more accurately, what the speaker will have become- as the result of a particular interpretive dialogue between reader, actor, director, or spectator, and the text. Thus, to modify the stipulative premise announced above, speakers as characters are the effects rather than the causes of their language and our interpretation. It may already be obvious that the commitments expressed so far may prove more congenial to a Lacanian than to a Freudian paradigm of psychoanalytic interpretation. In the next section I shall make this allegiance more explicit by distinguishing between the two paradigms and exploring some of the problems that arise when interpreters of Shakespeare rely on Freudian assumptions .

•

Lacan's critique and revision of the relation of the language of psychoanalysis to its explanatory schemes get discussed several times a month around the world and can do without still another airing. I therefore confine myself to mentioning the two features of the critique that bear directly on my argument. The first is that in the analytical dialogue the cognitive function of language is instrumental to its performative function -what words mean is instrumental to what they do-and that the analyst no less than the analysand may be in the dark about the work being accomplished in the dialogue. 1 The second is that epigenetic models of development founded on "considerations of instinct or naturalness or biological destiny" 2 shouldin accordance with the logic of the future anterior that governs the dialogue- be shifted from the register of the signified to that of the signifier so that they may become instruments rather than objects of inquiry:

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For the function of language is not to inform but to evoke .... I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it like an object. What is realized in my history is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process ofbecoming. 3

To carry through this shift is to denaturalize and refictionalize such master narratives as those excerpted here: We have arrived at our knowledge of this psychical apparatus by studying the individual development of human beings. To the oldest of these mental provinces or agencies we give the name of id. It contains everything that is inherited, that is present at birth, that is fixed in the constitution -above all, therefore, the instincts, which originate in the somatic organization and which find their first mental expression in the id.... This oldest portion of the mental apparatus remains the most important throughout life.4 Human beings in dealing with each other repeat the patterns they have developed in their relations to "significant others," and these patterns of relationships ultimately go back to those which the individual has developed toward the earliest "significant others": father, mother, siblings, nurses, etc. Such repetitions ... are the empirical referents of the transference concept.5 We are faced here by the great enigma of the biological fact of the duality of the sexes: for our knowledge it is something ultimate, it resists every attempt to trace it back to something else. Psychoanalysis has made no contribution toward solving this problem, which clearly falls entirely within the province of biology.6

The familiar responses to these assertions have come in various voices, but all insist on repositioning the narratives from the essentialized state and processes of nature to the culture-specific state and processes of discourse: There's no discourse that is not make-believe?

Hypotheses non jingo means that only discourses ex-sist.8 If only they would throw themselves deliberately and unequivocally into myth in all its majesty. If only they would dare to adopt the fairy-tale form. If only an analyst's story could start with "Once upon a time ...." But of course not: since they insist on describing everything, on making a pale replica of a scientific ideal confronted with the imaginary, whose mechanisms are themselves strongly interwoven with literary history, they can't go beyond the nineteenth century. As if they had discovered it, as if they were putting the real essence of their experience into their transcriptions.9 The humanistic conception of mankind assumes that the subject exists from the beginning. At least by implication ego psychologists, object-relations

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2!5

theorists and Kleinians base themselves on the same premise. For this reason, Lacan considers that in the last analysis,. they are more ideologues than theorists of psychoanalysis. In the Freud that Lacan uses, neither the unconscious nor sexuality can in any degree be pre-given facts, they are constructions; that is, they are objects with histories and the human subject itself is only formed within these histories. 10 From the very beginning, indeed, literature has been for psychoanalysis not only a contiguous field of external verification in which to test its hypotheses and to confirm its findings, but also the constitutive texture of its conceptual framework, of its theoretical body. The key concepts of psychoanalysis are.references to literature, using literary "proper" names-names of fictional characters (Oedipus complex, Narcissism) or of historical authors (masochism, sadism). Literature, in other words, is the language which psychoanalysis uses in order to speak of itself. ... In the same way that psychoanalysis points to the unconscious ofliterature, literature, in its turn, is the unconscious ofpsychoanalysisY This citational muster lines up the opposing factions most relevant to the conflict I want to address. My formulation of the theory of discourses owes much to the flood of studies that, during the last two decades, have applied psychoanalytic concepts to the contradictions of gender and generation that energize Shakespeare's representations of the family romance. At the same time, in order to appropriate their insights, I have often been forced to extricate them from what I believe to be a disabling reliance on the epigenetic or developmental paradigm and its commitment to "biological destiny." The thesis I hope to block is illustrated in general form by the following comment: We do not see Hamlet at his mother's breast, or Leontes learning to walk. Yet we can be confident, from the resonance of the poet's imagery and characterization, that he thought of them as human beings whose adult selves were shaped by the experience of growing up within a family. They speak in its modes of eating and spitting out, they echo its delusions of omnipotence and fears of abandonment. Their utterances and their conflicts spring from the residue of early life. While it would be reductive to translate the intricate action of a Shakespearean play into the terms of infantile experience, oedipal or pre-oedipal, seeing that experience as the source of the action helps us understand its inner coherence. This thesis allows the author to combine gender theory with pre-Oedipal theory in a genetic explanation of the central conflict of the history plays: Associating phallic consciousness with upright mobility, the boy is strongly motivated to turn away from his mother and toward his father. . . . His father ... can help the child resist reengulfment with the mother. In the his-

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tory plays, the intensity of the son's identification with the father measures the strength of the pull toward suchreengulfment, and the son's difficulty in separating from the mother.12

The susceptibility of such an approach to the genetic and essentialist fallacies has been ably pointed out by Lisa Lowe in an important essay on Coriolanus. Lowe stresses the difference between treating the mother-son relationship as a genetic cause, "a literary 'case study' from which we must draw the conclusion that overwhelming mothers always produce warrior sons," and treating it as a fantasy that is "a 'symptom' of cultural anxieties, particular to Elizabethan England, about the impossibility of achieving an absolute singular manhood ... , perhaps a male 'nightmare' which exaggerates feminine power to provide an explanation of these anxieties." Noting that one effect of the pre-Oedipal slant in feminist readings by Kahn, Janet Adelman, and (to a lesser extent) Madelon (Gohlke) Sprengnether is to scapegoat the mother, she argues that "if psychoanalysis becomes the exclusive means of explaining gender, it de-politicizes the family, and obscures the extent to which social, cultural and political circumstances influence family .structure." Lowe offers instead a reading that situates the gender issue squarely within the play's representation of those circumstances: The psychoanalytic critics have argued that Coriolanus inherits his violence from his mother's lessons. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to venture that both the son and the mother, as well as the patricians and plebeians and other members of the play's community, assume, perform, and develop the violent warrior ethos which already circulates within the language of the play. Volumnia's speech is not significantly more violent than that of other characters in the play, but as Coriolanus's mother, her words are overestimated. It is largely her position in the play, as "the" mother, coupled with her distinctly nonmaternal speech, which allows her to be interpreted as the "bad" mother and as such, the cause of Coriolanus's demise. 13

One of the advantages .of shifting psychoanalytic themes from causal to effectual and structural frameworks of interpretation is that it renders gratuitous the appeal to epigenetic accounts, which -whatever their "truthvalue" -seduce the reader into seeking explanations that have no warrant in the text and ignoring those that do. Some examples of the differences these frameworks can make follow. In the last section of a long chapter on- and a strong reading ofMeasure for Measure, Richard Wheeler attributes the failure of its comic resolutions to Shakespeare's circumvention of "the specter that shapes symbolic action throughout the drama of the tragic period," "an image of woman

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that no particular, female character can embody. . . . The experience of the tragic protagonist is shaped by an imaginary specter of woman, outside the masculine order of law, who seduces, betrays, usurps, castrates, ... who ultimately demands death, and from whom life can be freed only by tragic action that sacrifices the most manly of men- and often the best of women-to her." 14 This observation is testable in terms of the approach suggested by Lowe: Wheeler treats the fantasy of woman as "a 'symptom' of cultural anxieties" about manhood which is represented· in the language of the plays. He later makes some perceptive remarks on the way Richard II "collaborates in his own destruction" and on the way "the self-assured and instinctively powerful Bolingbroke" is reduced by his guilt to a king who "survives in a state of anxious suspension, continually affirming a role he can neither fill nor abandon" (159). But instead of trying to show how Richard's collaboration- his peiformance of his destruction- creates the specter of the royal victim that haunts and enervates Henry IV, Wheeler shifts to the epigenetic framework: "Henry IV's deterioration and death purge in a context of public destiny the most primitive layer of guilt in the individual psyche, which is rooted in an infant's murderous, devouring rage against a mother and the fantasies of retaliation in kind that such rage engenders" (163, my italics). The italicized phrase alludes to a previous statement: "In the main power struggles of these plays, the heritage of conflict centered in oedipal and preoedipal relations to a mother tends to be absorbed into symbolic objects of political loyalties and anxieties and only indirectly into relations among characters," and the maternal role is displaced to England (r62). The undemonstrable emphasis on Henry's bond to his mother diverts attention from his more obvious bond to Richard- his bondage to the specter of Richard- and the· equally demonstrable, though carefully muffled, bond to his father. This makes it harder for Wheeler to appreciate either the effect of those bonds on·Henry's interlocutory struggles with his son or the dark resonance of the specter of those struggles in Henry V. In his opinion. that play is weakened because the political displacement excludes "from Hal's direct experience the dimension of conflict and need that builds on potentialities established in a child's relation to a mother" (r62). Two comments by Wheeler suggest the importance he places on the presence of mothers among the dramatis personae as a criterion of aesthetic judgment: Shakespeare creates "an expanded reality" in the tragedies and "a greatly expanded range of conflict" in Hamlet (191) by staging "anxieties and hazards that derive from the bond to the mother" (167). The displacement of conflict takes its toll on Henry V: "by insulating the prince from psychic hazards that will qualify the autonomy of Shakespeare's tragic heroes"

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(164), the play "ceremoniously resolves the political troubles of the second tetralogy at the expense of flattening their human content" (167). Appeal to the epigenetic criterion leads Wheeler to ignore the textual indications of the "psychic hazards" that "qualify" and problematize the figure of Henry V, making him the subject of perennial critical controversy. The Henriad, Wheeler writes, "centers on royal inheritance complicated by patricidal motives in relations to actual and symbolic fathers" (158). Commentators from Franz Alexander and Ernst Kris to the present have discussed Prince Harry's "parricidal" impulses. It isn't difficult to educe from a close reading of his language the presence of hostile or aggressive reactions to his father, the anxieties they arouse, and the mounting stridency of displaced aggression/anxiety whose climax in the fourth play makes Henry V powerful, complex, and compelling. But traces of a desire to kill the father would be harder to find, and from this standpoint the word parricidal could be dismissed as hyperbolic.15 Of course the commentators insist that the parricidal impulse is "unconscious," and later in this essay I shall confront the premises that support the claim, the premises (r) that any speaker in the Shakespeare text "has" an unconscious and (2) that critics can specify with assurance which meanings in any utterance are conscious or intended and which are unconscious or unintended. At this point, _however, I only want to observe that parricidal often functions as a code word or metonym for the Oedipal conflict, and that it therefore implicates consideration, first, of the Oedipal triangle, and second, of childhood and the epigenetic paradigm. One odd consequence of this implication is that it occasionally leads critics to explain their evaluations of plays in terms of the adequacy or inadequacy· with which the triangle is represented. Kris tried to defend against this tendency in comparing the oedipal conflict of Harry with that ofHamlet: · · In Hamlet the oedipus is fully developed, centering around the queen. In Shakespeare's historical dramas women are absent or insignificant .... The psychological plausibility of Prince Hal as a dramatic character is not inferior to that of Hamlet, whatever the difference in depth and dramatic signijicance of the two plays may be. While only one part of the oedipal conflict is presented, the defenses which Prince Hal mobilizes in order to escape from his internal predicament are well known from the clinical study of male youths. 16

In spite ofKris's even-handed treatment, the first italicized phrase opens up a loophole for evaluative comparison, while the second· defends "psychological plausibility" by resorting to an irrelevant criterion ("clinical study") in order to compensate for the truncation of Oedipal conflict. Wheeler

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(159-63) repeats and expands Kris's argument only to reverse its emphasis. As we saw, he blames the inferiority of Henry Von that truncation. A m~ch fuller, subtler, and more appreciative reading of Henry V appears in C. L. Barber's The Whole journey, left unfinished at his untimely death and completed by Wheeler. Yet even here, passages of brilliant interpretation are punctuated by qualifying assessments similar to those in Wheeler's study, such as the statement that "[Henry V] uses (or through him Shakespeare uses) allegiances formed on the model of brotherhood as a way of avoiding confrontation with the Oedipal motives that we can see developing in the Henry IV plays and that will come to full tragic expression in Hamlet." This "developmental perspective . . . does not invalidate the direct vision of war that Henry V dramatizes" or the success with which "Shakespeare has shielded his hero king" from the Oedipal encounter with the "unfinished business of an earlier stage of life," yet the related "need for ruthless male assertion" served by the war "shapes and limits dramatic understanding." It isn't until Hamlet that the author dares to join his protagonist in representing and reexperiencing "the full stress of the Oedipal situation." 17 The epigenetic model enabling one to distinguish and characterize stages in the life cycle from infancy to adulthood may be used to organize data in a scheme that facilitates description of the stages and cycle. But for obvious reasons it lends itself equally well to the activity of moral judgment and evaluation. Terms like maturity and immaturity hover uneasily between descriptive and evaluative status. So, in commenting on Henry's command to kill the prisoners, Barber and Wheeler suggest that what repels us is not cruelty or ruthlessness as such, but the precarious sexual immaturity that motivates them. It is the use Henry makes of war in the service of unacknowledged inner conflict that puts us off, even as the play invites our assent. Shakespeare, to put it bluntly, is ennobling the psychology characteristic of an adolescent gang .... The kind of group interaction mobilized in Henry V can provide a defense against the failure to have adequately internalized the father and with this the ability to deal in a whole human way with sexuality. (227, my italics)

This failure occurs because Henry- "or through him Shakespeare" -avoids "confrontation with ... Oedipal motives" (231), as he had at his father's deathbed when he regressed to "the sort of uncritical identification of son with father appropriate to a much earlier moment, the beginning of the latency period, not the end of youth and the assumption of manhood" (233). Barber and Wheeler seem unwilling to explore the possibility that the play

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does not invite our assent to what they see as Henry's immaturity, that indeed it represents his inner conflict in considerable textual detail, represents it as unacknowledged, and directs attention to the effects of that lack of acknowledgment on Henry's language and behavior. In spite of their largely successful effort to give Henry V a proper hearing, or reading, they extend the charge of immaturity from Henry to the play and its author, and thus, shifting back and forth between description of what the play does and evaluation of what it fails to do, they tend to impose the closure of premature (not immature) judgment on a play that critically dramatizes such a tendency. This confusion seems at least partly motivated by the project of double epigenesis in which the development_al profile and relative "maturity" of the hero are coupled to those of the author. My concern is not to criticize· the coupling, the riskiness of which Barber and Wheeler show themselves well aware, but to use it as an illustration of the problem I want to address in the remainder of this essay. If only for the sake of argument, let's assume that the author of Shakespeare's plays was a real person, and that there is enough evidence about his life to enable him to be a subject of psychoanalysis. Then there may well be valid controversy as to which of the two perspectives I outlined earlier-the Freudian or the Lacanian- to put into play; controversy as to whether, in interrogating the evidence (or the subject, or his language), epigenetic themes and narratives should be accorded the position of signifier or signified. Butand this is the point of this little exercise-in the case of a fictional speaker, a dramatis persona, I submit that even with strong, persuasive readings like that of Barber and Wheeler, reliance on the Freudian perspective and the epigenetic model elicits forms of explanation that are inappropriate, untestable, arbitrary, and, above all, antipolitical in the sense indicated by Lisa Lowe when she argues that they divert attention from present (as opposed to past) sources of conflict, anxiety, and fantasy inscribed "within the language of the play" and circulating through its community. How, then, can we formulate an approach that will avail itself of insights drawn from psychoanalysis while blocking the epigenetic fallacy illustrated in the examples discussed above? The first step is to put into play a revised version of the radical stipulation, stated above, that speakers are the effects rather than the causes of their language and our interpretation: in the unperformed Shakespeare text there are no characters, no persons, no bodies, no interiorities; there are only dramatis personae, the masks through which the text speaks. At most the unperformed text offers material for an interpretation, a portrait, a set of portraits, that readers, actors,

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directors, and playgoers construct. Speakers don't have bodies, age, insomnia, corpulence, or illness unless and until they mention them, and when they do it is usually in the service of some discourse in which states of the body are signifiers used to mystify moral effects as physical causes. Speakers don't have childhoods unless and until they mention them. If, for example, John of Gaunt never mentions his youth, then he has and had no youth, no childhood whose critical events the analytical dialogue may recuperate and revise by the light of the future anterior. Speakers in Shakespeare texts, as in others, don't necessarily die. Some do. But others just stop; they leave the text or the stage and don't come back. Why, then, do some ofthem die? Not because they died, say, in Holinshed, but because their death is · the object of their desire, their response to the conflict of discourses. When John of Gaunt flaunts his age and dies, it is to ensconce himself in the complex discursive scenario I have elsewhere called the ars moriendi discourse. He is conspicuously old not because he is no longer young, or because he was old in Holinshed, but because he is moved to activate the weakling's plea, senility, and to use Tillyard's traditional world-picture as an excuse for his refusal to challenge Richard or support his son's cause. The aging body emerges in language as a signifier and trope- a metonymy of displacement-enabling the speaker to fend off awareness of his active complicity.18 Early in 2 Henry IV Falstaff alludes to the displacement function of physical disease while describing Henry's illness to the Chief Justice. The king, he says, suffers "a kind of lethargy, . . . a kind of sleeping in the blood, a whoreson tingling" that originates "from much grief, from study, and perturbation of the brain; I have read the cause of his effects in Galen, it is a kind of deafness" (r.2.IIO-I6). He distinguishes this from his own willful pretense of deafness, "the disease of not listening, the malady of not marking" (12o-2I). Falstaff's Galenic rumor parodies the "smooth comforts false" (Induction 40) of medical knowledge. His repeated "a kind of" detaches him from the diagnosis and teases us with a veiled allusion to "some other grief" (Ind. 13) more closely connected to "the disease of not listening." Dis-ease is also uneasiness; the uneasiness produced by turning a deaf ear to what one's words are doing-such words, for example, as "uneasy lies the head that wears the crown." Lafew's comment on the doctors trying to cure the king in All's Well That Ends Well delivers the message in more direct and generally applicable form: "we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves in seeming knowledge when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear" (2.3.3-6). In 2 Henry IV the figure of Rumor, itself (herself? himself?) a displacement, gloats over the power its mastery of the trope of

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displacement gives it to enforce the self-deception of the Lafew principle on the community of the play by diverting attention from what Henry calls t h e ""mward wars " (3.1.107) : I speak of peace, while covert enmity Under the smile of safety wounds the world; And who but Rumor, who but only I, Make fearful musters, and prepar' d defence, Whiles the big year, swoln with some other grief, Is thought with child by the stern tyrant War, And no such matter? (Ind. 9-rs) From Rumor's tongues They bring smooth comforts false, worse than true wrongs. (Ind. 39-40)

Since year in line 13 can function as a dialectal form of ear (and does so at 1.2.194 in the Quarto version of Falstaff's encounter with the Chief Justice), Rumor's figure of false pregnancy engendered from without may be reinterpreted as both Henry's and fat Falstaff's disease of not listening toin Richard II's words- "the unseen grief/ That swells with silence in the tortur'd soul" (Richard II 4.1.297-98). The question Falstaff and Lafew raise about Inside Dopesters in medical science strikes me as similar to the question Lacan raises about the postFreudian drift of psychoanalysis, and this suggests that Lacan's critique may contain a lesson for interpreters of Shakespeare. Crudely put, the lesson is that you can't situate a Shakespearean pathology in a conceptual framework of instinct, naturalness, organic function, or biological destiny. T~at framework only provides a set of signifying functions, material for the tropes of displacement, condensation, and visualization that manifest the latency of the "unknown fear;' or of the mysterious "other grief" Rumor alludes to. This is, as I noted, the first step in an approach whose objective is to reposition the themes, methods, concepts, and insights of psychoanalysis in a framework that avoids the problems caused by the epigenetic fallacy. In outlining it I have already used the term discourse several times without bothering to define it. The second and more important step will be to define it. This is the task of the next section, after which I shall give an account of the theory of discourses, and illustrate it in stretches of interpretation.

+ Discourse is the sort of modest, recessive term people use to define and discuss other things without bothering to define and discuss it. As a re-

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sult it has become an all-purpose instrument denoting anything from the narrow confines of a speech event to the amplitude of social and political practices. Benveniste centers the term on agency and self-reference; Foucault, on structure and power; Greimas, on the deep structure of value systems; others, on the inscription of ideology; still others, on the alterity or citationality or intertextuality of all linguistic performances.19 True to its etymology, the term runs incessantly back and forth across the field of meaning. What moved me to put it into play were two recent events in the history of the term and of my encounters with it, both of them involving gestures toward a definition. The first occurs in Catherine Belsey's Critical Practice, the second in Keir Elam's Shakespeare~ Universe of Discourse. Belsey's is an almost casual definition given during the course of an argument defending the claims of modern literary theory against those of a commonsense view of reading: discourse is "a domain of language-use, a particular way of talking (and writing and thinking)" that "involves certain shared assumptions which appear in the formulations characterizing it." 20 What interests me about this· is the way she deploys the two examples she uses to illustrate the definition: she notes that common sense is one such domain of language use, and modern physics another, and that "some of the formulations of the one may be expected to conflict with the formulations of the other" (5). This coupling is loaded. In Belsey's account, because common sense is inscribed in everyday language it presents itself as "obvious," "natural," "non-theoretical," as "the collective and timeless wisdom" that seems (like the word of God) "to be the source and guarantee of everything we take for granted" (2-5). Although Belsey doesn't spell it out, her reference to modern physics fixes on an example of discourse that presents itself as theoretical and counterintuitive, the product of an emergent •specialization of knowledge that developed under historically specific conditions. Furthermore, modern physics presents itself as a challenge to what common sense tells us to take for granted. This contrast suggests why Belsey goes on to say that "ideology" (which she uses in its Althusserian sense) "is inscribed in discourse" (5). Clearly, common sense and modern physics are not only two discourses; they instantiate two different kinds or levels of discourse. Yet this apparent difference, along with its apparent clarity, are themselves products of the commonsense view of the matter. Belsey's thesis, the argument served by the definition and examples, is that a commonsense approach to literature is no less discursive, ideological, interested, and culture-specific than a view which, like modern science, appears to violate common sense because informed by theoretical premises that are explicit and counter-

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intuitive. What the two have in common may be expressed by saying that "the discourse of x" is a formula that marks any "domain of language-use" as a social construction rather than a fact of nature. A discourse is an interpretation rather than a reflection of "experience." This agrees in spirit with the Lacanian position outlined in the last section. On the one hand, "There's no discourse that is not make-believe." On the other hand, since this is so, and since "Nature" is itself the name of a discourse, some makebelieve discourses are more real than others, and though all discourses may be make-believe, they need not have been feigned: "Hypotheses non fingo means that only discourses ex-sist." The difference between the two levels of discourse is that one is implicit and the other explicit. Discourses are explicit when they are culturally recognized as specific domains of language use, as the products of specifiable human agency (collective or individual or both), and as traditional or countertraditional bodies of practice and systems of interpretation. Implicit discourses-those, for example, of common sense, racism, colonialism, and sexism- conceal this recognition, whereas explicit discourses embrace and proclaim it. Explicit discourses (science, criticism, literature, law, drama, cosmology, medicine, anthropology, etc.) may well reinforce and participate in implicit discourses. But they may also bring out that implicit discursivity by representation, interpretation, and critique.21 Thus the implicit discourse of common sense tells us stories about ourselves and the world, and does so in a way that elicits our belief. The explicit discourse of physics challenges some of those stories and exposes their discursive character. We may still believe the stories, but we do so against the dissonant hum of a cultural undertone that tells us they are perceptual interpretations and that even perception, because it is linguistically informed, is "ideologically and discursively constructed, rooted in a specific historical situation, and operating in conjunction with a particular social formation." 22 This account may be linked to Shakespearean practice by passing briefly through another definitional context. The distinction between discourse and story appears in narratological theory: story is what is told, discourse is the telling; story is the sum total of plots, events, characters, etc., that is, the fictional "world" that can be imagined apart from the particular medium (or "substance") and narrative form in which it is represented, while discourse is the sum of narrative strategies that effect and affect the representation. Whatever its flaws (and it has flaws), the distinction is useful in highlighting the active character of discourse. It reminds us that discourse is an interpretation of the story it tells and that to abstract it from the story makes it possible to focus on the agency of the (individual or collective) teller. To go

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a step further, the most interesting instances of the storyJdiscourse distinction occur when the opposition is transgressed by discursive strategies that represent the story being told as itself a discourse, an interpretation and not merely a neutral transmission of its fictive "world" or "experience." This is, for example, a standard feature of literature whose representations of love stories include intertextual allusions to courtly, Petrarchan, Ovidian, and Neoplatonic interpretations of love. Here the phrase "discourse of love" translates into "interpretation of a story," and the burden of the interpretation is that the story is itself an interpretation: its point is that the story of love is not told by nature, or, if it is, it is one that has been radically mediated by the discursive strategies of gendered human agency; the story of love is critically represented as both a discourse about gender and a discourse authorized by the gender that controls the site of narration. The Shakespeare text often works in such a transgressive manner. While maintaining the distinction between what is told and how it is told, its metatheatrical and metaliterary strategies tend to dissolve the conceptual boundary separating story as a given from discourse as an interpretation of the given. Within the community of the play, the stories speakers tell each other and themselves about love, war, kingship, generational conflict, death, senescence, heroism, and the family drama are marked in this manner. In centering on the active character of discourse, the narratological concept encourages us to see that it is performative as well as informative, or constative, or cognitive; that it not only represents but also transforms what it represents; and that it is performative not only with respect to the stories it tells but also with respect to its recipients or addressees, who may include the teller. The activity of language as discourse is the subject ofKeir Elam's Shakespeare's Universe of Discourse. Elam notes that discourse is Shakespeare's favorite word in the comedies for "language in use" and on display, language as a form of action, and language as a "tangible presence" and a performed dramatic object? 3 From this he goes on to develop a view of Shakespearean discourse modeled on Wittgenstein's language-game concept. What he does with both Wittgenstein and Shakespeare is disappointing from an interpretive standpoint, but I find the connection suggestive, and I shall now take it in a direction different from his by briefly reviewing aspects of the notion of language-game that overlap Belsey's notion of discourse.24 Wittgenstein introduced the term language-game to connect forms of talk with what he called "forms of life," a phrase that, behind its vagueness, denotes the collectively, socially, culturally, institutionally constructed ambience of language use. He opposed this concept to the so-called privatelanguage argument in order to shift the focus of attention from the mental

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states of the individual to the outward criteria of observable discursive behavior correlated with specific bodies of community practice.25 The value of this move for my purposes is that it puts the emphasis on describable kinds of language-games situated primarily in the culture of the community and only secondarily in the individual. In that respect the notion of language-game has conceptual affinities with that of "the discourse of the other;' understood in the broad sense that extends its scope beyond the domain of the unconscious to that of the society's instituted processes, whether economic or political or medical or legal or literary or theatrical or anything else. And it also has obvious affinities with the view of discourse developed above on the basis of Belsey's discussion. So conceived, a particular language-game can be viewed as framing the conditions within which intentions arise, and Wittgenstein gives a clear example of how this works: 337. But didn't I already intend the whole construction of the sentence {for example) at its beginning? So surely it existed in my mind before I said it aloud!- If it was in my mind, still it would not normally be there in some different word order. But here we are constructing a misleading picture of "intending;' that is, of the use of this word. An intention is embedded in its situation, in human customs and institutions. If the technique of the game of chess did not exist, I could not intend to play a game of chess. In so far as I do intend the construction of a sentence in advance, that is made possible by the fact that I can speak the language in question. 26

Chess isn't the only game in the Shakespeare corpus, but it may serve as a sanitized model that reductively symbolizes, and thus conspicuously excludes, the language-games of a world less brave and new. Those games conform to a cruder model that, in one of the more unappealing languagegames of contemporary lay (or near-lay) psychology, goes by the name of "the games people play." Wittgenstein's account picks out an important feature of Shakespeare's practice, for it reminds us that we often can't tell from a speaker's language use whether his or her "playing" is intended as well as motivated; the game has its own logic, its own scenario, and plays itself out in the speaker's language regardless of the cognitive status we ascribe to it. Considered as discourses- Belsey's "domains of language-use" -most of the language-games I shall explore will be. implicit in·the sense indicated above, but, as we shall see, one of the problems confronting Shakespeare's speakers will be that of keeping them implicit, blocking awareness of the language-games they play. The commitment to the idea that states of mind "belong" not so much to particular speakers as to the discourses they participate in obviously risks

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succumbing to the structuralist tendency to devalue agency by taking a radical view of "the discourse of the other." The tendency is reinforced by drawing rigid boundaries between intended and unintended meaning, or between consciousness and the unconscious, and by restricting the category of agency to the first member of each pair. The problem just mentioned introduces a salutary complication because it presupposes a category of agency and responsibility that the structuralist disjunction can't handle, and it therefore demands a more flexible picture of the individual speaker's relation to discourse. In this connection, I have found some helpful clues in Anthony Giddens's distinction between discursive and practical consciousness: the former denotes what actors "are able to say, or to give verbal expression to, about social conditions, including especially the conditions of their own action." Practical consciousness denotes "what actors know (believe) about social conditions, including especially the conditions of their own action, but cannot express discursively." 27 It would be better to change the italicized word to "do not," since Giddens treats the boundary between the two forms of consciousness as permeable, but distinguishes practical consciousness, with its tacit knowledge, from the unconscious: "there are barriers, centered principally upon repression, between discursive consciousness and the unconscious"; if competent actors can, when asked, "nearly always report discursively about their intentions in, and reasons for, acting as they do, they cannot necessarily do so of their motives." 28 The Shakespearean discourses I shall examine call for a slight revision of this scheme, since. they involve situations in which actors may not want to, may try not to, confront and report on "their motives" or express "the conditions of their own action," and, in addition, may "want" or "try" not to become aware of this evasive action. Although such a form of agency is nonconscious, it is more like practical consciousness than unconscious repression, and I therefore baptize it practical unconsciousness. However difficult it may be to account for the mechanisms of this process, and however strained the indications of agency coded above in want and try may seem in this context, examples of this form of agency are legion and the concept is part of common lore. Agents may try to avoid discursive consciousness of the discourses they operate or submit to, and in this revision of Giddens's analytic scheme, the task of maintaining merely practical consciousness would be assigned to counterdiscursive strategies of practical unconsciousness. One of Giddens's central motifs is that of the "duality of structure," of the recursive processes by which social systems interact with human agents, and his "theory of structuration" is generated partly from a critique of structuralism. A structuralist perspective on agency is reductive if it limits the agent's role to that of

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a conduit for discourses or for anything else. Agents may but needn't be mere conduits. Although they are always to some extent subject to the discourse that "speaks through them;' they may choose to be conduits even as they deploy strategies enabling them to "operate" the discourse. The idea of unconscious strategies is not incongruous if practical unconsciousness is seen as a negative form of practical consciousness. That is, let's assume with Giddens that "every social actor knows a great deal about the conditions of reproduction of the society of which he or she is a member" and can draw upon "tacit stocks of knowledge ... in the constitution of social activity." 29 This is practical consciousness. Practical unconsciousness is then the tacit knowledge of techniques for occluding, ignoring, forgetting, whatever knowledge one has that interferes with belief in one's commitment to a discourse. The successful reduction of agents to conduits presupposes the discursive ability to find and apply the arguments by which they can convince themselves and, if necessary, deceive themselves. To give Kant's dictum a Sartrean skew, when it is necessary to curtail knowledge in order to make room for bad faith, practical unconsciousness is put to work. The conventional and stereotypical character of the discourses I shall examine, along with the apparently objective structure of their scenarios, facilitates that work because it signifies, indeed dramatizes, their independence of the agent, and signifies it to the agent.

+ The best general description I know of the activity displayed in the discourses I am about to explore occurs during Benveniste's ·discussion of language in Freudian theory: All through Freudian analysis it can be seen that the subject makes use of the act of speech and discourse in order to "represent himself" to himself as he wishes to see himself and as he calls upon the "other" to observe him. His discourse is ... a sometimes vehement solicitation of the other through the discourse in which he figures himself desperately, and an often mendacious recourse to the other in order to individualize himself in his own eyes. Through the sole fact of addressing another, the one who is speaking of himself installs the other in himself, and thereby apprehends himself, confronts himself, and establishes himself as he aspires to be, and finally historicizes himself in this incomplete or falsified history.30

Thus "discourse is both the bearer of a message and the instrument of action." I note in passing that such discursive activity is in high gear in the system of positional differences that Freudians call the family romance but that I prefer (for the reasons given above) to call the family drama. Since

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any single position in the system is not an integer but the fraction of a dyadic bond- "parent" and "child," for example, require and co-define each other-the differential logic of the drama speaks through the speakers inscribed in it, limits their autonomy, ambiguates their love, and intensifies their desire for self-representation while diminishing their control over it. There are recognizable and often-documented positional discourses-the father's, the daughter's, the son's, the mother's, the wife's, the husband's, the sibling's, and so forth. I shall return to the positional discourses later. I mention them now chiefly to distinguish them from the set of discourses to be explored in the following pages-the "ethical" discourses, to which I give names that reflect their stereotypical character as culturally constructed and constrained patterns of motivation: the discourses of the donor, the victim/revenger, the sinner, the villain, the hero, and the saint or martyr. The motivational scenario of the donor's discourse may be unpacked from Lear's "I gave you all," considered as a threat, an assault, an act of violence. The gift is a wound that must be defended against-as it is by Regan's reply, "and in good time you gave it." The donor's discourse works according to the logic of the gift spelled out by Marcel Mauss in his classic essay on the subject. His account suggests that it may be described in economic terms as the logic of negative usury. Usury boils down to getting more than you give. Negative usury is giving more than you get- but in order to get more than you give. Usury is a simple, straightforward practice; negative usury is a more indirect and powerful way to subjugate the recipient in bonds of obligation.31 Lear flaunts his paternal power of generosity from a position of weakness. He lets himself be persuaded by the Fool that he is being infantilized and emasculated by his daughters. The donor's discourse thus emerges hand in hand with another, whose root formula is expressed in Lear's "I am a man/ More sinned against than sinning." "More sinned against than sinning" is the victim's complaint, but within it lurks the threat of "I am a man," the threat stressed by the line division: "I am a man- and will have my revenges, will protect my manhood." As the donor's discourse sets up and justifies the victim's, so the victim's sets up and justifies the revenger's; the two are hard to pry apart and are often found in close embrace. This reading of the victim's formula, however, ignores the defensiveness inscribed in "more sinned against than sinning," which parries an implied accusation: "What I did to them was not as bad as what they did to me." The guilt this defense betrays· opens up another wound and signals the operation of another discourse whose radical is obtained by reversing the victim's formula. "More sinning than sinned against" encodes the confes-

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sionallogic of the sinner's discourse. Turning the revenger's discourse in upon oneself, its motivation is the desire to be punished, judged, or-what may be more painful and threatening-forgiven. One can punish oneself more easily than one can forgive oneself; forgiveness must be at least partly conferred by others, and it carries with it· all the dangers of the gift.32 Since one can't forgive oneself, the sinner's discourse can only solicit selfretribution. The sinner's secret quest and fearful desire is "to course his own shadow for a traitor." That desire. may lead him to hurt those he loves as a way of hurting himself. It may lead him to cultivate their distrust and disesteem. It ·may lead him to seek punishment at the hands of others; this in turn may tempt him again to resume the victim's discourse and direct his aggression outward, thereby deepening the inward wound. The sinner's discourse is seldom on the surface of a speaker's language; either it hides in the recesses of the text or betrays itself by its complicity in shaping the plot of self-undoing. The contrary holds for another discourse. If "more sinning than sinned against" articulates the sinner's acknowledgment of his wickedness as the mode of remorse, the same formula ironically announces the proud boast of the self-confessed villain. Shakespeare's most endearing villains- Edmund, Iago, and Richard III- tend to bring the villain's discourse right up front and use the soliloquy to tell themselves how bad they are. In fact, the discourse is more complex than that, since its operators often appear to be playing the role of stage villain, and doing so with varying tones and degrees of parody. The villain's target often seems to be himself as much as the traditional morality and its theater. Thus turned upside down, the conventional gesture of self-revelation is transgressed by other discourses that disenable the very claim to autonomy and voyeuristic power the act of soliloquy dramatizes. Speakers who relish in the villain's discourse often find themselves in the delightful position of staging a travesty of its opposite, the discourse of virtue or morality-or, hyperbolically, for lack of a better noun, the saint's discourse. Think, for example, of that wonderful episode in Richard III (3.7) that begins with the stage direction Enter Richard aloft, between two Bishops- "two props of virtue for a Christian prince," "a book of prayer in his hand;' and apparently fresh off his pious knees. The saint's discourse features a variety ofpostures that are often aggressively stated-unappreciated generosity or loyalty, self-sacrifice, slandered virtue, conspicuous probity, nonresponsibility for evil, renunciation of the world and its vanity. Honest Iago occasionally has a small piece of this discourse. But taken more seriously, the saint's discourse offers those who desire self-justification a richer and more positive resource than that of the victim/revenger, though it may

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be animated by it, and it sometimes unfolds in the shadow of the sinner's discourse. The saint's discourse responds to a persistent question, the fifth Henry's "May I with right and conscience make this claim?" It winds its way into the language ofEdgar, Kent, and Cordelia, and it takes over most of the Scots in Macbeth. 33 It appears in those two oddly reverberating phrases in the Merchant of Venice, Portia's "I stand for sacrifice" and Shylock's "I stand for judgment." It is hilariously burlesqued by Richard III, mockingly and bitterly (perhaps nostalgically) mimed by Richard II, and, in its most significant manifestation, pursued with increasing fervor through three plays by the son of Henry IV. Finally, it sometimes overlaps with another discourse, the hero's discourse, or discourse of honor. The saint's discourse involves a story one tells oneself- "Why I do trifle thus with· his despair/ Is done to cure it"- and one tells it to or solicits it from others primarily to persuade oneself, especially if one suspects that what one is doing may be reprehensible. But the hero's discourse involves a story one has to solicit and hear from others, a story that, like a prize, one has to win or earn by continuous displays or promises of a form of activity that in recent decades has come to be known as "laying one's body on the line." Now since this is not something one can ask one's poor body to spend all of its time doing, there are long periods of foreplay and afterplay during which honor is maintained by words rather than deeds, or by words as deeds. Each discourse, then, has its own rationale or scenario, or its own "argument" (in one of the older meanings of the term). Although the scenarios of the ethical discourses are primarily ethico-psychological they are always situated in specific positional scenarios. So, for example, the power of the donor's discourse, the discourse of the gift, is predictably keyed to the authority of the father or ruler. The affective ambivalence that marks the father's discourse is conditioned by the ambivalence of his legal authority over, his obligation to and dependence on, the filial beneficiaries (oldest son, married daughters) who will replace him; and over whom, waxing as he wanes, his last remaining power may be that of the gift. When the husband bearing phallic authority fears the unofficial power of the wife who could betray him, emasculate him, conspire with children, divert the patrimonial gift, he may defend or avenge himself by strategic deployment of the victim/revenger's argument. The plight of the Shakespearean hero inscribedin the ethical discourse of honor- Hotspur, Coriolanus, Othellois compounded by the inseparability of that discourse from the positional discourse of gender. Thus, in responding to the density of text that represents a speaker like Lear or Edgar, one can focus on the coexistence, conflict, and volatile interplay of several discourses. The positional exigencies

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of the paternal dyad motivate the occupants of both roles to engage in selfjustifying language-games. They represent themselves as maligned victims, unappreciated saints or donors or saviors, and these moves are sometimes depicted as strategies that defend against yet unavoidably exacerbate the self-wounding power of the sinner's discourse. To illustrate this interplay of ethical and positional discourses, I shall look more closely at the father's discourse in King Lear. In Shakespeare's text, the family is embedded in, and indeed identical with, a political order whose orientation toward father power is haloed by some version of what has variously been called "the inherited conglomerate;' the great chain, the Elizabethan world picture, and other vaguely essentializing concepts produced by the intellectual-historical tradition. 34 The tensions and ambivalence woven into the differences of gender and generation that constitute the family drama are amplified by the unequal distribution of patriarchal power, and complicated by the double inscription that marks age as the site of both authority and weakness. The ideal of metabolic balance between conflict and cooperation tends to be destabilized by the philosophy of zero-sum: "the younger rises when the old doth fall," or, to paraphrase the phallic wisdom of the Fool's little tiny wit, "the· woman rises when the man doth fall." As if to compensate for this disequilibrium, patriarchal ideology re-presents the zero-sum struggle in a language of authority and deference that features bonding, reciprocity, trust, natural inequality, and willing compliance. These two perspectives correspond to the two Natures whose conflict was the subject ofJohn Danby's Shakespeare and the Doctrine cif Nature: on the one hand, Hooker's happy hierarchy, and on the other, Hobbes's hairy horror. More recently, G. K. Hunter described the conflict in similar terms as a struggle between two value systems, the good old one with its "decencies" and "antique pieties" and the bad new one promoted by "anti-Establishment individualists." He sees the former "dissolving under the impact" of the latter's Machiavellian "modernism," and he describes the benign view with mounting fervor: For Gloucester as for Lear the "bias of nature" ... requires children and parents to love and protect one another; the "offices of nature" ... cause the young to respect the old, the subordinate to yield to the superior, the passionate to bow to the rational, as female to male or human to divine. All this follows inevitably from an assumption that nature is a reflection of the status quo, of an order without which things could not hold together and meaning would not exist. And the status quo is thought of not simply as "the way things happen to be" but rather as "the way things must be." 35

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But thought of by whom? The answer is in the opening phrase of the passage: "For Gloucester as for Lear" -not only "in their opinion" but also "on their behalf." And incidentally, the fathers believe, or would like to persuade themselves as well as others, that the status quo reflects nature, not the other way round. It is Edmund who claims that the status quo is mystified as nature, and it is not at all clear that he conforms to Hunter's portrait of a Machiavellian version of the Hobbesian yahoo or yippie. Edmund is not out to destroy the status quo. On the contrary, he wants to buy into it by replacing his brother and father in the seat of legitimate power. He shares the paternal values, and desires the paternal authority he criticizes. What Edmund sees is already there to see, and the way he sees it corresponds precisely to the way Lear and Gloucester try, ever more desperately, not to see it. The fathers tilt the so-called bias of nature in their direction to protect their interests against their children, to preserve their power against indirect and legitimate no less than direct and illegitimate filial challenges, and-above all- to maintain self-esteem, especially when doing things that jeopardize it. "I gave you all" is thus the founding gesture of a discourse by which the fathers reify a moral system favorable to them, and use it to monopolize the resources of self-justification in their strategic warfare with the next generation. As Stephen Greenblatt argues, the other side of the play's gerontocratic emphasis is the fear that nobody loves you when you're old and gray,36 especially if you have dealt with others in the mode of power and disguised it as love, if you have continually paraded the all you never really gave and somehow expected to be rewarded with loving, not servile, obedience. Against this background we may set the following version of the father's discourse. I have abstracted it from the language of Lear and Gloucester-chiefly Lear-supplemented by some of Edmund's observations.37 It is designed as an imaginary soliloquy, a kind of internal dialogue in which the father begins by rehearsing the catechism his children should obediently receive, and it is ordered to suggest how the initial premises are gradually subverted to expose the deep fears and contradictions that give rise to them: (1) I gave and give you all, and ask very little in return. It is my nature as a father to be kind and generous. I gave you birth, and when I give you and my land away in marriage I repeat that creative act, extending its power to the next generation. On my blessing depends your fertility and that of the land. Therefore, (2) you should study deserving, try to deserve my love by honoring the "offices of nature, bond of childhood," etc. Since I begot you, bred you,

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love you, you must return those duties back as are right fit; obey me, love me, and most honor me. The bias of nature obliges you- challenges youto merit my blessing. This isn't a heavy demand, considering my care, pains, and sacrifices on your behalf. Nevertheless, (3) you can't possibly pay me back, since I gave you all. You are perpetually in my debt, and you owe me such allegiance as the female owes the male, the young the old, or the human the divine. And yet, (4) for a father of males, it ·is true that the very act of begetting an heir is the first step in prescribing my power and binding me in service to my son's future lordship. The plague of custom and curiosity of nations assigns upbringing and inheritance as a right, not as a privilege. In the order of law, my heir is potentially my enemy and competitor. His appearance prophesies my death, and he grows up waiting for me to die so that he can rightfully claim that which his father loses: no less than all. This prompts a disturbing thought: (5) As I grow old and my power wanes, I sense more clearly what I have always dimly sensed, that you may not appreciate all I've done for you. No doubt, as your impatience and ingratitude· increase, you begin to find an idle and fond bondage in the oppression of aged tyranny, who sways, not as it hath power, but as it is suffered. No doubt, also, you think that when sons are at perfect age, and fathers declined, the father should be as ward to the son, and the son manage his revenue. But it won't be easy for you to justify or act on such beliefs so long as I display and maintain my power. This power, which can command your obedience, is vested in my generosity. Since I can't trust you, (6) I must do my best to make sure you remain in my debt. Even as you study deserving, I shall fight to keep your study from being successful. I shall heap new obligations on you by rewarding your hypocritical mouthservice with undeserved favors. It's becoming clearer and clearer to me that (7) what I have loved in you is only that portion of myself I've invested in you-my image stamped in your metal. Your breeding hath been at my charge, and you are dear in my account. Perhaps you haven't failed to notice that I haven't loved you for yourself. And perhaps you've also noticed that I don't trust you because I know you do not love me, and know you have some cause. And perhaps you even sense that I'm afraid of you. [Given these premises, fathers understand that the language of filial, parental, and conjugal love has its primary function in providing the verbal arsenal of their war against their children. And .they understand that primogeniture, bastardy, dowry, marriage, and inheritance provide the in-

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stitutional arsenal. If this were all there were to the parent's credo, Shakespeare's would be a dismal view indeed. But there are, at least for Lear and Gloucester (though in different ways), two additional premises that redeem paternal nature from the general curse:] (8) What if I'm wrong? What if, in spite of everything I've done, my child loves me? How could I face that or be worthy of it? I must be perpetually in her/his debt. It is I who owe her/him all. Everything I did was calculated to make them contemn and reject me, and if they should confront me, should judge me as I deserve to be judged, my heart would burst smilingly-it would be a relief to die. And yet, ironically, (9) everything I did to·my children, I did out of a need to be loved. Everything I did and still do is my way of trying to secure the love I need. But I know it can't work. I don't deserve it-didn't ever deserve it in the past. What I'm doing now makes me deserve it even less. Then what a terrible thing it would be for them to give me love-to wound me by giving me their all after I gave them nothing, while pretending to give them all. The father begins this soliloquy with the donor's discourse, expressing his love by his· phallic self-representation as a horn of plenty. But this investment in the power and warfare of the gift, unfolded in premises 1-3, is motivated by the fear of loss and declining power, which leads the warfare to be reimagined under the aspect of apprehension. (Etymologically, apprehension couples the desire to take with the fear cif being.taken.) ·Apprehension announces itself in premises 4-6 in the dialectic of the victim/revenger's discourse, and this outward war betrays what it displaces when the inward war of the sinner's discourse emerges in premises 8 and 9· The sequence is intended not as a record of Lear's or Gloucester's changes through the play but as a profile of the discursive strata that continually regenerate their versions of the father's discourse. The deepest stratum is the ninth premise. It is the ever-present and always self-canceling source of the others. As the simplest and most genuine expression of what the father wants, it should be the first premise. But it can't be allowed to surface; it remains the goal but also the target of self-inflicted blindness. Its basis is the sense of unworthiness that makes it impossible for him to expose himself in the expectation of love. Since he can't be loved for what he is-or thinks or fears he islove has to be taken, has to be won; and giving-the power expressed in the promise or denial of the gift-is his form of taking. The most dangerous consequence of this scenario is the need and inability to perform the acts of atonement by which one may ask to be forgiven. For in the face of his knowledge that his enactment of the victim's discourse was villainous,

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and that what he deserves is punishment, is judgment, what could be more terrifying or painful than to be forgiven by those he has wounded with his claims of generosity, love, and sacrifice? King Lear is no country for old men. But it is no country for the young either. They are often in arms, yet seldom in one another's. Their dilemma blazes out like a lightning bolt in a single sentence, which Gloucester means as a promise to Edmund, but which speaks· through him as a threat: "Loyal and natural boy, I'll work the means/To make thee capable" (2.1.84-85). In this gesture of emasculation whose instrument is the donor's discourse the energizing power of morally justified complicity is stated with a clarity that is as blinding as it is blind. ''I'll give you all." What can Edmund do to dismantle so many folds of favor except collaborate with Edgar in preserving the true blank of their father's eye? Gloucester's words glance at all the acts of folly- often but not always well intended- by which the characters marked "good" license the transfer of knavery to others, and help those marked "bad" to a measure of success the latter could not have achieved by themselves. So Kent, Cordelia, and Lear join Gloucester and Edgar in working the means that make Edmund capable of wringing from Lear his last agonized cry, ''And my poor fool is hang'd ...."

My account of ethical and positional discourses in the previous section suggests.that the former may be more fundamental than the latter, that the "logics" of the ethical discourses not only implicate each other but also inform positional relationships. Thus, although the father-child relationship has a describable structure that limits the range of positional interactions, Shakespeare's fathers and children deal with the structure and compete with each other through the medium of the ethical discourses. It is worth repeating that the discourses appear as properties not of individual speakers but of the community of the play. G. K. Hunter makes the important observation that "the language of the play is not so much an imitation of the way people speak as an evocation of the realities behind what people say," and he adds that the "metaphors the characters use" do not individuate the speakers but "are more like trains of gunpowder laid across the play, capable of exploding into action when the poet requires it." 38 Hunter's own vivid metaphor suggests that it is language in use and on display that explodes into action; in my view what it evokes are the "realities" of discursive conflict, and it evokes them not merely "behind what people say" but in what they say.39 This is of course easier to assert than to demonstrate, and my account of the father's discourse in King Lear was clearly not a demonstration

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because it abstracted from "what people say" to the interplay of discourses "behind" what they say. I shall now try to show how that interplay unfolds within the language of a single speaker and within the confines of a single speech. My purpose in doing so is to return the discussion to the questions raised in the second section of this essay-questions about intention, motivation, practical unconsciousness, and the uses of psychoanalysis. I hope to make a case for the value of certain features of Lacanian interpretation in dealing with those questions. The speaker is Henry IV, and the proof text is the speech that opens Part One of Henry IV: King

So shaken as we are, so wan with care, Find we a time for frighted peace to pant, And breathe short-winded accents of new broils To be commenc'd in stronds afar remote: No more the thirsty entrance of this soil Shall daub her lips with her own children's blood, No more shall trenching war channel her fields, Nor bruise her flow'rets with the armed hoofs Of hostile paces: those opposed eyes, Which, like the meteors of a troubled heaven, All of one nature, of one substance bred, Did lately meet in the intestine shock And furious close of civil butchery, Shall now, in mutual well-beseeming ranks, March all one way, and be no more oppos'd Against acquaintance, kindred, and allies. The edge of war, like an ill-sheathed knife, No more shall cut his master. Therefore, friends, As far as to the sepulchre of ChristWhose soldier now, under whose blessed cross We are impressed and engag'd to fightForthwith a power of English shall we levy, Whose arms were moulded in their mothers' womb To chase these pagans in those holy fields Over whose acres walk'd those blessed feet Which fourteen hundred years ago were nail'd For our advantage on the bitter cross. But this our purpose now is twelve month old, And bootless 'tis to tell you we will go; Therefor we meet not now. Then let me hear Of you, my gentle cousin Westmoreland, What yesternight our Council did decree In forwarding this dear expedience.

IO

IS

20

25

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If the deep fears signaled by the figure in lines s-6 whet the appetite of the psychoanalytically oriented reader, the biblically oriented reader responds to a different savor; the lines echo a passage in Genesis that shifts the fears to another sector of the family drama: "Now therefore thou art cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thy hand" (Genesis 4:n). Whether or not this is more palatable depends on one's taste in perversions, but in the narrative context ofthe tetralogy it is clearly more appropriate. It anticipates Henry's next lines as well as the civil strife he is about to encourage by his confrontation with the Percies; it establishes continuity with his command to Exton in the final speech of Richard II: "With Cain go wander thorough shades of nigpt.'' 40 And if we take the biblical echo as a comment on the speaker's own condition, it suggests the futility of that transparent exorcising gesture, the persistence of Henry's guilt of conscience laboring under the divine Father's judgment. But it is just here that Mother comes in handy. Rebellion in lines s-r8 is figured not merely as sibling rivalry but also as a mutual assault by the contending factions on the mother who raises them to kill each other and then drinks-or, in order to drink-their blood. The "trenching" violence of the sons is a defensive as well as aggressive response to the mother's bloodlust: war between sons is war against mother. As the figurative play ascends from hoofs to "opposed eyes;' the sons' genealogy is reimagined in celestial terms that affiliate them- even if only as portents and exhalations-with the paternal source. Heaven is troubled by the "civil butchery" on which earth battens. To appease the Father's anger and secure the sons from maternal threat, the king will lead them to "stronds afar remote" and redirect their bloodlust, their maternal legacy, from each other to the infidel: "Forthwith a power of English shall we levy,/ Whose arms were moulded in their mothers' womb" (22-23). This will domesticate the threat by impressing the mother's munitions factory into the service of Christian patriarchy. Inscribed in this figurative passage are suggestions of flight from the terror of maternal power, of sacrilegious assault on the source of the terror, of religious conquest of the source, and appropriation of the terrible power. Against what else but the bloodthirsty maternal earth do "armed hoofs" provide protection? Exposure of the feet and closeness to the earth appear repeatedly in the text of Part One as symbols of vulnerability. The imagery of the play discloses the workings of something like a counter-Antaeus system, a graduated scale of insulation, from lying down to walking barefoot to wearing boots to riding horseback to leaping and flying. Thus if boots are safer than bare feet, and horses safer than walking, the redun-

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dancy of "armed hoofs" ensures a level of security exceeded only by that which Harry's winged Pegasus provides. The ironclad ungulate protects a man from the thirsty mother by elevation, while its speed guarantees rapid travel, which -for warriors like Hotspur-means flight to the battlefield from centers of female power. The words with which Henry puts off the crusade, "bootless 'tis to tell you we will go;' are unsettled by the way his dream of barefoot penitence, his imitatio Christi, ends with "those blessed feet ... nail'd /For our advantage on the bitter cross" (26-27). "For our advantage" touches off the momentary flash of an alternate fantasy: Richard on the cross. 41 Henry's oddly Oedipal focus on injured feet filters into the final words of the speech, "dear expedience," since the root meaning of the Latin cognate of expedience is "freeing the feet." How costly this expedience might be to Henry becomes clear as soon as you recall not only the duplicity of the crusade proposal but also the train of events he is planning to set in motion when he confronts Hotspur. When I sight through these tropes to lines 5 and 6, I begin to hear in "the thirsty entrance of this soil" a displaced self-accusation: a reference back to the closing speech of Richard II and to "the king's blood" that "stain'd the king's own land." Henry's words hint at resigned acceptance of his estrangement from the motherland identified and stained with Richard, and at the same time they struggle against self-accusation by shifting blame to the Ricardian mother. But since he knows himself responsible for the "trenching war" he is about to encourage, the struggle is futile. Although his violation of the land is displaced to maternal violence, and his sense of the perversity of his project to maternal perversion, the bloodthirsty land becomes an image of his effect on the kingdom, his powerlessness to wash the blood from his guilty hand. The play is remarkable for the amount of incidental rhetoric devoted to fantasies of violation, impotence, and the feminization of alienated power. In the passage under consideration, the momentary allusion to the nightmare of the phallic mother signifies a specifically moral scene of castration: the fear of being punished by Richard and God for usurping their power; the desire to legitimize possession of the power; the fear of that desire. These reflections are a little too free-floating; they need to be pinned down more closely to what happens in the play. As always in Shakespeare, one has to take pains to ferret out the details of plot and timing as accurately as one can. For the plot discloses the plotting; it gives discernible shape to scenarios set in motion by the characters, scenarios they may never themselves mention or acknowledge, but that lurk in their language and lead us to wonder whether the agents know what they are doing. By the end of

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the first scene we learn that Henry had arranged the confrontation with the Percies, the one that occurs in I. 3, bifore he makes the crusade speech that opens the play. He had already sent the foppish messenger to Hotspur at Holme don to make an issue of the prisoners. His curt dismissal of Worcester at the beginning of the third scene, and his walking out after an angry ultimatum to Hotspur, seem calculated to incense the Percies. Though Worcester is obviously up to something, Northumberland and Hotspur are not unconciliatory in explaining the denial of prisoners, and Blunt's intercession on Hotspur's behalf suggests this. For reasons .to be discussed below, Henry seems motivated to incite the Percy family to rebel, and in this he is effectively complicit with Worcester. His behavior works to provoke them into an uprising that he can later be in the position to blame them for. So, at he end of I.I, he implies that Hotspur is responsible for his having to cancel the crusade that he proposed primarily in order to be able to blame the cancellation on Hotspur. Inscribed in this scenario are the tactics of the victim/revenger's discourse: stirring up trouble, disclaiming responsibility for it, targeting oneself as its victim. Yet at the same time we can hear in Henry's language the accents of another discourse. Although he deploys his fantasy of crusade as a political stratagem, and although he has no intention of actualizing it, he elaborates it in a rhetoric so misted over with the faded scent of nostalgia that it seems to be the expression of a devout wish. Here as elsewhere in the tetralogy his language reveals a yearning for the old-fashioned absolution he knows is no longer available: making a pilgrimage, going on crusade, marching to the Holy Land, dying in Jerusalem. This adds depth and poignancy to his utterance, especially at lines s-r8 of the crusade speech. The events he is planning to set in motion are precisely the events that, in those lines, are preceded by the repeated "No more" 's. Behind each "no more" lurks a potential "once more." The negations register sensitivity to the moral cost of the pretense: Henry dwells obsessively, as if wounding himself, on the self-wounding "intestine shock" that troubles heaven, even as he prepares to motivate the shock. In this context, the counterfactual gesture of crusade follows a bootless effort to imagine an act of atonement commensurate with that preparation: the blessed cross becomes a bitter cross. 42 His language is torn apart by the tension between the victim/revenger's discourse and that of the sinner. What is, as he says, "for our advantage" takes on a darker tone if we accept the idea that the fate he fears is also the fate he feels he deserves. His advantage would then consist in seeking the justice and retribution that would make Richard's prophecy come true. And this, I think, contributes

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to the motivation behind his stirring up of the Percies. The political motive is obvious: if he can facilitate the rebellion, and control the form it takes, he will create a challenge that places him in the position of at least quasilegitimacy as defender of the monarchy; having disentangled himself from his fellow conspirators, he can use them to secure moral justification. But the ethical motive, the sinner's motive, activates the same strategy against the political motive. To encourage insurrection is to constitute a faction that can uphold Richard's claim and administer his revenge. The sinner's motive is to keep "the edge of war, like an ill-sheathed knife;' turned against himself. In an important sense, then, strengthening his opposition enables him to keep up his. own strength by maintaining scapegoats and scourges that tend to the variable needs of a bad conscience. In 2 Henry IV the growing disarray and demoralization of the rebels after Shrewsbury are matched by the king's decline. His final physical collapse is synchronized with the good news of victory in a strangely resonant phrase: "wherefore should these good news make me sick" (4.4.102). When we look back from that deflationary moment, we can intuit a need to keep the rebels from losing too soon, as if his strength is proportionally related to- and is dependent on- that of the opposition. I think this follows logically from the collapse of the opposition to his seizure of the throne. In retrospect, the Northumberland faction may be said to have betrayed him by supporting him, and since he can see their complicity in his guilt, his guilt in their complicity, he can try· to mitigate its moral effect on him by promoting their grievances and making them God's justicers. Like his son, Henry finds it in his moral interest to "awhile uphold JThe unyok'd humor" of rebellion, especially the rebellion of Hotspur, the "son" he admires, and of Harry, the son he loves. The collapse of the rebellion throws him back on the inward war of the sick body as almost the only defense against. the sinner's discoursealmost, because he gets one more chance to cover the sinner's discourse with that of the victim/revenger when, after discovering that Harry, as he thinks, stole the crown, he tries to make his son's head lie uneasy.

+ What did the king know, when (if ever) did he know it, and how can we tell? At the beginning of this essay I suggested that a distinction between the semiotic and psychological dimensions of textual analysis might serve to codify a common practice in which meanings and messages are excavated from the language before the excavator decides whether they are meant or unmeant, heard or unheard, by fictional speakers and auditors. I

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also proposed that speakers should be treated as the effects rather than the causes of their language and our interpretation. This stipulation relativizes the approach to questions of irony and intention, and restricts the usefulness of the psychoanalytic paradigm associated with the name of Freud. For if there are no transcendent speakers in the unperformed text, then there can be no prior reality or truth of character, person, and consciousness to provide the object of knowledge or ignorance. And, in turn, the characters we construct through interpretation need not inevitably come equipped with the prior reality of organic appurtenances presupposed by the Freudian paradigm. They possess bodies, childhoods, repressed memories, Oedipal investments and displacements, and so forth, only when these can be shown to be relevant to interpretation. Knowledge reflects, but interpretation constitutes, its object (or subject). We can never know what the king knows, and he only knows it if and when we decide he does. These assertions are directed only to the unperformed text. They may also hold for the performed text, for all texts, for the great text of life, but at this moment I am not dealing in metaphysical commitments. My interest is limited to the cautionary influence the stipulation may have on the psychological analysis of fictional speakers. It counsels us to use flexibility in deploying such concepts as character and consciousness and to resign ourselves to the fact that their textual existence may be intermittent. It encourages a policy of consistent inconsistency in which we premise that we can sometimes determine what a speaker means to say and sometimes not, and that decisions about this may vary from moment to moment as well as from interpreter to interpreter. Above all, it affects our approach to the problem of irony and its relation to the play of discourses in language. This doesn't relieve us of the obligation to try to determine in any particular case whether a meaning or a discursive move is intended or unintended. But it changes the value of the exercise, perhaps diminishes its importance, because the focus on discourse partially redirects attention from the cognitive status of a speaker's language to its force as an agent of dramatic action. For practical purposes, we can reduce the kinds of irony that critics have classified and investigated into two kinds, rhetorical and dramatic, and we can subdivide rhetorical irony into two types, intentional and unintended, or structural. Irony is intentional when speakers knowingly say one thing and mean another, structural when they mean to say one thing but their language says something else that was not intended. Rhetorical irony differs from what Richard Levin has called "the old-fashioned 'dramatic irony' involved in the reversal of a character's situation and expectations." 43 Bertrand Evans's study of dramatic irony in Shakespeare's Tragic Practice shows

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why this is so. Evans is interested in the "gaps" produced by "discrepant awarenesses" that result from the "practices" and plotting of characters and playwright. His concern is with a dramatic device largely observable in abstraction from the language of the play, and his emphasis is on the playwright's manipulation of audience interest in the action; the criterion he employs is whether the "awareness gap" is "productive of dramatic effect." 44 Effects of intentional and structural irony, in contrast, can only be registered through continuous engagement with the language of the play. Because Evans's study remains framed within the classical scheme of peripeteia and anagnorisis-staples of the "old-fashioned" irony-it is essentially a character-and-action approach, relying little on the text as text, and it is adjusted to the conditions of theatrical performance. At the same time, his focus on "practices" orients his study toward intentions and intentional irony, whether rhetorical or narrative. I now want to introduce an approach to the concept of dramatic irony that differs from the one discussed by Levin and Evans in that it is literary rather than theatrical. It resembles their approach in centering on ironies of narrative and plot, but it assumes a more intimate and dynamic relation between narrative action and the linguistic action manifested by the play of discourses. It construes dramatic irony as the effect of a speaker whose discourses continuously move the plot forward whether or not he seems in the reader's judgment to be aware of it. If the formula for the structural type of rhetorical irony is meaning one thing and saying another, the formula for dramatic irony is meaning one thing and doing another. This implicates the speaker in a form of agency that can be considered entirely apart from the question of his intention or awareness, a responsibility for the shaping of events that we may easily interpret as the "practice," in Evans's sense, of what I described above as practical unconsciousness. The literary approach to dramatic irony takes us directly back to the Lacanian paradigm with which I began, and the connection may be secured by recalling Benveniste's statement (quoted above) that psychoanalytic discourse "is both the bearer of a message and the instrument of an action." The emphasis on the latter function is writ large in Shoshana Felman's recent study of Lacan. Its leitmotif is his insistence, first, that the analytic dialogue is "essentially performative ... rather than informative" or constative and, second, that "the analytical interpretation is itself a performative (not cognitive) interpretation in that it has a fundamental structuring, transforming function." 45 Interpreting, Lacan writes, is the opposite of understanding; it is "a gift of language ... rather than a gift of truth." 46 This applies as well to the interpretive dialogue with the unperformed text. If, behind the name

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to which speech is assigned, there is no intending person, only the site of the discourses of others, then our share in the dialogue is not to look for the kind of understanding or truth we call knowledge of the character but to transform the language into the structure of discourses that traverse the character's speech; by "transform" I mean something close to "invent" or "construct," though of course I could not invent discourses for the fictional community of a play if I didn't already find them among those that circulate through my community and traverse me. This homology between psychoanalytic and critical discourse tempts me to extend the performative orientation to the text, to make the interpretive act reflect itself by picking out the performative function of the speaker's speech. It constitutes the speech as an act, a doing, an agency of desire structuring a plot or scenario. It may have been apparent that when I was describing Henry's motives in the preceding section, I was sloppy and often evasive· in my treatment of their intentional or cognitive status. I tried to avoid having to make cognitive discriminations, and I did this by shifting attention to Shakespeare's emplotment-to the textual glimpses of the scenarios from which motivation is deduced and within which I situate the conflict of discourses. My concern was less with the cognitive interplay between the two rhetorical formulas of structural and intentional irony than with the performative interplay between rhetorical and dramatic irony. Henry's speech in the first scene of Part One seems to mean one set of things and to do another. Imagining the difference, the gap, filled with discourses helps me imagine what Henry wants-what he wants in the register of desire, which is to say, what he wants whether he knows it or not. It turns out that no matter how many precautions I take, my language inevitably attributes some mix of conscious, preconscious, unconscious, or half-conscious purposes to the character I invent. I find myself talking, if not about the speaker's intention, then about what might happen in his psyche were he to have one. My interest is caught by what he might think of himself if he knew what I think his language does, and it is from this standpoint that I now return to Henry to consider the scenario that motivates and is motivated by his opening speech. As I tried to show, that scenario assumes shape as the vector sum of two forces: the pressure of the sinner's discourse and the counterpressure of the victim/revenger's discourse. This is a graph of the structure of Henry's desire, and its movement can be plotted in the following steps. First, he badly wants moral, and not merely political, legitimacy, which is a point generally missed by so-called new-historicist and cultural-materialist readings (or under-re~~ings) of the second tetralogy. Second, this pursuit of

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self-justification is poorly managed at the level of interlocutory politics; its bad-faith moves are painfully obvious, and I infer from their obviousness that they perhaps reflect and reinforce the sinner's desire for judgment. Third, since the hope of absolution is destroyed by the crusading gesture that travesties it in proclaiming it, the alternative is to seek punishment. Fourth, just as Richard had in effect appointed or seduced Henry to be his heir and usurper ("here, cousin, seize the crown"), so Henry creates scourges to punish his mistreadings, delegates Richard's revenge to them, and at the same time sets them up for justified punishment. The two major candidates for this function are his son Harry and his "son" Hotspur. As to the former, if Henry feels uneasy about usurpation and regicide he must be aware of how much he depends on his son retroactively to secure the legitimacy denied him so long as he lives. This is hardly cause for paternal gratitude. It is not only that opposition to and from Henry's "nearest and dearest enemy" (1 Henry IV 3.2.123) gives the prince a function similar to that of the rebels in the economy of guilt management. But also, from the moment of Henry's questionable accession in Richard II, the terms in which he characterizes his son's behavior transfer to Harry qualities associated with Richard. This sets the stage for the transfer of his buried fear from predecessor to successor: the source of danger and insecurity and guilt will be displaced to the very person on whom their removal depends. In thus reinventing his relation to Richard, Henry seems motivated by a need to persuade himself that (I) Richard did not deserve to be king and that although (2) he-Henry-did not have the right to unking him, much less kill him, he· nevertheless (3) heroically sacrificed his own chance for salvation and ran the risk of destroying his reputation for the good of his country. To buttress this three-point scenario, he makes Hotspur his factor as well as Harry. The only way he can imagine redeeming his "banish'd honor" is to be reborn in an idealized filial image, but one who is not a legitimate heir, rather a would-be usurper like himself to whom he could transmit as to a scapegoat the soil of his achievement. It is as if his redemption depends on his losing the crown, not on handing it on. The futile character of this fantasy is inscribed in his nostalgia: to say "even as I was then is Percy now" (1 Henry IV 3.2.96) is to put the seal of failure on the wish for redemption. For if he was like Percy-or his image of Percy-then, the reason he isn't so now is that his idealism led to its own subversion by playing into Richard's hands. Henry thus symbolically adopts Hotspur and disowns Harry both to realize his three-point scenario and to defend against it. Harry's truancy

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will represent God's retribution and Richard's revenge, but he will also be cast as the Profligate Son who reincarnates Richard the Profligate "Father." In the context of the Oxford plot and the York/Aumerle episode, the new king sees Harry already as a kind of conspirator who represents Richard's interests, resurrects his unruly regime, becomes in effect Richard's son. York's denunciation of Aumerle for conspiring against the king supplies a melodramatic and therefore parodic epitome that introduces the more complex and sustained conflict between Henry and Harry. Through this scenario Henry projects his self-doubt on Harry and tries to pack his conscience with guilt so that he can deal with his own guilt as well as with the true inheritor's power over him. The scenario's corrosive effects unfold in Part Two, where it is poignantly registered in the discursive warfare that tears his language apart, and where the question of what the king knows- how aware he is of the performative force of the discourses that write his "book of fate" and make Richard's prophecy come true (2 Henry IV 3.2.45, 65-79)becomes more pressing. The poignancy resides in the shifting, volatile, uncertain character of the king's cognitive relation to what his language is doing. I shall explore this in the concluding section of the essay.

+ Henry does not make an appearance in Part Two until the first scene of act 3. The appearance is preceded by several references to his illness, the most interesting of which is the exchange between Falstaff and the ChiefJustice I discussed above in connection with the Lacanian critique of the Freudian paradigm. Falstaff's suggestion that physical disease displaces mental dis-ease establishes the context within which we read the king's initial speech in the play and interrogate the meaning for him of its concluding line: How many thousand of my poorest subjects Are at this hour asleep! 0 sleep, 0 gentle sleep, Nature's soft nurse, how have I frighted thee, That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down And steep my senses in forgetfulness? Why rather, sleep, liest thou in smoky cribs, Upon uneasy pallets stretching thee And hushed with buzzing night-flies to thy slumber, Than in the perfum'd chambers of the great, Under the canopies of costly state, And lulled with sound of sweetest melody? 0 thou dull god, why liest thou with the vile In loathsome beds, and leavest the kingly couch

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A watch-case or a common 'larum-bell? Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast Seal up the ship-boy's eyes, and rock his brains In cradle of the rude imperious surge And in the visitation of the winds, Who take the ruffian billows by the top, Curling their monstrous heads and hanging them With deafing clamor in the slippery clouds, That with the hurly death itself wakes? Canst thou, 0 partial sleep, give thy repose To the wet sea-son in an hour so rude, And in the calmest and most stillest night, With all appliances and means to boot Deny it to a king? Then happy low, lie down! Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. (4-31)

This is a highly troped apostrophe that reads and sounds like a performance before an audience. "Quintilian, speaking of oratory, defines apostrophe as 'a diversion of our words to address some person other than the judge.' " 47 Since the speech is a soliloquy, the audience and judge can only be the speaker. The project to be judged is announced in the first of the five rhetorical questions through which the speech moves: not merely the attainment of repose, but also his ability to rhetoricize himself into forgetfulness. "How have I frighted thee" teeters between question ("What have I done wrong?") and exclamation ("How much I must have frightened you!"), then completes itself by stumbling quickly from self-reproof to complaint (" ... to keep you from letting or helping me forget?!"). This dangerous ground is bordered on either side by materials for the sociology of sleep that Henry gathers to try to forget his unforgetful guilt and lose himself in a pleasurably self-pitying contrast between the happy torpid poor and the king who gives his subjects all, sacrificing his peace of mind for theirs. We recognize the convergent accents of two discourses reinforcing each other, that of the victim and that of the unappreciated donor. As he contemplates the lapse in taste or judgment that makes sleep abandon the "kingly couch," a healthy surge of anger transforms the "soft nurse" to a "dull god" whose prodigal itinerary oddly resembles that of Henry's truant son.48 I note in passing that if sleep's kindness to the shipboy makes him oblivious to the "rude imperious surge," it also makes him a likelier prospect for drowning. And perhaps the speaker envies him both possibilities as he slips by him to drench his own senses in a more powerful displacement of civil and psychic confusion, a vision of the less lethargic qualities of the "poorest subjects," the aristocrat's scapegoat, that recalls

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Rumor's image of "the blunt monster with uncounted heads, I The stilldiscordant wav'ring multitude" (Ind. r8-r9). The sea-boy image fails in its protective function, for the "high and giddy mast" is more an analogue of the "kingly couch" than a contrast to it. The descriptive thrust of the king's speech is undone by the play of meanings that superimposes an image closer to home: the "visitation" that incites the ruffian billows to disorder is also the force that hangs them for it, is both the arch-rebel and the official executioner. What stains the image is doubt of legitimacy and the sinner's impulse to pronounce judgment on himself. How you assess Henry's relation to the interplay of the donor's, victim's, and sinner's discourses in the soliloquy depends on your reading of the final line, and that comes down to how you assess his relation to the pun in lies. Several options are open. You can refuse the pun and allow the· statement only the force of a bromide, a generalized reference to the cares of kingship; that makes both speech and speaker innocent of darker meanings. Or you can accept the pun, put a reflexive spin on the statement, and read it as passing judgment on the speaker's resort to the bromide. Accepting the pun and the irony it encodes, you may decide it is present but unintended, unheard by the speaker, and you may then receive it as a message from the text: the message that Henry is sedating himself, successfully deceiving himself, by blaming insomnia on the burdens of state. At that point, if you affect moralistic reading, you may decide to assume the robes and role of justice abdicated by the speaker. Finally, if you allow him to intend or hear the pun, you can let him judge himself; you read the utterance as mordant and self-lacerating, make it convey the self-accusing sinner's bitter acknowledgment of his unwillingness to confront what really keeps him up at night: uneasy lies the head that stole the crown. Then it may seem that the soliloquy demonstrates not only his uneasiness but also his tendency to go on producing it. There is one more possibility, and it is the one I prefer. This is, not to decide, to keep yourself and Henry vacillating back and forth between the two conflicting discourses, to make him fearful and desirous of both, afraid to commit himself to the bad faith of playing donor and victim yet equally afraid to confront his self-despite head on. Henry's vacillation continues throughout the scene. In his next speech he transfers his illness to "the body of our Kingdom" and observes "How foul it is, what rank diseases grow, I And with what danger, near the heart ofit" (3.1.38-40). And in the lines that end the scene he reverts to his old desire: "were these inward wars once out of hand, I We would, dear lords, unto the Holy Land" (ro7-8). The resonant vagueness of "these inward wars," together with the counter-

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factual wish, marks his ongoing struggle to avoid committing himself to either of the discursive. factions at war within his speech. This struggle continues through the remaining episodes of his life, even in the final effort to reach atonement with his son. I have argued elsewhere that in Richard II there is a tense and deeply troubled relation between Henry and his father, John of Gaunt, that neither of them ever confronts and verbalizes, and that when this relation is taken into account it changes the mood of the self-justifying performance of the ars moriendi discourse that gets. Gaunt safely out of life and into anthologies in a heroic blaze of prophecy.49 One can only wonder whether he succeeds in blinding himself to his complicity with Richard and his betrayal of his son because the text is silent on this question, and it is largely (but not completely) silent on Henry's view of his father. Yet at the performative level, the level at which the speaker's language drives the discourses, the silence is re-membered in Part Two, and to some extent filled in. Henry replaces Gaunt as the dying father, but unlike Gaunt he has his son to help him work through the ars moriendi; he performs it for Harry's benefit, but also for his own. His pleasure in operating the victim's discourse gives way to an effort of atonement, but that effort is breached by the continuing desire to compete with Harry, outmaneuver him, put him down, and justify himself. Henry's language registers both the struggle with his son and the struggle to end that struggle in order to produce the atonement they both desire. When he says "all the soil of the achievement goes /With me into the earth" (4-5.189-90), the desire for happy ending is again foiled by the desire for self-justification. The statement is a kind of boast that seeks to win the battle of atonement: because of his suffering and sacrifice, his heroic response to his embattled regime, his son will have an easier road to travel. For the last time he exploits the discursive roles of saint, hero, and donor. He is still competing with Harry, and if what he intends is atonement, his performance in this scene can't be imagined to do anything but exacerbate the sinner's self-contempt and reinforce the other grief of guilty fatherhood the intention should alleviate. Henry's longing for the absolute, but not absolving, cure of the Holy Land appears finally to be synonymous with the longing for the satisfaction of a· death that will commemorate his failure, his unfitness, to reach the Jerusalem of his desire. On his deathbed he no longer speaks of the religious dimension of crusade; he speaks of it with self-directed cynicism only as a political maneuver. His final speech, when he hears that the room he had fainted in is called the Jerusalem Chamber, begins with "Laud be to God!" (4.5.234) and ends with "bear me to that chamber; there I'll lie;/ In

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that Jerusalem shall Harry die" (239-40). For me, "Laud be to God!" rings with a strange and wry tonality. I hear resignation in it, and relief, and an ironic recognition that he will at last get what's coming to him. There he may lie easy. But if, for one second, you let yourself glance sideways at the old pun -unlikely here, no doubt- "there I'll lie" slides ever so precariously over the deepest bitterness, the relentlessness of the sinner's ·discourse fixing its subject in the condition from which even now (or especially now) he can't escape. And a moment later we hear a distant echo of the judgment he .solicits in another voice, another key, pompous and laughable, when Shallow enforces his hospitality on Falstaff: "I will not ex;cuse you, you shall not be excused, excuses shall not be admitted, there is no excuse shall serve, you shall not be excused" (5. L4-6). Henry lies .uneasily and continues to do so to the end because he is alway trying both to deceive himself and to resist the attempt. What I find most poignant in this is the vivid process, the conflict, the discursive struggle, that couples the desire for moral legitimacy with despair at the futility of the desire. Time and again the speaker of Henry's language all but pronounces judgment on himself, and time and again he veers off to another bad-faith speech act that can only confirm the judgment. Passing judgment on him, as critics like to do, seems to me to be redundant. I have the same feeling about Henry IV that many critics of ironic reading have about Henry V: both Henrys, or Harrys, get bad press from certain sectors of the academy. Harrying Harry with pietistic panache is currently considered a sign of liberal chic. And because the fifth Harry gets very good press from other sectors, unlike his father, a tedious squabble has been going on between Harry-lovers and Harry-haters. Now, while I am not a Harrylover, I try not to be a Harry-hater, and I do this by formulating the trouble with Harry-with both Harrys, with all Harrys-in a manner that differs from the way the Harry-haters do. The issue is not what Harry's critics think of Harry but what Harry thinks of Harry; not whether they think he's good or bad but whether he does. The only trouble with Harry that really troubles me is Harry's trouble with Harry.

CHAPTER I2

+ Food for Words: Hotspur and the Discourse of Honor

In Richard II, Thomas .Mowbray, the Duke of Norfolk, having been accused of grievous crimes and challenged to judicial combat by Henry Bolingbroke, addresses the following piece of ceremonial bluster to the throne: However God or Fortune cast my lot, There lives or dies true to King Richard's throne, A loyal, just, and upright gentleman. Never did captive with a freer heart · Cast off his chains of bondage and embrace His golden uncontroll' d enfranchisement, More than my dancing soul doth celebrate This feast of battle with mine adversary. Most mighty liege, and my companion peers, Take from my mouth the wish of happy years; As gentle and as jocund as to jest Go I to fight: truth hath a quiet breast. (r.3.85-96)

Such ritual self-representation has the obvious purpose of turning the speaker as completely as possible into a conventional icon, of emptying out his particularity so that he may fully embody and signify the discourse of honor. It is insurance against potential detraction should he be defeated. Its value is commemorative: in what may be his last performance the speaker designs his own death mask, speaks his own epitaph, tries· to preempt the

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honor-giving function by stamping his ritualized idea on the future. The speech concludes not with one but with two rhymed couplets-double insurance. The message Mowbray intends is that he has already been enfranchised, that he is inwardly untouched by the "chains" of falsehood and corruption that bind him, and therefore that his truth, his probity, can't be affected by the outcome. Everything in this speech, however, strains against . this message, qualifies it, contradicts it. The initial strain is felt in the parallelism ofthe first two lines: his lot will be cast by God if he lives but by Fortune if he dies. This distinction may serve the rhetorical purposes of his message, but it is, to say the least, theologically difficult, and it is an evasive modification of the juridical logic that governs trial by combat, in which to lose is to be judged guilty by God. Another strain is suggested by Mowbray's insistence that he is true to "King Richard's throne"; his effort in LI discreetly to distance himself from complicity with Richard insinuates a distinction into this phrase: truth to the throne may not be identical with truth to Richard. Mowbray is implicated in the Gloucester murder as well as in other unpalatable Ricardian projects. After he deflects blame for the murder from himself to Richard he goes on gratuitously to mention his participation in another failed ambush directed at John of Gaunt (r.r.I33-41). Since nothing more is said about this episode we are left to wonder whether that was another Ricardian project, and the speculation only increases our sense of the snarled factional networks, the deep divisions, papered over by the ritual formulas that shape the language and actions of these public scenes. Given the conventional demands of ceremonial speech, Mowbray's assertion of complacent conscience need not be belied by the catachrestic violence· of his wild figural dance. Such a dance is expected to fulfill the pastoral function of ritual without succumbing to the deadly iterability of the cliches of self-praise. The function is pastoral because it is a simplified and artificial procedure that conspicuously excludes and therefore alludes to the complicated network of motives, purposes, and interests to which it responds. Yet because of his unhappy relation to this network Mowbray's defense of his probity and freedom from guilt is compromised from the start. He is not only placed in a false position; he is also in a no-win situation. He would be disgraced if Bolingbroke were to defeat him, but were he to win he would uphold the disgraced regime that taints him by association, and he would validate the king he had all but accused of murder (r.I.132-34). Furthermore, it seems clear to everyone involved that both Richard and Bolingbroke are using him as a factor, an expendable decoy, to further their own designs. For all these reasons the very assertion of truth,

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autonomy, and quiet conscience must be assumed to jeopardize the selfesteem of any speaker whom we imagine to cherish those values, and the phrase "truth hath a quiet breast" takes on ominous vibrations: given the situation Mowbray finds himself in, there can be no truth in words. He thus welcomes. the feast of battle as a liberation from the silenced truth of the network. in which he is hopelessly entangled. He throws himself into it as an escape from the effeminizing- because (in his case) castrating- battle of words, "the trial of a woman's war" (r.r.48), in which he has been forced to defend his honor in terms that can only further compromise it. There is no escape from this bondage except in the enfranchisement his language orgiastically solicits and anticipates: death. "Take from my mouth the wish of happy years": not only "I wish you many happy years" but also "let me not wish for happy years"; "let me die now." Mowbray's dilemma is a harbinger, a proleptic epitome, ofthe dilemma that faces Hotspur in 1 Henry IV. 1

+ The discourse of honor lurches like a sick horse toward the field it pastures and sickens on -the field beneath which problems of gender, speech, and gift exchange twist along in rhizomes whose bad fodder crops up everywhere. Harry Percy alias Hotspur rides into the field on that same horse, but misperceives the poor critter as his roan, his throne, and foolishly- or dashingly-disregards one of the symptoms of what ails it: ·it is, he says, "a crop-ear" (2.3.70). My topic in this essay is Hotspur's crop-eared dash toward death. More specifically, I am interested in Hotspur's talk and in things mucking about among the rhizomes of his language that the speaker seems not to hear, or not to want to hear. But before following Hotspur into the field, I want to set the stage for his entry by describing the field itself. One of the many fine moves Pierre ·Bourdieu makes in Outline if a Theory if Practice is to map the discourse of honor onto Mauss's famous account of the discourse of the gift. In that account, Mauss writes that to give "is to show one's superiority, to show that one is something more and higher, that one is magister. . . . To accept without returning or repaying more is to face subordination, to become subservient, a client, a debtor," for "charity wounds him who receives, and our whole moral effort is directed towa~d suppressing the unconsciously harmful patronage of the rich almsgiver" -the patronage, for example, of such figures as the Christian Father and the Jewish Mother, both of whom, taking a page from King Lear's book, conti~ually remind their children that "I gave you all." 2 In the course of sketching out what may be called a "gift-act theory," Bourdieu chooses for his first example the game of honor and goes. on to offer a conspectus

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of its strategies and misfires, which, he claims, conform to "a logic of challenge and riposte." 3 This move is interesting because the dialectic of honor is more than a casual example of the dialectic of the gift. To superimpose challenge-andriposte on gift-and-return is to bring out the ambivalence in each (the aggressiveness of giving, the generosity of the challenge) and in fact to suggest that the two form a reversible fabric, each side the inner lining of the other. Bourdieu insists that the logic of honor is inherent in the more general practices of gift exchange: just as a gift "is a challenge which honors the man to whom it is ·addressed, at the same time putting his point of honor . . . to the test;' so a challenge is a gift because it credits its :recipient "with the dignity of a man of honor." 4 This general view of the relationship, however, fails to engage the particular difference. that distinguishes the special discourse of honor from the contribution its logic makes to the ambivalence of gift exchange. For gift-giving as Mauss· discusses it may be aggressive and challenging, but it needn't be discussed by anyone but the anthropologist. The semiotics of gift exchange can operate with only nonlinguistic signs; the periodic deposit and removal of material objects (mineral, vegetable, animal, human) could conceivably take place in total silence. Not so the discourse of honor, which entails a linguistic component because it is not a closed or circular interaction but always subtends the arbitration and authority of a third party. If two men meet in the forest, draw their swords over a point of honor, and one falls, but nobody hears him, has the other won honor? Not. unless he returns to tell the tale, and the tale is accredited, and it reaches the right ears. Percipi est esse- and therein hangs a problem. Aristotle noted that while many think honor to be the telos of the political life, it is too superficial to be the final good because "it appears to depend on those who confer it more than on him who receives it." 5 According to Bourdieu's account, when the claimant to honor challenges others to recognize his claim, he may be said to confer honor on them because the challenge credits them with the capability of "playing the game of honor" and obligates them to respond. But since the challenge is a request, it also confers power on them. Even if the honor-seeker feels he deserves the gift, it remains a gift for which he incurs an obligation. Thus the struggle between honor-seekers and honor-givers generates the need on both sides for strategies that control the flow of power and indebtedness. The coupling of honor and gift exchange goes back at least as far as Aristotle, who says that "a gift is at once a giving of a possession and a token of honor." This remark may be coupled with another in which he indicates

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that honor itself is a gift, and with still another in which he notes of the "great-souled man" -who above all others prizes and deserves honor-that he "is fond of conferring benefits, but ashamed to receive them, because the former is a mark of superiority and the latter of inferiority." This suggests a problem, because;! if honor is a benefit conferred, shouldn't the great-souled lover of honor be ashamed to receive it, especially since he knows himself to be superior and "is justified in despising other people"? 6 Aristotle secures the great-soule.d man from this dilemma by arguing that he will be justified in feeling he receives "only what belongs to him, or even less, for no honor can be adequate to the merits of perfect virtue, yet all the same he will deign to accept their honors, because they have no greater tribute to offer him." 7 His gift to them will be to honor them with the opportunity to signify, however inadequately, what he already possesses. This helps him go on despising them, which is as it should be. A similar view appears in Leviathan, where, characteristically, Hobbes bares its fangs: To have received from one, to whom we think ourselves equal, greater benefits than there is hope to requite, disposeth to counterfeit love; but really secret hatred .... For benefits oblige, and obligation is thraldom; and unrequitable obligation perpetual thraldom; which is to one's equal, hateful. But to have received benefits from one, whom we acknowledge for superior, inclines to love; because the obligation is no new depression: and cheerful acceptation, which men call gratitude, is such an honor done to the obliger, as is taken generally for retribution.8

Hobbes seems to assume that hierarchy preconditions the different responses of equals and unequals, but if his language doesn't actually destabilize the assumption, it lends it a certain bite. Retribution, for example, is a strong term for the gratitude that is the honor done to the obliger; it is a power word, and he uses it again in chapter 15 in a punitive sense to denote justified revenge. Is the donee's repayment, his discharging of the debt, a form of requital? "The obligation is no new depression": the donee is already depressed, pressed down; this inferiority is what valorizes his gratitude; he isn't expected to make a more substantial repayment; the donation reaffirms his need and inferiority, as does the honor his cheerful acceptation pays the donor. Perhaps, then, generosity is the donor's revenge. But why should this be? Hobbes suggests why this should be in his discussion of honor: "The value, or WORTH of a man, is ... his price; that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his power: and therefore is not absolute; but athing

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dependent on the need and judgment of another.... And as in other things, so in· men, not the seller, but the buyer determines the price. For let a man, as most men do, rate themselves at the highest value they can; yet their true value is no more than it is esteemed by others" (1.ro). This is the theme that, as D. J. Gordon has shown, is central to Coriolanus. 9 If obeying and honoring confer power, those who obey and honor have power, which they both exercise and alienate when they obey and honor. It may be that in the terms of this master-slave dialectic, the more depressed they are, the more gratitude and honor they pay out, the more power they alienate, the more power they have. But what is the value of the honor one receives from those he considers his inferiors, those he relies on to reaffirm his superiority? It may be that in the overall scheme of Leviathan this dialectic promotes anxiety in the natural person who becomes the preeminent artificial person· when authorized by his subjects to represent them as their sovereign. Aristotle is no less political than Hobbes in his approach to honor, but Hobbes is more sensitive to the abstract and mediated forces of commodity exchange embedded in (but in his time much closer to the surface of) the concrete exchange systems of what.may be called logocentric hierarchy. As C. B. Macpherson paraphrases Hobbes's view, honor, "regarded subjectively by the recipient, is the difference between his own estimate and the market estimate of his value. But honor, regarded objectively, corresponds to the market estimate that both establishes his actual power and is established by his actual or apparent power." 10 One buys power or protection by paying out honor, and, as Hobbes asserts, the problem for the hero is that it is a buyer's market. This is because honor can't be taken or stolen or produced for self-consumption. It has to be borrowed, sold, or won; lent, bought, or ceded. As Ulysses puts it in Troilus and Cressida, the honor-seeker "Cannot make boast to have that which he hath, I Nor feels not what he owes but by reflection," and the pun on owes has real bite to it. Early in Part One of Henry IV, the king calls Hotspur "the theme of honor's tongue, I Amongst the grove the very straightest plant, I Who is sweet Fortune's minion and her pride" (1.I.8o-82). All the dilemmas of Hotspur's version of the discourse of honor are inscribed in these words. Honor is the theme of Hotspur's tongue, but since the honor-seeker's discourse is necessarily incomplete and solicits others' tongues, Hotspur is perforce the theme of honor's tongue. This chiasmic predicament is complicated by the fact that there has always been a troubled relation between the honor-seeker's tongue and his valor. It was so in warlike Sparta, from which we get the word and concept laconic. It was so in the wild American West, whose soft-spoken six-shooting heroes enjoyed actions louder

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than words. Enshrined in the films of the 1930s in such oversized, tightlipped, woolly-mouthed fantasies as Gary Cooper and Randolph Scott, they asserted their special virtue by responding to the demands of civil life and civil or uncivil women with the antirhetoric of awshucksism. Who can fail to imagine John Wayne nasally twanging out Mowbray's 'Tis not the trial of a woman's war, The bitter clamor of two eager tongues, Can arbitrate this cause betwixt us twain ... ?

He would have warmed to this, but the eighteen lines of eager tonguework Mowbray follows it with would have made him nervously toe the hoofimprinted dirt. Our heroes show themselves aware of the ancient tradition of the miles gloriosus. The counterfeit warrior is the one who talks too much; the real one proves his courage by letting his gun and other people do his talking for him. Paul Jorgensen's study of" the theme of the misplaced soldier" in Shakespeare and his contemporaries throws a certain amount of light on the man of valor's chief problem: "it is only on the battlefield that he is thoroughly at ease." 11 So, if Hot spur says, "I profess not talking," and if Coriolanus says, "When blows have made me stay, I fled from words," Jorgensen thinks this must be because they lack the polish needed to cope with a wordy world run by courtly and lawyerlike operators. But this explanation fails to account for the copiousness of speech with which Hotspur professes not talking, and for the rhetorical power of Coriolanus's wordy flight from words. The story has to change as soon as we recognize that these warrior heroes run away, not from what they do poorly, but from what they do too welland in Hotspur's case, from what he does so enthusiastically that, when he encounters someone like Glendower who reflects back to him an inflated version of his own bombast, he becomes irritable and embarrassed. I would argue against Jorgensen, then, that Hotspur's courage (and, in a different way, Coriolanus's) is inseparable from his weakness, and that it is more than battle courage. It is the ability to endure situations of verbal encounter that continually threaten him with disclosure of the weakness he fears. The language that speaks through him is a minefield, because it represents him as both rhetorically self-indulgent and disdainful of rhetorical self-indulgence. He deserves the honor he wants if only for his courage in traveling over linguistic terrain he doesn't control or trust. That terrain is "overcharg'd with double cracks," so it's a good thing he is devoted to his horse. Deep fears and defenses wound the language that represents Hotspur. His speech both dramatizes and problematizes his cardinal virtue by treat-

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ing it as the transformation of a latent desire of flight, and fear of weakness, into warlike valor and aggressiveness. The outlines of the problem can be more firmly set by noting that in the tradition which made Aristotle's ethics influential, the sphere of action allocated to the virtue of courage is narrowly circumscribed, and circumscribed in such a way as to create difficulties for its representation in Shakespeare's version of theatrical drama. From a Shakespearean standpoint, Aristotle begins well when, after defining courage as the virtue that observes "the mean in respect of fear and confidence;' he states that "the things we fear are . . . broadly speaking, evil things." But the notion of evil is then simplified by the following line of argument: courage is displayed in response to fearful things; the courageous man willingly faces the most fearful things; "the most terrible thing of all is death"; not every kind of death gives an opportunity for courage-drowning and disease, forexample, don't qualify as appropriate occasions; the noblest test for courage is the noblest form of death, that is, death in battle. '~nd this conclusion is borne out by the principle on which honors are bestowed in republics and under monarchies." Hence, the courageous man "will be he who fearlessly confronts a noble death, .or some sudden peril that threatens death_; and the perils of war answer this description most fully." 12 Aristotle's subsequent discussion of courage is entirely confined to warfare. Were Shakespeare interested in dramatizing this version of courage he would confront the obvious difficulty that battles are not the easiest things to stage, and that audiences would tend to be diverted from the hero's display of martial courage to the actor's display of acrobatic dexterity, thus from warfare to choreography. Jorgensen addresses this problem in the first chapter of Shakespeare's Military World, mounting an astute defense of what had previously been judged a dramaturgical weakness, Shakespeare's "physical staging of warfare." He argues that if Shakespeare differed from some of his contemporaries in his greater scorn of "stage realism" and his more "restricted battle display," it was from choice rather than from the limited "martial resources of the stage" (2-3). Shakespeare chose to appeal to the auditory rather than visual imagination "either through actual sound or through a stylized, connotative rendering of it in dialogue" (3). "With his actual military music" of drums, trumpets, and alarms as well as with his "rhetorical 'music,' " he sought to transport his audience from the immediate experience of battle-in which sounds, cannon, and blows have a precise, uncolored meaning-to a superior level of imaginative participation. On this level, not the mind's eye but the mind's ear

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is appealed to principally as a substitute for a full display of warfare. Remoteness . . . is an essential quality of both the martial discourse and the martial music. And the ear, more susceptible than the eye to the suggestiveness of distant and imminent events, is impressed both by the "sad harmony" of rhetoric and by a skillfully connotative use of drum and trumpet. (34)

The evidence Jorgensen adduces suggests a different and to my mind better generalization than the one his first sentence articulates. For example, he shows how the "persistent 'Low alarums' " in the last scenes of julius Caesar underscore "Caesar's Nemesis-like pursuit ofBrutus-but with an ultimate clarification in terms of military function" when "the identity of the Nemesis becomes prosaically clear with the arrival of the victorious enemy, whose presence on stage is far less impressive than the suggestiveness of their distant drums" (32-33). Similarly, Jorgensen remarks the increasing tension produced in the last scenes of Macbeth "by the cumulative effect of drums . . . and . . . alarums," and observes that "Macduff, like Octavius Caesar, may be a prosaic instrument of Nemesis, but not so the relentless music with which- in a more than military sense- he encompasses his victim" (33-34). What both these examples suggest is that Shakespeare first elicited "a superior level of imaginary participation" by appealing to the ear, and that the subsequent stage appearance of the victors seemed anticlimactic by contrast. And this is a significant pattern, evident in many plays, including the Henriad: the visualization onstage of battles and other external moments of conflict resolution is represented as unsatisfactory, as the reductive displacement of inner self-division to outward circumstances. From Jorgensen's discussion, then, I force this hypothesis: Shakespeare uses the power of auditory effects to arouse a sense of foreboding and premonition that makes the stage realization the effects anticipate seem inadequate as "objective correlatives." We could say, in fact, that "objective" in Eliot's phrase means "inadequate" in the value system of Shakespearean dramaturgy. This isn't only because in "the immediate experience of [staged] battle . . . sounds, cannon, and blows have a precise, uncolored meaning," whereas in "martial discourse" they are more distanced and suggestivemore seductive, as Othello and Desdemona found: "She'd come again, and with a greedy ear /Devour up my discourse" (1.3.149-50). The "precise, uncolored meaning" is itself a meaning. It signifies that insufficient and premature closure has been imposed on latent meaning ("some other grief") by the process of displacement that allows theatrical ending to coincide with dramatic judgment. The effect is not to dispel but, on the contrary, to intensify our bewilderment, skepticism, foreboding, sadness, or terror.

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"The music at the close" only reanimates the fearful and mysterious power of Shakespearean speech so that Desdemona's tremulous question remains the auditor's: "what does your speech import? I I understand a fury in your words, I But not the words" (4.2.31-33). And this is the perplexity that Shakespearean language continually inscribes in the speakers it represents: "what does my speech import? I I understand a fury in my words, I But not the words." When the fury is channeled outward in physical violence, the perplexity continues to vibrate. Shakespeare's final Exeunts order us out of the theater because the unfinished business they leave us with cannot be transacted here. It is as if, after all the buildup, physical battle au fond tests nothing more significant than skill in fencing and counterfeiting; as if the represented violence is no more "serious" an expression of the "inward wars" than the choreography that mimes it. That is not where Shakespeare's heroes kill and die. They kill and die in their language, and we have to follow the lethal traces down into its burrows and rhizomes. What stage death offers the hero is an escape from this verbal dying into the rest that is silence. What it offers the audience is something like a critique of this commitment to stageable closure as an escape from meaning. When the hero finally faces the test of battle and arrives at the wished-for haven where he can find judgment and prove his truth; when he is on the verge of escaping from his bondage to words, woman, civil life, and perhaps life itself, his drive toward transcendence may be betrayed, diminished, by the very convention of theatrical closure to which he has committed himself. Having displaced his inward wars to swordplay, he becomes vulnerable to a critique that may have arisen accidentally, as a by-product of theatrical constraints, but that offers thematic possibilities to a writer who wants to raise questions about such a displacement. The critique occurs when presentation overpowers and interprets representation, that is, when the agility of actors putting on a fencing exhibition preempts the mind's eye and occludes the symbolic valency of the fictional conflict. This critique speaks to the ethical limits of such notions as Aristotle's circumscribed concept of courage, the courage that thinks to prove itself by facing death in battle as "the most terrible thing of all." What that notion fails to consider may be suggested by glancing at the following qualification, in which Aristotle limits the range of the term according to the doctrine of the mean: "to seek death in order to escape from poverty, or the pangs of love, or from pain or sorrow, is not the act of a courageous man, but rather of a coward; for it is weakness to fly from troubles, and the suicide does not endure death because it is noble to do so, but to escape evil." 13

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But the interest, pathos, and poignancy of Shakespeare's warrior-heroes is produced by ignoring this distinction.

+ In the language of 1 Henry IV the politics of honor, the politics of speech, and the politics of gender are closely interrelated. To begin with some textualized representations of woman, consider the passage in which Gadshill boasts that he is the accomplice of those who

Cham.

Gads.

pray continually to their saint the commonwealth, or rather not pray to her, but prey on her, for they ride up and down on her, and make her their boots. What, the commonwealth their boots? Will she hold out water in foul way? She will, she will, justice hath liquored her: we steal as in a castle, cock-sure: we have the receipt of fern-seed, we walk invisible. (2.r. 79-86)

In this pathologically overstated piece of irreverence, the thrills of political, legal, and religious· violation are reduced to that of sexual violation. The commonwealth is feminized and canonized in the mode of Petrarchan parody-as the idealized object of erotic worship who is simultaneously the source, enemy, and target of sexual desire. Manly power and risk-taking are exaggerated in a phallic fantasy the rhetoric of which centers on the victimization of a woman and on the idea of preying o:q one's very source of protection. Gadshill's idyllic society of thieves is held together homosocially by what is imaged as a gang rape. The victim is not only violated but also "liquored"- corrupted either by bribery or by drink- and thus easier to penetrate. An earlier analogue to this passage appears in Falstaff's famous play on

body jbawdy jbeauty jbooty: Marry then sweet wag, when thou art king let not us that are squires of the night's body be called thieves of the day's beauty: let us be Diana's foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon; and let men say we be men of good government, being governed as the sea is, by our noble and chaste mistress the moon, under whose countenance we steal. (r.2.23-29)

The paradox in the last phrase is that those who steal under Diana's sylvan authority also steal under her face; they are thieves as well as squires of the night's body, beauty, and booty. 14 Manhood and male bonding are defined in terms of the conventional strategy, first idealizing and then violating the

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power, authority, or body of woman. Falstaff's idealization is itself motivated by the Prince's equally one-sided derogation: "clocks the tongues of bawds, and dials the signs of leaping-houses, and the blessed sun himself a fair hot wench in flame-colored taffeta" (r.2.8-ro). When Falstaff replies, "we that take purses go by the moon" (13-14), he is not exactly changing the subject from prostitution to robbery, since purse-taking is an image that accommodates robbery to the metaphor of sexual violation. The point of Harry's insult to Falstaff is his susceptibility to the lusts of the flesh that make him an easy mark for women. Falstaff gets the point, and parries it a few speeches later: "is not my hostess of the tavern a most sweet wench?" (39-40). But his Diana speech is also a riposte: "when you are king, let my immersion in the life of sack, whores, and thievery to which you (so righteously) consign me be romantically mystified as a form of service to the goddess to whose chaste countenance these very things are anathema. And let you be that goddess." This is "pretty daring" talk, as Dover Wilson observes, because it glances at the Virgin Queen.15 The speech is also daring because Falstaff offers Harry the role of Diana. And it is even more daring because of the double pun in the last phrase: (r) "we steal (a) under her authority but also (b) right under her nose"; (2) "we go stealthily not only (a) under her authority but also (b) under her face." Meaning zb is the most outrageous because it is sexual, and because it places Falstaff in the position of Actaeon. If Diana's foresters are men, they must be hunters of as well as for the goddess. 16 As Falstaff's five repetitions of "when thou art king" in this scene indicate, he is dogging his Diana now: laying bare the real project behind Harry's madcap role and goading Harry into exposing it himself, but also-and more compellingly-daring Harry to turn the verbal dogs back on their fat master. The Actaeon myth figures explicitly and importantly in Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Leonard Barkan has shown how Merry Wives articulates the comic aspects of the theme: the attempt to overmaster woman results in being mastered by woman; phallic aggression produces emasculation.17 In this direct form, the Actaeon theme does not enter into the concerns of 1 Henry IV. Its comic and farcical reduction in Merry Wives is a consequence of full detextualization, which transfers the dispersed nodes of textual meaning to the dramatic and theatrical surface, where the dangers are explicit and controlled. In 1 Henry IV, however, the traces of the myth produce a more sinister network of resonances. From his first words to his final rejection, Falstaff knowingly presents himself to Harry as a target, persistently probes beneath the madcap role to lay

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bare aggressive motives that Harry tries to conceal even from himself. In doing this, of course, he is asking for punishment and eliciting the gestures of negation or rebuttal that will add up to the ultimate rejection.

+ By heaven, methinks it were an easy leap To pluck bright honor from the pale-fac'd moon ... (I.J.I99-200)

With these lines Hotspur declares his candidacy for membership in Falstaff's Actaeon Club. The assault on the moon draws some of its energy not only from its echo of Falstaff's passage but also from a hunting image Hotspur has just unleashed:

North.

0, the blood more stirs To rouse a lion than to start a hare! Imagination of some great exploit Drives him beyond the bounds of patience. (!.3.195-98)

Some light on Hotspur's heroic frenzy and its Actaeonic implications is thrown by Barkan's comments on Gl' Eroici Furori: From the dedication to Sir Philip Sidney to all Bruno's sonnets which his dialogues analyze, it becomes clear that the conventional behavior and attitudes of the romantic lover are requisite for the visionary experience, even if the true enthusiast must purge the purely sexual aspect of his love. The enthusiast is first a lover, and Bruno builds his visionary structure upon the foundation cif Neoplatonic amorous furor. 18

It is the repression and displacement indicated by the italicized phrases that strike me as relevant to the Hotspurian discourse of honor. Erotic desire for woman is transformed into aggressive desire for honor. The linking term, put;ge, encodes a process in which the source of the "sexual aspect" is displaced outward to woman, and woman is violated either by the hero's direct assault or by his flight. The return and triumph of the repressed, which is inscribed in the fate of Actaeon, is also inscribed in Hotspur's language, and the consequent anxiety this language betrays is evident in his very first speech. Henry's curt dismissal of Worcester at the beginning of1.3, and his unbending attitude about Hotspur's prisoners, could not but be calculated to incense the Percys. The end of the play's first scene makes it clear that he looks forward to this confrontation, and that he had arranged it before his

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crusade speech. If he assumes that Hotspur is already infected by "his uncle's teaching," as Westmoreland claims (r.1.95), what he does in 1.3 can only be expected to aggravate the infection and strengthen Worcester's hand. We judge Henry's contribution to be even greater when we realize, early in 1.3, that Hotspur is not yet infected, and that although Worcester has clearly been up to something, Hotspur hears for the first time that Richard had proclaimed his brother-in-law,.Mortimer, heir to the throne. Against this background the emphasis in Hotspur's long speech explaining his denial of prisoners becomes more interesting for what it reveals about the speaker's basic motivation. He is chiefly concerned to document the source of his irritation in the behavior of the foppish messenger sent by the king. His caricature of a supercilious court butterfly conflates effeminacy with squeamishness, as in "neat and trimly dress'd, /Fresh as a bridegroom," "perfumed like a milliner," "With many holiday and lady terms," "a popinjay," "talk so like a waiting gentlewoman" (1.3.32-54). G. R. Hibbard sums it up thus: "Scorn and impatience ring through the entire passage. The images are precise, reductive, and, some of them, admirably designed to bring out the womanish qualities the soldier sees in the courtier.... Brusque, impetuous, impatient, direct, and courageous, Hotspur makes all this side of his nature evident in his first speech." 19 The italicized phrase betrays a certain diffuseness of reference that is no doubt occasioned by Hibbard's titular theme, the making of Shakespeare's dramatic poetry. Presumably the praise is directed toward the author rather than his character. But what if we ask whether the images are designed for the stated purpose by Hotspur: is he to be admired along with Shakespeare? Why? Hibbard's general objective often leads him to ignore crucial issues of motivation that would lend his judgments more weight. Paul Jorgensen comes closer to the problem when he notes that Henry's accusation places Hotspur "in the defensive position habitual to the Elizabethan soldier;' and that his apology reflects stereotypical features of the debate between the soldier and the courtier. 20 Hotspur is indeed apolo~ getic, but not quite in the sense intended by Jorgensen. His speech is no less finicky than the finickiness he contemns. Judging by the extravagance of his rhetoric, the dandy whose "womanish qualities" irritated him on the battlefield continues to irritate him now. It is as if he is still compelled to decontaminate himself by a speech act that aims primarily at contrastive self-definition. Hence I think the verb in Hibbard's last clause should be taken more forcefully than he apparently intends it: "Hotspur makes all this side of his nature evident;' that is, with self-dramatizing emphasis.

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There are specific reasons for this emphasis. Hotspur enters the play already on the defense. His utterance is a response to Henry's demand for the prisoners taken at Holmedon, but far from being an aggressive refusal, it is conciliatory, even apologetic. "My liege, I did deny no prisoners;' Hotspur begins, and then goes· into a long diatribe against the messenger who carried the king's demand to the battlefield. His "bald unjointed chat" so irritated Hotspur that he answered inattentively ("I answer'd indirectly"), and he begs the king not to let the messenger's "report I come current for an accusation I Betwixt my love and your high majesty" (1.3.64-68). This conciliatory tone is not at all what we had been led to expect at the end of I. I, where Henry and Westmoreland complained of "young Percy's pride" and of Worcester's bad influence, which makes Hotspur "prune himself, and bristle up I The crest of youth against your dignity" (9r, 97-98). Hotspur's response is even more surprising in view of the law of arms mentioned in editorial footnotes, which is that Hotspur was entitled to keep all the prisoners he took except those of royal blood. If we suppose this is something Shakespeare not only knew but expected his audience to know, it is still not clear whether it is something they are expected to take note of as a motivational factor. There seems to have been no law that gives the king the right to the prisoners, so even if we ignored the other convention and the question remained moot, we could still see_ Henry's demand as an aggressive act, and perhaps as a challenge to Hotspur's honor. Why, then, shouldn't Hotspur treat it as such? A closer glance at the circumstances preceding and surrounding his speech will bring out the difficulty of his position. Taking note of the law-of-arms convention about prisoners sharpens our sense of what motivates Henry's aggression. It reinforces a particular reading of the strategies he pursues in the first and third scenes of the play. His sending a messenger to Holmedon to make an issue of the prisoners; his setting up and eagerly awaiting the confrontation that, as the end of the first scene makes clear, he had arranged well bifore making his crusade speech (so that his frustration at having to call the crusade off is patently a pretense); his dismissal of Worcester and his angry deportment thereafterthese moves seem intended to provoke the Percys into an uprising that he can later be in the position to blame them for, as at the end of I. I when he implies that Hotspur is responsible for his having to cancel the crusade that he proposed primarily in order to be able to blame the cancellation on Hot spur. In all this he is deploying the tactics of the language game- the victim's discourse-various forms of which dominate the Henriad: stirring up trouble, disclaiming responsibility for it, targeting oneself as its victim. 21

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Hotspur does not make an issue of the denial of prisoners. But why does he downplay it? The reason is suggested at 1.3.76-79, when Henry accuses him of having at some point. denied his prisoners, But with proviso and exception, That we at our own charge shall ransom straight His brother-in-law, the foolish Mortimer.

Since Hotspur never disputes this allegation, it suggests that he has come into the scene aware of several things that may well be disquieting to the theme of honor's tongue, especially if one assumes (as I do) that Hotspur is genuinely devoted to this theme. First, Hotspur could not deny prisoners unless they had previously been demanded, and Henry's aggressiveness by itself constitutes a challenge that must be met. But the possibility of a clean and honorable response has already been severely jeopardized. For, second, even if his initial words in the play ("My liege I did deny no prisoners") are true, at some moment between his encounter with the messenger and the uttering of those words he decided to deny prisoners. Hence the utterance is evasive, and the narrative that follows it may be felt as a diversionary tactic. Third, since that encounter took place he acquired a not fully determinable amount of information about what happened to Mortimer, and we can imagine that this affected his decision. That is, it may not have been on principle that he decided to withhold prisoners but in order to have some leverage in forcing Mortimer's ransom. Fourth, however much or little he knows about Mortimer's defeat, the information he gets from Henry is enough to suggest that it has already weakened Hotspur's position. For he's come to his meeting with Henry prepared to do something he may consider shameful in order to save his wife's brother. To say "I did deny no prisoners" in this situation could be construed as an anticipatory gesture of placation by someone preparing to breach the code-yield up prisoners that were his by right-in order to bargain for his brother-in-law's release. This helps us contextualize the gender-coded weakness he displaces to the messenger. I read it as representing the sense of weakness aroused in the speaker himself by the utterance of this speech. Isn't there the slightest taint of cowardice and courtly sycophancy in his willingness to appease the king and prepare for the exchange? Doesn't the very function of this speech -what motivates it-subvert its rhetorical emphasis and reawaken the apprehension of moral and political impotence it fends off? From this standpoint, the figure of the messenger becomes the locus at which two opposed yet cooperating vectors of symbolic power collide: he

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represents the king's aggressive attempt to insult Hotspur, but he also represents Hotspur's repressed acknowledgment that-in making this elaborate apology- he may be insulting and compromising himself. All this renders more important and problematical Hotspur's relation to the shadowy figure of Mortimer. Having engaged his honor in Mortimer's behalf, he has ceded partial control of it to someone on whose behavior his reputation now depends. And the apparent reason for this commitment can only increase his vulnerability: he is bound to Mortimer through Lady Percy. I shall return to this dilemma after considering one more feature of Hot spur's first speech. The messenger offends Hotspur not on1y by his appearance and style, his disdainful comments, and his demand for prisoners, but also by something else. Hotspur complains that as he listened "Breathless and faint, leaning upon my sword" (31), the messenger rattled on about "guns, and drums, and wounds," and finally about what a pity it was that This villainous saltpeter should be digg'd Out of the bowels of the harmless earth, Which many a good tall fellow had destroy'd So cowardly, and but for these vile guns He would himself have been a soldier. This bald unjointed chat of his, iny lord, I answer'd indirectly ... (59-65)

Why should this complaint disturb Hotspur? Shouldn't we expect him to agree with the messenger about "these vile guns" that might well diminish the military value of the sword he leans on? The messenger's point, Kittredge writes, "was that warfare is no longer a glorious thing, as it was· in the old days of hand-to-hand fighting before gunpowder was invented." 22 There are enough references to guns in the play (pistols, calivers, heavy-ordnance, powder) to remind us of the wishful archaism of Hotspur's attachment to the golden age of chivalry prior to the violation of mother earth. The clean heroics of single encounter is by no means obsolete, for example, the possibility that "Harry to Harry shall, hot horse to horse,/ meet and ne'er part till one drop down a corse" (4.1.122-23). But it is circumscribed by the presence of more effective and less personal forms of warfare and instruments of death. Perhaps Hotspur's sympathy with the messenger's complaint is another reason for his irritation and decontamination. He never speaks of guns in his waking hoursonly in his dreams (2.3.64). The issue I am raising here is not, however, the familiar historical topic of the influence of technological change on sociopolitical change. I am

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not directly concerned with the way the decline of chivalry, the crisis of the aristocracy, may be represented in the portrayal of Hotspur's commitment to a threatened discourse of honor. Rather my emphasis is on another theme intrinsic to that discourse and to the ideal of manhood it expresses: the hero's need to have power over and to die his own death; to invent or choose it, to aim all his actions toward that consummation; to meet and stage his death in a public ritual that will inscribe it on the future and thus triumph over it. Against this ideal, the play opposes two ignominious forms .of death that are, appropriately, most often mentioned by Falstaff: the scaffold and "molten lead." In their different ways, both are threats to manhood. The fear of hanging, the image of an elevated body that suddenly drops toward mother earth (sometimes from a horse) and goes limp, gives focus to the pervasive anxiety that nourishes the villain's bravado. Hanging, in addition, suggests emasculation in a pointedly ironic form, since it producesas an exception to the limpness ·of the rest of the corpse- an erect penis, which, like the supplementarity of a Priapean dildo, symbolizes the power it wants. The erection represents the power of another. To be hanged is to lose one's power over one's death, to be made the helpless site and spectacle of another's power. The other ignominious death is produced by a similar shift of phallic potency from the manly hero and his sword: death by firepower-basilisk, cannon, or culverin-is the wholesale anonymous death that is the fate of "pitiful rascals . . . good enough to toss, food for powder ... they'll fill a pit as well as better" (4.2.64-66). Although Hotspur does not mention guns again, there is a passage in 3.1 that testifies by its hyperbolic distortion to his abiding respect for the destructive force imprisoned in earth's bowels. It's true that in the following speech he is only chiding Glendower by attributing the shaking· of the earth not to fear of the Welsh blowhard but to a bad case of gas. Nevertheless, his retort is itself shaken by fascination for the constrained violence that erupts from the image: 0, then the earth shook to see the heavens on fire, And not in fear of your nativity. Diseased nature oftentimes breaks forth In strange eruptions, oft the teeming earth Is with a kind of colic pinch'd and vex'd By the imprisoning of unruly wind Within her womb, which for enlargement striving Shakes the old beldam earth, and topples down Steeples and moss-grown towers. (3-1.22-30)

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The energy with which Hotspur depicts the grotesque body is carnivalesque. I imagine these lines fired off with the tart and testy exhilaration of a speaker who enjoys sending up the seismic flatulence of his interlocutor's rhetoric. But the caricature, like everything else about Hotspur, is overcharged with double cracks. Glendower embarrasses him because, however inflated his rhetoric and however absurd his pretensions, they caricature Hotspur\ as in a distorting mirror. He combines the excesses of the miles gloriosus with the musico-magical aspirations·of a comic Prospero in so bizarre a fantasy of power as to betray the lack of self-mastery that makes him an easy mark. Yet the flatus Hot spur criticizes· is a flatus that shakes his own language. The speech is itself a scapegoating violation of the maternal principle, to which it displaces vulnerability and impotence, incontinence and imminent rupture, the threat of having one's body possessed, concussed, by aliens that blow it apart-all the dangers that produce the fears that make the courage worthy of the honor the hero desires. Glendower is good for laughs, but his role in the play's economy of honor gives him a special kind of power, the power of weakness. The most seductive appeal to erotic desire as well as the most direct gesture of emasculation both come from Wales. The seduction is conveyed in a form that accentuates its alienation from and by the rigid, self-protective warrior ethos: it is uttered in a foreign tongue by Glendower's daughter. As a doting father, he fears her grief and at first wants the warriors to sneak away to battle in order to avoid "a world of water shed" (3.1.90). But he then submits to her desire and translates her invitation in lilting cadences: She bids you on the wanton rushes lay you down, And rest your gentle head upon her lap, And she will sing the song that pleaseth you, And on your eyelids crown the god of sleep, Charming your blood with pleasing heaviness. (207-n)

A truly Spenserian enticement, evoking the helpless Cymochles in Phaedria's lap, the helpless Verdant in Acrasia's, and also Shakespeare's more skittish Adonis with Venus. Glendower mobilizes cosmic harmonies and heavenly steeds in the service of a languor the dangerous allure ofwhich even Hotspur grudgingly acknowledges, and resists with awkward jokes. It is entirely consistent with the uncompromising claims made by the Welsh other that, as Westmoreland reported in r.r, after Glendower captured Mortimer and "butchered" a thousand of his soldiers, the Welshwomen mutilated the soldiers' corpses in "beastly shameless transformation" (44). Seductive enervation and violent dismemberment: these Cymochlean and Pyrochlean ex-

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tremes represent the twin threats to manly autonomy inscribed in the male fantasy of feminine power. The reported maenadic explosion suggests not only an externalization of the male nightmare but also a futile gesture of revenge on the worse "part of valor" by those who momentarily overcame their discretion, those whom the homoerotic flight to the battlefield has marginalized and dispossessed. In this warrior community Welsh is "the discourse of the other." The extremes over which Glendower presides- the extremes that he himself exemplifies in his grotesque doubleness as a cosmic braggadocio and his daughter's pliable advocate- have the same symbolic force. They speak to fears that male fantasy tries to dispel by blaming them on the power of the frailty named Woman. And that frailty .sometimes tries to strike back. Westmoreland's report can serve as a brief reminder that war between men is a form of war against woman. It is a perverse and futile expression of the desire, the lack, attending the more permanent state of bereavement of which Hotspur's banished wife complains in 2.3.

+ Hotspur's problematic relation to firepower is suggested in the first mention of his name, when Westmoreland describes his fight with the Douglas: On Holy-rood day, the gallant Hotspur there, Young Harry Percy, and brave Archibald, That ever valiant and approved Scot, At Holmedon met, where they did spend A sad and bloody hour; As by discharge of their artillery, And shape of likelihood, the news was told. (r.r.s2-58)

The first five lines imply single combat, but the sixth line renders that uncertain. Although Humphreys notes that artillery formerly referred to "any missiles in war" -arrows, for example-and was "not confined to gunfire;' the messenger's remarks about guns at Holmedon render this gloss gratuitous. The line allows us to wonder whether Westmoreland's previous statement refers literally to single combat or synecdochically to two armies. When we subsequently learn that Douglas has been "discomfited" and that "Ten thousand bold Scots, two and twenty knights" lie "Balk'd in their own blood" (67-69), we may also wonder about the nature of the artillery responsible for such mayhem?3 The issue is somewhat clouded by the earlier reference to the barbaric Glendower's butchery of a thousand of Mortimer's soldiers: butchered (42) could well suggest manual warfare, though it does

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not have to (mention of Glendower's "rude hands" in the previous line prompts the suggestion), but at any rate the "beastly shameless transformation" wrought by the Welshwomen may comment on the meaning of the wholesale slaughter of anonymous men. These issues are reawakened when Hotspur, in 1.3, defends Mortimer against Henry's charge that the latter "wilfully betray'd I The lives of those that he did lead to fight" against Glendower, "Whose daughter, as we hear, the Earl of March I Hath lately marry'd" (80-84). Hotspur's response is marked by the same impulse to decontamination that shaped his account of the messenger. The claim that Mortimer was seduced into treason by the offer of marriage- a claim at least partly borne out by subsequent disclosures- touches off another apology, and one that further betrays the speaker's anxiety: He never did fall off, my sovereign liege, But by the chance of war: to prove that true Needs no more but one tongue for all those wounds, Those mouthed wounds, which valiantly he took, When on the gentle Severn's sedgy bank, In single opposition hand to hand, He did confound the best part of an hour In changing hardiment with great Glendower. Three times they breath'd, and three times did they drink Upon agreement of swift Severn's flood, Who then affrighted with their bloody looks Ran fearfully among the trembling reeds, And hid his crisp head in the hollow bank, Bloodstained with these valiant combatants. Never did bare and rotten policy Color her working with such deadly wounds, Nor never could the noble Mortimer Receive so many, and all willingly: Then let him not be slander'd with revolt. (I.3.93-rn)

The speech is extraordinary because Hotspur is describing an encounter he had not seen- and one that may not even have taken place. This fantasy, in which Mortimer becomes the heroic Hotspurian loser, may well be an imaginative replay of Hotspur's own "sad and bloody hour" of battle with Douglas, and if it is, it isolates that conflict by framing it as single encounter and pushing the rest of the fray- the "artillery" and the ten thousand victims- into the background. What prompts this suggestion is the analogy to Hotspur's ignoring the "thousand ... people butchered" by Glendower. Such conspicuous exclusion renders his account more problematic.

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It is already problematic because he uses it to protect himself, along with Mortimer, from the stigma of shameful fear, effeminate cowardice, that Henry tries to mark him with by association. His language continues to be nagged by the rhetoric of decontamination, and the continuity is marked by the echo of the foppish messenger in the figure of the Severn as crisp-headed coward. Hotspur sends "him" cringing to the sheltering lap ("hollow bank") of blood-stained mother earth, and goes on to feminize "bare and rotten policy" by way of parrying the charge that Mortimer "fell off" for the sake of a woman and succumbed to the base condition of which the messenger's "fresh" appearance had reminded Hotspur: "a bridegroom." Henry's first reference to Mortimer had clearly put ·Hotspur on the defensive: "His brother-in-law, the foolish Mortimer" (1.3.79). Since it is Hotspur's marriage that links him to Mortimer and exposes him to the vagaries of Mortimer's behavior, Mortimer's purported vulnerability and folly reflect his own. This is partly why Mortimer's wounds do speak with Hotspur's tongue, and why that ·odd revision, "those mouthed wounds," is so telling. The wounds are mouthed because they eat-or are penetrated by-the sword and because they would speak of honor if they had tongues. But because honor's tongue is the tongue of another, the hero's wounds are mute and their mouths mutilated. The defeated hero is doubly emasculated, his heroic autonomy twice breached. The implications of the figure are more explicit in Coriolanus and julius Caesar. The Third Citizen says that if Coriolanus "show us his wounds and tell us his deeds, we are to put our tongues into those wounds and speak for them" (2.3.5-8). The metaphor associates stabbing, sexual penetration, licking (to eat or heal), and a surgical probe or tent with the giving of voices/votes that affirms Coriolanus's right to the consular honor. In julius Caesar, Antony describes Caesar's wounds in a figure that reminds one of Lavinia's-or any well-behaved woman'smouth: "like dumb mouths, (they] do ope their ruby lips/ To beg the voice and utterance of my tongue" (3.1.260-61). Honor's phallic tongue is what wounds, like women, lack and long for. Hotspur is more comfortable with the idea of eating swords fed by an enemy than with the idea of feeding "on cates" served up by a friend (3.1.157). The friend happens to be Glendower, whom he finds as tedious as "a railing wife" (154), and "cates"-delicacies-happens to echo the name of his wife. Yet the appetite for swords makes the hero dependent on and vulnerable to the enemy who feeds him. If he finds the prospect of violation and dismemberment by the sword nourishing, it is because "the voice and utterance" of honor can be begged only by exposing oneself to the risk

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of the ultimate emasculation: the loss of life and speech. Thus Hotspur, dying, grieves that Harry has "robb'd" him of his youth and "proud titles," and that "the earthly and cold hand of death" lying on his tongue cuts him off before he can "prophesy" -which means, perhaps, before he can put his own tongue into his wounds (5.4·76-84). The word robb'd briefly discharges into this moment the meanings generated in earlier episodes by the incessant play on threats to manhood- cowardice, victimization, the ignominy of hanging-inscribed in the activities of purse-snatching and pocket-picking. Even the noblest death may be no better than the casual by-product of robbery unless redeemed by honor's tongue. Since winner and loser are equally affected by this logic, Harry redeems both their honors by finishing Hotspur's sentence and letting "my favors hide thy mangled face" (5.4.95). Perhaps it is because he is doing himself a favor that he then somewpat oddly says, "I'll thank myselfI For doing these fair rites of tenderness" (96-97). The discourse of honor allows the hero to enjoy the foretaste and reiterate the promise of whatever may be redeeming in that death. It is a continuous incantation soliciting the tongue that can heal the final wound, and for these reasons the hero loves the talk that defers it. But talk is cheap, incurs debts, and the more the hero talks the greater will be the need to discharge the obligation not by victory but by death. The way of Tamburlaine must be avoided, the way of Sarpedon espoused. Hotspur keeps talking to the end, and at the last moment starts a new sentence that he won't be able to finish in order to leave space in the wound for Harry's tongue. The rationale behind this heroic ars moriendi was inadvertently prefigured in an earlier utterance: "I thank him that he cuts me from my tale, I For I profess not talking" (5.2.90-91). Later, it finds its way into Falstaff's mouth: "The better part of valor is discretion" (5.4.II9); one meaning of discretion is "cutting off." 24 Returning to the HotspuriMortimer relation, we have no information on the basis of which to ascertain what happened (or why it happened) before Mortimer "Was by the rude hands of that Welshman taken" (I. 1.41), nor can we ascertain under what conditions he accepted a wife from the same hands. The latter fact is expressed by Henry as hearsay (1.3.83), and since Hotspur doesn't challenge the statement it must be assumed that he is fully aware of it even as he insists that Mortimer "never did fall off ... I But by the chance of war," and goes on to elaborate a chivalric fantasy "to prove that true." Yet the links between these two events remain mysterious. We needn't assume that Hotspur knows more about those links than we do and is therefore lying. Much more interesting is the assumption that he

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doesn't know and that what he says is what he would like to believe. But if that. is the case, if he knows only as much as Henry knows, then we are entitled to feel that his chivalric defense against Henry's interpretation may be breached by doubt- and it will be well to remember this later, when Mortimer fails to show up at Shrewsbury. Hotspur's own honor would be threatened if Henry's interpretation were true and Mortimer proved to be a traitor for love. More immediately, the honorableness of his discourse is threatened for the same reason. The defense of Mortimer is a reckless move, and puts Hotspur at a disadvantage. He commits himself with highrhetorical ardor to an interpretation that may be false. Henry directly challenges his account: "Thou dost belie him, Percy, thou dost belie him,/ He never did· encounter with Glendower," and thrusts home with '~rt thou not asham'd?" (r.J.II2-r6). After he storms out and Worcester returns, Hotspur's report of the heated interchange is evasive: He will forsooth have all my prisoners, And when I urg'd the ransom once again Of my wife's brother, then his cheek look'd pale, And on my face he turn' d an eye of death, Trembling even at the name of Mortimer. (r38-42)

This is not at all how the conversation went: Hotspur's account of the battle is deleted and replaced by the second clause above, which reports something he did not explicitly say. The deletion argues a kind of willed forgetfulness of the extravagant claims he made on Mortimer's behalf, claims he is as yet powerless to verify. The extravagance may be read as an anxious reaction to his powerlessness, and his choleric response to Henry's exit speech seems all the more ·defensive in the ·light of the evasive report that follows it. "Art thou not asham'd?": perhaps he is, or fears to be; Henry seems to have more success managing Hotspur's sense of shame than he does in his parallel project of managing Harry's. Here he may have opened up a wound. When Worcester returns, however, he pours balm into that wound by mentioning Mortimer's claim to the crown. We should expect this news to relieve Hotspur because it legitimizes his political and verbal activity on behalf of someone who, it now turns out, defected not only for love but also for reasons of state. And indeed, he seizes this opportunity to regain his equilibrium. Relief pours out in the form of a long speech devoted primarily to heaping shame on "you" who helped the usurper to the throne. Worcester had given him the cue: for Richard's deposition and murder "we in the world's wide mouth/Live scandaliz'd and foully spoken of" (rsr52)-slander as mastication; the blatant beast; another source of mouthed

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wounds. Worcester appeals to Hotspur's sense of shame- his we reaches out toward his nephew- but in his long response Hot spur gradually narrows the referential focus of his offsetting you and evades Worcester's reach by himself assuming the role of appellant. The last half of his speech is directed specifically to his father and uncle, as the parenthetical line below (172) makes clear:

Vl/(>r.

0, pardon me, that I descend so low, To show the line and the predicament Wherein you range under this subtle King! Shall it for shame be spoken in these days, Or fill up chronicles in time to come, That men of your nobility and power Did gage them both in an unjust behalf (As both of you, God pardon it, have done) To put down Richard, that sweet lovely rose, And plant this thorn, this canker Bolingbroke? And shall it in more shame be further spoken, That you are fool' d, discarded, and shook off By him for whom these shames ye underwent? No, time yet serves wherein you may redeem Your banish'd honors, and restore yourselves Into the good thoughts of the world again: Revenge the jeering and disdain'd contempt Of this proud King, who studies day and night To answer all the debt he owes to you, Even with the bloody payment of your deaths: Therefore, I sayPeace, cousin, say no more. (I.3-165-85)

Hotspur's last eight lines trigger a vivid recollection of the end of Harry's "I know you all" soliloquy in the previous scene. The effect of superimposing the two passages, and their respective scenarios, is to increase our sense that Hotspur, like Harry, is selectively emphasizing a not fully justifiable line of argument by way of fending off another that is more reprehensible. In other words, he situates his appeal entirely within the discourse of honor and says nothing about the dishonor that would at.tend another insurrection against a ruler who- however dubiously he won the crown -was formally invested: "that same greatness," as Worcester had said, "which our own hands/ Have holp to make so portly" (r.3.12-r3). In doing this, Hotspur joins both Henry and Harry in playing the familiar game of disclaiming responsibility and pleading victimization. He unpacks this argument from the hints conspiratorially dropped by Worcester and

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Northumberland (143-52) and gives it back to them as a justifying spur to rebellious action- a spur, really, to revenge for the shames doubly heaped on them. But at the same time, by insisting that the responsibility and dishonor are theirs, not his, he directs the argument against them. As my previous discussion has suggested, Hotspur's opposition to the king is rooted· in a sense of personal affront which is exacerbated by the suspicion that he may be complicit in compromising his own honor. Here that opposition is inseparably bound to a new one: his competition with his senior kinsmen. He uses this speech event not merely to begin to "redeem" his banished honor, but to do so by dissociating himself from their shame. The force of this move is increased by its reverberation of the more familiar analogue that the verbal echoes of the "I know you all" soliloquy evoke: Harry's dissociating himself from his father. And as the soliloquy looks forward to the Great Day of his glittering reformation, so Hotspur begins his race along the cursus honoris with the express intention of wearing "Without corrival all her dignities" (205). On the other side, Worcester and Northumberland are obviously less interested in honor than in power and safety (in the power that will make them safe). Worcester's "Peace, cousin, say no more" is comical in part because he has already laid plans for the redemption of honors, and in part because having deliberately set Hotspur's discourse machine in motion he has a hard time shutting it off. The elder Percys need Hotspur to "face" their uprising, and if we bear this in mind we may be curious about their employment of Mortimer's claim, which had never been mentioned before, either in this play or in Richard II. Whether it is genuine or not- and we may as well assume that it is- is less important than the use they are putting it to as a political appeal to the legitimacy of the cause and a personal appeal to Mortimer's brother-in-law. The conspiratorial manner in which they broach the topic gives it an unpleasant smell, and the question is whether there is any indication that the smell reaches Hotspur's nose. They are using Mortimer to line their own enterprise, and using Hotspur to line Mortimer's. Does his language reveal any awareness of this? The phrase I just used is borrowed from Lady Percy who, in 2.3, after expressing concern over Hotspur's recent behavior, says, "I fear my brother Mortimer doth stir I About his title, and hath sent for you I To line his enterprise" (82-84). This is hardly a complimentary way to put it: she fears Mortimer has sent for him as for his factor or tailor. In the words Hotspur uses to show his kinsmen their "line and predicament," she fears he is being sent for as one of "the agents, or base second means" (r.3.163). Lady Percy's phrasing expresses a hint of disapproval directed at Mortimer for being the

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possible cause ofHotspur's anxiety, but if we hear it with Hotspur's ears we may feel that it only increases his anxiety at the position he finds himself in. For it is possible that he is aware of lining his wife's brother's enterprise at some cost to his own chivalric autonomy and self-respect, and his responses to Lady Percy in 2.3, which I discuss below, play back over his performance in 1.3. Mortimer's subsequent behavior, which suggests that uxoriousness (and perhaps cowardice?) may have caused his failure to show up at Shrewsbury, puts the whole of the enterprise in a bad light, and revives the questions that may have disturbed Hotspur in the early part of I. 3. Taking all this into consideration, one can't but wonder about the variety of dubious circumstances that hedge Hot spur in from the beginning and wound his sense of honor. From the moment he opens his mouth he appears trapped, like Mowbray, in "chains of bondage" to political, psychological, and social circumstances, not to mention the military specter of "vile guns." They jeopardize his honor, his manhood, and his chivalric autonomy. He tries by his speech to silence these truths, defend against them, and preserve the discourse of honor in its purity. But his language, inscribed within truth's "quiet breast;' continues to disclose them. Even his castigation of Worcester and Northumberland betrays an attempt to ignore the more reprehensible aspects of the action to which he commits himself, as well as a self-defeating attempt to compete with his allies in the race for honor. During the remainder of the scene, these doubts about his own condition give themselves away both in compensatory outbursts of bravado and in deliberately. irritating behavior, which -with a wry and selfmocking awareness- he displays as if asking his kinsmen to rebuke him. After Hotspur's rhetoric arcs excitedly up towarq the moon, it comes back down to earth with a set of figures whose idiomatic vividness has a peculiar effect: But I will find him when he lies asleep, And in his ear I'll holla "Mortimer!" Nay, I'll have a starling shall be taught to speak Nothing but "Mortimer" ... All studies here I solemnly defy, Save how to gall and pinch this Bolingbroke: And that same sword-and-buckler prince of Wales,

North.

Hot.

I would have him poison'd with a pot of ale! Why, what a wasp-stung and impatient fool Art thou to break into this woman's mood, Tying thine ear to no tongue but thine own! Why, look you_, I am whipp'd and scourg'd with rods,

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Nettled, and stung with pismires, when I hear of this vile politician Bolingbroke. (I.J.2I9-22, 225-30, 233-38)

Hotspur at his most winning playfully vents and deflates his anger. There is self-mockery in the kind and level of punishment he devises-in the threat to turn starling teacher and pester Henry like a popinjay (cf. J.I.253-54 and 1.3.49), and in the tonal drop from "solemnly defy" to "gall and pinch." It is not so much that he is charming as that he is being charming, begging his auditors' indulgence and apologizing for his own so that he can go o~ indulging himself, can go on savoring his minor grievances and revenges like a small boy who has been shamed and is bent on getting even. Yet his language acknowledges both his low tolerance for such grievances and his .high tolerance for the speech they enable. To scale them down to the level of galls, pinches, beatings, and stings is to admit· he has been making more of them than he should. But even as he apologizes to his auditors for his performance, and even if it is an enabling apology, he seems willfully, perversely, to give them-and here I borrow Portia's phrase-a vantage to exclaim. on him. In the speech action of this scene, as in the battle action later, Hotspur (like Harry) stacks the odds against himself and maximizes his commitment to the role of underdog. This relation of interlocutory disadvantage dramatizes one of the self-subverting aspects of the discourse of honor. He presents himself to his uncle and father, his paternal "corrivals," as a naughty headstrong boy who in effect resigns to them the responsibility of tolerating him, checking him, and guiding him, just as he leaves it up to them to find the battlefield he longs for and to aim him toward it. His dependence on them, his obligation to them, and his consequent lack of self-sufficiency are immediately present and active in the conversational protocol he establishes. To assume such a position is to enhance the authority of the fathers he intends to surpass in the race for honor. He relies on his corrivals to help him achieve the goal ofwearing honor's dignities without corrival. The irony of Northumberland's subsequent defection is that it gives Hotspur what he wants. Does it give Northumberland what he wants? The question may not be answerable, yet it is reasonable to ask it in a tetralogy centered on a set of father-son conflicts that reverberate, overlap, and speak to each other. Weak fathers like Gaunt, York, Henry, and Northumberland may be forgiven for flinching from their sons, and from the shame or guilt of small and great betrayals. But of course the plays don't ask us to get into the business of forgiving, as if we had any right to

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the voyeuristic power of divine judgment. All they ask us to look into is whether the fathers can forgive themselves. A good case can be made that in Richard II Gaunt's manhood and honor are threatened both by his son's behavior and by his response to it. What about Northumberland? There isn't much to go on. His brief responses to Hotspur reveal only irritation. But if we listen to Hotspur with Northumberland's ears, or lend him ours, we may feel that he is being upstaged, challenged, by the son who speaks of plucking all honor for himself while using his father as a factor. The final replies of father and son to Worcester's instructions poignantly drive home the contrast between them: North. Hot.

Farewell, good brother; we shall thrive, I trust. Uncle, adieu: 0, let the hours be short, Till fields, and blows, and groans applaud our sport. (!.3.294-96)

Hot spur looks forward eagerly to the crowds cheering him on the day of the big game. But his father's "I trust;' the last words he speaks in the play, hangs weakly and indecisively at the end of a line whose faltering rhythm prepares us for his absence from the future scene of his son's heroics. The father who began the scene interceding for his son, ends it edging away from him. Until fields and blows and groans applaud his sport, Hotspur finds a substitute outlet in words. His speech drives to an aggressive climax in his violent assault on the moon, a passage that reverbs Falstaff's stealthier attack on "our noble and chaste mistress" and is echoed in Gadshill's attack on Saint Commonwealth. These passages reinforce each other and are all the more significant for being merely incidental to what seems to occupy their speakers' attention. Here, at line 199, is what Hotspur says: By heaven methinks it were an easy leap To pluck bright honor from the pale-fac'd moon, Or dive into the bottom of the deep, Where fathom-line could never touch the ground, And pluck up drowned honor by the locks, So he that doth redeem her thence might wear Without corrival all her dignities: But out upon this half-fac'd fellowship!

''An oration in Ercles' vein," says the Arden editor: a touch of heroic frenzy. But there is more to it than rant, and it is more than a conventionally hyperbolic expression of chivalric ardors. Several ofHotspur's previous phrases in the scene are echoed: the pale-cheeked king "high in the air," "the down-

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trod Mortimer," the redemption of "banish'd honors," and the threat of drowning all converge, and some are transsexualized, in the chaste mistress of the moon who rules the deep. They discharge into that figure the value of the Enemy who threatens and challenges, and who provides honor with its occasion because she withholds it as if to "wear/ Without corrival all her dignities." What the figure virtually says· is that to desire and pursue honor is to dishonor a woman and a goddess-to violate her, to cause her to drown, to make her pale with fear and anger. (However irrelevant it may be, an image of the drowned Ophelia crosses briefly over my sense of this passage.) The rude force of "pluck up . . . by the locks" casts a dim light on "redeem," especially since what will be redeemed is a corpse. Honor, the ultimate prey of the desire for honor, is identified with, expressed in, the perpetration of dishonor and shame on its possessor. If to receive honor as a gift from others is to be diminished, emasculated, reduced to a minion, then the gift must be refused so that honor may be taken by force. Hotspur's imagined violation is also a self-violation. There is a suggestion of transvestism in the image of honor's redeemer wearing her dignities. It is as if his language refuses to let him defeminize himself, as if the woman who withholds honor stubbornly resists his violence. Honor as the lunar goddess is the ultimate figure of danger in the romance sense- the Spenserian daunger. Like Belphoebe, she protects the rights of women against the assaults of their male corrivals. Hotspur clearly means corrival to refer to his male peers, but in the figure, corrival refers to "her." "Half-fac'd" echoes "pale-fac'd" and can describe the figure ofthe moon, which, whether half or full, is flat, like the image stamped on a coin. So long as Hotspur shares honor with "her," so long as her pale face is partnered to his half-face, he remains impure, incomplete, merely half a man. To castigate and destroy the "noble and chaste mistress" within is the precondition for surpassing other males in honor.

+ Act 2, scene 3, is a short scene, running to only abcmt 120 lines. It begins with a prose soliloquy in which Hotspur testily responds aloud to the letter of an anonymous correspondent who writes that he is going to pass up the invitation to join the uprising against the king. Hotspur's wife then walks in and spends 27lines of blank verse complaining about how she has been ignored by her husband and worrying about the obsession with warfare that makes him talk in his sleep. The remaining interchanges between them feature his affectionate but nervous diffidence and her frustrated de-

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mands for more love and information. I conclude with some comments on this scene because in it is distilled the essential warfare between the claims of honor and those of gender within Hotspur's language. The opening soliloquy reads so like a dialogue carried on by the speaker with himself as well as with his correspondent that it has been interpreted by Robert Merrix and Arthur Palacas as an unsuccessful effort at self-reassurance. They attribute the "signs of inner conflict" revealed by his language to his "doubts about the rebellion," doubts which they think he silences "with a combination of argument, exhausting wordiness, and irrational tirade. Even in the face of the possibility that the letter's author will 'to the King and lay open all our proceedings,' Hotspur finally concludes, 'Hang him, let him to the King! we are prepared. I will set forward tonight.''' 25 But is this his only fear, or doesn't he also worry that the rebels' enterprise may succeed? Recall his impatience with "half-fac'd fellowship" in 1.3 and the irritability projected from his expressions of concern for honor. The impatience extended to the details of plotting, which he had wanted to leave up to his elders; they would work out the logistics and he would then ride off and reap the rewards: Hot. North. Hot.

I smell it. Upon my life it will do well! Before the game is afoot thou stilllet'st slip. Why, it cannot choose but be a noble plot; In faith it is exceedingly well aim'd. (1.3.271-76)

He is now aware that he may have proved his father right by "letting slip" when he exposed the plot to the correspondent whose "fear and cold heart" might lead him to turn informer. What is interesting about this is that although he blames himself for his folly, his words hardly betray any depth of guilt: "0, I could divide myself, and go to buffets, for moving such a dish of skim milk with so honorable an action" (2.3.32-34). The selfaccusation is lightheartedly irritable, and it is implicitly affirmative insofar as his own discretion proceeds from a rash willingness to take chances (in divulging the plot to potential allies-or informers?) that is more honorable than the correspondent's cautious scruples. The same pattern of contrastive definition is at work here as was evident in his fulminations against the effeminate courtier. If, as Merrix and Palacas observe, the very anonymity of the correspondent "demonstrates dramatically that Hotspur's ravings and defenses are . . . the unsolicited product of his own turmoil,'' 26 then the charge of effeminate cowardice may conceivably displace the fear-the fear of fear-inscribed in the discourse that speaks through him.

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It is thus questionable that Hotspur's anxiety is to be attributed solely to his "doubts about the rebellion," or that those doubts are silenced by the end ofthe soliloquy. Yet he anticipates new danger in an oddly positive tone of conviction: "You shall see now in the very sincerity of fear and cold heart will he to the King. . . ." This could be read as the utterance of the naughty "lack-brain" boy who has acted as his father suspected he might, and who expects-not without ,satisfaction-to get what he deserves. But it could also- if more obscurely- be read as another expression of the wish to be an underdog: to give the secret away will increase the danger and hence the excitement and honorableness of the action. It is as if the soundness of the plot detracts from honor. His anger at the writer's cowardice may well conflict with a touch of fretfulness over the careful plotting that allies him with so many corrivals, and threatens to diminish his share in "so honorable an action." The impatience of "Hang him, let him to the King, we are prepared: I will set forward tonight" is thus the product of an unresolved clash of motives; it is given a competitive edge by his previous statement that some of his corrivals have "set forward already" (2.3.28-29). But as a way of concluding the soliloquy it is also another gesture of escape to the enfranchisement of "fields, and blows, and groans" -escape from the tug of conflicting motives and from such logistical nettles or· pismires as the precautions of plotting. The situation I analyzed in my reading of 1.3 suggests to me that in addition to the contradictions internal to the discourse of honor, Hotspur's behavior in the circumstances entangling him in Mortimer's affairs could only intensify his uneasiness. Thus I deduce that in the soliloquy he summons up and welcomes the politico-military doubts Merrix and Palacas describe- summons them up to provide the trifling galls and pinches with which he diverts himself from other fears. "Enter Hotspur solus, reading a letter": the soliloquy is itself a single encounter against an absent foe whose "craven scruple" reflects those fears in conveniently parodic and displaced form. Having routed the foe in speech he can rush off to the battlefield before being attacked by second thoughts. Before dwelling with too long a face on Hotspur's uneasiness I think it is important to appreciate the keenness with which the soliloquist enjoys this verbal encounter. The rhythms of the language make it easy for actors performing the soliloquy to move audiences to laugh not merely at the speaker's expense but in sympathetic enjoyment of his rhetorical exuberance. By the very. vivacity of his utterance the actor can secure our approval of, for example, the scornful common sense of " 'tis dangerous to

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take a cold, to sleep, to drink," and can induce us to applaud the memorable riposte that counters it, "but I tell you, my lord fool, out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety" (2.3.8-m). The speaker means to distinguish the ultimate risk-taking Danger from quotidian sources of vulnerability, and the gallantry of the sentiment combines with its aphoristic form to elicit our assent. Nevertheless, the language resists this meaning. The syntax confuses the two kinds of danger because "nettle" is another minimizing figure, and "pluck this flower" -which recalls "pluck bright honor" -is a self-defeating image of the fragile, transient safety sought by fleeing from dangers to Danger. This resistance uncovers something deeper and more abiding in Hotspur's language, something engendered not simply by his uncertainty about the rebellion but by a fundamental ambivalence in the discourse of honor to which he commits himself Merrix and Palacas make good use of the trope of proleptic parody to show how Hotspur's uncertainty is foregrounded by comparison with the prior performance of Gadshill in 1.2: "Whereas Gadshill's defensiveness arises from an attempt to set his challenger [the Chamberlain] straight, Hotspur's much more intense disputations, voiced on a stage empty of everyone but himself, are directed against himself." 27 I imagine Hotspur trying to set himself straight but not fully persuading himself- imagine an edge of self-parody in his romantic posturing, a sense of being trapped in, embattled by, the bravery of a discourse he loves but has doubts about. If it is dangerous to sleep and drink, it is also dangerous to speak. And it is indeed dangerous to sleep, as we learn when Lady Percy enters: 0 my good lord, why are you thus alone? For what offence have I this fortnight been A banish'd woman from my Harry's bed? Tell me, sweet lord, what is't that takes from thee Thy stomach, pleasure, and thy golden sleep? Why dost thou bend thine eyes upon the earth, And start so often when thou sit'st alone? Why hast thou lost the fresh blood in thy cheeks, And given my treasures and my rights of thee To thick-ey'd musing, and curst melancholy? In thy faint slumbers I by thee have watch'd, And heard thee murmur tales of iron wars, Speak. terms of manage to thy bounding steed, Cry "Courage! To the field!" And thou hast talk'd Of sallies, and retires, of trenches, tents, Of palisadoes, frontiers, parapets, Of basilisks, of cannon, culverin,

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Of prisoners' ransom, and of soldiers slain, And all the currents of a heady fight. Thy spirit within thee hath been so at war, And thus hath so bestirr'd thee in thy sleep, That beads of sweat have stood upon thy brow Like bubbles in a late-disturbed stream, And in thy face strange motions have appear'd, Such as we see when men restrain their breath On some great sudden hest, 0, what portents are these? Some heavy business hath my lord in hand, And I must know it, else he loves me not. (2.J.J8-6s)

The first thing we learn from this is that whatever bothers Hotspur antedates the reception of the letter (unless he is imagined to have spent fifteen days talking back to it), and we can assume that it affected the response expressed in his soliloquy. Perhaps wounded honor is part of the problem: the word banish}d works like a mnemonic trigger connecting the violation of his wife's rights to the violent effect on him of his concern to "redeem/ ... banish'd honors." When she refigures "beads of sweat" to "bubbles in a late-disturbed stream," the image matches and recalls Hotspur's "drowned honor" (r.J.20J), and it also recalls his fantasy of the disturbance that "affrighted" the Severn (r.J.IOJ). These echoes filter back into "currents of a heady fight" and trigger another recall, Worcester's "current roaring loud" along with Hotspur's "If he fall in, good night, or sink, or swim" (r.J.ISS94). In this context of recollective allusion, "prisoners' ransom" and "soldiers slain" evoke not only Hotspur's generic martial anticipations but also specific backward references to Henry's demand and to the carnage in Wales for which his wife's brother may have been responsible. To read Lady Hotspur's speech this way is to go beyond the information available to the speaker, to see that the "portents" are also retrospects, and to place a different construction on "heavy business." At the same time it is also to validate the interpretive intuitions displayed in her two. comparisons in lines 59-63. Above all it is to listen with Hotspur's ears, not hers, for she knows less than he does. Doubtless this befits a woman's place, and the very accuracy of her woman's intuition might well motivate him to keep her in it. Her insight may cut too deep, her mirror reflect back to him a true image of the heavy business that he may want not to know as much as she wants to know it. She reveals the intimacy and demands the rights of a second self, and perhaps the demand itself has the force of "some great sudden hest;' since to share in half-faced partnership with a wifely corrival could only widen the breach in his honor and manhood. He can't redeem

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"drowned honor" or pluck honor from the pale-faced king without at the same time banishing-plucking honor from- his wife. Yet this might confront him with another problem. ''And I must know it, else he loves me not": that importunate "hest" could be bothersome just because he does love her- there can be no other way to read the playful affection and banter that mark their two scenes together. She speaks to him with the frankness, sympathy, and confidence of one assured in his love and therefore perplexed by his recent transformation. If we respond to this, it complicates our sense of the "heavy business" that besets him. For the business comes to include the demands she makes on him not only generally as his wife but also here and now, in this speech, and this adds a more immediate source to those that keep the spirit within him "so at war." Her questions mingle anxiety for his welfare with anxiety over her own frustrated claims on him, while her description mingles the marks ofthe distraught lover with the marks of fear. But what love, and what_ fear? Is it the love and fear of "iron wars" that rob him of his "golden sleep" and her of her "treasures" and "rights"? That bend him "thick-ey'd'; toward Henry's "thirsty . . . soil," the man-eating mother (r.r.s-6), or toward the "lean earth" the sweating Falstaff lards (2.2.103-4)? And what does the cry she reports mean? Is it only the leader's cry to his soldiers, or is it self-directed? And if self-directed, does it mean that he has to summon up courage to go to the field, or that going to the field- seeking the solace of "all the currents of a heady fight" -will give him the courage he needs? But courage, then, to defend against what fear if not that of "Thy stomach, pleasure, and thy golden sleep," if not that of "my treasures and my rights of thee"? Or is there another fear, another reason why he would feel threatened by the words with which the watcher at his bed anxiously reflects his anxiety back to him? The first of the "tales of iron wars" she reports fits comfortably within the chivalric paradigm: lines so-sr suggest the dean heroics of single encounter, of '~Harry to Harry, hot horse to horse." But she then goes on to report his tale of the messier warfare "Of basilisks, of cannon, culverin." It is as if, once the dreamer galloped into the field, he was confronted not by another Harry but by the hungry mouths of heavy ordnance and by the ultimate impotence, the prospect of a death he has no power to make his own -more pointedly, the prospect articulated by the fop who so irritated him on the battlefield with talk of "these vile guns" that "many a good tall fellow had destroy'd" (1.3.62-63), and whose connection with Henry and the question of prisoners is marked by Lady Hotspur's linking the sleeper's talk of guns to his talk "Of prisoners' ransom, and of soldiers slain." Behind

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this veil of references lurks the problematic figure of Mortimer and thus the even more problematic bond to Mortimer through Lady Hotspur, whose subsequent expression of concern ("I fear my brother Mortimer . . . I . . . hath sent for you I To line his enterprise;' 82-84) touches on the network of constraints and accommodations that have compromised Hotspur's honor from the start. As a bearer of messages from Hotspur's·troubled dreamland, this messenger can only add to the anxieties and vulnerabilities her account reflec~s. We can imagine why he would be eager neither to have her know what . he betrays in his sleep nor to have the betrayal mirrored back to him so that he is forced to recognize fears and terrors his waking words never acknowledge. Doesn't all this give a more poignant edge and urgency to the self-defeating impulse to flight inscribed in "out of this nettle, d~nger, we pluck this flower, safety"? Poignant, I mean, for both of them, for her as well as for him. His response· is powerfully evasive. He says nothing to her in reply but instead turns away and calls a servant:

Serv. Hot.

Serv. Hot.

Serv. Hot.

What ho! Is Gilliams with the packet gone? He is, my lord, an hour ago. Hath Butler brought those horses from the sheriff? One horse, my lord, he brought even now. What horse? A roan, a crop-ear is it not? It is, my lord. That roan shall be my throne. Well, I will back him straight. 0 Esperance! Bid Butler lead him forth into the park. (1.3.66-73)

He has betrayed his fear to his wife in his sleep, he flinches both from her reflecting it back to him and from her claims on him, and he begins to move rapidly away from that surveillance and self-dividing confrontation toward Esperance. The Percy motto, "Esperance rna comforte;' seems reducible here to "Horse is my stay," especially the horse that carries him away from his wife. Is there any reason why the text contains that apparently gratuitous epithet, "crop-ear"? Animal ears are cropped as a sign of identification, human ears as a sign of punishment. Hotspur's expression becomes less gratuitous when we situate it in the set of references that include a horse named Cut (2.1.5) and Gadshill's gelding (2.1.33, 94). "Cut" signifies either a curtal or a gelding, a horse that has been symbolically or literally castrated. If horses can represent their masters, then perhaps "Cut" speaks to the sense of powerlessness and apprehensiveness expressed by the Carriers who, in 2.1, utter a version of the victim's discourse, and perhaps Gadshill's

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gelding comments on what lies underneath and bears up the aggressive machismo of his rhetoric in that scene. Applying the same logic to Hotspur, "crop-ear" may conceivably suggest something about his wounded mode of audition, his diffident response to the articulateness of the claims, the sympathy, the careful observation, that threaten to make his wife his loving corrival. His affection for her is apparent in all their exchanges, hence if the crop-eared horse on which he plans to escape from her is identified as his, it may hint at a motive of self-punishment in his flight. But to admit this symbolism is to trot out a telling inconsistency: why should the equine instrument of his flight from the fear of emasculation itself be marked as a symbol of what he flees from?

+ "What is it carries you away?" Hotspur's wife asks, and when he answers, "my horse, my love, my horse" (2.3.76-77), it may occur to us that his horse performs the same function as his galloping speech, a perpetually unfinished rush of self-representation interrupted only by the death·it dooms him to. If there is an Icarian and also an Actaeonic futility inscribed in Hotspur's speech it is because this scene as a whole reveals that from the moment Hotspur opens his mouth he appears trapped in "chains of bondage" to political, psychological, and social circumstances that jeopardize his honor, his manhood, and his chivalric autonomy. He tries by his speech to silence these truths, defend against them, and preserve the discourse of honor in its Artemisian purity. But his language continues to defeat him. "That roan shall be my throne": his only throne will be his crop-eared roan. There is as much desperation and futility as there is determination in this utterance. He is king over himself only when he rides the horse that carries him away from his wife toward "golden"- or leaden- "uncontroll'd enfranchisement." Although the discourse of honor carries him away from the weakness he fears, it continually reproduces the weakness in the rhetorical transports that seduce his tongue. When he claims "I profess not talking," when he shows uneasiness about poetry, singing, and lovemaking, he is .in flight from his own vulnerabilities. Behind this obvious point is a more significant one: the language assigned to Hotspur is shot through with the awareness that the accents of honor are inseparable from those of the weakness and uncontrol that the discourse of honor marks as dishonorable or shameful. The hero loves and fears what Mowbray dismissively calls "the trial of a woman's war" as much as he loves and fears the only fate that will justify it and put an end to it.

CHAPTER

13

+ Making Trifles

of Terrors:

Redistributing Complicities in the Ethical Discourses

In All's Well That Ends Well, Lafew begins the discussion of Helena's medical miracle with a slighting comment on those who "say miracles are past;' and on "our philosophical persons" who "make modern and familiar, things supernatural and causeless. Hence it is that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear" (2.3.1-6). 1 He goes on to associate the "seeming knowledge" with that of "the learned and authentic Fellows" who diagnosed the king as incurable. If "unknown fear" is taken as the third member of the series that includes "things supernatural and causeless" and "terrors;' its obvious reference is to something that arouses fear because it is unknown. But within the clause introduced by ensconcing, the phrase can denote the effect of the self-protective flight "into seeming knowledge": among the fearful things the knowledge represses or occludes is the fear itself; fear of the fear of something better left unknown; fear of a fear the play's speakers do not (wish to) know but which their discursive action continually acknowledges and revives, and which, therefore, they must continually disown. The protective action Lafew describes is called "disowning knowledge" by Stanley Cavell,2 and it is in some respects analogous to what others call misrecognition (meconnaissance) and to Sartrean bad faith. It is this sense of Lafew's utterance that I shall explore. What is the cause or object of the unknown fear? For example, from what terrors, what unknown fear, do philosophical persons protect them-

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selves in responding as they do to the curing of the king? Why shouldn't they all rejoice? The Countess suggests one reason when she expresses her doubt that the king would accept Helena's tender of aid: He and his physicians Are of a mind; he, that they cannot help him; They, that they cannot help. How shall they credit A poor unlearned virgin, when the schools, Embowel'd of their doctrine, have left off The danger to itself? (r.3.232-37)

After they have been thus shown up, do "our most learned doctors" (2.r.rrs) fear to suffer the consequences of their medical impotence, the emptiness of their seeming knowledge? But that hardly qualifies as an unknown fear; it is, after all, the cure that appears supernatural and causeless, the effect of "great power, great transcendence," a miracle from the "Very hand of heaven" (2.3.31-35). Something besides the hand of heaven must be the source of the fear. A clue to what it may be emerges as soon as we realize that Lafew's sententious utterance is an example of the seeming knowledge it criticizes. No doubt when viewed in generational perspective the utterance illustrates the wisdom of the elders, a "backward-looking" wisdom obedient "to supernatural sanctions," resisting the disenchantment of "the new world of social mobility and opportunism," and imbued with the "tolerance and mellow grace" of its speaker. 3 But in the perspective of gender, Lafew's rhetoric struts its sapience, exemplifies the worldly wisdom by which patriarchal discourse disowns, represses, or displaces a specifically "modern and familiar" fear: the fear of being unmanned by power the discourse alienates from men and invests in the figure of woman. 4 In All's Ulell the fear is focused on Helena, the phallic virgin who bears her father's power and whose magical gift becomes a pharmakon that spreads the fear like a contagion from the king to Bertram. The gift combines with her chastity to make her capable of fulfilling her desire and asserting a socially transgressive claim to a husband and, incidentally, to his property, the transmission of which only she can guarantee by providing him with heirs. Helena joins Lafew and the other males in the play in defending against the fear of her access to power (through her possession of the pharmakon) by displacing the power from "Doctor She" (2.1.79), whom they reduce to a "debile minister" (2.3.34), to her father's drug, and to his Father in heaven, Doctor He, "Him that all things knows" (2.1.148). 5 This interpretation has already been published when 2.3 begins, for Lafew reads it out: ''A showing

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of a heavenly effect in an earthly actor" (2.3.23'--24). That is the more trivial, or trifling-if more comfortable-explanation: we who fear are human, and what we fear is God. The other explanation, the traumatic one from which everyone regresses, and which keeps cropping up in the text, is. that "we" who make trifles of terrors are men, and what we fear is woman: we fear the power we have alienated to the "sweet practiser" (2.r.I84), who is at once our magician and scapegoat-the virgin's power to restore and transmit potency, but also to destroy it, and to appropriate the phallus from its proper owner. But that story is incomplete; it has a hole in it, like a doughnut. We make trifles of things we fear and loathe in ourselves, and we call these trifles woman; and this enables us to make terrors of the trifles so that we can justify-to quote Lacan -assuming "the armor of an alienating identity": I am a man, the author of myself, of no woman born.6 Reducing woman to a trifle is called misogyny; transforming the trifle to a terror is called gynephobia. And both are displacements: misogyny displaces misautia, and gynephobia displaces autophobia. To cut this short, we fear to be dishonored in the breech. "The gift," as the king of France somewhat grandly and pathetically says of the warlike principles. he dishes out to his departing heroes, "the gift doth stretch itself as 'tis receiv'd" (2.1.4). The Lafew principle, as I have called it elsewhere, is a strategy of discourse, by which I mean that whether or not any speaker intends or is aware of deploying the strategy, the strategy -like the soul- inhabits, animates, and gives form to language, inscribing motivational patterns in it, effects of desire, before it is put in use? They are language-games in Wittgenstein's sense, community practices informed by socially constructed schemas not only of behavior but also of self-representation. Individual speakers and agents, for example, couldn't ensconce themselves in the seeming knowledge that they are victims, or manly heroes, or generous and disinterested donors, or true lovers, or saintly ministrants, or dangerous villains, unless ready-made formulas for these patterns, positions, or "roles" preexisted their performance by the speakers and agents. I should note here that I use performance in both its major senses: doing, executing, carrying through, etc., an action; and displaying, playing, or acting before an audience. Awareness of the shifting relations between these senses will be important to the discussion that follows. And this note prompts two others. First, language use, whether in acts of speech or of writing, is performance-performativein both the speech-act and the theatrical senses. Second, language use and other forms of doing always implicate acts of self-representation. This second point follows from the three basic rules that govern the dynamics of subjectivity as representation:

MAKING TRIFLES OF TERRORS

29!

• You never represent another without representing yourself, if only as the agent of representation. • You never represent yourself to others without representing yourself to yourself. • You never represent yourself to yourself without representing yourself as an other.

If we premise that the three situations specified by these rules are coconstitutive-are analytically distinct and interactive components of a single project-we can then proceed to explore the scene of representation as a continuous activity of displacement from one situation to another, an activity that at the same time oscillates between the two modes of performance. These dialectical interactions constitute the subject as a project of (self)representation that shuttles between the deictic poles of self and other driven by a never fulfilled and perpetually renewed desire for identification -for "the armor of an alienating identity." Representation gets it specific range of meanings by being distinguished from presence and presentation. As Joel Fineman puts it, representation "calls up and evokes as something absent the truthful presentation it confesses truly it is not." 8 This absence, or self-division, or alienation, is produced by entry into a signifying medium, for there can be no representation without mediation -without, that is, competence in deploying the culturally available materials and technical processes of performance, and their formal consequences. The primary medium of representation is the body, both as a system of signifying indices of gender, age, kinship, and race, and as an instrument of perception, speech, and labor, along with their mechanical and electronic extensions. From the premise that the body is the medium of representation it follows that presence, or self-presence, or selfidentity, is itself a mode of representation. Presence is the mythic object of desire, the object lost when the subject suffers the distortion of the media through which it passes, the object that transcends representation and drives the subject restlessly from one to another project of identification. I think this account of subjectivity as (self) representation offers a more powerful- because more dialectical and better articulated- schema than the concept of self{ashioning in terms of which to interpret the dramas of identification depicted in literary and theatrical texts. It makes possible a more detailed examination of the ways in which those texts represent, first, the dilemmas of conscience produced when specific ideologies exploit the self-alienation basic to the structure of subjectivity and, second, the discursive strategies with which speakers, characters, and narrators deal with these dilemmas. The strategies are often revealed as bad-faith defenses against

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the onset of guilt, misautia, and autophobia, and the Lafew principle is a strategy of that sort. "We make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear." This principle governs forms of language use driven by the desire to avoid knowing what one fears to know about oneself. Thus, as I noted above, if it is a strategy of discourse in the sense that the armor of seeming knowledge is a bricolage of language-games, it is also a strategy of self-representation. These two strategies are at odds with each other, and in the interpretations that follow I shall try to show how the Shakespearean text depicts tensions and negotiations between the performative desire invested in the project of representing oneself and the wayward performativity of the discourses that both structure and jeopardize the project. I begin with an analysis of the discursive interplay that animates Edgar's soliloquy in King Lear 2.3.

The cue to the relation between Gloucester's two sons is the one given by Edmund when he sees Edgar approach: "villanous melancholy, with a sigh like Tom o' Bedlam." The point about this is that Edgar presumably doesn't hear the phrase; he arrives at the idea of playing Tom o' Bedlam independently. The three questions Edgar puts to Edmund during the latter's edited summary of Gloucester's list of predictions reveal the legitimate son to be skeptical, even a little amused, as if he thought astrological lore was nonsense: "How now, brother Edmund! What serious contemplation are you in?"; "Do you busy yourself with that?"; "How long have you been a sectary astronomical?" Since Edmund is mimicking Gloucester, Edgar's questions are de facto responses to Gloucester's attitude, and their dry, cool tone tells us he wouldn't quarrel with his brother's judgment that theirs is "a father credulous." These responses indicate that he is no less sophisticated or disenchanted than Edmund, and so does his first, correct reflex to Edmund's trickery: "Some villain hath done me wrong" -an insight he never bothers to check out. As Edmund's comments and stratagems make clear, neither Edgar nor Gloucester seems eager to clear up the problem in face-to-face encounter. What keeps them apart and binds them together is wickedly pinpointed by Edmund in one of the phrases summarizing Gloucester's predictions: "needless di:ffidences." It's important to keep this in mind when you hear Edgar as Poor Tom babbling away on the heath and elsewhere. 9 For if the Edgar who later plays on his blind father's credulity is the same as the one who responds skeptically to Edmund's predictions, you might well expect him to behave with a touch of condescension toward the father he tries to cure of despair. At

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293

any rate, instead of going to his father to verify Edmund's story, Edgar runs off in disguise. In the soliloquy that modern editors isolate as a single scene (2.3) he tells us-which means, as I try to show in Imaginary Audition, that he tells himself- he has decided to masquerade as Poor Tom, the Bedlam beggar: I heard myself proclaim'd; And by the happy hollow of a tree E~cap'd the hunt. No port is free; no place, That guard, and most unusual vigilance, Does not attend my taking. Whiles I may 'scape, I will preserve myself; and am bethought To take the basest and most poorest shape That ever penury, in contempt of man, Brought near to beast; my face I'll grime with filth, Blanket my loins, elf all my hairs in knots, And with presented nakedness outface The winds and persecutions of the sky. The country gives me proof and precedent Of Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices, Strike in their numb'd and mortified bare arms Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary; And with this horrible object, from low farms, Poor pelting villages, sheep-cotes, and mills, Sometime with lunatic bans, sometime with prayers, Enforce their charity. Poor Turlygod! poor Tom! That's something yet: Edgar I nothing am.

We should note not only the arbitrariness and deliberateness of this decision but also its substance. Playing Poor Tom equals avoiding his father, hiding from him, but also taking revenge on him. Like Edmund, he selects a melancholy that is "villanous" in being vile, ignoble, abject; and he also establishes the identity of the villain who has done him wrong: as a morality play, Poor Tom pursued by the foul fiend is a caricature of his relations with his father. In the soliloquy, he chooses not only to escape and preserve himself but also to assume "the basest and most poorest shape/ That ever penury, in contempt of man, /Brought near to beast." To select penury as the cause of baseness is to focus on the plight of the disinherited. The quasipersonification, "penury," is a displaced and condensed allusion to Gloucester: "the poor condition attending the penury imposed by my father, in contempt of me." Similarly, he displaces his father's persecutions and lack of charity to "the winds and persecutions of the sky," and to the farms and villages whose "charity" he will "enforce." The possibility of rapprochement

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with his father seems to compel Edgar's mind less than the possibility of savoring Gloucester's unjust treatment in a disguise that targets its effects and dramatizes them for all to see. His description of beggars striking pins and other sharp objects in their "numb'd and mortified arms" tells us that he plans to play the victim as melodramatically as he can, and if- as some critics have thought-there is a vague shadow of imitatio Christi in this role, we should remember that the role is Edgar's idea as well as Shakespeare's. Mere flight and self-preservation are not, therefore, Edgar's primary concerns. He notes them ·briefly as conditions, and then turns to fuller consideration of a scenario that features aggressive rather than fugitive impulses. His beggar's progress will be a parable of judgment, a way of punishing the father who punishes him. If Gloucester has proclaimed him traitor, he will proclaim what Gloucester has done to him; and perhaps in wounding himself he will eventually wound the father who must at some time discover how he has misprized his son. Yet Edgar's aggression is blunted or muffled by the very displacement that enables him to express it: "with presented nakedness outface" not Gloucester's persecutions but those of the elements; "with this horrible object ... enforce" not the rich, highborn Gloucester's charity but that of "low farms" and "poor pelting villages." And though his scenario is an invention, a work of wit, no less than Edmund's, he is much less eager to take full credit for it. The decision to escape is actively asserted ("Whiles I may 'scape, I I will preserve myself"), and this accentuates by contrast the passive and periphrastic beginning of the next clause announcing Edgar's plan: "and am bethought I To take the basest and most poorest shape." ''Am bethought": as if the thought happened into his mind, externally prompted by the "proof and precedent" which "the country gives . . . I Of Bedlam beggars." The alliterating doublet adds formulaic emphasis to Edgar's decision, and thus a touch of self-justification: "the proof and precedent comes from 'the country; not from within myself; it isn't my own paternally imposed plight that inspires me but that of beggars entirely unrelated to me." So Edgar is exactly like his father in the quality of his diffidence: he refuses to name his father; his words carefully avoid acknowledging Gloucester, even as their indirections register Edgar's sense of his injustice. 10 The irony inherent in Edgar's "proof and precedent" is that the Bedlam beggar is a confidence man, the Abraham man who "will talk franticly of purpose" and will pretend to undergo self-inflicted pain (with his arms numbed and mortified) "only to make you believe he is out of his wits" (Dekker, quoted in Muir [ed.], King Lear, 8r), hoping by these means to

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get food or money. As an objective comment on Edgar, this image brings out the predatory impulse behind the pretense of victimization; it reminds us that the claim to be more sinned against than sinning is often a rogue's device, and emphasizes the extent to which Edgar contributes his share to the darker purposes and inventions that reduce him to Poor Tom. But unlike Edmund, Edgar is far from embracing the character of rogue or knave; as a confidence man his deceptions are practiced primarily on himself. The message he sends himself is that his father had reduced him to nothing, stripped him of his rights, his name, his existence, and left him no alternative but to disguise himself and beg his living from the countryside. Yet the counterstatement pressing through the soliloquy is that he refuses to take the risk of letting his father see and know him as innocent, and that he prefers· to hide from Gloucester (be nothing as Edgar) in order to play. the victim's role that will enable him to shoot judgments at his father from his place of concealment. This counterstatement can be heard in the terse final phrase that it so oddly scrambles. "Edgar I nothing am": he could as easily have been made to say something less strained, such as "I, Edgar, am nothing" or ''As Edgar I am nothing." But "Edgar- I- nothing": full comprehensibility is withheld until the verb at the end, so that the first three words temporarily stand forth as isolated or separate terms waiting to be connected. In the final position, am produces a strong closure; to me, at any rate, it has the force of "Edgar I nothing choose to be," and this converts passive self-deprivation to active self-suppression. Thus, as a speech act, the soliloquy effectively embraces a condition equal to bastardy. He and Gloucester unwittingly conspire to make him nullius filius, the son of nobody, and so he frees himself to take an eye for an eye. "If it be nothing," Gloucester had said, "I shall not need spectacles." Since Gloucester had blinded himself to Edgar, Edgar by remaining invisible to Gloucester will confirm his father's blindness. His muffled aggression is conspicuous in the displacements and distortions of language by which poor Tom will continue to represent Gloucester's wickedness. Poor Tom is also poor Turlygod, a name that continues to puzzle commentators. Collier's speculation, hazarded in r8r7, still seems to me the most helpful conjecture: "Perhaps 'Turlygod' is a corruption of Thoroughlygood." 11 Poor Thoroughlygood, or Trulygood, falsely suspected by his wicked father, is reduced to Poor Tom; or poor Truly-god, the Bethlehem outcast, will display his stigmata through the countryside, reenacting the catastrophe of the old comedy until the expected happy moment "when false opinion, whose wrong thoughts defile thee,/ In thy just proof repeals and reconciles thee"

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(3.17.II5-16). But the parody is adjusted to Edgar's darker purpose: until he is resurrected, the sacrificed son, although a willing victim, will sit in judgment on his father. There is, then, more to Edgar's scenario than the self-protective detachment and passivity, the sometimes verbose tendency to stand aside and moralize, that some critics have discerned; 12 more, also, than the impulse, founded on shame and guilt, to avoid Gloucester's recognition that Stanley Cavell ascribes to Edgar chiefly after he meets his blinded father. 13 The passivity of the victim's role is carefully chosen to permit mental aggression within tolerable limits, and Edgar's inaction is itself a form of action that makes others capable of harming Gloucester.14 By perversely continuing to play Poor Tom on the heath, and so to refuse to reveal himself to his father, he makes Edmund's success possible. In act 3, the interweaving of the three heath scenes (2, 4, 6) with the three castle scenes (3, 5, 7) works to emphasize the discursive complicity by which the "good" characters make the "bad" characters capable of mutilating Gloucester. The unilinear thrust of the castle plot, accelerated in the short and verbally spare third and fifth scenes, benefits from the increasingly mad polyphony or cacophony on the heath. The activities in the castle make the heath scenes seem not merely idle but destructive. And this destructiveness owes not merely to the truancy that abandons the field to the wicked, but to an active though unintended complicity that assumes increasing force at the level of motive and fantasy. But as I tried to show in Chapter 4, Edgar's Poor Tom language is unstable. It oscillates between the self-pity and anger of the victim/revenger's discourse and the shame and guilt of the sinner's discourse. Whether Edgar is alone or with others, his language throughout act 3 represents him as continuously focused on the performance of his morality play-staging himself before himself and others, giving himself to be seen, speaking like an actor who monitors the effect of his rhetoric on an audience that includes himself He appears to be so attentive to what he is doing with his language-to its inter- and intralocutory effects-that he seems not fully in control of, perhaps not cognizant of, what his language is doing by itself, what it is doing to him, what it betrays about his lethal desire, what-most importantly-it does to Gloucester not only in fantasy but also in fact. And it is to this strange conjunction of rhetorico-theatrical awareness and discursive uncontrol that I want to direct attention as we leave Edgar. The two sides of the conjunction illustrate two interpretive principles: the metatheatrical principle of histrionic self-misrepresentation and the discursive principle of redistributed complicities. I shall try to show that the relation between them is one of mutual entailment, and that its

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effect is to disarticulate the two senses of peiformance or peiformativity I distinguished in the introductory section ofthe essay.

+ As to the metatheatrical principle, it presupposes the emergent structure and practices of the new "concept of theater" that flourished in public playhouses after 1576. Public theaters create not only their dramas and their audiences, as Stephen Orgel notes; they also create images of theatricality that reflect and comment on the forms, practices, and institutionalized positions (players, characters, audience, etc.) specific to the new medium. 15 The texts written for this medium reflect and comment on its newness by strategies of citation or parody that establish its genealogical relation to, its difference from, its predecessors. The ancient idea of the world as a stage, life as theater, is caught up in the material and textual practices of a new order of representation, an order that reflexively exploits the ambiguities and oscillations of serio ludere. Through the set of mise-en-abtme strategies whereby dramatic fictions represent both the structure of theatrical practices "outside" themselves and the structure of social practices "outside" theater, public theater becomes not only "an established and visible part of society"- Orgel's claim- but also an established and visible model. Theater stages theatricality, represents representation, dramatizes its own skeptical relation to its truth claims, by inscribing the structure of theatrical relations within the dramatic fictions it stages. Thus a kind of map of its structure, its history, and its internal and external relations is inscribed in theater's metadiscourse, or in a discourse of metatheater that quickly becomes part of its repertoire of conventions, becomes available for the taking whether or not any particular playwright or company chooses to take it. Judd Hubert begins his study of metatheater in Shakespeare with a statement defining the mode of inquiry he will pursue: a "performative" but textually based approach emphasizing linguistic signs that, in addition to communicating developments in plot and characterization, explicitly or implicitly designate the art of stagecraft and entertainment. These signs serve a metaphorical purpose insofar as they transfer or transport elements involving content to performative schemes ascribable to the medium. It does not really matter, for the present purpose, if some of these signs happen to assume additional metaphorical or metonymic functions within the context of the fable. 16

This passage clarifies by contrariety my own interest in the way signs that designate performative schemes are transferred from theatrical "form" to

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dramatic "content" so as to assume functions within the context of the fable. My sense of "metatheater" is closer to Lionel Abel's. Abel introduced the term to define a specifically modern· genre invented by Shakespeare and Calderon, the genre of plays "about life seen as already theatricalized;' plays in which the fictional speakers "themselves knew they were dramatic" and. were "aware of their own theatricality." The metaplay "is the necessary form for dramatizing characters who, having full self-consciousness, cannot but participate in their own dramatization." 17 In part an apologia for the modernist drama of Brecht, Beckett, and Genet (among others), Abel's Metatheatre valorizes this drama as the genre best suited to express the skeptical problematic Stanley Cavell would subsequently badger wl.th much more philosophical panache and persistence. 18 But this diverts what I take to be the peculiar force of Abel's thesis as an insight into Shakespearean· dramaturgy, namely, that to represent characters as "aware of their own theatricality" is to represent them as continuously dominated by the conditions, demands, desires, and pleasures of self-representation in interlocutory performance. The spectacle in which actors represent characters to an audience infiltrates and haunts the language and actions of the characters, and it is the textual signs and traces of this displacement that constitute what I call the discourse of metatheater. It isn't only that dramatic speech is always before-and for-another, and is always in that respect public (always "onstage"), but also that to speak in public is to represent oneself to one's auditors; and this, as I have been suggesting, implicates the kind of rhetorical awareness that requires one simultaneously to represent oneself to oneself. Keir Elam's useful account of the variety of devices that give Shakespeare's language its "self-advertising" quality is easily transferable to the self-advertising of dramatic speakers.19 Something of the histrionic self-representation of the actor as charismatic performer rubs off on the character, and something of the playwright's delight in the sound, the verve, and the tropical bravura of his own language transmits itself through the actor to the character. Even amid the declamatory thunder of tragic climaxes, speakers seem to be listening to themselves and to the way others listen to them. In that respect, every dialogical speech act contains within it an element of soliloquy. And every soliloquy is dialogical because it represents the "I" that speaks as performing before the "I" that listens. To imagine the effect of the interaction between these two functions of metatheatrical discourse is to practice what I call imaginary audition. Imaginary audition picks out the reflexivity of speech acts, their status as part of a speaker's rhetorico-theatrical self-representation. But in pick-

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ing this out, it reveals both its own limitations as an interpretive standpoint and the limits the histrionic motive informing metatheatrical discourse imposes on the speaker's relation to other discursive forces active in the text of his or her language. When readers perversely shift their attention from the script as a promptbook, the sign of a performed play, to the script as a text, they uncover darker purposes and deeper plots of which speakers seem not to be- or not to want to be- aware. And this may arouse the suspicion that the very theatricality of the self-representation that dominates speakers' relations to their utterance works to protect them from an unknown fear inscribed in their language. They remain enclosed within their projects of self-representation, attentive-as .imaginary audition is-to what they do with their language, what they mean by it, what they hear in it. Accordingly, they don't monitor certain textual and illocutionary forces alive in that language-what it says and does regardless of what they say, do, mean, and hear. At this point the two senses of the term performativity part ways. The theatrical performativity of self-representation encloses speakers within whatever alienating identities they desire or imagine themselves to be. Therefore, the linguistic performativity-the illocutionary force-of their speech acts escapes them, or, to put it more pointedly, is escaped by them. It is thus that one may conceive of textuality as the unconscious of the subjects constructed by dramatic speech -not, however, the textuality of language pure and simple, nor the unconscious of an individual speaker. The textuality is that of the discourses or language-games that circulate through the fictive community of speakers, constitute the community of their speech, and disclose the pressure of collective patterns of desire and motivation on their language. Under this description, the unconscious is coordinate only with the network of discourses that animate the text. And this leads me to my second principle, the discursive principle of redistributed complicities. According to this principle, the interaction between self-professed virtuous and wicked characters takes a specific form: the wicked can succeed only because they are empowered by the good, who, at some obscure motivational level, delegate to others the agency for doing things they themselves would never do or wish to be done, things that would horrify or grieve them, but things their language shows them deeply and darkly to desire. The speakers of this language tap into discursive resources of selfdeception to keep themselves from knowing what they dgn't want to know about the plots and purposes set in motion by the medium that shapes and channels and expresses their desire. This medium is the play of discourses textually inscribed in their acts of speech. Speakers represent or hide them-

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selves, their purposes, desires, and fears, to or from themselves and each other. While .they do this, while they cultivate or cling to one or another discursive identity-victim, donor, sinner, saint, villain, revenger, heroagency passes to the discourses. The pressure, the insistence, of discourse in the field of the text converts their desires and unknown fears into the forces that drive the plot. Cordelia, as we shall see, ensconces herself first in a Cinderellan version of the victim's discourse and later in the discourse of the saintly redeemer; she disowns knowledge of her complicity with great success, and apparently minimal effort, while Edgar spends much of his time onstage trying, like Lear, to wrestle down the ghostly apparition of the sinner's discourse. 20 In the perspective of redistributed complicities, the "good" characters are those who try to hide their darker purposes primarily from themselves, and the wicked are those who try, or pretend to try, to hide them from others. This polarity is transgressed by the discursive interactions that bind together the opposed moral figures- Edgar with Edmund, and Cordelia with her sisters. An odd pathos attends the self-representation of Edmund and the wicked sisters, for they seem unaware of the extent to which they are. empowered by and carry.out the mandates secreted in the languagegames that drive the utterances· of Gloucester, Edgar, and Cordelia. Questions of power directly or indirectly implicate questions of gender, and in the language of speakers who ensconce themselves in the discourse of honor and represent themselves as warriors or heroes- in their language the source of fear is coded female. Behind the desire for the armor of the alienating identity of manly warrior is the fear of being unmanned, effeminized, emasculated. 21 The conflict between theatrical and linguistic performativity resolves, in this scheme, into a conflict between the motives of self-representation that drive metatheatrical discourse and those that drive the network of ethical discourses I have just profiled. By way of introducing my account of the latter I want to emphasize that far from being esoteric, the ethical discourses are, considered as patterns of motivation only (that is, apart from the textual and contextual environments in which they appear and interact), simple .and familiar almost to the point of embarrassment. They are the· stuff, if not of life, then of pop psychology, one of the practitioners of which wrote a book some years ago entitled The Games People Play. Shakespearean discourses are little more than the language-games speakers play (though play perhaps has misleading connotations of purpose and intentional control). Their complexity, as we shall see, derives from the games that texts and their interpreters play.

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30I

At the core of the network of ethical discourses is a small knot of volatile interactions among the discourses of the victim, the revenger, the sinner, the villain, the donor, the hero, and the saint or savior. Lear's "I am a man/ More sinned against than sinning" gives us the formula for the victim's discourse, but it is edged with a threat- "I am a man;' I will have my revenges-and the victim/revenger relationship often tilts in the other direction: not from victimization to revenge but from desire of aggression to pursuit of the victimization that will justify it. 22 This version of the language-game encourages the cultivation of strategies for getting insulted and injured-for sharpening what Milton's Satan calls the "sense of injur'd merit" (P.L. 1.98). It thus impinges on the discourse of honor, since honor seekers are almost always insult hunters. Victimization and revenge are so tightly interlaced in the Shakespearean network that I treat them as two parts of a single discourse, the discourse of the victim/revenger, one of the most interesting-and perhaps unexpected-examples of which occurs in King Lear.

+ Following Goneril's puffy response to Lear's demand that his daughters stage a contest in public expressions of their love, Cordelia's first words are "What shall Cordelia speake? Loue, and be silent." This is the Folio reading. The First Quarto gives "What shall Cordelia doe, loue and be silent" (Q 57).23 Apart from the obvious fact that the difference in pointing translates into a different range of tonal possibilities-the whole of the Quarto line, for example, can be delivered as either a question or an assertion, the latter being more decisive and aggressive- the substitution of speake for doe is profoundly suggestive, if only because it isolates the cardinal principle of speech-act theory that speaking is doing. Thus, to ask what Cordelia's speech does may not be the same as to ask what it says or means-or at least what she means to say. The use of the third person indicates that the speaker self-consciously observes herself, that she possesses a strong theatrical sense of her image and role. 24 How should she meet the challenge of Goneril's overblown rhetoric? She will do the opposite of Goneril, hide her love, and say nothing-a resolution that gets critically modified when instead of saying nothing she says "nothing." After Regan's performance, Cordelia interjects her second utterance: Then poor Cordelia, And yet not so, since I am sure my laue's More ponderous then my tongue. (F 82-84)

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The speaker of the first line already senses the value of the victim's role, and she goes on to defend her true filial love against the false and unjust estimate of it that she anticipates. In some better world than this, her virtue might be appreciated and rewarded, but here it will have to be its own reward, her only riches. In glancing critically at Regan's heavy tongue, Cordelia displays a concern for style, especially for her own style, her own self-presentation, in this difficult moment. She practicys the rhetoric of antirhetoric, as Paolo Valesio calls it, to compete not only with her sisters but also with her father? 5 And in exposing the extravagance of her sisters' answers she will also expose her father to ridicule. In that respect, her love is more ponderous than her words can express in this situation. But it is also more ponderous because she chooses not to express it: it will be of graver import, will have more substance, weight, and effect, by remaining unexpressed. Rather, what will give it its weighty effect is that she expresses its inexpressibility. In saying "nothing" she chooses to stonewall in order conspicuously to hide her love and protect it from being sullied. In soliciting and embracing victimization, she places herself in the position of one who stands in need of vindication. Cordelia's final two utterances in the first scene reveal that the desire for vindication is not entirely free of vindictiveness, that the desire for justification may contain within it traces of a desire for retribution and even, perhaps, revenge: The Iewels of our Father, with wash'd eies Cordelia leaues you, I know you what you are, And like a Sister am most loth to call Your faults as they are named. Loue well our Father: To your professed bosomes I commit him, But yet alas, stood I within his Grace, I would prefer him to a better place, So farewell to you both. (F 293-300) Time shall vnfold what plighted cunning hides, Who couers faults, at last with shame derides: Well may you prosper. (F 306-8)

"To your professed bosomes I commit him": this classic example of the speech act called peiformative beautifully illustrates the tension between what the speaker's words "doe" and what she apparently means to "speake." The vouloir-dire of her speech -what she means to say, and certainly what she represents herself as meaning to say-is that although she knows her sisters won't tend and care for their father as she would, were she in the position.

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to do so, she hopes they will love and tend him as well as they can. After their snippy rejoinders she exits with a dark prediction aimed at discouraging the studied negligence she fears by appealing to their self-interest. This seems to be what the speech means to say. What it does, however, is to confer on Cordelia's sisters the power to mete out the punishments Lear deserves for having cast her away and deprived himself of "a better place." She in effect commits him to prison. Repressed anger vibrates in the aphoristic bite of the final couplet predicting the inevitable results to follow from her sisters' evil disposition, and the gnomic form of the statement generalizes it, not only increasing its sense of predictive certainty but also broadening its application so that it reaches beyond the sisters to Lear: whoever covers his own faults, refuses to acknowledge his complicity, must be exposed and shamed-not only to and by others but also to and by himself; when he finally acknowledges his own guilt he will deride and hate himself, and be ashamed. Cordelia thus displaces the instrumentality of punishment to her sisters. In doing so, she covers a small fault. But she will disprove the truth- or at least escape the force- of her own prediction. For she will ultimately be vindicated by the effects of their punishment without herself having had any hand in it. Few traces of this "darker purpose" and complicity trouble her language when she returns in the fourth act. She appears to join others in perceiving herself as a merciful redeemer who was more sinned against than sinning but who has forgiven her tormentors and now returns to restore them from their crimes and woes. She joins Lear in harping on the violent wrongs her two sisters did when they threw him out of doors into the terrible storm. With its Lear-like rhetoric her accusatory speech at F 2781-90 forgets, or at some level denies, "To your professed bosomes I commit him." But to recall that phrase is to shackle their mistreatment of Lear to his mistreatment of her. Even as she blames her wicked sisters, she does so in language that betrays a touch of sororal understanding: "Had you not bin their Father, these white flakes I Did challenge pitty of them" (F 2781-82); she concedes that a father, and such a- father, could fail to challenge pity. And even as she feelingly dissociates herself from the outrages they perpetrated, her language glances at his ill use of her: "Mine Enemies dogge, though he had bit me, I Should haue stood that night against my fire" (F 2784-85; my italics). As I argue in "King Lear: The Lear Family Romance" (Chapter 3 above), the reunion scene is poignant in part because of Cordelia's moving concern, the love she shows her father in her careful tendance of him. It is also poignant because in discounting what he did to her ("No cause, no cause") she also in effect discounts her complicity in what was done to him. This

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may be the only way the reunion could happen- its condition; its cost. The sense of the cause and the cost together leaves its mark on the oddly formal, aphoristic, remote words of her last speech in the play. It is especially clear in the wild ambiguity that escapes from the speaker's taut rhetoric at F 2496, "For thee oppressed King I am cast downe," in which the obviously intended message, "I'm sorrier for you than for myself," doesn't quite occlude an alternative that is, syntactically, equally plausible: "I have been cast down for your sake, defeated and imprisoned because I came to relieve your oppression." When Cordelia third-persons herself in her first two utterances in I. I, she stages for her own benefit the orthopsychic purity of "that within which passes" the show being performed under the direction of the paternal regisseur. As she prepares to give herself to be seen, she tells herself that she can utter the truth of her love-its inexpressible depth and genuineness- only by displaying the evidence of things not seen. Thus she first "silently" decides to utter the silence that will publicize her unwillingness to go public- she first gives herself to be seen by herself; she then goes on to perform the "nothing" that expresses the inexpressibility of her inner truth. In this reading, Cordelia knows and feels what she has "within that passes show," the truth of the love she won't be able to express to others because they press her to play a false Cordelia that conforms to the exigencies of their theater. But at the same time, the text of her language reveals aspects of inner truth she isn't able to express to herself because she is committeddeeply and genuinely committed- to playing a Cordelia that conforms to the exigencies of an antitheatrical ideal of integrity in which no alterity severs the union of the player with the role or the mind with the face. Does Cordelia "bare her soul" and utter her truth in her first .two asides? The transgressiveness and ambiguity of that stage convention put the issue in doubt. The speaking aloud that is the only way to share private or secret thoughts with the theater audience compromises the very distinction between private and public it is meant to dramatize. But perhaps the convention isn't clumsy after all. For in Shakespearean dramaturgy the aside, like the soliloquy, is part of the metatheatrical practice of dialogical self-representation I discussed above. Cordelia speaks to herself as to an audience, addresses herself as if she were an actor who rehearses and monitors her performance preparatory. to staging it before others ("What shall Cordelia speake? Loue, and be silent") and who anticipates the effect of their interpretation ("Then poor Cordelia"). Whether one takes the asides to express sentiments meant for her ears alone or to solicit the attention of

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a Judge more sympathetic and fair than the one who is about to oppress her, they have the force of preemptive self-justification. My reading of Cordelia's language discloses the interplay of several familiar language-games that exceed the evident range of the speaker's vouloir-dire. Although the speaker seems for the most part to nest deeply . and securely within a benign representation of her motives and actions, her language is more troubled than she is. Discourses of victimization, justification, and retribution complicate her investment in a discourse of filial love that is seasoned by occasional infusions of the discourses of the truthsayer and the saint. The desire of victimization and justification already troubles the asides in which she anticipates the impossibility of publishing her virtues. Thus, while the performativity of self-representation ensconces Cordelia in the orthopsychic identity she desires and imagines for herself, the performativity of her speech acts continuously structures the dramatic action to ensure both her complicity with her sisters and her ability toremain unaware of it.

+ "More sinned against than sinning": the victim/revenger's formula indicates a subversive and potentially destabilizing element in· the discourse, for it glances at sinning on the victim's part. "More sinning than sinned against" expresses the confessional logic of the sinner's discourse. Aiming the revenger's discourse inward, it motivates its users (its agents or subjects) to desire to be punished, to expose themselves to the judgment they (eel they deserve. 26 Having discussed the operation of this discourse in Edgar's language, I turn now to a very different example in order to give some indication of the variety of forms it takes. The example is Prince Harry's first soliloquy in the Henriad, and by way of introduction I repeat a thesis I have tried to demonstrate elsewhere, which is that as we move through the tetralogy Richard II's voicing of the sinner's discourse reverberates with increasing force. It infiltrates the language of Henry IV, who tries without much success to suppress it with querulous appeals to the victim/revenger's discourse and an occasional rueful longing to appropriate the saint's discourse he knows he could not perform with any conviction. Henry constructs his son as Richard's surrogate, "mark'd" by "the rod of heaven, j To punish my mistreadings" (1 Henry IV 3.2.ro-n), and also as a "young wanton, and effeminate boy," a Ricardian Prodigal Son going amok in the. big city (Richard II 5·3·I-I2). The soliloquy shows how enthusiastically Harry participates in this construction.

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Near the end of the first tavern scene, Harry reluctantly agrees to the ingenious plot proposed by Poins after Falstaff leaves. The plot is ingenious because Po ins shifts the emphasis from theft to a practical joke on the thief, an.d he thus offers the cautious prince both moral protection and a chance to baffie his misleader. So it is to be expected that the prince, who seemed just a few minutes earlier to be in his element as Happy Hal the Corinthian wit-cracker, would appreciate Poins's thoughtful concern for his fears and scruples. Yet when Poins exits, the speaker left alone on stage shows no sign of gratitude: I know you all, and will awhile uphold The unyok' d humor of your idleness. · Yet herein will I imitate the sun, Who doth permit the base contagious clouds To smother up his beauty from the world, That, when he please again to be himself, Being wanted he may be more wonder'd at By breaking through the foul and ugly mists Of vapors that did seem to strangle him. (1 Henry IVI.2.190-98)

This moment of self-revelation is our first glimpse of Harry as Henry burning off the mist of Hal, and it is marked by his first shift from prose banter to the ritual formality of blank verse. The shift produces the odd effect that, just when he could be expected to speak what he feels, not what he ought to say, he sounds like he is making a speech, rehearsing a preformulated scenario, before an audience. Dr. Johnson thought the soliloquy artful because it "keeps the prince from appearing vile in the opinion of the audience," and the comment becomes more interesting if we redirect it toward the only opinion and audience of which the soliloquist can be aware. 27 The speech has been a critical battleground for obvious reasons, which don't need to be rehearsed at this late date. It has long been thought that Shakespeare wrote it to reassure the audience that the speaker was very different from his genuinely rakish counterpart in The Famous Victories. This is reassuring only if you overlook the simple point that the difference resides in Harry's pretending- to be the counterpart, a pretense the motives and moral implications of which the Harry-haters make much. The prince's defenders join battle on this point. A committed meliorist like Dover Wilson argues that such a speech in Shakespeare's time was a convention whose "function was to convey information to the audience about the general drift of the play, much as a prologue did," and that it is therefore absurd to "charge him with meanness ... for not communicating to Falstaff what

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Shakespeare makes him, for technical reasons, tell the theater." 28 A much more cautious meliorist like William Empson, during the course of his long essay on Falstaff devoted chiefly to dogging Dover Wilson, doesn't deny "that the placing of this soliloquy is meant to establish Hal as the future hero as firmly as possible." But he fails to see "that it does anything (whether regarded as a 'convention' or not) to evade the obvious moral reflection, obvious not only to the more moralizing part of the audience but to all of it, that this kind of man made a very unreliable friend." Empson nevertheless ends up on Wilson's team: "The basic point of Henry's first soliloquy, saying that he will be more admired later because he is despised now, is not a cynical calculation to betray his friends but a modestly phrased reassurance that he is learning how to be a national king;' and in any event the story of his "useful development" -which Empson views as a justification of Falstaff's tutelage- "does not need us to suppose that Henry was very good to start with." 29 This position is a little wobbly, and I suspect it is because Empson, no less than Dr. Johnson and Wilson, assesses the speech primarily in terms of its effect on the audience. Presumably he means that Harry's "modestly phrased reassurance" is directed at "us," the audience to whom the unsettling "moral reflection" is "obvious." But everything becomes more interesting if attention is redirected from the audience in the theater to the auditor in the speaker. The speech as a whole reveals intense ambition. But it also reveals an equally intense desire for personal (not only royal) legitimacy-a desire to maintain self-esteem while winning the esteem of others. For the terms in which he conceives of his scenario confront that desire with a problem. To cite one example, his promise to imitate the sun is poised between a condescending emphasis on the one-sidedness of the conflict and a censorious emphasis on the culpable violence of those who are cast as "the base contagious clouds," "the foul and ugly mists/ Of vapors." Since these antagonists are trying to strangle the sun-prince, they will deserve what they get after he has finished using them as a screen. 30 The terms of the nature image he chooses enable him illogically to suggest that the clouds are doing to the sun-prince what he is actually planning to make them do. But the image subverts itself because mists and vapors are raised- upheld- by the sun before being burned off (cf. 4.I.III-12; Henry V 4-J.IOO-IOJ), as they will be when the carnival moves from Eastcheap to Westminster: ·

If all the year were playing holidays, To sport would be as tedious as to work; But when they seldom come, they wish'd-for come, And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents . . . (1.2.I99-202)

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This utterance invites deceleration because it seeks the reassurance of proverbial wisdom in the tone of the earnest explainer who carefully rehearses its adversative logic as if to make sure he gets it right. 31 One can safely guess at his intention: he means to tell himself that when he leaves his carnival among the base contagious rioters, "when this loose behavior I throw off," the reformation he plans to stage will so glitter "o'er my fault" as to surprise and delight the world at large like an unexpected holiday. And of course since he wishes that holiday for himself and is currently playing holidays all the year, he may mean to argue that he finds this preliminary Falstaffian carnival tedious but necessary to the achievement of that goal. But does he find it tedious, or is he only telling himself that in order to justify upholding (and enjoying) it for a while? And does he also mean to tell himself that the ugly Falstaffian mists he raises and hides behind will be sacrificed as scapegoats· in preparation for the real carnival- the one briefly savored at Shrewsbury, ritually inaugurated at the end of 2 Henry IV, and extended through Henry V? Does he already anticipate violently dispelling those mists as just punishment· for their violent threat to, their attempted thievery of, "the day's beauty" (1.2.25)? For surely the touch of anger flaring forth at lines 192-94 of the soliloquy responds to the Actaeonic provocation of Falstaff's earlier association of the future king with "our noble and chaste mistress the moon, under whose countenance we steal." Obscure motives and unruly impulses lurking under the probable intentional surface of Harry's language make its bottom hard to discern, cloud it with uncertainties that resist penetration now and may possibly resist it later. But the pulse of a restrained violence intensified by deferral and building toward a moment of release can be felt beating under the intentional surface. It quickens during the remainder of the speech, which already tangs with the foretaste of carnival: So when this loose behavior I throw off, And pay the debt I never promised, By how much better than my word I am, By so much shall I falsify men's hopes; And like bright metal on a sullen ground, My reformation glitt'ring o'er my fault, Shall show more goodly, and attract more eyes Than that which hath no foil to set it off. I'll so offend, to make offence a skill, Redeeming time when men think least I will. (r.2.203-12)

I think it is by now apparent that the positive question, "What does he

mean to say? What is he trying to tell himself?" needs to be supplemented

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by its negative, "What is he trying not to mean? What is his language saying that he doesn't want to hear?" Por example, does he want to hear himself saying what 1 hear him saying when he plans to "falsify men's hopes"? For no matter what we suppose the utterer to intend, the utterance is open to Greenblatt's paraphrase: "to exceed ... and ... also to disappoint ... expectations, to deceive men, to turn their hopes into fictions, to betray them." 32 I imagine that Harry would prefer to have his speech read back to him by Alan Dessen, who endorses him as "a notable and crucial exception" in a world where everyone else "readily finds reasons not to pay their debts or keep their vows." Harry "pays all his debts, even those he never promised," and Dessen thinks this is fine. 33 Such a reading would protect Harry from Leonard Tennenhouse's judgment on him: he is Shakespeare's "most memorable figure of misrule," and his. career proves that "legitimate order can only come into being through disruption." 34 (Tennenhouse doesn't venture an opinion as to whether Harry's language may be troubled by the same insight, and the possibility that it may-that Dessen's idealization might not make Harry entirely comfortable after all-is what I find most compelling in Shakespeare's portrait.) It has often reasonably been assumed that Harry is falsifying hopes or causing disappointment by playing the rake. But that isn't what he says. He says he will falsify hopes by reforming, which implies that when his loose behavior deceives men he counts on their hoping he will come to no good end, will remain corrupt, so that he may suffer for or they may profit from his evil ways. Falstaff is not the only intended victim of the imposture. The vagueness of the phrase "men's hopes," even as it defends against the specific identification of victims, gestures beyond the tavern. One of the provocations behind the soliloquy is Falstaff's report that "an old lord of the Council rated me the other day in the street about you" (81-83). The plural form of Harry's phrase no doubt muffies a reference to his father, but it also embraces the Establishment in general: old, lord, and Couticil index the three aspects- generational, social, and political- of authority targeted by "the paradigm of prodigal rebellion," which, as Richard Helgerson (whose words these are) has shown, expressed central cultural tensions in sixteenthcentury England.35 The deception or betrayal that Greenblatt mentions has a more insidious dimension: Falstaff's hopes and Henry's will be falsified in contrary ways, but in both cases such falsification presupposes the planting offalse hopes. Harry assumes or hopes that he can deceive them into hoping for the worst so that he can show them up for the ill-wishers they are. The aggressive and self-justifying cynicism of the epithets "base contagious" and "foul and

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ugly" is transferred to the word hopes and suggests the same disclaimer of responsibility for the false impression he plans to encourage. From this standpoint, what he owes them is not only the reformation that will pay off the debt incurred by profligacy but also the disappointment that will reward or punish them for their false hopes. I have put the harshest construction on the ·soliloquy, have ascribed sentiments to it that one might expect to hear from Iago, Edmund, and Richard III, and, perhaps because the soliloquy lacks their peculiar verve, their self-amused or self-loathing delight in speaking evil, I have made it seem even more unpleasant. But I do this to bring out the problem that confronts a speaker who, as I imagine him, has good intentions, is confident that he can overcome the handicap he gives himself and win the world's esteem, but would also like to assure himself that he is worthy of his own esteem. Otherwise it would not be a problem. An interesting approach to the moral dilemma his scenario poses for him has been opened up by Joseph Porter in his experimental application of speech-act theory to the Henriad. Porter argues that it makes a difference whether we take the soliloquy (a) as a statement. of intent ("My intention is to throw off this .loose behavior, falsify men's hopes, etc.") or (b) as a promise ("I promise to throw off this loose behavior, falsify men's hopes, etc."). With (a), Porter claims, "Hal is autonomous- he has a plan which he deigns to state; and this fits with the picture of him as a sort of hypocritical schemer. With (b), however, Hal is placing himself under an obligation to act in a certain way- he is being morally responsible." 36 This is a valuable distinction, but the notion that falsifying hopes is being morally responsible strikes me as a little weird. I think his problem can better be formulated by modifying Porter's (b) as follows: Harry is placing himself under an obligation to play-act in a certain way, and promising to perform in such a manner as to persuade the world that when he pays the debt he will have become morally responsible. This implies that he assumes (or would like to assume) he is already morally responsible, even now, as he contemplates falsifying hopes. Porter believes that- given the very different implications of (a) and (b)- "it is important [for us] to decide of what sort Hal's illocutionary act is." 37 I believe it is more important for Harry to decide what sort it is, and to decide that it is (b), even though it may be hard for him to avoid at least suspecting it is (a), since the two kinds of speech act are entangled with each other in the utterance. The problem his soliloquy confronts him with seems to me to be identical with that which attends his claim to France in Henry V: "May I with right and conscience make this claim," or play out this scenario? He is no fox; right and conscience are important to him.

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Therefore, since he obviously enjoys the language that expresses his power, autonomy, and theatrical ability, it may also be important for him to disarm his conscience by acknowledging the pleasure in terms that will enable him to deal with it. Thus he attenuates his awareness of hypocritical intention (a) by transforming it into the promise to reform (b). And the threat of (a) is further forestalled by the complex figure that concludes the soliloquy and begins at line 207, "And like bright metal ..." The puns and images in these lines reconceive the promise in aesthetic and heroic terms as a precious display, a theatrical triumph, and an honorable encounter. When I visualize the bright metal with which he plans to pay off the debt I think first of a coin, a royal medallion struck off to commemorate the anticipated victory. After that, I think of a sword, and then my eye is attracted to the alliterating filament threaded through the sullen ground:Jalsifyjaultjoil-offince. The last two words strike off another image: that of dueling.38 The undertone of violence persists, but it changes to a less devious, more forthright image, and one that characterizes the soliloquy as a whole, the image ·of aggression controlled and blunted: not an ambush or robbery or unequal assault by the almighty sun, but a dream of honor that goes Hotspur one better. Harry will redeem his "banish'd honors" in a battle of wits, a test of skill undertaken with foils rather than rapiers. And his honor will be increased by giving all odds to the enemy. Putting· on loose behavior will mobilize a royal troop of ill-wishers against him and make the underdog's single-handed victory more admirable. The rationale of the Crispin's Day speech already glimmers on the horizon: "The fewer men, the greater share of honor"; "if it be a sin to covet honor,/ I am the most offending soul alive"; "We few, we happy few" (Henry V 4.3.22, 28-29, 6o). What Harry seeks, however, is not mere Hotspurian honor, but the justification that will confirm his sense of probity. The structural pattern of his confirmative activity in all three plays is to exchange bad humors or bad conscience for good, and the problem that confronts him as a result of this moral economy is, how can he respect the respect of those he aims his virtues at if the validating audience on whom he depends consists of those he plans to deceive? Won't the very success of his strategy keep alive the fear it is designed to bury? Won't the double-edged glitter of his benign intentions perpetually renew the sullen ground of the fault that foils them? The language of his soliloquy both suggests and responds to a suspicion that the scenario is morally reprehensible- not merely because it is hypocritical but because it implicates him in the bad faith of scapegoating others and disclaiming responsibility for it. I agree with Ernst Kris that Harry's paramount concern is moral sol-

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vency, and that his playing the rake may be interpreted as both a comment on the bankruptcy of usurpation and a defense against it. 39 ·But the line of argument I have been developing suggests a strategic function closer to home: he invests moral capital in the Prodigal Son role in order to minimize risk, for to pretend to a form of wickedness he knows himself unaffected by does not jeopardize his self-esteem. Indeed, it may temporarily work to divert himself as well as others from the suspicion of a more profound culpability. And if the device proves not to persuade him, he will have to depend all the more on the validation he receives from the world on that glorious day when, after a single encounter or change of status, the issue will be resolved for all time. To dream of a one-time future reformation may well serve to dispel the fear that reformation is something he needs now and always. The melodramatic form of the noble change he purposes has the look of a failsafe device calculated to burn off any mists of selfdoubt the scenario trails behind it. Thus, what disturbs the Harry-hating critics of Henry Vis already present early in 1 Henry IV, but their formulation of the problem exposes them to the charges leveled by Richard Levin, Gary Taylor, and others. My formulation differs from theirs in identifying the problem with Harry as Harry's problem with Harry, in postulating that Shakespeare represents Harry as a potential Harry-hater, and in locating the essential interest of his portrayal in Harry's struggle for moral (not merely political) legitimacy. ·

+ I began my account of the ethical language-games with Lear's formula for the victim/revenger's discourse because it offers two advantages. The first is that Lear's voicing of the formula brings out its close and troubled relation-its susceptibility-to the sinner's discourse encoded in the inversion of the formula. The second is that the sinner's discourse shares this inversion with another that seems superficially to be its opposite: "more sinning than sinned against" is also the formula for the villain's discourse. The obvious difference and similarity may be expressed as that between "I am a sinner, alas!" and "I am a sinner, ho ho!" But the modes of interfusion may produce complex and varied effects. Performers of the villain's discourse may shore it up by appealing to the rationale of the revenger (that is, that they were sinned against) or by reminding themselves and warning others that "I am a man." Yet as critics since Coleridge have noticed, the specific motives to which those who perform the discourse attribute their villainy often seem unconvincing, and this may have as much to do with

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the displacement of motive and attention implied by the word perform as with motiveless malignancy pure and simple. For the villain's discourse there is a well-demarcated site of enunciation: the soliloquy, in which the villain addresses himself as if he were a conventional stage villain taking his audience into his confidence. Shakespeare's most endearing and mischievous practitioners of this form of selfparody seem positively to enjoy the chance to strut downstage and tell themselves how bad they are. Often, however, the villain's language betrays alien discursive pressures beneath his maleficent chortles, the pressures of redistributed complicities. In plays after Richard III,. the villain's power is compromised by the acquiescence of his victims in their victimization: Gloucester and Edgar collaborate with Edmund, Othello with Iago, Don Pedro and Claudio with Don John, and Prospero with his usurpers. A similar complicity marks the interaction of Cordelia with Lear, Falstaff with Harry, and Richard II with Bolingbroke. The self-justifying stories many of those figures tell themselves and others betray the pressure of the fear of bad faith- the fear that what they are doing to others may be worse than what others are doing to them. In the discursive activity of Richard II, Falstaff, Othello, Gloucester, and Lear the pressure is manifested by their complicity in bringing about their own victimization, suffering, or downfall. Where villains are involved, the imprint of that complicity is variously registered, but what is common to the situations of Don John, Edmund, and Iago is that something more than mere obtuseness in their victims allows the villains to get away with as much as they do, and that the villain's proud claim to be more sinning than sinned against is. ironically framed within a network of discourses that reveals how much he is obligated to his victims. It is they whose use for him empowers him, which is to say it disempowers him, since it places his power at least partly in their gift; if they don't give him all, they give him more than he wants, for whatever he is given he can't take, and the ability to take is the soul of manly villainy. This ambiguous sense of the villain's discourse seems to have emerged between Richard III and Richard II. The two player kings share a mordancy of language sharpened by the bemused, delicious, blank-eyed perception that they can be the knaves they are and get away with so much. But where Richard III "inhabits a world where everyone deserves everything he can do to them," 40 Richard II is a little more selective in his choice of victims, and what chiefly differentiates him from Richard III is that he acts as if he deserves everything he can do or get done to himself. His mockery of himself, of others, and of the discourses he mimics produces a version of the

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sinner's discourse that is braced by anger and black humor because it has, so to speak, ingested Richard III's villain's discourse even as he parades his victimization. In his relation to Bolingbroke, the victim's and villain's discourses shuttle back and forth between the two speakers and bind them together in strange co-dependency. Just such a co-dependency underlies and jeopardizes the performance I shall use as my example of the villain's discourse, Edmund's claim to autonomous villainy in King Lear. G. K. Hunter nicely observes that "Edmund, Cordelia, Kent, all begin with powerful acts of self-definition, strong denials of their contexts," but that "the play seems ... intent on hunting down the man who thinks he knows what he believes or evenwho he is." 41 Edmund clearly relishes his role as a witty knave and attacks his first soliloquy in high spirits, with a dash of chivalric bitters: "Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law j My services are bound" (r.2.r-2). More than the oath ofa pagan devotee of anarchy, this is a courtly lover's tender of secret and illicit services to his master-mistress, mi dons, who spurs him to translate his lust into heroic villainy. The autoerotic ambiance of this allusion underlines the rea~ force of the apostrophe: "Thou, Edmund, art my god." The soliloquy goes on to strut the speaker's intention to have his way at the expense of his father and brother, and to justify this project on the grounds that he owes society nothing except the chance to pay it back for stripping him of his rights. With charming irreverence he argues that since "the lusty stealth" of adultery produces better children than tired married sex, primogeniture is an inefficient mechanism for the transmission of paternal virtu. The criterion should be, not older before younger, but illegitimate before legitimate. Aiming a kick at the cornerstone of patriarchal society, Edmund castigates it for trying to impede his progress by making a legal mountain out of a few moonshines. Yet the bracing tonic of the soliloquy doesn't quite kick free of qualifying undertones. There is, first, something odd about the apostrophe to nature that impinges on the speaker's proclaimed freedom from obligation and convention. As a piece of courtly swash it betrays a certain affection for chivalric and aristocratic gestures, an affection clearly-if bizarrelydisplayed in the final duel in 5. 3, during which both brothers seem eager to embrace the knightly role and compete in exchanges of noble style, while Edmund savors a leisurely Arthurian death scene. From the beginning Edmund seems bothered primarily by the low social standing, the baseness, of bastards. Parading as nature's nobleman, he clearly respects the values of the society whose rules he intends to flout. (Courtly love is a parasite on, not a destroyer of, the tired bed of arranged marriages.) Far from wanting

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to tear down the patriarchal order, he would like it to remain alive and well so that, by short-circuiting its legal impediments, he can enjoy its rewards. It isn't his father he initially plans to displace but his brother. His mention of primogeniture seems irrelevant to the project of a bastard, a stage villain, who wants only to have lands by wit if not by birth. But it is relevant if what he wants is to supersede his brother in the order of law and attain · aristocratic honors-in short, to become his father's lawful heir. This desire is reinforced and its meaning insidiously turned by a second oddity in Edmund's speech, one that surfaces in the following lines: Why brand they us With base? with baseness? bastardy? base, base? Who in the lusty stealth of nature take More composition and fierce quality Than doth, within a dull, stale, tired bed, Go to th' creating a whole tribe of fops, Got 'tween asleep and awake? (1.2.9-rs)

Like Edmund's "I shall study deserving," "lusty stealth of nature" solicits inversion: "the stealthy lust of nature" is not only a more straightforward reference to Gloucester's lustful nature and adulterous act, it is also less complimentary; it denotes a sneaky rather than a vigorous act. Anyone attuned by Edmund's rhetoric to expect expressions of contempt for Gloucester may pause long enough to wonder why he chooses a term of admiration at this point. Perhaps it is because the speaker intends "the lusty stealth of nature" to signify an attribute of bastards rather than of their fathers. "The lusty stealth," however, refuses to specify the agent and produces uncertainty: whose lusty stealth, theirs or ours? They are the fathers whose vigorous and lustful theft of natural pleasure accounts for our superior quality, yet who at the same time deny us our legal share. in their nature and make us their scapegoats; we are the bastards whose stealth is natural because our fathers force us by their denial tb steal what others get by order of law, but is also lusty because we have inherited their vigor through the act by which we were conceived. _Edmund thus reformulates the relation described by Gloucester in his joking dismissal of the whoreson and his mother (1.1.925): he is not the son of a whore but the bastard of a nobleman, his father's image in shape and mind and fierce quality. Thus the soliloquy challenges the speaker's claim to lawless autonomy from the beginning (the challenge is implied in the self-destroying irony of the phrase "to thy Law/ My services are bound"), and the attempt to say "Thou, Edmund, art my god" gradually gives way to the interdicted utter-

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ance behind "Thou, Nature, art my goddess," that is, "Thou Gloucester, art my father": "my mind as generous, and my shape as true" as Edgar's, and even more deserving of Gloucester's love, since-unlike Edgar- I share our father's inclination toward lusty stealth. Playing the bravo, dissociating himself from the effeminacy of the order of law, prizing his "fierce quality": this performance argues an uneasiness about sex roles that recalls Gloucester's in r.r and makes it appear that Edmund is competing with Gloucester, repeating his rhetorical machismo in a· more confident vein and, indeed, validating his behavior. In sum, the soliloquy that begins with a counterpatriarchal appeal to Goddess Nature ultimately reveals itself as an act of reauthorizing the father. The soliloquy with which Edmund responds to Gloucester's "late eclipses" lament is a second attempt to affirm his open-eyed independence, directed this time toward the superstitions or evasions by which the tribe of fops explain misfortune. Since he has just gulled his father and knows the true source of Gloucester's unhappiness, his tone in this soliloquy is more exclamatory, a mixture of self-congratulation and contempt for others. His ability to see through the illusions of conventional men encourages him to celebrate his own freedom from obligation, and to assume full responsibility for his own villainy: This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeits of our own behavior, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars; as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforc'd obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star! My father compounded with my mother under the dragon's tail, and my nativity was under Ursa major; so that it follows I am rough and lecherous. Fut! I should have been that I am had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing. (r.2.124-4o)

Edmund's "Thou, Nature" soliloquy was a kind of self-introduction, his first chance to represent and explain himself as he would wish to be seen and understood by the villain's Model Audience. The defiant rhetorical questions, the orotund phrasing, and the lofty contempt for convention compose into the self-romanticizing, self-mythologizing figure of the rebel whose confidence as a debater is flagged by his sure control of the verse medium. But no five-foot walls of verse can hold back the rush of disdain provoked by Gloucester's attempt to ensconce himself in the seem-

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ing knowledge of astrology. Edmund is still speechifying, still representing himself, but as a debunker, not a debater, and his prose has the effect of desacralizing, demythologizing, whoremaster man's celestial treasury of excuses. His use of the first-person plural is ironic mimicry intended to set himself off from the rest of "the world" while making his father the epitome of it. He can sneer at the foppery and effeminacy of a world that claims to be more sinned against than sinning. Yet once again the logic embedded in Edmund's language contradicts his intention. Given the scene that this soliloquy concludes, it seems reasonable to accuse Gloucester of blaming the sun and moon for his sick fortune, but Edmund's reference to "the surfeits of our behavior" is a gratuitous interpolation that speaks to nothing in the preceding scene. He must still be thinking of Gloucester's adultery, and this implies that he, Edmund, the immediate cause of Gloucester's sick fortune, now blames that fortune on Gloucester himself: Father is being rewarded for his whoring and bastardizing. In other words, what Edmund does, and who he is, are his father's responsibility. His speech, therefore, doesn't manage to deliver the message that "Father should blame his sick fortune on me, since I am the master of his life and mind." Instead, the argument of the soliloquy proclaims Edmund a villain on necessity; a knave, thief, and treacher by paternal predominance; and a liar by an enforced obedience of paternal influence. He lays his disposition at the charge of his father, and in so doing echoes his father's words: "his breeding . . . hath been at my charge" resonates in the phrase "lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star." Accusing Gloucester of evading responsibility by blaming his evil on celestial and divine causes, Edmund evades responsibility by blaming his evil on paternal causes. In this deeper mimicry he (once again) reauthorizes the father, and in his failure to control his language he lets it tell us that he feels more sinned against than sinning. This may strike us as even more sinister, or pathetic, if we hear faint echoes of Christian myth in the soliloquy- an infernal parody of the virgin birth with divine father, maidenly mother, and sacrificial bastard sent into the world to redeem it by his suffering. Luckily for Edmund, Edgar happens in at that moment, so the catastrophe of the old Christian comedy can be safely transferred to the willing surrogate, soon to be reincarnated as the self-lacerating Bethlehem pariah. Almost as if he sees his self-victimization "faintly, nothing like the image and horror of it," Edmund hastens to reconfirm himself in the villain's discourse and imagine himself in the part of the confidence man who only plays the outcast: "my cue is villanous melancholy, with a sigh like Tom o' Bedlam." While

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Edgar is on the way to embracing this ambivalent version of the victim's discourse, Edmund sings the diabolical music and steps forward at the end of the scene to celebrate his wickedness and ensconce himself in the doggerel identity of the conventional Vice. In 2.1 Edmund will hear his father call Edgar a "strange and fast'ned villain," and although he may relish the fact that the epithet marks his own witty triumph, the phrase suggests that he, too, is fastened or bonded to his father. The words with which Gloucester crowns Edmund's achievement unpack this darker sense and renew the touch of impotence: "of my land,/ Loyal and natural boy, I'll work the means/ To make thee capable" (2.1.83-85).

+ Among discourses of self-justification the most aggressive and expansive is that of the donor, which, as Lear's "I gave you all" clearly indicates, is a discourse of moral power and a privilege structurally bestowed on fathers, rulers, and gods, and also-with problematic consequences of a different sort- on mothers, husbands, and heroic saviors. Explicated by Marcel Mauss in his classic account of the· gift as a socially mystified instrument of economic exchange used as a political weapon, the power of the gift is a bone of contention not only between different groups brought together by the traffic in women and other objects but also between the factions internal to the group and reproduced in its structure, the factions of gender and generation. It is in this context, for example, that Tlie Merchant of Venice ironically explores the various strategies of what I have described as negative usury-generosity, mercy, self-interest-that characterize the politics of donation, strategies in which the resources of Christian ethics are used to enable the very practices the play's Christians stigmatize in the Jew. Their mercy is revenge- not a gentle rain, but a ton of bricks, or, in Gratiano's words, ''A halter gratis" (4.1.375). The mercifixiol} that makes the Jewish pariah a Christian places the mercifiers in the scriptural position occupied by Jews. Thus, the bitterness that vibrates in Shylock's "I am content" (4.1.390) is not without its satisfaction, its mordant gratification and compensation. For he has made his point: "if you wrong us shall we not revenge?-if we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that" (3.1.60-62). In the judgment scene it is the Christians whose behavior utters this message; and this is Shylock's revenge. 42 Another feature of the donor's discourse is its intimate connection with the hero's discourse of honor. The strain produced by the conflation of the hero's discourse with the discourses. of the gift and gender are. comp~ctly illustrated in Coriolanus 1.9, the scene in which Caius Marcius receives his

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new name while responding to the attempts of his fellow generals and patricians to do him honor. In his first speech, as Lartius is about to add to Cominius's praise, Marcius demurs: "Pray now, no more. My mother, I Who has a charter to extol her blood, I When she does praise me, grieves me." Lartius lacks such a charter, and besides, Marcius adds, he has only done what any loyal citizen would do: "I have done I As you have done, that's what I can" (13-16). He goes on to deploy this modesty topos with enough arrogance to increase both his unique stature and his colleagues' obligation to recognize it. Cominius continues to praise him, but with more caution: You shall not be The grave of your deserving. Rome must know The value of her own. Therefore, I beseech youIn sign of what you are, not to reward What you have done- before our army hear me. (r.9.19-27)

Marcius replies that he has "some wounds upon me, and they smart to hear themselves remembered." "Should they not," Cominius responds, "Well might they fester 'gainst ingratitude I And tent themselves with death" (2831).43 Marcius's repetition of hear is guardedly concessive: "my wounds, if not myself, desire to hear you." But the ambiguous "they smart to hear themselves remembered" signifies to his interlocutors that he has conflicted feelings: the wounds desire, burn, to hear themselves commemorated; they are pained to hear themselves commemorated; or, more simply-and with more lethal modesty- "let's cut this short; my wounds hurt; they want a tent and attention." The dramatically understated quantifier, "some wounds," and the displacement of the grammatical subject· from the speaker to his wounds bespeak an aggressive coyness. It is precisely the ambiguity of the statement. that allows Marcius to assert self-sufficient reluctance even as he encourages Cominius to continue with his praise. In 2.3 the Third Citizen delivers himself of his wonderfully disgusting line, "if he show us his wounds and tell us his deeds, we are to put our tongue into those wounds and speak for them" (5-8). The metaphor conflates stabbing, sexual penetration, licking (to eat or heal), and a surgical probe or tent with the giving of voices that affirms Marc ius's right to consular honor. Those "mouthed wounds," as Hotspur calls them, are mute, tongueless as Lavinia, for honor's tongue is always the tongue of another, and so for the hero to be honored is to receive another wound. The com-

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ments on the wounds by Cominius and the Third Citizen suggest that Marcius's word, remembered, may also be understood as "re-membered"healed, made whole. For this is a relevant danger: if the wounds are healed by the gratitude and praise of others, there is a way in which they can be forgotten, since the hero will have been paid back. And if he can be paid back, if his fellow Romans discharge their obligation, he will no longer be superior and unique, the sole possessor of himself and his value, the benefactor who can claim, "I gave you all," and whose giving is enhanced by Portia's sentiment, "I stand for sacrifice." Considered as interlocutory warfare, the dialogue with Cominius in 1.9 is a continual reassertion of this advantage and a defense against being paid back. The elegance of Marcius's refusals, themselves praiseworthy, elicit (perhaps solicit) the very "acclamations hyperbolical" (so) that they reject. The dialogue is itself a duel in which Cominius tries to overcome Marcius's advantage and heal the wound of obligation. Cominius scores a point by conferring the name Coriolanus on him (6r-6s), and his response to the acclamation (66) filters a flat "thank you" through a screen of diffidence: I will go wash; And when my face is fair, you shall perceive Whether i blush or no. Howbeit, I thank you. (67-69)

The next lines carefully temper the terms of his accepta~ce ·of the title, for he begins by claiming from Titus Lartius the steed he won in a wager (r.r4), and links this paratactically to his acceptance of the title, implying that it, like the horse, is his by right and not by gift. I mean to stride your steed, and at all times To undercrest your good addition To th' fairness of my power. (70-72)

What follows, in one of the strangest moments of a strange play, is entirely consistent with this line of interpretation. Cominius takes charge by proposing a dispersal that will logically conclude the scene of Coriolanus's triumph, which (since he urged it on Coriolanus) is also his triumph. Coriolanus, however, blocks this move. He delays the ending to put his colleague under another obligation; newly acclaimed, he reminds Cominius of his princely refusals of gifts and then stoops to beg a tiny favor:

Com.

The gods begin to mock me. I, that now Refused most princely gifts, am bound to beg Of my lord general. Take't, 'tis yours. What is't?

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Cor.

Com.

LArtius Cor.

32!

I sometime lay here in Corioles At a poor man's house; he used me kindly. He cried to me; I saw him prisoner; But then Aufidius was within my view, And wrath o'erwhelmed my pity. I request you To give my poor host freedom. 0 well begged! Were he the butcher of my son, he should Be free as is the wind. Deliver him, Titus. Marcius, his name? By Jupiter, forgot! I am weary; yes, my memory is tired. Have we no wine here? (78-9r)

This is a finely timed gesture of magnanimity, whatever else it may suggest. He articulates a nonthreatening debt of gratitude to one who was poor, an enemy, and a Roman prisoner, a victim of his successful assault; he failed the man then, and would like to make it up to him now. The magnanimity is extended to Cominius, but edged with the condescension of one who can well afford so modest a personal request after his triumphant refusal. It is a way of using Cominius "kindly" by placing himself in his debt, and also by giving Cominius a chance to do a little something for the man whose monstrous favors to Rome are scarcely repayable. But his lapse of memory frustrates the project. Cominius will not be able to place him in his debt or pay him back. When Coriolanus lets the matter drop, pleads weariness, and fails the poor man again, how is this to be taken? As a planned move or a spontaneous lapse? It is impossible to determine intention in so spare an episode. But that scarcely matters. What we· can say is that the fate of the anonymous man seems less important than the gesture for which he provides the material; he is an instrument in the illocutionary struggle· between Marcius and his interlocutors. We interpreters may disagree as to whether or not the speakers are aware of what motivates them, but the strategy unfolded in their discourse characterizes that motivation. The moves the speakers make in the language-game of honor are chosen, not determined; but the range of choices is constrained because the discourse has its own logic. And for Marc ius to be re-membered by otherswhich he clearly wants-is nevertheless to be dismembered, unmanned, in his own eyes.

+ The permutations produced by the interplay of discourses might well light up a Greimasian square, if one is inclined to such video games. But my

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concern at present is with the critical difference produced in the rhetorical tone and grammatical voicing of the interplay by the sinner's discourse. Its effect is to interrogate the motives inscribed in the speaker's performance of the other discourses. This interrogation may be characterized in grammatical terms as diathetical, or voice-related. For example, the relation of donor to donee, and of revenger, hero, or villain to victim (donee and victim often end up being identical), is one of active voice to passive voice. But the sinner's discourse recasts those relation.; in the middle voice of shared responsibility, or of complicity, and thereby destabilizes all clear distinctions based on the active/passive opposition. Thus, (1) "Look what they did to me" translates into "Look what I let or had them do to me," and (2) "Look what I'm doing to them" translates into "Look what they're letting or having me do to them," which may be another way of saying "Look what they're doing to me," which in turn gives way to "Look what I'm having or letting them do to me," namely, "what they're letting or having me do to them." In this discursive merry-go-round it seems impossible to circumscribe the limits of either responsibility or culpability within the confines of individual speakers. Complicity and the site of agency are shuttled back and forth in the oscillation of discourses within one speaker's language and in the circulation of discourses through the language of one, then another, speaker. The 111iddle voice diffuses the force of any attribution of agency by placing the subject of the verb "inside the process" so that "it effects while being affected," as in "Look what I let or had them do to me" and "Look what they're letting or having me do to them." 44 These two examples get their force from their demystifying modification of the simple active constructions to which they are coupled. And even if in the second and longer of my two sequences the discursive merry-go-round concludes on a note of vertiginous cynicism, the force remains moral. As Hayden White observes, in Greek the differences "between the active and the middle forms of the same verb have to do with the kind of consciousness on the part of the subject involved in the action indicated and the force of involvement ofthe subject in the action"; the middle voice "is used especially to indicate those actions informed by a heightened moral consciousness on the part of the subject performing them." 45 The shift from "Look what they did to me" to "Look what I let or had them do to me" precisely illustrates such heightening; structurally, it is the grammatical equivalent of the shift from the victim's to the sinner's discourse. Benveniste defines "voice" as "the fundamental diathesis of the subject in the verb; it denotes a certain attitude of the subject with relation to the

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process- by which the process receives its fundamental determination." He notes that one advantage of his account of the middle voice is that "it frees us from resorting to the elusive and, moreover, extralinguistic notion of the 'interest' of the subject in the process." 46 But the "interest" of the subject is by no means an extradiscursive notion, and the humanistic rhetoric of White's phrase, "heightened moral consciousness," marks a level of analysis that is pertinent to the discursive interactions discernible in Shakespeare's . text. The interactions that most concern me are those in which heightened moral consciousness is conspicuously excluded but exerts its force, reveals its traces, in the uneasy rhetoric of-for example-a speaker caught between opposing desires of self-punishment and revenge; a speaker in whose language the forbidden desire for revenge seeks to conceal itself by displacing punitive power into the discourse of the other(s) delegated both to enact and punish the desire and to suffer for it. In this situation, "heightened moral consciousness" may describe "a certain attitude of the subject," an "interest" adhering to the project of self-representation, but an attitude and interest that may betray themselves even to the subject as marks of the bad faith that intensifies guilt. Thus the discursive interplay that underwrites Edgar's Poor Tom scenario produces mutually intensifying oscillations between guilt and self-loathing, on the one hand, and anger and defensive self-justification, on the other. Edgar's language betrays a conscience that is "heightened" in the sense of "made more irritable." 47 Edgar, Lear, Cordelia, Gloucester, and Kent all try to ensconce themselves in the victim's discourse, and most of them at one point or another activate its passive-aggressive potentialities. The sense of injured merit and unappreciated (therefore depreciated) value is strongest or at least most durable in the self-representations of Cordelia and Kent. They compete with each other-and with the king who failed to appreciate them -in the deeds of soterial service by which they lovingly and loyally Rise Above what had been done to them. The speech performances of Edgar and Lear are more persistently troubled by traces of the self-directed fears and scruples against which their rhetoric defends with a verve at times flamboyant, at times zany.

+ Victim, revenger, donor, hero, villain, savior, sinner: such patterns have lent themselves almost too readily to characterization in terms of role theory. Thus, in his powerful reading of Othello, James Calderwood notes that in the protagonist's attempt to give "an honest account of the true Othello,"

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what emerges is not the image of a unique and essential self but a series of generic snapshots: The Soldier-Servant ("I have done the state some service"), The Unfortunate Lover ("one that loved not wisely but too well"), The Jealous Avenger ... , then more ambiguously The Unlucky Indian or The Villainous Judean, and finally a fusion of the Infidel Turk and the Venetian Christian. Instead of a core-self discoverable at the center of his being, Othello's "I am" seems a kind of internal repertory company, a "we are." 48

Calderwood argues that if "an expression like 'I am playing roles' raises the question of whether the I is something separate from the roles played," Othello answers the question in the negative: "even when he tries to tell the definitive inner truth about his essential self he is inevitably led outward to the generically commonplace- The Soldier-Servant, The Unfortunate Lover, and so on." Although Othello tries in his final speech to justify his earlier claim that " 'My parts, my title, and my perfect soul I Shall manifest me rightly' ... the unique me is betrayed by its generic manifestations, even as the word parts turns false and takes on a theatrical cast. That the self is a series of parts tried on, acted out, and left behind is most memorably expressed perhaps in Jacques' [sic] account of the seven ages of man in As You Like It (2.7)" (ro4-5). In his expressly Lacanian attempt to interrogate the "essential self," Calderwood insists that the analogy of an actor playing parts. falsifies the relation of the I to its roles (ro4). Yet his own reliance on the theatrical metaphor and his appeal to Jaques's speech tend to obscure this point, for they encourage us to imagine that some agent, some unrepresented "self," is trying on and acting out the parts that multiply represent the plural self. In order to carry out a Lacanian interrogation, one would have to place Jaques's "all the world's a stage, I And all the men and women merely players" in contraposition to another formula, "all the world's a text, and all the men and women merely characters" -characters first in the graphic sense (alphabetic inscriptions), then in the theatrical sense (dramatis personae), which may further include the two ethic senses (having character, being a character). In this contraposition, the men and women who represent themselves to themselves and each other as players of roles are (whether or not they are aware of it) simultaneously being represented as the roles, the characters, the dramatis personae, written and performed by- by whom, or rather, by what? By the motives, the desires, the fears, inscribed in language. Not, however, in language tout court, not even in what Lacan calls the "symbolic" tout court, but in the "discourse networks" of specific "social texts." I don't mean to imply that "all the men and women" are reduced to sites or conduits of autonomous discursive agency. Both sides of the contra-

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pos1t10n, the theatrical and the discursive, are equally important to this dialectical conceptualization of agency. The relation between discourse and roles in some respects resembles the relation between the Symbolic and the Imaginary implied by Lacan's rhetoric if not by the surface of his exposition: the Imaginary is the product, the genealogical back-formation, the ghost or specter, of the Symbolic, the reductive embodiment of discursive patterns in (quasi-)perceptual and organic forms. The Imaginary is to the Symbolic as the body is to a text. 49 The structures of the Imaginary are produced by condensation, displacement, and visualization of the Symbolic; the structures of theatrical or social role are produced by similar transformations of discourse. To advert briefly to another lexicon, role is logocentric while discourse is grammatocentric. Social and theatrical roles, which Calderwood aptly describes as "a series of generic snapshots," are thus foreshortened versions, misrecognitions, of the discourses they represent. But the main obstacle posed by the figure of role-playing to the interpretation of discourses is· that the sociotheatrical notion of role freezes and personifies what in textual perspective are dynamic and interactive discourses; role is the detextualization and allegorization of discourse. Were a speaker's language to be wholly invested in or taken over by a single discourse he or she would become a personification. The volatility with which discourses combine and modify each other, or flow in and out of each other, in the speech action of major speakers can't possibly be captured by the image of serial role-switching suggested in Calderwood's figure of the "internal repertory company." The figure is, however, valuable in one respect: as "generic snapshots;' roles are conventional personae, cultural readymades that preexist their players and possess distinct and relatively stable characterological profiles. Similarly, the .discourses individually possess distinct and relatively stable motivational profiles and are part of the cultural capital of speech communities. They are language-games in Wittgenstein's sense, readymade community practices informed by socially constructed patterns not only of behavior but also of self-representation. It should be obvious that the distinction between role and discourse conforms to the distinctions I previously made between the two senses of performance and between the two interpretive principles I referred to as metatheatrical and discursive. My focus in discussing the previous distinctions was on the limits of awareness occasioned by the difference between the attentiveness to self-representation that dominates speakers' relations to their utterance (and to their interlocutors), on the one hand, and the tacit performativity of the discourses· that inhabit their speech, on the other. In

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making the present distinction between role and discourse on the heels of my account of Shakespeare's ethical discourses, I have tried to suggest that self-representation is shown to motivate not only the interlocutory performances of speakers but also, if more obscurely, the shape their use of language gives to-or is given by-the interplay of discourses. Discourses, then, are patterns of reflexive self-representation that operate at a level different from, and often at odds with, the patterns disclosed by imaginary audition in speakers' rhetorico-theatrical performances.

Most of the ethical discourses I have been sampling are keyed to dominant or characteristic practices in different types of institutional and cultural formations- the practices and strategies involved in gift exchange, warfare, vendetta, or those involved in maintaining (or transgressing, or renegotiating) boundaries between genders, generations, and classes. Since the discourses are patterns of reflexive self-representation, it is better to view them as functions loosely affiliated to such general types of structure rather than as functions of historically specific situations in a cultural sequence or configuration. But a cluster or network of discourses the interactions and performances .of which are destabilized by the traces of the sinner's discourse obviously belongs to the sequence or configuration we call the Christian era, and to the historically motivated task of constructing a particular form of identity, which is another term for a paradigm of reflexive self-representation. The formation of Christian identity presupposes and exploits the recognition that the human subject is self-divided by its entry into, its imprisonment within, mediation. This identity is founded on the desire, the promise, and the hope of transcending self-division and mediation toward unmediated union with self and God. The desire itself is animated by a cultural decision to treat self-division not as an ontological and therefore morally neutral effect of the entry into mediation but as a fall, an unregenerate state for which the subject is responsible, is culpable, but which -precisely because the state is ontological- the subject cannot transcend merely by its own effort. Christian identity thus exhibits the basic attributes of narcissism in the Lacanian definition I prefer: "the impossible effort of the subject to reunite with himself in his own objectified image ... within the register of representation" and the consequent "alternation between selfdeprecation and pretension." 50 One aim of many traditional strategies of identification is to construct subjectivity as an agency continuously chal-

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lenged or summoned or called upon to give an account (that is, a representation) of itself to itself as well as to others. The desideratum of continuousness means that interpellation, as Althusser appropriately calls the subjectifying process, is never merely inscription, or is partial inscription at most. In the passage from tuition to intuition the challenge or summons is internalized by a dialectical procedure: interpellation is the simultaneous generation of the desire to resist the cultural discourse of inscription and the desire to resist the resistance and voluntarily complete the work of inscription that "society" began but left unfinished. The objective of continuous challenge is continuous dissatisfaction with self-representation. This unhappiness is narcissism, and the Lacanian account of it given by Joan Copjec precisely describes that objective in its Christian form: narcissism must consist in the belief that one's own being exceeds the imperfections of its image. Narcissism ... seeks the self beyond the self-image, with which the subject constantly finds fault and in which it constantly fails to recognize itself · What one loves in one's image is something more than the image .... Thus is narcissism the source of the malevolence with which the subject regards its image, the aggressivity it unleashes on all its own representations. And thus does the subject come into being as a transgression of, rather than in conformity to, the law. It is not the law, but the fault in the law-the desire that the law cannot ultimately conceal-that is assumed by the subject as its own.51

In Christian discourse, the meaning of the phrase "the fault in the law" is best glossed by St. Paul's "I had not known sin but for the law," which may be unpacked as follows: what I desired and did wasn't sinful in my eyes until the law told me it was; the new knowledge simultaneously intensifies guilt and intensifies desire by making the once-accessible fruit forbidden and thus more tempting; the law arouses resistance to itself and punishes as it arouses; this double effect makes me feel more unworthy, sinful, helpless to overrule the contrary "law of the members," and it thus drives me to resist my resistance-drives me beyond myself and beyond the law toward the violence of grace that alone can shatter and transform and redeem both. 5 2 Christian discourse is- to give it an Althusserian acronym- an I CA: an Ideological Cultural Apparatus for the production of narcissism. It aims to instill in the subject an initial and sometimes lasting effect of selfdeprecation, insufficiency, even self-loathing. It actively cultivates the selfdivision, the psychomachia, latent in the very structure of subjectivity as an agency that apprehends itself, is present to itself, only through historically delimited forms of mediation and representation. It induces the sinner

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to seek identification with "the self beyond the self-image" in the forms of self-transcendence sanctioned by God and Church. These forms and inducements undergo historical variations within a more or less constant paradigm: Christian ideology establishes guilt at three levels- as an ontological structure, as articulations of ethical agency, and as a pattern of selfrepresentation. The first is established through the concept of original sin, the second through the various categoreal schemes enumerating particular sins and vices, the third through confessional and penitential practices designed to maintain or refresh bad conscience and give shape to the interior drama of the sinner's discourse. The constancy of this paradigm derives from that of the Old Testament narrative transformed by the Gospel into the Greatest Story Ever Told, the story to which St. Paul "gave a structured character.... After Adam's crime, man, cut off from Redemption, is ... inevitably bound unto eternal death .... Nevertheless, this black picture is rigorously made only to heighten, in contrast, the necessity and grandeur of Christ's redemptive mission. Original and personal sin become an integral part of a system of salvation, whose other component is justification." 53 Susan Harding's characterization of the effect of the rhetoric of contemporary fundamentalist discourse testifies to the durability of the paradigm and reproduces, in the pathos of conversion, a condensed and therefore parodic manifestation of the universal subject of semiotics and psychoanalysis: I am emptied, stripped of all vestiges of Pt:rsonality and uniqueness. My life is rendered meaningless, my past erased. I am primarily distinguished by what I lack, and, given my lacking, by what I need. I stand for absence, for void, yet I am aware of something more, something missing, unseen, hidden, and I come to need that, to desire it, perhaps to crave it, and am thus launched on a quest for affirmation and revelation which may be achieved only through conversion. All this is accomplished in me by implication and presupposition, not by direct argument. My consent is not sought; I am implicated, already enlisted as a collaborator, in my own metamorphosis.54

The quest for affirmation is a quest for identification, for what Lacan calls "the armor of an alienating identity" in which one may lose oneself, may disappear into the peace· of union with the Other. This is narcissism with a vengeance. The necessarily schismogenetic effect of mediation and self-representation is here displaced from the defining structural condition of subjectivity to a defective but corrigible state of consciousness and desire that is posited precisely so that it may be "treated" and "cured." The power of this ideological construction lies in its appropriative reliance on the basic

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model of subjectivity as self-division. I cite Harding's account because its sympathetic responsiveness to the power is balanced by its implicit critique of the interest, the bad faith, with which Christian rhetoric strives to transform the universal effect of mediation -the fate of subjectivity-into the goal of an ideological project: "Witnessing, like evangelical preaching, 'is intended to create a spiritual crisis by calling to the fore one's desperate and lost condition, which one may have been totally unaware of.' " 55 I have tried to show that the same combination of sympathy and ironic distance informs Shakespeare's dramatizations of the sinner's discourse. But if that can be shown, the historical question remains: What makes such a perspective possible? Given the constancy and durability of the Christian paradigm, what specific changes in cultural performance of the sinner's discourse makes possible the sympathetic critique of a discourse that produces guilt by rhetorical inoculation? Historians of Christianity often factor into their diachronic patterns the fluctuating relations of the sinner's discourse to the official and institutionally sanctioned discourses of the Church. The Lutheran critique of the sacramental and confessional abuses of the discourse, and the attempt to extricate it from the "shackles" of Catholic ritual, have been shown to give it a new and more flexible life in a variety of media that transgressed the boundaries between sacred and secular authority. It has seemed obvious to many that an· important aim and effect of the reforms initiated by Luther and Calvin was to intensify the pressure of the sinner's discourse in the economy of self-representation. Arguing from other evidence, the archive of "the history of manners," Norbert Elias found this intensification already at work in Catholic Europe. He attributes it to the effects of humanism, literacy, and the need to respond to destabilizing pressures on class structure with new techniques of boundary maintenance that relied on the internalization of social control: "The development Elias has traced in the period;' writes Steven Mullaney, "represents, on the one hand, the secularization and expansion of the realm of scrutiny from that of sin to the minutiae of everyday life, and on the other, the incorporation of judgmental authority within the self. The result was an expanded threshold of shame and apprehension." 56 I give the Elias thesis in Mullaney's words because he cites it in support of his argument that the Elizabethan public theater took over some of the psychological functions leached out of confession by the Reformation's attempt to eliminate the priestly confessor's "apprehensive powers" (roo). He claims that this "theater of (self) apprehension" (132) had the power "to induce an audience ... to view themselves as actors in their

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own lives" (u3), to produce in them "a sense of dread or shame, ... a sense ofbeing observed ... that made the spectators, in an imaginary but potent sense, the object of their own gaze" (102). Stephen Greenblatt's distinction between theater and ritual-the former "elicits from us complicity rather than belief" -is the epigrammatic germ from which Mullaney develops his account of the crisis produced by the Reformation in "the symbolic economy of the period" (91, 96), a crisis in which the weakening of customary mytho-ritual controls was offset by technologies of justice, edification, and display reinforced by such "partly illicit cultural phenomena" (97) as that most dangerous supplement, the popular stage. 57 Greenblatt's examination of a variety of texts leads him to conclude that "Renaissance England had a subtle conception of the relation between anxiety and the fashioning of the individual subject, and its governing institutions developed the discursive and behavioral strategies to implement this conception by arousing anxiety and then transforming it through pardon into gratitude, obedience and love. These strategies," he adds, "are already implicated in cultural practices that are essential to the making and staging of plays." The theater is "a virtual machine" for the production and management of "salutary anxiety." 58 But even as he comments on "the startling. increase in the level of represented and aroused anxiety" in the dramaturgy of Marlowe and Shakespeare (133), Greenblatt notes theater's stake in the process: ''Anxiety takes its place alongside other meanserotic arousal, the excitement of spectacle, the joys of exquisite language ... -that the players employ to attract and satisfy their customers. The whole point of anxiety in the theater is to make it give such delight that the audience will pay for it again and again" (134-35). There is of course a difference between claiming that the drama represents a theater of "(self) apprehension" -that is, represents dramatis personae who view themselves apprehensively as actors in their own lives-and claiming that it had this effect on actual audiences. While I strongly support the first claim, I'm not convinced by the evidence Mullaney adduces for the second. I can well imagine that plays induced and produced such effects, though I'm not sure how I could go about verifying that hypothesis. Greenblatt's remarks on Marlowe and Shakespeare suggest a more guarded view that implies the distinction between virtual and actual audiences: his emphasis falls on the playwrights' efforts to arouse anxiety and on the effect the plays were supposed to have (133-35). What seems uncontroversial is that some plays dramatize theatrical self-apprehension -represent the discursive games people play in the schismogenetic theater of self-representationas if that is what really goes on in the extratheatrical lives of spectators,

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whether or not they are aware of it. And perhaps that is evidence enough. Perhaps the documented conversion of theatrical practices to metaphors of extratheatrical practices testifies to the power of the public stage to persuade its audiences that all the world's a public stage and all the men and women merely sinners exposed to the "gaze that circumscribes [them], and ... makes [them] beings who are looked at" even when there is no one to look at them- beings who, in giving themselves to be seen, "encounter ... not a seen gaze, but a gaze imagined by [them] in the field of the Other." 59 This is unquestionably a theme of Shakespearean dramaturgy; it may or may not have been one of its effects. But as a theme-the metatheatrical theme of theater as critique of itself and of the world- it testifies to something else. In Religion and the Decline of Magic, Keith Thomas argues that "Malinowski's picture of magic giving way before technology" does not hold for Tudor and Stuart England: "It was the abandonment of magic which made possible the upsurge of technology, not the other way round," for "the Protestant attack on sacramental magic had severely eroded the ritual of the established Church." 60 Thomas supports his claim that magic "was on the wane" before technology "was ready to take its place" by noting that the Reformation did not "coincide with any technological revolution." 61 But this can be maintained only by a narrow construal of the term technological. Theater is a new technology, and so is printing, and, together with new developments in the visual arts and what Martin Kemp calls "the science of art," they compose a technological revolution of a particular kind: a revolution in technologies of representation and self-representation.62 There may still, as Mullaney insists, be residual or displaced magic in the web of theatrical technology, but its displacement from religious to secular technology exposes not only the magic to the disenchantment process but also the whole psychological system constructed to justify and indeed to necessitate the confessional and penitential functions of sacramental magic, the system of Christian narcissism that has the sinner's discourse as its centerpiece. Greenblatt's discussion of theatrical anxiety and pleasure suggests that to the series of proliferating oppositions Mullaney picks out- Protestant vs. Catholic, monarchy vs. papacy, Puritan vs. Anglican -we should add another: theater vs. all of the above. And whether we think of theater's relations to the others as one of contained or of uncontained subversion, it provides the stage from which Shakespeare launches a sustained textual inquiry into the uses and abuses of the religious ideology and discursive economy centered on the sinner's discourse. To understand this inquiry we have to begin with the obvious fact that guilt and redemption, the polar terms that structure the system of Christian ideology and motivate

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the production of Christian narcissism, are related to each other as bound variables. As Jean Delumeau puts it, in both Catholic and Protestant versions of Christianity's narrative paradigm "menace was counterbalanced by consolation," and, especially in Lutheran homiletics, "the pair menace and consolation ... seem to be ... inseparable." 63 The thesis of Delumeau's "cultural history of sin" (555)- "the history of a negative self-image" (3) -is that the menace dramatized in "guiltinstilling discourse" (550) was intensified during the early modern period: "from the fourteenth century on, even among laypeople, the formation of a guilt consciousness had become the main preoccupation of the ·ruling culture" (207), and the objective of an inculpatory "discourse of fear and intimidation," the appeal of which rapidly widened "from the Black Death to the end of the Wars of Religion," was to turn Christian warfare inward so as to raise consciousness of "the fear of one's self" (556, 1). The "evolution toward a culture of guilt" after Lateran IV (1215) was contemporary with and intersected a movement "to fix the theology of the sacraments and . . . aggrandize the powers of the clergy. . . . The new theology of penitence, by enlarging the priest's role, risked diminishing that of the sinner and his or her necessary contrition" (197-98). The Protestant response to this has received differently inflected interpretations. Delumeau follows Keith Thomas in emphasizing the need for measures that would alleviate the new anxiety aroused by the decline or rejection of the Church's recourse to sacramental magic (523-54). Steven Ozment, however, argues that this rejection was itself intended to alleviate anxiety: "The first Protestants attacked the medieval church for demanding too much, not too little, from laymen and clergymen, and for making religion psychologically and socially burdensome, not for taking it too lightly.... The traditional practice was criticized for demanding a contrition no man could achieve and leaving the penitent in doubt and anxious about forgiveness." Not that Protestants softened the sinner's discourse. On the contrary, the sinner is urged to say to himself before God, " 'All that I am, whatever I say or do, is mortal and damnable'. By so maximizing the state of sin Protestants actually sought to minimize preoccupation with sinning." 64 Ozment discusses the dilemma with which the Reformers struggledthe opposing claims of freedom and discipline, spirit and structure, the "freedom fighter" and the "new papist" -and emphasizes the care with which they tried to implement religious punishment so as not to jeopardize the final goal, which was "not to terrorize but to create 'peace, inner calm, and a quiet life'" (155-59).65 Yet the change of focus from "sinning" to "the state of sin" must be assumed to rub against the grain of this objective. Praising Luther's Small Catechism for its promotion of religious freedom, and for

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shifting the confessional initiative from the priest to the penitent, Ozment finds it "an irony still to be appreciated by many scholars that by so maximizing sinfulness (before God every man is guilty of every conceivable sin) Protestants tried to minimize its psychological burden (no man is required to ponder and recite his every actual sin)" (155-56). But to redirect attention from what the sinner does to what the sinner is- "What dost thou, or what art thou, Angelo?" -seems to be a good recipe for normalizing the selfrepresentation and -flagellation of the overnice or fastidious conscience, for internalizing the confessional dialogue- ("Go to your bosom, I Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know") 66 - and at the same time giving it the stability, the repeatability (citationality), of discursive form. If we map this change onto the basic Christian paradigm, "menace counterbalanced by consolation;' two consequences would seem to follow: (r) intensifying or maximizing sinfulness should be counterbalanced by the intensification of reassurance-and this is a development in religious rhetoric Ozment, Delumeau, and Thomas have all noted; (2) internalizing the menace from sins to sinfulness should be counterbalanced by a comparable internalization of reassurance so that sinners will have the discursive resources enabling them to confront increased autophobia and misautia and to reassure themselves they aren't as bad as they suspect they are. It is in this second area that Shakespeare finds material for his nuanced and varied studies of the negotiations between the sinner's discourse and the other language-games in the discourse network he depicts. (It is here, too, incidentally, that the interpreter of Shakespearean discourses can realize the value of Stanley Cavell's studies of the relation between knowing-or disowning knowledge- and acknowledging in Shakespeare. Cavell, who doesn't deal with The Tempest, might have made something of Prospera's "this thing of darkness I I Acknowledge mine.") I note in passing that although Foucault's analysis of the compulsion to confess is ancillary to his history of the compulsion to transform sex into discourse, the analysis applies to the broader topic of the compulsion to transform sinfulness into discourse, "shifting the most important moment of transgression from the act itself to the stirrings of desire" and then "extracting from the depths of oneself . . . a truth which the very form of the confession holds out like a shimmering mirage": The confession is a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement; it is also a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile; a ritual in which truth is corroborated

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by the obstacles and resistances it has had to surmount in order to be formulated; and finally, a ritual in which the expression alone, independently of its external consequences, produces intrinsic modifications in the person who articulates it: it exonerates, redeems, and purifies him; it unburdens him of his wrongs, liberates him, and promises him salvation. (my italics)

This profile of the Christian paradigm, with its concluding reassurance, is what Foucault sardonically calls "a shimmering mirage," the "internal ruse of confession": viz, that confession "frees;' and the truth it brings forth "does not belong to the order of power." 67 Students of Shakespeare influenced by Foucault have, in my opinion, diminished the rich interpretive value of his analysis by taking his onesided emphasis on power- one-sided in that, unlike Weber and others, he doesn't distinguish between power and authority but subsumes the latter under the former-and limiting its applicability to Shakespeare's representations of political relations. I don't deny that issues of political power are central to the plays and that much can be- and has been -learned from interpretive emphases similar to or influenced by Foucault. But "the political" is a flexible category not only because it includes the micropolitics of interlocutory negotiations but also because the political issues in Shakespeare are inseparable from and modified by questions of moral authority and legitimacy. These questions are raised within the discursive frall).ework of reflexive self-representation, within the institutional framework of what Mullaney calls a "theater of (self) apprehension," and within the cultural framework of religious reform- a set of frameworks at the center of which I situate problematic enactments and evasions of the sinner's discourse. In its normative form, the discourse may be characterized in Foucault's terms as a quasi-confessional dialogue with the "virtual presence" of the interior partner "who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile." But the implication of fear or anxiety in the idea of self-apprehension (which, in conjunction with theater, is focused on being seen, looked at, heard, overheard) reminds us that the norm may be honored more in the breach than in the observance. Continually modified and distorted in its interactions with other discourses, the sinner's discourse may deviate on the one hand toward masochistic pursuit of the punishment or judgment that confirms misautia, and on the other toward prophylactic deployment of self-exculpating strategies that expose it in the mode of conspicuous exclusion. For my next, and final, example, I turn to Measure for Measure, where these two deviations are sharply juxtaposed in the discursive performances of Angelo and the Duke. Since Angelo's melodramatic explosions of misautia are self-explanatory, I shall concentrate my attention on the Duke.

CHAPTER

14

+ What Does the Duke Know and When Does He Know It? Carrying the Torch in (Measure for Measure)

Opinion and interpretation of Measure for Measure tend to gather around the critical hearth kindled by reactions to the Duke of Vienna. Some argue that he is a good person, others that he is a bad person; still others, remembering this is a "problem play," argue that he is at least both at once. Some argue that the play fails, and others that it succeeds, because he is so good, or so powerful, or so bad, or so hard to fathom, or all of the above. My view of the Duke differs from most of these views in premising that my view of the Duke is less important or interesting than the Duke's view of the Duke. But if I distinguish in this way between what I think of the Duke and what I think he thinks of himself, I should be a little more precise about the second half of the proposition: whether or not we agree that we can say of the Duke as a fictive speaker, a mere speech-prefix, that "he is thinking (of himself or anything else)," we can at least say that the language that constructs the speaker expresses thoughts about him -opinions, interpretations, desires, fears- and we may even be able to agree on what it is that gets expressed. But we would still have to decide-and here there is plenty of room for disagreement- whether the thoughts we ascribe to the utterance should or ·should not be ascribed to the utterer, and what the mode of ascription might be. The conditions for arriving at such decisions are complex, and I shall not theorize about them in advance because the conditions have arisen for me as methodological or heuristic orientations that are contingent on (and not merely operative on) a particular set of reading practices. I hope the following account will clarify the double

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distinction I draw here (r) between what I or any critic thinks of the Duke and what he thinks of himself and (2) between what he may think of himself and what his language thinks of him. The second distinction obviously hooks into the theory of discourses I have been illustrating in these pages. It's to the first distinction that I now attend. This distinction is not merely disjunctive but also interactive: the two sides mutually implicate each other. If my aim is to show that the Duke or his language betrays awareness of moral· duplicity in his behavior, I am obliged to analyze and assess that behavior apart from such awareness. And my assessment is negative. I number myself among the detractors of the Duke-but not among those who imagine that· since the author of Measure for Measure intended to make his protagonist exemplary, ideal, godlike, Shakespeare-like, etc., he failed and thus produced an unsatisfactory play. On the contrary, I find the play compelling, mysterious, exciting, precisely because its donnee is that the Duke is a bad person. Yet if, to utilize Stephen Booth's distinction, he is a bad person, he is nevertheless a good character. He works behind the back and from behind the arras-voyeuristically, duplicitously, furtively, even maliciously; an intriguer, a practicer, a pious fraud. At the same time, his stage "presence;' his style of self-representation, delivers a hilariously devious, irritable, energetic, histrionic, and bumptious protagonist who manages somehow to be simultaneously the life of the party and its killjoy. My view of the Duke is chiefly obligated to Graham Bradshaw's trenchant defense of the thesis that "the final scene, the Duke's verdicts, and the Duke himself are all problematic by design." 1 Bradshaw argues that the Duke is a negligent governor who now believes that he must confront, but still wants to evade, a problem which he has helped to create. If we are not to defuse or short-circuit this play's power to challenge and disturb, it is important that we do not minimize or disregard the "Vienna-problem." The point that immediately matters is not whether we believe that Vienna requires surgery, but that the Duke himself believes this and feels obliged to act accordingly. After indulging an inclination to be merciful in the short term, for fourteen years, the Duke is convinced that this was a "fault," and not merciful at all in the long term. (r66-67)

Bradshaw puts the case for paying attention to the Duke's "Viennaproblem" and appreciating the ambivalence of his response to the problem better than any other account of the play I have seen. He makes it clear that to minimize the Vienna-problem is to minimize the Duke's complicity, which in turn diminishes the possibility of locating the play's center in his response to that complicity-a response that includes and is complicated by

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his reasons for delegating his authority to Angelo and by his response to that complication. To this I add a further consideration. It has cost many critics very little effort to find the Duke's treatment of Angelo, Isabella, Mariana, and others morally questionable or even repugnant. Bradshaw, for example, notes that "the ironic parallels between three cases involving promises to marry expose the unprincipled, capricious and self-regarding nature of the Duke's legal and moral thinking." The message conveyed by the play's last act is "that life is not like stories, and that only a moral idiot ... would expect a work of art to resolve problems which are ... wholly intractable" (208-9). I submit that unless we read the play in a way that reduces the Duke to a moral idiot we shall have trouble imagining him so obtuse as to be blind to acts of bad faith that have seemed obvious to one after another critic and blind to the equally obvious questionability of motives that he himself directly acknowledges or responds to in a conspicuously defensive manner. In short, my reading of the play leads me to premise moral competence in the Duke such that he could be expected to be as anxious about his behavior as the critics are. Whether he is, and, if so, how the anxiety manifests itself, remain to be seen. But before turning to explore this issue I want to digress briefly in order to differentiate my emphasis on reflexive self-representation and the problem of moral legitimacy from another approach more central to current interpretive practice. In one of the· more penetrating examples of cultural-materialist criticism of Shakespeare, Jonathan Dollimore, after noting that the Duke attributes the crisis in Vienna to "a failure on the part of the rulers," observes that the Duke "at the same time displaces responsibility on to the ruled: like disobedient children they have taken advantage of their 'fond fathers' (I.iii.23). Hence the need for a counter-subversive attack on the 'liberty' of the low-life." Dollimore goes on to argue that although the low-life are "demonized," and even Escalus displaces blame for disorder to "the apparently alien Friar" in 5.1, "possibilities for actual subversion seem to come from" the top: while "Escalus really believes it is the subordinate and the outsider who are to blame . . . he is prepared to torture his way to 'the more mightier member' behind the plot," betraying "the implication, and certainly the fear, that the origin of the problem is not intrinsic to the lowlife but a hostile fraction of the ruling order." 2 The burden of Dollimore's canny analysis of institutional conflict in the play is not merely another demonstration of the way subversion is encouraged in order to be contained. Rather, his point is that issues centered on such notions as "realpolitik," "paranoia," and "fears of the uncontrollable" should be explored "at a social rather than an individual level" (79-80).

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This point introduces and governs the series of detailed glimpses Dollimore gives of the Duke's anxieties, practices, ideological strategies, and concern for legitimacy (So-86). The emphasis in Dollimore's commentary on the Duke is generic: his analysis is directed less toward the problems and reactions of this particular Duke than toward those of "the rulers;' "the authorities," "those in power," "the State," "the ruling order," "a ruling class." The Duke is thus used as an illustration or embodiment of the way patriarchal authoritarianism manifests and deals with the fears endemic to a social structure in which exploitation is mystified as hierarchy. Although I take this admirable interpretation as my point of departure, I shall try to turn its insights back from the "social" toward the "individual level," and I emphasize toward because I think Dollimore's conversion of the Duke to an example of early modern political ideology, practice, and discourse is based on a reductive use of the "social vs. individual" polarity.3 Putting the notion of ethical discourses into play gives me a mediating term between the social, or cultural, and the individual, for if those discourses are, as I have defined them, cultural readymades with their own logic and agency, they are taken up, deployed, and "operated" by individual speakers whose language may be interrogated for traces of discursive activity and motivation. The Duke is not, after all, a member of the class of Jacobean rulers, not the product of the set of texts and interpretations called historical, but a member of the class of fictional characters and a product of the set of texts and interpretations called literary/theatrical. Dollimore claims that his essay on Measure exemplifies "two complementary modes· of materialist criticism," one that "looks directly for history in the text" and the other that directly addresses history itself (85). Together these modes render the theatrical character down to the tenuity of an allegorical diaphane, dissolve his fatness as a site of self-representation, and subject the resultant specter to the fate of interpellation in the historical ruling class. By looking in and around the text toward history, materialist criticism tends to elide out the material effects of linguistic, discursive, and rhetorical play. To take these effects into account exerts a subversive pressure of deceleration on the drive through theater to history. Attention shifts from the problems and ideological strategies of political authority to those of moral legitimacy. The anxiety about power that motivates the surveillance and demonization of others gives way in the portrayal of the Duke to an anxiety about self-representation. This anxiety also motivates the surveillance and demonization of others, but it does so in the interest primarily of self-surveillance and self-justification, an interest driven less by the desire

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for truth or power than by the desire to ensconce oneself in the seeming knowledge that one has wielded one's power for good rather than for evil. The Duke's delight in skulking about in dark corners as an eavesdropper and voyeur, the sheer joy he displays in staging himself as a holy friar always alert for the chance to indulge his compulsion to confess (that is, to confess others), his absurd asseverations of unappreciated probity and injured merit, his little fits of pastoral counseling, and his self-exonerating appeals to the discourse of misanthropy, all reinforced- and discredited- by an increasingly enthusiastic (desperate?) resort to dirty tricks and other questionable practices: these features of his performance make the Duke too idiosyncratic, zany, and, in a word, weird to submit without resistance to Dollimore's ruling order. By assimilating the Duke to "the State," Dollimore to some extent demonizes him and suppresses the odd mixture of unruliness, irresponsibility, and tender conscience, of bumptiousness and diffidence, that characterizes his negotiations with his subjects. I want to return, therefore, to Dollimore's initial insight, his comment on the way the Duke "displaces responsibility" in 1.3, and develop it in a slightly different direction. The Duke begins the play with praise of Escalus's "science" in government, and before going on to commend his preeminence in political "art and practice" he seems, in a textually garbled passage (r.r.s-14), to urge him to put these virtues to work, then concludes a few lines later with a statement that appears logically to climax the praise: "There is our commission, j From which we would not have you warp." 4 Since the obvious presumption is that Escalus is being offered some new and responsible portfolio, the Duke's swerve to Angelo in the succeeding lines is mildly surprising. 5 Though little is made of this misdirection, it doesn't entirely disappear: after his moral pep talk to Angelo, the Duke tells him that "Old Escalus, /Though first in question, is thy secondary" (r.r.45-46); when the Duke departs Escalus worries aloud to Angelo that he needs to "look into the bottom of my place," since he is "not yet instructed" as to the "strength and nature" of his power, and Angelo responds that the same is true of him (LL77-81). 6 The Duke apologizes for the precipitous getaway that "leaves unquestion'd/ Matters of needful value" (r.r.s4-55), but it isn't clear that he includes the dangers of jurisdictional confusion, rivalry, and disappointed expectations among the ends he leaves untied. If we suppose that he builds up Escalus only to soften the effect of his being passed over for Angelo, the way he breaks the news is peremptory, and the question he puts to Escalus is both clumsy and anticlimactic, since it makes it clear that the Duke had

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praised him not as a potential deputy but merely as someone whose opinion he values and who can be relied on to ratify his choice of someone else:

Esc.

What figure of us, think you, he will bear?· For you must know, we have with special soul Elected him our absence to supply; Lent him our terror, drest him with our love, And given his deputation all the organs Of our own power. What think you of it? If any in Vienna be of worth To undergo such ample grace and honor, It is Lord Angelo. (r.u6-24)

This reply is politic and noncommittal but not entirely without bite. Undergo hardly means "enjoy" (the Signet Shakespeare editor's euphemistic gloss). As other editors point out, it bounces off the question in line 16, and· especially off the verb, bear: it means "bear the weight of" (Bevington/Craig), "sustain, endure" (Arden), as if to suggest that the figure struggling under such ample grace and honor· may be bent or cracked by its burden? Twice later in the play Escalus delivers himself of comments that in similar fashion hint discreetly, diplomatically, at a detached assessment of the Duke. At the end of 2.1 hejustifies the needfulness of Angelo's severity with an aphoristic jingle that generalizes and displaces but doesn't entirely dissipate a criticism of the Duke's policy: "Mercy is not itself, that oft looks so; j Pardon is still the nurse of second woe" (28o-8r). In 3.2, after the disguised Duke, still smarting from Lucio's salty insinuations, introduces himself to Escalus as an emissary from the Pope and asks him about the Duke's "disposition," Escalus replies that he was one "that, above all other strifes, contended especially to know himself" (226-27). As Marc Shell ob- , serves, although the statement may be phrased and heard as a compliment, its "literal meaning" is that "the Duke does not know himself." 8 Is there any indication that he wants to know himself? ''Above all other strifes, contended especially . . .": this phrase places the emphasis on the resistance to self-knowledge the Duke encounters. His peremptory flight from ducal responsibility and enthusiastic performance of a friar's role and offices suggest that above all other strifes he struggles to control the self-representation that will convince others of his goodness so that their conviction may shore up his own. The Duke contends especially to justify himself. Escalus's reply also serves up another meaning, which is that the Duke may be more focused on the struggle for self-representation than on "other strifes," more interested in himself than in anyone else. This very episode is

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dramatic proof of his touchiness on the subject of the Duke and what others think of him. In the wake of Lucio's assault on his virtue, the two questions he puts to Escalus seem nervously insistent. Escalus asks for news from abroad; the Duke obliges him with a little diatribe on the world's wickedness (a slant reference to the wickedness of Lucio, Pompey, and the other participants in "filthy vice" he has just been offended by, and has admitted himself responsible for, in 1.3), then abruptly shifts to his favorite subject: "I pray you, sir, of what disposition was the Duke?" (3.2.215-25) and, after Escalus's reply, "What pleasure was he given to?" (228). In context, this is an attempt to assure himself that Lucio's slander has no currency. Escalus shows himself less interested than the Duke in talking about the Duke; his answer is heartening but brief, and he, too, abruptly changes the subject: Rather rejoicing to see another merry, than merry at anything which professed to make him rejoice. A gentleman of all temperance. But leave we him to his events, with a prayer that may prove prosperous, and let me desire to know how you find Claudio prepared. I am made to understand that you have lent him visitation. (3.2.229-35)

Luckily for our hero, Escalus's desire to move on to a more pressing and important topic than the virtue of the Duke leads directly into a short but gratifying exchange on the Duke's virtue as "Friar" (236-44). It is the privilege of readers (and actors, who are, after all, initially readers) to shuttle back and forth between later and earlier moments of play scripts in order to see what lights and shadows are cast on the relatively muffled interactions of opening scenes. In the case of Escalus, the two glimpses of his reaction given above confirm the suspicion of diffidence conveyed by his use of the phrase "undergo such ample grace and honor" in I. I. Escalus finds it prudent to suggest to the Duke that he will be a hard act to follow. The same compunction is evident in Angelo's carefully measured response to the offer of commission: "Let there be some more test made of my metal, I Before so noble and so great a figure I Be stamp't upon it" (1.I.48-50). This show of reluctance is deferential but not sycophantic. Taken together with Escalus's earlier statement (which Angelo didn't hear), it suggests a level of courtly. rhetoric that the speakers expect the Duke to expect. But Angelo's response is also reasonable, and evenjudicious. Thus, to return to this scene after reading I. 3 is to become aware of the extent to which from the beginning-and even before the beginning-of the play the Duke has been engaged in a voyeuristic practice at Angelo's expense, and to discover the extent to which his rhetoric in I. r has been a smokescreen aimed at keeping both of his interlocutors in the dark. When he

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confides to the Friar at the end of I. 3 that his desire to test Angelo is among the reasons behind the bizarre project he has just outlined, he speaks of his deputy's puritanical facade with tart skepticism verging on disdain: Lord Angelo is precise; Stands at a guard with Envy; scarce confesses That his blood flows; or that his appetite Is more to bread than stone. Hence we shall see If power change purpose, what our seemers be. (I.3.so~s4)

One can only conclude with David Bevington, among others, that the Duke "obviously expects Angelo to fall," and although one needn't agree that the Duke is a providential figure· in the play, "an all-seeing deity" producing redemptive effects in the sinners he (mis)leads into temptation, it is easy to imagine that so benign a view of his function would be enthusiastically endorsed by the Duke. 9 Bevington reminds us that the Duke's assessment of Angelo is affected by a piece of information he doesn't disclose until 3.1 but has possessed since before the play began: "he has known all along how Angelo has dishonorably repudiated his solemn contract to Mariana when her dowry disappeared at sea." 10 Therefore, as Harriett Hawkins notes, "he knew at the outset that Angelo was not the paragon that he himself had seemed (?) to believe him to be," 11 and when we review 1.1 from the perspective of 3.1 this knowledge casts his very first speech to Angelo in a strange light: Angelo: There is a kind of character in thy life That to th' observer doth thy history Fully unfold. (u.26-29)

Surely the Duke can't mean at this point to discombobulate Angelo with dark hints about Mariana. That would be sly and wicked of him, and counterproductive as well. Initially protected from accusations of this sort by the deferral of the information we get in 1.3 and 3.1, the Duke strikes us only as a speaker fond of sententious utterance that asks to be admired from a distance rather than approached, decelerated, and perused-utterance that solicits confidence in its utterer's mature wisdom, judgment, and insight into human nature. But as I've suggested, his tactics in dealing first with Escalus and then with Angelo seem less than assured. His relative prolixity (he owns three-quarters of the lines in the first scene) indicates a heavy investment of energy in managing his interlocutors' responses; and there are seemingly gratuitous turns in the rhetoric and logic of his comments to

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Angelo that arouse curiosity at first reading, a vague sense of withheld or occulted meanings, which, on our returning to I. I. from later scenes, becomes much less vague and more unsettling. For then the suspicion arises that the speaker of the Duke's first speech to Angelo may perversely enjoy teasing his interlocutor, letting him know he knows something (and with Escalus standing by) and trying to see how much he can get away with while he pretends only to exhort Angelo to publish his virtues. This exhortation is by no means consistent with the ·notion of an already unfolded character expressed in the immediately preceding lines: Thyself and thy belongings Are not thine so proper as to waste Thyself upon thy virtues, they on thee. Heaven doth with us as we with torches do, Not light them for themselves; for if our virtues Did not go forth of us, 'twere all alike As if we had them not. (I.I.29-35)

If Angelo hasn't yet published his virtues, what is the content of his already unfolded character or history? What has, in effect, gone forth of him? His vices? Heaven may use us as torches not only to illuminate "the aims and ends j Of burning youth" (1.3.5-6) but also to kindle them -something the Duke so much as accuses himself of having done- and even to kindle Angelo. Shakespeare, as Hawkins points out, "implicates his Duke by giving him three different reasons for having invested Angelo with 'absolute power' and ostensibly leaving Vienna." First, he "has neglected to enforce the law ... and the result is social chaos"; second, he "does not want to take the responsibility, or the rap, for enforcing the law"; and third, he "wants to test the icy Angelo for cracks in his facade." These reasons suggest to Hawkins "that Shakespeare here holds the Duke himself to account for the suffering experienced by, and inflicted upon, his subjects" (52-53). My leading question is based on Hawkins's astute and concise account of the structure of polarized ambiguity that problematizes Shakespeare's representation of motive in the play, but I shall shift the emphasis of the question from Shakespeare to the Duke, since the major source of her three reasons is the Duke himself: granted that he implicates himself and holds himself to account, how does he represent his complicity to himself in the course of representing it to others? 12 For example, is there evidence in his language and behavior that the question Hawkins attributes to Shakespeare in the following passage is a question the Duke may put to himself and try to

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cope with (to confront or evade) throughout the play? "Shakespeare raises the question whether it is fair for the Duke to put a protesting Angelo to a test for which he is unprepared ... and then self-righteously condemn him for failing it . . . while conveniently forgetting, or ignoring, the fact· that he had deliberately appointed Angelo to confront a situation of his own creation (i.e. to weed the vice he had let flourish in Vienna) and so caused all the problems involved at the outset, including Angelo's?" (56). I reserve discussion of the broader aspects of this question until I have glanced at the motivational context that seems to illuminate the otherwise arbitrarily aggressive desire to bring Angelo down discernible in the utterance with which the Duke concludes 1.3. Since that utterance suggests that Angelo is sexually repressed, it should be set against the ducal protestation that opens the same scene: No. Holy father, throw away that thought; Believe not that the dribbling dart of love Can pierce a complete bosom. Why I desire thee To give me secret harbor hath a purpose More grave and wrinkled than the aims and ends Of burning youth. (1.3.1-6)

After the focus on the effects of the dribbling dart in 1.2, it is easy to understand why Friar Thomas may have thought he was facing a replay of Romeo and juliet and why, when the Duke emphatically rejects that dribbling thought, he struts the unassailability of his well-armed bosom. He is at pains to distinguish and distance himself from burning youth by reminding the Friar that he has "ever lov'd the life remov'd" and found it unprofitable "to haunt assemblies, j Where youth, and cost, witless bravery keeps" (1.3.8-10). And he explains to the Friar that he will not haunt them now-will not try belatedly and tyrannically to enforce the laws he has "let slip" for so many years (r9-21, 35-38). Instead he has imposed the office on Angelo, "Who may in th' ambush of my name strike home, I And yet my nature never in the fight I To do in slander" (41-43). The logic of this statement takes an odd swerve from the first clause to the second. The first conveys the sense that although the charge to Angelo commits him to a kind of warfare against the unruly people, the ducal name will lend him security and advantage as he strikes home. But the second clause states that it is the Duke who will benefit from the ambush, since, if someone should happen to be discredited, it will not be he; it will, in a word, be Angelo. The lurking or passive aggressiveness in this utterance retroactively infiltrates and reinterprets the Duke's initial exhortation to Angelo to let Heaven kindle him as a torch,

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for if our virtues Did not go forth of us, 'twere all alike As if we had them not. Spirits are not finely touch'd But to fine issues; nor nature never lends The smallest scruple of her excellence But, like a thrifty goddess, she determines Herself the glory of a creditor, Both thanks and use. But I do bend my speech To one that can my part in him advertise: Hold therefore, Angelo. In our remove, be thou at full ourself Mortality and mercy in Vienna Live in thy tongue, and heart. (LI.33-45)

The context of deputation puts a disingenuous spin on this cluster of tropes, positioning the Duke as Heaven to Angelo's torch and as the thrifty creditor, nature, to Angelo's debtor. 13 It isn't only that torches are self-consuming instruments that give light at their own expense (a figure conspicuously hidden in and distorted by the pompous aphorism in lines 33-35, then smuggled into its sequel, the otherwise less violent analogy of spirits to coins, via the consonantial echo of torch in touch'd). 14 It is also that in this deputation the virtues literally, plurally, "go forth of us": the Duke's virtues will go forth through Angelo rather than himself, hence the virtues that go forth through Angelo will not be his own but those of the Duke, who expects gratitude and interest for so generous a loan of his excellence. What interest? What will Angelo have to pay for his "use" of the Duke's virtues, his power and authority, the ambush of his name? When the answer is given in 1.3, it becomes obvious that the Duke's language in I. I already betrays the traces and pressure of a bad-faith scenario different from the one he is trying to persuade Escalus and Angelo to accept. Near the end of 1.3 the Duke requisitions from the Friar the mendicant habit and the short course in mendicant behavior that will render him invisible so he may "visit" -i.e., spy on- "prince and people" (44-48). He is especially eager to hold up his torch to the performance and apparent preciseness of Angelo, not only "to behold his sway" (43) but also to "see/ ... what our seemers be." By this time it's hard to avoid the conclusion that Angelo's ambush of the people has been planned -from before the conversation in I. I -as part of the Duke's ambush of Angelo. But why should the Duke want to prove that Angelo's metal is flawed and will not "undergo" the burden of "so noble and so great a figure"? How will Angelo's fall restore-pay back with interest-excellence and glory to his thrifty creditor? One answer, suggested by Bradshaw, emerges when we link the final lines

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of 1.3 with the Duke's dismissal of the Friar's erotic speculation at the beginning of the scene: it is that the Duke has decided Angelo was the only rival who could seriously challenge his claim to Vienna's most "complete bosom," and that he would meet the challenge by exposing his rival to the temptations bound to arise when the possessor of "absolute power and place" (1.3.13) is forced to go forth into assemblies of burning youth and expose himself to the dribbling dart oflove. 15 If Angelo is the hypocrite the Duke seems to suspect him of being, perhaps "he will succumb to the temptation and turn out no better than the general run of unruly subjects he has been deputed to police-indeed, worse, given his pretensions to probity. This hypothesis about the Duke's motive for testing Angelo has itself to ~e reconciled with the larger agenda he describes to the Friar in 1.3, his plan to get someone without his track record for lax governance to clean up the mess in Vienna. The most striking aspect of his disclosure is the way he appears, while speaking, to monitor and manage his performance of himself, as if he is concerned not merely to tell the Friar about his project -but to tell him about himself-to persuade his interlocutor of his integrity, reliability, and fairness, and of a self-control rooted in mature, high-minded temperance as opposed to the "stricture" he imputes to Angelo (1.3.12). He does this, of course, while detailing and justifying a course of action so meticulously devious, so bizarrely ambiguous,.so visibly sneaky, as to make its earnest propounder seem a little mad. The touchiness with which he later responds to Lucio's jibes about "the old fantastical duke" and his "mad, fantastical trick" (4·3.156, 3.2.89) is one of several clues indicating that his exercises in self-representation are reflexive as well as objective-directed toward himself no less than his interlocutors. From the moment in I. 3 that he protests his "complete bosom," the Duke's explanation is embedded in a series of moral cameos, fragments of self-portrayal the exemplarity of which progressively weakens under the pressure of his involvement in the story of disorder he unfolds: My holy sir, none better knows than you How I have ever lov'd the life remov'd, And held in idle price to haunt assemblies, Where youth, and cost, witless bravery keeps. I have deliver'd to Lord AngeloA man of stricture and firm abstinenceMy absolute power and place here in Vienna, And he supposes me travell'd to Poland; For so I have strew'd it in the common ear, And so it is receiv'd. Now, pious sir, You will demand of me, why I do this.

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Friar Duke

Friar

Duke

347

Gladly, my lord. We have strict statutes and most biting laws, The needful bits and curbs to headstrong weeds,16 Which for this fourteen years we have let slip; Even like an o'ergrown lion in a cave That goes not out to prey. Now, as fond fathers, Having bound up the threatening twigs of birch, Only to stick it in their children's sight For terror, not to use, in time the rod Becomes more mock'd than fear'd: so our decrees, Dead to infliction, to themselves are dead, And Liberty plucks Justice by the nose, The baby beats the nurse, and quite athwart Goes all decorum. It rested in your Grace To unloose this tied-up justice when you pleas'd; And it in you more dreadful would have seem'd Than in Lord Angelo. I do fear, too dreadful. Sith 'twas my fault to give the people scope, 'Twould be my tyranny to strike and gall them For what I bid them do: for we bid this be done, When evil deeds have their permissive pass, And not the punishment. Therefore indeed, my father, I have on Angelo impos'd the office .... (1.3.7-40)

He finally acknowledges that the "witless bravery" he so carefully distances himself from is the product of his own permissive governance (they only did "what I bid them do"), but he edges toward this admission guardedly. The string of royal we 's in lines 19-27 confl.ates his personal responsibility with those of the civic institution and the city fathers, and the two analogies he appeals to along the way have self-exculpatory force. The overgrownlion figure equates a ruler who enforces the laws with a lion going out to prey; the implication is that, whatever the condition o'ergrown glances at (fat? lazy? sick?), he chose the more humane alternative. 17 The figure of the fond fathers who spare the rod works toward the same end. Fond tempers the self-accusation: "our paternal affection made us foolish, and now, however well-intentioned we were, we are paying the price." The looseness and diffuseness of the simile allows "fond fathers" momentarily to float in grammatical limbo before the "as ... so" structure locks it in place as the analogon modifying "our decrees." In the brief space of that moment, "like fond fathers" gives way to "as we fond fathers do"; both the royal plural and the Duke wander from his absolute place and seek refuge in the genera-

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tional cohort; it is only in his disguise as one of the kindly but misguided fathers that the Duke accepts his.share of responsibility for the death of their decrees. Their permissiveness, born of love, is understandable if not entirely excusable. The Duke reserves his rhetorical animus for "burning youth," "witless bravery," and "headlong weeds." These generational contrasts appeal to nature for their legitimation: "it is a father's nature to be fond, a child's to burn," etc. In a similar vein, the Duke as friar will practice his new pastoral cure by persuading Claudio to embrace the chance to escape from a life the natural conditions of which make it not worth living (3.1.5-41), will express his disgust at the "filthy vice" of Vienna's sex workers (3.2.5-38), and will regale Escalus with a mini-sermon on the vanities of a fallen world (3.2.216-24). Such homiletic exercises have the effect of setting Viennese corruption within a framework of rationalization that blames it on life's base conditions and sinful human nature. Are they delivered solely for the benefit of their putative auditors (Claudio, Pompey and Elbow, Escalus)? I prefer to see them as, at the same time, part of an ongoing project of self-persuasion by a speaker trying to forget or disown the knowledge of the complicity to which he had confessed in 1.3, the knowledge that the cause of Viennese corruption was not nature but ducal policy. This view of the matter, seconded by Friar Thomas (1.3.31-32), had been proposed in the preceding scene by Claudio, who attributes Vienna's "too much Liberty" (r.2.n7) to the fact that the penalties for vice "have, like unscour'd armor, hung by th'wall I So long, that nineteen zodiacs have gone round, I And none of them been worn" (155-58). 18 After 1.3 the persistent insinuations of Lucio keep the Duke's complicity, and therefore his homiletic evasions and pious disavowals, before us- but also, and more importantly, before him. Yet even in 1.3 his generational contrasts enact a flinch away from complicity and toward the victim's discourse: after he plaintively implies that the reward for parental tenderness is that youthful "liberty plucks Justice by the nose," his suspect emphasis on the helplessness of mature authority is accentuated by the outlandishness of his next example, "The baby beats the nurse," and it is with a touch of impatience that the Friar brings him up short at line 31. The Duke's response is not a simple mea culpa: that confessional move is relegated to the status of a causal antecedent ("Granted that it was my fault, the strategic response to the situation is ..."), and emphasis is shifted to his justification for investing Angelo. The dramatic force ·of this stretch of dialogue inheres in the sinuous sequence of strategies or rationalizations the main purpose of which seems to be not so much to evade or disclaim his responsibility as to contain it

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by putting a relatively benign construction on his motives and a relatively harsh one on those of his unruly subjects: the responsibility, the accountability, for disorder is his, but the culpability is theirs. It's obvious that this conclusion depends heavily on a particular method of reading, a method that narrows its interpretive focus to effects of self-representation unfolding in the, now of utterance. And it goes without saying that there are many other ways to read acts of speech and interlocution. In one of the more interesting accounts of the Duke's performance and motives, David Sundelson argues that the play "fuses anxieties about political and sexual power, about government and gender, and the Duke tries to defend himself against them." He is unwilling to exercise his absolute power because he fears "sadistic impulses," but "he also dreads humiliation, the moment when 'the rod j Becomes more mock'd than fear'd.' " 19 There's no question that the Duke has anxieties, but there is a difference between letting them bleed into the general psychology of the character (as Sundelson does when he makes a slant inference from snippets of utterance to a summary profile of the Duke) and confining them to the problematics of self-representation elicited from the now of discursive, rhetorical, and interlocutory action. For example, if the overgrown-lion simile suggests that the Duke identifies enforcing the law with preying on lawbreakers, it could, on Sundelson's reading, signify the speaker's hypersensitivity to and fear of sadistic impulses. But on my reading of it the simile only signifies his desire to persuade the Friar and himself that if he was at fault it was because he feared to be misperceived as sadistic, that his fault was more like the absenteeism produced by physical disability (overgrowth), and that it could be excused as testimony to his more humane impulses.20 Impulses in the first reading denotes the enduring object or content of the character's generalized fear,·but in the second reading it denotes the local objective, the desired effect, of a rhetorical strategy of persuasion, an ethical strategy of self-representation. Similarly, the Duke's acknowledging to the Friar that he and the fond fathers contributed by their permissiveness to a bad attitude in the young is no evidence that he "dreads humiliation." Rather it makes the point that however remiss those in authority have been, the young ingrates who give them no respect are worse. What .Sundelson reads as dread of humiliation I read as part of a self-justifying effort to retain the Friar's respect while accepting responsibility for the mess in Vienna and divulging a fairly shabby scenario for cleaning it up. There is undoubtedly a danger of ethical humiliation in this interlocutory predicament. At least the carefulness with which the Duke proceeds in characterizing the mess and the scenario indicates a concern for amour-propre in the presence of the "Holy father" to

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whom in effect he is making a confession, a confession which that concern leads him to try to manage (along with the confessor) as he tries to manage everything and everyone else in the play. The Duke goes to inordinate lengths to make sure everything turns out well. Is it because he knows he is largely responsible for everything getting out of hand? What does he think of the lengths he goes to? After 1.3 he never again adverts to his complicity. Does he forget it? Ignore or "forget" it? How can we tell? Is there indeed a "he" who can be the subject of these questions? A "he" whose desires, fears, and thoughts are identical with or can be abstracted in foreshortened formfrom the language and behavior in terms of which "he" is constructed? A "he" sufficient to enable us to distinguish what "he" may think of himself from what his language and behavior may "think" of him- that is, what they may signify about the motives conveyed by the often strange turns his interlocutory performances take? Here I think the most important clues are those developed by Bradshaw in his account of the effects produced by the play's "timing," its "dramatic rhythm" or scene sequence (180). He notes the odd disjunctions and discontinuities that throw an audience off in the passage from the first to the second scene, and again from the second to the third- the deferral to the third scene of information that explains or changes the meaning of events in the preceding scenes- and he argues that the questions thus raised by "withholding crucial information" produce a shock that retroactively makes "the given sequence ofscenes ... more jolting" (183). To this one need only add that if "Shakespeare keeps asking us questions" (181), they are questions about the Duke, or at least from 1.3 to the end of the play the questions are drawn toward the Duke like iron filings toward a magnet so that, as everyone has noticed, the play is about the. question of the Duke, and everything else in it may be seen to reflect on or to displace that question, to radiate out from it and circle around it?1 Since the question of the Duke is in my view a question about the Duke's self-representation-about the reflexive meaning of his obsessive focus· on his performances and their impacts on others- I scan the scenes in which the Duke doesn't appear primarily for clues to that meaning. In 1.2, for example, two features of the first part of the scene are suggestive in this regard. The first is the reference to the political context: "Lucio and his chums •gossip about 'war' and an apparently urgent need (which actually never troubles the Duke) to come 'to composition with the King of Hungary.' Anyone reading or watching the play for the first time might reasonably suppose this is why the Duke rushed off" at the end of I. I, "and would then be surprised when the Duke reappears" in I. 3 to explain his real

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purpose and tell the Friar he circulated the rumor that he had "travell'd to Poland" mainly to throw Angelo off (Bradshaw 182). The first scene ends in some confusion, for the Duke's interlocutors as well as the audience. Angelo's and Escalus's uncertainty about their jurisdiction makes the Duke's getaway seem even more hasty and mysterious. Thus, although Angelo's valedictory "The heavens give safety to your purposes" (1.1.74) is blandly conventional, one imagines the line uttered in a tone, or with a look, that conveys the sense of being in the dark: "your purposes-whatever they are." A minute or so later, after Lucio begins the next scene by telling his companions what those purposes are- to join other dukes in threatening the king of Hungary with war if he doesn't accept their terms of peacewe hear an echo of Angelo's utterance in the First Gentleman's response: "Heaven grant us its peace, but not the King of Hungary's" (1.2.4-5), that is, "heaven grant us the safety of a clear conscience while making it possible for us to wage war against both Hungary and the hunger we would face if deprived of our military function." To this the Second Gentleman says '~men" and Lucio compares their false piety to that of "the sanctimonious pirate" who, in Jonathan Goldberg's paraphrase, "stole the commandment 'thou shalt not steal' and thus remained pious, breaking no commandment, yet remained a pirate, too." 22 However flippant and self-satisfied this witplay sounds, it focuses attention not only on quotidian dilemmas of bad faith, the piratical motives of soldiering even in a "legitimate" cause, but also on real political and economic problems-the economic problems of the "many gentlemen" whom the Duke had ~eceived with "hope of action" (1.4. 51-52). This last piece of information, however, isn't divulged by Lucio until after we have been enlightened as to the Duke's purposes and the "safety" or peace he s~eks from heaven. Only then are we told that among the false rumors he had "strew'd ... in the common ear" (1.3.15) was the promise of a military expedition abroad that turns out to be "of an infinite distance j From his true-meant design" (1.4.54-55). Whether Lucio is a reliable source is at this poiil.t less an issue than the impression building up through the first act that the Duke's disinformation campaign is mounted in a context of actual affairs that accentuates the force of these glimpses of abdicated responsibility and broken promises. And although the references to heaven, grace, and false piety are merely phatic in function or cynical in tone, they frame the glimpses in a larger context of (un)ethical discourse in which the rationalizations invoked by the soldier to justify his soldiering and by the pirate to justify his pirating rub off on the duplicities of the Duke's duking. The Duke will be careful to fend off such impieties; they are the stuff

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of the public discourse, which, whether rhetorical or sumptuary, he later contemns as "witless bravery." But he is obviously no less· disenchanted or "knowing" than Lucio; otherwise he couldn't fend them off 23 The reference to and attitude toward the political context displayed at the beginning of 1.2 and in 1.4 is thus one of the means by which we are being prepared, in the Duke's absence, to assess the reckless intensity and moral dubiety of his inward turn, and prepared in such a way as to become curious after 1.3 about what in himself he contends "above all other strifes" to know, or not to know. The second feature of 1.2 that throws light on this question operates more indirectly through rhetorical and topical displacements. After tripping through the puns on grace, Lucio and the First Gentleman turn to the inevitable bravo's topic in a conversation Bradshaw describes as "riddled with trench jokes about syphilis" (r8r). Thisechoes a statement by Empson: "The jokes are trench humor, not made out of insensitivity to a common mortal danger but to keep up strength." Empson's point is that these deliberately bad jokes index the problem that motivates the Duke: "One can interpret the Duke as saying 'There's too much syphilis in this town,' and trying to find a way to reduce it without getting personally unpopular." 24 I think they can also be shown to index a problem of another sort: Lucio 1

Gent.

Lucio 1

Gent.

Lucio

1. Gent. 2

Gent.

... Grace is grace, despite of all controversy; as for example, thou thyself art a wicked villain, despite of all grace. Well, there went but a pair of shears between us. I grant: as there may between the lists and the velvet. Thou art the list. And thou the velvet; thou art good velvet; thou'rt a threepiled piece, I warrant thee: I had as lief be a list of an English kersey, as be pil'd, as thou art pil'd, for a French velvet.25 Do I speak feelingly now? I think thou dost: and indeed, with most painful feeling of thy speech. I will, out of thine own confession; learn to begin thy health; but whilst I live, forget to drink after thee. I think I have done myself wrong, have I not? Yes, that thou hast; whether thou art tainted or free. (!.2.24-40)

Lucio greets the arrival of Mistress Overdone with "I have purchased ... many diseases under her roof" (42), and after a few more tedious puns on this topic the First Gentleman says, "Thou art always figuring diseases in me; but thou art full of error; I am sound" (49-50). What is this all about? It may suggest, according to Bradshaw, "a commonwealth running to seed in the absence of effective government;

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but whether," he adds, "this should be telling against the Duke as governor is for the moment left perplexingly unclear" (181). Cynthia Lewis claims that the repartee embodies "the excesses the Duke seeks to remedy: drunkenness, prostitution, and 'disease'. Bereft of self-restraint, these subjects have lost any sense of responsibility for their own actions." 26 Lewis goes on to temper this judgment and interrogate the Duke's motives, but it needs to be stressed that the passage begins with "as for example" and is therefore in quotation marks, that is, .the speakers are not making serious accusations but putting up the exemplary targets that enable manly witcrackers to exercise their skills of offense. By itself this "trench talk" gives little indication of the speakers' state of unrestraint or irresponsibility. Their enjoyment is in the rhetorical moves they make as they traverse different categories of insult, from the allusion to religious controversy though cliches about class and clothing to the homosocial topic of choice, the misogynist bravado ofthe "wicked villain" flaunting his manliness either by accusing his fellow rakes of being victims of the women who take their money and infect them or else by boasting of his own conquests/defeats in that line. The air of badinage makes it unclear whether Lucio really did purchase diseases in the brothel or whether, having drawn first blood, he condescends to let the First Gentleman catch him out and thus (1) proves how very Bad he is but (2) gives the Gentleman vantage to exclaim on him and mete out measure for measure. How, then, does this stretch of dialogue reflect on the condition of the Duke's Vienna, or of Vienna's Duke? I don't think it will do simply to correlate sex talk with Vienna's climate of corruption because that ignores a more complicated set of rhetorical moves in which the sex talk is embedded. In the exchange between Lucio and his chief interlocutor two rhetorical games are simultaneously going on: Being Bad and Getting Had. The games have as much to do with ethical self-representation as with manhood and misogyny-they are about playing the villain or victim, doing wrong to another or to oneself The turning point occurs when Lucio converts the Gentleman's "Do I speak feelingly now?"- "Do I touch you" or "make my point?" -to "with most painful feeling of thy speech, etc.": "you speak as if your speech hurts your mouth, therefore you must be infected, and like a good priest I will learn from your confession how 'to begin thy health' and also how to keep my own (by not drinking out of your cup) so that I won't catch your infection and my speech won't hurt my mouth. Thus whether I am 'tainted or free' my having learned to speak as ifuninfected will prevent me from thinking 'I have done myself wrong' (even if I have)." When he follows this by confessing-or boasting-that he has often been infected he

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asks for the put-down he gets but at the same time allies himself with his fellow victim against their common foe in the sex wars, Madam Mitigation. For me, the clue to the relevance of this passage is the idea of painful or injuriou's speech- speech that hurts the speaker-because it lends itself so easily. to the logic of displacement and to the hypothesis that physical disease and its symptoms are parodic misrecognitions, misrepresentations, of moral dis-ease.27 That is, speech that hurts the mouth = speech that hurts the conscience or is itself infected by bad conscience; the problem, the fear, or the boast of sexual contamination displaces (avoids or misrecognizes) the problem, the fear, or the boast of ethical contamination. I think the initial jokes about the ten commandments and grace locate the jokes about venereal disease in this context. The dismal role assigned to woman needn't be minimized by the hypothesis. The interlocutors' speech remains conspicuously sexist and misogynist, and that is not accidental or extraneous to the ethical focus. Rather, the hypothesis explains Viennese· sexism and preoccupation with sexuality as a strategy of diversionary engrossment, the medium of displacement in which pricklings of bad conscience get melodramatically disguised, inscribed, and acted out. It is in this direction that I would like to take Carolyn Brown's account of erotic religious flagellation. The play, she argues, "suggests that the purists may be as sexually impure and sick as the lowlifes," that theirs is a sexuality "aroused not by affection but by abuse," that "the protagonists' very asceticism, ironically, causes this deviant desire and that they associate their austere religious practices with pleasurable feelings." 28 Thus, to translate this into my scheme, if both Angelo and Isabella perversely enjoy his wickedness, Angelo's pleasure arises from his exploration of the formula "more sinning than sinned against" in its pathological or hybrid form (sinner/villain), whereas Isabella's derives from commitment to the victim/revenger's discourse. To return to Lucio, I don't mean to imply that in 1.2 his speech betrays symptoms of bad conscience. My point is rather that it exhibits or stages the sinner/villain's discourse. Part of the fun of Being Bad, as Lucio plays the game, is that one shows oneself to be a wicked villain by pretending to be sanctimonious and accusing another of being the wicked villain one knows oneself to be. To play the game properly is to open oneself to the justice of measure for measure and thus to risk Getting Had- getting the trouble one asks for and knows one deserves. This suggests to me that although Lucio is no Falstaff he does fulfill something like a Falstaff function in the play because-as I argue elsewhere in this volume- Falstaff's career is structured in terms of a seriocomic dialectic between Asking For It and Getting It, Being Bad and Getting Had. 29 The Actaeonic fate parodied in Merry Wives of Wind-

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sor is the comedic detextualization of a figure already lurking in the shadows of his initial appearance in the second scene of 1 Henry IV. From the time he speaks of being one of "Diana's foresters ... governed ... by our noble and chaste mistress the moon, under whose countenance we steal" (r.2.25-29), Falstaff-who voyeuristically observes and accurately predicts the plot profiled in Harry's "I know you all" soliloquy-plays Actaeon to Harry's Diana. He knowingly performs the two roles condensed in the epithets Harry applies to him, "fat-kidneyed rascal" and "embossed rascal" (2.2.5, 3.3.156), for a rascal is both a knave and a young deer, both villain and victim. If, as I say, Lucio is no Falstaff, or is at most a minor-league Falstaff, he is nevertheless inscribed in the same discursive scenario of the double game. But the mere hypothesis is enough to arouse curiosity about the things Harry and the Duke have in common. Both, for example, scapegoat others and disclaim responsibility for it. Both want to be respected, not suspected, yet the behavior of both raises a question as to how much they can respect- or how much respect they can anticipate from- those whom they have practiced on and deceived. The same concern for moral solvency is detectable in the prince's performance of the Prodigal Son and the Duke's performance of the "Friar." We've seen in the prince's language traces of uneasiness about his plan to falsify hopes coupled with an attempt to justify the plan and persuade himself he is behaving in a morally respon.:.. sible manner; do the Duke's strategies of self-representation betray a similar uneasiness? This is a question that the revelations in 1.3 bring to the foreground. But until act 3 there is very little opportunity to explore it because before then the Duke appears only in 2.3, the brief encounter with Juliet that inaugurates his confessorial career. Act 2 belongs for the most part to Angelo: his rise and fall as a just judge are swiftly delineated in 2.1, 2.2, and 2.4-so swiftly, indeed, that the Duke's suspicion is almost too easily borne out. Angelo is a pushover. His lust flares up with the rapidity of Leontes' jealousy, or of a case of hives. His collapse as a wicked "seemer" would be total and, dramatically speaking, premature did he not summon up the deceitfulness that enables him to welch on his promise to Isabella in 4.2, making him a less unworthy target of ducal aggression. In the light of 1.3, Angelo's flare-up and collapse are telling. If they testify to the Duke's insight into his deputy's character, they also reflect on the voyeuristic curiosity that motivates his knowingly creating a situation in which, to all intents and purposes, Angelo will be placed in harm's way, given the opportunity to let his desire of liberty pluck his sense of justice by the nose. Act 2 thus unfolds as a demonstration of the brilliance of the Duke's duplicitous design but also of its mean-mindedness. It shows

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his genius in cultivating the sins of others. 30 I use the plural form because Angelo is not the only subject of the Duke's experimental practice. The first scene of act 2 discloses that his laboratory includes all Vienna and that his experiment in the voyeuristic cultivation of sin may have been going on for at least fourteen years. To drop the metaphor, 2.1 shows the extent to which he is complicit in the disorder he complains of in 1.3. Angelo is set up at the very beginning of the scene by the proleptic irony in the language with which Escalus questions the harshness of his sentence on Claudio (2.1.4-16) and by the little philosophy of justice Angelo regales him with in response. But after the swift and decisive launching of the new regime, climaxed by the order to execute Claudio "by nine tomorrow morning" (34), the wheels of justice encounter the preexisting ducal institution in the figure of Constable Elbow and grind to a halt. Angelo quickly loses his edge, backs, off after firing an initial salvo of questions (45-61), lets Escalus take over, and eventually leaves the stage impatiently expressing the hope that Escalus will "find good cause to whip them all" (136) -echoing in condensed form the very sentiment the Duke expressed in 1.3 with respect to Angelo when he, like Angelo, announced his with::... drawal from the scene of disorder. In this regression to the pre-Angelesque state of affairs, the deputy is no less ineffectual than the Duke, and Escalus doesn't fare much better. Both are baffied by the breathtaking ineffectuality of the Duke's other deputy. As Anthony Dawson has nicely put it, the great debate between Elbow and Pompey "makes comic hay out of the judicial procedures on which both Angelo and Escalus depend for the clarity of their legal determinations"; "marked by the parody of legal language, by sexual puns whose wayward meanings are only vaguely apprehended by their victims, ... Elbow's self-contradictory malapropisms" conspire with "Pompey's evasions, his wicked puns and sly re-definitions," to "keep the obliquity and perversity. of language in the foreground." 31 More specifically, what is kept in the foreground is the ducal source of obliquity and perversity. The great debate wryly demonstrates that if Liberty plucks Justice by the nose it is because the agent of the Duke's justice is overdone by the figure of Iniquity (see 2.1.169). The reason Elbow has been in office for seven and a half years is that nobody else wants so thankless a job; those more fit to serve pay him to serve in their place (257-67). This may be a parody, but it is also an effect, of the Duke's policy of deputation-andwithdrawal. Throughout the scene, Pompey has Elbow on the run. He is at home in the transgressive discourse of equivocation, well schooled in the patois that subverts, inverts, and confuses legal and moral distinctions, whereas Elbow "misplaces" (2.1.87) rather than misuses key terms in a man-

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ner that betrays his unwitting acceptance of the moral economy of Vienna's sex workers.32 His dilemma is described by Steven Mullaney in a manner that concisely captures the way the constable mirrors and dramatizes the Duke's complicity: Elbow "seems to have picked up the local idiom of the stews without realizing it; the logic of his malapropisms is the logic of Elizabethan thieves' cant, which customarily appropriated and inverted the official terms of authority." 33 In addition, the hapless Elbow twice commits the sin of hyperbaton, identifying himself as "the poor Duke's constable" and "the poor Duke's officer" (2.1.47-48, 174-75).34 These transpositions conflate the speaker with the Duke, characterize the quality of his performance, displace responsibility insofar as poor modifies .the lowly speaker, and, insofar as it modifies the Duke, glance at his deployment of the victim's discourse in 1.3. The figure of Elbow thus dramatizes the way the Duke's complicity is inscribed in the flawed chain of command and deputation that implicates him in the very disorder from which he tries, by deputation, to distance himself. And the Duke is entangled in the disorder by still another tie. In all the Folio stage directions and speech prefixes, Pompey is called "Clowne;' and several of his exchanges with his betters ·show him commenting on the state of Viennese disorder with the shrewdness, insight, and impudence of a licensed Fool-licensed, allowed, as the stews are, by the Duke. The pander who is marked by his stage appellation as a sort of court entertainer helps keep the spectacle of vice going and is at times an eloquent defender of the spectacle against the new attitude and restraints divulgated in Angelo's name. By such means 2.1 subjects the Duke's explanations and disclosures in 1.3 to something like a reality check; they interrogate his gestures of dissociation by dramatizing his continuing complicity as it materializes in Elbow and Pompey and in their ability to frustrate the corrective efforts of Angelo and Escalus.35 If 1.2 gives a quick sketch of Vienna's moral tone apart from the Duke, 2.1 rewrites that sketch in a way that draws it more expressly into the orbit of the question of the Duke, that is, the question of what motivates his behavior from now until the end of the play. As this question is introduced in 1.3, however, it is rootedin the implied prehistory (of fourteen or nineteen years) the play constructs for itself. Thus, readings that ignore or minimize the link between his past and present performances, as Duke and as "Friar," have a hard time accounting for the motivation. This holds for what is otherwise one of the most stimulating and important discussions of the play in print, and I cite Richard Wheeler's comments not only to illustrate the problem but also to dramatize the difference a single shift of emphasis will make to the overall framework of interpretation:

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In order to present Vincentia as the ideal ruler of Vienna, Shakespeare displaces conflict away from the central figure and into the world around him .... Vincentia is freed from involvement in, and personal responsibility for, motives realized in the actions of others .... But Vincentia, as a character ... , is largely bereft of an inner life. It is as if the substantial life that might have been gathered into the conception of Vincentia's role is found unacceptable and emptied into his surroundings .... Shakespeare ... attempts in Measure for Measure to distance himself from conflict through the characterization of Vincentio.36

The shift I mentioned is produced by substituting the name Vincentia for the name Shakespeare in the above passage, and treating the displacement, evacuation, and distanciation mentioned by Wheeler as moves by means of which the Duke copes with his involvement in and personal responsibility for the decline of morals in Vienna.37 Modulated into this register, Wheeler's comments point suggestively toward expressions of motive that are the most vital signs a play text can convey of a dramatic speaker's "inner life." But in order to make this shift, one has to resist the Duke's own account of his relation to Vienna- resist, for example, such formulations as "The corruption Vincentia observes boils and bubbles in a cauldron that is Vienna itself" (Wheeler 150), which paraphrases an utterance of the Duke's and, tellingly, an utterance made late in the play when, as the "Friar," he is threatened by Escalus and claims to be exempt from Viennese jurisdiction: My business in this state Made me a looker-on here in Vienna, Where I have seen corruption boil and bubble Till it o'errun the stew: laws for all faults, But faults so countenanc'd that the strong statutes Stand like the forfeits in a barber's shop, As much in mock as mark. (5.!.314-20)

It makes a considerable difference whether we think ofVincentio as merely the observer of corruption or as its enabler-whether we attribute the corruption in Vienna to the state of "the world Shakespeare creates in Measure for Measure" (Wheeler 103) or to Vincentia. For if we don't take his acknowledgment of complicity in r. 3 seriously, we miss the significance of his backing away from it and claiming only to be an uninvolved observer in 5. r. Granted that this claim accords with his disguise, has the disguise by this time become more than a disguise? In the passage quoted above, the period indicated by the present perfect ("I have seen") extends back only to the imaginary friar's entrance at the beginning of 2.3, but the summary judgment of the second clause stretches

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it back further until it collides in strange conjunction with the passage it verbally echoes, the Duke's confession in 1.3. The conjunction is strange because the "Friar," especially in the phrase "faults so countenanc'd," not only distances himself from the Duke but glances critically at the laxity that baffled the laws.38 As we saw, the Duke at first guardedly accepts responsibility for what has occurred during the previous fourteen (or nineteen) years. But from the moment he announces his decision to become "as 'twere a brother of your order" and "formally in person bear [himself] /Like a true friar" (1.3.45-48), he begins to shy away from that responsibility-as if, indeed, the "as 'twere," "formally," and "like" were only temporary lets to full identification in which the sinner could ensconce and lose himself in the caracter indelibile of holy orders, could embrace the orthopsychic fantasy of the holy friar-father. The assumption of that role allows him to stage his difference from and superiority to his Viennese subjects. It allows him to exchange his absolute power for the moral authority that, in r. 3, he admits he lacks, and for the power of the confessor who is entitled to try to inscribe the sinner's discourse in others. But it also allows him to avail himself of functions ascribed to friars by both popular and theatrical conventions, which represent them "as intriguers and romantic go-betweens," extralegal problem-solvers who work behind the scenes to mend "troubled relationships," often in contravention of patriarchal authority and custom. Victoria Hayne, whose words I quote, notes in an interesting discussion how "the theatrical expectation set up by seeing a duke go into disguise-that he will scout out and correct political or social abuses- modulates into an understanding that some of those abuses . . . are to be resolved not by defining them as crimes and applying the rigor of the law but by regarding them as relationships to be sorted out and directed toward completion in marriage, a dramatic function appropriate to the friar disguise the Duke assumes." 39 An amusing light is thrown on this expectation by our knowledge that the Duke is responsible for the abuses he scouts out and tries to correct, and that even as he somewhat evasively acknowledges his responsibility for them he uses them as an excuse to assay the rigor not of the law but of Angelo. This adds bite to the theatricality Hayne emphasizes, for it suggests that the Duke's performance as a holy problem'-solver is intended to edify and persuade himself as much as any other audience; it has a compensatory function. Yet given what we know the Duke knows about his Viennaproblem and what we suspect he must suspect about his Angelo-problem, the scope for intrigue and connivance allowed by the disguise and exploited by the Duke may interfere with the major ethical motive his assumption

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of the disguise signifies: to loosen "all connections that would link him to Angelo or Lucio or Pompey" and to represent himself as the "wise, good, powerful and forgiving" father, "an anchor of purity and strength in a world that has otherwise tumbled headlong into corruption" (Wheeler 142-43). Wheeler's locution, "that has otherwise tumbled," reflects his emphasis on Shakespeare's responsibility for both the "idealization of the Duke" and the invention of "a very worldly Vienna" (143), but these phrases acquire tartness when appropriated as paraphrastic expressions of the Duke's selfidealization and denial of any part in the headlong tumble. From the moment he appears as friar to the end of the play the Duke's concern for amour-propre takes the form of a persistent and at times hilarious anxiety, the anxiety of self-representation sharply characterized by Sundelson, who observes that the purity of his motives is his constant theme, even with Barnardine, Pompey, and Abhorson for an audience. He speaks to the Provost of "yonder generation" (IV. iii. 89) as if he did not belong to it himself, and the calculated strangeness ... is essential to his manner. "Not of this country," as he tells Escalus, but on "special business from his Holiness" (III.ii.2I2-2I5), he seeks to rise above the messy domains of human sexuality and power, to assume, like some Christian knight-errant, a sanctity not available to ordinary men.... "Thou art the first knave that e'er mad'st a duke" ... , Vincentia says dryly when Lucio tears off his disguise in the final scene, but the real irony is that ... he defines only the identity the Duke wants most to avoid. "The Duke's in us" ... , Escalus asserts, but he too is wrong; the play ends by ... surrounding the uncontaminated Duke with a circle of subjects in disgrace. 40

But how did they all fall into disgrace? Did the Duke merely permit the headlong tumble, or did he encourage it? Commenting on his "~oyeuris­ tic fascination with the corruption that boils around him," Janet Adelman writes that "even while Shakespeare apparently uses him to reconcile the others to their own human nature, he reinstates in the Duke a fantasy of escape from that nature." 41 Reversing the emphasis of this statement reinforces its point: the Duke's fantasy of escape from corrupt nature is made possible only by ensuring the continuance of corruption that enables him to continue to escape it and rise above it. And how does he ensure its continuance? By grafting onto the effects of his permissiveness in the years before the action begins the series of effects that (he all but wagers) will be triggered by his temptation of Angelo. To set up Angelo for a fall and then to skulk about in dark corners watchingit (or making it) happen is only an intensified version, a foreshortened parody, of what he had been doing before: by inaction or indirection encouraging a scene of sensuality he himself doesn't

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participate in or condone so that as he watches others fall he can enjoy not only his own probity and tolerance but also his disapproval of the sins of others. Positioning Angelo as the Bad Cop and himself as the Good Father more actively continues the passive-aggressive policy of sequestering his absolute power and enabling Liberty to pluck Justice by the nose. The irony of the scenario is that to let Angelo loose for the purpo-se of assaying his virtue is to promote the possibility of the very corruption the Duke has appointed Angelo to clean up. 42 The cross-purposes that trouble the scenario may be taken to reflect those that trouble the Duke. Or maybe they aren't cross-purposes. The scenario is, from another standpoint, a brilliant and coherent plan: the Duke will use Angelo to recoup his own losses and at the same time defeat him in the contest for the title of Vienna's most complete bosom. But maybe, even from this standpoint, the plan troubles the Duke. After Angelo is exposed and humbled, the Duke concludes his triumph with a move that would delight Rene Girard: he lays claim to the "lovely" (5.I.489) object of his rival's desire. But he does so only after having seized higher moral ground from which to condescend to Isabella and raise her up so as to "make her heavenly comforts" of the "despair" his lies about Claudio induced (4.3.109). "Your friar is now your prince," the newly unmasked Duke graciously assures her, still "advertising and holy to your business, I Not changing heart with habit, ... still I Attorney'd to your service" (5.!.380-83). In other words, her prince is still her friar. 43 But he won't let her be his nun. Isabella's plan had been to avoid becoming either an object of male desire or the subject of her own desire. She welcomed the conventual challenge or security of"a more strict restraint" (r.4.4): like the Duke, she wished to distance herself from Vienna's corruption and take herself out of circulation by seeking refuge in the sanctuary of holy habits. In acts 2 and 3 she shows herself not only invulnerable to love's "dribbling dart" but also willing to sacrifice her brother on the altar of her chastity. That makes her a serious competitor for the title of Vienna's most "complete bosom" to which the Duke aspires. 44 While eavesdropping on her impassioned debate with Claudio in 3.1, and learning about Angelo's dastardly proposal, he hears her use a variant of the very argument he had unfurled just before her arrival in prison: she urges Claudio to be as absolute for death as she is for chastity.45 The source of the full-throated operatic pleasure Isabella displays in proclaiming her brother unfit to live is not only Claudio's cowardly reluctance to exchange his head for her maidenhead. It is also her conviction that he has already "fall'n by prompture of the blood" (2.4.177) and is no better than Angelo and other males who "their creation mar I In profiting

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by'' women (126-27). She would never "stoop I To such abhorr'd pollution" (181-82), the fate of other women in Vienna. Indeed, she welcomes challenges that will assure her Lucio was right to praise her as "a thing enskied and sainted" (r.4.34): "Th'impression of keen whips I'd wear as rubies, I ... ere I'd yield I My body up to shame" (2.4.101-4). Denied the glory of martyrdom, Isabella falls back on a second-best assay of her complete bosom, one that would at least give Claudio a chance to redeem his honor: "Then, Isabel live chaste, and brother, die: I More than our brother is our chastity" (183-84). This stirring battle cry inspires her as she rushes off to prison to "fit his mind to death, for his soul's rest" (186). When he fails to take advantage of the opportunity, she contemptuously equates Juliet's lover with the denizens of Vienna's stews: Thy sin's not accidental, but a trade; Mercy to thee would prove itself a bawd; 'Tis best that thou diest quickly (33.I.I48-so)

so that she may keep herself and her principles clear of contamination. These are·the last·words she and Claudio exchange in the play. "Does the Duke, like his angelic substitute, 'desire to raze the sanctuary' -that is, Isabella-precisely because she seems to be one of the 'saints' ... ?" 46 Marc Shell heads this provocative question toward the thesis that "the Duke wants to have sexual relations with Isabella" and that he is, "to all intents, the principal caitiff in Measure for Measure, the one whose conscious and unconscious intents Angelo acts out," who "comes to know as his own the vice of fornication intended or actual," and who is thus, even if only by intention, "the whore-chaser that Lucio claims he is" (9193). Shell finds this thesis corroborated not only by Lucio but also by a much more reliable source: Isabella. He cites her "remarkable denunciation of some unnamed person" at s.r.ss: it isn't impossible, she says, "But one, the wicked'st caitiff on the ground, I May seem as shy as grave, as just, as absolute j As Angelo." "That Angelo acts for Vincentia by taking his sexual as well as political place is," according to Shell, "one gist" of these words (92). I don't find this a particularly compelling gist for the obvious reason that from the moment the Duke rejects Friar Thomas's erotic hypothesis in 1.3 it is clear that his way of minimizing his accountability for the sins of others, which in Vienna is reducible to the promiscuous sexuality of others, is to minimize his own vulnerability to the dribbling dart and to· pin his hopes for achieving moral legitimacy as a ruler on the completeness of his bosom. It might be a nicely ironic touch to have Isabella breach his defenses and then to show him struggling with or refusing to acknowledge or

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reluctantly discovering his "lustful ... feelings" and intention to fornicate; but apart from Lucio's characterization, the evidence Shell offers for this idea is thin. 47 I do, however, agree that Isabella's denunciation is remarkable if it glances at the "Friar," for if it does it hints at a scenario more obscure, sinister, and subtle than the sexual plot Shell picks out. The information about Angelo that the Duke overhears gives him a chance to test the rigor of Isabella's commitment to the high standard of purity she holds up to Claudio. He immediately, abruptly, begins his own seduction, his own attempt to "raze the sanctuary" of her cloistered virtue- but not in the crudely sexual mode depicted by Shell and exploited by Angelo. Rather, he pulls Mariana and the bed trick ·out of his hood in a much subtler form of temptation, the seductive promise of which is that by a single act of deception Isabella will solve all problems- Mariana's, Claudio's, and her own -with no moral cost to herself In fact, although the project this panacea implicates her in may preserve her chastity, it compromises her integrity and entangles her in a web of intrigue that neutralizes her ability to represent herself as "a thing enskied and sainted." As Steven Mullaney describes it, the Duke persuades Isabella to adopt in public "the role she did not play in private, not only to accuse Angelo of the crime he did not commit but also to shame herself twice over, both by lying and by tarnishing her chaste image." By the end, she has come "to incorporate Angelo's lust into her reformed sense of herself" ("A due sinceritygovern'd his deeds /Till he did look on me," 5.1.444-45), and "her participation in the Duke's scheme of substitutions has ... made her an object of exchange in an economy of male desire, even to the point that she has come to view and define herself through the eyes of such desire in its more illicit manifestation." 48 Throughout this process, the Duke keeps Isabella off balance. After he hears her wish Claudio dead in 3.1 he offers-and persuades her-to save him. After she compromises herself to save him, he lets her believe Claudio was killed. After he hears her plead for Angelo's life and acknowledge the justice of Claudio's death ("he did the thing for which he died," 5.1.447), he arranges to have Claudio brought forth. The complexity of the last move is profiled in Philip McGuire's stimulating account of open silences in Measure for Measure; McGuire comments on the "potential ambivalence of the silence between Isabella and Claudio'' in the final scene: "the last words an audience hears Isabella speak to Claudio [in their only conversation in 3.1] are those with which she denies his fitness to receive the mercy that she, looking on in silence, sees the Duke extend to him during the final scene. The silence between Claudio and Isabella may be tantamount to a retrac-

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tion of the bitter words they had exchanged earlier, or ... that silence may signify a continuing rupture in their relationship." 49 But what possibilities are deposited by previous events in the silence with which Isabella sees the Duke pardon Claudio-what, for example, might she think Claudio thinks when he sees her? And does she think the Duke. has stolen her thunder, stripped her of moral authority, thwarted her saintly desire to rise above the sea of corrupt males all about her, and thus razed the sanctuary of a complete bosom much more effectively than did the hapless Angelo? What does she think of the way he stages himself as the city's savior, its harrower, clinging to the newfound institutional sanctity that licensed him to pry and spy and practice on his subjects? What does she think of the energy with which he frenetically scatters pastoral and ducal sugarplums, punishments, and pardons in all directions, a godly looker-on descending from his celestial see with blessings for those he has redeemed or (in other words) humbled? The question of Isabella's reaction to his climactic bestowal of what Mauss calls "the charity that wounds:' his last and most aggressive thrust of donation, the gift ofhis hand-this question can't be extricated from the others. On all these open, crosscutting, bleeding silences, Isabella has the last word, and she utters it in her last words: "Thoughts are no subjects; j Intents, but merely thoughts" (5.!.451-52). "Not subject to the law" is the standard editorial gloss on the first clause. But the law at this point and in this place is the Duke: "not subject to the Duke" speaks more directly to the condition of Isabella and her fellow subjects. Silence is their best escape from the debilitating moral effect of the leniencies and remissions that thinly conceal the coerciveness of the Duke's matchmaking and his monopoly of the instruments of Happy Ending. 50 Whatever other constructions are placed on the aggregated silences at the end of Measure for Measure- and McGuire's analytical survey of different productions incisively illustrates the copia of possibilities- they all presuppose the conspicuous withholding of thoughts and intents from the audience that matters most, the Duke to whose competent staging of justice tempered by mercy (justhe discourse of self-justification) utterance tice + mercy + staginess would make them subject. I have been trying to show that however indeterminate the withheld intents and thoughts may be, the reasons that motivate withholding may be tracked through the text of the play. The most important of these reasons are the ones denied utterance by the Duke, the thoughts and intents not fully subject to his control because they slink about in the dark corners of his language, unable to make themselves part of what he seems to want to. say, or hear himself say, in his speech. It is to this problem, the problem of the Duke's self-representation-and specifi-

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cally, I shall try to show, the problem of his failure to carry out a project of self-exculpation- that I now turn. The difficulty the project confronts him with lies in the bad faith of the proposition on which it is based- not merely the bad faith involved in the testing of Angelo but the fundamental duplicity dramatized, indeed parodied, by his escape into holy orders: he will take it upon himself to make the sinners in Vienna recognize and acknowledge the iniquity of their ways as they should have but failed to do during his regime; he will abdicate as duke only to return as confessor and savior of the city's souls. That he is at least as responsible for the iniquity as .the sinners are makes this at best a project of aton:ement and reparation, though as we saw, he is at pains in 1.3 to back away from the responsibility he acknowledges. But there is possibly a more troubling element in the bad faith of the. project, which I mentioned above when I suggested that his voyeuristic temptation of Angelo may supply a kind of model, an intensified version, a continuation, of the passive-aggressive policy he had pursued the previous fourteen or nineteen years: countenancing-in effect licensing-the licentiousness he complains about; that is, countenancing it so that he can complain about it. The liberty he permits and his subjects abuse, the authority he bestows and Angelo abuses, give him an advantage similar to the one Portia gains and describes when she bestows the ring on Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice: I give ... this ring, Which when you part from, lose, or give away, Let it presage the ruin of your love, And be my vantage to exclaim on you. (3.2.I7I-74) 51

As an ethicalstrategy, the Duke's policy is also illuminated by the chilling words Brutus uses to depict the proper way for an assassin-to-be to approach his task: "let our hearts, as subtle masters do, I Stir up their servants to an act of rage, I And after seem to chide 'em" (julius Caesar 2.1.175-77). 52 I derive my sense of this policy from Jonathan Dollimore's insight into the authoritarian construction, displacement, and demonizing of deviant behavior, but I depart from it (as I noted at the start of this chapter) in changing the focus of analysis from the generic ideological and political practices of patriarchal rulers to the particular discursive and ethical practices of Duke Vincentia; from the duplicities of political representation to those of ethical self-representation. My view of the Duke may easily be seen to glimmer through the following passage: Whatever subversive identity the sexual offenders in this play possess is a construction put upon them by the authority which wants to control them. . . .

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Prostitution and lechery are identified as the causes of crisis yet we learn increasingly of a corruption more political than sexual. ... Arguably then the play discloses corruption to be an effect less of desire than authority itself It also shows how corruption is downwardly identified- that is, . . . displaced from authority to desire and by implication from the rulers to the ruled. (Dollimore 73)

Dollimore illustrates this argument with the Duke's response, at 3.2.18, "to Pompey's observation that such exploitation not only exists at other levels of society but is actually protected 'by order of law'" (r.8), and he observes that this is "just what the Duke's diatribe ignotes-cannot acknowledgefixating instead on the 'filthy vice' and its agents" (74): Fie, sirrah, a bawd, a wicked bawd; The evil that thou causest to be done, That is thy means to live. Do thou but think What 'tis to cram a maw or clothe a back From such a filthy vice. Say to thyself, From their abominable and beastly touches I drink, I eat, array myself, and live. Canst thou believe thy living is a life, So stinkingly depending? Go mend, go mend. (3.2.18-26)

Discerning in this "demonizing of sexuality a relegitimation of authority" (74), Dollimore then moves away from the text to consider and analyze similar ideological moves in contemporary England. At this point we part company, and I remain behind to dwell on Duke Vincentia's performance as the holy man from abroad who seizes the high iambic pulpit to rain down fireworks and brimstone on the Sodomites in Vienna. This is the Duke's first direct contact in the play with the ground-level effects of his policy of "lenity to lechery" (3.2.94, Lucio's phrase) on the Viennese sex industry. It is also the first verse he speaks since his long sermon to Claudio at the beginning of 3.1 (which is part of the same scene in the Folio). He has just successfully used his prose resources to persuade Isabella to frame Angelo with the bed trick when in walks "Elbow, Clowne, Officers" (Folio) to offend his sensibilities: "0 heavens, what stuff is here," he moans (3.2.5) as he listens to the barbs exchanged by the poor Duke's officer and the tapster/bawd whom the Folio calls "Clowne" and whose de facto status, in Dollimore's trenchant analysis, is equivalent to that of the ruler's licensed Fool and scapegoat. To Elbow's "Bless you, good father friar," the Duke responds, '~nd you; good brother father" (3.2.n-12). If, as Lever glosses the response, he "plays on Elbow's vulgarism" (Arden ed. 82), the play glances back to the cohort of fond fathers he mentioned in I. 3 and

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to the transpositions in 2. r by which poor Elbow links his shaky constabulary to the Duke. Elbow's explanation of why Pompey has been arrested (3.2.14-17) gives the Duke his chance to lash out at sin, and he goes to it with gusto, exploiting one of the peculiar properties George T. Wright attributes to verse in Shakespeare's time and practice: it may "function as a secular instrument of sacralization" and as. an expression of "the wisdom of the culture." 53 It may also, as in this case, function deictically as an instrument of selfsacralization. Ensconcing himself in Savonarolan fury allows the Duke to persuade himself that the corruption he witnesses has nothing to do with him or his policy of permissiveness. This "thing of darkness" he doesn't acknowledge his. But as the conversation continues, as the Duke wields his self-sacralizing weapon against his interlocutors' prose, stray sparks of acknowledgment fly from its blade: Porn.

Indeed it does stink in some sort, sir. But yet, sir, I would proveDuke Nay, if the devil have given thee proofs for sin, Thou wilt prove his. Take him to prison, officer: Correction and instruction must both work Ere this rude beast will profit. Elbow He must before the deputy, sir; he has given him warning. The deputy cannot abide a whoremaster. If he be a whoremonger and comes before him, he were as good as go a mile on his errand. Duke That we were all, as some would seem to be, From our faults, as faults from seeming, free! (3.2.27-38)

If I particularize Dollimore's argument that "the play discloses corruption to be an effect less of desire than authority," then generic authority is transformed into the Duke, whose words to Pompey assign the devil a responsibility and power of donation that correspond roughly to those of the Duke himself. For in spite of his metrically enhanced and preacherly delivery of the warning that crime doesn't pay, the words remind anyone who overhears them that it is the Duke who has given Pompey "proofs of sin" as well as "means to live." If Pompey can intimate to Escalus that up to now his has been a lawful trade because the law allowed it (2.1.221-24), the reason is that "evil deeds have their permissive pass" (r.3.38) and it would be the Duke's tyranny "to geld and splay all the youth of the city" (2.1.227-28) for what "he bid them do" (r.3.37). Pompey might well say, as Escalus will later, "the Duke's in us" (5.1.293). He is no less beholden to the Duke than to the devil for his profitable life and its justification.

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The Duke seems so eager to implement his warning and prove the sinner his captive that he momentarily drops the friar's disguise and orders Pompey to prison, usurping the ducal prerogative he had alienated to Angelo. When the ever alert Elbow catches this procedural miscue and demurs, the Duke quickly backpedals into the sacralizing security of a sententious couplet (3.2.37-38). He discovers that Angelo has beaten him to the punch and can be counted on to. do his job. Isn't that cause for joy? Fresh from his initial success in organizing the bed trick, the Duke is already secure in the knowledge that Angelo will probably prove to be his as well as the devil's; he soon hopes to "see/ ... what our seemers be" (1.3.54). Yet the acephalous and awkwardly stressed pair line ofthe couplet about seemers (3.2.38) conveys a sense of strain, a touch of irritability, that troubles the expression of impartial censure. 54 The we and our solicit the security of the convention that exempts the first-person singular, the speaker, from the censured plurality. But here the solicitation fails. The implicitly selfrighteous utterance is itself an instance of the seeming it criticizes. Could the Duke by this time blind himself to his inclusion in the group of seemers he castigates, or to the hypocrisy of the double-edged castigation that nicks him as he aims it at Angelo? Alexander Leggatt finds a similar question already inscribed in the lines that conclude I. 3: In seeing how Angelo behaves, the Duke may be revealing a curiosity, even anxiety, about himself. "Our seemers," interestingly, is plural. We see how nettled the Duke is by Lucio's slanders; and most of these concern his sexual behavior. A similar defensiveness is suggested by the Duke's jest with the Provost, when he asks to be left alone with Isabella: "My mind promises with my habit no loss shall touch her by my company" (III.i.176-77). This is odd and pointless .... Like his reactions to Lucio, it may reflect the Duke's touchiness about his own sexuality. 55

To keep the final comment from drifting toward such groundless constructions of the Duke's sexual fantasies and designs as Marc SheWs, it would be better to rewrite it: " ... the Duke's touchiness about the perceptions of his sexuality others may entertain." For it is a touchiness not about sexuality per se but about misperceptions that assimilate him to the disorderly subjects (including Angelo) from whom his mendicant masquerade is intended to insulate him. This rewriting preserves Leggatt's emphasis on an anxiety that may include the more diffuse concerns I have been tracking in the Duke's linguistic and behavioral reactions to the implementation of his designs on Vienna and Angelo. Several considerations related to the timing and larger context of 3.2 support the argument that the source of the pressure on the Duke's Ian-

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guage is a general suspicion of moral reprehensibility rather than a specific worry about sexuality. First, his assumption of the friar's habit, rhetoric, and perspective shows that he wishes to increase his moral distance from the cauldron of corruption and atone for his share in it by working on the souls of sinners. Second, in his first two interventions he rides on the coattails of Angelo's severe justice, still unaware of his deputy's encounter with Isabella. At this point, the "Friar" bustles about as if he is relieved to see his plan working· so well and eager to hone his confessional and homiletic skills on Juliet and Claudio. Whether he badgers Juliet to acknowledge the gravity and accept the guilt of her "most offenceful act" (2.3.26) or badgers Claudio to accept Angelo's verdict on the grounds that mortal life is not worth living and can only get worse, his fraternal mission thrives parasitically on the sexuality he contemns. Third, it thrives not only on the sexuality he uses Angelo to inhibit, and on Angelo's acts of inhibition, but also on the sexuality he expects his testing of the precise seemer will expose. Fourth, as the Duke's emphasis changes from supporting the new deputy's strict justice to exposing his weakness, he encourages and capitalizes on sexuality-Angelo's desire for Isabella and Mariana's for Angelo- as a mode of entrapment. He puts temptation in their way, and, at a different level, in Isabella's, offering to get both her and Claudio off the hook as.he plays · Master Mitigation (r.2.41) and makes her his "means" (2.1.81-82). Fifth, the bed trick is the turning point, the peripeteia, of the Duke's project, closely linked to the change of emphasis I just mentioned. From this moment on, voyeuristic practices and theatrical machinations largely replace his efforts of homiletic and confessional persuasion; the one exception to this development, his catastrophic attempt to shrive Barnardine, is discussed below. These considerations converge on what is, for me, the unavoidable hypothesis-! won't go so far as to call it a conclusion-that the Duke can't know all he expressly knows about what he is and has been up to without being aware that there may be as much chicanery as morality in his displays of brotherly or fatherly love, counsel, and assistance. Even as he throws himself into his performance with obvious pleasure in both the rhetoric of piety and his command of it- with an enthusiasm that suggests he may or would like to believe himself during the moment of performance- several aspects of the interplay between speech and self-auscultation betray an uneasiness that prevents me from agreeing with those who find him (or Shakespeare) morally obtuse, inattentive to the bad faith of his project, "bereft of an inner life," "a phantom to the end": 56 viz., the stridency of his denunciations of "filthy vice," his irritable and defensive reaction to Lucio, his curiosity and touchiness about the impression he makes on others, and

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the odd moments of displaced self-description that identify him with those from whom he would dissociate himself. Such indicators of anxiety appear more frequently and intensely after the bed trick for all the reasons given above, but also for another reason, which Leggatt has picked out, and which is so obvious (yet so weird) that it tends to escape scrutiny: the priesthood is represented here by a Duke who dresses up as a Friar and goes around hearing confessions in a manner that would produce a major scandal in an actual Catholic community.... He is taking on, like Angelo, power that is not his own. He gives spiritual counsel, though his advice to Claudio is more Stoic than Christian; more remarkably, he hears confessions. He says of Mariana, "I have confess'd her, and I know her virtue" (V.i.524). This is after the masks have fallen, and we have no reason to disbelieve him as we disbelieve his earlier claim to be Angelo's confessor.... For anyone who takes this sacrament seriously, the implications of the Duke's conduct do not bear thinking about. There is no such thing as a substitute priest, and the Duke's assumption of priestly power means, among other things, that he is giving false absolutions to people on the point of death. . . . Yet the Duke seems blandly unconcerned with this problem. 57

Whether he and (as Leggatt adds) the play actually are unconcerned with this problem is not easy to determine. It depends partly on whether we find evidence that the implications of the Duke's conduct are of concern to himself. And as the work ·of the best commentators demonstrates, the evidence doesn't lend itself to tidy packaging. Bradshaw, for example, describes the Duke at one point as "incorrigibly complacent" (174). In another passage discussing the Duke's "self-esteem;' he states that the Duke "speaks, with no obvious disturbance, of 'my fault; but will countenance no criticism" (r83). Again, he claims that although the Duke intends to punish Lucio "for offending him personally ... Lucio's slanders are far less damaging than the Duke's exhibition of indignant, obsessive self-regard" (191). "Obsessive self-regard" better fits the behavioral profile I have been eliciting from the Duke's language than incorrigible complacency, and the two aren't compatible unless they are relativized-that is, as prickly self-regard vs. bland unconcern with or complacency toward others. The Duke seems less concerned with the effects of his false ministrations on the spiritual welfare of others than with the effects on himself of observing their responses to those ministrations, which he performs very much in the spirit of a Player Priest, albeit with serious intent. He resembles Spenser's Archimago in that his delight in dissimulating sanctity is good for laughs, but there is more than eros hypokritikos behind his sidesplitting refer-

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ence "to the love I have of doing good" (3.1.197). Vincentio wants respect. He seeks it from those whose response to his suasions might persuade him he can exert, and thus possesses, the moral authority he had "let slip" (along with the will to enforce the laws) from his "absolute power and place here in Vienna." Perhaps the ministrations even of a Player Priest could compensate or atone for that slippage. 58 Yet what a strangely self-defeating and obviously suspect way this is to get respect. In playing confessor with Juliet, Claudio, and Barnardine, it may seem that he aspires to "visit, as a ghostly father, the inner recesses of their souls" and produce confessions, conversions, contrition, absolutions, but he can only do this as if a ghostly father. 59 And his reasons for becoming an imaginary friar, a Player Priest, are contaminated at the source: to spy on Angelo ("to behold his sway"), I will, as 'twere a brother of your order, Visit both prince and people. Therefore, I prithee, Supply me with the habit, and instruct me How I may formally in person bear Like a true friar. (1.3.43-48)

When he first reappears in the role of the priest, voyeuristic motive gives way to the seductive moral privileges of the habit and he supports Angelo's severe justice by formally bearing down on Juliet and Claudio. But since he knows, even if his spiritual advisees don't, that his pastoral representations are "specifically histrionic manipulations" undertaken in part from dubious motives, he has to rely on the advisees' acquiescence to persuade him that his imitation is the real thing. 60 The imaginary friar's first words after greeting the Provost reveal how tightly the voyeuristic and moralistic motives are entwined: Bound by my charity, and my bless'd order, I come to visit the afflicted spirits Here in the prison. Do me the common right To let me see them, and to make me know The nature of their crimes, that I may minister To them accordingly. (2.3.3-8)

This is a wonderfully inventive and self-exculpating way to snoop about for information, all the more winning in that the Duke so clearly enjoys his new cover. But it is also clear that the legitimacy of his performance is contingent on his taking some confessional scalps, for he may be making believe primarily in order to try to believe himself, or believe in himselfin his charity and good intentions and moral efficacy. So he plays very seriously at being a friar, especially since he knows he isn't one and is as aware

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as we are of the delicious duplicity of motive in his request that the Provost "let me see them, and ... make me know/ The nature of their crimes." If, then, he depends on pastoral successes to fend off the threats to ethical self-validation inherent in his project, it's significant that those successes do not materialize. He may seem to make short shrift of his first opportunity,Juliet, and to renew Claudio's resignation after Isabella's ferocity made him wry away from the initial set of Stoic arguments with which the Duke convinced him to welcome death. But Stephen Greenblatt has persuasively argued that the Duke fails even with Juliet, and fares no better after. Greenblatt attributes the failure to the Duke's inability to induce the salutary anxiety and misautia of guilt rather than less useful kinds of anxiety. After a brilliant reading of Juliet's resistance to spiritually productive contrition, he notes that none "of the duke's other attempts to awaken anxiety and to shape it into what he regards as a proper attitude has the desired effect," so that "at the close of the play, society at large seems singularly unaffected by the renewed exercise in anxiety" projected by the Duke when he complained to Friar Thomas in 1.3 that the unused "rod" had become "more mock'd than fear'd." Greenblatt concludes that if Barnardine and Lucio, those "magnificent emblems of indifference;' are "any indication, the duke's strategy has not changed the structure of feeling or behavior in Vienna in the slightest degree." 61 As we saw, there isn't enough evidence of the structure of feeling or behavior among·the Viennese who suffer the Duke's justice and mercy in act 5 .to confirm or disconfirm this conclusion. But there are signs that the Duke's changing strategy may be correlated with his anxiety and with indices of change in the structure of his feeling and behavior. These signs begin to cluster around his major change of strategy, the shift of emphasis to dirty tricks in 3. r. In his second conversation with Claudio, the Duke lies that "Angelo had never the purpose to corrupt" Isabella; "only he hath made an assay of her virtue, to practise his judgment with the disposition of natures. . . . I am confessor to Angelo, and I know this to be true" (3.1.160-66). Suppose we substitute "the Duke" for ''Angelo" and ''Angelo" for "Isabella": then, in lying about Angelo, the Duke tells a kind of truth about himself, including the truth that he would probably be reluctant to confess to himself that he had the purpose to corrupt Angelo. A few lines later he will begin to make his own assay of Isabella's virtue when he asks how she will "content this substitute" and save her brother (186-87). The conflation of these two utterances puts an odd spin on "this substitute," for although the demonstrative functions as a derogatory adjective, the Angelo the Duke constructs for Claudio and Isabella (see 3.1.194-96) is an assayerand practicer like him-

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self: he invents an Angelo "that can my part in him advertise" (1.1.41) as in a flawed mirror. "In our remove, be thou at full ourself" (I. 1.43)- but in the safely distanced and degraded form that makes the Duke's ''Angelo" a fantasmatic scapegoat, very different from the more tormented and sympathetic speaker we hear in 2.2 and 2.4.62 Sometime between eavesdropping on Isabella and Claudio and addressing her himself, the Duke decided to shift from morality to machination and trap Angelo with a device that could not be expected-that he with his sensitivity to public impressions could not expect-to leave the self-respect of Isabella or Mariana intact. Thus, as he tiptoes piously and guardedly into this dubious scheme his assurances to others take on a more ·hollow ring of self-assurance. He assures the Provost that "my mind promises with my habit no loss shall touch her by my company" (3.1.176-77). Having heard Isabella exclaim, "how much is the good Duke deceived in Angelo," and knowing better, he alerts her "to the love I have in doing good" and announces, with a discreet shift of agency, that "a remedy presents itself" (3.1.190-91, 197-98). This is the pious "Friar" speaking, not the scheming Duke. Yet he had also heard her follow her exclamation with "if ever hereturn, and I can speak to him, I will open my lips in vain, or discover his government" (191-93), and the pronominal confusion in the final clause threatens once again to couple the deputy's wickedness to the Duke's. "That," he replies, "shall not be much amiss"- only a little; but enough, for "as the matter now stands, he will avoid your accusation- he made trial of you only" (194-96). This is what Angelo will say, and it is what the "Friar" had said to Claudio; the ingenuously good Duke will continue to be deceived, and Isabella will have opened her lips in vain. This being the case they will have to resort to a Polonian strategy of "windlasses and ... assays of bias," or so the Duke will go on to imply, having already decided on such a strategy. Is this an entirely gratuitous and mendacious move? Wouldn't he, on his return, be in the position to confirm Isabella's charge and void Angelo's avoidance? Or would that require him to implicate himself and "discover his government" (expose his behavior) as a mendicant dux absconditus? Or again, would he, in staging his return, conceal that complicity, pretend he didn't set Angelo up, play the innocent, and thus risk allowing Angelo to pluck Justice by the nose-while himself remaining silently immured in the corrosive knowledge of his own hypocrisy and the fraudulence of his pretensions to piety? These would seem to be the narrative alternatives that the logic ofthe Duke's situation inscribes on the future. His response is to try to cut his losses by finding a way to do his dirty work early so he can make sure of his victim, can prove him guilty in order to be able to atone for the dirty

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work by subsequent displays of mercy and forgiveness that will leave him with a clear (or at least clearer) conscience. Against this admittedly hypothetical background of motivation, the terms of his proposal to Isabella are suspiciously if predictably careful in their appeal to a moral and Christian sensibility:

Isab.

Duke

I do make myself believe that you may most uprighteously do a poor wronged lady a merited benefit; redeem your brother from the angry law; do no stain to your own gracious person; and much please the absent Duke, if peradventure he shall ever return to have hearing of this business. Let me hear you speak farther. I have spirit to do anything that appears not foul in the truth of my spirit. Virtue is bold, and goodness never fearful. Have you not heard speak of Mariana ... ? (3.1.198-2o9)

Isabella's "if ever he return" is archly answered by "if peradventure he shall ever return," which accentuates the element of doubt and shifts the emphasis to the advantages (low risk, high moral value) of acting now rather than waiting for the Duke, After telling Isabella the sad story of the rupture caused by "this well-seeming" Angelo's perfidy, he repeats the advantages twice more: It is a rupture that you may easily heal: and the cure of it not only saves your brother, but keeps you from dishonor in doing it. (3.1.235-37)

Isab.

Duke

Isab.

By this is your brother saved, your honor untainted, the poor Mariana advantaged, and the corrupt deputy scaled. 63 •.• If you think well to carry this out as you may, the doubleness of the benefit defends the deceit from reproo£ What think you of it? The image of it gives me content already, and I trust it will grow to a most prosperous perfection. It lies much in your holding up. Haste you speedily to Angelo; if for this night he entreat you to his bed, give him promise of satisfaction. . .. I thank you for this comfort. Fare you well, good father. (3.1.253-70)

A negotiation equivalent to that of a pimp and madam is carried on in pietistically pussyfooting rhetoric that dances around the perilous place clearly acknowledged by the Duke: they are accomplices in an act of deceit that needs to be defended from reproof. Their level of talk is itself part of the defense, and, at least in the Duke's repetitions, the air of protesting

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a little too much communicates the sense of queasiness attendant on his effort to justify something that isn't morally defensible.64 As has often been remarked, the Duke's impressment of Mariana as a "corpus ex machina" who is "in effect invented by his need of her" and "serves entirely at his pleasure" puts him in the position of providing "a service not altogether unlike that [which] he abhors in Pompey," an abhorrence he gets the chance to express almost immediately.65 The conspicuous effort to sanitize the bed trick with holy talk produces a small comic explosion at the phrase "give him promise of satisfaction," which bounces off the Duke's earlier use of that loaded word in the same scene, when he begs a moment of Isabella's time: "the satisfaction I would require is likewise your own benefit" (J.I.IS4-S5). Where Marc Shell thinkS that here the Duke is slyly proposing a sexual benefit, Lever more sensibly speculates that the Duke "as friar may be hinting at 'satisfaction' in the ecclesiastical sense, i.e. performance of a penance enjoined by one's confessor" (Arden ed. 76). 66 I call Lever's reading more sensible because it sets up the second incidence of the term: as an ecclesiastical rather than sexual innuendo the first usage veils a threat to Angelo, and this echo discharges into the clearly sexual sense of the second usage the pomposity of an ecclesiastical circumlocution. The pomposity is placed in high relief when the poor Duke's officer stumbles in lecturing to Pompey about his wicked trade, "you will needs buy and sell men and women like beasts" (3.2.1-2). For the Duke who overhears this it may be a relief of another sort, since with "0 heavens, what stuff is here!" (3.2.5) he begins to warm up the rhetoric of indignation that leads to his verse tirade against Pompey as the epitome of Vienna's "filthy vice." The increasing strain and irritability he displays .in this scene, the traces of complicity that breach his self-sacralizing defenses, have already been discussed, and I recall them here only to make the point that the Duke's anxiety of self-representation· has been established before Lucio's appearance at 3.2.39. Lucio catches the Duke in a moment of vulnerability, though exactly what he is up to-and why-is obscure enough to cause justified disagreement among critics. I defer discussion of the why until later and will only venture a few general remarks about what I think he is up to as a way of getting to my real topic: the Duke's reaction to Lucio. The target of Lucio's barbs is not the Duke's sexual desire; it is his voyeuristic desire. I take it that when Lucio misdirects his comments from the Duke as cause of lechery to the Duke as lecher, this merry metonymizing is in part a playfully fractious and irreverent way to rile the "Friar" while expressing affection for- and displaying intimacy with- the Duke, whose

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"lenity to lechery" (3.2.94) enables people like Lucio to flourish. The behavior he displaces to the Duke is the behavior others allow themselves "in th'ambush of ... [his] name" (1.3.41). The displacement represents in the Duke the effects of his lax policy.67 Jonathan Dollimore speculates that "perhaps the most subversive thing in the play is the most casual, namely Lucio's slurring of the Duke's reputation;' because in doing this he "strikes at the heart of the ideological legitimation of power" (83). But is that really what angers the Duke? Dollimore's next comment suggests a different source of irritation: the disguised Duke "insists to Lucio that he, the Duke, 'be but testimonied in his own bringings1orth, and he shall appear to the envious a scholar, a statesman, and a soldier' (III.ii.I40-42; italics added). AfterLucio has departed he laments his inability to ensure his subject's dutiful respect" (83). What Lucio strikes at the heart of is the Duke's desire to persuade others of his probity, and so, through their acquiescence, to persuade himself that in spite of "the business he hath helmed" and in spite of such "bringings-forth" as Lucio and the bed trick he is the exception to the lack of restraint and rationality everywhere else in Vienna. This argument won't stand up against the principle the Duke himself had enunciated early in the play: since "heaven doth with us as we with torches do, I Not light them for themselves" alone, it follows that "if our virtues I Did not go forth of us, 'twere all alike I As if we had them not" (1.!.32-35). Lucio's hectoring gives the Duke a justified occasion to represent himself to himself as the victim of slander and to protest his injured merit. He seizes the occasion twice-after Lucio's exit in 3.2 and at 4.1.60 in an apparent nonsequitur following his successful campaign to have Isabella persuade Mariana to turn the bed trick: No might nor greatness in mortality Can censure 'scape. Back-wounding calumny The whitest virtue strikes. What king so strong Can tie the gall up in the slanderous tongue? (3.2.179-82) 0 place and greatness! Millions of false eyes Are stuck upon thee: volumes of report Run with these false, and most contrarious quest Upon thy doings: thousand escapes of wit Make thee the father of their idle dream And rack thee in their fancies. 68 (4.r.r6o-65)

Although the first complaint responds primarily to Lucio's delight in abusing the ears of an increasingly stiff-necked "Friar" with scurrilous references to the Duke's sex life, I suspect that the keenest offense to the soliloquist's "whitest virtue" comes from the one comment Lucio aims at

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his lax policy: "The Duke yet would have dark deeds darkly answered: he would never bring them to light" (3.2.170-72). 69 The unexpectedness of the second outburst with its heady rush of hyperbole and catachresis suggests personal exasperation, not sententious reflection. But why at this. point the irritated sense of exposure-of being overseen, pursued, and caught in the glare of a monstrous multiplicity of torches as if Lucio's slander had metastasized? Is he even more offended than before because he has just reaffirmed his virtue and greatness by organizing the bed trick that would bring Angelo to book and solve all problems? He performs his good deeds in dark corners, unseen, unappreciated, unapplauded-and misunderstood. Perhaps, however, what disturbs him is that this "mad fantastical trick," this "repair i'th'dark," as Isabella later calls it (4.1.43), conforms all too well to Lucio's description of "dark deeds darkly answered." Even as he protests being pilloried as the father not of "their" bastards but of their idle dream-pilloried as the scapegoat on whom corruption is blamed- the context of the protest makes his language evoke the predicament of Angelo, for the Duke is in an important sense the father of his deputed scapegoat's dream. Though spaced apart, both soliloquies seem to be reactions to the interplay between the bed trick and Lucio's provocations. Having talked Isabella into helping him "scale" "the corrupt deputy," he hears a phrase that perfectly describes and judges his own dark deed as the instigator of the fall for which Angelo is to be scaled. Small wonder, then, that a few lines later, after Escalus appears and meets the "Friar" for the first time, the Duke makes the most of his chance to ensconce himself in the holiness and detachment afforded by his disguise: Esc. Good even, good father. Duke Bliss and goodness on you! Esc. Of whence are you? Duke Not of this country, though my chance is now To use it for my time. I am a brother Of gracious order, late come from the See In special business from his Holiness. (3.2.208-14)

But he loses his detachment instantly. When Escalus asks him for the "news abroad i'th'world" he launches a splashy little diatribe on the world's wickedness that seems driven primarily by the sting Lucio's "backwounding calumny" inflicted on his "whitest virtue." Thus he complains of the great "fever on goodness," of the desire of novelty that makes it "as dangerous to be aged in any kind of course as it is virtuous to be constant in any undertaking. There is scarce truth enough alive to make societies

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secure; but security enough to make fellowships accurst" (3.2.215-22). It is a further sign of Lucio's impact that the "Friar" then changes the subject and, as Robert Watson puts it, "promptly begins fishing shamelessly for compliments from Escalus" (see 3.2.224..;....28 and p. 341 above) 70 and that when Escalus inquires into Claudio's state of mind the good father waxes expansively on his pastoral success (3.2.233-42). The response from Escalus is truly gratifying, and it encourages the Duke to filter a tiny hint of trouble through his fair-minded qualification ofEscalus's doubt about Angelo: Esc.

Duke

You have paid the heavens your function, and the prisoner the very debt of your calling. I have labored for the poor gentleman to the extremest shore of my modesty, but my brother-justice have I found so severe that he hath forced me to tell him he is indeed Justice. If his own life answer the straitness of his proceeding, it shall become him well: wherein if he chance to fail, he hath sentenced himself (3.2.243-sr) 71

It is strange to listen to the Duke's words with the Duke's ears, knowing what he knows and remembers as he blandly pushes Angelo aside and himself ascends to the seat of Justice. But what comes next is stranger still, even though it continues the mon1:entum of his ascent to that severe and holy siege. Roughly halfway between the two short soliloquies complaining of injured merit falls the major soliloquy that concludes act 3: 72 . He who the sword of heaven will bear Should be as holy as severe: Pattern in himself to know, Grace to stand, and virtue, go: More nor less to others paying Than by self-offences weighing. Shame on him whose cruel striking Kills for faults of his own liking! Twice treble shame on Angelo, To weed my vice, and let his grow! 0, what may man within him hide, Though angel ori the outward side! How may likeness made in crimes, Making practice on the times To draw with idle spiders strings Most ponderous and substantial things! Craft against vice I must apply.

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With Angelo tonight shall lie His old betrothed, but despised: So disguise shall by th' disguised Pay with falsehood false exacting, And perform an old contracting. (3.2.254-75)

Hawkins seconds the opinion of Rosalind Miles that the speech is " 'wonderfully strange and effective,' " possessed of an " 'unusual rhythmic urgency' ... comparable, in incantational power, with those spell-casting, spelldissolving speeches associated with supernatural forces" in other Shakespeare plays. 73 Kathleen McLuskie, on the other hand, finds that "moral absolutes are rendered platitudinous by the language and verse"; "the jingling rhyme of the couplet mocks the very morals it asserts." 74 For me the speech is wonderfully strange and effective precisely because of the qualities McLuskie criticizes. The tetrameter couplet makes the speaker sound as if he is chanting or reciting incontestable platitudes and necessary consequences: in the first sestet, the ideal of the just ruler founded on interior reflection and self-scrutiny; in the second, the denunciation of the violator of the ideal; in the third (probably), the difficulty of bringing powerful hypocrites to justice; in the fourth, the solution to the problem and the moral justification for the solution. In the second, third, and fourth sestets, the enunciator of the ideal speaks as if he is its mouthpiece, the mediator through whom the exemplar's judgments and decisions are conveyed and enacted?5 The measured stateliness. of the first sestet quickening into the rhythmically restrained but morally justified passion of the second may give the impression of a speaker who embodies the absolutist ethos described by Franco Moretti: "the sovereign of the Elizabethan utopia, dedicated to the public weal insofar as devoid of personal interests," "subject to reason and not to will," "a figure of integrity" and "superior vision" who is not above "subterfuge and canniness." 76 At least this is an impression the speaker appears to try for, the spell he tries by incantatory means to cast on himself. Yet it is true not only that "the jingling rhyme of the couplet mocks the very morals it asserts" but also that the occlusion of the Duke's culpability is rendered glaringly conspicuous by several utterances that pick it out and all but present a brief against the speaker. The self-righteous castigation of Angelo in the second sestet perfectly illustrates the Duke's failure to weigh what he pays others "by self-offences," so that the phrases "what may man within him hide" and "making practice on the times" are as applicable to him as to Angelo.77 I rely on Lever's solution to the corrupt passage and his gloss of "idle spiders' strings" as the ineffectual "web of the law" (Arden

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ed. 95) because they reinforce the interpretation of the fourth sestet I find privileged by the ducal behavior leading up to the soliloquy: the lines rationalize the necessity of working through craft rather than law but go on to reflect the self-satisfaction with which the speaker both savors the prospect of paying the false angel in kind and redefines the bed trick as the instrument of heavenly justice. It is at this point in the play that the two opposed scriptural messages available in its title come to blows: "an eye for an eye" vs. "judge not, that ye be judged." Against the retributive justice that sanctions revenge speaks the warning so stringently expressed by the first sestet: "The warning that we shall be judged as we have judged others is above all a warning against spiritual presumption and self-righteousness." 78 The self-sacralizing verse through which the Duke strives to realize his "glassy essence" is riddled with the accents of "an angry ape" whose "fantastic tricks before high heaven" (2.2.121-22) are made possible by the Player Priest's original "fantastical trick": "to steal from the state and usurp the beggary he was never born to" (3.2.89-90). This clash between what the Duke is trying to do with his language and what his language is doing despite his effort accounts for the haunting effect of the soliloquy. It is haunted by the traces of self-inculpation that transform the verse. into the vehicle of conspicuousand conspicuously hollow-self-exculpation. This is because it is haunted by the traces of Angelo. 79 The first two sestets could as easily have been ·uttered by Angelo as by the Duke: the first condenses Angelo's reflections on the law to Escalus (2.1.1-31), the second, his two high-pitched self-accusing soliloquies (2.2.163-87 and 2.4.1-30). The ironic play of similarities and differences between the Duke and Angelo has often been remarked, and I now want to focus attention on a particular aspect of it: the Duke's act of deputation transfers more than his power to Angelo; it transfers, so to speak, his rights in the sinner's discourse. My idea, .which, as we'll see, was inspired by Richard Wheeler's nuanced account of their changing relations, is that Angelo's incontinent explosions of and perverse delight in self-loathing give the sinner's discourse a concentrated, indeed pathological, fullness of expression that is markedly absent from the Duke's language- so markedly as to arouse the suspicion of at least one slit-eyed analyst. I find it significant that the two explosions fall on either side of the scene, 2.3, in which the Duke makes his first appearance as a friar and examines Juliet. When the "Friar" asks the Provost for rights of visitation in the short speech that, as I mentioned above, crosses pious intentions with duplicitous motives, the stage on which he speaks. still resonates with the echoes of Angelo's first self-flagellating soliloquy, and among them

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is a scatter of aphorisms any eavesdropper· may find as applicable to the Duke as to Angelo: "The tempter, or the tempted, who sins most, ha?''; "Thieves for their robbery have authority,/ When judges steal themselves"; and "0 cunning enemy, that, to catch a saint, j With saints doth bait thy hook!" (2.2.164, 176-77, r8o-8r). After the imaginary friar has unfolded some niceti~s·of his casuistic art for Juliet's edification, Angelo returns and continues to lash himself with strokes that occasionally reach behind him toward the "Friar": Heaven in my mouth, As ifi did but only chew his name ... (2.4.4-5) 0 place, 0 form, How often dost thou with thy case, thy habit, Wrench awe from fools, and tie the wiser souls To thy false seeming! (2.4.12-15)

The speaker of Angelo's soliloquies is deeply invested in the perverse hybrid of the sinner's and villain's discourses, so much so that when he weakens momentarily and swerves toward· the victim's excuse- blaming the devil and Isabella -it only feeds his self-disgust. 80 Voyeuristically fixated on his own wickedness, contemptuous of the hyprocrisy of others and even more so of his own, the Angelo we hear is very different from the one constructed by the Duke: "The tempter, or the tempted, who sins most, ha? /Not' she; nor doth she tempt; but it is I" (2.2.164-65). This reaction may preempt an effect the Duke intended ultimately to produce, but nothing he says about Angelo indicates any cognizance of moral (or masochistic) sensitivity. Indeed, the statement reverses, as in a mirror, the basic argument or groundplan informing the Duke's assay of Angelo: "Not I; nor do I tempt; but it is he." Angelo's exultant self-accusation is fitted to the Duke's self-exculpation as a plug to a jack- or, in his own words, he offers himself as the "sanctuary" the Duke razes in order to "pitch our evils there" (2.2.!71~72).

"Not I ... but ... he" would be a classic example of what Freud called Verneinung, a negation that denies itself because it can only recall the secret it (ends off: "Hence shall we see/ If power change purpose, what our seemers be" (1.3.53-54). Of course, the Duke does not say "Not I. ..."That is only a specter I conjured up from Angelo's statement, for if the specter were to exist it could only ex-sist, elsewhere and otherwise, since the traces of motivation given off by the Duke's language and behavior may be read as indices of something like a black hole that sucks in all exculpatory matter around it- or its converse, a white hole, a hole of "whitest virtue" pro-

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duced by evacuating "our evils" into the dark corners of others. The specter confronts me as "a prime instance of the play of language, beyond character, outside local intentionality," and one that arises because I premise, with David Willbern, whose words these are, "that both characters are subsumed within a play of language wherein such meanings are already in play." 81 And within the play of the Duke's language and behavior the Verneinung is already in play: he embraces his disguise in a symbolic effort to disown culpability and separate himselffrom Vienn~'s corruption. But since he also embraces his disguise in order to assay Angelo and watch for the "bringings-forth" of dark deeds that he can darkly answer, the assumption of the disguise that ~xpresses his disavowal is a means of continuing what he disavows: it enacts both the end and the continuation of his complicity. Angelo's self-vilification is expressed several times in terms that describe or evoke the Duke. 82 Such echoes as the fo~owing, for example, provoke us to tease out the meaning of the specular relation that binds the two speakers together: Angelo compares the way the blood rushing to his heart (as he anticipates the approach of Isabella) incapacitates him to a situation in which a crowd, The general subject to a well-wish'd king Quit their own part, and in obsequious fondness Crowd to his presence, where their untaught love Must needs appear offence. (2.4.27-30)

Now listen to the Duke: I'll privily away. I love the people, But do not like to stage me to their eyes: Though it do well, I do not relish well Their loud applause and Aves vehement; Nor do I think the man of safe discretion That does affect it. (r.u67-72)

Because commentators refer both these passages to King James's ochlophobia, the triangulation that thrusts toward a vertex outside the play neutralizes the force and directness of the echo, which' assimilates Angelo's problem with his body natural to the Duke's diffidence toward his body politic. This is a diffidence that (as we have seen) signifies his desire to keep himself apart from and· above the disorder his permissiveness has encouraged; the diffidence kept alive by Lucio's offensive demonstrations of "untaught love." The Duke steals "privily away" not only from his absolute power and place in Vienna but also from the moral danger posed by his temptation of Angelo as well as by his former lenity. Angelo, in contrast,

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stages himself to his own eyes, fascinated by the moral and physiological symptoms of his degradation. My sense of this complex relation is indebted to Wheeler's account of its variations during the course of the play. Wheeler argues that "Vincentia's deputation of Angelo serves . . . to separate characters who at first seem in important ways to mirror each other." Though initially it forms the basis for identification ("In our remove be thou atfull ourself"), in 1.3 Vincentia retracts this identification, distancing himself from Angelo's acts and their probable consequences. . . . The tensions among the various ways Vincentia regards the deputation of Angelo create the possibility for a dramatic action generated by deeply conflicted impulses within the Duke. But the potential complexity of the Duke's characterization is sacrificed to the effort to affirm his moral purity.... [By act s] all traces of Vincentia's personal investment in Angelo have been erased. The rich web of mutually contradictory connections that complicate Vincentia's early efforts to articulate his relation to Angelo has given way to a simple moral polarization. . . . Shakespeare, in short, uses Angelo as a scapegoat who suffers in his person· the consequences of a conflict Vincentia is thereby spared. (134-38; my emphases)

The two italicized terms belong together: the effort is Shakespeare's. Thus Wheeler can speak of Angelo's "self-depreciation" and "self-degradation" but of the "idealization of the Duke" (r38) -not, that is, his self-idealization, for it is Shakespeare who does the idealizing. Predictably, I prefer to shift the agency from Shakespeare to the Duke. It is his effort to affirm his moral purity, together with the tensions and contradictions Wheeler illuminates, that convey the sense of "deeply conflicted impulses within the Duke," and in. the framework of my argument Wheeler concisely charts the changes that sustain rather than suppress the conflict. Inasmuch as the drive toward polarization may be seen as an attempt by the Duke to deny or disown or rationalize the scapegoating of Angelo; inasmuch as it is caught up and diffused in a more general pyrotechnical display of punishments and pardons that has a spurious look about it because the punishments seem imposed only as a praeparatio enabling the gesture of pardon; and inasmuch as these ·moral fireworks are greeted by a parade of open silences (the number and repetition of which may indeed make them a little less open), Wheeler's account of the "conflict between idealization and degradation that has troubled the entire play" (139) becomes, first, a conflict between self-idealization and self-degradation, and then a conflict between selfexculpation and self-inculpation. Angelo's compulsion to confess and punish himself is set over against the Duke's compulsion to confess others. As Wheeler nicely puts it, "Vincentia's relation to Viennese corruption mirrors the conflict that breaks Angelo; what is in Angelo surrounds the Duke"

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(139), or, what Angelo internalizes the Duke displaces. Wheeler's emphasis on this specular coupling allows us to situate both figures on the common ground of the sinner's discourse; if Angelo wallows in its mud, the Duke strains away toward higher ground. Thus Angelo, with his discourse of selfinculpation, makes himself a kind of"waste ground" (2.2.170) on which the Duke pitches his evils, the excrements of sin (171-72). When we direct this understanding of their relation to the Duke's performances. in acts 4 and 5, it may become more apparent that his thrust toward the self-idealizing omnicompetence of the deus ex machina is powered by the energy he devotes to disowning complicity and steering clear of the sinner's discourse. In the first three scenes of act 4 the pace of intrigue accelerates, coupled with a parallel intensification of holy-father talk. The Duke connives, miscalculates, then has to improvise a new connivance, adding the head trick to the bed trick. The more he connives and improvises, the more he moralizes, the more he seems to need to moralize, to shrive, to impose spiritual discipline. As he divides his time in 4· r between pious reassurances to Mariana (14-15, 71-76) and plotting with Isabella, punctuated by his second complaint ("0 place and greatness! ..."),we learn that he hasn't yet let Mariana in on the secret and is leaving that delicate task to Isabella (49-58). We also hear, in the casual throwaway of Mariana's opening lines, the startling news that the Duke has dropped in on the forlorn, forsworn Mariana more than once: his "advice j Hath often still'd my brawling discontent" (8-9). When did he start doing this? It would have to be after he requisitioned his friar's habit in 1.3, and although the question is unanswerable, given Shakespeare's handling of time schemes, it is still tempting to wonder whether this news is meant to alert us to the possibility that the Duke, in planning to test Angelo, had already decided to thrust his torch into what he knew was a dark corner in Angelo's history. If it does so alert us, it only sharpens the impression building up since his first interview with Isabella that the Duke's priorities have undergone a significant change. To borrow and vary Bradshaw's distinction between the play's "Vienna-problem" and its "Claudio-problem;' the Duke seems definitively to have redirected his Machiavellian energies from his "Viennaproblem" to his "Angelo-problem," and this change is registered by his abrupt introduction of Angelo's Mariana-problem. 83 The desire to reestablish order in Vienna gives way to the desire to destroy Angelo and exploit Isabella's unsaintly lust for revenge by capitalizing on poor Mariana's "brawling discontent." The suspicion of bad faith is only aggravated by the thought that from the beginning his decision to attack the Vienna-problem was an.cillary to his desire to attack Angelo. Is this a thought that the Duke

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could somehow be expected not to entertain? The irruption of Lucio in 3.2 renders this unlikely. Lucio is there to remind him of his responsibility for and to the Vienna-problem and of his defection from it. Lucio is the condensation, the hyperbolic symbol, of that problem. Like a perverse and subversive Jiminy Cricket, he goads the Duke by holding up a distorted mirror of his complicity.84 The mirror is distorted enough to let the Duke think himself slandered. Yet the near-hysterical rhetoric of the two complaints of injured merit betray more than the vulnerability of a fastidious self-esteem. Together with the tendency of the longer self-sacralizing soliloquy to exemplify. the injustice it condemns, they have the hollow ring produced by the touches of bad conscience that accompany but don't impede his abandonment of the Vienna-problem, his deepening entanglement in the dirty tricks and countertricks of the Angelo-problem. It becomes more critical for him to offset his plunge into practices by generating occasions of pastoral care. The collision, or rather cooperation, between his two projects, playing tricks and playing friar, comes to a climax in 4.2 and 4.3. The convergence of these two courses on the head and soul of Barnardine produces some of the play's most wonderful moments, beginning with the rhyme-enhanced conclusiveness of the Duke's three couplets that sententiously predict Angelo's pardon of Claudio (4.2.106-n) and prove to be dead wrong. Angelo's double-cross forces the Duke to supplement the bizarre bed trick with the even more bizarre head trick, which he concocts on hearing Barnardine's name in· the execution order. Bradshaw gives a summary and analysis of the background of Barnardine's case that smartly illuminate its relevance to the Duke's Vienna'-problem and suggest in addition the kind of moral pressure it puts on the Duke in his struggle with Angelo: Everything we learn about Barnardine's case in Act 4 · casts doubts on the Duke's judicial competence and motives. Although the Provost has to remind the Duke who Barnardine is, we learn that the Duke tried that case himself- and that, after listening to those friends of Barnardine who "wrought Repreeves for him;' the Duke eventually declared that matters could not be brought to "an undoubtful proofe" (4.2.128-30) and forgot all about the case. In sharp contrast, it transpires that Angelo has been working through the backlog of ducal messes and has established, quickly and firmly, that Barnardine's guilt is "most manifest, and not denied by himself" (4.2.131): here, perhaps, is an example of what the Duke has in mind when he sneers that his deputy is "precise." (r7r)

Angelo has done what he was appointed to do, clean up the ducal mess, and the Duke now finds himself contravening the details of the execution

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order while relying on the deputy's severe justice in an effort not only to save Claudio but to make the bed trick pay off. Thus it is in timely fashion that he avails himself of a window of pastoral opportunity and threatens to go to work on Barnardine: Duke

Prov.

Duke

Prov.

Hath he borne himself penitently in prison? How seems he to be touched? A man that apprehends death no more dreadfully but as a drunken sleep; careless, reckless, and fearless of what's past, present, or to come: insensible of mortality, and desperately mortal. He wants advice. He will hear none (4.2.138-45)

-a response undoubtedly greeted with sighs of relief by any who overhear it. 85 The Duke enlists the Provost as an unwitting accomplice in his latest conspiracy against Angelo by feeding him a farrago of mysterious hints and reassurances focused on his-the "Friar's" -intimacy with the Duke. But even as the rosy-fingered flush of success suffuses his reaction to this triumph, he takes care to safeguard his pastoral privilege: Look th'unfolding star calls up the shepherd. Put not yourself into amazement how these things should be; all difficulties are but easy when they are known. Call your executioner, and off with Barnardine's head. I will give him a present shrift, and advise him for a better place. Yet you are amazed; but this shall absolutely resolve you. Come away; it is almost clear dawn. (4.2.202-9)

Although the Provost agrees to deputize Barnardine's head as a substitute for Claudio's, the Duke finds that when he tries to administer shrift (or, in the Provost's words, "do good on" his victim, 4.2.66), the New Day hasn't yet arrived: Sir, induced by my charity, and hearing how hastily you are to depart, I am come to advise you, comfort you, and pray with you. Barnardine Friar, not I ... I will not consent to die this day, that's certain. Duke 0 sir, you must; and therefore I beseech you Look forward on the journey you shall go. Barnardine I swear I will not die today for any man's persuasion. Duke But hear youBarnardine Not a word. If you have anything to say to me, come to my ward: for thence will not I today. Exit Duke Unfit to live or die! 0 gravel heart. 86 After him, fellows, bring him to the block! Duke

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Prov. Duke

Now sir, how do you find the prisoner? A creature unprepar'd, unmeet for death; And to transport him in the mind he is Were damnable. (4.3.49-68)

The Duke, Bradshaw observes, is so "determined to get his substitute head" in order "to save Claudio and triumph over the exposed Angelo that he gives that 'damnable' order to 'transport' a 'creature unpre.;...par'd, unmeet for death,' " and this "shows the lengths to which the. Duke will go, when Barnardine presents an obstacle to his attempt" to implement the head trick (172-73). This is only partly true, for when "heaven provides" the happy accident of Ragozine's head (4.3.68-76), the Duke informs the Provost that he will continue trying to do good on Barnardine ("whiles I I Persuade this rude wretch willingly to die," 79-80) -which suggests, first, that "bring him to the block!" expresses momentary pastoral frustration rather than ducal machination; second, that the scruple over damnability denotes a flinch of conscience; and third, that the providential pirate head will free him to concentrate on meeting the moral challenge offered by Barnardine's resistance. 87 As we learn later, when Barnardine appears onstage, this is a test the "Friar" fails. But for the time being, the relief which that possibility offers is registered by a renewed decisiveness of tone as he issues the commands and rehearses the plans leading to Angelo's downfall (4-3·86-ws). It's perhaps in this spirit that he segues immediately into his third trick upon hearing Isabella approach; yet one has to wonder what relation obtains between the gratuitous cruelty of the trick and the pious rationalization he gives himself for perpetrating it: "I will keep her ignorant of her good [Claudio's pardon], I To make her heavenly comforts of despair I When it is least expected" (4.3.108-no). The Duke says this for his own benefit; he comforts himself with terms that have high spiritual resonance but are disabled by their context of utterance: at best, "heavenly" and "despair" are hyperboles, but at worst they are something else, since what the Duke tells himself is that he will lie in order to make Isabella feel terrible so that he can make her feel better later when he surprises her with good news and earns her gratitude. 88 On Isabella's arrival he wastes no time cultivating her despair: Duke

Hath yet the deputy sent my brother's pardon? He hath releas'd him, Isabel, -from the world. His head is off, and sent to Angelo. (4-3-II3-I5)

He follows this with wholesome counsel ("Show your wisdom, daughter, I In your close patience"; "give your cause to heaven," II7-18, 124) and pre-

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pares the "good path" that will lead her to her savior and salvation: "you shall have your bosom on this wretch, I Grace of· the Duke, revenges to your heart, I And general honor" (133-36). The Duke is nothing if not brisk as he proceeds to give Isabella the more specific instructions that will enable her to approach "the Duke; and to the· head of Angelo I Accuse him home and home" (142-43). "The head of Angelo" is a stark synecdoche compacted with a metaleptic foretaste of revenge, an Angelo for a Claudio. "For my poor self;' he archly continues, "I am combined by a sacred vow, I And shall be absent" (143-45), but his reliability and the prospect of revenge should quickly make her put Claudio behind her and perk up: Command these fretting waters from your eyes With a light heart; trust not my holy order, If I pervert your course. (4.3·146-48)

This will turn out to have been part of another misdirection, similar in form to the one that raises then dashes Isabella's hopes in line II4 ("He hath releas' d him, Isabel,- from the world") but calculated on a larger scale when the Duke rudely dismisses her accusation and throws her in jail (5.1.27124). Is it indeed calculated, or does the Duke improvise? What does he know, when does he know it, and how can we tell? 89 His plans for his "return" are already afoot and broadcast (4.3.127, 154). As I argu~d earlier, his treatment of Isabella throughout the play exhibits a pattern of passive aggression that seems to me to character his desire to be sole possessor of Vienna's most complete bosom, a title Isabella obviously covets. His express design to keep her "ignorant of her good" in order to liberate her from the despair into which he throws her anticipates his treatment of her in acts. As an aside this utterance is close kin to Edgar's "Why I do trifle thus with his despair /Is done to cure it" (King Lear 4.6.33-34). 90 Although the Duke is in control and his situation is comedic, whereas Edgar is making trifles of terrors, both asides have the same moral valency: both denote their speakers' desire for protection against the suspicion that their bosoms are less complete, "more sinning," than they would like to believe. Of course, the Duke lacks Edgar's excuse that he was more sinned against, but that isn't necessarily a good thing for his self-esteem. When the "Friar" subsequently tells Isabella he is "combined by a sacred vow" and won't be present to substantiate her accusation, we know it is because of the Duke's "return" and are again reminded that he already has the prospectus for act 5 pretty well worked out. Incidentally, the most interesting gloss on the quoted phrase is that of N. W. Bawcutt, the Oxford editor:

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since combined could mean " 'joined, associated with someone else' ... the whole line would mean 'I have promised to join someone else.' " 91 This gives the statement the air of a private joke uttered for his own benefit. in the Duke's dark corner, "The 'Friar's' in us" -or the Duke's in the "Friar"and in this form the statement glances reassuringly at the projected convergence of "Friar" with Duke that will produce the happy ending. I take t4e need for reassurance seriously: the Duke places himself at moral risk when he induces and trifles with Isabella's despair, and he only increases the risk, raises the stakes, in his reassurance to her- "trust not my holy order, / If I pervert your course"- since, if the scenario for act 5 is already worked out, he knows he will at least temporarily pervert her course. He has to. remind himself that the end will justify his means; the completeness of his bosom· depends on it. I don't mean to imply that the Duke does not have full confidence and take great pleasure in his political, conspiratorial, and theatrical skills. I only mean to suggest that he has a lot more riding on those skills than the restoration of order and justice with mercy in Vienna; he does not want to lose his pension, be deprived of his heavenly comforts. And these considerations shoot a wild meaning into "trust not my holy order," for, even as he continues self-indulgently to squeeze little pietisms out of his disguise, he prolongs the private joke and gives it a more sardonic edge. If he can't resist a clever but nasty joke at the unwitting Isabella's expense, how can he respect himself so long as he continues to take advantage of the voyeuristic privileges the disguise offers? The hint of self-contempt will surface in act 5, as we'll see, when, in the strange confrontation of Duke with "Friar," the Duke will aggressively publicize his distrust of the "Friar's" perversion of his holy order. "Trust not my holy order" hauntingly anticipates that move. And immediately after he misleads Isabella, in walks Lucio- on cue, as it were-to badger the purse-mouthed "Friar" with comments that irritate the Duke not only because they slander him with sexual innuendo but also because they glance approvingly at the consequences of his negligent government. What Lucio presses on him as an example of "pretty tales of the Duke" (4.3.164) is the anecdote in which he boasts of having evaded justice by lying to the Duke when he was accused of "getting a wench with child" (r67-72); we recall that in the preceding scene the Duke had heard an equally pretty tale from the Provost about his conduct of the Barnardine case. But perhaps in the context of the Duke's exchanges with Isabella, Lucio's first comment may be more galling: 0 pretty Isabella, I am pale at mine heart to see thine eyes so red: thou must be patient. I am fain to dine and sup with water and bran: I dare not for my head fill my belly: one fruitful meal would set me to't. But they say the Duke

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will be here tomorrow. By my troth, Isabel, I loved thy brother; if the old fantastical duke of dark corners had been at home, he had lived still. (4.3.150-57)

Lucio's humane response echoes and thus sharply sets off the flippancy of the Duke's "Command these fretting waters from your eyes j With a light heart" (146-47), the dismissiveness of which can be accounted for by his knowledge that Claudio lives and that Isabella's heavenly comforts are just around the corner. To tell her to lighten up may be his way of "riding" Isabella, putting her through her paces, trifling with a despair he knows is groundless. Lucio's intervention underscores the reality for Isabella, which the Duke· himself lightheartedly ignores. 92 The Duke then hears Lucio complain about Angelo's strict justice and look forward to the return of the old "lenity;' which is invidiously associated in his anecdote with the Duke's gullibility. Finally he hears Lucio hypothesize what is in fact the truth: Claudio still lives because the Duke is at home in his dark corner. The hypothesis eerily anticipates the denouement the Duke has planned for Isabella. Lucio might well claim, as Escalus will do in act 5, that "the Duke's in us" -which is not where the Duke wants to be, as he shows when he testily replies that "the Duke is marvellous little beholding to your reports; but the best is, he lives not in them" (4.3.158-59). This is as close as the "Friar" has come to directly expressing the Duke's opinion, dropping his guard and speaking as the Duke. Is it because he hears still another sexual innuendo in Lucio's epithet? It may be that, but it may also be because he kno:ws Lucio's wish expresses the true state of affairs and divulges the Duke's characteristic if not admirable modus operandi, in which case the Duke is not saying what he knows when he protests that the Duke "lives not" in Lucio's reports; for he knows he does. If Lucio holds up an anamorphic mirror to the Duke, it is still a mirror. The strange logic of his response to Lucio's threat to tell more "pretty tales of the Duke" suggests that he is bothered by something besides slander: "you have told me too many of him already, sir, if they be true; if not true, none were enough" (165-66). But if they are true, why too many? Is it discretion that prompts the "Friar" to protest against hearing the truth about the Duke? Lucio's intervention produces a certain strain in the Duke's performance of the figure with which he is "combined by a sacred vow"- in his relation to and representation of himself- and this strain will be exacerbated in act 5· The armature of the play's denouement in the fifth act appears to be a string of performative utterances in which the Duke issues commands, sentences, and pardons: he pardons Escalus (35 9), orders Angelo to. marry Mariana (375), pardons Isabella (385),93 orders Angelo decapitated (412-14),

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391

dismisses the Provost (459-60), pardons Barnardine (477-84), more offhandedly pardons Claudio (487-88), orders Lucio married, whipped, and hanged (but cancels the last two orders, 516-19), and orders Angelo to forgive the Provost (529-30); the proposal to Isabella that concludes and climaxes this sequence of performatives is hardly itself a performative, though who knows whether or not the speechless Isabella construes it as such (as a command, for example). The problem for the Duke is that so few of these speech acts are bona fide performatives. He pardons Escalus for doing what the Duke had himself instigated, suspecting and defrocking the "Friar"; he should actually ask his own pardon. He blandly grants Isabella's request for pardon while well aware, since he continues lying about Claudio, that he should ask to be forgiven by her. The order to kill Angelo is spurious; so is the· dismissal of the Provost and the request that he be pardoned, which continue stratagems initiated by the "Friar" and maintain the Provost's cover as the secret accomplice of both "Friar" and Duke. The strangest of the Duke's acts is the pardon ofBarnardine. Is it a true performative? Why is it the longest pardon speech he gives? There was a friar told me of this man. Sirrah, thou art said to have a stubborn soul That apprehends no further than this world, And squar'st thy life according. Thou'rt condemn'd; But, for those earthly faults, I quit them all, And pray thee take this mercy to provide For better times to come. Friar, advise him; I leave him to your hand. (5.1.477-84)

To appreciate the strangeness of this act, let's consider how poorly it fits the framework of a historical explanation: Historically, the roles played out in the ceremony of execution are strict. In order to elevate the might of the state, the protocols of execution demand a kind of consent on the part of the condemned- a consent rarely denied. . . . Furthermore, criminals had to be conscious of and acknowledge the punishment meted out to them. . . . The ceremony of execution requires ·the cooperation of the prisoner.

And although in this case the prisoner doesn't cooperate, "in the end the Duke pardons him, perhaps because Barnardine cannot be persuaded 'willingly to die' any more than the subjects of Vienna can be purged of all sexual desire." 94 The focus of the play is on the Duke, not the state; it isn't the state that vents the frustration expressed by "unfit to live or die! 0 gravel heart," nor does this Duke's desire to exercise the power to par-

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don, the power to forgive, spring from the structural needs that generate "the protocols of execution." If anything, it springs from an ethical need to wield that power over as many of the subjects he has practiced on as he can; a need to produce signs of remorse, contrition, gratitude for his mercy, acknowledgment of the error of their ways, and to solicit these signs, oddly enough, precisely from those he has knowingly practiced on or cozened. Perhaps the disproportionate amount of pardon he lavishes on so minor a player as Barnardine measures his failure to sway that gravel heart. Until this moment Barnardine was the one who got away, but now the Duke gets to deliver the coup, unfurl the grand gesture, thatBarnardine had blocked in 4·3· The Duke's revenge is to "do good on him" and remand him to a friar for religious instruction. Whether the poor brother on whom this thankless task falls will get anywhere with Barnardine is another matter, another open silence. But does the Duke really care? His pardon speech glances at more pressing interests: his continuing attachment to the performative privileges of the confessor ("for those earthly faults, I quit them all"); his continuing competition with Angelo, opposing mercy to the deputy's strict justice ("Thou'rt condemn'd"-by Angelo-but liberated by "this mercy"); and the opportunity to show he can act decisively and resolve a case he had previouslybeen inattentive to. These interests place the pardon of Barnardine in the larger pattern of compensatory moral action given shape by the sequence of performatives. Thus on the one hand, when the Duke sentences Angelo first to marriage and .then to death (375-77, 401-53) he does so with a rhetorical stringency that flaunts the rigor notably lacking from his pre-Angelesque style of governance. On the other hand, he compensates for the effect of the former lenity by continuing to exercise the moral power he assumed- or usurped-in 1.3 along with the friar's habit, the power that would enable him to help his subjects see the error of their ways so that he could atone for making them worse by trying to make them better. In act 5, several of the Duke's statements as a ruler retain the accents of the holy father after Lucio has defrocked him. First he comforts Isabella with the thought that although "your friar is now your prince," her prince remains her friar, "Not changing heart with habit" (380-83). He will remain both her advocateas he had been before the Duke discredited her testimony (5.1.92-128)and her spiritual guide: he shows her how to resign herself to Claudio's death (394-97) and advises Mariana against persuading Isabella to plead for Angelo's life lest Claudio's ghost "take her hence in horror" (431-34). His pardon of Barnardine rhetorically conflates political acquittal with ecclesiastical remission. In his final speech he divulges a hitherto unsung feat

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performed by the ghostly father: 95 'Joy to you, Mariana; love her, Angelo: j I have confess'd her, and I know her virtue" (523-24) -and also, Angelo must suspect, her secrets. Delivered with casual complacency, this mindboggling news testifies to the speaker's virtue as much as to Mariana'sto the moral authority that justifies his right to dispense judgments and rewards. It serves as a reminder that the "Friar's" labor in dark corners consisted of more than dirty ·tricks; he did the Lord's work there, even ifas an imaginary friar, a Player Priest- he had no right to do it. Still, dirty tricks are never very far from the surface of this speech, which, whatever else it tries to be, is a reprise of the "Friar's" accomplishments as an intriguer. When he turns to Isabella after devoting four and a half lines to the Provost's complicity and the head trick, the initial clause of his proposal, "I have a motion much imports your good" (532), is enough to make any theatrical or lectorial eavesdropper want to warn Isabella to beware: it harks back, first, to the pious rhetoric with which he persuaded her to participate in the bed trick ("fasten your ear on my advisings, to the love I have of doing good," 3.1.196-97) and, second, to the aside in which he promised himself he would make heavenly comforts of her despair (4.3.109) after deceiving her about Claudio's death (i.e., the dead trick).96 The Duke is thus loath to give up the moralizing advantages of his imaginary holy order yet unable to detach himself from its. more suspect advantages. 97 This dilemma accounts, in my opinion, for the two most conspicuous features of his performance in act 5, the strategic importance to him of a diffusely religio-political power of pardon and the persistent strain of anger displayed by the Duke toward the "Friar," the "Friar" toward the Duke, and both toward Angelo. The deployment of pardon has been aptly characterized- and severely criticized-by David Sundelson: Concealing the truth about Claudio will let the Duke restore him to his sister as if resurrecting him from the dead. . . . The synthetic miracle will earn Isabella's perpetual gratitude, but his strategy, surely, is at the heart of our disappointment in their union. It ... defines a hierarchy-patron and debtorthat precludes any marriage of equal partners. . . . In addition this "most bounteous sir" (V.i.448), as Isabella learns to call him, finds a novel strategy: he rules by forgiving. As the play ends he pardons not only the obvious offenders Angelo, Claudio, Lucio, and Barnardine, but the Provost, Escalus, and Isabella as well. It is startling to hear Isabella, after all her needless suffering, ask forgiveness for having "employ'd and pain'd /Your unknown sovereignty" (V.i.391-392), but such is the magic of his spell.98

Isabella's "perpetual gratitude" may be what the Duke wants, but, as we saw, it is far from clear that by the end of the play she doesn't share "our disap-

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pointment" in a miracle that must seem· as synthetic to her as to us- and a miracle she may witness with as much shame or embarrassment as gratitude. The miracle does not occur until after she utters the words Sundelson quotes and after she has been subjected to one of the Duke's more outrageous bits of nonsense, his fabricated apologia for Claudio's death (5.1.385-97), a production one doesn't imagine Isabella to have forgotten when Claudio walks in. But this only adds interest to Sundelson's striking idea about ducal reliance on the related strategies of giving and forgiving, for it arouses our curiosity as to what- besides the desire to regain political and moral authority-motivates so theatrical a deployment of the self-empowering donor's discourse. Why so insistent a repetition of the two-step dance, first condemn, then pardon? Is it merely to dramatize his new acquisition of the ruler's art of dispensing justice before mercy, showing severity before lenity? If I listen to the Duke's words with his ears, such explanations don't ring true because the speaker of those words knows too much about his own complicity: his complicity in allowing the corruption of which Claudio's act and Lucio's behavior are featured instances; his complicity in the actions for which he condemns Angelo; and particularly his complicity in the ·series of dirty tricks that culminates in the cozening of Isabella. This is a speaker in whose autoconfa;sional moments of soliloquy and aside the victim's strident expressions of the sense of injured merit mingle with the self-sacralizing accents that proclaim "the purity of his motives" as he "seeks to rise above the. messy domains of human sexuality and power ... like some Christian knight-errant" (Sundelson 98). But does he respect himself or suspect himself? Does the flow of benefactions make up for the malefactions he alone is privy to? Since the Duke knows his condemnation of Angelo, like his abuse of Isabella, is planned as a prologue to bestowal of happy surprises, he can't be unaware that his show of justice tempered by mercy is a hoax, that he misuses the forms of judicial process and ecclesiastical privilege as a screen behind which to pursue another agenda. For me, then, the choreographer of sentences and pardons stages a strenuous discourse of self-exculpation that shows itself to be motivated by taints of self-apprehension. It is strenuous because even as it registers the pressure of a compensatory desire to set things right, the choreography of performatives through which it is expressed continues the dubious practices it seems organized to compensate or atone for. Thus on the one hand, inasmuch as he acknowledges himself accountable for the things that went wrong in Vienna, and inasmuch as he all but explicitly gave his campaign against Angelo priority over his plan

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to (use Angelo to) clean up Vienna, it follows that in pardoning Angeloand everyone else- he seeks to forgive himself, to get himself off the moral hook and assure himself of "the purity of his motives." But on the other hand, since he knows Claudio lives and his "apt remission" of Angelo's crime can be no less spurious than the death sentence it remits, how could he expect to cancel his debt, to find forgiveness through such forgiving? There may be safety in numbers: as Sundelson notes, the Duke dispenses one pardon after another, and no one who is on the premises in act 5 escapes. But not safety enough, perhaps. If, in Mauss's classic formula, the power to (for) give makes the Duke magister and his recipients minister, it also seems to make him angry. I refer not to his displays of mock anger but to an undertone of real anger that occasionally filters the spirit of revenge into the act of pardon. This is apparent, for example, in his use of the verb to quit, which he introduces in the titular phrase "Like doth quit like, and Measure still for Measure" (5.1.409), where quit bears its simple retributive sense, "requite." When it recurs in his pardon of Barnardine ("for those earthly faults, I quit them all," 481), the primary meaning is "acquit," yet the context of his frustrating negotiations with this "stubborn soul" (478) adds an aggressive edge: to "quit" those faults is to force them to leave in spite of Barnardine's resistance. 99 The climactic use of the word occurs a few lines later, after the Duke has pardoned Claudio: By this Lord Angelo perceives he's safe; Methinks I see a quickening in his eye. Well, Angelo, your evil quits you well. Look that you love your wife: her worth, worth yours. I find an apt remission in myself. (5.1.492-96)

Several senses jar for control of the third line: "look what I've done for you -your evil leaves you well (thoroughly) and leaves you well (cured, healed)"; "your evil repays or rewards you well, and better than you deserve"; "you get just what you deserve;' in the negative sense implied, if not intended, by the Oxford editor's gloss, "your evil has been well repaid (by marriage to Mariana instead of punishment)." 10° Contempt for Angelo modulates into self-satisfied reflection on the wittiness, the aptness, of the speaker's terms· of remission, but the whole statement retains its sarcasm as "look what I've done for you" gives way to "look what I've done to you." Is the quickening in Angelo's eye anything more than the Duke's interpretation? Has the unexpected sight of the quickened Claudio diminished the sorrow that, Angelo exclaims just before Claudio's entrance, "so deep sticks . . . in my penitent heart j That I crave death more willingly than mercy;/ 'Tis my deserving, and I do entreat it" (473-75)? Those are the last

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words Angelo utters in the play, so the questions remain unanswerable; and since they are the first and only words he utters after his shotgun wedding to Mariana, his response to that event is also moot. But his request and selfjudgment are consistent with the principle he expressed early in the play to Escalus: "When I that censure him do so offend, JLet mine own judgment pattern out my death" (2.1.29-30); they are consistent also with the request he makes on realizing that your Grace, like power divine, Hath looked upon my passes. Then, good prince, No longer session hold upon my shame, But let my trial be mille own confession. Immediate sentence, then, and sequent death Is all the grace I beg. (5.1.367-72)

The shame that public exposure adds .to his already confirmed sense of "guiltiness" (365) is for all the "passes" the Duke has held his torch to. When we recall the self-loathing he dwells on in 2.2 and 2.4, the idea that he wants to live and is relieved to see Claudio alive isn't compelling. Even though he shuffies like a tepid villain until the "Friar" is unmasked, his total collapse after that makes the Duke's reference to his quickening eye perverse and the whole remission speech gratuitously harsh in its flippancy, as if pardoning Angelo is done in the spirit of revenge. The Duke continues in this vein in the play's final speech. His selfcongratulating summary of the moral fruits of the "Friar's" surveillance and intrigue discharges the animus aroused by Lucio's slander into another set of allusions to the good he has done on Angelo: Joy to you, Mariana; Love her, Angelo; I have confess'd her, and I know her virtue. Thanks, Provost, for thy care and secrecy; We shall employ thee in a worthier place. Forgive him, Angelo, that brought you home The head ofRagozine for Claudio's: Th'offence pardons itself. (5.1.523-31)

"Forgive him, Angelo, for disobeying your order, since by that disobedience he saved your life (whether you want it or not)." He savors the ruse as he reveals it, reminding Angelo that he was duped and disclosing by his reference to the Provost his own role as the genius behind the plot. "Th'offence" was really his, then; and as it pardons itself, so he pardons himself With that compact and disingenuous tactic of self-exculpation he pu-ts down Angelo

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one last time, abruptly terminates his dealings with his deputized scapegoat, turns to the more· delicious prospect he entertains for "Dear Isabel" (531), and with an equally abrupt and compact gesture, one could call it an impatient gesture, he completes his wrap-up- almost: I have a motion much imports your good; Whereto if you'll a willing ear incline, What's mine is yours, and what is yours is mine. So bring us to our palace, where we'll show What's yet behind that's meet you all should know. 101 (s.r.sp-J6)

The play ends with two deferrals: a brisk proposal contingent on a response that has yet to be given, and the promise of further disclosures. These deferrals don't chime well with the obligatory couplets that signify closure; the message of nonclosure increases the effect of nervous and hasty jingling that makes the speaker seem anxious to lead his entourage to a less public place where he can unveil the hidden mysteries ("show j What's yet behind")- but not all of them, only those that are meet for them to know. What wouldthe Duke find inappropriate to disclose, or confess? The qualification opens up another silence in addition to Isabella's and the others mentioned above (pp. 363-65) and stirs up more questions. If the open silences of Angelo, Barnardine, Claudio, and Isabella render their reactions to his pardons obscure to us, is he shown to be affected by the obscurity? About which secrets is he on the verge of breaking silence, and which will remain hidden? What impels him to continue-or to defer-explaining, confessing, disclosing? Is it only to protract the moment of triumph?Is it to continue to reassure himself and the others, in the face of all those silences, that this is a moment of triumph and not a moment of revenge-the triumph of justice and mercy that vindicates the practices of the voyeuristic intriguer? Do the deferrals, in other words, register the Duke's continuing desire to justify and forgive himself for offenses-against Vienna, Angelo, and Isabella- that resolutely refuse to pardon themselves because in act 5 they are not only ongoing but exacerbated? For me, such questions are kept in play by my sense of the residual anger that charges the Duke's treatment of Angelo and can't be fully explained by Lucio's slander. Indeed, the anger is present in both his language and his behavior early in the scene. And if we take into account the extent to which most of what happens in 5. I plays out a previously scripted scenario, the scenario itself may appear to be a product of its author's anger. The three short scenes that conclude act 4 show that the Duke has

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already worked out the script and is in the process of implementing it. We observe the effect of his mixed messages on Angelo and Escalus in 4.4, hear his instructions to the Friar in 4-5 (during which we learn that "The Provost knows our purpose and our plot," 2), and hear Isabella and Mariana discussing their assigned roles in 4.6. The sharpest foretaste of what is to come occurs in 4.6, when Isabella tells Mariana she is uneasy that the "Friar" has instructed her to lie about sleeping with Angelo- "I am advis'd to do it, I he says, to veil full purpose" (3-4) -and relays his warning that if peradventure He speaks against me on the adverse side, I should not think it strange, for 'tis a physic That's bitter to sweet end. (4.6.5-8)

Her role assignment is bitter enough by itself: she is simultaneously to lie and to humiliate herself ("My sisterly remorse confutes mine honor, I And I did yield to him," 5.!.103-4), while "on the adverse side" the Duke accuses her of having been "suborn'd" (ro9) and has her thrown in jaiP 02 But what is the "full purpose" and "sweet end" that justifies this bitter means and entitles it to be called "a physic"? As we've already seen, that entitlement may be far less ·obvious to Isabella, whom the Duke continually jerks around before offering the "heavenly comforts" of his hand. Is it more obvious to the Duke? The immediate purpose and end of the script imposed on Isabella is a confrontation the strangeness of which isn't often appreciated. It is a confrontation confusedly anticipated by Isabella's use of the pronoun he in the lines from 4.6 quoted above ("if ... I He speaks against me"): she can only be referring to the "Friar," but in fact it is the Duke in his own person who will speak against her. This is no trifling point. Vincentia as "Friar" persuaded her to lie so that as Duke he may use the lie as the index to a plot against Angelo and (pretend to) smoke out the instigator: ... thou art suborn'd against his honor In hateful practice. (5.1.109-10) Someone hath set you on: Confess the truth, and say by whose advice Thou cam'st here to complain. (n5-17)

Isab. Duke

This needs must be a practice. Who knew of your intent and coming hither? One that I would were here, Friar Lodowick. A ghostly father, belike. Who knows that Lodowick? (126-29)

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399

Words against me! This' a good friar belike. And to set on this wretched woman here Against our substitute. Let this friar be found. (134-36)

Angelo soon picks up the Duke's cue: Isabella and Mariana "are no more I But instrument$ of some more mightier member I That sets them on" (23537). The Duke then prepares to rush offstage and don his disguise so as to be able to answer his own summons: "There is another friar that set them on; I Let him be sent for" (247-48). Before the Duke departs at 5.1.258 he installs Angelo in the seat of judgment at the latter's request (233-38) and commands Escalus to sit beside him and assist him. When the "Friar" arrives he does everything he can to insult and aggravate the presiding deputies. First he dismisses as false Escalus's claim that he "set these women on." Then, in reply to Escalus's angry "Know you where you are?" he says, Respect to your great place; and let the devil Be sometime honor'd for his burning throne. Where is the Duke? 'Tis he should hear me speak. (5-!.290-92)

If the two hortatory subjunctives are read appositionally as directed toward a single figure and status (you= devil, great place= burning throne), giving the and that conjoins them the force of "like" or "as," then the "Friar" may be imagined to direct both phrases toward his interrogator, Escalus. But that isn't likely because Escalus is sitting beside Angelo. The instructions the Duke gave before leaving suggest that both be visualized on a dais with Angelo occupying the Duke's throne and Escalus on an adjoining chair. Given this staging, either the "Friar" could be addressing both judges at once, or he could aim the first, more honorific, phrase toward Escalus, even if ironically, and the diabolical figure toward Angelo.103 In either case, what gives bite to the utterance is that the place and throne temporarily occupied by Escalus and Angelo are the Duke's, and that the language of the second phrase, regardless of the intention one ascribes to the speaker, contains a strange sentiment: let honor be accorded to the devil not merely for the high position symbolized by his throne but also for the pain imposed by the hellfire he endures. The "great place" should be respected-which, in Elbow's lexicon, means suspected. To put the emphasis on burning in the second phrase, and thus on the occupant's pain, is to convert the utterance to an expression of savage pity for Angelo. But if this speaks to Angelo's condition it must also speak to the Duke's, and if it registers vindictiveness toward Angelo one may also hear in it an uncanny note of self-reproof, the

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bitter acknowledgment of the unjust uses to which the Duke has put what Angelo will soon call his "power divine" (5.1.367). The "Friar" insists that the Duke "should hear me speak;' for he knows the Duke's torch set fire to the throne on which he placed Angelo. "The Duke's unjust" and should suffer for Angelo's pain: although this phrase isn't uttered until six lines later, when the "Friar" further incenses his interlocutors by calling the Duke unjust because he let Angelo preside over Isabella's "trial" (298-301), the accusation only extends theprevious acknowledgment of complicity. Yet even if one grants that the "Friar" alludes to the injustice-and pain-of the burning throne's true occupant, the allusion is safely concealed behind a flamboyantly cryptic figure. In the heat of the moment Escalus can ignore or miss it as he intercepts the allusion with "The Duke's in us" (293). 104 But this assertion escapes his control, for it links up with the allusion to reiterate the identity of the Duke with the devil. The diabolical figure, as I noted, is conspicuously cryptic: it suggests something else going on behind the interlocutory surface and it solicits interpretation. What emerges is the possibility of an inner polemic, a psychomachian split within Vincentia between the "Friar" and the Duke. After he makes the Duke orchestrate an attack on the "Friar" as a scheming troublemaker, he has the "Friar" caustically glance at an association between the burning throne and the injustice of its absent tenant toward both the lieu-tenant and Isabella. It is easy to read back from the play's happy ending and restrict one's focus to the Duke's amusing and high-spirited histrionics, his energetic investment in political theater, or theatrical politics. The Duke has to terminate his masquerade and reveal himself sooner or later, and this is the time and the way in which he chooses to do it. But of course he could have done it any number of ways, so why this way? Why discredit the "Friar" and then -after showing the "Friar" at his worst- get himself unmasked in an awkward and embarrassing manner? The Duke may be asking for trouble simply so as to flaunt his ability to get out of it and to display his "power divine." But the continuation of his final performance as "Friar" suggests otherwise. In another strange moment, some aspects of which I discussed on pp. 35859 above, the "Friar" broadly hints at his identity with the Duke, even as he proclaims himself an outsider free of the Duke's jurisdiction: Be not so hot: the Duke Dare no more stretch this finger of mine than he Dare rack his own. His subject am I not, Nor here provincial. My business in this state Made me a looker-on here in Vienna,

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40!

Where I have seen corruption boil and bubble Till it o'errun the stew: laws for all faults, But faults so countenanc'd that the strong statutes Stand like forfeits in a barber's shop, As much in mock as mark. (5.I.3II-2o)

This has the force of a sardonic private joke, for it is as close as the Duke comes to echoing the confession he made to Friar Thomas in 1.3, only this time his rhetoric (responding perhaps to his encounters in 3.2) is harsher and more critical. Part of its sharpness as self-critique owes to the way the hint of identity and the echo of r. 3 send up the fiction that the speaker is an outsider, a mere looker-on, and thus mock the Duke's desire to use the disguise to insulate himself from and elevate himself above the corruption. This hidden colloquy is the "Friar's" most bitter comment on the DukeVincentio's on himself-both for his complicity in the corruption and for his abuse of holy orders to disown complicity. The private joke continues when the Duke protests to the chivvying Lucio that "I love the Duke as I love myself" (339). Even as he all but gives himself away and goads his interlocutors into laying hands on him, he raises the question implicit in the preceding colloquy: Does Vincentio love himself as Duke any more than he loves himself as "Friar"? At this moment, just before the "Friar" disappears into the Duke, the sense of self-dislike flashes briefly to the surface. The Duke's behavior in actualizing this scenario of self-exposure makes for uproarious theater, but, as I have been trying to show, it is a mistake to re·ad it only in a politico-histrionic framework or to imagine that Vincentio is merely entertaining himself with displays of mock anger directed by the "Friar" and the Duke toward each other. Within the context of the series of calculated practices stretching from the assay of Angelo through the series of dirty tricks to this instigated self-exposure, the anger has the ring of selfcontempt. Thus I take the mutual accusations of "Friar" and Duke as definitive moments in which self-exculpation collapses into self-inculpation, the moments that signal the failure of the confessorial disguise as a medium of self-exculpation.105 The Duke mobilizes opinion against the "Friar" in order to get him exposed not only as an intriguer but also as the Duke. Once respected, now suspected, everything the "Friar" has done becomes assimilable and chargeable to the Duke. The motivational scenario suggested by an act that so combines rejection with assimilation is complex. Vincentio seems to find it necessary to discredit this brotherly or fatherly ghost before discarding him. Is it because the Duke enjoys playing the "Friar'' too much-enjoys·the power, the intrigue, the unfair advantages of the ecclesiastical voyeur? The problem, as we've seen, is that during the remainder

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of act 5 his addiction to his holy habit persists: he seems loath to give up some of the dubious practices enabled by the disguise he has discarded. 106 Because this reluctance continues in the shadow of the crisis I have just explored, it takes on a darker tone: the vibrations of self-contempt resonate in the displaced form of the anger the Duke directs toward others not only in his initial accusations and sentences but also in the magnanimous if ungentle rain of earthly and "heavenly comforts" he pours on those whom the "Friar's" practices installed in temporary "despair." This rain of mercy is ungentle in part because it gives him permission temporarily to tighten the screws of terror or hopelessness before dispensing pardons: in addition to bullying Angelo and Isabella he terrorizes Mariana (5.L4I6-53). It is as if he takes perverse pleasure in showing himself how Bad he can be, as if this aggressive and angry game is made possible-or, more forcefully, made safe-by the apt remissions he has waiting in the wings and which, presumably, will enable him at the last moment to forgive himself and break his liens to the burning throne. But does he believe that? Or does he know that pardon, in the words of Escalus, is "the nurse of second woe" (2.1.282)? Do sinners possess the "power divine" to forgive themselves? Does the Duke acknowledge any other "god" in Vienna from whom he can implore justice or mercy, retribution or forgiveness, and who will pardon him as he has pardoned everyone else? "I pardon him as God shall pardon me": there is a vague but possibly illuminating similarity between the Duke's moral problem and the issues raised in the Aumerle pardon scene in Richard II, from which I quote this statement and which I discuss elsewhere in this volume. Commenting on Bolingbroke's utterance, I note that the performative "I pardon him" is disturbed by its qualifier in a manner that affords a glimpse of what the conspiracy scene conspicuously excludes and of the distance between his own problem with forgiveness and the use of pardon as a political commodity by which the donor forges alliances and the donee saves his skin. The amused contempt playing over his reference to "The Beggar and the King" indifferently embraces the style of political theater he is trapped in, the moral poverty of the kind of pardon he is empowered to give, and the irony of his receiving that power only by wounding himself with a much deeper version of the need for pardon he can so quickly satisfy. . . . "I pardon him as God shall pardon me" provides the peephole that refocuses the conspiracy scene as an anamorphic distortion of "things [that] would hurt me more." 107

Without pressing too hard on the analogy-the tonal differences are obvious and important- I submit that the zero-sum relation between the strate-

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gic and political pardon Bolingbroke as ruler is empowered to give and the desire to be forgiven his empowerment via usurpation can only intensify, and perhaps baffle, provides a structural model of the Duke's dilemma. 108 But the difference between Bolingbroke and the Duke, a difference that complicates the latter's dilemma, may be expressed by reversing and inverting Bolingbroke's statement: "May God not pardon me as I have pardoned them." For if he knows his pardons are spurious and have been cooked up in advance to give him the latitude to be Bad, if he but faintly suspects himself of playing, "like an angry ape I ... such fantastic tricks before high heaven I As makes the angels weep," what kind of pardon does he think he deserves from God? When the Duke sentences Angelo to death at 5-L40I-I4 he says it is because he finds him "criminal in double violation I Of sacred chastity and of promise-breach" .(402-3). But what does criminal denote here? The Duke has already foiled both attempted violations, and the failure of Angelo's attempt on Isabella has already been made public by Mariana. Thus only Angelo's "promise-breach" in regard to Claudio is included a few lines later in the sentence that contains the play's titular phrase. Yet the Duke knows he is lying. Is this all for effect? Do we hear it in strictly theatrical terms as part of the buildup toward the happy ending? What does the Duke know, what does he tell himself, what does he want to, or try to, hear? Concerning both charges, he knows that if there is criminality it inheres in Angelo's manifested but foiled desires and "salt imagination" (399), since no legally punishable act has been committed. If everyone else knows this holds for the attempted violation of Isabella's chastity, they will interpret criminal in moral as well as legal terms, and they will reinforce the Duke's commitment to the view that Angelo is a wicked, wicked man who deserves at the very least to be humiliated and shamed and to spend a few minutes worrying about decapitation. For the Duke to produce a consensus on that issue and thus "prove" Angelo inherently wicked and morally depraved is to make it easier to persuade himself that since his initial suspicion (r.3.50-54) now appears to have been correct he can justify his assay of Angelo. If giving Angelo license to pluck justice by the nose and commit "dark deeds" is itself a dark deed, it has turned out for the best: to foil and then pardon Angelo is to dissociate himself from his own small if devious share in the "bringingsforth" of Angelo's perfidious nature. And by preventing him from doing harm to anyone but himself, the Duke becomes the savior of the city, its moral and judicial arbiter, the holy bearer of heaven's sword and torch, the font of mercy. This at any rate is the scenario charactered by his behavior, and I imagine it is what the Duke wants to tell himself. If he found it cred-

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ible, he might be expected to dispense his pardons and remissions in a less angry. or vengeful tone. But of course he knows he is lying. Nor does it help that he knows someone else knows he is lying and quietly but firmly lets him know she knows in a manner that all but accuses him of bad faith. In her final speech Isabella argues that although her brother deserved to die, clemency should be granted to Angelo in part because ''A due sincerity govern'd his deeds I Till he did look on me" but chiefly because "His act did not o'ertake hisbad intent" (5.1.444-45, 449). Here she does exactly what the Duke fails to do, acknowledging some responsibility for leading Angelo astray-though when she alludes to the reason he was thwarted, the bed trick, her words quietly suggest that she has made up for her innocent role as his misleader. In this case, at least, Isabella distinguishes sin from crime: Angelo's case is differentiated from Claudio's, and his pardon requested, on strict legal or secular grounds. In acts 2 and 3, both her appeal to Angelo and her condemnation of Claudio are founded on arguments that subordinate the obligation of the judge and the specific criminality of the malefactor's act to their potential and actual sinfulness, respectively. The departure from this view in 5.1 is rendered all the more significant by the contrast, for it emphasizes her resistance to the Duke, who had just treated Angelo's foiled "bad intent" as a punishable act in a conflation of moral and legal judgments that enables him to assert his religious, ethical, and political authority-and superiority-over Angelo. Isabella's reference to Angelo's "due sincerity" becomes loaded when one listens to it with the Duke's ears, and her utterance as a whole amounts to a challenge flung at the Duke and concluded with what is in effect an explanation- an aggressive explanation- of her subsequent silence.109 In this final speech, however, Isabella misrecognizes her effect on Angelo in a manner that raises some basic questions about a topic I haven't yet confronted: the play's representation of a more general culture of misrecognition produced by transgressive relations between the discourses of sexuality and Christianity. For she is only partly correct to assume (as do most modern commentators) that Angelo was tempted by an object of scopic desire ("Till he did look on me"). What Angelo says is, "What, do I love her, I That I desire to hear her speak again? I And feast upon her eyes" (2.2.177-79). The seductive effect of her speech on him in 2.2 and 2.4 is so conspicuous that although her scopic hypothesis may be partly correct, it seriously distorts the interaction between them portrayed in those scenes. It is primarily her speech that the "cunning enemy" baits his hook with (2.2.180-81), according to Angelo: "She speaks, and 'tis such sense I That my sense breeds with it" (142-43); so even when Isabella does no more

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than use a polite valedictory formula he hears a threat in it: "Heaven keep your honor safe" and "Save your honor." ''Amen," he mutters to the first, and "From thee" to the second (158-59 and 162). This is a problem Isabella seems to have anticipated from the start. We first hear her expressing a wish that "a more strict restraint/ Upon the sisters stood, the votarists of Saint Clare" (1.4.4-5). Immediately after, when Lucio is announced, the Nun reminds her that When you have vow'd, you must not speak with men But in the presence of the prioress; Then, if you speak, you must not show your face; Or if you show your face, you must not speak. (r.4.I0-13)

Perhaps if she desires stricter restraint than this it indicates less a fear of self-betrayal than a fear that any verbal intercourse with men is likely to be perilous and escape her control. I make this suggestion to qualify if not to counter the prevailing view, which, in Bradshaw's paraphrase, is that both Angelo and Isabella "show a fear of sex that becomes denaturing"; their "uncompromising ... commitment to their respective religious and secular ethical systems" is "a form of cowardice" that reveals them to be "frightened of life." 110 That may be, but Isabella's performance also shows she and Angelo have something else to be afraid of. In trying to make Angelo bend the law-trying to corrupt a judge-she seduces him with "bribes" and arguments drawn from Christian discourse (see 2.2.64-66, 73-79, and especially 135-56); "exploitation" of her religious system better describes this than "uncompromising ... commitment" to it. It isn't only that she deploys the judicial logic of the Sermon of the Mount ("Judge not, that ye be judged") to remind Angelo he may be as lustful as Claudio (2.2.64-66, 75-79, 137-42).111 It is also that the mere entry into this discourse of "a very virtuous maid ... to be shortly of a sisterhood" (2.2.20-21, the Provost's introductory words to Angelo) sexualizes it to her disadvantage. In her encounter with Angelo sexual arousal is an effect of a series of double entendres that place Isabella in the same position relative to her language that the malapropist Elbow is to his. The tone of the encounter was established, well before it began, in 1.2 when Claudio described to Lucio Isabella's "prone and speechless dialect" and the "prosperous art" with which she can "play with reason and discourse" (173-75). Lucio's hyperbolic praise of her heavenly state in 1.4 (31-37) is so careful, and so unlike his badinage in 1.2, that the conspicuous exclusion of the kind of raillery men aim at nuns and virgins lends it an edge. Isabella remarks it: "You do· blaspheme the good, in mocking me" (1.4.38). But she is mocked less by Lucio than by

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the compromising conditions of her reluctant return to a discourse of gender and sexuality dominated by male fears and desires. As Juliet Stevenson observes in her wonderful commentary on the role she played at Stratford in 1983, Isabella opens with an argument she knows is weak (Angelo points it out and she acknowledges it at 2.4.II4-20), and prefaces it not by "pleading for Claudio's life" but by "positioning herself with respect to that word 'vice' ['There is a vice that most I do abhor'], as if to establish her credentials." But, Stevenson speculates, after Isabella has begun "moving in on him" and "aligning him with the actual offender," perhaps her phrase "You would have slipped like him" (2.2.65) "triggers in him the capacity to slip." Stevenson is struck by the eroticism of their language: "She and Angelo have been copulating across the verse ever since they first met." 112 To put it in a slightly different way, what Claudio anticipates with his salacious innuendo at 1.2.170-76 and Angelo responds to in 2.2 is that Isabella has a way of performing her Goodness that unavoidably makes her "talk dirty." She of course means something else when she says, "To. have what we would have, we speak not what we mean" (2.4.n8), but Angelo is moved by the speechless dialect lurking in her language, and he tries to lay it bare: "I do arrest your words" (133); "Lay by all nicety and prolixious blushes I That banish what they sue for" and yield "up thy body to my will" (161-63), a demand that sadistically echoes the perversely erotic figure of masochistic desire with which Isabella asserts that she would never "yield I My body up to shame" (103-4). 113 Isabella's desire of stricter conventual restraints thus seems to be more a fear of sexuality produced in discourse than a fear of sexuality per se. It is as if to speak and disclose oneself to men is to activate and be threatened by the sexuality that insidiously hides in language and is conveyed by its conspicuous exclusion from Christian discourse. And indeed, it seems to be her discourse of virtue that seduces Angelo, the "sense" of sensuality appealing to him from within the "sense" of her rational, occasionally casuistic, persuasions.114 "Never could strumpet I With all her double vigor, art and nature, I ... stir my temper" as Isabella does (2.2.183-85). He is stirred by a duplicity of speech that produces her sexuality as an unintended effect of her Christian rhetoric even as her insinuations about his "natural guiltiness" make him aware that he is the secret agent hiding in her language and helping it breed sex. By the end of 2.2, however, his sexual excitement has already become the occasion for something else: he is aroused by the prospect of Being Bad, committing sin, projecting himself down the road to damnation and retribution. Alternately raging at Isabella and himself, seeking revenge on both, he enters a discursive vortex that whirls him

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through surges littered with floating fragments of the sinner's, villain's, and victim/revenger's arguments. In the episode that spans 2.2 and 2.4 the pressure imposed on the speakers by Christian morality diverges in two directions: toward justified fear of and susceptibility to the seductiveness the aspiring nun's discourse only intensifies by putting it under erasure, and toward the seductiveness of finding oneself seduced, the self-flagellating pleasure in Being Bad and seeking the torment of the burning throne. What links these two emphases together is that Angelo finds Isabella most seductive when she disingenuously offers heavenly bribes and cites his potential brotherhood in sin to Claudio as a reason for showing mercy. In doing this she deploys Christian ideology in a de facto conspiracy aimed at inveigling Angelo to violate his commitment to uphold the law. Behind Isabella's part in the conspiracy are Claudio and Lucio; behind Angelo's is the Duke. Behind Isabella's hypothetical "Ifin your heart you're no better than Claudio" is the probative force of the others' assay, "Let's see if we can reduce-ifisabella can seduce -Angelo and bring him down to Claudio's level." When the situation is looked at in this way I think it becomes clear that the ethical thematics of the play is bifurcated: the dominant accent falls on the question of disordered sexuality, the recessive accent on disorders of bad faith and the sinner's discourse. Both the law and the Duke focus on the first in such a way as to obfuscate its relation to the second. When attention is concentrated on the Duke, the recessive accent is. made dominant and the other accent assumes the function of a scapegoat, a screen, a site of strategic displacement. When attention is concentrated on the law, however, the character of this relationship between the two accents remains obscure, in part because there is no consensus among commentators as to the scope and provisions of the laws the Duke has let slip and Angelo is expected to enforce. "We have strict statutes and most biting laws" in Vienna, states the Duke, and although he admits they are "The needful bits and curbs to headstrong weeds," they are apparently so rigorous that he has been loath to enforce them (1.3.19-20). Just what are those laws? Two are mentioned: (r) Claudio is to be executed "for getting Madam Julietta with child"; the two Gentlemen, hearing this, speak as if they already know something about it and acknowledge that it agrees "with the proclamation" (1.2.6667, 71-74); Lucio mentions "the hideous law" and notes that Angelo "hath pick'd out an act/ Under whose sense" Claudio may be executed, and "follows close the rigor of the statute/ To make him an example" (1.4.63-68). (2) Pompey informs Mistress Overdone of "the proclamation" that ''All houses in the suburbs of Vienna must be plucked down"; Escalus tells

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Pompey the law will not allow him to continue in his trade as a bawd, and he and Mistress Overdone are eventually remanded to prison.115 The target of the first statute is less clear than that of the second. These two laws address what Bradshaw calls the Duke's Claudio-problem and Viennaproblem respectively. In a carefully argued discussion, he dissents from the standard opinion that what the first law punishes with death is fornication; rather, he claims, it is aimed not at fornication per se but at "deadbeat dads" or, in his words, "fathers who have shown no intention of legitimizing and maintaining their offspring" (215).116 But he also states, taking the second law into account, that the first is represented as "only one part of a menacingjudicial package" intended to implement "a far more comprehensive attempt to enforce morality by law" (214). Bradshaw supplies convincing evidence that the distinction he makes with respect to the first law is operative in the play-that Claudio's "legal offence presupposed, but does not consist in, fornication" (215). 117 All the more significant, then, that although the play serves up the evidence and allows us to register it, the distinction is nevertheless kept in the background: the rhetorical and dramatic emphases of the play fall on lust, promiscuity, whoring and pimping, pleasure and disgust, and, as the second law indicates, the general policing of morality and desire. In Bradshaw's interpretation the first law addresses the specific social problem of unwanted children. But the whole ''judicial package" as well as the play's language direct attention more to sinful behavior than to socially irresponsible behavior as such. Thus inasmuch as Bradshaw's heterodox interpretation of the first law is validated by the evidence he cites, it identifies a norm, a standard of justice, that is conspicuously recessive, and provides a measure of the extent to which those involved in administering justice in Vienna ignore that pragmatic standard and treat the statute. as if it were a "law which makes fornication a capital offence" -a law which, Bradshaw adds, "could be justified only by the religious extremist's argument that an absolute sin should be treated as a capital crime" (215). He concedes that Isabella and Angelo are both "disposed . . . to condemn fornication per se " and that although the Provost dutifully enforces the law and "tells the Duke that Claudio is to be executed for having 'got' a child, we do also hear him ruefully reflecting that 'all Ages smack of this vice, and he j To die for't' (2.2.5-6), and here 'vice' seems to refer to illicit sex" (213). To this we may add that the Claudio-problem singled out by Angelo is anomalous: as committed lovers who are all but married, Claudio and Juliet are exceptions to the misrule the second law is intended to rectify. His explanation to Lucio makes it clear that although he thinks he and Juliet have

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done something furtive and foolish, they are guilty of bad planning rather than of promiscuous or criminal behavior- they propagated a child before they got around to the "propagation of a dower" (r.2.136-44). The circumstantial and motivational specificity that distinguishes Claudio's single violation from the organized and recurrent disorder of Vienna's stews lends credence to his and Lucio's suspicion that Angelo is arbitrarily making an example of him. From the pragmatic standpoint, Angelo begins by aiming the law at a less than exemplary or appropriate target. And yet oddly enough Claudio doesn't entirely see it that way. When Lucio asks him if his offense is lechery he responds, as if in hesitant or perplexed acknowledgment, "Call it so" (r.2.129), before going on to his explanation. The response follows a statement in which he articulates the common source of the two lecheries, his and Vienna's, and seems to view his offense as an example of the general immorality the Duke will castigate in I. 3 -and thus as a violation of the second law: he tells Lucio his restraint comes From too much liberty, . . . Liberty As surfeit, is the father of much fast; 118 So every scope by the immoderate use Turns to restraint. Our natures do pursue, Like rats that ravin down their proper bane, A thirsty evil; and when we drink, we die. (1.2.n7-22)

This image of self-destructive natural appetite is a key to the play's moral problematic. Claudio expresses a view in which evil and disorder spring from the weaknesses of the unpoliced body. Shortly after Isabella glances at this view in her statement that Claudio "hath fall'n by prompture of the blood" (2.4.177), the Duke elaborates on it in the sermonin which he tries to prepare Claudio for death. The arguments he musters repeat traditional denigrations of the body, a discourse of misosoma that centers on the subjection of spirit and life to breath and the flesh, to an impure and unstable mixture of elements "Servile to all the skyey influences," and "all th'accommodations" of which ''Are nurs'd by baseness" (3.!.9, 14-15).119 I call the discourse of misosoma the key to the play's problematic because it is the form given the fundamental system of misrecognition that supports the Duke's program of self-exculpation. It is a system in which questions of morality are concentrated not merely on issues of desire and pleasure, lechery and promiscuity, and the dangers (social, political, physical) of disordered sexuality, but on the general fear of entrapment in an organism determined less by its metabolic than its catabolic processes; entrapment in or by a body of shame traditionally characterized in terms of the negative

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values associated with woman as nature, mother or nurse, "leaky vessel," and whore. 120 The locus of this discursive system is a network of interrelated tropes threaded through the language of different speakers. Before tracking them, I should note. that their implications are fully discussed in Gail Kern Paster's The Body Embarrassed, on which I rely for my understanding of the system. Paster mentions Measure for Measure only twice, but hers is not a book about Shakespeare's plays; her interest "lies in how all the texts of the early modern body"- dramatic texts among others- "inscribe the ideological effect of humoralism ... on the changing canons of bodily propriety." 121 My interest here, by contrast, is in one particular play's representation and critique of an ethic that identifies immorality and sin with the embarrassments of the humoral body and, in so doing, displaces attention from guilt to shame. One symptom of the gendered skew of somatophobia is the frequent cultural recourse to fantasies of male parthenogenesis. In r.r, Angelo's bond to the Duke is established in terms of a figure that conflates coinage with procreation: "What figure of us, think you, he will bear?" (r6). "For you must know," he continues to Escalus, we have with special soul Elected him our absence to supply; Lent him our terror, drest him with our love, And given his deputation all the organs Of our own power. (!.1.17-20)

Robert Watson finds this diction "relentlessly suggestive" of the Duke's intention to fashion ''Angelo into a son and heir," and notes that Angelo "expresses his anxiety about having 'so great a figure ... stamp'd upon' him (r.I.49-50)." Watson assimilates the Duke's "implicit fantasy of parthenogenesis" to "the struggle of Shakespeare's tragically misguided men ... against their own mortality," and it is in the light of this theme that he explores Measure for Measure's critique of "the Duke's immortality strategy": The Duke's purpose ... will be served only to the extent that Angelo stumbles in the footsteps of his paternalistic patron. First, the Duke must show his citizens the dangers of provoking excessive restraint by their false equation of life with mere sensual indulgence. Second, he must prove that even an apparently pure embodiment of his moral law makes a very poor substitute for the Duke's own wit and kindness, for the individual humanity that shines redeemingly even through his disguise. The Duke thus entangles himself in a contradiction: trying to prove to his citizens that replacing oneself procreatively is more iii?-portant than indulging selfish desires, yet aspiring to do so in a way that will

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prove him irreplaceable .... Angelo's failure as a dynastic heir, precisely by the way it bolsters the Duke's claim to lasting political glory, ruins the Duke's figurative claim to procreative survival.1 22

Although Watson's thematic focus is on immortality and mortality, whereas mine is on immorality and morality, I have obviously profited from his trenchant account of the Duke's dilemma and would make only two changes in his formulation of the filial and other figures that relate Angelo to the Duke. First, inasmuch as male parthenogenesis is involved, this fantasywhether· implemented in "primitive" initiation rituals and cosmologies or described in such loci classici as the speech Plato has Socrates pretend he heard from Diotima in the Symposium-is always compensatory, appropriative, and defensive. It expresses the desire of males both to escape from and to alienate the sexual, procreative, and nurturant powers of woman and the constraints of the domestic group in which those powers are organized and amplified. The dream of stamping out filial replicas undistorted by maternal interference is not only misogynist or matrophobic and (as Watson suggests) misopaedic but also antierotic. In the Duke's case, the desire to filiate Angelo should be associated with his aversion to "the dribbling dart of love" for which the transfer of his "organs/ Of ... ·power" to his replacement will be a remedy, while the filiation itself exemplifies the Platonic understanding of safe sex as sublimation. The sex is rendered even safer by conflating images of procreation with images of coinage, which displace creative power from the organs of the Duke's body natural to those of his body politic. Second, when the Duke suggests that Angelo will be the bearer of his image, he taps into two different figural themes: the bearer is the metal in the coinage figure (r.r.48), but in the procreation figure the bearer can't be the son; he must be the womb or mother. The Duke will impregnate him and he will bear-what? Bradshaw has conveniently collected Angelo's references to their offspring: ''Angelo considers what his sense 'breeds' (2.2.143) and is horrified by the 'strong and swelling evil of my conception' (2.3.6-7); he fears that his own crime 'unshapes me' and 'makes me unpregnant' (4.4.18), while trying to assure himself that his authority still 'bears credent bulk'" (217), as if he hasn't yet given birth to the crime, or could pretend that he hadn't. 123 This tropological series binds together the Duke and Angelo in what is actually a double relation: according to the imagery of I.I.I7-20, the relation is quasi-filial- Angelo will "supply" the Duke's absence and "the organs" of the Duke's power will be formally con-

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ferred on the replacement; but according to Angelo's imagery the relation is quasi-sexuaP 24 The modulation of the first into the second responds to the Duke's revelation at the end of 1.3 that his election of Angelo is in part driven by the curiositas of the assayer, for at this p~int the Duke becomes Angelo's tempter or seducer as well as his "father": he becomes the "father" of Angelo's evil. Of course, it couldn't have happened without Isabella, the proximate cause of Angelo's downfall. But after we have heard Claudio beg Lucio to persuade her to "assay" Angelo with her "prone and speechless dialect" (!.2.171-73) and Lucio obediently urge her to '~ssay the power you have" (1.4.76), we become aware of a homosocial network in which Isabella is made the organ by which they hope to persuade/seduce Angelo, and the network widens in 3. I to include the prime assayer, the Duke, who makes her the organ of his power of entrapment. In the preposterous logic of the future anterior, it may be said that when Angelo "gives birth to" his evil he will have been "screwed" by the Duke. But from the moment Angelo begins in fascinated disgust to represent his degraded passion to himself, the tropological series takes another turn: he depicts the ·desire to violate and bewhore the chaste virgin as a desire to "raze the sanctuary" and reduce it to a privy (2.2.170-72). Fornication is desecration, and in this respect the image applies to what he is doing to himself as well as to her, but beyond that the image fuses the spilling of seed with defecation or urination and, more generally, with the purging of corrupt bodily humors. 125 Angelo and Isabella extend the association in 2.4 to filth, disease, and pollution (54-55, 183-84), and also to pregnancy, illicit procreation, and counterfeiting (6-7, 42-49, 126-29). The Duke picks up the thread in his sermon to Claudio, describing children"thine own bowels which do call thee sire" -as "The mere effusion of thy proper loins;' and further adulterating the image by running "effusion" into "the gout, the serpigo, and the rheum" cursed by the bowels "For ending thee no sooner" (3.1.29-32). 126 Several comments by Lucio in 3.2 and 4.3 conflate intercourse with urination or treat it as the necessary outcome of food and drink (3.2.97-99, ros-S, 173 and 4·3.151-53). 127 Finally, this excremental contamination of copulative, procreative, and filiative functions and relations may suggest one set of reasons for the names Pompey Bum and Abhorson, the first denoting the "means," the organ, or, in modern parlance, the "infrastructure" by which the Duke's lenity is translated into institutionalized lechery, the second denoting the executioner who "is evidently an abhorred whoreson. Promiscuity ... appears to generate its own punishment; the execution~r has been created by the fornicator.... Both fornication and its extreme repression are wastrel expenditures of the bodies

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natural and politic." 128 This may remind us that Lucio fathered an "abhorred whoreson" and that such unwanted children may have the nuisance value of excreta and the other necessary accidents- disease, for example, or bad conscience-that attend and befoul the pursuit of bodily pleasure. If promiscuity "appears to generate its own punishment" either as the executioner or as disease or as an abhorred whoreson, perhaps this appearance is itself a consequence of the strange dislocations that skew the play's language. For in the first place, as Watson's little allegory suggests, the legal caveat "Crime doesn't pay" is confused with the moral caveat, "Sin doesn't pay," and what this i~dicates is a process of systematic self-victimization viewed from the standpoint ofthe critics ofthe process, a standpoint similar to the one that today blames AIDS on the sins of its victims; and in the play, as we have seen, this is essentially the position the Duke takes in displacing responsibility for Vienna's corruption from his "permissive pass" to "flaming youth" and the bawd's "filthy vice." In the second place, this displacement is echoed and doubled by the network of tropes that express political power, social relations, and personal desire in figures of a body often embarrassed by its transgressive and unruly functions. If crime is conBated with sin and sin is reduced to unregulated sexual desire and whatever other desires are instrumental to its fulfillment, then Vienna's moral corruption can easily be identified with the immediate causes of illicit sex, disease, and unwanted children. To resort to a traditional classification, this produces a moral economy that targets sins of weakness rather than sins of malice, sins of the flesh rather than those of the spirit .. Lechery is the deadliest sin, abstention the saving virtue. Precisely because they have been allowed to flourish, the body's desires, needs, functions, and products become the source of evil, the law's chief target, morality's scapegoat. Being good in Vienna means avoiding sex and rising above the temptations of the body, which, through the Duke's leniency, have become the temptations of the body politic; as Angelo and Isabella try to distance themselves from the former, so the Duke tries to distance himself from the latter. 129 From the standpoint of textual analysis I have been pursuing, this moral economy is a conspicuous misdirection. For the licensed folly of Vienna's sex trade is productive not only of disease and unwanted children but also of bad conscience in the ruler. The story of the Duke and Angelo is the story of their opposed responses to misautia and autophobia. But in the story of their relation to the Vienna-problem, misautia and autophobia are displaced into misosoma and somatophobia. This Platonico-Puritan displacement adds another wrinkle to the often-noted conflict of value systems encoded in the play's title,

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the rift between the principles of retributive earthly justice and those of the Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon is indeed more concerned with the inner state of an agent than with the effects and consequences of an action: it internalizes external acts, and those Mosaic ordinances which governed external acts. As Jesus warns ... , the God who sees to the bottom of the heart may regard lustful intent as adultery, and anger as murder: in that case we are all, to a terrifying degree, sinners, although we are plainly not all criminalsY 0

But sinners in what respect? Everyone in the play worries about the problem and policing of illicit sex, and all the major speakers (though they aren't consistent and are at times self-contradictory on the point) talk as if "illicit" means not only "illegal" but also "sinful." The play, however, uses this worry as the material with which it worries about something else. In her tough-minded analysis of the play, Harriett Hawkins picks out "a major moral and structural conundrum; that is, .how not to condone premarital sex in general and, simultaneously, justify (a) the bed-trick and (b) the pardon of Angelo" (23). Illustrating the inconsistencies involved, she notes "that even the most venial act of illicit sex involves guilt and shame on the part of Julietta and Claudio alike," the play's only true lovers (23), and that although "Julietta's sexual complicity (her act of love) is ... morally held against her ... the identical act ... is, in the case of Mariana, proclaimed to be 'no sin' at all" (17). What, Hawkins wonders, "is therelationship between sex and sin and vice and virtue in Measure for Measure? Which of its characters should. be condemned as malefactors, or seen as more sinned against than sinning or more to be pitied than censured?" (24). Surveying the "tangle of intertwined, yet mutually contradictory interpretations of the play" (16) she finds not only in the tradition of commentary but also in the play itself, she concludes that it can best be explained as an effect of the deep structure of polarized ambiguity (62-65) that mandates incompatible responses from both its characters and its critics (88), that drives "the dramatic forces and counter-forces involved in ... the confrontations between Isabella, Angelo and Claudio" (127), and that frames the Duke in a shifting interplay of diametrically opposed perspectives (51-62). The power and acuity of this integrated rationalization of disintegrative phenomena is undeniable, and I don't wish to dispute it so much as take advantage of it as the background of a different interpretation focused more narrowly on the question Hawkins poses as to "the relationship between sex and sin." The general thesis of polarized ambiguity partly explains but partly etiolates the specific thesis of polarized ambiguity in· self-representation I have been trying to develop, namely, the ambiguity that polarizes the performance of the sinner's discourse into strategies of self-exculpation and

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self-inculpation. In this thesis, the titular paradoxes and problems centered on Christian ideas of justice, mercy, self-examination, and the criminality of sinful intentions are complicated by the tension between the explicit reduction of sin to illicit sex and the implicit critique of the reduction as itself an act of moral evasion and bad faith. I think it significant that the only feature of the play Hawkins identifies as one-sided, unmarked by polarized ambiguity, is the representation of the fallen condition of Vienna as an index to the "profoundly ambivalent" character of ducal and divine power: [The] original state of things in Vienna is temporally associated with the world's oldest profession, even as it is metaphysically associated with Original Sin, and the sexual licence reigning in the city is never unequivocally portrayed as a positively anarchic, carnivalesque freedom from repression and restraint. It is negatively portrayed in terms of a sleazy, commercial "trade," involving pimps and madams and brothels and informers and pay-offs, and described as if it were a venereal disease infecting the whole of society. (68-69)

This original state is both product and object of the Duke's voyeuristic fascination in the sins of others. In Christian discourse his own sinful pleasure has a name: curiositas, or "concupiscence of the eyes" -not, however, the scopic pleasure described as the "looking on a woman [thatJ is directed to lust" but the pleasure of "sightseeing" that consists "in the discovery and dispraise of our neighbor's faults." 131 What the Duke represents to the Friar in r. 3 as a regime of benign if culpable neglect, and what he proposes as a solution to the problems it has caused, is marked by his own language in the scene and by his subsequent behavior as effects of curiositas. His worry about sexual promiscuity is the other side of his interest in it, an interest writ large in his assay of Angelo, and an interest ultimately in the service of his desire to ensconce himself in the seeming knowledge of a "complete bosom" that will set him above and apart from the subjects who are unruly because, as he admits, they are unruled. Thus, in the economy of self-representation the culpability the Duke admits to is the price he pays for keeping himself in the dark while he passively or actively provides opportunities for his subjects to make spectacles of themselves, and diminish themselves, by pursuing "filthy vice." When we organize our interpretation of the play around the question .of the Duke it becomes evident that speech and discourse are not about sexuality, but rather sexuality and the sins associated with it are about discourses, the discursive evasions that mark the variants of the sinner's discourse in the interplay of self-inculpation and -exculpation. My argument in this essay has been that if we read the Duke's language and behavior primarily as evidence of the vicissitudes of reflexive self-representation,

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we discover the signs of a peculiarly morbid version of the discourse, one that reveals its inculpatory force chiefly through the speaker's efforts to evade it. After the Duke acknowledges himself accountable for disorder in Vienna he tries to distance himself from both his express knowledge and the effects of his leniency. After he hints to the Friar that his election of Angelo was partly motivated by the desire to put his seeming virtue to the test, he acts as if this were not the case; he in effect disowns knowledge of his complicity even as he masterminds the dirty tricks that make it hard to disown, since they continue the project of assaying and entrapping Angelo. The outlandishness of his discourse of self-exculpation, the measure of the anxiety against which he defends, is expressed by his decision to ensconce himself in imaginary holy orders. But the divided structure of that rolespiritual advisor vs. intriguer-reflects and reinforces the conflict revealed in r. 3 between the desire to clean up Vienna and the desire to probe for suspected flaws in Angelo. The shift of the Duke's attention and energy from the former desire to the latter correlates with the shift from moralizing to machination, and his effort to cloak that shift in the pious rhetoric he uses to persuade Isabella in 3.1 further diminishes the utility of his disguise as a defense against self-inculpation. The psychomachian result of this crisis is registered in the reactions to Lucio that include the three soliloquies in 3.2 and 4.1. In 5.1, after the Duke reclaims his identity by staging the psychomachia, the edge of bitterness flashed by that contentious exercise continues to glint in the rhetoric of remission through which the happy ending is secured. The speaker who is most active in helping the Duke and others identify the "Friar,'' and the one who defrocks the "Friar,'' is his chief heckler and the Duke's admirer, Lucio. Their common antipathy toward the "Friar" draws them together in an unlikely conjunction that the Duke immediately disarticulates ("Thou art the first knave that e'er mad'st a duke," 5.1.354). But from early in the play the Duke has been bound to Lucio by a strange proximity that makes disarticulation both difficult and necessary. In 3.2, for example, after the "Friar" denounces Pompey and orders him to prison, Lucio enters and does exactly the same thing. Although the Duke's denunciation is in high iambic style and Lucio's is a prosy fusillade, a staccato of jeering rhetorical questions (3.2.43-50), and although the listening Duke's comment on the diatribe is a critical aside that lumps Lucio together with Pompey ("Still thus, and thus; still worse!" 51), the two denunciations are equally contemptuous. And when Lucio responds to Pompey's request for bail with "imprison him" (64), he echoes the instruction given by the "Friar" at 3.2.30, "Take him to prison." As Bradshaw notes, in this scene the Duke finds himself morally supported by-

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and coupled to- "an embarrassing ally" (193). Lucio's notable inconsistency in this scene, alternately flouting and siding with authority and the law, makes sense chiefly as a pattern of utterances we hear the disguised Duke overhear and respond to from his de facto position as an eavesdropper. Listening with the Duke's ears gives everything Lucio says or does the force of an encroachment, a violation ofthe Duke's cordon sanitaire. First, the Duke hears what must seem to him to be a distorted echo, therefore a parody, of his aggressive treatment of Pompey, which Lucio was not present to witness. Then we hear Lucio criticize his abdication in terms so accurate that many commentators suspect he has inside knowledge, a suspicion that may be usefully directed toward the Duke: can he fail to hear an allusion to his mendicant masquerade in Lucio's "a mad, fantastical trick ... to steal from the state and usurp the beggary he was never born to" (89-90)? After this, Lucio's misinformed disparagement of Angelo's iciness leads, as if by the logic of rhetorical antithesis, to his misdirected praise of the Duke's "feeling for the sport" (ns-16). In this scene, and also in 4.3 and 5.1, Lucio's slander seems to be aimed chiefly at an auditor he treats as a purse-lipped cleric and probable hypocrite, as if he sees in this "Friar," in any friar, an occupational paradigm or parody of Angelesque precision: a prig who puts his virtue on parade and whose habit sends the generally false message that its "wearer doth rebate and blunt his natural edge/ With profits of the mind, study and fast" (1.4.6o-6r); a potential ally of the deputy, the antitype of the tolerant Duke, an antibody threatening the flow of "use and liberty" (62) through Vienna's venal if not venereal veins. To irritate what he treats as an Angelofigure, a generically self-styled angel or messenger of God, Lucio belabors the "Friar" with equally parodic, and therefore strategically distorted, representations of the Duke. We know the Duke knows better and can correct both sides of the false antithesis. But what picture would this correction yield? The picture of the lenient ruler turned intriguer and factitious friar, the Duke of dark corners at work on his intertwined Angelesque and angelesque agendas, parading his virtue while hunting down or stirring up secret sins and making pious reparation for his complicity in vice. These are the agendas for which he punishes himself by his campaign to get himself unmasked as the "Friar." Lucio's utterances in 3.2 thus emerge as if from an imperfectly baffied echo chamber within the Duke's conscience. But before 3.2 ends, this noisy resonator of his conscience who is also the creature of his permissiveness is discredited in a manner that affects both those relations. After Lucio has turned down Pompey's request for bail and aggravated the "Friar" by

4!8

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slandering the Duke, and after the Duke's bitter aside about Lucio's "Backwounding calumny," Mistress Overdone complains-in the Duke's presence-that she is off to jail because of

Esc.

Lucio's information against me, Mistress Kate Keep-down was with child by him in the Duke's time, he promised her marriage. His child is a year and a quarter old come Philip and Jacob. I have kept it myself; and see how he goes about to abuse me. That fellow is a fellow of much license. Let him be called before us. Away with her to prison. (3.2.192-99)

The news about Lucio is divulged by a beleaguered and possibly unreliable source and is embedded in a fragmentary, rapidly paced segment of action that can easily divert attention from it. Nevertheless, it is news, and the abrupt, rapid-fire battery of Overdone's three accusatory clauses gives dramatic urgency to what Patricia Parker might call an undilated delation, one that will be verified (as we have seen) by Lucio himself in 4.3 and will provide the substance of the Duke's final action against Lucio in 5.!.132 Interpretive retrospect thus reads against the grain of the dramaturgical tempo and confers on Overdone's words, her last in the play, the force of a crucial revelation the importance of which is only increased when we take account of its effect on our assessment of Lucio's words and actions up to this point. First, then, we suddenly learn that he is guilty of the same "crime" as Claudio and of the same "promise-breach" as Angelo, and this double comparison works to his disadvantage, making his betrayal even more perfidious than Angelo's of Mariana. Second, his apparently disinterested service on Claudio's behalf in the earlier scenes now appears motivated by awareness that he is subject to the same penalty and that any success Isabella might have with Angelo could be beneficial to Lucio himself as well as Claudio. Overdone's revelation also brings out the residual self-concern in what was apparently no more than a blustery hyperbole uttered by Lucio earlier in the scene when he contrasted Angelo's rigor to the sympathetic tolerance of the Duke, who, before "he would have hanged a man for the getting a hundred bastards, ... would have paid for the nursing a thousand" (J.2.II3I5).133 Third, although Lucio shows affection for the Duke and his ways, and contempt for the precise deputy, his treatment of Pompey and Overdone contributes to Angelo's cleanup campaign; whether or not he betrays Overdone to the law because he resents her having kept his child, as Bradshaw argues (189), the betrayal may be construed as a kind of preemptive pleabargaining similar in purpose to his support of Claudio and Isabella. There is, however, another line of explanation for Lucio's behavior, different in

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emphasis but not entirely incompatible with the idea that he is chiefly intent on saving his skin. This is that he alternately appeases and flouts authority as if he respects its power but despises its hypocrisy and wishes to test its limits. There are moments in which he seems unable to resist playing the rogue and asking for trouble. 134 To some extent he is a vice figure who exhibits "the functions and attributes of the Lord of Misrule, the Fool, the Buffoon, and the Jester," the qualities Dover Wilson ascribes to Falstaff. 135 Thus, although Lucio may at first be entertaining, his image worsens as 3.2 proceeds; precisely as it does so this deteriorating figure not only echoes the Duke's judgment but flaunts his intimacy with him. The consequences of the Duke's permissiveness begin to look more serious, and with Overdone's revelation Lucio's perfidy explodes in our faces like a firecracker. 136 In our faces, and in the Duke's, for he is onstage at the time; it is news to him as well as to us, and if we listen with the Duke's ears, the most telling phrase is "in the Duke's time." Overdone's words link the Duke to Lucio's foul play, presenting him with a pointed contrast between Angelo's treatment of Claudio and the effects of his own negligence. Conceived and carried off on the Duke's watch, itself a child of the Duke's time, Lucio's escapade reinterprets the meaning of corruption in a way that can only cast a darkening shadow over the Duke's complicity. It exemplifies more than the "loose morals" associated with irresponsible sex: the "much license" Escalus refers to includes the triple betrayal of mother, child, and caretaker.137 Throughout the play the "corruption" overrunning "the stew" has been delineated in terms of Viennese categories that would minimize such a betrayal by redescribing its victims as punk, whoreson, and bawd. These categories repress or occlude moral standard different from the play's dominant Platonico-Puritan ideology of misosoma with its attendant misogyny. It is a standard that locates "corruption" in the failure of community or charity, the duplicity. or unreliability of people's dealings with each other, the lack of truth (troth) in their relations. Overdone's speech gives us a glimpse of the moral contraries picked out by this standard. Against Lucio's betrayal we may set the charitable act remarked by Bradshaw: Overdone's caring for Lucio's bastard is the play's "one conspicuously disinterested act of human kindness," and it "occurs in the lower depths and makes little or no itnpression on the Duke" (192). The act and the standard it imports are indeed recessive, and they surface only in a passing reference by a speaker who may herself have an interest in mentioning the act. Yet I think the abrupt and anomalous character of the mention, along with its transformative effect on our reading of previous events, does make the act, the standard, and its recessiveness conspicuous. And I'm not sure Overdone's disclosure makes little or no impression on the Duke.

a

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The redescription of Lucio's victims as punk, whoreson, and bawd reduces them to positions or players in Vienna's sex trade and makes them fair game for both lawful prosecutions and lawless persecutions. By treating them and Pompey in this manner Lucio participates in both kinds of action: refusing to bail Pompey and informing on Overdone, he contributes to the program of reform devised by the Duke and delegated to Angelo; at the same time, this aggression is directed toward those whose occupations he and the Duke, in their different ways, supported. Thus his two-sided relation to the sex trade imitates the Duke's and represents a nasty parody of it. Overdone's disclosure offers a brief abstract of pernicious "bringings-forth" that might be laid to his own regime and that are now melodramatically condensed for the Duke in the figure of Lucio. That he registers Lucio's acts and claims of alliance is indicated by his utterances during the remainder of 3.2, for as we have seen, they exhibit an intensified form_of the movement of recoil and decontamination, of self-exculpation, that first marked his dialogue with the "Friar" in 1.3. This is evident, for example, when he tells Escalus he is "Not of this country" but "from the See/ In special business from his Holiness" (3.2.2II-14). His sense of the deeper corruption is directly expressed in the complaint that "There is scarce truth enough alive to make societies secure; but security enough to make fellowships accurst" (220-21 ). The arch question he appends to his diatribe, "of what disposition was the Duke?;· continues the effort of self-exculpation that reaches a climax in the concluding "sword of heaven" soliloquy. "Sir, your company is fairer than honest; rest you well": so, at the end of 4.3, the "Friar" tries to make his getaway after being subjected to Lucio's "pretty tales of the Duke." But his valedictory hint is ignored: ''I'll go with thee to the lane's end. If bawdy talk offend you, we'll have very little of it. Nay, friar, I am a kind of burr, I shall stick" (4.3.173-77). Sticking to the Duke as well as the "Friar," Lucio as burr dramatically figures, and his persistence ironically mocks, the Duke's inability to distance himself from the behavior for which, in 1.3, he had held himself accountable. Lucio perversely exhibits the Vienna-problem in its worst light when he himself confirms Overdone's report of his mistreatment of Kate Keep-down and boasts of having lied about it to the Duke (4.3.167-72). Whatever we imagine Lucio to intend, we and the Duke watch him perform his knavery in the "Friar's" face and frustrate Vincentia's desire for the moral advantage and insulation he sought from his disguise. It makes sense, then, that the burr who unwittingly pricks the Duke's conscience while trying to make the "Friar" prickle turns out to be the Duke's principal auxiliary in his campaign to get himself exposed. Lucio ex-

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ternalizes the Duke's anger when he strips off the mask of pious hypocrisy. The embodiment of all that was wrong in the Duke's style of government presents himself as an agent, if not an allegory, of the Duke's conscience. The strangest moment in this strange event occurs during the interchange at 5.1.324-53, when Lucio claims that it was the "Friar;' not he, who had earlier slandered the Duke. Superficially, the motive here is obvious: Lucio · is joining the others in following the Duke's lead and ganging up on the "Friar." Since the "Friar" has been discredited, Lucio can safely taunt him: "You and I both know that what I say you said about the Duke is actually what I said about the Duke. So what are you going to do about it?" Lucio is being just as Bad as he can be. But if we recall the content of those slanders, some of which may have struck· home more than others, we could well expect the Duke to hear another message in this patent misattribution: "I don't really believe what I said about the Duke's lechery. That was no truer than what I'm saying now, no less patent a misattribution. Had the Duke been present he would have known that my slander was actually a hyperbolic or metonymic way of expressing grateful admiration for his discreet and tolerant method of government, and especially for the license he allowed us." The sentiment behind this message may be phrased in words borrowed from Pompey, "I hope here be truths" (z.I.I26, I32); replacing hope with fear would give us the Duke's probable reaction. Their common aggression against the "Friar" in 5.1 draws the Duke and his burr together more closely than the Duke would like. But since after his exposure the Duke perversely clings to the "Friar's" moral authority, it also makes sense that he would try to extricate the burr and throw it away. Thus his last official act in the play is directed against the brazen embodiment of his Vienna-problem, whom he singles out as unworthy of the "apt remission" he has just granted to Barnardine, Claudio, and Angelo in rapid order: ''And yet here's one in place I cannot pardon" (5.1.497). What would it have meant for him to implement this refusal, to seal Lucio's fate by sending an abhorred child of ducal lenity to Abhorson on the grounds of "Slandering a prince" (522)? It would have sealed his own commitment to the discourse of self-exculpation. The play would have ended leaving "more behind that is ... [less] gratulate" and more than is "meet you all should know." So, as with the others, the Duke backs off and finds an inept remission. The series of moves in this episode is zany enough to deserve a closer look. In response to the Duke's asking why he was vilified, Lucio apologetically ("I spoke it but according to the trick") tries to preempt the judgment and limit his punishment: "if you will hang me for it, you may: but I had rather it would please you I might be whipped" (5.1.502-4). After the

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Duke wins this round by taking both suggestions- "Whipp'd, first, sir, and hang'd after" (sos)-he goes on to pay Lucio back for the "pretty tale(s)" he had told at the Duke's expense in 4-3 (163-74), and although the Duke had in fact learned about Kate Keep-down in 3.2, he rubs it in by alluding to the anecdote in which Lucio boastfully informed on himself. He tells the Provost to proclaim

Lucio

Duke

Lucio

Duke

round about the city, If any woman wrong'd by this lewd fellow, -As I have heard him swear himself there's one Whom he begot with child -let her appear, And he shall marry her. The nuptial finish' d, Let him be whipp'd and hang'd. I beseech your Highness, do not marry me to a whore. Your Highness said even now, I made you a duke; good my lord, do not recompense me in making me a cuckold. Upon mine honor, thou shalt marry her. Thy slanders I forgive, and therewithal Remit thy other forfeits.- Take him to prison, And ·see our pleasure herein executed. Marrying a punk, my lord, is pressing to death, Whipping, and hanging. Slandering a prince deserves it. (5.1.506-2!)

By this time in the fifth act the prefatory "here's one ... I cannot pardon" flags an imminent act of pardon, and although the Duke appears once again to have planned this maneuver, it zigzags through changes of emphasis to a conclusion that all but throws it off course: let Lucio be whipped and hanged for slandering a prince; let him be married for wronging a woman, then whipped and hanged; let the slanders be forgiven and their "forfeits" remitted, but let the other penalty stand; let him be taken to prison so that the Duke's "pleasure herein" may be executed; let him suffer the unpleasure of marriage "to a whore" for slandering a prince. Not unlike Angelo, who welcomed death but was silent about his compulsory marriage, Lucio protests only the sentence of marriage. The logic of his complaint is that since he is forced to marry not only a woman he wronged but also a sex worker he is doomed to a shameful life of what may be called occupational cuckoldry. This seems to satisfy the Duke who, by now, has his pardons and remissions at the ready and whose cancellation of the death penalty indicates that letting Lucio linger on in living shame will be sweeter revenge. But why, if the execution of the Duke's pleasure consists in seeing Lucio unhappily married to a woman he wronged, does

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he order him to be taken to prison? "Take him to prison, I And see our pleasure herein executed": the only circumstantial explanation of the first clause- that the bride has been incarcerated with the other sex workers, so the marriage must take place in prison- does. not register clearly because the Duke's prior instruction to the Provost culminating in "let her appear" (506-w) diverts attention from it. But in any event, the explanation would not fully account for the touch of incoherence in this angry and abrupt imperative. What, precisely, does herein- "in this matter"- gesture toward? Lucio's marriage is the obvious referent, yet the energy of the utterance strangely and contradictorily veers toward the punitive contents of the "other forfeits," as if the Duke momentarily forgets the pardon he has just pronounced and reinstates his original sentence. This ghostly gesture adds interest to the term executed. Of its two senses, "accomplished" or "performed" and "put to death," the first is the one the context obviously selects. Yet of the twelve other variants of execute in the play- I exclude the two occurrences of the occupationally specific term executioner-all but the first (at 1.1.59) denote the second more specific sense, and eight of these are found in the relatively recent action of 4.2 and 4.3.138 Their influence on the present usage generates the wild reading "See our pleasure herein put to· death," which destabilizes the simple, patently ceremonial intent of the phrase and provokes the search for other possibilities. The reading puts pressure on 'the royal plural pronoun: in loosening the ceremonial constraint, it opens up a space for another referent to creep in, "Lucio's pleasure as well as mine," and this in turn offers resistance to the ceremonial reduction of "our pleasure" to a euphemism expressing royal prerogative. The wild reading begins to make a comprehensive kind of sense, for the coupling of the Duke's pleasure with Lucio's is the theme of Lucio's slander, which, behind its distortions, comments on the Duke's voyeuristic pleasure in the sinful pleasures of others. It is this curiositas that he tried to atone for by playing "Friar" and that now bears the burden of Lucio's vicious pleasure. The sentence of marriage that will kill Lucio's pleasure will thus pronounce the death of the curiositas it is coupled to. "Take him to prison, I And see our pleasure herein executed." Because this is the last of a string of carceral imperatives, several of them uttered by the Duke, it has a punitive ring that exceeds its circumstantial function. In 5.1 alone it is preceded by "To prison with her!" (Isabella), "Lay hold on him" (Lucio), and "Away with him" (Angelo), not to mention Escalus's rabid repetition of''Away with him (the 'Friar'] to prison" (5.1.124, 357, 414, 34246). "Take him to prison" repeats the words used by the Duke as "Friar" at 3.2.30 after denouncing Pompey for his "filthy vice;' and the echo sharp-

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ens the sense that at play's end the Duke is still trying to distance· himself, decontaminate himself, from the agents, argot, and institutions promoting Vienna's vicious pleasures, all of which have now been compacted into the irrepressibly loose-tongued nose-plucking figure of Lucio, the final icon of the Vienna-problem. The carceral imperative has become the problemsolving reflex, the tactic of decontamination, the speech act by which the Duke reappropriates and demonstrates his politico-legal authority. It gestures peremptorily toward a fantasy of imprisonment and execution that Lucio, impudently playing the moral odds, goads or dares him to actualize. The utterance is too conspicuously not saying "Take him to prison and put him to death" to prevent that wish from leaking into the nobler forbearance he tries to display: "In spite of all he has done to me I am not going to put him to death." This wish disrupts the Duke's endgame since, as we have seen, the carceral imperative is a strategic feint enabling him to reappropriate and demonstrate moral authority by exercising the power of pardon. To succumb to the wish to decontaminate himself by killing Lucio for misdeeds attributable to the ruler's permissive pass would be to inculpate himself The Duke therefore plans to terminate Lucio's pleasure rather than Lucio, and the intent of the command is to associate compulsory marriage with incarceration: "Take him to prison, that is, to marriage, and see our (his and my) pleasure therein executed." Forcing Lucio to marry the prostitute he wronged is a just and reasonable application of the principle of measure for measure, and one might expect him to leave it at that, since it would enable him to retaliate against his slanderer under the cover of a more disinterested judgment. Yet at the last moment he swerves again, and applies the principle illogically: compulsory marriage is Lucio's just desert for slandering a prince. I can imagine the Duke's final retort delivered as a smart but offhanded putdown by a speaker well in control of the situation and eager to wind things up. He catches Lucio's plaintive hyperbole, "Marrying a punk ... is . . . j Whipping and hanging," tosses it back at him, and thus reinstates the original sentence as a "death" penalty. But I prefer to hear something more in the Duke's voicing of the retort, the touch of anger confused by its bidirectional vector-anger at Lucio and at himself-that gives the Duke's utterances in this scene their distinctive timbre. However flippant, the retort is enriched and blurred by overtones of the wish to execute Lucio, cast off the burr who sticks· to him, and get rid of the ducal complicity the burr brazenly represents. This makes the gesture of remission ring a little hollow, especially since the wish fuses with the Duke's desire to seek revenge for the affronts to his princely dignity and personal

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probity. To hear it this way is to recall his reactions to Lucio in 3.2-the interplay in his language between the appeal to the discourse of injured merit and the refractions of self-accusation the appeal fends off "Slandering a prince deserves it. j She, Claudio, that you wrong'd, look you restore" (5.1.521-22). Presumably the speaker pauses between these two lines and gathers himself for his happy-ending speech. But the pause doesn't provide insulation; it is a kind of relay, the site of a kinetic transfer. The strains of anger and self-justification pulsing through the relay make "look you restore" sound more peremptory and curt. Coming only twelve lines after his command to the Provost, "If any woman wrong'd by this lewd fellow, ... he shall marry her" (so6-ro), the Duke's exhortation to Claudio takes on the weight of a warning, a quasi-command, that assimilates Claudio's wrong to Lucio's. It is as if the Duke recognizes that his attempt to deal impartial justice to Lucio has been thrown off and now tries to regain his balance; lingering anxiety about the aptness of the remission he grants Lucio leads him to replay it and get it right in his address to Claudio. But the exhortation at line 522 fits Lucio better than Claudio, of whom it is misleading to suggest that he "wrong'd" Juliet in the same way Lucio wronged his child and its mother. Sandwiched between assertions to Lucio and Angelo, the warning to Claudio falsely assimilates his ·impending nuptials to the shotgun weddings the Duke has just godfathered. The saccadic tempo of the exit speech, with its succession of terse addresses, its promissory hints and deferred disclosures, makes the obligatory business of happy ending seem a little jumpy and impatient. In moving from Lucio to Claudio to Mariana and Angelo, the Duke begins the speech with a comedic flourish that proclaims his power, justice, and good works as a matchmaker; he announces the attainment of the ends that justify his duplicitous means before going on to thank the two confederates who made his masquerade and dirty tricks possible. The oddest feature of this performance is that although Claudio's sentence and the efforts to circumvent it drive the play's plot and narrative action, the Duke's address to Claudio is not merely the first but also the shortest in the exit speech. 139 His first and only words to Claudio since J.I are thus anteclimactic, as if Claudio is no more than a bridge to be passed quickly over on the way from Lucio to the other recipients of ducal attention. This oddity seems to have some connection with the fact that his last and longest address is reserved for Isabella, whom he had so blithely and energetically kept in the dark about her brother's escape from death. But what is the connection? Does his cursory treatment of Claudio, and his separation of the two addresses, reflect his embarrassment in the presence of Isabella? Does he recognize that she

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reconciled herself almost too quickly and willingly to Claudio's death, and may herself be embarrassed by Claudio's presence? Just before he addresses Isabella, the Duke makes his first and only public mention of the head trick in a comment to Angelo that has, as I noted above, the effect of a final affront to his defeated rival. But what effect does it have on Isabella, who can't be presumed to have known about the head trick before this reference to it? For the first time she is able to comprehend not only his role in saving Claudio but also the extent to which, the deliberateness with which, he has deceived her from 4·3 to this moment. Does the Duke mention the head trick for her benefit as well as Angelo's? Is the possible ambivalence of the effect of the mention on Isabella something the Duke-given what we know he knows-may be imagined to desire? 140 What kind of spin do these questions put on the intentions represented by the words with which the Duke edges into his proposal, "I have a motion much imports your good," and by the conditional clause that politely qualifies it, "Whereto· if you'll a willing ear incline"? 141 Is the gesture of proposal muddied by the possibility that it constitutes the last move in the Duke's successful campaign against Angelo? For those who may detect in the conditional qualifier a dist'ant echo of the annunciation motif parodically introduced by Lucio's "Hail, virgin, if you be" (1.4.16), the Duke's appeal might well seem to register an aspiration to the semblance of "power divine" -to the purity no less than the power of the messenger bearing "heavenly comforts." But how could such a gesture of angelic donation avoid being contaminated by the "doubling or counterfeiting [of] Angelo's desire" that the proposal represents? 142 The triumphant closure the Duke's exit speech tries to perform is perforated by too many questions, lends itself to too many competing interpretations, to fulfill its function. The noise or static they generate is sustained by the conspicuous openness of the silences that greet the Duke's parade of pardons and by the tonal dissonance of the exit speech. Its strains of anger and self-justification bear the burden of the ruler who carries the torch of his curiositas into every dark corner in search of the exculpation that will ensconce him in seeming knowledge and free him from the swinges of his burning throne. I hope here be truths

Reference Matter

Notes

Acknowledgments I. Stanley Cavell, Must ~ Mean What ~ Say? Modern Philosophical Essays in Morality, Religion, Drama, Music, and Criticism (New York: Scribner, 1969), 255. Subsequent page references in the text are to this work. 2. Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 157. 3· The critique is part of what would become Cavell's lifelong project of interrogating skepticism and demonstrating the importance of taking it seriously. 4. From the slightly revised version of Cavell's "The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear," reprinted in Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 103-4. 5· For more detailed discussion, see pp. 41-49 below. 6. Cavell, Must·~ Mean, 277-78. 7· The quoted phrases are used here with no regard to the work they do in their original context, a later and more general section of"The Avoidance of Love," in Must ~Mean, 346, 348. 8. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), 222. 9. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 2d ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), 8e, ne-I2e, 5e.

Introduction I. The account is Berger's "On the Continuity of the Henriad: A Critique of Some Literary and Theatrical Approaches," in Shakespeare Left and Right, ed. Iva

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NOTES TO PAGES XXVI-XXVII

Kamps (New York: Routledge, 1991), 225-40. It must be noted that the peculiar organizational structure of this volume provides an anomalous context for Berger's essay. The evocative title phrase "Left and Right" applies primarily to the first part; the second section functions as a miscellany whose relation to the title theme is often far less clear. Where, for example, does Berger position himself with regard to left versus right? Berger's cantankerous tone and deliberately unfashionable stance here may make it sound as though he were inadvertently swerving into alignment with.Richard Levin, the anthology's chief subject and spokesperson for the Shakespearean right. This impression of convergence is, however, contradicted by the decisive critique of Levin in chapter I of Berger's Imaginary Audition: Shakespeare on Stage and Page (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). Moreover, even within Berger's contribution to Shakespeare Left and Right, the posture is not so exclusively negative as it at first appears because Berger goes on to suggest the potential for a positive alternative corresponding to each inadequate critical mode. 2. In his retrospective account "Reconstructing the Old New Criticism," Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics 9 (1986): 1-41, Berger objects to the "moralism born of a diffuse cultural nostalgia" associated with New Criticism and indicates his opposition to "the moral and political implications of estheticism" imbued with this spirit (2-3). 3. Berger defines the term revision in "Biography as Interpretation, Interpretation as Biography," College English 28 (1966): II3-25; quotation from II4. Subsequent page references in the text are to this essay. 4· As the derivation of the poet's respo~sibility from Yeats's "In dreams begin responsibilities" indicates, elements in Berger's model are reinforced by his apprenticeship in twentieth-century poetry. We usually think of Berger's non-Renaissance work as belonging to earlier classical and medieval periods- Plato especially, as well as Theocritus, Virgil, Dante, and Chaucer. His anthropologically inflected studies of kinship structure and early social organization also come to mind, as in the following cluster: "Social Structure as Doom: The Limits of Heroism in Beowulf" (with H. Marshall Leicester, Jr.), in Old English Studies in Honour ofJohn C. Pope, ed. Robert B. Budin and Edward B. Irving, Jr. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), 37-79; "Bodies and Texts," Representations 17 (winter 1987): 144-66; "The Lie of the Land: The Text Beyond Canaan," Representations 25 (winter 1989): II9- 38; and "From Body to Cosmos: The Dynamics of Representation in Precapitalist Society," South Atlantic Quarterly 91 (1992): 557-602. I therefore briefly survey Berger's base in the modern period. Although there are occasional references to Eliot and Stevens, his primary focus is on Yeats and Frost: Yeats is considered in a major section of "Biography as Interpretation," II925, while Frost is the subject of "Poetry as Revision: Interpreting Robert Frost," Criticism 10 (1968): 1-72. Berger also discusses three contemporary poets: R. P. Blackmur and Stanley Kunitz, in interpretive essays written in 1961 for jackets of the Yale Series of Recorded Poets, and Theodore Weiss, in "A Local Enclave: The Poetry of Theodore Weiss," Fat Abbot 3 (summer-fall 1961): 39-79. I cite this work not to prove that Berger's conception of the Renaissance is necessarily ahistorical

NOTES TO PAGES XXVIII-XXX

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but rather to establish how wide-ranging are his resources and how capacious is his critical imagination. 5. "The Renaissance Imagination: Second World and Green World" (1965), in Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction-Making (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988),3-40; quotation from 37· 6. "Miraculous Harp: A Reading of Shakespeare's Tempest" (1969), in ibid., 14785; quotation from 150. 7· Eleven years younger than Barber, Berger registered his early awareness of Barber's work in his 1955 Yale dissertation (The Allegorical Temper: Vision and Reality in Book II of Spenser's Faerie Queene [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957], 141, 159), where he cites "The Saturnalian Pattern in Shakespeare's Comedy" (1951), the essay that becomes the first chapter in Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959). Subsequently, from 1970 until Barber's death in 1980, Berger and Barber were colleagues at the University of California, Santa Cruz. 8. Berger's departure from Frye is signaled in his essays "The Renaissance Imagination," 13-14; and "Miraculous Harp;' 149n.5. On Barber's differences with Frye, see my references in "In Memory of C. L. Barber: 'The Man Working in His Works;" in Shakespeare's "Rough Magicn: Renaissance Essays in Honor of C. L. Barber, ed. Peter Erickson and Coppelia Kahn (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1980), 304, and notes 5 and 26. 9. Subsequent page references to Berger's reading of The Tempest are to "Miracu-· lous Harp." ro. "'Gentle Breath of Yours;" in C. L. Barber and Richard P. Wheeler, The Whole Journey: Shakespeare's Power of Development (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 334-42; subsequent page references in the text are to this essay. Further discussion of the political implications of Barber's criticism is available in my essay "On the Origins of American Feminist Shakespeare Criticism," Women's Studies 26, no. I (1977). rr. In his introduction to Berger's Revisionary Play: Studies in the Spenserian Dynamics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), Louis Montrose deftly draws attention to this paradox: "If they have tended to avoid direct confrontations of sociopolitical issues, Harry Berger's writings have nonetheless always manifested a contestatory stance toward the prevailing critical orthodoxies" (7). In particular, Berger implicitly opposes "the endemic intellectual and ideological conservatism of Spenser studies" (8). But if this opposition is implicit, how then is its inspiration so clearly communicated? 12. "Biography as Interpretation," II4. This dramatized image of career and the more literal, mundane meaning of career are of course connected. In his introduction to the Spenser volume, Louis Montrose illuminates the connection by reference to Berger's ethnic- that is, Jewish -identity in the context of Yale University in the 1940s and 1950s: "It may be that the experience of social and ethnic difference from the genteel Protestant and Anglo-Saxon ethos that pervaded and still pervades Spenser studies both produced in him a· sense of cultural exclusion and provided the vantage point of his appropriation of a text and a tradition that

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were not his cultural birthright" (8). Documentation of this period at Yale is provided in Dan A. Oren, Joining the Club: A History oj]ews and Yale (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); more general accounts are Marcia Graham Synnott, The Half-Opened Door: Discrimination and Admissions at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, 19001970 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979), and Susanne Klingenstein,Jews in the American Academy, 1900-1940 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). Also significant is the division of Berger's career between the two institutional locations of Yale and Santa Cruz. The first half of his career-from B.A. in 1948 and Ph.D. in 1955 through instructor, assistant and associate professor positions until 1965 -was spent entirely at Yale. The second half of his career has been entirely at the University of California's Santa Cruz campus. The origin of Santa Cruz in the 196os, its founding commitment to experimental education, its Californian cultural environment, may all have reinforced and enhanced his outsider's perspective, with an intellectually liberating result. 13. One important "plaintive interruption" in Berger's life was the death of his son, the dedicatee of Second H!c>rld and Green H!c>rld. Berger discussed his son's death in his commencement address at Cowell College, published as "Commencement Address: June 1976," Quarry llftst 17 (1983): 92-102. 14. I use the word adversarial advisedly. Since structures of intimacy are a shaping force in academic work, a brief comment on my own location within the narrative is warr.anted to establish the point of view from which I am telling this story. As a Santa Cruz graduate student writing a dissertation on Henry Vin 1974-75, for which Harry Berger was the first reader and C. L. Barber an active second reader, I experienced their antagonism at close range, though I willingly put myself in this cross fire for my greater educational benefit. The stress of this double influence can perhaps be tracked in the two essays I published based on the dissertation: " 'The Fault/My Father Made': The Anxious Pursuit of Heroic Fame in Shakespeare's Henry V," Modern Language Studies ro, no. I (winter 1979-80): 10-25; and "Fathers, Sons, and Brothers in Henry V," in Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare's Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 39-65. As Berger's gracious testimony in the Barber festschrift indicates, this period of high conflict subsequently gave way to a more productive accommodation. However, the philosophical and temperamental differences were too great for the tension completely to evaporate. 15. "Reconstructing the Old New Criticism," 2. 16. "Bodies and Texts,'' 145. 17. "On the Continuity of the Henriad,'' 229. An even harsher version of this critique of moral critics is contained in Berger's study of Richard II, Imaginary Audition, I63-64n.9. 18. "Text Against Performance: The Gloucester Family Romance,'' Chapter 4 in this volume. Since I shall later remark on differences between Berger's work and new historicism, I would like to note how apposite Berger's formulation here is to Louis Montrose's punning reference to "subject" as a necessary tension between being capable of internally generated agency and at the same time subject to the

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constraining force of external pressures; see "New Historicisms," in Redrawing the Boundaries: The Traniformation of English and American Literary Studies, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn (New York: Modern Language Association, 1992), 392418, esp. 414-15. 19. Imaginary Audition, 102-3. 20. Ibid., 147. 21. On the concatenation of new historicism, cultural materialism, and feminist criticism, see my afterword to Cross-Cultural Peiformances: Dijferences in U0men'S Re-Visions of Shakespeare, ed. Marianne Novy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 251-64. For an assessment of the specific instance of the interchange between Louis Montrose and Harry Berger in the introduction and afterword to Revisionary Play, see Rewriting Shakespeare, Rewriting Ourselves (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 13-17. 22. Afterword to Revisionary Play, 457-58; "On the Continuity of the Henriad," 232-33· 23. Imaginary Audition, 152. 24. Ibid., rso, 149. 25. Glimpses of these books can be seen, respectively, in three published pieces: "Hydra and Rhizome," in Shakespeare Reread: The Texts in New Contexts, ed. Russ McDonald (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), 79-104; "Fictions of the Pose: Facing the Gaze in Early Modern Portraiture," Representations 46 (spring 1994): 87-120; and ''Actaeon at the Hinder Gate: The Stag Party in Spenser's Gardens of Adonis," in Desire in the Renaissance: Psychoanalysis and Literature, ed. Valeria Finucci and Regina Schwartz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 91-n9. Also in preparation are Apprehensions: Dialogical Waifare in Plato'S Writing, to be published by Princeton University Press, and a book on the villain's discourse in Richard III and Othello. The former is exemplified by "Phaedrus and the Politics of Inscription," in Plato and Postmodernism, ed. Steven Shankman (Glenside, Penn.: Aldine Press, 1994), 76-n4, a portion of the latter appears in "Impertinent Trifling: Desdemona's Handkerchief," Shakespeare Quarterly 47 (1996). In addition, Berger has completed a book entitled Rembrandt'S Looking-Glass Theater: The Fictions of the Pose and the Politics of Self-Portraiture, of which the forerunner is the review article "What Is This Thing Called Self?" Clio 23 (1994): 285-94.

Chapter 1. (The Merchant of Venice' r. Alexander Welch, "The Loss of Men and Getting of Children: All'S r#ll That Ends r#ll and Measure for Measure," Modern Language Review 73 (1978): r8. 2. All quotations in this essay are from William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, gen. ed. Alfred Harbage (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969). 3. Lawrence Hyman, "The Rival Lovers in The Merchant of Venice," Shakespeare Quarterly 21 (1970): 109. 4. For an argument against either or both of these views and a return -unpersuasive, in my opinion- to a more traditional reading of the play, see Lawrence

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8-3 I

Danson, The Harmonies of uThe Merchant of Venice)} (New Haven: Yale University Press, I978). 5. Lorenzo's earlier comment, while making even clearer the difference between Jessica and Portia, still spells out both the outcome she desires and the pagelike subservience she fears: she hath directed How I shall take her from her father's house, What gold and jewels she is furnished with, What page's suit she hath in readiness. (2.4.29-32)

Chapter 2. {Much Ado About Nothing' I. All quotations are from William Shakespeare: The Complete VV